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March 29 HometownI think your hometown is the first place you are scared to leave.
Then you leave it by choice or by force and you find another place. And after a while you are scared to leave this new place.
But leave again you do, and the next place and the next. Again and again. After each place you find there's stuff you forgot to pack, like slippers or t-shirts or phone numbers. There's also stuff that finds its way into your baggage every time, like old pills and figures of speech and trousers that don't fit.
After a while what you pack and what you forget becomes constant. And if you don't like it that's too bad. Because now your hometown is what you bring with you from that first place. And what you have now is what you will never leave behind.
(written Tuesday, 26 October 2006) March 27 All this and brains too"I want a girl with a mind like a diamond" -- Cake, "Short Skirt, Long Jacket"
"Men don't want smart girls."
If my girlfriends, Maureen Dowd, and the SDU say so then it must be true. Too bad then that those men are misguided, as I will prove mathematically.
Why don't men want smart girls? They're afraid their partners will 'show them up' or embarrass them in public. But this is not a characteristic of all smart girls. In fact, it should be uncharacteristic of any smart person. If you were truly intelligent would you really be that socially inept? No! Therefore some other dimension is involved.
I call this dimension 'Subjective IQ' or 'how smart you think you are', whereas I give 'how smart you actually are' the term 'Objective IQ'. Let's model using the two dimensions. Four combinations emerge:
As you can see from the table, out of the three desirable combinations 2/3rds feature high objective intelligence. The undesirable combination does not involve high objective intelligence. In other words, going for 'smart' is a safe bet. Conversely, guys who restrict themselves to bimbos have a 1 in 2 chance of getting one who thinks they're smarter than they actually are.
Smart chicks out there, take heart. Maybe not all men want your stupid sisters. Just the dumb ones.
Personally I find that it boils down to attitude and personality. These are greater turn-ons or turn-offs than intelligence.
And whether or not you're as smart as you think you are, we can all take this pearl of wisdom from the Oracle of Delphi. March 21 Tokaido (東海道) TrailingYou got to hand it to the medieval merchants who plied the Tokaido trail between Tokyo (Edo) and Kyoto on foot. It's 520km through very mountainous country with one of those mountains being Fuji. Though the mountains made the hike difficult, they couldn't do it by any other means because it was so mountainous. How very zen.
Nowadays the rest stops that used to give travellers relief are mere local train stations. Even Shizuoka is just a town that you whizz by on the Nozomi shinkansen between Osaka and Tokyo. Urbanisation also bypasses these townships. Indeed, they remain so rural that the people aren't friendly.
In Tokyo, asking for directions in Japanese will usually land you an answer in perfect English. Walking the Tokaido train line between Yui and Okitsu (興津) however, brought me a "Wakkannai Ore!" ("How the hell would I know?") from a chain smoking old gent.
10 metres down the line I found it anyway. Seikenji (政見寺), home to the 500 buddhas. Apparently, if you look among them you will find one that looks like someone you know. March 20 The Kyoto Photo-crawlCrowded, expensive, and sprawling. I had low expectations for Kyoto (京都) and even they were not met. Okay, KiyoMizuDera (清水寺) was great at night and the autumn leaves were nice. But if it weren't for the sake of saying I went there and amassing photographic evidence I would have rather gone somewhere else. You know what I mean. There are some places in Japan you have to hit. It doesn't seem to matter how many remote, obscure, yet dazzlingly beautiful places you went to. If you didn't do Kyoto, then to the 90% of gaijin who are 2-week JR Rail Pass tourists, you never really went to Japan. I recommend Kamakura (鎌倉) instead.Or visiting other sites in Kyoto, like Nintendo HQ. March 06 Personal business"Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of sh*t every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal. Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes. Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult. So I came late, OK, but I'm coming all the way. Damn right, I take that broken jaw personal; damn right, I take Sollozzo trying to kill my father personal." Michael Corleone, "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo The Terror of Knowing"It's the terror of knowing what this world is about: watching some good friends screaming, let me out."
- David Bowie, Under Pressure Mates, dearly as I love them, say life is:
1. Punishment. 2. Education. Or, 3. Self-created. Fair enough...
1. Life is not punishment. If God wanted to punish us, I'm sure he could think of better ways.
2. If life is a lesson then the lecturer should be fired. There is no syllabus, no aims, no assessment criteria, and no results. Complaints go unheard and the lecturer is frequently inebriated/malicious/absent (much like my university, actually). Those who hold this view keep looking retrospectively for metaphysical 'lessons' arising out of random events and try to decipher what they must 'learn' in order to progress. This gets tiresome to listen to.
3. "I have 100% control - my issues must have caused the rain today." Ridiculous. The exceptions invalidate the rule. Still, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle has been hijacked by New Agers to bear wholly on the observer rather than on the unknowable. This viewpoint provides no comfort to the unfortunate. They bear the blame for their misfortune like a child who has been beaten and told nothing but that it is his own fault. We can only manipulate our realities insofar as we can manipulate the 'issues' through which stimuli and response is filtered, but not all 'issues' should be manipulated. I have 'issues' about looking both ways before crossing the road and I'll hold onto them, thanks.
That is not to say there are no truths to life. Here's two:
1. Time - seconds, minutes, hours. We perceive the passage of time and its relationship with change. 2. Emotion - Sorrow, joy, fear, anger. We may try to 'manage', indulge, or deny them, but both time and emotion will pass. |
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