rePost::I Wrote This For You

I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn’t get it. They may think they get it, but they don’t. This is the sign you’ve been looking for. You were meant to read these words.
via I Wrote This For You.

The above is the tag line of a blog I discovered while trying to read through mail I sent myself.
I found this :

All persons entering a heart do so at their own risk. Management can and will be held responsible for any loss, love, theft, ambition or personal injury. Please take care of your belongings. Please take care of the way you look at me. No roller skating, kissing, smoking, fingers through hair, 3am phone calls, stained letters, littering, unfeeling feelings, a smell left on a pillow, doors slammed, lyrics whispered, or loitering. Thank you.

also from the same blog here:
http://pleasefindthis.blogspot.com/2009/08/rules-of-engagement.html

Best Read::Beyond Ownership

from here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/05/05/beyond-ownership/

The work of life is doing, not having. Even if having is what you’re doing, it’s the doing that matters. Life is process, not product. That process is one of contribution, I think. We want to leave the world with more than it had when we entered it. And with goods that are beyond measure or price. Goods which, like time, we can only give.
With the Net we have invented an excellent place to do that.
Let’s just say that the way the world is going/working right now is not really making me happy. Stuff doesn’t make me happy. Hope I find that something , that seems to be missing.

Best Read::Nicanor Perlas and the Dreams of an Ordinary Citizen | Filipino Voices

Millions share his vision because they see, and feel it. Perlas is someone crying out in the wilderness and asking people to come to him and share his vision for the Nation. Perlas wants to unite people and fight against poverty. Perlas wants to eradicate graft and corruption. Perlas will exercise strong political will to fight the forces that weaken the Motherland. And Perlas will see to it that those who have committed grave injustices against the People are put behind bars.There is something terribly wrong when people like Nicanor Perlas who once lived peacefully in their rich hamlets are suddenly seen in the streets, preaching the Gospel of Salvation from poverty and wants. When people who hate politics are suddenly going around town, preaching of “New Politics”, that’s surely a sign that things have turned for the worst.It just means that the exploitation, the degradation, the immorality, the amorality, the misery of the human condition, has seeped into the comfort zones of those who are not of the hungred kind.And I laud Blogwatch.ph and the Vibal Foundation for allowing me to partake of Nicanor Perlas’ vision even for an hour. Meeting him just makes me realize that the end is definitely not near, because there are still a few good men left who will sacrifice everything, just so that others may live better lives.
via Nicanor Perlas and the Dreams of an Ordinary Citizen | Filipino Voices.

rePost::ABC The Drum Unleashed – Prioritising life

When will we get our priorities right, and learn how useless the free market is in dealing with tsunamis, earthquakes, Aboriginal health, African AIDS, Middle Eastern pogroms, Chinese tyranny and the sort of shameful poverty that breeds terrorists everywhere and sends them walking in explosive underpants out of universities into airline waiting rooms? When will we understand that twenty dollars a week is better spent on tax-funded air ambulances and Elvises and hot rocks and wind power and stem cells and solar cars than on oil magnates who are killing the planet as we speak?
…..
Why don’t we get our priorities right? Why don’t we do our sums? We could spend five billion dollars on aid that civilises East Timor and ten billion dollars buying up Indonesia’s forests and a billion buying eighty Elvises over three years and the cost per week per taxpayer would be nine dollars fifty, the price of an hour’s parking or two Toblerones. Why don’t we do this?
via ABC The Drum Unleashed – Prioritising life.

Quote:: Does Travel Make You Smarter?

So let’s not pretend that travel is always fun, or that we endure the jet lag for pleasure. We don’t spend ten hours lost in the Louvre because we like it, and the view from the top of Machu Picchu probably doesn’t make up for the hassle of lost luggage. (More often than not, I need a vacation after my vacation.) We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.
via Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Does Travel Make You Smarter?.

rePost::The Trials of Tony Judt – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

This was a an excellent read , both of the ideas and the person with the ideas Tony Judt. I cannot even imagine how hard it is to have ALS. I was recently called restless by someone, I guess I am. To think I initially have to walk around, till I can get focused, after I am focused then I can hunker down and actually do stuff. We develop these habits that become part of our MO, to get ALS and suddenly need to change how one thinks is something quite unbearable for me.
READ THE WHOLE THING!!!!!

To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—”is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come.”
The lecture, which lasted nearly two hours, yoked together a few themes that have long preoccupied Judt: the role of intellectuals and ideas in political life, and the failure of both Americans and Europeans to understand and learn from the past century. (We live, Judt has written, in an “age of forgetting.”) He concluded his remarks on a pragmatic note. “It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world,” he said, carefully pronouncing each word. “It does not even represent the ideal past. But, among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand.”
The standing ovation was tremendous. “I was initially shocked by the disjunction between his intellectual capacity, which is completely undiminished and in many respects unequaled, and the physical degradation,” says Richard Wolin, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who was in the audience. “But after five minutes, I lost sight of any physicality and focused on his words and their importance.” He adds, “It was one of the most moving scenes I have ever witnessed.”
About a month later, I meet Judt at his apartment, on the upper floor of a tall brick building near Washington Square Park, where he lives with his wife, the dance critic Jennifer Homans, and their two teenage children. A sign on the door asks visitors to wash their hands. Judt's nurse, a young man, silently leads me through the spacious, immaculate wood-floored apartment to a book-lined study, where Judt is waiting in his wheelchair, head against a tan pillow, hands on lap, feet bare and swollen. At 61, he has close-cropped hair and a graying beard. Dressed in a maroon T-shirt and flannel pants, he peers out through circular glasses. A wireless microphone is affixed to his left ear. Though we are sitting only a few feet apart, his nurse flips the power switch, and Judt's faint voice suddenly booms out of a nearby speaker.
“We have watched the decline of 80 years of great investment in public services,” he says. “We are throwing away the efforts, ideas, and ambitions of the past.” It is plainly difficult for him to speak, but he is doggedly eloquent. His eyes, forced to do the work of his entire body, are strikingly expressive; when he gets excited, he arches his brows high and opens them wide, which he does when he says, “Communism was a very defective answer to some very good questions. In throwing out the bad answer, we have forgotten the good questions. I want to put the good questions back on the table.”
I ask how he felt after the lecture. “Elated,” Judt replies simply. Some friends and colleagues had encouraged him to scrap his planned remarks and speak instead about ALS. “I thought about it,” Judt says, “but I have nothing new to say about ALS. I do have something new to say about social democracy, and by saying it in my condition I can maybe have some influence on people's understanding of sickness.” He takes a deep breath. “There is something to be said for simply doing the thing you would do anyway, doing it as well as you can under the circumstances, and getting past the sympathy vote as soon as possible.”
via The Trials of Tony Judt – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

rePost::The magic moment « Paulo Coelho’s Blog

The magic moment
Published on January 7, 2010 in News. 235 Comments
Paulo Coelho
We have to take risks. We can only truly understand the miracle of life when we let the unexpected manifest itself.
Every day – together with the sun – God gives us a moment in which it is possible to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day we try to pretend that we don’t realize that moment, that it doesn’t exist, that today is just the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if you pay attention, you can discover the magic instant.
It may be hiding at the moment when we put the key in the door in the morning, in the silence right after dinner, in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. This moment exists – a moment when all the strength of the stars passes through us and lets us work miracles.
Happiness is at times a blessing – but usually it’s a conquest. The magic instant helps us to change, drives us forward to seek our dreams. We shall suffer and go through quite a few difficult moments and face many a disappointment – but this is all transitory and inevitable, and eventually we shall feel proud of the marks left behind by the obstacles. In the future we will be able to look back with pride and faith.
Poor are those who are afraid of running risks. Because maybe they are never disappointed, never disillusioned, never suffer like those who have a dream to pursue. But when they look back – for we always look back – they will hear their heart saying: “What did you do with the miracles that God sowed for your days? What did you do with the talent that your Master entrusted to you? You buried it deep in a grave because you were afraid to lose it. So this is your inheritance: the certainty that you have wasted your life.”
Poor are those who hear these words. For then they will believe in miracles, but the magic instants of life will have already passed.
in “By the river Piedra I sat down and wept”
via The magic moment « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

Part of the finding your passions series of posts due to the phase of my life of the same name, I’m presently in. Which is another name for Fucked Up Life. joke only.(good thing only a few reads the whole thing hehehe)

Advice::how to be creative | Gapingvoid

This was an excellent list do yourself the favor of reading the whole list. These aren’t even the best insights he writes!!!!!

23. Worr­ying about “Com­mer­cial vs. Artis­tic” is a com­plete waste of time.
You can argue about “the sha­me­ful state of Ame­ri­can Let­ters” till the cows come home. They were kvetching about it in 1950, they’ll be kvetching about it in 2050.
It’s a path well-trodden, and not a place where one is going to come up with many new, earth-shattering insights.
(more…)
24. Don�t worry about fin­ding ins­pi­ra­tion. It comes even­tually.
Ins­pi­ra­tion pre­ce­des the desire to create, not the other way around.
(more…)
25. You have to find your own sch­tick.
A Picasso always looks like Pic­casso pain­ted it. Heming­way always sounds like Heming­way. A Beetho­ven Symphony always sounds like a Beethoven’s Syynphony. Part of being a mas­ter is lear­ning how to sing in nobody else’s voice but your own.
(more…)
26. Write from the heart.
There is no sil­ver bullet. There is only the love God gave you.
(more…)
27. The best way to get appro­val is not to need it.
This is equally true in art and busi­ness. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having.
(more…)
via how to be creative | Gapingvoid.