Friends Season 10 – On The 8 Spot

March 24, 2009

rePost:Dying Alone:The dead man who wore pajamas – part II at Paulo Coelho’s Blog

We live in a culture of self absorption and in this world were we are ever connected to Die Alone is a great tragedy. I try to see the silver lining, I imagine that the dead man who wore pajamas was someone like miyamoto musashi, self recluse for purposes of enlightenment, but this is just me not wanting to see what I fear maybe the way I may go.

Then I thought of the dead man in his pajamas, of solitude so utter and abysmal that for twenty years nobody in this whole wide world had realized that he had simply disappeared without leaving a trace. And my conclusion is that worse than feeling hunger and thirst, worse than being jobless, suffering for love, in despair over some defeat – worse than all this is to feel that nobody, absolutely nobody in this world, cares for us.
Let us at this moment say a quiet prayer for this man and let us offer him our thanks for making us reflect on how important our friends are.
via The dead man who wore pajamas – part II at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

March 16, 2009

Confessions:Never Loved:The Everyday Masters – Part 5 at Paulo Coelho’s Blog

Read The Whole Thing!

My friend insisted: “Have you ever loved anyone?” I have always been afraid of that question, but Paulo asked me to write this diary and so I have to give an answer. No, I have never loved anyone. I have had many men but I have always waited for the right person. I have been all round the world and have not managed to find the home that I am looking for. I have been in control and have been controlled, and relationships have never gone beyond that.
Now that I have answered “No, I have never loved anyone,” I feel freer. I see what is missing in my life.
via The Everyday Masters – Part 5 at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

March 13, 2009

Things To Ponder: Reclaiming The Space :Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Realtime kills real space

: Image by Scarleth White via Flickr

Call me a Luddite but I think its time to fight back!
Not by isolating ourselves and not using the web and all its gifts but by trying to one up the web and making our real world interactions better. Trying to find the kinds of interactions that would flow naturally from using the web and living a connected life.
This is a new category , “Reclaiming Space”. trying to find the ways that would help make the web a complement , and not a substitute to real connections!

A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. “It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping of thumbs.”
Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen – the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Realtime kills real space.

March 13, 2009

Best Read:Better Man:The everyday Masters – Part 4 at Paulo Coelho’s Blog

Image by superciliousness via Flickr

The harder thing is to try to be the bigger/better man/woman and in a sense this is about knowing yourself, being true to who you are, and trying to best your thoughts on who you are.

Cliche is cliche for a reason, it is the low resistance path, and as stated below, It is a choice. We must be mindful that we choose to get irritated, we choose to be disrespectful, we choose to be humiliated, we choose to be mean, we choose to be impolite. I’ve been thinking about this while going to work. I saw three people at Philcoa near UP trying to find a jeep that would take them to Nepa Q Mart. I have nothing against rural folks but I suspect that someone cheated them recently because the driver of the jeepney I was riding, was telling them that if they wanted to go to Nepa Q Mart the only way was to take a bus and they were at the farthest lane, the lane which no buses enter. Here was this jeepney driver trying to tell them something true and in a way did not even benefit him, because he was telling them to ride the bus, and here was these people telling him off. What he did was simple to say “Okay I don’t care anymore (“Bahala Ka Na” <in tagalog>)” and he drove away. I’ve been in similar situations where I tried helping someone and was rudely treated and I have to say there are a few times I wasn’t able to contain my irritation and probably insulted/cursed a few people. “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;”(line from If by Rudyard Kipling). I forgot that I know who I am , and the opinion of others are to be considered but far from something to be mad about. In most things and situations I believe we should try to be a better man than we think we are.

If I react the way that people expect me to, I become a slave to them – and that is a lesson that applies both to love and work. It is very difficult to prevent this from happening, because we are always ready to please somebody, or to start a war when we are provoked, but people and situations are the consequences of the life that I have chosen, not the other way around.
via The everyday Masters – Part 4 at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.