When you are given half a glass of water, what do you think?
Someone would think half a glass is not enough, and want to get a full glass, preferably with ice. But some would be grateful for having that much of water, because it is a gift.
It is all in your mind, be contented or want more.
I was watching the Star Wars again.
You pick up different tiny little things every time you watch the same movie. I just figured that the first line young Anakin talked to Padme was "Are you an angel?... I heard the pilots said angels were the most beautiful beings in the universe."
Some people say the first 3 minutes of conversation determine your relationship with one another. I should have said what I thought. You are an angel.
The US is a country made up of webs of highway. Somehow the American decided to build more highway than railway, probably meant to create more jobs for the automobile industry. Now this country is overconsuming fossil fuel.
This is pretty much what you will see in any section of any interstate highway. Wide opening of highway lined with trees and forrest on both sides.
Over I-93, somewhere in New Hampshire; Oct 3, 2004
Sometimes things are not as bad as you think. Modest people usually look at their own and surroundings less positively than arrogant people.
Modesty is good, but balance is important.
The Forty Steps, Cliffwalk, RI; Aug 13, 2006
There is a clear northern sky out there. I bought a book to identify the constellations. I wanted to do that for a while. The weather is still a bit cold to sit outside.
A Japanese company has produced a cute little projector that can project a night sky image onto the ceiling. The little thing can also rotate the image slowly to simulate the movement of the stars over a 24 hour period, and throw you a few comets once in a while.
This little projector no bigger than a soccer ball has a price tag of HK$1500. I think they price it to target only 3 kinds of people: 1. true geeks who buy all fancy technologies; 2. idiots who give in to their girls' romantic daydreams; and 3. men who are desperate to make their girls happy.
For whichever reason you find yourself sitting under a starry sky, try to do nothing but stare at the stars. That is sweet.
I read an interesting research today. It was selected the 23rd important discovery of 2005 by Discover. The magazine has been sitting on th shelf for almost a year. Someone happened to be reading it and left it open at that page, when I was making a chocolate drink.
A team of neuroscientis in University of Michigan measured the so-called "placebo-related brain chemistry" the first time in history. They injected a salt solution into the jaws of 14 men to produce an ache. Then each of them was given a placebo, which is an injection said to be an experimental pain medication. Nine of the men said the pain subsided.
Then, the researcher scanned the brain activity of these people with positron emission tomography scanning. It turns out that those nine people have increased activity in parts of the brain that modulates pain. Radioactive trace also showed that binding occurred at receptors for endophins, naturally occuring pain-fighting sustances.
The conclusion from the neuroscientists: "If somebody believes something will work, that positive expectation by itself, through different connections in the brain, activates mechanisms that suppress pain."
So, now we know that there is a biochemical basis of hope.
If you are in difficult time, think positive. You don't know what the brain is doing, but it can make you go through the difficult time easlier. If you feel you are restricted by the environment, do something to make the environment favorable to you. In another word, make yourself comfortable.
Look around. Hope may be right at your shoulder. You feel what you think after all.
CAPE ANN, MA; Nov 7, 2004
I remember in Science lesson back in middle school, we were taught that a flame is its coldest in red. As the flame gets hotter, it changes to yellow, white and then blue. Now I know that it is to do with the wavelength of the light energy flames emit.
Let's drop the science. Isn't this rose turning up the love it represents from red-hot to yellow-hot?
Rose Garden, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA; Aug 3 2006
Today I turn 32. Friends and colleagues threw me a birthday party. Yvette and Sophie baked me cakes. I am very lucky to have them living together. They are sweet. They bought me the DVDs of the Star Wars Prequels and a nice blue sweater. I love the gifts.
Everyone says happy birthday to me. I cannot think of any reason to be happy but one, which is my birthday wish of this year. I have never made birthday wish seriously. This is my first time.
I was organizing my mail boxes. These are excerpts of some of the old messages:
Aug 31, 2002:
... I want to tell you: you are the best girl I have ever met. I love you and treasure you. Don't worry about me. I will wait for you... you take care of yourself. I want to go on my life with you by my side.
-------
Aug 30, 2002:
Honey,
I just came back from the breakfast in my boss's home. I dont think that I can use internet and telephone in these 2 days. Miss you. So i will stay in my guesthouse...
-------
I didn't even remember she had ever called me "Honey". She rarely did.
I have been to Munich 5 times.
It is a city that is unfamiliar but heart-warming to me. It is not the locals who are particularly welcoming, but I was always accompanied by my love there. I always want to fly there and stay with her forever.
Snow comes at last for this season.
I haven't had a chance to take a picture of it yet. I have taken some pictures outside my workplace last winter. It was Februry 2006. The sky cleared up after snowing.
I was so cheerful and excited at that time. I uploaded the pictures onto the web and showed them to people that I cared. I am not sure I will do that again anymore.
NEB Campus, Ipswich, MA; Feb 13, 2006
Aug 13, 2006, the day after Aug 12, 2006, obviously. But the world means completely different to me all at once since Aug 12, 2006. It was quite amazing that I was feeling I owned the eternity only a few months ago back in Greece, and suddenly I felt nothing worthed living for anymore. I could have locked myself out at home but I figured it was better to do something outside. The walk had been planned a week before after all.
So we drove two and a half hours south to have a walk at the famous Cliffwalk in Newport, Rhode Island.
It is not the Rhodes Island of Aegean Sea, but the Rhode Island state of the USA. Historians are disputing the origin of the name. Some historians believes that an Italian explorer name the largest island in the Narragansett Bay Rhode Island because of their similarity in shape; others think that the name came from "Roodt Eylandt", old Dutch for "red island", an Dutch explorer referred to the red clay on the island's shore.
We arrived there at 2 pm. That was fine. The sun was not going to set before 7 pm in the summer. Half of the distance of the Cliffwalk is paved, and half of it is covered with gravels or simply boulders to walk on. As the name implies, the trail is all over a cliff.
With a beautiful view like this, it is quite natural to believe that houses sitting right on this cliff are incredibly expensive. In fact you cannot really buy a house there anymore. People had done that 200 years ago. And they are terribly wealthy folks. They built huge mansions along the trail. Some of them have become museums that admit with entry fee, and some become private clubhouses. There is a private university there too. There are a couple of restaurants there though: one at the head of the trail and a "Chinese Teahouse" in the middle.
A round trip takes about 3 hours. It was a fairly easy walk, except the section made up of boulders. It is mostly flat though, and you can easily maneuver over the boulders as long as you are not on high-heels.
I got this day spent nicely, but worse were still to come.
CLIFFWALK, RI; Aug 13, 2006
Acropolis is always in restoration since 1960's. It is almost impossible to find an angle where you can picture the Propylaea without cranes. It was crammed with tourist even before tourist season.
The Propylaea survived almost two thousand years, through Greece, Rome and Byzantine. It was only destroyed under the rule of the Latin Empire in 1656, and during the Greek-Turkish War in the turn of 1920's. I felt the misery of its state of destruction more than the greatness of the Atheanean culture. It was a good walk though.
I had a dream last night.
In the dream, I was opening the front door of my home with my key. It was a cold day. A cute little mouse in dress ran into me and stucked itself to the edge of the door. It was running away from a tiger. I was not afraid of the tiger. I hit it with an umbrella, but it kept trying to get to the mouse. I used my body to keep the tiger away from the mouse and tried to open the door to let the mouse in. But I couldn't hold the tiger long enough. It took the mouse and swollowed it.
We ran into an art gallery in Fira, Santorini. There are a few art galleries there, but this Mati Gallery is most interesting.
This Galllery is owned by Yorgos Kypris, a Greek artist and a Canadian art dealer. The gallery itself is only about 600 square feet big, but your attention will be caught immediately to one of its walls, where over a hundred of silhousette of fishes carved out of thin aluminum sheets were posed like a flock of fish swimming down from the upper right corner.
Among the other works of Kypris's, the Gallery features some impressive bronze casts: A 3 feet long shark head sticks out of the wall into the street, and a full-size man sits on the roof, looking out into the Aegean Sea. He might have the best seat for the famous sunset of romance, but he has also taken the best spot to look at the joy and misery of the visitors of the island.
Mati Gallery, Fira, Santorini, May 9, 2006
Helen's birthday was on Nov 22. We only remembered to send her a greeting 4 days later.
She wrote back with a couple of pictures. One of them is the birthday cake her friend baked for her. The name of the cake is "Man of your life". It is a shame they didn't finish the cake with the lower half.
I said the cake was cute. Shamik said, "You must be gay to find this thing cute."
2003:
Christmas markets were everywhere in Prague during Christmas time.
Prague is probably the most tourist-crammed city in Europe. I doubt any photographer can take a picture of a deserted Charles Bridge anymore.
What was I doing in March 2006? I don't remember. Must be some stupid things at work. Not as important as the person I wanted to stick with.
MARTINSTRIED, March 2006
