I need to write again
A lot has changed---> check out www.roblim.com for the start of a new blog after a 5 year hiatus :) After reading some of this blog I feel like I have a lot to catch up on.
Not so random memories
- Sitting on a bench in Rome making sandwiches as we waited for a train.
- Swimming with you on beach in greece and practicing our dancing skills
- The first time I walked past you, the first smile
- Little drawings of Ninjas
- Scooter Cat
- The Weakerthans
- The first time we were bored, playing battleship (and a grade four trivia quiz)-- me winning at both
- Death Cab for Cutie (past and future)
- Hoar frost and shooting with two cameras
- Is the krinkle in my forhead still there?
- Walking around the Vatican wall while you tell me the ending to Angels & Demons
- Summer drives out to Steves
- An Agora is an open market
- Coaching me with my first Mac purchase
- Chai lattes at Remedy
- Watching the sunset over a volcano
- Actually being at/in a volcano
- George
- Running from hub to P126 - in like a minute, huff - to give you a single broken carnation
- Waiting inline at travel cuts
- A pediment is arrangement of statues over a temple
- A freize is a border telling a story in relief
- Walking through knee deep snow one day to see the cityscape from some religious commune.
- Snacks: noodles, fennel seeds, rice crackers and chedder cheese fish
- Waking up next to you in the morning
- The first Kiss
- The second Kiss
- Your Batman cup
Random memories
- Walking along a beach in New Zealand. There was no moon and it was too cloudy to see any star. It's hard to walk in the dark and near impossible on an uneven sandy beach. I remember taking my sandals off, feeling the cool sand in between my toes, listening to the sound of waves and laughs of friends as we stumbled along.
- I was on an island in the Gulf of Thailand. I rode a scooer along a beautiful coastal beach and pulled off the road when I saw a sign for a used book store. The bookstore was run by an old English guy who had married a thai women and settled on the island with her to do some light farming and trade books. I had a book in my bag I was trying to trade for a new one. The book was "How to be good" by Nick Hornby. The guy was pleased to talk to me as it didn't seem he had a lot of visitors. The book I had brought was actually a Vietnamese photocopy of an original book and as such was worthless. Surprisingly this conversation about photocopied books lasted sometime and in the end I just gave him the book (apparently he was a collector). It occurred to me just now that i might have been equally happy to have had someone to talk to.
- About grade six everyone was making these little bow and arrow type devices but putting a hole in the middle of a thick felt marker, rigging an elastic to cover the hole on one side and using them to fire pencil crayons at eachother. It sounds silly but some were powerful enough to stick into drywall. One day at lunch break a group of several kids were playing with them outside and a bird flew over head, a kid shot and hit the bird. The bird hit the ground and sort of twitched there in pain while a circle of kids stood around watching it. A supervisor came and took the kids away and the principle came and took the bird away.
- The first house I remember growing up in (the second house that I lived in) we had this dog that had this tendency to tear sofa pillows apart in the middle of the night. We would wake up in the morning and there would be stuffing all over the kitchen floor. I remember waking up early one morning and sitting with the dog on the stair case and laughing with him about how much trouble he would be in once mom woke up.
- We had thanksgiving one year about the same time the dog was tearing up pillows. My grandma brought both me and my sister big cadbury eggs. My mom told us we could have them after dinner. I ate as fast as I could and then cried when they told me that my sister had stolen and eaten both eggs.
Ideal State
I was talking recently to a friend of a friend about political preference. How can you not with the election so near? It was a brief conversation but conclusions were drawn quickly. He's a PolSci major and while I'm certain he's more aware of current events (and historical trends) than I am, I'm not certain that I can agree with what he said. To put it quite simply he believes there is nothing that we can do to change anything. Asked about his ideal state, he said he would like it to be just like it is right now, he gave a reason for this that I can't quite remember but it isn't the reason that matters it's the fact.
I disagree with this notion entirely. I won't get into political preference in this post, it's not what this is about. This post is about challenging your ideal state. I find it laughable that someone could just be satisfied with their current situation. If you're not careful you may read my previous sentence to mean something like "how can anybody be happy right now"-- that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that in order to be happy you have to have something to strive for, you have to believe that it is not beyond your power to control future events in your life. I want to follow my previous sentence with "I know there are somethings that you can't change in your life" in order to placate all those people who say that some things are impossible. I will resist that urge and instead suggest that anything is possible. It's simple a matter of moving from believing we can't to believing we can.
What about my ideal state? Always changing, and no end in site. I don't ever want to reflect on life with the belief that I have completed everything that I had to. How sad would that be to be satisfied with the status quo?
Between the lines
We all live lives of inconsequence. I mean that in the nicest way. If you have a hard time believing me visit http://nobelprize.org/index.html The Nobel Prize is an award of diploma (fancy document in what looks like latin), medal, and money (aprox. 1.4 million Canadian dollars). One prize has been awarded in each area since 1901.
Browse through the list of names in one of the 6 areas it is awarded in. You'll probably recognize 1 or 2 people of the hundreds you scan through. It's easy to pass through such lists without being moved because you don't know their stories. You don't know how they lived their lives, what their personalities were like, and how much passion each recipient had.
The people on those lists have changed the world with how they lived their lives, but we barely recognize them. Prize seems like sort of a misnomer, in that it is hard to believe that anyone of those list did what they did for the money. They did it because they we're in love with their work. But so few of us remember them or understand their impact on our lives. I'm getting carried away here, this post isn't about praising nobel prize winners.
What I'm trying to say is that even the most brilliant people in the world weren't that successful building an unforgetable empire. True they weren't really trying build an empire, but even those who were and are trying to build an empire will be forgotten. In a 1000 years the most such empire builders will be, is a footnote in a much larger catalog of human history. It's hard to deny this fact, yet despite this the majority of us engage in competative empire building.
When I think of the future, I think about how much fun there is left to have. I think about how, for me, living is about letting go. Realizing I will never be complete. That I don't want to be complete. There is so much to experience and so much love to taken in. Popular culture should focus more on developing passions than the collection of material things.
My random post of the month.
