please be patient with me
What it is to be a person like me
To be happy, yet discontent
To grasp what you love, and let it slip
To be surrounded by great friends, yet feel alone
To love home and hearth, but yearn to see distant shores
You read journals of intellectual repute
and ruminate on celestial being
but you're better known for sexual innuendo
it's your own fault
Your greatest asset is your greatest curse
A mouth and mind that charms and offends in equal measure
it giveth, and it also taketh away
limits
what is desire? love liberty fortune and fame
perhaps not in that order
right now you'd settle for hot chocolate and the new Wilco album
your mind is honest
you're stubborn, opinionated, prone to flights of fancy
your heart is confused
most of the time you don't know how you feel
but when you do feel it, you're so convinced by it you'll never change how you feel, no matter what else comes your way
self deprecating on your qualities
extravagant on your weaknesses
One day I woke up and decided I could change the world. I thought about what this meant, and how I could do it. Simple is better, I thought to myself. To make an impression, but brief, a ripple in the pond. I decided to change the world one person at a time. If I could walk away from a person having left a laugh on their lips, challenge a preconceived notion, or opened their minds to a new way of thinking, doing, than that would be my contribution. When someone uses a word they've never used before, let that word come from me. When someone goes home humming a catchy tune,let that tune come from me. I want to start a catchphrase, and three months later have that catchphrase used on me.
Let my change be grassroots change - so subtle, so viral that no one will ever know it was me, but to subconciously leave such an indelible mark that impression becomes routine, routine to habit, until they don't know how they ever lived before it. Let that be me, and I will be pleased with my work.
Travelling the Silk Road
I've decided. Many of the great men of our times have been shaped by this great metaphysical journey where, either just in the mind or with body and soul, they reach some oneness with the Universe, some Understanding, from which the rest of their lives, their actions, are shaped from this TRUE BEGINNING, or the end of which they view the journey as the GREAT JOURNEY, the defining moment of their lives. Che Guevara's motorcycle diaries through the South American outdoors, Alexander the Great's journey through Asia, into India. To one, the journey shaped him to be one of the most influential (if misaligned) men in Latin America - the other, the undertaking of his lifetime which, while ultimately consuming him in the end, defined his greatness and ensured his immortality in legends.
I want that. I want this great experience which will shape me, shape my life, spur me to do things which may not have happened without it, a journey I will look back on in my dying days and know that it was some of the best days of my life. My personal Odyssey of triumphs and disasters, and adventure in which I will play the part of Odysseus.
And I've found it - a journey of proportions that will beggar anybody else's. I will travel the Silk Road, in the way of the nomads and traders that travelled it so many centuries ago. By camel, horse, and foot, I will travel the intercontinental land route - starting in China, through the wild mountains of Central Asia, into Turkey. And on the way I will live like they did before them, possibly with an ipod, camera and..nintendo ds.
I'll probably need to get some guards for at least part of the way, or maybe just pack some heat. I heard there's hundreds of bandits in those mountains. Still! My mind is settled. I can think of the title for my memoirs already: Hitting the (Silk) Road Jack! A tale of high adventure with some breaks inbetween. Hrmm, probably needs some work.
Word from Mike
hay what u been upto how life with out me.not been up 2 much just getting a the paper work like the bank and stuff done of 2 peebles at the weekend so that going to be fun.talk 2 u later have fun
Ok I managed to figure out - 'peebles' is a place, apparently much like Bunbury.
My reply:
"Just deciphered your email. How was Peebles? Slip Gwen one for me"
FRIENDS4EVA
blogging
Blogs. Everyone has one - it's a place where people can place their thoughts out on the web with the idea that somewhere, someone is reading what you have to say and thinking "yes, that does make sense, good guacamole is all about the mix". In reality however, that dreaded state of consciousness in between my ice highs, more often than not its just your friends reading about your everyday mundane goings on like how you go to Borders bookstore everyday and pick up that copy of Dark Desire erotica but always chicken out before you get to the counter because it's always that same cute girl with the brilliant smile and excellent rack waiting to judge you with those come-hither eyes once you reach the counter. I'm sure everyone has a story just like that one.
However, I am tempted to think that perhaps that is not the case. While the initial takeup of blogs and groups were tech savvy teens who unfortunately did not concern themselves with true intellectual discourse ( One infamous facebook group description - "For all of those 8th graders who think they are entitled to hang out flirt w/ 9th grade guys, and can wheedle themselves into HIGHSCHOOL parties, im sry u r in eighth grade..um soo stop. DONT think we hate you tho") more and more blogs are now run by older professors, lawyers and other such intelligentsia looking to discuss weightier topics such as politics, religion etc. The internet is not more and more shaping up to be the new front in the war for hearts and minds, much like television, radio and the newspaper before it. For example, look how much controversy one (now ex)anonymous poster caused when uploading a anti-Hilary pro-Obama ad on Youtube. Intellectuals are now flocking to the internet for dialectic that before were confined only to stuffy monthly periodicals and journals. And the beauty about this is, it is much more accessible than the aforementioned methods, especially by the ordinary man and woman. Of course there are disadvantages (sometimes the ordinary man or woman is uninformed or just plain stupid), but the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Which brings me to this: never has the flow of information been so fast, so instantaneous. And this has all happened in the last 5 to 10 years. We are on the cusp of what could be the greatest revolution humanity will see in this or the next century - a Golden Age of information where the great dialogues of the age to rival that of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, except on such a grand scale that would blow the minds of even those great thinkers of history.
It really makes you think.