Handcuffed to History

and in the end its not the years in your life but the life in you years that counts...Abraham Lincon

Angelique wants to be Delilah	11th July 2008, 17:43
	Hey There Delilah by Plain White T's Hey there Delilah What's it like in New York City? I'm a thousand miles away But girl, tonight you look so pretty Yes you do Times Square can't shine as bright as you I swear it's true Hey there Delilah Don't you worry about the distance I'm right there if you get lonely Give this song another listen Close your eyes Listen to my voice, it's my disguise I'm by your side Oh it's what you do to me Oh it's what you do to me Oh it's what you do to me Oh it's what you do to me What you do to me Hey there Delilah I know times are getting hard But just believe me, girl Someday I'll pay the bills with this guitar We'll have it good We'll have the life we knew we would My word is good Hey there Delilah I've got so much left to say If every simple song I wrote to you Would take your breath away I'd write it all Even more in love with me you'd fall We'd have it all Oh it's what you do to me Oh it's what you do to me Oh it's what you do to me Oh it's what you do to me A thousand miles seems pretty far But they've got planes and trains and cars I'd walk to you if I had no other way Our friends would all make fun of us and we'll just laugh along because we know That none of them have felt this way Delilah I can promise you That by the time we get through The world will never ever be the same And you're to blame Hey there Delilah You be good and don't you miss me Two more years and you'll be done with school And I'll be making history like I do You'll know it's all because of you We can do whatever we want to Hey there Delilah here's to you This one's for you Oh it's what you do to me Oh it's what you do to me Oh it's what you do to me Oh it's what you do to me What you do to me.
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It can't rain all the time	25th June 2008, 18:54
	Yahoo! Answer to "Why must life be so unfair?" Life is all about probability and the "20/80" rule really exist if you look around. Look around our life and you will see that not everyone who works hard will get rewarded and there are aplenty of undeserving people who are filthy rich or not needing to work for a single day. There’s even proof (some mathematic algorithm) that no matter how hard you try to distribute wealth, it will ultimately end up with 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth while 80% of the population will share the peanuts. Also, there is great disproportion to various degrees within segment(s) of both. This is also why Marxism/ Communism fails, divide everything proportionally, so that everyone can have equality? Nay, over time inequality will RETURN AGAIN! A competence and uncorrupt government should tweak (thru tax, start-up incentives, and social benefits for the disadvantage …) to create a satisfying balance (though true balance will never occur). Satisfaction is to the competencies of individual nation and their economic circumstances. We can blame it on our birth, fate but neither will respond to us. We can only choose to face it with the attitude we chose to! Let’s look at 2 living proofs below, As the old saying goes, “the dawn of enthusiasm is the birth of genius”. Look at Steve Jobs. He’s not a geek, yet, his enthusiasm character make up for what he lacked and his VERY successful career. Another old saying, “good things come to those who wait”. Look at Warren Buffet, his meticulous investing methods of investing only in his area of competencies (finance, retail, energy …) and through research, along with down to earth approach for reliable long-term gains while not chasing the “wind” (various sectors’ cyclic boom) has lead to him becoming the richest man in 2008 while no. 2 for over a decade. Isn’t that hard work and patience. Another perspective of looking at life is start by asking yourself what you need. Only by knowing yourself and fulfilling your needs while understanding contentment, can you really become a HAPPY man. Person ‘A’ may only need $1 million to be happy while Person ‘B’ needs need $100 million. So, is Person ‘B’ a) more greedy, b) ambitious or is c) Person ‘A’ a better person? If it’s (c), then how about Person ‘C’ who only wishes for a job that can feeds himself and his family? In my opinion, none of them is wrong; it’s only they have differing needs and desire to fulfilling those needs is their motivation in life. However, one must also learn of being content with his lot before he can be happy when he finally fulfill his needs. --------------------------------------... Karma is a good theory but I only believe in the while "alive" portion as I'm not dead yet, so I don't know. So does all the people who tell us it’s TRUE! How would they know?! They sign up for a pre-death trip up/down there?! IMPOSSIBLE!!!! Why good things do not comes back? Well, if you look from a (viral) marketing perspective, the attitude of a customer towards a product/ service, a) Happy = tell 3 other person b) Unhappy = tell 11 other person So, if you do a good thing, there's a ~21.43% (3/[3+11]) that s/he will be grateful and return the good deed, though not necessarily to you but another helpless soul in need (in memory of that kind soul (you) who help s/he). This is the basis of building a kind and compassion society. (PS: There’s a movie called “Pass It Forward” on this theme) So, when doing a good thing, do not ask if there’s good karma but if you enjoy doing/ helping. That SATISFACTION is definitely yours foe keep without needing to wait for good karma as it may be return in another form while the beneficiary may not be you. However, if you do a bad thing, s/he will be 3 TIMES (~78.57%) more likely to take revenge and it’s more likely on you than another person! Moral of the story, DON’T DO BAD THINGS!!! I could use a Mojito right about now.
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Please Define.	28th May 2008, 03:30
	how aptly put. i love good writing. nytimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04love.html?_r=1&oref=slogin May 4, 2008 Modern Love Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define By MARGUERITE FIELDS It’s a Complicated Subject Just before Valentine’s Day this year, Sunday Styles did something very unromantic: we asked college students nationwide to tell the plain truth about what love is like for them. We weren’t sure what to expect, but we thought we wouldn’t receive many essays about red roses and white tablecloths. When the contest deadline passed seven weeks later, more than 1,200 essays had arrived, from 365 schools in 46 states and Puerto Rico. In perhaps typical collegiate fashion, nearly 700 poured in on the last day, 400 over the final hour. We counted only three red roses among them, and one was bestowed in a laundry room. As for the more complicated stuff, and the uniquely 21st century struggles — those we got by the hundreds, covering everything from how students view communications technology (as a lifeline, a crutch or a scourge) to their ambivalence about the no-strings-attached sexual opportunism of the hookup culture. Five of these essays will appear as the Modern Love column, starting today with Marguerite Fields’s winning entry, “Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define,” an eloquent, clear-eyed account of her generation’s often noncommittal dating scene. On the Sundays between Mother’s Day (May 11) and Father’s Day (June 15), we will publish the four runner-up essays. Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define By MARGUERITE FIELDS RECENTLY my mother asked me to clarify what I meant when I said I was dating someone, versus when I was hooking up with someone, versus when I was seeing someone. And I had trouble answering her because the many options overlap and blur in my mind. But at one point, four years ago, I had a boyfriend. And I know he was my boyfriend because he said, “I want you to be my girlfriend,” and I said, “O.K.” He and I dated for over a year, and when we broke up I thought my angsty heart was going to spit itself right up out of my sore throat. Afterward, I moved out of my mother’s house in Brooklyn and into an apartment in the East Village, and from there it becomes confusing. So, a few days after the chat with my mom, when I found myself downtown drinking tea with my friend Steven, I asked him what he thought about dating. He has a long-term girlfriend, and I was curious how he viewed their relationship. “The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right? I’m just glad I get to hang out with her. Spend time with her. Because that’s all we really have, you know? I don’t want her to be mine, and I don’t want to be anybody’s.” I sucked my teeth and looked over at the next table, where two men sat opposite each other. One looked over his shoulder and gave me a closed-mouth grin. Steven explained that it’s not a question of faithfulness but of expectation. He can’t be expected not to want to sleep with other people, so he can’t expect her to think differently. They are both young and living in New York, and as everyone in New York knows, there’s the possibility of meeting anyone, everywhere, all the time. For the sake of brevity and clarity, I’ll say I’ve dated a lot of guys. It’s not that I’ve gone out anywhere with a lot of these guys, or been physical with most of them, or even seen them more than once. But there have been many, many encounters. I’ve met guys in the park, at the deli, at galleries, at parties and on the Internet. The Internet idea came from thinking that if I could sift through people’s profiles, like applications, I could eliminate the obvious lunatics. And that didn’t work out very well. One leaned across the table an hour into dinner and screamed: “You love me! I know you do!” Another stood outside my apartment with one finger on the buzzer and another covering the peephole, occasionally banging his fist, until he finally exhausted himself and left. As for the guys I first met in person, there was the construction worker I ran into on the train twice before saying anything, kissed the third time, kissed the fourth time, got stood up by the fifth time and never saw again. Then there was the guy with tattooed knuckles, the young Republican, the Irishman on vacation and the guy who stole $300 from me to buy drugs. There was the activist, the actor, the librarian, the waiter and the bond trader. So when my friends and I started having a conversation about the nature of monogamy, I thought I knew something about monogamy. Because, despite the fleeting nature of most of my encounters, and despite my own role in their short duration, I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence. Sometimes I don’t like them, or am scared of them, and a lot of times I’m just bored by them. But my fear or dislike or boredom never seems to diminish my underlying desire for a guy to stay, or at least to say he is going to stay, for a very long time. And even when I don’t want him to stay — even when he and I find each other as strangers and remain strangers until we stop doing whatever it is we are doing — I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans. But noncommittal is what we’re all about. There was the guy with red hair and big steaklike hands that walked with me arm in arm through Washington Square Park, kissed me on the stoop of my mother’s brownstone and said he wanted to be my boyfriend. Until our next walk, when he kept his hands to himself and said he meant boyfriend “in the theoretical sense of the word.” Then there was the installer of soy insulation who cooked soggy pasta and made me watch football and whimpered and kicked in his sleep. In the spring there was the guy 12 years older than me who shared an apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park with an antediluvian man who walked around in graying long underwear. There was the guy who wore more makeup than I did, and the one who waxed his eyebrows clean off his face. And the one who slept with a guy when he was drunk, then with another when he was sober. (But he insisted he wasn’t gay, just curious, and since when was I so uptight anyway?) Over the summer there was the Jesuit taking a break from the seminary who stopped calling after I said I wouldn’t sleep with him on our third date. In the fall, back at school, there was the banjo player from the woods of New England who took me home to meet his family, then moved away and told me to wait for him. And I did, for months, until he called to say he was falling in love with me, and oh, man, I had to come see him right away (“Buy your ticket tonight!”), before he called again to say it was moving too fast and he wasn’t ready. And on, and on, and on. Then this winter I met a guy while waiting to have my computer fixed. He had big blue eyes and a wide red mouth and delicate hands and greasy brown hair. He sat down and asked what I was reading and did I have a boyfriend because he was asking me out. He smelled like incense and clean linen, and I was overwhelmingly and instantaneously smitten. Among other things, I liked his indifference, confidence and knowledge of foreign film directors. On our first date he explained his theory of exclusive relationships, which was that they shouldn’t exist. We talked about our (and all of our friends’) divorced parents, about how marriage was nothing but a pragmatic financial venture, and about the last time we cheated on someone. He said that his disregard for monogamy wasn’t a chauvinistic throwback, but quite the opposite: the ultimate nod to feminism. On our second date we watched coverage of the Iowa caucus, and later, after listening to jazz at his apartment, he crawled onto his bed, leaned against the headboard and said he didn’t burn artificial light after dark. I sighed and edged into bed next to him. During the night he kicked and snored, grabbing greedily at me with his well-moisturized hands like a child snatching at free candy. We overslept. In the morning I watched him dress frantically, the way a drifter would (gray pants and shirt tucked in and tie and vest and brown wingtip shoes and gray sweater and red scarf and jacket: it was lovely). He looked up occasionally from his scrambling to give a big toothy smile. I made the bed and drank the orange juice he bought for me the night before. We left his apartment and tried to find a cab. As we crossed Hudson Street, we waded through a passing stream of preschool children walking in pairs, holding hands. I watched their teachers — one at the front of the line, one in the middle, one at the back — while he hailed a taxi. A week passed before I saw him again. I was about to go back to school in Vermont, and he was headed to Jamaica on vacation. When I entered the restaurant, he said: “The nice part about having a shoddy memory is I forget how pretty some people are. You look beautiful.” As we ate, we theorized about the effects of -bleep- on romantic relationships. Dinner ended; he had to go pack for his trip. I asked casually when I was going to see him again. He sighed. “That’s a loaded question.” I asked what he meant, because I thought the question was fairly straightforward. Then it came. The story. The long, boring, aggravatingly rehearsed and condescending story. It spewed, overflowed and dripped off our table and onto the floor and underneath the shoes of the other patrons and into the street. He said he had just gotten out of a long relationship, and now he was single and didn’t really know how this whole dating thing works, but he was seeing a lot of other people, and he liked me; he thought I was special. Cross my heart, he actually called me special. WHEN he was done, he asked: “That’s what you were talking about, right? Seeing me again and the nature of our relationship? Like, what are we to each other?” I said I just meant to ask when we were going to see each other again, because I thought that was the polite thing to do after a few dates, and I wondered if he wanted to make time for me to come back to New York to see him. And he said no, that was “too much, too soon,” but if I’m ever in town I should call him. He would love to see me. We left. It was raining, he hailed a cab for me, and we hugged without looking at each other. I got into the cab and rode away. And tried to process it. And tried to remind myself that when we first met I thought he was an arrogant, presumptuous little man. I tried to think about my conversation with Steven. I tried to remember that I was actively seeking to practice some Zenlike form of nonattachment. I tried to remember that no one is my property and neither am I theirs, and so I should just enjoy the time we spend together, because in the end it’s our collected experiences that add up to a rich and fulfilling life. I tried to tell myself that I’m young, that this is the time to be casual, careless, lighthearted and fun; don’t ruin it. Marguerite Fields is a junior at Marlboro College in Vermont.
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The Audacity of Hope	16th February 2008, 14:03
	oh so much has happened since my last post. one in particular demands immediate attention. February 11, 08 - Monday - Sen. Barack Obama visited the University of MD and not only was I able to attend the rally but was one of those lucky few to stand at the railing and actually get to shake hands with him. (!!!!!!!! - I KNOWWWW). It was so surreal. He was right there and so wonderful. No pride, no pretense - just sheer intelligence personified. What made it even better was that my dear loves - Afting and Rububs (and her love Shahed) was there right beside me to experience it all together. :). Yay! You can see us in the rally in the video I have embedded to the left. <--- And if you haven't watched it already - please please please watch the "Yes We Can" song either right here at my website or at www.yeswecansong.com. Its absolutely brilliant. Thank you Black Eyed Peas for yet another masterpiece. "YES WE CAN" It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom. Yes we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can. It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballots; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land. Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can. We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change. We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics...they will only grow louder and more dissonant ........... We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea -- Yes. We. Can.
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wisdom	27th November 2007, 14:52
	"When the world pushes you to your knees, you are in the perfect position to pray." ki bujhle? Photo by Shihab
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