為了自由的未來

Vienna Teng is an amazing singer, and
this song is putting me in a good space.

a good imagination (不怕了)

I keep coming back to a question asked a while ago by a good friend:

What would the world be like if you weren't afraid?

What would life be like without fear?




I have a good imagination, and a lot of practice. I can make flowers sprout out of table-tops, fill rooms with water to see the items float, and watch fish swimming around the trees.

But, more usefully, I can often see or sense the way I want things to be, and then move towards that future. Vision and visualization are important tools to me in setting and moving towards goals. If I can perceive it in my mind, I can often find a way to execute it.



For my next endeavor, I shall summon the courage and skill to imagine a life and a world in which I am not afraid. And, I shall live it.

gifts

A good friend sent me these musics.
Here, maybe you would like them, too.

Refrigerator wisdom (part 1)

"If we really believe that God's presence is always a Saving Presence, then we come to know that when we reach out to others in unconditional love, we are being saved. When we tear down walls & build bridges in our relationships, we are being saved. When we seek our true selves in the depths of our being in God, we are being saved. When we replace a mere collective being together with true community, we are truly experiencing ourselves as being saved. And this experience of being saved is the only way we can experience God's Presence as a Saving Presence. We find a Saving God in the experience of being saved" - William H. Shannon

Pangaea Project Rocks

The Pangaea Project (Bringing the World Back Together) is a relatively recent nonprofit organization that provides high school kids from underserved areas to get involved with various issues of social concern on the international and local levels by giving them a chance go abroad and learn from others in the international community.



This Video of returning students addressing the Mayor of Portland is solid evidence for the great work this project is doing, and will continue to do.

refreshing

It feels wonderful - to accept others' challenges of my thoughts, opinions, and actions - and understanding that I am not judged or criticized, but allowed to learn and grow.

The windows all around my heart must have come loose, and I hope to keep them so. I sense the wafting curtains in my chest, and feel again well-ventilated.

It's about time.

我最近開心。
（我最近开心）

just me

Tonight, I went to a celebration thrown by a local nonprofit, the Pangaea Project. I donated some money to them because the work they are doing is important, and they invited me to come to their event held at a neat bar in northeast. Sometimes when I'm doing things like this - going to events, talks, documentaries, screenings, exhibits, restaurants, I mention it to a friend if someone happens to be nearby.

"Oh neat," they usually say and then, "Who are you going with?"


I usually smile and say, 'oh, it's just me.'
Sometimes I wish I had a different answer.
It feels lonely when they put it like that.

acts of kindness

If you're going to hold a door open for someone and expect them to walk appreciatively through it,

THINK AHEAD, GET TO THE DOOR, AND HAVE IT OPEN BEFORE THEY NEED TO WALK THROUGH.

Every time

Friends and family who remember and tell me again by their presence who I am,

a heavy pincushion of stars filling through tree branches above,

a firefly valley in the summer below,

This is where I'm from.

Every time I go back, I feel crazy for leaving again.

Reintroduction

I remind myself to respond to fear and uncertainty with an openness and willingness to greater understanding.

If a stranger is a friend you've never met,
perhaps fear can be a world unexplored. I will ask its name and place of birth and allow us both to be transformed.



A friend and I were talking last year about the concept of good things coming from bad situations. I think I believe instead that good things come to those who can keep their heads lifted enough, no matter what the situation, to see them.

吃醋

I watched Dream Weavers, a documentary about preparations for the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics today.

One of the young girls on the gymnastics team reminded the interviewer that "bitterness comes before sweetness" when she talked about how difficult and tiresome it was to train. (I wish I could remember their exact sayings)

She and the others making their preparations - such as the architects and builders of the birds nest - expended great effort in a relentless striving for perfection with high stakes.

They reminded me that the end goal takes dedication and difficult or unpleasant work in the getting there. That is the necessary exchange. It is not enough to endure the days leading up to the Olympics - one must actively work and invest to avoid failure.

If the builders had merely done their job to get it done, the Bird's Nest may have collapsed when they took away the supports. But because of extensive preparation and testing, before rigorous precision and demanding execution of the building tasks, the creation stood and succeeded as the centerpiece of the Olympic structures.

They were willing and able to follow through with making the exchange.

From my brother's blag:
"
Human kind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of equivalent exchange.
-Full Metal Alchemist
It is high time I begin exchanging and work to learn.
"

How it should be (feat. Chris Brown)

I am very glad that people and things like this exist.

'typical' model of abuse is too extreme to be commonly recognizable

I think that the general image that our society has of an abuse being committed by a willfully harmful person against another small and weak individual is unfortunate and misleading.



It is misleading because there are many situations which are not so clear-cut. And, it is unfortunate because, like most lies, it makes the truth harder to see. It seems that many times, especially situations where the abuse is not physical, the abuser and the victim do not see each other as fitting the stereotypical roles and therefore do not recognize that the situation really has an abusive dynamic.

The stereotypical model makes it difficult for victims of more subtle psychological or emotional abuse to realize that they are in an abusive situation. They may not see their abuser as an intentionally destructive person, and they probably don't see themselves as the vulnerable and helpless victim. Neither image does justice to the complexity of the many kinds of people that find themselves in either role. Neither image is useful for determining whether a person qualifies as an abuser or as a victim.

It seems probable that part of the reason people do not recognize when they are in this picture is because they might not see the other person as being in the picture either, or might not want to admit it. For example, if a woman consistently suffers because of the improper manner with which her husband is treating her, she might still believe that he loves her and is not intending to harm her (and she may be right, but that doesn't make it ok). This belief conflicts with the usual image of the abuser as being obviously and willfully destructive, so she may not think she is being abused.

Further, even if she suspects she is being abused, she may not want to admit it because of the connotations or associations of being cast into the images of abuser and abusee. If she thinks of herself as a victim, that might also carry connotations of being weak, passive, and helpless, and she may not want to see herself this way (and she might be right). Or possibly more compelling, if she begins to think of her husband as an abuser, this can carry the connotation that he intends to harm her, and she may not want to accuse him of this. This is not necessarily foolish protectiveness - she may be right. It may very well be that he does not intend to harm her, but that his ability to interact with other people is just so poor and underdeveloped that in trying to satisfy his own psychological needs, he inflicts unnecessary pain upon others.

(In the above example, I used the image of a woman responding to the abuse of a man. The genders in the example could be reversed, identical, or neutral without changing the idea. Perhaps it would even make a stronger point to consider that the situation where a female abuses a male is not as easily recognizable to society as the image I chose to present.)

I think that in order for people to more easily recognize when they are in an abusive situations and to more easily point out when someone else is in an abusive situation, we need to (as a society) reduce the social stigma and taboo around being either a victim or an abuser. This may make it easier for people to realize and seek help because they will recognize the nature of the real situation before it reaches an extreme. They will not be afraid or deterred by the stigma of being either helpless or uncaring.

It's also true that there probably are situations so terrible that they fit and deserve the extreme depictions. But, I expect most cases are more subtle and are probably just the case of someone who, in their inability to express themselves functionally, harms others. These kinds of power dynamics exist in all sorts of human relationships, and I think that abuse of any kind of power is something that we as a human society should open up more for discussion and introspection.

We as people need to be alert to responsible ways of interacting with our fellow humans. We will make mistakes sometimes, but we must be open to realizing, atoning for, and learning from our mistakes.

It seems that too often, unhealthy and dysfunctional power imbalances are allowed to escalate and perpetuate (and perhaps even become expected or 'normal') because they are not extreme enough for people to recognize and discourage. I think that because people cannot really believe that their situation is as bad as the accepted model (and it might not be, but it is still unhealthy), they do not see that their situation also counts as abuse and believe that there is just something wrong with the way they see or understand things.

These people begin to believe that they are crazy for sensing that what is happening around them is not right. They are not crazy.

It is possible that they have just been misled by the popular image of what abuse is 'supposed' to look like.

Blind

People only see what they already think they are seeing.

blind blind blind.

(and, I am probably no exception.)

Hedgehog in the Fog

I downloaded Google Chrome recently and just started it now. This post is in honor of something I should have noted here long ago, which is now available as a Google Chrome theme. Hedgehog in the Fog is a russian folktale brilliantly made into a film, produced in 1975 by the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow. Google Chrome created the theme in honor of the film being awarded 'Best Animated Film of all Time' in Tokyo in 2003, according to Google and Wikipedia.

the Internet

While being curious regarding the source of the whole 'leekspin' meme (originally Loituma Girl), I stumbled across this quote in Wikipedia which, although directly applied to the explanation of 'leekspin', seems to adequately describe much of the rest of the internet as well:

This is basically a joke for someone who spends all of their time staring at a computer, made by people who spend all of their time staring at a computer. It's possible to read deeper meanings into it, but it sort of defeats the purpose because in the end it's just this hypnotic clip of animation.
-Patrick Macias, as interviewed by The World


(more about the original weirdness:)

Link to Wikipedia Leekspin article
Link to Leekspin on 'Know Your Meme' which claims to have an archive of the different versions. I have not researched this.


I doubt that this is the 'original version' due to its title and comments, but it is very popular on YouTube.

Correlation?

It is sometimes hard to tell if there is much correlation between how hard I try and whether the results are 'good enough'.

The downside?
Well, that could be kind of a disappointing thought. It's a little painful to invest a lot in a particular thing for no or negative return.

The upside?
Maybe I can save myself a lot of tragic effort by realizing that I'm already either good enough or not (and things will be ok one way or another) before I start. That could be a load off my shoulders.