SILLINESS
Now, I’m pretty silly for a guy who thinks about serious things.
And I haven’t spent much time with my mother and sisters the past few years.
But in being in their company, it’s apparent where that silliness comes from. It’s a sort of family language.
I always thought I was just channeling my sister Ellen.
But she is just the best practitioner of that language.
Sorry Veronika. It’s Genetic.
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-27 20:38:00 UTC
THE ERAS IF ONE’S LIFE
How do you break down your life into sets of memories?
I don’t think anyone uses years. Years measure. They don’t explain.
I think in terms of jobs and women. After that, cars. The women and jobs are connected. The cars aren’t. 🙂
My friends stay constant over time. So that doesn’t categorize anything.
I haven’t thought about what that means.
Just curious how others think of their lives. Whether systems are isolated like that or a continuity of relations. 😉
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-22 11:57:00 UTC
LIVING WELL?
I love this country.
The hotel’s owners have offered me, unsolicited, a two bedroom apartment with full maid service overlooking the main street, or my choice of suites in the hotel for less money than I’d pay in seattle for a monthly apartment.
And that’s sweet. Because common areas including apartment entries are treated like trash heaps here. And the hotel staff is fantastic.
The apartment is wonderful because I could get out of eating restaurant food.
It’s bad enough that the streets are lined with pastry shops. I don’t need to live on restaurant food.
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-19 06:57:00 UTC
ANOTHER EXPAT
He’s my age. A bit taller and better looking. American. French swept hair. Dances well. Good tailor.
I think I’ve seen him in every club in kiev so far.
Not sure why that’s so weird. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-15 18:02:00 UTC
A BAR. IN KIEV. THE POWER IS OUT.
And people are singing popular songs a-Capella. By candle light.
We are clapping. We are happy.
This is life. This is good life.
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-14 17:40:00 UTC
UKRAINE IS THE BEST THING TO HAPPEN TO ME IN MY ADULT LIFE
if there is a heaven. It looks like Ukraine.
These are the most wonderful people on earth.
White people in their natural habitat. With a government that has abandoned them.
It’s beautiful.
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-09 19:40:00 UTC
FASHION : WEAR AND TEAR
The last time I lived in a city full time, was in Boston in the 1980’s, when I had a ponytail, an earring and wore a jacket, jeans and sneakers every day – and yes, it was pretty trendy (hip) at the time.
Normally, I keep a lot of shoes. And while I favor two or three pair, I wear most of them. But that means I wear them driving around, at home, or in the effete shops of bellevue. The main danger to fine shoes in seattle is to the soles from being wet so frequently.
Today I’ve noticed the wear and tear on my shoes from walking in the city. My Geox are less than six months old and are pretty much at end of cycle. The new Prada’s are taking a beating. Cobblestones and all.
So, it’s either go thru two pair of shoes every three months, and keep up with fashion or move to four pair and try to make that last six or nine months.
I guess, if you don’t need a car, you can afford the shoe budget. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2012-11-27 02:41:00 UTC
IT’S GREAT TO BE BUILDING A COMPANY AGAIN
Building a team. Building a product. Working fourteen hours a day… simply because you absolutely want to. Watching something beautiful begin to emerge from collective effort. The joy on people’s faces as they solve some problem or other. The comfort that comes from slowly beginning to understand something, and being a part of something.
Entrepreneurship is tribal. It’s just faster than building a tribe the old fashioned way. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2012-11-15 17:12:00 UTC
HEALTH UPDATE : DRINKING?
OK. I can apparently drink like a fish now without hangover or other nefarious repercussions. I still have a lower tolerance than most people but I’m no longer afraid of going out on the town with Max Romanenko and ending up in the hospital.
A close friend has always teased me that normal people, when they have a bad day, just have a drink and are done with it. And I had to invent more creative means of getting to a cerebral reset.
Thankfully, as a side effect of surgery, I’ve joined the club of ethanol tolerance.
I feel a little guilty commenting on this topic so frequently, but as my body adapts I feel like an alien transported to a worldly garden of Eden where everything is no longer poisonous, where I can breathe without effort most of the time, and where the autistic reactions that took a week to vent, can be shut down with a class of scotch and a cup of coffee in thirty minutes.
Source date (UTC): 2012-11-15 10:53:00 UTC
I LOVE THESE PEOPLE
Seriously. I want to just hug them at random. And I’d give into impulse and do it if I thought I could get away with it.
Now, sure, I’m not yet sensitized to the cacophony of signals. And sure, I tend to broadcast my own, which positively colors the reactions of others to me in this environment.
But that said. It seems that a smile and consideration are more valuable currencies here. More like the small towns that some of us still remember growing up in.
I’m working on a bit of theory here that I’m trying to convert into propertarian language. I can’t quite do it yet.
But we know that there is a small and maximum diversity if race, religion and culture that allows normative excellences to develop before these same interpersonal “calculations’ must be diverted to accommodative compromises.
One easily visible example is the loss of rhyme, poetic expression, alliteration, subtlety and allegory, especially literary allegory from american English And it has had and will continue to have extraordinary consequences for not only norms, but the structure of the physical mind, and for the unarticulated habitual metaphysics of the population.
We have diverted extraordinary efforts to accommodate diversity for no other reason than to preserve the monolithic state. Yet that monolithic state exists entirely for the purpose of conducting warfare. First to conquer and profit from the continent. Second to protect that continent from European adventurism. And finally to protect the west after its suicide, from communism.
Now these habits are norms, and these norms embodied in socialist myth and political institutions. And our pursuit of excellences is abandoned in favor of compromises. not just in our language. But in dysgenic breeding and outbreeding.
One can lament a ones culture. We have been lamenting ours for a century now.
But lamenting is romantic. Institutions grounded in norms are functional technologies.
We lost mortar and cement for what, the better part of thousand years? We lost reason for approximately the same.
We lost literacy for as long
The first Greeks lost writing for six hundred years.
The path of civilization through time is not linear. It includes cataclysmic boundaries.
The most expensive technologies to develop in any civilization are norms.
Yet we treat them as given.
Source date (UTC): 2012-11-11 07:49:00 UTC