you can’t handle the truth

Well, looks like the old blogs are lost for good, boys and girls. I could be tempted to wax poetic and talk about “brand new starts”, but I don’t feel very sacchariny today. If I get sweet on top of wearing pink, I might as well just join the Oprah book club.

Belgium came and went, too laden with content and meaning to post in a public archive. I’ll post the pictures sometime soon though. Beautiful country, wonderful two weeks. Too wonderful, I’m thinking about moving. But that’s another story for another time.

I was thinking about a girl today, someone whom you could say was my twin in another life. I met her six years ago when I left a job to go to Asia. She was my replacement. We dropped out of acquaintance, until four years later when I started a job as a training materials developer. I was replacing someone who had left to go to Asia, and as I would later find out, that someone was her. To add another parallel, shortly after starting that job, I met NiceGuyAtTheOffice, with whom things soon seemed to be well on their way. Then I found out NiceGuyAtTheOffice had just been dumped by this girl leaving for Asia.

(Things never actually took off with NiceGuyAtTheOffice, by the way, as I met the charming T - that was two years ago).

What’s my point?

I was just thinking about a conversation she and I had one night, about how she felt life was simplest if you were governed by the simple principle of Living by the Truth. Have nothing to hide, deal openly with all. However, she was finding that to be difficult, as most people close to her just “couldn’t handle the truth”. Some seemed to prefer being lied to, somewhat. It seems to be my experience of late. The truth is often met with anger, vehemence, defensiveness.

Note to self: reward truth with understanding.

The girl now lives in Japan.

Well, off to swing…

kalifornia

Still jetlagged on my third day here, I’m still getting up at 4 every morning (local time). By the time I get zeitgebered into local time, it’ll be time to head to Belgium (a nine hour difference from here).

Couldn’t shake the weird feeling that California felt familiar, but couldn’t quite grasp how, and then I realized it feels like Indonesia for some reason. I think it’s the smells, because it sure ain’t the weather - it only gets up to about a “chilly” 15 here. But it’s sunny and blooming all over the place, and the vegetation is garishly lush.

A funny thing about the flight over: the pilot tells us we’ll be going right smack over the Grand Canyon. I’m thinking, “we’ll that sucks, we can’t see directly down. Only left and right”… Well, when we got there I realized that the Grand Canyon… is big. Holy crap it’s big! Kind of had trouble with perspective, looking at it from so high up, but the fact that it went on and on, on both sides of the aircraft, well…

I couldn’t decide whether the endless, reddish desert terrain over Arizona and New Mexico looked more like a scene from Roadrunner (complete with those natural monoliths you see in cartoons) or Mars. Gotta get down there for a closer view someday.

metaphysical spewings

I just realized, it’s been a while since I’ve had a (nocturnal) dream. I’m enjoying all this living in the literal world, but I’m almost afraid of liking it too much. I’m afraid of enjoying my work too much, like I have some sneaking suspicion I might be missing out on the real picture. Or perhaps it could slowly kill my soul. Mythologist Joseph Campbell says it’s a fallacy to believe that the intellectual mind, the brain, runs the show within a person. It is but a tool for one’s humanity. I used to say that intellectualizing situations was the easiest way of solving them, because logically there’s always a right answer. But right (or wrong) answer only comes down to what you just “know”. And it is not the brain that just “knows”. The heart is, indeed, the seat of your true humanity.

Is this thing on?