Category: General

February is my least favorite month.

The area I live in only gets 1 – 2 dustings of snow per winter. We get ice, we get barren trees, brown grass, cold air and the bleakness of frozen concrete urban sprawl zones. In short all of the ugliness of winter without much of the beauty.

By the time February rolls around I am done with the bleakness of winter. The bleakness in the current news doesn’t help either.

I’m thinking about this favorite quote of mine from concentration camp survivor, psychologist and inventor of logotherapy ( a form of cognitive therapy ) Viktor Frankel:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Okay, time to pump things up.

February is my least favorite month, but is also the shortest month and we are already 10 days into it.

The news is bleak, but I have new hope with our new President. I can’t imagine another person with a mix of qualifications better to tackle the problems at hand. Good grief, just imagine if the opposition won.

It is starting to get light out when I wake up and stay light for about 10 minutes after work.

In a few weeks it will be that weird in between time, not winter and not spring with a sense of foreshadowing in the air. Soon after that those ephemeral flowers you see on bushes that only last a few weeks in spring will come out. Then buttercups, then those blue chicory flowers, then dandelions. Squirrels, rabbits, birds. Cats lazily sleeping on porches.

Now, I feel better.

Good night! 🙂

In the last few years I have seen a number of articles with scientists claiming that they have been able to see physical manifestations of love in human brains. The upshot of these articles is that the researchers claimed that the flush of romantic love only lasts between 1 – 3 years.

Just when it looked like the last bit of magic had been stamped out of our bottom line world it looks like “true love” is getting a second chance:

A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.

Granted, “1 in 10” does not sound all of that optimistic, but it looks like the facts are there for magic, at least romantic magic still existing in our world. Furthermore, this study shows that it is possible for it to be measured. If something can be measured then it can be learned how to produce and perhaps more importantly, maintain it.

Its not “The Princess Bride”, but it sounds like a nice compromise between magic and reality.

“Scientists discover true love” by John Harlow and Brendan Montague

Hat tip to my friend Mala who sent me this interesting piece. These icons were designed by Liu Young who was born in China and educated in Germany.

Blue == Western Cultures

Red == Asian Cultures

Opinions:

Way Of Life:

Punctuality:

Contacts:

Anger:

Queue When Waiting:

Sundays On The Road:

A Party:

In The Restaurant:

Traveling:

Handling A Problem:

Three Meals A Day:

Transportation Changing Over Time:

The Elderly In Day To Day Life:

Moods And The Weather:

The Boss:

What Is Trendy:

The Child:

Beauty:

Me:

Taking A Shower: