Sleeping habbits for beagles of a certain age ;-)

@Work and sleepy...........

(looks like a tweet......ah new words tweeting and googling etc etc) :-)

Anyway.......my strip for the day :

(yeah yeah that's me weird sleep habbits):p

p.s. But I do try to change :)

Focus and strength - * With or without you

Decisions, decisions, decisions.....

From the smallest to the biggest, what to eat, which movie to see, continue striving with work and university when clearly overworked and tired, allowing people in and so many others.

My last university essay (a topic I'm pursuing just because I want to and has nothing to do with my industry, Computer Science) had to do with the Dark Ages and Early New Europe (Λιμοί και Λιμός LOL!!!!!!!! - very very private joke for a couple of eyes only).

I find myself not conflicted but strangely satisfied by my field of work and my field of studying at the moment. They say that there comes a time you stop studying, but not for me. I wish I had the time to go through everything that has to do with the human condition, how we perceive the universe, philosophically and scientifically, how we have evolved, who are we, what are we doing here.........studying for the joy of it is probably never stop asking the questions.

And, God, there are so many to ask :-)

Robert Frost said

'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler; long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth;
- Then took the other, as just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear; though as for that, the passing there had worn them really about the same.
- And both that morning equally lay, in leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
- I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence; two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.'

Cliche but true nonetheless.....

But I'm also dissapointed....well maybe dissapointed is not a proper word. In the past year I have fought with any and all strength that I could muster to stay afloat. And, to my great surprise, it seems I did.

I didn't quit university, I didnt quit my job, I was broken but it really doesn't matter how you fall but how you rise.....and I managed to rise in so many ways. And now, when I'm starting to get into balance, here comes something to blow me out of balance.

Worth it? I thought so......I would like to think so. Is that objective? No......is that right? What are the criteria to judge?

What I do know is that people very rarely find people that they consider unique. Divine beasts I should say in a world filled with anything but.......

And there are words, actions, thoughts that scar people......scar them and make them ache. Strong people can distinguish and even with a considerable effort and pain make a calculated decision. And rise to meet Life.

One asks you to open up and break the borders of your solitude for him. Well first of all he has to have the strenght and the will to do it for himself as well , and probably, be so kind as not to ask you to take such a huge bet on......blind faith. Faith....I have all the faith in the world in Newton's law of gravity. And I would bet my life on that.....all other bets....are difficult.

People.....as the song goes, 'everybody's got to learn sometime'. So if you want me to change , you gotta change as well.

I have my clusters and my databases and my Dark Ages and my music and my books and my memories and my solitude and all that consists and makes up Me. And that is worth to be appreciatted for itself, not compared nor used as a substitute. After all, if you're not the Leading Lady of your life you're always gonna be a supporting Actor.

My body is recovering, my mind is recovering and strong, my will is unbent......I want it all because I nearly escaped the Great Reaper so for now I want it all and I want it now.

Isn't that one of the things that make me human? I think so.

There is no innocence, only degrees of guilt - somethings never change - . Careful with your own.........guilt or innocence.

As the song goes ' I can't accept that we're going nowhere, lay down beside me, one last time lets go there....'

I ask for focus and strenght......

* Listening to With or without you by Connie Williams

The Great Gatsby

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

Jay Gatsby as first described by F.S.Fitzgerald


If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

.............................................................................

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.

...........................................................................

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock—until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

..........................................................................

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Jay Gatsby..........

Attracted to the light

And people ask me why I realate to Snoopy........:-)



I have a couple of root consoles minimized in my taskbar, an enterprise manager who is apparently angry at me and keeps loosing connection to all cluster db's and a documentation of 1000 pages which I really DO NOT enjoy reading.

But it feels good......why it feels good is a mix of a multitude of reasons, and I have lately been so obligated to write and write and write that I now find it difficult to write for pleasure...pathetic for me ......shame on me.....well its not just that. I have also developed what I can now recognise as a reluctancy of expressing my inner thoughts out into the void.

The void.....difficult to define but felt nonetheless.

My body and my apparent actions are here but my mind wanders and this seldom...no ....almost never happens to me , at least not to an extent that is difficult for me to focus. I'm out of balance yes, but the good kind. Is there a good kind? Hell yeah there's a good kind (kind of exhausting though because I have to keep up 3 personas together all the time)

Its actually quite quiet right now here, completely different than this morning when it was chaos....not the organised one but the other kind...the hectic one.

So my mind easily drifts .....

I am still the same person who was a few weeks before yet I feel quite different.....out of balance (yes I repeat myself) but good.....I talk and interact, produce but still a part of my mind is outside of all this, sometimes observing sometimes in a completely different place, with someone else.

Life is quite unexpected. And it has been said by my betters in much more eloquent ways how difficult it is to open up your closed and guarded self and allow someone to step over it but who is the judge who will tell you when to do it? Answer : Noone, not even you.

You just do it, and as that great kid says to Liam Neeson in Love actually, 'Let's go get the shit kicked out of us by love'.

You take a chance and as you grow up the chances become less and less and your own willingness to take them becomes less as well. You reach a point when it just does not even move you, not a tiny bit. And you think, ok that's it for me, I m out of the game because I don't want to play the game , no more interesting 'contestants' and the ones I thought were interesting or equal were delusions probably and at best, have not left a bitterness behind.

Yet, as life would have it, because life is, afterall, not entirely stupid (quite the opposite I would say), you get a sudden kick which tells you, get up, wake up, this is your Life calling, come and re-join the ranks, the Game goes ever on and on.

I still hope, so I still cry at La Traviata. As for Tosca, well that is now for me absolutely exclusive.

My young heart, you are still here, still beating, as sung at Musetta's waltz (that's La Boheme). (Gioventù mia – tu non sei morta – My youth - you are not dead - Quanto m'en vo)

My heart you are still able to feel and get hurt. God, what a relief, I though you were gone.

Particles of dust, dancing in a sunbeam.....

P.S. I feel alive.......and for that I am grateful and happy.

P.S.2. I am listening to Nessun Dorma , the instrumental version. My spine has chills and my eyes water......

P.S.3. The human race is filled with passion. repeat: THE HUMAN RACE IS FILLED WITH PASSION. Do not let that passion fade because of the ones that have been too weak, or afraid, or liars simply to face it.

P.S.4 I am like a butterfly attracted to a bright light

P.S5. Listening to Enigma A posteriori - Private Lounge Remix - Invisible Love the Boca Junior Remix

Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent - Pour partir; coeurs légers, semblables aux ballons, - De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s'écartent, - Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours: Allons.

Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), le Voyage Charles Baudelaire

Μα οι πραγματικοί ταξιδιώτες είναι αυτοί μόνο που φεύγουν
Για να φύγουν. Ανάλαφρες καρδιές, σαν αερόστατα
Από την μοίρα τους ποτέ δεν απομακρύνονται
Και δίχως να ξέρουν γιατί, λένε πάντα : πάμε!

InBetween Days*

What a year......let me rephrase.....WHAT A YEAR!!!!

It matters not how straight the gate etc etc my head is bloody but unbowed etc etc I'm the master of my fate I'm the captain of my soul. Right.

It is probably useless to try even summarise this past year, useless and unnececerily painful.

So what I can now honestly say is that the last seconds of this year did go with a bang...one I did not anticipate nor expect and I got to face some of my daemons and they were really......kind with me at that confrontation.

To all who have been there in this past year thank you. To all who have not.......I kind of expected it so no worries ( I use that a lot these days)

As Queen Elizabeth of the Tudors said in her Tilbury speech before the battle with the Spanish Armada which changed the course of european history (yes I still do love the Tudors)

'I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm;'

I could say the same just replace the world England with Self and Parma and Spain with anything that puts one's self in jeopardy and borders of my realm...borders of my consciousness.

Self.....my self....my conscioussness.....my self awareness......which has been put on the line far too many times to count or mention in the last year.....I reclaim it this year.

I want to live. I want to live without fear. So I am prepared to fight, and again as Elizabeth said, to put down in the dust my honour and my blood even. Well not quite so tragically as in battle maybe but in this battle we call life casualties are often less then obvious but casualties nonetheless.

Solitude. I grow and with me my solitude grows, as a steady companion and comforting surrounding. I thought I understood Rilke years ago but every year that passes his Letters
seem to make more and more sense. Everyday I see people afraid of loneliness getting into situations destined to destroy their own individuality.......I say do not be afraid of your loneliness , embrace it and find your solitude and someday you ll be able (probably if you re lucky) to find someone to stand beside you, guarding each other's solitude. But that's maybe asking too much.

They didn't call them the Dark Ages because it was dark. How right you were Daniel.....

So to sum up a post that really doesn't make much sense.......to the year that passed.......I have only one word form Puccini's Nessun Dorma :

'Vincerò!'

I got to cry again at La Traviata and that was far more than I expected.

And I got to feel things I thought were lost to me so a big salute to Life for her unbelievable and unmistakable ways.......one wink to the Universe just for being (or not being who knows anyway):)

And for the New Year I wish......I wish for myself and for everyone Sapere Aude! Dare to know. Kant's motto of enlightment and “the freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters” .

Enlightment, reason , knowledge, a bit of chance, dare and ...maybe.....someone to guard each others solitude.

I think that is enough for one year......one lifetime even :)

As always......I still claim to be Noÿs Lambent, non-Eternal, agent of Reality change and hopeless dreamer of a humanity that will reach the Stars







And now......reality.sys corrupted......reboot Self (not Universe at least not yet anyhow) :-)

*by The Cure (which I shamelessly admit I do like)