Anger is a defence mechanism: it is always ultimately motivated by fear. Maybe you’ve heard this before, maybe you haven’t - if not, think about it for a while, and it will make sense.

So then try this: train yourself to ask yourself whenever you get angry, “what am I afraid of?”

Sometimes the answer is obvious, although frequently the obvious ( Read more... )

I have a picture of Earth taken from space here, and a few days ago I was looking at it and thinking.


( Read more... )

Literally.

Yesterday morning, some workers came to fix something in our building. To that end, they shut off the air vents which draw the air from the bathrooms, for a day. These exhausts are normally responsible for a relatively high level of constant white noise.

Now, suddenly, the bathrooms were utterly silent. I could even hear the clock in ( Read more... )

A few days ago, in a pretty foul mood, I decided I had to get rid of the old computer magazines I was keeping. I don’t want to be shackled by posessions; the less I own, the fewer ties. “Freedom is just another word,” or so the saying goes.

It was a trolley full of paper. I pushed it up to the garbage; then I started unloading armful for armful of ( Read more... )

I don’t know why I felt compelled to look up the word “transient” when I came across it in an online article I was reading earlier tonight. I know its meaning. Curiosity is obviously what drove me to do it - being someone who obsesses over expression and shades of meaning, I wanted to see what the exact given definition is. But I don’t understand ( Read more... )

Every once in a while, a stranger calls me.

Apparently, the health insurance branch1 of a local car manufacturer (the German branch of Ford) used to have the number that is mine now, years ago.

So about once a month on average, there is an unknown voice at the phone; seldomly enough so that I never instantly register what the call is about. So ( Read more... )

I love living at night. Ensconced inside a desk lamp’s spacetime bubble floating in a sea of serene darkness, it is an almost fetal experience. The distantly murmuring thunder of busy life is absent; there are no distractions.

But I am finding that it also has a major drawback: there is no progression of daytime. Time appears frozen inside your ( Read more... )

I love it. I love the smell of rain, and I love the sound of it, and I love the crash of thunder.

I always do, but even more so after two days during which I almost melted down.

Funny how dreams seem to have recurring themes.

In mine, I am always on my own, there are only one or two persons I deal with directly - though a crowd of nameless people may be involved in some part of the dream -, and I do something crazy and bad on an uncontained compulsion, but there are no immediate consequences, and I get ever more anxious ( Read more... )

Until I discovered Alpha Centauri1, the “kid in a candy store” was just a proverb to me. But no longer, now that I have. Discovering that a new episode has been posted is a moment of childlike joy every time.

1 For those with no command of German: it’s just a professor who talks about physics (mostly astronomy, but not only) in layman’s terms, for ( Read more... )