today a good friend called me a Minx. it got me thinking as to the number of nicknames i've collected along the way and how that affects my relationships to the people who use them. sometimes i find that after a given nickname is coined by someone, it doesn't sound right to be called the same name by a different person. others, are used more ubiquitously.

nicknames aside though, real names are important too. a plethora of friends have been struggling to pick baby names lately. as i listen to them, i realise that i have very strong preferences and associations for certain names. have you ever noticed that certain types of names come with certain types of personalities? it makes me wonder how much of my personality was shaped by a seemingly random choice of name from my parents. after all, they named me after a golfer ...

my sister sent me a clip today of the Olympic ice skating in Torino. it's worth watching - in particular to see the drive and courage some people have.

http://www.6park.com/enter5/messages/10617.html

Pema Chodran once wrote about 6 kinds of loneliness and how instead of trying to escape from it, we should try to accept it without looking for resolution. The way of Shambhala buddhism is to walk the middle way; to accept and not judge; and to relax into the moment, with all its uncomfortability and just be.

With that comes the realisation that we are fundamentally alone in the world, and that there is no certainty to anything.

How true. And how truly difficult it is to live in the moment without desperately grasping for resolution in either direction. Living on my own, I have learnt to savour the feeling of loneliness. But even then, I am not good at sitting still and just being. I guess I still have a lot to learn from Pema.

(selected parts, translated)

...

Of everything i have seen,
it's you i want to go on seeing;
of everything i've touched,
it's your flesh i want to go on touching.
i love your orange laughter.
...

where is she? i keep on asking
if your eyes disappear.
how long she's taking! i think, and i am hurt
i feel poor, foolish and sad,
and you arrive and you are lightning
glancing off the peach trees.

that is why i love you and yet not why.
there are so many reasons, and yet so few,
for love has to be so,
involving and general,
particular and terrifying,
honoured and yet in mourning,
flowering like the stars,
and measureless as a kiss.

i have spent the last 3 days sequestered in a data room. in a merger & acquisition situation, often one party will hire consultants to perform a due diligence exercise on the other. that involves the consultant (i.e. me) spending hours in a room full of boxes full of documents that often don't have anything interesting in them. however, sometimes you can follow enough of a paper trail so that a story starts to form about a company.

yesterday, i found the target customer for a mobile operator in south asia.

Male
Middle-old age (50+)
Formal dressing but old fashioned

Personality attributes
Sober
Not confident
Cool temperament
Not very pleasant personality
Peple do not like to meet him
Works at some small shop / clerical job
Drives suzuki FX
Lives in city slums

if you happen to subscribe to this mobile operator ... do you just assume that you are the anomoly?

Yesterday, wearing a yellow and black shirt, and a long black skirt, I felt like a bumble bee. It reminded me of a wonderful quote I read once ...

“According to the theory of aerodynamics, and as may be readily demonstrated through experiments, the Bumble Bee is unable to fly. This is because the size, the weight, and the shape of his body in relation to his wingspread make flying impossible. But the Bumble Bee, being ignorant of these scientific truths, goes ahead and flies anyway - and makes a little honey everyday!"

i read through my old postings, and there is the one where i was told that "everyone" who goes off to business school comes back engaged. i guess i failed on that account. does it count when your business school ex-boyfriend tells you he would have proposed ... if you hadn't broken up with him?

tonight i was finally inspired to fix the PHP code for my website, which has been broken for the better part of a year. finally, my photos are up again, although they are so old ... it might have been better to leave the website down. regardless, i was pleasantly surprised that i managed to wade through my code and update it so that it complies with the version on the server. hooray for global variables. and hooray for geekhood. i guess you never quite give that up.

It is my experience that passionfruit is a questionable name for a wrinkly round fruit full of yellow flesh and black seeds. I have never experienced any passion from handling nor from eating them. However, that sharp tangy taste never fails to elicit a sense of pleasure from me, especially when blended into something as wonderful as ice-cream.

In some parts of the world, pick-up involves a bar, some alcohol and very often some sort of negotiation between two people for services that may be shared or traded. In the ultimate crowd, pick-up involves a lot of athletic people, a big field, and a plastic disk called a frisbee.

I wonder though, if ultimate pick-up earned its name for a reason. In my experience thus far (that would be two games), it is a pretty good place to "pick-up" in the original sense of the phrase.