Tag Archives: people

Thoughts

Finding myself more and more

Imagine this: you’re born with a desire to relate to others, to spend time talking and laughing with good friends who respect you and want to relate to you. But as you grow up, you find your confidence betrayed by false friends, derided by immature ones, or worse, you find yourself fending off unwanted advances from homosexuals who confuse your wish to socialize and relate to them as one human being to another for something else, something disgusting to you.

What do you do? You put up a wall. You become a loner. You choose to call yourself non-social. You make yourself believe you don’t need friends and you don’t need others. Alone, in the dark, you even start getting doubts about your sanity and sexuality, though you know better.

But then, after much prayer, you meet a girl who loves you for who you are. She respects you. She inspires you. She wants to be with you. She becomes your closest confidant, your best friend, the one you always go to for advice, and then, your wife. A dark, brooding veil begins to lift. You start seeing life through a different light. You meet her friends — decent, sociable people who enjoy good company the way God intended it, with laughter and talk and jokes and more laughter and help when you need it.

You begin to grow as a person. You start to make friends on your own now. People begin to discover you for who you really are, and the honest ones tell you that you’re a likable guy after all, that their first impression of you was wrong. All of a sudden, life is better. There’s more hope and joy in it. Friendship starts to take on the meaning you’ve always dreamed about. You find yourself.

This happened to me. I tell you, it feels like a long, dark night is giving way to breaking light. I doubt I’m alone in this. So what I want to say is, don’t lose hope. Hang in there. Pick your friends carefully. Don’t doubt who you really are for a minute. If you persist, you will succeed.

Thank you, Ligia, for making me see the light. It was through you that I grew and found myself. Thank you, and, though you already know it, I love you.

My wife Ligia

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Places

A look at my church

Have you ever wondered if I go to church, and where I go? Well, I put together a set of 89 photos that looks at my church, inside and out. You can go directly to the slideshow view if you’d like.

If the word “church” scares you, don’t worry, I’m not proselytizing. The photos are portraits, abstracts, and macros of various people, objects, details and flowers inside and around the church. I think you’ll like them. My church is quite beautiful in both spring and fall. There are a ton of things to photograph, and I thought it high time I put together a set to show them off. If you’re ever in the area on a Saturday morning, drop by and say hi to me.

Here are several selected photos from the set.

Extra special frosted somethings

Quite possibly possible

Peaceful, easy feeling

What to do in case of fire

Forget-me-nots

Love offering

Pinnacle

Polished

Hang on

Love comes in abundance

Us

Solitude is peaceful

It’s there for you

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Thoughts

What should your superpower be?

Blogthings is running a quiz on this, and I went through it. The questions were a bit loaded, and I wasn’t sure about a couple of the answers, but even after I went back and changed them, I still got the same result. That short fuse of mine shows through again… For the record, I don’t think I’m terrifying, and neither does my wife. And I’m not keen on that whole “world belongs to you” business either. But, I’ve got a short fuse, I’ll admit that. And I’m definitely intense, driven, passionate and obsessed — sometimes to my detriment.


Your Superpower Should Be Manipulating Fire
You are intense, internally driven, and passionate. Your emotions are unpredictable – and they often get the better of you. Both radiant and terrifying, people are drawn to you. At your most powerful, you feel like the world belongs to you.

Why you would be a good superhero: You are obsessive enough to give it your all.

Your biggest problem as a superhero: Your moodiness would make it difficult to control your powers.

What Should Your Superpower Be?

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Thoughts

Talk about screwing up

I get digest emails from the Economist every Thursday, on politics and business. Two things caught my eye in today’s edition.

  1. Chrysler appointed Robert Nardelli as its CEO. This is the same guy that left Home Depot after employee and investor dissatisfaction with his management and personal style, with a severance package worth about $210 million. So the guy pisses off people at Home Depot left and right, is run out of the company, but gets hundreds of millions in bye-bye pay… and then Chrysler hires him? Isn’t Chrysler supposed to be in trouble as a company? What do they see in him?
  2. Trump Entertainment Resorts reported a second quarter loss that was more than double that of last year’s. So they’ve been losing money all along, just like all of the other business ventures run by Trump, and yet their share price surged when they released their earnings report?! Are the investors sane?!

I’m going to rant a bit now, because I’ve wanted to say this for a long time. Donald Trump has to be one of the most overrated businessmen ever. On the whole, his career and life are an exercise in ridicule.

Take business: for years, he’s managed to do poorly in his ventures. He’s had a few successes, but on the whole, he’s run project after project into the ground. The ones that are still standing are so heavily in debt that they should be dead by rights. Yet investors continue to sink money into his ventures in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The guy cannot run a business in the black. He’ll run them all in the red, and he’ll pay himself tens of millions while his companies wither away.

Take life: he managed to get a TV show that was a hit with the general populace — that in itself was incomprehensible. He, the clueless, poorly performing CEO, dared to dole out business advice to others, and to act as a role model for other businessmen. If Trump is a model for American business and leadership, then God help us, because we’re headed for the crapper!

Take style: the man looks like he’s got a dead cat on his head. Over the years, he’s persisted with that cockamamie hairstyle to the chagrin of decent people everywhere.

Trump seems to be rubbing it in our faces: he’s ridiculing us. He may be saying something else, but his actions say, “Look, I’m going to thumb my nose at all of you. I’ve got you all eating out of my hand even though I can’t run a business to save my life.” In spite of this, people clamor to kiss his behind and stand in line to invest in his businesses. I don’t get it.

It seems to me that greedy losers do best in modern business, and Americans on the whole love to celebrate them. The two people I mentioned in this post are just a few of the guilty parties. But then, is that any wonder when almost every CEO has ridiculous compensation packages regardless of their job performance, and when companies (especially those that deal in non-physical assets) are stupidly overvalued? I think we’re headed for the crapper, and Trump and others like him are the icing on the cake that’s going to give us the runs.

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Thoughts

Technorati’s new photo message

Logged into my Technorati account late last week to check my profile settings, and guess what I saw on my photo page? Granted, the message wasn’t for me, it was for every Technorati user, but I thought it was hilarious nonetheless:

For the benefit of those of you that can’t see the image above, let me quote the text:

“Tip: Please favor us with a photo that doesn’t depict your very special but also very private parts. We have to hunt down and quarantine those, and that’s bad for everyone.”

I guess they’re having problems with nasty people posting nasty pics of themselves, or else they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of warning users. That’s pretty sad — to know there are people out there with absolutely no sense of decency and self-control. Zooomr had a huge problem with this last year, in Mark II. You could browse its full photo stream — all public photos posted by users, as they posted them, and I did that a lot to discover great photographs. While I found plenty of great photographs that I faved, I also found plenty of pornographic images.

At any rate, that stuff was pretty nasty, and I spent plenty of time emailing Kris and Tom with specific links, and they would dutifully either make those photos private or remove them altogether. Flickr has the same problem, and that’s why they’re rating accounts as Safe, Moderate or Unsafe, which I think is a better approach than Zooomr’s — Kris and Tom are still stuck doing manual removals, even though they promised they’d introduce a feature to allow users to flag questionable photos.

My rantings aside, I thought Technorati’s approach was pretty funny, and I’m glad to see more companies do their part to make sure the nasties don’t get to poison everyone’s good time on the web with their filth.

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