Why certainly, all skin types may apply

http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/player/3player_new.asp?fileId=09fulltomgirls

Source: http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/audio_library.asp#drphil

A private and intimate podcast that is as provoking as it is compelling.

I have written these 5 minutes, and I will remember this.

"As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air,composed of sounds and ideas - abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken - and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who have told them, and some of them outlasted the lands in which they were created.

And while I do not believe that any of the stories in this volume will do that, it's nice to collect them together, to find a home for them where they can be read, and remembered. I hope you enjoy reading them."

-Neil Gaiman
On the first day of Spring 2006
Foreword for Fragile Things

And I'm staring at this glaring wall of white, summoning, picking the most relevant thoughts. But screwit. I'm going with bulldoze. So here's to the long-awaited, but remarkably sudden arrival of another decade - to 2010, a year I hope will see strangers, misfits, oddballs, outcasts, the ever-excluded, hippies, vagabonds, nomads and other exciting types bang the boring daylights out of their socially normal counterparts. So that we can all share what it's like to be breathing mad and madly free. I wish you all the powerful energy in the world to celebrate when it's time to celebrate, and to wholeheartedly submit yourself to grief when it's time to. I hope you all discover someone who strokes your fingers, then holds those fingers and takes you somewhere wonderful, and I hope you dive in and take some risks and that you stand by those risks even though the world thinks you're an idiot. Because God has mercy, even for idiots. And this I hope, oh I intensely, madly hope, that your heart gets to pump itself up for a wild dance - and for that I have to wish you love. May your 2010 be filled with way too much of that.

Avatar in 3D was a sensational eye popping heart stopping feet numbing ear shattering nail gripping thought provoking show of a show that leaves you breathless and emotionally tingling. Oh gosh. What a spectacle. James Cameron has a wickedly wickedly beautiful mind!

Stuffing our faces with Mexican was also much fun. I hope to dream of mojitos and enchiladas tonight.

Burgundy.

My sweet parenthetical, hypothetical beloved,

So many days have gone, the best days of the year have gone. They go, leaving me. So now I'm living proof, a byproduct of those richly coloured mornings wearing yellows, purples, greens and blues. And of those ruthlessly short nights I have only this to say - what do they know. Now by saying that they will probably ask us what do we know? The tight cloisters of rigid bodies enclosing ghostly, colourless spirits and faceless heads that I have no interest in. Baby eyes with shiny pupils swimming and spilling over with dazzling wonder and stunning alacrity have now swam towards cover, hiding behind those caves of black. Tiny outstretched arms fidgety and restless, beckoning the sky to reveal one of its endless suprises have been clenched shut, shoved back into tiny pockets, some willingly, others not. Us, we have done something, us. To harvest the moon while being tied down with black burning coals of dusty weight, is that not something? To have created playgounds, dancing around irons bars like prison bars. These people, they cry while shaking their heads, telling me how hopelessly sad I am, they ask how this kind of being can ever be ideal, how is it that I am not looking for the life that has been consciously taught to me.

A couple of times they make me laugh, but sometimes I cry. In fact - most of the time, I cry. I cry with them, for them, just as they think they are crying for me. I cry for they who know where the prison bars are, who march up to them and stand behind them willingly. But then many more times I cry because I'm afraid that my greatest fear has come true, that you've become one of them.

"I like to think about the life of wine..how it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the
grapes were growing, how the sun was shining...if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes and if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if i opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I had opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive and it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity - that is until it peaks, like your 61. And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline."

-Virginia Madsen, Sideways

Such beguiling words. Don't they just ruminate in your ears? The layers and layers of meaning pinned to the whole conversation on Pinot Noir, and wine appreciation...By far one of my favourite dialogues, and it deserves to be put down and read again, and again.

A glass of wine, bunch of grapes, a contemporary film with lots of grapes & lots of wine makes for a good way to end the day.

I'm ready to swear by a newly-formed method of starting the day by immersing in lots of beauty, lots of eye-candy as I get around to finishing my tea. Always a good way to start the day, to begin mornings with pretty little things, isn't it? Away from all unappreciative, negative energy...

Have a good week!

"So will you send them to study overseas?"

"Well, I don't know, I don't. I mean, who knows where I'll be in ten years?"

"In ten years you won't be here."

"In ten years you won't be here."

Well who ever knows what's going to happen, but at some point it just feels right saying aloud the visions you have in your mind, and having someone who knows you say it back too.