To edit or not to edit?

A friend urged me to upload on Instagram a certain picture I took last year in Vienne. "You can edit it while uploading", he said, " add filters, make it look better." I tried it - it turned out that editing on Instagram was very easy indeed. But now I know why it hasn't even occurred to me to do it before. It simply doesn't feel right. Sure, the pictures look more impressive but it feels like cheating and I'm equally uncomfortable with cheating on small scale as well as on big. Cheating is cheating, period. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett - if you find excuses to cheat small then you'll find excuses to cheat big. Keeping your moral standards in shape requires discipline on every level. 

Harsh

I can't forgive my parents that they became old. I don't mean aging, of course - aging is not a matter of choice, needless to say no one can stop it. But they act and think and talk like old people, which IS a matter of choice and I can't forgive them for making that choice. Not trying to avoid it is simply sloppy.

Is that what awaits me too? I don't think so - of course I don't, but I don't think so at the present moment and I bet my parents haven't expected that they would change that way either. That Voltaire quote is still fresh in my mind: “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”

I couldn't agree more. However, there is one thing I am certain of: I don't want to get old.

I'm not thrilled about aging either.

Again?!

What do you know, it happened again.

This morning at the supermarket:

" - Two packs of cigarettes, please."

" - Are you sure you're old enough to buy cigarettes?"

" - ?!?!?  Alas! I'm sure."

Considering that I became old enough to buy cigarettes two decades ago I should've simply said "thank you".

Are we the only humans?

The need for love and the capacity to show and give love is the indicator of consciousness. It has nothing to do with the ability to build elaborate devices or solve mathematical equations or write touching poems. An animal that wants to cuddle is more human than the man who wants to kill him.

Why winter?

These few minutes in the morning before the office gets crammed with people and noise – priceless.

These few months before life starts happening again – endless.

Brainy quotes

Yesterday was Voltaire's birthday. No, I didn't know that until an hour ago when I clicked on a Facebook link and found myself enthralled by his words. A brilliant man apparently and the following quotes come to prove it:

"Common sense is not so common."

"Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do."

"What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a lack of energy."

"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

"We never live, we are always in the expectation of living."

"It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of the mankind."

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung."

And my most favorite of all:

"I do not agree with what you have to say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

Gloomish

Next time I decide to travel for a concert my mother will freak out for sure...and it will be for a good reason.
If there is a next time at all.

How did we get into this mess? And, what's more important, how do we get out?

Coloured

No, I didn't change my FB avatar in remembrance of the Paris massacres. Will it undo what happened? No. Will it bring the dead back? No. Will it make it any easier on the living? No. I don't see why I should sheepishly join the crowd into something that will produce no real use.

Of course there is no harm whatsoever in decorating your profile picture with the colours of the French flag. But somehow I think that those who did will assume they have done their good deed for the day and will stop there. Don't stop. Good intentions come and go but they're good for nothing if they're not backed up by corresponding actions. If you truly want to honour all the lives so pointlessly and abruptly wasted then honour them by changing your own life and becoming the people you've always said you wanted to be. Those who died will never have that chance. Don't waste yours.

Distraction exercise

Let's say I'm offered to become a vampire. Yes, I am aware that vampires are fictional creatures (aren't we lucky?) just as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are. But for the sake of the exercise let's say vampires exist and I have the chance to become one. Would I accept? I wouldn't rule it out. I am curious to see what will become of the human race.

But I would agree on one condition: if it's possible to transform a dog, so that I could have a companion who will never get sick and will never die, and will give me unconditional affection for whole eternity. No life should go without love.

Coping

After what happened in Paris on Friday night, I don't think I will complain about anything anytime soon. I was in shock yesterday morning, I'm still in shock now. I am, of course, aware that at each moment there is war somewhere in the world. But you don't expect to find it in your living room. The scariest of all is that “the enemy” here are lunatics, mad people with whom you can't reason in a civilized way. In any other situation one could hope that people will eventually come to their senses. But what do you do when one of the sides has no sense at all?

Got a smile?

On Friday, at the office, I was forced to listen to my male colleagues telling faggot jokes. Yes, that was the word they used. But it wasn't the jokes that shocked me, it was the fact that they all laughed. Perfectly normal on the outside ordinary people, with wives and kids, the guy-next-door kind. And they all laughed. It was ugly and disheartening.

Yesterday morning I woke up to the news of the Paris horror. I watched Euronews for hours in a state of disbelief and denial. I knew it was real and my mind was refusing to process it.

The same day, while outside, in a matter of a couple of minutes, I saw the bodies of a dead pigeon and a dead cat.

And I've had it. I felt sick, utterly and desperately sick. Wherever I turned I would find nothing but sadness. 

I need a hug. And a reason to smile but I have no idea where to look for one. Smiles are in short supply this week. 

"I want so much to believe"

But there seems to be not much left to believe in.

It could've been me

From news reports I learned that the biggest death toll was at a rock concert but until an hour ago I had no idea that it was Eagles Of Death Metal concert - a band that I like a lot and in different circumstances I could've been there. That is a crushing thought.

Just around the corner

It is official, and there's no denying it: the world, as we know it, is gone. What happened in Paris last night is not going to just fade away and be buried under more recent news. It was the trigger of an inevitable chain of events that will unleash on everyone like an avalanche and will be just as unstoppable and deadly. I don't know what it will lead to but surely it will change things from bad to unimaginably worse. Yet another proof that there are no limits to people's selfishness, cruelty and stupidity.

I was on the metro a couple of hours ago. And the whole time I couldn't help thinking "What if it explodes right now?" As of today that is a possibility not so unimaginable.

Bright lights

Listening to this song at dawn as a flock of birds was making drawings in the sky = magical. There's nothing like the feeling of being lost in a dream and I want to hold on to it for just a little longer. 

Observation

I’m watching Star Wars (yes, again, and I will watch it as many times as it is on TV) and I can't help thinking that technology and morality of humans advance at such a different pace (and it never ceases to amaze me how human beings can be so intelligent and so dumb both at the same time). I know, that is hardly an enlightenment, many before me have noticed that and it is, after all, something quite obvious. Too obvious in fact but, as it happens with everything that is right in front of you, you often fail to see it.

Musing

“Everything happens for a reason” isn’t to be taken literally of course. The meaning of it, according to me at least, is to make you rewind the line of events to the origin and go through each one to evaluate your own involvement and if there has been anything you could’ve done differently. The meaning is to learn from your mistakes so that you wouldn't repeat them. Alas! too often these lessons fall on deaf ears. And (double alas) I have shown selective deafness one too many times. Maybe that is why people say that you learn all your life.

Rushing

I can't wait for winter to begin so it could end and it is spring and summer again. 
So typical of me to wish for the impossible and the useless.

New hope :)

Scheduling issues? Because 30STM are recording a new album and and a new album is to be followed by a tour?

Please, please, please, let it be it!

Encapsulated

The perfect moment-no less and no more. I have nothing urgent to do, the phone is quiet. There's no fuss and no rush. Just perfect. Just now.

I was thinking

...that maybe the phrase "happy end" should be revised. The "end" part disagrees with me. "fortunate solution" feels more like it.

Of patience

“Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”         - Yoda

Yoda nails it, doesn't he?

There’s more to him than meets the eye – for eyes can be deceiving. And they usually are because it's easier that way.

I will actually try to do that. And I say "try" simply because something like that takes a loooooong time. Well, patience I have. As for time...who knows.

C'mon surprise, I haven't got all day

My most favorite, and respectively, the rarest Lavazza slip: "You'll be pleasantly surprised". I got one today, hooray!

It is the jackpot of the fortune slips, the ultimate wish because it covers just about everything and every smile or kind word makes me think the wish has come true. It's easy to please someone who expects nothing.

Do this and you're golden

No one likes advices, me including. No matter what I'm told I always end up doing what I think is right, even when I'm wrong. (Mind this: when you're given an advice the purpose is not to make you succumb to someone else's will; the purpose is to show you you are cared for, to let you know someone gives a damn about you.) A good advice can only be appreciated in past tense, never in present.

Which, in a way, makes posting this piece of advice pointless. This is the kind of wisdom that comes to you through time, experience and long hours of self-reflection (trying to figure out what went wrong). It is the kind of wisdom that has to come from within.

But then again, is there any other kind?