Whoever is loved is beautiful
~~Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī ( مولانا جلال الدين محمد رو )

Whoever is loved is beautiful, but the opposite is not true, that whoever is beautiful is loved. Real beauty is part of loved-ness, and that loved-ness is primary. If a being is loved, he or she has beauty, because a part cannot be separate from the whole.  Many girls were more beautiful than Laila, but Majnun did not love them.  "Let us bring some of these to meet you," they used to say to Majnun, and he would reply, "It's not the form of Laila that I love.   Laila is not the form.  You're looking at the cup, whereas I think only of the wine I drink from that cup.  If you gave me a chalice studded with gemstones, but filled with vinegar or something other than wine, what use would that be? An old broken dipper-gourd with Laila-wine in it is better than a hundred precious goblets full of other liquid."

Passion is present when a man can distinguish between the wine and the container.  Two men see a loaf of bread. One hasn't eaten anything for ten days. The other has eaten five times a day, every day.  He sees the shape of the loaf.  The other man with his urgent need sees inside into the taste, and into the nourishment the bread could give.  Be that hungry, to see within all beings the Friend.

Creatures are cups.  The sciences and the arts and all branches of knowledge are inscriptions around the outside of the cups.  When a cup shatters, the writing can no longer be read.  The wine's the thing! The wine that's held in the mold of these physical cups. Drink the wine and know what lasts and what to love.  The man who truly asks must be sure of two things: One, that he's mistaken in what he's doing or thinking now.  And two, that there is a wisdom he doesn't know yet.  Asking is half of knowing.

Everyone turns toward someone.  Look for one scarred by the King's polo stick.

A man or a woman is said to be absorbed when the water has total control of him, and he no control of the water.  A swimmer moves around willfully.  An absorbed being has no will but the water's going.  Any word or act is not really personal, but the way the water has of speaking or doing.  As when you hear a voice coming out of a wall, and you know that it's not the wall talking, but someone inside, or perhaps someone outside echoing off the wall.  Saints are like that.  They've achieved the condition of a wall, or a door.

"Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way you're a mile away, and you have their shoes too."
~~Unknown



I got to go in racing cars around a race track very very fast. This is a picture of me in my mate's Cateram 7. I enjoyed the break this is a self portrait of me in his car at the end of the day as the sun was setting.

I am just about to spend £13,000. Wish me luck.

"We were so poor my daddy unplugged the clocks when we went to bed."
~~Chris Rock

That is all, carry on.

I hate being used. No strike that, it’s not the being used that gets to me, it’s the moment of realisation, the point at which it dawns on you that a friendship that you thought you had was false all along. I would rather be used and never discover it, at leased that way I would never know what was going on and it would always feel real to me. The next bit that hits you hard is when you can’t work out whether or not you are being silly over nothing or if it is real.

“Am I just being too sensitive, why would they invite me out but then stop talking to me, are they trying to drop me a hint?”
“Why did they leave me in the night club without even saying goodbye, now I have to make my way home on my own, were they deliberately snubbing me or were they just drunk and didn’t realise what they were doing?”
“Were they giving me funny looks and not talking to me or was it just in my mind perhaps it was it something I said?”

You can’t ask them about it because then you sound paranoid and neurotic, but you still feel like you deserve an explanation. All those times they told you how great you were, thanked you for helping them when they needed you and introduced you to their friends. And now you realise it was all just to win your favour so that you would carry on helping them. And you only help them because you want to make people happy, other people being happy makes you happy and you desperately want to be loved, you think that if you help people they will like you, you don’t feel as though you deserve love for love’s own sake and you feel so alone and you just want that loneliness to go away. You spend most of your time in your room forming virtual relationships on the internet, people in real life find you weird and they frown at you when you talk to them. All those women you fell in love with never had enough respect for you to tell you to your face that they did not feel the same. And so you cry to yourself with no-one to confide in and you wonder how you long you can put up with it until eventually you have had enough.

And then finally it all comes down to the bottom line: “How can you expect anyone to love you if you do not even love yourself?”

So I went out taking pictures of artwork that was on display in London the other day. And I took a picture of the Criterion Building. I was curious to know whether or not anyone here thought these pictures were any good and if so which one would you prefer.

1.


( The rest are under here )

Current Mood: bored

“The only exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions, running down their friends, side-stepping responsibility, and pushing their luck!” 
~~Author Unknown

You know I keep meaning to write a post on this thing. I keep writing them in my head but by the end of the day I just feel soo tired.
 
Well I was going to write this really cool post about how I am all “My body is my temple” these days. My fear is that the post will be boring and will end up having a mild sedative effect on my flist. Right now I bet you’re falling asleep aren’t you? Your eyes are feeling heavy, you are feeling sleepyyyyyyyy.
 
Well look I can’t be arsed to go in to detail about my diet but here is a run down of what I had yesterday:
 
Breakfast: Peanut butter on Wholegrain bread, All Bran cereal with skimmed milk and strawberries, one medium orange and a cup of Green tea.
 
1st Snack: Handful of Almonds and Raisins.
 
Lunch: Low fat mature cheddar cheese with onion on wholemeal bread and an apple.
 
2nd Snack: Small banana (eaten slowly) and an apple while waiting for the train.
 
Dinner: Chilli Con Turkey (like a Chilli Con Carnie except with Turkey mince) that was made using Brown Rice, peeled tomatoes, sweetcorn and kidney beans.
 
3rd Snack: V8 juice and a low fat yogurt just before going to bed.
 
I also exercise 6 days a week. One day I do upper body, which means lifting weights, doing crunches and push-ups for about an hour, then the next day I go on a 2 mile walk while wearing a 1kg weight around each ankle.
 
I cannot believe that I am soo addicted to all this. I cannot believe that I have been keeping this up for the last 2 months. Originally it was just designed to help me give up smoking and now look at me… but you know what’s good? I have a 2 pack! Yes the stomach is flat, I feel more confident, I have more energy and girls keep smiling at me. I look great and feel great, so fuck it. I want a six pack. Not for anyone else’s benefit but just for my own. I had to set myself a goal, I decided that if I was going to be happy I had to put my mind to something that wasn’t work related or involved women. And it’s working.

But now I am all celibate and everything I find that women have been paying me more attention which is nice. Over the past 4 weeks there have been these two young South African women who always sit opposite or next to me on the train first thing in the morning. I have my personal stereo on and despite listening to System of a Down I can normally overhear snippets of their conversation. They often look over my shoulder to see what I am reading or looking at and when I talk on my phone they suddenly go all silent. I don’t plan on doing anything about it, they have both smiled at me and I find it flattering but also slightly ironic. I don’t think it is any coincidence that women have been paying me more attention now I am slimmer and have more muscles and it makes me cynical. I think this quote sums it up:

"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence."
~~ Frederick Douglass

Current Mood: thirsty

Not more bombs surely!???

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4703777.stm

ETA: 14:27

Sirens going off from all directions. Keep hearing rumours that it's a hoax but now it sounds pretty real.

“That is why we laid it down for the Israelites that whoever killed a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be deemed as though he had killed all mankind; and that whoever saved a human life shall be deemed as though he had saved all mankind.”
~~The Qur'an, Sura 5:32 (a passage commonly exploited by extremists)

I have never witnessed London so quiet. We all stood outside for the 2 minute silence at 12 noon today in Soho. Lots of people were outside all standing quietly in the streets. So many people and then the bells chimed. The silence was astonishing, no traffic no sirens, one or two people whispering in a distance that was all.

London just doesn’t seem the same since the bombs. It is a lot less crowded and the tube on the way to Uni on Tuesday was empty. It was the first time I had used the underground since Thursday’s attacks and I have to admit I did feel something. Not fear really, don’t know what it was but I couldn’t stop my mind from conjuring images of what it must have been like to have been on one of those trains that exploded.

You know I hear all this stuff about Londoners bravery and stoicism and I find it hard to understand or even relate to. I don’t feel brave by carrying on with my life as normal, the way I see it I have no choice; if I don’t turn up for work I don’t get paid, simple as that.

The reason I don’t feel scared by getting on the bus every morning is because A) I don’t genuinely believe I am likely to be involved in a terrorist attack purely on a logical and statistical basis; London has a population of 7 million and out of that 7 million only 700 people were directly affected, as tragic as that is in my mind I do not feel threatened and B) because nothing has really changed since before the 7th. The threat of a terrorist attack has been here for ages, London is one of the largest cities in the world after all. The likelihood of an attack is no greater now than it was 1 month ago.

In my view terrorism is a fact of modern society, you can try and prevent as many attacks as you possibly can but you will never stop them all. Once a planned attack passes under the radar of the intelligence services there isn’t much you can do to stop it, after all how do you stop someone who has explosives strapped to their body and who isn’t afraid to die? Even if we defeat the current Islamic terrorists with all their extreme beliefs they would soon be replaced by a new wave of individuals keen to fill the void. Plus ça change…

And on that rather negative note I am going to get back to work, in a very hot office in Soho, London.

“The terrible thing about terrorism is that ultimately it destroys those who practise it. Slowly but surely, as they try to extinguish life in others, the light within them dies.”
~~Terry Waite British religious adviser, hostage in Lebanon

I am in the office with a few colleagues who managed to make it in this morning. We are listening to Capital Radio over the internet. It keeps cutting out I suppose because so many people are trying to find out what’s going on this morning.

I got in to work ok because I set off early. Not sure how I am going to get home tonight though. They are saying 6 explosions and 20 dead. Got a feeling I might be stuck in London tonight. Mum has left a message on my mobile but I can’t call her back because the network is busy.

This is pretty major, but outside everyone is just carrying on as normal by the looks of it.

"The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes? Ah, that is where the art resides!"
~~Artur Schnabel

Seems like an age since I last updated. I don't know how long an age is but it sounds like a very long time indeed. Life is good at the moment, I have never been happy for this long in my life before. I am not sure what happened but I think it was on my birthday this year, I just woke up in the morning and felt happy about myself, felt more confident and just higher spirits and ever since then good things seem to have happened to me and even the bad things haven't seemed so bad.

I am still working at the University and am really enjoying it. I have a little fan club now, the students seem to have really taken to me, I have had to set up an email account for them to send messages to. I get ones just saying thank-you for being a good teacher; some asking me for a job as an assistant and a lot with questions about photography/Photoshop which I am happy to answer. I met with the school secretary today; he runs the admin for the section of the Uni that I work at. He is a very busy man, very busy indeed and I was lucky to get a meeting with him. He wants me to meet with the Dean of the University or, as he called him: The Big Cheese. Apparently my course is getting very popular but the facilities aren't too good so they are going to look in to getting me a bigger class room. Unfortunately they are short of a lot of cash and I am worried that they will be put off and might not ask me to do so many lessons in the future.

I also got another job working as Head of Digital Imaging and IT at a photographic lab in West London. This is happening too fast, I just went in for a casual visit one day last week, since I know them already I presumed that they just wanted to have a chat. But I ended up being sat down and interviewed. I was caught off guard a bit. They have been very accommodating towards me, giving me pretty much full reign over the whole department to do whatever I want to do with it so I am very pleased. Finally something I can get my teeth in to.

One bit of bad news though, I am going to be fined by Companies House for not getting my company's accounts in to them on time. I am a Managing Director of my own business you see and I didn't get my documents in for April’s deadline since I have been so busy lately. It is totally my fault and I did say that to them on the phone, I tried a bit of reverse psychology but I don't think it worked. It's 250 smackers, which is a pain.

Sorry for not updating in so long, I really do keep meaning to but I just never seem to get the time. I do read my friends page now and again to see how you all are. I am amazed none of you have defriended me.

Current Mood: exhausted but happy

"Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone."
~~G.B. Stern

I just wanted to say thank-you to everyone who left me happy birthday messages. I had a good day and got a bit drunk and someone's party that evening. Bumped in to Chris Evans as well at a pub in NW3, god that guy is weird, he just sat in the corner talking to himself, he's a bit shy really nothing like on TV. Anyway yes so feeling more possitive, going to meet up with Vrinda this weekend hopefully should be fun.

Talk to you all soon.

Current Mood: bored

"You are only young once, but you can be immature for a lifetime."
~~John P. Grier

Hey! Long time no update, just cos I have been low and I didn't want to use this journal as a sounding board. In addition I have kind of got tired of sitting at the computer all the time.

Well it's my birthday today and compared to other birthdays it's not too bad. I am feeling possitive actually, I don't know why but these last few days I seemed to have cheered up a bit. It might be because I am reading a new psychology book on treating depression and low self-esteem. I hope it carries on like this, I hate being so down all the time.

Anyway my heart seems to be fine but I am not sleeping very well, fortunatly I have some sleeping tablets for the next few weeks to help me get back in to a routine but I feel fine.

I hope you are all doing well, sorry I haven't been around much online.

"In hospitals there is no time off for good behaviour."
~~Josephine Tey

So yeah, on Thursday evening I had severe chest pains, got taken in an ambulance to the hopsickle where they gave me diamorphine. Having spent 4 days on hospital food surrounded by senile old men I am happy to finally be home. I feel a bit better now but I am weak, I don't know where this leaves me and what am I going to do with the rest of my life if I have to go through this all over again, last time there was a 15 month recovery period. They only just discharged me on the 16th December, did I tell you? I can't remember. I am feeling woozy, I have all this medication to take so I best go lay down. I might update later.

ETA 18:23ish: I just found out that Sally Geeson's body was found on Saturday, nobody told me. God things just get worse, I really wanted her to be ok.

Current Mood: sick

"He's not the Messiah he's a very naughty boy."
~~From Monty Python's Life of Brian

If this is the season of goodwill does that make the rest of the year the season of bad will? Just a thought.

I got some nice things for xmas, James got me Metropolis on DVD the 1920's classic, watched it this afternoon with dad, it's beautiful I really enjoyed it. I got lots of yellow items of clothing (yellow is my favorite colour for those who don't know). I bought James' parents a single malt whisky and apparently they were very surprised and happy with it so I am glad because I really wanted to say thank-you for all the Indian meals they have bought me these last 12 months and generally cheering me up. So yeah today I have consumed 5,000 calories with a large meal, lots of cake and chocolate so that means a long workout session tomorrow to burn it all off.

I just got back from my grandmother's. Dad said it might be the last time I will see her since she isn't very well... apparently. Now I don't mean to sound callas but I think she is playing up this dementia for attention. Granddad is waiting on her hand and foot and he is 5 years her senior, it's really draining him. She always has been selfish, she hasn't treated my mum very well at all over the years or my dad for that matter. I don't hate her but I do harbor some resentment. She was meant to come round our house today, like every year, for tea but we got a call saying that she refused to leave the house, so we had to put all the food in the car and take it round to her house; something about moving the mountain to Mohamed.

I don't think she is putting on the dementia but I think she is more aware of her surroundings than she's letting on in order to get her way. We have always had to bend over backwards to please her. When I was a kid she leant my parent's some money for a car and then when she wanted it back she kept badgering them like a loan shark and she even demanded it back with interest. She has always bullied my mum too it makes me slightly angry, I hate bullies.

Anyway big news of the month is that I had my last, yes last, hopsickle appointment on the 16th. The doctors don't think I need to keep going back for tests anymore since my heart condition has stabilized. When I asked about the long term i.e. heart transplant I got the usual answer of well we will just cross that bridge when we come to it but we are pleased with your progress. So good news.

Anyway this is me signing off.

Current Mood: still relaxed

"Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind. "
~~Mary Ellen Chase

Merry Christmas to everyone on my friends list and indeed anybody reading this. I know I haven't been updating much recently I will do at some point in the near future.

Enjoy the festive period whatever your faith, after all a holiday is a holiday no matter what it's pertaining to celebrate.

Current Mood: relaxed

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
~~Thomas Jefferson

"If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it."
~~Ken Livingstone

"Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear."
~~Alan Corenk

"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."
~~George Bernard Shaw

Current Mood: depressed

"I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones."
~~John Peel

"I think a lot of the stuff I'm playing now is crap."
~~John Peel

John Peel has died of a heart attack. RIP John Peel.

Take the quiz: "What do you love about making love?"

Intimacy
You love to be intimate with someone. You know every inch of them, you're big on touching and any kind of body contact especially cuddling though you need to feel comfortable with someone.

I just went out to buy a designer coat for winter! Totally on impulse and mainly because my normal coat is like 2 years old now. I am soo indecisive as well, took me 3 hours to decide which one to get and when I finally went to try it on it didn't even fit and they were unable to accommodate me with one that did. So I had to go for my second choice and I have to say I like it.

Well I am off home and taking William the dog with me.

Current Mood: happy

"I like being quoted."
~~Me

I didn't want to tell anyone about this yesterday because I thought everyone would think I was some sort of weirdo (more so than usual) but two nights ago I had a dream that I was superman! Yes the day that we found out that Christopher Reeve had died of a heart attack. Coincidence? That's what I thought, in this dream I was walking around a market place with Greg, a photographer colleague I have worked with for the past 4 years or so and we kept bumping in to old friends of mine, people I used to know but have since lost contact with. I can't quite remember all the details but I was superman and turned in to a human-drill type thing and dug myself underground, I cannot remember why this was.

Later on, when I got to work, I saw the news of Christopher Reeve's death and was quite shocked! I couldn't work it out for the life of me, I know what it means to see yourself as a superhero in your dreams and it is not consistent with my personality type, not one bit (it represents one's hidden talents and latent abilities that may not be recognised on a conscious level). Anyhow when I got home I soon discovered why it had happened. My stereo had been set to go off at 6:30 but the night before I had accidentally turned the volume down to low so when the radio came on yesterday morning I slept through the news reports of Christopher Reeve's death and the words must have filtered in to my subconscious as I lay sleeping. It has happened to me before many times and is a well known phenomenon.

I had another dream last night and it had one significant character in it. She is one of my friends on LJ and well it was an interesting dream indeed. It was situated at the end of my road and we stood there for a long time just talking. There was a sign up in the garden of one of the houses and it had the name ‘Lorelei’ on it which is the name of my best friend's sister, you remember the one who got married recently? And just in front of the sign, in the road, was my white Escort. My dreams are getting more and more interesting as time goes on but I am afraid to analyse them in a public forum such as this.

Anyway I had better get back to work.

Current Mood: bored