doberman pizza. a baha'i (bahai, bahá'í) blog.

my hard drive died messily. now I’m without most of my files until I can get it fixed :P

well… not that I need most of those files… but they do help me procrastinate ;)

examining the words we read and understanding what they mean bestows some pretty phat insight. as long as the subject matter is phat in the first place.

O My Servant! Free thyself from the fetters of this world, and loose thy soul from the prison of self. Seize thy chance, for it will come to thee no more. (Hidden Words, Persian no. 40)

hey, catherine’s here. woohoo! she’s doing better now. apparently she had the flu while she was up in Goose Bay (and even before that). she’s in bed already ‘coz she had a long drive and got up at six. we had a chance to talk for awhile and I showed her the photos I took at the youth auction. she’s here mostly to rest up and visit a few friends.

so I just faxed and emailed out a bunch of resumés. I’m starting to get the hang of this. only problem is, one of the people I’m trying to send it to just will not receive anything I try to send. their fax is out, and their email is down. what the!

wow ruhi was phat. that’s the first time I’ve ever tutored a study circle, and it was really cool. for those of you who don’t know, a “study circle” in this case is a group of people who get together to study a course offered by the Ruhi Institute, commonly just called Ruhi. these courses have the Bahá’í Writings as their base, and cover topics like the life of the spirit, prayer, the purpose of life and death, and so on.

so I tutored Ruhi Book One this weekend with a friend and it was phat. I love talking about this kind of stuff with people. call me a keener but I just like talking with people about spirituality and sharing my experience and learning from their insights. and we got mad awesome baghali polo for lunch. WOOHOO RICE

and my brother’s back from egypt and my sister should be back from labrador by now. cool. tomorrow it’s back to work on my resumé, and the circle continues next sunday. for great justice.

I was just reading from lindsay’s diaryland posts right now and the following caught my eye and made me think: “I return to my previous viewpoint that boys are trouble. Even if you think ‘this one is different,’ he never is… trouble trouble trouble.”

It’s true, in a way, but I wonder why. each one of us, boy or girl, is endowed with the capacity to be so much more. but still, boy chases girl and girl chases boy (or whoever chases whatever else), and the chase wears us down. why the chase? why the pursuit and pageantry, proud like peacocks to have someone think we’re all that? why do we need someone else to tell us that?

boys are trouble because they’re taught to be trouble. we look at the animal world with their mating rituals and say, “this is how everyone else does it; why not us?” and we prey upon one another, trying to find a ‘true love’ to call our own, a mate, an other half to complete us, to fill the void we perceive within ourselves. our courtship practices are based on power struggles and they don’t have to be. we don’t have to act like animals. before our feet is the challenge to transcend this buffoonery and to discover within ourselves something that really works.

we’re trouble because we’re buying into a sham — a model of courtship that does not respond to the true needs of humanity. what we need is to let go of the hidden agenda. what we need is to see friendship at face value, not as a foot in the door to something deeper. we need to be treated, and treat others, with honesty, with equality, and with justice. these are not pipe dreams; they are very much within our capacity. sure, our hormones may get to us sometimes. we simply need to approach each other chastely so we can keep level heads. and if you’re about to say that it’s too hard to even try, believe me, I of all people know how hard it is, and I definitely know, from experience, that it’s worth it.

we can’t have everything for free, but at least we know that if we truly work at it, we can stop being so much trouble to each other.

time for bed. boy, what a long post. :)

I need to get to bed. I have to get up in seven hours or so and get to Elham’s place to prepare for Ruhi. woohoo, I’m going to co-tutor a study circle, woohoo! I guess I have a lot of reading to do to prepare for it, too.

bah, I spend most of the week trying to finish a little tiny thing for my resumé and a couple days before the weekend I get an offer like this. oh well, life’s like that. ;) ben to tings.

From an MSNBC humor column:

U.S. Considers Military Action to Remove Skating Judges

President issues ultimatum to ‘axis of cheaters’

hehehehe. :D

holidays are funny, aren’t they? this one started out as the veneration of a christian saint, and now we just send each other pink and red cards with love all over them. same thing with hallowe’en, same thing with christmas. we don’t celebrate things the way we used to. of course, we’re not in the habit of flagellating ourselves nowadays, either.

to offset those observations, here are some words of wisdom about love:

Let not man glory in this that he loveth his country, let him rather glory in this that he loveth his kind.

So my sister called from Goose Bay just now, adding 709 to the list of area codes we’ve received calls from lately (joining 506 [New Brunswick], 416 [Toronto], 514 [Montreal], 819 [Quebec], and 012 [Egypt].) She’s over there visiting friends Sarah and Byron, trying to make herself useful and struggling with a cold. Apparently the cold plugged up her ears, and at the advice of a doctor, has chosen to delay her return flight to T.O. to avoid ear damage. :P Oh well. I was hoping to visit her this weekend. Guess that’s not going to happen.

that’s still neat, though — hee hee

i’ve been flipping through classified ads for apartments, and gathering job postings that I’m interested in… I guess the next step is just to roll up my sleeves and start calling, and to send out my resumé too. I just found the demo of the new Dark Castle game tho, so I don’t want to work, I want to play around :)

bah! procrastination never got me anywhere. it’s time for ass to be kicked.

neat stuff: apartments are way cheaper in victoriaville than they are in ottawa. the price tag on the apartment I lived in this summer was over $800, for a two-bedroom. The same thing might go for about $350 over there. unless I’m misunderstanding the ads. sweet.

hey, i replaced my news page with a blog because I didn’t want to have to keep updating my news script. looks nice, doesn’t it? the picture on the left is one I took on a short trip to quebec city last october.

from now on, i’ll be using this blog to post updates about my life, particularly my upcoming adventures in victoriaville, quebec. it’s a real nice town [site in french]. it’s got lots of cheese, and goats. but a fuller description will have to wait until later. for now, enjoy the rest of the site as it begins the slow process of metamorphosis.