Jozef’s blog

Here are my notes from The R. Crumb Handbook.

• p10 There's only one country in the world where a person could get away with expressin' theirself as freely as I do! ... an' that's right here in th' good ol' U.S.A., and don't choo forget it! So when I tear down dis country an' criticize our society, remember I do it with love!
• p12 "I want to give you a piece of advice about fame," the master said as we were about to begin the interviews. "You should get down on your knees and thank the baby Jesus every day that you are on your side of the microphone and not on mine. Think about it!"
• p18 The spread of slums, the hypergrowth and congestion of manufacturing cities, the noise and stench of the industrial process, debased urban life all over the western world and led to a great yearning from escape ... in America, with its superabundance of cheap land, simple property laws, social mobility, mania for profit, zest for practical invention, and bible drunk sense of history, the yearning to escape industrialism expressed itself as a renewed search for Eden. America reinvented that paradise, described so briefly and vaguely in the book of Genesis, called it suburbia, and put it up for sale.
• p25 My father talked about being a kid on the farm and going out hunting and doing things connected with earth. Real stuff that kids of his generation had to deal with, life and death stuff. We barely had contact with real world. We were silly, wimpy, suburban kids playing games inspired by movies, television, and comic books. For us it was all filtered through the mass media. We were children of the media, the first TV generation.
• p28 It's strange to think of our fathers going to war. The glory of war is as old as the human race. You prove your manhood by going out and fighting another tribe, being a brave warrior. Get out there and prove yourself - kill somebody!
• p54 Everybody off camera was sleazy and stressed out.
• p56 Mass media is a fairly recent development, only as old as the Industrial Revolution, and it is spreading over the whole world and turning the last proud, independent, tribal population into consumers. We are products of this industrial commodity culture. It's hard to make a value judgment about it, but certainly the world wasn't always like this.
• p132 I was relieved when it was finally over, but I also immediately missed the egoless state of that strange interlude. LSD put me someplace else. I wasn't sure where. All I know is, it was a strange place. Psychedelic drugs broke me out of my social programming. It was a good thing for me, traumatic though, and I may have been permanently damaged by the whole thing, I'm not sure.
• p142 I see LSD as a positive, important life experience for me, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anybody else.
• p164 I would work at night when the ne'er-do-wells were sleeping, then I could get something done. But that was part of the hippie lifestyle. If you had a house, you couldn't turn people away who needed a place to "crash." And they would stay for six months and just hang out! I didn't have the courage, the nerve, to kick people out. Eventually, the wife had to be the ogre and do the hard thing. I couldn't do it, I was too weak.
• p180 All the people who work in the commercial culture are part of a conspiracy against the average man to get his money. They are not concerned with what effect their product might ultimately have, physically or spiritually. They are always looking for the lowest common denominator, the broadest possible market. They don't care what that might be. If Jesus movies are putting butts in theater seats, they'll make Jesus movies. If ultraviolence appeals to a certain segment of the population, the butchers are happy to provide it for them. Basically, the commercial media culture is a cold, merciless mechanism that is there to feed money to the people who perpetuate it. Before industrial civilization, local and regional communities made their own music, their own entertainment. The esthetics were based on traditions that went far back in time - i.e. folklore. But part of the con of mass culture is to make you forget history, disconnect you from tradition and the past. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Sometimes it can even be revolutionary. But tradition can also keep culture on an authentic human lavel, the homespun as opposed to the mass produced. Industrial civilization figured out how to manufacture popular culture and sell it back to the people. You have to marvel at the ingenuity of it! The problem is that the longer this buying and selling goes on, the more hollow and bankrupt the culture becomes. It loses its fertility, like worn out, ravaged farmland.
• p210 I was a fool. There is something in us that us always looking for the hard-to-find ultimate experience. We wade through a lot of shit to get to the fulfilment of our dreams.
• p217 Deprivation enhances the desired object - every desired object! If heaven meant having everything you desired in life, whenever you wanted it, eventually it would become meaningless. And then what? Where do yo go from there? What do we really want? What is this yearning, this "fire in our bellies?"
• p217 When my daughter Sophie was born in 1981, I changed. I became more conservative. I believe in law, order, stability! You gotta have it for the protection of the children!
• p227 "That means you think I'm too emotional, loud, obnoxious, spoiled, insensitive + pushy!" "No I don't sugar! HONEST"
• p243 Drawing became a way to win admiring oohs and ahhs from adults - mostly women, come to think og it - my mother, various female teachers, etc. My father's praise was always qualified, tempered with little criticisms or suggestions. And then, too, I always and ever had a big ego. Where does that come from? Damned if I know, ..., I think I was born with it... and I was a dreamer, shy, socially awkward, always... an odd ball, even in early childhood... then I was drawn into the comicbook thing by my older brother... He called himself a "failed mystic".
• p251 It was already obvious to us that comics had been in decline since the early 1950s. In any case, most cartoonists have about a ten year of inspiration or creativity. After that they begin to burn out from the relentlessness of churning out comics on a regular basis. They are totally locked into their contract, their standard living, their family responsibilities. They're forced to keep producing, like it or not.
• p297 Essentially, you're marketing an illusion. It's much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell them the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don't want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it's just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp.
• p343 Ahh the scum of the earth, those are my people.
• p363 My generation comes from a world that has been molded by crass TV programs, movies, comic books, popular music, advertisements and commercials. My brain is a huge garbage dump of all this stuff and it is this, mainly, that my works comes out of, for better or for worse.
• p375 The purpose of human life is to increase awareness. --Carlos Castaneda
• p394 For me, the most profound confrontation with death I ever experienced took place in 1966 after ingesting a powerful dose of LSD. I don't remember precisely what it was that terrified me, because at that moment I told myself that if I ever wanted to be sane again, I ahd to forget what I saw. I forced amnesia on myself so that I could return to the normal world. Bummer, man ... With LSD, you don't have to kill or be killed ... it all happens on some other plane of existence.
• p394 My work has a strong negative element. I have my own inner demons to deal with. Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside mself that I can't otherwise grasp.
• p394 Isn't it strange that we are such a mystery to ourselves?
• p396 This world is always going to be bigger and more powerful than you are, but you've got to deal with it. Life is active struggle. As Rocky says, "I know I can't beat this guy, I just wanna go the distance with him. I just wanna still be standing at the end of the fight, that's all..." That's the only victory you can hope for. You've got to figure out a way to stay in shape, and stay alert, to keep standing.
• p398 There's a wealth of great music recorded in the 78 era, before the onslaught of mass media profoundly changed everything ... forever!

-------- Original Message --------
Hello

I am sorry to inform that your grant was not voted for rejection, but
when ranking grants, it was not in the first places. Given the lack of
funds we will only fund the first two grant proposals.

Therefore, your grant proposal will be kept to be analyzed and voted
again in the next round. If meanwhile you decide to change or remove
this proposal let me know.

Thank you
Alberto

Here are my notes from book How to analyze people on sight:

• It's not how much you know but what you can DO that counts.
• The most essential thing in the world to any individual is to understand himself. The next is to understand the other fellow. For life is largely a problem of running your own car as it was built to be run, plus getting along with the other drivers on the highway.
• The game is the same old game--you must adjust and adapt yourself to your environment or it will destroy you.
• Adapt or Die - Who will win? Nature answers for you. She has said with awful and inexorable finality that, whether you are a blade of grass on the Nevada desert or a man in the streets of London, you can win only as you adapt yourself to your environment.
• The moving picture industry--said to be the third largest in the world--is based largely on this interrelation. This industry would become extinct if something were to happen to sever the connection between external expressions and the internal nature of men and women.
• The size, shape and structure of a man's body tell more important facts about his real self--what he thinks and what he does--than the average mother ever knows about her own child.
• Five Biological Types - Human Analysis differs from every other system of character analysis in that it classifies man, for the first time, into five types according to his biological evolution. It deals with man in the light of the most recent scientific discoveries. It estimates each individual according to his "human" qualities rather than his "character" or so-called "moral" qualities. In other words, it takes his measure as a human being and determines from his externals his chances for success in the world of today.
• ...bring to mind any intimate friends, or even that husband or wife, and note how few changes they have made in their way of doing things in twenty years!
• Every human being is born with preferences and predilections which manifest themselves from earliest childhood to death. These inborn tendencies are never obliterated and seldom controlled to any great extent, and then only by individuals who have learned the power of the mind over the body. Inasmuch as this knowledge is possessed by only a few, most of the people of the earth are blindly following the dictates of their inborn leanings.
• Succeed at What We Like - No person achieves success or happiness when compelled to do what he naturally dislikes to do. Since these likes and dislikes stay with him to the grave, one of the biggest modern problems is that of helping men and women to discover and to capitalize their inborn traits.
• Furthermore just as a Ford never changes into a Pierce nor a Pierce into a Ford, a human being never changes his type. He may modify it, train it, polish it or control it somewhat, but he will never change it.
• The world classifies human beings according to their superficialities. To the world a human motorcycle can pass for a Rolls-Royce any day if sufficiently camouflaged with diamonds, curls, French heels and plucked eyebrows.
• In the same manner many a bicycle in human form gets elected to Congress because he plays his machinery for all it is worth and gets a hundred per cent service out of it. Every such person learned early in life what kind of car he was and capitalized its natural tendencies.
• The most man can do for his neighbor is to understand and inspire him. The most he can do for himself is to understand and organize his inborn capacities.
• the nutritive, circulatory, muscular, bony or nervous
• 
• When he takes the trouble to think about it there are a few kinds of people the Alimentive does not care for. The man who is bent on discussing the problems of the universe, the highbrow who wants to practise his new relativity lecture on him, the theorist who is given to lengthy expatiations, and all advocates of new isms and ologies are avoided by the pure Alimentive. He calls them faddists, fanatics and fools.
• But Nature must have intended fat people to manage the rest of us instead of taking a hand at the "heavy work." She made them averse to toil and then made them so likable that they can usually get the rest of us to do their hardest work for them.
• They fail to recognize that the world always pays the big salaries not for hand work but for head work, and not so much for working yourself as for your ability to get others to work.
• ...and he knows that quarrels are expensive, not alone in the chances they lose him, but in nerve force and peace of mind.
• This personal element will be found to dominate the activities, conversation and interests of the Alimentive. For him to like a thing or buy a thing it must come pretty near being something he can eat, wear, live in or otherwise personally enjoy. He confines himself to the concrete and tangible. But most of all he confines himself to things out of which he gets something for himself.
• ... the fat man is built around his stomach--and stomachs do not read!
• Gaining his ends by flattery, cajolery, and various more or less innocent little deceptions are the only social handicaps of this type.
• One average-minded fat man near the door of a business establishment will make more customers in a month by his geniality, joviality and sociableness than a dozen brilliant thinkers will in a year. Every business that deals directly with the public should have at least one fat person in it.
• 
• You can always tell what any individual WANTS MOST by what he DOES. The man who thinks he wants a thing or wishes he wanted it talks about getting it, envies those who have it and plans to start doing something about it. But the man who really WANTS a thing GOES AFTER it, sacrifices his leisure, his pleasures and sometimes love itself--and GETS it.
• To be able to put one's self in the role of another, to feel as he feels; to be so keenly sensitive to his situation and psychology that one almost becomes that person for the time being, is the heart and soul of acting.
• We are prone to judge every one by ourselves.
• The man who makes but one mistake a year because he makes but two decisions is wrong fifty per cent of the time.
• An aim, a definite goal is essential to the progress of any individual. It should be made with care and in keeping with one's personality, talents, training, education, environment and experience, and having been made should be adhered to with the determination which does not permit little things to interfere with it.
• The big problem of individual success is the problem of eliminating non-essentials--of "hewing to the line, letting the chips fall where they may." Most of the things that steal your time, strength, money and energy are nothing but chips. If you pay too much attention to them you will never hew out anything worth while.
• We do not like anything we do not understand and we seldom understand anything that differs decidedly from ourselves.
• He wants his house to be elegant, the grounds "different," the view unusual.
• 
• Morality is mostly a matter of how much temptation you can withstand.
• The most that training can do is to brace up the weak spots in us; to cultivate the strong ones; to teach us to avoid inimical environments; and to constantly remind us of the penalties we pay whenever we digress.
• Work palls on the Alimentive and monotony on the Thoracic, but leisure is what palls on the Muscular.
• We tell others to do certain things because "it will do you good" but the real reason usually is that we like to do it ourselves.
• All emotions powerfully affect muscles. A sad thought flits through your mind and instantly the muscles of your face droop and the corners of your mouth go down. Hundreds of similar illustrations with which you are already familiar serve to prove how close is the connection between emotions and muscles. The heart itself is nothing more nor less than a large, tough, leather-like muscle.
• 
• Externals are not accidental; they always correspond to the internal nature in every form of life.
• If you desire to know at once what kind of person the Osseous is, put the Alimentive and Thoracic types together and mix them thoroughly. The Osseous is the opposite of that mixture.
• Everything in one of Nature's creatures matches the other parts. Agassiz, the great naturalist, when given the scale of a fish could reconstruct for you the complete organism of the type of fish from which it came. Give a tree-leaf to a botanist and he will reconstruct the size, shape, structure and color of the tree back of it. He will describe to you its native environment and its functions; what its bark, blossoms and branches look like and what to do to make it grow.
• The typical New England housewife, who washes on Mondays, irons on Tuesdays and bakes on Saturdays for forty years, is a direct descendant of the Puritans, most of whom belong to this bony, pioneering type.
• The Alimentive avoids those he does not like and forgets them because it is too much bother to hate; the Thoracic flames up one moment and forgives the next; the Muscular takes it out in a fight then and there, or argues with you about it. But the Osseous despises, hates and loathes--and keeps on for years after every one else has forgotten all about it.
• The pure Alimentive seldom troubles his head about causes. The Thoracic is the type that lives chiefly for the pleasure of the moment and the adventures of life. The Muscular fights hard and works hard for various movements. But it is the Osseous who dies for his beliefs.
• There is little to be done with the Osseous when you meet him socially except to let him do what he wants to do. Don't interfere with him if you want him to like you.
• 
• Mind and matter are so inseparably bound up together in man's organism that it is impossible to say just where mind ends and matter begins.
• We are so constructed that brain and stomach--each of which demands an extra supply of blood when performing its work--can not function with maximum efficiency simultaneously.
• The Alimentive lives to eat, the Thoracic to feel, the Muscular to act, the Osseous to stabilize, but the Cerebral lives to meditate.
• But the man who can only dream lives in a very hostile world. His real world is his thoughts but whenever he steps out of them into human society he feels a stranger and he is one.
• Ideas always have to go begging at first, and the greater the idea the rougher the sledding.
• The ideal combination is a dreamer who can DO or a doer who knows the power of a DREAM. Thinking and acting--almost every individual is doing too much of one and too little of the other!
• He is too abstract to add to the gaiety of social gatherings, for these are based on the enjoyment of the concrete.
• Another reason why he has few friends is because these people, being in the great minority, are not easy to find.
• Since we get only what we go after in this world, it follows that the Cerebral is often poor. To make money one must want money. Competition for it is so keen that only those who want it badly and work with efficiency ever get very much of it.
• As we have seen, all the other types have decided preferences as to their clothes--the Alimentive demands comfort, the Thoracic style, the Muscular durability and the Osseous sameness--but the extreme Cerebral type says "anything will do."
• We have always said people were "absent-minded" when their minds were absent from what they were doing. This often applies to the Cerebral for he is capable of greater concentration than other types; also he is so frequently compelled to do things in which he has no interest that his mind naturally wanders to the things he cares about.
• The poor talker sometimes surprises us by being a good writer. Such a one is usually of the Cerebral type.
• ...and when society idlers will not be considered better than people who earn their livings.
• The world is managed by fat men, entertained by florid men, built by muscular men, opposed by bony men, but is improved in the final analysis by its thinking men.
• Fame is the food of the tomb.
• In the room of the Alimentive you will find cushions, sofas and "eats;" in that of the Thoracic you will find colorful, unusual things; the Muscular will have durable, solid, plain things; the Osseous will have fewer of everything but what he does have will be in order. But the pure Cerebral's furnishings--if he is responsible for them--will be an indifferent array, with no two pieces matching. Furthermore, everything will be piled with newspapers, magazines, books and clippings.
• The type PREDOMINATING in a person determines WHAT he does throughout his life--the NATURE of his main activities. The type which comes second in development will determine the WAY he does things--the METHODS he will follow in doing what his predominant type signifies.
• Human happiness is attained only through doing what the organism was built to do, in an environment that is favorable.
• Every individual owes it to himself to find the right work and the right mate, because these are fundamental needs of every human being. Lacking them, life is a failure; possessing but one of them, life is half a failure.
• Accordingly, just as it is easier to change the frosting on a cake than to change the inside, it is easier to change a man's religion than to change his activities.
• In other words, more than seventy per cent of American divorces are granted because husbands and wives can not adapt themselves to each other in the matter of how they shall spend their LEISURE hours.
• The only time we are free to act is during our leisure hours. All other hours are mortgaged to earning a living--in the accomplishment of which we often have very little outlet for natural trends. So it is only "after hours" and "over Sundays" that the masses of mankind have an opportunity to express their real natures.
• Law of Marital Happiness - Marriage should take place only between those whose first type-elements are sufficiently similar for them to enjoy the same general diversions, yet whose second type-elements are sufficiently dissimilar to make each strong where the other is weak.
• The human ego is so constituted that we tend to like all interesting people who do not offer us opposition.
• The business man has enough of "brilliant" people all day. When he gets home he is rather inclined to be merely the "tired business man," and in that state nothing is more agreeable than a wife with a smile.
• Feminine prettiness (not beauty) consists of the rose-bud mouth, the baby eyes, the cute little nose, the round cheeks, the dimpled chin, etc.--all more or less monopolized by the Alimentive type.
• Sales people everywhere say, "We like to see a fat woman coming, for she usually has money, spends it freely and is easy to please."
• For this type of woman, unlike the home-keeping Alimentive, enjoys being a widow and remains one. She usually has many chances to remarry but her changeable, gaiety-loving nature revels in the freedom, sophistication and distinction of widowhood. The appearance of endless youth given by her alive, responsive personality deceives the most discerning as to her age. The woman of f ifty who enthralls the youths of twenty-five is usually of the Thoracic type.
• The same thing happens every day between severe, bony wives and their florid, frolicking husbands. "She is a perfect housekeeper and a good wife" exclaim her friends--"why should her husband spend his evenings away from home?" These questions will continue to be asked until we realize that being "a good housekeeper and a good wife" does not fill the bill with a Thoracic man. A wife who will leave the dinner dishes in the kitchen sink occasionally and run away with him for a "lark" on a moment's notice is the kind that retains the love of her f lorid husband. A husband who is willing to leave his favorite magazine, pipe, and slippers to take her out in the evening is the kind a Thoracic woman likes. She even prefers a "gay devil" to a "stick"--as she calls the slow ones.
• So, even when they love him best they usually marry the fat salesman, the Muscular worker who always has a good job, the Thoracic promoter who promises luxury, or the Osseous man who won't take "No" for an answer.
• "When poverty comes in the door love flies out the window" is a saying as old as it is sad. And it is as true as it is both old and sad.
• Poverty does more to bring out the worst in people and conceal the best than anything else in the world.
• Because he lives in his mind and not in his external world the predominantly Cerebral must marry one who also is predominantly Cerebral. The reading of books, attendance at good plays, and the study of great movements constitute the chief enjoyments of this type and if he has a mate who cares nothing for these things his marriage is bound to be a failure.
• But here's the rub. You will never do anything with that brilliant efficiency save what you LIKE TO DO. Efficiency does not come from duty, or necessity, or goading, or lashing, or anything under heaven save ENJOYMENT OF THE THING ITSELF. Nothing less will ever release those hidden powers, those miraculous forces which, for the lack of a better name, we call "genius."
• Whenever you are considering your fitness for any vocation, ask yourself these questions:
• Self-Question 1 - Am I considering this vocation chiefly because I would enjoy the things it would bring--such as salary, fame, social position or change of scene? If, in your heart, your answer is "Yes," this is not a vocation for you.
• Self-Question 2 - Knowing the requirements of this vocation--its tasks, drudgeries, hours of work, concentration and kind of activity--would I choose to follow them in preference to any other kind of activity even if the income were the same? Would I do these things for the pleasure of doing them and not for the pay? If, in your heart, you can answer "Yes" to these questions, your problem is settled; you will succeed in that vocation. For you will so enjoy your work that it will be play. Being play, you will do it so happily that you will get from it new strength each day.
• Self-Question 3 - Do I tend to follow, of my own accord, for the sheer joy of it, the kinds of activity demanded by this vocation which I am contemplating? If you do not you will never succeed in this line of work.
• To be a success you must PRODUCE something out of the ordinary for the world.
• But they found a line that fitted their particular talents, and they went ahead cultivating those talents without asking for everything in advance.
• Life is full of opportunities for every person who will consult his own capacities and aim for the big chance.
• Parents can be divided into three classes--those who over-estimate their children, those who under-estimate their children, and those who do not estimate them at all.
• I don't want any of my boys to be lawyers. Lawyers are all liars. Ministers are worse; they're all a bunch of Sissies. Doctors are all fakes. Actors are all bad eggs; and business is one big game of cheat or be cheated. I'm going to see that every boy I've got becomes a farmer.
• He must avoid working for, with, under or over others. The Osseous should never have a partner if he can help it.

Many smart people creating amazing smart things like web searches assume and think that we know what we are looking for. But we don't. Also when we go out to "so called real world", we don't have a specific and concrete task or interest. We just go out for a walk, which it self is a first choice, but then we let things happen and enjoy the ones that caught our attention.

When we go out, our brain is amazing at exploring and hiding the world around us at the same time. We no longer notice or concentrate on walking - we walk, we no longer concentrate so much on driving - we are steering + change gears + look into mirrors + talking to our mates at the same time, we no longer listen to what others say - we are networking, we are no longer paying attention to the TV - we are entertained.

Designing search that key feature would be eliminating and filtering could be a nice experiment into unknown, inspired by nature.

Imagine visiting my blog, that has ~160 entries at this time, and being able to filter out the ones that are out of interest for you. You may end up with one or two that you would really like but had no idea about them, or their keywords, before.

... just a dreamer

Over the weekend we discussed with my father in law why did Communism in the east performed so badly compared to the Capitalism in the west? Why, when everything was planned and organized by the system plus every single person had to work? How come that the capitalism could fill-up their supermarkets with goods while communistic supermarkets were nearly empty? Wasn't the starting point after 1945 kind of the same for all European countries?

Looking back at people and countries with totalitarian regimes shows the best what a system gone crazy can look like. It will enslave and suck life out of everyone and everything.

We naturally need a system, we need to believe, to have a reason why to get up from bed in the morning. Even the strongest atheists have their believe system, it's not called religion just because it's not organized.

Now Europe united in this so called "free democratic capitalistic" system. Is it better? Definitely we are free to express our opinions and the supermarkets are filled to bursting with goods, but ...

We humans create and use systems all the time, we are giving meaning to our everyday events, that is what makes us humans different from animals. When the systems serve people, people flourish, when the people serve systems, people become wasted.

Living in city of Vienna, city declared to have highest Quality of Living in the world by Mercer 2012 Quality of Living Survey, looking around in the subway or the city, I see few people smiling, most of them are simply gray. Not only their clothes are black or dark colors, but their faces does not shine. That makes me wonder what kind of system do we live in? What's our organizing principle? Is it flourishing or wasting us?

There is one simple system that unite us for thousands of years, no matter what religion or believe → and that is money. Awesome invention allowing humans to grow, invent and accomplish things that no other creature could do on this planet. We can not only adapt to our environment super fast, we can adapt or change our environment within hours by our selves.

Modern times, modern diseases - "Burn out" syndrome appeared. What the hell is "burn out" anyway? Why are these rich and super successful people sick? Notion that time is money slipped under our skins. No matter if it's spent at work, walking in the city or watching TV. Even being fit and relaxed can be evaluated to later profit. We can count every click, catch every eye ball everywhere and then turn it into profit. We are organized, we are optimized and we are planned to be super productive! The fact is, we have a crisis...

What is our crisis really about?

Traditionally Twitter was 140 characters messaging tool. Some people love it because it makes everyone to be brief and clear in their tweets, some hate it because when they are about to finish the last word it say "-2" chars.

The interesting thing is that both haters and lovers are right. That's an amazing revelation about conversations. We can be in conflict while both sides are right! The trouble and conflict is not with the reality or truth, but that those two people doesn't share the same reality, their truths are simply not in sync.

But back to the 140 spell. May people, including me until 43 minutes ago, believe that in Twitter it's possible to use only 140 letters. Which is true, but Twitter allows to attach a picture to every single tweet. This feature many already use to tell their story with their photos. Stretching that possibility a bit more further allows for attaching screen-shot from website or e-book or taking photo of hand written text and attaching it to the tweet. That way the "Keep it simple, stupid!" rule is satisfied and we are also allowed to express our selves beyond that limitation → win-win.

More then that, we see what makes us comfortable:

We see what we want to see:

And the truth? Were is it? What is it?

I've read book by Anthony "Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality" couple of times, found it amazing but stayed puzzled. HVP test showed me a new direction of thinking towards values and valuation and finally, when I've realized that valuation is in other words judgment, I thought, is this what Anthony wanted to say?

Valuation or (pre)judgment gives objects, situation and people different values. In extreme case it allows for totally reverted valuation and choices. Painting remains to be a painting no matter if it's by Leonardo da Vinci or my little kid. It's our thinking that gives one or the other much greater value.

What Antony say is that we are programmed to value or judge in a certain way which changes the reality. We are not aware, we don't see things as they are but as we are because we look through our lenses of judgment. And our judgment is a coping strategy that prevent us from the pain of what causes or caused anxiety to us:

So how much awareness is possible? There's just too much input information around us. How can we train our unconsciousness to filter "properly"? Isn't that "properly" just another appealing system?

Here is what Goleman writes about well adjusted marriage or working couple:

• "This is well-adjusted marriages," he notes "we expect that each partner may keep from the other secrets having to do with financial matters, past experiences, current flirtations, indulgences in 'bad' or expensive habits, personal aspirations and worries, actions of children, true opinions held about relatives or mutual friends, etc."
• Each partner in a working couple ignores areas of shared experience that would threaten the partners' shared sense of a secure, comfortable relationship. She doesn't comment on the looks he gives younger women at the beach; he never mentions his suspicion that she fakes orgasms. Over time, these discretions can become converted into lacunas: they do not notice, and do not notice that they do not notice.

I've read fairy tales about love, but I don't think I've ever seen a couple that loves in intrinsic way. All I see is systemic and utilitarian relationships. Is my seeing blinded by my lack of believe/faith or is it simply so?

Actually Goleman gives a hint how to recognize happy couples.

• On the other hand, something rather remarkable tends to happen with couples who live together for decades, finding happiness with each other. Their continual rapport even seems to leave its mark on their faces, which comes to resemble each other, apparently a result of the sculpting of facial muscles, as partners smile or frown in unison they strengthen the parallel set of muscles.

So such couples must exists! But where? What really is love?