Letter Never Sent

Happy birthday, Favio! What email address you use now?

I started up a Bulletin Board, The Ministry of Love, for LNS users, friends, etc. You can access it here. It’s a good way to communicate and to leave messages for other readers etc. I’ll be setting up a sub-domain for it shortly since the url is a tad long. By the way, infopop makes great stuff…I’d like to plug their package, Ultimate Bulletin Board System. It is perl-based and very affordable.

I inadvertently took a breather from the blogging thing for a few days. I try hard to do my little part to shout into the wind. It can be discouraging to see how rarely things change for the better. It drains the reserve of optimism and hope I try to hold on to. We go two steps forward three steps back, perpetually getting nowhere. I feel as if there is a significant force or influence (not a metaphysical one) whose purpose is to make life miserable for as many others as possible. When I look around I see nothing but potential. If we put our minds to it we could be living in an earthly paradise, treating one another with respect and love. I don’t think this is a foolish idea. I know it is possible. The problem is one I think primarily of psychology. Why do so many expect so little? I want my life to mean something.

Our society seems so sado-masochistic to me. I think this is where the work needs to start, on a person to person basis. Why are people hurtful to one another? Where is the root of it? What fixes it? I don’t believe in sin. For some reason, there are people who are emotional plague carriers. People whose daily mission is to extinguish happiness. I think this is why children seem so special. They possess a certain confidence and delight in life. All I know is, I get tired of seeing a world where people are content to be cowed and dehumanized.

Meanwhile, in the shell-game we call the US Government, President Bush is planning on increasing the defense budget by another 48 billion dollars. It hurts to laugh sometimes.

At my graduation party Galadriel gave me a copy of the I Ching, the Book of Changes. In the back of my head of been thinking about the I Ching ever since I had a class on the classic 18th century Chinese novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. (It was an entire course because The Dream of the Red Chamber is five volumes long.) At the end of the semester, our professor, Dr. Faurot, showed us how to cast three coins to generate the trigrams that are used in the consultation of the I Ching. In this way you can cast your own sort of horoscope.

It’s not really to predict events but rather to ask advice if you are in need of answers. It’s strange because I had developed an interest in Chinese culture and encountered the I Ching, and then I started reading Philip K. Dick and in his book The Man in the High Castle the I Ching is a prominent plot device. It just seems so strangely coincidental. I’m gonna try to mess with it a little bit and see what happens. I could definitely use some advice right now.