Plato's lesson on love and marriage

One day, Plato asked his teacher, "What is love? How can I find it?"
His teacher answered, "There is a vast wheat field in front. Walk forward without turning back, and pick only one stalk. If you find the most magnificent stalk, then you have found love."

Plato walked forward, and before long, he returned with empty hands, having picked nothing.
His teacher asked, "Why did you not pick any stalk?"
Plato answered, "Because I could only pick once, and yet I could not turn back. I did find the most magnificent stalk, but did not know if there were any better ones ahead, so I did not pick it. As I walked further, the stalks that I saw were not as good as the earlier one, so I did not pick any in the end. "

His teacher then said, "And that is love."

On another day, Plato asked his teacher, "What is marriage? How can I find it?"
His teacher answered, "There is a thriving forest in front. Walk forward without turning back, and chop down only one tree. If you find the tallest tree, then you have found marriage."

Plato walked forward, and before long, he returned with a tree. The tree was not thriving, and it was not tall either. It was only an ordinary tree.
His teacher asked, "Why did you chop down such an ordinary tree?"
Plato answered, "Because of my previous experience. I walked halfway through the forest, but returned with empty hands. This time, I saw this tree, and I felt that it was not bad, so I chopped it down and brought it back. I did not want to miss the opportunity."

His teacher then said, "And that is marriage."

Gray

Grey is not white.
Grey is not black.
Grey is not wrong.
Grey is not right.

Grey is in between.
Between heaven and hell.
Between among the mortals and immortals.
Between angels and demons.

Grey also is a choice.
A choice for someone who doesn't believe in choices.
A choice for someone who doesn't believe what's right or wrong.
A choice for someone who want to live in the between.

One cannot judge whether they are white or black.
Still, it is their option to take the path.
But somehow I just couldn't see that path.
For I am still in the path of gray.

Connecting the dots.

Reading Steve Jobs Speech about connecting the dots makes me wonder. Is it true everything happened for a reason or is it just pure coincidence? A serendipity?

Before I make this blog, I used to write some of my thought in Notes at Facebook. I got few of them, but when Facebook change its face, don't know why, all my notes are gone. And it kinda piss me off actually cause I realize it just when I feel like I wanna write again. And that's when I remember my long forgotten blog that I haven't touch it since the day that I make it. Which is about a year ago.
So here am I writing about nothing to ease my wondering soul. (pfffht..)

Anyway, after I start blogging, many nice thing happened to me. Some of my friend think it's good and I thank them for it. Though I don't know which one the good part is.
Well, not all of them actually. But I like to pretend that what I'm about to tell you is nice.
You see, I told one of my friend about my blog. An old friend I rarely contact. And as the chit chatting goes, somehow she's offering me a job. A pretty good offer actually if I could say.
Yeah, she's been so nice to me for many times with her offer. But I don't know why, I just not in to it. Not just because I still have my responsibility to finished my current job here, but maybe that just wasn't my passion. And of course, she's mad at me for having many reason.

But nevertheless, having misfortune of loosing all my notes leads me to another fortunate event. So, is this what you called everything happened for a reason or just a slight coincidence?
Whatever it is, God sure work in a mysterious ways.
Every dots that connect must have its end. And I'll just have to find a way to reach my last dot.

Stay hungry, Stay foolish.

Transcript of Commencement Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs


Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.

My Banana Pancakes

Few days ago friend of mine, show me a piece of lyric from a song "Better Together". The song was good. And I'm curious about the singer who turn out to be Jack Johnson. Search the net and look at the wiki to find out how many album he got. And download them all. :D
One of the album, In Between Dreams, it have a cool song called "Banana Pancakes". Nice song actually but what makes me curious is what is so special about this banana pancakes so he turn it into a song.
And so I find myself surfing through the deepest net to find some exotic recipes.
VOILA!
My first own homemade banana pancakes.


With some modification I made this into a not-bad-first-attempt banana pancake. Honey, duck egg, and a pouring cheese as a topping. What can I tell you.. I love to cook sometimes.
Just sometimes.. It's been a while since I go to the kitchen and make something. And what do you know.. It feel great!
Thanks to Jack Johnson and his Banana Pancakes..

The Parking Guy

I just met the most friendliest parking guy in the world. He's so friendly he never stop smiling to anybody who parked there. And it is a very very HOT weather out there.

How much do this guy got for one day? Is he happy with what he do for living? And does he expect other people to return their smile to him? I don't think so.

Shame on me.

I have a friend. My dear friend since Junior High School. And whenever I tell her a joke, she just smile and never laugh. Don't know why. Until yesterday. I give her a link and she laugh all night long. And I said to myself; "YES! Today is the most beautiful day in my life.."

I like to make other people smile. Hell, I even make them laugh. And when I do that, I become the most happiest guy on earth. But sometimes I do that 'cause I'm expecting others might do the same to me too. Well, sometimes they do that. But I guess I'm expecting way too much. Until that parking guy change my view.

If you're happy making anyone else smile or even laugh, what more do you expect then? Sincere is the key to value life. And I need to learn more.
But the funny thing is, even though I love to make everybody smile, I don't smile a much (or perhaps never) nowadays..

Hope I could found someone who could make me.. :)

Someday

"We actually only live for 3 days.
Yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Yesterday is about our past. What is done is done. No matter how bad our past was, there’s nothing you can do to change it. What u can do is simply keep up the good work.
Today is about how we live our life now. And it’s about making the right choice (or not..). But still, there’s always a choice. Just be careful where your step leads you.
Tomorrow is about how we live our dream. I think a dream is like an ice. You can make ice into an ice cream with many delicious flavor, or you just do nothing n watch it melt n turn to water."


That was taken from my first thing that I ever write about something in my whole life. And that was 2 years ago. January 11th, 2008 to be precise.
2 years ago.. 2 years and I don't feel like achieving something. I wonder what I will be in two years from now when I read this again.

Looks like I'm not a good ice cream man.

Many things that slip in my very eyes. Not respecting other is one of them. Others that actually do really care for me. And that are few indeed.
For all the ones that I have disappointed, please accept my deepest apology.

Nevertheless, everything I’ve done, will always be my shadow.
It will follow me where ever I go.

I never regret it.

'Cause what ever I do, it will never going to be white..

And now, I believe in someday. Not the past, the present or even the future. But someday.
Someday I will be found. Cause if you hadn't found me, I would have found you.


And you will be the one and only, most delicious ice cream that I ever made. :)

Orange

This is a story of a fruit named Orange.
Which fell from her branch seeking for challenge.
She talk a lot when things are getting out of range.
Who make her kinda a little bit strange.

Despite of her unique behavior anomaly,
She got the sweet of no other orange carry.
Even adorable when she acted funny and brainy.
That make her a cute little orange fairy.


"Dedicated to my dear friend who show me The Annoying Orange for the first time.." :)