Archive for 2009

 

Freud said that religion is a form of collective neurosis in which we regress back to a childhood state with protective father or mother figures in the form of gods. Perhaps, this definition can be extended to new age beliefs.

 I have always had ambivalent feelings about new age beliefs. On the up side, it helps people, to a certain extent, to deal with their existential anxiety and provide them with a re-assurance about the future. On the other hand, it lulls people into a very dangerous false sense of security and holds them back from actively making life’s decisions.But it is always interesting to me to see how these beliefs reincarnate in new forms.Take Rumpology for example. I came across an advertisement last week inviting readers to send a picture of their rear and a cheque for $125.00 if they want to find out what is in their future.  Rumpologists claim to have the ability to foretell one’s future by reading the characteristics of one’s buttocks!!! Apparently, they believe that the shape, lines, folds, marks, spots e.t.c. on the buttocks reveal a person’s love life, personality, past, future and fate among other things.

Rumpologists say that the art (or science?) of foretelling your fate through your buttocks was practiced in ancient India, Greece and the Middle East, but provide no evidence to support the claim. I would not be surprised to see a column soon in trashy magazines or tabloids asking readers to send pictures of their rear to be analysed by a celebrity rumpologist. Sir, you are predestined to be sad. Your future is bleak and I see no hope for you, the way your behind is shaped,” the keister expert would probably tell clients. If only people were born with perfect buttocks, their life would be perfect too.

 It saddens me to think that there might be people who are willing to let an ass, in this case theirs, run their lives. It is a pity that they do not choose to go about life making their own decisions to achieve results, but want someone else to reassure them about their future, make sense of life for them, tell them how to act, how to think, and how to feel.

Seriously, why take a crack at life if we believe that the course of our life is already charted?  Why not leave it as(s) is? Is it worth living our life if everything is, according to our posteriors, predestined?

Hmmm….I am blogging and surfing the net at work “instead of getting stuff done!” Found this funny video by Lev which we all can relate to. Enjoy!

 More at http://www.ingredientx.com

I am surprised that most people fail to grasp the word vegetarian. I have been, by choice, a vegetarian for most of my life and have not had an urge to eat meat at all. I am always asked annoying questions whenever I tell people that I am a vegetarian. Some really clueless think vegetarians eat grass and leaves. A few others think vegetarians are always sick. A few more sophisticated think vegetarians don’t care about taste.  Anyway here are top 10 annoying questions people have asked me when I told them that I am a vegetarian:

10. So where do you get your proteins from?

9. So where do you get your vitamins from?

8. Do you eat fish?

7. Do you eat chicken?

6. So you just eat vegetables?

5. So what do you eat?

4. Are you ill?

3. So you are not a Christian?

2. So you don’t like animals?

And my personal favourite

1. Oh! So you eat Halal meat then?

  

 

I have been an avid note taker for years. I always carry a notebook  in my bag as it helps me capture my thoughts when they strike and pictorialize them too. The good old books have served me well. I still keep them around and refer them.

Here’s what they look like.

© Dave Walker

Am back on the blog after a lengthy absence. Work, work, work and more work had schemed against my blogging efforts in the last few months but hopefully things will remain calm from now on, giving me more time to blog. I am working on the feature now. Should be online by next weekend.

In Death Valley
by Edwin Markham
From The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1921)

There came gray stretches of volcanic plains,
Bare, lone and treeless, then a bleak lone hill
Like to the dolorous hill that Dobell saw.
Around were heaps of ruins piled between
The Burn o’ Sorrow and the Water o’ Care;
And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls
One pillar rose up dark against the moon.
There was a nameless Presence everywhere;
In the gray soil there was a purple stain,
And the gray reticent rocks were dyed with blood—
Blood of a vast unknown Calamity.
It was the mark of some ancestral grief—
Grief that began before the ancient Flood.