Hurt

Only those you care about can really hurt you. Once you have no one and nothing, you wont feel anything. You will be free, but utterly, hopelessly empty. Without direction and motivations, truly apart from your fellow man in that you have no feeling anymore. Blacken the soul. Crush the heart. Close yourself to people. What use are these in this world. Any other reaction is an invitaion to pain. Life is pain and suffering. But you are a coward to do so. A fool to hide from people. To isolate yourself. Surely this will simply lead to madness. Or have you been down that path for too long now?

The Beauty of Women

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" famous words, but how true are they?
To a certain extent there are many types of beauty, and what a person percieves as beauty. However, I think when we look at women (sorry I don't do beautiful guys in this topic, perhaps this will warrant more analysis later, ok got sidetracked oops) As I was saying before I interrupted myself, in women beauty has a lot to do with childbearing, strangely enough. Of course I didnt really see it that way untill I read Gene Wolfe's THe Fifth Head of Cerberus. In this book, one chapter talks about how you can simply break it down to men seeing how fit the member of the opposite sex is to bear his children. Not much of a suprise really considering we're all wired to procreate as much as possible, ensuring the continuation of our genes and what not.
So we look at what a woman from the top down (I'd say there are quite a few guys who would start elsewhere, but lets go in a systematic manner here). First the face, the facial features are simply an indication of the overall health of a person, 'most' of the time if a person looks after themselves their faces will reflect the care they put into thier health. Moving right along we come to the...uh chest area. The breasts are quite obviously the main source of nutrition for a child (or at least it used to be, I'm not so sure how popular breast feeding is nowadays). Further down we get to the hips, of course this is where the baby will actually come to form and be born from. Then the legs, women leg muscles are usually some of the strongest and largest in their body, and this is to bear the additional weight of a child (this is the one point I added to Wolfe's, see I contribute!) and of course longer legs mean they can run faster from predators and such.
So the full breasts, wide hips and long legs we men rave about seems to simply be another instict in us to find appropriate child bearers. I know what you're thinking, its not like the notion that all guys thought about was sex needed to be stated again.

Uni Life

Studies are in full swing now as the first slew of midterms come up and kill almost all my free time. Living with so many guys and girls who routinely get drunk/high is a very new experience. Most of the time I don't really bother to join them in thier partying. I'm not really comfortable with crowds anyway. I find myself one of the only people who on my floor who doesnt drink, smoke or do anything basically. I always say its against my religion to drink, but honestly, that decision is a personal thing. Constantly we decide on what we do (this contradicts my previous post about having no choice whatsoever, but hey, no one said I was right in the first place) for example the aforementioned smoking and drinking. it may be banned, illegal or against your religion, but lets face it. If you really wanted to, you'd find a way. Everytime we have a choice to either start (or continue) any one of these things. I wont really say they are "bad habits," since I honestly do not know (having never tried it myself) and so I think it unfair to judge others, as if i'm somehow above them simply because of my abstinence. If I tried it, decided for myself I didnt enjoy it and gave it up, it still would not give me the right to tell them what to do.

Karate

I have been practising for around 6 years of my life now. Shito-Ryu Karate-Do is once again a big part of my life, and I find it helps so much in dealing with stress. I think I know why I almost gave up on practising the past year; simply put, I wasnt stressed out. I wasnt having the work load of studies (and in the case of late 2004, I simply didnt have a place to train). As such I didnt feel the 'need' to go and train to the point of physical exhaustion. Now i'm back to being a full time student (summer made me feel like a jobless bum on a sabbatical) I see that its actually rather important part of my life again. Perhaps its also the fact that almost anything seems better than actually doing my work! But heres hoping i'm just missing the karate.