Dream casts a human shadow, when it occurs to him to do so.

Let us discuss the land of dreams. Share a somehow memorable dream/nightmare you've had. Maybe it was so bizarre that is stuck with you, or so beautiful, funny or horrible...

I believe it was my turn to give out the topic this time so here you go.

I'm going to share a dream that has stuck with me for years, surprisingly not because it was something awful but because it was so beautiful I keep wishing I could go back to it.

I was standing at a market place of sorts. It was a large area covered in cobble stone. Surrounding the market place were several buildings of beautiful old-timey tile and stone architecture, I think many of the buildings were factories. In contrast to all the stone and tile, there was a gorgeous park with the greenest grass and a nice fountain. One side of the park was framed by a row of Oak trees.

The sun was shining, making the green grass of the park practically glow, along with the Oak leaves. I was in what looked like it could have been 19th century England. I was wearing the clothes of a fairly upper class woman, it seemed. I could hear the sound of horse hooves hitting the cobbled streets as people, mainly lower class workers in their worn clothes, used them to pull carriages around. I was not paying particular attention to any of those people, I was looking at a man in a dark suit and a top hat, who was discussing with a man who I assume was someone who worked at horse stables, maybe a stable master. They were smiling as they spoke and I was content at just looking at them in silence, from a distance. The man in a top hat was my husband, I think it was an arranged marriage but I wasn't upset, I felt fine and warm.

After a while my husband and the stable master approached me, walking a beautiful horse with a copper-red coat towards me. Apparently the horse was my wedding present. They helped me up onto its back and like a proper lady, I sat there with both of my legs on the same side of the saddle (sidesaddle). Suddenly something spooked the horse, or it just decided it was time to go - I'm not sure. It started to gallop, fast, like a race horse. The sun made its red coat shine, everything around us still looked so beautiful. I wasn't scared, I just conformed to the movement of the horse, but I did feel an adrenaline rush as I struggled slightly to hold on and keep myself from slipping (if any of you have ridden sidesaddle, you know it's definitely not the best position to go with if you want to stay firmly on the horse). The stable master tried to run after us, but he couldn't keep up. We were off and I still had that warm feeling. That's when I woke up.

After waking up I couldn't think about anything else but the beautiful imagery. The landscape, the colors, the horse...it was all gorgeous. I wish I could paint it but I'm just not good enough. It's been years since I had this dream and I still haven't dared to even try and sketch out what I saw onto a paper. It's kind of hard to explain but I fear that if I even try, the memory of the beauty will fade or change if I make an attempt to spill it onto a paper. I don't want to let go of it. Not just yet.

Mahal Kita

The people I love the most is my family. I am fortunate enough to be in a a family that shows me the importance of saying "I love you" to one another. Not that we use those words loosely, but whenever we see it fit we'll most likely say it. Considering that fact, I have never said those words to anyone else but my dad, mom, and my sister.

The thing I love the most is food. No surprise there. Food has really been good to me as well. It is my living and without it i'd literally and figuratively starve.

A little lesson on Tagalog which is our mother tongue. Love in my language is "mahal" (/maˈhal/). That exact same word also means expensive or something with value that is more than you would like to spend or can afford. I really like how it implies that it is something you can never pay for in full and that it is a gift you can give someone and not expecting anything back.

QsOTD: How do you say "I love you" in your language? How many ways do you know how to say "I love you"?

Hear from you guys soon

RUBEN IV

I love the whole world

Good morning friends, it's Monday!

I love my mom a lot. Out of all the people and things that exist in the world the one that comes first to my mind when I think of love is my mom. Our relationship isn't perfect, we fight and generally disagree. I don't tell her every thing that's going in my life, but when something is bugging me or I'm overwhelmed I call her first. Maybe I'll have a friend or a partner some day who I'm close enough with that I can share the things I'm most proud and most afraid of but for now it's still my mom.

I love books and Libraries. They are one of the most important things in my life. When I'm stressed or going stir crazy I don't go to the mall I go to the Library. The quiet and the smell of books relaxes me. Books are one of the only things that can completely take my mind off things. when I'm reading I so immersed in someone else's world that I can forget about my own, forget about my own problems and worries for a while.

These are the two things I love the most. Of course I love the rest of my family and I love my friends. But their impact isn't quite as far reaching, they don't hold the same place in my heart.

Love,

Allysa

All you need is Love?

So, I was thinking about what theme I could set for this week. In honour of Esther Day, which was Wednesday, I've decided to dedicate this week to things/people we love. Oh, and just in case you haven't seen Hank's Esther Day video, here it is :

I'll leave my post till next Thursday, but I'd like to see what you guys have to say on the subject :)

summer break :(

It's summer „break“ over here, which basically means all students either do internships or are locked in their rooms writing papers. It's the latter for me, which is rather a shame considering how nice it's outside, and how big my books are (way too big and heavy to take to the riverside). So I'm trying to keep myself from procrastinating too much (so far I've seen neither Friends nor The West Wing in their entirety, which is rather an improvement over the last years).

So basically I'm not going out much, and spend most of my day reading up on the medieval Flemish art and court scene, which means I have absolutely nothing to talk about. Yay. I could tell you about medieval feasts featuring orchestras playing in giant pies and stuff, but I'm too lazy to scan the pictures. One day I'm going to use my accidental expertise in early stage design for something useful (it's an utterly fascinating topic, since they did all sorts of crazy stuff you wouldn't expect them to be able to do back then (and that would be way to expensive to do today), but, you know...)

Ooh, a few days ago we saw a semi-staged reading of Dracula near a pseudo-medieval tower above town (the one we like to bullshit tourists into believing is the Rapunzel tower, despite it having been build after the Grimms snuffed it – it's a bit of a hobby among towns that have any connection to the Grimms ;) we like to lay claim on Little Red Riding Hood as well). Anyways, the play was awesome (mostly thanks to the great actors). We were sitting outside, in the middle of the forest, and the sound was so astonishingly good that you really couldn't tell whether the birds you heard in the background were real or not. Plus they served really strong (vampire-themed) drinks, so the audience was rather giggly by the end. Only getting back down to town was rather an adventure (it was dark, near midnight, and none of the buses went where they were supposed to go. By foot it would've been a ten minute walk through a dark forest potentially full of mines or a 90 minute walk along deserted roads (... and highways).)

QotD: What's your most useless area of expertise?

Slap in the face

I say eat the way you want to eat!

I use to eat everything, but for almost 6 years now I haven't eaten pork, at least not consciously. But only because suddenly I can't stand the smell and taste of it anymore. My sister is pescatarian but that doesn't mean she's healthier than everyone else.

As to being healthy, I think diet is just 10% of the battle. You can be vegetarian or vegan but eat french fries everyday and still get a heart attack. What you really need to do is exercise. But, although it should be, health isn't exactly my focus in terms of food but taste.

If you don't like how it taste then don't eat it. But at least try it once, otherwise how will you know if you like it or not. I actually got slapped in the face for being adventurous with food. We have a delicacy here in the Philippines which is called balut. It's a duck embryo, around 16-21 days old, boiled and eaten with salt and/or vinegar. I told my roommate that I have and liked eating balut. She slapped me in the face, jokingly of course. I'm not saying I didn't deserve it cause I told her the story partly to freak her out a little. We were having a debate about prop. 2. Mind you my roommate eats more meat than I do. That's a whole other story that I really don't have time to talk about and isn't that interesting anyway.

My point is try it and if you don't like it don't eat it.

QOTD: What's the most exotic thing you've eaten?

Hear from you guys soon

RUBEN IV

P.S. Sorry for the late post =P

Lions And Antelopes

Terminology legend for those too lacy to Google or use dictionary:

Vegetarian
- a person who does not eat or does not believe in eating meat, fish, fowl, or, in some cases, any food derived from animals, as eggs or cheese, but subsists on vegetables, fruits, nuts, grain, etc.

Vegan
- a vegetarian who omits all animal products from the diet.

Pescetarian
- a vegetarian who will eat fish; also called pescevegetarian, piscatorial.

I’m an omnivore, I haven’t moved on from the nutrition that evolution has created my bunodont teeth to indicate. This is to say that I eat meat, as well as fish, vegetables, fruit and so on. I don’t have a healthy diet, I don’t count calories, and though I’ve considered trying out vegetarianism and pescatarianism in the past, it hasn’t lead to anything. I guess I’m not motivated enough. Once I saw this horrible documentary with no narration that showed the brutal way animals are treated in the food production process in some French factory or something along those lines. The scene I remember the best was one where masses of little baby chicks were moved around on a conveyor belt to these plastic boxes. Some chicks kept falling off and this raunchy looking factory-worker lady just threw them back on, like they hadn’t even been alive. No emotion, no carefulness. It was like she had been throwing rocks, bored as hell. And these poor chicks just sat on that conveyor, fell around, chirping. Still, that documentary wasn’t enough for me to pull a Lisa Simpson and start rejecting meat over night because of emotional reasons (it did make me want to adopt all the poor baby chicks of the world though). I guess all I can do is check the brand on what I eat and prefer local brands. Luckily I don’t eat that much chicken so, yeah…at least I’m keeping myself from contributing to some cruelty. Eh?

As for the versus idea of the topic, I don’t find that particularly interesting. I won’t go to health benefits and such since that’s a topic everyone and their mother has likely gone through multiple times in their lives - I think some were already covered here too. Plus there’s google for finding out pro and con arguments on that. I’m not passionate enough on the subject to fill this post with my own arguments.
What I will say is that I respect other people’s nutritional choices and don’t feel the need to start shoving meat down anyone’s throat. Many of my friends are vegetarians and it’s fine by me since they don’t exactly try to shove their lifestyle down my throat and they are not snobby about it. Vegetarianism is not going to harm anyone, except for the one on the diet if they aren’t careful, so I don’t mind, why should I?

Only unpleasant thing is that some vegetarians and vegans alike show a nasty higher than thou attitude about their ethical and nutritional choices. I think the worst of it I saw on PETA’s forums. One day I figured I’d give the site a look and what I saw was a board full of thousands of aggressive vegans whose attitude was utterly disgusting. In one thread some poor new member asked if she was a bad person for eating meat or something along those lines and a hoard of higher than thou vegans, senior members, pretty much told her that yes she is the worst person in the world and she doesn’t really love animals. It was like witnessing a crowd of 20-year-olds give a 5-year-old little girl the beating of her life. That sort of an attitude is not going to help anyone. I’ve seen somewhat similar rude behavior from the carnivore side too. Mostly crude jokes in the form of face book groups though. Nothing as flashy as PETA forums. I guess I’ve been lucky on that front. Generally I’m surrounded by accepting people in real life so such conflicts rarely come up there. Most of the rudeness I witness is online where it's bound to be harsher than in real life due to a certain degree of anonymity.

I guess I'm done with this ramble. I don't think I had anything concrete to say but... I posted! Late, sure, but better late than never. :P