Life And Death @ MindSay

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bleh life!!! bleh it all...
i feel like removing myself from this life...i don't particularly mean killing myself, but literally just getting up and going somewhere else...running away from everything i know...i'm seriously considering not coming back to school spring semester...i don't want to be here, i just want nothing from no one...i freaking despise academics and requirements!!!

i fucked up really badly with relationships, and i just want to make things right...someone please tell me what to do...this is my heart crying out for help...i care too much about him, to just throw it all away...he gets upset at the things he has no control over, and he doesn't understand and won't let me explain myself...i want him in my life, but i don't want either of us hurting...i know he wants for me to be happy, but i can't when i know deep down inside he is hurting...

"you're going to be the death of me".... him} you already did that to me...
 
 
   
 

Death and loss - This is for you Gary
Well someone shared, and it surely warmed my heart!  Gary....you will be forever remembered for being the courageous one to take the first step forward.  Following is Gary so kindly wrote to me:

"Well, Gabby...kind of you to offer...I too, have been through a few tribulations, being 73 and a surviving stuntman from motion pictures. (go to Garykentfilmmaker.com for more info on this very old soul).

Am cutting it short today, as my great, good friend Gary Graver has just passed away. (Garygraver.com). The world will be a little emptier without him...a little less colorful and funny!

Anyway...your blog is a hoot. Keep sending out those good vibes...

Hugs from Gary, the Gar Bear".



Death.


What does it mean to you? How does it affect you? Does it affect  you?  Can you remember the first time you experienced death?

 

Elegys, eulogies, epitaphs, monuments and memorials. Some leave us suddenly, some leave unexpectedly.  Some leave knowingly, some leave obliviously...but leave us, they all do.

To me, death means life. Nothing but death gives you that ineffible realization that YOU are alive.  In its ironic way, death celebrates life.  Gary, your friend's death pays tribute to those 'colorful and funny' days of his life.  I believe that when someone you love dealy passes away, he or she passes on their spirit of living on to their beloved.  For instance, if I were to pass away, I would want my loved ones to live life with even more zest than ever, I want to forward my livelihood to my loved ones.

I experienced my first death at the age of six.  My great grandmother with whom I was specially attached to had died in front of my eyes.  She died with a smile on her lips, she was serenely beautiful even then.  I still remember the words she spoke to my mom about me.  Every time I think of her, I get courage and I put a smile on to my face, and live on.  I believe that if you really love someone, the best gift you can ever give them is to live for them, when they themselves cannot.

Gary, the world is not emptier.  His presense lives on, you and I are living for him.  If he made films, he loved life.  He loved life so much, he captured a few moments of that life on to a film, so those moments could become immortalized.  The world doesn't sound empty to me. 

If you are a stuntman Gary, YOU my friend are very courageous as well.  Remember him well.

 

Here is one of my very favorite poem for you. May you live to see another 73 years :) *hugs from Gabby*

 

 

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day.
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

 

~ Christina Rossetti

 

 

 

 
 
 

   
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
my grandpa sent me this. i thought it was pretty powerful. enjoy. Smiley
This is the text of the Stanford University Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, 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 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 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 college 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 have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said "Of course." My biological mother later found out 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 someday go to college.
 
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively 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 how college was going to help me figure it out.  And here I was spending all of 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 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 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 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 san 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, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal 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 ten 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
 
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 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation, the Macintosh; a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. 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. So at 30 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 had 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 happe! ned 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 of 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 worlds 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, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.
 
And Laurene 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 hits 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 your 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. 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 until you find it. 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 tool 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 tu! mor 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 doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure 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 and 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 doctors 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 I'm fine now.
 
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its 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 is 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 is 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. And most important, have the courage to follow your 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 Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
 
This was in the late 1960's, 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, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
 
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, 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 it 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.
 
 
<3
 
Smiley
 
 
   
 

this is weird but im kinda thinking too much ,see if you can figure it out.

This feeling is unreal, unhuman

its like death

no i take that back

its worse than death

death is the end of a life of problems

 

this is life

life is what you make of it

life doesnt always go how you envision it going

sometimes you wonder where your going, but really

your always going in the same direction.

backwards.

 

Life has hard times and life has harder times.

If life was easy it would be death

but life is a course, you take tests of strength

physical, emotional, tests of will power

tests of determination

 

determination is the key

what do you want?

how far are you willing to go to get it?

how far have you gone sofar?....

dont look back, never look back

 

 

whatever it takes, yourgonna push on harder. keeping your head up and your shoulders out. suffering through the most terrible pains.. heartache is like prison. you feel weak,feel tired, and helpless, your stuck and you cant get out and there is a key but you've been looking forever and it wont show up. heartache is missing someone, something. heartache is not heartbreak, but its just as hard to take. untill i collapse im not giving up im gonna find my way even im bruised and battered when i get there, and living only on the thought that that someone or something is sitting right on the shelf, if you could just reach out and grab it. but the shelf is 400 miles away, and you have no way to get to it. but there is always hope or life would be too easy. you have to sit in this cage for 20 more days before the door opens and you get out of this prison, and your able to get to the shelf and when you get to the shelf, thats where you commit your greatest crime. a crime so great, you would be the luckiest one alive if you could pull it off.

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

   
This is the end, beautiful friend...
This is the end
My only friend, the end...

Death has been on my mind once again as anyone who has read any of the previous entries to this Blog will know. And attending six viewing and two funerals has led me to consider things that I haven't had cross my mind before. In many ways it is a good thing to have strange and unusual thoughts fill the cavern between my ears, and in some ways, this change of brain waves causes me to look at people in different ways that are not necessarily how I would choose to think of them...

For example: those who blame God for the lose of a loved one - those who need to find a scapegoat for death. To me it seems more than a little selfish to think that God should keep folks on this planet just so those who love them will not suffer grief. Why should God cater to the needs of those who are selfish enough to feel that God owes them an easy life? Why do those few feel that those who have died should stay with them when the those who have died have reached the end of their journey through this life?

What I cannot understand is why there is this need to blame God for death? Death is a fact of this life and should be accepted as such. I am not speaking of murder; I am speaking natural death when the body has finished its time on this world. In the case of murder there will be someone to blame for the death and this isn't God...

I have seen people lose their faith in God in what ever form he or she may be in because of this selfish need to blame the ultimate authority for causing the pain of grief in those who are left behind. To me, these people have do not have proper understanding of their religion...

Sometimes I just wonder what goes through other peoples' minds. What are they thinking and why do they think the way they do? What makes people tick?

I don't have the answers and I may never have the answers to the questions that pop up in my head...

This is the Word of the AntiCrust...

Praise be the Word...
 
 
   
 

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