Life Is Beautiful, This Weekend

1) The boys asked her, “Sybil, what do you want?”

“I want to die,” answers Sybil of Cumae.

pic from Wikipedia.com

Story goes, in exchange for carnal favors, the Greek god Apollo offered to grant Sybil one wish. However when she asked for eternal life, she forgot to ask also for eternal youth. And so she grows ever older, frailer, trapped in a body that continues to fail and break down, forever unable to die.

T.S Eliot used the quote to bring life (sorry) to one of his greatest poems, The Waste Land, about (among many others) the emotional wasteland of living without truly loving or feeling or being. (Of course he later famously becomes Christian and a la Bon Jovi without the pain the poet becomes a lot less angsty-creative – but one of the beautiful things about his newfound life I felt was the huge contrast between what and how he wrote as a disillusioned non-Christian, vs his post-Christianity works. It’s the same life, but seen through infinitely different eyes.)

Japanese villages share their secrets of youth. (Sorry, that’s just a BBC news article that they’re meeting to share, it doesn’t say what they shared, stay tuned….)

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2) The Beautiful Story of A Couple in an Arranged Marriage Who Fall In Love With Each Other 30 Years Later. Written by their grown daughter, no less. One of the sweetest-yet-real things I’ve read in a long time, she talks about how her own ideals of love are affected by her parents’ very late progression. Like it or not, we either provide for our children an example of “Utopia” (because there is also bias and well y’know, how people want to see what they want to see) or….. an example of what not to do. As in, not affecting them at all is the harder one. Dis is actually terrifying 😀 (But honestly, I got misty eyed reading this one…)

I think it says this was taken in 1968

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3) More plays in perspective: Some super creative bathroom mirror selfies.

SO much cooler than just the standard young-girl-posing-to-look-hot-in-selfie in mirror right…

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4) What. A. Home. I used to love small, functional spaces, before we had kids. (This has now served as good insulation against Family Home Envy when I see friends’ beautiful pictures of their beautiful homes.. I never understood until I had my own kids, when a former mentor – brilliant forex derivatives trader/ structurer – told me wistfully how hard she had her sights set on a home, until I had my own kids)..

That’s adjusted itself a little nowadays, despite wanting a bit more room for the kids I still don’t have a taste for absolutely palatial spaces…….. I was once unwittingly shown something a bit sad (this rich couple had a beautiful, really beautiful huge house along with an already fully furnished baby room, all waiting for its future occupant. They had been struggling to conceive naturally for awhile) and that made me realize the extent to which you never get the “perfect” package family situation. You strive for the best combination on your “laundry list” (I think I used the same analogy once, re life partners.)

AND technically, these mobile homeowners’ yard is just massive 😀

Indoors… (Yes that’s a big flat screen tv almost escaping the frame, up there)

Huge yard, right? 🙂

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5) Here’s another – Billboards Turned Into Shelters For The Homeless.

So this is cool….

And this is HOW is this even possible?! Looks so much bigger inside…

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6) 6 Words To Say To Your Kids About Competition. Found this through cheekiemonkies.com on my blogroll. It’s here not so much because of the sports thing, it’s here because of how to encourage your child, and sports are a great parenting and learning opportunity.

The 6 words (there’s lots more in the article even if I give that away) are I Love To Watch You Play (sports). Point is, the 6 words recommended are powerful affirmation, not anything that breeds insecurity… I wrote some time ago about reading in Brain Rules for Baby that insecurity causes the brain to learn less well; because it is first of all wired for surviving, not learning.

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7) Parenting Lessons I Learned From A Waldorf Kindergarten

Mild caveat in it seeming to have been written by someone who works there, but some of the points are pretty interesting – for e.g. #6 You can trust your kid with knives and fire, seriously (supervised, of course – the point being they need to learn to use real tools and be taught caution and care) and #9 Fill up the whole page when they do art.

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8) Rockstars do their own remake of The Bodyguard this week… Rockstar felt strongly about picking the Miss from class even if it meant rushing for taekwondo after, because the timing is when cabs in HK cabs change shifts, but then after I took the pic I realized it looks like she has a martial artist bodyguard who is looking about for any wrongdoers 😀

Good weekend dears…