An October Sunrise

Posted: 16th July 2011 by Fuva in life
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I was up the next morning before the October sunrise, and away though the wild and the woodland. The rising of the sun was noble in the cold and warmth of it; peeping down the spread of light, he raised his shoulder heavily over the edge of grey mountain and wavering length of upland. Beneath his gaze the dew-fogs dipped, and crept to the hollow places; then stole away in line and column, holding skirts, and clinging subtly at the sheltering corners where rock hung over grassland, while the brave lines of the hills came forth, one beyond other gliding.

The woods arose in folds, like drapery of awakened mountains, stately with a depth of awe, and memory of the tempests. Autumn’s mellow hand was upon them, as they owned already, touched with gold and red and olive, and their joy towards the sun was less to a bridegroom than a father.

Yet before the floating impress of the woods could clear itself, suddenly the gladsome light leaped over hill and valley, casting amber, blue, and purple, and a tint of rich red rose; according to the scene they lit on, and the curtain flung around; yet all alike dispelling fear and the cloven hoof of darkness, all on the wings of hope advancing, and proclaiming, “God is here!” then life and joy sprang reassured from every crouching hollow; every flower, and bud and bird had a fluttering sense of them; and all the flashing of God’s gaze merged into soft beneficence.

So, perhaps, shall break upon us that eternal morning, when crag and chasm shall be no more, neither hill and valley, nor great unvintaged ocean; but all things shall arise, and shine in the light of the Father’s countenance, because itself is risen.

Craigslist Cheaters

Posted: 14th July 2011 by Fuva in life
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“I’m afraid my wife will find out again. But I can’t give it up.”

Terry Stiller* has been married to his wife for the past twenty years. Once a month, he will pay a call girl between $200 and $350 to fulfill his sexual desires. His wife, who suffers from a physically debilitating illness, has stopped having sex. Terry continues to hobby on the side–even though his wife has caught him once before.

“It’s exciting,” said Terry. “I love hearing about these women’s lives.”

Terry’s story isn’t unique. A quick search on Craigslist reveals 248 postings in the United States, all with the promise of money for sexual favors. One poster from Philadelphia writes, “Married white man seeks cute white female for fun and mutually beneficial arrangement.” Another poster under the title “Sugar Daddy seeks his Baby” from central Florida writes,”Older, married, retired, successful businessman seeks an adventurous and carefree companion for fun times and travel. I have the ability to help financially, and this should be a beneficial relationship for both of us.”

For the men who participate in these activities, it’s an anonymous world that promises excitement and intrigue, apart from their everyday lives. Here, they can live out their greatest fantasies and desires.

There isn’t just one reason why married men choose to pay women for sex. Clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula from California State University is an expert on human sexual behavior. She argues that there are a number of different explanations for the men’s behavior.

“Each man is different,” said Durvasula in a phone interview. “The loss of physical intimacy or companionship can be at fault for their behaviors.”

Very little is understood about the world of married men who choose to pay women for sexual favors. Men who pursue this illicit lifestyle are inherently trying to avoid attention, which makes understanding their mindset difficult. Gabe Noler., a married man from the Atlanta area, used to frequent the world of call girls on a regular basis. On business trips, he would spend hundreds of dollars on a night of anonymous and unrestrained sex.

“My marriage was strained,” he said. “I didn’t leave a paper trail, and no one ever found out.”

For Gabe, the reasons behind his actions were clear. At the time, his wife had stopped being physically intimate, and with two young children under the age of five, Gabe felt as though his sex life had been put on hold.

“We weren’t talking or communicating,” said Gabe. “And we didn’t have sex.” For six years, Gabe made regular visits to prostitutes. One day, he looked at his kids and realized the severity of his choices.

“I felt guilty, ashamed, and disgusted by my actions. I felt like I was cheating on my kids as well.”

Just like that, Gabe went back to his wife and kids. To this day, his family has never found out about his behavior. Durvasula points out that the men in these behaviors suffer from tremendous guilt, whether they recognize it or not. For many of these men, the sexual longing and need can be overpowering, as pointed out in both Terry and Gabe’s stories. Dr. Dennis Lin, a psychotherapist from New York City, has treated many men in recovery from a sex addiction. As a sex expert, Lin stresses the need for treatment for these behaviors.

“They know that something is wrong,” said Lin. “For them to change their behavior, they must find healthy sexual outlets,” Lin explains. Lin recommends that men use other outlets such as masturbation to fuel their desires.

According to Lin, extra material affairs can cause a man to feel unfulfilled. Do they really love their spouses? “It’s very possible that these men love their spouses,” said Lin. “Instead of engaging in an actual affair, which could cause irreparable damage to his marriage, the choice to pay for a woman’s service satisfies a mental or physical need,” explains Lin.

A 2005 study by Martin A Monto from the University of Portland on A Comparison of the Male Customers of Female Street Prostitutes With National Samples of Men, cited that 40-percent of married men surveyed were repeat users of prostitutes. Monto also concluded that married men who repeatedly used prostitutes were half as likely to report that their marriages were very happy and nine times more likely to report that their marriages were not too happy than were noncustomers. During a preliminary interview, one anonymous sharer from the Navajo County of Arizona broke down in tears on the phone as he spoke about his strained relationship with his married wife of six years.

“I wake up feeling guilty every day of my life,” he said. “I’ll never forgive myself.”

Suffering Is Self-Manufactured

Posted: 14th July 2011 by Fuva in Uncategorized
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I believe the immediate purpose of life is to live – to survive. All known forms of life go through life cycles. The basic plan is: birth – maturing – mating – reproducing – death.

Thus the immediate purpose of human life is for each individual to fulfill his life cycle. This involves proper maturing into the fully developed adult of the specie.

The pine tree grows straight unless harmful influences warp it. So does the human being. It is a finding of the greatest significance that the mature man and woman have the nature and characteristics of the good spouse and parent: the ability to enjoy responsible working and loving.

If the world consisted primarily of mature persons – loving, responsible, productive, toward family, friends and the world – most of our human problems would be resolved.

But most people have suffered in childhood from influences which have warped their development. Hence, as adults they have not realized their full and proper nature. They feel something is wrong without knowing what it is. They feel inferior, frustrated, insecure, and anxious. And they react to these inner feelings just as any animal reacts to any hurt or threat: by readiness to fight or to flee. Flight carries them into alcoholism and other mental disorders. Fight impels them to crime, cruelty, war.

This readiness to violence, this inhumanity of man to man, is the basic problem of human life – for, in the form of war, it now threatens to extinguish us.

Without the fight-flight reaction, man would never have survived the cave and the jungle. But now, through social living, man has made himself relatively safe from the elements and wild beasts. He is even learning to protect himself against disease. He can produce adequate food, clothing and shelter for the present population of the earth. Barring a possible astronomical accident, he now faces no serious threat to his existence, except one – the fight-flight reaction within himself. This jungle readiness to hurt and to kill is now a vestigial hangover like the appendix, which interferes with the new and more powerful means of coping with nature through civilization. Trying to solve every problem by fighting or fleeing is the primitive method, still central for the immature child. The later method, understanding and co-operation, requires the mature capacities of the adult.

In an infantile world, fighting may be forced upon one. Then it is more effective if handled maturely for mature goals. Probably war will cease only when enough people are mature.

The basic problem is social adaptation and biologic survival. The basic solution is for people to understand the nature of their own biological emotional maturity, to work toward it, to help the children in their development toward it.

Human suffering is mostly made by man himself. It is primarily the result of the failure of adults, because of improper child-rearing, to mature emotionally. Hence instead of enjoying their capacities for responsible work and love, they are grasping, egocentric, insecure, frustrated, anxious and hostile. Maturity is the path from madness and murder to inner peace and satisfying living for each individual and for the human specie.

This I believe on the evidence of science and through personal observation and experience.

The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language

Posted: 9th July 2011 by Fuva in life
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Here’s a curious paradox related to American Sign Language, the system of hand-based gestures used by around 2 million deaf people in the US and elsewhere to communicate.

Almost 40 years ago, researchers discovered that although it takes longer to make signs than to say the equivalent words, on average sentences can be completed in about the same time. How can that be possible?

Today, Andrew Chong and buddies at Princeton University in New Jersey give us the answer. They say that the information content of the 45 handshapes that make up sign language is higher than the information content of phonemes, the building blocks of the spoken word. In other words, there is greater redundancy in spoken English than signed English.

In a way, that’s a trivial explanation, a mere restatement of the problem. What’s impressive about the Princeton contribution is the way they have arrived at this conclusion.

The team has determined the entropy of American Sign Language experimentally, by measuring the frequency of handshapes on video logs for deaf people uploaded to youtube.com, deafvideo.tv and deafread.com as well as from video recordings of signed conversations taken on campus.

It turns out that the information content of handshapes is on average just 0.5 bits per handshape less than the theoretical maximum. By contrast, the information content per phoneme in spoken English is some 3 bits lower than the maximum.

This raises an interesting question. The spoken word has all this redundancy for a reason: it allows us to be understood over a noisy channel. Lessen the redundancy and your capacity to deal with noise is correspondingly reduced.

Why would sign language need less redundancy? “Entropy might be higher for handshapes than English phonemes because the visual channel is less noisy than the auditory channel…so error correction is less necessary,” say Chong and co.

They go on to speculate that signers cope with errors in an entirely different way to speakers. “Difficulties in visual recognition of handshapes could be solved by holding or slowing the transition between those handshapes for longer amounts of time, while difficulties in auditory recognition of spoken phonemes cannot always be easily solved by speaking phonemes for longer amounts of time,” they say.

And why is all this useful? Chong and friends say that if sign language is ever to be encoded and transmitted electronically, a better understanding of its information content will be essential for developing encoders and decoders that do the job. A worthy pursuit by any standards.

Share and Dedication

Posted: 9th July 2011 by Fuva in life
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The spirit of giving and sharing is at its peak during the Christmas season. People are so generous to dole out gifts, money and other things to people they care about, and at times to charity, too. This innate feeling in us is always there. It’s not only for special seasons like the holidays that we should be able to give and share whatever we have in abundance. It must likely be the instinctive feeling in us that we should be willing to share and give something all year round especially to those who are in need.

The holiday feeling is all around us. The malls are all decorated with pretty and shiny Christmas decors all around. There’s happy Christmas music being heard all over the place. A lot of people are shopping because there are lots of sales and discounts offered. The traffic has gone from bad to worse and more people line up in the bank to get money for their shopping spree. Everybody seems to be in a happy mood complementing the Christmas holiday feeling.

Okay, this is the season where there is a lot of sharing and giving. We would be having parties in our companies and family gatherings where we would have gifts for everybody. There would be plenty of good and delicious foods around and the merry making would last till late into the night. Having said that, we may have to stop for a while and think why we are all in the celebration mood. It’s Christmas and it’s Jesus’ birthday and that alone is enough reason to celebrate.

However, if we take time to find the other meaning of Christmas in its simplest term, it is a season to thank God for everything we have for this year. It would be nice to give back to Him through the spirit of sharing and giving to those who are less fortunate in their life.

In my church, our parish priest encourages all parishioners to share some of their blessings to people who have less. There are requests for used clothing, some canned goods and other goodies stuff to be donated to some charities. The usual charities would be children’s orphanages, home for the aged, for prisoners in a nearby prison area and for the sick that are still confined in government hospitals. The response has always been very positive and our parish priest can only express gratitude by blessing all of us in church and promising to pray for all of us throughout his lifetime. That would be truly reassuring since we have in our community many priests aside from our main parish priest who would continuously pray for all of us!

The spirit of sharing and giving is innate in all of us. It is just a matter of discovering it in you and finding this deep inside you. If you have found it in your heart to share and give not only during Christmas, but every time you are have the chance to do so, then you are so blessed. I truly believe that giving even only a little is already a lot of help. That wholeheartedness of sharing and giving would come back to you in some other way. You’d be surprised that more blessings would come your way. It may be an unexpected promotion, some problems being solved on their own, some financial help coming from somewhere unexpectedly and a lot more. I’m speaking from experience. I’ve been blessed so many times from this sharing and giving habit that I have in me.

I try to give what I can no matter how little. I do this thru my church. Everything goes with a prayer that hopefully the people who get these little things would be happy even only for a while. That thought makes me happy, feeling at peace that somehow I was able to do something for people even though I don’t know them.

Hopefully, everybody would give a little help. The spirit of sharing and giving doesn’t mean that you are spoiling these people thru charity. It’s not that; it’s just that these people may feel helpless at times, hopeless most of the time and this is where we can come in, that we can show them that we care, we can give them hope and something to live for in their life. It is our way of showing them that their life is worth caring for so that they should be inspired to do better in their life. Thankfully, there is always the goodness in all of us; all we have to do is make use of it this Christmas and through out the years to come.

Girls of summer

Posted: 6th July 2011 by Fuva in life
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We lived on the banks of the Tennessee River, and we owned the summers when we were girls. We ran wild through humid summer days that never ended but only melted one into the other. We floated down rivers of weekdays with no school, no rules , no parents, and no constructs other than our fantasies. We were good girls, my sister and I. We had nothing to rebel against. This was just life as we knew it, and we knew the summers to be long and to be ours.

The road that ran past our house was a one-lane rural route. Every morning, after our parents had gone to work, I’d wait for the mail lady to pull up to our box. Some days I would put enough change for a few stamps into a mason jar lid and leave it in the mailbox. I hated bothering mail lady with this transaction, which made her job take longer. But I liked that she knew that someone in our house sent letters into the outside world.

I liked walking to the mailbox in my bare feet and leaving footprints on the dewy grass. I imagined that feeling the wetness on the bottom of my feet made me a poet. I had never read poetry, outside of some Emily Dickinson. But I imagined that people who knew of such things would walk to their mailboxes through the morning dew in their bare feet.

We planned our weddings with the help of Barbie dolls and the tiny purple wild flowers growing in our side yard. We became scientists and tested concoctions of milk, orange juice, and mouthwash. We ate handfuls of bittersweet chocolate chips and licked peanut butter off spoons. When we ran out of sweets to eat, we snitched sugary Flintstones vitamins out of the medicine cabinet. We became masters of the Kraft macaroni and cheese lunch, and we dutifully called our mother at work three times a day to give her updates on our adventures. But don’t call too often or speak too loudly or whine too much, we told ourselves, or else they’ll get annoyed and she’ll get fired and the summers will end.

We shaped our days the way we chose, far from the prying eyes of adults. We found our dad’s Playboys and charged the neighborhood boys money to look at them. We made crank calls around the county, telling people they had won a new car. “What kind?” they’d ask. “Red,” we’d always say. We put on our mom’s old prom dresses, complete with gloves and hats, and sang backup to the C.W. McCall song convoy, ” which we’d found on our dad’s turntable.

We went on hikes into the woods behind our house, crawling under barbed wire fences and through tangled undergrowth. Heat and humidity found their way throught he leaves to our flushed faces. We waded in streams that we were always surprised to come across. We walked past cars and auto parts that had been abandoned in the woods, far from any road. We’d reach the tree line and come out unexpectedly into a cow pasture. We”d perch on the gate or stretch out on the large flat limes tone outcrop that marked the end of the Woods Behind Our House.

One day a thunderstorm blew up along the Tennessee River. It was one of those storms that make the day go dark and the humidity disappear. First it was still and quiet. There was electricity in the air and then the sharp crispness of a summer day being blown wide open as the winds rushed in. We threw open all the doors and windows. We found the classical radio station from two towns away and turned up the bass and cranked up the speakers. We let the wind blow in and churn our summer day around. We let the music we were only vaguely familiar with roar through the house. And we twirled. We twirled in the living room in the wind and in the music. We twirled and we imagined that we were poets and dancers and scientists and spring brides.

We twirled and imagined that if we could let everything — the thunder, the storm, the wind , the world — into that house in the banks of the Tennessee River, we could live in our summer dreams forever. When we were girls.

A Friend’s Prayer

Posted: 5th July 2011 by Fuva in life
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A voyaging ship was wrecked during a storm at sea and only two of the men aboard were able to swim to a small, desert-like island. Not knowing what else to do, the two survivors agreed that they had no other recourse than to pray to God.

However, to find out whose prayers were more powerful, they agreed to divide the territory between them and stay on opposite sides of the island.

The first thing they prayed for was food. The next morning, the first man saw a fruit-bearing tree on his side of the island, and he was able to eat its fruit. But the other man’s parcel of land remained barren.

After a week, the first man became lonely and decided to pray for a wife. The next day, another ship was wrecked and the only survivor was a woman who swam to his side of the island. But on the other side of the island, there was nothing.

Soon thereafter the first man prayed for a house, clothes and more food. The next day, like magic, all of these things were given to him. However, the second man still had nothing.

Finally, the first man prayed for a ship so that he and his wife could leave the island, and in the morning he found a ship docked at his side of the island.

The first man boarded the ship with his wife and decided to leave the second man on the island, considering the other man unworthy to receive God’s blessings since none of his prayers had been answered.

As the ship was about to leave, the first man heard a voice from Heaven booming, “Why are you leaving your companion on the island?”

“My blessings are mine alone since I was the one who prayed for them,” the first man answered. “His prayers were all unanswered and so he doesn’t deserve anything.”

“You are mistaken!” the voice rebuked him. “He had only one prayer, which I answered. If not for that, you would not have received any of my blessings.”

“Tell me,” the first man asked the voice, “what did he pray for that I should owe him anything?”

“He prayed that all your prayers would be answered.”

A Good Lesson

Posted: 5th July 2011 by Fuva in life
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A young man, a student in one of our universities, was one day taking a walk with a professor, who was commonly called the students’ friend, for his kindness to those who waited on his instructions. As they went along, they saw lying in the path a pair of old shoes, which they supposed to belong to a poor man who was employed in a field close by, and who had nearly finished his day’s work.

The student turned to the professor, saying: “Let us play the man a trick: we will hide his shoes, and conceal ourselves behind those bushes, and wait to see his perplexity when he cannot find them.”

“My young friend,” answered the professor, “we should never amuse ourselves at the expense of the poor. But you are rich, and may give yourself a much greater pleasure by means of the poor man. Put a coin into each shoe, and then we will hide ourselves and watch how the discovery affects him.”

The student did so, and they both placed themselves behind the bushes close by. The poor man soon finished his work, and came across the field to the path where he had left his coat and shoes. While putting on his coat he slipped his foot into one of his shoes; but feeling something hard, he stooped down to feel what it was, and found the coin. Astonishment and wonder were seen upon his countenance. He gazed upon the coin, turned it round, and looked at it again and again. He then looked around him on all sides, but no person was to be seen. He now put the money into his pocket, and proceeded to put on the other shoe; but his surprise was doubled on finding the other coin. His feelings overcame him; he fell upon his knees, looked up to heaven and uttered aloud a fervent thanksgiving, in which he spoke of his wife, sick and helpless, and his children without bread, whom the timely bounty, from some unknown hand, would save from perishing.

The student stood there deeply affected, and his eyes filled with tears. “Now,” said the professor, “are you not much better pleased than if you had played your intended trick?”

The youth replied, “You have taught me a lesson which I will never forget. I feel now the truth of those words, which I never understood before: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.”