I’ve always known that I am a little strange (no comment necessary ). In some ways my mind likes order more than the average. Especially where it comes to the use of language, I have a tendency to separate myself from many of my peers.

A classic example in this technological age is my tendency to self-correct my spelling and grammar during an instant message conversation. People often see ‘… is typing” followed by a pause and then the same message repeated and come to the conclusion that I changed my mind about what I was planning to say. Funnily, I am usually proof-reading for spelling errors and punctuation.

Yesterday I “discovered” another odd element to my quirkiness. When doing a little stream-of-consciousness writing, I realized that I not only think in perfect spelling and good grammar, I even put forward my thoughts in paragraphs. Heh heh! So much for the free-flow.

Jealousy: Not wanting anyone to share what you have.

Envy: Wanting to have what someone else has.

‘Bad mind’: Not wanting anyone to have what you want.

Not really suffering from any of these. Just a thought that occured to me this evening.

Having avoiding commenting personally on the recent move to ban explicit lyrics on public media (though I do think it’s about time), I have written a summary piece on the Jamaican blogosphere’s reactions for Global Voices.

Yo no se just what it is
but la musica
hits me hard
gets under my skin
pumps my blood
hips start to sway
feet beat a rhythm 
twirling magic
my head fills with
la salsa caliente

Today I had a brilliant moment of enlightenment. 

Over the course of my life, I have loved a few men. While I can look back on those loves and smile at how I have grown since each one, I don’t deny the love for what it was. Each of them I loved with everything I had and all of them continue to hold a very special place in my heart.

I am no longer really close with any of them, a result of the unequalness of our feelings probably. But all of them could call me day or night and I would offer assistance where needed. 

Today, I reached out to one of them and he responded in a manner that was unexpected, illuminating and amazingly generous. I have to consider that maybe, despite my conviction that he never loved me, he was right all along when he claimed to love me in his own way, just not the way I hoped.

If nothing else, I realized that I still hold a place in his heart.

So maybe, just maybe, it is possible to love someone and not want to be with them.

Sometimes we set ourselves up for disappointment, building up an anticipation in advance of an event. When it is something for which we need strength, we psyche ourselves up, visualizing the course of the event, imagining the situation as we’d like to see it happen, how we will behave, what we will say. Then if it doesn’t happen when we expect or something gets in the way, the anticlimatic resolution is painfully disappointing.

May I still have the courage and fortitude tomorrow with which I awoke this morning.

Honesty. Truth. Openness.

The American Book Review has a list of the 100 best first lines from novels. While I haven’t read many of the novels on the list, the lines are fascinating. Some of them are such truisms for life:

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett,Murphy (1938)

35. It was like so, but wasn’t. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston,Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.  —L. P. Hartley,The Go-Between (1953)

What should just be a false memory, a mistaken sensation, could be a fold in the material of time, placing our present right up against our past, causing a proximity that forces us to repeat our actions, our thoughts, reliving experiences we thought were behind us, in a disturbing cycle that seems inescapably familiar.