Mercedes must be really not be doing well since they have so many commercials on the radio. I hate those Mercedes commercials. You know these companies pay alot of money to advertisers to come up with advertising campaigns and all those ad companies can come up with are those stupid ads. It makes me think that anyone who would buy a mercedes is a total idiot or a gold digging materialistic freak.

Then next worse ads are those Pacific Bell DSL commercials. God, they're just really dumb. It's always some guy who can't control the guy next door from using their DSL line. Like one kind of idiot lets the guy next door take over their DSL line? In the commercial on TV, the guy is always in their house. It's very weird! I think the message of those commercials came from the fact that people can build wireless networks and it's an attack against people who have wireless networks. Businesses like SBC Pacific Bell obviously hate the whole wireless network idea.

I wonder if people actually buy these products based on these commercials. It's having the opposite affect on me, but that's just me and I don't have normal reactions to anything. I wonder.

I just finished reading a book of essays on Venice by Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1987. Venice is a city that I've always wanted to visit, if I ever get married again I'm determined to honeymoon there, and I was keen to find out what he had to say about it.

One of his essays is about the autonomy of the eye. Brodsky suggests that the eye is "the most autonomous of our organs ... the eye keeps registering reality even when there is no apparent reason for doing this ... Why? ... because the environment is hostile and eyesight is the instrument of adjustment to an environment which remains hostile no matter how well you have adjusted to it."

It's an interesting way to look at the function of your eye, but I wonder if it's true. Brodsky then goes onto say that "the eye has an appetite for beauty and art because it's looking for safety ... beauty is solace, since beauty is safe ... when the eye fails to find beauty -- alias solace -- it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to percieve virtue in ugliness".

Brodsky's essay on beauty made me think about this book I read by Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, a book from the point of view of one of Cinderella's ugly stepsisters. I wonder what it's like to be ugly. I mean, not that I think I'm that beautiful, but too many men's and women's appreciative glances over the years have told me that I'm not ugly either. God, what is it like to not have people look at you with appreciation in their eyes. That must be such a trip.

If people have thought me ugly, it's only been a few. I'm not a knock out anything, I'm cute, maybe even pretty sometimes, but definitely not ugly. And if Brodsky is right that the eyes seek out beauty, does this mean that ugly people aren't sought out by people's eyes?

I had a roommate in college, who was a total math genius, but not very pretty. She wasn't ugly really, just kind of big and homel. She told me once, while I was complainng about my life, that I should feel lucky because I never had to work at having men notice me. Not that having men notice me has added anything significant to my life, but I'm sure I would have a differen opinion if men didn't notice me.

And beauty is such a fleeting thing to me anyway. Something or someone can appear beautiful depending on my mood, my emotional state, what side of the bed I got up on, how much or how little sleep I had that night and in a bar, how much I've had to drink. And my own standards for male beauty are so different than most women. All the men that the media and Hollywood tell me I'm supposed to panting over, just aren't that attractive to me.

I've had saved for years a Far Side comic where this monster guy is coming through a door on one side. On the other side, are a bunch of women. All of the women have the thought of 'Ugly' in their head except for one, she has heart in her head. The caption of the comic says 'Someone for Everyone'. I wrote my name on the woman with the heart because that's me.

Sometimes when I see a really great looking guy, say in like a seminar, I don't even talk to him, especially when I noticed that every woman in the room has made some excuse to talk to him. God, with that kind of competition who needs the stress, so I just avoid those popular types altogether and don't even bother to talk to them. Most of the time, these hoties guys are so arrogant and jerkish anyway, because they know they can just walk into a room and have the choice of any woman in it.

Of course, there's always an exception. I saw a guy like that in a seminar I was taking and I was dying to talk to him, because the man was just drop dead gorgeous. But I wasn't the only one who noticed the guy's beauty, because I saw him get hit on by every woman in the room except me. I was bummed to because this guy was exceptionally fine, but it was way to stressful, so I drove thoughts of him out of my mind.

Much to my surprise, while I was attending a one day seminar given by the same company who ran the other seminar we were both in, Mr Drop Dead Gorgeous ends up sitting next to me. It freaked me out so much because I'd been dying to talk to him for week and there he was, a breath away.

He turned out be such a nice guy and we actually became quite good friends after that. He turned out to not really my type but he was so cute. If we were back in the south and that holiday, Sadie Hawkins Day, came up where you could ask a guy to marry you, I'd ask this guy. Nice, sweet, smart and cute, what a dynamite combo! Plus, he was always tanned and I'm very partial to a man with a tan. Never mind, that he's not my type, I'm very flexible when it comes to pretty men.

I wonder what that guy is doing now. He spent some part of the year as a ski instructor/bum and I got the distinct impression that financially, he was well taken care of. We lost touch a few years ago, but I often think of him since he seemed so damned perfect to me. Talk about beauty. I know I would never grow tired looking at that guy's mug through the years.

Just finished watching the movie Pearl Harbour. I liked it! It's a slow moving love story but I loved the special effects of the bombing of the harbour. This movie reminded me again that the USA wouldn't be the great power that it is, without our military might. I saw that in the church service they had in the DC after 9/11 when the military colour guard was there.

It is easy to forget that a military even exists, living here in the bastion of liberal thought. But the military is there and we wouldn't be the country we are without them.

It was weird to watch that Pearl Harbour movie because I grew up in Hawaii and you couldn't ignore the military presence. They weren't many on the island I lived on, but everytime I took a trip to the state's capitol, Honolulu, there they were. Bands of short haired young men, very young, mostly white and clean shaven from hometowns in the middle of the country, would roam around Honolulu especially on the weekends. They were all so strange and I was alway afraid to talk to any of them. Some of them were friendly, some weren't.

The other thing I got from watching the movie was how many people died. And most of them are buried in Hawaii at Punchbowl cemetery. Punchbowl cemetery is situated on one of the best plots of land on the island with the most incredible view of downtown Waikiki. And there are so many people buried there and a lot of them are from the Pearl Harbour disaster. You can't be buried at Punchbowl unless you served in the military or are the spouse of someone who served. My uncle served as a medic in Vietnam and he and my aunt already have their plots picked out.

I've been to the Arizona Memorial several times. If you go to school in Hawaii, every time you make a trip to the state capitol, a visit to the memorial is always on the agenda. The school board of education in Hawaii wanted every school kid in Hawaii to never forget what happened. The images of the bombing of Pearl Harbour are as familiar to me as they might be to someone who was alive during that time. When you visit the memorial you can't help but freak out at the thought of all the soldiers entormbed in the ship below. It's a trippy feeling and the Pearl Harbour movie brought it all back.

So I debuted my story at screenwriting class and I'm back to my original short story idea. The screenplay will be about baseball playing son who has to contront his estranged father and deal with his resentment and hatred of his father. My screen writing teacher called it heart felt family drama. GADS!!! I was the only one in class writing a heart felt family drama. Everybody in class was writing action films, films with lots of action or travel or comedies, dark humor, and I'm writing a family drama.

I don't know. It's my curse, it's my karma and it sucks! I don't know. The stories that I like nobody likes, the stories that I don't think are interesting everybody wants to hear about. I hate this. I swear to god, I can't tell what's good and what's not good. I can't divorce myself from my own work and step back to see whether it's good or not. I have to have other people tell me. I hate that.

I'm like thinking who the hell would pay $9.50 to watch a heart felt family drama. How boring!!! Do people really want to see dysfunctional families getting it together on the big screen. Haven't they had enough of that in our life? Or are people out there leading such broken and messed up lives that they have to fantasize about getting healthy?

I don't know. I'm a very whole person. I'm pro active as hell about therapy, personal growth and development and staying and being happy. I don't have a lot of relationships in my life that haven't been healed and the ones that aren't healed, I'm okay with them the way they are.

I feel like I'm 21 years old and my therapist is telling me I've got more awareness that 99.9% of the people in the world. I can hear my therapist's voice so clearly saying "most people don't look at their action and themselves the way you do and you have to remember that." I found it shocking then and years later I still don't understand that. How can people not be aware of how their actions affect others? I'm aware. Aren't there other people in the world like me? My therapist said no.

The last time I was in a seminar and dealt with my father issue, half the people in the seminar called their father on the break. I had people coming up to me after that for a couple of years to thank me for inspiring them to heal their relationship with their father. People who said they'd been in that seminar with me, most of whom I didn't recognize. People who thanked me for saving their life.

Is this heart felt father/son family drama that I'm supposed to write supposed to do the same thing? Inspire people to heal their relationship with their father? I don't know. I'm at the point now where I just have to write this story because it needs to be written. I have no idea how I'm gong to write this story. It seems so boring to me. But my writing teacher said to write it ike it's in real time. What does it all mean? Honestly I don't want to inspire people, I want to entertain people, make them laugh, make them think abou stuff. Is healing people entertaining? It's free therapy that's for sure.

I swear to god, it's my curse and my karma. Everytime I try to write about what I want I end up heading towards some drama with some spiritual message. It's not bad to do that, but I'm really not interested in writing about that. It's all so boring to me and old hat, like haven't most people made peace with their parents. According to my screen writing teacher, no. I don't understand any of my impetus to write anymore and I'm starting not to care either because I can't tell what people will like or not like. I only know what I like, what interests me, what compels me to write. Everytime I try to second guess what a reader or audience will like, the story falls flat on its face and people go how boring.

Does this mean I should follow my own intuition and just keep writing all the weird stuff that I like and to stop caring about what other people like? It's obvious to me now that I am totally clueless about the general public's taste. God, I just hate this. I'm tired of being weird, different and freaky. I honestly just want to be like everybody else, but everytime I try to think like other people I fail. It's such a lonely existence for me sometimes. It's so my karma though, and how can I fight my own karma?

I know, I'm complaining about this gift that I have. What I'm really interesting in writing about, other people really like, even though I always have the feeling that nobody would ever read or carfe about this except for me. When I try to write for an audience or a reader, I fail. So the lesson is I guess to just write to please myself, because everytime I think I'm writing to please other people I fail. It's all so confusing to me but if it works and places less stress on me, I'm all for it. It feels so weird to just write for myself without any thought to others, but I'm willing to give it a try. Writing to please myself and no one else, what a concept. I've gone done every road with my writing except that one and it's the last road, so I have to take it and see what happens.

Since there's been a discussion on my church Yahoo Group about the origins of liberalism and capitalism, I started researching books to read on the subject. I came across The Prince by Machiavelli and I was reminded of how my first love in college used to tell me I was "The Machiavellian Princess". I never knew what he meant by that since I had never read the book and when I asked him, he said that he saw me in the future as a chain smoking, three time divorced, corporate VP on my fourth husband and with three bratty kids.

As I was 18 when he predicted my future, I was naturally flattered. Me, corporate VP, how strange. As I grew older, I came to realized it was one of those backhanded compliments. But then I think he sort of thought of himself as the Machiavellian Prince, so of course, I had to be the Princess.

Funny isn't it, that being politically aware as I am, that I never bothered to take a political science course. If I had taken one, as all my friends in college did, I would have had to read Machiavelli. My first love said I would have aced Political Science, but at the time, I didn't know I was interested politics and politics was a boring subject to me since I had grown up in a politically aware household.

Well, I never did grow up to be the chain smoking corporate VP, although at some corps I worked at, I was on the periphery of that elite circle of employees. As soon as I started working, I knew i didn't want to be under the pressure of a management job. Oh sure, I was curious, but not curious enought to really want it and they're right when they say, to get to the top, you've got to want it bad, real bad.

At my job prior to the one I'm at now, I worked for a female CIO. She liked me and I was hired to be her financial analyst of sorts. It was my job to see that she didn't spend too many millions of dollars and to keep track of the millions she was spending. We liked each other and became very good friends, like sisters sort of. She was older and I saw her as my hardworking successful sister.

I got to see first hand what it was like to be a female in a top position and what I saw was frightening. People at the job knew we were close, so they loved telling me all the rumors they'd heard about her. Everyone thought she was incompetent and had slept with the CEO at a previous job to get this one, at least that was the rumor. Everyone below her wanted to be her or be close to her. I was close to her because of my job, it's not something I coveted, it was a function of my job. And I will admit, I wanted to be her when I first started, but after seeing how many people hated her and all the shit they said about her, I decided that being in a position of that much power in a corporation is so not worth the trouble.

Everything she did was looked at through a microscope. If she was too friendly to a male manager, everyone thought she was sleeping with him. Her clothes, her hair, her shoes, her choice of laptop and even her jewerly were all up for discussion. She was lucky she was a perfect size 4 or the discussion would have very nasty. My boss worked her bunnies off and she was still criticized. But she was a cool customer. She never lost her temper, she was always professional and I knew people in the office often remarked how professional she was at all times. She never let anyone hear her real opinions except for me and the director that hired me. She was always cheerful and optimistic and always coming up with new projects. And I knew the stress of the job got to her, because she told me she could only sleep 4 or 5 hours a night.

If I needed it confirmed again, why I didn't want to be a corporate VP, she confirmed it. My last love, Brian, like my first love, Michael, told me he could see me as a VP of some company. He kept encouraging me to get that kind of position. It's all so strange that he would say that, because he knew I hated the whole VP thing. He just kept saying I would be very good at it because I understood office politics and could drive a project to completion. Needless to say, I still have yet to become a corporate VP and have no intention of doing so, if I can help it.

So, I guess it's about time to read some Machiavelli after all these years. Maybe I will finally be able to see what two of the most important loves of my life have said I have a instinctive knack for. Besides, I want to be very well versed in the origins of capitalism and liberalism, so I can add some decent feedback to my church 9/11 discussion one of these days.

I still have such a long way to to go on my studies. I want to read Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, reread Plato and Aristotle, Mills, Hobbes and Burke. And that's just the origins part. But Machiavelli is a good place to start since he and his theories seem to be an odd letmotif running through my life.