Rudynate

I remember a New Years Eve dinner. My housemates and I managed to throw a great dinner together with what we had on hand. This was back when all the stores closed early on New Years Eve. We scared up some Asti wine somewhere and watched the Berlin Philharmonic perform Beethovens Ninth Symphony on TV. I've always remembered it as a paricularly nice time.

I like plain whole-milk yogurt or Greek yogurt. I don't like fruited yogurt in cups or any other kind of sweetened yogurt. I really enjoy fresh berries with it and a tiny sprinkle of truvia over it.

High tea or afternoon tea?

I know about the disappointment of being a mediocre musician. When I was 13 or 14 years old, I first heard the 3rd movement of the Moonlight Sonata. And I determined that someday I would be able to play it. Of course, it's a virtuoso piece. A few years ago, I decided to give it a try, even though it was beyond my skill level. Even, though, ideally you should possess the required skill level for a piece, I thought, "Why couldn't I use the process of learning the piece to acquire the necessary skill?" I worked on that piece for years. Some people even thought it was good. More perceptive listeners said, "You know, it's not bad." But it took years to get to "not bad." So I decided to content myself with learning easier pieces that I could learn to play really well.

Happiness is a by-product of being the best "you" you can be.

Mostly into "chopping wood and carrying water." Doesn't seem a bit bleak to me.

I used to enjoy pondering the imponderable. Now I mostly find it a waste of time. I enjoy devoting myself to becoming the best I can be.

Quien sabe? You didn't do anything. Forget about it and move on.

That's a problem generally with Eastern European men - they seem to age rapidly. I remember a conversation I had once with a Lithuanian woman. She was a young widow - her husband had died from heart disease at a young age. She said it was quite common in Lithuania for young men to die early from heart disease and that young widows like herself were a common thing.

Melania's escort for the SOU speech was very fetching. She might have gotten at least a little enjoyment walking on the arm of a man who looked like that.

Maybe 40 years ago, yes. But the world is now so homogenous, probably not.

I remember I was boarding a flight back to the US in Frankfurt and I was having a little trouble finding the gate. Then I saw this big crowd of dowdy, frumpy-looking Americans and I thought, "Oh, this must be it." Sadly, it was.

It depends where you are too. Handholding in the middle of an urban gayborhood and handholding in rural Mississippi are two different things.

Guilty. Love em-looking at em, stroking them, sniffing them, licking them. One of my favorite parts of an encounter with a sweaty guy is smelling like him for the rest of the day.

In grade school.

I made a marjolaine once. Toasted hazelnut meringue layers, whipped cream between the layers and chocolate ganache frosting. Best thing I ever ate. It was so much work, I never made it again.

There isn't much not to like in European men.

Right. Europeans and Americans really dressed differently back then. In the late 60s, we hosted an exchange student from Sweden. When he first got here, I was sitting in his room chatting with him as he was unpacking and I thought, "Wow, what weird clothes he has." Even more recently, in the mid-90s, I worked at a global company with headquarters in Silicon Valley. Quite a few of the engineers and executives were European, and I noticed that they often wore color combinations that you would never see on an American. It would be nice to report that they were interesting and unexpected, but mostly, they just looked weird. Even now, you see haircuts on Europeans that you wouldn't see on Americans.

Another difference was build. It has all changed now, everybody looks the same. But back then, European men tended to be more slender than Americans and they often didn't have broad shoulders and v-shaped torsos. We used to say that a man had a "European body." This was so even if a guy was athletic and in good shape.

I spent three years in Europe in the 70s in the military. You could spot an American a half-block away just from the way he walked.

I use simple algebra all the time. I took calculus in college but I don't remember much about it.

It used to be easy to distinguish Americans from Europeans at a glance. Movement, mannerisms, dress were all distinctive. Not so much anymore.

It's become commonplace for women to nurse in public. It's true that I would rather not see it, but thats easily solved by not gawking at nursing moms. Anything that eases the burdens of motherhood is a good thing.

There's nothing wrong with subscribing to canned meaning.

And the combination of variables didn't lead inevitably to the evolution of life, it favored it. Which means that the same combination of variables could occur on some distant planet in some distant galaxy and it might not lead to the evolution of life. The universe is so immense that it is likely that life has evolved elsewhere in the universe.