Scarred and broken

The society will say,

"That type of thing doesn't happen around here.
She must like it if she stays.
Some women like to stir up trouble."

Domestic violence is a subject engulfed with myths.The reality is often quite different.

Why doesn't she just leave?It's the first question people ask.

She stays because she hopes it will get better. Maybe they can get help. Maybe she will make him happy again. Maybe it will stop.

She stays because she is ashamed that they have come to this, that she has allowed him to treat her this way, that she has taken him back so many times before and he has disappointed her again.

She stays because she doesn't have enough money to start all over again. She hasn't held a job before, or she doesn't earn enough to support herself and the kids because he had promised her that he will always provide. She's scared to try to make it alone.

She stays because she is afraid. He has told her that she had better never try to leave him. He says that he will find her no matter where she goes. He says that he'll take away her kids and run. He says he will track her down and kill her. She knows that he means it.

The society blames her for not being able to keep her home intact.It blames her for not being a supportive wife.BUT then for how long is she going to support her husband?Till she's scarred,broken and dead?

Blood groups and personality

I never knew that my blood group plays a big role in my personality.Check this out and group yourself.

• Blood Type A - Tend to be cooperative, sensitive, clever, passionate and smart. Often bottling up anxiety in order to get along with others, they may hold in their emotions until they explode. Many are tense, impatient and unable to sleep well. While they are capable of leadership positions, they may not take them because the stress is not good for their tightly wired systems. In Japan many "A"'s are in research. They have roles in discovering more about and refining science, economics, manufacturing, etc. Their research on microflora and other areas of medicine is some of the best and most meticulous in the world. They are perfectionists to say the least.
  Blood type A's tend to have more sensitive constitutions. Too much stress weakens their immunity more quickly than other blood types. Low stomach acid is common among blood type A's even from birth, so special care should be taken when eating animal proteins.They also eat raw fish which is much easier to digest than cooked.

• Blood Type B - Blood type B individuals tend to be balanced: thoughtful like A's and yet ambitious like O's. They are empathetic, easily understanding others' points of view, yet often hesitating to challenge or confront. Chameleon-like and flexible, they make good friends.

Peter D'Adamo found that While their immunity is strong, they are more prone to slow-growing viral infections like lupus, MS and chronic fatigue.
They may also have problems with hypoglycemia and blood sugar, especially if they eat the wrong foods.

• Blood Type AB - Tend to be very charming and popular. They don't sweat the small stuff and can be seen as spiritual and even at times a bit "flaky". Only about 2 - 5% of the population are blood type AB. There is never a dull moment in a AB's life, so if you find one for a friend, consider yourself lucky! Youll enjoy some exciting times together! Like blood type A's, AB's react to stress poorly. They are stronger and more active than type A's, but need to pay attention to stress levels so that they don't compromise their immunity.
• Sometimes it is difficult to be an AB. AB's don't like to fit in anyone else's "boxes". If they feel too confined, they'll break out of that box and do things their own way. When it comes to food choices and AB must discover when they are more B-like or A-like. For example, dairy foods like milk can be excellent for them or not good at all.

• Blood Type O - Tend to be loners or leaders and are intuitive, focused, self-reliant and daring. They handle stress better than other blood types and have strong immune systems, a well developed physique and a physically active nature. Blood type O's tend to have sluggish blood flow and feel better with vigorous exercise for about an hour each day.

So is it true or false?

The unuttered bible

His name is David. He has wild hair, wears a safaricom T-shirt with holes in it, jeans and red flip-flops. This was literally his wardrobe for his entire four years of college. He is brilliant. Kind of mysterious and very, very bright. He became a Christian recently while attending college.

Across the street from the campus is a well-dressed, very conservative church. One day David decides to go there. He walks in with red flip-flops, jeans, his T-shirt, and wild hair. The service has already started and So David starts down the aisle looking for a seat.

The church is completely packed and he can't find a seat. By now people are really looking a bit uncomfortable, but no one says anything. David gets closer and closer and closer to the pulpit and, when he realizes there are no seats, he just squats down right on the carpet. (Although perfectly acceptable behavior at a college fellowship, trust me, this had never happened in this church before! )

By now the people are really uptight, and the tension in the air is thick. About this time, the minister realizes that from way at the back of the church, an Elder is slowly making his way toward David. Now the Elder is in his sixties, has white hair, and a three-piece suit. A godly man, very elegant, very dignified, very courtly. He walks with a 'mkongojo' and, as he starts walking toward this boy, everyone is saying to themselves that you can't blame him for what he's going to do.

How can you expect a man of his age and of his background to understand some college kid on the floor? It takes a long time for the man to reach the boy. The church is utterly silent except for the clicking of the man's cane.

All eyes are focused on him. You can't even hear anyone breathing. The minister can't even preach the sermon until the Elder does what he has to do. And now they see this elderly man drop his cane on the floor. With great difficulty he lowers himself and sits down next to David and worships with him so he won't be alone.

Everyone chokes up with emotion. When the minister gains control, he says, "What I'm about to preach, you will never remember. What you have just seen, you will never forget. Be careful how you live. You may be the only Bible some people will ever read."

Wife and Husband.

Wife: You always carry my photo in your handbag to the office. Why?

Husband: When there is a problem, no matter how impossible, I look at your picture and the problem disappears.

Wife: You see, how miraculous and powerful am I for you?

Husband: Yes, I see your picture and say to myself, "What other problem can there be greater than this one?"

Lord ,my wife doesn't know what I go through

A man was sick and tired of going to work every day while his wife stayed home. He wanted her to see what he went through so he prayed: "Dear Lord: I go to work every day and put in 8 hours while my wife merely stays at home. I want her to know  what I go through, so please allow her body to switch with mine for a day.

God, in his infinite wisdom, granted the man's wish. The next morning, sure enough, the man awoke as a woman. He arose, cooked breakfast for his wife, awakened the kids, Set out their school clothes, fed them breakfast, packed their lunches, Drove them to school, came home and picked up the dirty clothes,washed them.  And stopped at the bank to make a deposit, went grocery shopping, Then drove home to put away the groceries, Paid the bills. He cleaned the cattle shed. Then it was already 1 P.M. and he hurried to make the beds, and sweep and mop the kitchen floor. Ran to the school to pick up the kids and got into an argument with them on the way home. Set out snacks and got the kids organized to do their homework, then set up the ironing board and watched TV while he did the ironing. At 4:30 he began peeling potatoes and washing vegetables for supper, prepared rice and snapped fresh beans for supper.

After supper, he cleaned the kitchen, ran the dishwasher, folded clean laundry, bathed the kids, and put them to bed. At 9 P.M. He was exhausted and, though his daily chores weren't finished, he went to bed where he was expected to play the role as a wife, which he managed to get through without complaint.

The next morning, he awoke and immediately knelt by the bed and said, Lord, I don't know what I was thinking. I was so wrong to envy my wife's being able to stay home all day. Please, oh please, let us trade back." The Lord, in his infinite wisdom, replied, "My son, I feel you have learned your lesson and I will be happy to change things back to the way they were.

About Einstein

Once the professor of a university challenged his students with this question. "Did God create everything that exists?"

A student answered bravely, "Yes,he did".

The professor then asked, "If God created everything, then he created evil. Since evil exists (as noticed by our own actions), so God is evil.

The student couldn't respond to that statement causing the professor to conclude that he had "proved" that "belief in God" was a fairy tale, and therefore worthless.

Another student raised his hand and asked the professor, "May I pose a question? ",
"Of course" answered the professor. The young student stood up and asked : "Professor does Cold exists?"


The young student answered, "In fact sir, Cold does not exist.According to the laws of Physics, what we consider cold, in fact is the absence of heat. Anything is able to be studied as long as it transmits, energy (heat). Absolute Zero is the total absence of heat, but cold does not exist. What we have done is create a term to describe how we feel if we don't have body heat or we are not hot." "And, does Dark exist?", he continued.

The professor answered "Of course".

This time the student responded, "Again you're wrong, Sir. Darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in fact simply the absence of light. Light can be studied, darkness can not. Darkness cannot be broken down. A simple ray of light tears the darkness and illuminates the surface where the light beam finishes. Dark is a term that we humans have created to describe what happens when there's lack of light."

Finally, the student asked the professor, "Sir, does evil exist?"

The professor replied, "Of course it exists, as I mentioned at the beginning, we see violations, crimes and violence anywhere in the world, and those things are evil."

The student responded, "Sir, Evil does not exist. Just as in the previous cases, Evil is a term which man has created to describe the result of the absence of God's presence in the hearts of man.

After this, the professor bowed down his head, and didn't answer back.

The young man's name was " ALBERT EINSTEIN."

STEVE JOBS

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poeti touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Thank you.

The Apple of Love

"Can I see my baby?" the happy new mother asked. When the bundle was nestled in her arms and she moved the fold of cloth to look upon his tiny face, she gasped. The doctor turned quickly and looked out the tall hospital window.

The baby had been born without ears. Time proved that the baby's hearing was perfect. It was only his appearance that was marred. When he rushed home from school one day and flung himself into his mother's arms, she sighed, knowing that his life was to be a succession of heartbreaks. He blurted out the tragedy. "A boy, a big boy...called me a freak."

He grew up, handsome for his misfortune. A favorite with his fellow students, he might have been class president, but for that. He developed a gift, a talent for literature and music. "But you might mingle with other young people," his mother reproved him, but felt a kindness in her heart.

The boy's father had a session with the family physician..."Could nothing be done?" "I believe I could graft on a pair of outer ears, if they could be procured" the doctor decided. Whereupon the search began for a person who would make such a sacrifice for a young man.

Two years went by. One day, his father said to the son, "You're going to the hospital, son. Mother and I have someone who will donate the ears you need. But it's a secret," said the father. The operation was a brilliant success, and a new person emerged. His talents blossomed into genius, and school and college became a series of triumphs.

Later he married and led the diplomatic service. One day, he asked his father, "Who gave me the ears? Who gave me so much? I could never do enough for him or her." "I do not believe you could, "said the father, "but the agreement was that you are not to know...not yet." The years kept their profound secret, but the day did come. One of the darkest days that ever pass through a son. He stood with his father over his mother's casket. Slowly, tenderly, the father stretched forth a hand and raised the thick, black-brown hair to reveal the mother had no outer ears. "Mother said she was glad she never let her hair be cut," his father whispered gently, "and nobody ever thought mother less beautiful, did they"?