Monthly Archives: August 2012

Love Everlasting: Revisited

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I am sure most readers of my blog have noticed the “I am a fan of DudeWrite” badge on my sidebar. DudeWrite is a weekly contest for male bloggers. I have been a fan from the beginning and I encourage you to go check it out. There are always some great posts and you get to vote on your favourite three.

This week WilyGuy (the host at DudeWrite) opened the contest up to dudettes with the idea being that dudes who had entered in previous weeks would invite two female bloggers to enter a post. Sadly, no one invited me. WilyGuy suggested I make a comment on the post describing the Dudette week and someone would sponsor me. I tried that but still no invites to the dance. Oh broken heart. :)

So, in an unorthodox move, Wily added an “early follower exemption” and told me to throw up a post anyway. In the original rules the dudette was to give a shout out to the dude who had sponsored her. In yet another twist of unorthodoxy, Wily told me to give a shout out to whoever I wanted. There are quite a number of blogs I follow who are regulars at DudeWrite. None of them sponsored me for the contest so I won’t mention any. Hahaha! That was a total joke. I am a regular lurker on most of their blogs so not surprising that I go unnoticed.

I will give one shoutout to Birdman from Change the Topic. He’s honest, real, a little rough and very funny. Just like every good Canadian boy should be. :) He is also very much in love with his wife, Mrs. Birdman, who also posts on the blog. In this spirit (and since no rules have been followed in getting me to this point anyway!) I am going to go against the grain and post a slightly altered version of an older (not that old) post of mine. I have read most of the dudette entries for this week and there are some very funny ladies. I am not that funny so I am going to offer up a more serious post.

So regardless of my bruised ego :) and with no further adieu, I give you some thoughts on love.

Since the beginning of time love has been the subject of many forms of writing. While there are many different kinds of love, I refer here to one of the most confusing kinds – romantic love. I am going to try hard to be honest and I hope I do not come off sounding sentimental or cliche.

I think that there is a very big difference between love and infatuation. As young people we are more inclined to confuse the two. This is a big part of why one out of every two marriages end in divorce. We are asked to make a very major decision at a very young age. An age when we have not had enough experience with other people to know the difference between what is good for us and what is not. We can certainly feel passion and physical attraction but we are naive and innocent. We think that this feeling will “conquer” all and that this feeling will last forever. We are oblivious to the inner workings of a long-term relationship.

In reality this feeling does not last forever. We have all heard of the “seven year itch” but studies have shown that passion actually dies somewhere between two and four years in any relationship. It helps explain the fickle nature of Hollywood relationships in which some of the most physically beautiful people in the world get sick of one another. So what we can’t know as young people is that we are going to need something else to sustain the relationship. That there are other signs we should have been looking for aside from the quick heart beat and giddy nervousness.

But we don’t do this. Instead we go headlong into a life-time committment and what starts as something exciting and beautiful sometimes turns destructive and ugly. Two people who, at one time, could not get enough of each other eventually transform into mortal enemies. In my eyes, it is one of the saddest aspects of the human condition.

Of the relationships that do last I see many that are not very happy. It has become a partnership that happens to work. The cost to escape is too steep financially and too deep emotionally – and so people stay.

But there are some long-term relationships that, due to a stroke of good luck (yes, I do believe a lot of this boils down NOT to the accepted notion of “hard work” but to simple good luck) involve love in its truest sense. A few years ago I attended the short film festival in Toronto and watched a series of films bunched together under the heading ”love”. My favourite of these shorts much more eloquently depicts true love than anything I could write. So with that in mind, I leave you with the love story of Danny Perasa and his wife Annie.

Summer Fun and The Woman With a Hole in Her Face

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As I was saying in my last post, I spent a week in London with my brother and his family. I took my eldest son along with me and we had the time of our lives.

My favourite picture.

I noticed when watching CTV that they use this shot as part of their montage when referring to “London 2012″. I think it is very cool that I took the exact same shot.

We visited Westminster Abbey – so amazing to walk across ground that has seen every British monarch crowned over the last one thousand years or so. It has also seen the funerals of royalty including Princess Diana. And, most recently of course, it was the place of the nuptial ceremony between Prince William and the lovely Kate Middleton.

My favourite place of all was The Tower of London. The original tower – The White Tower – was built in the year 1066. Ann Boleyn was held here and executed in the inner courtyard. Ann, as you know, was King Henry VIII’s second wife – and the reason Henry broke from the Catholic church and created the Church of England. Henry was married to Catherine of Arragon, who was not doing a great job providing him with a son, and he fell in love (lust) with Ann Boleyn. Ann would not become his mistress which left Henry no choice but to break away from the Catholic church so that he could divorce Catherine and marry Ann. Quite remarkable really that a change as vast as that came about largely because Henry wanted to “know” (in the biblical sense) Ann. What people will do when sexually frustrated……..incredible really, isn’t it?!

A portion of the White Tower on a rare (particularly this summer) sunny day in London, England.

Unfortunately, along with the wonderful memories, I will always also have a rather traumatizing memory.

Colin and I were walking toward Westminster Abbey one day when I spotted a woman coming toward us who was being pushed in a wheelchair. Her sunglasses were sitting slightly agee on her face. My spidey senses went up and I thought to myself “There is something wrong with this woman. Majorly wrong.” As we drew closer I got a brief glimpse at her face. There was a hole in her face. It was about the size of a large marble and you could not see anything inside. It was like staring into a very dark cave. To make matters worse, the flesh surrounding the hole was inflamed and infected. It was as red as the double-decker bus that passed by and it was weeping. Weeping the most awful thick, whitish liquid I have ever seen. In all honesty, I don’t think she had eyes or a nose either – but it was the blank hole and the surrounding sickly flesh that horrified me. I will never be able to erase the sight from my memory. She was a stark reminder that some people’s troubles are far worse than others.

So there you have it. Some old sites, some history, some blue skies and a woman with a hole in her face. Never a dull moment.

To help you wipe out the visual presented above, I will leave you with a more pleasing image. :)

London preparing for the Summer Olympics 2012.