Posted 4:56 PM by Blah blah

"Pretty Boy," the pretty song I got on Valentine's, looks Asian but is actually by a couple of Norwegian teenaged girls---a group called M2M (Marion and Marit). Talented, multilingual, and beautiful. They even sang their song in both English and Mandarin!

My God. Yesterday, another online marriage proposal. This time on a message board of Slashdot, the big computer geek news page. "Kathleen, I wanted to do this in this most potentially embarassing way possible, and I figured doing it here and now, in front of a quarter of a million strangers was as good a way as any...." Well the geeks rule!

Have a wonderful weekend, everybody!

Posted 11:00 AM by Blah blah

Do you use Yahoo Messenger? Here are some really weird and secret smileys I have never seen!

Hmmm... Annie, this Taiwanese girl I met at her party two weeks ago, was asking if I knew anyone who wanted to model for a fashion show in April. She and my dormmate from college, Huang, are starting this big, primarily Asian social group in SF called Serendipity. This Sunday she will be having modelling tryouts in SF. She has a relationship with the restaurant/club sponsoring the events, Venture Frogs. She has the clothing designers lined up already but needs to find people to put into those clothes! So if you are interested, please let her know or email your picture to her.

Sam sent me the link to pictures of some of the kids in his youth group in Toronto. He's one of the adult leaders. Snow camp!

Talking More but Enjoying It Less (NY Times): "The number of wireless subscribers in the United States has more than doubled since 1998, to some 130 million today, as new customers are lured by offers of free long-distance service and inexpensive phones. Cellphone subscribers are also talking more than ever before, thanks to so-called bucket plans that include thousands of free minutes of use every month. Subscribers use their cellphones an average of 422 minutes a month, an increase of 75 percent from 242 two years ago.

All that talking is taxing the capacity of the country's wireless system. Cellphone companies have been unable to build enough new cell towers or squeeze the capacity they need out of existing ones. As a result, subscribers complain of disconnected calls or busy signals caused by overloading of the networks. Others are frustrated when roaming charges appear on their bills because the signal proved weak in their local service areas or for calls within areas included on those colorful coverage maps. Some customers say they are tired of waiting so long for voice-mail messages from missed calls.

No wireless provider in the country is free of complaints about service. For every satisfied customer, it seems, there is a horror story. About 15 percent of wireless customers have switched providers in the last 12 months, nearly double the level of four years ago, J. D. Power said. Many subscribers have given up trying to resolve problems with the cellphone companies and have taken their grievances to the F.C.C. or a state attorney general's office. A few have filed lawsuits seeking refunds."

Posted 6:26 PM by Blah blah

Dolly sent me this Valentine's song. So sweet!

Posted 9:22 AM by Blah blah

Love

TO ALL OF YOU who so faithfully come to this page,
To you who are weary after the frustrations of the day,
To you who are lost and seeking an ear...a flame...a wink,

To those who know me and those who do not
but still will treat me for dinner,

To those who could care less whether they are with someone
and to those who do,

To those who drink milk from a glass
and to those who drink it directly from the carton,

This is for you, and you, and YOU!!!

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY, everyone!

From Emerson's essay on "Love":

But here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking backward, they may find that several things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows, and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary, and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him; for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, "enamelled in fire," and make the study of midnight.

"Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art,
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart."

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter, who said of love, —

"All other pleasures are not worth its pains";

and when the day was not long enough, but the night, too, must be consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass, and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men....

Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing love-liness is society for itself, and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues. For that reason, the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds....

If, however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the promise which beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the body, and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate, he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint, which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the same. And, beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim....

Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and, losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign each other, without complaint, to the good offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each other's designs. At last they discover that all which at first drew them together,— those once sacred features, that magical play of charms, — was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and the heart, from year to year, is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness....

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again, — its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds, must lose their finite character and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.

Posted 3:31 PM by Blah blah

My gosh, look at this! Marriage proposal in a blog comment section.

"I REPEAT: MY MOM DOESN'T KNOW ABOUT THIS YET. So we can't tell you when (but we do, indeed, know when). Once we tell my mom, then we can tell y'all.
Posted by dooce at February 6, 2002 11:03 AM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The moms will be told this evening. Followed by about 7 martinis. Heather, I love you.
Posted by dj blurb at February 6, 2002 11:07 AM"

Posted 12:08 PM by Blah blah

Sex and Food. Cheshire Dave.

Note, guys, this woman's husband was a "famous journalist." Maybe in the future they'll say "Naomi Numbobs, wife of famous blogger Raymond Roastbeef, fries the most captivating pork cutlets on television. They are shaped like her legs..." (What vanity!)

Sex and the Kitchen (NY Times):
____________________
If you've heard of Nigella Lawson, it is likely you know the following things about her: She is voluptuous. She licks her fingers and likes to flick her hair as she flirts with the camera. And her cooking show, Nigella Bites, has created a sensation in Britain, where it is one of the country's most popular cooking programs....

Ms. Lawson manages to deliver what so many other food shows don't. She brings to life the sensual aspects of cooking, helping you understand not only what you are after but also the pleasure of the journey, and she encourages you along the way. It is the rare example of great food television.

The show is set in her house in west London, and you see her digging spices out of plastic bags in the pantry. She prepares dishes you can imagine making after a busy day at work. She mixes salads with her hands. She uses canned chickpeas. And yet her house is just fabulous enough, her cooking just ambitious enough, to keep the bubble of fantasy intact.

Ms. Lawson, 41, became known as a food critic for The Spectator, and is now the food editor for British Vogue. In How to Eat (John Wiley & Sons, 2000), she brings you into her life and tells you how she thinks about food, how meals come together in her head, what snacks she makes for herself and how she cooks for family and friends. The premise is solid. "Although it's possible to love eating without being able to cook, I don't believe you can ever really cook unless you love eating." Rather than telling you how to cook, she encourages you to take pleasure in feeding yourself and others....

But it is on her television show that she comes into her own. It makes many current cooking shows look like vaudeville acts. Ms. Lawson's greatest feat may be that she comes across as a real person. Gourmet magazine said in its April 2001 issue that Ms. Lawson "looks like a movie star." It is a common claim, and it is where many observers get it wrong. Ms. Lawson looks like your neighbor, who would be beautiful if she had time to fix her hair, but who is preoccupied with getting her kids to school, has a job to keep and battles her weight. It's the Oprah Winfrey effect. She may have a much more glamorous life than you have (Ms. Lawson's father was Margaret Thatcher's chancellor of the exchequer, her dead husband a famous journalist), but she seems to face the same struggles you do, and so you can trust her every word.

The show in her home has a vitality that cannot be reproduced on a set. Ms. Lawson moves around the kitchen, instinctively reaching for the herbs in the corner by the stove, pulling on the door of her refrigerator, turning on the burner. It is a modern kitchen with a greenhouse-like wall and stainless steel accessories. Next to it is a cozy dining area with a worn oak table and simple white vinyl chairs. The walls are lined with books. There is no product placement in sight. And although her kitchen is minimal to the point of being cold, this works to Ms. Lawson's advantage. Hosts like Martha Stewart, who uses a warmer and fuzzier setting, can come across as ice cubes. Ms. Lawson is her kitchen's moving hearth, its focal point and soul.

There is a distinctly voyeuristic appeal as well. You find yourself wishing the camera would zoom in on the books, to see what Ms. Lawson reads, and on the refrigerator door, which is patched with photos, notes and clippings. What is on that grocery list?...

She throws in good tips left and right, like freezing leftover wine in little baggies so you don't have to open a new bottle when a recipe calls for it. She even admits taking the leftovers from her guests' glasses.

She also takes plenty of reassuring shortcuts. In one episode, she warmed water in a kettle and combined it with chicken broth, couscous and canned chickpeas. In another, she defended the use of frozen peas. There will also be the occasional amusing comment, which feels refreshingly unscripted. "My skill lies in eating," she said, after fumbling over her words.

At its best, Nigella Bites makes you want to cook.
____________________
A cool guy on my reading list is Cheshire Dave, a cat who purrs around Berkeley. He's just written a play, "The Finest Poet," that will be performed with a host of other short plays at La Val's Subterranean Theater (remember the pizza place, guys?) every weekend this March!

He wrote me:

After a zillion years of doing posters for plays written by other people,
I'm beyond thrilled to announce I've finally moved on to doing a poster for
a play written by, well, me. That is, my play and six more plays written by
other fine folks -- it's Impact Theatre's Impact Briefs 5! It's their fifth
festival of ten-minute plays, culled from submissions from all over the
country but focusing on life here in the Bay Area.

I'm writing not so much to hype the poster, really (though we all think it's
pretty fun -- email me if you want a PDF of it), but more to encourage you
to check out the show. It's playing every weekend in March, at La Val's
Subterranean (where, if they get their remodeling done in time, you can
bring pizza and drinks into the theater), just north of the UC Berkeley
campus. It should be quite a fun show -- at the very least a far, far better
sequel than, say, Rocky 5, Star Trek 5, or perhaps even Henry V.

Way to go, Cheshire Dave!!! I will try to make it next month, probably with my astrophysicist friend Bob. I also asked Cheshire about his unusual name. He wrote back:

Yes, Cheshire is really my name, though not in the legal sense. Cheshire is
an old nickname that I adopted as my actual name in 1994. Only my family and other people who knew me before then still call me Dave. It sounds weird
when they try to say Cheshire, not that most of them have tried.

Some people have an easier time of it than others. Recently, my girlfriend's
parents asked her how to address a wedding invitation to us, specifically
how to address me. When she told them "Cheshire Beckerman," they replied,
"But this is, you know, _formal_." Fortunately, Sarah reiterated how they
should write my name on the invitation.

As a designer, I just basically go by the moniker Cheshire Dave. I still
haven't resolved what my professional name will be.

Whoa, Cheshire Dave! Rewind the tape!...Wedding??? Did I just miss something? Goes to show what happens when I don't keep up with my online friends. Many congrats, Cheshire! I wish we had this automatic service that would scan our favorite blogs and send us a note whenever anything major had happened. Like a blogger...

had a stubbed toe,
broke up,
died laughing,
had six-headed baby and started hourly breastfeedings,
tried twice to "go on hiatus" but could not handle the withdrawal symptoms and came back begging for more hits.

Bottom line: Go see him next Month! Get out of the house and get your nose out of that chip specifications data book. Go soak up some Cheshire culture!

Posted 12:44 AM by Blah blah

Sorry I haven't updated for a while. I have been running from one event or activity to another since Friday, and when I have a free moment, I seriously need sleep. Will update soon! Thanks for your patience. You won't be disappointed. Lots to say as always!

In the meantime, here's a cool idea to get to know your fellow bloggers: Blogger Insider. Thea did a great job answering it. If you haven't checked her out yet, please do. She's studying biology at Caltech and a very prolific writer who completed her novel for NaNoWriMo. She's also a long-time cello player.

Friendship

In the meantime, here's a quote from my favorite essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I read and reread him while in college, and Ralph helped me through many a discouraging night. I love these parts from his essay, "Friendship":

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, — and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words....

Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love.

DEAR FRIEND: —

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise; my moods are quite attainable; and I respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine ever, or never....

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul, is the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man, who, under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and, omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says, — "I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted." I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighbourhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

No two men but, being left alone with each other, enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation, — no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit....

Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.

Happy Chinese New Year and Happy Valentine's Day!