Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, for those of you who have followed my ongoing adventures, you know that today marks a year away from any sort of recreational drugs or alcohol use.

I had some thoughts I wanted to post as a result of my adventures thus far. They’re not very well organized, but after all, it is my blog. 😉

First off, I don’t think drugs are bad. I’m glad that I had the adventures I had with them, and I think I learned a lot and had a lot of good times as a result. I think that specific people have specific weaknesses to certain drugs, probably as a result of psychological or emotional issues or their physical biochemical makeup. If you keep trying different drugs, sooner or later you will probably find one you can’t handle. That’s pretty much what happened to me.

I also don’t think drugs are the end all be all to our evolution. I think that you can have all sorts of spiritual and personal growth without ever using any recreational drug, and I think that – like driving a ATV, flying a plane, or any number of other high-risk activities, drugs are potentially dangerous. I’m not going to be standing up and saying that you should use drug X because it will result in a evolution of your thinking. They’re a tool, and they can be a powerful one – but like any other powerful tool, they are potentially dangerous. Choose wisely.

I believe we should have the freedom to experiment. I don’t believe in the drug war. I do believe the world should have lots of resources to help people who are struggling with emotional and physical issues (one reason people take drugs).. and I think that it in fact does. If you are a addict who sincerely wishes to stop, there is a lot of help out there for you. Your biggest enemy is your own worst thinking.

I do think that children should stay away from drugs – I applaud the age limit on purchase of alcohol, and think that in a world where legalization of other drugs occurs, they should have similar age limits.

I also think that some drugs cause dangerous behaviors, and it should not be legal to use them unless you are in a controlled environment – basically locked up where you can’t hurt other people. I think a look at violent crime statistics and drug use would quickly identify which drugs come under that category. But I’m not writing this post to reform drug laws, or even to propose reform. I’m writing about my own experience.

The reason I put those first few lines in is to say – if you’re a drug user, and you’re happy with your choice, I applaud you. I’m not writing this to give a extended mental finger to all people who play with their blood chemistry. But I needed to stop, because the drug I was using and the way I was using it were getting in the way of personal growth, and getting in the way of me moving away from situations which were not healthy for me.

When I decided to start using drugs, I was curious about the experience of being someone else, of seeing the world through different eyes. I wanted to know what the experience of being altered would be like, and I found it to be very interesting. I don’t think that I would have been that curious about having my emotional and mental state altered if I hadn’t been at least somewhat unsatisfied with the default states.

I will be the first to admit that I may have badly misprogrammed my mind. I probably made some very poor choices about who to trust and how much when I was very young. It’s also possible that some of my problems were the result of my physical state although a lot of them have been increasingly addressable through software (my thoughts and beliefs) – I’m learning how to not be unhappy, and how to have the experiences I want to have and get the things I need. I’m learning how to not hurt myself and not believe that I should be hurt.

When I found my “drug of choice”, at first I was just hooked on spending time not experiencing fear. Then I discovered that I could communicate – with my mind – with someone who wasn’t me. I still don’t know who it was – but the experience was fascinating. I was hooked on the mystery. I wasn’t thinking ahead to the crushing hangovers, the moments of utter irrationality that would follow as my body chemistry came unwound, the empty bank accounts and mounting debts, the frightening friends and loved ones, or any of the other downsides that accompany drug abuse. I had not yet learned to – as the 12 step people say – “play the tape all the way through”.

The ability to experience a communication with someone who isn’t me has not left me. These days I talk to a lot of people ‘out there’ – and it’s possible, as I’m sure many of my friends would point out – that these people are just my imagination. If so, I’m still glad that they’re there, because they have helped me understand the faults in my own thinking in ways that I’m not sure anything else would have. They have exhibited knowledge and abilities that make me *very* skeptical that they are just me. 😉 I think this is a experience that I have always wanted to have, and I’m glad that I’m having it – it’s one of the things that has me hooked on what tomorrow’s going to bring in my current life. I think that the people I have been talking to via whatever this method is have been much more able to communicate with me since I stopped using. I note that contact with a higher power is a suggested part of one of the more popular addiction support groups, which suggests that I am not alone in this experience.

When I decided to stop using drugs, I found a number of good, valid resources available to help me. As with so many of my problems (and my biggest problem was and continues to be paranoia) the real struggle was within me. It’s not that the world didn’t provide resources to help with addiction, because the world does. It’s that the filters that my mind provides, and my defense mechanisms, made using those resources challenging at first. Obviously, I’m glad I persisted. I have found many of the things I was searching for with drug use in other things – often better than any drug I ever tried ever was. If you are a addict reading this and wondering if getting clean is worth it – it is. You will learn a lot about yourself and about the world you live in, and you will discover a lot of new adventures and new experiences. And, if you’re like me, you will be a lot less unhappy after having gone through some of the process.

One of the things that I had a big problem with at first was thinking that if I didn’t agree with any part of a recovery program, they couldn’t help me. I have since learned to take the good and ignore the bad – in some cases, the bad will become good later as I understand more, and in some cases, the bad is just *shrug* wrong. For me anyway.

I won’t claim that it isn’t a lot of work. Learning to accept and love yourself is challenging if you’ve strongly programmed yourself to be critical of yourself. I don’t know what challenges other addicts face and I can only speak for myself – but Whitney Houston’s ‘The greatest love of all.. is easy to achieve’ is utter BS for me. It is NOT easy to love yourself, or accept yourself, starting from the position I started from. It is very challenging. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing – a lot of things that are worth doing are very challenging. I am also not claiming to be a paragon of self-acceptance now. I am just no longer interested in hurting myself with constant harsh criticism of my thoughts and actions. I am no longer telling myself that my dreams and desires are small, or stupid, or wrong – even if they don’t align at all with the desires of the rest of the world, or they don’t make sense in the context of what I “should” want, or they’re not what other people would choose. I’m no longer interested in even talking or thinking about suicide. I want to find ways to make my life as awesome a ride as possible, and I believe that it can be as good as I am willing to let it be.

I think in my case that addiction really translated to a malfunction of my free will, and that this was present all over my life. I was wanting things and not taking actions to get them. I was taking actions that previous experience suggested would continue to lead to unpleasant results. I had set up rules for myself that made no rational sense, based on cognitive distortions or on complete fallacy. I believed a whole large number of things which were inconsistent or impossible. In general, I was stymed by cognitive distortions – bad thinking. I was also seriously negatively impacted – and continue to be negatively impacted – by paranoia. Unreasonable fears. I once emailed a list of fears I had to a friend and I think I sent about 70 before I stopped – and I hadn’t listed them all or been completely honest about them. I still think the process of doing that was a huge step forward for me.

Overcoming my fears – especially the ones that I understand in my conscious mind to be irrational – is a journey that I have not yet completed. In some ways I feel like I have just begun upon it. However, I can already see the fruits of my labors. I am *much* happier now than I was as a drug addict. I am much more aware of how much of the fear and discord and negative emotions I experience are the results of my own subconscious thinking and problems with my mind that are within my power – eventually, with time and work – to fix.

A lot of things about my view of the world have changed in the last few years. I also don’t think I’m done changing – I’m still trying on beliefs to see how they fit, trying on thought patterns to see which ones work, and trying on possible futures to see which ones feel like they are me.

I would like to thank all the friends who have helped me along.. sometimes with kindness, sometimes with a thought-provoking comment, and sometimes just by being there.

I wanted to say a few more things, and these are messages directly to fellow addiction sufferers, because I think it’s possible that some of you will land here because of google keywords. (Certainly my blog seems to get tens of thousands of hits a month already for *some* reason)

First of all, own your power. The first step of the twelve steps is extremely misleading when you’re thinking like a addict. It is not saying you will *always* be powerless over whatever your addiction is. It’s saying that *right now*, because of the fact that you have in essence a mental illness, you are powerless and need help. It’s also saying that that help is available – and it is! But I think if you just wait for some external higher power to fix you, you’re going to have a long wait. That’s not saying you won’t receive help from other people – sometimes visible, sometimes not, sometimes supernatural, sometimes not. But you can have a lot less suffering, and much more growth, if you also work yourself towards reaching a day when you are not powerless. Try to have power. You may not always succeed, but you will sometimes and each success will make you stronger.

Second of all, don’t beat yourself up over failures. DO learn from them. Shame and guilt and fear are your enemies – they are the emotions that keep you in bondage, that keep you from being mentally free. I think a lot of the reasons for working the steps (if you’re a 12-stepper) is to remove your shame and guilt over your past mistakes, and to encourage you to develop a way of living which leads away from making more of the types of actions you have to feel bad about when you look back over them. You can’t make good decisions if you’re being whipsawed by your own shame and guilt every time you think anything.

In general, don’t kick yourself. Learn to recognize when you are hurting yourself, and learn to stop. The more often you stop, the better you will get at stopping. You don’t do anyone on earth any favors by making yourself unhappy. It’s not going to help any of the people you have hurt. It’s not going to help you.

Third of all, learn about stinkin’ thinkin’ (12 step) or cognitive distortions (smartrecovery) and learn how to spot them in all your thinking, not just your thinking about drugs. I did.. and do.. a lot of very questionable thinking. Bad thinking is your enemy. It’s what makes you the destroyer of your own free will, it’s what sets you up for bad decisions and bad results, and it’s something that you can learn to recognize.

Fourth of all, believe that it’s possible. Believe you can be clean, or free of overeating, or gambling, or whatever your problem is. I know that believing is much more difficult than just saying you believe, and that belief comes about somewhat because you put a tiny little feeler of faith in the water and get back experiences which validate that faith – belief is at least somewhat controlled by experience – but to whatever extent you can, make sure you’re open to believing you can succeed.

Fifth of all: Also consider the possibility that your problem is just a symptom of a larger problem. Work to fix the symptoms, but also work the larger problem. In my case, my constant and blinding paranoia was a much larger problem than my drug use ever was. While I’m no longer using drugs, I’m still working to address my fear issues. My belief that I deserved to suffer, and my willingness to hurt myself internally by negative self talk, was and is a much larger problem than my drug use. Also still something I’m addressing. I hope at some point I can come back and write one of these posts about overcoming irrational fear, and overcoming negative self talk. It’s possible that no one else will ever read it, or even want to read it, but I think it will be good for me to write it.

Sixth of all, figure out what you really want. Make a list. On paper. Be honest. Even if they seem impossible, be honest. It’s very hard to get what you want if you don’t know what you want.

Seventh of all, find positive activities to keep you busy. Work. Write music. Dance. Skate. Bowl. Go for long walks in the woods. Kayak. Waterski. Learn to fly a plane. One could list hundreds of different possible activities here – my point is that in my experience, you’re not going to be experiencing stinking thinking or a craving for drugs when you’re doing something else that keeps you aware and engaged and interested.

Eighth of all.. one of the people I talk to over my internal link has a saying. The people in heaven and the people in hell inhabit the same physical space. The people in heaven try very hard to reach the people in hell. Make sure you’re open to accepting the gifts the universe and all it’s inhabitants offer. Make sure you’re open to being helped. Be ready to leave hell. Make sure you don’t need the pain, the suffering, the drama. If you find that you do need them, figure out why and figure out if you really want to live that way. All of this is your choice, but choosing is a complex and layered thing. Expect to have to put some effort into choosing a good life experience, especially if you’ve put some effort into choosing a bad one.

One of my favorite sayings, from Fred Brown Recovery Services – a place where I learned a LOT – is a simple mantra. ‘We don’t have to live that way today.’. It’s what I have told myself, this past year, whenever I was tempted to buy and use. I’m also learning to tell myself the same thing whenever I start to think things which are hurtful, or which imply I don’t deserve to have a wonderful life, or to be loved.

Whoever you are, I wish you the best of luck. There are many people out there who love you – probably more than you will ever know. There are many resources to help you. And, obviously, I’m not altogether “better”. This isn’t a post to say I’m cured. It’s a post to say I’m progressing. I just wanted to share some of the important lessons I learned along the way, in case they can help you too.

I slept last night for about 3 hours. I awoke with the feeling that I was staring at a blinking cursor under the word ‘READY’ – like I was waking up at exactly the right moment. I had one problem-dream, involving moving cars about in a parking garage. It had not progressed to the nightmare stage when I exited it.

Lucid dreaming is still beyond me, but I do have certain new capabilities, like the ability to find the exit in dreams. It does seem that I think less circuitously and more directly when I get more sleep.

Of late – the last two years I think – I’ve been sending a lot more personal emails to various people in which I write about myself. One part of me thinks this is stupid egoism, but another part has found that for whatever reason, writing to one particular person, imagining their viewpoint as I write, is more helpful for certain types of internal debugging than writing to a entire blog. It’s a lot easier to imagine that the single reader cares about me.

In general, I’ve noticed, they don’t get responses. Actually, the majority of email responses I get are to ‘action emails’ i.e. ‘would you like to do this next week?’ or ‘Should we dump this database using this technique?’. I did recently send a ‘Would your label like to represent me for a album?’ email, but it didn’t get a response either. Pity.

I am planning on recording another album starting in the next few weeks – I am looking for a space to record it in, and have sent out several emails inquiring about practice spaces. I do hope some label will decide to represent me for it, since I don’t even have the marketing skills of a cute, cuddly puppy. The theme for this album will be what I’ve learned about the world and myself in the past two years. It should be interesting.

Anyway, I hope that my personal emails don’t cause too much harm. I try to moderate my desire to say anything that pops into my head with a understanding of who I’m writing to. Occasionally I fail, which has been known to cause distress both for me and the people I write to. However, overall the exercise has been worthwhile, so I will likely continue to do it. I do think people sometimes get the wrong ideas about me from these emails, and maybe I should balance them out with emails that indicate that my life is steadily getting better, I am in fact mostly sane, and I’m not evil incarnate.

Anyway, to all those who reply, or even who accept them, thanks for “listening”.

From @ClintJCL:

Idealism unattached to practicality is a useless daydream, man.

That would apply to the previous post if the following did not:

1) I didn’t learn anything from the thought exercise
2) I didn’t get any satisfaction from writing that blog post
3) It wasn’t part of a larger, more overarching topic (or topics) which are what is my personal definition of utopia and how can I get from where I currently am to that place, or more productively, recognize what attributes of that place are in where I currently am and make myself happier by enjoying those attributes
4) It wasn’t part of a larger thought experience which is the question of where the intersection of representative democracy where the representatives are the ones interested in the topic at hand, direct democracy, communism, and technology is. I will be fascinated to see how the Chinese take advantage of the internet and computer technology to make their communist system work better and more efficiently, and I think this sort of thought experiment is worthwhile in it’s own right.

I would also comment that if one is sufficiently nihilist, everything is useless and pointless – and yet, here we are with time on our hands, so let us strive for the simple joy of striving, and think because it beats the alternative. IMHO.

Well, I recently bought a macbook pro and I have a bad feeling it is going to be returned – the first computer I’ve ever done so with.

The problem is the OS – OSX 10.7, which apparently is unable to run *any* of the core applications that I use my macbook for. No vmware fusion (at least not without a expensive upgrade), no Cisco VPN client (and the native VPN software is totally unable to communicate with my VPN concentrator), and no Flex Builder (again, at least without a *very* expensive upgrade).

So, my first plan of attack is to take it to the apple store and ask for a downgrade. If that doesn’t work out, I will be returning it and shopping the used market for something with 10.6.

Robbie Robb, “In Time”

No fear, no loss, no tears,
The time is almost here.
Our dreams will all come true, I promise you,
‘Cause I can see for miles and miles.
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night (all night, all night).
In time, yes, everything will be all right (all right, all right).
It’ll take time but we’re going far,
You and me, yes I know we are.
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
All night.

One heart, one soul, one mind,
Our eyes will not be blind.
We’ll see this rain come down without this sound,
We can all, we can all break free.
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night (all night, all night).
In time, yes, everything will be all right (all right, all right).
It’ll take time but we’re going far,
You and me, yes I know we are,
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
In time . . .

In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night (all night, all night).
In time, yes, everything will be all right (all right, all right).
It’ll take time but we’re going far,
You and me, yes I know we are,
In time we’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
All night, we’ll be dancing,
We’ll be dancing, we’ll be dancing,
All night . . .
We’ll be dancing in the streets all night.
Dancing . . .
In time, we’ll be dancing . . . all night.
We’ll be dancing in the streets all night.

Okay, so ClintJCL posted a reply to my last entry, which I’m going to take one point at a time.

Clint: I don’t need to subjugate worlds, there’s plenty of evidence of how things work here in the real world.

There’s evidence for all sorts of things here in the ‘real world’. If the latter phrase has any meaning.

Later in your reply you suggest that I’m unable to use logic in considering the way the world will behave. I don’t think that’s true – I just think we start with a different set of beliefs, from which different conclusions logically follow. One of my beliefs is that there is no objective ‘real world’ – that there are in fact a whole series of subjective ‘real worlds’ occuring individually inside the minds of each of us. There’s more data coming at us than we can possibly absorb and the dataset that we choose to experience, and believe, and call our own is driven by our beliefs.

Clint: You can’t just “stop funding” for NARAL. They are free people free to collect money from other free people. People don’t just magically do your bidding – or indeed you’d be able to subjugate this world.

I wasn’t suggesting we ‘stop funding’ in the sense of officially declaring ‘No more NARAL’. I was suggesting that we as individual free people start spending our money and energy in more efficient ways than continually funding a equally balanced debate over whether we should or shouldn’t publicly fund abortions. Basically, saying those who are pro-choice provide funding for abortions. I understand that your view is if there were no longer pro-abortion activist groups funded by pro-abortion people then anti-abortion people would quickly act to make abortion illegal. My counterargument is that perhaps the anti-abortion people are taking a extremist stance because they are emotionally upset by the fact that their dollars are going to fund abortions, and they might take a more moderate stance if that was not the case. Essentually, I’m suggesting that both sides disarm since it doesn’t seem likely that either side is going away, and we agree that anti-abortion people don’t have to fund abortions in exchange for anti-abortion people agreeing not to try and make abortions unobtainable. I don’t know whether this would work – it probably depends on what the motivation of anti-abortion people is. If they are just upset that their resources are going to kill people, they should be willing to come to some agreement. If they see themselves as guardians of the public morals, then they may be unable to disarm whatever the cost. I think that laws to legislate morality are sick and wrong, and maybe what we should be doing instead of taking them all on a case by case basis is banding together to try and convince people in general that legislating morality (as opposed to laws to reduce harm) is a bad idea.

Clint: Furthermore, if you limit the funding of some activity only for those who believe in it, then activity is not determined by what is right, but by who is rich. If only 1% of people support something, and they are poor, it doesn’t get funded. What you are basically asking for as a tyranny of the majority run by aristocracy. There’s not simply a magical amoutn of money available for what a group of people want or need.

Well, right now, what we have is a system where activity is determined not by what is right, but by who is both rich and inclined to grab power. I’m suggesting that we should remove the second part of the equation. Ultimately, I’m not a big believer in money – a system that tries to represent all types of value in a single variable is inherently flawed, because among other things, there are different types of value and they don’t play on the same field. Some things become more valuable when more of them are made (i.e. a fax machine) while others become less valuable (i.e. a scarce resource). Some things gain value when they are copied (i.e. music that becomes a cultural rosetta stone, video games that support multiplayer modes) while other things do not. Some types of value are eternal (i.e. a song, once found, is ours forever) while others do not (physical resources like gold and oil get used up, and can only be used once). Abstracting all these things to a single variable seems likely to cause problems.

Clint: Hell, if you only had people who believed in vaccinations pay for them (instead of funding research through compulsory taxes) — between the antivax crowd, and religious people who don’t want to fund science, our vax tech would probably be 100 years behind, and you’d probably already be dead from measles.

I don’t know that. Why I don’t know that would be a subject for another, much longer debate.

Clint: Except you’d probably have never been born because we’d be speaking Germany or Japanese, because if things were your way, only people who believed in war would fund the army, and we would end up defenseless and unable to magically conjure up an army by the snap of our fingers after Pearl Harbor.

I’d still have been born, just born into a different world. Whether it would be better or worse is not something we’re equipped to predict, because of emergant behaviors. Also, I think a lot of people believed in WWII being a necessary thing, and where you have a bunch of people believing in something, you are going to get results pretty quickly. Consider how quickly the Apollo system – the biggest machine ever built by man, and a much more complicated animal than, for example, a atomic bomb – was designed, built, and deployed. I believe in war to protect against insanity. I don’t believe in war over resources, or political or economic idealogy. I think the majority of people would believe it was necessary to ramp up military technology and assemble a army to fight in WWII – and Germany and Japan weren’t really equipped to attack mainland U.S. and by the time they had been, we’d have built some things to fight back. I also think that if you just had those who believed we needed to be ready for war now fund war tech, the results would still be a much larger army than we need to protect us against the current level of threat.

Clint: Then again, we might not have even colonized America, because columbus was funded by the king – and if the king only got money from people who believed there should be a king….

I believe there will always be people who believe in exploration, because curiosity is a fundamental part of intelligent life.

Clint: Then there’s the whole national health care vs american health care. We’re the only industrialized nation where you basically only pay into health care if you believe in paying for it.. (Of course, lots can’t afford it, which speaks to my aristocracy points above.)

I see your point – and I believe that health care is a much better thing to be funded by the government than extreme levels of military tech.  I think the majority of people want access to health care. I also think that insurance is something that, when run for profit, tends to slide towards corruption. The problem with *any* for-profit insurance is that the company has motivations to try and cheat the insured, in order to maximize profit. I also think that hospitals are vastly overbilling because they can get away with it – they’re a industry that is not required to submit a quote prior to work, a industry where you often can’t easily hop over to the competition.

Clint: You’re such an impressively logical person on the computer. I have a hard time comprehending why your excellent mental abilities only seem to work inside the computer case, but not outside. It’s damn confusing to me. At least it’s interesting.

I think that we start from different precepts. It’s not that I’m not using logic, it’s just that I’m using that logic on a very different set of views than you have.

Clint: BTW – politics is truth, and affect everything. Every breath you take, the quality of air, every bite of food that goes into your body, the flame retardant chemicals in all of our bodies, every time you poop, your sewage, your computer usage – it’s all governed by politics. Politics is simply the administration of reality. To ignore it is to basically ignore a large portion of how the real world works. It’s good for stress (physical effects of stress on the body), but poor for fostering a proper understanding of the real world systems that actually govern us.

I don’t really agree with this statement at all.

Clint: Of course, if only people who believed in funding computer research paid for it – we probably wouldn’t be talking online right now. Compulsory military taxes made the research and implementation of the internet possible.

Definitely don’t agree with this statement. We as consumers loved computers, bought them by the droves. Computer networks were inevitable. And, I think that if the military hadn’t built the ARPAnet, someone else would have. There were a number of other, competing network designs – ARPA just happened to be the first people who chose a big enough address space and implemented it enough places.

Clint: Just call me secretary of keepin’ it real.

Well, start out by defining what the world ‘real’ means to you. Are you a objectivist? Do you believe in the quantum observer effect, and if so, what effect on the system does having me as a observer have, given that I don’t believe the system I see in front of me is the only reality, and I believe that the flaws I see in it are reflections of the flaws in me? Is it more important to be firmly grounded in the sickness that is all-american ‘reality’ than to be happy? If so, why?

Ending the abortion debate – and problem – in one easy move: If we took all the money that we’re spending on pro-abortion punditry and put it into a trust fund to pay for people’s abortions instead – basically, stop funding NARAL and the other political organizations agitating for abortion, and instead just have those of us who are pro-choice contribute directly to a trust fund to make sure people who can’t otherwise afford abortions have access to them, would this not end the problem and let the rest of the health care and reproductive health people get their money?

Actually, we could take this all sorts of fun places. We could have only those who wanted war contribute money to the army, too. 😉 Right now, it seems like a great racket to be in is to be a political action organization who sends out emotionally inflamed emails every few weeks saying how if you just send $35 now we can beat those no-good-nicks on the other side (who are doing exactly the same thing). In other words, we’re spending a lot of money getting nothing done while we carefully balance two opposing forces. Sending the money to support abortions directly seems like a better solution.

I pretty much try to stay out of politics – I don’t watch the news, I try not to read any news – because among other things it seems totally pointless and like the entire system exists to benefit the politicians. But it does seem to me like we could end the debate and just have pro-choice people directly provide funding for abortions – and end up spending less than we’re spending now for organizations to shove ads at each other.

So, recent adventures in my life would look like a speed bump – some might even call them a major crisis.. except that they’ve led to a awful lot of enjoyable experiences. From Devine doing my hair to a ride on the pacific starlight, not to mention a visit to the beach and the monteray aquartium, there’s been (so far) more silver lining than cloud. I’m hoping that it stays that way.

updated the site.