Remembrance Day, a year on...

Friends are always there when you need them

Happy birthday +Rok Trost. You are 36 today. I mark this your official remembrance day because I cannot soon forget you.

Your daughter remains as beautiful and vivacious as your wife; thankfully, +Tamara Pavasovic Trost shares enough pictures online so we can watch her grow up in your image together.

Your friends are right where you left them, although some of us have moved to different cities or countries since you left this world. To be expected.

All is good, except that you will not be physically there for the next meet-up or reunion. As tough as this might be, we understand. It's tough because you were always the one willing to meet up, through treacherous snowstorms or jet lag. Today, we would have talked over the phone for your birthday; I missed you calling me todd...ee...tee, the online handle that +Virginia Duan bestowed upon me all those years ago at UCLA. Nobody said it quite like you, I cannot help but smile.

I'll always remember you - and Jan 17th - with a smile because that's the only appropriate reaction remembering you. I'll save the Slovakia jokes for another day, though, I'm sure you would appreciate it.

In remembrance, forever your friend...

Comments

Spring Cleaning (better late than never)

Memorial Day weekend came and went like the thunderstorms that rumbled on Sunday evening here in the DC area. I thought that a three-day weekend would be just the cure for a crazy-busy schedule the past month (work projects blowing up all over the mainstream news, wedding planning, homeownership nicks & nacks, getting my personal affairs in order, travels, and stealing a moment for reflection), but it turned out that the only salvation was that the next weekend was now only 4 days away. Oh yeah, and a great friend was going to be in town in the upcoming week but that is the topic of another post. Still, I tried to make the best of the extra out-of-work time - which got funneled right back into homeowner activities (and what else does a homeowner do except spend free time keeping up with whatever is going on around and inside the home?). To be more specific, I took to cleaning up the "jungle", Wendy's vividly wonderful description of our backyard's overgrowth. I...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Journal : OpenRoadWorks

Search This Blog