Housemate wanted!

I read somewhere, somebody wrote, "solitude is sweet." Hahaha it can be paiful too. I think the sweetness or bitterness of solitude depends on your needs.

My two housemates, Small Wonder and Smarties have just moved out over the weekend, having completed their three month internship at a medical centre in the city.

Since Sunday night, I've been in total privacy and solitude at home. For several days, solitude indeed tastes very sweet, because once again, I can walk about naked in my own home, not just in my bedroom.

home sweet home 


I no longer have to fret having my guest bathroom, living room, dining room and kitchen messed up. Especially my guest bathroom, because I'm such a stickler to having clean bathrooms.

I no longer have to fret having other people using my personal grooming stuff especially my hairbrush.

I can now have my huge comfy sofa all to myself, which was a rare opportunity back then, because Smarties and her boyfriend were always occupying my sofa. I couln't even watch the tube in total comfort in my own home, because I feel awkward having to sit next to the cuddling (and whatever) lovebirds.

Having said all that, I do miss the two kiddos and all their idiosynchrasies and what not. Three of us did have a lot of fun together.

I surely hope my new housemate will be as fun but a lot tidier and more respectful of my personal space and privacy. And yes, I am looking for a new housemate.

Thinking out of the box

Belle of the Party once told me that I've not been spending my time with people who matter most to me. One of the reasons I keep meeting people who are wrong for me and who are with me for the wrong reasons. I think I need to prioritize my time for the people I really should be with, not simply going with the flow of things. I need to incorporate more planning in my personal life. Nevertheless, at the moment, prioritizing the people in my life looks pretty much impossible -- at least not without hurting someone's feelings.

Opting out and spending some time solo may be my best option. So, travelling alone would be a good thing for me as I would be spending my time alone thinking, and thinking out of the box too, because I'd see things in a different perspective.

hippo joey 


For the most part of my life, I've always needed company for everything that I do, and doing things and going places alone scared me sometimes. It didn't help that The Ex Hubby loved playing hero to this once-upon-a-time damsel in distress, he hardly let me do anything on my own. It made become a "make-do woman" because I became emotionally dependent on my "hero" ex-hubby, and made me feel so helpless in some ways. When I looked back at how I used to be, I see a pathetically helpless, naive, gullible and conventional woman who I was ashamed to be. Reality bites when The Ex Hubby left me naked and alone. Post-separation struggles and bitterness and post-divorce turns of event in my life have made me stronger and wiser.

Thinking out of the box, I think I will feel lighter and less weighed down by all the conventions that I have in my life. I will undoubtedly solve some of the problems I've encountered in my past and present relationships.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

‘You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

graduation 


Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 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, its 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.

mt kinabalu conquered 


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 retuned 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.

Job 


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 its 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 other's 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 poetic 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.

graduation dinner 

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Spend now, pay later?

Ever heard of the old phrase, "A fool and his money are soon parted."?

I'm glad I've successfully implemented a debt reduction exercise with what little bonus that my company paid me. I guess half of my bonus money went into paying credit card debts and a couple of outstanding payments. Although I didn't manage to pay off all of my debts, I've managed to strike out some debts off my list totally. I really want to be debt-free by end of the year. I want to be released from the yoke of credit card slavery.

Indeed, credit card is the evil of all evils known to man. It enslaves you to hell, while promising you heaven. It encourages people to "spend now, pay later", "live the life you want, now" and suffer later. Heh heh...

sale 


After experiencing such excruciating pain of parting with my money for such an evil, I've repented and become a born again spender. I think I'll just use cash to spend on what I really need. I won't shop unnecessarily, and I'll think twice before buying anything I want. Is it really a NEED or simply a WANT? I promise, I'll be financially wiser this time.

Spending cash will likely squash any urge to splurge -- in fact, I'll probably pinch every penny whenever I think of cash physically leaving my wallet. It's a lot harder to part with cash than to sign a credit card slip.

overstretched 


I think I'll make a cup of coffee at home instead of spending ten bucks on a latte. Hehehe I can even bank in my spare change. If I'm a lot less generous to my friends than I was before, please forgive me. Really, I need to save my money, and I need to have a chunkier savings account. A bigger, better cause is en route...

When you book a single room

living room 


According to Oprah.com, "Ask any intrepid traveler. It's a whole different trip when you book a single room. And so it is with life. Whenever you challenge yourself to do something on your own, the world opens up."

I finally decided to take my long overdue break. Because I'm planning to save for THE vacation, I'll just go to a local destination for a mini vacation. That way, I won't have to spend a bomb just to take a break. I'm thinking of Penang, The Pearl of the Orient.

I think I'm going to book a single room and drive there by myself. I think four hours of driving alone on the North South Highway would be therapeutic.

As Carl G. Jung puts it, "Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes life worth living."

Extremely interesting facts

Here are some extremely interesting facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

wedding 


Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath.

It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying a "thresh hold."

(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot.

They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

pee soup 


Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."

And that's the truth... mow, whoever said that history was boring!

At this age of unreason

I watched a movie on TV last night. It's about an old man, Earnest, who journeyed across the country to spend time at his late wife Emily's grave on their wedding anniversary. Because he missed her too much. As he travelled, along the way he met with many interesting characters whose lives were changed for the better because of him. What touched me was the undying love he has for his Emily, the kind of love I would like to have from a man one day.

Enthusiasm is a kind of faith that has been set on fire, as George Matthew Adams puts it. I don't feel that right now when it comes to matters of the heart.

I'm usually full of energy, but I was feeling a little less vivacious than usual. I cried my heart out watching the movie, and also because I wanted that kind of love from a man. No man has ever loved me that earnestly. I thought I had, but I was wrong.

akad nikah 


I sat on my huge sofa alone at home and spent the time to do some thinking about my personal life, and what I expect to get out of my relationships with men. A string of failed relationships somehow establishes in my mind beyond any peradventure of doubt that even at this age of unreason, I'm still all wet and all wrong in my understanding about relationships. I'm still a naif when it comes to deciphering men!

I think I need to break away from myself, men and relationships. Some deep feelings are welling up inside me, and it's time to get them out of my mind and dissect them.

I need to be alone to think about how I intend to go about getting things right! Just as one Maria Isabel Barreno puts it, "It is only alone, truly alone that one bursts apart, springs forth."

Oh God, I really do need a vacation badly. I think a vacation would be a unique opportunity for me to resolve some past issues -- and start moving into the future.

I will have to find time for a vacation for my much needed break away.

tahiti 


As one of my favorite authors, Stephen King, once said, "If you don't have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?"

To all daddies in the world

Durex ad 



Despite this witty ad...Happy Father's Day!

To Abah, you may have been absent for most of my growing up years, and is still absent most of my adult years. I thank you, nevertheless. For without you, there would be no me. I love you all the same.

To Uncle Mat Noor, who is my father's cousin and best friend, and all my uncles, thank you for being a father figure to me during my growing up years, and for watching over us when Abah was busy with his new wife and family. I am ever so grateful.

To Tahir, my ex-hubby, I hope you would have managed to locate your bastard son, whom you were so irresponsible not to own up to, when you knocked up that girl, while were engaged 12 years ago. If I had known that you had been that irresponsible, I wouldn't have married you. Why did you marry me, knowing you had left her with the bastard child in her womb, and ironically, years later you decided to feel remorseful and wanted to find them to make amends. I really hate to think that the miscarriage I had is God's punishment to you - depriving you of your own flesh and blood. But sometimes, I can't help but feel that way. Then I found out that you're leaving me not to find your bastard, but instead for The Other Woman, I was speechless at your conniving lies. So, tell me, is your confession about that bastard son true? Or is that another conniving lie? Because, that bitch is already a mother of two, and you are supporting her brats, I wish you all the same, and I hope you enjoy being a father.

I haven't thought and feel much about Tahir for a long time, and doing so makes me feel this way. Dear God, please help me forgive and forget what he has done to me. Please help me get over him completely.

To Tahir's brother, who is a loving father to my god son and god daughters.

To my friend Misai Kucing, whom I admire for being a doting father to his children. Thank you for your moral support and for sharing with many thoughts and your 5S Principles.

To my jealous ex-boyfriend, Medicine Man, I hope your ex-wife is letting you see your children more often.

To my other ex-boyfriend, The Aussie, keep up the good work!

To my chat friend, Roadrunner, who as a confidante to his 12-year old daughter, has to listen to all her complaints and anger about the mum. All the best, my friend. Pre Menstrual Syndrome, unlike Pre Marital Syndrome, is biologicalically existent.

To all my friends, fellow bloggers and readers in the whole wide world, who are committed, responsible, dedicated, doting and loving fathers.

To Mr. Right, the man who would one day be the father to my child, where are you? What's taking you so long? Please ask for directions if you're lost.

you are here 


To Stupid Cupid, please help Mr. Right find his way to me! He seems to be getting lost, and like most men, would probably hate asking for directions.

Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend

Something interesting I came across and thought I'd share with other bloggers. This write up is an interesting explanation and an alternative view by a male scientist who is probably socially challenged when it comes to women.

This is meant to be taken as a piece of humor.



Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend
By Tristan Miller
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence 1
20 December 1999

Why don't I have a girlfriend?

This is a question that practically every male has asked himself at one point or another in his life. Unfortunately, there is rarely a hard and fast answer to the query. Many men try to reason their way through the dilemma nonetheless, often reaching a series of ridiculous explanations, each more self-deprecating than the last: "Is it because I'm too shy, and not aggressive enough? Is it my opening lines? Am I a boring person? Am I too fat or too thin? Or am I simply ugly and completely unattractive to women?" When all other plausible explanations have been discounted, most fall back on the time-honoured conclusion that "there must be Something Wrong(tm) with me" before resigning themselves to lives of perpetual chastity.2

Not the author, though. I, for one, refuse to spend my life brooding over my lack of luck with women. While I'll be the first to admit that my chances of ever entering into a meaningful relationship with someone special are practically non-existent, I staunchly refuse to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me. Instead, I am convinced that the situation can be readily explained in purely scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some elementary statistical calculus.

Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age - let's say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term all-encompassingly to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent - she doesn't have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are - three simple demands, which I'm sure everyone will agree are anything but unreasonable.

That said, I now present my demonstration of why the probability of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements is so small as to be practically impossible - in other words, why I will never have a girlfriend. I shall endeavour to make this proof as rigorous as the available data permits. And I should note, too, that there will be no statistical trickery involved here; I have cited all my sources and provided all relevant calculations3 in case anyone wishes to conduct their own independent review.

resources 



Let's now take a look at the figures.


Number of people on Earth (in 1998): 5 592 830 000 [WP98, Table A-3]


We start with the largest demographic in which I am interested - namely, the population of this planet. That is not to say I'm against the idea of interstellar romance, of course; I just don't assess the prospect of finding myself a nice Altairian girl as statistically significant. Now anyway, the latest halfway-reliable figures we have for Earth's population come from the United States Census Bureau's 1999 World Population Profile [WP98]. Due presumably to the time involved in compiling and processing census statistics, said report's data is valid only as of 1998, so later on we'll be making some impromptu adjustments to bring the numbers up to date.


...who are female: 2 941 118 000 [WP98, Table A-7]


I'd've thought that, given the title of this essay, this criterion goes without saying. In case anyone missed it, though, I am looking for exclusively female companionship. Accordingly, roughly half of the Earth's population must be discounted. Sorry, guys.


...in "developed" countries: 605 601 000 [WP98, Table A-7]


We now further restrict the geographical area of interest to so-called "first-world countries". My reasons for doing so are not motivated out of contempt for those who are economically disadvantaged, but rather by simple probability. My chances of meeting a babe from Bhutan or a goddess from Ghana, either in person or on the Internet, are understandably low. In fact, I will most likely spend nearly my entire life living and working in North America, Europe, and Australia, so it is to these types of regions that the numbers have been narrowed.


women's age 



...currently (in 2000) aged 18 to 25: 65 399 083 [WP98, Tables A-3 & A-7]


Being neither a pedophile nor a geriatrophile, I would like to restrict my search for love to those whose age is approximately equal to my own. This is where things get a bit tricky, for two reasons: first, the census data is nearly two years old, and second, the "population by age" tables in [WP98] are not separated into individual ages but are instead quantized into "15-19" (of whom there are 39 560 000) and "20-44" (population 215 073 000). Women aged 15 to 19 in 1998 will be aged 17 to 21 in 2000; in this group, I'm interested in dating those 18 or older, so, assuming the "15-19" girls' ages are uniformly distributed, we have

39 560 000 × ((|21 - 18| + 1) / (|19 - 15| + 1)) = 31 648 000.

Similarly, of 1998's "20-44" category, there are now

215 073 000 × ((|25 - 22| + 1) / (|44 - 20| + 1)) = 34 411 680

females within my chosen age limit. The sum, 66 059 680, represents the total number of females aged 18 to 25 in developed countries in 2000. Unfortunately, roughly 1% of these girls will have died since the census was taken;4 thus, the true number of so-far eligible bachelorettes is 65 399 083.


...who are beautiful: 1 487 838


Personal attraction, both physically and personality-wise, is an important instigator of any relationship. Of course, beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population.5 Without going into the specifics of precisely which traits I admire, I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall at least two standard deviations above the norm. From basic statistics theory, the area to the left of the normal curve at z = 2 is

one-half minus the product of the square root of two ? and the definite integral from 0 to 2 of e to the negative one-half x squared, which equals approximately 0.02275

and so it is this number with which we multiply our current population pool.


...and intelligent: 236 053


Again, intelligence can mean different things to different people, yet I am once more relieved of making any explanation by noting that it, like most other characteristics, has a notionally normal distribution across the population. Let's assume that I will settle for someone a mere one standard deviation above the normal; in that case, a further

one-half plus the product of the square root of two ? and the definite integral from 0 to 1 of e to the negative one-half x squared, which equals approximately 84.1345%
of the population must be discounted.

bubbles 



...and not already committed: 118 027


I could find no hard statistics on the number of above-noted girls who are already married, engaged, or otherwise committed to a significant other, but informal observation and anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that the proportion is somewhere around 50%. (Fellow unattached males will no doubt have also noticed a preponderance of girls legitimately offering, "Sorry, I already have a boyfriend" as an excuse not to go on a date.) For reasons of morality (and perhaps too self-preservation), I'm not about to start hitting on girls who have husbands and boyfriends. Accordingly, that portion of the female population must also be considered off-limits.


...and also might like me: 18 726


Naturally, finding a suitable girl who I really like is no guarantee that she'll like me back. Assuming, as previously mentioned, that personal attractiveness is normally distributed, there is a mere 50% chance that any given female will consider me even marginally attractive. In practice, however, people are unlikely to consider pursuing a relationship with someone whose looks and personality just barely suffice. Let's make the rather conservative assumption, then, that a girl would go out with someone if and only if they were at least one standard deviation above her idea of average. In that case, referring to our previous calculation, only 15.8655% of females would consider someone with my physical characteristics and personality acceptable as a potential romantic partner.

men & aging 



Conclusion


It is here, at a pool of 18 726 acceptable females, that we end our statistical analysis. At first glance, a datable population of 18 726 may not seem like such a low number, but consider this: assuming I were to go on a blind date with a new girl about my age every week, I would have to date for 3493 weeks before I found one of the 18 726. That's very nearly 67 years.

As a North American male born in the late 1970s, my life expectancy is probably little more than 70 years, so we can safely say that I will be quite dead before I find the proverbial girl of my dreams.

Come to think of it, she'll probably be dead too.


Nel: In no way does the writer's views reflect my own personal views. Besides, I don't expect anyone to be so foolish as to take this crap as subtantial. It's just one guy's thoughts that he thought would be substantiated by empirical justifications. Let Tristan Miller be, whatever he wants to think or believe, because everyone has a right to his or her own thoughts. You don't have to subscribe to anyone's thoughts and beliefs.

When it feels right...

I think, and I hope, my recent soul-searching mode these past week has been very fruitful. Here's some good food for thought I wanna share with you:

"When your heart is gently touched, it is apt to feel loving, generous, and supportive of everyone around. If your heart is lonely, it is apt to feel deserted by everyone on Earth.

love ingredients 


It would be impossible to try to make rational sense of why things always need to be so extreme for you, but the fact of the matter is, you don't need to try to figure it out rationally. You only need to accept the fact that this is the way you feel."

I accept the fact that all I need is love and lots of tender loving care from a man. I don't deny my needs, but because patience is a virtue, I'll just wait for the right moment and the right man. And when it feels right...

Like water to fish

bubbles 


The fish says you can't see my tears because I'm in the water, but the water says I do feel them because you are in my heart. A good friend would be like water to fish.