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+It’s beginning to feel like winter; warm sake (Izumi) is a great prelude to coffee (Balzac’s)
+Hearing Gabriel Palatchi Septet play Chilangotango and Libertango at the Rex
+In three days, Mum and Dad and I will begin our two week trip from San Diego to Carmel

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what matters most: part ii

For the past nine months, I have struggled with the idea of going to Asia to work. I whined about how easy it is for guys to find supportive wives and how hard it is for women to find supportive husbands. I went through a break up. I cried. By now, I have told everybody: no, I’m not going. And I feel okay. Which is really amazing.

A couple possible reasons for why I feel okay.

+ Two years ago, a very senior person at Manulife moved his family for his job. His daughter was unhappy. Recently, his wife and daughter moved back to where they came from. Gender roles or not, optimizing career and family is a crazy thing that may or may not work out.

+ For the past month, I have been dating someone that did long distance so that the girl he was seeing can be adventurous with her career. The relationship did not work out. Supportive or not, optimizing career and family is a crazy thing that may or may not work out.

No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need

img src=flavorwire

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+Found a cool gift to give

+The Story: An Outdoor Movable Play at Brickworks preceded by wandering through the forest in the not-quite-dark

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+ beautiful end to long day at work …

+ my favorite at UT Undergraduate Art & Architecture Show

+ 37 > 10% x 365

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image from a cup of jo

• “My friends Susan Cernek and Rob Giampietro framed this receipt from their first trip to Paris together in 2006. They’d had two coffees at the Cafe de Flore, and now the receipt hangs in their kitchen, as a lovely reminder.”
• Listening to Cafe De Flore (Club Mix) by Disco Attack.
• Amazing hotpot with Mum + Dad featuring oysters.
• Looking forward to Pina (December 23).
• “Old Spice Matterhorn smells so much like a fresh mountain that if your lady friends ever summit the actual Matterhorn they’ll think, This mountain smells just like (insert your name)’s armpit.”

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• Really really good cappuccino @ Sense Appeal
• Really really good Chagall @ AGO
• Really really good pinot @ cafe la gaffe

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photo from Marie Claire Maison via annesage.com

• “L’enfance trouve son paradis dans l’instant. Elle ne demande pas du bonheur. Elle est le bonheur” = “Childhood finds paradise in the moment. It does not demand happiness. It is happiness.”
• Last week’s modern love essay: My mother would probably say that love transcends the zeitgeist. She does not see her experience as part of a cultural trend; it was just the way things happened for her. “I guess it was a different time,” she said when I explained some of the modern complexities we face. “But people are people, so how hard could it be?”

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• Jessica made delish cookies!
• “It’s not uncommon in grade school for each student to be assigned a class job that rotates every week, but some of the jobs in Claudine’s kindergarten class have been a bit unusual. See her up there at a recent field trip to the park to sketch some trees? She’s the class comforter.”
• “In 1995’s Before Sunrise a very young Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy spent a long, meandering, romantic night together in Vienna. In the 2004 follow-up, Before Sunset, an older, more jaded Hawke and Delpy spent a long, meandering day together in Paris, still crazy and tortured about each other after all these years. Now it looks like the third film might be on the way.”

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img src=morresi fruit

• Air Canada refunded the plane tickets. Yes, I’m good at telling sob stories.
• Read November Vogue on Slacker Saturday. Have I mentioned that I love Rachel Sterne? I don’t think most real people (i.e. non models) look good in prints featuring three primary colors. She looks amazing.
• Denise and I are going to try Pilates.
• Manager informed me that I must take 7.5 days of vacation before end of the year because I can only carry forward 10 days. I’m taking 5.5 days to visit southern Cali with mum + dad over the holidays. Forced to take 2 more days. Oh no! What shall I do!
• morresi fruit grows the best tangerines. The orchard is in San Pedro, not far from Buenos Aires.
• Starting with any positive integer, replace the number by the sum of the squares of its digits, and repeat the process. Those numbers for which this process ends in 1 are happy numbers. 1 is a happy number.

365 grateful project (count=10)

I’m feeling okay now. My first response to feeling okay: Should I go visit three countries starting with U (Uganda/Uruguay/Uzbekistan)? Okay, I’m making fun of Eat Pray Love. Which I have never read. But I hear it’s about a woman who divorces her husband and visits Italy/India/Indonesia. My real first response: Should I go climb seven volcanoes in Guatemala over the holidays? I only climbed Acatenango, Fuego and Pacaya the last time I visited. But: Perhaps happiness is the love of what is here and now.

• Completed first round interviews. One candidate seemed genuinely attached to Manulife: “It was my first actuarial experience.” My first memory of Manulife dates back to my first week in Toronto. I saw the lawn and immediately decided it would be a great place to work. Even now, I find myself sighing as I walk through the garden. Burning with leaves. Bright even at night.
• They seem to be brewing Caffè Verona everyday at the Starbucks close to the office. “Literature lovers out there will recognize Verona as the city where Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet. Although the play ends in tragedy, we’d like you to know that every cup of this coffee has a happy ending.”
• Once busy seasons is over, I’m going to spend a couple weekends visiting coffee spots west of bathurst, east of don valley. And read the Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” And wonder: Does the past tempt us to destroy the future?