Time flies...

Salut,

sitting in the train... got here unusually early... Yet still... Time flies... especially when you fly to time square for a weekend...I was recently spoiled with a quick surprise New-York City trip, and we missed the plane coming back... time really flies... you'll soon be able to read more details on my MAD-Voyages blog...

I have not written here in a long time so I wanted to leave you a quick trace as I was preparing to write about my NYC trip... I think I'll try to change my writing habit a bit and see if I can write smaller posts, yet more often...

I could also tell you about some of the reasons why I have not written more recently... I could tell you again about my French blog for which I invest a bit more time now... Or my job causing a virtual slowdown... Or my new passion for Open Mic Nights... But if I start in any of those directions, I won't be able to make this a quick post... Anyway, I already talked about those things already... So I'll stop here... For now... ;-)

See you soon!!!

And HAVE FUN!

BYE
MAD the busy bee...

P.S.: Ho... and I turned 43 yesterday...

P.P.S.: Time really flies!!! :-O

Madly MAD -> MADeries en Français

Salut,

just to let you know that I started writing a little more on my French blog... In case you would be interested... http://madecoste.blogspot.com... Enjoy...

And don't worry... I will continue to write to this blog here... Once in a while...

BYE
MAD

LonelyMAD

Sitting in the train... Just leaving the downtown station... Going back home early (for a Monday) because the mother of my kids needed me to take care of them tonight. She has some sort of activity tonight and after my trip to Mexico a few weeks ago, I owe her a few nights anyway... And since I totally forgot about this, I accepted an invitation to a Creators Club meeting tonight... I fortunately found a baby sitter to take over just before the kids get to bed, because we always have trouble finding time where all members of the club are available... And it would be sad to miss it, it's a very interesting part of my artistic life...

Anyway, this is why I'm in a train so early today... a Monday... And actually, in a train at all, since I usually take the bus when I have the opportunity to work later to compensate for the nights where I go home early to pick up the kids (guess I'll have to find some other time to compensate this week, most probably when the kids are asleep on Wednesday and Thursday, since tomorrow night, is Open Mike Night ;-)... And this is because the trains to my place don't run very late... This is why I usually take the bus if I don't have to go pickup the kids...

So... When I stepped out of the train this morning, after I finished reading the “Last Lecture”, I couldn't help thinking about where my life is going these days... And I felt lonely... Not that I'm all alone... I have great kids, many impressive friends, and I also love my job and my co-workers... And this very cute blond I was following out of the train, almost all the way to the office... She took one last turn out of my way and I had to watch her walk away from me without the slightest idea that I was watching her, and finding her beautiful, graceful, attractive, interesting, and all those other qualifiers that should have motivated me to talk to her... But I didn't...

So... Anyway... I'm not alone, but as I say in one of the songs I wrote for the Khrônos album from the band Continuum that I was a part of in the early nineties, you can be “Living a lonely life, while never being alone.” And that's how I feel these days...

But my first reflex is to push back on this feeling, force a smile on my face and move on with my usual laid back, optimist, positive, easy going and (hopefully) funny attitude... But not this morning... As I have been trying not to push back on other feelings these past few years, I realized this morning that it is OK to feel lonely... And I decided to give a name to that part of me that I've been ignoring for too long... LonelyMAD...

As for ParanoMAD (which I also talked about previously), LonelyMAD is an integral part of me... And I also got to realize that MultiMAD suits me very well, and not just for my multiple artistic creation fields (http://www.multimad.com), it also expresses very well my multiple personalities. Again, as I said before about ParanoMAD, I realized one day that I wouldn't be able to shut him up so I learned to live with it. Instead of shutting him up, I learned to control how I react to its whispering...

So today, I decided I would do the same thing with LonelyMAD. Instead of trying to shut him up as I used to do... I will let him express himself, but I need to be careful, and keep a good grasp at how I let my behavior get influenced by its whispers.

Recently, LonelyMAD has pushed me back to the Internet dating game to help me find the love of my life... Though it is possible to find gems there (some people did it), it is far from being a sure thing (as the bar scene, the coffee scene, the sports scene or any other scene where we can meet people are no sure things either)... So I don't have too much hope about it... But it still brings me some satisfaction to just browse, search and make a few attempts... It gives me the false impression that I'm getting closer... Even though... You know... Still... It's a bit comforting in some way... It kind of help me cope with LonelyMAD...

Note that I'm very confident that I'm a very interesting guy (at least for a good proportion of the female population), and there are many very interesting women out there... I sometimes wonder if there are enough that are single to give me the opportunity of meeting one that will be a good fit for me (and I will be a good fit for her) because, in theory, interesting people shouldn't stay single very long... But I've been single for a little while myself now, so there must be a few women in the same situation... We also become more picky with age and experience so we don't rematch so easily, thus stay single a little longer, so there should be a good probability of meeting her... Yet... it's a only probability... we'll see...

Randy Pausch (the author of the Last Lecture), met the love of his life and mother of his children when he was in his late 30s, and he seems like a great man... So I guess I should count myself very lucky to have met a great woman in my early 20s and have 2 great kids with her even though it didn't work out to be the love of my life... I'm only in my early 40s... I still have a lot of time to meet the love of my life... Unlike others who didn't even live to turn 40, or 50, or 60, or whatever... You know what I mean...

So I would like to finish this post by thanking Randolph Pausch for sharing his great life experience with us, even though he didn't get to turn 50, and didn't get to see his kids grow to teenage... Still... he will inspire many of us now, and generations to come, to live a great life... Whether we find true love... or not...

BYE
MAD
P.S.; Don't worry about me... I'm still HAVING FUN!!! ;-)
P.P.S.: Just feeling a little lonely, that's all...

What am I up to?

sitting in the train... Typing the date and realizing it is April fools day today... I could have used this to tell you a ridiculously foolish and incredible story... But you probably wouldn't have noticed since I already feel ridiculously foolish and incredible in my day to day life... So I will stick to my original idea and tell you about what I am up to these days...

Last night was another interesting Open Mic Night at the Arts Café... we had a lot of fun and I even got one of my university buddies to join in for the first time and he came to play the piano and sing one of the songs he wrote... It was a lot of fun... And I think that this is what life is all about... Having a lot of fun... I told about the three laws of the meaning of life in a previous post, and the 3rd is about having fun... as long as we don't break the second law which is to be kind and even help those around us as long as we don't break the first law which is to be kind and even help the generations to come... as much as we can... of course... because we don't all have the same skill set and energy to save the world, but we should still all do our part...

Freud (and many others actually), have concluded that there two main driving forces that help us make decisions: Pleasure and Pain... We want to avoid pain, because we must survive, and if our ancestors were not driven by the will to survive, I wouldn't be here, sitting in this train, writing this post and you wouldn't be there (wherever you are), reading it... And pleasure... well... we all know how good it is... And the main one, is the pleasure of sex so that we can reproduce... and again... Just imagine if our ancestors wouldn't have done it... right?
So to survive in a pleasant way, we still need to go through some pain (that some of us may find more painful than others), do the grocery, cook, wash the dishes, go shopping, do some renovation, cleanup the house, pay our bills, go to work, drive the kids to social activities (whether they do sports or arts), etc... etc... But we must also leave some room in this busy schedule for our own little pleasures (and not just the one driven by our reproductive glands, whether we take care of it alone, or with a loved one), spend some time with friends, have a drink, sing a song, play games, do some sport, go see a movie, a concert, any kind of show, read a book, write a poem, etc...

Now that doesn't tell you much about what I am up to these days... Well... a little bit... cause if you know me a bit by now, you know that I live through my words... I practice what I preach...

So I go through those little pains that are worth suffering to better enjoy a pleasant survival, like the grocery, cooking, washing the dishes, cleaning up the house and driving the kids around... Note that I didn't put going to work in there... Not that I quit my job (though it would have made an interesting April fools joke :-), but must I admit, I'm lucky enough to enjoy my job and it is actually a pleasure to go to work. So once the choirs are done and the kids are happy (I also admit that having them just half the time helps a little bit, though that "only half the time" I have them, I have to take care of them alone, so I guess it evens out a little bit), I then have some time for myself... So what do I do with it? What am I up to?

As I wrote in my first post on my French blog MADeries, deciding what we do with our time, is the only decision we need to (and can) take... As I said above, we are driven by pain and pleasure, but only to take this crucial decision: "what do I do with my time?"... Time is interesting... Because it is limited, though most of us don't really know how much we have left... Time can NOT be stopped or slowed down (unfortunately), though we can get the impression that its speed varies sometimes (gee... my train is almost at its destination now... Wow... time flies...)... And... of course... we can't go back in time... Too bad... it's done... asta la vista baby...

So what do I do with my time these days... well... music started taking a bit more of my time... I love to go to these Open Mic Tuesday nights (a good thing they are on Tuesdays, I "almost" never have my kids on tuesday nights)... I also need to finish composing the music to go with my Novel... I recently needed to move my music to a new WEB site because I used to have (music.download.com) has closed. So while you are here, note that you can now access my music on Last.fm (I also moved the music of Continuum there). I also took this opportunity to update the Music section of MultiMAD.com.

Ho... and I also wanted to tell you that I have been cheating on you again... Well.. at least... I had given you an early warning... I spend quite a lot of time writing on my vacations blog (in French, sorry, it's very nice language though, you should try to learn it if you don't already know it :-). And of course, uploading, tagging and adding legends to all the 338 photos that I found good enough from the roughly 800 photos I took during my trip to Mexico with GG.

And, of course, I have been continuing my quest for the ultimate pleasure, the one for which we would accept to suffer all the pains of this world... LOVE!!! I have not found it yet, I don't even have a solid prospect... That new book I was exploring is not very responsive, so I get the feeling that she is not as interested in turning my pages to discover me more and I am about her... I'm toying with the idea to push her a little harder to open herself to me... But then again, it might be better for me to put her back on the shelf and browse for other books... More open... Closer... More interested... and yet very interesting... we'll see...

To be continued...

BYE
MAD
P.S.: Never, ever, forget to have fun!!! :-)