The weather in the evenings has been so beautiful lately. The sun takes its time going down, and there is a cool, fresh quality about the air...maybe from the plants rejoicing in the cooler weather of this month.

I do not think I can stay in Thailand for much longer. I enjoy the culture, and I love the place, but I cannot live life as one long extended hang out phase. I need more meaning in life.

Now that I am thinking of moving, I think perhaps it is time to buy a new camera. Besides being pretty beat up and not functioning so well, my camera has joined the multitudes of cameras that make people look bad in pictures. I can't stand that. I think people are so lovely...but most cameras do not do them justice, and some cameras should be locked up forever - like mine. Now that I have saved up money - that was the only thing I ever really thought of saving up a whole lot of money for - a really good SL camera...like a Nikon D70 or 80...(the only thing I've ever really wanted to be rich for is to visit the people I love who are scattered around the world)...maybe I will go out and buy a camera. But maybe it won't be an SL after all...I don't want to deplete my savings. I just want a camera that makes people look nice...as close to real life as possible - and that captures the beauty of color. And maybe now I think compactness is a factor to look for. I used to like photography enough to carry a really cumbersome camera around for good shots, but now I just want a camera with good features where you can adjust lighting and have several modes but that isn't huge...

I think I get on the Internet way too much. I am thinking that maybe I need a project...so that whenever I think of getting on the Internet, I work on this thing instead. In a month or so, instead of hours wasted online, I'll have something beautiful to show for my time. :-)

I think that probably I will struggle with depression all my life. I guess it has something to do with openness and sensitivity to beauty...because then you filter less...leaving the door wide open to take in beauty also means a lot of other things steal in too...and you're just as sensitive to the things that are not beautiful in life.

I freak out when I think about change...like people aging. Maybe that's why I want a camera to capture the beauty of the moment...how a person looks just at this point in life. Oh, the next moments will be beautiful in their own way, but I hate to think about change...enough that sometimes I think I would rather die now than live to see it. If only I could realize - the things we no longer have when we are in heaven...will be replaced with things infinitely greater. But I have trouble imagining infinitely greater - so maybe C.S. Lewis was right to write about things just a bit greater than what we know here on earth, so that we could catch a glimpse of what heaven might be like (rather than having to imagine something beyond our imagination and rely on logic).

I wonder if I will ever feel grown up. Somehow I doubt it. I thought I'd feel grown up three years ago, at twenty - and I still do not now. Maybe that is actually the case for most people (like some song I heard last week, "You're not the only one who feels like the only one..."). But then, feeling grown up and feeling old are not the same. I felt old a long time ago. Maybe it is when I actually grow old that I will feel young - because then, I will have been exposed to so much that much of it won't matter anymore. That is perhaps when we recover the spirit of youth...the bliss of ignorance, or perhaps in this case, informed ignorance. How much do most things really matter? Not THAT much; in the light of eternity only some things stand the test of time.

I think life is like a bell curve. During the first twenty years or so, things matter more and more to our conscious mind as we age. (I think it's the reverse for the subconscious...for the first few years of our lives, what is ingrained in our subconscious is going to affect us the most for the rest of our lives.) Then for the next 40 or so we learn to let things matter less, and maybe the last 20 we start to return to the state we were born in (never completely, and not in the same way...but: "I have LEARNED one thing - that I know nothing.").