Valentine's day greeting

There is reason to be grateful.
God, thank you for putting me here, precisely in this place, in this body, with these thoughts.Thank you for the variety of things to eat, do and think about. Thank you for my friends who are there for me at various points of time, for whom I may be there when they want company. Thank you for all the fun and laughter. Often I am assailed by negative thoughts, self-doubts, bouts of jealousy and great insecurity as to what I am worth, what the future will bring and whether I shall succeed in the things I take up. Teach me to look to you at such times and not curse what I have.

Thank you for the steadying instance that is home, where there is kindness even in the routine struggles of everyday life. Please give my mother, my grandmother, my father and my brother all that they need to live well. My cousin in India is somebody I do not know well, but she has good things in her life. Help her to maintain these. Teach me how to nurture a home one day. Please bring love into my life, in my manner, in my sight and in the form of a man. Help me lose the urge to control situations.

Happy Valelntine's Day.

Pointers in C for Carroll

There is this neat analogy to pointers in "Through The Looking Glass":

The name of the song is called Haddock's Eyes
The song's name really is The Aged Aged Man
The song is called Ways And Means
The song is A-Sitting-On-A-Gate

Assume that "The song is called..." means the same thing as "The song's name really is...", and there you have the perfect mnemonic to remember pointers... if you like the stories of Alice.

Braking mad

The other day I woke up from bed feeling fantastic. The sun was shining and instead of being woken by the alarm I had heard a bird's chirping first thing in the morning. I decided to translate the feeling of well-being to the clothes I was going to wear, and noting that it was not too cold a day, pulled out a short skirt and tights.

On wearing these I looked at my reflection and suddenly had an inspiration. Women's clothing can be... interesting, depending on how well it is padded from underneath. So I began to surf the net to learn more, and by chance stumbled upon the following article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,388668,00.html

This was such a nice and humorous read that I continued combing the internet for similar articles and I eventually came across
http://www.007b.com/why_wear_bras.php

and then: http://kerryg.hubpages.com/hub/Why-I-Go-Bra-Free

This was enough support for me. I removed the constraining piece of clothing and was free. I had started out wanting to find out how to enhance the appearance of those dear little friends, and I found that I wanted to do an experiment.
So I spent a couple of days without a bra. Usually I wear comfortable, non-underwired, non-padded models. I thought my bras were comfortable, but my experiment proved me wrong. Three days of no bra followed by a day of wearing one, as I had been used to it before, showed me that I actually do not need one. The pressure to wear these bits of cloth has been around right since I was in seventh grade and practically all my classmates wore one, to the extent that I used to feel incomplete without one. Thanks to a conversation with a friend about this in the recent past I decided to look into the matter more closely.

To all those reading this, please gain some awareness on the issue and get a solid opinion on it.