Orkeed

Privacy is a big thing these days. Everyone keeps very much to themselves and, as a result, we often do not even know who our neighbors are. We drive straight into our garages , shut the door, and go inside without any interaction with those who may be outside. It is not that we do not like people; we just want and value our privacy. Home is our refuge away from the rest of the world. One area of the house that largely affects that need for seclusion is the windows. Big panes of clear glass, windows can allow just about anyone walking by to see inside. If your current window treatments are just not cutting it there are a few things that you can do.
Some types of sheer or lightweight shades may seem effective during the day; however at night, when the lights are turned on, your house becomes a fish bowl for anyone in the neighborhood to see in. Shades are very effective at reducing the amount of uv rays that come into your home so do not rule them out completely. Because they come in a variety of styles and fabrics, choosing something in a darker, thicker material would go further to maintaining your privacy. For an even more effective way to ensure your privacy, consider wood blinds . They allow zero visibility from the outside when the slats are closed and restricted visibility when they are open. They also create a very classy yet simple look.
In an age where identity theft is not a matter of if but when it is no wonder we hold on so tightly to our privacy. As we attempt to create a safe, protected environment for our families the fabric we put on our windows can often make all of the difference.

This would be a suggestion for a nice romantic getaway.  Going to another country is always the perfect way to make things more interesting.  For one thing, there’s a pressure that gets taken away.  In a new place, there are many expectations that tend to follow us around that seem unable to cross borders.  This is very good news, especially for people who are typically nervous.  Wanting to know outcomes is a sign of an anxious personality, and traveling in new lands always means giving up this need to know, and it’s a great way to learn how to give into the flow of it all.

That’s something that’s also a good lesson for romance, because when you’re with another person, sometimes it does feel like a foreign country.  There’s no way of knowing, and no one around to translate.  In Singapore, however, the majority of people speak English, so there’s a chance of being understood, and it’s safer than love, perhaps.

A dinner in an Italian restaurant is always going to be a good move.  There may be two people in the world who don’t like Italian, and even if you’re gluten-free, chances are good that you’ll find something.  This is an important principle in a relationship, to find something you both like.

Another one of the pressures that we lose when we’re traveling has to do less with control, and more with anonymity.  Coming to a place where you’ve never been sometimes suggests that you may never be back, and with that comes a sense that you can probably be as free as you like.  Sometimes we’re not so free because we’re afraid we’ll look silly.  On a vacation, however, it doesn’t matter, and everyone looks silly, so it’s the perfect chance to find out who your partner is again, and have some lovely food.

It could be the first of May.  It could very well be raining.  Dallas is the place where I will have to find something else to do with my time.  It is not a difficult thing, finding things, not in this place.  It might be difficult to settle in on a choice, however.  Every choice looks at first like it must be the best choice, because it is the only choice.  The moments go on, and more choices present themselves, and it’s starting to become apparent that there is no only choice.  Moments like these I will go back to my room, back in my Dallas hotel, and reassess the situation from there.

The room is nice.  There’s space in this room, almost enough to make it look and feel roomy.  This is perhaps just as it should be.  I have my doubts, anyway.  At the end of the day, I always have my doubts.  I have showered and I have also eaten something.  They tell me it is an armadillo and they laugh.  This is probably terribly terribly funny, and when I try to laugh, too, they don’t try to make me laugh any more.  I have been told that my smile is not a pretty thing to look at, and that it’s better if I just refrain.  That advice suits me well.  I would rather be thinking about the rain.

But it is not raining.  It is not raining any more today, nor tomorrow, is what they say.  I still have hope.  This is too much, this weather.  I can’t find my way around when everything is lit.  It is all for the best, because I have no place to go.  Because I have no place to go, I go to the opera, where I might be able to see myself on the stage, telling my story to myself, if it is in French.  It is not in French, it is in Italian.  I am lost, and there is nothing on the stage to remind me of me, and I realize, with sorrow, that I will perhaps never be able to wear buffalo horns.  Such things are not up to me, decided long before I set foot in Dallas, where I am inordinately happy, but not smiling, and not raining.

Coming into Hartford again, and remembering the things that we saw here before.  So much of what I know, and what I have to keep in the palm of my hand, is made up of pieces of things that I cannot explain to anyone.  And only you would understand.  When we were here, it wasn’t that long ago, but it seems like we were too young, and didn’t know anything, and life lived sweetly, in a Hartford hotel, where there was no care in the world, just something that felt like time moving across my wrist…

It was too long ago, and it wasn’t long enough ago, and we were young and older than anyone would have guessed.  I found you here, even though we’d known each other all our lives.  There was a show, there was music, and all our friends told us this was the best club, this was the one where you could move like they do in San Juan, and for a few moments I could see white sand falling from your mouth when you spoke, and the waves were in your eyes.  It’s grey here, greyer than I imagine, the kind of grey that I like, awake in the morning and again just before the light of day goes away…

This is why I can’t imagine Hartford without thinking of that mix of white sand and sun, and the blue of the sky and the water.  Those colors fall over everything, like a dream of Yemaya in her younger version Asesu, calling somewhere beneath the first layer of wave, wearing it like a blanket, while she is peeking into the hearts of her sleeping children to find out why they are still awake.  And I can’t tell her that we are always awake, because we never sleep.

Denver is a place tucked from me or it was. It was a tiny and silent location on a map I never much thought about except if a stranger on the bus in a flurried question and a letter in hand with a half in address on it asked me if I knew the capital of Denver at the six AM bus on the BART. It is an authentic story. Of course this philosopher acquaintance of mine would have something to say about what is authentic or not. Her name is name of another city, Chicago. She said her parents named her that name not because of the musical because both of them disliked musicals, but because her cries sounded so fierce, fierce like the winds that blow in Chicago. She cried a lot as a child, but she was not really, Chicago told me. She was just so frustrated that no one wanted to hear her ideas about what was authentic and what Derrida and Foucault and she had to say about the subject that her anxiety about not being able to articulate herself came out as cries.

Chicago might seem strange but we all are a little strange. Chicago just has bit more than the rest of the people in Denver or any other city. She was a lawyer in that tucked in city, Denver. Lawyers there always had briefcases and fancy fountain pens that came in only the colors black and blue. Chicago did not think the lawyers there chose those colors because those are business colors but because those colors match the bruised skies during the winter when the city is tucked in with snow that has threads of dead branches keeping it together.

She stopped being a lawyer one day, not because she was unhappy, but because she suddenly had an epiphany. She was in the wrong line of work. She remembered she was supposed to be a philosopher when the wind started to howl through the branches of the threading trees. She literally quite her practice that day and started to read Simone de Beauvoir and other people whose names I got difficulty typing. Chicago went to Paris to study the art of philosophy but she always comes home to the city of Denver where she remembered what is was she was supposed to be doing for those thirty years she was a lawyer, and still is. Now she knows the laws of philosophy: she knows that are no laws and that was why she was frustrated as a baby.