Because with that timeless beauty and sophistication, you look like a character out of the world of Scott F. Fitzgerald. And since we are fantastically successful in mastering our New Year's resolution of FOCUS, Tender is the night will provide the romance until we reap equal victories in the area of LOVE.

He seemed kind and charming - his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities. /.../

"I was watching you," he said, and she knew he meant it. "we've grown very fond of you."
"I fell in love with you the first time I saw you," she said quietly. He pretended not to have heard, as if the compliment were purely formal. /.../

She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret. /.../

When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds' wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her. She felt wildly happy, felt the warm sap of emotion being pumped through her body. /.../

Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipine your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you. /.../

Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover.

Because it looks like you have a Holy Bible-shaped lighter, hanging out at Sundance and behind your hazel eyes is a mind that think thoughts rarely thought. And because your aura is all-over bad-ass.

Because our new favourite expression is blue-sky thinking.

The conclusion at last appears. I guess that, I over-reacted.
But, no. In our world, the term is: lover-reacted.

It is fascinating how an inadequate language still manages to explain a lot of things with a single tap on the key board.

Ah, because between boyfriends is the new single. And because dark, medium-length hair and nice guys are the best.

Because you look like a modern day, drummer hippie who gives us good vibrations. And because a Chinese girl who sat next to our brother on the plane and ended up celebrating Christmas with us gave mother a book: A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. Our mom disregarded it as mumbo jumbo and the paperback ended up in our loving hands. We are unsure of what to make of Tolle himself, but he does bring forward some worthy ideas:

Whatever you do, to ensure a positive "vibrational frequency of consciousness" you should make sure that you are in one of the following states: acceptance, enjoyment or enthusiasm. "If you can neither enjoy or bring acceptance to what you do - stop. Otherwise, you are not taking responsibility for, which also happens to be the one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness."

"Unlike stress, enthusiasm has a high frequency and so resonates with the creative power of the universe. This is why Ralph Waldo Emerson said that, "Nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm." The word enthusiasm comes from ancient Greek - en and theos, meaning God. And the related word enthousiazein means "to be possessed by a god."

The book is really about not minding what happens, acknowledging that the good that already is in your life is the foundation for all abundance, that you cannot lose something that you are and that our main purpose in life is to be and do whatever we are right now. There is no such thing as becoming successful. You can only be successful, by being one with life and being one with now. "You then realize that you don't live life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance." Amen.

Let's dance.

Because we do have a thing for Russians. And it is fascinating to walk around the Met and find pretty boys from the late eighteen hundreds. This man is called Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin and apparently liked double figures, born in 1955 and died 33-years-old in 1888, by throwing himself down a stairwell. Before that this handsome author ("published approximately twenty stories, many of which powerfully express his pacifist beliefs, his love of beauty, and his aversion to evil") was turned into oil on canvas by Ilia Efimovich Repin.

And because this makes us think of fellow country man of his, a charming character from Philip Roth's My Life As A Man, who we most ceratainly would like to get to know better. "Agniashvily, an elderly Russian émigré who wrote original "Ribald Classics" (in Georgian, and translated into English for the class by his stepson, a restauranteur by trade) aimed at the Playboy "market"..."

The same book also includes a wonderful piece of advice:
"I wanted to hang a sign over my desk saying ANYONE IN THIS CLASS CAUGHT USING HIS IMAGINATION WILL BE SHOT. I would put it more gently when, in the parental sense, I lectured them. "You just cannot deliver up fantasies and call that 'fiction.' Ground your stories in what you know. Stick to that. Otherwise you tend, some of you, toward the pipe dream and the nightmare, toward the grandiose and the romantic - and that's no good."