Buddhafied

Beauty within

I got a very unexpected email from someone last week.

When I was still back in school, I got my first client as a freelance graphic designer for a company in the gay community. They basically gave me a chance to skill up while getting paid. The general manager there, Norm (not real name) is a little weird and slightly flirtatious, but he respected me and my work a lot, so we always have a very good working relationship. A few years back, when I was still single, he would even invite me over along with a few other guys who don't have family in town for Thanksgiving dinner. I was never too close to him, but we kept in touch.

About four months ago, I got a voice message from Norm one day:

This is Norm. I know I am supposed to forward you some stuff today, but I am in shocked right now... I've had a very emotional week and really can't handle it right now... ooh I'm just not feeling good. I will try to get you information maybe after the weekend.

He sounded very worried and shattered on the message. I thought it might have something to do with his family or personal issue, so I didn't want to call him back to disturb him. I never got a call from him the following week, and a week later, I got an email from a guy letting me know that he will be my point of contact at least for a while because Norm had gone to rehab.

I can't say I was shocked, knowing that Norm was deeply involved in the gay community where drug and alcoholic addiction is a common thing. I used to hear rumors that he was doing drugs, but again, so many people do it in the community that as long as they don't push it on me, I couldn't careless.

A few months have passed. I've been working well with the new management team at the company. They told me that Norm will no longer come back. I didn't ask them why as I don't want to be nosey. I contacted a few people and they don't have more news to tell me what's going on, so I just left it at that. When I was just about to think I'll never hear from Norm again, I got an email from him last Thursday subjected "Connections":

Scott and Cleo

I stole this from my friend, Greg's blog.

So, this little tag cloud summarized all the keywords that I used on my blog. I was totally expecting that the most used words will be something completely inappropriate, but luckily, it only analysis the more recent posts, which I happened to type a lot about Buddhism. I love how the words "just everything Buddhism" all showed in one line.

Going through this, I realized I haven't talked about my boyfriend and my dog enough, so for the remaining of this post, I'm going to start all my paragraphs with Scott and end it with Cleo... starting... now:

• Scott and I are planning to go to Anaheim! Since I have a trade show at Anaheim late February, we decided to go to take a small vacation trip there because my flight will be already paid for by my company. Five years ago, when I went to the same trade show, I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to go to Disneyland with someone that I love. Instead, my virgin Disneyland experiences was taken away by my co-workers which proved that Disneyland is only the happiest place on earth when your boss is not there watching you screaming like a school girl when you're on a ride. We've just booked our flights today and hoping to get a good hotel for free using our Airmiles points. If you have one that can recommend to us please let us know. Now we just need to arrange stay over for the dog, who will probably hate us when we pick her up after 10 days. Poor Cleo.

• Scott and our friends are training for the Sun Run lately. The Sun Run is basically a 10 kilometer run in the Spring. It is the the largest 10 k race in the world. I have been involved with it through work for the past few years and my best year so far was finishing at 58 minutes. It's always a good reason for me to go out and do some outdoors activities (I sometimes try to argue that my FFXI character also do a lot of running, but Scott doesn't find that amusing at all... talking about that, my Dark Knight is at level 58! w00t!). It's great that I don't have to do it alone this year. We are training on a weekly incremental basis. I am looking forward to see the dehydration faces of the guys when they start having to run 15 minutes non-stop. Maybe they'll be so tired to stand that they'll have to sit on the floor with Cleo.

• Scottish actor Gerald Butler is sooooo cute. At times, even more so than Cleo.