When Stars Connive with Ellen

Sofia Vergara

Dennis Quaid

Paris Hilton

Jennifer Aniston

David Beckham

Have fun!

Letting Go of Unfit Things

Well, being crazy sometimes can bring you a lot of things in your mind.

* Let go of the approval of others. Be yourself. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. Display the image that imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

* Let go of anger and resentment. I have been trying to be forgiving and yet there were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me, even now. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in but it was cancer. It ate me and sent me to oblivion.

* Let go of the idea of a perfect partner. Throw away those standards you have. Find the person that you can love with all of your heart, not with the conditional preferences you have. One that you feel most comfortable with and accepts you as who you are; because not falling DEEPLY in love is like living no life. Falling in love is like getting hit by a truck and yet you're still alive. You're just sick to your stomach or some even call it butterflies. You become high one minute, low the next; starving hungry but unable to eat. hot, cold, forever horny, full of hope and enthusiasm, with momentary depressions that wipe you out. It is also not being able to remove the smile from your face, loving life with a mad passionate intensity, and feeling ten years younger. Love does not appear with any warning signs. You fall into it as if pushed from a high diving board. No time to think about what's happening. It's inevitable. An event you can't control. A crazy, heart-stopping, roller-coaster ride that just has to take its course. You can't expect something like that from your checklist.

* Let go of the "perfect life." There is no perfect life. Life is what you make it. No matter what happens, you will eventually mess things up (who hasn't?); but at least you have free will and get to decide how you would mess it up, right? Make friends; but remember, people come and go. Be thankful to the ones who will stay with you through everything, they're your true best friends. Don't ever let go of them. Find your love; and they come and go too (trust me, most of them will.); but don't give up. You will find that one. It won't be called absolute happiness to find the half who makes you whole if you haven't struggled to look for him/her. Just because you failed once, doesn't mean you're going to fail at everything else. Believe in yourself because if not, who will then?

* Let go of the obsession of getting rich. I do not mean disregarding a realistic goal of exhaling yourself from monetary problems, but to stop letting money be your sole motivator. Appreciate the life you live and be grateful to every thing/person you have. Live each day by having daily goals in life and life long goals to hope for tomorrow.

* Let go of excuses and procrastination. Live in the present and get your shit done when it needs to be done. Maximize your time to the best of your ability. Complete each task as soon as you can. This allows you to feel free from worry and stress by getting out of things as soon as possible. The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can't achieve it.

* Let go of your baggage. We've all been hurt one time or another by someone we loved, or we thought we've received love. Carrying this to future relationships will only be disastrous. The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward. It is important that we forgive ourselves for making mistakes. We need to learn from our errors and move on because we were never in control anyway.

* Let go of expectations. If you expect nothing from anything and anybody, you're never disappointed. We always believe that we accept the love we think we deserve. Unfortunately, people and things around us will eventually mess up. If you spend your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, you would forget who you really are; that the face you showed to the world was just a mask and beneath it was nothing but nothingness. 

* Let go of insecurity and being judgmental. Why do we need to constantly worry about what is going on in other people's lives? Minding our own business would mean our lives being more meaningful. Besides, you won't be needing insecurity to be judgmental. Heck, you've had a share of pains and all but you made it through. You already have huge balls but at least you've been humbled and that will make you grateful for everyday you have; and I promise you it doesn’t even matter for others what you believe, how you live your life and how strongly you become for others. Somebody else, somewhere, thinks you are in the wrong. Somebody else, somewhere, thinks your beliefs are senseless or illogical. Somebody else, somewhere, thinks you have it all wrong. In fact, there are a lot of people in this world who do.

* Let go of Negativity. What you put out into universe will come back for you. Change that way of thinking and be grateful for everything you have and you will have more. Concentrating on what you do not have will never have enough. Keep your face toward the sunshine and shadows will fall behind you. Just like what Mahatma Gandhi have taught us, "Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny."

Paulo Coelho's Like the Flowing River

A boy was watching his grandmother write a letter. At one point he asked: "Are you writing a story about what we've done? Is it a story about me?" His grandmother stopped writing her letter and said to her grandson: "I am writing about you, actually, but more important than the words is the pencil I’m using. I hope you will be like this pencil when you grow up." Intrigued, the boy looked at the pencil. It didn't seem very special. "But it’s just like any other pencil I've ever seen!" 

"That depends on how you look at things. It has five qualities which, if you manage to hang on them, will make you a person who is always at peace with the world." 

"First, you are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand God, and He always guides us according to His will." 

"Second: now and then, I have to stop writing and use a sharpener. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, he’s much sharper. So you, too, must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because they will make you a better person." 

"Third, the pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps to keep us on the road to justice." 

"Fourth: what really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So always pay attention to what is happening inside you." 

"Finally, the pencil’s fifth quality: it always leaves a mark. in just the same way, you should know that everything you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in your every action."

en paix avec le monde.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Last night, I couldn't get myself to sleep since my energy was still on high with all of the things I have been doing during the day. I had a flight-roamed around-talked-roamed around-talked-flight. So, I bumped (not exactly bumped) into HBO with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

It is a very quirky feel-good romantic comedy that offers not only the cliche of romance but with a satisfying and surprising offbeat realization of life. It's a story of Britain's leading fisheries expert, Dr. Fred Jones (played by Ewan McGregor) is approached by a consultant, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (played by Emily Blunt, a favorite) to help realize Sheikh Muhammed (played by Amr Waked) vision of bringing the sport of fly-fishing in the desert, he immediately thinks the project is both absurd and unachievable. But when the Prime Minister's overzealous press secretary, Patricia Maxwell (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) latches on to it as a "goodwill" story, the project seemed to have had a boost with the aide of the British government. As the desert is irrigated, so romance blooms, the salmon of love leaps in the river of emotion.

Alfred Jones, the fisheries expert at the center of "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen," faces challenges that are widely common for us. Jones has been going with the flow with his life and is afraid to take chances and a leap of faith. Though he's played by the effortlessly charming Ewan McGregor, Jones is as nearly as cold-blooded as the fish he studies.

His relationship with his wife, Mary Jones (played by Rachael Stirling), a sharp finance expert, never felt the conjugal bliss they have as a married couple and only saw it as a routine. It also seemed funny that when they made apathetic love, she made it look like Fred needed a certain amount of milk to nourish him or something saying, "That should do you for a while." Fred is like one of P.G. Wodehouse's characters, overmatched by life. "I don't know anyone who goes to church anymore," he says wistfully. "On Sundays we go to Target." (This really made me furious.)

Making this young fogey a viable romantic figure is the film's challenge and they overcame it along the story gracefully. Luckily, there is a clever screenwriter ("Slumdog Millionaire" Oscar winner Simon Beaufoy), a warm-spirited director ("Chocolat's" Lasse Hallström) and a favorite of mine and brilliant co-star (Emily Blunt) to lend a hand.

He is netted out of his government desk job by a bizarre research request. A sheikh wants to stock the Yemen River with North Atlantic salmon. The government, desperate for a positive human interest news story out of the Middle East, appoints Fred to the task. Fred's slow development and change of heart in the story was a struggle. As a viewer, you can actually feel the exhaustion with Fred being narrow with the idea and his absence of faith, and it's agreeable nonetheless.

The idea was "theoretically possible" just like "the theory of the manned mission on Mars was possible." At first, Fred did not have an interest or even a pinch of assuagement in working alongside the sheik's attaché, Harriet (Blunt), a lovely English rose with soulful eyes and a snippy sense of humor. For her part, she wonders whether Fred has Asperger's. But under the desert sun, a romance that looks fundamentally unfeasible becomes theoretically possible.

Kristin Scott Thomas proves herself a grand comedienne as the prime minister's press secretary who hatches the scheme, a tart, caustic conniver of imperial self-confidence. She is the sort of woman who could pick up her phone and have a hurricane canceled. She may be the scariest, funniest, most nuanced comic villainess since Meryl Streep wore Prada.

There are clever ideas in the film, like Fred's heart-to-heart talks with the koi imprisoned in his back-yard pond. And faith and the power of believing. The movie had so many contemplative and touching lines that you could actually feel the subtle weight of the movie and it actually felt good. The movie gave its purpose without actually giving the audience a hard time. While "Salmon Fishing" fritters away the comic momentum of its madcap opening chapters, it's like angling -- a pleasant diversion if you can look below the surface and muster the patience to appreciate it.

“Then in a moment, in that vast space of rocks and sky and scorching sun, I understood that he had not meant religious faith, not exactly. He was not urging me to become a Muslim or to believe in one interpretation of God rather than another. He knew me for what I was, an old, cold, cautious scientist. That was what I was then. And he was simply pointing out to me the first step to take. The word he had used was faith, but what he meant was belief. The first step was simple: it was to believe in belief itself. I had just taken that step. At long last I understood.

I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the first step away from a world which only recognised what it could count, measure, sell or buy. The people here still had that innocent power of belief: not the angry denial of other people’s belief of religious fanatics, but a quiet affirmation. That was what I sensed here, in this land and in this place, which made it so different from home. It was not the clothes, not the language, not the customs, not the sense of being in another century. It was none of these. It was the pervading presence of belief.

I believed in belief. I didn’t exactly feel as if I was on the road to Damascus, and I was aware I could not think straight because of the power of the sun, but now I knew what the Yemen salmon project was all about. It had already worked its transformation on me. It would do the same for others.”  -- Paul Torday, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Fave Men's Fashion Spring/Summer Collection 2014

The looks I loved during the Paris/Milan Fashion Week for Spring/Summer Collection of 2014.

Hermes. The Bohemian Soul - Hermes' creative director Veronique Nichanian took the French house' man in a relaxed style. Showcasing the hues of blues and silver with construction of simple articles of boat neck tees and unstructured blazers.

　



The House of Versace. Collaboration of Audacious and Versace - A mix of Versace's classics and the whim of modern man who loves to experiment.

 

 

Salvatore Ferragamo. Ferragamo Revision (Themes of Classical Antiquity) - merged with the references of 1930's for Massimiliano Giornetti's spring/summer 2014 for the Italian label. Circling around sports prowess and leisure of colors. Collection includes semi-structured coats, minimally fastened jackets, and available shorts.