and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

I had a long hard talk the other night about empowerment, emancipation, feminism, foreplay, sports, image, society's evolutionary directionals, racism, and all other things generally difficult to speak of without getting a little personal.

Luckily there was no blood boiling that night.

But regardless the whole thing irked me and I had to ask myself what the point was. Why were we talking about it? What did we really think the outcome was going to be? After all, solving world hunger we were not.

This, combined with my own crippling hunger on my ride home, was annoying.

This morning I opened my inbox with the expectant click that I always do. Whoops. Not what I was expecting. Somehow, every day, I manage to convince myself time and time again that it'll come, some message or sign or note. A memo even. A TPS report. I don't know why. Hope springs eternal? Perhaps. I am, maybe, too tired to care.. but I still check anyway since it's a matter of great importance - a matter so monumental in it's fleetingness that it decides the very fabric of my daily life - whether I leave my proverbial home through the front door every morning or sneak out the back, whether I see the world through a grey or purple filter, whether I believe.

Belief, you see, does not spring eternal. It doesn't have the childish faith of hope. Hope is belief suspended.

A good friend emailed me the other day and asked "Are you still alive?" and I said yes, Ross, yes I am. I was glad he asked though. Hope and belief are, afterall, two different things. I'm still alive and though I replied to his email with a rundown of my recent activities I wasn't thinking nearly as much about the words that I was typing as I was about the words that he had told me last time I had seen him, which were that I should forget.

Forgiveness, however, must come before the forget and I'm still struggling with that first one. Forgiveness isn't my forte. It's an elusive beast I manage to tame only when I feel there is true regret. Regret is belief as apology is to hope.

And in the end apologies are only words, as thin as the paper they are written on, as filling as ribbon candy in an ice castle, like hope they are fleeting and cheap.

Regret, conversely, is a heaviness of syrup and molasses, a saucy emoticon of remorseful delight. A hearty meal, indeed.