[1] Operating Instructions For readers (women in particular) who want to have a baby or are yet to have a baby this book might be insightful and hilariously entertaining. For doctors or to be doctors it has some medical jargon on the side.So go read the first chapter HERE. It's beautiful writing and just incase one of you weirdos wants to buy me something, I will have this. ;-)

[2] What about a Guy's view on the world?

We will begin with a few questions from the Guyness Quotient Quiz to warm up(women may take this quiz too with no observable side effects):

a) You have been seeing a woman for several years. She's attractive and intelligent, and you always enjoy being with her. One leisurely Sunday afternoon the two of you are taking it easy--you're watching a football game; she's reading the papers--when she suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, tells you that she thinks she really loves you, but she can no longer bear the uncertainty of not knowing where your relationship is going. She says she's not asking whether you want to get married; only whether you believe that you have some kind of future together. What do you say?

That you sincerely believe the two of you do have a future, but you don't want to rush it. That although you also have strong feelings for her, you cannot honestly say that you'll be ready anytime soon to make a lasting commitment, and don't want to hurt her by holding out false hope. That you cannot believe the Jets called a draw play on third and seventeen.

b) Okay, so you have decided that you truly love a woman and you want to spend the rest of your life with her--sharing the joys and the sorrows, the triumphs and the tragedies, and all the adventures and opportunities that the world has to offer, come what may. How do you tell her?

You take her to a nice restaurant and tell her after dinner. You take her for a walk on a moonlit beach, and you say her name, and when she turns to you, with the sea breeze blowing her hair and the stars in her eyes, you tell her. Tell her what?

c) One weekday morning your wife wakes up feeling ill and asks you to get your three children ready for school. Your first question to her is:

"Do they need to eat or anything?" "They're in school already?" "There are three of them?"

Women make too much of being difficult to read, try a guy when he is drinking beer and doing his favourite thing(which of course is his next favourite thing after sex). For such wisdom to be able to read a guy's mind and understand him so as to live in peace and harmony click here. Once you get that all you women should consider developing a psychological profile of your mate as explained here.

And if any of this helps, please invite me to your wedding where I will eat all of your wedding cake and laugh hysterically, at you ofcourse!!

        
        Lay down these words
        Before your mind like rocks.
                  placed solid, by hands
        In choice of place, set
        Before the body of the mind
                  in space and time:
        Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
                  riprap of things:
        Cobble of milky way,
                  straying planets,
        These poems, people,
                  lost ponies with
        Dragging saddles --
                  and rocky sure-foot trails.
        The worlds like an endless 
                  four-dimensional
        Game of Go.
                  ants and pebbles
        In the thin loam, each rock a word
                  a creek-washed stone
        Granite: ingrained
                  with torment of fire and weight
        Crystal and sediment linked hot
                  all change, in thoughts,
        As well as things.

Even though I don't agree fully with what Wendell Berry says, I thought the following few questions and answers were somehow relevant to me.

Fisher-Smith: Many people who would agree with you in principle don't have the benefit of what you were born into, this ancestral relationship with a place. They find themselves living far from where their ancestors are buried, in unfamiliar land that they didn't grow up with, and don't know much about. How would you advise them to begin deepening their relationship with place?

Berry: Well, I think that I would give the same advice as Gary Snyder. Stop somewhere! Because you can't recover what's lost. There's no going back to get it. You just have to start again, and I think what people have to experience--have to let themselves experience--is the knowledge and understanding and even happiness that come with long association with people and places and kinds of work.

Of course, along with those enrichments there are griefs and worries too. As you learn what's involved in a place, or in a personal relationship, or a kind of work, you come to understand the dangers, the shortcomings, the damages that already have been inflicted, and so on. And if you stay in a place and make connections, make relationships, you experience losses that are difficult to bear.

What we're really talking about is faith, the faith being that if you make a commitment, and hang on until death, there are rewards. The rewards come. Nobody has ever said that this was easy to do, but I think that everybody who has done it has done it out of this faith that there are rewards. My experience suggests very powerfully to me that there are rewards.

Fisher-Smith: The phrase you just used, "make a commitment and hang on until death," reminds me of marriage. Something like half of all American marriages will fail, and forty percent of all adults are single now. That's a larger proportion than any time in this century. Is there a relationship between the present failure rate in marriages and families, and the failure to form a sustainable human relationship with the land?

Berry: As I see it, there is. People pursue perfection, and I suppose that's a thing that humans have a duty to do, in a way. But there's a tendency now to misunderstand this obligation to pursue perfection as a right to be perfect, to have perfection given to you. And so people enter into their relationships with one another and with their places with the idea that they have a right to expect those places and those people and those connections to be perfect, and then when imperfection appears, as it inevitably does, they feel that they have a right to be offended, and they don't see the arrogance and the condescension in that.

It's not up to the other people and the places and the relationships to be perfect. It's up to every participant to make the relationship and the place and the other person as perfect as possible. We don't have a right to give up on our choices and our places and, indeed, our cultural inheritance because it's not perfect. We don't deserve that they should be perfect. We have an obligation to make them perfect, if we can.

Fisher-Smith: Is this expectation of perfection in one's marital partner and in one's land, a form of narcissism?

Berry: Well, you expect the thing you have to be a perfect replica of the thing you desire. I suppose there's some narcissism in that. It also is condescending and arrogant.

Fisher-Smith: ...and childlike, in a way?

Berry: Very childlike, and it results in childish disappointment and frustration. The other thing is much more difficult because to submit to the job of making perfect a relationship or place or another person means that you must submit to correction yourself. You must submit to the agony of being made perfect yourself, and that's terrifying and extremely difficult. It means you have to face failure over and over again--to realize that you never will really succeed, but this is the necessary work of the world.

Fisher-Smith: Which is?

Berry: To take what we've got and make it better.

Click for full Interview