What I've learned since moving to D.C. (some of which should be obvious): 0103

5101.  The spicy oxtail stew (i.e., oxtail, habanero, tomato, thyme, scallion & basmati rice) at Compass Rose (CompassRoseDC.com) in D.C. is pretty tasty too;

5102.  (Grilled) duck hearts remind me of sausage;

5103.  Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641;

5104.  At least 700 black soldiers served at Valley Forge (during the Revolutionary War);

5105.  The Bank of the United States sold bonds in slaves that helped finance roads, levees, canals and railroads;

5106.  Insurance companies sold policies to guarantee the “soundness” of slaves’ bodies;

5107.  Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election with less than 40 percent of the popular vote and without winning a single southern state;

5108.  If you’re craving a (Turkish) simit, try Simit + Smith (SimitAndSmith.com) in Georgetown;

5109.  Happiness doesn’t happen to you.  It’s something you create;

5110.  Action will always bring results.  Sometimes they are results we don’t like and sometimes things still go wrong, but you learn from that;

5111.  The only sure way to change your situation from what it is now to where you want it to be is to take action;

5112.  Doing nothing will always result in nothing happening;

5113.  It’s your life.  If you don’t like something, change it.  No one else will change it for you;

5114.  It’s easier to accept that something is impossible than it is to accept that you need to improve something about yourself;

5115.  Clarity comes in degrees.  And you only need enough light for the next step;

5116.  Waiting feels safe, but waiting kills dreams;

5117.  Watch out for the knockoff ad(vertisement)s on Instagram;

5118.  Apparently, you can depreciate residential real estate (i.e., the house, not the land, which is usually 80% of the purchase price) over 27 ½ years;

5119.  I don’t like mint tea;

5120.  The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise.  A man must be unabashed and expressed in his appreciation for his woman.  Praise her freely;

5121.  Only the masculine side of your woman will grow through challenge.  The feminine side thrives on support and praise;

5122.  Praise always magnifies the quality of your woman that you praise;

5123.  When speaking to your woman, it is always better to call the glass half full than half empty;

5124.  Praise is literal food for feminine qualities.  If you want your woman to grow in her radiance, health, happiness, love, beauty, power and depth, praise these qualities.  Praise them daily, a number of times;

5125.  It is a difficult practice for most men to learn, but you must learn to praise the very qualities you feel are not yet praiseworthy in order for them to become so;

5126.  Intimacy is about growing more than you could by yourself through the art of mutual gifting;

5127.  Just remember that any woman you are with, if she has a feminine sexual essence, will cycle through moods of closure every day which seem to have no “reason” to them.  You cannot avoid this by changing women or waiting for the moods to stop.  You can only develop your skill in serving your woman into openness.  It never ends though, even if you are passionate, fearless, loving and humorous with her;

5128.  90% of a woman’s emotional problems stem from feeling unloved;

5129.  Give her your love.  Walk over to her, look deeply into her eyes, hold her and stroke her, tell her how much you love her, smile, hum her favorite song and dance with her and chances are, her emotional problem will evaporate.  She may still have some situation to deal with and you may be able to help her with that, but the emotional aspect will be converted to love;

5130.  It is a very rare occasion when your analysis of her mood relieves her of it.  Most often, your analysis and attempts to fix her will just piss her off more;

5131.  Give her love through your eyes, touch, movement and tone of voice.  Then and only then, after the connection of love has been made, find out what remains to be talked about;

5132.  As a man, you can learn a lot about yourself by clearly analyzing your problems.  One of the best ways for you to grow is to use your discrimination, feeling what is causing unnecessary pain in your life and then changing whatever you need to change;

5133.  One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy (though not in business or simple friendship) is to be able to relax and surrender knowing that her man is taking care of everything.  Then, she can simply enjoy without having to plan it all herself and tell her man what to do.  She can be pure energy, pure motion and pure love without having to analyze all the options and decide which ones are best.  She can enjoy her man taking responsibility for the direction so she can be what the feminine is: pure energy;

5134.  The masculine chooses a single goal and moves in that direction.  Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction: the feminine energy itself is undirected, but immense, like the wind and deep currents of the ocean, ever changing, beautiful, destructive and the source of life;

5135.  (I can say) I was at Karl Alzner’s 500^th consecutive(, regular-season) NHL game;

5136.  Apples, blackberries, celery and carrots (all) act as natural toothbrushes.  They are fibrous enough to clean teeth, but also can kill bacteria that cause bad breath;

5137.  Any time you try to force your woman to be more like a ship than an ocean, you are negating her feminine energy.  Any time you talk to her and expect her to analyze her mood and situation to the point of being able to fix it, you are talking “masculine” with her.  She can do it, she might even be better at it than you, but it won’t make her a happy woman;

5138.  A happy woman is a woman relaxed in her body and heart: powerful, unpredictable, deep, potentially wild and destructive or calm and serene, but always full of life, surrendered to and moved by the great force of her oceanic heart;

5139.  Women do not become free by analyzing themselves.  They become free by surrendering into love, not your love, their love.  They become free by surrendering to the immense flow of love that is native to their core and allowing their lives to be moved by this force in their heart.  It may involve moments of analysis, but primarily it involves deep trust;

5140.  One of the deepest feminine pleasures is when a man stands full, present and unreactive in the midst of his woman’s emotional storms.  When he stays present with her and loves her through the layers of wildness and closure, then she feels his trust ability and she can relax;

5141.  The way you relate to your woman’s chaos reflects the way you react to the chaos of the world.  If you are the kind of man who needs everything placed neatly in its nice little box, then you will also try to box your woman’s emotions.  If you are the kind of man who would rather hire other people to take care of the chaos in your attic or the chaos of your finances, you would probably also rather leave it to someone else to take care of the chaos of your woman;

5142.  A man abandons responsibility by expecting that his woman will always make her own decisions and then be accountable for the results.  This expectation is a withholding of his masculine gift.  It puts a woman in the position of magnifying her own masculine;

5143.  Your woman asks you for your input and you say, “Whatever you want to do is fine with me.”  This is the statement of a friend not a lover.  As friends, you want to treat each other fairly and give each other space and independence.  As lovers, you and your woman are more than just friends.  You are playing the full dynamic of masculine and feminine polarity.  Wouldn’t you like your woman to be a goddess and offer you her feminine gifts?  To evoke them, you must offer her your masculine gifts.  One of your most valuable masculine gifts is the ability to see all the options and make a decision based on this view of all the potential outcomes;

5144.  Feminine decisions are based on what feels right and often this is the best way to make a decision.  However, the point in intimacy is not simply to make the best decision, but to make the best decision while maintaining the force of masculine/feminine polarity that attracted you together to begin with.  If that polarity begins to diminish, conflicts will begin to increase.  When that polarity disappears, attraction disappears and the life of the intimacy disappears with it;

5145.  You need to play the masculine pole if you want your woman to play the feminine.  Offering your perspective on decisions is one way to give your masculine gift.  Even on the most trivial decisions, never say, “Do whatever you want.”  If she asks you which shoes you think look better on her, make a decision and tell her.  Don’t just say, “They’re both nice.”  Say something like, “I like the red shoes, but what’s most important to me is that you’re happy.”  She is, of course, free to wear whatever shoes she wants, but she is also the recipient of your masculine gift of decisiveness;

5146.  If you refuse to offer your masculine gift by saying things like, “I don’t really care.  It’s up to you,” then she will have to learn to depend on her own masculine capacity.  Another way to say this is that she will begin to trust her own masculine more than yours.  Then, you will find that she trusts you less and less across the board.  She will refuse to surrender to you even sexually because she hasn’t been able to relax and trust you all day; you haven’t offered her your masculine clarity and perspective, so she has to be her own man and give it to herself;

5147.  As a practice, always help your woman make decisions by giving her your perspective and telling her your choices, while letting her know that you love her regardless of the decision she makes;

5148.  If you feel uncomfortable with your attraction to women, you are probably uncomfortable with your own masculine essence.  If you feel it is demeaning for a woman to be the “object” of your polar attraction, then you have probably disowned your masculine core.  You have energetically emasculated yourself by condemning and suppressing your native desires.  You are negating your sexual essence, rather than being at home with it;

5149.  Any negative attitude you have about your attraction to women is a sign of fear; somewhere along the line you learned that such attraction was “bad” or “evil.”  Your attraction to women, all kinds of women, is natural, normal and beautiful;

5150.  Sexual attraction is very different from having sex.  There is a big difference between choosing to be intimate with a woman and simply being attracted to her energy and radiance.  Intimacy is a choice between people who want to commit to loving and serving one another.  Whereas the zing of attraction is a choiceless natural flow of energy between your masculine core and feminine energy, wherever it is found.  When a woman is relaxed in her feminine radiance, she is like beautiful music or a warm ocean breeze.  You don’t need to have sex with her to savor inexpressible joy;