"... when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness"

My doodle for today, our calendar for May.

I have a number of hopes this month and I hope they will all come to pass. 

A friend has a tattoo which roughly translates as "I hope for nothing". I looked it up and the writer, Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba, the Greek; The Last Temptation of Christ) has it as his epitaph: "I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free."* Philosophically, it could be he has accepted life as is and has achieved a state of non-desire, the Buddhist nirvana. But to have no desire -- which hope is an expression of -- the idea seems counter to life. To me, to be alive is also to strive. In order to strive, one must have desire to do so. So if you no longer hope, then you no longer strive. Ergo, you are not alive. At least emotionally so. My friend, I hope that this is not what you want. It can be very attractive to be emotionally void -- to feel no pain, no despair, no crushing disappointment -- but you will also no longer feel joy, delight, and crucially, love, because you cannot have one without the other. If there is a more positive interpretation of this, I'd like to hear it.

My mini project's D-day is 10 May: I hope I will see it through, and I hope it's a hit. I hope for many things, and yes, I will be disappointed when some of those hopes are crushed, but to stop hoping? I may as well just stop.

*Since he is dead, it just makes that statement a simple truth.