The Sun Raising

Abigail and Dwayne Shoppa (pictured here) Austin, Texas Ages 29 and 33                                                                Married nine months Abigail:  I never met men through my job (I’m a real estate investor). So instead I had the bad habit of reigniting old relationships, seeing if I could make them work the second time around. In May 2010, my three sisters, with whom I’m very close, and my brother-in-law Chris urged me to try someone new. When I demurred, they insisted on buying me a date at a local bachelor auction for charity. At first, I protested, but eventually I gave in. And once I looked through the online profiles of the men up for grabs, I admitted that a civil engineer named Dwayne looked pretty dreamy. Plus, his bio mentioned that he coached Little League baseball. I love kids. Dwayne:  ...

Movies constantly bombard us with unrealistic expectations of love. Real life, meanwhile, tells us that most relationships are poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But there’s no need to feel depressed about romance. Read on to restore your faith in love. 10 Love Despite The Distance When Irina and Woodford McClellan got married, they never imagined it would be another 11 years until they could be together. In the early 1970s, Irina was living in Moscow working for the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. It was there that she met an American professor named Woodford McClellan. Irina and Woodford fell in love and married two years later in May 1974. Only a short while later, in August, Woodford’s visa expired and he  had to leave the Soviet Union  and return home. Woodford tried to visit his wife in Moscow but was repeatedly denied entry. In turn, Irina was denied permission to leave the country, without explanation. The two newlyweds marked their anni...

… Underwater there is a thing that I call The Deathless Moment, that creeps up on you when the memory of noise has become a static image and you regress to pre-reality, resealing the membrane of suspended time. In that Moment, when there is no hope of communication or self-expression, when you are alone in the perpetual half light and the sun bends its fingers, struggling, down to uproot you, you reach the spot of unmeaning at the heart of reality. It rises to meet you in the brooding depths as though from the mouth of some monstrous sea-creature, a bubble filled with nothing, somehow realising and containing itself by the sheer, baffling fact of its emptiness. And as it hovers for a moment in front of you it trembles from the pressure of your perception, trembles but does not burst. It hovers in front of you and you observe it as you might an eagle that alights, unafraid, on the ground before you, and looks into your eyes with all the majesty of meaninglessness. And then i...

One glance from her eyes so dark and so brown, put him under her spell, his world spun around One smile from her lips, his heart skipped a beat, her womanly spell, knocked him right off his feet One word, just one look, he flew out of control, and her magical spell, touched the heart of his soul Her voice of pure velvet, his thoughts were now drifting, her magic and laughter, her joy so uplifting For her magic, her charms, her feminine ways, would enchant him would capture him, all of his days His heart was now hers, his love hers to keep, for the power of her magic, that moved him so deep For the love in her eyes, sent him out of control, and her magical spell, played the harp of his soul.

Most chemical reactions and biological functions take place in solution. This simple fact has spurred a tremendous research effort aimed at elucidating the effects of the solvent on the chemical or biochemical reactivity. A complete understanding of liquid chemistry requires knowledge of the detailed molecular pathways that are involved in the reaction dynamics. The elucidation of a set of unifying principles describing chemical dynamics in liquids represents a challenge to both experimentalists and theoreticians. The amorphous and dynamic nature of the liquid state leads to reaction systems of exceptional complexity. Any chemical or photochemical reaction in the condensed phase starts off by a redistribution of charge in the chromophore. In particular, light offers a clean way to selectively trigger reactions, both in energy and in time. The first step of any photo induced process is a redistribution of charge in the absorbing atom or molecule. While this modifies the field of fo...

You invaded my private world with your beautiful smile and understanding heart, And I wondered to myself that you were different right from the very start. You listened without judgment to what I had about me to say, And even after I was done with the good, the bad, the ugly you still didn't run away....