Best. Birthday. Ever.

Playing in the background: Joan, messing with tarts. No, that's not as naughty as it sounds (alas).

June 12 quote from the Zen calendar: "Surely joy is the condition of life." --Henry David Thoreau

Holy cow, I'm 40. Still not sure how that happened. I could swear that just a few days ago I was 13. We finished the records project yesterday, so I had my birthday off work. This is good. Everybody should get their birthday off work. I didn't have to get up early, but I did because there were presents involved. Not many, this being a tough year on everybody, but more than enough to make me feel loved. Here's the List o'Loot:

Books: Madness by Marya Hornbacher (a stunner; I fell into it yesterday and couldn't get back out) and Mindful Eating by Jan Chozen-Bays, both from Joan.

Gift certificate for Fire Mountain Gems from my sister. Whoo hoo!

A Thor's Hammer pendant, also from Joan, in celebration of The Book Publication (and there's still time to get your copy! See above.)

Tarts from Joan and Tammy and Tracy. I don't eat cake anymore so that's going to be the Birthday Treat at dinner tonight.

Somebody, probably Tammy and Tracy, renewed my subscription to Tricycle Magazine.

And here's the topper, the clincher, the Ultimate Maximum Present. My mom must have been planning this for years, literally. She sent me a scrapbook of pictures and mementi from my first forty years on the planet. It's bound in kid leather that must have cost a bloody fortune, and it's full of pictures of me doing all the stuff I love to do. Including swimming and wearing long strings of beads (circa 1974 - I wonder if they are love beads.) It goes from roughly birth through our wedding last July. (Yeah, okay, it was technically our third wedding, is it our fault California can't get its story straight?) What's amazing is that you can look at all these pictures of me from childhood and say, "Now there's a solid little kid." I always thought I was hugely fat. But I wasn't, really. Just of a size and obviously muscular. Quite amazing. There's also a pic of me in a wild hot pink dress for a ballet recital, and since that's one of my favorite colors to this day, it definitely left an impression.

And I got scads of cards and emails from all over the planet. Somebody (Joan, maybe?) went to a lot of trouble to let people know when my birthday was, and that it was a Big One (with a zero after it). There's evidently a gathering this evening in my honor, for which I should go shower and change shortly. But first, here's How I Spent My Birthday, by Jen.

I slept late, as I believe I mentioned. Then I headed out to L. Ron Hubbard, er, Lake Ray Hubbard in Rockwall for an open water swimming lesson with my coach. Open water swimming, in case you did not know this, is a whole different ball of wax from swimming in a pool. Currents and winds and stuff. Fish. Unexpected floating corpses (okay, not that day). My coach followed me in her kayak out to the bouy, which I couldn't really see ("Just swim that way," she said), and we did a little tour de bouys and then came back into shore and then went out and back again. The whole thing took an hour and fifteen minutes and I was more tired than I can ever remember being after a swim. It was windy and choppy and I was really glad the kayak was there because I might have had to grab onto it at some point. I didn't. The coach said I did a great job for my first time out. I'm hoping to enter this open water swim that's next Sunday, and this was kind of a test run. I think I passed.

So, I was tired and muddy and I felt fantastic. I stopped at Starbuck's on the way back and then went home and took a shower. I had mud in places I didn't know I had places. The water in this lake is so murky that when you hold your arm out, you can only see about to your elbow. Your fingers are invisible. After lunch a nap was definitely in order, and I was joined by not one, not two, but all three cats (okay, Caesar kept an eye on me from across the room).

It was Friday, so of course we had to take in a Friday Fright. A Haunting in Connecticut at the dollar theater. I'll give this one somewhere between a GOOD and a GREAT (that is, two to three stars). It could have been a lot scarier but it had a good heart. If you've seen the special on the Discovery Channel, you know this family moved into a former funeral home made over into a rental house, where all manner of strange things started happening to them and especially to their oldest son, who was sick with cancer. The movie took that and ran with it, brought in another story line about a dead kid from a previous century, a possible past life thing, an old Russian Orthodox priest (or maybe he was Romanian?) and, um, bodies that were mysteriously missing from the local cemetery. Automatic one star deduction for too many horror-movie shots obviously missed. Like, you know, the girl's fixing her hair in the mirror and she reaches down to get something and while her face isn't in the mirror you see Something Really Scary. They had five or six chances on that shot and didn't nail a one. I grudgingly admit the Spooky Reflection in the Turned Off TV Set was pretty good, though. And of course there were Milk-Duds. There are always Milk-Duds.

I got home just before Joan and we stuck a pizza in the oven. Then Tammy and Tracy came over to make tarts, as I mentioned. I worked on Tammy's necklace for her brother's wedding and Tracy and Joan dished about -- whatever they dish about, algebra, torture, the finer points of blackberry glaze. There was an episode of House on, which was a rerun, but I love House no matter what he's up to. And then I fell into bed, exhausted, about eleven.

A birthday full of all my favorite things. It just don't get no better than that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta knock off another chapter of Madness before I hop in the shower.

Rejected By Tricycle Magazine

Playing on the iPod: "Robin Adair" by the Black Watch
Meters swum today: 2000
Kilometers swum in July, Swim for Distance Month: 20.9

Dear Ms. __________,

Thank you for your previous essay submission, "Losing Gally." We are sorry we were not able to reply any sooner, as organizational issues kept your essay in the backlog for an extended period of time. Unfortunately, your article does not meet Tricycle's requirements at this time.

We frequently receive essays on insights and lessons learned from the myriad of phenomena that compose our lives (including cats!), and we enjoy hearing about how the simplest things can lead to the most the most profound lessons. However, we found your essay was not pertinent enough to Buddhism for publication in our magazine.

We are very glad you thought of Tricycle, and we wish you luck in placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely, etc.

Not Pertinent Enough To Buddhism. I love it. Not content with merely flaunting its intellectual superiority and more-Buddhist-y-than-thou, Tricycle Magazine is now grading my relevance as a writer. I guess I am not surprised, just kind of sadly amused. I knew I should have called myself Ven. Gandalf Aragorn Rimpoche when I submitted the silly thing.

Course, it's also possible they saw my post about the DharmaCrafts Catalog...
.

Meditation Smackdown!!

Playing in the background: The air conditioner. It's summer in Texas.
Meters swum today: None (though I did hit a whopping 2800 last Saturday).

Well, it's that time of the quarter, kids. Another issue of Tricycle magazine has arrived and once again I'm feeling completely outclassed. Tricycle, in case you missed my last post on all things Buddhist and mass media, is the magazine that makes yours truly, a card carrying member of Mensa, scramble for her dictionary (Webster's Nth Collegiate in one hand and the Sanskrit to English phrase book in the other) to figure out what the hell it's about. Well, Buddhism, obviously, but this magazine (actually I think it'd be insulted to be referred to as a "magazine"; it is, after all, "the Buddhist review" which should qualify it as "journal" status or at least "quarterly") ain't exactly written on the level of Family Circle. More like the level of Scientific American, which is to say, it's pretty darn dense. An "intellectual challenge," one could say.

I guess if you read Christianity Today and you're the sort of Christian who goes to church at Christmas and Easter, you'd probably feel the same way. All these lofty articles on Insight Dialogue and the Gateless Gate and the fertile soil of sangha. I meditate every day and sometimes get to my meditation group on Sundays and I have read some of Thich Nhat Hanh's greatest hits, but start me reading that article about demon feeding or chod practice and, honestly, I'm a first-grader trying to make my way through The Divine Comedy. (Which I did, but in fourth grade. I have limits, ya know.)

I mean, these writers are hardcore Buddhists. They have names like Venerable Gandalf Aragorn Rimpoche and they go on months-long retreats at Spirit Rock Center and Temple of the Ten Thousand Buddhas. (In fact, they walk there. Two hundred miles. Living off the kindness of strangers.) They live in caves, they sit down to meditate for like fourteen hours at a time, and they sleep in the lotus position. They chop their fingers off to prove how unattached they are to their bodies and say cosmic stuff like, "The setting sun/follows the pilgrim's hat/ down the green mountain." (The correct answer, of course, is "Because the lion is dreaming.")

Meanwhile, over here in Jen-land, I'm trying to figure out how to achieve enlightenment without shaving my legs.

Okay, I'm whining. A little. But: Do I have to do that stuff to be a Real Buddhist (TM)? Can't I be serious about my practice and still keep all my fingers? Enlightenment is certainly something to reach for (I've been there, once, though just for a few seconds, and believe me, it is awesome) but I still live in the world. I still hold down a job and raise cats and so forth and so on. I'm a lot more level-headed than I was a few years ago, though. And I'm nicer to people than I used to be.

One could point out (and one would be right) that one could just stop reading Tricycle magazine, already, if it makes one feel unworthy. I'm not ready to go that far, though. For one thing, I already paid for another year. For another, it doesn't exactly make me feel unworthy. Just outclassed, like I should be in there competing with everybody, lopping off fingers, losing limbs to lotus-position gangrene and responding to all questions with "The pop-tart and the Q-Tip are in harmony."

That's what we need. A new reality show. Last Monk Not Standing. Anyway, I'm going to read Family Circle now.

Dharma Dough

Playing in the background: The dulcet, soporific tones of the dryer
Meters swum today: I take Sundays off. Anyway, there's lots of laundry to heft.

One of the downsides of subscribing to Tricycle is that the 'zine seems to forward its mailing list to every do-gooder organization on the planet. Every week I get solicitations from people like FINCA, the Tibetan Buddhist Nuns Project, the Sierra Club and much stranger things. Most of 'em get tossed into the recycle bin (yes, I do recycle; I eat meat, but I'm not beyond hope) and once in a while I send money (Center for Victims of Torture, your check is in the mail). Yes, I know, that only encourages them. Most of 'em are good causes, though, and even if I can't afford to feed all of them, I'm okay with them hanging out at my place between sojourns at the bulk mail factory and the recycling shredders.

On the other hand, we have the DharmaCrafts catalog.

Look, I'm sure Buddhists need cool merchandise just as much as anybody else, but my God, have you seen this thing? Seems like there's no item too hokey, glitzy or overpriced to show up in its fine pages. I know a lot of em are handmade out of used construction nails by native craftspersons who make three cents an hour and have to sell their children for food and so on, and I realize the goods have to be trucked out of Nowhere, Tibet on yakback before they can be sold on the open market, but seriously, there is something wrong with this catalog. You spose those Buddhist monks we saw getting the snot pounded out of them in Myanmar were carrying Heart Sutra Alms Bowls, engraved by a master calligrapher, an heirloom quality treasure ($149.99US)? I did see a couple of them wearing fine lapis lazuli stretchy wrist malas ($39.99), but not too many of them had Golden Lotus Necklaces ($129.99 plus $8.95 flat rate shipping.)

Here in the States, of course, it gets much colder than it does in Myanmar, and we can buy a nice hooded meditation cloak for only $159.99. Hold it together with a Namaste pin for $49.99. Underneath it, you can wear a Mobius-strip metta bracelet in 14 karat gold, a bargain for only $1,699.99. The lotus pond wedding screen ($429.99) makes a fine backdrop for your meditation space, and you can add a tea house fountain ($199.99) and perhaps a copper water bowl (marked down! Only $329.99 for the month of March!) And who can possibly hope to achieve enlightenment without a relaxed Quan Yin garden statue for a mere $4,000? I mean, excuse the snarkitude, but come on, now.

I am not rich. My parents are rich, but that's another post. I make somewhere below that magical threshold of $50,000 a year, beyond which money starts making you unhappy. I am not rich, nor am I poor. Could I afford the $89.99 black onyx mala? Yes, probably, if I wanted to set aside some money from a few pay checks. But why do I need one? I made one myself out of spare beads I have around the house and it works fine. I could probably make you one in your choice of colors for less than $10. I do have stretchy wrist malas (in ten eye-catching colors, no less) but I got 'em from Fire Mountain Gems for a quarter apiece in one of their warehouse sales. I have a pendant of Buddha and the eight auspicious symbols pressed into a copper disk. I think I got it for $20.

I realize necessity isn't the only reason for buying things. If you're going to spend a chunk of change on something, you might as well spend a bit more and get a really good version of whatever it is, or so my dad always said. If I did have, say, $4 grand I didn't know what to do with, would it be a crime for me to buy a relaxed Quan Yin for my garden? Well, no, but geez, the Tibetan Nuns Project would be falling all over themselves if somebody gave them $4 grand. And I don't wanna get on my high horse and start calling other people irresponsible for their purchase decisions, because it's their money and not mine and how they spend it is none of my business, but seriously, doesn't the $1,699 Mobius metta bracelet seem just a little--I dunno--un-Buddhist-y?

(Says the carnivore.)

Well, anyway, I'm done with this month's issue of the DharmaCrafts catalog. Now I'm giving it to Joan, who will promptly chop it to bits with a scissors for all those cool pictures of Buddha to use in some future decoupage project. Finally, a really good application of the $4,000 Quan Yin statue. And it didn't cost us a dime.

Back in the water again!

Playing on the iPod: "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin (Vikingkittens.com)
Meters swum today: 1600 - a mighty mile!

Thank God. I was afraid my skin would start sloughing off from lack of exposure to chlorine. Luckily there was lots. Chlorine, I mean. While I was driving to the pool at 6:30 am, and the temperature here in Dallas was a balmy 26 degrees (that's -3 for you Canucks) I had decided to be happy if I managed 1200 meters. 1400 would be excellent. But 1600? That I did not expect. I wasn't as tired as I thought I'd be, either, which means I'm in better shape than I thought. Or else that I'm delusional and in a few hours I'll wake up minus all of my limbs.

I drove over to Starbucks after the pool and I guess they were having a bad day or something. They must have asked me about my order four or five times. "Now, was that a double half-caf espresso mocha with a twist of lemon?" "No, it was a grande skinny cinnamon dolce latte." "Was that a caramel macchiato chai tea whack-a-mole fanny banger?" "No, it was a grande skinny cinnamon..." You get the idea. I was at the drive-up for like 15 minutes. Well, actually I did not keep track, but it was long enough that I broke out my issue of Tricycle and made it through most of an article on happiness.

One thing about Tricycle, it's one of the few lofty intellectual zines that can make me feel like I don't know what I'm talking about. I sometimes have to look up stuff in the dictionary. I'm serious. Anyway, when I did get to the front the flustered-looking lady at the cash register gave me my double half-caf espresso caramel cinnamon chai tea whack-a-mole dolce latte fanny-banger for free. About which I felt bad. I tried to pay her anyway and she wouldn't hear of it. One of the Big Five Precepts is to take nothing that is not freely given, the reverse of which being, I guess, that you take something that someone is insisting on giving you. So I quit arguing with her and took the coffee thing (it was good, whatever it was--still can't tell you) and drove to the mechanic's for an oil change. And to check out my ignition cylinder, which keeps sticking when I try to turn my key.

While I was there, I read the rest of the article on happiness. People actually study what makes people happy. Isn't that kind of like studying what makes humor funny? Anyway, this guy traveled to the supposed happiest places in the world, which were as diverse as Iceland and Bhutan. The United States is only the sixteenth-happiest place on earth, and Disney World didn't even make the list. Sooner or later, those dark tales about a rash of suicides among the Seven Dwarfs are going to come out. I can feel it.

Back to the article, though. Iceland is a wealthy, highly developed, very clean, technologically savvy society that's cold and dark for six months of the year. Bhutan is a beautiful, mountainous, semi-tropical but very poor country, where the per capita income is about $840 US and they just got phones a few years ago. Totally dissimilar societies, but most folks who live there are very happy. Again, I don't know how you measure happiness but it must be true. It was in Tricycle, after all.

There was a little statistical blurb about how money not only doesn't equate happiness, but after a certain point, more money actually makes you less happy. The tipping point seems to be about $50 grand a year. That's probably for an individual, not a family, but anyway, above that level people report being less happy. I guess you start worrying about investments and stuff.

About this time the mechanic came in and told me that the sticking ignition key problem was actually a bad ignition cylinder and they were going to have to change it out, as well as make me a new key. I said fine (I always say fine) and then I started wondering how much that's going to cost. I mean, a new ignition cylinder sounds kind of pricey. I just got my tax refund so I knew I had a little money but I was kind of hoping to stick it in savings.

A while later the mechanic came back and told me he was done. I went up the cash register, bracing myself. $400? $500? Good God, might it be four figures? Then the cashier said, "That'll be $36.50, ma'am" and my jaw about hit the floor. Turned out the ignition thingy was covered by the extended warranty that I'd forgotten I had. The only thing I was paying for was the oil change.

If I ever make over $50 grand a year, I'll let you know about that getting-less-happy thing, but for now let me say this. Today I got back in the pool after over a week away and swam a mile. I got a free coffee thing, whatever it was, and my new ignition cylinder cost $36.50. If you can't be happy about things like that, then all the money in the world won't help you.

Oh, and Saturn of Mesquite like totally rocks!