The Eyes Have it

Well: I  am happy to report that Joan and I had A Talk about my finding an indoor pool.  SMU's pool operations office continues not to answer the phone, which is not a good sign; and the Baylor pool is open, but they're only letting in their own members, and the membership is pricey; so that's kind of out for right now too.  However, we decided that the lackluster pool at the gym is probably fine if it's not crowded.  (Not that I'm complaining about the pool at the gym; I was swimming in a lake full of fishpoop, fergodsake, so I can handle a pool at a gym, though honestly, they could clean it more often.)  I made my way over there yesterday and got a lane to myself.  The lane is probably about seven feet wide and 25 yards long, which seemed like appropriate social distance.  I wore a mask on the way in and on the way out, and I didn't shower or use any of the other facilities.  So I think I'm okay, COVID-wise.  In the meantime, I somehow sprained my stupid knee, so I probably won't get back over there today, but maybe tomorrow during church time.  This is Texas; if you want a facility to yourself, go during church time. 

(And just incidentally, my Buddhist meditation group meets on Wednesday nights, so it's not like I'm not going to any religious gatherings at all, and by the way, it wouldn't be any of your business if I weren't, so there. Nyah.)

Another thing:  I am OUT OF SHAPE.  Yes, I know round is a shape.  I used to swim 1600-2000 meters (that's a mile to a mile and a quarter) as a matter of course, and yesterday I didn't even make it through 1200.  Well, the time I've had in the pool has been pretty limited, and though I'm sure I swam farther than that at the lake, it's impossible to measure, really.  I'm going to have to build back up to a full 1600 before my swim team starts up again, if it ever does.  I've been doing a lot more walking on the treadmill than I have swimming, which I guess builds up different muscles.  (And altogether now, let's hear it for the treadmill; when we first bought it I was wondering if we'd lost our minds, and then came the lockdown.  Really, really glad we had a treadmill during the lockdown and since.) 

 

So now for the big announcement:  I'm having cataract surgery in October.

Yes, I'm really 78 years old.  I just look really young.  😬 And I'm thrilled to bits about being treated for this, but it's either get treated or possibly not be able to drive at night anymore, and since we're down one driver to begin with, what're ya gonna do?  As it is, I have to round up a support person (who can drive) to accompany me on this crazy errand, plus come up with a rather alarming amount of money for the stuff my insurance doesn't cover (and as always, there's something).  Now, cataract surgery is No Big Deal anymore, they do it all the time and they hardly ever make misteaks make mystiques  do things wrong. Still, it's a little unsettling to have somebody carve into your eyeball, yank your lens out and replace it with a fake one.  The upside is, of course, that I won't need glasses anymore.  The downside is that I will still need glasses anyway, because they're only doing one eye; the other eye isn't due for years. 

Also, there are add-ons.  I guess there's always a luxury component to surgery?  I can get a spiffy lens called a PanOptic for an additional $4,000.00, which will correct my distance and close up vision until the end of recorded time.  (Though one article I read suggested that younger persons, which I guess means me, shouldn't opt for the PanOptic lens because it can lose focus over time.  Geez, for $4,000.00 shouldn't you expect quality eyeball part replacements?) Or, I can opt for the cheaper Toric lens for a mere $2,450.00 extra, which will cure my distance vision; I'll still need glasses for close vision.  Or I can opt to have a laser surgeon do the job, rather than a boring old human, for $1,000.00 extra. And whether I opt for any of the add-ons or not, I am going to need new glasses, because my vision will have changed; so add another $300-$500 to that price tag.  

Anyway, that's in October.  Then I need to get my hearing checked.  The way you know you need to get your hearing checked is that your wife tells you to get your hearing checked.  Amirite?  In all seriousness, I need to get my hearing checked; since everybody started wearing masks I find myself unable to tell what they're saying about half the time.  My sibling has been diagnosed with something that involves thinning of the bones of the ear, and has hearing aids now.  It's genetic, so it could be that.  Or it could be Central Auditory Process Disorder, which they told me I had when I was 26, getting lots worse over time.  That sounds like exactly the sort of thing they would lump in any hearing loss that they can't explain.  And of course nothing could be further from the truth, except what they said was, "Your hearing loss is all over the register and we can't explain that, so we think it's Central Auditory Process Disorder." Anyway, Google it.  It can't really be helped with hearing aids but maybe I've acquired something else over time that can.  

I gotta say, turning 50 has been expensive. And not just because my comfort has become worth more money, though that's true, too.  I wonder how much the COVID vaccine will cost, when it finally comes out, and how long it'll last, and whether or not insurance will cover it.  Maybe there'll be add-ons for that, too.  Maybe for an extra $1600 you can get one that was actually tested on humans.  

Zen For A Day

So for about two years now, I've really been wanting to go to a retreat.  That is, a meditation experience where you go someplace, usually a nice place with lots of plants and trees, and do some serious meditating for days or even weeks.  I don't think this is strictly a Buddhist thing -- I went on a Christian retreat once as a teenager, though no actual meditation happened -- but Buddhists are kind of known to do this.  The idea is to have really deep meditations, so that you realize profound and awesome things about your nature and the universe.  Or at least you get a break from the phone ringing and people texting you every five minutes.

The last time I went on a retreat was I think in 2013, when Brother ChiSing was still alive and we all went to Praxis in far North Texas, just south of the Red River. That was awesome.  It was three days of meditation, walking, quiet and general restfulness.  I had a close encounter with a grasshopper, which is sort of a long story but you can read about it here.  And there were stars. Lots of stars. Zillions and zillions of stars. And grasshoppers.  Anyway, a great time was had.  And now it's been a couple of years and I really want to do this again and I keep running into the same two barriers:  One, there just ain't a lot of Buddhist meditation retreats happening in Texas.  This here's the Bible belt, in case you didn't know. And two, the ones there are, are either A. prohibitively expensive or B. far away or often C. both.

There was this one in Austin, for example, last weekend.  It was for women only, and it was hosted by the Plum Blossom Sangha, which is kind of a sister group to the Dallas Meditation Center, where I hang out. Same school of Buddhism, same guys in charge.  So it would have made a lot of sense to go, except the cheapest accommodations they had available were still too expensive for our budget.  I jist ain't got that kind of money for a weekend.  (And if I did, I'd be saving it up for a new mattress, which I desperately need.)  There's another one in April, which is cheaper, but still too expensive. Life is expensive, you know.

So, last Saturday I hauled myself over to the local Zen center, another Buddhist group in the Dallas environs, for a daylong retreat. It was better than nothing. (It was also cheaper.  A mere $35, and for that you get tea and crackers, too.)  Now, there's meditation in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition, which is what I do, and then there's Zen, which is a whole nother thing.  A Zen retreat basically involves a whole lot of sitting, not a whole lot of anything else, and it's all very formal.  No stars. No grasshoppers.  You sit facing the wall instead of facing other people; people bow at you; you do certain stuff when the bell rings, etc.  Which, again, is great, unless you're like me and you have A. very little patience for formality and B. no clue what to do when the bell rings about half the time.  Or maybe more than half the time.

Now, I knew what I was getting into.  I've been there before.  But, that was an hour and a half long regular session, not a daylong retreat.  I also knew what I was bringing with me, which is, a right hip that gets very cranky sometimes, especially when you want to sit on it for what seems like an inordinate length of time.  So, being a smart person, I asked for a chair.  Yes, you can meditate in a chair.  It means you're not touching the Earth like all the cool kids, but you can do it.  The trick is not to rest on the back of the chair, and just kind of sit forward with your spine straight but not rigid and incline yourself not exactly forward but not exactly backward, either, while avoiding being straight up and down.  Yeah, it's kind of like flying a helicopter.  Not that I've ever flown a helicopter, but I don't imagine you just sort of wing over to where you want to be and press the "hover" button.

So anyway.  I was in this chair, and I was meditating, and everything was going more or less well, and then the teacher showed up.  The teacher is a pretty cool dude.  I think he's a comparative religion professor someplace besides being a Zen master, and professors of comparative religion (and Zen masters) tend to be rather even tempered and sanguine about this whole what's-my-place-in-the-universe thing.  I've only met him like once three years ago, but he remembered meeting me and I, remarkably, remembered what he'd said to me last time, which made him very happy.  (I imagine most professors of comparative religion would be overjoyed if they ran into a student who still remembered the basic plot of the Bhagavad Gita.)  So that went well, and we broke for lunch, and that went well, and honestly, I was doing fine until time for the tea ceremony.

I hope y'all have actually been to a Japanese tea ceremony, because I don't know if I can possibly describe what it's like. Let's just say, like all things Japanese, that the presentation of the thing matters as much or more as the actual substance.  You know how when you go to a Japanese restaurant, the food is very artfully designed and served on attractive little plates with contrasting colors and stuff?  Yeah, well, they do that with everything. Not to mention tea.  Well, especially tea.  Tea is very important. How important is it?  Well, it's important enough that I scooted out of my chair and got down on the floor, with the cool kids, so that we'd all be sitting at the same height and the tea servers wouldn't have to bend at a different angle to offer me a cup.  Because that wouldn't look right. 

Unfortunately, scooting down onto the floor was a mistake.  My cranky hip was already cranky, in spite of the chair, and being on the floor did not make it any happier. There's something about leaning outward at that angle that it just really doesn't like after a while.  So we meditated for half an hour, and then the teacher said a few words, and then the tea ceremony started, and by this point my cranky hip is making it really obvious that I'd better do something, like immediately, if I want to be able to limp down the stairs to go home.  So what did I do?  I straightened my right leg.  Rolled my toes to the inside.  Rolled my toes to the outside.  Then tucked the leg back in, figuring it would be good for another ten minutes.  Maybe.  Possibly.

And the second I saw the expressions on the faces of the people across from me, I could just tell I'd committed some kind of horrible faux pas.  Which, in a Japanese setting, is ridiculously easy to do.  And it had to be during the tea ceremony.  Of course.

So, being the brave person that I am, I snuck out the back door an hour and a half early, which was the second I had a chance and before anybody could talk to me.  Eesh.  Maybe if I don't show up back there for like thirty days or something, everyone will have forgotten all about it.  Or maybe it'll become one of those apocryphal fairy tales people use to scare hell out of children; "And that, young grasshopper, is why we don't straighten our right legs during the tea ceremony."

(Like how I came full circle on the grasshopper thing?)

Well, anyway, how embarrassing.  But I got my retreat, sort of.  Somebody just please remind me that the next time I go back there, I'm not to get out of the chair for anything. Yea verily, even tea.  Unless, of course, that would be another horrible faux pas.  Which is possible.

Mini-Post: Damn, I Got Old Quick.

In case anybody wants to know what it's like to jump back into the pool after a month away and a lot of that resting in bed, the answer is, IT SUCKS. I feel like I've gone back in time to the month I started with the swim team way back in '07.  I get extremely tired, I take hits from my inhaler because I get so winded and I actually get out of the water with sore shoulders and arms.  Last Sunday I swam 1800, my longest distance since I started back.  Yeah.  1800.  When I was turning in like 3200 at least once a week and training up to 5000.  If that 5000 meter race were really in July, as originally scheduled, I'd be screwed. The rumor now is that it's going to be in September.  I'd like to say September is no problem and I'll be back to fighting form in nothing flat, but then I also said I'd be over this pneumonia thing in a week and that didn't exactly work out, so I'm hesitant for my brain to start writing checks my body may not be able to cash.

So I realized today that I've gotta do what I've been putting off doing.  I gotta go back to the gym and start lifting weights again.  I'm no Arnold Schwartzenbarfer, but I used to lift weights and it helped my swimming a lot.  I gotta build up those wing muscles.  Luckily there is an LA Fitness right down the street from my office, and if I actually leave on time I should be able to squeeze in a good 30-45 minutes on Tuesday and Thursday nights.  Again, that's leave ON TIME, not whenever I get to a logical stopping point.  I could feasibly work all day and all night for weeks and I'd never get all the stuff done that I'm supposed to do.  But I do keep us two steps ahead of the next crisis, and sometimes that's all you can ask for.  Especially in a law firm.

In other news, I'm going to turn 47 in a couple of weeks here.  This means I'm no longer in my middle forties; I am now in my late forties.  Joan, who just turned 57, is probably laughing at me right now, but the other day it occurred to me that I'm probably past the mystical halfway point, unless I plan on living to be 96.  Yep. Half my life is already in the can and I'm working on the second half.

So what am I gonna do for the second half, you ask.  Well, let's see. I think I'm going to hang around with family and friends as much as possible, share big laughs and small stories, and be as unserious as possible.  I'm planning on a little more meditation and a little less anxiety.  Less sugar, for sure, more fruits and vegetables.  Less wasted time on the news (I'm not supposed to watch the news; it upsets me).  More trips to Austin.  Fewer doctor's appointments.  And who knows, maybe I'll write something.  Else.  Something else.

By the way, it's Mental Health Awareness Month.  So be aware.

Brother ChiSing: 1969-2016

Well, we knew this was coming for months, but somehow nobody was even remotely prepared when Brother ChiSing died on Monday.  Brother ChiSing was my Buddhist monk friend and spiritual director of the Dallas Meditation Center, sometimes called the Awakening Heart Center. He founded the Center back in 2007 with a few friends and some rented rooms at Unity Church of Dallas, and by the time he died we had had our own building and there were something like 200 of us, not counting the walk-ins and general hangers-on.  Besides running the Center, Brother ChiSing recorded music, appeared at local interfaith events, hosted meditation workshops for beginners and just in general did as much as one human being can possibly do to get non-Buddhists interested in meditation.

He's been eulogized plenty on Facebook and there's not one but two memorial services coming up.  We weren't good friends and I wasn't part of the "inner circle" so I feel a little weird about adding my own "what-I-remember-about-ChiSing" thing.  But, I'm gonna do it anyway.  I was one of the few people showing up at the Unity Church back in 2007; not one of the original founders but I was there pretty early on.  The main thing I liked about ChiSing was his endless enthusiasm, which was sort of like a puppy being placed on the floor next to a bunch of new toys. When giving talks he often interrupted himself because such-and-such had just come to mind and he just couldn't wait until later to tell anybody, leading to a lot of "Where was I?  Oh yes..." moments.  And sometimes we never did get back to the original point, whatever it was, but the trip was always fascinating no matter where we ended up.

Brother ChiSing started out as a fairly liberal evangelical Christian pastor of the Baptist stripe.  He ended up getting kicked out of that role when some of the higher-ups "discovered" he was gay, though I can't imagine he was ever very quiet about it so they must have been pretty obtuse.  How he ended up becoming a Buddhist monk was going to be the subject of a book called "From Baptist to Buddhist and Beyond," and I don't know how far into it he was when he got sick.  I hope he left his notes with somebody because I'd love to see it finished.  Anyway, ChiSing met Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village in France sometime in the early 2000s and that meeting put him on the Buddhist path.  I've never met the man myself, but I understand Thich Nhat Hanh does that to people.

Anyway, I remember plenty of Sunday evenings at the Unity Church meditating and listening to ChiSing's talks (some of which can be found here, and really, you should give one of them a listen if you have a few minutes.  They really give you a better idea of what the man was like).  ChiSing also hosted daylong meditation retreats about once a month, and I looked forward to those like it was Christmas.  Even when my work schedule changed and I couldn't get to the Sunday night services anymore, I tried never to miss those daylong retreats because they were awesome.  Once, when I'd first been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was still on a manic tear, I thought about not going to the retreat because I wasn't sure I could sit still.  But I went anyway, and kind of bounded into the church like Tigger from the Pooh stories. Bound bound bound bound bound up to the circle of meditation cushions and then dropped down onto one of them.  I looked around at everybody and said, "HI!!"  I could see Brother ChiSing trying really hard not to roll his eyes.  But anyway, he was incredibly patient with me, and I actually did calm down enough to meditate that day.

Another time, I went to a half-day meditation thing, to which I was the only one who showed.  There had been some kind of mix-up with the schedule, apparently.  But ChiSing and I sat and meditated together, and then we went over to the Thai temple to drop off some food for the monks (which is good luck) and just to have a look around.  It's a beautiful temple with a huge golden Buddha inside, and on the wallpaper inside are numerous Buddhist stories, including one picture of a man drowning in delusion while looking at Facebook!  ChiSing pointed this out to me like a kid would show off a tree house he and some friends had built in the forest.  It was a fascinating afternoon.  

In 2012 Brother ChiSing went to Thailand and entered a monastery for a couple of months.  He came back with hair that was about 1/4" long.  Sort of the "punk rock" look.  It was SO not him.  He put up with a lot of teasing about his hair, some of which came from me.  I think I dubbed him "ChiSing Rotten" (after John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten) but that might have been Cornell.

Anyway.  In 2014 ChiSing announced he had been to the doctor, and found out that he had nasopharyngeal cancer.  Chemotherapy was probably never an option due to where the tumor was located but he'd decided against it anyway.  He did have some radiation and some herbal therapies but mainly, he tried to do as much as he could in the time he had left.  During this time, the Dallas Meditation Center got kicked out of our building so it could be torn down to make luxury condos.  This was probably one of the biggest tragedies of his life, but he was focused on getting the rest of us through it instead.  We are now renting space at the CSL Dallas, which is fine, but having a permanent building would really be nice.  Our funding kind of comes and goes with the seasons, though, and landlords have this habit of wanting to be paid every month. To say nothing of employees, maintenance people, etc.

Through most of 2014 and up through this year, ChiSing split his time between his family in Houston and his Dallas family of friends.  He had just decided to enter hospice last week.  He died in his sleep Monday morning.  Not many people have the opportunity to make the kind of impact ChiSing did.  He was lucky.  He will be greatly missed.

Swimming Anxiety

This morning I swam 3200 meters by mistake. That is, I only set out to swim 3000 but I lost track somewhere in the middle there and by the time I figured it out I'd gone 200 extra meters.  Like that's a bad thing.  So we have a new record of farthest distance swum by Jen.  That's twice I've done 3000 and this time I felt like I could have kept going, maybe made it to 3500.  So my quest for 5000 meters is evidently heading in the right direction.  Whoever invented Gatorade (yes, the low sugar version -- it's at least a little better than the Really Bad Stuff) gets my thunderous applause. Whoever invented pureed fruit to be sold as baby food, however--he and I need to have a talk.  Somebody told me I could stay away from the Snickers bars by eating some of this pureed fruit, which conveniently comes in little squeezable bottles.  Well, that pureed fruit is some of the worst stuff I've ever put in my mouth.  Ick!  It's supposed to be plain fruit, but it's so ridiculously sweet that a diabetic might lose consciousness. And they feed this stuff to babies?  No wonder they scream.  Next time, when I shoot for 3200 again (this time on purpose), I'll try just plain ol' blueberries and sliced bananas in a baggie.  And chew them really, really fast. And try not to pay too much attention to the "No Food Or Drink Allowed" sign that dominates one whole side of the pool room.

In other news, I've just realized something.  It is this: I basically have no faith in people who say they are going to do something.  This comes from work, of course.  I spend much of every day asking people to bring me things, send me things, tell me things.  They always say they're going to do whatever it is, but for some reason I just don't believe them.  So I put a little note on my calendar and I call them a week later to see if they've done it yet.  Sometimes they have.  More often they say something like, "Oh hey, I forgot all about that.  Thanks for reminding me!" Or something along those lines that's a little less polite. Or, as occasionally happens, "Did you pay my invoice yet?" to which the answer is generally, "Let me check with the accountant."  Which means no, in case you don't understand business doublespeak.

In case you haven't guessed this, I'm also a regular whiz at nagging people. I have a particular system where I call people every week, then twice a week, then three times a week, and then every day until they cough up whatever it is I need.  It never fails (well, except for this one hospital, and I can't call that a failure just yet because I've only been calling every day for about a week now).  Never call more than once a day; that's harassment. (Yes, I used to work for that arm of a bank that calls you when you're late with your credit card bill.)  But call at different times of day.  Try nine o'clock, then three, then ten-thirty, then four in the afternoon.  If they get wise to your work number and send you directly to voice mail, call from your cell phone.  If that doesn't work, either, start faxing letters.  My goal in these situations is to make it easier for you to send me whatever I need than continue to dodge me.

The thing is, I don't know how to turn this off when I'm not at work.  If somebody says she's going to call me about something or other and then doesn't do it for whatever reason, I'm equal parts surprised, hurt and anxious.  I seem to be incapable of grasping the simple concept that just because something is important to me doesn't mean it's life or death to anybody else and that sometimes, shit just happens.  Your kid gets the flu or your husband loses his job or the heater goes out in the middle of December and you're too busy handling the crisis, whatever it is, to get back to me.  No wonder I feel kind of equal parts silly and whiny when I call people to see if they've done what they said they were going to do.  That doesn't stop me from doing it, though.

When I told her about this, Joan pointed out that any time things don't happen on my timetable, which is evidently the most important timetable on the entire planet, my anxiety gets triggered.  In case I didn't mention this to you guys, I don't have a problem with anxiety.  Anxiety IS my problem.  If I could get a grip on the anxiety, I could probably get a grip on everything else just fine, but short of chemical solutions, anxiety is just not that easy to get a grip on, people.  And those chemical solutions are great, but they come with side effects of not being able to drive and occasionally falling asleep sitting up.

The most recent example of this involved my health insurance company, my doctor and some phone calls.  My doctor, not me, had to make these phone calls; they would not do any good coming from me.  Now, most people would just call the doctor (or, as is my wont, send him a fax) and let him/her handle it.  And I did do that, after a fashion, as in, I didn't call back every day to say, "Have you handled it yet?" I wanted to, but I didn't.  And after about four days, which would be pretty reasonable to anybody's timetable that isn't mine, my doctor called and told me that it was handled.  All fine and dandy, except I won't get back the four days I spent obsessing about it and wondering if it was too soon to call and check up.

This is about as un-Buddhist-y as you can possibly get, except maybe killing somebody.  Buddhists are supposed to be patient and calm and not worry about things.  Maybe you get that way after you attain enlightenment, but I ain't there yet.  Thich Nhat Hanh talks about giving others "the gift of non-fear," especially in scary situations; he uses the situation of a boat full of refugees being blown about by a storm.  Everybody's starting to panic except one guy, who starts saying, "Everything's going to be okay.  Don't be afraid," and since he seems to be very calm, everyone believes him and settles down.  Thich Nhat Hanh doesn't end this story with what actually happens to the boat because the point isn't the fate of the boat; the point is to not be afraid, and to help other people not be afraid.

People tell me I stay calm when I handle things.  I'm the one in the office who's most likely to say, "Okay, calm down, give it to me, I'll fix it."  I never feel calm, though.  Maybe it's possible to act yourself into being calm.  Or, at least, not adding to the general anxiety.

Rainout!

Every now and then I feel this mad urge to start another blog--call it the Secret Blog, maybe--and blog about all the stuff I don't blog about because people who actually know me read this blog.  You know, things people do that aggravate me, my latest struggle with something or other that we can't talk about on this blog because--yeah, and things that just happened where if I post them, everybody will know it's me because they were all there when it happened (or, worse, they were all there when it happened and Hey Jen, it didn't happen like that, it happened like this.)  Trouble is, if I started a secret blog I wouldn't be able to tell anyone where it is because--all together now--then it wouldn't be a secret.  And if it was a secret, nobody would read it unless I also had a secret Twitter account that I could Twitter from and tell people where it is, and that's getting pretty far into the realm of too many things to remember.  I know some people invent whole new identities on the Internet and call themselves clever names like Elvis Hitler that no one will ever guess are fake, but I'm not among them because I'd forget if my password was like EHitler88 or 88EHitler or some combination of the two and then my blog would never get updated.  It's hard enough to keep updating this one on something remotely resembling a regular schedule.

So for the record, here's something that irritates me that is innocuous to include on this blog.  People and elevators.  I may have mentioned this before, but why does every person who ever steps into any elevator just automatically assume that A. they know where that elevator is going and B. that elevator is going the direction they want to go?  This is particularly annoying at the Tom Landry center where I swim (Tom Landry also has a freeway named after him, in case a sports center isn't enough).  The elevator chimes once for up and twice for down, just like most other elevators on the planet.  What's more, there's a big ol' light outside the door that points up or down, and if that's not enough, a pleasant female voice comes on when you enter the elevator and says something cheerfully informational like, "First floor.  Going down."  So that's three (count them) 3 different clues which direction you're going before your elevator doors even close and still!  STILL people get on the elevator and look at you in astonishment when the elevator starts going down (or up) and say, "Oh, I thought it was going up (or down)."  Fer cryin' out loud, you normal human beings can pay attention to things like that without a half hour a day on the meditation cushion and certain pharmaceuticals, unlike Space Cadet Yours Truly who might have a bad day and end up on an airplane going the wrong direction and say "Oh, I thought we were going to Shanghai."  Why don't you do it? Really, is it that big a deal?  Please think about it.  Thank you. Pant. Pant. (wiping foam off face)

So it's Memorial Day weekend.  Every year we try to get out to see a couple of baseball games.  For the most part we don't go to Rangers games, though--too far and too expensive and the seats we can afford are worse than airplane seats (no, really).  We go to see the Frisco Roughriders

Alec Asher of the Frisco Roughriders

instead, the minor league team that the Rangers stripmine when they need a new player at basically no notice.  Minor league baseball is a whole nother thing entirely from the major leagues.  For one thing, you never know what's going to happen.  Sure, baseball is baseball and there are bound to be surprises, but minor league play has a lot more of them.  Minor league players are still learning, you see, and they'll do things like accidentally run into each other or both make a grab at the same ball or--well, stuff you don't often see in major league games.  Which sometimes turns the whole tide of the game in a direction you never expected.

(I'm guilty of my not-exactly-major-league sports fandom for a long while now.  When we lived in San Diego, we often went to see the San Diego Gulls for the same reason.  Minor league hockey is exactly like minor league baseball, except it's played on skates and you don't get called out for a bad swing.  Oh, and the zamboni is often the best player of the night.  You can always count on the zamboni.)

So yesterday we packed up and headed out to a Roughriders game.  The Roughriders play at Dr. Pepper Ballpark in Frisco, which is right across the street from IKEA.  In fact, if you leave early, you can stop at IKEA, buy a Stockholm sofa, put it together in the parking lot and watch the game in relative comfort from section 107.  Okay, I exaggerate a little, but the seats really are pretty nice compared to Rangers Stadium.  It's a low-rise stadium, which means you feel like you're practically on the field, and it's very family-oriented (you can be thrown out for excessive swearing, among other things).  There's between-inning entertainment, which gets silly because the mascots are these giant orange fuzzy things I've never figured out.  think Joan said they were prairie dogs, but if they are, they're mutant prairie dogs from the nuclear testing of the 1950s. I'm serious.

Have you ever seen a prairie dog that looks even remotely like this one?  No, the guy in the middle.  Honestly, don't make me smack you.

Things started going wrong at 2:05 P.M. with the first pitch.  I had completely forgotten that for a day game start time, there's no such thing as a "shady side of the park."  Usually the third-base side eclipses the sun early in the game, and if you're on that side, you don't have to worry about getting hot or how much sunscreen you put on.  Not so this particular day, in which we're out there at peak sun time and the sun shows no sign of going to hide behind the third base wall any time soon.  I started to get concerned about sunburn, coming as I do from a family of anti-sun fanatics, and finally I got up to walk all the way back to the stupid car to get the stupid sunscreen that I'd stupidly left there.  Which, for the record, was stupid.  I got out of the ballpark and into the parking lot and quickly became aware that sunburn was going to be the least of my problems.  Barrelling toward us from somewhere near Irving was a thunderhead the size of--well, it was big, anyway.

So I went back to the stands (with the sunscreen) to tell Joan that the rain cloud was on the way.  She said she didn't care; if it rained we'd be cooler.  She had a point there.  But when the rain cloud showed up ten minutes later, it let loose with apocalyptic sheets of rain, thunder and lightning that sent all the players scrambling for cover.  Well hey, it is Texas, you know.

Yep. Can't hardly see across the field.

As for us fans, we huddled in the back of the ballpark under awnings, concession stand panels and anything else that might make us less wet.  Too late to be dry.  I mean we were pretty soaked.  The field staff, good kids all, ran through the crowd wearing swim fins and snorkels, but for the most part the crowd started to evaporate after about 45 minutes.  Even Joan and I limped back to the car (Joan's having all kinds of trouble with her knee) and drove home, wringing out hair and clothing and we just happened to have a towel in the car, thanks to yours truly and her swimming habit.  Never know when you're going to need a towel.

And the Roughriders?  Well, two hours and thirty minutes later they came back and won the game, 3-2.  Still, I'm not sorry we left.  2 1/2 hours is a long time to sit around in wet clothes, even for baseball.  To say nothing of being menaced by mutant prairie dogs.

A Buddhist Quotes The Bible

"And [Jesus] said: 'Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.'"

--Matthew 18:3

Some of you guys may not know this, but I used to run with a Lutheran street gang. Went to Sunday school for ten frick'n years, thankewverymuch, and two years' worth of Confirmation classes before the Big Day.  Comes in handy when I want to argue with Fundamentalists, which I don't do much of these days, and for cultural subreferencing, there's really no substitute (except maybe Greek mythology; Kellum and I can debate that sometime and y'all can vote.)  

But I will admit to a completely ridiculous fondness for the book of Matthew.  This is Jesus at his most awesome and quotable (outside the gospel of Thomas, which, oops, you haven't read because it's not in there. Gosh.) This is the story, as well-told as you're going to get outside of the Nag Hammadi Library. This here's he temple of the money changers, the triumphant ride into Jerusalem, the dark days before the Crucifixion and all the wild stuff that happened after. I mean, it'd make a good movie (oh, wait, it did).  And it's full of quotable Jesusness that, when pondered, often lead to entirely different meanings than the ones they taught you in Sunday school. (Twelve years.  Twelve years. And it didn't take.  Truly, I'm ill.)

Let's take St. Paul, for example.  No, he's not my favorite example, just the first one I thought of.  In one of the letters to Thessalonia he says something like, "Suffer a woman not to teach, but to remain silent in the church."  For centuries this line has been used to shut women up when they had problems with how a church was run, and was probably the justification to shut women out  of the priesthood. But if you read the context, and consider who the guy was talking to, it sounds a lot more like he's saying, "Men (he's talking to men), don't expect your women to lead in the temple; what with raising your kids and keeping you dressed and fed, they have plenty to do already.  Time to man up and be the leaders you're supposed to be."  Yeah, not exactly a popular sentiment there.  But that's what I get out of it.  It doesn't make St. Paul any less of an ass, though. 

Back to our friend Jesus.  I have no problem with Jesus. Guy was cool. Long haired radical, wanted his followers to do what was right instead of what was popular, scared hell out of the ruling class and coined the phrase, "Get thee behind me, S*t*n." Jesus is still all right with me. (Oh yeah.)  I just happen to be a Buddhist, is all.  

So I saw this sculpture today of Jesus and the little children and it suddenly hit me, like it sometimes does totally out of context and with no warning, that our collective understanding of Matthew 18:3 is totally wrong.  We assume Jesus meant that in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven when we die, we have to have faith like little children believe in Santa Claus, I guess.  Be totally convinced with no evidence whatever that God loves us and will see us on the other side.  But I thought, Hey. What if Jesus isn't talking about after we die? What if he's talking about the way we live?

Bear with me here because I'm gonna get all Buddhist-y on ya.  There are Buddhists, and I are one, who would tell you that heaven and hell are right here.  We create them every day, and every day we decide which one we are going to live in.  (And, to some extent, which one we're going to create for other people.) In the simplest terms possible, heaven is the present moment.  Heaven is when we are so focused on what's going on right now, right here in front of us, that we forget about the mortgage payment and the dress for Dinah's wedding and those 15 pounds we need to lose.  When all we experience is the cute baby who's making faces at us or the pretty lady in the copper-colored skirt or the taste of hot Starbucks coffee on a rainy day.  You know. Totally absorbed.  Like little children.

And hell?  Well, hell is--all those other moments.

Take right this second, for example.  There's a pretty lady next to me in a  copper-colored skirt - well, copper and black, actually.  She's Indian and the skirt looks fantastic on her.  It's light cotton but there's a lot of it and when she moves it seems to fly along around her.  I'm not wishing I had a skirt like it or despairing of ever being as pretty as her or thinking that I need to go clothes shopping.  I am admiring the skirt.  And I am (gasp!) happy.

Yeah, it only lasts a second.  But so what.  There"ll be another one.  Yep, here it comes; fat giggly baby, chewing on her fist and making faces and waving.  And then I'm back into this blog post, which it feels like I've been working on for days now.

If you're a Buddhist, this is what you're shooting for.  Not isolated moments of being mindfully absorbed in whatever you're doing, but being mindfully absorbed in whatever you're doing all the time. I don't know anyone who's been there, though I hear Thich Nhat Hanh has done it.  And once, at work, I had a moment where everything suddenly sharpened in color and the living beings all kind of glowed a little and I started laughing because the whole world had always been that way and I just hadn't ever noticed it before. And I kind of thought, "Oh, is that all?" and then it stopped happening and I am not describing this very well, but anyway, it was nifty.

I bet Jesus felt that way almost all the time.  I think if he were still around, he would look at us like we were crazy and say, "Guys, the miracle isn't me.  The miracle is that all of you can do it, too." 

Which is why you meditate, people.  And if you don't, you can always start.

When Real Estate Deals Go Bad

Oh yeah.  We were selling the house, weren't we?

Well, we were, and then we weren't.  And now we're not.  And in case I never got around to telling that story, here it is.

The whole point, you know, of selling the house was that it needs an expensive sewer pipe repair.  Not only is it expensive, it's also annoying; we'll have to move out for at least a couple of days, we don't know what to do about the cats during that time, the logistics are mind-boggling even if you aren't mentally interesting and the whole thing upsets my wife, and what does it say in the marriage manual on page one?  Never, ever upset your wife.  In italic print, no less.  So somehow, it seemed like a great idea to just sell the house and let someone else deal with it.  As if packing up, buying another house (with problems of its own, considering our budget) and settling into a weird new neighborhood was going to be less stressful than just fixing the damn sewer pipe, already.  And trust me, they were weird neighborhoods.  There was this one where we looked at a duplex that--actually, I liked that duplex.  A lot.  I just wanted it to be built somewhere else, that's all.

The first sign that This Was Never Going To Work was when our wonderful real estate agent, who helped us find this place after a day of running around in the rain, suddenly didn't work for the agency anymore (we never did find out what happened) and the agency assigned us another agent.  The new agent was--well, it didn't really matter, because I never gave her much of a chance.  I tried to.  I even muttered it through my teeth; "Give her a chance, Jen.  Give her a chance."  The truth is that I have very little patience for certain kinds of professionals, and one of them is real estate agents.  Before we found the Wonderful Real Estate Agent, I fired three others.  (Or was it two?)  In that particular transaction, we had 48 hours to fly into Dallas, buy a house and fly back out again.  We. Did. Not. Have. Time. To. Fuck. Around.  So the second one of them started messing with us (and they do that; they give you weird hand signals during a viewing that you're supposed to understand sight unseen, they show you places that have everything you don't want and say things like "Just wait until you see the kitchen", they show you places you can't even remotely begin to afford and say, "Now, with an FHA loan, you only have to put down 3 1/2 percent!"), I fired them.  But I was fair about it. When the next one came on board, I'd say, "Don't do this, this or this."  Then either they did, or they found a new and exciting way to mess with me, and I fired them.  God has a special place in Her heart for these people.  They had to put up with me, after all.

So here we are with this new agent, and already things aren't going well. She wants us to "dress up" our house so it'll sell faster, which basically means stripping it of everything that suggests two human beings live there.  She wants the pictures gone, the paintings gone, the craft stuff gone, the bells and chimes gone.  She wants the frick'n meditation cushions gone and makes some crack about it doesn't look good to homebuyers if you're worshipping a pagan god.  (Damn. Well, reschedule the human sacrifice til next week.)  She wants the doors replaced, the kitchen painted, the back yard redone.  Oh, and she has no sense of humor.  She didn't actually curl her lip at us and say, "How charming," but she could have and I wouldn't have been at all surprised.

The other thing was that she had a specific kind of person in mind to buy the house, a "target market," as it were.  Which was great, if the specific kind of person was ever going to come within fifteen miles of our neighborhood.  Our neighborhood was built in the late 50s/early 60s, and apart from the fashions and the presence of people who have skin colors other than white, it's kind of like it never left.  Kids ride bikes around and toss the football after school instead of going to some expensive day care. What's more, they walk to school.  Both ways.  In the snow.  Our street is about half white, half Hispanic with a smattering of Other, largely working class, largely multilingual.  Our across-the-street neighbors just got here from somewhere south of the Rio Grande, and on most weekends they have friends over, barbecue something, drink beer and tell jokes until the wee hours of the morning.

It's not suburbia, is what I'm trying to say here.  It's really not the scene for the soccer mom and the downtown lawyer dad.  Yet when we tried to suggest they print the flyer in Spanish, she looked at us like we'd just grown nine heads.  And when it arrived, a beautiful four-color laminated flyer that was all in English, we'd also lost a bedroom.  Somehow we went from a 3-bedroom 1-bath to a 2-bedroom 1-bath with an "extra living space."  But that wasn't supposed to have any effect on the price.  People like extra living spaces. Um, I checked Zillow and Realtor.com until my scroller got sore and there wasn't a single 2-bedroom 1-bath anywhere around listed for as much as we were.  3-bedrooms, sure, but no 2-bedrooms, extra living space or no extra living space.

Then the agent e-mailed me and suggested we drop the price, because there hadn't been very many showings.  Hey, was that the crack of doom I just heard?  I was delighted--not about dropping the price, but because I didn't think there had been any showings.  I immediately called her up to see what people had said during the showings.  Was there something particular they liked or didn't like, something we could fix, play up, learn from?  No reply for a while.  Finally she said there actually hadn't been any showings.  At all.  None.

I can put up with a lot, but when I lose respect for you, I do it all at once and very hard.  In this case it wasn't the lack of showings, it was the fact that she lied to me.  It was a ridiculous lie, too; all I had to do was call the lockbox company to find out how many showings there had been.  It was a good thing we weren't having too much luck finding something to buy, either, because I was about to fire another real estate agent.

Only I couldn't.  We'd signed a contract.  The only way to get out of it was to take the house off the market.  So that's what we did, and we're still in our little house.

Which is good.  I love my little house.  And my shrink, when I mentioned all of these goings-on, got a bit annoyed and said, "You know, if you'd told your psychiatrist you were considering this move--and you should tell your psychiatrist, when you're planning a major life change--he would have told you not to do it, because it would be a lot of stress you wouldn't need right now."

Oops.  Duly noted.

No, the sewer pipe isn't fixed yet.  If you have seven grand you don't need, you could send it our way.  And maybe come pick up our cats for a little while.  But anyway, that's what happened with the selling of the house.  And now (Paul Harvey voice) you know the rest of the story.

A Thousand Stars in the Night Sky

Stars.

Oh, yeah, I went to this Buddhist retreat, and there was a lot of meditating and a lot of Noble Silence, and it was a great time all the way around, but what I remember most are the stars.

I live in Dallas.  It's a fine place to live, but there's so much light here. It's humid and light bounces off the water in the air and at nine at night it can look like twilight.  If you see a star, it's either really bright or it's a comet that's burst through the outer stratosphere and is plummeting toward Earth, due to explode a thousand feet up and take out thousands of trees in a repeat of Tunguska that practically screams you'll be late for work tomorrow, er, if you're not dead.

But this place.  Oh my God.

We were eighty miles out of Dallas.  We could see it, glowing on the horizon like a nuclear plant with serious problems, but it was far away.  Standing out in a field on the prairie just a mile or so from the Red River, we looked up and saw stars.  Hundreds and thousands of stars.

"There's a thousand stars in the night sky, I wonder which one could be yours."  --Big Country, "The Broken Promise Land"

It takes a human eyeball about forty minutes to fully acclimate to the darkness.  I spent the forty minutes lying on my back in the field, staring up at the sky.  I only pried myself away to go to bed because it was freezing cold and at some point I needed to get some sleep.  (Yes, sleeping in the field was an option, but there were cows, and cows, though they aren't very bright, are extremely curious.  Imagine waking up at three a.m. to find a heifer nosing your forehead. One might never lie on one's back in a field again.)

I was back in the field the following morning for some walking meditation.  I lay down on my back again, and  my sweater rode up on my stomach.  After a while I felt something walking around on me.  I looked down (not very easy, with the breasts the size of Montana; I kind of had to flatten 'em and move them to one side) and beheld a very tiny grasshopper.  It was maybe the size of my little fingernail, bright green, wide-eyed and  moseying around on my stomach in a just-hatched sort of way.

"You might want to watch out," I told it.  "I'm a mass murderer."  (When I was a kid, grasshoppers infested the mint and asparagus plants in our backyard.  I must have killed thousands of them.  I've felt bad about this ever since.)  The grasshopper did not seem alarmed.  Neither did another one that hopped up next to the first one.  So I shut my mouth and just watched them until they hopped off and disappeared into the grass.

I wonder if I've been forgiven.

Anyway, I had a pretty good time at the retreat, in case this isn't obvious.  And I caught a stomach bug. Well, that wasn't so great, but I guess into every intestine a stomach bug must fall.  Maybe it was the vegetarian food.  I've always preferred they take it easy on the vegetarian.

Coincidentally, Joan and I are sneaking out of town this weekend for her birthday.  We're going to Bonham, and that's not far from the retreat center.  I've already emailed them to see if we can stop by and look at the stars.  Answer: Yes.

Cool.

Off To Be The Wizard

I suck at this packing to leave town thing. I can't imagine it's anybody's favorite chore. I'm even reasonably good at the packing part; I can get a lot into a suitcase (thanks, Military Dad) but I still suck at it.  Mainly I can't stop thinking about odds and ends I might need or could need or am thinking about possibly needing. Like a new pair of ear buds to replace the pair that broke yesterday. Like bug spray and some Power Bars and ear plugs for that hardy soul that gets to room with me.  Mind you, I've already left the house, so all these things will need to be picked up from the drugstore. And a Starbucks, to get some Via in case they don't have coffee there.  It's a Buddhist retreat; they'll probably only have tea. Coffee interferes with the blah blah blah and is bad for your ___________ and makes __________ more difficult or something like that.  To which I say, blammo. Bring on the caffeine or I might get ugly. Er.  

This place I'm going is in Oklahoma. Well, not quite Oklahoma. It's actually the border of Oklahoma, just south of the Red River.  On Google Earth, anyway, you can see the river from there.  Probably not in real life. It looks pretty darn rural, with fields and trees and rolling hills and stuff.  Very intimidating for this child of technology. 

Speaking of technology, this weekend is all about ditching it.  There's no cell phone reception and no wi-fi. Which means no phone, no lights, no motor car, not a single luxury.  Well, okay, I'm driving a motor car, so there must be SOME such things.  And I've got a flashlight.  There's probably electricity, at least for lights. But they're serious about no cell phones, no laptops, no tablets, no Internet, no Nooks, no...

Well, actually, I am taking my Nook.

But I can explain. 

Our gang of Buddhists is reading a book called "Training In Compassion," by Norman Fischer. We're actually supposed to have read the whole thing, which I haven't done. I've read about half of it and understood basically none of it, but hopefully what I have absorbed will help some. We're all supposed to have a copy, and when I bought mine I did what I usually do. I bought it with my Nook. So there it is, on the Nook. And on my cell phone, which has a Nook app.  

(In fact, in the ongoing war between Nooks and Kindles, I expect both to lose.  Tablets will win and reign supreme, and Nook and Kindle apps will duke it out in cyberspace. But I still think Nooks should win just because they have a cooler name. Kindle. That's what you do to light a fire. Fire. Books. Bad combination.)

Apart from the Nook, though, which also has a bunch of religious texts, a couple of sci-fi thrillers, a trashy noir or two, the latest issue of Time Magazine and maybe, just maybe a cowboy romance (no, not really, but I scared you there, didn't I?), I'm going to unplug, put away and otherwise be shed of tech for two days.  I think I can go that long without Tweeting. And if this thing lives up to its advertising, there won't be much to Tweet about anyway. Be safe, everybody. See you on the other side.

PS. Last night, in blasting wind and frigid temperatures, the mighty Law Dogs were brought low by Bat Pitch Crazy to the tune of 6-19. Yeah, that's pretty bad, but in the first inning we were ahead by two runs for the first time in team history.  And yours truly managed two hits and runs to first without falling down.  Truly, can the majors be far behind?

P.P.S. Big Country's new album "The Journey" is really really good!! Yes, even though Track Four is a heartbreaker and made me cry. Check it out.  "The Journey," wherever classy CDs are sold.

Retreat Retreat

I'm not even sure how long it's been since I did this, but in two weeks I'm going on a weekend meditation retreat.  I think it may have been a couple of years, actually.  I do recall I went with some folks from the Unity Church in Grapevine, which is hell and gone from Cartagenia, in a manner of speaking. It rained most of the weekend and opportunities to meditate outside were pretty much nonexistent.  Plus my idiot neighbor (have I mentioned my idiot neighbor?  He's an idiot)  chose that weekend to chop down half of our live oak and demand payment for having done so, and I fielded a lot of frantic calls from Joan (understandably).  Since then, I've done quite a few half-day retreats and I think a couple of full days, but nothing beyond that.

Devout Buddhists, by which I mean rich Buddhists, go on retreats a lot, and they go on much longer ones; a week, two weeks, even a month or more.  Yes, it is technically possible to meditate ten hours a day for a month.  Real Buddhist monks do it for years, sometimes their whole lives.  But to go on retreats to meditate that much, you pretty much have to have money. Oh, no one's ever turned away from lack of funds, and all that, but even the Scholarship Rate can get pretty pricey.  Take this one at the Shambhala Mountain Center, for example.  Yeah, tuition's only $100 for an entire month, but lordy lordy, look at that room and boardy.  $2,315.00 for a shared room.  Same price for solitude in a tent.  A tent.  Scholarship rate, $1500.  Okay, it's true that rent and food and everything else you need to live in the world probably costs that much or more, and if you spent that much for a week on a cruise ship you'd just be getting started, but you don't have to come up with it all at once, do you?  Plus there's the getting there, and the incidentals, and the laundry, and the paying bills for the place you left behind (it's not like your landlord gives you a rent holiday or anything), and the sending postcards (I wonder if they let you send postcards).

Then there's the Retreats With Famous People, like this one.  I, personally, have never heard of His Eminence Jigme Lodro Rinpoche Khandro Nyingtik, nor do I have any idea what the Heart Essence of the Dakinis is, but given the advertisement, I certainly should know, and I'd darned well better find out before I show up.  Here's another one, and I've actually heard of Jack Kornfield.  He's the author of The Wise Heart, which I've been trying to get through for a couple of years now.  (It's full of lists.  Buddha apparently liked making lists.)  This one's nine days long, for a cost of between $1350 and $2110 depending on how comfortable you want to be. Kids, if I'm going to have my butt on a kapok-stuffed cushion for ten hours a day, I want to be as comfortable as possible.  And there better be a swimming pool, too.

No, when it comes to retreats I'm kind of low-rent.  I hang around with two different groups of Buddhists; the Maria Kannon group (all Zen, all the time) and the Dallas Meditation Center (Brother ChiSing's cult of personality and Tiep Hien - Order of Interbeing for those of you that don't speak Viet Namese, ie, practically everybody). Bet you didn't know Dallas had two gangs of Buddhists.  How's this: There are actually more than a dozen.  The DMC has a mini-retreat one Saturday morning every month, and I try never to miss one because by the time they roll around I'm usually in desperate need of some peace and quiet.  The MKZC has zazenkai (day-long meditation) about once a month, and while I've thought many times about going, I've never actually managed it. Zen meditation is formal to the point of being scary and after about an hour I need a chair.  What would they think if I dragged a chair in there?  Terror of exclusion from the group; it's all very Japanese.

Well, there's one on the 27th and I might go.  Maybe it would be a good warm-up. Until then, hoping for less rain and fewer altercations with my idiot neighbor.  I did mention he's an idiot?

Talk Thursday: Security

My mom and dad are in Italy this week.  No, not the town in Ellis County, Texas.  The country shaped like a boot on the other side of the planet.  They're going to Rome and Florence and Venice and places that have more syllables than consonants in their names.  They're going to hang out and eat pasta and drink vino and have a fabulous time.  At least, I hope they are.  (And I'm stuck here at Afrah eating stuffed grape leaves and akawi pie.  I can't even tell you what a tragedy this is.)  There was a time when I did that whole international travel thing, but I have to admit it generally took place in years where I didn't have to replace a roof and a water heater and a stove and a washing machine and a huge transmission component for the Saturn and a cell phone and half my wife's mouth.  Yeah, we can kind of forget international travel this year.  I'm trying to figure out how to get the two of us to Phoenix some time around the holidays so we can reassure our friends and relatives of our continued existence.

Anyway:  I don't think I have ever once in my life had occasion to yell, "Call security!"  I did, once, have occasion to yell "Call my lawyer!", but A. I yelled it in English and everybody around me spoke only Swedish, and B. I didn't have a lawyer, so it really didn't have the kind of impact I would have preferred.  Security, though, is an interesting concept.  For some people it means big ugly guys with guns and six-cell flashlights.  (In my mind, the six-cell flashlight and gun disappear, and I'm carrying a mere Detex watch clock.  Yes, I was a security guard in college.  The things people will do to, you know, eat.)  For some, it's all about money.  For Linus, it's a blue blanket.  (Please, I beg of you, get this pop culture reference.  Lie to me if you don't.  Because if you don't, I'm going to lapse into despair and start into one of my what's-wrong-with-kids-today speeches and nobody wants that. Not even Linus.)

For most of my adult life and probably most of my youth, as well, I've been plagued with anxiety.  What the heck is anxiety, anyway?  Well, that's probably something else that means different things to different people.  What it always meant to me, still means today, is a fundamental, lizard-brain feeling that I Am Not Safe.  Yes, this floor looks very sturdy, but be not fooled; I'm about to fall through it.  Yes, this job looks pretty promising, but don't hold your breath; I'm about to get fired.  Yes, this relationship looks happy and stable; but she's going to leave me any second.  And any number of dreadful occurrences are going to happen before you can say Jack Robinson.  (Don't ask me who Jack Robinson is.  I think he's just one of those people whose name just doesn't take very long to say.)  Tornado? Fire? Flood? Gout? Mitt Romney?  Yep, expect any or all of them any second now.  And once this feeling gets started, it does not want to go away.  There are things that help, but the only thing that's Guaranteed To Work is the judicious application of pharmaceuticals.  Legally prescribed ones, that is.  And what are they prescribed for?  Uh, severe anxiety.  Imagine.

Now, this here's a Buddhist speaking.  We're supposed to be all calm and relaxed-like.  And I am, most of the time.  Unless the anxiety jumps me.  Does meditating help?  Yes, somewhat.  Does chanting, reading stuff out of one of the sutras, something by Thich Nhat Hanh help?  Yes, again somewhat.  Does plunging into a project and just working like hell until I forget what I'm so anxious about help?  Yes, though it doesn't stop it from Coming Right Back as soon as the coast is clear.  but if I need a guarantee, if I want to be positive that I'm going to stop wanting to jump right the hell out of my skin in twenty minutes or less, pharmaceuticals help the best.

I'll give you an example.  I was talking to the New Guy last night about one of those things I really don't want to talk about.  I have quite a few such things, and generally deal with them by saying "Yes, that happened.  It was gross.  Let's move on."  The thing about visiting mental-health care professionals of any stripe, though, is that you really have to talk about the stuff you don't want to talk about or visiting doesn't do you a bit of good.  So I have this way of sneaking up on something, whacking it with my paw, and then taking off at great speed, only to return a few minutes later and sneak up on it again.  I learned this technique from my cat.  New Guy played along pretty well (he must also have a cat, although I haven't asked him).  And gradually we got close enough to the big icky thing I didn't want to talk about that we could, you know, talk about it.  Afterward, in the parking lot, I was a jangly mess of nerves.  So I did something I have not done in a while.  I Took Something. It kicked in, in about twenty minutes, by which time I was home.  And calm.  And secure.  And starting to get very darn sleepy.

That, in my humble opinion, is the biggest problem with pharmaceutically-induced security.  It comes with a side effect of unconsciousness.  Joan said she had a terrible time waking me up.  Shaking my arm didn't do it and patting my face didn't do it.  She finally had to take off my shoes.  I don't know why that wakes me up, but it does.  Maybe in a former life I was a World War I soldier in the trenches, and I had to keep an eye on my boots because boots got stolen a lot.  I don't know.  Anyway, I got up and stumbled into bed and woke up this morning with a hangover.  I haven't been hung over for so long I'd forgotten what it was like, but, yeah.  It was a hangover.  That's another downside to the pharmaceutical anxiety treatment.

Still, today's a new day and today I feel better.  No crawling out of my skin, no looming threats of tornadoes or earthquakes or Romneys.  And I'm late for my meeting.  Ciao.

Talk Thursday: Meditating in Traffic

No, this isn't an approved Talk Thursday topic. The topic-o-meter is stuck again. Besides, who knows if I'd be able to crank out a genuine Talk Thursday column in the slightly less than thirty minutes I have here at Afrah tonight. Not my fault. Talk to the Dallas drivers, whose collective insanity made both the Tollway and the 75 virtually impassable this evening. One was at a dead stop, so I tried the other, which was at a slow crawl. Better than a dead stop, you say? Well, you'd say wrong. Apparently I annoyed the guy behind me, an oilman type driving a BMW, because he honked at me. As he pulled around me and roared into the other lane, I experienced a momentary thrill because he had to immediately slam on his brakes. That lane wasn't moving either. Ha, I thought. Serves you right, jerk. And immediately felt bad for being un-Buddhist-y. I should, of course, have wished him every happiness and a safe journey.

You know what I'm talking about. If you're a Christian, you've probably said or done or thought something less than charitable to somebody or about somebody and immediately felt guilty because that wasn't very Christian of you. Jesus would definitely not approve, in other words. Or Buddha, in my case. (Well, Jesus and Buddha. They would have gotten along.) But darn it all, we can't be saints 24/7. Sometimes we return to our inner cave man, and when that happens, we can just be mean-spirited little weasels.*

This sort of thing seems to happen quite a lot in traffic. I haven't exactly researched this, but I think it's a combination of being in a car, which feels about as familiar as being in your living room, and being terrified out of all reason. As Gary Numan put it, here in my car I feel safest of all. I can lock all my doors. It's the only way to live. You're anonymous, merely a shell of paint and metal zooming down the freeway. Or crawling down it, more to the point. Now add in the extreme terror (Watch! BMW guy pulling around Jen at great speed! See! Some idiot on a motorcycle popping a wheelie at 65 mph! Thrill! To the unrivaled stupidity of the guy in the pickup dragging a metal cart that's lost its wheels and is spraying sparks all over the freeway!) and it's only a matter of time before you get pissed off. As soon as the panic starts to fade, the angry rushes in. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's how-dare-you-scare-me. Maybe it's more like I've-been-made-a-fool-of. I'm not sure, but it definitely happens to me. Scared to pissed in 4 seconds.

Which is why, when they teach driver's ed in high school, they should teach meditating in traffic.

Not traditional meditation, where you sit with your eyes closed and your legs crossed. That'd be a recipe for disaster (though in Dallas, one might not even notice the difference). A kind of meditation that's even easier. As you drive, you take a breath and you let it out. You take another breath and you let it out. You don't take your eyes off the road, and you don't take your hands off the wheel. You just breathe, and you watch the traffic, and as long as your attention is taken up with traffic, and breathing, there's not enough room left to get scared, or pissed off. And if you start getting scared or pissed off, you take an extra long, extra deep breath and let it out slowly.

I do this. Practically always, when I'm driving, and I've been working on doing it when I'm just, you know, walking. At some point along the line, I stopped yelling at other drivers. Just stopped, after doing it from the time I got my license. One of these days, maybe I'll stop having un-Buddhist-y thoughts about other drivers, too. Or at least remember to think something nice about them when I catch myself doing it.

*Apologies to Zev and Scooby. I realize that real weasels are not mean-spirited.

Talk Thursday: Year's End

Aaaaaand suddenly it's the 29th of December. I'm not sure how that happened. I'm pretty sure I haven't missed any days, but how so many of them squeezed into that little span of time between January 1 and now, I can't explain. It seems like the older I get, the more time slips into fast forward. Somebody told me once that it had to do with my relative perception of time; the longer you've been alive, the greater the frame of reference you have for which to view time, so a year seems to go by faster at 45 (when you've had 44 years to view how long a year is) than at 9 (when you've only had eight years). To which I say, hooey. Sounds like something Einstein came up with when he was tossing a ball around on a spaceship and trying to prove that it got to its destination before it left. There's no excuse for clumsy theories of relativity.

Anyway, I'm at Afrah, munching on a piece of pita bread and trying to figure out if I have any great rituals to mark the passing of another year. I know I used to, but that was back when A. I drank alcohol and B. I felt like it was necessary to actually go out on New Years Eve. That I can't remember what they were is, you know, just par for the course. I got home, that's the important thing. At some point I began staying home, which was just, you know, smart. The year that 1999 begat 2000, Joan and I drank an entire bottle of Asti Spumante and began firing a cap gun off the balcony of our overpriced San Diego apartment. Then Joan staggered back out onto the balcony and yelled, loud enough to be heard in Tijuana, "'Sokay, everybody! 'Sjust a cap gun!" because she was worried somebody might call the cops. So far as I know, no one did, though a scared little voice floated in and said, "Thank you," very faintly from another balcony. (Call the cops. Ha. In our fine Texas neighborhood, a whole gang of morons, no doubt led by my idiot neighbor, open fire on the sky right around midnight, and the cops don't even bother to call back.)

New Years Eve is the one time of year I kind of miss alcohol. Not enough to go back, but there's something kind of homey about lolling around on your couch, pleasantly drunk, playing "spot the facelift scars" on Dick Clark's head while the crystal ball (made in Ireland, by the way, at the Waterford Crystal Factory) descends over Times Square. This is, of course, assuming I can even stay awake until midnight; I'm pretty sure that last year I curled up in a blanket, rang in the New Year with Maine and Florida and promptly fell asleep. And that was without alcohol (six years sober, y'all.) I'm gettin' old, Zeke.

So, apart from falling asleep, I don't really have any rituals to ring in the New Year. Every year I plan to get the house clean before the ball drops, and every year that kind of doesn't happen. House blessing? Burning sage? Casting a couple of spells? Nah. Never happens. The guns go off, if we're still conscious we hide under the dining room table, and in the morning we're about the only two among our circle of friends who aren't hung over. Which is great, but no claim to fame, really. We're also the only two that probably didn't go anywhere.

Some friends at work who happen to be from Mexico were talking today about "the grapes." Apparently on New Years Eve in Mexico and other Latin American countries, you try to swallow one grape for every time the bell tolls at midnight, and each one begets a wish. (Allergic to grapes over here, so can't do that, but that's an easy way to get a dozen wishes, if you ask me.) There's also something you do with a suitcase, but I was a little unclear on that. Maybe you put grapes in it. In France they're fond of fireworks, in Russia everybody's supposed to be quiet for the last twelve seconds of the old year, and in Scotland your year's luck is determined by the first person to set foot in your house after midnight. (Ouch. I wonder what happens if the first person is a lost American tourist with a full bottle of whiskey, a set of plastic bagpipes and a really bad map of Edinburgh? I mean, that could herald the Apocalypse.)

What do Buddhists do for the New Year? Well, hey, if they're part of Brother ChiSing's gang, you have a New Years Purification Ceremony. (Buddhists are big on ceremonies.) If you're more Zen, you're probably just going to meditate quietly somewhere. And if you're me--well, yeah, you're probably hiding under the dining room table. Dang, but those guns are loud.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Talk Thursday: Comfort Food

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!! I hope you all have a place to go engage in a celebratory meal with friends and relatives, and time to think about what makes this country great and all the blessings in your lives and stuff like that.

I, on the other hand, am thinking about what I nearly always think about. Namely, food.

I don't do Thanksgiving with family for the same reasons a lot of you probably wish you don't. That said, however, I do have a gathering of friends to go to later this evening. And I'm very much looking forward to the company and the gossip and the cameraderie and the playing with the cats and chickens and so on (our friends are urban chicken farmers). But over and above all that, I'm looking forward to the food. I've been told to expect turkey, of course, but also sweet potatoes, twice baked potatoes, creamed corn, veggies, pumpkin pie, pecan chocolate chip pie and chocolate Irish cream cheesecake. In short, a veritable smorgasbord of doom for the cardiovascular system. Not to mention people who aren't supposed to eat sugar.

Um, yeah. That would be me.

I take this whole mess of prescription drugs, see. A bunch of them aren't supposed to be taken with alcohol. I don't drink, so not a problem, but guess what sugar breaks down to as it's being digested? Yep. And the prescription drugs don't know if they're being interfered with by real alcohol, or the also-ran equivalent. Either way, they don't work as well as they should, and that's not a Good Thing if you're me.

To say nothing of the fact that I'm also hypoglycemic, which is kind of like being diabetic but without the glucose meters and the toys and stuff. It can be a precursor to diabetes or it can be genetic, which is the case with me (grandmother and uncle both had it). I get the lows but not the highs, and I can tell when I've got the lows because I'll stand up from a chair and almost lose consciousness. (Actually, I sometimes make it all the way from my desk to the hallway by the ladies' room before the vertigo hits. That's even more fun, grabbing for the wall to stay on my feet.) What causes the lows? Eating sugar. Or rather, eating sugar an hour or so ago, in quantity, by itself with nothing else. As soon as it clears the system, I crash and burn. The only cure is a regular meal, but it's faster to just grab some more sugar and start the whole cycle over again. I'm kind of stupid that way.

Some people are alcoholics. Some people are drug addicts. Some people can't stop gambling. Me, it seems to be All About The Sugar. I react to sugar like some people react to cocaine. There's no such thing as just a little bit. If I have some, I want more. Lots more. And if I have more, things get all kinds of ugly.

For about the last year, I've been trying to get off the sugar. I don't mean all sugar--there's sugar in all kinds of weird foods, like yogurt and ketchup, so it's hard to avoid altogether--but to a reasonable extent, giving up things that are supposed to be sweet, like doughnuts and cookies and cakes (especially cakes with white or cream-cheese frosting; that frosting is heroin. I'm serious.). I do okay--I once went 60 days, in point of fact--but lately it's been off and on. Five days here, three days there, and I think I had a streak of like eight or ten days earlier this month. Then Something Happens and suddenly I'm back on the sugar. Which means I have to get back off the sugar. And here's a news flash: Every time I try to get off the sugar, it's really hard.

Back when I quit drinking, I went through a weird three-week period where suddenly, out of nowhere, I'd start craving alcohol at odd times. Like the middle of the work day, say, or at ten a.m. on a Saturday. It was weird, but I figured it was just the last of the stuff making its way out of my system and it would go away soon. It did, and I haven't had a drink in about five years. Still, alcohol's easy. You look at a bottle and if it says, "Contains alcohol," you don't drink it. Sugar, on the other hand--there's sugar in practically everything. In fact, your average American eats 156 pounds of added sugar every year--a lot of it in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, which is just all kinds of bad for you. In 1850, that same average American only had 5 pounds of sugar a year. Which just goes to show something or other, and not that we've made brilliant progress in marketing high fructose corn syrup.

Anyway, there's no cure for my condition except to stay off the sugar, and there's no way to stay off it unless I can get off it to begin with. Which means I just need to keep trying. One of the Buddhist precepts is about not consuming intoxicants, which is usually translated to mean alcohol. I'd take that a step farther and say that anything that separates you from your practice is an intoxicant. If you feel rotten about yourself and are on an up-and-down roller coaster from eating (and then not-eating) sugar, you're not going to be meditating in a very serene frame of mind. So I'd throw sugar onto that list of intoxicants not to be consuming. At least, for me.

I'll bet Buddha never had this problem. Heck, in his time sugar maybe hadn't even been invented yet.

Talk Thursday: Before Cell Phones

I gotta start this off with a complaint. Well, maybe just a peeve. This happens at work sometimes and it really frosts me and I don't know why. I'll pull into a parking space, get out of my car, head for the elevator. A colleague will pull in next to me and get out of her car (it's always a female; I've never seen a male do this). Said colleague will be talking on a cell phone. It's braced against her shoulder, or she's talking on her headset (it's usually braced against her shoulder, though) and she's in the middle of some conversation that Should Not Be Had In Public, often about the breaking-up of a relationship or the color of poop in somebody's diaper that morning. Said colleague will follow me, or walk next to me, to the elevator and down in the elevator and across the bridge to the building and into the lobby. And then, finally, once we're in the lobby and waiting for the main elevator, said colleague says, "I have to go, I'm about to get into the elevator," and hangs up. Whereupon she looks at me (for the first time in five minutes) and says, "Good morning!"

Too late.

Honestly, I don't know why that bugs me so much. Maybe it's being privy to the conversations I'd rather not overhear. Maybe it's knowing she was driving and talking on her cell phone, which is dangerous. Maybe it's flat-out being ignored, then suddenly being acknowledged, like I only exist when it's convenient. But anyway. It puts me in a sour mood. Do not ever let anyone tell you that Buddhists are always placid and content. We do get in sour moods. Sometimes we even (gasp!) lose our tempers. Over cell phones. Talk about attachment to material things.

It's a little hard for me to believe this now, but I actually lived more than thirty years on the planet without a cell phone. I once had nothing more than a simple land line with an answering machine and thought that was plenty. I never worried about somebody trying to reach me in class or at work or some number of other places where I might not be reachable. The guy in charge of my band (yes, I was once in a band) had one of the first car phones, and he used to leave me amusing messages that sounded something like this: "Jennifer, I'm going to be late to practice because my hearing ran over, so I need you to stop by my house and you stupid son of a bitch pick up the keys from my wife and watch where the hell you're driving go down and unlock the church..." What cell phones existed were huge and clunky and had these weird antennas that stuck up in the air. I couldn't imagine ever needing one. Doctors and lawyers and emergency managers might need something like that, but me? Hardly.

Fast forward to 2011 and try to separate me from my BlackBerry. Go on, I dare you. Many braver men than you have tried and failed.

I might point out, I didn't even have e-mail back then. I'd heard of it, but only a few people had it, and no one that I knew. My dad was on something called "Compuserve" that he seemed to really like, and I was glad he was having fun and so on, but as far as I was concerned, computers existed for one purpose only: To serve as glorified typewriters. Oh, and video game consoles. I was particularly taken with a game called "Welltris" (three-dimensional Tetris) that no one else had heard of. Now I get my e-mail on my cell phone, and play a game called "Brickbreaker" that no one else has heard of. One of these days I'll spring for "Angry Birds." No, I probably won't.

I don't just use my BlackBerry, I rely on that sucker. I read headlines on it, tweet on it, keep my appointments on it, keep my address book on it, get directions on it. It keeps me entertained when I'm waiting for something and oh yeah, once in a while I actually do call somebody on it. If I ever lost it I wouldn't know where I was, where I was going, what was happening in the world or what I was supposed to do next. The mere thought makes me a little green. I have a cartoon somewhere of a meditation instructor saying to the student, "Your posture's very good. Now drop your shoulders a little bit and try to relax your grip on your cell phone." Yep, that's about it. When they pry it from my cold dead fingers.

By the way, my BlackBerry has a meditation timer. Yes, I know I'm hopeless.

Techno-geeks rejoice! Afrah, home of the World's Greatest Pita Bread, is now on Twitter! Follow them @AfrahMedFood. And tell them Jen sent you. I wonder if they tweet in Arabic?