Sitting Down To Meditate With My AK-47

Playing on the iPod: Something vaguely Irish-y with lots of guitars. Your guess as good as mine.

Meters swum today: 1600

Miles swum in July, Swim for Distance Month: 21.4

Take a look at this banner for a second:

I have great respect for Christiane Amanpour. I think she's awesome. She did a tremendous series on being a woman in Afghanistan that should have won all kinds of awards (and maybe it did.) She's my favorite journalist besides Anderson Cooper (I still wanna take that soulful, sad-eyed boy home, feed him a good meal, give him a hot bath and _______ his brains out; unfortunately he bats for the other team, or rather my team, or--well, he wouldn't be interested). But I gotta wonder where on earth she got the idea to call her new series "Buddha's Warriors." Uh, hello? Christiane?

I mean, talk about antithetical. In Myanmar, lots of monks got the snot beaten out of them recently for protesting 500% increases in the prices of gas and most foods. What did they do to deserve this? Pretty much march up and down the street chanting. When the guys with the billy clubs showed up, they didn't fight back; they just got pounded into the ground. I mean, there are exceptions - many Samurai were Buddhists, and they killed people for a living - and there's Buddhist Army chaplains (one who served at Abu Ghirab) and plenty of modern-day Buddhist martial artists running around, but for the most part, Buddhists? Warriors? Hard to fit into a sentence together. I realize "Buddha's Peace-Time Civilians" isn't nearly as catchy a name for a series, but somebody should have thought about it. Sincerely.

That's not gonna stop me from watching, though. I'm rabidly curious. I wonder if it's gonna be one of those, "This is what Buddhists believe" things that are always so accurate. Sorry, that's me being snarky again. This being Texas and all, there's plenty of letters to the paper that say, "I'm a Christian and therefore I believe..." as though all Christians always agree on everything (and even when I was a Christian I didn't agree with a lot of folks; Christianity is kind of God's joke on the term "organized religion"). There are worse letters about what all Muslims allegedly believe, and don't get me started on Wiccans/pagans. But still, it's very cool that somebody's doing an actual series on Buddhism. Maybe they'll say in the series how many Buddhists there are in the world, the U.S., or whatever; Buddhists never seem to show up on those Pew Research Center surveys of American religion. (Prompting my Buddhist monk friend to say, "But of course; Buddhists do not believe in answering surveys." Uh, he was kidding.)

Meantime, you might wanna check out this book. Heck, for that matter, so do I. I wonder if the local library has it. Oh, Joan...

This is your knee. This is your knee on the slab.

Playing in the background: "Food Detectives" on the Food Network, which just incidentally is a channel Jen should not be watching.
Meters swum today: 1600
Miles swum in July, Swim for Distance Month: 19.3

What we have here in this nifty graphic is a representation of a human knee. I think it's a right knee. If you'll squint at a little structure underneath that top knee bone, kind of on the left (your left, not the knee's left) you'll see something called a "lateral meniscus." Why is this important, you might well ask. Because, I tell you, it is this little structure that is causing Joan so much distress.

Remember when we went to get married in California? Well, the day before we left, Joan took a bad step outside a restaurant and her knee went "AAAAAIGH!!" Two and a half emergency room hours later it was determined that nothing was broken. And just now, three weeks after the fact, we're finally getting the MRI results back. Guess what. That "lateral meniscus" fella has suffered what we shall call a "radial tear." And that's not all: The inside of Joan's knee (I guess that'd be the curvy bit above the squiggly bit) is possessed of "stage III and IV degenerative changes," which is to say, arthritis. So Joan is headed for surgery. Directly for surgery. Do not pass "Go," do not ask your health plan how much this is all gonna cost.

Now here's the strange part. Every time I start talking about this, or blogging about it for that matter, my own right knee starts to hurt. Why, I have no idea. I was in a skiing accident some 24 years ago (having violated the Family First Commandment of Skiing, which is, "Thou shalt not follow Uncle Rod," who is, just incidentally, my father) and caused some as-yet-unknown damage. Every now and then, when it gets humid or a storm is coming, my knee makes my life unpleasant for a few hours. To have it simultaneously kick on and off at the drop of a hat, or a knee, is a new thing.

Well, there's only one possible explanation. We've been together so long that my knee is having sympathetic ouchies. It's a good thing we didn't have kids or one of us would be having sympathetic labor pains.

The Ultimate Lesbian Wet Dream

(Boy, that oughta increase site traffic...)
Playing in the background (badly); Jocelyn Pook, music from "The Merchant of Venice"
Meters swum today: None.
Miles swum in July, Swim for Distance Month: 17.9

Okay, kids, take a look here at the cover of Time Magazine. That's Dara Torres, age 41, a serious medal contender in the 50-meter freestyle at the Beijing Olympics. This is a slightly more flattering shot:
I admit I have a thing for the older ladies (I am exactly 18 months younger, thank you). Seriously, though, when someone who's 41 can do great things in a sport that's dominated by 20 year olds, the rest of us oughta have a prayer in heck, wouldn't you say? In a recent post I was whining about not looking like a swimmer. Well, take a look at Dara here. THIS IS WHAT A SWIMMER LOOKS LIKE. Rippling muscles. Six-pack abs. Eighty-inch wingspan. Jen's wingspan, for anybody who's interested: 65 inches from middle fingertip to middle fingertip. Joan had to help me measure. She graciously agreed to be interrupted in the middle of the Sunday papers for this purpose. She is a sport. She also speaks of herself in the third person when she wants me to add something to my blog about her, which she could do herself, but hey, I digress.

Anyway, if God had asked me what body I wanted for Christmas I could not do better than Dara's (though whether that's a body to be in, or a body to be all over, I don't think He was specific. I also don't think it matters. Alas, she is straight. And I am married.) And, yes, it's true that I took the body I got and did terrible things to it, but even if everything had gone exactly perfect, I would not look like Dara. Wrong set of genes altogether.

This week I finally got near a scale (the scale at the pool underweighs me by about 30 pounds, which is flattering, but not at all accurate) and discovered I've reached a weight I last saw in 1997. At least, I think it was 1997 because it was the last year before Beth moved to Oregon and we went to Disneyland on her Holiday Inn employee rate pass. Anyway, we were in Tomorrowland where they have these scales that show you what you'd weigh on different planets and I had this moment of amazement standing on the one for Earth because my weight was over a certain number that ends in two zeroes for the first time. I'm not gonna tell you what number that was. Here's a hint, it did not start with a one.

From 1997 to 2006 is nine years. It took nine years for me to pass this double-zero milestone and go up to my highest weight ever, which, again, I'm not gonna tell ya, but it was 40 pounds more than the first one. It's only taken A YEAR AND A HALF to come back down from there. That's a miracle. That's the hand of God. And here I am whining that I don't have Dara Torres's body. In either capacity. Which just goes to show that we human beings do a lot better and are much happier when we appreciate what we have; air conditioning, law enforcement that comes when we call (usually), three cats, a laptop, four functioning limbs.

I solemnly vow not to whine about how long it's taking me to lose this weight any more. But if Dara Torres ever wants to come over for dinner, a movie, etc. etc., that would be just fine.

Century Mark!

Playing on the iPod: Paul Horn, "Amazonia" from Brazilian Images (I'm not much of a jazz fan, but this one speaks to me)
Meters swum today: 1600
Kilometers swum in July, Swim for Distance Month: 24.4

I finally hit 100 miles in the pool for the year -- 102, actually, as of this morning. Very cool. I'm not gonna make 25 miles for July, but I might make 20 or 22. That's a big increase over the typical month (12-16 miles).

Honestly, the last thing I look like is a distance swimmer. Swimmers tend to be tall, lanky, and have very long arms. I'm short, fat, and have legs like tree trunks. I have no wingspan to speak of (little chicken arms) and a pair of enormous floater bouys (that's breasts to you non-swimmers) that play hell with my center of gravity. This should disqualify me (and it probably would, from the Olympics or something) but nobody on my team seems to mind. I think they thought I was kind of cute at first - a mascot or something. I even had a nickname. "Fireplug." Now I'm just one of the gang. And ya know, one of the gang is not a bad thing to be.

How far is 102 miles, you may be wondering. Well, ponder this: It's like swimming across the English channel. Five times. Later!
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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...
.

Wetitude, Part II

Playing on the iPod: "This Moment Now" by 2002
Meters swum today: 2000
Kilometers swum in July, Swim for Distance Month: 18.9 km or 11.74 miles

Nope, I didn't hit the century mark yet. Very close though. Maybe tomorrow.

Swimming pools, on the whole, are not great places for enlightenment. Well, I suppose enlightenment in the Buddhist sense can strike basically anywhere, any time, but great ideas should pick better times to hit you than in the middle of a 400 pull descending. Why? Well, because when you gasp in delight, you're likely to inhale a mouthful of water, come up coughing, and maybe lose a hand paddle flappin' around tryin' to get stable again. It's always the left hand paddle, too. Dunno what it is with that. Kind of like I always get water in my right ear and not my left ear. What? Huh? Come again?

This is all the fault of an airplane book called The Wheel of Darkness, by Douglas Preston and somebody-or-other Child. What, you may ask, is an airplane book? Well, it's a book that you pick up right before you get on an airplane, when you realize much to your dismay and chagrin that you didn't bring anything decent to read. (I dunno about you, but to me, getting on an airplane without a good book is like crossing the Gobi Desert without a water bottle.) A true airplane book stands out from other fiction of its class in that you can leave it on the airplane half finished and never miss it. It's either that bad, that poorly written, or that uninteresting. In this case, all three.

In case you're not familiar with these guys, they apparently write books about a repressed FBI agent named Pendergast that gets involved in lots of investigations of weird arcane artifacts and folklore from places most Americans don't visit. In this case, Tibet. The artifact in question is an evil scroll that, when you look at it, kills all of your interest in your fellow beings and strips you of your moral sense. Kind of the anti-enlightenment, I guess; instead of realizing all beings are one, you decide that you're the only being that matters. There's a lot of Buddhist subreferences, which was why I picked it up in the first place. But don't be fooled. This book has as much to do with Buddhism as weird arcane artifacts and ancient folklore have to do with the everyday goings-on of the FBI. In short, it's the perfect airplane book, right down to the bad dialogue and forgettability. And there's all this plot about a luxury ocean liner and a frustrated captain and, I dunno, crashing on the rocks and killing four thousand people or something, but by the time we got that far I no longer cared. Hate to tell you this, but ol' Pendergast wasn't much fun even before he dealt with the evil scroll.

Getting back to this morning, though, I now have somewhat of a handle on where I get my ideas. I think they're amalgams of things I run across during the day and they just fall together in my head in such a way that I can Make It Work, People. In this case, the airplane book, two nine-volt batteries, something that Nicholas said in Mindbender and the basic interconnectedness of everything all fell together (in the middle of a 400 pull descending) and I suddenly knew why Roland was the way Roland was. What happened to Roland, that is, to make him Roland.

Backing up a sec: Who the hell is Roland. Roland is my bad guy. Well, kind of. He's not a nice guy, that's for sure, and he does some really nasty things, but once in a while I get the feeling he might actually be the only one in my group of characters that has any kind of grasp of what's going on. He might even be the hero. Anyway, nobody likes him except me, and I'm crazy about him, but that's mainly because Roland does whatever Roland decides Roland needs to do, and to hell with everybody else. For somebody who's so caught up in What Everyone Will Think Of Me most of the time, this is just unbelievably cool. But, something had to have happened to Roland to make Roland Roland, and that's been bothering me for the whole last book and a half. Then, today, this morning, I finally figured it out.

I called Joan on the phone from my car at the swimming pool's parking lot and asked her if she had a minute. She said, "Jen, I'm standing on the front porch with my keys in my hand about to leave for work. What is it?" I told her I had to tell her something before my brain exploded. Ever patient, she stood there on the front porch and listened to me rant about the evil scroll, the nine-volt batteries, something Nicholas said and the basic interconnectedness of everything. Joan is such a sport, she didn't even say, "So Roland looked at the evil scroll?" Well, no. Not exactly. But the evil scroll was an important part of the whole falling-together-of-things. Anyway, Joan's ability to let me rant and even say "Oh, cool" occasionally is just one more testament to her absolute goddesshood. Anybody who would put up with me is inherently a supreme being.

Anyway, I think I can finish the book now. It's about time, hey?

So how's the book going? you ask.

Well, you didn't ask, but--Spellbinder continues to go great guns. I'm closing in on The End, maybe fifty pages or so from now. And what do I do for my next trick? Well, howabouts getting the first one published so the second one can have some kind of existence? You think maybe? I seem to be stuck again. I told David two weeks ago I'd be sending the silly thing to MacMillan and then I didn't do it. I'm liking Spellbinder a whole lot more than its predecessor. Can you publish part two of a trilogy first? Hey, Douglas Adams wrote a five part trilogy and it wasn't even called Confession, Obsession, Possession, Repossession and Replevin. Okay, that doesn't rhyme.

Chloe the Cat just leaped across the keyboard and left a stray P someplace. Now I can't find it. I think she likes the laptop because it is warm. Which is odd because it's about a million degrees outside and when I hung up the laundry, I could pretty much take down the first pillowcase by the time I finished hanging the last one.

I'm procrastinatingp. Can you tell?