So something happened yesterday that's probably happened about a million times before, but I didn't notice for whatever reason. Probably because I wasn't being mindful, which, you know, a Buddhist kind of should be. Ironically, Thich Nhat Hanh's school of Buddhism, which is my particular sect, is All About Being Mindful; my Buddhist name, for Godsakes, is "Deepening Mindfulness of the Source," which is pretty Jedi, when you think about it.
But anyway. I woke up in a bad mood, which happens. I kind of grumped around the house having coffee and getting ready and so on, and then I went to the pool. There was a New Guy in my lane. This is not surprising; new guys often show up in my lane because I swim in what we shall call the Slow Lane, with the older guys and the guys recovering from injuries and the guys who, for whatever reason, don't want to swim in the Fast Lane with the ex-Olympians and the 30-year-old doctors and, you know, the kings of the water. (And they are mostly guys, now that I think about it. We probably have twice as many men as women. It's a pretty egalitarian sport, but I bet women have more trouble getting out of the house at 5 am to get to the pool what with kids and pets and jobs and--stuff.) So the first question that always comes up is, "Does the New Guy know the rules?" There are a couple of different ways to share a lane--like circling, going up one side and down the other side, or splitting, where each of you stays in one half of the lane. and I could tell this guy didn't know the rules because he was kind of all over the place. In that circumstance it's not very safe to jump in and start swimming because there could be a collision, so I jumped into the water and just waited by the wall for him to come back from the other end so we could Discuss.
And an amazing thing happened. I guess I never noticed this before because I normally jump in and then immediately push off and start swimming, and in this case I was just holding still, but the second I jumped into the water, the happiness meter started going up. I swear, it was like watching the mercury increase on an oven timer; I came in grumpy, I jumped in the water, and just by being in the water my mood started to improve. Never mind the actual swimming. When I started actually swimming, my mood just shot up. Sure, exercise and endorphins and all that, but still, this was pretty remarkable. Instant happy, just add water.
And speaking of swimming, how's the swim-for-distance thing going? Pretty good. I'm at 19.7k or 12 and a quarter miles. I still have the better part of two weeks, so it looks like I'll hit at least 20 miles and hopefully 23. This Sunday I'm hoping to do a double session, or a session and a half, which comes to at least an hour and a half in the water and 2700-3000 meters. The big 5k swim is in September and I lost a lot of ground when I was out with a month with pneumonia, but we'll see how that goes. Somebody told me recently that there's a two-hour limit on the 5k swim, anyway. There's absolutely no way I will get fast enough to swim 5k in 2 hours (more like 2 1/2, maybe even closer to 3) but I can probably swim between 3500 and 4000, and that's a lot. (Hm, maybe I'll take bets on whether or not I hit 4000. Proceeds to go to some charity. Not sure which one. There are a lot of them out there.)
I have several sponsors pledging me by the kilometer or the mile, with all proceeds going to Heifer, International, but I could always use more. It's easy; just be around when I post my final tally at the end of the month and send me a check, made payable to Heifer (which is tax deductible and all that) so that I can mail it with all the other checks and a nice letter from everybody. If I raise $250, we can buy a water buffalo for some family in Southeast Asia, which would be cool. If not, we can still buy goats and chickens and hives of bees and so on. Farm animals make a huge difference in the lives of poor families and they are not to be eaten, so there's something for the vegetarians.
Showing posts with label mindfulness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mindfulness. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Sunday, January 31, 2016
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.
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.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Whiplash, Part II: Is This Any Way To Run A Music School?
Spoiler Alert: I will be talking about the outcome of Whiplash somewhere in this post. Where, I can't really say, but I'm sure it'll come up.
In the last two weeks, I've missed three days of work due to inclement weather. Namely ice storms, which is the Texas term for when the heavens open and dump tons of snow and sleet on the city, and then the temperature rattles down to way below freezing so that everything for miles around is evenly covered with a solid sheet of ice and it's basically impossible to leave your house without falling on the steps. Now, I spent a goodly chunk of my formative years in Salt Lake City, where the whole valley fills up with clouds around about November 1 and just pretty much stays solidly socked in until March. That's bad, too, but these Texas winters are just amazing. The whole thing may sound like not so much if you live in Buffalo, New York or North Dakota or something, when you get seven feet of snow every time the governor sneezes, but when an ice storm like this hits, everything just grinds to a halt. It has to. You literally can't leave your house.
Fortunately, the power has stayed on the whole time (knock on Formica) and I have software that will let me load into my work computer, so I can get a few things done while I'm sitting in my kitchen. Unfortunately, a lot of things I need to do my job are on my desk, or in the file room, or otherwise inaccessible. So I end up working on stuff I need to do, but have been trying to avoid, like populating this table in Excel that lists and catalogs about 30,000 pages worth of documents generated by a certain business. Or reading hundreds of pages of somebody's medical records and breaking them down into three talking points for a lawyer who's writing a complaint, Fun stuff like that. All good, all important, all gotta be done, but not really the sort of thing I feel most proud of when somebody asks me why I do what I do. Or whether or not a college degree really does any good in the long-term prospects for a job and a career.
Which brings us back to Whiplash (told you we'd get there), and the whole reason anybody goes to music school, vs. medical school or law school or guitar building school or any other old school, in the first place. (Like what I did there?) About 2/3 of the way through Whiplash, after he's been thrown out of music school and Fletcher, the instructor, has been fired by the same music school, our protagonist meets up with Fletcher once again at a little jazz club where Fletcher is playing the piano. Fletcher sees him, waves him over, buys him a drink, and there's some actual conversation, during which Fletcher explains himself, somewhat. And what he has to say is actually very interesting. He tells a few stories about legendary jazz artists and road blocks they hit along the way. About how they screwed something up, made mistakes, were otherwise not at their best at this thing they were best at. About how each one swore that whatever just happened would never happen again, and because of that, they became legendary jazz artists. Fletcher says something like, "Do you know how Miles Davis got to be Miles Davis? Because he never again let his horn be flat when he was playing with Dizzy Gillespie," or something like that (and yes, I know I just mixed up two eras, not to mention two instruments, but hey, jazz is not something I know a lot about, okay?) Fletcher saw his role as a music teacher to be the obstacle, the guy everybody's afraid of, the guy who yells at you when you screw up so that you solemnly swear to yourself that it will never, ever happen again (and thus, later on, you achieve greatness). He finishes his soliloquy by adding that the most ruinous words any music teacher ever speaks to a student are, "Good job."
And really, being on the receiving end of this speech, it sort of makes sense. Does his classroom behavior discourage students? Maybe, Fletcher says, "but Miles Davis wouldn't have been discouraged." Maybe not, but we can't all be Miles Davis. Still, as I mentioned in my last post on Whiplash, if you're not going to be Miles Davis, there's really no point in going to music school. It's the non-Miles Davises among us who get kicked out of music school for failing piano. Only the Miles Davises of the world are going to graduate, go into the performance world and get good jobs. The rest of us are going to become music teachers. Or lawyers or engineers or construction workers or whatever else pays the bills, and maybe play a little music on the side. Is that fair? No. But lots of things aren't fair, and music school is just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, we hear this speech, and sort of come to understand Fletcher a little, before we find out he's completely sociopathic and probably a little bit crazy. The next thing we know, Fletcher's entered a major music contest with a new ensemble and then proceeds to throw the entire ensemble under the bus to get even with one guy. Let me explain to you how often that Just. Doesn't. Happen. Music teachers live and die by the results of these contests and what Fletcher does here is, well, just crazy. Yet the whole thing ends in a way nobody saw coming. Well, I didn't see it coming, anyway, and I quit reading murder mysteries quite a few years ago when I realized I usually knew murderer, motive and method before anyone had even died yet.
So we're left with this question: Is being an asshole ever justified? Buddhist-y speaking, the answer is no. Good behavior toward others is basically required as a condition of being human. But, if being an asshole is what's required to fix a given situation, or to save a few lives we do it, and then we tell everybody we're sorry after the fact. If, for example, the only way to get proper medical attention for your significant sweetie, after the pre-surgery unit has already screwed up three times and is about to do it for a fourth, is to raise your fist and yell about the standard of care and how they're not meeting it, then you do it. (Not that that's ever happened to me, or anything.) And you come back afterward with a box of chocolates for the staff and explain you were "under duress" at the time and you're really a nice person and they're all just fine, fine doctors and nurses who were evidently having a very bad day. And maybe they believe you. Or maybe they call security. Anyway, it's a good way to avoid eating a box of chocolates by yourself.
In any case, I think most of us are nice people and are trying to do the right thing most of the time, But then, some of us are Fletcher. Maybe the important thing is to be able to tell the Fletchers of the planet for what they are, and if we can't beat them, find a way around them. At least before you're part of the ensemble that gets thrown under the bus.
By the way, in case anybody missed my "adults only" post last week, here's a picture of a big, throbbing cock.
Cheers, all.
In the last two weeks, I've missed three days of work due to inclement weather. Namely ice storms, which is the Texas term for when the heavens open and dump tons of snow and sleet on the city, and then the temperature rattles down to way below freezing so that everything for miles around is evenly covered with a solid sheet of ice and it's basically impossible to leave your house without falling on the steps. Now, I spent a goodly chunk of my formative years in Salt Lake City, where the whole valley fills up with clouds around about November 1 and just pretty much stays solidly socked in until March. That's bad, too, but these Texas winters are just amazing. The whole thing may sound like not so much if you live in Buffalo, New York or North Dakota or something, when you get seven feet of snow every time the governor sneezes, but when an ice storm like this hits, everything just grinds to a halt. It has to. You literally can't leave your house.
Fortunately, the power has stayed on the whole time (knock on Formica) and I have software that will let me load into my work computer, so I can get a few things done while I'm sitting in my kitchen. Unfortunately, a lot of things I need to do my job are on my desk, or in the file room, or otherwise inaccessible. So I end up working on stuff I need to do, but have been trying to avoid, like populating this table in Excel that lists and catalogs about 30,000 pages worth of documents generated by a certain business. Or reading hundreds of pages of somebody's medical records and breaking them down into three talking points for a lawyer who's writing a complaint, Fun stuff like that. All good, all important, all gotta be done, but not really the sort of thing I feel most proud of when somebody asks me why I do what I do. Or whether or not a college degree really does any good in the long-term prospects for a job and a career.
Which brings us back to Whiplash (told you we'd get there), and the whole reason anybody goes to music school, vs. medical school or law school or guitar building school or any other old school, in the first place. (Like what I did there?) About 2/3 of the way through Whiplash, after he's been thrown out of music school and Fletcher, the instructor, has been fired by the same music school, our protagonist meets up with Fletcher once again at a little jazz club where Fletcher is playing the piano. Fletcher sees him, waves him over, buys him a drink, and there's some actual conversation, during which Fletcher explains himself, somewhat. And what he has to say is actually very interesting. He tells a few stories about legendary jazz artists and road blocks they hit along the way. About how they screwed something up, made mistakes, were otherwise not at their best at this thing they were best at. About how each one swore that whatever just happened would never happen again, and because of that, they became legendary jazz artists. Fletcher says something like, "Do you know how Miles Davis got to be Miles Davis? Because he never again let his horn be flat when he was playing with Dizzy Gillespie," or something like that (and yes, I know I just mixed up two eras, not to mention two instruments, but hey, jazz is not something I know a lot about, okay?) Fletcher saw his role as a music teacher to be the obstacle, the guy everybody's afraid of, the guy who yells at you when you screw up so that you solemnly swear to yourself that it will never, ever happen again (and thus, later on, you achieve greatness). He finishes his soliloquy by adding that the most ruinous words any music teacher ever speaks to a student are, "Good job."
And really, being on the receiving end of this speech, it sort of makes sense. Does his classroom behavior discourage students? Maybe, Fletcher says, "but Miles Davis wouldn't have been discouraged." Maybe not, but we can't all be Miles Davis. Still, as I mentioned in my last post on Whiplash, if you're not going to be Miles Davis, there's really no point in going to music school. It's the non-Miles Davises among us who get kicked out of music school for failing piano. Only the Miles Davises of the world are going to graduate, go into the performance world and get good jobs. The rest of us are going to become music teachers. Or lawyers or engineers or construction workers or whatever else pays the bills, and maybe play a little music on the side. Is that fair? No. But lots of things aren't fair, and music school is just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, we hear this speech, and sort of come to understand Fletcher a little, before we find out he's completely sociopathic and probably a little bit crazy. The next thing we know, Fletcher's entered a major music contest with a new ensemble and then proceeds to throw the entire ensemble under the bus to get even with one guy. Let me explain to you how often that Just. Doesn't. Happen. Music teachers live and die by the results of these contests and what Fletcher does here is, well, just crazy. Yet the whole thing ends in a way nobody saw coming. Well, I didn't see it coming, anyway, and I quit reading murder mysteries quite a few years ago when I realized I usually knew murderer, motive and method before anyone had even died yet.
So we're left with this question: Is being an asshole ever justified? Buddhist-y speaking, the answer is no. Good behavior toward others is basically required as a condition of being human. But, if being an asshole is what's required to fix a given situation, or to save a few lives we do it, and then we tell everybody we're sorry after the fact. If, for example, the only way to get proper medical attention for your significant sweetie, after the pre-surgery unit has already screwed up three times and is about to do it for a fourth, is to raise your fist and yell about the standard of care and how they're not meeting it, then you do it. (Not that that's ever happened to me, or anything.) And you come back afterward with a box of chocolates for the staff and explain you were "under duress" at the time and you're really a nice person and they're all just fine, fine doctors and nurses who were evidently having a very bad day. And maybe they believe you. Or maybe they call security. Anyway, it's a good way to avoid eating a box of chocolates by yourself.
In any case, I think most of us are nice people and are trying to do the right thing most of the time, But then, some of us are Fletcher. Maybe the important thing is to be able to tell the Fletchers of the planet for what they are, and if we can't beat them, find a way around them. At least before you're part of the ensemble that gets thrown under the bus.
By the way, in case anybody missed my "adults only" post last week, here's a picture of a big, throbbing cock.Cheers, all.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Book o'the Decade: Savor, by Thich Nhat Hanh and Lilian Cheung
I don't wanna talk about it.
Yeah, I know it's bad. It's really bad. Here's another article if you wanna read about what the state of Massachusetts just did to Justina Pelletier. And here's the court decision, which somebody leaked to the media (twas not I); juvenile court rulings are typically not available to the public, so go read it before it disappears. I think she'll be dead in six months, seeing as they won't get her medical treatment she clearly needs. And I worry even more about her state of mind ("Hey, fifteen-year-old kid, guess what, you can't ever go home until you turn eighteen, if you make it that long.") But I don't wanna talk about it. Can't, really. I gotta let other people handle this one. I'm not even supposed to be watching the news, much less following gut-wrenching custody battles. My doc tells me there's nothing on the news that won't upset me, worry me or anger me and I don't need that degree of angst in my life, or, to put it more specifically, "Don't. Watch. The. News." Still, I'd probably wave him off if Thich Nhat Hanh didn't say the same thing.
In fact I'm reading a Thich Nhat Hanh book right now, called Savor. It's about "mindful eating." You'd think just the eating of food wouldn't be a big deal, never mind a Buddhist concern, but it is, Blanche, it is. The way we eat food in the modern world is completely messed up as far as what we actually need. It's not only that everything is full of sugar, fat and salt (and I've been off sugar for a week now, so I can say that it's damned difficult to find foods that are less than 15g of sugar per serving and are therefore edible by Jen), but it's the way we eat stuff. Like in the car, pouring it from a cup into our mouths without taking our eyes off the road. Or at a buffet, scrambling to pack away as much food as possible so as to get our money's worth. Not only have we lost track of the whole point of food, but we've lost our ability to--get this--enjoy eating. Our ability to enjoy things is part of what makes us human, so I'm recommending Savor as my new Book o' the Decade, which will stand until I get another one.
And it's not just the eating of food that's a problem, it's the taking-in of all kinds of stuff. A lot of what we read, hear about, decide to do and think about is toxic to us. Ferexample, I've always been a big fan of horror movies, horror fiction, things generally scary. I think I read my first Stephen King book when I was about twelve. However, in the last couple of years, I've become very choosy about my horror fiction. I only read/watch supernatural, ghost story type things, both Western and Asian (best possible example: Shutter, the original Hong Kong version. Holy cow was that ever creepy--and when you get to the end you suddenly realize that you don't know if there was really a ghost there or not. It might have all been his guilty conscience. Seriously, see this movie.) I don't do serial killer/slasher stuff anymore. I don't do people being mean to other people. The book Horns, by Big Steve's son Joe Hill, had a scene in it that upset me so much I talked about it in therapy (!). And my therapist was a bit nonplussed; as he pointed out, if you read a lot of horror fiction, sooner or later you're going to find something that horrifies you. Or, as we say outside the therapeutic world, "Well, duh."
So there's stuff you eat, and there's stuff you read, look at and hear about. Then there's the stuff you decide to do, and most important of all, the stuff you think about. (Or, to put it in Proper Buddhist Language, the Four Nutriments; edible food, sensory impressions, intention/volition and consciousness.) If you think about it (and did you know we humans are the only animals, as far as we know, that can think about thinking?), what you think about is everything. The thoughts you have in your head make up your current mood, your beliefs about various issues, your ability to be there for your fellow human beings and the way you feel about yourself and other humans.
If you spend much of the day thinking about what you need to do next, how you're going to get everything done, what might next go disastrously wrong and how to prevent it, and what to do if it goes wrong anyway, you're probably not going to be in a very good mood. What's more, you won't be there to do the things you are doing, never mind all the other stuff you have to do. I mean, are you really there for your friends and family members? Or are you just squeezing them in between appointments? Do you actually spend time with them or do you spend the time you're with them worrying about how to get out of here in time to do the next thing? This sort of stuff is out of control in our culture. We eat, listen to, read, think about and decide to do more toxic stuff than ever before in history, and it's not surprising that it might be affecting our health.
I've had bronchitis for the past two weeks. The doc never figured out if it was bacterial or viral, but it sure did hit me like a truck. Besides all the cold-y symptoms, I couldn't effing breathe, which is sort of a problem if you, you know, want to do anything. I missed two days of work, spent the entire weekend lying in bed resting, I haven't been to the pool for over a week and I'm still popping an array of exciting meds (including my least favorite, prednisone, which does horrible things to you but also helps you breathe when you can't).
Now, I caught the germ for this thing somewhere, but if you think about it, I'm coming off about a six-month period of walking around with a monkey on my back. This particular monkey had a gun to my head and kept saying, "Well, maybe I'll pull the trigger in December. Or maybe in February. Or maybe I won't pull it at all. Or maybe..." I mean, you can learn to live with that, sort of. You can't be afraid of something at a high, insistent pitch full-time. But that's a lot of stress to be under for a very long time, folks. So it's not surprising, to me anyway, that I caught this thing. I was, as they say, ripe for it.
Luckily, I am on the mend. I'm still hauling my nebulizer back and forth to work, but I think the day is coming when I won't have to do that anymore. And I'm thinking about trying to go back to the pool on Friday or Saturday. One of the four nutriments ought to be chlorine, because I certainly don't feel well when I don't have enough of it in my system. Yes, I know it's toxic.
Yeah, I know it's bad. It's really bad. Here's another article if you wanna read about what the state of Massachusetts just did to Justina Pelletier. And here's the court decision, which somebody leaked to the media (twas not I); juvenile court rulings are typically not available to the public, so go read it before it disappears. I think she'll be dead in six months, seeing as they won't get her medical treatment she clearly needs. And I worry even more about her state of mind ("Hey, fifteen-year-old kid, guess what, you can't ever go home until you turn eighteen, if you make it that long.") But I don't wanna talk about it. Can't, really. I gotta let other people handle this one. I'm not even supposed to be watching the news, much less following gut-wrenching custody battles. My doc tells me there's nothing on the news that won't upset me, worry me or anger me and I don't need that degree of angst in my life, or, to put it more specifically, "Don't. Watch. The. News." Still, I'd probably wave him off if Thich Nhat Hanh didn't say the same thing.
In fact I'm reading a Thich Nhat Hanh book right now, called Savor. It's about "mindful eating." You'd think just the eating of food wouldn't be a big deal, never mind a Buddhist concern, but it is, Blanche, it is. The way we eat food in the modern world is completely messed up as far as what we actually need. It's not only that everything is full of sugar, fat and salt (and I've been off sugar for a week now, so I can say that it's damned difficult to find foods that are less than 15g of sugar per serving and are therefore edible by Jen), but it's the way we eat stuff. Like in the car, pouring it from a cup into our mouths without taking our eyes off the road. Or at a buffet, scrambling to pack away as much food as possible so as to get our money's worth. Not only have we lost track of the whole point of food, but we've lost our ability to--get this--enjoy eating. Our ability to enjoy things is part of what makes us human, so I'm recommending Savor as my new Book o' the Decade, which will stand until I get another one.
And it's not just the eating of food that's a problem, it's the taking-in of all kinds of stuff. A lot of what we read, hear about, decide to do and think about is toxic to us. Ferexample, I've always been a big fan of horror movies, horror fiction, things generally scary. I think I read my first Stephen King book when I was about twelve. However, in the last couple of years, I've become very choosy about my horror fiction. I only read/watch supernatural, ghost story type things, both Western and Asian (best possible example: Shutter, the original Hong Kong version. Holy cow was that ever creepy--and when you get to the end you suddenly realize that you don't know if there was really a ghost there or not. It might have all been his guilty conscience. Seriously, see this movie.) I don't do serial killer/slasher stuff anymore. I don't do people being mean to other people. The book Horns, by Big Steve's son Joe Hill, had a scene in it that upset me so much I talked about it in therapy (!). And my therapist was a bit nonplussed; as he pointed out, if you read a lot of horror fiction, sooner or later you're going to find something that horrifies you. Or, as we say outside the therapeutic world, "Well, duh."
So there's stuff you eat, and there's stuff you read, look at and hear about. Then there's the stuff you decide to do, and most important of all, the stuff you think about. (Or, to put it in Proper Buddhist Language, the Four Nutriments; edible food, sensory impressions, intention/volition and consciousness.) If you think about it (and did you know we humans are the only animals, as far as we know, that can think about thinking?), what you think about is everything. The thoughts you have in your head make up your current mood, your beliefs about various issues, your ability to be there for your fellow human beings and the way you feel about yourself and other humans.
If you spend much of the day thinking about what you need to do next, how you're going to get everything done, what might next go disastrously wrong and how to prevent it, and what to do if it goes wrong anyway, you're probably not going to be in a very good mood. What's more, you won't be there to do the things you are doing, never mind all the other stuff you have to do. I mean, are you really there for your friends and family members? Or are you just squeezing them in between appointments? Do you actually spend time with them or do you spend the time you're with them worrying about how to get out of here in time to do the next thing? This sort of stuff is out of control in our culture. We eat, listen to, read, think about and decide to do more toxic stuff than ever before in history, and it's not surprising that it might be affecting our health.
I've had bronchitis for the past two weeks. The doc never figured out if it was bacterial or viral, but it sure did hit me like a truck. Besides all the cold-y symptoms, I couldn't effing breathe, which is sort of a problem if you, you know, want to do anything. I missed two days of work, spent the entire weekend lying in bed resting, I haven't been to the pool for over a week and I'm still popping an array of exciting meds (including my least favorite, prednisone, which does horrible things to you but also helps you breathe when you can't).
Now, I caught the germ for this thing somewhere, but if you think about it, I'm coming off about a six-month period of walking around with a monkey on my back. This particular monkey had a gun to my head and kept saying, "Well, maybe I'll pull the trigger in December. Or maybe in February. Or maybe I won't pull it at all. Or maybe..." I mean, you can learn to live with that, sort of. You can't be afraid of something at a high, insistent pitch full-time. But that's a lot of stress to be under for a very long time, folks. So it's not surprising, to me anyway, that I caught this thing. I was, as they say, ripe for it.
Luckily, I am on the mend. I'm still hauling my nebulizer back and forth to work, but I think the day is coming when I won't have to do that anymore. And I'm thinking about trying to go back to the pool on Friday or Saturday. One of the four nutriments ought to be chlorine, because I certainly don't feel well when I don't have enough of it in my system. Yes, I know it's toxic.
Saturday, October 12, 2013
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.
--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.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Radical Acceptance
I dunno if any of you have the privilege of watching WFAA's morning news show, but if you do and you happened to see it Monday, boy howdy, what a show you got. Monday was the day the Boy Scouts were supposed to announce whether or not they were changing their policy on accepting gay members, but they changed their minds and didn't announce it after all. (Maybe they weren't prepared.) Anyway, reporter Shon Gables was interviewing this pastor guy, who was all in favor of not only keeping out gay Boy Scouts but banishing gay people to the end of the Earth, evidently, or maybe even farther than that. Among other things, he said that the "radical homosexual agenda" was all about using "terrorist tactics" on good God-fearing folk.
If anybody has a copy of the radical homosexual agenda, would you send it to me, please? I lost mine the last time I was out practicing my terrorist tactics. And since when did organizing, protesting and letter writing become terrorist tactics, anyway? Somebody ought to notify Homeland Security. But enough about this guy, he had plenty of air time as it was. Let's talk about this reporter for a second. Right in the middle of this interview, she asks this guy if he maybe already has some people in the Boy Scouts that are hiding their "gender identity." He allows that he probably does. I missed everything else, though, because I was busy rolling my eyes.
"Gender identity"?! What does that have to do with anything? Isn't this the 21st century? Can there actually be people who don't know the difference between "gender identity" and "sexual orientation"? I guess there are. Okay, here we go: "Sexual orientation" has everything to do with who you love. As in, male or female. "Gender identity" has everything to do with how you feel. As in, male or female. If you're a woman trapped in a man's body, you have "gender identity disorder," not "sexual orientation disorder." And, okay, I'll reluctantly accept that I can't expect everyone in America to know that, but how about a reporter who's reporting on gay and lesbian issues? Is that too much to ask? I hope not, because every time the collective I.Q. of the United States slides down another point, I break out in hives.
And look. I know somebody's gonna say it. "You keep making Christians out to be the bad guys." I know. I'm sorry. But, ya know, I keep getting such good examples. Where are the rest of you, the 99% of Christians what love one another like Jesus said? Could y'all grab the microphone away from these other guys and, I dunno, SAY SOMETHING once in a while? It'd be appreciated. I used to run with a Lutheran street gang, I know of what I speak. In San Diego the Christians were the ones trying to close the abortion clinics and gerrymander all the gay and lesbian folk into Imperial Beach until my gang marched downtown to protest the closing of a residential hotel that kept many near-homeless folks off the street. We were on the news, organist Jared ringing his bell and pastor Noel demanding justice. We got the hotel to stay open for three more months, long enough for most of the residents to make other arrangements. And when the Westboro Babtist folks came and protested us, we protested right back at 'em, in the middle of Sunday services, no less. So never say it can't be done. Evil flourishes when good people wring their hands about How Things Look and then go back inside to make lutefisk.
Anyway, this blog post started out being something about trying to accept something you don't want to accept because you really, really wanted it to turn out different. I'm not sure how we ended up in San Diego protesting the Westboro Babtists. Trouble is, I don't know how to say it, now. Just that, you know, if you've known someone for a very long time, and all that time they've been doing things a certain way, it's very strange that you would expect them to suddenly do things a different way, just because you want everything to turn out differently from the way it usually does. Am I being obtuse on purpose? Um, yes. But I'm kind of in that sort of situation, and it's no different than expecting Fred Phelps to suddenly appear on TV with his arms around, oh, say, Ellen DeGeneris. (Sorry, Ellen, if that gives you the creeps; I'd have one of my "He's dripping slime on me" moments, too.) (Nice thing about blogging; you get to borrow celebrities. Leonard Nimoy is stopping by next week and the last time Annie Lennox called to say she loved me, my page views shot into the thousands.)
In Buddhism, there's this concept called "radical acceptance." It's when you pay attention to how you feel about a given situation and just--accept the way that you feel. You know, just kind of sit there with it, instead of downing a beer or chowing down on several doughnuts or, I dunno, turning on the TV. No problem doing this when you're happy or serene, and even when you're mildly distressed. But when you're trying to swallow that the person you've known for a very long time is just basically never going to give you what you want, and you're pounding on a door that ain't never gonna open--whew. That is some trick, brother. Much easier to sit with how you feel about Fred Phelps and the San Diego Lutherans, or the WFAA morning show. Or the Boy Scouts. But for that, my friends, I am not prepared.
If anybody has a copy of the radical homosexual agenda, would you send it to me, please? I lost mine the last time I was out practicing my terrorist tactics. And since when did organizing, protesting and letter writing become terrorist tactics, anyway? Somebody ought to notify Homeland Security. But enough about this guy, he had plenty of air time as it was. Let's talk about this reporter for a second. Right in the middle of this interview, she asks this guy if he maybe already has some people in the Boy Scouts that are hiding their "gender identity." He allows that he probably does. I missed everything else, though, because I was busy rolling my eyes.
"Gender identity"?! What does that have to do with anything? Isn't this the 21st century? Can there actually be people who don't know the difference between "gender identity" and "sexual orientation"? I guess there are. Okay, here we go: "Sexual orientation" has everything to do with who you love. As in, male or female. "Gender identity" has everything to do with how you feel. As in, male or female. If you're a woman trapped in a man's body, you have "gender identity disorder," not "sexual orientation disorder." And, okay, I'll reluctantly accept that I can't expect everyone in America to know that, but how about a reporter who's reporting on gay and lesbian issues? Is that too much to ask? I hope not, because every time the collective I.Q. of the United States slides down another point, I break out in hives.
And look. I know somebody's gonna say it. "You keep making Christians out to be the bad guys." I know. I'm sorry. But, ya know, I keep getting such good examples. Where are the rest of you, the 99% of Christians what love one another like Jesus said? Could y'all grab the microphone away from these other guys and, I dunno, SAY SOMETHING once in a while? It'd be appreciated. I used to run with a Lutheran street gang, I know of what I speak. In San Diego the Christians were the ones trying to close the abortion clinics and gerrymander all the gay and lesbian folk into Imperial Beach until my gang marched downtown to protest the closing of a residential hotel that kept many near-homeless folks off the street. We were on the news, organist Jared ringing his bell and pastor Noel demanding justice. We got the hotel to stay open for three more months, long enough for most of the residents to make other arrangements. And when the Westboro Babtist folks came and protested us, we protested right back at 'em, in the middle of Sunday services, no less. So never say it can't be done. Evil flourishes when good people wring their hands about How Things Look and then go back inside to make lutefisk.
Anyway, this blog post started out being something about trying to accept something you don't want to accept because you really, really wanted it to turn out different. I'm not sure how we ended up in San Diego protesting the Westboro Babtists. Trouble is, I don't know how to say it, now. Just that, you know, if you've known someone for a very long time, and all that time they've been doing things a certain way, it's very strange that you would expect them to suddenly do things a different way, just because you want everything to turn out differently from the way it usually does. Am I being obtuse on purpose? Um, yes. But I'm kind of in that sort of situation, and it's no different than expecting Fred Phelps to suddenly appear on TV with his arms around, oh, say, Ellen DeGeneris. (Sorry, Ellen, if that gives you the creeps; I'd have one of my "He's dripping slime on me" moments, too.) (Nice thing about blogging; you get to borrow celebrities. Leonard Nimoy is stopping by next week and the last time Annie Lennox called to say she loved me, my page views shot into the thousands.)
In Buddhism, there's this concept called "radical acceptance." It's when you pay attention to how you feel about a given situation and just--accept the way that you feel. You know, just kind of sit there with it, instead of downing a beer or chowing down on several doughnuts or, I dunno, turning on the TV. No problem doing this when you're happy or serene, and even when you're mildly distressed. But when you're trying to swallow that the person you've known for a very long time is just basically never going to give you what you want, and you're pounding on a door that ain't never gonna open--whew. That is some trick, brother. Much easier to sit with how you feel about Fred Phelps and the San Diego Lutherans, or the WFAA morning show. Or the Boy Scouts. But for that, my friends, I am not prepared.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Radical Acceptance and Fluffy Bunnies
My doctor told me to stop watching the news, and for the most part I've done it, except for occasional forays into the local weather. Can't help but think he made the right call, there. Nothing on the news is ever good. It's a long parade of murders, rapes, arson, impending financial disasters, chaos, mayhem and serial killers stalking beautiful, smart, assertive professional women in Large City (oh, wait, that's an episode of Criminal Minds.) Really nothing there that will improve my mood at all. He didn't say to stop browsing CNN and MSNBC online, but I imagine he would have, if it had crossed his mind. He would probably also tell me to stay out of the chat rooms, where I taunt the stupid hornets in their stupid plastic-bubble hornet's nests until they come out and yell at me. (As I said, they're fairly stupid hornets.)
Okay, I haven't done such a good job of quitting the chat rooms. Or staying off CNN and MSNBC altogether. Recently I've wandered over to such gems as RHRealityCheck and NAPW, and if those don't thoroughly piss you off, there's always Mother Jones and BadBreeders. Believe me, if you want outrage and fury and a loss of all hope for the future of the human race, your Internet can do that for you.
Mind you, I don't know why I read this stuff. It's kind of the equivalent of repeatedly poking a sore tooth with your tongue. If I knew of a Web site that only had happy stories about fluffy bunnies and cute smiling toddlers and pictures of kittens, I might go there. But I don't. Kittens do not create bandwidth traffic. Outrage creates bandwidth traffic.
Yet somehow, according to Buddhism, all this has to be okay. Not just "That stuff exists, but I'm going to ignore it and be marginally happy," but really, truly okay. We gotta be in the world, with all the suffering that there is, and totally accept it--because only by totally accepting it can we hope to change it.
I hate stupid rules like that. They give me headaches.
Turns out, though, that there isn't much of an alternative. Either you're mindful and engaged with the world, and fully accepting of whatever's going on at the present moment, or you're not, and if you're not, you ain't gonna be happy, y'all. (Me: In the present moment, sitting at my dining room table, in my jammies, typing this and drinking coffee. Well, not typing and drinking at exactly the same second, but you know.) If your brain is off making future plans while your body is, say, washing the dishes, all you're gonna get out of it is clean dishes and confusion. I don't know the exact formula for happiness, but I do know the perfect formula for misery: Dwell on all the things that went wrong in the past, plan all the stuff you're going to do in the future, and forget entirely about today. Yep, that'll do it faster than any Web site I've ever been to.
So. Can I totally accept the morons in suits trying to pass laws to re-enslave American women, the famous pastors in Georgia and South Carolina that want to send me to a concentration camp (or just kill me), the sweet but deluded folk in Utah that think I'm going straight to the fiery pit (maybe without even dying first!), and the congressman who would happily let me die of an ectopic pregnancy if it meant the fetus got big enough to save? That is a totally unfair question, and I protest. I want to work on accepting the fluffy bunnies and the cute smiling toddlers and the pictures of kittens first. The kittens are the hardest, since they raise my blood sugar. In the meantime, I'd be fine with all those other guys existing, as long as they would stop hurting people and stay far away from me. Turns out, though, you don't really get a choice on those things. Like I said, it's a dumb rule.
Okay, I haven't done such a good job of quitting the chat rooms. Or staying off CNN and MSNBC altogether. Recently I've wandered over to such gems as RHRealityCheck and NAPW, and if those don't thoroughly piss you off, there's always Mother Jones and BadBreeders. Believe me, if you want outrage and fury and a loss of all hope for the future of the human race, your Internet can do that for you.
Mind you, I don't know why I read this stuff. It's kind of the equivalent of repeatedly poking a sore tooth with your tongue. If I knew of a Web site that only had happy stories about fluffy bunnies and cute smiling toddlers and pictures of kittens, I might go there. But I don't. Kittens do not create bandwidth traffic. Outrage creates bandwidth traffic.
Yet somehow, according to Buddhism, all this has to be okay. Not just "That stuff exists, but I'm going to ignore it and be marginally happy," but really, truly okay. We gotta be in the world, with all the suffering that there is, and totally accept it--because only by totally accepting it can we hope to change it.
I hate stupid rules like that. They give me headaches.
Turns out, though, that there isn't much of an alternative. Either you're mindful and engaged with the world, and fully accepting of whatever's going on at the present moment, or you're not, and if you're not, you ain't gonna be happy, y'all. (Me: In the present moment, sitting at my dining room table, in my jammies, typing this and drinking coffee. Well, not typing and drinking at exactly the same second, but you know.) If your brain is off making future plans while your body is, say, washing the dishes, all you're gonna get out of it is clean dishes and confusion. I don't know the exact formula for happiness, but I do know the perfect formula for misery: Dwell on all the things that went wrong in the past, plan all the stuff you're going to do in the future, and forget entirely about today. Yep, that'll do it faster than any Web site I've ever been to.
So. Can I totally accept the morons in suits trying to pass laws to re-enslave American women, the famous pastors in Georgia and South Carolina that want to send me to a concentration camp (or just kill me), the sweet but deluded folk in Utah that think I'm going straight to the fiery pit (maybe without even dying first!), and the congressman who would happily let me die of an ectopic pregnancy if it meant the fetus got big enough to save? That is a totally unfair question, and I protest. I want to work on accepting the fluffy bunnies and the cute smiling toddlers and the pictures of kittens first. The kittens are the hardest, since they raise my blood sugar. In the meantime, I'd be fine with all those other guys existing, as long as they would stop hurting people and stay far away from me. Turns out, though, you don't really get a choice on those things. Like I said, it's a dumb rule.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
This Guy I'm Seeing
Warning: If you don't believe in reincarnation, read no further. Well, actually you can read further if you want to, but you're sure to have your nonbelief in reincarnation shaken up a bit, and some people don't handle that well, so if you're one of those people who doesn't handle that well, read no further. Actually, the truth is once I've written this thing I don't care if you read it or not, so scratch this whole first paragraph. Read it. Or don't. So there. Nyah.I've always thought that Buddhism has this whole reincarnation thing ever so slightly wrong. You probably know the rules, if not the specifics; if you're good, you come back a more intelligent being and have a better chance at becoming enlightened; if you're bad, you come back as, I dunno, a less intelligent human (or a very smart fox) and you have a poorer chance of becoming enlightened. If you're really bad, you come back as something that has no chance of becoming enlightened, like Dick Cheney or my idiot neighbor or maybe a centipede. But here's where I think we have it just slightly wrong. According to Zen, we're all enlightened already. We're all just sort of waiting to realize it. So if even Dick Cheney and my idiot neighbor (who is an idiot) are enlightened, then we owe an apology to centipedes everywhere. Besides, the whole universe is nothing more than a Buddha-making machine, and we're all going to realize we're enlightened sooner or later, so the whole higher-reincarnation lower-reincarnation thing doesn't make any sense. It's just ever so slightly wrong.
Here's the other reason it's ever so slightly wrong: We're all everybody else already. I've thought about this for a long time, and it's the only thing that makes any sense. I know we all think we're individuals, having individual existences totally cut off from everyone else, but that's an illusion, folks. Sorry. The truth is we're all one great big organism, from us to aminals to centipedes and even the surliest of surly little rocks. We're all having different experiences because the nature of Life is to exist, but in the end we're really all made of the same stuff, and it all comes from the same place. Which means I'm you and you're Dick Cheney and Dick is a centipede and the centipede is my idiot neighbor. (Which, frankly, would make him much easier to deal with.)
Once I turned into Brother ChiSing for about half a second. Or took a peek out of his eyes, anyway. I remember he was talking and I was totally fascinated with his hands. Probably because they weren't the same hands I was used to hauling around. So I watched the hands go up and down and move around in illustration of some point, and then I lost it and I was back in my own head again, staring at my own hands. Which was fine, too. They're nice hands.
No doubt some of you will wonder if I've become totally unglued at this point, but unfortunately I haven't. I have it on excellent authority from my psychiatrist of choice (who, being Indian, believes in reincarnation) that people who begin questions with "I may be crazy, but..." probably have not become totally unglued. Which is good, because I've been seeing this guy lately. Or rather, seeing out of his eyes and experiencing what it's like to be in his head. It all started when I flipped over to the classical channel on the radio while KEOM was playing this truly horrible radio show, "Words You Never Heard." You'd think I'd be all over a radio show about rare English words, but the woman who narrates the thing has a voice that sounds like pieces of broken glass being tossed into an electric fan and I just cannot, repeat canNOT listen to her. So I switched channels, and the classical channel was playing a Mozart contradance, and just like that I was in somebody else's head for a couple of seconds.
The guy--I am sure it is a guy--was attending some fancy party in an era that is certainly not ours. The first time I dropped in on him, he was thinking about how great it was that part of being a gentleman is knowing how to dance, because he hates these fancy parties, but he loves to dance. He thought himself too old to be dancing with the sweet young things, but he was fine with dancing with the older ladies, and in fact was looking for a widow, someone with kids, because he just found out his only brother was killed in a (the word battle should go here, but the word battle doesn't fit; I've tried duel and skirmish and even tragic blimp accident but I haven't found anything that fills up the space) and he has to think about who he'll be leaving the estate to when he dies, which he imagines will be soon, he's nearly fifty and he can't imagine he'll make it to sixty, no one does that except the king God save him, and then I was back in my car, wondering what in hell just happened.
A one-off for this sort of thing would have been fine, but I dropped in on him again a few days later at the same party. He'd lost his wife in childbirth many years ago and had never remarried. He managed an estate, which was a full-time job, apparently. He didn't seem like a bad guy, perhaps a little on the religious side. No name yet but I'm working on that. This and a few other tidbits I've picked up. Oh, and at some point I realized he wasn't thinking in English. I could understand him perfectly well, but it wasn't English; it was something Germanic-sounding. I'm pretty sure I don't speak German, except for the ever-necessary "Ein bier, bitte."
So there are three possibilities, here. One is that I've flipped my wig. Two is that the creative part of my brain is working overtime on some story I haven't started writing yet. But I do think that the most likely is that this dude, whoever he may be, is--well, not a past life; I think that's ever so slightly wrong, but I won't get into this whole thing about time being arbitrary and all of history happening at the same moment--but a past expression of experience that I seem to recall rather clearly for who knows what reason.
One thing for sure is that listening to Mozart contradances at six in the morning can be dangerous to your grasp on the present day. They should come with warning labels.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Talk Thursday: Resurrection
When this topic first floated across my email, a song popped into my head. One of those old hymns from Bible camp; “I am the Resurrection/And the life/Those who believe in me will never die.” Not the world’s greatest Bible camp song, though it involved a lot of clapping. This being Easter Week and all that (yes, we Buddhists keep track of the Christian holidays; it’s hard not to when you live in frick’n Texas), it’s wholly appropriate to be talking about this coming back from the dead thing—even if it calls to mind, as it does for me, those creepy-crawly guys that growl and hiss their way through The Walking Dead on AMC. (Seriously. Jesus. Zombies. There’s a connection. It gets creepy if you think about it for too long.)
For some reason, resurrection has become the subject of arguments. When I was in college, some Christian organization was showing a movie about a guy who set out to prove the Resurrection never happened. If Christ never came back from the dead, as the story goes, then obviously all of Christianity was a fraud, and the entire Church would cease to exist. (The tag line: “Can your faith survive?”) I’ll admit I never saw the film, but I thought the premise was a little flawed. I know this will come as a news flash to some of you, but disproving something has never done much of anything to change anybody’s mind about anything religious. Every now and then some guy (it’s almost always a guy) announces that the day of judgment will be, say, next Tuesday at four o’clock, and when it doesn’t happen, his flock doesn’t exactly get up and leave him. If anything, they believe in him even more, because he’s singlehandedly staved off the Apocalypse. (Okay, sometimes they commit mass suicide instead. But nobody’s perfect.)
Sometimes I take in one of those Shroud of Turin shows on NatGeo or the History Channel. The shroud, in case you did not know this, is a piece of cloth with a radiographic image of a guy who looks remarkably like Jesus. Supposedly the image was made as His body dissolved into light, which is pretty interesting because, uh, you can only see the image with a radiograph. So as He was dissolving into light He had to predict that many years in the future, somebody would invent radiography, and then they’d be able to see that he’d dissolved into light, which is kind of an obscure thing to be thinking about at the moment you’re going from the state of being human to the state of being divine, if you ask me. But hey, he’s Jesus, right? He can do whatever He wants, right? So, yeah, he could commune with his divine state and dissolve into light and think about radiography all at the same time. I mean, why not.
So do Buddhists believe in resurrection of the body and life everlasting? I dunno. Go ask a Buddhist. Just kidding. Seriously, though, let me channel my inner Brother ChiSing here and say that Buddhists believe it does not matter if there is resurrection of the body and life everlasting. What’s important is living mindfully and graciously in this life. After all, this life is the one we have. There’s no reason to speculate about a life we don’t have. Anyway, if this is the only life we have, we would want to live it as mindfully and graciously as possible. And, if there is resurrection of the body, we would want to live this life as mindfully and graciously as possible, so as to be resurrected in a blessed state and have a better chance to be of use to more people following the resurrection.
What, you were expecting something profound? We haven’t even settled the question of reincarnation yet. Ask ten different Buddhists how reincarnation works and you’ll get twenty answers and forty deep discussions. And that’s just if you ask them today. Ask them again tomorrow and you’ll get twenty entirely different answers. Ask them before they’ve had their coffee and—no, don’t do that. That could get ugly.
What do I think about the resurrection of the body? That’s easy. Gross and no thank you. Reincarnation I can handle; Nature is a very efficient recycler. Besides, I’m planning to be cremated and made into plant food. This Jesus guy better be pretty good if He’s going to try to reconstitute me from ashes, soil and a big ol’ live oak. I’m just sayin’.
Happy Easter, everybody!!
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Talk Thursday: The Story Of My Life.
Today I ended up at the pool with a neatly packed backpack full of all the stuff I needed EXCEPT for my little bag of jewelry. For this avid beader, walking around with no jewelry feels like what an ordinary woman would probably feel like walking around stark naked. Yet I could swear, I packed up my little black and crystal netted necklace and my little black and silver earrings and my wine colored bracelet that matches my wine colored pants, and tucked it into the outer flap of my backpack with my little pill box and my lucky coin and my hairspray. Still, when I got out of the pool, I found the pill box and the hair spray but no lucky coin and no jewelry. When I got home, I found out that I'd left the little bag on my dresser, next to my lucky coin. Why I remembered to stuff my pill box in there is beyond me, but it's a good thing I did or I'd have been even later to work than I already was. One Does Not Go To Work Without One's Meds. It's noisy enough in my head with the volume control fully engaged, if ya get mah drift.
And yeah, okay, the Jen as absent minded professor thing is amusing, but I like life more when I'm calm and mindful and deliberate and doing things slowly, one at a time, like Thich Nhat Hanh says. Which isn't all that often, but at least I try. And occasionally patience is rewarded. After all these months with my annoying coworker, putting up with his endless sad stories about how patently unfair it was that he had to work for this crummy law firm, he suddenly up and resigned. He gave actual notice, by which definition he could have stayed a week or so longer, but oddly enough, management didn't want him to. Indeed, they could hardly wait to get him out the door. And the lack of having him around has been almost dizzying.
Have you ever lived with something unrelentingly negative for so long that it just becomes part of the atmosphere? And then all of a sudden it's gone, and only then do you realize how bad it was? I can come up with two analogies, one lofty and one mundane: Clinton winning the Presidency in 1992, and getting new tires and a spin balance on my old Toyota pickup. Watching the Democratic convention unfold in North Dakota, thanks to my uncle's brand-new (at that time) satellite TV, I saw Mr. Clinton come to the podium amidst a surge of energy that was palpable and said to myself, "There's our next President." I realized then how utterly draining the last twelve years had been. Likewise, dealing with my temperamental truck that had needed new tires for months since I'd been in a wreck: Pulling out of the service station, I felt like I was gliding along on a pane of glass. "Wow, it must have really been bad before," I said to myself.
That's kind of what this is like. Sure, I freaked out six ways to Sunday when I thought I might be handling a double case load again, but my boss Dave has put my mind at ease about that; "Who told you you were handling both case loads? Nobody? Well, then why did you assume that? Okay, then calm down." I'm really starting to like the guy, which is funny considering how much we didn't hit it off at first.
Incidentally, here's a pic of (right to left) Indiana Jen, boss Dave (as the Joker) and his case manager Sal (as El Mariachi) on Halloween. See why I like the guy? That costume took some serious work. Plus, he stayed in character, to the point of greeting one of the suited partners (just come from a hearing) with, "We meet again, Batman."
Anyway, other people in the firm are now coming and talking to me and telling me they had the exact same issues with him that I did. Not that he did a bad job or that he was slow or anything like that, but just the unrelenting negativity. And the lack of getting it. As in, this is the reality of working at this particular law firm at this particular time in this particular century; accept it or get out. As I believe I've stated a couple of times before, I was and still am fine with it. My only real complaint, and it is minor, is that they aren't paying me as much as I want. I made more at a former job, so part of me still thinks I should be getting paid that amount, but the rest of me has pretty much gotten over it because jobs are scarce right now and this is a really good one no matter how much they're paying me. Ever heard the expression, "my way or the highway"? Well, it isn't my way because it's not my law firm, but that's the gist of it. And I could go into the whole doctrine of nonattachment and walking the middle way thing here, and quote Buddha half a dozen times, but I won't. Let's just say it's better for everybody that my annoying coworker and the law firm have parted company. I hope that if I encounter somebody like him in the future, I will find some way to simply not deal with him, rather than let him suck my energy like a vampire. Stregoi. Whatever.
(Hey, it came to my attention yesterday that the word that means the closest thing to "vampire" in old Romanian is "stregoi," and the word that means the closest thing to "witch" in the same language is "stregoica". Now, in Italy, there's a form of witchcraft called "strega", so what is the common root of all of those words? Streg? Strego? And what does that word translate as in the original Latin/Roman? Inquiring minds want to know.)
So coming back to the original point (and I do do that, occasionally), one might wonder how I became the dumping ground for my annoying coworker's complaints in the first place. Well, my friends, people will do that to me. Normal people. Weird people. Any people. On airplanes. In offices. On jury duty. In libraries, even. They walk up to me, sometimes without even introducing themselves, and begin talking about their many woes. After years of this, I have determined that it has to be the tattoo. The invisible one on my forehead that says, "Your sad story welcome here." And that, ladies and germs, seems to be the story of my life. Rock on.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Big Bad Buddhist Bipolar Books o' the Decade
Meters swum today: 1400
Playing in the background: The ceiling fan
Probably most of us have wondered what we'd do if we were presented with the news that we had a serious illness. By "serious" most of us probably mean "fatal" but it doesn't need to be. Even if somebody hands you news that you have, say, diabetes or Parkinson's or some other massive systemwide malfunction, you will probably spend some time contemplating What This All Means and then decide what to do. Ie, if I found out I needed a septuple bypass and I was 82 years old, as recently happened to a family member of my shponsor, would I have the surgery or not? There's a number of factors to be taken into consideration. How comfortable am I now? If I drop dead, will it be sudden or lingering and painful? What's this surgery like? How's the recovery? What will my life be like afterward? In the case of the septuple bypass I might have Just Said No to the surgery. Ann's dad ended up having the surgery, though, and he's doing very well. Better than before, in fact. You never know how some of these things are going to turn out.
Which is kind of what happened when somebody handed me the news that I might have bipolar disorder, recently confirmed and now being medicated. So what did I do? I went skydivin', I went Rocky Mountain climbin', I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu...
Well, actually I went to a Buddhist meditation retreat, which was maybe the strangest choice ever. Try being on a manic tear and meditating sometime. I hopped into the church bound bound bound bound bound like one of those boings that we have out in the garden (see previous post), threw myself onto a cushion, apologized to everybody in advance for being obnoxious, and then attempted to sit still for the next roughly eight hours. Yeah. That was interesting. Must have been so for my fellow retreatants, too, saintly folks all.
I also did what anybody with a librarian in the household is bound to end up doing; read books. Lots and lots of books. Joan is my book pimp; anything I want, she can get it, from the latest NYT bestseller to an obscure text about the perfection of wisdom. Course, I sometimes have to wait a while, being as the library has wait lists for a lot of popular stuff (budget cuts, ya know.) But I've got four different books on bipolar disorder, and two of 'em have made my Books o'the Decade list already.
The first one is Bipolar Disorder for Dummies. You gotta love the title. If you're not
medically inclined but you need to know how not to go completely insane, this is a great place to start. Any of the Dummies books are automatically fantastic (pretty sure I also have Container Gardening for Dummies, Lawn Care for Dummies and Buddhism for Dummies. No, I am not kidding about that last one.) This is also a great reference for family members or friends who have to live with you. Let's face it; bipolar disorder = not easy to live with. You never know which of your two or three roomies you're going to encounter on any given day. In fact, I'm sending a copy of this to my parents, also saintly folks, who are hosting me and Joan for four days in November.
The second one is New Hope for People with Bipolar Disorder. (Sorry for lack of graphic but I seem to be having Issues this morning.) This one is a little more medically technical, but it's full of cool stuff about how the brain works, how it doesn't if you have this thing, and even has a couple of brain scans so you can actually see what's going on. Plus a lot of stuff about hope, optimism, the power of positive thinking and a whole long chapter about the different new kinds of psychotherapy, which is an essential part of treatment (and also one I haven't started yet) along with drug therapy. Almost all of the new schools of thought and even most of the old ones talk quite a bit about mindfulness. As in, don't worry about what's going to happen to your brain tomorrow; today everything's good, today you're taking your meds and they're working, today you can handle stressful things, etc. It's like Buddhism has infiltrated the psychology profession while nobody was looking. Well, that's okay. We could use a few Buddhist psychologists.
And have I figured out what else I'm gonna do with my life? No. What I'm mainly figuring out are my new and exciting limitations. Climbing to the Mount Everest base camp; probably out. Can't be that far away from modern medicine. Flying to Europe: Maybe still in, but the time difference will have to be very carefully managed. Guess what knocks my system all wonky; sleep disruption. And guess what I'm very good at from many sessions of wild hyperfertility. Yep, you guessed. I think flying to Australia might be out. That's a time difference of twelve hours and I'm just not sure how I could possibly do that in anything remotely resembling a vacation-size time period. Getting a book published: Still in. Or it better be, anyway. I have a new heater to pay for somehow. Staying up all night writing is definitely out, even on holiday weekends. Alas. And I was all set to jump into NaNoWriMo on November 1, too.
Well, guess what. I'm gonna do NaNo anyway and write the sequel to No Accounting For Reality. Right now I'm calling it No Accounting For __________, because I don't have a word to complete the title yet. Stability? Serenity? Sanity? I dunno. It's about statues coming to life all over Dallas. If you have any suggestions, feel free to comment.
Playing in the background: The ceiling fan
Probably most of us have wondered what we'd do if we were presented with the news that we had a serious illness. By "serious" most of us probably mean "fatal" but it doesn't need to be. Even if somebody hands you news that you have, say, diabetes or Parkinson's or some other massive systemwide malfunction, you will probably spend some time contemplating What This All Means and then decide what to do. Ie, if I found out I needed a septuple bypass and I was 82 years old, as recently happened to a family member of my shponsor, would I have the surgery or not? There's a number of factors to be taken into consideration. How comfortable am I now? If I drop dead, will it be sudden or lingering and painful? What's this surgery like? How's the recovery? What will my life be like afterward? In the case of the septuple bypass I might have Just Said No to the surgery. Ann's dad ended up having the surgery, though, and he's doing very well. Better than before, in fact. You never know how some of these things are going to turn out.
Which is kind of what happened when somebody handed me the news that I might have bipolar disorder, recently confirmed and now being medicated. So what did I do? I went skydivin', I went Rocky Mountain climbin', I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu...
Well, actually I went to a Buddhist meditation retreat, which was maybe the strangest choice ever. Try being on a manic tear and meditating sometime. I hopped into the church bound bound bound bound bound like one of those boings that we have out in the garden (see previous post), threw myself onto a cushion, apologized to everybody in advance for being obnoxious, and then attempted to sit still for the next roughly eight hours. Yeah. That was interesting. Must have been so for my fellow retreatants, too, saintly folks all.
I also did what anybody with a librarian in the household is bound to end up doing; read books. Lots and lots of books. Joan is my book pimp; anything I want, she can get it, from the latest NYT bestseller to an obscure text about the perfection of wisdom. Course, I sometimes have to wait a while, being as the library has wait lists for a lot of popular stuff (budget cuts, ya know.) But I've got four different books on bipolar disorder, and two of 'em have made my Books o'the Decade list already.
The first one is Bipolar Disorder for Dummies. You gotta love the title. If you're not
medically inclined but you need to know how not to go completely insane, this is a great place to start. Any of the Dummies books are automatically fantastic (pretty sure I also have Container Gardening for Dummies, Lawn Care for Dummies and Buddhism for Dummies. No, I am not kidding about that last one.) This is also a great reference for family members or friends who have to live with you. Let's face it; bipolar disorder = not easy to live with. You never know which of your two or three roomies you're going to encounter on any given day. In fact, I'm sending a copy of this to my parents, also saintly folks, who are hosting me and Joan for four days in November.The second one is New Hope for People with Bipolar Disorder. (Sorry for lack of graphic but I seem to be having Issues this morning.) This one is a little more medically technical, but it's full of cool stuff about how the brain works, how it doesn't if you have this thing, and even has a couple of brain scans so you can actually see what's going on. Plus a lot of stuff about hope, optimism, the power of positive thinking and a whole long chapter about the different new kinds of psychotherapy, which is an essential part of treatment (and also one I haven't started yet) along with drug therapy. Almost all of the new schools of thought and even most of the old ones talk quite a bit about mindfulness. As in, don't worry about what's going to happen to your brain tomorrow; today everything's good, today you're taking your meds and they're working, today you can handle stressful things, etc. It's like Buddhism has infiltrated the psychology profession while nobody was looking. Well, that's okay. We could use a few Buddhist psychologists.
And have I figured out what else I'm gonna do with my life? No. What I'm mainly figuring out are my new and exciting limitations. Climbing to the Mount Everest base camp; probably out. Can't be that far away from modern medicine. Flying to Europe: Maybe still in, but the time difference will have to be very carefully managed. Guess what knocks my system all wonky; sleep disruption. And guess what I'm very good at from many sessions of wild hyperfertility. Yep, you guessed. I think flying to Australia might be out. That's a time difference of twelve hours and I'm just not sure how I could possibly do that in anything remotely resembling a vacation-size time period. Getting a book published: Still in. Or it better be, anyway. I have a new heater to pay for somehow. Staying up all night writing is definitely out, even on holiday weekends. Alas. And I was all set to jump into NaNoWriMo on November 1, too.
Well, guess what. I'm gonna do NaNo anyway and write the sequel to No Accounting For Reality. Right now I'm calling it No Accounting For __________, because I don't have a word to complete the title yet. Stability? Serenity? Sanity? I dunno. It's about statues coming to life all over Dallas. If you have any suggestions, feel free to comment.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Who ya gonna call?
Playing in the background: Odd silence. I wonder what the cats are up to...
Meters swum today: 1800
It occurred to me last night that Buddhists would make lousy ghostbusters. I'm a big fan of the History Channel and its ilk (though I'm not sure I should use the word ilk; I don't know what it means. Joan said once that she could not drink ilk because she was actose ntolerant. I guess that's good enough for me.) There was this program on called "Amityville: Horror or Hoax?" talking about the world famous house with the creepy eye windows that caused such a sensation in the late 1970s. On this show was a panel of experts, lawyers, witnesses, "paranormal researchers" and their ilk (there's that word again; I wonder if an ilk is some kind of evil spirit) arguing about whether the house was really haunted. Or possessed by demons. Or whatever.
Quick recap in case you weren't alive in the 1970s (you know who you are!): Ronnie DeFeo, a disaffected malcontent with a grudge and a shotgun, murdered six of his family members in the aforementioned house one night in 1974. Shortly after, 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville went up for sale, cheap, and George and Kathy Lutz, a young couple with three kids from Kathy's prior marriage, bought it. Spooky stuff started happening. The Lutzes lived there for less than a month before being chased out by what they said were ghosts or demons. Media coverage ensued. Movies got made. People started suing each other (ending in a famous case before the California Supreme Court, Lutz v DeLaurentiis 211 Cal. App. 3d 1317 (1989), in which it was determined that the title of a work could not be copyrighted. Remember Lutz if you ever wanna title something All Quiet on the Western Front.)
Even us diehard horror movie fans have one or two films that actually scared us. The ones where we left the lights on all night and had bad dreams anyway. The kinds of flicks we swore (however dishonestly) we'd never watch again, we'd get a different hobby, maybe start doing beadwork, learn to knit, whatever the hell. The Amityville Horror, the 1979 version, was just such a movie for yours truly. (The 2005 remake didn't do it.) I saw it again about a year ago and it still scares me. Yeah, it's not very well acted, and plenty of it doesn't make sense, but there's something about having that kind of thing in your house with you that just gives me the screaming meemies. After Amityville I thought I'd never be that scared again. Then the creepy little girl with the long stringy hair crawled out of the TV set in The Ring. But let's not talk about that. It was traumatic enough the first time.
So I'm watching this show on the History Channel, and getting creeped out again (I slept with a lamp on). They had on these self-proclaimed demonologists, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who proclaimed that this house was "a ten" on the scale of most haunted. I can't speak to the Warrens' religious affiliation but they were some stripe of Christian, probably Catholic or variants on a theme. They commanded the demons in the name of Jesus Christ to leave them alone and stuff like that (I kind of doubt that would be the right line of dialogue for, say, a Hindu.) That's when it occurred to me that a ghostbusting Buddhist would be all kinds of antithetical.
For starters, a ghost in the Buddhist pantheon is more of a state of mind than an actual being. Buddha talked about "hungry ghosts" as a condition where you want more and more of something but nothing will satisfy you (a classic portrait of addiction some 2500 years before the term made its way into the lexicon). There are other kinds of ghosts, spirits and minor demons, but they tend to be personifications of ignorance and illusion. Mara, for example, is the Buddhist "god of death," but he's more a tempter and distractor than a nasty ol' house haunting demon. Plus, he can be scared off if you offer him a cup of tea. Buddha did this lots of times.
Second, at least in theory most Buddhists would approach a ghost or demon the way we approach everything else; with killer friendliness. There's an old Zen story about a monk who was living by himself in a cave. One day a bunch of demons moved in. He tried to chase them away, but they wouldn't go. Finally he shrugged and said, "All right, we'll all live here together." At that, several of them disappeared. He began fixing meals for the other demons and tried to teach them how to meditate. Several more of them disappeared. The nicer he was, the quicker they went away, except the biggest and nastiest of the bunch. That one hung around until the monk, out of all patience, finally put his head in the demon's mouth. "Here, eat me, you look hungry," said the monk. And the big bad demon disappeared, too, leaving the monk in peace. The moral: Love your demons. Take good care of them. Give them what they want (generally, to be loved and listened to, regardless of how much they may insist what they really want is, say, lots more booze) and they'll go away. Or at least become easier to live with.
So picture, if you will, the Buddhist ghostbusting monk, walking into 112 Ocean Avenue. Flies appear out of nowhere; the ghostbuster smiles at his fellow beings and invites them to make themselves at home. A sense of terrible oppressive fear sits uponst the chest of the ghostbuster; he sits down, meditates and practices holding his fear in his arms and listening to what it has to say. Slime starts pouring down the walls like tears; the ghostbuster extends his compassion to the weeping slime and all the grieving beings that have ever existed. The Devil Himself storms into the room and tries to get rid of the annoying monk; the monk goes and gets the Devil a comfy chair and starts making him tea.
On second thought, maybe that would work. Mara didn't like tea, either. But I think I'd still have to recommend the Catholics if your house should ever become infested with demons. They know more about that stuff than we do. And don't forget to ask your insurance agent about their demonic-possession policy before your next renewal.
Meters swum today: 1800
It occurred to me last night that Buddhists would make lousy ghostbusters. I'm a big fan of the History Channel and its ilk (though I'm not sure I should use the word ilk; I don't know what it means. Joan said once that she could not drink ilk because she was actose ntolerant. I guess that's good enough for me.) There was this program on called "Amityville: Horror or Hoax?" talking about the world famous house with the creepy eye windows that caused such a sensation in the late 1970s. On this show was a panel of experts, lawyers, witnesses, "paranormal researchers" and their ilk (there's that word again; I wonder if an ilk is some kind of evil spirit) arguing about whether the house was really haunted. Or possessed by demons. Or whatever.
Quick recap in case you weren't alive in the 1970s (you know who you are!): Ronnie DeFeo, a disaffected malcontent with a grudge and a shotgun, murdered six of his family members in the aforementioned house one night in 1974. Shortly after, 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville went up for sale, cheap, and George and Kathy Lutz, a young couple with three kids from Kathy's prior marriage, bought it. Spooky stuff started happening. The Lutzes lived there for less than a month before being chased out by what they said were ghosts or demons. Media coverage ensued. Movies got made. People started suing each other (ending in a famous case before the California Supreme Court, Lutz v DeLaurentiis 211 Cal. App. 3d 1317 (1989), in which it was determined that the title of a work could not be copyrighted. Remember Lutz if you ever wanna title something All Quiet on the Western Front.)
Even us diehard horror movie fans have one or two films that actually scared us. The ones where we left the lights on all night and had bad dreams anyway. The kinds of flicks we swore (however dishonestly) we'd never watch again, we'd get a different hobby, maybe start doing beadwork, learn to knit, whatever the hell. The Amityville Horror, the 1979 version, was just such a movie for yours truly. (The 2005 remake didn't do it.) I saw it again about a year ago and it still scares me. Yeah, it's not very well acted, and plenty of it doesn't make sense, but there's something about having that kind of thing in your house with you that just gives me the screaming meemies. After Amityville I thought I'd never be that scared again. Then the creepy little girl with the long stringy hair crawled out of the TV set in The Ring. But let's not talk about that. It was traumatic enough the first time.
So I'm watching this show on the History Channel, and getting creeped out again (I slept with a lamp on). They had on these self-proclaimed demonologists, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who proclaimed that this house was "a ten" on the scale of most haunted. I can't speak to the Warrens' religious affiliation but they were some stripe of Christian, probably Catholic or variants on a theme. They commanded the demons in the name of Jesus Christ to leave them alone and stuff like that (I kind of doubt that would be the right line of dialogue for, say, a Hindu.) That's when it occurred to me that a ghostbusting Buddhist would be all kinds of antithetical.
For starters, a ghost in the Buddhist pantheon is more of a state of mind than an actual being. Buddha talked about "hungry ghosts" as a condition where you want more and more of something but nothing will satisfy you (a classic portrait of addiction some 2500 years before the term made its way into the lexicon). There are other kinds of ghosts, spirits and minor demons, but they tend to be personifications of ignorance and illusion. Mara, for example, is the Buddhist "god of death," but he's more a tempter and distractor than a nasty ol' house haunting demon. Plus, he can be scared off if you offer him a cup of tea. Buddha did this lots of times.
Second, at least in theory most Buddhists would approach a ghost or demon the way we approach everything else; with killer friendliness. There's an old Zen story about a monk who was living by himself in a cave. One day a bunch of demons moved in. He tried to chase them away, but they wouldn't go. Finally he shrugged and said, "All right, we'll all live here together." At that, several of them disappeared. He began fixing meals for the other demons and tried to teach them how to meditate. Several more of them disappeared. The nicer he was, the quicker they went away, except the biggest and nastiest of the bunch. That one hung around until the monk, out of all patience, finally put his head in the demon's mouth. "Here, eat me, you look hungry," said the monk. And the big bad demon disappeared, too, leaving the monk in peace. The moral: Love your demons. Take good care of them. Give them what they want (generally, to be loved and listened to, regardless of how much they may insist what they really want is, say, lots more booze) and they'll go away. Or at least become easier to live with.
So picture, if you will, the Buddhist ghostbusting monk, walking into 112 Ocean Avenue. Flies appear out of nowhere; the ghostbuster smiles at his fellow beings and invites them to make themselves at home. A sense of terrible oppressive fear sits uponst the chest of the ghostbuster; he sits down, meditates and practices holding his fear in his arms and listening to what it has to say. Slime starts pouring down the walls like tears; the ghostbuster extends his compassion to the weeping slime and all the grieving beings that have ever existed. The Devil Himself storms into the room and tries to get rid of the annoying monk; the monk goes and gets the Devil a comfy chair and starts making him tea.
On second thought, maybe that would work. Mara didn't like tea, either. But I think I'd still have to recommend the Catholics if your house should ever become infested with demons. They know more about that stuff than we do. And don't forget to ask your insurance agent about their demonic-possession policy before your next renewal.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Battle of the Eco-Snobs
Playing in the background: The soft gurgle of the kitty fountain
Meters swum yesterday: 1800 (whoo-hoo!)
They're at it again. As gas prices continue to creep upward, my North Texas denizens are writing letters to the paper, slamming each other for various driving habits. While I think it's true that the one sure way to bring gas prices down is to frick'n use less of the stuff, people seem to have endless ideas about the best way to do that and they all think they're right. Which means everybody else is wrong. Which means they're behaving just like church people, which, seeing as it's Sunday, is totally appropriate.
Quick disclaimer: I do drive to work, by myself, most days. Roughly two days a week, Joan and I drive together, which saves us about 32 miles, or maybe a gallon and a half vs. driving alone. I live about eight miles from my office. There is public transit and I do use it sometimes, but it's not terribly convenient from here and takes twice as long. Throw in going to the pool and I'm more or less forced to drive by myself. Joan is not terribly keen on getting up at 5 am and hanging out at a Starbucks for two hours, waiting for me to drive her the rest of the way to work.
We have a Saturn Vue, which gets like 20 mpg, and a Toyota Corolla, which gets 28. Most weeks we're going through about half a tank in the Vue and maybe a quarter tank in the Corolla, the "other car." Which doesn't seem like much. I'm always after new and exciting ways to use less, though. If not for two really nasty hills I could ride my bike to the pool, and Joan could pick me (and the bike) up in the Vue afterward. So yesterday I browsed around on the Internet for an electric bike, which has a small motor that can push you up hills. I found a couple of options, but they all cost around $1000. So much for that idea. It might be an option in the future, though.
Back to the paper. Some guy writes in about how gas-guzzling SUVs are feeding the terrorists. Then some lady writes in saying, "Hey, I have an SUV because I car pool all the kids in my neighborhood, and you're driving your Mini-Cooper 45 miles to work one way, and how is that saving any gas, you moron?" Then some other guy writes in and says that they're both idiots and the best way to save gas is to live downtown in a walk-up. Meanwhile, my cousin Kyle, who works for BP and should therefore be the Deciding Word, sends around an email saying by far the biggest problem we've got energy-wise is how we've built all these cities sprawled out for miles and miles, and that's not going to be fixed any time soon. He advocates all of the above; moving closer to work, driving a fuel-efficient car, ride sharing and so on.
I think Kyle has the right idea. I think everyone else, including me, is missing the basic point. One could argue the whole history of Western exploitation of Middle Eastern oil resources and the geopolitics of global warming, business interests, declining production and investment capital for several years, but let's just consider this for a second; we got into this mess by not thinking. Not thinking about the environment when we built the cities. Not thinking about the length of the commute to work when we bought a house. Not thinking about the budgetary consequences, or the effect on the ozone layer, of buying a Hummer. Not thinking about how our actions, both individual and as a society, effect other people, other countries, other climates and other beings. Maybe the guy with the mini-Cooper is smarter than the lady with the Hummer, but at least they're both thinking.
So there's the task, the mission for the millenium. THINK. Be mindful of how you affect other people and things. Be aware that your purchasing decisions do have consequences. Consider that you might not have all the answers and it wouldn't kill you to listen to other people every now and again. Do what you can to save gas, but don't beat up on other people just because they save gas in different ways. If you're not driving your Hummer 45 miles one way to work by yourself, you're doing something right. And if you are--well, why are you? Think about that. In any case, quit writing letters to the paper bashing other people for their choices. All that ink and paper being used up to make somebody else feel bad. Honestly. Cut it out.
So when are they gonna put me in charge?
Meters swum yesterday: 1800 (whoo-hoo!)
They're at it again. As gas prices continue to creep upward, my North Texas denizens are writing letters to the paper, slamming each other for various driving habits. While I think it's true that the one sure way to bring gas prices down is to frick'n use less of the stuff, people seem to have endless ideas about the best way to do that and they all think they're right. Which means everybody else is wrong. Which means they're behaving just like church people, which, seeing as it's Sunday, is totally appropriate.
Quick disclaimer: I do drive to work, by myself, most days. Roughly two days a week, Joan and I drive together, which saves us about 32 miles, or maybe a gallon and a half vs. driving alone. I live about eight miles from my office. There is public transit and I do use it sometimes, but it's not terribly convenient from here and takes twice as long. Throw in going to the pool and I'm more or less forced to drive by myself. Joan is not terribly keen on getting up at 5 am and hanging out at a Starbucks for two hours, waiting for me to drive her the rest of the way to work.
We have a Saturn Vue, which gets like 20 mpg, and a Toyota Corolla, which gets 28. Most weeks we're going through about half a tank in the Vue and maybe a quarter tank in the Corolla, the "other car." Which doesn't seem like much. I'm always after new and exciting ways to use less, though. If not for two really nasty hills I could ride my bike to the pool, and Joan could pick me (and the bike) up in the Vue afterward. So yesterday I browsed around on the Internet for an electric bike, which has a small motor that can push you up hills. I found a couple of options, but they all cost around $1000. So much for that idea. It might be an option in the future, though.
Back to the paper. Some guy writes in about how gas-guzzling SUVs are feeding the terrorists. Then some lady writes in saying, "Hey, I have an SUV because I car pool all the kids in my neighborhood, and you're driving your Mini-Cooper 45 miles to work one way, and how is that saving any gas, you moron?" Then some other guy writes in and says that they're both idiots and the best way to save gas is to live downtown in a walk-up. Meanwhile, my cousin Kyle, who works for BP and should therefore be the Deciding Word, sends around an email saying by far the biggest problem we've got energy-wise is how we've built all these cities sprawled out for miles and miles, and that's not going to be fixed any time soon. He advocates all of the above; moving closer to work, driving a fuel-efficient car, ride sharing and so on.
I think Kyle has the right idea. I think everyone else, including me, is missing the basic point. One could argue the whole history of Western exploitation of Middle Eastern oil resources and the geopolitics of global warming, business interests, declining production and investment capital for several years, but let's just consider this for a second; we got into this mess by not thinking. Not thinking about the environment when we built the cities. Not thinking about the length of the commute to work when we bought a house. Not thinking about the budgetary consequences, or the effect on the ozone layer, of buying a Hummer. Not thinking about how our actions, both individual and as a society, effect other people, other countries, other climates and other beings. Maybe the guy with the mini-Cooper is smarter than the lady with the Hummer, but at least they're both thinking.
So there's the task, the mission for the millenium. THINK. Be mindful of how you affect other people and things. Be aware that your purchasing decisions do have consequences. Consider that you might not have all the answers and it wouldn't kill you to listen to other people every now and again. Do what you can to save gas, but don't beat up on other people just because they save gas in different ways. If you're not driving your Hummer 45 miles one way to work by yourself, you're doing something right. And if you are--well, why are you? Think about that. In any case, quit writing letters to the paper bashing other people for their choices. All that ink and paper being used up to make somebody else feel bad. Honestly. Cut it out.
So when are they gonna put me in charge?
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