Getting my bearings

It's only today that I feel like I've completely gotten my bearings back after Wednesday.

And my cold seems to have taken care of itself.

Monday

I felt better than I expected to when I woke up. I got down to the RC for awhile, then came home and did a small amount of house cleaning. I also pulled some stuff out of the minivan that had been in the back awhile.... some of it more than a year. There's still more to go.

Bloggin' pneumonia

I went to bed about ten feeling like I was running a low fever. I don't have a thermometer around here, so I couldn't tell for sure. I also seemed to have a bit of a chill.

But I eventually fell asleep and I when I awoke a few minutes ago, the fever and chill seemed to be gone.

I still have the sniffles and the beginnings of a cough. This is typical when I catch cold. If recent history is any indicator, I'll have the cough for weeks. But the sniffles will clear up and I'd rather have the cough than the sniffles.

My bed is surrounded by bits of torn up tissue paper I've used to blow my nose and dab at it, and there are a couple of cereal bowls I need to move to the kitchen sink.

Looks like I'll be staying home again Monday.

Head cold

The cold is still with me this morning.

Ain't it the truth!

Lifted from Flibbertigibbet!:



In case you can't read the fine print, it says:

The only consistent feature of all your dissatisfying relationships is you.

I'd like to get about a dozen of those posters and give one to every woman with whom I ever had a dissatisfying relationship.

Sunday AM

As I post this, the death toll is at 18 from tornadoes that hit far northeast Oklahoma as well as Missouri and Arkansas. Six people died in the EPA Superfund town of Picher, which has been in the process of being abandoned. The town celebrated its 90th anniversary this weekend, and according to news reports, some former residents had returned for what many thought would be its last annual anniversary celebration.

Saturday evening

My neighbors across the street have a mariachi band performing in their front yard. I'm going to sit on the porch and listen for awhile.

Saturday evening

Yeah, it's definitely a cold. I made a run to the grocery store for a few days' worth of comfort food and I'm settling in for the duration.

It's tough to be pinned down like this when I've got so much going on and so many busy activities planned, but I need to take care of myself to stay at my peak energy.

I'll be back in circulation when I'm well.

Saturday morning

I think I may be coming down with a cold.

Other than that... nothing to report.

The electric non-attachment acid test

It's easier to consider yourself non-attached, I've learned, when the object of your non-attachment is not within reach.

Shenxiu, who was the senior monk and teacher under the fifth zen ancestor, Hongren, probably didn't consider himself attached to the idea of eventually ascending to the position of sixth ancestor and leader of Chinese zen — at least not while Hongren remained in authority.

But how did he feel when the day came to choose a successor, and Hongren, as tradition tells it, picked the monastery's cook, Hui-neng, over Shenxiu? That would have been the moment when Shenxiu would have known for sure whether he had attachment or not — the acid test of his non-attachment.

I spent a couple of hours visiting with someone I used to be very close to, and with whom I had not spoken face-to-face in more than a year. At one time, I was very attached — up all night, pacing the floor, talking to myself attached. She may have been a little attached, too, back then, but never as much as I was.

She became a major exercise in non-attachment — not just non-attachment to her specifically, but non-attachment to all the wondering and speculating and second-guessing and blaming her and blaming myself and all the other samsaric bullshit that goes on with this kind of thing.

She dropped out of sight for awhile, and during that time, I felt that I had gotten that attachment out of my system.

Not entirely.

I wonder if she noticed how much my hands were shaking today. I finally had to put them flat on the table to keep them under control. Eventually that stopped. But during much of our conversation, I was just nodding mechanically while thinking, 'Non-attachment... non-attachment... non-attachment...'

---

In other news, there were four previously-unseen kittens, just a month or six weeks old, sitting on my glider when I got home. Three were calico and one was black. The calicos all scattered when I came up on the porch, but the black one followed me inside.

Also

I will also mention that I'm sick of the presidential primary. The cynic in me says Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, perhaps after the abduction, torture and murder of sufficient Obama delegates. Get back to me when it's November.

Tuesday AM

I was awakened by another TV news dream — one which featured a curious cast of characters from one job I had about thirty years ago and another job from about eight years ago, brought together in some dream-imagined town I don't think I've ever seen in waking life. It also featured, oddly enough, an old old computer newsroom program from yet another phase of my career — one which I haven't laid eyes on in many years and which I don't think I've even thought about since the last time I saw it. It wasn't the worst of those dreams, by far, but I hate having those old memories pulled up to the front of my brain.

There's a thunderstorm rumbling overhead. I checked the web, and there are no watches or warnings, so I'll assume it's just a generic summer thunderstorm.

Here's a story from the Telegraph about middle-aged men giving up sex.

"What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the 1950s: 'I can have sex but I do not want to. It’s not rewarding’".

What else?

I've misplaced some socks. They're in the house somewhere, but they've gotten separated from their mates.

I mentioned several days ago reading H.G. Wells' The Outline of History. This was the 1919 first edition, which stopped at about the creation of the League of Nations. I picked up a similar but more recent book, The New Penguin History of the World, to cover events from 1919 to the present.

I'm also reading a book called Doubt, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, which had been sitting on my bookshelf untouched for a few years. She's basically assembled some historical sketches of people and groups who went against the conventional wisdom of their eras. For example, she describes how the biblical books of Job and Ecclesiastes are so out of synch with the rest of biblical teaching that she wonders how they were included in the Bible in the first place. ("Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity," is still my favorite Bible verse, and the only one I've carried with me from my thumping days.)

I've been on 'vacation' for a month or so from Zen and Taoist books. I figured I needed to spend more time being it and less reading about it. But I miss having that reading, and I think I'm going to find Wen-Tzu again for another read.

I'm still fat and I haven't gotten any younger.

Eating lentils

A friend of mine recently quit a job in what was, from her description, a rather unpleasant and even somewhat abusive environment. She had not been there very long. Like anyone who leaves a job without a new one ready, she was worried about finances and finding something else.

"Tell me I'm not a failure," she said, and I was happy to do so. Hell, I've been fired from more jobs than she's ever held. If she's a failure, then I'm a total disaster.

But that got me to thinking about our definition of 'failure.' Once we let someone else define 'success' for us, we pretty much take their definition of 'failure' along with it. So if we allow The Man to define 'success' for us as material wealth, social prestige or outstanding loyalty to our employers, then 'failure' is bound to be the opposite of those things: home in the wrong neighborhood, generic automobile, low-level job, lack of enthusiasm for the mission statement.

Lack of enthusiasm is my specialty, by the way, and it saddens me there's not more demand for it in corporate America.

Another friend, who occasionally posts here as dzaster, told this story at the Red Cup over the weekend:

There was a servant of the king who lived a comfortable life, surrounded by fine possessions. One day he saw a man eating a bowl of lentils. 'If you'd learn to suck up to the king,' the royal servant said, "you wouldn't have to eat lentils."

"If you'd learn to eat lentils," the man replied, "you wouldn't have to suck up to the king."