In case you missed it the first time...

First posted November '05



Hey. Mr. Flathead! You want a piece of me?

It's Thursday

Attention.

My life is 99.9% perfect.

That is all.

New profile pic

I thought the old one was too bleak, since I'm all cheerful and perky now.

When I'm hungry, I eat

Some of you have heard me use the expression, "When I'm hungry, I eat, and when I'm tired, I sleep."

Here's the whole story, as told on kwanumzen.com

One day, a Sutra Master came and he questioned Zen Master Dae-Ju. "I understand that you have attained Satori. What is Zen?''

Dae-Ju said, "Zen is very easy. It is not difficult at all. When I am hungry, I eat; when I am tired, I sleep.''

The Sutra Master said, "This is doing the same as all people do. Attaining Satori and not attaining are then the same.''

"No, no, people on the outside and on the inside are different.''

The Sutra Master said, ''When I am hungry, I eat. When I am tired, I sleep. Why is the outside different from the inside?"

Dae-Ju said, "When people are hungry, they eat. Only the outside, the body, is eating. On the inside, they are thinking, and they have desire for money, fame, sex, food, and they feel anger. And so when they are tired, because of these wants, they do not sleep. So, the outside and the inside are different. But when I am hungry, I only eat. When I am tired, I only sleep. I have no thinking, and so I have no inside and no outside.''

The Sutra Master bowed respectfully, and became Dae-Ju's student.

What Cory Doctorow said

Read this.

Cory Doctorow writes about social networking (MySpace, Facebook, etc.)

"Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping."

The scarf

Although I don't have a picture that really does it justice, I should mention the fabulous 12-foot long scarf my friend Joanie crocheted and presented to me on Thanksgiving Day.

I had mentioned to her that I have a hard time finding scarves long enough for me, and that I really needed something similar to the scarves Tom Baker wore as Dr. Who. Less than two weeks later, she presented me with this amazing scarf that is more like a narrow blanket.

You can't tell from this picture, of course, but this scarf reaches my ankles.

It snowed!

!!!

Well, the high today is supposed to be 52. It should melt off pretty quickly.

Commitment phobia, part 2

I'll agree I'm relationship-phobic. I'm not sure it's costing me happiness.

Lately, I've been thinking that happiness is not something that should be pursued (no matter what the Declaration of Independence says), but something that should be enjoyed when it happens to come 'round.

Most of my peace has come not from pursuing happiness, but from avoiding, where possible, things that make me unhappy.

Unavoidable things come in life which bring both happiness and unhappiness, and we have to make our peace with both. We can't hide from every setback or misfortune. But I'm not going to stick my hand in boiling water or walk out into rush hour traffic to prove my detachment from pain or discomfort.

And I try not to become 'addicted' to experiences that bring happiness and comfort, although that happens on a small scale almost daily.

Survey says: commitment phobia

"The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said.

I know of no better way to follow the path to self-realization than the online web survey.

(Too bad the Socmeister didn't have the Internets back in the day. Instead of drinking hemlock, he could have just cancelled his MySpace page... or died of natural causes waiting for all the %^$#&# ads to load. Hit Aristotle and win a free ringtone!)

Following Nina/Christina's lead, I took the BeliefNet Commitment Phobia Quiz, and here's what it said:

You scored 85, on a scale of 30 to 100. Here's how to interpret your score:

75 - 100 Commitment-Phobic: Your fear of relationships is costing you happiness. You may want to take steps to break your pattern.

Well, maybe.

Results of previous online surveys:

I'm a Mahayana Buddhist

I'm INTP

I'm depressed

Sunday evening

I have to say that I've been in a pretty good mood since just before Thanksgiving.

I'm wondering if the fish oil is finally having some effect on my demeanor. I think I wrote previously that the jury is still out on the benefits of fish oil on depression... at least from what I've read on the Internets.

But Tall Ed says it's helped him.

In any event, the past four or five days have been pretty darn good.

Another social networking rant

There was an article in Slate a few days ago about how young people no longer use email, preferring to use text messaging and MySpace or Facebook instead.

As I've said before, I don't think MySpace is much more than warmed over America Online.

To get my regular email, I click on mail.app, and after a few seconds pf downloading, there are all my latest messages. With MySpace, it's a different story.

I get my MySpace email by:

1. Clicking on my MySpace bookmark.
2. Waiting for page to load. There's the banner... there are the google ads... there's the outline for the match.com ad with a woman flirting with her monitor, eventually followed by the video clip itself... there are the announcements for MySpace 'events'... finally, when all the ads are loaded and I have my browser back... I can
3. Click on 'home,' wait for more ads to load... there's the dancing mortgage reindeer... and, when I have my browser back,
4. click on 'log in'.
5. Wait for more ads to load. Click on 'inbox.'

And so on. And all during this time, my mail is more or less 'trapped' in MySpace. I don't have local copies. If I cancel MySpace (or if, for some reason, MySpace closes my account), I lose my 'paper trail' of messages.

And as I've said before, MySpace is, from a visual standpoint, an abomination. Cluttered, counterintuitive and just plain ugly. FaceBook is better, I suppose – based on what little I've seen of it.

But I still believe these social networks are basically a fad, just as all-day AOL chat was in the nineties, and eventually they'll go away or evolve into something more usable and sane.

Just say "no" to Black Friday

Well, it's too late now, of course, but next year for sure... right?

From SFGate.com:

"It's disgusting when you see people line up in stores drooling to just buy stuff," said Buehlman, 38, who e-mailed about 100 friends and family this year urging them to abstain from buying anything today. "People have such a hard time going inside themselves to fix things, they try to buy stuff to fix things on the outside."

More here.

I ate lunch at a restaurant with television on Friday and caught a little bit of one cable news network's Black Friday coverage.

While this one of the busiest shopping days of the year, it is also one of the slowest days for real news, which means news operations struggling to fill time between paid commercials are tempted to run what amount to free commercials about the Christmas shopping rush.

One reporter I saw was doing a live report from the aisles of what looked like a Wal-Mart or Target store. The sound was off, so I could only guess at what he was saying. But judging from the graphics full-screened during the report, it was another of those 'What's Hot' lists.

When I was a reporter, I always thought those stories were basically bogus. Some marketing company sends out press releases announcing that a client's product is 'hot,' content-starved news outlets report it as fact, and the reportage makes the press release reality. How many times have you seen one of those 'What's Hot' lists, and you've never even heard of half the stuff on it?

I'm doing my Christmas shopping (what there is of it) online this year.

Saturday evening

Okay, a quick rundown of Thanksgiving: dinner at a friend's home with a few Red Cup friends, which consumed the afternoon and early evening.

Later... sitting by the firepit at Sauced! with some of those same friends and others. The temperature had dropped below freezing, but we were all bundled up and warm in front of the fire Ed built for us.

For the moment, at least, my life has calm and serenity, which are the things I most sought.

Saturday morning

Well, it's two days since Thanksgiving and I still haven't written about it as I promised to.

I haven't been much in the mood to blog. Which is not to say I'm depressed; quite the opposite, actually. Everything's fine. But I just want a mini-vacation from blogging and computer stuff in general.

Thursday

The best Thanksgiving ever!

details to follow...

Wednesday

I have nothing to report.

What I should be doing..

...is cleaning up my turd-spangled back porch/laundry room. That's where the litter boxes are, but I guess the cats aren't always motivated to climb in them. They think the general vicinity is close enough.

Not doin' nothin, day 109

I've spent another day not doing much of anything except being an unmotivated layabout.

The zen tradition is that if you don't work, you don't eat. Well, I'm not working, or at least not working very much, but I am eating. Make of that what you will, or better yet, make nothing at all of it. Have no concept of making something of it. Don't even think 'it is what it is.'

I feel very fortunate to be in this space. I probably shouldn't have any feeling about it at all, at least not in terms of it being 'fortunate' or 'unfortunate.'

No concept of anything. No concept of even having or not having a concept.

Waaaugh.

Team Knight Rider update

I forgot to mention soartstar, who gave me a ride to pick up the battery at the auto parts store.

Just like Team Knight Rider, only with a minivan

Replaced the battery and a badly corroded cable terminal, and the minivan is again ready for thrilling fast-paced adventures.

Much thanks to Tony O for loaning me his socket set and to Randy S for figuring out how to get the old battery out of the engine well. (There was a bracket on the bottom I had forgotten about.)

Thanks to Tish for offering to send her mechanic to help me and to Lauren and Cristin for stopping to offer aid.

It's a good life in the bubble.