Posts
A lot has changed for me lately, and I need to get it all out of my head.
Religion:
I've felt connected to Buddhism for a long time, but I didn't really start studying it until shortly before I left Indiana last April. Since moving, a lot of little things have nudged me further in this direction. Meditation is becoming easy again, I found a beautiful (and cheap!) Bhodisatva statue that I was kinda looking for, I stumbled across "How to Practice" again by the Dalai Lama, and I stumbled across the Dhammapada (a Buddhist text) online, just to name a few.
In one kind of meditation, you're supposed to picture the myriad Buddhas and Bhodisatvas and confess your successes and failures to them, and then ask them to teach you. Now, I'm terrible at this kind of thing. First, I have a bad memory. I don't remember what I had for lunch yesterday most of the time, let alone things I did 20 years ago. This morning, however, in my meditation on the train, a flood came back to me. If you know me, you'll also know I can be very critical of myself, even concerning the things I know I'm good at. The flood started as memories of a few things I deeply regret. Then it turned to things I've done right -- compassions that I've shown, good lessons I've taught, etc. I felt guilty about the number of good things that came to me because I know I've screwed up more than that. I caught myself though, and let the good things come through because even if I've screwed up my fair share, I realized it's the intent behind actions that count, and I've never really done anything with cruel intent that I know of. This realization is a tough one for me, for reasons I can't explain or understand. I know it's a step in the right direction though.
Relationships:
Rob and I celebrated eight years together last month. We decided to have a ceremony on our 10th anniversary, which is February 2011. I'm still amazed that another human being has put up with me for this long, but I'm glad he has. I can't imagine life without him.
When we moved to Delaware, it was another major life-change for me. Until recently, I've felt very alone here. Rob had family and friends in the area to reconnect with, but I was alone essentially. I know couples tend to have different classes of friends -- his friends, my friends, and 'our' friends -- but I was missing out. It was, frankly, crushing. The past few weeks have been a respite from that though. I'm starting to get to know some local people who I think may eventually be good friends. They're still going to be people Rob introduced me to, because he's the one with the time and energy for chatting online and coordinating our social calendar, but I have to start somewhere before I go nuts. My only worry is that I'm so starved for friends right now that I feel like I'm going to end up either neglecting Rob or smothering the potential friends. All I can think of right now is a quote from Moby Dick -- "as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it" -- I feel like I'm putting everything into getting other people to like/notice/pay attention to me. Honestly, I feel like a 12 year old. What will be, will be I suppose.
Work:
I hate being in IT. I kick myself daily for not staying with Nursing. It felt right working in a hospital and helping people get well again. I'll never forgive L.S. for driving me out -- or the moron of a department head that sided with her despite CLEAR evidence that she should have her license revoked. All I want to do is go back and finish the schooling, but the longer circumstances conspire against me, the less likely it becomes. I'm grateful to have the job I have, especially in this economy, but I'm miserable. Congratulations to those at UC who took bets on how long it would be before I hated this job -- 6 months appears to be the winner.
And that's all I can bear to write at the moment. Maybe more later. I've just depressed myself. :P
I hate Windows. XP, despite being relatively "mature" as operating systems go, is about as secure as a bank vault made of drywall. You trust it to keep your things safe, but anyone with a good right hook could break in if they wanted to. I have been, and continue to be, a huge advocate of OS X, but even I concede that an OS limited to one hardware platform is lunacy.
That being said, I have to say I'm impressed with Windows 7. I tried upgrading my home PC to vista a while back. It lasted a week. An upgrade from XP took no less than five *hours*. Then there were issues with drivers I couldn't resolve, one of which was with my network card, which meant I couldn't download driver updates. Fortunately I had another computer to use to download them, but imagine my nightmare if I didn't.
Last night I installed Windows 7 beta. It took about 45 minutes for a clean install, and the only things I remember it asking me for were a username and password. Then... it just worked. No driver headaches, no security screens hassling me every two seconds, no spending hours turning off Aero components to make the system faster. The installer either had all the drivers it needed or downloaded the ones it needed (it's all transparent, so what do I know?), it didn't open a bunch of widgets that I didn't want (or have the power to run), and the security warning settings were set to a very reasonable level. I didn't even need to download special display drivers to handle the projector I have on the second video head -- it handled the independent resolutions beautifully. And within minutes of loggin in, I was watching Futurama DVDs using Windows Media Player 8 without codec warnings... and the playback looked better than VLC Media Player under XP.
I'm still installing software, so I may yet come across things that won't work under the new OS, but I understand it's a beta. I'll give it some slack. But frankly, at this point it doesn't need any. Win7 is what Vista ought to have been, and Microsoft knows it -- hence the extension of WinXP support. I'll be very sad to see Win7 Beta expire in August. Here's hoping I can afford the real thing when the time comes.
I was just reading the Theravedan Buddhist text called the Dhammapadda. I came across a passage that really struck a chord. It goes like this:
"Through many a birth in samsara have I wandered in vain, seeking the builder of this house... O house-builder, you are seen! You will not build this house again."
First, some definitions. Samsara is the Buddhist concept of cyclical existence. Birth, death, rebirth until one achieves the ultimate state of detachment and peace with the universe. Second, the "house" is the body. The verse essentially means "I've lived enough to see the universe for what it is -- I need not be born again."
I have been working on thoughts lately -- trying to banish those dark lines of thought that lead to depression and hatred. It's hard. I pass a street preacher every day on the way to work, and I'm always thinking in my head how hypocritical and contradictory his rhetoric is -- how falacious his logic. Today, I took a step in the right direction. I countered those thoughts and a few that followed about the people outside on "smoker's row" that I also pass daily outside the hospital. It was a small thing, but it was the first time I realized how deeply I was invested in these angry thoughts -- and about such trivial matters!
Today's meditation: Prajna Paramita, from the Heart Sutra, the mantra to calm all suffering.
A few years ago, I came down the stairs in the house on Arsenal and on the last step my ankle gave out. The doctors said I'd sprained it as badly as I could have without breaking anything. I went into shock, my lower leg turned technicolor purple, and I was limping for weeks. Yesterday, I tripped going up a flight of stairs with the vacuum cleaner in my hands and kicked the vertical portion of the stairs with my big toe and fractured it. Both times, it was my left foot. I think I might be cursed -- no one has my kind of luck and lives.
Just thought I'd throw up a quick "I'm alive!" note and update folks on a few things.
First, love the new house. We're still in Wilmington, but further north in a MUCH nicer neighborhood and in a much roomier house. We have a roommate, Brian, whom I have known for years. I'll post pics after the housewarming next weekend, when the house *will* be finished.
I set up a CafePress site for a few things Rob and I have always said would make great bumper stickers. Visit cafepress.com/imeister and have a look. It's only two items right now, but I'll be adding more as I think of things.
The restaurant review blog is going well. I've done a dozen places now, with more to write. I'm getting comments more and more frequently, and site stats are rising steadily. I even had a friend ask for one of my cards so he could pass it on to a friend who gets paid to do reviews in hopes that I might join their ranks. Getting paid to eat out? Hells yeah, I say!
Devoid of interest in life, moving only from day to day as flotsam on the tide. Moving with my fellow automatons to do the tasks of a bidding society, unawares that they too are part of the ebb and flow. Perhaps this is a gift; a conceit they hold close and cover under their jackets -- that they do not know the numbness of the world around them. If this be true, then their ignorance surely is bliss. In knowledge, to be sure, the educated are left listless and impotent. Give me not the pain of existence in the body, but rather in baser substances -- the feather of the wing, the hair on the cheetah. Let me be one of those so that I may at least take part in the exhilaration of flight or the chase. If I am to be part of anything, let it be of the basic - not the complex. Let me participate in the creative, not the commercial. Let us all carriage ourselves through life with the grander purpose of living it, rather than trying so in vain to understand, mold, or caress it into unnatural shapes and molds sure to break with time. If nature is to reclaim this all when we are gone, then perhaps it is because nature itself is the mold, and we are the cats, unherded, escaping a mold made for us long before we thought of questions as goals. Let us relax into the shapes nature has made for us, rather than try holding the ocean in a plastic cup. Marvel at the cups complexity, but look not too deeply into it's capacity -- for like this tumultuous life, you will find it lacking.
Do you bring or buy your lunch during the work week? How much money do you spend on food consumed during working hours?
(I was amused by this question because I *just* finished updating my restaurant review blog.)
During the week I usually bring my lunch. Rob and I figured out one time that we'd spent about 25% of our disposable income on eating out -- and a large portion of that on a particular Indian restaurant we loved. That notion and a growing list of places we like in Delaware are what gave me the incentive to create the DelawareDiner blog. In an effort to, I don't know... keep a ROOF over our heads, however, I've been keeping my lunches light and portable of late. During working hours, the money I spend is generally less than $3 a day.
So, I've thought about doing this for years, but I only started really acting on it tonight: rating the myriad restaurants I eat at. I *hate* cooking. It's messy, I'm always bumping up against recipes that call for ingredients no GUY would ever have around, and I hate cleaning up after cooking almost as much as I hate cooking itself. So I eat out. A lot. And now, I write about it.
I know most of my readers won't ever be anywhere near these restaurants, but if you like the style of my writing, you'll get a lot more of it, more frequently, at my new blog, The Delaware Diner.
After fighting with various Linux distributions for the past week, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that I'm simply not smart enough to use it. Admittedly, part of the problem is that I'm cheap. I bought a $12 wireless card; a "fubatchu" brand card as my old pal Lars would have called it, and drivers for it are apparently non-existent in linux without doing some mystical and entirely undocumented NDISwrapper trick, whatever the hell that is. That's an exaggeration -- there IS documentation, but it might as well be written in Swahili. Someone, somewhere along the line apparently wrote a python script to do it, but by the time I got to it, it already had disclaimers about not working with the current revision of the OS. So after plowing through FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Knoppix, Ubuntu.*, and CentOS, I'm done. I'm breaking down and trying a WAMP server instead. At least there will be documentation. *heavy sigh*
If only I could afford to buy a computer from the company I work for. :P
