Six in the City - compassion for the bus lady.

I noticed something else about the bus lady this morning. She was still on her perch this morning, still selectively greeting only the dark-skinned women who boarded the bus, and I sat right behind her. She had The Bible in her hands this morning and an orange-colored highlighter in one hand. I could see over her shoulder and I was interested in which passages she was highlighting. I noticed this morning that when a male or a light-skinned person boarded the bus instead of greeting them she would tap her bible with her finger and say "Mmm-hmm, that's right, that's right" loud enough for the boarding passenger to hear.

So, I put my reading glasses on and noticed she was reading from Judges and she was highlighting every word on the page. Then I watched her a little longer, seeing which passages she was highlighting, and it dawned on me what's really going on.

She can't read.

Her highlights were random. They would end in mid-sentence, on articles, and then she would tap on the page on a place she had long passed in her highlighting when a male or light-skinned person boarded the bus and mutter her "Mmm-hmm, that's right, that's right" and then go back to the highlighting every word on the page, including the page number at the bottom and the chapter-verse citations at the top.

My heart sank, all of the disapproval and superiority I felt over this woman melted away as I realized that she can't read and she's so ashamed of it that she goes through this elaborate ritual to disguise it.

How tragic, she can't study her religion on her own at all, all she knows of it is what she's told by whatever preacher is trying to extract a tithe from her. She's isolated from her greater Faith community.

If she belongs to a church, it seems likely that no one knows her well enough to help her with this profound social disability. That may be because she works to hide it so, but she didn't do such a good job with a random guy on the bus, did she? If there were someone showing her the loving attention, patience, compassion, understanding, and good-will that characterized the life that Jesus Christ sought to lead, I believe she would have gotten the help she needs by her age. Her Faith community has failed her and she might not even know that.

That is just so sad.

I can't stop laughing at this.

QotD: If your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you?

You might try looking at all the stuff that comes up in your head as just a secretion. All our thoughts and feelings are a kind of secretion. It is important for us to see that clearly. I've always got things coming up in my head, but if I tried to act on everything that came up, it would just wear me out. Haven't you ever had the experience of being up on a very high pace and having the urge to jump? That urge to jump is just a secretion in your head. If you felt that you had to follow every urge that came into your head, well....

--Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith

cf.

QotD: Mindfulness on the line of scrimmage.

One of the most difficult things to learn is that mindfulness is not dependent on any emotional or mental state. We have certain images of meditation. Meditation is something done in quiet caves by tranquil people who move slowly. Those are training conditions. They are set up to foster concentration and to learn the skill of mindfulness. Once you have learned that skill, however, you can dispense with the training restrictions, and you should. You don't need to move at a snail's pace to be mindful. You don't even need to be calm. You can be mindful while solving problems in intensive calculus. You can be mindful in the middle of a football scrimmage. You can be mindful in the midst of a raging fury. Mental and physical activities are no bar to mindfulness. If you find your mind extremely active, then simply observe the nature and degree of that activity. It is just a part of the passing show within.

--Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith

Right on.

cf.

.6k - The quickening - mid-breath report.

As you may or may not know, I have had to suddenly vacate half of my already-small apartment in Harlem. My rent increased by almost 50% (42.8% to be exact) suddenly last week. It was an increase I was expecting, and it came during a genuinely friendly and mutually compassionate conversation with my landlady.

Her husband died suddenly of pancreatic cancer right before I originally moved into the building. He was in fact the only person who knew that I had been promised the second floor apartment. I ended up getting a third floor studio that came open at the same time because she gave the second floor apartment to her housekeeper-nanny, who had also apparently lovingly tended to her husband at the end of his life. How could I object? So, I didn't.

So, I lived quite comfortably in the third floor studio, except for it's being on the third floor. That added pretty significantly to the amount of trouble it was the do things there. The laundry room was four floors down, for example. So, when the ground floor apartment came open, I asked her if I could take it. She wanted me to take it. She offered me a 22% reduction in the rent she was asking from everyone else to encourage me to take it. I took it.

It was pretty cavernous. I wanted a cool New York apartment so I started buying furniture. I bought some furniture I didn't really want in order to please a friend. This was, of course, completely the wrong reason to buy furniture, and my friend wasn't that invested in my decision anyway, but I felt I needed to have furniture.

Why? Because I felt like I was less than something I should be if I didn't have it. Not because I wanted it, not because I used it, but because a man my age is supposed to have furniture. Just as if someone was going to drop by like a census-taker to count my lamps and bookshelves, I sought to prove something to myself, mindlessly, on some consumerist autopilot, to fill some lack, some hole in my self-regard, with a chest of drawers, a couple of cabinets, a rug and some broken lamps (projects!).

Guess how well that worked?

So, my landlady left the rent at the same rate for 3.5 years. It was less than 60% of the market value of the apartment this last year. So, she raised it 42.8% and it is still less than 85% of market value. I'm not going to bitch about that, and I'm not going to move. I told her that on the phone. Her relief was palpable.

But, that doesn't mean I'm Daddy Got-Rocks. I'm an underpaid nurse informaticist. I can't really afford the rent increase while I'm still in therapy and fighting a legal battle over my father's estate. So, I have to find a roommate and one dropped right into my lap, literally five seconds after I first let it be known to the world that I needed one.

So, guess what I have to get rid of? That furniture I bought mindlessly when I moved into the apartment, plus I have acquired some better pieces that displace even older pieces. That hasn't been so hard except it really drives home the point about what a slave I have been to consumerist mindlessness.

What do I mean by consumerist? I mean the notion, so much a part of our culture that we don't notice it, that one becomes something important in life through the acquisition of stuff, constantly newer and better stuff, which you're supposed to have to be fully actualized as a modern human. There's a complementary notion that people without stuff are somehow disabled, or worse yet, sort of stupid. Or if they don't use this best stuff, they're the loyal losers in the getting-the-best-stuff competition. They're the team playing the Harlem Globetrotters. We have to have losers to have winners, so that's the people with the zune and the new Windows Vista machines.

Why does the stock market always have to go up? Why do this year's sales always have to surpass last years? Why must there be ever-increasing profits? What do we need more of? What do we lack? Are we meeting that lack with more stuff/dollars?

Do you see how consumerism was at the root of my notion to buy furniture I didn't want and didn't use? It still amazes me what I have realized about all this in the last three years.

In addition to the mindless furniture I possessed, it was also time to get rid of the stuff I was holding on to because it wasn't "in my way." I'm not really sure what I mean by that, though, when I think about it. I know I like space, so potentially everything is in the way.

I think the "not in my way" declaration was a veil over something deeper. I know from the emotional reactions that i had to the purge I conducted on Thanksgiving Day that I still invested my sense of self in a lot of that stuff.

It is important to note at this point that I did not throw out or recycle a single item I have used in the last year other than an appliance I dropped and broke accidentally, some books I had read and saw no reason to keep, and a large number of books I had never read.

That brings up a point I want to make. I am beginning to question the habit I have of buying paperback books. I was able to take a tote bag full of hardback books to a used bookstore and get $35 for them last week, plus they put them right on the shelf for someone else to enjoy at less than half price.

My paperback books I only recycle. My used book store, The Strand, doesn't take paperbacks if they are not in new condition. My books travel with me, they do not get read and stay in new condition, so they're recycling, which is fine but there's a lot of organization there, those words on that page, that gets lost because it is, in essence, a disposable binding compared to hard-cover.

So, why did I buy these books in paperback editions? Because they are cheaper. What do I want with a cheaper book? More for my money. More of what? By the time the book is in paperback there are hard-cover copies at the library, if I really want to read it, why not just check it out? Because maybe going to the library doesn't satisfy me the way that buying books does? Hmm? What's having this book really about? It doesn't seem to be about reading it, does it?

The paperback books I have that are in new condition are the ones I bought and never read. Usually I planned to read them in order to improve myself in some way (another consumerist notion), i.e., that if I read this book I am somehow better informed, or more well-rounded, or more interesting to others in some way. I don't ever read those books, and I had a lot of them, but chances are if I *owned* them and didn't read them that they aren't that compelling to start with, so I just recycled them instead of trying to dump them on The Strand. I feel like a part of a community at The Strand, I don't want to injure that community with crappy paperbacks that are of more use to humanity as wood pulp.

I recycled about 75% of my library on Thanksgiving even though I did not recycles a single book I plan to open the cover of again. I reduced three bookshelves worth of books to part of one. Something about that still bothered me even though these books were clearly possessions I didn't use or anticipate using. There's another guy I heard or read about who is doing a similar divestment of possessions who exempts books from the count he is keeping of his possessions because he regards them as a different kind of possession. I don't think I followed or really understood his rationale, it just sounded like a rationale to me, so I dismissed it.

I think I'm right. The fact is there are libraries which my tax dollars go to support which do a lot better job of preserving books than I do. I can use one of the greatest library systems on planet earth for free. I have the Internet, I am not vested with the responsibility for preserving the collective wisdom of the published word nor any part of it. I'm clear on that.

But, I really do wrap up a sense of myself in having books. That hurt.

I also went through my CD/DVD collection again and this time I eliminated all of the packaging and put the disks on spindles. This also was less than comfortable. Even though I am well aware that I purchased my Simpson's collection to watch the result of the decoding of the ones and zeroes stored on the discs (and to obtain permission to do so) it dawned on me that I liked seeing the boxes up on the shelf, that I felt like this says something about me too. Why do I feel like I'm losing something about my self when I separate the plastic from the cardboard recycling parts of the package and spindle the storage media?

So, I am about mid-way through the process I need to complete to make room for the roommate. I have a closet to empty, a chest-of-drawers set to empty, and some cabinets to empty. Most of it is going to be discarded or recycled, I haven't been using about 75% of it, either. I'm not looking forward to this with my usual enthusiasm for the task. Again, none of this stuff fits the criteria I have adopted for my target 600 possessions (utility and/or beauty), I don't want it, I've made that decision, but I have not yet detached. I am still on the karma wheel, this is loss because I thought this stuff represented gain in the first place. I am having trouble seeing through to that even though I know it.

But, that's what practice is like. You don't do it to gain anything. You do it because it is what there is to do, not from a sense of accomplishment or achievement, there's pain there, this pain, that I'm in now, but the possessions didn't create that, they didn't relieve it either, there just the chips in this card game of living.

But it's not like I'm supposed to be doing something else. I'll get back to you when I'm finished with this intensive.

What if you thought you were going to die today?

I was teaching today at my hospice agency. I am actually assigned to teach them how to use our mobile-enabled electronic medical record, but I can't help but slip the cork on a bottle of hospice here and there. Today I talked about the difficulty of hospice work and its rewards.

The difficulty is all the loss. I am an expert relationship loser. I have meaningful closure rituals, I stay present. Still, it hurts, and the only way to live with pain is to hurt. It's finite for each loss, I get over it, but I have a lot of losses.

On the other hand, I get to relate to people who live now, today, with a lot more intensity because death is perched on a bookshelf in every room. This makes relationships come alive with compassion and a quiet sense of shared joy in every breath. This is a lot like life was for me when I was a neonatal intensive care nurse and I went to a lot of births, particularly high-risk births. There's something special about my experience there that is difficult to name.

So, I essentially gave that same talk, and the room got very quiet. I quickly returned to the subject, because we had work to do, but maybe it was a little too quickly. It seems that way now, I guess there's something there I was avoiding.

Anyway, I was thinking about all that tonight, maybe because I am still dealing with the financial details of my father's death last May, trying to see that his wishes, as I best understand them, are respected. I mailed off some documents today to my lawyer that are going to cause a significant corner to be turned in that process towards some sense of understanding and agreement among the interested parties. I've been avoiding that too, I guess because I wanted to believe that I would be taken care of by my family, that his wishes would be respected without my self-advocacy. That's a loss, too.

So, I put myself back in that room and I thought to myself, how would I hava acted differently? What would I have done differently knowing today is my last?

I would have asked Zoe to dance.

Zoe is a nurse practicioner in my class, Puerto Rican / Portugese family, who is just lovely. She's physically attractive, nice, kind, concerned and intelligent. She has an accent that makes her speech musical. She smiles a lot.

I actually would have predicted that my fantasy for the final day of my life would be more x-rated, but it's not. I'd really want to dance with her, to move with her as man with woman, sure there's an erotic element, but there's also an artistic element, the beauty of dance is for it's own sake. Dancing needs no agenda.

Sex would be messy and insecure, plus we'd need to be alone, and it's unpredictable with a new partner. I've only got one shot at this, I'm going to ask her to dance. I don't want some huge involved relationship, I'm dying, remember, I just want to know her scent, feel her warmth and notice what's unique about her eyes.

There's something to this "live every day as your last" stuff.

So, think about it. Imagine that you know you're going to die comfortably a day. You can't tell anybody, they won't believe you. It's too late to travel anywhere or plan some big event, you just have to live the rest of your life in the next day. What would you do? Would you really stay home from work? Don't think so fast, really let the scenario settle in before you answer any questions.

Then, ask yourself, why did I not do those things today?

They are important, you had the opportunity. What are you waiting for?

Because you think I know when you're going to die?

Really? I wonder what Crash thought.

So, hug those kids, write that letter, say those words, whatever. That's living.

Ah, well, yes, that impermanence thing.

I just found out that my rent will be increased in January 2008 by 50%. Something pretty significant about my life is going to change real soon, and I'm not yet sure what it is. Could be moving, could be getting a roommate, could be something else.

Wow.

QOTD: Becoming

Becoming, which results from clinging, involves the idea of having or being something more satisfying than at present. We want to become a very good meditator, or we want to become spiritual, or more learned. We have all sorts of ideas but are all bound up with wanting to become, because we are not satisfied with what we are. Often we do not even pay attention to what we are now, but just know that something is lacking. Instead of trying to realize what we are and investigating where the difficulty actually lies, we just dream of becoming something else. When we have become something or someone else, we can be just as dissatisfied as before.

-Ayya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith

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Let's pile on Maureen Dowd!

Oh. My. God.

I post a link to a column by Maureen Dowd that I think is interesting and you people are so threatened by a silly little study that you rip into Ms. Dowd. She's a newspaper columnist, folks. Her job is to write columns that keep people coming back to a place where her employer sells ad space, she's not a religious leader.

Of course she has faults, of course she has biases, of course she gets things wrong, she's a human being. Just so we don't have to go to a lot of trouble establishing this, I'll confess, I have faults. I have biases. I get things wrong. Ok? You are officially excused from taking anything I say seriously. I've been wrong once, I can be wrong again. Ok, forget about anything I say.

Continue to believe we're "making progress" in Iraq, too, while you're at it,.

Don't you see what happened? Something about a STUPID study, about as substantial as discussing Britney's fitness for parenthood, something there set you off, just like people were set off by the row over what liking women who have curves means, exactly, in BMI. Then, the entire discussion becomes about the PEOPLE who are expressing the opinions rather than the opinions themselves.

This is why ad hominem attacks are de facto discounted in serious discussions. Not because they're mean, they're diversion tactics, strategies for managing emotions and ending serious discussions when you are losing them, or when you lack anything persuasive to say in support of what you want to believe is true. They're also mean, and you know, that really is enough of a reason to not make them, but go ahead, be vicious, you're still stupid.

But, since we tolerate this madness in public political discourse because we enjoy watching the powerful get humiliated, this type of immature and vicious word-play has become legitimized in all venues of public discourse. This is what reality TV has done to our public culture. Back-biting, passive aggression and character assassination are sanctioned in public discourse just like beating someone into unconsciousness for money is sanctioned in boxing, i.e, it's "sport."

I challenge any of you to stand naked before your God, or your own heart, and maintain that's ethical behavior.

So, yes, I like Maureen, and I'd date her, but I'm not looking to her to guide my life or set the optimum example of human existence for me. While we're on a rant, I like Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, too. None of them is a perfect human being, they have made mistakes, each failed at one time or another to live up to their own ideals, misrepresented themselves, waffled instead of admitting a mistake, etc, etc etc.

So. Have. I.

So. Have. You.

Maureen found something thought-provoking to write about one day, good for her. She writes things that I think, so I imagine we share some faults, some biases, and we've agreed about things that ended up being wrong. Guess what? That does not distinguish us in any way from you, or from the rest of humanity.

I am grateful that I don't have to denigrate someone else's character to avoid accepting the fact that I'm human.

Now, to the subject. Of course, we like visually appealing people. When we are operating according to our appetites and aversions we do not see things as they really are. No one does. Some people get married that way, some people have something happen that distances their facilities for reason from their appetites by varying degrees. They see things a bit more clearly and make a bit more reasonable decisions.

There's no there there. I've known some fantastically attractive people who were also very worthwhile people, right to the core, among the finest people I've known. I've also known some people who weren't very easy to look at who were also very fine people. Vice versa and backasswards too. We all have.

But to deny that any of us is or should be above these desires and biases is just more delusion and confusion. Your mind is what it is. It wants to believe it is special. it wants to believe it can end the persistent sense of dissatisfaction we all share by getting something from somewhere else. We all have it, we can't get rid of it, we just have to try to see it and work with the disability.

Untrain your parrot.

Take it from someone who knows. It hurts to be judged negatively on your appearance, even more to be ridiculed or ostracized. Being hurt makes me angry. Being angry makes me want to retaliate, *that's* the brain weevils. That's the cruel joke in all this, retaliation makes things worse. Denigrate men for liking a big rack or denigrate women for claiming to want to be valued for the quality of their hearts and minds while they squueze into thongs and miracle bras. There's enough delusion, confusion, longing and loathing to go around for everybody.

Or, stop for a moment, and see that we're more than this mental chatter. There's a place in all of us that loves without expectation of return, that will sacrifice our own welfare to care for another. We all share it and it's beautiful.

Nice, huh?

Ok, back to the T&A! Join in, it's life, it's being human.

Why men choose their dates.

Maureen Dowd, who is more accomplished than I and makes more money than I do, who I would ask on a date in a second, writes in her column (linkage - PDF) in the New York Times yesterday, entitled "Should Hillary pretend to be a flight attendant?" about a study conducted at Columbia University (just a stone's throw from my home, by the way) concerning speed-dating at a local bar (which I have no doubt been in at one time or another). Quoting a slate article about it:

“We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks."

He continued: “By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point ... It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.

“When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”

Present company excepted, of course.

No, the truth is, when I am sizing up a woman the way one would in a speed-dating situation I'm all about the looks. Intelligence and ambition are down-sides.

But, you know why intelligence and ambition are negative factors when considering my likelihood to ask them out? Not because I find those qualities unattractive, no, not al all, it is because I think it is less likely that they will accept my request for a date. I don't want to be rejected. That's where the fragile ego comes in for me. It's not that I don't want to be professionally one-upped by my date, I don't want to hear "It's not you, it's me. Let's be friends."

But that's speed-dating, and I don't speed-date. I don't ask anyone out that I don't already know pretty well. Who am I kidding? I don't ask anyone out at all.

But, I am well-aware of the operations on my mind and what I look for without really thinking about it is a visually attractive woman who will admire me and with whom I do not expect to compete. This is why it's good to know your mind. That is not actually the kind of woman I want as a partner. I'm only going to overcome this tendency in my perceptions if I am aware of it and I accept that it is there.

You can see the world clearly through rose-colored glasses if you know you're wearing them.

It's a wonder we ever find anyone at all.

Six in the City - the bus lady

Another thing that I've noticed in the morning is that the buses run on time. The drivers have an LCD console that notes their position via GPS and informs them if they are early or late with regard to their schedule. I always glance at this fascinating little bit of technology when I board the bus, during the day no one is ever anywhere near being on time. I don't fault the bus drivers for this. With the unpredictable nature of Manhattan traffic, the number of disabled passengers who may have to be assisted with boarding (they take up to five minutes to get on the bus), and the weirdos/malcontents they have to deal with at random intervals during the day, it is nigh impossible for them to move at a predictable rate.

But few, if any of these challenges exist in the morning, so I always take the same bus down to the zen-do, it comes by my stop within a couple of minutes of the same time every morning and I've noticed that the same people are on it every morning. One woman, of African-American descent in her 50's or 60's, boards the bus up-stream from where I do (i.e., somewhere in Central Harlem) and always sits in the same seat prominently reading either her highly adorned Bible or some obviously Christian book, always facing the cover out to the aisle as if holding up a placard. I have no way of knowing her actual intentions, but this would be exactly the position in which to hold the book if she wanted everyone boarding the bus to know what she was reading. I've also noticed that in the twenty minutes we ride together she rarely turns a page (I sit behind and across the aisle from her).

What's remarkable is that she warmly greets every woman of African-America descent with a cheerful "Good Morning, Sister! It is a blessed day, isn't it!" How nice that she was so friendly in the morning! I assumed she had been riding the bus for a long time and she knew all of these women she was greeting, in fact, it is mostly the same half-dozen women each day. I've been trying to greet her when I get on the bus but I've been frustrated in that attempt because she never looks up from (or out from behind, more accurately) the book she's displaying when people get on at my stop.

Then I had some additional insight into her situation.

This morning a young African-American woman got on the bus with me at my stop. We had been chatting amiably before the bus arrived, she's from North Carolina and she noticed my UNC hat. We talked a bit about the game last night and the upcoming season while waiting on the the bus.

Of course, I let her get on the bus ahead of me. The bus lady greeted her with "Good Morning, Sister! It is a blessed day isn't it?"

After the woman I was boarding with smiled and nodded a greeting to her while walking past her, I also passed her and said "Good morning!" She looked back at her book without indicating that she was aware of my existence. I was taken aback by this.

The woman I was boarding the bus with looked at me with a mixture of puzzlement and disgust as I sat down, and the two other women of African-American descent on the bus put their hands over their mouths to stifle a giggle as they warmly smiled at me.

Ah. Now I get it.

on real-life vs. on-line friends

I think this discussion about on-line vs. real-life friends that's been going on in several of my on-line communities is interesting. There's been some mention of a shared awareness of a lack of friends among the adults here on Multiply in their 30's. I went through the same thing in my 30's (and it extended into my 40's when I moved to NYC). I'm through it now. My problem now is I have to really juggle my schedule (thank you Google calendar!) to make time to see all of my friends. If anything, and I have trouble saying this, I have too many friends. I don't mean that any of them are a burden, but I am constantly feeling inadequate as a friend because I have to turn down so many requests to get together with people.

And that's my real-life friends.

On-line, the term friend gets a little murky. My friendships on-line are asynchronous. I don't have to be there for them at any particular time or place (and vice-versa). Also, as I think Sielwolf mentioned, there's a lack of sense of shared physical space and time which is palpable in on-line friendships. Further, I'm pretty sure that I am friends on-line with some people with whom I would likely not have a real-life relationship because we just don't share enough in common to sustain it.

I feel the same way about a number of people I know from work. I like them, I spend time with them in the workplace in that I'll sit next to them and chat at meetings, or stop by their office for a chat during the day, but if we tried to get together outside of work I have the feeling we'd quickly run out of things to talk about once we caught up on what was happening at work for each of us.

However, in both arenas, work-friends and on-line-friends, there are a much smaller number of people for which the limited context of our meeting, either at work or on-line, just sets the stage for our real-life friendship. Oddly, I have found that once I experience them in real-life, that context in which I met them, be it on-line or at work, becomes much less rich as a relational context and consequently transforms into little more than a way to schedule/arrange the real-life meetups. There's still the heartfelt e-mail here and there (or lunch away from the office during the day), but if they are geographically remote I find myself waiting to see them again to really experience the relationship.

I've made it a bit of a habit to meet people in person that I've met through the slashdot circle (and now here through multiply). I haven't decided upon a milestone in particular which they go from one category to the other, that is when an on-line friend turns into a real-life friend. I can't say it is just geography either. I've met on-line friends in real life who live within 50 miles of me who remain on-line friends even after I've met them, and I have others I've met only once or twice in real life who are definitely real-life friends even though the bulk of our actual interaction takes place on-line (because of their removal by geography and/or other life responsibilities).

I also am not willing to abide by the implied notion that real-life friends are somehow more significant friends. That's not true for me. Each of my friendships is unique and it "ranks" in significance strictly according to my experience of it, the context doesn't matter. Of course, I know well that what we can only know so much about someone from on-line interaction, I don't "trust" the self-declarations of someone I meet on-line as quickly as I do someone I've met in person.

But, even though I've never met Em, for example, I'm pretty sure he's a 30-ish IT guy with a wife and house. If our initial meeting had been in person it wouldn't have taken me nearly as long to develop that confidence. Also, when he's not on-line, not posting his lunch posts, or musing about the moment reflections, I miss him just like I miss real-life friends when I don't see them in a while. So, there's not as much difference as the popular denigration of on-line relationships implies.

I don't think you can substitute one kind of relationship for the other. Sam's post is a good example, if it was just sheer numbers of friends that mattered he wouldn't be feeling a lack of friends, he's got a very large following on-line.

Yet, I can also say that I have no real-life friends that make up for what I miss when I miss an on-line friend. I am missing one right now in fact. I have more real-life friends than I can deal with, but I still miss a person I only know from on-line who dropped out of sight recently.

Apples and oranges, I say. I like them both.

Six in the City - after the change

Back in the first "Six in the City" post I mused whether or not the time change would make a difference in my experience of the City at 6am. Well, I have an answer, or a couple of them: yes and no.

There is a lot more activity in the City at 6am standard time. There are more cars, more people, the people are more active. But, the thing that I find fascinating about this time of day, i.e., the sense of calm and mindfulness in the City, remains. This larger and more diverse number of people who are out are still polite, undistracted, and pleasant.

I find the fact that the time change hasn't seemed to automatically move everyone's schedules an hour to be comforting. Perhaps we aren't as tied to the contrivance of a mechanical clock as we think, perhaps we are really more attuned to the rhythms of the planet and solar system than we believe.

Or perhaps people use the opportunity of the time change to practice new resolve around getting up early.

In any case, just as my decision to sit with a group of people is encouraging, encouraging both to me and to them, this sense of propriety and mutual respect among those who populate Manhattan at 6am encourages me to get up early enough to be in the midst of it all. I hope I am encouraging them.

Buddhist QOTD: The nature of reality.

"The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of "physical reality" indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions - that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics - in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically."

--Albert Einstein

Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

Yes, I used the Silver Palate Oatmeal, in fact I got the recipe off the box.

An hour or so before you plan to bake, take a stick and a half of butter out of the fridge.

When you put on your apron, crank the oven to 375F

• 1 cup APF
• 1.5 t Baking Powder
• .25 t salt

Sift above together, set aside.

• .75 cup (stick and a half) butter, softened.
• 2 T milk
• 1 t vanilla
  
• 1 egg
• .5 cup sugar
• .5 cup brown sugar, firmly packed

Mix above well, dump into the dry ingredients, blend evenly

• 6 oz chocolate chips
• 1.75 cups rolled oats

blend with base batter.

Spoon on to greased baking sheet, bake off until lightly browned on top. Cool and let set-up. Eat with milk.

Awesome.

Suzuki Roshi QOTD

One day a student asked, "Roshi, I have a lot of sexual desire. I'm thinking of becoming celibate. Should I try to limit myself in this way?"

"Sex is like brushing your teeth," Suzuki answered. "It is a good thing to do, but not so good to do it all day long."

from To Shine One Corner of the World
ISBN 0-7679-0651-9

Six in the City

You know, New York City is a very peaceful and tranquil place. There's just a low ebb of activity, people are quiet, seemingly content, and the quiet joy of shared respect for public space is in full bloom everywhere you go.

What kind of crack am I smoking? 6 a.m. crack.

I've been getting up earlier and earlier since I sat the sesshin at Dharma Field a few weeks ago. I found a group with which I can sit on an almost daily basis, their morning sits start at 7 a.m., and to make sure I am there on time I have to get up a few minutes before 5 a.m..

My entire life I have not regarded myself as a morning person. That was just a thought I held about myself, but it seemed real at the time. It still seems real, but the fact is I am getting up with the birdies these days.

I don't know how long I am going to be able to do this. That's a "gaining idea," anyway, i.e., just confusion, delusion, longing and loathing. It doesn't matter how long I am going to do this.

Its not that I don't think this is important, or that I don't have any particular intention to continue. No, it's that considering how long I am going to do this really doesn't help me to get up tomorrow, which is what I really have to do, just like it doesn't help me with eating to imagine what my life will be like when I weigh less.

I have noticed that I really like the upper west side of Manhattan at 6 a.m.. People are quiet, friendly, and they all appear to have some purpose of which they are mindful. Maybe because it takes some effort to get up earlier than the rest of the City, I don't know.

I like Six in the City.