I was riding the 3 train to work (that's the #3 Subway line for non-NYers) and I walked into a car just as a tall, slender, gorgeous, redhead entered from another door, walking towards me. We were both headed towards two adjacent open seats.
I need two seats. I'm big and fat. I actually occupy about 1.25 seats, but I need two adjacent seats to be open for me to sit down and still have those seated next to me be comfortable. So, I usually don't attempt to sit down unless I can occupy two seats without inconveniencing someone else.
When I saw this tall drink of cool water was headed towards these seats I motioned for her to sit down. She sat down gracefully, tucked her breezy spring skirt under her legs and motioned for me to sit next to her on her left. I leaned down and said "I don't think you know me well enough to let me to sit in your lap, but thank you" with an smile. She grabbed my right wrist and with one motion turned me around, put my arm around her and pulled me down into the seat on her left.
I am now sitting on the Subway with a stunning redhead tucked underneath my arm. She placed my hand on her hip and rested her forearm on my thigh. Her giant rock of a wedding ring sparkled on her left hand as she patted me affectionately on the inside of my knee. She leaned into me and rode quietly until her stop, 14th street, about a 15 minute ride from where we began.
When she got up, she pecked me on the cheek and said "I used to weigh 330 lbs. Don't be ashamed of who you are" and flounced away, skirt swishing behind her, as she disappeared into that great mass of humanity that is NYC during the rush hour.
I still don't think my feet are touching the ground.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
What has happened to us? The sequel.
I wasn't discussing the relative merits of Facebook vs. Multiply. It is clear to anyone that Multiply is a better platform for what our group does most of the time, but I don't find it necessary to make a choice. Facebook and Twitter have both filled a niche that Multiply does not address--synchronous communication.
Monday I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room coming into contact with some difficult feelings. I was there 2 hours and 45 minutes, plenty of time for isolation and fear to grow. I tweeted about it and a number of you got back in touch with me one way or the other to offer companionship. That was awesome. There I was, suffering the consequences of my poor planning, i.e., not asking someone to go with me, and by picking up my cell phone and sharing my situation I suddenly had friends thousands of miles removed geographically with me, metaphorically hanging out and sharing my experience.
That was awesome, and that wouldn't have happened *now* in exactly the same was if I had just posted to Multiply. There used to be a time when everyone sat around F5-ing their inbox page, using it like an awkward IM client, but that's not going on as much anymore.
To return to my mall metaphor, we may still be more or less hanging around at the same place in the Food Court rather than over at someone's house. It is almost the same except if you want a order of pot stickers you don't have to rely on someone having them in their freezer, you can walk over within everyone's sight and pick some up. There are more resources available.
I didn't say anything is dying, though clearly it is. Things are always dying. I was noticing change. It doesn't distress me, it interests me.
Monday I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room coming into contact with some difficult feelings. I was there 2 hours and 45 minutes, plenty of time for isolation and fear to grow. I tweeted about it and a number of you got back in touch with me one way or the other to offer companionship. That was awesome. There I was, suffering the consequences of my poor planning, i.e., not asking someone to go with me, and by picking up my cell phone and sharing my situation I suddenly had friends thousands of miles removed geographically with me, metaphorically hanging out and sharing my experience.
That was awesome, and that wouldn't have happened *now* in exactly the same was if I had just posted to Multiply. There used to be a time when everyone sat around F5-ing their inbox page, using it like an awkward IM client, but that's not going on as much anymore.
To return to my mall metaphor, we may still be more or less hanging around at the same place in the Food Court rather than over at someone's house. It is almost the same except if you want a order of pot stickers you don't have to rely on someone having them in their freezer, you can walk over within everyone's sight and pick some up. There are more resources available.
I didn't say anything is dying, though clearly it is. Things are always dying. I was noticing change. It doesn't distress me, it interests me.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
What has happened to us?
In that dynamic field of human behavior we call the Intarnets there has been a lot of change. Our little neighborhood has been no different, we started at Slashdot and took advantage of the prescient social networking there. That went on for a while and we kept growing. There was weirdness, there was pain, there was stupid duplicity, there was clever duplicity, there was love, there was support, there was compassion, there was wisdom.
Then prominent and influential members migrated to Multiply, or at least those that I regard that way, and something more subtle and nuanced developed through the use of multiple media for expression. We rolled like that for a while, then something happened at Facebook and something happened at Twitter that sucked the air out of the room.
Worlds collided, suddenly our little house party came out of the tunnel and into the football stadium of Facebook and Twitter. Suddenly there's someone's sister, someone's parents, someone's ex, some *high school* friends of someone you've only known online (what could be less relevant?). Wow, the sense of organization, exclusivity and shared iconography evaporated, after spending time in our little shared living room we're suddenly at the mall!
Well, the mall is kind of cool, there's a lot of resources here, but who are you with? The friends you came with are being diluted by artificially equivalent connections based either on communities long gone (college, high school) or as conceptual objects (Texas Longhorns, New Yorkers, Democrats). Where is the significance of your close friends, those with whom you share a connection that is beyond description? Shouldn't you be seeing more of their cat pictures and less from that quiet girl you barely remember from high school?
Yes, there's Friend's Lists on Facebook, and I make use of them, but that's so analytical, and it is static--you have to update and modify your lists if you want them to reflect your life. That seems like a silly amount of work, and besides, to whom, exactly, am I providing all that information?
This is the kind of thing you think about at the end of your 12th straight day of work, particularly when this one was 12 solid hours.
Then prominent and influential members migrated to Multiply, or at least those that I regard that way, and something more subtle and nuanced developed through the use of multiple media for expression. We rolled like that for a while, then something happened at Facebook and something happened at Twitter that sucked the air out of the room.
Worlds collided, suddenly our little house party came out of the tunnel and into the football stadium of Facebook and Twitter. Suddenly there's someone's sister, someone's parents, someone's ex, some *high school* friends of someone you've only known online (what could be less relevant?). Wow, the sense of organization, exclusivity and shared iconography evaporated, after spending time in our little shared living room we're suddenly at the mall!
Well, the mall is kind of cool, there's a lot of resources here, but who are you with? The friends you came with are being diluted by artificially equivalent connections based either on communities long gone (college, high school) or as conceptual objects (Texas Longhorns, New Yorkers, Democrats). Where is the significance of your close friends, those with whom you share a connection that is beyond description? Shouldn't you be seeing more of their cat pictures and less from that quiet girl you barely remember from high school?
Yes, there's Friend's Lists on Facebook, and I make use of them, but that's so analytical, and it is static--you have to update and modify your lists if you want them to reflect your life. That seems like a silly amount of work, and besides, to whom, exactly, am I providing all that information?
This is the kind of thing you think about at the end of your 12th straight day of work, particularly when this one was 12 solid hours.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate - a book review.
Re: Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate - by Brad Warner
I like this guy, we are a lot alike in many ways. He's been practicing longer than I have even though he is four years younger, but our interest in zen more or less coincides. He says repeatedly in the book that he's been sitting for 25 years. If my math is right, that goes back to 1983-ish. I began studying zen in 1981, but I didn't have a regular practice until 2003, so Brad sat for 21 years before I stopped thinking I didn't need to. This means his butt is a lot flatter, and you might not know that one can tell how enlightened someone is by the flatitude of their butts.
He has two other books, which he says aren't as good as this one, so I'm probably not going to read them. I've picked them up repeatedly in bookstores, but I harbor such a cultivated distaste for punk rock that I let that cause me to put them back down and never buy them (Brad is also a punk rock artist). This guy has a life in my head, he has for years, even though I've never met him, and we're still circling each other warily in this little play in my mind, so maybe I will read the other books someday when I lose this need to feel superior to my little mental statue of him.
He comes from a different lineage (Gudo Nishijima Roshi, who received his transmission from Rempo Niwa Roshi), though he is reverent of mine (Suzuki/Katagiri). His teacher sounds pretty cool. When he does talk dharma in the book he makes sense, which distinguishes it from most Zen-y literature. He's not a phony, he clearly has a strong practice, and it comforts me that he knows that he is full of shit a lot of the time.
He uses the term "zen master" self-referentially a little heavily in the book, but it is not incorrect. He has a valid zen license--dharma transmission--and he is not caught by the trappings of his worldly authority, so he probably deserves the title. My little snit is about my own preference that "zen master" is one of those titles like "hacker," i.e., really only something other people should call you. He tempers this by calling out the irony, but it's not clear that he really means that. Oh well, this is all the Brad Warner I create in my mind anyway, so that all says something more about me than him.
He takes us through the death of his mother, family dysfunction, day-job career wheel-spinning, a creeping divorce, sleeping with a student, a very sweet affair with a Japanese woman, and the death of his grandmother--all in 2007. His description of his Japanese fling-object sounded so much like a close friend of mine that I did a mental double-take to assure myself that we weren't referring to the same person. That was weird.
In the last part of the book he reveals that he decided to "be an asshole" before he wrote the book and let all this out, like he was lancing some boil he was hoping would just go away someday because he could no longer stand the pressure. He's not an asshole even when he says he's trying to be one. He's a thoughtful, rigorously self-honest, zen practitioner who is trying to find his way around 21st Century life not unlike the wandering monks of 1000 years ago.
Dogen would have had a blogspot account, I'm sure of it.
So, who should read this book?
Anyone who wants a glimpse into American Zen Practice through the lens of an authentic practitioner, a master, even, who also realizes that you never get anywhere with zen, because there's no where to go. As David Chadwick says, Buddhism is the religion that promises nothing, and delivers.
Also notable is that this is the first book I have read on my iPod Touch, using the Amazon Kindle app, exclusively while sitting (or standing) on the NYC Subway system. Awesomeness. I doubt I will buy a book on paper that I can get this way again. Ironically, the last few pages of the book proudly detail the recycled paper, earth-friendly processes and soy ink used to print it.
Well eff that, I didn't use anything at all to read this book! I paid money and got, well, nothing!
I am such a Bodhisattva.
Linkage
I like this guy, we are a lot alike in many ways. He's been practicing longer than I have even though he is four years younger, but our interest in zen more or less coincides. He says repeatedly in the book that he's been sitting for 25 years. If my math is right, that goes back to 1983-ish. I began studying zen in 1981, but I didn't have a regular practice until 2003, so Brad sat for 21 years before I stopped thinking I didn't need to. This means his butt is a lot flatter, and you might not know that one can tell how enlightened someone is by the flatitude of their butts.
He has two other books, which he says aren't as good as this one, so I'm probably not going to read them. I've picked them up repeatedly in bookstores, but I harbor such a cultivated distaste for punk rock that I let that cause me to put them back down and never buy them (Brad is also a punk rock artist). This guy has a life in my head, he has for years, even though I've never met him, and we're still circling each other warily in this little play in my mind, so maybe I will read the other books someday when I lose this need to feel superior to my little mental statue of him.
He comes from a different lineage (Gudo Nishijima Roshi, who received his transmission from Rempo Niwa Roshi), though he is reverent of mine (Suzuki/Katagiri). His teacher sounds pretty cool. When he does talk dharma in the book he makes sense, which distinguishes it from most Zen-y literature. He's not a phony, he clearly has a strong practice, and it comforts me that he knows that he is full of shit a lot of the time.
He uses the term "zen master" self-referentially a little heavily in the book, but it is not incorrect. He has a valid zen license--dharma transmission--and he is not caught by the trappings of his worldly authority, so he probably deserves the title. My little snit is about my own preference that "zen master" is one of those titles like "hacker," i.e., really only something other people should call you. He tempers this by calling out the irony, but it's not clear that he really means that. Oh well, this is all the Brad Warner I create in my mind anyway, so that all says something more about me than him.
He takes us through the death of his mother, family dysfunction, day-job career wheel-spinning, a creeping divorce, sleeping with a student, a very sweet affair with a Japanese woman, and the death of his grandmother--all in 2007. His description of his Japanese fling-object sounded so much like a close friend of mine that I did a mental double-take to assure myself that we weren't referring to the same person. That was weird.
In the last part of the book he reveals that he decided to "be an asshole" before he wrote the book and let all this out, like he was lancing some boil he was hoping would just go away someday because he could no longer stand the pressure. He's not an asshole even when he says he's trying to be one. He's a thoughtful, rigorously self-honest, zen practitioner who is trying to find his way around 21st Century life not unlike the wandering monks of 1000 years ago.
Dogen would have had a blogspot account, I'm sure of it.
So, who should read this book?
Anyone who wants a glimpse into American Zen Practice through the lens of an authentic practitioner, a master, even, who also realizes that you never get anywhere with zen, because there's no where to go. As David Chadwick says, Buddhism is the religion that promises nothing, and delivers.
Also notable is that this is the first book I have read on my iPod Touch, using the Amazon Kindle app, exclusively while sitting (or standing) on the NYC Subway system. Awesomeness. I doubt I will buy a book on paper that I can get this way again. Ironically, the last few pages of the book proudly detail the recycled paper, earth-friendly processes and soy ink used to print it.
Well eff that, I didn't use anything at all to read this book! I paid money and got, well, nothing!
I am such a Bodhisattva.
Linkage
Saturday, March 7, 2009
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