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Snap Out of It
I think I’ll be better off once I’m back at work on Monday. I’ve been off since the day before Christmas, as we’ve been on an extended holiday, and I don’t do well with long periods of free, unstructured time. I become obsessed with small matters and fall prey to my imagination. After several days… — read more
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Getting Past the First Noble Truth
As I mentioned, I’ve been reading the Bodhicharyavatara and various commentaries on it for the last few weeks. Though the root text, in verse, is quite pithy and aphoristic (and deceptively ironic–I wish I could read Sanskrit or Tibetan so I could appreciate it more fully as a poem), in conjunction with the commentaries, it… — read more
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Follow the Bouncing Mind
I first heard of Maxwell’s Demon in Thomas Pynchon‘s The Crying of Lot 49. In the novel, a character builds a box that seeks to exploit the apparent intersection of the fields of thermodynamics and information theory, implied by their similar use of the idea of entropy, to create a perpetual motion apparatus. His device,… — read more
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Serenity Now
Last night, the night of the winter solstice, I flipped open my copy of John Ashbery‘s Notes from the Air, pretty much at random, to “And the Stars Were Shining,” which begins thus: It was the solstice, and it was jumping on you like a friendly dog. The stars were still out in the field,… — read more
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Absurdist Aspirations
I’ve been reading Shantideva‘s Bodhicharyavatara, and various commentaries on it. I even made it through part of a weekend program on it. I came across this little fable in Kunzang Pelden’s commentary on it, called The Nectar of Manjushri’s Speech: Once upon a time, when the son of Vallabha… was setting off on a sea… — read more
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What’s an Asymptote?
I don’t what was going on in my left ear between October 1st and October 22nd, but whatever it was, it doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. In that three week stretch, the skin graft that had been put there back in May went from three-quarters healed to ninety percent healed. In the six weeks… — read more
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The Power of the Powder
Do not doubt the power of Crazy Sam’s Good Time Magic Powder® (though there may be reason to doubt Sam’s messianic tendencies–more on that below). After using the powder every day for a little over a week, and despite a catastrophic breaching on Monday morning of the cotton and petroleum jelly levee I use to… — read more
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So That Just Happened
I’m exhausted, and I’m still in shock. Last night was like most of the cities in the country winning the World Series at the same time, and New York was no exception–horns and yelling up and down Broadway until at least 2:30 this morning. And watching the reactions from around the country–black college students collapsing… — read more
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Can You Stand It…
…because I don’t know if I can. And I’m not even talking about tomorrow’s election, though I’m not sure I can stand that either. Whatever the outcome, the world will be significantly different on Wednesday than it is today, and I’m not especially upbeat about any of the possible shapes it could take. I don’t… — read more
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Halfway Home
This evening, after a three week wait that became less and less excruciating as I noticed my ear and jaw less and less, I saw my ear doctor. His hip is healing, but he’s frustrated with how long it’s taking. He’s pretty active, and he’s going crazy not being able to walk yet. But he… — read more
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