The kittens from last spring have appeared on television! You can see them here. The orange and calico indoor kittens who are playing with a laser toy are the ones we fostered, and the black and white ones playing with a yellow feather were also filmed in our living room. The shots are cut so short it's hard to get a good look at them, but yay kittens! I wonder how they are doing.
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(3)
02:41:14 PM,
Friday 1 October 2010
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Just got an iTunes receipt for an outrageous sum for something I'd never heard of. I clicked on the link to "Report a Problem" and, you guessed it, it was a phishing attack. I have not been taken in by one of those in years. Possibly ever. My virus software got a workout. I hope nothing got through. So, if you get an outrageous iTunes receipt, you have been warned.
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(1)
10:57:13 AM,
Friday 1 October 2010
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I was reading a book by Pema Chodron the other day and among the generally sensible advice about meditation and compassion she mentions something that made me go whoa, wait a second, what? She's going on about how our negative energies can be considered like hungry ghosts hanging around us, and mentions that monks would often make a cake for them. Meditating about your personal demons is one thing. Making them a cake is another. Sometimes when reading modern Buddhists it is possible to forget that Buddhism is a foreign religion with lots of strange traditions that don't fall directly out of the teachings of the Buddha (just as many Christian rituals don't fall out of the teachings of the Bible). Anyway, I looked up the cakes, which are called torma and are very pretty, and somehow googling around I stumbled upon this absolutely bizarre debate. There's this book The Shadow of the Dalai Lama which claims:
Once the gods had accepted the sacrifice they stood at the ritual master's disposal. The four-armed protective deity, Mahakala, was considered a particularly active assistant when it came to the destruction of enemies. In national matters his bloodthirsty emanation, the six-handed Kschetrapala, was called upon. The magician in charge wrote the war god's mantra on a piece of paper in gold ink or blood from the blade of a sword together with the wishes he hoped to have granted, and began the invocation.Now there's some serious WTF right there. Tibetan Buddhists used human body parts in rituals? As recently as the 1940's? I first found this book page on one of those conspiracy sites that like to make articles look vaguely childish by printing them in large colored fonts, and the authors of this book (who are bitter ex-Tibetan-Buddhists) seem to think that a problem with Tibetan Buddhist shamanism is that it might work, so if you're like me you'll take it with a few heaping spoonfuls of salt. Still, interesting. Is there anything to this? I couldn't find anything conclusive. Claims and counter claims, with the Chinese as the excuse for the existence of the rumor. It occurred to me that if it were true, it would amount to human sacrifice, so I looked it up on wikipedia, and indeed, there is a section on Tibet that repeats the claim, with a flag for possible inaccuracies (of course).Towards the end of the forties the Gelugpa lamas sent Kschetrapala into battle against the Chinese. He was cast into a roughly three-yard high sacrificial cake (or torma). This was then set alight outside Lhasa, and whilst the priests lowered their victory banner the demon freed himself and flew in the direction of the threatened border with his army. A real battle of the spirits took place here, as a "nine-headed Chinese demon", who was assumed to have assisted the Communists in all matters concerning Tibet, appeared on the battlefield. Both spirit princes (the Tibetan and the Chinese) have been mortal enemies for centuries. Obviously the nine-headed emerged from this final battle of the demons as the victor.
The Chinese claim that 21 individuals were killed in this enemy ritual so that their organs could be used to construct the huge torma. Relatives of the victims are supposed to have testified to this (Grunfeld, 1996, p. 29).Now, one could with good reason doubt the Chinese accusations because of the political situation between the "Middle Kingdom" and the "Roof of the World", but not because they contradict the logic of Tibetan rites of war : these have been recorded in numerous tantric texts.
It's hard to know what to think, to even know what is likely, or to know where to go to settle it. Human sacrifice is something that has happened in almost every culture, as the wikipedia article's extensive entry amply documents. And as far as I understand it, Tibet was isolated, and the lamas had excessive power. At the same time, it's exactly the sort of baseless but horrifying accusation that gets used as propaganda. If it's true, I don't think I can help changing how I look at the Tibetan Buddhism and the Free Tibet movement. But somehow I feel like if it were true it should be common knowledge, but then I think, why should there be common knowledge here about Tibet 70 years ago?
Next time I'll blog about kittens or something, I promise.
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11:03:47 PM,
Tuesday 28 September 2010
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Dream: My cat knows how to play Go. I am explaining to someone "no, it is not a trick, and it's not magic, he just knows how to play. He looks where he wants to play and I place the stone for him. He only plays 9x9, but he wins sometimes."
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10:46:00 AM,
Friday 24 September 2010
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We are temporarily kitten-free. Possibly very temporarily, more little ones could be arriving in a few minutes. I keep thinking I should go sit with the kittens or do kitten-related chores.
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(2)
08:58:19 PM,
Thursday 23 September 2010
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Huge new development planned for South Boston, near the ICA. I go there infrequently, but those parking lots are pretty sad and it would be nice to see it developed. Oddly central-planning-ish to lay out a whole neighborhood and have it done by one developer. I hope it goes well.
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04:04:53 PM,
Thursday 23 September 2010
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I was at my computer for about five minutes before I noticed a pair of ears behind the screen. My cat was lurking very quietly back there. It made me jump. He's been very quiet lately, especially upstairs, since we've had the kittens. He can't be convinced that they don't come with a raging monster mother cat that might attack him at any moment, which is sensible enough, given his previous experience with kittens.
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09:06:10 PM,
Thursday 16 September 2010
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Went for an MRI today. I had no idea that they made noises. It sounded like very free form industrial noise music. Sometimes cool, sometimes annoying. Someone has indeed made music out of these noises (via this more extensive description of the sounds.) The MRI is to see if they can figure out why I occasionally fall into a stupor suddenly for no apparent reason.
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(4)
02:01:23 PM,
Tuesday 14 September 2010
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I haven't had an exam nightmare in recent memory, but I do get going back to school dreams. Last night I was back on the Santa Fe campus of St. John's, happy that I would be able to finally finish my degree. As I was talking to the librarian (who was explaining the policy of getting the police involved if a book was lost) and worrying about whether I would fit in among much younger students, I realized that I had finished my degree, many years ago in fact. But then what was I doing in Santa Fe? The librarian said that it was ok, I could still check out books, and pointed out a large colorful atlas that I might like.
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11:57:17 AM,
Sunday 12 September 2010
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Via Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: The Story of Marjoe, a child Pentecostal preacher who became a hippie, returned to preaching, then made a documentary about the dishonesty of his preaching. Totally fascinating peek into tent revival culture and one man's strange journey.
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08:22:28 PM,
Saturday 11 September 2010
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Animal adoption oddities (warning, cuteness toxicity risk): A squirrel that thinks it's a kitten. A porcupine that thinks it's a puppy. An elephant and dog that are best friends.
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(1)
08:51:24 PM,
Friday 10 September 2010
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Kittens need educating. Toes are not toys. Also, this batch has trouble mewing, though I can't help them so much with that. Two of them tend to open their mouths and make no noise at all, while the other two sound like birds. It's "mew", not "chirp", little kitties.
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(2)
10:17:46 PM,
Wednesday 8 September 2010
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Thought process: There's a fire truck outside our neighbor's house! Is everything ok? Look, there's a fireman attending to something on the ground. Is someone hurt? Oh, it's my neighbor's dog. A fireman is playing with the neighbor's dog? Oh yeah, the neighbor's son is a fireman.
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(4)
09:36:03 AM,
Sunday 5 September 2010
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Sometimes when I don't want to do stuff, I say to myself, what's the point in doing stuff? I have never gotten over this by finding the point. I just start wanting to do stuff again.
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09:39:43 PM,
Monday 30 August 2010
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"70-80% of petulance belongs to cats."
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05:07:56 PM,
Sunday 29 August 2010
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There are tiny peppers on the pepper plant in the backyard. It's like magic.
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(2)
08:57:13 AM,
Friday 27 August 2010
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Battle hamsters are on sale at CVS, or so I hear. Sometimes the invisible hand gets something right.
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06:26:07 PM,
Friday 20 August 2010
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"Your mind is like the ocean: troubled, deep and full of seals."
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05:54:07 PM,
Friday 20 August 2010
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04:36:04 PM, Thursday 12 August 2010
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Enrolled in a basic drawing class today. Starts next week. Yay!
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(3)
05:44:39 PM,
Friday 6 August 2010
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Hina dolls: like a creche except for the Japanese Imperial court. This message brought to you courtesy of Erika playing Japanese puzzle games.
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07:30:42 PM,
Thursday 5 August 2010
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In other news, Tim and I have invented a new game at our local basketball court. It is called pathetic-ball. The target audience is people who are so bad at basketball that even Horse is too elaborate. How to play: take turns trying to make a basket from anywhere on the court, with no interference. 1 point per basket. Ping-pong scoring rules: game is to 20, winner has to win by 2.
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(3)
08:04:04 PM,
Tuesday 3 August 2010
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Seriously, I don't know what to do with mania.
Mania is a real altered state of perception. No question about that. I put on sweaters when it was hot out. I could see things in slow motion, for instance watching dragonflies, I could see their paths and intricate dance, when normally they would just be buzzing this way and that.
My culture gives a variety of explanations for altered states and methods of dealing with them. The current accepted priesthood of the altered state is psychiatry, with its mantra, "it's all in your head". That's a quite helpful explanation, much of the time. And it means that one doesn't need to look for an explanation, which is also good. However, when it is actually happening, that dry bone doesn't cut it. The mind wants a meatier explanation, and it will prepare one, or a dozen. One can think, at the beginning of an episode, "ok, just an altered state, it's just me that's having problems", but that just isn't going to last. Sure, if I could have my rational mind on task I might be able to manage it, but the everyday mind quickly gives way to pure dream-logic.
It's very much like I'm dreaming while I'm awake, in fact I had the only-partly-wrong delusion that I was dreaming for part of this episode. Just about anything that covers "something seriously out of the ordinary is happening here" can come up as a delusion. Time travel, spiritual awakening, alternate worlds, death, etc.
I spend all this time reading about philosophy and spirituality thinking that maybe these people will be able to help me. They know something about reality, right? They know something about how to tell the difference between what's true and what's not, right? But realistically, I know that philosophers are like my seminar-mates: they can yammer on for hours about the being or not-being of the table right in front of them, but when it comes down to it, they can go home and tables are just tables. Philosophy is not some mental kung-fu that lets you keep a grip on reality.
The spiritual leaders, sometimes it seems like they could help. Surely, after all, this is their domain of expertise. After all, they are often seeking out experiences that are just as wild (if in some subtle way non-insane), and finding knowledge and solace in them. But they disappoint as well. Spiritual experience is huffily distinguished from mere madness (or, worse, madness is ascribed to demons or bad karma), but then spiritual leaders often act mad (at a Buddhist group I attended they spoke of an enlightened one who was homeless and walked the streets, they were very excited about him). I end up thinking that probably a lot of what goes for spiritual experience is the same thing as madness, in some milder or more socially acceptable form. I would really like help figuring out the spiritual content of my madness, but as Tim tells me, I'd have to walk in the prophet door, and religions don't actually want prophets. They don't want the Holy Spirit buzzing around making trouble, they don't want to stamp quasi-spiritual madness trips as divine, and you can see why. I don't have any interest in being a prophet, either, but I've been wild places that made religion make more sense to me, and that's a large part of my interest in religion. I would really like for someone else to understand all this and explain it to me. This seems less and less likely. I start to think that a Zen master or monk confronted with what I am confronted with would do just as badly.
There are all these theories that the mind is a special domain where we have total control, or could have control if we only had the discipline. I'd like to believe that. But you know maybe it's just bullshit. I don't know, I'm not all that disciplined, but from recent experience it's pretty clear that my mind is part of forces that are utterly beyond my control. "It's all in your head" is not the slightest bit comforting. My "head" is something that can swallow me up in a terror-world and spit me out at its leisure. Just because something is defined externally as "me" or "my brain" does not mean that I have any control over it whatsoever. I was doing my honest best to see what was happening as illusion and delusion, but damn, that did not get me very far. All it seems to have done is erode further my assurance and security about the world in general. I wonder about that sometimes, how much that typical living-on-an-edge-off-a-cliff sense of things changes my views in general. I tend to have an unreasonable demand that others just accept that the world is like that.
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05:59:20 PM,
Tuesday 3 August 2010
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Mania: like a bad fantasy series where every book ends "and she woke up in a mental hospital."
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04:55:46 PM,
Tuesday 3 August 2010
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Nothing like experimental ice cream, videogames and friends to make one feel human.
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08:23:43 PM,
Saturday 31 July 2010
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A few days ago when logging into twitter I saw one of their "top tweets" which was something like "After seeing [whatever movie] I don't know whether I'm awake or dreaming!". And I thought, yes, yes you do, actually. If you didn't, you'd have had a last few weeks like mine and then you wouldn't be tweeting breathlessly about it.
This time around mania beat me. Hands down. Fair and square. My defenses were up, it blew them away like a straw house. I don't even know what hit me, anymore. I used to think I understood, at least partly, what was going on in mania and depression. Now I just don't. I used to find it annoying that doctors nattered on about it without seeming to actually understand. Now I find it scary. Because it's this big thing that can knock me over any time, and I'd really like for someone else to be an expert on it.
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02:02:38 PM,
Saturday 31 July 2010
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I had a period of being super-organized externally to make up for my lack of internal organization. That phase seems to have passed, for better or for worse.
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01:52:26 PM,
Saturday 31 July 2010
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Turns out I had blackouts, this time around. Whole conversations I didn't remember. So if I don't remember something I said to you from a week to a few weeks ago, it's 'cause I don't remember much, even when I was seemingly coherent.
Glad to be back in order, but tired. Been lying on the couch listening to new music downloaded from the Free Music Archive, including a cello concert I actually went to a couple of years ago, with a cool breeze coming in the window, room a little cavelike cause the blinds are down, but trees and sky still visible through the slats. I don't know where I've been but sometimes for a few minutes things are ok.
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01:49:23 PM,
Saturday 31 July 2010
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The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity, as often happens in the case of the old-time discipline. And all this because our aim is to discipline for activity, for work, for good; not for immobility not for passivity, not for obedience. (pg. 93)The Montessori Method, Maria Montessori (1909) _
True rest for muscles, intended by nature for action, is in orderly action; just as true rest for the lungs is the normal rhythm of respiration in pure air. To take action away from the muscles is to force them away from their natural motor impulse, and hence, besides tiring them, means forcing them into a state of degeneration; just as the lungs force into immobility would die instantly and the whole organism with them. (pg. 354)
We often hear it said that a child's will should be 'broken', that the best education for the will of the child is to learn to give it up to the will of adults. Leaving out the question of injustice which is at the root of every tyranny, this idea is irrational because the child cannot give up what he does not possess. We prevent him in this way from forming his own will-power, and we commit the greatest and most blameworthy mistake. (pg. 366)
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03:12:39 PM, Saturday 24 July 2010
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12:51:50 PM, Thursday 22 July 2010
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12:50:18 PM, Thursday 22 July 2010
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12:49:54 PM, Thursday 22 July 2010
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Growly thunder.
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09:23:27 PM,
Monday 19 July 2010
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Scared, even though I'm back, even though I can interact with reality again. This time this thing grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and shook me absolutely to my foundations.
Her world collapsed early Sunday morning. She got up from the kitchen table, folded the newspaper, and silenced the radio. (R.E.M.)
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09:27:27 PM,
Saturday 17 July 2010
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Somewhere around the blogmass recently there was talk of some sort of planning/goals group somewhere. What was that? I need help with goals tracking right now. Let me know if you have any recommendations for software etc.
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(2)
12:26:30 PM,
Saturday 17 July 2010
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...
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09:29:50 AM,
Saturday 17 July 2010
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