Sorry, dad, but I had to. I am in competition with my dad for claim to the prestigious title, "miner forty-niner". I think I'm gonna lose. 

My twin sister, emily. She likes to beat people up. 

This is my husband, Patrick. As Erin Lewis might say, he is a "go-to" kind of guy. (Quoting her made me die, by the way.) 

We've got to stop it.

You all know what I'm talking about:




Sitting on my front porch last night, four out of five cars that drove by had the above magnet, or any number of variations on it, affixed to the trunk. Or side. Or driver's door. Or passenger's door. Or more than one, in several places.

The clincher is that, if you are a citizen of the United States, or if you purchase something here and pay sales tax, you are supporting the troops! So, in an unyielding effort to bring common sense back into our country's lexicon, I am going to begin the manufacture of similar magnets that say, simply, "Pay your taxes or we'll be overrun with terrorists the likes of which you can't even imagine". Got to make a big enough magnet though...

By the way, we've been lowered to yellow! That's right kids, feel free to play in Lake Erie!

It's not that I'm against this country, I'm just against the direction we're heading.

Tom Turkey

Ah, old school Radiohead on my speakers today, in my office. Makes me feel like committing a random act of anarchy, or at least taking an extra-long lunch. (I’ve come a long way since Evergreen, babes!) This conformity is only temporary though, I assure you…

Thanksgiving is coming, so is Pat’s dad and Mary, so is a four day weekend. This will be my ninth, or perhaps even tenth vegetarian Thanksgiving. Yesterday at work, Marsha asked Emily if she was a vegetarian as well, or if she’d be eating turkey on Thursday. Emily replied that she’d indeed be eating Turkey, and Marsha gave a little cheer, and said something like, “go girl”! I heard it all from my office. It was funny though, because, I mean, I’ve never really talked to Marsha about going Vegetarian, in fact she’s asked me more about it than I have freely told her. So it’s funny that she’s defensive about being a carnivore. This is how insecurity manifests, though, right? We get fiercely possessive about our ideas and beliefs and lifestyles, and WE DON’T WANNA TALK ABOUT IT! We team up depending on whatever our dominant super-roles are each moment… “Proud American” you know?

Ah, the ego, the ego. How much suffering will it cause us before we realize that pride is NOT a good thing? Thanksgiving is such a selfish holiday, when you think about it. (I’ll stop ranting in just a second…) Columbus was responsible for the death of somewhere between 100-300 million indigenous people on this continent! Yeah! Let’s celebrate his landing and this crazy crazy country with all of its wasted bounty! All right, I’m done now.

On a lighter note, did you see this?

dillards mania!

malls are bad for people and small children 

"kiss the ring"

my cat, who makes us refer to him as, "the godfather" 

second thoughts.

We are changing the world though, we are. Every time one of us meticulously exams our consumption habits, every time we choose grain over meat, every time we buy from scratch not prepackaged, every occasion that we walk instead of driving, we’re making little ripples, sending out little probes of consciousness. This is certainly not a democratic form of resistance because you have to pay to play, but we’re performing disobedience within our means, and I do think it makes a difference. Examine where your dollar goes, learn about how we can be responsible with our privilege, work for change. For better or for worse (or at least until we move to Canada) we are the ones that perpetuate this culture, so let's lead by example, let’s turn our society into one we can respect.

21st century digital girl.

I forgot to order the canned pink salmon and usda egg noodles on Friday. I had planned on ordering both, but somehow it didn’t happen… I think I’m frying my brain capacity here, especially when it’s Friday afternoon, especially when it involves details. Between the stream-of-consciousness I get from my boss, the unending task of thinking up work for the students here, and the minutiae that is client services, I’ve short-circuited my synapses. Must have a break that does not include anything structured, especially not including arguing about what kind of structures will be participated in over the weekend.

blah, blah, blah.

When we were in Ireland we watched some very intermittent Irish television. I stumbled across this weird panel talk show, with about 15 different people making up the panel (seemed excessive at the time). They weren’t talking about incest, or cross-dressing, or being a stripper. None of the standard American stuff, right. They were talking about work, about the non-inspired drudgery that drains the soul and leaves the person flat, and what to do to avoid it. This very gentle looking man, slender and sure of himself, was speaking about how a bad job can kill you; a parasitic metaphor, it will drain you and leave you hollow and it will take all of your energy at the end of the day to just recover. And how radiant the people who are inspired by their work look.

So I thought about dhamma, and about managing a center.

I am really not sure of much, I’ll admit. But I do know that this place I’m at right now, this is not inspired. (Maybe it used to be, but it’s all been drained of its essence now.) I think of Ireland, and I am even more convinced that I’m in the wrong place (not trying to imply that Ireland would be the right place…) Need to find an escape hatch.

Here’s the kicker: I make up the 15% of all the world’s people who make over 9G’s a year. Does that make you cry? Well, if it doesn’t, this will: the bottom 60% live on a dollar or less a day. That makes me feel like erasing all of the above crap that I’ve written.

But I won’t…

one fine day in october (my wedding) 

Someone help us,

we’ve lost our context! We’ve collectively entered into this post-modern quagmire! We live in a world that is defined by our earning potential and our habits of consumption. More than half of us are on anti-depressants, and the other half can’t afford them!

Take the quick road out, and do it now.

For those of you stuck in your minds and prone to criticism and doubt, may I suggest this simple prerequisite, before you take your first course. May we all someday find the noble path, and walk on it with confidence.

november.

rainy, misty day out like washington state today. kind of blue on the speakers, coffee in my bloodstream, that insatiable feeling that everything is right in the world. what a shift in perspective a thought like that requires…

the quest for a life that is somehow moral. what does that mean, what would that look like? first of all, what is morality… a word that has been engaged in a devaluation of meaning for the past 20 centuries. these are ideas that we have about qualities that are inherent in certain circumstances. words like honor, integrity, justice, compassion – aren’t these terms really trying to wrap around the worth of certain actions? wouldn’t a moral life then be a life which has engaged in many of these different actions, a life that has strived to perform these actions over actions which do not encompass some form of morality?

but then, how to choose which morals, how to value one over another. I realize, now, that I am lucky, perhaps luckier than most facing such a crisis, because I have the proverbial North Star, which to me, is dhamma. that one could choose a path that brings with it a set morality, values to develop, a way to navigate out of the maelstrom of non-moral, or shall I say non-conscious life to which we are all overly accustomed, is at least amazing, and at its most grandiose, life-saving.

a thank you to mike for congealing all of the whisps of thought in my brain and leading me along to this conclusion, which is still forming… my practice has gotten so much stronger since the wedding.

killing time

my eyes feel all squished and compressed and my stomach sort of hurts. fifteen minutes then a drive to lorain and a meeting on homelessness and what we can do about it. I am so far from being ready to go to a meeting…

nevertheless. oh my god I had a terrible dream last night. libby and I discovered patrick’s badly beaten body, slumped over lifeless, on a sectional, bloody face, hysteric, hysteric. because his eyes looked so real, he really looked dead. I remember shaking him, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him, crying, terrified, someone had beaten the life out of him and he was gone, but I was still there, looking for him, not fully able to understand…

then a painful readjustment back into the early morning and my warm bed. patrick asleep next to me, breathing, warm, safe. I snuggled close and rested my hand on his back, the fear of it all still gripping me. sankhara. the death sankhara. this is the second time for such an horrific dream (and after such a volatile sit).

the clincher is that, in my dream, mike is who killed him. explain that, someone.

ah, time for my meeting…

the dishrag pipes up!

the prospect of moving onward to the north! aurora borealis is calling my name and this time I’m gonna listen… meanwhile I’ve got this intermittent stabbing pain in my left should blade. must’ve shanked someone there in a past life. so much sankhara!

to all the people in the dead sea: if you have not already, go out and find a copy of alasdair macintyre’s book, after virtue. my god is it a revelation. it’s like a quenching glass of water on a scorching day. emotivism? rejected. existentialist vacillation? denied. moral debate? exposed and thrown out. seriously, this is the best book that I have read in a long, long time. this guy’s prose is sharp like a razor. it’s mind-blowing; he can take the abstractness and subjectivity of a philosophical dialogue, boil it down to its essence, and show you, through several examples, where it’s flawed. he is a philosopher king; a god among fools. and I’m not even through the book yet.

it’s raining outside, cold, dark already (it’s 4:15pm), dreary, ugly. perfect day to go for a run after I leave this little office. there has been a spike in the number of people coming in looking for food since 11/2/04. coincidence? who knows, really. people are truly in a bad way. woman in here this afternoon, a grandmother. she can’t fill her husband’s heart medication (she came in because he’s still out working), the mortgage payment is late, her son moved back in, they don’t have food, she just found out that her daughter has throat cancer, so she might inherit three more grandkids. she starts crying, is embarrassed, is frustrated and mad. not at me though, I’m the one who listens. this office is the place where people can come and leave some of their worry, fear, shame, anger, rage, rage, dehumanization. not so many places as this anymore.

deep breath in, out. you know so very little, you know nothing, really. makin’ it up as you go along, adapting, changing, movin’ on, movin’ on. this is the way it has always been.

suspend disbelief for a minute.

a brand new conspiracy theory to entertain my people. this is what occurred to me this afternoon: what if the government has set up this whole “40+ hour work week” thing to keep our minds dull. to make sure that when we get home all we can do is cook dinner, clean the house, manage the mundane details of life, and go to bed. that we would be so fatigued from our variously demanding work days that we would have no time left to foster critical thinking. to mull over ancient philosophical dialogues. to be critical of foreign policy and domestic interventions, to engage our creativity, to perhaps – a beautiful thought—reinvent the way that we live, to think of a system that would benefit all, including this planet we find ourselves upon. to restructure government, rethink how we consume, decipher the reasons for our current hollow lifestyle and seek answers from those who have, over time, foisted it upon us.

in short, what if we are the worker ant, oblivious to the fact that we are no longer receiving our proper remuneration from the hive queen.

one way of thinking about the mind would be to compare it to soil that is farmed. we are constantly, all day at our computers or desks or phones or copy machines, taking, pulling, interpolating, extracting the content of our mind’s surface area. which key to push, which paper to shuffle, which client to help, whom to phone next. same thought patterns, over and over, the neuro-pathways become worn we never factor the time in for the necessary crop rotation, so our soil gets depleted. we grow old and the only mental stimulation that we are capable of consists of a sunday paper and its crossword puzzle section. we are capable of so much more than that!

they don't want to be removed from power. they are so scared of being stripped of their titles, their money, their luncheons.

they got their thumbs on our necks keeping our noses pressed to the grindstone. ammunition stocked and inventoried, lest we become restless, disenfranchised. there are no speakers left, no movements, no struggles, not in this country. we’ve lost our perspective. we’re all too busy spending our paychecks at walmart, feeding our family with products made by the same company that makes our cigarettes.

this is turning into an entirely different rant.

damn you, rockefeller

my brain feels remotely like a pile of sludge. for the past five minutes I have been staring at a blank template for a letter that I need to write. I’ve inserted the greeting and the closing and the date. that’s all I’ve got so far. overdrawn at the memory bank.

the days are slipping away like yesterday’s oatmeal, one is hard to distinguish from the other and I find myself well on my way through a new one when I come to realize that the previous one is finished. this is no way to act…

pat’s statement of yesterday hit me like a lightning bolt: I feel like I’m biding my time, waiting for something, except in fact there’s nothing to be waiting for.

so much challenge involved with making a quick decision to move on, to move out, to move forward. I had this strong feeling last night, which lasted for a few minutes, to drop everything and move to the Northwest Vipassana Center. hopefully they would still need managers. right natural environment, right social environment, a house, progress, change…

what is this robber-baron instinct? how can it persist so unrelentingly? what is wrong with just staying, being settled, comfortable, saving money for a certain future plan… what is wrong, what is right?

the weighing of morals is a trap that one will never escape… I suppose, if I were to answer all of this honestly, I would decide that staying, going, living somewhere in between, each choice has its merit, each is an equally valid option. the decisive factor is up to me; which direction do you want your life to move? if I want to commit myself to dhamma, then the answer is obvious. if I want to work towards a secure future for pat and myself, the answer chooses itself. the problem is that I haven’t a clue what (in total) I want. I am doing well here, this is maybe the best job that I have ever had. I mean, I directly help people in need. what could be better? ah, but why do I still feel hollow, still feel like this is not the right path…

(the trick is that I know the answers, I am just not ready to admit them to myself. in the coming months there will be much dialogue, much conversation.)

lead by example

all of my clothing recently shrunk in the wash. either that or I’m gaining weight by leaps and bounds. I can’t make my mind up as to which one it is. I don’t feel any different, so, I’m blaming the washing machine. I mean, we did buy it from a crazy lady and it does sometimes rip our clothes up.

well, anyway, my household is starting its diet this weekend. the idea of the diet began after watching the documentary, supersize me. now, to clarify, my household is not one which consumes fast food, and, generally speaking, the three of us are much more informed about nutrition than your average american. (two of us are vegetarian and all of us have a deep, abiding appreciation for leafy green vegetables.) so, the diet is more of an act of civil disobedience than a means to lose weight (although, we did kind of gorge at the wedding). the rules are fairly simple and straightforward: no going out to eat, the most processed food we can eat is tofu (i.e., no food can be more processed than by two steps), no meat (obviously), and it’s supposed to last for a month. I’ll post how it goes…

this whole election thing has really wacked me out. inside my guts I feel this violent apathy which, at first glance, seems contradictory but the sensation of it permeates my entire being. perhaps the apathy is for the future; I don’t care about what happens because it’s all going to be bad, the violence is in an effort to leave my mark on the present. “children of the future, I had no hand in creating this vacuum of a world that we’ve left you!” seeing that in print makes me realize that throwing in the towel at this point would be just as criminal as any maneuverings that bush or dick might employ over the next few years.

to the american people, to the world community, I have one thing to say: THIS WILL NOT STAND.

meet me at the presidential inauguration this winter, and we’ll stand together and let them hear our dissent, disapproval and disenfranchisement. let’s hold a vote of no confidence in the republican party’s capacity to foster democracy. let’s not let the world think that all of us approve of HIM and his CRONIES.

what will the bunker look like?

the conspiracy theorist inside of me is going ape-shit. why would john kerry concede so immediately and with such passivity? isn’t john edwards a trial lawyer? I was expecting an epic battle between good and evil… and what I got was a milk-toast concession speech, which left all of us liberals stunned and disenfranchised. where is dennis kucinich when you need him? who will fight for the underdog now?

but, I suppose, when I think about it rationally, there aren’t a lot of missing facts that would make a conspiracy likely. or even remotely possible. (I hesitate to say this, but) george w bush won the popular vote. the american people rallied to the polls and chose dubya. in some states, overwhelmingly. a little part of me has died – a part that so closely resembled hope.

this is the thing: the voters didn’t like john kerry because he was, as the media described him, too aloof. because he wasn’t “chummy” enough. middle America couldn’t envision themselves swilling beer with kerry, he didn’t seem like the kind of guy that you could joke around with, I mean, he’s probably never even eaten at a Friday’s, and so they decided that he didn’t stand for what they believe in. (perhaps this analogy assumes too much, but it remains.) in the sixties he stood up for peace in southeast asia; a clear indication that he is a commie infidel and doesn’t believe in good Christian values. he is well-spoken, intelligent, and forms opinions based on facts, and logic, and all of these things were clear indications of his inability to lead the populous.

we are crying, in every state, some of us feel shattered.

so now, we have an America who, in the next four years, will look very much like a house of mirrors; mcdonald’s, applebee’s, walmart, the home depot, dave and buster’s, regal cinemas, target, taco bell, famous footwear, mcdonald’s, applebee’s – a loop that never ends, it just keeps repeating, repeating. we will destroy the national wildlife and and watershed refuges, the park systems will shrivel, and we will desecrate the wildlife preserve in Alaska by drilling a hole straight through, and sucking out what little oil has coalesced underneath the glaciers and forests.

women have genuine reason to worry. the brazilification of our class system also seems to be polarizing gender roles, specifically the perceived maleness of the american man (thank you, dubya, for your swagger and flight suits). perhaps we (women) will be put out of work, birth control will become illegal, and our forced natural state will be something like a barefoot and pregnant existence, making sure dinner is piping hot when our breadwinners come home. these days it is cool for guys to be fat, sloppy looking, rude and just plain old-fashioned macho. it’s also cool for “girls” to be razor-thin, have skin that glows, long flaccid hair and very little clothing.

what the fuck is wrong with us?

I am really worried, and it’s manifesting in this hyper-cynicism and disgust. right now, ‘merica is absolutely not where I want my passport to be from.

frizzled.

solidarity in the strangest of places. goddamn what a mess, what a muck of it. if I were a man I would say that I feel emasculated. when she said it, to me, my brain split into two distinct poles; one red-hot mad and foaming at the mouth, the other observing the chain of reaction (the pine needles filling my head, which changed into immense eye pressure, which morphed into heat and throat clenching, which slowly transitioned into a headache). one small aspect of a miniscule transition in the midst of this massive tide of change which is, and will always be, my life.

I am a spoilt fucking brat.

deep breath in
deep breath out

Danielle, I was so incredibly wrong, and I take your respect for me and I give it back to you. I have this wellspring of anger lodged deep inside of me, I went spelunking, thinking it would be fun, and here I am, just discovered the surface of things and got no idea what to do now. I want to rage, I want to break things, I want to rail against the world that shit isn’t fair, but that part of me which remains observing, is all the time laughing at me. laughing in the way that a grandfather would laugh, in a way which just makes the anger more intense because the ego feels bastardized. because sometimes I lose perspective and forget the wisdom that a laugh can contain.

deep breath in

head is tight like a vice, shoulders ache with tension, lips are dry, face is oily, I would like to go home and take a bath. there is no why, anne, only how, sometimes when. the path is dangerous in parts, you can trip, you can step on glass, it can be dark and difficult to see. increasingly I’ll try to bring along my flashlight, a pair of sturdy boots, some fucking optimism for once (which can be really hard to teach yourself), maybe even I’ll manage some faith.

got to get out of my head.

please oh please

i will dance naked in the rain
if john kerry wins.

holla if ya hear me…

people around the world are watching us with nervous anticipation, especially ohio, dubbed the new florida. how could it come to this? how could a nation so devoid of critical thinking ability be able to choose (well, not really choose…) the most influential person (well, man) of these seven continents?! i am so scared that we are going to let the world down tomorrow… public policy ruled by religious fervor, humanitarian campaigns that resemble the dark ages, lies, misinformation, bigotry.

it all comes down to this.

call me crazy. what if we had a system where the president and vice president were elected independently of each other; a built-in check-and-balance. what if every single political contribution could not be greater than ten dollars. what if the european union grew stronger than the good ole u-s-of-a and was able to keep our hedonistic military might in check. what if americans were rewarded (via tax-cuts perhaps?) for being healthy, for driving environmentally responsible vehicles (or for not driving!), for having a relatively small ecological footprint, for investing in small american companies, for voting in every election. what if americans wanted to do such things simply because they were the right thing to do!

sometimes i feel exceedingly simple-minded. like my foreign (and domestic) policy ideals spring forth from the mindset of someone who is eight and who loves unicorns. but, having said that, i still hope that america doesn’t let me down tomorrow.

otherwise i’m packing my bags and the little kitty too and moving to scandanavia. they’re clean like cats there.