mushinnoshin

I add, “I think I threw my knee out playing piano”.

I guess my little holiday bender is officially over now. Well it was fun while it lasted.

Lest you think otherwise, there actually was a greater purpose. 2007 turned out to be a mildly shitty year for me. Mildly in that nothing much happened, the problem was just that, well, nothing much happened.

I spent most of 2005 and 2006 working very hard on my self improvement trip, standing on a tripod of karate, yoga, and meditation. By 2007 I was becoming tired and frustrated, feeling like I’m doing all this work and getting nowhere.

But I *had* been making progress, on many fronts. It’s just the sort of gradual process that’s hard to appreciate one day to the next, especially when the ultimate goal still seems so far away. Hell, understanding exactly what the goal is still seems far away.

Anyway as the year waned on I found myself slipping more and more. Skipping meditation with the Tibetans. Wanting to skip karate & yoga classes — and watching the clock even when I made it to class. Skipping or half-assing my morning practices, and going to bed later so as to wake later so as to have an excuse. Backslid on my ongoing attempts to reduce & eventually give up meat consumption. I only read one book the whole year, and that’s only because I read most of it on the plane to and from California — and I still owe Lesley a book report :)

So by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, and with the added incentive of struggling with a knee injury, I figured maybe the best way to keep from going over a cliff was to take the car into a ditch. No karate, no yoga, no meditation — no concerns, no limits, no discipline. Sensei often tells us, as a metaphor to illustrate that we can only make progress in small steps, that we have to “fill the cup, empty the cup, fill the cup, empty the cup” … my thinking is that sometimes you even have to wash the cup, dry it, apply a new coat of silicone sealant, and let it cure for a few weeks. Or maybe even just smash it and buy a new one.

So now I feel like hell and look like hell and I’ve got a couple of pounds holiday beer cheer to work off, but at least I can again appreciate *not* feeling like this.

And I woke up bright and early, and did my full morning practice.

Well I was totally prepared to wake up yesterday with a raging hangover. I wasn’t prepared for it to be completely eclipsed by a brutal and relentless head cold. Well at least it gives me an excuse to take Nyquil :)

Gah. So yeah I spent most of yesterday wrapped up in a blanket, drinking tea, blowing my nose, and catching up on Netflix. I saw Raging Bull plus the last disc of Curb Your Enthusiasm season two. I wasn’t wowed by the movie — De Niro and Scorsese did a masterful job, but it wasn’t a subject that compelled me. My short summary: jocks can be assholes. Yeah, we knew that already. Larry David made me much happier. I actually wasn’t all that crazy about the show after watching season one, but I liked it enough that I figured I’d give it another shot, and I think he seems to have really found his groove in season two.

Meanwhile today the cold is still with me, but I’m feeling better than I did. Sadly there was no way I could make yoga though. Which makes three weeks in a row that I’ve skipped, and I feel pretty shitty about that. Oh well, next week…

Well anyway Thanksgiving was excellent. My goal had been to have the parlor / living room project that I’d been working on done in time for the holiday, and I basically made it. I ran out of time and budget to finish up a few details — I need a corner bookcase / library thing to replace this stack of milk crates & plastic drawers over here to my left while finally bringing my books out of storage, and then once I get that and see how it looks I’ll know how to decorate the rest of that wall. I also probably need to replace the old mini-blinds at some point. And that bookcase may turn into a project by itself — it’s sort of a weird cramped corner that I need to maximize, and I haven’t found anything even close to what I picture, so I may have to try my hand at building something myself. But I don’t know, that might be biting off more than I can chew. We’ll see I suppose.

But anyway most of the pieces were in place — the painting is done, curtains are hung, the piano has a fresh coat of shine & varnish, the CD collection has a new home in a beautiful hanging wall unit, and most importantly the computer is set up at the new desk, at which I’m typing as we speak, as Dark Side of the Moon drifts in from the good speakers in the living room, which I can now hear as I work. Which is all to say I’ve finally moved into the front half of my house :)

And it looks pretty damn good if I do say so myself. I would post pictures, but I’m trying to entice you to visit, damnit! And speaking of visitors, there were of course the Thanksgiving festivities themselves. This makes the second year since my sister and I have taken co-ownership of the family ritual — I provide the house, the booze, and the bread, and she brings the rest of the feast. Of course we don’t have a whole lot of immediate family around any more, so it’s usually just the two of us plus my dad & grandmother. But we had an awesome addition this year, as the ever-fabulous Kate O’ and Karsten joined us for drinks and desert. Good times.

Pro:

1. It would be good for me
2. Having been very busy and having kept late nights, I overslept every day this week and only did about half of my usual daily practice
3. I skipped last week due to the Buddhist festival
4. I will feel justified to reward myself with my usual post-yoga Chinese takeout for lunch

Con:

1. Yesterday’s Peace Walk left me with a mild sunburn on my head, which won’t do well for headstands
2. I did already get in a third night of exercise for the week with a karate Fight Night last night
3. I’m still in mourning that my amazing and beautiful teacher is out for a few weeks getting married, to someone who, sadly, isn’t me (I kid! I kid! … well, mostly ; )
4. Too much coffee this morning has my stomach a bit queasy
5. I think spending the next few hours sitting on my ass, perhaps catching up on my Netflix, will be more likely to put me in a place to get some more painting done this afternoon
6. In the time it took me to write out this post, I missed the window to get there on time, and class is actually starting at this very moment.

I think that last one’s the winner.

Let us briefly interrupt the California recaps to write up the weekend –

• Thursday — 3rd meeting in the South Nashville Planning process. Pretty uneventful. They showed us maps marking out their proposed changes to the land use policies (not zoning, but the guidelines that encourage zonings) and basically just made sure we were cool with it all. It does look like they want to take more design issues into consideration along Nolensville Pk, and move more of the Nolensville/Thompson intersection & Armory/Sidco areas from industrial use to public commercial. All Very Good Things. They also gave us a handout which I suppose we’re going to discuss at the next meeting which indicates some proposed roadway changes — notably including one that I’ve been begging for, connecting Armory to McCall/Antioch Pk, giving us another route across the railroad and making it easier to get to 100 Oaks & I-65. Woo-hoo! Too bad they can’t make all the connections I’d like to see, but this is the big one.
• Friday — The Constant Wife presented by ACT1 at the Darkhorse. Another comedy of manners — very touching & verry funny. Kay Ayers-Sowell as Constance and Martha Manning as her mother were particularly engaging.
• Saturday afternoon I decided to try a produce run at the K&S World Market. Most of the produce seemed very good, though maybe not up there with Plumgood — but it’s priced accordingly. Two bags of veggies & a package of tofu for $13? Nice. The real trick of course will be learning how to make use of some of their more exotic offerings. Although I think my next run is going to be at the Mediterranean grocery on Thompson that Lesley has recommended. We’ll see how it compares. It’s much closer, and I could easily bike to that one. Once I buy a bike, that is.
• Saturday night was a real treat, the Chinese Arts Alliance of Nashville gave us an amazing bit of theater that combined dance, martial arts, music, poetry, and storytelling — I hate to gush but damn it was wonderful. That’s all I can say because no description I could give would do it justice.
• As for today, I’ve got a lawn to mow. And this afternoon I think I’ll take in the inaugural meeting of The Bhakti Yoga Society — not sure what to expect from that, we’ll see I suppose.

Whew. Sleep has been had. Clothes have been unpacked and washed. Cat litter has been emptied, cat fur has been vacuumed. Groceries have been bought. Mail has been sorted and mostly read. Next step I suppose is to tackle the daunting stack of receipts and asses the damage, to figure out how many times I’m going to have to sell my body on the streets to pay for this little trip. Anyway before I do that, here’s the brief on the balance of the week:

Wednesday continued:

• Batting zeros on the sessions for the day, hopefully Mike’s having more luck. Flush cache and redirect a symlink to a big de-normalized table “replicated” over scp? That’s your plan? Really????
• Staying in tonight for some much needed recoup. Food at the hotel bar, then we killed the evening in a roundtable discussion group hashing out clusters (that engine=NDB thing). Slow joins might be a problem, we’ll see.

Thursday:

• Better sessions this morning. But next time, give You Tube all three hours. And yes, I do like my SQL spicy, thanks. Sorry we’ll have to miss the “ice cream social”.
• ALCATRAZ! (related: what does it say about us that we both put a prison high on our must-see list?)
• I checked into the Cathedral Hill, Mike checked into The Monarch. I had actually looked at the Monarch previously in my research and had it as a High Maybe. Unless Mike tells me it’s a shithole inside, that might be my choice next time, if there’s ever a next time. My place was nice, but pricey. But then, pricey did include parking, so maybe on net I got the deal.
• The. Fillmore. Fuck yeah. I’m pretty sure I saw the ghosts of Jim and Janis in the balcony, watching DJ Shadow tear it up. Sorry Alison, I would have been just as happy to see the Decemberists, but I had to see the Fillmore. Close out the night with another Thai dinner and another Irish Pub.

Friday:

• Allright mister “I don’t know where we need to go, lets just drive around the East Bay ’til we find it”, I don’t want to hear any more shit about me getting lost. We’re even : )
• “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” — I spent the early part of the day on a proper tour, complete with Dim Sum lunch, and spent the afternoon wandering on my own. I’m sure the racists paleos would disapprove, but some of us like salad. I wonder if Dorothy’s old tenement is for rent?
• Evening interlude at the Abode of Iyengar
• Wandered south from my hotel to Grove & found the symphony, the opera, a museum, a gallery. West to the library at Larkin, not quite to the Tenderloin — head north back to Geary and discover Little Saigon. Tasty lemongrass. But was the beer really Vietnamese? The bottle says it was made in Cali…
• Went for a cruise through Haight & Castro, but didn’t stop, didn’t want to hassle with parking and wanted to get sleep early to prep for Saturday…

Saturday:

• 8:15, arrive at the Zen Center. Today is absolutely today.
• Wander through “Lower Haight”, Page street to Duboce between Steiner and Octavia. Lunch on a panini and greens at a nondescript little cafe. No idea what it was called, it didn’t have a sign, but the food was mighty tasty.
• Woo-hoo! I fixed my camera! Now I can head back through the arts & city hall area for pictures. Then it’s off to Haight-Ashbury proper. Note to city planners: people can shop more if they don’t waste 30 minutes trying to park only to be constrained by parking meter time limits. Just sayin’.
• Mmmmm, paella…. and holy shit, wow, Cusquena Dark — Negra Modelo, you’ve been usurped.
• Finally found an internet cafe (meaning a place with terminals, not just wi-fi — for a nerd, I am remarkably laptop impaired). Why the hell don’t they list these things in the tourist guides? I could have saved a small fortune had I found one of these in Santa Clara.
• Wrap up the trip with a last night of bar hopping through Haight & Castro. As far as I know, I didn’t have anything to do with that highway collapse at 3 in the morning, but, well anything’s possible…

Sunday:

• Nurse hangover at a greasy spoon, then it’s off to the airport, and back to reality.

Allright. Time to dive into that pile of receipts. Pray for me. If I survive, I may follow up with deeper thoughts on a few high points. Almost every one of these bullets deserves a post of its own, but of course few will get one. I really do need to introduce you to Dorothy. Oh! And I’ve got pics! Time to finally make use of that Flickr account I guess.

• Went to the South Nashville planning kickoff meeting last night. I feel so civic and responsible and stuff. This can’t be good for my street cred. Anyway all they did was give us a little presentation talking about sustainable urban development & tell us a bit about what the meetings are for. The real work apparently starts at the next meeting in two weeks.
• Farewell, Mr. Gates. I’ve got an HTPC (think homebrew Tivo for nerds) at home that is my last machine running Windows. Well, something hosed one of the hard drives last week — couldn’t boot, couldn’t even boot the rescue disk or run chkdsk. Spending the better part of the weekend, I was able to salvage about 40 gigs of material off the drive using a Knoppix live CD, and finally got it reformatted and was able to boot again last night. Only problem is that now Windows doesn’t see that drive (actually 2 SATA drives in a RAID array) at all. Well, it looks fine in the device manager, but there’s no F: drive anywhere to be found otherwise. So I think the machine is not-so-subtly trying to tell me it’s ready for Linux and MythTV (maybe the KnoppMyth mash-up?) I’m afraid the drivers for my ATI All-In-Wonder may be a problem, but it *is* an older model now, so maybe that will work out. Otherwise I do also have a Hauppage capture card & would just need a new card for TV out. I’m sure I probably could fix the XP installation if I really tried, but I’ve been meaning to switch anyway, and this seems as good a time as any.
• I have to admit, I don’t get it. What’s with the whining about NPR/NPT pledge drives? Seems to me there are three types of people here: 1) those of us that pledge, we get to feel snooty and superior, so the campaign doesn’t bother us, 2) those who listen but don’t pledge — freeloaders with no right to complain, and 3) those who don’t listen & thus wouldn’t be affected. So which are you, Fabricator?
• On the subject of things I don’t get, why the hell must the local eateries turn the A/C down to 40 degrees as soon as the weather gets warm? Yesterday at Subway, I thought perhaps I’d mistakenly ordered a bag of hypothermia on the side or something, but then today at Moe’s it was the same deal.
• Another great piece from OnTheCommons on advertising’s invasion of noncommercial space.
• Oh! I remembered another thing I’ll have to do while in CA — yoga with Manouso (my teacher’s teacher, whose workshop I attended in January). Good stuff.

…when 2 hours of yoga, followed by 2 hours of karate, followed by 2 hours of yoga — only leaves enough time in between to scarf down some greasy fast food for lunch.

Sigh.