Voodoo Time Dot Com

So I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was interviewed for a newspaper article. It ran last week in the Washington Post (check the comments section of this post for a login and password). It was supposed to run yesterday and have photos (they contacted me last week for a shoot), but it looks like it ran early and was scaled back quite a bit. The reporter mentioned me by name but neglected to mention that my vote-selling offer was a facetious political statement rather than a serious offer. Now I’m probably on some Secret Service watch list.

Three cheers for journalistic integrity!

If I took all of my clothes off and started walking downtown, I wonder how far I would get before The Man intercepted me. And I wonder, if I painted a face on my rear end and was talking to myself, would I get any farther or would that get me picked up even faster?

I’ll let you know.

When I was out for lunch the other day, one of my coworkers picked up a penny. She was pretty pleased about that because she had been having a rough week, and found pennies are supposedly good luck. That is, pennies are good luck for the people who find them. But what about the all the people who lose pennies everyday? Is losing a penny bad luck?

Then I wondered if luck is karmic. What if our fortune depends solely on our ratios of found money to lost money?

I do know one thing though. If that is the case, I’m screwed.

Bye for now.

So I know I haven’t done much with this site in a while, which is due to several factors, foremost of which being lack of time, and a general feeling of waning creativity. I’m not sure when this will change, but I’ll add stuff here and there as I can.

Something happened today that brought this site back to the front of my mind. I received an e-mail from a reporter from a nationally-known newspaper, asking me to talk about a post I wrote several months ago as part of a story she is writing on the topic. She interviewed me over the phone this afternoon. I don’t know if I’ll make it into the finished article, but if I do, I’ll be sure to post it.

Update: The article was published on 7/22/04.

In previous posts, I’ve touched on my Buddhist leanings. And while I have no hope of enlightenment in this lifetime, I really think that guy was on to something. One of the central themes of Buddhist practice is to see things for the way they are, and stop getting caught up in wishing things were different.

I think about this a lot, because I often catch myself wishing things were different. This is because I am an idiot idealist. I really get angry when I notice people acting selfishly. So, as you can probably imagine, I feel angry quite often. This happens a lot while I’m driving. Everyday someone cuts me off and I get angry. Nearly everyday, some jerk drives down the left turn lane, only to swerve back into another lane in the middle of the intersection, just to race ahead of the rest of us who obey traffic laws. (That is, except that bit about speed limits. I never could get the hang of speed limits.)

The problem with this is that I end up letting other people affect my happiness, which is dumb. A Buddhist forest monk from Thailand, called Ajahn Chah (”Ajahn” means “teacher”) taught an interesting lesson about this kind of thing. Apparently, in Thailand, the forests are chock full of monkeys (or at least they were when Ajahn Chah was still alive). Monkeys make a lot of noise, and they are forever swinging around and throwing things or stealing things. As a monk, one spends considerable lengths of time everyday in meditation. With monkeys making a racket, it could be hard to achieve tranquility in one’s mind. So the natural human reaction is to be angry with the monkeys.

One could try shooing away the monkeys, but they would just come back, or worse - attack. You could yell yourself hoarse, telling the monkeys to “shut up”, but monkeys don’t understand Thai (everyone knows monkeys only speak Dutch). If you’re angry with the monkeys, you’ll never achieve any kind of peace, because now there is a racket outside, and on the inside as well.

A wise person knows that this is simply the way monkeys are. There is no point wishing they would act otherwise. A wise person will relax and let the monkeys be monkeys.

So next time you’re angry at someone for being an ass, just remember that this is only human nature (or at least the nature of that particular human), and let it go. Let the monkeys be monkeys.

Bye for now.