Mondegreen Thursday

Song heard in the car just now:
I could never make you oh so lewdly happy...

Eventually I figured out that it was actually absolutely happy. Ah well.

I screw for a living

So the past couple of days have been busy days at work. We're setting up an experiment, which means I've been running up and down ladders carrying equipment that is some combination of heavy, awkward, expensive, so fragile that it can be broken if you breathe on it, laboriously handmade, or irreplaceable. Oh, or radioactive. (It's somewhat less nerve-wracking carrying these things myself than watching other people carry them.) We've had to make a lot of changes to the set-up, which means I've been putting in and taking out the same twenty or thirty screws over and over again. All of a sudden, in the middle of one of these tasks this afternoon, it hit me: I screw for a living.

...although not perhaps in the way my mother feared I would end up doing back when I was eight and showing a marked preference for barbies and dress-up over trucks and lego.

blogging JOY!!

I've just started a work blog. Like, a blog to help me keep track of my work, and to share my results with my colleagues. Whe I told Corey about it, he said that the only thing that could make it geekier, or less generally comprehensible, is if it were written in Elvish. I know that publishing the link is just going to get me more snide comments, but anyway, it's here.

The name comes from an Eddie Izzard sketch, about how he doesn't have techno-fear, he has technoJOY!!! and will recklessly install computer hardware without ever cracking open the manual. Similarly, I've got simulation JOY and will simulate breakfast cereal, given half a chance.

question

How lazy does one have to be before buying new pants seems like a better idea than doing laundry?

Because however lazy that is, that's how lazy I am.

weekend quiz

So I spent this weekend in London with my dear friend Elisa and her S.O. Alex. We hung out on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon with three of their friends. Among the six of us, we have at least eight advanced degrees (it might be more, not sure) in subjects as diverse as mediaeval french, physics, philosphy, and law, are natives of six different countries, speak six languages (not counting Latin), and have lived in at least two countries besides our native countries. What do you think the chief activity was, while we were eating sushi, drinking wine at an obscure-but-excellent wine bar, and watching the Cambridge-Oxford rowing race?
(a) Discussing current events and our own personal theories of politics, economics, and literature.
(b) Recounting stories of our many and diverse travels.
(c) Making animal noises.

While watching the boat race, the right sort of picnic is
(a) Kir and brie.
(b) Diet coke and Doritos.
(c) Kir and Doritos.
(I think that last option must be an example of what Annene-of-Orkut calls Dada food.)

And a personal question: I like to wear my hair in braids
(a) for the convenience of having it out of my face.
(b) for the alternative-skater-Lolita effect.
(c) so that I can hold the ends above my head and pretend to have antennae, or in front of my face and pretend to have a moustache.

The answers should be obvious.

It was a good weekend.

Input?

Okay, so there's A Situation at the centre where I'm living. I've gotten a biased third-hand account of it, so the only thing I'm sure of is that I don't know the whole story. I don't think there's any point in going through the details here, but I'd like to know, those of you who have experience in living and working in spiritual communities (Mom and Shugetsu, this means you)--how do you preserve the authority of teachers without giving them a licence for emotional abuse? The situation here involves someone being told by someone in a position of power that telling her side of the situation would be divisive speech, which the Buddha prohibits. That strikes me as manipulative bullshit. So I ask: how do you balance authority with accountability, faith with mutual respect? How do healthy communities work?

too good not to share

a comic strip on a friend's wall...forget the name, unfortunately

Dog: Dog food! Again! They know what I like! I feel so loved! I dance now! Joy joy joy joy joy!
...
Cat: Cat food. Again. They hate me.

--methinks there's a teaching in there on contentment and how our lives create the world, but I mostly just liked the way the dog was zipping around in the background all full of glee while the cat was glaring sulkily at the food.

jet-setter

So tomorrow morning I set out on my travels again--Austria for a week (workshop at a ski resort, woo!), then Germany for a weekend with my dear friend Kate and her fiance, then to Gaia House for a ten-day personal retreat, then "home" for a couple of days, to re-pack for my next trip: I'm spending April in Vancouver. After that it looks like I may have as much as five weeks here before I'm off to Paris for a couple of weeks.
...so if you don't hear much from me for a while, that's why.
Question: How silly is it that I'm leaving my home at a retreat centre to go on retreat?
Answer: Very. Which is typical.

Q: What's a zombie's favourite breakfast cereal?



...give up?


...okay, I'll tell you.

A: Brain Flakes.


AHAHAHAHAHA!
Honestly. I slay myself.

cheeky monks

This evening's class was led by one of the monks, instead of the resident teacher. (He himself is one of the reasons I wanted to live here. The first time I visited the centre, I wanted to make a phone call and was baffled by the incoming-calls-only hall phone. This monk was walking by, so I stopped him and asked for advice. He was so helpful and patient and present that I figured that any place where people like that hang out is a place I want to spend time too.) At one point he was saying something about how on a spiritual path we learn entirely different ways of thinking about the world, and how we don't want to change our habitual ways of thinking, and so we struggle and argue every step of the way. Immediately, at the same moment, two monks on opposite sides of the room piped up and said, "No we don't".

Getting ordained doesn't mean you stop being a smart-ass, apparently.