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I’ve never been a singer really, except when I’m alone in my car on the freeway. Last night my good friend MJ decided to drag us all out to a karaoke bar called The Mint for his birthday party.
I figured I would have trouble singing for two key reasons.
1. I can never remember the words to a song
2. I can’t sing
So I went for humor effect and sang “I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls. Special thanks to my dance backup who added additional comic effect. Click here for more pictures, and click on each picture for a larger view. In all it was a good time, and though I missed some of the lyrics to even this simple song I had fun singing to fifty willing victims in the bar.
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i’ve noticed a ton of small ways in which I don’t react well to life’s minor challenges. i had no idea i’m so incompetant. mostly the reactions are habitual and subconscious. but i’m noticing many more than before thanks to this weekends retreat.
big examples so far:
- in meetings where people drone on and on, i just can’t avoid glazing over or fidgeting or reacting to status items in a variety of not too professional ways. at least i keep it all to myself. but internally it’s a peanut gallery.
- getting chai at a nearby cafe i just discovered, the reactions of all the people in the place was sad and my reactions to them condescending. i watched a little symphony of bizarre emotional reactions people had to each other and doing simple things like “buying coffee” and though: yikes. if this is so tough for people how do we all function at all?
- normally for lunch i go to one of about three places to eat, even though there are about twenty restaurants within walking distance. worse, if i’m tired of one of those places i actually have the gaul to complain to myself that i don’t know where to go or what to eat and that there’s nothing that sounds good. so today i went somewhere new for a change. progress…
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if you’d like to read more about my retreat experience this weekend, i’ve written a summary essay.
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this weekend i’m sitting a meditation retreat with my favorite teacher in the world, Ani Pema Chodron. she has been here for part of the summer teaching a commentary on the 8th century scholar Shantideva’s book “The Way of the Bodhisattva”, and she stayed on an extra weekend to teach a class on shenpa and meditation.
the class is called “doorway to freedom”. you could also call it “using the unexpected difficulties and suffering in life as doorways to understanding and workability” or something like that. Pema’s lineage of Tibetan Buddhism is known for using fear and anger and sadness as components of the spiritual path, as fuel and embracing them instead of trying to push them away. our natural tendency is to push away negative emotions, so that counter-intuitive instruction intrigues me. i’ll write more about the specific teachings and instructions after tomorrow’s class.
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I’m so proud of my mom, this is a picture of her keynote address at the AACC conference this weekend. (click for a larger version) She was such a rock star at this and so many other presentations, receptions, and award ceremonies that she attended. I had never seen this side of her professional life. She knew everyone and made everyone feel at ease. A socialite scientist. That’s my doctor mom.
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i’m currently in the city of brotherly love, here to see my mom keynote the annual american association of clinical chemistry conference. she’s the president of that organization this year and has been busy speaking at dinners and award ceremonies. i was lucky to sit with Dr. J. Craig Venter at dinner last night, and hear about his next project goal to sail around the world and collect microbe samples for 50,000 new species and sequence their genes. his lab has enough super computer power and using shotgun sequencing techniques that he devised, sequencing the genes of each microbe only takes a couple hours. his team took only 9 months to sequence the human genome from scratch using these techniques, beating the public genome projects efforts handily. Dr. Venter will likely be remembered as one of the people who ushered in the genomic shift in medicine we’ll experience in our lifetime - where each person has their personal gene map pressed onto a CD ROM just after their born and before they leave the hospital. this of course will bring up all sorts of ethical issues.
if you could, would you like to have your DNA completely sequenced?
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ok, i’m cursed this week. no one is allowed to drive with me for their own safety. i was rear ended this morning on the way to work.
apparently the guy behind me thought I was going to run a red light but when I stopped he didn’t have enough room to do the same. i ended up spraying hot chai all over my windshield and dashboard he hit me so hard.
it doesn’t look like much damage, just a few places where he punched holes in the plastic over my bumper. his car was similar. but i’ll have to take my car in and have it checked out just in case there is more serious structural damage.
i was fine with the situation, but then lost my buddhist equanimity when he was resisted giving me any of his contact or insurance information. that made me furious at first. i had to talk for two minutes to get him to pull over even. he started to leave the scene and i had to stop him, i got out and stopped traffic so he could pull over, and then had to follow him two blocks. it took another 45 minutes to get all of his information out of him. he lied to me about not having insurance information, then i eventually got it out of him. he even gave me a bogus cell phone number at first and when i called it to verify it was the cell phone in his car he finally gave me the correct number.
i didn’t let the anger over all this take hold though, i just tried to sit with it and be aware of it as just anger. he was really visibily frightened. in the end i had talked both him and myself down. he was frightened for his insurance rates and his license. he just got a point on his license from an accident only a month ago, and his rates were really bad already from other accidents. his insurance company suggested we try to work it out and when i repeatedly told him that we could find a way to do that then he calmed down more. i didn’t trust him because of the earlier lying but since i have his insurance and license info now i can probably avoid being stuck with the bill.
on the way to work i reflected again on the uncertainty in life, and how we react with the things which just come up unexpectedly with fear and anger and frustration. we cling to trying to make things go a certain way. when i started to let go of all that, and open up to the experience of the morning, i noticed suddenly that my car had a nice, spicy chai smell which was really pleasant. 
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Yesterday I came very close to dying.
I rented a 15 foot truck for the weekend, to bring my Moroccan Tent and all of the interior furniture back to storage. Yesterday morning I went to return it. I stopped at the Texaco near Harbor and Old County Road in Belmont to fill up with Diesel first.
My day started normally; my world was just as solid and typical as any until I stepped on the brake, turned the key, and threw the truck into “drive”. From that moment my world turned into a crazed, wild horse ride.
The truck lurched forward with full force. I heard the engine rev to the max. The front wheels were not straight, they were aimed at the next gas pump in front of me. I wasn’t in control. My first thought was, “what the hell!” then I thought “not the gas pump!!” I grabbed wildly at the steering wheel after being thrown back in my seat. I couldn’t reconcile why we were moving forward, i was on the break and the emergency break was still on. It felt like the truck was just surging out of control. I turned madly to the right, hoping to miss the gas pump.
I glanced up at where we were headed, and I thought “jam it into park”. that seemed like the best plan of action once I cleared the gas pump. I also saw a grassy spot where the gas station ended and I could aim for that. I kept turning at the wheel. All this occurred in less than a second.
But as I missed the gas pump, I couldn’t turn it right fast enough to miss the steel guardrail protecting the pump. I thought, “at least this will stop us”. and we hit hard. I went flying into the windshield and bounced off of it like a rag doll. I hadn’t even put my seat belt on yet; I wasn’t expecting the truck to just take off.
I put the transmission into park, turned off the engine, and crawled out the passenger door. I felt my head for blood, but I was ok. No one else was hurt.
The next couple hours involved phone calls to budget, their towing company, their insurance company, and talking with the Texaco employees to hear what they saw. The Belmont police showed up and took pictures and notes and statements. I ran over what happened again and again in my head, “how could this have happened?” I wondered. I usually trust simple mechanical things like trucks and cars to behave as expected. Especially when the outcome could be so deadly. People kept saying “bad luck” to me when they pulled up and saw the truck. I kept responding “good luck” that no one was hurt. Then I took a closer look at that grassy patch I had been aiming for.
It wasn’t a grassy patch at all. There was a slight berm of grass, but then tall reeds growing out of a cement lined canal. If I had made it that far without stopping the truck, we would have vaulted up the berm and flown head on into the cement lined canal wall, which was angled 45 degrees. The rest of the truck would have slammed the small cab containing me and my friend Max into that wall. I missed the gas pump and a potentially fiery death, and just missed as dangerous a plummet into the canal wall only thirty feet away: very good luck.
click on each of the pictures here for a larger image.
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seems a group from the north fork vipassana meditation center have started ten day silent retreats for inmates at a medium-security prison in san bruno. i love the idea, though it sounds like some prisoners thought it might be too cultish. the prisoners follow buddhist precepts during the session, and this group is in s. n. goenka’s school of vipassana so they’re also subjected to video tapes of his instruction - that might feel creepy even to me. not sure if the program is still underway, but there was an article in the sfweekly two years ago which i just found. i’d love to hear if this is still going.
the five basic precepts required during the course:
- - to abstain from killing - the inmates eat vegetarian all ten days
- - to abstain from stealing
- - to abstain from all sexual activity
- - to abstain from telling lies
- - to abstain from all intoxicants
personally, i wouldn’t require inmates to follow precepts during a ten day retreat except the intoxicants requirement. sure all the precepts are there to help avoid addictions and habits which get in the way of insight, but there’s such a barrier for people to even try sitting - why add even more of a barrier? i’d suggest saving these for a second retreat so meditators see how they help.
wow, i just found a treasure chest of buddhist lectures downloadable as mp3 files at www.audiodharma.org — weeks and weeks of lectures from local and some well known vipassana and zen teachers.
what hobbies would you pick up if you had to do hard time?
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feeling better this mornin’, so i headed to work right into a two hour meeting. i have a few ideas for the interface of our next product, I spent some time sketching those out today. this weekend i’ll see if i can make some mock ups to test out.
not sure if i’m completely free of this cold. tonight i’m treating myself to my favorite comfort food and getting extra rest.
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