Late Night Blog Reading Yields Results

The Lotus And The Mishpocheh:
The Principles of Jewish Buddhism

1. Let your mind be as a floating cloud.
Let your stillness be as the wooded glen.
And sit up straight.
You'll never meet the Buddha with such round shoulders.

2. There is no escaping karma.
In a previous life, you never called,
you never wrote, you never visited.
And whose fault was that?

3. Wherever you go, there you are.
Your luggage is another story.

4. To practice Zen and the art of Jewish
motorcycle maintenance, do the following:
Get rid of the motorcycle.
What were you thinking?

5. Be aware of your body.
Be aware of your perceptions.
Keep in mind that not every physical sensation
is a symptom of a terminal illness.

6. If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

7. The Tao has no expectations.
The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao does not speak.
The Tao does not blame.
The Tao does not take sides.
The Tao is not Jewish.

8. Drink tea and nourish life.
With the first sip, joy.
With the second, satisfaction.
With the third, Danish.

9. The Buddha taught that one should practice
loving kindness to all sentient beings.
Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being
Who happens to be Jewish?

10. To Find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.

11. Be here now. Be someplace else later.
Is that so complicated?

12. Zen is not easy.
It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have?
Bupkes.

Characters

I love how characters come alive as you write. Last night, I was enjoying a bit of whiskey with a friend and I read him part of my novel. From one paragraph, he surmised that my narrator was a late twenties to early thirties college educated male in the upper middle class from somewhere other than the East Coast. Either he's scary or there's something good about the writing I've done so far, because he was absolutely right.

Fiction

Writing fiction is extremely liberating. Fiction can be as real as you want, or as far from reality as you desire. It can also be both at the same time. I decided to do National Novel Writing Month. Google it, it's cool.

Ein Matzav

Ein matzav v'zeh hu. This is my new best response to 'mah hamatzav?' This is inspired by a conversation I had at Hillel tonight.

It can be used if you don't know what's going on or if you don't want to talk about it.

Gossip

Two of my friends are beginning a relationship. One of these friends has told me absolutely everything she thinks about the relationship and all the details of their first get together, whereas the most I could get out of the other friend was that she had gone to a restaurant with a girl. When I asked, "With a girl?" with the same intonation that I would, "Tell me more?", my friend asked why I latched onto that phrase. I then went into a mini-lecture about how "with a girl" has a different meaning than "with a friend," to which she responded, "Well, to me they mean the same thing. And I will not tolerate speculation into my personal life."

This situation fascinates me. How do you deal with knowing so much about someone that they won't reveal to you personally?

King for a day, at least

I went to campus in drag yesterday, all done up in a suit, and a friend of mine went as my date (in a dress, of course). He was absolutely fabulous. It was the first time I had gone in drag since my beloved died in 2000. I was happy to do it, but it brought up many memories of my love. Today I did a reprise of the hat, by which I mean I wore the hat I wore yesterday because it is awesome and I was having a bad hair day. My RA asked me if I left the suit at home accidentally. I found that amusing.