Activities to Beat the Winter Blues

This is funny. I am posting this again because i can’t think today. I have a feeling it might be a while before i can.

Words About

8. Try to cheer up an on-line tech support person at your wireless phone providers website.

When she typed, “It’s my pleasure to help you.”  I typed back: “OMG you mean they don’t pay you?”  Which got a “har, har” and then she told me that she does in fact get paid. 

I tried to go with another company.  My choice in new provider seemed fitting because it was a really windy day yesterday, my contract was finished with the other company and due to watching WAY TOO MUCH TELEVISION this holiday season I heard about their GREAT DEALS.  I need very little from a wireless phone as I work at home. You can call it working.  Okay, I’m feeling blue again. I gave up switching because I don’t have a drivers license and I don’t know where my expired passport has gotten to and their debit machine was not working and…

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Doing the Next Thing

I am in that weird place in life when I have lots of time to just observe things. I see when the wheel on the wagon is wobbling but it’s not my wagon.

Not any of it is my wagon.

I just try to appreciate every moment and applaud every success. “Yay!”

Crazy people, cruelty and all the other painful things humans can perpetuate on each other, hatred, confusion, obscuring the way forward; It is a crazy time. Maybe it is always a crazy time.

I find zazen, sitting staring at a blank wall excruciating, but preferable to action often because I don’t know what I can do in the face of so much suffering. I know I am probably getting my practice completely wrong. I imagine Bodhisattva cringing. I remember teachers telling me not to talk about my practice outside the Dokusan room…

The other day the bus was so full the driver told us to try to get on at the back door. It looked impossible and I was the last in line. All these backs towards me, every shade of skin a human can possess represented before me, me, covered in liver spots and freckles. For the doors to close, fat, thin, male, female, shy, brazen, tall, short, young, old, we had to smoosh together.

“Well, we are all good friends now!” Laughter and smiles, people looking over their shoulders at me in the crush, somehow making room for me where there was none.

That was enough.

It is never a personal Titanic on which we arrange the deck chairs.

April was A POEM A DAY month and this was one I pounded out like bread dough.

Unrecorded

Once she wrote
with the sharp edges of her being.

Strands of her stories were used to make nests
and her words were footprints
that could lead you home.

Then
The Fire
The Famine
The Pestilence
The Wars
left her only with
seven names for herself and all her sisters.
Sentenced as the cause
her story was reduced
to being just a man’s rib.

She was worn as smooth and small as a pebble.
She curled like an apostrophe
in a sentence
describing
history.

The only proof she was ever an author
woven into nests and buried
in unmarked graves.

Watching Comedians in Cars before falling asleep

Mario Joyner
Comedians in Cars

Sometimes I think the genius of the old Jerry Seinfeld show was how his character might think he gets the point better than his other co-characters but the actual point is usually completely missed by all of them. For me, often the whole point of the show was that awesome bass rift. Literally the cherry on the top of the situational sundae.
But I don’t know how much of any of that was actually Jerry Seinfeld. But supposedly on Comedians in Cars the guy really is actually Jerry Seinfeld. He likes to complain and he likes to talk about how he and the people he admires did it better than anyone else, namely comedy but occasionally there is a moment in Comedians with cars when the awesome bass rift should be present, when on some level your brain shifts and you go, “that is actually brilliant, I think my brain is developing.”
When I am tired but can’t go to bed because it is only 9pm I sometimes let The Netflix roll out one Comedian in a Car After Another ’till it asks me “Are you still there?”. Which seems nice, but The Netflix doesn’t leave room for any response other than “click” which is annoying because I think it is a question that requires a longer answer. AM I, am I really?
On this occasion the comedian was Mario-Joyner and it seems he and Jerry Seinfeld are good friends. Its like the going for coffee with friends who completely ignore you and never acknowledge you or apologize at the end for being rude, which is sort of every episode and the big joke might be that The Netflix is passing the cheque to us. But then it comes to this bit:
(First skip the crap about watermelon and black people pleeeeeease.) Around ten minutes in Mario talks about Sammy Davis Jr. and how he could do everything Jerry hits his usual note about specializing in comedy and comedy alone and why that is how a comedian gets better, or at least a seat in the car.

Mario-Joyner says:
“That’s your focus theory. (However) You can get good at anything you can get good at, it’s not one or the other…When you are focused on something you are focused, there is no other thing.”
And he, Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian he is says, “I’ll try to agree on that.”
It is funny because, whether it is just shtick or not we laugh because Jerry, being smart, has still missed the only point in the whole seventeen minutes that was worth hearing and we are sad, so existentially sad that we let out that ‘POP’ of laughter.
Awesome bass rift.
All these thoughts came into focus while watching this video, which was part of Sigrun’s post called, The world as a process of unfolding.

Debbie Downer — Seriously Clowning Around, re-posted because I really don’t have the energy to be enthusiastic about anything new.

I have decided that my recent angst against optimistic slogans is not helpful. I suspect that many people are freaked out about a lot of the things they see going on around them and in the world and so clinging to sayings like, “Sometimes when it seems things are falling apart they are really falling into place…” […]

via Debbie Downer — Seriously Clowning Around