Walpola Rahula v. Herman Miller

I recommend saving intellectual discourse until seated on the floor. I' m serious. It's very satisfying. There you are, under your desk, cross-legged, and discussing the vagaries of unclaimed property law with a senior partner at your firm, via phone. Of course, the situation is vastly improved if you are both sitting on the floor. Although there is something incredibly satisfying about you knowing that you're sitting on the floor, but not knowing whether the other guy is, and knowing that he certainly doesn't know that you are. What would he do if he knew? What if he's seated on the floor as well?

Why is it satisfying? Because it is subversive and good for posture (back straight, hips open, etc.), a combination that is bound to fortify the soul. It brings your practice into meditation, or the "culture of the mind." It's so much easier to be mindful of what you're doing when seated below the world, below the flurry of politics. When seated in a chair, at the acceptable level of business culture, the desk level, it is too easy to be hit by a stray bolt from some battle of office politics. But on the floor, you're below the fray.

And after all, why should I sit in the chair? I'm perfectly comfortable on the floor. And as Walpola Rahula says, "To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual." And so, I refuse the political affiliation and partisanship of the "chair." The humble floor is good enough for me.

Today's rule: sleep as well tonight as I did last night.

Life is Boring.

I am thirty years old. And I can't decide if that's old or not. Looking at the matter as a soci0-anthropo-historian (whatever that might be) might, 30 is ancient; I have well exceeded the average human life expectancy averaged over our history (controlling for population growth, I imagine). As a natural law philosopher (all things are devoted to the propagation of the species, i.e., man-woman unions, gays are weird, etc.) might, 30 is old as I should have already bred by now, I should be swimming in little Michaels and Michelles and rearing of them.

Thank god for all those recent ideologies devoted to production and progress (whether utilitarianism, communism, capitalism, etc.), where my value is measured by growing productivity (measured by those who have more or less, but never my own standards), regardless of age. And thank industry for religion, where my value is measured by growing proximity to self-absorbed virtue (and thus excruciating self-denial and reproach) and my youth is protected as I'm convinced, or at least some annoying and powerful part of my soul is convinced, that all the passions and powers of youth are threatening my chance to enjoy eternal existence as merely boring and not painful.

But where are you when all of these competing schemes seem equally ridiculous? Maybe I should just focus on the moment? As old as 30 may be, I feel that I could be at the top of my powers, except for the hair loss and a job that requires me to sit still for 10 hours a day.

I'm wondering what time in my life I should decide was the optimum moment, the zenith of my development. What about today? While I'm a little physically weaker at the moment than I have been, a little less attractive (losing the hair, you know), probably a bit more boring (a result of the job, or a job), etc., I'm also easier-going, able to read a book from end to end (how I made it through school without being able to really read is a mystery), wealthier, more patient, probably a better lover then ever before, and more productive...

Today's rule: to try and make no decisions about how old "old" is.

An Opera Fan is Born

Hooked. L'Elisir d'Amore. I should have known it would be this easy. Pretty girls batting their eyelashes, acting perfectly coy, singing like angels. It's that good old fashioned girliness that meant the eventual end of arranged marriages in the West. Or perhaps cynically, women created by men, a distillation of all that's sweet, appealing, and redemptive. And honestly, who cares if opera has anything to do with reality? I am now quite convinced that I understand what the compliment "enchanting" means. Under normal circumstances, it is virtually impossible to be "enchanted" by anyone. There are too many words, too many opportunities to disappoint, to many disappointments, too many pores. But Jenny tonight, was absolutely enchanting. She was Adina, a coquette turned inamorata. Beautiful, doll-like, with a voice that seemed to literally melt your heart. Absolutely the stuff of fancy.

Not alone. My two weeks of opera camp included other crushes. And some very charming attempts to cross generational gaps. A beautiful (actually "hot" is the better word) high school student, gushing summer camp enthusiastic cuteness, asked me for my email address. She was getting everyone's email address to send updates to, or have new penpals, or whatever one did with the fruits of camp networking as a teenager. In what I'm sure was a very confusing gesture, I laughed.....and gave her my card.

What was truly wonderful about opera camp was this: that the characters singing opera were as ridiculously unique, large, and dramatic as their characters. The tenors were a serious and solemn bunch, deep feeling, small, dark. The basses louder, laughing more, in charge. The sopranos, flirty, feminine, sensual. If opera didn't exist for these people, they'd have to invent it.

Today's rule: watch an opera written by a woman.

Dancing Around the Coal Fires and French Cubes.

Al Gore and the planet. Up until last night I was one of those diehard activists that work "within" the system. In other words, at parties I attempted to convince like-minded people to accept, even more profoundly than they already had, the value of any number of progressive values. It's shooting fish in a barrel really; I only hang out with lefties.

Seen from a slightly different perspective, I've attempted to make people feel a little bad, a little "less than," if they were not as cynical about the present as I think cool people should be. After all, peopls should be idealistic about the possibility of the human future if our present leadership was eliminated, the ghettos were firebombed, and the bourgeousie finally grew so fat that they were no longer able to forage for food, viz. reach the phone to order pizza, and thus starved.

Obviously, if we were able to eliminate these groups, only the thin and cynical would be left to rule the world. Of course, that would be the end of the human race, since those of us that fit within that group seem to be unwilling to have enough children to reproduce our numbers.

But there'd be a lot of excellent microbrew on the way out.

The Day After Yesterday. Today, however, is a new day. I have seen an Inconvenient Truth. And I am struck by two things: first, at how frightening weather can really be; and second, at my reaction to the bad news. Gore is convincing. And it's a relief. Because the "debate" on global warming has been like a soccer game where the score is 154 to 1, but everyone is constantly talking about the "game," as though there is any wonder as to how it will turn out.

Gore presents the facts; they don't seem shrill. And you finally figure out where we are in history and how close the future is. He does a good job of presenting the immensity of weather. For example, apparently North America was once covered by a giant sheet of ice, and when that melted a huge lake formed. "Huge," as in almost-the-entire-continent huge, kept in by enormous ice mountain ranges, like dams. One day the ice levees broke. A gazillion gallons of cold fresh water poured out into the Atlantic.

The cold fresh water shut down the Gulf Stream. The result, Europe went back into an ice age, covered the whole continent with ice. And the craziest bit? The ice age may have occured in as little as a ten year period from the time the dam broke.

Okay, wow. But then I thought, "cool. "

Back when I thought this process (by that I mean global destruction) was going to take a long time, it seemed like the only responsible thing to do was to protect our children's inheritance, the seventh generation, etcetera, etcetera, etc. Committed to saving the planet, I support hybrids, complain bitterly about poor environmental policies, and generally think that I would do things differently from the "Administration" if cursed enough to rule.

But, I think I've changed my mind. I mean, come on, France could be an ice cube by 2016 if Greenland melts. And Greenland is getting sloshier by the day. Sure, how horrific. But HOW EXCITING! We could watch.

But then I thought....Oh no! This movie is self-fulflling prophecy: Al Gore has just informed our government that if we just keep having as much fun as we can, dancing around our coal fires, driving our ridiculously huge cars, and turning our forests into numbing expanses of horrendously ugly architecture, France will eventually turn into a giant ice chip. Problem solved.
Today's rule: try and visit Paris again within the next ten years.