After I saw High School Musical, I saw High School Musical 2. Neither is very good, though Zac Efron is cute. He’s cuter in the recent version of Hairspray, however, and the music in Hairspray is lots better, too.
I’m still working on the book about Henry Ford, and now that I’m out of renewals, it’s costing me 10 cents a day. The fine will be capped at $5.00, which is good, though I don’t mind supporting the library.
In the dharma department, I just finished Ajahn Sumedho’s Teachings of a Buddhist Monk. It’s extremely off the cuff. Some dharma books someone actually sits down and writes, and some are collections of transcribed dharma talks. This one sounds like Ajahn Sumedho drank a few beers, which we know he didn’t, and rambled very informally and freely to a longtime friend who is a good listener.
The final chapter, “He Did Not Pass the Cakes,” is full of useful stuff that is highly pertinent to my situation at work, and in general. It’s about the friction and irritation we encounter all the time, and how to work with it.
It is clear that Ajahn Sumedho has put in his time wrestling with this stuff, and he makes it sound like the fruits of learning to direct attention inward will be very much worth having. I’ve read or heard this exact advice approximately 2000 times and still manage to forget about it when it’s most needed, so I appreciate bumping into something that inspires me anew.
I’ve been reading a little bit of this chapter each morning to remind me of my intention. I really don’t want to be run hither and thither all my life by this or that thing that someone else might be doing, and I do want to be a kind and patient person.
Meditating in the morning is making it so much easier to be tolerant at work, and to listen to my “customers” attentively.
I am reading, at night, Awakening the Buddhist Heart, by Lama Surya Das. So far it hasn’t offered any notable revelation, but I like his down to earth, friendly style.
I recently got two Etta James CDs, Heart of a Woman and Blue Gardenia. There are several songs on both that I like. It’s neat, too, to hear the lyrics to several jazz standards I’ve played many times on the trumpet. Listening to Etta makes me think of Amy Winehouse; some of Amy’s phrasings are identical to Etta’s. It’s easy to be critical when a musician displays her influences so obviously, but I think it takes talent to be able to analyze what another musician is doing and reproduce it so faithfully. I guarantee I can’t sing anything that sounds like Etta James.
I have also obtained three Jonatha Brooke CDs, including The Works, the one that uses the Woody Guthrie lyrics. It is charming and lovely, incredibly sweet and passionate. Woody Guthrie evidently often wrote from a woman’s perspective.
I discussed my co-worker’s web surfing habits with Tom, whose advice in any situation of undesired behavior is almost always to ignore it, but in this case, he said that was absolutely not OK and that I should have a word with the person’s team lead. As soon as I had Tom’s permission to make an issue of it, I decided I could live with it: the miracle of reverse psychology.
My parents have lately acquired digital cable in their new house. My mother wrote me this:
“Our cable TV is hooked up. The installer said to us, ‘Are you familiar with digital cable TV?’ I said, ‘No. Will I still be able to use my La-Z-Boy?’ He said, ‘Yes, but there will be an extra charge.’”
I’m sorry to say that, after being excited for months over Obama’s candidacy, I’m angry and disappointed about him inviting Rick Warren to participate in the inaugural ceremony, and I wish I had back the money I sent him.
Gay people worked hard to elect Obama. They (or we; I’m bisexual) sent money and spent time volunteering, and voted for him three to one. Rick Warren has likened gay marriage to pedophilia and worked to pass Proposition 8, denying certain human beings and American citizens the right of marriage enjoyed by nearly every other adult; I guess if you're in San Quentin on death row, you also can't get married.
I was actually going to take a vacation day so I could watch the ceremony on TV, but now I probably won’t watch it at all, let alone use a vacation day for this purpose, and I took the “Yes We Did” button off my backpack, because it made me feel a bit heartsick every time I saw it.
I don’t buy the “reaching across the aisle” thing, because there is absolutely no way Obama would have invited an avowed segregationist or KKK leader to participate, because THAT would have been offensive to people he actually cares about not offending.
In the past day or two, there was a report on sfgate.com about a lesbian who was gang-raped by four men who made clear the attack was based on the victim’s being gay.
As one commenter wrote (I have removed an errant apostrophe and added a comma), “I'm convinced that the passage of Prop. 8 and its attendant marketing contributed to [these] other recent instances of hate crimes against perceived LGBT people. Words are powerful, and hateful rhetoric designed to take away people's civil liberties encourages hateful people who act to fulfill their sentiments.”
Rick Warren’s insulting comments about gay people are on the same continuum as this dreadful crime. Maybe they are near opposite ends of the continuum, but it’s the same continuum. When I think of Rick Warren praying at Obama’s ceremony, all I can see is Matthew Shepard’s battered body hanging from the fence in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming. He was still alive then, barely, but died later at the hospital, leaving his family and friends to grieve forever.
It makes me cry, and to think that our new president has so honored an open bigot makes me really, really angry.
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