Monthly Archives: December 2007

How many unbelievable remarks can your MIL drop inside of a single Christmas? Wait. Don’t answer. It’s a koan. The answer is inside of me, but I am still working it out. It’s probably zero, but at the moment the figure I have is much higher. I wonder which will happen first: I solve the […]

People who rely on the sun: take a minute with me here. I’ve been waiting for this day for weeks, as every year. Thank god the days begin to lengthen again tomorrow. What a difference the margins make, even though the sun is still mostly with us even now. Those couple of hours off each […]

A few years back, I started asking how-questions. I was initially trained in statistical and formal modeling—ways of asking and answering why-questions predicated on a world constructed out of “things” also known as variables. Think Freakonomics: elegant pat-answers to elegant why-questions. Beautiful, but trite. The just-so stories of my formal training were appealing, but the […]

I did not go to naked yoga today in San Francisco; and that is why this post is not password-protected. The only reason for this was a full schedule, not fear of or distaste for the concept. I’m sort of interested, actually, in finding out whether the people at One Taste can pull it off […]

The best thing happened! Which was that my brother added a stop to the round-the-world game and touched tarmac at SFO just a few hours after me. He’s pulling down a contract; and I’m rooting around the superdynamic market in carbon offsets. Lots of open threads in a dissertationly direction, and sibling catchup in the […]

Shiva, the god of eroticism, is also the master of the method by which the virile force may be sublimated and transformed into a mental force, an intellectual power. This method is called Yoga, and Shiva is the great yogi, the founder of Yoga….  Assuming the various postures of Yoga, Shiva creates the different varieties […]

Some sensitive came around today with the tip that active & receptive, will & surrender, are as Siva and Shakti: we contain both, and cheat ourselves in any reduction to one disposition or the other. Which reminded me of the brilliant and controversial Wendy Doniger’s words on Siva as the embodied resolution of apparent opposites. […]

I ran around last week saying, in conversations all over town, such things: I’ve little patience for those who are mystified by their own emotions. Outsmarted by their own samskaras. Why be so involved in and fascinated by yourself? Why be so terribly intrigued when you catch a glimpse of your own interior? Know thyself […]

There’s this phenomenon. The December Congestion. Santa Monica gridlock in all directions, starting when darkness edges in at 4 and holding out until 8—every weeknight from about the 5th through the 23rd. You can’t go anywhere. Sidestreets are solid taillights in red. Flying over we must look like a colony of fire ants frozen in […]

Pendulum is on the swing again, these few weeks, for the elusive one. London–Paris–Istanbul–Paris–New York–Billings. Aaahh, Billings. I'll tell you a little about it, since we got talking under the last post about how different it is in the redstates. The returns to Montana were so weird for so many years after I moved away, […]