Fun things to do in DC

New blog for Australia

2007-02-02T13:43:00.000-08:00

I've moved to Australia...
www.ozzified.blogspot.com

Neighbor

2006-04-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

Well but so let's say it's a beautiful spring morning, juicy tips of green on trees like a baby's eyelashes, and you peek your head out the door to greet your husband with his orange juice and the newspaper on the porch. And he's talking to a man on the bottom of the stairs, a miserable leprous apparition of a man, with a sad secret mouth and eyes of howling need with red spots in the very center of each. The man on the stairs is asking for money and although he's standing on the very bottom step you can feel the tendrils of his desperate need reaching and curling up the stairs and through the porch and around the whole house. Your husband looks at you and you say "Hi" and he says "Hi" then you look at the man on the stairs and you say "Hi" and he says nothing. You are wearing a loose blue cotton skirt and your arms are bare. He looks at you with a shadow of desire hidden behind a wall of sorrow and then he turns to your husband and he says, a statement not a question, "So that's your..." Your husband says, "Yes. That's my wife." There's a pause, three people on the porch and the sunshine and the wind in the leaves. Your husband says, "I'm sorry my friend, you have to go." The man on the stairs says, "Well do you know any place - any place to go?" Your husband says, "No, I can't help you." The man on the stairs turns and walks away without looking back, and you watch him and then you look at your husband and he looks at you and you say, "But - I think I know some places he could go - there's the church on Harvard St - or the Quaker Church in Dupont Circle - " and your husband says "Forget it." You glare at him and slam the door as you go back into the house, and a few minutes later he follows you in. "Did you just slam the door on me?" "I wanted to help him. He was so sad." "Why do you care so much?" "Because he was miserable and we are happy." "That's what you need to live with in a city. You need to shield yourself, or you'll never survive." "But there's so much pain in the world." "Look, if you care so much why don't you make him a sandwich?" "How can I find him?" "He told me where he was going. He's with his mother, sitting in front of the bakery, a block away." "He's with his MOTHER?" "That's right." So you very noisily and angrily open the fridge and begin packing last night's leftovers into a carton. "You're giving him my lunch?" You glare. "That's right." "That's ten dollars for me to buy one." You glare. "Fine, I'll make him a new sandwich." "I was only joking." You continue making the new sandwich and he does not stop you. You pour some peanuts into the lunch carton and pack it into a bag and start and then you go back and put the whole jar of peanuts into the bag. You glare at your husband in case he noticed this. Then you head for the door. "You're going without me?" "I didn't think you wanted to come." "Well, you thought wrong." You slip on your flip-flops and walk outside. Your husband follows, still in loose pajama pants. As you both walk down the lane with the sun on your hair you must look a handsome couple and your neighbor the English professor waves a greeting. "Beautiful morning!" You smile at him, the white-lie expression of a polite neighbor, and continue walking. There's a teenager listening to his Ipod in front of the bakery and a few friends chatting in front of the nearby cafe. Other than that nothing but a yellow dog wandering down the dusty street. Your husband shrugs. "Gone, just like that." You say nothing as you both walk back to the house. "I wish I'd talked to him more, gotten his story," your husband says. Still your icy silence. "I don't think you understand, I was talking to him until you came out, but then I wanted him to go away. I wanted to protect you."

Well but so how are you supposed to feel about that?

Kids attacking bikers on 11th St between U and Florida

2006-04-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

It looks like my Ode to the Hill is outdated. There's a gang of kids that for some reason have decided to wage war on bikers on 11th St. There was a CityPaper article last week about how they throw rocks - but Martin was actually assaulted a few days ago. I quote from a letter he wrote to some journalists about it:

Dear Mr. Grim,

I have a brand new appreciation for the article that you wrote in CityPaper recently:http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/districtline/2006/rocks0407.html

My name is Martin Nikoloski, and I have been a proud resident of DC and the Columbia Heights neighbourhood for the past six years. I have been riding my bike as a major form of transportation, and I would always boast to my friends that I've never been mugged because I'm hard to catch on my bike. I'd like to share with you what happened to me yesterday, April 6th, around 3:10pm, as I was riding my bike heading north on 11th Street, b/n U St. and V St. NW. There was a group of a dozen African-American kids, that appeared to be coming back from school, as some of them still had their back packs on. My guess is that they ranged b/n 9 and 13 years of age. One of them was crossing the street ahead of me and I wasn't paying too much attention to him when suddenly he turned around and struck me with his elbow. I tried to maintain a balance on my bike with grocery bags hanging, when next thing I know I was jumped by around five kids from all directions who started throwing punches and mercilessly kicking me in my head and ribs. For a minute or two in broad daylight, there was this surreal sight of cruelty and terror.

I started yelling 'stop it, Stop it, STOP IT,' raising my voice as I was taking one blow after another in my head... I never had a chance to get back on my feet. As they ran away I could hear sheer excitement and laughter in their voices. There was a bus (#66) heading north, and my bike, grocery bags and body was blocking its way... I had a bloody nose, bloody knees and vicious headache stemming from a blow just above my right ear, which is limiting motion in my jaw...
Had it not been for my helmet I would have easily ended up in the emergency room.

I am grateful that none of my injuries are permanent or debilitating, and sad that these kids grow up with so much violence in their lives and actually get joy and pleasure from these acts. Around 3:40pm I called 311 and asked to file a police report, describing what had just happened to me. The operator took my name and address and said that she would send the next free officer to take my report. Of course the officer never showed up... I've lived inDC for long enough to know that they might not show up and that they have bigger fish to fry, but I nonetheless wanted to mention this for the record.

I guess I'd like to inform as many bikers as possible to stay away from 11th St. b/n U and Florida, the backyard of Cardozo High, and hope that the community or the DCPD can bring some attention to this problem.

Touch the Works of Art

2006-04-01T09:20:00.000-08:00

"Do not touch the works of art.
Do you hear me? No touching!
I'm talking to you. Do not touch.
It's against the rules!" And on the wall
a rather more gently-worded plaque,
full of helpful info about the corrosive effects
of the oil on human skin (it's like acid!),
how many other art patrons
want to enjoy these sculptures, please
help us keep them safe, preserve their lifetimes,
which will hopefully at least be longer than your
own, fourscore fleshbag turns of the hourglass.

Although if the sculptures could speak, I'm sure
they'd have their own opinions of the rule;
some haughty and happy on their pedestals,
others longing to touch and be touched, Moore's
Girl on a Chair wishing for a kind stranger's
shawl around her shoulders, to hide her
prepubescent breasts from grown men's calculating eyes;
Rodin's Crouching Woman writhing, twisting in her
hungry serpent desire for a hug, some human warmth
to break the monotony of rain, sun, camera flash, and
occasional dropping from a pigeon who
definitely did not pay attention to the rules.

on art

2006-03-15T19:46:00.000-08:00

"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401961_pf.html"

No, art is not instrumental. Art is the bloody point. Art is not so that we can work harder, shit better, poke the other ape in the eye harder, art is for its own sake, art is what lifts us above animate tubes separating a mouth-hole from an anus with a drive to reproduce; that is what separates us from animals: the ability to SUBLIMATE.

What do you remember in the end, when you hear that fly buzz before you die, that "blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz"? You remember the moments of art, the moments of transcendence beyond the daily grind... whether abstract, or whether attached to instinctually appealing actions like eating or fucking - it's not the wet in-out-in-out that we remember, in the end, but that connection to creation.

And art is the father of spirituality, isn't it? Our ideas conceive of form, and yet that form inevitably disappoints, never quite embodies that original spark of imagination, so that we wonder: where does that spark live? What would happen if it did arrive perfectly made into the world? Art doesn't happen in a museum, not even in a painter's studio, not even in the space between pencil and paper; those are incidentals, faint traceries around the swirling whirlwind
of art that lives in every human moment.

How does art serve life? How dare you even pose the question? Rather ask how your life serves your art.

SEE IF THEY WET THEIR PANTS

2005-11-27T14:51:00.000-08:00

The words Guru, Swami, Super Swami, Master, Teacher, Murshid,
Yogi, Priest,

most of those sporting such a title are
just peacocks.

The litmus test is:
hold them upside down over a cliff for a few hours.
If they don't wet their pants

maybe you found a real
one.

--KABIR

(translated by Daniel Ladinsky, from "Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West")

"The Politics of Meaning" and mail

2005-11-26T05:23:00.000-08:00

From Michael Lerner's book "The Politics of Meaning":

"The recipients of instrumental government caring do not get the idea that their economic entitlements represent an act of caring by society as a whole. Consequently, they do not feel particularly grateful. Rather, they hear themselves being discussed as a social problem that must be managed and controlled, and the benefits they are receiving appear to be part of a scheme whereby others (who have more wealth than they do) will exercise social control. To the recipients, these acts of instrumental caring actually feel more like patronizing and paternalistic gestures, not like genuine attempts to treat them as equally-cared for members of a concerned community. Some recipients feel guilty and ashamed; others feel angry and full of rages; few feel gratitude. The rage intensifies when their inability to find jobs at a living wage is blamed on them, and they are characterized as having created a pathological culture of poverty that keeps them from enjoying the opportunities that would otherwise be theirs.
Nor does the way in which services and benefits are delivered express an ethos of caring. Governmental officials who originally entered public service precisely because they desired to care for others soon discover that they are not rewarded for the degree of caring that they show to the public. on the contrary, such concerned behaviour is seen as soft and foolishly idealistic. The task of government workers is to administer people and things, to provide benefits and services that are often underfunded - and hence, incapable of creating the goals for which they were created. Overextended in demand and greeted with suspicion or outright hostility by some recipients of the services they provide, government officials soon develop a protective emotional shell that makes it difficult for them to act in a way that conveys genuine caring to the public. At best, what the public receives is objective caring (namely some service or economic benefit is really being given to them) in a way that does not feel subjectively, genuinely caring.
As a result, even though we continually benefit from government services that may objectively represent our mutual generosity and willingness to care for others, it is very rare for us to feel that we directly experience that generosity and caring. Even services that are provided efficiently and at relatively low cost, such as the US Mail, rarely feel like a manifestation of collective caring. Our actual benevolence is rendered invisible, and hence fails to create in us the sense that we belong to a world that benefits from mutual goodness and generosity of spirit, as manifested through the mechanisms of government."

***********

Yesterday as Martin and I were riding our bikes home from the Natural History Museum, he said to me, "Keep your eyes peeled for a mailbox; I've got to post something."
A few minutes later, as we were stopped at a traffic light, he peered around and dashed behind me. I turned to see him handing his letter to the driver of a US Mail truck idling behind us. As we started riding again, she honked and waved.
"She took my letter!" Martin said and we both grinned with glee. And I was filled with wonder at the miracle of us humans - not too many thousand years ago, with only sticks and stones as our tools - having organized a system that has the power to deliver a small object to a precise location, anywhere in a gigantic continent, within a few days, for the cost of a piece of currency so negligible to us that we allow piles of it to collect beneath our couch cushions.
The ability to take that miracle for granted being perhaps even more amazing than the miracle in the first place.

Weekend assortment

2005-10-14T11:33:00.000-07:00

Free kirtan at Inspire Yoga tonight with Dave Stringer...

Musical performance at Dumbarton Oaks, my favorite garden in DC, on Saturday night...

I'm teaching a workshop on building a yoga home practice on Sunday afternoon at Studio Serenity....

Indian virtuoso Ravi Shankar performs at the Strathmore Theatre with his daughter Anoushka Sunday night...

"Passion Play" at the Arena Stage

2005-10-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

So I'm theatre buddies with this amazing 90-year old man I met at my office - he's a real inspiration: still plays tennis, writing his memoirs, just went on a tour of Croatia, smart as a whip, and glowing with happiness. I wrote about him before, here.

We went to see "Passion Play" at the Arena Stage last night. It's a long play, with three acts that cover the staging of the medieval "passion play" of the crucifixion of Christ during different time periods, with recurring archetypal characters. Sarah Ruhl is the playwright - she won a Pulitzer a few years ago for her play "The Clean House" - and she wrote in the play notes that she was particularly interested in how peoples' lives were affected by playing these characters year after year. (How would you feel if you channeled Jesus Christ in front of a crowd of thousands, twenty years in a row?)

The first act is set in England during the Protestant Reformation (so the Catholic play gets shut down mid-act by Queen Elizabeth) and features a Virgin Mary actress who has a sleazy affair with the village fishmonger (who plays Pontius Pilate), gets pregnant, and claims that she had a dream where God told her he was going to give her a baby so she could play the part of the Virgin Mary more convincingly. There's naturally a bit of controversy about her fellow villagers.

The second act is in a small town in Germany, Oberammergau, in 1934 - many of the actors in the play are members of the Nazi party, and they focus their Passion Play on incriminating Jews for the murder of Jesus. It includes a real historical speech by Hitler, which he gave when he visited a passion play (six weeks after the Night of the Long Knives.)

After the second act, my theater buddy, Lincoln, told me, amazingly enough, that he'd actually seen the Passion Play in Oberammergau that same year! He'd been in London on a Rhodes Scholarship, and had planned a Rhineland tour. "It wasn't quite the same atmosphere as the play portrayed," he said. "It was in July, so it was much sunnier and brighter. And the Nazi party hadn't really solidified their political control yet. I met a lot of intellectuals who complained bitterly about 'that Austrian house-painter.' "

And the third act is set in South Dakota and features a Pontius Pilate actor who returns as a Vietnam vet, and some rather funny cameos by Ronald Reagan.

Here's one review that gives a
pretty good flavor:
http://www.curtainup.com/passionplaydc.html

Some critics thought it was too sprawling and messy, and indeed the play is stuffed to bursting with symbols and themes and connections, poetic outbursts, complicated jokes, historical references, cameos, and other metaphysical paraphernalia. But I think a lot of the complaints I've read in critical reviews seemed to stem from the critics not being willing to pay attention and give themselves over to the play. It all does really make sense, and even the surrealist parts are beautifully connected to other themes, and the whole shambling, coruscating, gargantuan, slobbering whole of the play is so much greater than the sum of the parts.

Really, it was brilliant. It's still on for four more days - until the 16th - and if you're at all interested in theater, and if you like a challenge, I highly recommend it.

I'm going back to see it again tonight, to give you some idea of my enthusiasm...

Cai Guo Qiang was much louder than Dar Williams

2005-10-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

Who's cooler than a guy whose full time job is organizing massive fireworks displays with subversive political messages in symbolic public places?

I've written about Cai-Guo Qiang before:
http://dclagniappe.blogspot.com/2005/01/gape-at-cai-guo-qiangs-traveler.html

So I was excited when I heard that he'd be organizing a fireworks display over the river last Saturday, in a prime spot for viewing from the Kennedy Center.

Some friends and I rushed out early from an extremely mediocre Dar Williams concert at the 9:30 club*, and the Parking Gods were smiling on us, because we found a spot on 24th St. Even someone who didn't know where the Kennedy Center was would have been able to go there easily, because the streets and sidewalks were full of this strange, lemming-like crowd of people walking in that direction, chatting and laughing with that particular excited vibe of people who are about to watch loud, colourful explosions.

We made it to the Kennedy Center balcony just in time - it was completely full and I noticed the preponderance of families.** I guess those guys all read the Washington Post Sunday Source very diligently.

The display started with a series of rainbow coloured streamers over the river, and continued on with some interesting and beautiful coloured fireworks in very artistic patterns, cool jiggly streamers, gradually crescendo-ing until the whole river was topped in smoke and the air reeked of gunpowder. The fireworks display was exactly what you would get if someone who was trained in colour theory and composition, not just engineering cool pyrotechnics, was running the show.

And then it stopped, with that orgasmic finale that seems common to fireworks shows, and a few final, post-coital bangs from the late-starters.

The crowd seemed satisfied, and there was the rustling noise of people who are getting ready to leave.

I was bitterly disappointed.

I said to Jaiva, "I was expecting some kind of conceptual statement! I mean, that was cool and fun, but I always thought that Cai Guo Qiang's works would always have a larger message than pure aesthetics. Particularly with this location and at this time, it seems like there are so many more things he could do..."

BANG!! BANG!! BANG!!!!

All at once my griping was interrupted by a series of massive, staccato explosions. They all went off in a swarm, pure white light - no colours in these - and clustered together like a swarm of bees - or like a cloud of machine gun fire. Everyone in the audience was shrieking and Jaiva had grabbed my back in fright, almost falling over.

Then it was over. My ears were ringing. Through the ringing I could hear the murmurous sounds of thousands of parents consoling their freaked-out children. "Mummy what's happening was it a terrorist attack?"

"Gosh, that's so interesting," I began to pontificate. "I think it must be a message about - "

BANG!! BANG!! BANG!!!!

And again the explosions came. It was an absolutely primal experience; even the second time around, our first reaction was unmitigated terror that struck directly to the gut without the intermediation of the head. Gigantic noises tend to do that to a human being. The audience noise again was shocked and startled, but after the initial shock there was an undercurrent of paranoia. Was the show over? What was going to happen?

I started pontificating again and I'd just started on about the war on terror, the recent spate of natural disasters, the potential commentary on us fat bourgeoisie types who want to have nice aesthetic experiences and shield ourselves from the more visceral experiences of the brutalities of nature or fellow man - which has the side effect of dulling our empathy and our social consciences - when, for a third time:

BANG!! BANG!! BANG!!!!

After a nice juicy pause for the now thoroughly shell-shocked crowd to debate amongst themselves when this ordeal was going to end (Little girl to her mother: "Mummy, he's TRICKING US!"), the Kennedy Center balcoony fountains, which had been turned off, resumed flowing again - and this time we could all really leave.

Cai Guo-Qiang, you are a magnificent performance artist, a masterful manipulator of crowd dynamics, and you must have some kind of magical hypnotic ability to get your plans past government bureaucrats and convince them that an obviously political anti-war piece - which ended up alarming DC residents all over the city who deluged 9-11 with anxious calls about terrorist attacks - is only about hurricanes. I salute you, Sir. I salute you.

______________________________________________________________

*I went with two friends who'd never heard her before and who agreed to come on my assurances that she was a fun performer. I thought loved Dar Williams on the basis of her live album, which includes snippets of witty crowd banter, but her performance last Saturday was like a nightmarish amalgam of all of the more annoying aspects of her personality: the anti-cool/cool hipsterness, the aw-shucks kumbaya moral sincerity, the obsession with teenage angst. I might still have enjoyed myself, since I go for cheesy stuff sometimes, but spent way too much energy worrying about how my friends weren't enjoying themselves and had just wasted $25 on their concert tickets.

**Including a large number of white parents with adopted Asian babies. I've become sensitive to spotting adopted families ever since I used to fly back and forth to Moscow on Delta (the airline of choice for couples who'd just picked up their adopted Russian baby). Moscow -> New York flights would seriously have like 15 couples staring incredulously and lovingly at their freaked-out toddlers, and I used to enjoy hearing their war conversations about paperwork battles with pissed-off provincial official babushkas who didn't like admitting the fact that Mother Russia couldn't handle taking care of its children and had to give them away to the West.

When the cat's away the mice will play....

2005-10-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting very much recently... my muse has been concentrating on a few other things in my life. I just looked at my comments section after a few weeks and there were all these spam comments with links...geez. I'd like to not agree with my geeky friends who lament that the internet is doomed and will choke on spam, but...

Upcoming workshops at Studio Serenity

2005-09-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

September 30th - Yoga Nidra with Katja
October 2nd - Ashtanga workshop with Para
October 16th - Home practice workshop with me

Human music

2005-09-10T05:31:00.000-07:00

When you tune a guitar, the most important thing is not the absolute pitch of the strings but their relation to each other. So you hold the fifth fret of the lowest string, and then pluck the next-highest string. The two notes should be the same. Then you do the same for the next-highest string and the next-next highest, and so forth. Eventually, the whole guitar is in tune with itself, each string vibrating in harmonic proportion to the next. At that point lives in the guitar the potential for all the music that exists in the universe.

Sometimes, though, when you're tuning, it doesn't quite work out. The top string doesn't match the bottom string, so you twiddle the knob. Then it's higher, so you twiddle the knob back again. Then it's lower. Twiddle, twiddle. At a certain point you've scrutinized the sounds so many times you're not even sure which string is higher or lower, you just know that they're different. It's as though some combination of heat, humidity, and sheer molecular dissatisfaction is making that tuning knob slither back and forth defiantly past its sweet spot.

Eventually, perhaps, you give up, do your best, and move on to the next string. But now the guitar is out of tune and all your little mistakes snowball, the strings' vibrations careening around like balls on a pool table, and a hesitant strum across the belly of the instrument yields a jangly caterwaul, as if you were scraping your fingernails across a dying cat.

Human moods are a bit like that. After being played for a while - or, simply sitting still through the changing weather - all our little tuning knobs slip to one side or the other, and we begin to jangle. At that point, if we want to make any music at all, it's necessary to take a little time and get back into tune. If our tuning knobs are a bit sticky, perhaps it's necessary to remove them, clean them, and put the instrument back together. This may be quite time consuming, but what's the alternative, if we want music and not a jangle?

Hatha yoga is one of the most effective ways I've found so far to tune a human guitar. Of course, sometimes physical yoga isn't what's called for. The best tuning method may instead be sitting meditation, mantra chanting, a hot bath, a nourishing meal, a clarifying conversation with a loved one, the fulfillment of a procrastinated-on duty, or perhaps a stroll through a cemetary. Whatever shape it takes, though, this tuning process is one of the most important things we can learn as human beings, to live our lives melodiously.

I went to an Indian sitar concert where the instruments were so delicate, subtle, and finely pitched that the musicians re-tuned them in between each half-hour raga. But these sitars were just made of wood, glue and string. Our human instruments are made of body, mind, and spirit. Is our tuning any less important, for the kind of music we'd like to play?

Hurricane Katrina benefit at Studio Serenity, 9/9

2005-09-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

Hurricane 'Katrina' Benefit: Heart-Opening Yoga

After the storm that has wreaked havoc on so many homeless refugees in the New Orleans area, we are all reminded of our lucky lives and the power that each of us has to directly reach out and help others. This disaster has created a very real need and the donations from this charity event will go directly towards providing food, shelter, and medical services to the people stricken by Hurricane Katrina.
Join Zoe Konovalov for a 90-minute yoga practice where we will also provide handouts and contacts for supporting and volunteering with the Red Cross and other disaster relief agencies.
We will begin with a flowing warm-up practice, and move towards more restorative poses with a focus on stretching the chest and shoulders to open the heart and release our wellsprings of compassion. The class will finish with some meditations on gratitude.

Hurricane 'Katrina' Benefit: Heart-Opening Yoga

Teacher: Zoe Konovalov

When: Friday Sept 09, 2005
Where: Studio Serenity, 2469 18th St NW
www.studioserenity.com
(202) 491-4151
Time: 7:30-9:00
Cost: $20 donation will go to Red Cross efforts to aid disaster victims

Kindly pre-register by sending an email to workshop@studioserenity.com or by signing up at the studio. Namaste.

Not Enlightened Any More

2005-08-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Lord, perhaps one day
you'll remove the veils from my sight;
I'll dive into the river of light -
a thirsty fish, and all the ocean.

And then, perhaps,
jump back out
to the bank
amidst your hard rocks, muddy trees
like a silly child
at a border crossing:
"I'm in France! I'm in Germany!
France!
Germany!"

Or like me, now,
on this corporeal rock
in this solid wet river,
dipping my foot
in and out
of the water.

It will be, perhaps, the biggest
joke of all:
"Enlightened! Not enlightened!
Enlightened!
Not enlightened!"

My brother's recipe for baked cauliflower-cheese

2005-08-18T19:01:00.000-07:00

INGREDIENTS:
Lots of butter
Blue cheese
Cheddar cheese
One pint heavy cream
Flour
Milk
One tbsp English mustard
Oh yes, and a cauliflower

PROCEDURE
1. Heat some butter in a deep frying pan, and, when it's melted, add some flour and stir it in with a wooden spoon. Keep stirring until the flour has all been absorbed by the butter (you'll have a sort of thick paste in the frying pan). If you run out of flour and it still looks a bit wet, add more flour. If it looks a bit dry, add more butter. Continue until you get bored and/or you run out of butter.

2. Pour in a bit of milk and stir until it's absorbed. Quickly decide that milk is inadequate for your purposes, and switch to heavy cream. Stir into the butter/flour paste until you have a large quantity of thick, gloopy white paste.

3. Gloat for a while about how smooth and creamy the sauce is.

4. Still stirring maniacally, start adding pieces of blue cheese and cheddar cheese into the mix. The blue:cheddar proportion depends on how strong you want the sauce to be, so it's important to keep on dipping the spoon in to taste and check. Every time you taste, you must sigh, "Oh, this is so good! It's so rich!"

5. Keep on going until you've run out of cheese, and/or your deep frying pan is completely full of sauce. It should be even thicker and gloopier, with a deep yellow sheen of grease whenever you stir it.

6. Chop your cauliflower into florets and boil them for a minute or two until they're slightly cooked; drain.

7. Add a tablespoon of mustard to the sauce and stir it in. Taste again and practically faint with rapture. Take a picture of yourself posing as you stir the glorious sauce.

8. Put the cooked cauliflower florets into an oven safe baking dish and pour the creamy sauce on top of them. If you've done this right the dish should be like an ocean of sauce with a few lonely cauliflowers poking out here and there. Top with a few breadcrumbs (which will immediately soak with grease for that golden crispy effect).

9. Scrape the last little bits of sauce from the pan with a spoon and eat them.

10. Bake in a hot oven for half an hour or until golden brown and bubbling and your whole kitchen is full of a tantalizing caramelized cheese aroma.

11. Serve. If your guests are at all calorie-conscious, tell them that you used skim milk.

Cow skull anyone?

2005-08-17T18:34:00.000-07:00

From a letter to my friends:

*****************

Hi all,

So my mum's farm is full of these Galloway cows roaming around, and it seems that Australian cattlemen have invented their own version of aHindu sacred cow, because there is a Galloway Cattle Society and a Galloway Cattle Review Magazine and lots of glossy coffee table booksof the History of the Galloway Cattle Breed through the ages with endless archived black & white photos of cows at cattle shows (which all look the same to me but I suppose that's what white Americans used to say about Chinese people). These guys are obsessed!

But the point of this story is that the hills of her farm are beflowered with cow skulls and bones, all bleached white by the 100% Australian sun. If I was a priest perhaps I could commune with these skulls, and if I was Hamlet perhaps I would lament that alas I knew them well, but I am just Zoe and I reckon that they could be the next big thing in interior design.

Just imagine the possibilities! You could hang a skull on a string and make a punk rock mobile with danging safety pins and razor blades. You could paint it like an egg and save it for Easter. You could arrange it on a stylish wood table with a bowl of fruit and a musical instrument for a still life worthy of the old Dutch painters. You could arrange it next to a statue of Shiva for a little altar dedicated to the remembrance of mortality, the observance of which is certain to make breakfast taste extra good every day. Oh, the mind boggles...

In short, let me know if you'd like me to bring you a cow skull. They're plentifully strewn across the hills, and I've got a lot of room in my luggage, so come one, come all!

As an added bonus I promise to hose off all the little dried pieces of bullshit. Since we live in DC, we certainly don't need any more of that.

Love,

Zoe

*******************
So far I've had five orders and I'm starting to get a bit worried about the possible scene in Customs. Ah well, last year I convinced them to wrap up my walking stick and check it specially, since it wouldn't fit in my bags.

The emu ate my baby

2005-08-14T21:23:00.000-07:00

I went to the Tidbinbilla nature reserve in Canberra with my brother yesterday, where we had a chance to witness the phoenix-fast resurrection of the eucalypt forest there.

Australia's a natural tinderbox of a country: hot, and dry, and full of trees juicy with highly-flammable eucalyptus oil. Before white people came, Aboriginals used to practice natural forest management by setting small, controllable fires at appropriate times depending on the weather. But now that we've taken over the wilderness, our forests are primed to explode at any moment.

It happened in Canberra three years ago: massive bushfires scorched forested hillsides bald.
Entire neighborhoods in outlying suburbs were burned down. It was so fast and hot that wildlife were roasted alive; cooked koala carcasses fell from the trees and to lie with their limbs sticking up in the air.

There was only one known animal survivor of the bushfires: a koala now known as "Lucky", found huddled in the hollow of a tree, nearly comatose, dehydrated, with singed-off fur. It was a perfect Aussie rallying symbol and the Tidbinbilla park rangers whisked Lucky away to their animal hospital where they put her on an IV drip and treated her wounds. Lucky can now be seen rehabilitating in the Tidbinbilla reserve where she keeps to a koala's ideal schedule: lolling in a state of supreme relaxation in the fork of a tree munching eucalyptus leaves, with perhaps a midafternoon excursion to a neighboring tree branch, followed by another long rest to recover from the exertion. Her damaged tufted ears and swaths of pink healed scars where fur had been burned away makes her resemble an aging punk rocker, resting in the sun, beer-belly up.

Lucky noshes on gum leaves

Unlike animals and houses, however, eucalyptus trees thrive on fire - to restore the vitality of their soil and, in some cases, even to open their seed-pods - and their regrowth is marvellous to see. Trees that are entirely blackened, with dead scorched branches twisted in the air like witches' fingers, grow new branches directly from their trunks. You can see it here in this picture: the branches are dead, and the tree-trunk is covered with leaves.

It's hard to kill a eucalyptus tree

After we'd wandered around in the regrowing forest, we decided to take a walk in a field with a flock of emus. Here's a picture of the huge birds, peacefully at a distance:

Tranquil emus

When we got a bit closer, our dog, Fenris (an alarmingly militaristic-minded golden retriever), decided it would be a good idea to run, barking, at the emus - perhaps he got the idea from his fondness for chasing cows or kangaroos at my mum's farm. Unlike cows or kangaroos, however, the emus didn't flee. The leader of the emus - a huge, scruffy bird with demonic red eyes - puffed up his neck feathers and rushed at Fenris with the eerie speed of a velociraptor from Jurassic Park. Fenris turned and ran, tail between his legs, whereupon the emu made a few terrifying dashes at me and my brother, croaking and jabbing with its beak. My life flashed between my eyes when the emu circled around us and blocked our escape route at the top of the hill, and I started to wonder, "All this lead-up? All this travelling, wondering, and dreaming, just to go down in history as another emu fatality?"

Amazingly, my brother had the presence of mind to snap a picture, as he was running away backwards from the emu:

Evil attacking emu

I think the snap could be from a movie, you know, where they develop the film from the mysteriously dead man's camera, and the last shot is an out-of-focus monster, rushing up.

Eventually, however, the emu must have decided that we were sufficiently terrified and retreated to a safe distance, casting us a glowing red glare as we dashed back to the parking lot as fast as we could.

When we'd made it to safety, Fenris plopped down in a little pond where he floated on his belly for a while, taking some contemplative gulps of water. He had a tremendously satisfied expression on his doggy face and although I'd like to think the moral he gleaned from the episode was Never Piss Off an Attack-Emu, I suspect his real lesson was something like, Barking Loudly at Emus Yields Extremely Exciting Results.

One of my rare blog entries about work

2005-08-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

I just danced an jig with Mary Robinson and Senator McCain in a huge ranch in the hills of Aspen. Mary Robinson has very nimble feet. I can see why she was so popular in Ireland. Diane Feinstein hired a country western band to play at the dinner and they had all the famous people singing drunkenly in a circle about the hills of Colorado. I took my shoes off and I was doing high kicks, at one point narrowly missing George Soros' head as he chatted with his gorgeous young Chinese girlfriend.

Madeleine Albright was wearing a gigantic suede shirt with huge shoulderpads and several layers of long, floppy fringed tassels, and a bright turquoise leather cowboy hat. She had a whole plate full of ribs.

Queen Noor was wearing an exquisite silk shirt with intricately hand embroidered tiny mirrors all over it. I thought she was flirting with Al Gore, but that's just my opinion. She gave us her email address so that we could keep in touch with her about global poverty. It was an AOL account; I don't know why I thought that was so strange.

The sunset from the ranch looked like an Ansel Adams photograph, if you stared at it while you were on acid and then fell asleep and dreamed about it. There was a double rainbow peeking through the violet clouds.

Gosh, I'm drunk. There was an open bar every ten meters and Diane Feinstein has good taste in Scotch.

Global Poverty Menu

2005-08-05T20:10:00.000-07:00

We had a dinner at the Aspen Institute and Al Gore gave his slide show about global warming to the group. It was an extremely well done presentation, and Gore was clearly passionate - but I can see why he turned a lot of American voters off. His passion can seem a bit like self-righteous anger, like, "I'm right about this guys! You've got to listen to me or you'll get into trouble!" Which is totally true...but politically, it's off-putting. Anyway, I loved the presentation and I'm glad that he's putting so much effort into these issues - the man really does have remarkable vision about the important issues facing the world, from his work with the internet, to this. He's starting a new open source TV network and I'll be interested to follow what he does with it.

I stole the menu from dinner, and I think I'm going to take it home and frame it. I reproduce it here for you, although the irony is much better when you actually see the menu, with the heavy cardstock paper and the fancy printing.

Yep, global poverty. It's, like, so sad. All those poor people, I bet they've never even tasted a really good chevre! We've totally got to help them.

************************************

CONFERENCE ON GLOBAL POVERTY
Thursday, Augsut 4th, 2005

SALAD
European baby greens, chevre goat cheese and prickly pear vinaigrette

ENTREE
Buffalo ribeye, blueberry demi herb mashers and baby vegetables
OR
Lemon baked Alaskan halibut with pineapple mango salsa, asparagus and tuxedo orze
OR
Roasted red pepper polenta with grilled vegetables

DESSERT
Chocolate ecstasy cake and raspberry coulis

Luminaries

2005-08-05T16:01:00.000-07:00

Al Gore is one of the guests at our star studded Aspen conference on global poverty and two nights ago he called Emily, our administrative assistant, at 11pm on her cell phone. "Hello, Emily? This is Al Gore. I've lost my laptop." So now she has Al Gore's number saved on her cell phone. We joked that she should get drunk one night and call him back. "Hello, Al Gore? This is Emily. I've lost my car keys."

By the way, Al did get his laptop back. He'd left it on his friend's private jet.

Aspen is a very beautiful town. But there are more women with plastic surgery here than I've ever seen in my life.

Back to Oz...

2005-08-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving tomorrow morning to go to a conference in Aspen on global poverty. Yes, I know the irony is astounding. The main funder of the project I work for is a billionaire investment banker who's into Buddhism; he has a huge ranch on the hills of Aspen with sweeping views and gigantic tapestries of Buddhist mandalas. Uh huh.

And then I'll be going to Australia straight from Aspen, for two weeks to visit my brother. So I probably won't be posting very much for a while. But I'll let you guys know about any particularly fun things to do in Australia...

Party with 900 international types

2005-07-27T05:44:00.000-07:00

A World Bank evite has spun out of control ... so I figured I'd add to the madness. Tonight, in Georgetown on the waterfront.

Refuse a police search on the DC metro

2005-07-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

From my friend Steve, founder of www.flexyourrights.org. If you are stopped for a random bag search, Flex Your Rights has an excellent primer on how to refuse on their blog. Incidentally, another fun thing to do in DC is host a screening of Busted, Flex Your Rights' guide to handling police encounters more generally. It's a great excuse for a party.

*************************************************************

Dear Just About Everyone I Know in DC Who Might Take the Metro:

Any day now Mayor Williams might cave into pressure to implement New York style random bag searches on the Metro. All I know now is that they are considering it but wouldn't be surprised if random searches go into effect within the next few days.

I also wouldn't be surprised if Metro police were to begin random searches this week -- perhaps before an official announcement is made. That's why I need your eyes.

Specifically, I need you to CALL my cell immediately at 202-607-9501 if you see random police searches happening in the Metro. I imagine that the first day of DC Metro searches will be greeted by lots of media cameras. As such we want to get in or near that Metro where searches are happening to pass out Flex Your Rights literature reminding people that they should refuse police searches.

We're staying on top of print media stories, so please don't forward me articles. But please call me if you have information from officials who might know if and when random searches will be starting and, of course, if you see searches happening.

Thanks for your help,
Steve

Trance dancing with Neva

2005-07-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

Neva, the wonderful teacher at the Hot Yoga studio, is having a trance dance workshop on Friday night at 7:30pm, which will be absolutely magnificent.

To register in advance ($15) click here.

***************************

Since recorded history of mankind there has been a striving for something beyond the limited, physical and mundane. Great devotees of this quest developed yoga, which means fusion between the physical and the divine. The understanding that this divine spark exists within the temple of the human body has lead mystics to delve into the science of body, mind, and spirit integration. Sacred or divine dance has been esteemed as an expression and a striving towards, the human-divine connection. Ultimately this striving is for the joy of complete union. Today the longing for inner fulfillment continues to inspire us. Through Chakra dance enjoy connecting with tribal rhythms, elemental imagery and archetypal expression. In 21st century terms explore this organic process of renewal and healing in an evening of rejuvenation & empowerment, stillness & ecstatic movement, silence & celebration.

3408 Wisconsin Avenue, NW (Suite 205)
Washington, DC 20016
(202) HOT-YOGA (468-9642)
www.hotyogausa.com
info@hotyogausa.com

Yoga class reading, 7/21/05: Things to Think by Robert Bly

2005-07-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

Things to Think
BY ROBERT BLY

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Another paean to Epitonic.com: music to eat cotton candy by

2005-07-19T14:58:00.000-07:00

What a great website.

Previously, rainy day music.

Black Box Recorder:

"The Art of Driving" is a damn sexy song. And the next time I'm making out with an aggressive cutie, I'm gonna start warbling "Because a heart-felt seduction lasts a lifetime...You've been driving way too fast..."

Call and Response

It's an incredibly catchy song about rollerskating, suitable for singing as you ride your bike fast downhill with no hands. "You've got to learn how to stop/Before you do the bunny hop."

John Vanderslice:

In particular, the first MP3 listed ("Me and My 424"). It's just a damn good song, suitable for enthusiastic waltzing with a teddy bear, alone in the bedroom.

Mull Historical Society:

Sweet and happy. I wouldn't write an arts thesis on it, but this would be fine for a soundtrack for a montage scene from an indie romantic comedy film.

Versus:

Especially the song "I Love the WB."

XXX-treme yoga

2005-07-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

Teaching a last-minute substitute class on Friday, I miraculously made it to the studio half an hour early. I decided to take advantage of my extra time by setting up an extra-nice atmosphere: tea light candles everywhere, incense, sprays of room freshener, carefully-calibrated lighting, etcetera.

The class started very well. Then, as I was demonstrating a chataranga (slowly lowered pushup) I smelled something harsh and sulfurous - and looked up to see that a lock of my hair was burning: big, flickering flames like a candle. "Oh my gosh, your hair's on fire!" said Chaka, a student in the front row. I reached quickly to bat it out. "Okay, hang in a forward fold for five breaths," I told the students to give myself a chance to regain composure. There were little pieces of hair ash all over my yoga mat.

At the end of class Chaka teased me, "Your crown chakra was really on fire tonight..."

Tea-lights go on the windowsill from now on.

Clarification

2005-07-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

I was trying to be pretty funny in my last post, but I hope I made it clearly that I'm totally disgusted with myself. For heaven's sake, how immature can you get? I went to a wonderful Durga Das kirtan last night, and met so many happy glowing yogis who were all, "I went to see Amma last night - it was so amazing!" I didn't mention to them that I spent the bulk of my evening sulking.

Hugging a saint is harder than it might seem

2005-07-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

I'd done a lot of fun things in DC before, but I'd never hugged a saint, so I had no idea what to expect.

Martin was coming with me, with special expectations for Amma all his own. In the year 2000 he was taking a road trip with some friends. They got into a terrible car crash in a small town far from home - nobody was hurt but the car was totalled. While waiting in the wrecking yard watching the old car get crushed, they called up a newspaper ad for a beat-up used car and explained their plight: they were broke college students, with no way to get home. The owner of the car in the ad drove an hour and a half to show the car to them, dropped the price by three hundred dollars, invited them to her home for the evening, cooked them dinner and let them sleep there that night. Martin and his friends drove away the next morning, overwhelmed by her generosity. The car she'd sold them was a fantastic old clunker - and covered, windshield to bumper, with "Amma" stickers.

Amma's website was fairly uninformative, just requesting that you collect your token an hour beforehand and bring a pillow to sit on. There would be a spiritual ceremony at 7:30, after which Amma's followers would get the chance to line up for a "darshan," or hug. The website had one little section describing the age-old concept of a "pilgrimage": once upon a time, people were willing to travel for weeks or even months, just for a brief visit to a holy site or to catch a glimpse of a saint. Now, the website said, we just have to catch the metro and sit in line; however the reader was implored to bring the same patient attitude as pilgrims past. There was a rather ominous mention of Amma's endurance, how she often worked all night hugging her crowds of followers until 4 in the morning. I'd been invited to a barbecue that same night, and had breezily assured the host that I could definitely make it, on the late side, after I'd gotten my hug. Perhaps that was false confidence, I decided. I resolved to let go of any expectations of the evening, and, although I am skeptical of cults of personality, to simply open my heart to the experience of waiting in expectation with my spiritual brothers and sisters. It was a very nice, and - in retrospect - an insanely ambitious resolution.

I agreed to meet Martin at the corner of 21st and K after work, when we'd bike the Mt Vernon trail to Crystal City (an exercise we'd done previously, when going to see Krishna Das perform in Alexandria, and thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful trail with views.) By the time I met him, around a quarter to six, the raindrops were fat and heavy.

"Let's take the metro," I suggested. "My brakes aren't very good and I need to take my bike to the shop."

"It'll be fine," Martin said. "We can just ride slow."

"But it won't be very enjoyable right now. What's the point in killing ourselves?"

"It's rush hour. We can't take the bikes on the metro."

"Well, we were planning to take the metro home in the darkness anyway," I said. "Why don't we just leave the bikes here in the city? We're going to get soaked and I bet the hotel will have the AC blasting, we're gonna be freezing."

"No way," Martin said. "I'm biking over. This is supposed to be like a pilgrimage." And he began riding away. As I followed him, my brows were already knotting together, almost as stormy as the sky over our heads - and I wasn't sure if the growling rolls of thunder I heard were real or just my own internal soundtrack.

(You probably need some backstory for this argument: two weeks ago, I'd joined Martin and two of his visiting friends for dinner at Dukem. I took Neva's yoga class first, got myself hot, ridiculously sweaty, and tired, and then stepped outside into a rainstorm. I took a bus to the dinner, still in my skimpy yoga clothes, and shivered in its intense AC. I was freezing by the time I arrived at the restaurant, only to find that our table was right underneath an AC vent - and I was still soaking wet. By the end of the evening my bones felt cold and my teeth were chattering, only to get into an air-conditioned car and wait around while Martin showed his friend a few sights. It was ridiculous - Washington D.C. in the middle of July, and I haven't felt that cold even when I was living in Moscow in -30 C weather. I should have just excused myself from the dinner, gone home and taken a hot bath - but idiotically, I decided to try to be a martyr. Dear reader, take it from me: there's no point in being an insincere martyr, because nobody else is ever going to appreciate the depth of your suffering and you won't get any credit for it. Mine was a profoundly insincere and ineffectual martyrdom, because I spent the entire evening internally lamenting how miserable I felt, and resenting Martin for not noticing how unhappy I was and sweeping me away to somewhere warm. How dare he ignore my suffering? Look at him over there, warm and dry and laughing and having a good time, while icicles form on my eyelashes. Etcetera, etcetera. I am frankly too embarassed to tell you any more details.)

Anyway, as we began riding through the torrential downpour, I had a sinking suspicion that my resolution to maintain inner calm and receptivity was going to be tested pretty damn quick. The rush hour traffic whizzed past us, car wheels splashing through puddles and spraying solid sheets of mud in my face, and the rain was stinging my eyes and blinding me, so that every few seconds I'd have to wipe my eyes, making my bike swerve precariously and occasionally forcing me to slam on my nails-on-a-chalkboard brakes: KKKRCKKKHH!!! And yet I was going to see Amma, damn it, I was going to get there, it was the last night of her visit to DC, and it was important to get a ticket as soon as possible to avoid waiting around until 3am.

Zzzzoom, splash, KKKRCKKHH! Focus on the breath, I thought to myself. The mind can make a hell of heaven, heaven of hell - or, in Hamlet's words, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams...' You're riding your bike in the rain, that's a fact and you're stuck with it, but your attitude about it is your choice. It can be a painful drag or it can be an exhilarating wrestling match with Nature - the difference is only in your perspective. Remember your lucky life, your good health, your love, your amazing fortune to meet a spiritual leader. Try to focus on your anticipation of Amma.

These things were all true, but nonetheless the actual thoughts in my brain were a surging, meanspirited jumble that went more like this: This is terrible. I'm going to be so cold in that hotel. Why did I let Martin push me around? He totally didn't even care that I was going to suffer! Look at him riding over there with that smug look on his face. Oh, the rain is hurting my eyes, I can't see. Fuck that car over there - yeah, you, you're an asshole driver. Oh, shit, I'm the asshole. Why am I getting so angry about this? I'm so cold. My shoes are squelching and I'm dirty. Why did I let Martin push me around - just like my mum let my dad push her around... And repeat, for the duration of the half hour bike ride.

At one point Martin called over to me, "You doing ok, babe?" and I yelled back, "No, this fucking sucks!" The witchy, ugly screech of my voice in my own ears startled me.

By the time we'd reached the Hyatt hotel, the rain had stopped and I'd calmed down a little bit. There were crowds of people streaming through the entrance who, I'm pretty sure, didn't make it a habit of visiting Hyatts in Crystal City: Indian families in brightly colored silk; hippie couples with dreadlocks and beads, clutching prayer cushions; Rastafarians in tall turbans; and groups of freshly-scrubbed people with glowing, angelic faces, wearing white robes. They all looked very comfortable, clean, warm, and dry, I noticed, as I reached up to brush some of the road mud off my cheek.

The Amma organizers had rented out one of the big conference rooms and lobbies in the second floor underground of the Hyatt; there were groups of smiling people in white robes and red sashes to direct the crowds down to the entryway where you were to take off your shoes. It was the kind of space I'd never imagine even on the craziest acid trip: imagine a vast, underground hotel conference space in a 100% dull corporate motif: from the boring blue and grey abstract designs on the acres of acrylic carpet, to the grey ceilings and nondescript tables, and random cluttered piles of podiums and conference equipment in the corners. Layer on top of that an occasional attempt at decoration: silk saris pinned up on pillars, posters with Amma's smiling face - colourful drops lost in the carpeted ocean. Then fill this huge grey space with kiosks selling Indian snacks; tables with home-made posters and flip-books with information on Amma's extraordinary array of charitable projects; long tables covered with photographs of Amma, mostly close-ups of her smiling face; tables selling Tulsi, or holy basil potted plants ("Personally blessed by Amma!"); sandalwood bracelets or malas ("Worn by Amma! In her room for three months!"); incense; essential oils; crystal beads ("Personally blessed by Amma!"); racks of Indian clothing; silk and wool shawls ("All proceeds from sale go to Amma's charitable works!"); and piles of Amma dolls. And, finally and most importantly, add huge crowds of eager pilgrims: Indian families, hippies, eager laughing children, huge throngs of white-robes, of all ages and colours. Interestingly, most of the people I saw were very physically attractive, whatever their ages: in good shape and health, bright-eyed and vigorous. Probably a lot of them did yoga.

The energy was almost overwhelming, but I wasn't so overwhelmed as to not notice that I was becoming extremely cold. My cotton pants and top were completely soaked and, just as I'd suspected, the place was air-conditioned and drafty. I'd brought a change of clothes in my bag, but everything in my bag was sopping wet. So my thoughts were an interesting mixture of: This is wonderful...feel the positive energy...listen to the Indian musicians...I'm so lucky to be here with the man I love...Fuck, I'm cold...I'm going to be cold for hours...Oh, if only I could be dry...Oh, this is all Martin's fault...Wow, this Amma has a lot of energy...It's inspiring to see what she has accomplished...I like her speech to the UN 50th Anniversary Celebration...although those huge piles of dolls are a bit creepy...Fuck, I'm cold....

All the pilgrims in the huge room sat down to meditate and smiling Amma followers came round with little plastic cups of holy water. "This water has been personally blessed by Amma," the announcer told us. "It has great healing power and you can keep it and sip it slowly over time and share it with your family and friends." He had a strong Indian accent, so the booming voice sounded more like a sing song "Share it with your fam-i-lee and friends."

We sat in meditation and Amma delivered a series of spiritual parables, translated into English by the booming, sing-song announcer. They were heavily laced with amusing stories and aw-shucks jargon: "Love is a funny thing. One day your lover will say to you, I cannot bear to be away for you even for one single moment. Oh darling you are my everything. The next day he might say, Oh, I cannot stand to be near you, even for one single moment. I must run away from you now! This is why we must come to understand a more spiritual type of love. This is illustrated by the story of the man who was sitting in the farmer's house eating a bowl ("bow-ul") of delicious vegetable soup. There was a little pig who was very affectionate to the man: running around his legs, wagging its little tail. The man said to his host, 'Your little pig has really taken a liking to me. I'd like to take one of his relatives for a pet.' The farmer replied, 'I wouldn't judge too quickly - he's acting like that because you're eating out of his bowl.' " Gusts of laughter billowed through the conference room at this tale - proving that there are all types of senses of humour in this world.

For much of the spiritual lecture, I was shivering, and Martin sat behind me, hugging me and rubbing my shoulders for warmth. A middle-aged woman in flowing robes drifted past us and murmured disapprovingly, "Remember that you're in a temple."

After the spiritual lecture, everyone chanted "OM" together several times, and let me tell you that I've rarely experienced anything as powerful as a room with thousands of fervent people chanting OM in unison.

We'd all received tokens for the darshan, to let us know when to get in line. Martin had numbers 800-900, while I had 1300-1400. "How come you're so far ahead of me?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "But I want to get the darshan with you."

"OK, are you going to wait for 1300 with me?"

"No, get into line with me, I'm sure they'll let you."

"Nuh-uh! I'm not skipping in line to see the saint!" I exclaimed. "That's so wrong!"

"Why? It doesn't matter."

"There's plenty of other people who are going to wait just as long as us." I was feeling particularly self-righteous, because I was still pissed off about the rainy bike ride - and steadily getting colder.

A buffet vegetarian dinner was being served in an adjoining conference room for people while they waited for their numbers to come up. As we were standing in line for the dinner I found myself casting a longing eye at the tablecloths. Perhaps I could take one from the tables and wrap it around my shoulders for a bit of warmth. As Martin hugged me from behind and I leaned into his body heat I found myself gazing around at the other pilgrims, wondering if anybody else was going to remind us this was a temple.

Dinner was delicious, fresh and well-spiced vegetable curries, and by the time I'd polished off two heaping plates of food I felt momentarily better. We went back to the main conference room - where it was up to number 500.

At some point I lost Martin in the crowd and wandered around looking for him. You know, I'm sure there's a principle in physics that has to do with feedback mechanisms in finely balanced equilibriums. I'm thinking of a spinning top that starts tipping more and more, or a wobbling person on a tightrope whose wobbles begin to spiral out of control. Something like that was happening to my mood at that point: ecstasy and despair chasing each others' tails in an ever-tightening circle, burning momentum from the spiritual energy fizzing from the crowd. Fuck I'm cold it's Martin's fault - Beautiful Amma an inspiration praise God - where is he, he's got my bag with money and I want to buy a Tulsi plant - All these people here to praise a saint, they really love her - These people are kooky and what's with all the Amma dolls - fuck I'm cold...

And then Martin tapped me on the shoulder. "Where were you?" I said shrilly, again becoming aware of how ugly my voice in my own ears sounded.

"I'm here - I've been meditating."

You've been meditating while I've been freezing my ass off and panicking?

I sat down and sank into my all-time least peaceful yoga Child's pose. Martin came close: "Can I get a hug?" We enjoyed a dramatic and angsty embrace, teeming with love and anger and yearning.

But it didn't take long before a white robe came and tapped me on the shoulder. "Excuse me, but some people were complaining about your behaviour with your partner. Please remember that this is a temple."

Although my sins of the evening were so juicy and numerous that it seems unfair to try to pick a winner, perhaps the gold medal should go to the way I rolled my eyes at the white robe guy, channelling generations of rebellious, be-pimpled teenagers getting kicked out of movie theaters for necking.

Shortly thereafter we realized it was 11:20, the metro closed at midnight, it was still raining, the Mt. Vernon bike trail was pitch dark, and Amma was only up to hugs in the 1000's. We approached the lavishly-decorated podium where Amma was receiving her followers, and explained our plight to one of the organizers. He was a snappy, fiery man with a clipboard, and he asked, "This is your first time to see Amma?"

We nodded pathetically.

"OK, I'll see what I can do. There's just one family of seven left to go up there, and then we're clearing the stage for the next group, but there's a few more to go. It's gonna be tight, gonna be tight." He rushed off with his clipboard and rushed back. "Good news, things have changed. Looks like I can get you on after this family. Are you taking the darshan as a couple?"

We looked at each other. My eyes were still puffy with spite. "Do you want to?" Martin said.

"Yeah..."

We climbed up the little stairs to the stage and shuffled on our knees towards Amma's chair, behind the Indian family. A follower met us with a bag of tissues. "Please wipe your faces off. Are you taking the darshan as a couple?" We nodded and she said, "Ok, he comes to the left and ahead of you." She gave us a little nudge on the small of our backs to direct us forward. I suppose this is all essential organization if you want to be efficient enough to give 21,000,000 hugs.

And then the people in front of me parted, and I saw Martin resting his head on Amma's breast, and there was a hand pushing me forward, and I was in her arms.

The whole evening had been a prelude, a pilgrimage for this single moment, and yet I'd hardly been anticipating it, so distracted had I been by my rush of self-righteous internal drama. Suddenly there were a pair of impossibly bright and knowing eyes twinkling at me, and I was hugging a saint.

I closed my eyes and for a second felt that I was floating through an eternity of stars. I felt surrounded by a vast knowing compassion; a compassion that instantly perceived and understood every scrap of my ridiculous pettiness, and loved me anyway. I realized that Amma was chanting something in my ear: "Totoro...ma, ma, ma..."

Pardon the cliche, but the moment really did seem to last a million years. And then it was over, and Amma pressed something into my hand with a wink, and white robed followers were urgently pulling me away to make room for the next hug. As I dazedly descended the podium, I opened my palm and saw a yellow flower petal and a Hershey's kiss.

Then Martin and I began sprinting towards the exit. It was 11:44.

We dodged the followers grabbed our bags, put on our shoes (still soaking wet) and ran up the escalators and outside to where we'd locked our bikes. "Excuse me, which way to the metro?" I yelled to a bellhop.

"That way," he said, and frowned. "But you know, the metro closes at midnight."

"Yeah, I know..." I said as I jumped onto my bike in a single movement.

We raced to the metro, dismounted, and carried our bikes down the metro escalator (illegal - you're supposed to use the elevator.) I could hear the rush of an approaching train as I fumbled with my wallet to pull out a dollar for the ticket counter. The dollar was wet and the machine spit it back out.

Martin, who had a Metro pass, was already inside and called impatiently back to me, "The train's here! What are you doing?"

"The machine's not taking my dollar because MY FUCKING BAG IS SOAKED!!!" I shrieked back at him. I abandoned the machine and ran with my bike through the handicap gate, yelling at the attendant, "I'll pay on the way out!" As we approached the platform, the train doors closed and it zoomed away.

Martin and I looked at each other in disgust, mutual recrimination scarring both our features.

"Let's ride our bikes home," Martin said. "I'm not leaving my bike here."

"No fucking way!" I shrieked. "It's raining, I'm cold, I'm tired, and I'm not riding on the fucking highway in the middle of the night!" (Apparently my vocabulary had not been washed clean by the sparkling river of Amma's pure love.)

And so we eventually decided to lock up our bikes near the metro entrance, take a cab home, and pick the bikes up the next day. As we huddled for warmth in the taxi together, I looked up at this person who provoked me into such fits of uncontrollable fury and joy. "What was it like for you...the hug?" I asked.

Martin looked a bit dreamy. "She's so sweet..."

"What does it mean that we took darshan together?"

"Whatever you want it to mean."

BORF is dead; long live BORF

2005-07-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071302448.html

The Mark Of Borf
With Graffitist's Arrest, Police Put a Name to the Familiar Face

The mysterious, ubiquitous and eminently destructive graffiti artist known as Borf was arrested yesterday after waging a months-long campaign that may have been intended to enlighten Washington, but mostly just confused us.

The man primarily responsible for Borf is, it turns out, an 18-year-old art student from Great Falls named John Tsombikos, according to D.C. police inspector Diane Groomes. He was arrested along with two other young men in the wee hours of yesterday morning after officers received a tip that graffiti artists were spray-painting at Seventh and V streets NW.

Approached by a reporter at D.C. Superior Court yesterday, Tsombikos refused to comment. One of the other men arrested, Richard Lee, 18, said, "Borf is dead."

Well, yes and no. According to Tsombikos's mother, Kathleen Murphy of Great Falls, Borf was the nickname for a close friend of her son's who committed suicide about two years ago....Murphy suggests that for her son, the Borf face and moniker came to stand for all that he felt was wrong with the world.

Many who saw Tsombikos's graffiti -- including a huge five-foot-high Borf face that appeared on a Roosevelt Bridge sign this spring, and a 15-foot "BORF" above a Dupont Circle cafe -- might suggest that, far from making the world better, he cost the city of Washington a lot of money.

Dennis Butler of the D.C. Department of Public Works said the Borf tag prompted almost daily phone calls to the city call center. "He's just all over the inner city," Butler said.

"Citizens are ecstatic about him being caught," Groomes said.
**********************************************

Yeah, we're "ecstatic." We want all of our public spaces to be completely bland and featureless and uninspiring of thought. We far prefer a blank wall to one with a piece of art that might provoke a thought or a giggle or a shared joke with a friend, or even a bit of secret solidarity with the chutzpah of an anti-authoritarian rebel. We don't want any challenging shared public spaces for public use; we want shopping malls. Thanks for protecting our interests. Thanks a lot.

From the words of a colleague at my think tank: "I think the people who work here are generally Borfers who just express themselves in a different type of graffiti."

Yoga class reading, 7/13/05: A Place to Sit, by Kabir

2005-07-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

Six students this morning, mostly regulars - very reassuring that attendance is picking up. It was a nice flow - I put in the Warrior II -> Garudasana balancing transition and the standing split -> seated twist transition. I think I'm getting better at sensing when people's energy is losing focus and either making the poses more challenging or more restoring in response - although there's some virtue in pushing people past where they think they're tired, like Darren John Main does. Anyway, the reading for the morning:

A PLACE TO SIT
by Kabir

Don't go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don't bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.

translated by Robert Bly

Last minute Dinosaur Jr, also an Ode to the Hill

2005-07-11T21:59:00.000-07:00

My friend Matthew called me at 8:30 tonight and said his friend had cancelled on him and he had an extra ticket to the sold-out Dinosaur Jr reunion concert at the 9:30 club. "I'm planning to head over in about an hour, would you like to come?"

I was sitting in my red velvet armchair with my feet up, staring at leafy trees rustling out my window, drinking tea, and brimful with inertia. "Thanks Matthew, but I'm a bit tired."

"No problem. Give me a call if you change your mind."

Immediately after I hung up I realized that I'd broken a solemn vow I'd made to myself: never to turn down a potentially fun invitation, just because I'm feeling lazy (unless I have a good excuse like sickness or an important appointment to rest for). Just like the True Love Waits teen chastity movement, I believe a good vow is meaningless if you break it the first time it's a little inconvenient. So I called Matthew back and told him I would come.

At nine thirty I jumped on my bike and zipped down the hill* to the club. While I was waiting outside for Matthew, a guy came up to me and handed me two of his extra tickets. "Here you go, take these," he said, and dashed inside.

It seems that Dinosaur Jr tickets have a habit of multiplying like rabbits. Just an hour ago I hadn't had any, and now I had three of the little creatures in my possession. I gazed warily at the tickets in my hand lest they multiply again.

I had the curious problem of unloading two $30 tickets to a sold-out rock concert, at 10pm on a Monday night. I called around to all my friends who lived in the area but didn't get in touch with anyone except Marcella, who was already at the Black Cat.

When I'm trying to decide whether to become friends with someone, I usually apply the following mental test. I imagine being shipwrecked with them on a desert island. When we begin to seriously starve, will the person pick up an axe from the wreckage and murder me for food? If I am pretty sure the person would never do such a thing, I know they'd be a good friend. Although this is the most important test, I suppose a good auxiliary would be to imagine how the person would respond if contacted at 10pm on a Monday night with an offer of free tickets to a Dinosaur Jr show.

The concert was rockin', by the way, and Matthew and I took it in turns giving each other piggy-back rides so that we could see better. J. Mascis shook his grey ponytail all around, and pounded his guitar, although he kept spelling out the band's name: "D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R Jr." I have no idea why; perhaps he's started a family since the band broke up, and he's in the habit of spelling things in front of kids.

_____________________________________________________________

* ODE TO THE COLUMBIA HEIGHTS HILL

Dear Columbia Heights Hill,
I have been riding my bike up and down you at least once a day
for more than a year.
Like my former roommate Jamia you have a lot of different outfits:
Connecticut, 19th, 18th, 16th, 14th, 13th, and 11th.
Every street looks a bit different on you:
Connecticut is wide and full of cars,
19th is short and steep and passes by Mehr's house,
18th is longer and more gradual, studded with restaurants and evolutionary experiments.
(17th doesn't go all the way.)
16th is steep, borders Meridian Hill Park, and is full of zooming buses, so after my accident I've always ridden my bike on the sidewalk.
(15th doesn't go all the way).
14th is not so steep...
but 13th, right next door, is vertiginous, with a downhill slope after you get up to the top (what a waste!)
(12th doesn't go all the way)
11th is about as steep as 14th, but has more potholes.
I usually ride down you in the mornings and what a joy you are then! My bike picks up speed until there's no traction on the wheels even on the highest gear, and I lift my arms in the air and grin against the wind in my face.
But unfortunately in life it seems you cannot zoom downhill all the time.
I have ridden up you in all weather: crisp spring, humid summer, pouring rain, snow, windy cold with lashing leaves.
I have ridden up you in all moods: happy energetic with legs pumping, sick and crabby feeling heavy, lamenting too-sore muscles from a yoga class, enjoying the rush of blood to work-dulled muscles, with an empty belly anticipating the meal I'll cook at the top of you, with a too-full belly from a happy hour, tipsy and swerving, heart pounding on the way to Martin's house.
I have ridden up you in all accoutrements: work clothes, yoga clothes, frilly dresses from going out, with shopping bags from Whole Foods dangling from the handlebars.
When I first climbed up you while shopping for apartments I didn't know you were going to be there (my MapQuest printout hadn't labelled you) and you seemed unreasonably long and steep.
Now you just seem like a little hill.
Sometimes I resent you, sometimes I dread you, but mostly I love you.
Going up and down you is part of my yoga practice.

Be the 20,000,0001st hug

2005-07-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

Amma will be giving hugs to her followers at the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evening. Here's the schedule. From her bio:

*******************************
Her name is Mata Amritanandamayi, which translates into "Mother of Immortal Bliss", but to millions around the world She is known as "Amma" (mother) or "Ammachi" (beloved mother). So approachable is She that many have to come to realize in Her a love that is archetypal of "everybody's Mother".

When invited to speak at the United Nations, She is recognized as a "preeminent religious leader". The news media have dubbed Her "the Mother of Compassion" because of the extensive humanitarian charities She has launched. The press have also nicknamed Her "the Hugging Saint", because of the loving embraces She has given tirelessly to thousands everyday for the last 30 years. It is estimated that Amma has already hugged over 20 million times!

Around the world She is identified as "a living Saint". Wherever She goes the crowds that flock to Her only seem to grow as people experience something unique in Her presence. To observe what Amma does, it becomes obvious that She exhibits nothing of what we would call "a personal life". Sleeping less than two hours per day, She is the untiring servant of all people, dedicated to removing human suffering. Her outreach takes two principal forms: 1) Her darshan programs, where She reaches people individually, and 2) Her charities, designed to improve peoples' lives on a broader scale.

So, who is Ammachi? There are as many answers to that question as there are people asking. Indeed, She is almost impossible to describe—She needs to be experienced.

Join me for late afternoon beats & beers next weekend

2005-07-09T15:01:00.000-07:00

Dear reader,

My friend Matthew is having a party next Saturday. Here's the description from his invitation:

"Join us for a lazy late afternoon of beats and beers on Peter's roof deck. Bonepony will spin his quixotic -- and sometimes salacious -- mix of tech, breakbeat, and downtempo. Kegs will be provided; additional drinks are welcome.
The roof deck has space for at least 300 people so feel free to forward this invite to others."

Matthew's also planning to post an invitation on Craigslist, just asking people to drop a note with the reason they'd be a positive addition to a party.

It should be a great time with a lot of VERY DIFFERENT types of people! I'm planning to teach a free yoga class in front of the White House that afternoon (more on that later) so I'll invite everyone in the class as well. And, dear reader, if you'd like to come just drop me a line at funthingstodoindc@gmail.com and I'll forward you the Evite.

Best wishes,
Zoe

P.S. For fans of Australian beer I expect there will be some VB involved....

Citizen Cope at the 9:30 club

2005-07-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

WHEN: Saturday, July 9, 9pm doors WHERE: 9:30 club EQUIPMENT: $18, earplugs (if you're anything like me).

Cosimo was the person who introduced me to Citizen Cope's Clarence Greenwood Recordings - it's an amazing CD, every single track. It's also the perfect soundtrack, I discovered, for a sunny afternoon outside playing boules at a group house near the beach with a bunch of psychedelic philosophy grad students.

Well, the ambiance won't be quite as good, but Citizen Cope is coming to the 9:30 club! I have no doubt it'll be an splendid show.

"We LOVE YOU! Share the experience!!!"

2005-07-06T16:03:00.000-07:00

I rode my bike down to the Mall on Saturday and my delightful day was an example of the joys of public spaces (and the usefulness of having a bike in DC).*

Winslow Homer Exhibition at the National Gallery of Art

First I stopped by the National Gallery and looked at the exhibition of some Winslow Homer paintings and watercolours - he's considered to be a classically "American" painter, whatever that means, and it's not a description that ever inspired me to learn more about him.

Classics are classics for a reason, though, and of course there were some very powerful pieces there. Watercolour is one of those mediums that require not only technical expertise but a shaman-level of wizardry with the free-flowing coloured liquid that (perhaps bearing a distant memory of its molecular kin the Niagara waterfall), constantly threatens to splash and crash over your delicate composition: it's picky, tricky and totally unpredictable. Yet Homer coaxes some heart-breakingly subtle effects out of this diabolical medium.

His paintings are also very narrative-ly pleasing - the grim-face sharpshooter in a tree or the wistful school-teacher holding a book or the gang of boys building model ships are all fertile subjects for your imagination to wander, filling in their personalities and musing about their social contexts. Not to mention what he's most well-known for: the vivid sea-scapes that almost have you licking salt off your lips.

But I've got to say, some of his stuff is cheesy. One painting that was apparently extremely popular and widely copied in magazines is "Cracking the Whip," showing a bunch of enthusiastic young boys playing outside. I looked at it and thought, "Yeah...rosy cheeks...the vitality of youth...the wholesomeness of these nature games...as American as apple pie..." It just seemed like a technically skilled Hallmark card to me.

If you do go to the exhibition, please take a moment to enjoy the exquisite potted gardenia tree just outside the entrance, which you can smell from twenty feet away. As I was leaving I noticed an old man stopping to admire one of the flowers; he inspired six other museum goers to pause and start chatting with each other about the rapturous smell, and then the exhibit. It could have been a moment out of a Winslow Homer painting.

Brutal death sends toxins into meat Brooke Shields soy protein karma environmental sustainability clogged arteries digestion vitamin B12

I left the National Gallery and wandered over to the Mall to look at the Folk-Life Festival, which, I was surprised to discover, appeared to be a paean to the moral virtues of vegetarianism and the spiritual implications of reincarnation. There were all these kiosks with pro-vegetarian fact-sheets and a diorama of the Bhagavad Gita with wax sculptures of the ages of man. There were colour photographs of lavish gourmet vegetarian meals, side-by-side with garishly lit photos of huge greasy slabs of steak that reminded me of certain illustrations of surgery in the anatomy textbooks I bought for my yoga teacher training course. Then I came to a kiosk with lots of information about a Hare Krishna food donation program in Russia and it all made sense. Those tricky, tricky Hare Krishnas! Obviously their vegetarian brains have a keen marketing sense, because there were many confused tourists wandering around reading all the kiosks, clearly believing this was the Folklife Festival everyone had been talking about. They're going to go home to Wisconsin and tell all their Republican friends that their tax dollars go to support vegetarian cult propaganda, instead of war-happy paranoia police-state propaganda, as is actually the case.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival

however, was just another block further away, and the first thing I saw was the "Slow Roasting Meat" section where you could buy a sloppy piece of a whole goat to chew on. Fear not, Wisconsin taxpayers! The American government supports meat!

The Festival seemed a bit disjointed this year. There was a vegetable garden for schoolchildren, and South American food stations, and this whole section on Oman with arts and crafts and dancing. If there was a unified theme I couldn't identify it.

I remember, a few years ago, they set up the Festival to honor the Silk Road trading voyage of Marco Polo, with booths echoing the geography of his trip, and I saw the rockingest performance of a philosophical debate by actual Buddhist monks from a tiny village in Tibet (it's an action show! They've got this whole sign language/musical collaboration of stamping feet and waving fists to respond while each debater stands up to proclaim, and then they jump up to interrupt each other and yell and giggle - it's like a slam poetry gig/drum circle/philospher's meeting all in one, and supposedly completely untranslatable.) Anyway, this year is nothing like as cool as the Silk Road was.

But I bought some tasty date juice with rose water and stopped to watch an Oman dance performance, with ridiculously happy and energetic dancers the like of which I've only ever seen at Dukem**. At the end of their dance, the leader grabbed the microphone and implored the audience, "Come to the stage! Join us! Share the experience!" The crowd shared a collective pause and he repeated, "Share the experience! We love you! SHARE THE EXPERIENCE!!!" Then a bunch of people clambered onto the stage (yes, of course I did too) and we all danced around experimenting with ridiculous improvisations of the Omani dance steps. I noticed that Share the Experience Man quickly found a beautiful hippie girl to waltz around with; occasionally they traded twirls, and I think he pinched her butt once.

We all went back to our seats for the next show and a man came to sit down next to me, a little closer than socially acceptable. I didn't look at him though, since I was riveted on the dancers. "That looks like a nice drink," he said and when I glanced at him in annoyance, my frown melted away when I saw that it was George, the father of my first boyfriend Ben (and passionate love and four-year relationship). "It's so funny," said Angela, Ben's mother, coming up. "Everyone was jumping on stage and I was thinking to myself, That's just the sort of thing that Zoe would do. And then I saw you!" George and Angela are among the sweetest people on the planet and I hope to keep in touch with them.

Monkeys Grasping for the Moon at the Sackler

As I wandered away from Oman, my friend Cosimo, who was visiting from New York, called, and I agreed to meet him in the Sackler museum garden. While I was waiting I wandered into the museum; they always have superb modern art exhibits in the main lobby and right now it's half of Cai Guo-Qiang's Traveler: a breathtaking ruined ship filled with broken ceramics, visually smashing*** and poetic and moving. Their permanent stairway exhibit, "Monkeys Grasping for the Moon," is also extremely clever.

Cosimo and his friends were late to meet me in the garden, and when they arrived they breathlessly regaled me with tales of how they went to the wrong sculpture garden in front of the National Gallery, and they were hot, so they jumped in the fountain even though there was a sign saying that you couldn't, and all these onlookers were watching them frolic, and then a security guard kicked them out, except he was secretly sympathetic and just had these bureaucratic rules he had to follow, so he had to tell them they could have been arrested, but he just asked for their names and wrote them down on a scrap of paper.

Cosimo is a philosophy graduate student studying in New York, so he is naturally interested in such anthropologically fertile scenes of passive resistance. In fact, as he told me, he just got funding for a research project in France. He has also fallen in love with a woman he met on the train a month ago, who lives in Harlem and has been taking care of her six younger siblings for the past ten years after their mother died. Cosimo is planning to marry this woman so that she and three of her six siblings can join him in France for the next two years.

Coming from most of my other friends, these would seem like pretty dramatic developments, but with Cosimo I take it all in stride. This is a guy who sells designer hallucinogens to his philosophy professors, after all. He spends about half his life tripping, and seems to have a new epiphany every month. (I believe it's the movie Amelie where some guy worries that there are a limited number of orgasms in the world and so if you have one, it's selfish because you're denying somebody else the chance. Well, I sure hope it's not like that with epiphanies, because Cosimo**** certainly has more than his fair share of them.)

Cosimo and his fiancee took me over to his sister's apartment where we ate some baba ghanoush and they enjoyed some 2CI powder mixed with root beer. I politely declined, since it's become pretty clear to me that with my overactive imagination, an escape from reality is not exactly what the doctor ordered.

Then I rode my bike all the way home.

Total cost for the day: $3 (date juice).

_________________________________________________________________

*Yes, I got a new one. It's from Chain Reaction on the corner of 6th and R - they have very good deals, if you're looking.
**The best Ethiopian restaurant in DC (and that's saying something, because there are zillions of 'em).
***Ha! Sorry.
****Of course that's not his real name, and any other possibly identifying details have been removed; in fact, the whole character is my fiction-writing exercise.

Maybe next they'll keep Hermes open for me

2005-07-06T15:11:00.000-07:00

I just got the following email:

From: leah morgan [mail@leahmorgan.com]
Date: Jul 6, 2005 12:42 PM
Subject: MUSIC EVENT INVITATION: Leah Morgan @ Iota 7/19

Good afternoon,

I hope you are doing well. I wanted to invite you to my band's next performance at Iota Club & Cafe on Tues 7/19. Our start time will be 10pm. Please let me know if you are interested in attending and I will gladly put you on the guest list. Also let me know if you have any questions about the event.

WHO: Leah Morgan Band
WHAT: live performance @ Iota Club & Cafe
WHEN: Tues, 7/19, 10pm (music starts @ 8:30pm)
WHERE: 2832 Wilson Blvd Arlington VA, www.iotaclubandcafe.com

Best regards,
Leah Morgan
703.220.2047
www.leahmorgan.com
mail@leahmorgan.com
EPK: www.sonicbids.com/LEAHMORGAN
KENNEDEY CENTER SHOW: http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/artist_detail.cfm?artist_id=LEAHMORGAN

***********************************

It's my first blogger perk - not surprising, considering that I expend zero effort to promote myself or make myself accessible. I can only assume that Leah, on the other hand, is a savvy and efficient self-promoter, did some kind of "dc activity blog" search that turned me up, and quickly added me to her marketing database. If she was familiar with my blog...well, she'd realize that it is focused more on navel-gazing rants about how yoga can save the world, rather than real, live, fun things to do in DC. (For which I apologize, reader. I've been going through a navel-gazing phase. Maybe it's the love, maybe it's the weather.)

Nonetheless her music seems pretty good and I promise to report back.

By the way, on a completely unrelated note, you've got to check this out:
http://ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com/

Love

2005-07-03T13:10:00.000-07:00

"To love" is a very peculiar verb, and "I love you" are three very peculiar words. "Love" is one of those words in the English language that is possible to use without the slightest shadow of understanding what it is. Furthermore, it is a word that is almost useless for communication - since I would guess there are as many definitions of love as there are thinking minds.

Yet it is a very commonly used word. "I love you. Do you love her? I love ice-cream. I loved your performance. If I loved it..." It can be declarative, interrogative, in the past or future tense, even conditional.

"I love you." Within the context of a relationship, these words are considered signifiers of the utmost importance. "Has he said 'I love you' yet?" "I'm not sure whether to tell him, because what if he doesn't say it back?" "Yep, he went and dropped the L-bomb." All of this in a world where it's acceptable to exclaim, "I love carrots!"

I have said 'I love you' to people when I had no real guess as to its true meaning in my mind. Would I die for the person? Would I let them have the bigger piece of cheesecake? Perhaps the former and not the latter? Perhaps the latter and not the former? Nonetheless, although I could not have defined "love," I knew it was the emotion I was feeling. And occasionally circumstances gave me the opportunity to test my definition of the emotion. By observing my choices while influenced by love, I could further refine the approximation I had of its secret manifestation within me.

Some of these example decisions cause me sincere regret, and I realize that's because they did not accord with what I would have expected a pure love to produce. These decisions reflect an inner definition of love that is not entirely worthy.

But 'worthy' of what? And from where do I get my notions of what a 'worthy love' actually is? Who or what instilled these ideals in me? Is it a simple matter of a combination, according to some biological alchemy, of all the different theories of love I've been exposed to over my life? Does it spring from my first memories of a huge form leaning over me whispering "I love you" and my subsequent memories of the behavior of that form toward me?

Perhaps these multitudes of definitions of love are all simply reflections, or rather refractions, of one huge, unitary, original love? That 'I love you' and 'I love carrots' and 'I loved your performance' really all are aspects, seen through the looking-glass, of the same thing? And, further, that we are all just pretending not to understand what it means? How else could philosophers have maintained a conversation over this supposedly mysterious concept all these years?

It's not too late to check out the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

2005-06-30T08:51:00.000-07:00

Held on the Mall for a few weeks every year during summer, the Folklife Festival is always entertaining and educational - one of the truly quintessential DC activities.

Here's the schedule.

Yoga class reading, 6/27/05: If God Invited You To A Party, by Hafiz

2005-06-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

I'm usually groggy for half an hour after I wake up, and prefer to gently ease myself into consciousness: stretching, yawning, showering, wandering back and forth between the bathroom and the bedroom, forgetting what you were going to get in the first place - I'm sure you know the drill. But I've never woken up faster than I did this morning - this morning that I was scheduled to teach a 7am yoga class at Studio Serenity - when I saw the clock flashing 6:44. There wasn't time to wonder why the alarm didn't go off, to brush my teeth or wash my face; I sprang out of bed, pulled on some clothes, ran downstairs and jumped on my bike as I was still blinking sleep out of my eyes.

The class went well though - four people showed up, which is good for a Monday morning (which we've decided is a bad day for a 7am yoga class, as the start of the week, and will probably switch back to Tuesday or Wednesday next week).

This teaching diary is a bit self-indulgent, I'm afraid - I've been trying, with this blog, to only include entries that might actually be useful to a reader, whether related to an activity you could do, a poem/author/resource you might enjoy, or an insight into life I've had that has actually helped me and which might conceivably also help someone else. Nonetheless I'm gonna keep posting them, because I think it'll help me to look back on my teaching - and perhaps there's some other yoga teacher out there who might be interested in the musings of a new teacher.

I've already started to notice my habits as a teacher - ways of teaching, certain poses and turns of phrase, certain asana sequences, which I tend to use frequently and especially when I'm a bit tired/distracted/not in the moment. I don't think it's a problem to have habits, but I want to stay aware of them and avoid getting stuck in a rut. For example, my standard warmup sequence begins in an extended child's pose for the centering meditation - then I ask students to stretch and begin waking up their spine - then a few variations on downward dog and thread-the-needle twists. Last week I made a conscious effort to change this up, beginning in corpse pose and asking students to do a meditation locating their heartbeats and tracing it through their bodies. It's something that really worked for me in a yoga nidra workshop I took, but I suspect it requires a certain level of body awareness to be effective and I'm not sure if my students got anything out of it.

After a warmup I usually do one round of sun salutations slowly, with some hip-opening movements in the lunges especially, and then a few rounds more quickly - and I always try to include a few rounds of sun salutations where students move on their own, without my voice instructions, to help them feel more independent and to deepen their meditation.

Keeping track of time is a constant challenge. For example, I realized today at 7:55 that we were still doing standing poses and the class was almost over, so I quickly took the students to the floor for a few backbends, an abbreviated shoulderstand, side twists, and then corpse pose - without time for any other interesting seated poses, abdominal strengthening, or long hip openers. When I first started yoga teacher training I was intimidated by the idea of filling a whole hour with choreography, but it turns out that my major problem has been making the classes fit. It seems that with every class I teach, I resolve to finish the standing flow earlier and give more time to seated poses - but I haven't managed the balance yet.

One of my students seems very fit, and she must enjoy yoga because she has a two-month unlimited pass and always comes back to my classes, but I feel challenged teaching her because she performs all her poses quite limply, without seeming enthusiasm or building any heat. Her breath always seems quite shallow; her warrior poses have a very short stance, hardly bending the knee at all; and in general she just doesn't seem to push herself in any of the poses. I'm struggling with how to push her, or even whether it's appropriate to push her, as I say things like "Exhale and sink into your front knee a little deeper, allow your breath to carry you through this very active pose..." But I suppose I shouldn't worry about it too much; she's got good regularity in her practice, coming to class 3-4 times a week, and I'm sure that she will make her own discoveries at her own speed.

I included a Warrior II -> Side Angle -> Triangle transition today, which I think is an interesting alternative to the regular way of coming into Triangle from a standing position. Neva gave me a good Trikonasana adjustment in her morning class on Saturday - apparently I don't lengthen the bottom side of my waist enough, which requires a bit of shifting the hips around - so I should practice it more at home in order to understand the pose better when I teach it.

Some of my other favorite things to teach in class: Tree pose with an arm flow: inhale raising them to the sky and exhale open them out - this really helped me focus on the breath when I was a beginner; a Cowface or seated twist transition of keeping the feet in place, lifting the hips, and circling 360 degrees around the feet (fun, and always such a surprise when you get there with the legs reversed); a vinyasa involving rocking on the spine all the way up to a standing pose. I've really got to get more seated poses in, though. And I should start teaching Dancer with the use of a strap.

I also want to start weaving better philosophical themes and meditations into class - but that's quite hard to do and can seem pretty hokey if it's not thought out well.

My reading this morning was an old favorite, since I was still feeling rather flustered from my hurried start.

The Inner Domain with Neva: Saturday, June 25th 3pm-5pm

2005-06-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

Martin said this morning of Neva Ingalls, a teacher at the Hot Yoga studio, "Damn her - she's spoiled me for any other yoga class! Nothing else is as good..." When you consider that he was saying this to his yoga teacher girlfriend, that's quite a strong statement - but I've got to admit he's right, and I feel the same way. To give you some slight indication of my own devotion: as a teacher at Studio Serenity, and a teaching assistant at Tranquil Space, I can go to classes at either studio for free - but I still ride my bike half an hour uphill almost every Wednesday and Saturday to the Hot Yoga studio, near the National Cathedral, to learn from Neva. And when I look around at her 2-hour advanced class on Saturday mornings, I'd guess more than half the people in there are also yoga teachers from studios in the area.

Neva's teaching a workshop this Saturday:

************************

The Inner Domain with Neva
Saturday June 25, 2005
$40.00 pre-reg/ $45.00 at door
3:00-5:00pm
"Help support our Workshops by forwarding this email to a friend or fellow yoga teacher."
This Workshop is hosted by HOT YOGA
202.HOT.YOGA (202.468.9642)
See more details at www.hotyogausa.com

All of your potential and force for good lies dormant inside of you. Through guided meditation, imagery and extended svasana, melt through the outer koshas or layers of the physical and mental bodies and enter the "Inner Domain" of the sacred wisdom heart. From this place of balance drink the nectar of clarity, spontaneity and creativity.

3408 Wisconsin Avenue, NW (Suite 205)
Washington, DC 20016
(202) HOT-YOGA (468-9642)
www.hotyogausa.com
info@hotyogausa.com

*************************

So I plan to go to her two-hour class in the morning tomorrow, grab some lunch & eat it in the National Cathedral garden, and then go back for her meditation workshop.

TV Be Gone

2005-06-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

Diary of a recovering television addict:
http://escapeyourtelevision.blogspot.com/

Device to turn off any TV in a 50 foot radius:
www.tvbegone.com

*Insert self-righteous essay here about what a waste of time watching TV is and how much better it is to do things. Actually I haven't watched TV in such a long time that I've forgotten all the indignant details of this rant. I'm just surprised every once in a while when I realize how much most other people watch it, because I tend to forget...it's like I'm living in a slightly different reality. Yes, there are some good & artistic shows on, I'm sure. It's just that the cost of being plugged in to TV and all the other crap on there, to me, outweighs the benefits of figuring out what those few shows are & selectively tuning in. Etcetera.*

Packing

2005-06-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

I'm moving, which is a good opportunity to throw things away. Or, according to my friend Ben, sell them on ebay.

Yoga class reading, 6/20/05: The Journey, by Mary Oliver

2005-06-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

I chose this especially for a good friend who was attending class this morning and will be facing a lot of changes and challenges over the next year. Since she's one of the strongest, wisest people I know, I have no doubt that she'll thrive on the challenges.

THE JOURNEY
by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

YogaConnect.com

2005-06-19T18:55:00.000-07:00

Internet socializing aficionado that I am, I was interested to look at the www.yogaconnect.com site. I was quite disappointed by it, so I filled out their feedback form with some rather harsh comments. The owner of the site wrote back within a few hours. Here's our exchange:

From: YogaConnect [mailto:noreply@yogaconnect.com] Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 11:54 AMTo: Support PersonellSubject: YC Feedback From: satara, funthingstodoindc@gmail.com

The other internet friend/dating sites I use do not have such a restrictive pricing model. Friendster, which is aimed at friends and secondarily at dating, is free; the Spring Street Personals charge to send messages, but not to read them. Considering that you can search based on interests on those sites as well - allowing you to find other yogis - I doubt I'd ever consider paying for a site like yours, especially since you have a very limited membership so far and there are few people in my area. Am I expected to pay a monthly fee while I wait for you to build your membership to the point where the site is worthwhile? In addition, I think your site feels commercialized/hokey/not in the spirit of yoga. This carries through even to the profile, which has a lot of little boxes/categories to fill out and not much room for self-expression. I think profiles like the Spring Street Personals, which encourage more creative liberty with the profiles, are much more simpatico and I get a much better sense of the person's true nature based on what they decide to mention. In short I was excited about this site since I love yoga and yoga culture, but have been very disappointed with your implementation. I detect a stink of the notion that yoga is trendy, and you are trying to cash in on a hot fad.

From: Chris Roy - YogaConnect
To: funthingstodoindc@gmail.com
Date: Jun 13, 2005 4:46 PM
Subject: RE: YC Feedback From: satara, funthingstodoindc@gmail.com

Hi Zoe,

Thank you for your honest comments...we sincerely appreciate it. There is a lot of validity and insight to be considered in what you have shared. I agree with you, in many regards. You probably do not know this, however we are a brand new site (2 weeks new) and are obviously still working through the components of our offering and model. We have been receiving quite a bit of feedback from our members, mostly positive. However, the not so positive always provides the best insight. Our original intent was not to duplicate the Friendster or Tribe social networking model, rather something more similar to a Lava Life or Match.com exclusively for the yoga culture with community features. I would share that comparing us to any of those companies is a stretch, given that these are seasoned and well funded companies, that have had the luxury of time to refine their business models. We are likely moving toward a hybrid of these sites. I'll take a look at the Spring Street Personals for profile and user communication ideas, thank you for bringing that to our attention. Our current profile and pay model is simply the first iteration. I am sure it will evolve.

In truth, we understand that members will only pay for our service when they see value as they define it. Most people have just chosen to fill our their profile for now. I can share with clarity that we created the site from our heart and with pure intentions of bringing value to a culture that we love as well. Our commitment is to creating a long term community that the yoga culture embraces, not just generating quick buck. The last thing that we want YogaConnect to convey is being hokey or commercialized. We are actually quite the contrary.

Please be patient with us as we continue to evolve and grow the site. I would love to hear your additional insights and thoughts. We realize there is a wonderful community here that is being underserved and YogaConnect has great potential. If you have ideas on how you could help us get there, let me know :)

Namaste,
Chris

From: Fun Things To Do in DC
Reply-To: Fun Things To Do in DC
To: Chris Roy - YogaConnect
Date: Jun 13, 2005 5:27 PM
Subject: Re: YC Feedback From: satara, funthingstodoindc@gmail.com

Thanks for your response, Chris.
Yes, the mixture of the ideals of yoga and business is tough - I worked as a strategy consultant for two years out of college, so these types of business issues fascinate me -mixing ideals with capitalism. I do some free-lance teaching at home,and teach at a studio where I have gotten to know the owner, who started the place up a year ago. You don't just want to cash in, butyou also want to run a clean business, pay the bills and make a living... But I do suspect that your current pricing model is not going to get off the ground.
I've been using the Spring Street Personals for two years (I accessthem through Salon.com but they're also on Nerve and The Onion) and really enjoy meeting people on the internet. Never used Match.com since it turned me off for many of the same reasons I mentioned in mynote to you (all the little boxes). I much prefer Spring Street to the larger Match.com since it seems to attract much moreeclectic/literate/interesting people, partly with interesting/provocative questions that allow some room for interpretation, and an emphasis on expressive writing as opposed to checking off boxes (which never tells you much about a person.) I think Match.com is probably a much larger business, but it also seems to me that yoga people are more expressive and creative and in my opinion something closer to the Spring Street model would be a better match. SS has two tracks; with free profiles you can receive but not send messages, and with payment (they have you buy points instead of a monthly subscription) you can send messages (cost 1 point) or "winks"(no informational content & free as long as you also own paid credits). I think that system probably works great, because there are many desirable people with free profiles, and the ability to contact them, without them having to pay, makes purchasing credits much more useful for people who do. I purchased credits at Spring Street, butI'm pretty sure that there's a demographic that's just never going to consider paying cash for such stuff. Nonetheless, makes no sense to drive away that demographic since their profiles still increase the overall value of your site.
I don't know what your funding's like, but it seems like network effects are so important here that it would be worthwhile to burn a bunch of capital in the beginning with promotions to swell your ranks and make the system worthwhile.
In terms of yoga-specific features, one thing that would really turn*me* on is some kind of organizational system for freelance yoga lessons or group yoga practices, perhaps at someone's house . I teach yoga to my friends at home right now, and I use Yahoo! Groups -they've got a calendar, bulletin board, little files section, etc. But one thing that's lacking is a sign-up system to register for class (necessary since my room is small), which I was lucky enough to have a friend build for me in PHP. This type of thing might be useful not only for yoga teachers but for groups of friends that wanted to get together to organize private lessons - or just practice by themselves. And even yoga teachers at studios often do freelance work on the side. That would drive your site more towards a community type ofthing rather than strict dating, but would probably also attract some desirable people - lots of people want to date their yoga teacher ;)
I'd also love to find a really useful active & intelligent bulletin board to discuss yoga teaching - methods, relationship with students, tricks of the trade, etc. I'd imagine it could be in the context of other conversations about yoga. Of course building this type of community that really requires a large group of active & articulate particpants is sooner said than done.
Well, that's my 75 cents! Good luck with your site & sorry if my first words were harsh - I did assume that a business owner that really cared would appreciate frank feedback.

Namaste,
Zoe

From: Chris Roy - YogaConnect
To: funthingstodoindc@gmail.com
Date: Jun 15, 2005 4:40 PM
Subject: RE: YC Feedback From: satara, funthingstodoindc@gmail.com

Thank you again Zoe. Yes, it's an interesting balance. You have given us some really good food for thought.
In appreciation,
Chris

From: Fun Things To Do in DC
Reply-To: Fun Things To Do in DC
To: Chris Roy - YogaConnect
Date: Jun 19, 2005 10:07 PM
Subject: Re: YC Feedback From: satara, funthingstodoindc@gmail.com

Good luck with everything, Chris :) You're going to get a lot of advice from everyone (and their aunt and their cousin too) but in the end it all comes down to your gut...

Yoga class reading, 6/12/05: Just This, by W.S. Merwin

2005-06-14T13:36:00.000-07:00

It was a very small class, so I took the opportunity to read a beautiful but slightly opaque poem by Merwin.

*************************************************

JUST THIS

When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven

-W.S. Merwin

Hitch a ride from DC to New York - virtually!

2005-06-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

I travelled up to New York on Memorial Day weekend to visit my adorable friends Rikhil (who was staying with his boyfriend in Queens for a few weeks before going to India for the summer and then starting a political science PhD at Stanford) and Roberto (a gargantuan-ly eclectic philosophy grad student who lives on the beach on Long Island and just finished teaching his first college philosophy course). Naturally I left any decisions about transportation to the last minute, and after spending a few minutes staring grimly at the Chinatown bus website and recalling the pervasive smell of chemical cleaning product mixed with very unclean bathroom that had indelibly marked my last trip, decided to try the craigslist ride share.

I hope never to take the bus again.

I corresponded with a number of people and ended up with 2-3 choices both for the trip up and back. All of the people I spoke to, when mentioning their motivations for offering a ride, didn't mention a desire to defray the cost of gas, but said something along the lines of, "I make this drive all the time, because I have family/work in New York, and I thought to myself, what a shame that this car is always empty. It's so wasteful. And the bus is so uncomfortable."

On the way up, I was picked up at my door by Salid, who had graduated from college a year ago, was working in DC and had moved houses, and was driving up a few extra pieces of furniture to his parents' house in Boston. He agreed to drop me off in Queens on the way up to Boston, but there was one caveat - he'd already offered a seat to Baht, a Turkish engineering student. He was driving a minivan, with all the seats in the back removed, and one of the pieces of furniture he was taking up to Boston was an over-stuffed armchair - in which I could sit. On the way to pick up Baht, Salid and I had an interesting conversation about his time living in the Netherlands when his father, a college professor, was on sabbatical. I regaled him with my admiration for the dynamic Dutch bikers. The conversation dropped off, though, when Baht replaced me in the bucket seat and I moved to the armchair in the back. It was like sitting in a very tiny living room during a low-level earthquake, which is, in fact, quite comfortable. I slept for most of the way up, waking only to give Salid directions to Rikhil's front door. I asked him how much to chip in for gas, and he said, "Well, five dollars? Maybe ten..." I gave him fifteen.

On the way down, I went with John - an older guy working for the Defense Department and driving a green truck. The departure was slightly less convenient, since he asked me to meet him at the Newark PATH train station - but he also dropped me off at my front door. I gave him $20 for gas.

John had spent a lot of time in the military, which seems to feed into a certain personality type which I haven't had much experience with, but which is so distinctive that I can easily recognize it nonetheless. Some markers of this worldview/character include an obsession with efficiency, a preference for "straight talk" and a highly developed loathing for B.S. or insincerity, high respect for loyalty, and even higher respect for courage, sacrifice, and determination - as well as a slight complex about the fact that "regular civilians" both do not understand the rigor and intensity of a military lifestyle, where every decision might influence human lives, and disrespect that lifestyle, even while lacking the strength and determination to succeed at such a lifestyle themselves, should they want to. I've never spent much time with military types - most of my friends are more along the lines of absent-minded professor/ organic vegetarian/ tree-hugging/ /bohemian, and if you handed me a gun, my first instinct would be to use it in an art installation. Nonetheless, I do have a lot of respect for military men and it was refreshing and illuminating to chat with John and have some of my steretypes dispelled - a two-person, in-car version of the One Big Dinner.

John worked in the propaganda division of the Defense Department. His job was to communicate good things about the US to the Arab world through newspapers, radio shows, and various other forms of media. And he was very, very, very bitter about his job. "How am I supposed to say that America's good when I get no support from military leadership following my words up with actions?" he demanded. When I mentioned that my dad used to work for the World Bank, he said, "It's a good thing he doesn't work there now, because I believe that its new head, Wolfowitz - alongside Rumsfeld and Cheney - they should all be hung from the nearest tree. Those men have blood on their hands."

John volunteered at the Red Cross hospital in Virginia - he used to be an army medic - and he said that Iraq casualties were more than 50% larger than official statistics, because the Army shipped mortally wounded soldiers back home. When soldiers die in US hospitals, they aren't added to the official casualty statistics.

To sum up: the bus and the train are for suckers! Hitch a ride on craigslist,* and you get a high likelihood of door-to-door transportation, a comfy seat in a car, and conversations with the type of person who travels between DC and New York and is willing to offer a ride to a stranger - which, as it turns out, is a very nice type of person indeed.

******************
*Yeah, I don't know, I guess a psycho serial killer could get you in their car and rip you off. But honestly, there are so many other ways that a psycho serial killer could get you. Living in a city, you interact with strangers all the time. It just seems like such an inefficient way to get someone. Besides, I'm a big believer in scoping someone out based on their writing style and what they choose to mention. My gut instinct hasn't ever led me wrong, when I've been willing to listen to it. There's a chance that arranging a ride-share with a stranger will get you in trouble. There's also a chance that you will live a boring life during which you'll never take any risks, and then you'll die and turn into dust.

Overheard in New York

2005-06-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

I was in New York for Memorial Day weekend and had my very own "Overheard in New York" moment, on the corner of Park and 54th St:
A very fat couple, holding hands with giddy grins on their faces, were crossing the road. I heard the woman say, "Aww, you're so funny! ....But you're still ugly."

Bike documentation for the Secret Service

2005-06-12T17:38:00.000-07:00

My poor baby!

Bike documentation for the Secret Service

Amanda Sauer's beautiful photographs

2005-06-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

Check out my friend Amanda's website here. There are some amazing pictures - including interesting shots of D.C.

By the way, she paid for the 'D.C.' project with a grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which provides a lot of different funding for D.C. community arts and education projects (often with rolling deadlines.) Artists & community go-getters should look into it.

Sufi events in DC

2005-06-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a Sufi spiritual retreat with Katja, the owner of Studio Serenity (this was how I got the job as a yoga teacher.) It was an absolutely wonderful experience and I'm planning to put up a long entry about it sometime. In the meantime, if you're at all interested in learning more about Sufism, it seems that the community in DC is very small - but very welcoming.

From the newsletter, for upcoming events (don't hesitate to contact any of the emails listed; I added the "NOSPAM" myself because I didn't want to flood their inboxes with a buncha junk):

Sun, June 5 - Circle of Worship in Silver Spring, 11 AM, followed by a potluck lunch. Our theme will be Healing Words. The right words at the right moment can be a healing force in our lives. Words are especially helpful when they come from the presence of the Heart. We have planned an activity where we will create healing prayers for ourselves and to share with others. We will put our prayers together to create a collective community prayer of healing. After the potluck – from 2:15 – 3:30 PM, we will have a long overdue Community Meeting. See directions to Stream and Tania's below.

Sun., June 5 - The Spirit of Guidance, a monthly class in Alexandria (date varies; not in July). We're covering many approaches one-by-one, including prayer, attunement to great beings, seeing from within, listening with the heart, and working with breath and light and dreams. Held from 4 to 6 PM this month, followed by a potluck supper. Our method is to learn from each other. This month's topic is: becoming receptive to the Spirit of Guidance, with practices from last month's retreat. " Shatter your ideal on the rock of truth," Murshid says. - Jami

Mon., June 6 - New moon, and time for the next monthly practice for mureeds (initiates). This month we are continuing on last month's practice of Tasawwuri Murshid, from Aziza. It's requested that you have a guide that you are working with for questions and issues that come up.

Fri., June 17 - Celebration of the Urs (passing) of Pir Vilayat. Details not yet known. The first anniversary of a murshid's death is especially significant, and it's a time to remember all the contributions he made to our lives and to celebrate the magic and mystery of his being. Held at Zarifah and Munawir's in Chevy chase. Nawr@NOSPAMaol.com or nkadian@NOSPAM earthlink.net

Sat., June 18 - The Hollow Reed Teahouse, with religious music from many different traditions, in a friendly atmosphere with tea and desserts. This is the fourth of our gatherings, and will be held at the Washington Ethical Society 7750 16th St., NW, at 7:30 PM. $20, including desserts, or half price for young adults. The location is close to Silver Spring on the corner of Kalmia St., where there is plenty of parking.

Sun., June 19 - Universal Worship in DC, at 2 PM sharp, at the Institute for Spiritual Development, near Arizona Ave., a block from MacArthur Blvd. Directions are at the end of this letter. This is a time to join people of all religions, throughout the world, in meditation and prayer. Held on the third Sunday of each month, except for July and August.

Sat., June 25 - The first of four monthly Classes for Healing Conductor, for those who are currently Conductors or those interested in becoming, led by Ramana and held at the Ishk Center in Silver Spring. Future dates are: Sat., July 16; Sat., Aug 20; Sat., Sept. 17. 10 AM to 5PM with pot luck lunch. $35. ramana3@NOSPAM verizon.net

July 7 to 17 - Annual Sufi Order Summer Gathering at the Abode in New Lebanon, NY.
The first three days, July 8-10, will be devoted to a celebration of the Message, with an big concert on Friday night. Running through this part of the camp, will be intensives to explore several themes relevant to the need of our times: interspiritual dialogue, guardianship of our sacred environment (esoteric eco-science), sacred sound and movement (celebration through music and dance), and the call of the Message (introduction to the new initiative called Universal Awakening).
The second three days, July 11-13, will be an alchemical retreat guided by Pir Zia and Aziza.
The last four days, July 14-17, will offer Leaders' Training with Pir Zia, Aziza, Taj, Gayan, and others. A Jamiat Am meeting is planned for the evening of July 13 at the end of the retreat.

July 11 to 17 - Creative Arts for Peace Camp, at Claymont, near Charlestown, WV. Exploring the Elements of Peace. Each day will be dedicated to an element: Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether (Spirit/Source). We will weave in ritual, clan bonding activities, spiritual
walking practice, stories, and of course, lots and lots of Dances of Universal Peace! The evenings will include drumming, a family concert, a bonfire, an Abrahamic deepening, and a Talent Sharing. SpiralRose@NOSPAM aol.com

Oct. 20 to 23 - October Mid-Atlantic Sufi Camp, Practice Makes Perfect, to be held at Camp Holiday Trails in Charlottesville, Virginia, beginning the evening of Thursday, October 20 and ending on Sunday, October, 23. Sponsored jointly by the Sufi Order and the Ruhaniat, and offering lots of opportunities for spiritual practice including: dance, song, walks, prayer, meditation and zikr, as well as time for building friendship and community

Special announcement

Len & Wendy's CD, called Flow, is due out in July, with lots of new songs, and features guest appearances by cellist David Darling, percussionist Jon Seligman, and multi-instrumentalist Stream Ohrstrom. They have three appearances coming: Sat., June 4, at the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt; Sun., June 26, at Arlington United Methodist Church, and Sat., July 30, at the Sangha Cafe in Takoma Park. See www.lenandwendy.com

------------------------------

--------

Regular classes

Chevy Chase

Mon. evenings: Sufi Teachings and Practices

Nawr@NOSPAM aol.com or nkadian@NOSPAM earthlink.net (Munawir and Zarifah)

Silver Spring Ishk Center

Noor and Ramana have moved here from Gaithersburg.

Teachings and practices, 1st and 3rd Thurs. at 7:30. Zikr on the 1st and healing on the 3rd.

Individual retreats

asmallen@NOSPAM email.usps.gov or ramana3@NOSPAM verizon.net

12422 New Hampshire Ave Sil. Spr. MD 20904, phone 301-622-2779.

Alexandria
Zikr
every Thursday night at 7:45 PM. lwilliamsva@NOSPAM earthlink.net (Zehra)

The Spirit of Guidance
: Once a month. Day varies; this month 4-6 PM in Alex. on Sun., June 5 -Jami Baltimore area:

Teachings and practices, 2nd Thurs.

Healing Class and Service, 3rd Thurs.

Dances of Universal Peace, 3rd Wed.

Universal Worship, 3rd Sun.

mkammerer@NOSPAM jhmi.edu

In Cockeysville

agape101@NOSPAM comcast.net (Savitri)

In Randallstown
yanur@NOSPAM yahoo.com Raphaelite Interims (tentative)

Raphaelite Training: In Balt. area with Nur-al-Haqq, July 16-17 (in Eldersburg)
New group with Ramana in Silver Spring starts Sept. 9-11, 2005
One on One processing: Dec. 9-11, 2005 (tentative date)

Dances of Universal Peace. Many activities, described in a separate monthly announcement called Spirit of the Dance. Write to SpiralRose@NOSPAM aol.com to receive it.

--------------------------------

Directions to the Institute of Spiritual Development for the Universal Worship
5419 Sherier Pl., NW -- off Arizona Ave, close to MacArthur Blvd.

From the Beltway: Take the exit for the Clara Barton Pkwy, which is #41 from the south and #40 (marked as Cabin John Pkwy) from the north. That changes to Canal Road. Just past Chain Bridge, go left on Arizona Ave. for 1/4 mile, then left on Sherier Place. (If you reach MacArthur Blvd you've just passed it.) The church building is a block and a half on the right.

From downtown DC: Take Canal Road to Arizona Ave. Go right on Ariz. for 1/4 mile, then left on Sherier Place. (If you reach MacArthur Blvd you've just passed it.) The church building is a block and a half on the right.

From upper NW DC: Take Nebraska Ave (by American University) to Arizona Ave. Go left on Ariz., go past MacArthur Blvd for 1 block, then right on Sherier Place. The church building is a block and a half on the right.

From Virginia: Either go into town and follow the directions above from downtown DC, or take Chain Bridge and follow the directions above that start from the Beltway.

Directions to Stream and Tania's for the Circle of Worship: Wash. Beltway to Exit 33 for Conn. Ave. North. Stay left on Conn. Ave (not Univ. Blvd.) After Viers Mill, Randolf and Weller Roads, take the first left on Atherton Dr, first right on Neola, and right at end to Littleton St. 3804 Littleton is on right, phone 301-949-8984.

Take a yoga class at Studio Serenity on Monday or Wednesday at 7am...

2005-06-09T22:50:00.000-07:00

I'm teaching them!

A common misconception about yoga is that it is "soothing and relaxing" but "not real exercise." There certainly are some yoga poses that soothe and relax you, and all yoga should help to calm your mind, but the flowing vinyasa style I prefer to teach is pretty vigorous and strength-building, and students are generally drenched in sweat by the end of class. Aerobic? Absolutely. You may be familiar with sore legs from running or sore arms from weightlifting...yoga is the only exercise I've encountered that can make every single muscle in your body sore, all at once. When I overdo it in an advanced class, it's sometimes difficult for me to walk the next day.

I generally begin with a centering meditation, asking students to set an intention for their practice, then a warm up that flexes the spine in each of its six different directions (front back side side twist twist), then sun salutations with various variations, then a bit of pranayama, then standing and balancing poses, then deeper backbends and hip openers, then inversions, then finishing poses and a stint in savasana or "corpse pose" and a final meditation during which I read a poem or quote. I've noticed that some teachers skip the reading but I love it...where else would I get a captive audience of people to read poetry to?

Oh yeah...a blog.

So I'll start keeping a record of my readings, mostly for my own benefit - it'll be interesting to look back at the themes I chose.

Wednesday morning:

Gitanjali (selection)
by Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Changes

2005-06-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

My friend Marcella, with whom I spent last evening scampering around the roof of her new house throwing water balloons at the neighbors; who, when she graduated from American University and came back to work in DC after spending the summer in Mexico with her family, seriously considered buying a $2,000 van and living in it, while using the bathrooms at the AU gym, to save on rent; who quit her job as a waitress at Blues Alley (said job allowed her to sign up for any shifts she wanted based on whether she liked the band that was playing that night) because it was "too much commitment," and earned most of her cash nude art modelling for the next few months; who once saved a woman being beaten up by a gang of thugs on the side of the road; who had a musician/painter boyfriend break up with her once because she was, quote, "too bohemian for him to handle" (to which Marcella said exasperatedly, "What does that word mean anyway?"); who told me seriously sometime last year, "Zoe, I've decided to stop being an existentialist"...

Marcella just got a job at the IMF. And she's doing a great job. They love her.

Spinning my wheels

2005-06-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

The search for a new bike continues, although Martin kindly lent me one of the beaters from his basement to tide me over. It doesn't have handbrakes - you stop by pushing the pedals backwards. Since one of my habits is to idly spin the wheels quickly backwards while I'm riding downhill, this has resulted in a number of embarassing jerky stops.

But never fear, reader, I'll try to find a bike that does not closely resemble a nuclear bomb, in order to avoid the inconvenient events of Monday.

In the meantime my friend Ben's post, on how the whole world and legal system likes to kick around us poor bikers, is great and rather cathartic.

Whatever you do, don't lock up your bike near the White House

2005-06-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

I went to a briefing at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building this morning for my think tank research assistant job. Cindy Courville, the director for African Affairs at the National Security Council, was holding a briefing for policy-makers in the community to discuss a recent trip to South Africa she'd made.

Now, my boss, stretched in forty seven directions and the mother of two young children, never goes to events anymore - even at conferences where she gives speeches, she tends to show up five minutes before her speech and leave shortly thereafter. The only events she attends are the ones she organizes. It seems that in Washington, once you're "important", events are irrelevant. Your network of people lets you know what the important facts are anyway.

As a result of this, I get sent to an awful lot of different events: Capitol Hill, other think tanks in the area, hotel conferences: you name it and I surf the buffet table and scoop up all the available literature for our files.

I'd never been to the Eisenhower building before, so I biked over early, enjoying the sunny morning and the wide, car-free expanse of Pennsylvania Avenue near 17th St. After searching vainly for a bike lock station, I locked my bike to an inconspicuous fence around a garden. All the briefing attendees were huddling in a security tent outside and we chatted amiably as we waited for our escort, who turned out to be a pleasant young summer intern with a thick, tan, bulgy neck that protuded over the collar of his polyester blend suit. He'd been on the job two weeks and was still distracted by the click of his business shoes against the polished marble floor.

In the wood-panelled meeting room, Cindy Courville launched into a teeth-grittingly optimistic report of a conversation she'd had with the President of South Africa about his "initiatives" in various genocide and atrocity-ridden regions and the continuing progress of the horrific plague of AIDS. Her talking points were smooth; she stressed the points of cooperation with South Africa and smoothed over disagreements by labelling them "the inevitable disagreements that two mature sovereign nations can have with each other while agreeing to disagree."

She gave an update on the status of bilateral free-trade negotiations with South Africa: basically, nothing had happened but this was not surprising because "there are tough negotiators on each side who are committed to upholding their countries’ interests. Nonetheless President Mbeki is committed to pushing this process forward."

Further, President Mbeki was committed to pursuing South Africa’s leadership role in Sudan and the US was committed to supporting that effort whole-heartedly. The US was also committed to supporting South African initiatives in the troubled regions of Zimbabwe, Burundi, and the Cote d’Ivoire.

In fact, according to Cindy, there was enough commitment involved on both sides to make a young 20-something Washingtonian in a fuck-buddy relationship jump 20 feet in the air and run for the hills. Commitment was in the air, in peoples’ hearts and minds. It just wasn’t reflected in any legal documents or concrete agreements.

I’m sure Cindy would have loved for Africa to have been more of a strategic priority for her bosses, for W. to pay attention to her memos in the free time between his morning jogs, his speeches on terrorism, and his pancake breakfasts. But she didn’t have much to work with and her facade of optimism, though I mock it, was a brave show. Because that was her job and she was doing the best she could to help the world.

There are people in the Bush administration who do genuinely care about Africa. After all, the Millennium Challenge Account - a rather ground-breaking organization aimed at delivering aid in a new way, encouraging recipient countries to design their own projects based on their assessment of their needs - was the brainchild of the Bush administration. Granted, it’s received funding at levels approximately half what Bush originally promised it’d get by now, but part of that shortfall is caused by delays on the part of the recipient countries designing their projects.

Such were my musings as I left the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, about forty five minutes later, and headed towards the fence where I’d locked my bike.

It wasn’t there.

I looked left. I looked right.

Near the security tent where I’d first registered for the Africa briefing, there was a bike resting upside down with its tires spinning sadly in the air. It looked a bit like an antelope after every single lion in the pride including the cubs has had its turn chewing the entrails out. Lying on the ground near the bike was something that used to be a Kryptonite lock.

I demanded of the security guard in the tent, "What happened to my bike?"

He snickered. "That’s your bike? You’d better talk to that policeman over there."

A fat man in a police uniform was leaning against his patrol car on the empty Pennsylvania Avenue, watching us. He walked over and after a bit of back and forth we established my name, my Social Security number, my date of birth, my employer, and my purpose for standing there near the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

"How do I even know that’s your bike?" he asked.

"Well, my key fits the lock for it, want to try?" I offered.

So he picked up the mangled half of the lock that had the keyhole in it and I turned my key. It sprang creakily open, wagging little flaps of plastic.

Although he’d been truculent at first, after he’d chatted on his walkie talkie for a while and established that my data checked out and that I wasn’t on any no-fly lists, he warmed up and became quite apologetic.

"Once your bike is locked to government property, it becomes abandoned goods," he explained. They’d instated this rule to help deal with all the protesters who did things like chain themselves or their possessions to gates.

I said, "There wasn’t any sign on the fence not to lock things to it. And I couldn’t see any other good places to lock my bike on the whole block. I thought for less than an hour, it’d be fine."

He shrugged. "You know, in this heightened terror alert time...post 9/11 world... security... preventive response..." I can’t remember if he put in any filler words or if he just recited the buzzwords like a mantra, but it’s not relevant.

I noticed that he was holding a bandage against one of his hands, which was dripping blood. "Are you okay?"

"Oh, I injured myself with my boxcutters trying to saw your bike in half," he said. "You know, that Kryptonite lock is great. I tried blasting it, I tried drilling on it, it wouldn’t budge. So I had to saw the bike in half. You should really feel great about that lock."

I said, "For future reference, if you ever need to break a Kryptonite lock, try a Bic pen. Apparently you can pick them by just sticking a pen in there. They issued a recall and I always meant to send in my lock for a replacement but I never got around to it." I thought but did not comment that if the cop had known the Bic pen trick, my bike (and his hand) might still be in one piece.

The cop glanced at my driver’s license. "Zoe - that’s a beautiful name! My little girl is called Zoe," he beamed.

"It means ‘life’ in Greek," I said.

"Yes it does," he replied. He was warming up. "You know, you might see your bike on the
evening news tonight."

"Really?"

"Yeah, you don’t understand, I was really going at that bike with the drill, the box-cutters... and there are always media people hanging around near here." he said, idly kicking a few charred scraps of rubber lying near the bike carnage. "Hey," he said, brightening, "maybe you could keep the lock and send it in to Kryptonite. Tell them that someone stole your bike. I bet you anything they’d refund it."

"No way," I said. "That’s bad karma."

In the end we filled out an accident report which I am to turn into the Secret Service. It will also include my name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, and sundry other details. It is a multi-purpose form, for government negligence that causes damage to property, injury, or wrongful death. In the case of injury or death the person who fills out the form is asked to itemize their hospital and medication bills and provide documentation from a doctor (or, I presume, a coroner in the case of wrongful death, although I remain curious as to how you can fill out such a form in the grave, considering how dark it is down there). But in my case since there are no bicycle doctors per se I will simply take some photographs to document the damages. I can expect an answer within 4-6 weeks although, stressed my friendly policeman (who provided his name and badge number) the government is not actually obligated to reimburse me. Abandonment of property and all that.

I leave any thoughts on creeping police state, regime of terror, endemic paranoia, etc as an exercise to the reader.

But I do ask you two pieces of advice. Should I fill out this accident reimbursement form? Or will it land me on some sort of trouble-maker list with the Secret Service? This seems paranoid but then again I never anticipated that locking my bike to a shrubbery fence would present me with bicycle Kibble n’ Bits within the course of half an hour.

Also, anyone know of any good used hybrid bikes that would fit a 5'7'’ woman (who prefers frames to run large)? Please let me know!

Music (ethereal, beautiful, dreamy - for a rainy day)

2005-06-03T13:20:00.000-07:00

For those who enjoy new music tips: my latest musical obsession is the hauntingly beautiful indie chamber music group Rachel's. You can download French Gallease free at the always entertaining www.epitonic.com.

In the same ethereal and beautiful vein, people who haven't discovered Sigur Ros yet can check out two of their songs here.

Here's a gorgeous Blonde Redhead song, Misery is a Butterfly.

Kristin Hersh's music has become even more exquisite since Throwing Muses broke up. On this page I especially like Echo.

And the Ida song, Blizzard of '78, is fun.

Henry Cowell's Exultation is cute, stylishly peppy piano...

Terminal 4 does bad-ass things with cello improv...

Finally, I'm afraid that the Pretenders song offered here, Complex Person, does more to sum up my personal psychological pathologies than I ever thought possible in a pop song...

Notice that I did not mention Enya even once here. I'm very proud.

Anybody have any recommendations?

CROOKED DEALS

2005-06-03T13:16:00.000-07:00

Crooked Deals
by Hafiz

There is
A madman inside of you
Who is always running for office -
Why vote him in,
For he never keeps the accounts straight.
He gets all kinds of crooked deals
Happening all over town
That will just give you a big headache
And glue to your kisser
A gigantic
Confused
Frown.

The Jam-Jar Hop

2005-06-03T13:14:00.000-07:00

When I was younger than I am now
I dreamed I could teleport objects
Just by staring at them.
Then I woke up. But I thought
I'd only dreamed that I woke up.
Sitting bleary at the breakfast table
I glared at the strawberry jam jar
Surprised it did not jump into my hands.

I love to tell the story of this memory
Because it is cute.
However, I have re-told it so many times
The memory itself, for all I know, may be a dream.

Smallest Witnesses: the Crisis in Darfur Through Childrens' Eyes

2005-06-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Committee on Conscience

Smallest Witnesses: The Crisis in Darfur Through Children's Eyes

This event will be live webcast at www.committeeonconscience.org

Friday, June 3, 2005
2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

On a recent mission to the refugee camps along Darfur's border with Chad, Human Rights Watch researchers, Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault, gave children pens and crayons to draw while their families were being interviewed. Without any instruction or guidance, the children began to draw scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: the attacks by the "Janjaweed", the bombings by Sudanese government forces, the shootings, the rapes, the burning of entire villages, and the flight to Chad. Join us to see the children's drawings and learn more about the situation in Darfur.

Featuring:
Jemera Rone, Sudan Researcher, Human Rights Watch
Olivier Bercault, Emergencies Researcher, Human Rights Watch
Dr. Annie Sparrow, Third Millennium Fellow, Harvard University
Researcher, Human Rights Watch
Moderator: Jerry Fowler, Staff Director, Committee on Conscience, U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum

This event is presented in cooperation with Human Rights Watch. It is free and open to the public. RSVP to cocrsvp@ushmm.org. It is held at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Pl., SW, Washington, DC, 20024. Metro: Smithsonian.

This event is made possible in part by the Helena Rubinstein Foundation.

Letter from the Congo

2005-05-31T06:49:00.000-07:00

From my friend Josh, currently working in the Congo.
By the way, there's also an editorial in the New York Times about Darfur today.

************************************************

The e-mails asking if I’m still alive have started coming in again. I’ve intended to write to you all for a while, but was often busy with work.

Since many of you asked me what I’ve been doing in DRC, I thought I’d write about my work but ended up writing about something else. (See attachment.) Besides what I mention in my update, I also report on the human security and human rights situation in certain areas, write project proposals, and investigate individual cases of abuses outside the courts.

Since I don’t cover everything in this update, please feel free to write me back. It’d be great to hear from you and I’ll gladly respond.

I hope you are all well and enjoying life.

Best wishes,
Josh

Monday, 30 May 2005

When I first saw her body, I thought she was dead. She was lying motionless under the midday sun outside the health center with a thin shawl draped over her face and torso. A peasant woman of 60 years, Lwakasi was one of the latest victims of a group of bandits who had been kidnapping villagers from the Walungu territory in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Known as the Rastas, these bandits had mutilated or killed over a hundred people in the territory of Walungu in the past six months alone with the cooperation of the FDLR, a rebel group that’s at the center of the Congo-Rwanda conflict. The number is relatively small compared to other areas of the DRC, but this group had succeeded in sinking the already destitute population into deeper misery. Demanding ransoms upwards of $2000 per group, the Rastas had stripped most villages of their savings, obliterated many of their crops, and had raped, mutilated or killed hundreds of their children and adults. Those who were spared the nighttime attacks live in constant fear of being the next targets.

Undisciplined Congolese troops added to the toll of pillaging and rapes, committing some of these acts in front of villagers by daylight. And nature—which had blessed this area with fertile ground and beautiful weather—also played a role, ruining swathes of this year’s harvest with the mosaic virus.

The elderly woman I saw, though, was alive but exhausted from the previous day’s journey. She had walked all day through the forest to offer the ransom to release eight of her family members and neighbors that were held captive by the Rastas. Since she had only collected $1050 instead of the necessary $1500, the bandits kept a 14-year old girl, one of three adolescent girls whom they had been raping about four times a day for the past two weeks.

On the long journey home, her husband was too weak to walk from spending two weeks in the forest with little food, regular beatings and being tied up violently. She had to carry him on her back and, at some point during the walk, he died on her back. Those remaining were an elderly man, two adolescent girls, and their parents, who were forced to watch their daughters raped each day for two weeks.

Drained from the experience of the last two weeks, Lwakasi would fall in and out of consciousness when I interviewed her. She wouldn’t cry although she stifled a few sobs when I placed her husband’s half-covered corpse into our jeep next to her. The elderly man who was held captive with the same group rode emotionless in our vehicle, even though he had bone-deep rope burns and lash marks from being been beaten with chains and burning sticks.

Sadly, this woman’s experience is similar to others I had heard over the past few months. Women would speak of having guns and other objects inserted inside them, of having their parents forced to spread their legs while they were raped, of being forced to lie down between rotting corpses to remind them of their imminent death. One adolescent girl I had met asked matter-of-factly if we were going eat her baby, the first of two to be born from rape. Previously a bright student in school, she had been raped or held as a sexual slave since she was 13 or 14. Now at 18, her eyes had the glazed look of someone out of touch with reality. Only the cries of the baby she carried on her back seemed to pull her back to life.

Since November, I had been writing reports on the human rights and the human security situation in Walungu for work. The reports have required regular field trips to the area, about 45 km southwest of my home base in Bukavu, and meetings with military, civil society, local government, rebels, and people like Lwakasi.

Although I have taken risks to meet with rebels in no-go zones, the most indelible experiences have been with these women and with others who’ve gone through the kidnappings. Coming from the West, it’s difficult to comprehend the depth of such suffering and these people have brought me closer to the human reality of the conflict that has wrecked the eastern part of this country.

Others who’ve also seen the conflict upfront are outraged by the inattention the DRC receives. “People don’t know the suffering of the Congolese. Because if they did, they would do something about it,” said a missionary friend who’d been in DRC since 1982 after I had recounted the stories from my most recent field trip. Her comment captured the frustration many humanitarians feel at the inattention the DRC receives. Earlier this year, for example, a survey of top humanitarian officials, activists, media professionals and academics placed the Congolese conflict as the most forgotten humanitarian crisis, ahead of Uganda, Sudan, and West Africa.

The ignorance of the problems in the DRC, though, is not so surprising. Faced with such unfathomable devastation from a country so far away, it’s easy to take a head-in-the-sand approach while living in the West. It strains the imagination to comprehend what’s going on and, unfortunately, the fact that black people from the bush are dying makes it more difficult for many to empathize with this suffering.

Besides, those who do try to help are often disillusioned by the seeming intractability of the conflict. Unlike the tsunami catastrophe that killed hundreds of thousands, the Congo crisis, which has resulted in over 3 million deaths, is man-made and thus more difficult to control. Donors pledge hundreds of millions of dollars for the DRC only to see the creeping progress jerk back several paces because of the actions of the principal actors.

Despite the complexity of the Congo crisis, we can do more. Donor governments and institutions can hold both the DRC government and its neighbors more accountable for their actions. The U.S., the European Union, Belgium, and others can pin their pledges to concrete measures of progress in the transition, such as beginning election registration and more transparent use of government funds. On paper, donors have already promised to take such actions but, in reality, they’ve been dithering in their responses. Many of those same donors can also press Rwanda to hold to its word to facilitate the return of Rwandan rebel refugees from DRC.

Citizens of western countries can do something, too. You can help fund several outstanding organizations that work in this region, including Doctors Without Borders and International Rescue Committee. (If you e-mail me, I can send you information on various organizations that work in my region.) While it will be the will of the political and military leaders in the DRC and the heads of its neighboring countries that will steer this country toward peace, the individual actions we all can provide do mean something. Whether it is through donations or through aid work, they save lives.

Knock down little girls to the ground

2005-05-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

I biked home from work two days ago in a teeth-grittingly hellacious mood.

It was one of those free-floating, petty, bad moods - I don't know if you're familiar with them, dear reader - which aren't even ameliorated by the knowledge that you have something to justify them. Nope, it was just a cavalcade of low-grade annoyances: the grizzly, rainy day, the slightly annoying living situation, the amorphous worry about my future direction and continent of choice. I was hungry and my blood sugar was low. I'd been working since 7am and I was about to teach two more yoga classes. My thigh muscles, already sore from a week of intense yoga practice, screamed at me as I grunted up the 16th st hill, splashing myself in a mud puddle on the way. The traffic was heavy and cars were honking at each other. A taxi swerved out of its lane and cut me off, prompting a bus-accident flashback. So I switched to the sidewalk.

Now, pedestrians are very easy to avoid if they move in a predictable way - just check out the streets of Amsterdam if you want proof. But sometimes you encounter bike-phobic pedestrians. They see you coming from twenty feet away, their lips clench, and their little eyes fill with paranoid, passive-aggressive fury: "That bicycle should be on the street! It's clearly only on the sidewalk for the express purpose of barrelling into me and grinding my bones into the sidewalk! I must prepare defensive maneuvers!" They stop walking, glare at you, and then they jump to the left. Just as you start to swerve to the right to avoid them, they change their minds and jump to the right. This continues for a couple of beats until you screech to a halt in front of them. They glare at you for a final few moments - channelling the combined hostility of a suburban fetish gardener watching adorable children play on his obsessively-watered lawn, and perhaps Laura Bush watching W. do the tango with Condi at the White House Christmas party - and then they continue walking. Meanwhile, you've lost all your momentum on the hill and have to get back on your bike again.

So yeah, there were a couple of those anal pedestrians. And I was wet and tired and hungry and cranky. I was hardly noticing anything around me, so wrapped up was I in my internal narrative of woe and self-pity. Every detail in the universe seemed designed to annoy me.

When I finally reached the stairs leading up to my apartment - sweet 15-minute catnap! Hot tea and taking my shoes off! - I eagerly picked up my bike and swung it around the corner to start climbing. Then I heard a faint noise behind me.

This noise was absolutely indescribable: subtle, somehow anthropomorphic, and also, somehow, definitely bad. I turned around.

There was a small girl in a bright pink sweatsuit lying on the ground. Sunk in my absurd funk, I hadn't noticed her behind me, and I'd knocked her down with the back of my bike as I swung it around to start climbing the stairs.

All the competing noises in my head vanished, like fog in the wind, to be replaced by just one thought: OH SHIT. I KNOCKED OVER A LITTLE GIRL BECAUSE I WAS DISTRACTED BY MY BAD MOOD. I'M SUCH AN ASSHOLE. And then a series of imaginary images: the little girl's bloody mouth with all the teeth I'd knocked out, her black eyes, her sad innocent face, her dawning realization that the world was out to get her...

"Omigod omigod omigod, is she okay?" I said, putting the bike down. "I'm so sorry, omigod..."

Then the little girl sat up. She laughed.

Her family, who'd been walking behind her, also laughed. Her dad made a waving motion at me as if to say, "Don't worry about it." Her sister began yelling something at her in Spanish; I'm not sure what it was, exactly, but from the tone of voice it seemed to be along the lines of, "Ha ha, you got knocked over by a bike!"

My panicked tongue was a bit late in catching up with the situation and it continued to blabber. "Oh my god, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, are you okay?"

The little girl jumped up and ran over to take her sister's hand. The whole family was laughing now - perhaps at the farcical physical comedy of the situation, or perhaps at my flustered distress - and they all waved goodbye at me.

I have to say, I'm a fan of instant karma. It's nice to just get it over with, y'know?

Support the World's Only Imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Recipient On Her 60th Birthday

2005-05-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

TIME: June 17th, 2005 from 9:30 - 11:00 am LOCATION: 2300 S St, NW Washington, DC 20008 EQUIPMENT: Yourself, your friends, and your voice

PROTEST FOR AUNG SAN SUU KYI, JUNE 17th, 2005

Just as the world rallied around Nelson Mandela when he spent his 70th
birthday behind bars as a politcal prisoner in South Africa, every
single person in the world who cares about human rights should take
action to support Aung San Suu Kyi on her 60th birthday. On June 17th,
two days before her birthday, activists in one dozen countries from
Africa to Europe to Asia will protest at embassies of Burma's military
regime to demand her release. Join us in Washington, DC!

Let Us Know You're Coming: write to info@uscampaignforburma.org

US Campaign for Burma
1612 K St, NW #401
Washington, DC 20006
(202) 223-0300
(202) 466-5189 fax
www.uscampaignforburma.org

======================================

More Information on Aung San Suu Kyi's 60th Birthday

For Immediate Release: May 20th, 2005

Contact: Aung Din and Jeremy Woodrum at (202) 223 0300

30 Days to the 60th Birthday of World's Only Imprisoned Nobel Peace
Prize Recipient

Campaign to Honor Aung San Suu Kyi Growing Rapidly As Activities Planned
in US, Asia, Europe, Africa

(Washington, DC) A global effort to honor the world's only imprisoned
Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi on her 60th birthday has gained
rapid momentum over the past month as scores of individuals and organizations
have signed up to participate in activities around the world.

The effort is modeled on global demonstrations and rallies in 1988 to
free former South African leader Nelson Mandela when he was still imprisoned
on Robben Island.

A brief summary of activities taking place:
--US Campaign for Burma has collected pledges for 6,000 birthday cards
for Aung San Suu Kyi on her 60th birthday. USCB will attempt to "deliver"
these cards to the Burmese embassy at a demonstration to be held on June 17th.

--The city of Edinburgh, Scotland will award Aung San Suu Kyi its
"Freedom of the City" award.

--Protests are planned in front of 16 embassies and consulates of
Burma's military regime, in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy,
South Africa, Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Switzerland and Thailand.

--The organization WITNESS, founded by musician Peter Gabriel, will
release a new film on the plight of internally displaced persons in eastern
Burma.

--A major university in Thailand will award Aung San Suu Kyi an honorary
doctoral degree.

--The city and county of San Francisco have officially declared June
19th "Aung San Suu Kyi Day". The cities of Berkeley and San Jose are
considering similar measures.

--60 individuals have pledged to "Arrest themselves" at home for 24
hours in solidarity with Aung San Suu Kyi. While at home, they will host "House
Arrest Parties" to raise awareness and funds for the international
struggle for human rights and democracy in Burma.

--Irish musicians Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan released a press release
stating that he planned to release a new song dedicated to Aung San Suu
Kyi during her birthday celebrations.

--In the United States, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and
leading US Senators will host an event dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi.

--Two women's organizations, San Francisco-based "Burmese American
Women's Association" and New York-based "Women on the Move for Burma" are
hosting events to honor Aung San Suu Kyi's 60th birthday. Burmese democracy
activists in Korea and Japan are also planning to hold the events on
June 19th, 2005 in Seoul and Tokyo.

Since 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi has led an international campaign to end
over 40 years of brutal military rule in the Southeast Asian country of
Burma. After a nationwide uprising was crushed in 1988, she led her political
party the National League for Democracy to an 82% victory in a national
election in 1990. The ruling dictatorship refused to recognize the results and
has kept her locked for ten of the past 15 years. In the meantime, Burma's
regime has recruited up to 70,000 child soldiers (far more than any
other country).

Krishna Das in Alexandria on Thursday

2005-05-24T07:36:00.000-07:00

TIME: Thursday, May 26, 8pm LOCATION:George Washington Middle School, 1005 Mt. Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia EQUIPMENT: Yourself, vocal chords, sense of devotion, $20

Krishna Das, the fusion devotional chanter, will be performing this Thursday. His shows are absolutely wonderful, intense experiences. Bring a cushion or blanket to sit on the floor; there'll be audience participation.

Information here:
http://www.prasadayoga.com/KDpress.html

One Big Dinner in the Washington Post today

2005-05-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/23/AR2005052301693.html

Looks like I underestimated the attendance - they claim 40. Jocelyn, the girl quoted in the last paragraph, is the one I chatted to, by the way...

One Big Dinner - and One Long Reading List

2005-05-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

I went to the potluck dinner for members of the LGBT community and evangelical Christians last night, and had a blast.

The dinner was held in the basement of the Unitarian Church on 16th and Columbia St - conveniently two blocks from where I live, so I made a big pot of bulgur pilaf and carried it over, still warm. There were maybe 25 or 30 people there, and two big tables full of peoples' food contributions. It was fun to look at the food and guess which of it had been made by whom - the Christians or the gays. A salad of field greens with purple edible flowers (SO DELICIOUS! I went back three times to pick out more of those tasty spicy flowers) turned out to have been brought by a gay man who got it at the local farmer's market, and there were some appetizers in the shape of little circles, made of bread wrapped around ham and American cheese, that I recognized from the recipe oeuvre of some Christian family friends of mine. So that was predictable enough. But another Christian girl brought some dumplings with steamed edamame beans, carrot and ginger; so much for my prejudice.

It was equally fun to look at the guests and guess which camp they were from (not as obvious as I'd assumed it would be.) There were also the obligatory DC-is-small moments: I ran into two people I knew, Jeff (who I met with Kaelan at the Art-o-matic), and Jesse (a friend of Jamia's I'd met at her clothing swap last year).

Everyone was very friendly and many people got up and switched tables halfway through dinner so as to meet more people. I had conversations about living in Indonesia and how it feels to have roots in life, sign language and the deaf community, clothing swaps, thrift stores, the health benefits of fasting, Western imperialism and genetically modified crops. At the second table I was sitting at, a blond girl called Jocelyn was speaking very animatedly about the failings of Western capitalism, and the unfair way in which the US treated the rest of the world. At first I assumed she was from the gay side since her politics seemed so liberal (and hence scoped her out a little bit, I have to admit) - but as she continued to speak I noticed a certain passionate fervor in her words that seemed undeniably religious.

Sure enough, she was a Christian. She told me that her parents were both hippies - her mum a yoga instructor and her dad a drug addict - who'd both had religious experiences and moved to the country and lived in a house with their eight children and a series of house guests. Most recently their guests had included an opera singer who was going crazy as a result of a brain tumor, and a physicist who'd sworn a religious vow of celibacy since being a teenager but had unfortunately recently fallen in love with Jocelyn, she said with a hint of complacency, which was disrupting his whole worldview.

Jocelyn said that her mum had become a born-again Christian after she'd been meditating in her bedroom, looked out the window, and saw the face of Jesus in a dogwood tree. (I mentioned to her that the dogwood tree is a Christian symbol, as explained here - the four-bracted red marking inside each flower is supposed to represent the cross.) Her dad found God when he was shaving one morning and heard a voice: "If you get high tonight, you'll lose the sight in your right eye." He ignored the voice, went on a binge that evening, and when he woke up he was missing part of his right retina. Her parents founded a Christian church together along with some of the members of the rock band her dad had played with (who'd also all found God one night when they were sitting in a jail cell) and their church had been growing rapidly over the past 30 years, now with 60 chapters across the world.

We had a VERY long conversation about the notion of Absolute Truth and whether all religions are ultimately expressions of the same Absolute Truth once you gain a high enough perspective (my belief), or whether there are enduring differences (Jocelyn's belief; she thinks there's a notion of "grace" in Christianity that you don't see in any other religion.) Jocelyn hadn't read many non-Christian religious works and had a lot of questions about Islam and Hinduism. I mostly know about yoga philosophy and a bit about Sufism and Hinduism, so I promised to send her a reading list. We pledged to keep in touch and continue our inter-religious dialogue.

Here's the email I sent her this morning:

***********************

Dear Jocelyn,

It was very nice to meet you last night! I'd love to continue our conversation... since it's basically about the most important thing there is to think about :)

I became interested in religion about two years ago after an experience during meditation, which was an intense feeling of divine connectedness and oneness, and also completely independent of any particular religious symbolism (perhaps since I didn't know much about any religion at that point.) Anyway, my overwhelming intuition is that every human being throughout history has always had equal opportunity to the divine, and that therefore a good angle for a search for the truth is to assume the ultimate union of truth, and then examine not only the similarities between religious paths, but also their differences, and try to think about what sort of paradoxical leap would be necessary for those differences to reconcile.

However, my sense is from my reading so far is that you can only compare religions for so long and it's helpful to eventually settle down with one particular spiritual path, even if you continually draw inspiration from others. The Dalai Lama once said that he didn't want any Christians to convert to Buddhism; if they were familiar with Christianity, that was the path that they should stick with - and ditto for Muslims and Hindus. This is tough for me since I'm a naturally eclectic and interdisciplinary person (double major English and Economics in college, for example)...so far yoga philosophy and Sufism have spoken to me most strongly, but there is so much beauty in so many different religious traditions. Anyway, a reading list for you - this was a great excuse to get out all my books...if you can't tell, I'm a huge bookworm!

I'd love any reading suggestions from you, such as parts of the Bible you think would interest me, or books about Christianity. To be perfectly frank, a lot of the books on Christianity I see on the shelves in stores are ridiculously shallow. I do love CS Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle, though...as well as a few others listed below.

Best wishes,
Zoe Konovalov

**********************************
"The Holy Longing: the Search for a Christian Spirituality" by Ronald Rolheiser

I'm in the middle of this now, and it's *very* well written. He's got a great bit in the beginning about how spirituality is a channeling of eros, the erotic energy within us, and he compares the lives of Janis Joplin, Princess Diana, and Mother Teresa, all of whom had a great deal of eros energy, but who each chose to channel it in different ways.

"Spirituality is about what we do with the fire within us, about how we channel our eros. And how we do channel it, the disciplines and habits we choose to live by, will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our bodies, minds and souls, and to a greater integration or disintegration in the way we are related to God, others, and the cosmic world."

********************************
Sufi poets:

Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam and focuses on a personal relationship with God. It's very inclusive and Sufis honour holy leaders from all religions.

Hafiz and Rumi are both so wonderful. For Hafiz I would recommend the Daniel Landinsky translations and for Rumi, Coleman Barks.

There are some Hafiz poems on the internet here:
http://www.poetseers.org/the_poetseers/hafiz/

I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself
A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
A Buddhist, a Jew.
The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me
That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel,
Or even pure
Soul.
Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me
Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.

And Rumi here:

http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/Rumilove.html
http://www.poetseers.org/spiritual_and_devotional_poets/contemp/rumibarks/6

Some Kiss We Want

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language- door and

open the love window. The moon
won't use the door, only the window.

***************************************

Bhagavad Gita -
This is one chapter out of the Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu epic. Most scholars think that it was a poem written much later and inserted into the middle of the Mahabrata. Most of the Mahabharata is a series of action packed stories; the Gita has a very different style, it's a long philosophical discussion that occurs in a split second, when Arjuna sits down on the battlefield and refuses to fight, and Krishna stops time and comes to talk to him. It includes the first thorough explanation of some of the most important concepts in yoga.
The Stephen Mitchell translation is very poetic, but other translations by Indian Swamis provide more explanation and context.

From the Gita:

"The Blessed Lord said,
Although I am unborn, deathless,
the Infinite Lord of all beings,
through my own wondrous power
I come into finite form.

Whenever righteousness falters
and chaos threatens to prevail
I take on a human body
and manifest myself on earth.

In order to protect the good,
to destroy the doers of evil,
to ensure the triumph of righteousness,
in every age I am born.

Whoever knows, profoundly,
my divine presence on earth
is not reborn when he leaves
the body, but comes to me.

Released from greed, fear, anger,
absorbed in me and made pure
by the practice of wisdom, many
have achieved my state of being.

However men try to reach me
I return their love with my love;
whatever path they may travel
It leads to me in the end."

********************************************

BKS Iyengar:

One of the first people to bring yoga over to the West. It happened when Yehudi Menuhin, a classical violin prodigy, had a block in the middle of his career and couldn't play music anymore. He tried everything and eventually one friend suggested he travel to India and study with Iyengar. He did and the breathing techniques and meditation he learned there were so powerful he was able to start playing again - Menuhin is quoted as saying that Iyengar was "the best violin teacher I had in my life." But the yoga made other differences to his life and he started to become much more interested in helping the world. He paid for a plane ticket for Iyengar to come to theStates and introduced him to many of his friends. He also founded a lot of educational institutes for young musicians to ensure that they had healthier and more nurturing training methods that included meditation.
I would recommend Iyengar's book "The Tree of Yoga" which is a wonderful collection of essays about yoga philosophy. His other books "Light on Yoga" and "Light on Pranayama" are much more technical and not as accessible.

I don't have "The Tree of Yoga" with me, but here's a quote from the introduction to "Light on Yoga":

"As water takes the shape of its container, the mind when it contemplates an object is transformed into the shape of that object. The mind which thinks of the all-pervading divinity which it worships, is ultimately through long-continued devotion transformed into the likeness of that divinity."

**************************************

Japji: Meditation in Sikhism (Translation and Commentary by Swami Rama)

I don't know much about Sikhism but picked up this book in a used bookstore - it includes a primer on meditation and some poems by the first Sikh Guru, Nanak Dev.

From the introduction (I like the last paragraph on the connection between grace and personal responsibility):

"Every word of the mul mantra, starting with Ek Omkar Sat Nam to Gurprasad, has profound meaning, so these words should be pronounced mentally with reverence. When the entire human being becomes an ear, then he hears Omkara. One can never imagine such a joy unless he directly experiences this stage.
Ek means "one." Here it refers to that infinite and eternal Reality that is One and Absolute without a second. That One is self-existent and ever deathless.
Omkara is the mother sound, perennially hummed in the cosmos. Sat Nam is used because among all the names and forms of the animate and inanimate, the word sat is the highest. Sat means "essence"; sat alone is self-existent, not subject to change, decomposition, or decay. Nam means "name". The Truth is infinite and eternal, and to attain this Truth the grace of the guru, who is accomplished and one with the Divine, is required.
Sri signifies the feminine gender, singular in number. It represents the feminine principle of the universe, the first cause of manifestation of the universe, without which the universe cannot exist.
The phrase Wahe Guru is also profound. The word wahe means "awesome." Guru is a combination of the words gu and ru. Gu means the darkness of ignorance, ru means the light of knowledge; that knowledge which dispels the darkness of ignorance is guru.
There are four aspects of grace. The grace of the Adi Granth is received by reverently repeating the sayings. The grace of God is equally important. The third, the grace of the guru, leads a student to a state of freedom from the bondage of karma and the sanskaras.
The fourth aspect is the grace of the self. If the aspirant does not have his own grace, he cannot retain the grace of the guru, of God, or of the Adi Granth. Therefore, before expecting to have the grace of God, guru, or Adi Granth, one should tap the resources within oneself.
Sankalpa - a full zeal for attainment, a burning desire, a perennial fervor, and a burning flame - should be lit."

Nanak Dev's first poem:

The nature of God eludes the soul
Who seeks through thought the final goal.
In silent trance, through eons spent,
Mind's restlessness may not relent.
The desire of man may never cease
Though wealth and worldly goods increase.
From a thousand, nay million feats of mind
No closer is man to God sublime.
How then for man to be pure in soul,
Transcend illusion, and achieve the goal?
Nanak says:
Self-realization requires surrender
To the pre-ordained will of God, the defender.

********************************

Thomas Merton, "Zen and the Birds of Appetite"

I haven't read this yet but it's on my list. Thomas Merton was a priest and Trappist monk who also lived and studied in a Zen monastery. This book is a collection of essays about the connections between Christian mysticism and Zen Buddhism.

********************************

Miguel Unamuno, "Tragic Sense of Life".

Unamuno is a Spanish philosopher and a Christian, and sometimes a Christian philosopher. I have dipped into this book in a few places but haven't tackled the whole thing yet. He's got a good perspective on the necessity for worldliness we were talking about - for example, the first chapter is entitled, "The Man of Flesh and Bone."

"For me the adjective humanus is no less suspect than its abstract substantive humanitus, humanity. Neither "the human" nor "humanity," neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive - man. The man of flesh and bone, the man who is born, suffers, and dies - above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother."

********************************

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz - "Poems, Protest, and a Dream"

Sor Juana was a nun who lived near the place that is Mexico City today, from 1648-1695. She wrote many religious poems and love poems, but her most famous work is a letter to a bishop defending the right of women to intellectual pursuits.

"That I study not at all is not within my power to achieve, and this I could not obey, for though I did not study in books, I studied all the things that God had wrought, reading in them, as in writing and in books, all the workings of the universe. I looked on nothing without reflexion; I heard nothing without meditation, even in the most minute and imperfect things, because as there is no creature, however lowly, in which one cannot recognize that 'God made me,' there is none that does not astound reason, if properly meditated on."

*******************************

Walt Whitman - "Leaves of Grass"

A poem to return to again and again in different ways! There is a lot of influence from Eastern philosophy here.

"A child said, 'What is the grass?' fetching it me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? ..I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and
remark, and say Whose?"

**********************************

Rabindranath Tagore

An Indian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
http://www.poetseers.org/nobel_prize_for_literature/tagore/

From his long poem "Gitanjali":

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary
desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

*********************************

The Dalai Lama, "The Art of Happiness"

A series of conversations between the Dalai Lama and a Western journalist. The journalist is not a Buddhist, and it's cute to see him try to wrap his mind around his encounters with the Dalai Lama.
He intersperses each conversation with a review of various scientific proofs of the benefits of meditation. It's a pretty accessible book, but ultimately limited by the fact that the author doesn't have a very deep understanding of Buddhism.

*********************************

Rilke - Stephen Mitchell translation

Stephen Mitchell is a wonderful translator for these very difficult German poems (he also did the Bhagavad Gita.) Rilke is mysterious and mystical and absolutely beautiful.

"I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world:
groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like a rising from the dead."

*************************************

Thomas Moore

A wonderful Catholic writer. Lots of his stuff here:

http://barque.blogspot.com/

I like this interview, on "The Care of the Soul":

http://www.ngws.org/service/Articles/CareOfSoul.htm#temptation%20to%20oversimplify

Dance on-stage at the Dresden Dolls concert

2005-05-20T21:02:00.000-07:00

I went to see the Dresden Dolls, a band I love, tonight; they were playing at the 9:30 club. As I was standing in line to get in, I noticed rather more exotic plumage around me than I was accustomed to seeing in DC. There was also a certain restless, simultaneously exhibitionistic and anxious, pulsing energy around me that I hadn't experienced since...since...since...high school.

Yep. I'd thought to myself before, offhandly, that the Dresden Dolls, piano and complex rhythms aside, basically represented the harnessing of turbulent teen-angsty feelings in a complex and sophisticated way. I was now witnessing the concrete confirmation of this observation: they had a huge teenage fanbase. There were all these gaggles of young people around me! They were giggling and talking loudly amongst themselves. One girl came up to me and complimented me on my rainbow striped stockings. "Those are great," she said. She was one of those confident teenagers who practiced striking up conversations with strangers. She hadn't quite perfected it yet, but she was going to get there.

The show, of course, was wonderful. Amanda was riveting as usual, and there were blistering drum solos from Brian. At one point halfway through the concert, Amanda pointed out that Brian had broken four drumsticks already. "That's so rock n' roll," she said, teasing him. "Well guys, I'm not trying to be a role model here," he said, addressing the audience. "It doesn't mean I'm manly, or anything."

At one point, Amanda asked some people from the audience to come up onstage as backup singers. I'd brought a book to give her: "Gods and Devils," a book of poems by Charles Simic. Simic is a hauntingly akimbo visionary and he seemed like the kind of thing Amanda would like. From his poem The Great War:

"You never saw anything as beautiful
As those clay regiments;
I used to lie on the floor
For hours, staring them in the eyes.
I remember them staring back at me in wonder.

How strange they must have felt
Standing stiffly at attention
Before a large, incomprehending creature
With a moustache made of milk...."

I wrote a long and heartfelt inscription for Amanda on the title page, all about how I'd first seen the Dolls at Iota more than a year ago, at a tiny show with about fifty people, and I was so glad that she was becoming so successful, and that she should treasure and preserve her talent.

I wasn't sure how I'd be able to give the book to her, but I figured I could just throw it on-stage. When she asked for volunteers, though, I eagerly jumped up and handed her the book. "Thanks," she said, and commented to the audience, "Somebody just gave me a book! It smells good..."*

It was a good vibe up there on stage and at one point we got a can-can going. I kicked my rainbow-striped legs high in the air.

Is it an insult to say that the Dresden Dolls are teenager music? They are very good teenager music; the best of teenager music. When we are teenagers, it seems that all the experiences of life are more vivid, perhaps because we are having them for the first time. Love is overwhelming and all-consuming; disappointment threatens to wrench our very selves away from us. Over time, it seems, we accumulate psychological scars from these vivid disappointments and decide that a safe trade-off to make is just to feel everything less vividly, both the highs and lows. Well, that's one solution. I believe that another solution is to try to cultivate detachment from those happy and sad emotions. You can still experience them; you can acknowledge them and sit with them, but you also acknowledge that your true self is essentially untouched by these experiences - not only the bad ones, but the good ones. Hence detachment actually contributes to the maintenance of a richer emotional texture in life. There's a more extensive discussion of detachment here, by the way, at my friend Ben's blog.

I looked around at all the teenagers at the concert and my heart went out to them. They were so alive; they cared about everything so much. They were so sensitive! This music really meant something to them; they sang along lovingly with the lyrics and many had dressed along with the goth style of the band. Their eyes were so bright and active, watching all of their friends, noticing other people watching them, noticing other people watching other people. And it broke my heart to think about how much pain many of them were going to go through, because you get hurt when you care about things that much. And some of them were going to make the decision to die a little bit, just so they could avoid dying all the way.

I hope some of them start going to yoga class.

*****************************************

*I keep bottles of aromatherapy oil in my bags, for anointing purposes. Sometimes the lids come off and over time my bag has accumulated a complex blend of odours that also scents anything I put in there. Basically I am like a wee version of the massive smell factory Salman Rushdie describes in his book "The Moor's Last Sigh."

Ode to My Keys

2005-05-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

When I found out about the crack dealers
Living in the house across the street
And the brisk business they were doing
I called my landlady to complain. She said, "Oh,"
in her sweet old lady voice. "We've had problems
With that before." I said indignantly,
"They harassed my roommate
As she was walking home!" "Ok, well," she said,
"Just make sure not to call the police
To complain." She said
One of the neighbors
Had done that and then
One of the crack dealers
Confronted him on the street and repeated
The same words he'd used in his call.
So she thought they had contacts
In the police station. Then the crack dealers
Called the neighbor bad names when they saw him
On the street. Until he had to move away. "So,"
said my landlady, "If you want to complain
Let me know and I'll call for you.
I'll use an unmarked pay phone."

I thought that was pretty rotten
That she never warned me before I moved in.
I'd asked about the safety!
All my friends agreed with me.
They were very indignant, too.
What a naughty landlady she was!
Our apartment door has a lock on it.
And then, the entryway door we share with next door
Has a lock too. Outside that door there's a steel cage
And you can lock that too.
None of the locks are that impressive.
I bet you could break them with a big hammer.
But I guess the fact that there's three of them in a row
Would discourage people.

Our apartment in Moscow
Had only one lock, but it was a big one,
Huge steel bars inside a steel door.
That door was designed so you could shoot it
With a machine gun
And you still couldn't get in.
There were all these dangerous people everywhere.
One businessman got shot in the Mayakovskaya metro
And you could see the bullets in the walls the next day.
Our door in that apartment was so good
Because there were a lot of Mafia people in the building.
The apartment building knew what its clients wanted.

All these naughty people in the world!
And what's more
They know that they're doing the wrong thing.
Me, sometimes I know I'm doing the wrong thing
But it's not as wrong as the things THEY do.
Although, where is the measuring stick that lets me know?
It would be a funny kind of measuring stick
And not, I think, very precise.

Sometimes I think I'd like to move far away
To a place without any other people.
I could run through the trees all day
And smell the flowers.
Insects jumping in the grass
Would devour each other horrifically
But it wouldn't be any of my business.
Not the way it is with people.

I don't enjoy locking doors.
I'd like to give a key to all my friends
So if they ever needed anything
They could come and get it. Or, maybe
Just stop and take a shower
If they happened to be playing frisbee
in Meridian Hill Park. Just think of my useful apartment
Sitting empty all day! Except
Sometimes they might come to visit
When I wanted to be alone. Perhaps
That would be inconvenient. Also, perhaps
I'd be writing in my journal, and leave it open on the table
And then they'd read all of my secret thoughts.

I can see that there are many reasons why
I carry around this heavy keychain.
It looks like a sodden, bedraggled sea anenome
Washed up, green and sandy, from the high tide.
When I run it jingles in my jacket pocket.
Ja jing cling cling! Ka ka ko king!
CHING! CHING! CHING!

Attend a potluck for the LGBT community and the Evangelical Christian Church

2005-05-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

TIME: Saturday, May 21st, 6:30-8:30pm LOCATION: All Souls Church, Unitarian (1500 Harvard St. NW, 3blocks southwest of the Columbia Heights Metro station. Enter through the side door) EQUIPMENT: Food to share OPTIONAL: Bible, rainbow scarf or both NOT OPTIONAL: "Positive attitude"

I met the incomparable Kaelan for ladies' night at Chaos tonight. They had live performances of drag kings and burlesque strip shows, which may have been good, but we were so far in the back of the crowd that all we got was the sound of the songs they were singing karaoke to, and an occasional peep of jiggling lesbian flesh. "Want to get up on my shoulders?" Kaelan offered. "Sure!" And so I leapt onto her adorable shoulders, and she stood up, bringing my head perilously close to the ceiling. It's pretty fun, teetering on a 6' tall chair with a Southern accent that drips molasses, and I was just starting to get into the swing of things when a man tapped Kaelan on the shoulder. He wasn't wearing a uniform or anything, but he had that indescribable pompous air of the undercover police officer, or the hallway monitor that enforces water fountain time limits, or the Soviet customs official who checks your passport. "You have to stop that," he said.

A little bit later, as I was talking to Adam, his eyes widened. "Look behind you," he said. There were two beautiful women, dressed in bikinis and big boots, grinding away with some rather hypnotic hip wiggles. From what I could tell, their dancing was quite a bit better than what was going on on the stage. Adam amused himself by watching the women in the mirror, but I eschewed such pretense and just stared.

But, sure enough, within about five minutes, Boris Hallway Monitor slithered out from whatever greasy stone he'd been hiding under, and tapped one of the girls on the shoulder. I stomped up to him angrily. "Why are you telling them to stop?" I asked. "They're distracting people from the show on the stage," he said. "But the people who are watching them are the people back here," I said. "We can't see anything on the stage." "Well, that means you should have showed up early," he said. "That's not the point," I said; "the point is that they're not distracting me from anything since I can't see the show. Why can't you let them dance? They're having a good time." "No way," he said. "If I wanted a show like that I would have hired strippers." The women shrugged their graceful gazelle shoulders and melted into the crowd, as my mournful eyes followed their delicious booties, waving good-bye.

I hate people who spoil other peoples' fun! For heaven's sake, it's hard enough to enjoy ourselves in this life full of pain and suffering and disease and disappointment, without party poopers rushing to squelch the delight you've been enterprising enough to find. Any expression of creativity and pleasure should be cherished and appreciated, not crushed out of some kind of twisted repressed jealousy. Gosh, that guy really pissed me off. It reminds me of the time I was waiting in line at the INS office in New York to apply for my first Social Security number, the summer that I was interning for a dot-com. It was a very long and boring line in a hot office, full of annoyed people; not a good scene. Standing in front of me was a family with two young girls who were on the verge of going bonkers, much to their mum's distress. I winked at the girls and pulled a bottle of bubble solution out of my bag. Pretty soon we were all giggling and blowing bubbles into the air. The girls were ecstatic and having a great time, and all the people around us replaced their irritated expressions with that slightly moony look you get when children are being adowable. Then, just as I was about to blow the totally hugest bubble ever, a uniformed official came up and tapped me on the shoulder. "You can't do that here," he said.

Why is it always a tap on the shoulder? People never tap me on the shoulder for anything good. Usually they hug me or they put their arm around my waist. Those stupid shoulder taps never bode well.

Anyway, as I was walking out of Chaos, breathing and trying to remove the chip from my shoulder, a couple of wide-smiling girls on the street handed me a flyer. It reads, in its entirety:

************************

ONE BIG DINNER
A potluck meal and more for members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Community and members of the Evangelical Christian churches
Saturday, May 21st, 6:30-8:30pm
All Souls Church, Unitarian
1500 Harvard St. NW
3blocks southwest of the Columbia Heights Metro station. Enter through the side door

Purpose: To bring together members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Community and members of Evangelical Churches for an evening of relatedness and fun! It is a night to put aside differences/agendas and delight in the commonalities we share as human beings!

What to bring: Please bring food to share. Homemade or store bought - anything is welcome. Beverages will be provided.

Cost: Event is free!

Sponsored by: A very small group of individuals who dreamed this up and committed to making it happen. We are not affiliated with any particular organization or church. Contact Kelli at 240-413-1070 or send email to relatednessandfun@yahoo.com for more information or to RSVP.

Agreements of the evening: Participants will be asked to initial a board with the following agreements as they enter the dinner:
I am here to be related to other people and to enjoy a good meal and a good time. I will treat everyone I meet with respect and positive regard.

************************'

Would anyone like to come with me?

Earth Water Fire Air

2005-05-18T19:05:00.000-07:00

Earth water fire air, beloved:

When you press me with your weight.
The gravity of mass to mass.
On our heavy road from birth to grave
We long to be together.
And so on Einstein’s universal rubber sheet
We trampoline!
And we rest.
We squelch
Into the mud.
Your solid hand upon my waist.
Our hair sheaved together.
That is called earth.

And when we’re licking mouth
to mouth a juicy
flicking ooh-la-la, a
serpent’s coiling play of hips that
follows our red waterways, our
Amazons of blood rising
to our cheeks, flowing down
waterfall necks, dissolving our
grudges...that is called water.

When just a wink kindles a spark and your hands ignite
from palm to palm and I race to you my legs pump
heart burns like a coal on the bellows krik krak
lickety split and I fling myself into your arms the room crackles
with possibility and all past woes seem
to burn in the....that is called fire.

And when
your loving
breath
brushes
the edge
of my anticipation
- the breath
that’s ours,
that inhales
from dust
of million years past,
that exhales
to the corners
of the stars
Beloved ...
that is called air.

The Dresden Dolls are back this Friday...

2005-05-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

Early show at the 9:30 club.

I wrote about them here.

Bohemian Caverns on Saturday

2005-05-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

From a friend...

BEAUTIFER

behold! the arts collide in one great party of unknown climax.

Saturday night, May 14, 9 p.m. -- 3 a.m. upstairs of bohemian
caverns, 2001 11th Street (corner of 11th and U St, NW), near the U
Street Metro. only $10.

the top two floors of bohemian caverns (aka Club 2001). music:
featuring laura burhenn, the monorail, dj william, and the art of
alicia k. cosnahan and evan zimmerman.

this is the first of a series of events, where we bring live music to
mix and mingle with all sorts of media...video, visual, voice...

dance floor, couches, balconies, two bars, two floors, beaucoup of
acts, special guests.

bring the whole city.

Need to lubricate your loom? Try a Trojan!

2005-05-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

Working in the field of development economics can sometimes make you depressed. You're constantly reminded of the soul-crushing misery afflicting so many people across the world and the string of failures people have encountered, both in trying to alleviate it, and in motivating other people to want to alleviate it if they themselves are comfortable.

But reading newspaper stories like this give me hope. (Registration required; Login: funthings Password: todoindc )

Humans are so goddamn entrepreneurial, resourceful, and creative, aren't we? We take lemons and make lemonade. We take overwhelmingly numerous and rather patronizing gifts of free condoms from NGOs, we grin shit-eating grins, and then we make orchid headdresses out of them.

Perhaps we're gonna make it after all.

I thought we lived in an information economy

2005-05-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

I've been on a course of antibiotics in connection with an accident I recently had (a bus hit me as I was riding my bike on 16th St; I was mostly fine but had a few cuts that got badly infected.) My sensitive, yoga-licious, earthy self does not enjoy taking pills, especially pills with a name that literally translate as "anti-life," but I must admit that although the natural path is overwhelmingly preferable, for a few ailments (such as a gigantic, throbbing staph infection in your foot) the best course is to go into the garden with a bazooka, obliterate the monsters, and then worry about replanting all the delicate little flowers.

So I did some obsessive internet research on the side effects of these "anti-life" pills - most of which connect to the balance of your natural intestinal flora. Although some bacteria are harmful, some are very beneficial to the body, and live in our stomachs and intestines and help us digest food. When we take antibiotics, these benefical bacteria die and our digestion gets shot. However, a good remedy for this is to eat a lot of yoghurt, kefir, cottage cheese, or anything else with live active bacterial cultures (especially L. acidopholus and L. bifidous.) There are also "pro-biotic" pills you can buy at health stores with extra-concentrated doses of these good bacteria.

Women have an additional problem, which is that we also have the same benefical bacteria in our vaginas that help us stay healthy and clean ourselves. Taking antibiotics changes the pH of our vaginas, making them slightly more alkaline, and kills off those beneficial bacteria - leaving an open playing field for the nasty bacteria in a yeast infection or thrush. Fifty percent of women get a vaginal infection after taking a course of antibiotics. Fifty percent! I never knew this - I'd never taken them before.

Well, I was very proud of my new knowledge and my resolution to diligently protect my health while taking these harsh, alien Western medicines. And as any of my friends who've suffered through my ministrations can testify, I love playing doctor. So when one of my colleagues mentioned that she was taking antibiotics to deal with a lung infection, I practically glowed with the chance to help.

"Oh, I've just been doing all this research about dealing with antibiotic side effects!" I said happily. "You know to eat yoghurt, right?"

"Yeah...I never quite understood why, though."

I rocketed my schpiel about the beneficial bacteria in our gut.

"Ah, that seems to make sense."

"And, unfortunately for women, the same is true for our vaginas - the good bacteria die there, making room for unhealthy bacteria."

My colleague's cheeks flushed. "Yes...I often get yeast infections after taking antibiotics," she said.

I was almost jumping up and down with excitement. "Well you know, you can fix that! All you've got to do is stick a little yoghurt up there once a day. And maybe a weak solution with some vinegar, to make it a bit more acid. I like to break open one of the pro-biotic pills I get at Whole Foods, and mix it with the yoghurt."

The cheeks were getting redder. And the body language was becoming closed (you know that way you can tell that people at a cocktail party don't want to talk to you any more?)

I added, "If it makes you uncomfortable to touch yourself you could just dip a tampon in some yoghurt and..."

The body language situation was getting too obvious to ignore, even with my health proselytization enthusiasm. "Well, sorry if that was too much information," I said.

An awkward smile from the colleague. "I think I'll just eat some yoghurt. But thanks!"

Gosh, you know, I really don't understand our culture. We've all been intimately familiar with the vagina at least once - yes, even you, flinching male reader! - when our heads slid out between its walls in an avalanche of mucus, blood (and sometimes shit). And our existence and the continued existence of other human beings depends on the intricacies and vagaries of its physiology and chemistry. Yet although it seems to be okay to let other human beings, some of whom are relative strangers, stick things into it, and it's okay to touch it to shave it or get it waxed, things that relate to its health, to its function or dysfunction, seem highly taboo.

I'm sure that feminist theory - which I'm not very familiar with - will have a world to tell me on this subject.

The Meridian Hill Park drum circle...

2005-05-09T17:59:00.000-07:00

has started again. And it's just as wonderful as it was last year.

I went yesterday, with a book called "The Idea of Pakistan" I wanted to read as background for some research I'm doing. I didn't intend to actually read it at the park; it was more as a totem, in the way that you put a picture of your boyfriend in your wallet.

I did some yoga and then danced. The drummers all congregate on the concrete flat space just in front of the steps that separate the two halves of the park. I was dancing in the grass, slightly separated from the main group. As I danced, a man in the center of the circle smiled and waved at me, meaning that I should take a turn dancing in the center of the circle. This may astonish some of my friends, but I turned him down because I felt shy. There are some amazing capoeira dancers who dance in that circle, and I just didn't feel worthy. But I will, eventually.

When I turned around I saw that a small group of friends had set up a tightrope tied between two trees (about two feet off the ground), and were practicing on it. One guy - who was short, had very long toes, and seemed somehow elfish - jumped on and ran back and forth. He was wonderful, just like a monkey. "Can I try?" I asked them. "Sure," the elf said. "Why don't you put your hand on my shoulder." Even when using him for support, I couldn't stay up for more than a few seconds without toppling. It was astonishingly challenging - and I like to think that yoga has given me an excellent sense of balance. "You'll get the hang of it," he told me encouragingly. "You can buy the rope for it at any climbing store."

I thanked him and went back to my yoga practice. As I was resting in downward facing dog, two kids came up to me. "We know you!" the girl said. "You can put your feet behind your head!" They remembered me! They were astonishingly taller and bigger and older and I felt a brief pang of mortality before I began playing with them. "Show us more, show us more! I know that one, I can do it!"

Children have a marvellous energy and I believe that all children naturally love to learn. If I ever teach children in any way, I hope that I'm never arrogant enough to believe that my job is to instill them with a love of learning; my job is to teach them to figure out how to satisfy the love of learning they already have in the context of what I want to teach them. If a teacher is boring or uninspired about their subject, it quickly becomes obvious to children that they'll have a much richer experiential learning curve by making noise or creating some interesting social interactions by throwing a paper ball at the kid next to them.

In BKS Iyengar's wonderful book "The Tree of Yoga", he describes teaching a rowdy class of children, who had daunted all the other teachers who tried to work with them. He says, "I allowed them to play with me. If I had been very strict on the first day, the next day when I went to the class I would have found an empty classroom, because the children would have skipped the class and would not have come at all. But when they started making mischief, I said, ‘You are very good at making mischief. Come on, a little more! Perhaps you should make a little more noise. It’s not enough!’ That gave them a shock. Then I conducted the class. Then I say, ‘I love you. I like you because you are very mischievious.’" Oh, that BKS Iyengar, he's so cute.

So I played around in the grass with the kids for a while. We did some yoga moves, and then we invented some dances with soundtracks: "Peanut - (pump arm) - butter - (kick leg) - and jelly (jump up and down)! Fried (stretch left) bananas (stretch right) and HONEY (Big jump)!!!"

Then the kids noticed the tightrope. Naturally they dashed over there faster than a spring lamb leaping in a paddock. "I can do that! I can do that! Let me try!" So the Elf Man gave them a little impromptu lesson and I have to say their teamwork was remarkable. One kid would try the tightrope while his or her two siblings each held a hand and gave a running pep talk. "Just focus...concentrate...get in the zone! The zone!" Michelle kept chanting.

After the children had left I danced a little while longer and a guy came up to me and gave me a lesson in breakdancing: popping and locking. "It's all about isolation," he said sagely. "Just follow each movement of your limbs with your other hand." He led me through a baby exercise and then broke off into this amazing dance routine with the complex rhythms of the drums pounding away behind him.

Really, where else could you go on a Sunday afternoon to lie in the grass and listen to amazing music, get an heart-pumping dance workout, play with children, and get awesome lessons in walking a tightrope and breakdancing?

Free Shakespeare in the Park!

2005-05-09T07:22:00.000-07:00

TIME: May 26 – June 5, 2005, 7:30PM (except Monday, May 30) LOCATION: Carter Barron Ampitheater, Rock Creek Park EQUIPMENT: Yourself, free ticket (pick up that same day at the box office), picnic supplies, anti-mosquito spray

Free Shakespeare in the park is one of my favorite urban summer treats...don't miss it!

From the Shakespeare Theater email:

Please join us for William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the 15th annual Shakespeare Theatre Free For All at Carter Barron Amphitheatre.

FREE performances are from Thursday, May 26, through Sunday, June 5, at 7:30 p.m. (no performance Monday, May 30). *

A Midsummer Night's Dream
by William Shakespeare
directed by Jef Hall-Flavin
original direction by Mark Lamos
7:30 p.m. nightly (no performance Monday, May 30th)

All performances, including those specially designated below, are free and open to the public. Come out and picnic and join us under the stars!

VOLUNTEER – Receive tickets to the performance of your choice.

GROUP TICKETS - for nonprofit, community-serving organizations.
(Groups who volunteer are acknowledged from the stage that evening.)

MARION BRYCE MEMBER PICNIC – Thursday, May 26, 2005

FREE FOR ALL INFORMATION IS ALSO AVAILABLE AT 202.334.4790.

*Please note: The best time to attend the Shakespeare Theatre Free For All is the first 4 or 5 performances, when there are shorter lines for tickets and much better general seating availability.

Bike down to the cherry blossoms on the Mall in the middle of the night

2005-05-06T11:25:00.000-07:00

TIME: Midnight LOCATION: The National Mall - near the cherry blossoms (around 19th st near the river) EQUIPMENT: Bicycle, friend, bottle of water, extra sweater, snack, tissue paper, bus fare

Sometimes you have evenings where everything is just perfect. Perhaps you plan it, perhaps you don't, perhaps what you end up doing is completely different than what you thought you would, but nevertheless the entire experience, from start to finish, is an exercise in being completely present. You feel vividly awake and suffused with joy. And this seamlessness of being doesn't feel like anything you deserve, particularly, but rather an unearned and loving lagniappe from the universe. Czeslaw Milosz said it better than I ever could in his poem "The Gift":

THE GIFT
By Czeslaw Milosz

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

*****************************

One morning about a month ago, during the peak of the cherry blossom season, I stopped by the Mall in the morning to sit in the grass for a few minutes before a yoga class. I was struck by the blue sky, the impossibly delicate pink puffs and their contrast with the iron-black branches, like that calligraphic principle of contrasting strong and subtle brushstrokes.

I was also impressed that approximately 95% of the cherry trees featured a girlfriend standing underneath, with her freshly brushed hair flowing, as she tilted her head stiffly and held a frozen smile for the vertically framed picture being taken by her boyfriend, approximately 15 feet away. It was as if there was only one cherry tree, bookended by a couple of mirrors that duplicated its denizens into eternity... that would later spirally spawn into identical pictures in photo albums across the world...

Well, I resolved to come back that night with Martin. The unimaginatively photographic tourists would be gone. It would be a dramatic evening with pale blossoms glowing in the darkness. We'd light up a joint and climb the trees and do cartwheels and roll around in the grass for just as long as we wanted to. It was going to be a perfect evening.

Except that it wasn't.

I biked on down that night, but just as I'd passed 4th St and C realized I was terribly thirsty. I called Martin. "Are you on your way? Do you have a bottle of water?" Our cellphone reception was bad, so it was only after shouting for a while that we established that both of us were thirsty, neither had water, and neither was near any kind of water-selling establishment. "Well, I know that there are water fountains on the Mall," I howled into the receiver. "What?" Martin said. "There are WATER FOUNTAINS! It's Just! That! Some! Of! Them! Don't! Work! We can ride around and see!" "What?" "Forget it. We're meeting on the corner of 17th and Constitution, right?" "What?"

It was a lovely night and as I rode I tried to sink into my happy reverie, but it's hard to appreciate the fresh night air when your mouth and throat feel like cottonwool. I fidgeted on the bench at our rendez-vous point, trying to be mindful and enjoy the moment.

Ten minutes...twenty minutes... I called Martin. "Where are you?" "I'm here!" "What?" "I'm here!" "No, I'm here! I don't see you!" "Which corner of the street?" "What?" "Which! Corner! Of! The! Street!" "I'm on the south - on a bench. It's a T intersection." "I'm waving, do you see me?" "No! Are you sure you're not on Independence Avenue?" "What?" "Are! You! On! Independence!" "Which one is that?" "What?" "Look, I'm on 15th st. Where are you?" "OH! I said, 17th! You didn't hear me right!" "What?"

He biked over two blocks and we greeted each other cursorily, then: "Oh my god I'm so thirsty, let's go." After riding in circles for a little while we finally discovered a bathroom, where we filled an empty bottle from the tap and drank it ravenously.

By this time, I was getting impatient for the fun part. "Let's go let's go!" I jumped on my bike and rode off without checking that Martin was behind me...until I was there at the cherry blossoms, and he was nowhere to be seen. My cellphone rang. "Where are you?" "I'm here, where are you?" "I'm back at the bathrooms." "What?" "I'm! At! The! Bathrooms! I took a wrong turn when I was following you."

So I rode back to the bathrooms, and then we rode together over to the cherry blossoms, where we jumped off the bikes and I sighed with eager anticipation. It was just like I'd hoped: dramatic, glowing, a soft wind, the odd pink petal fluttering through the velvet air.

And Martin was shivering. "Oh, are you cold?" "Yep. I've been going all day, and when I left the house it was so warm, I just wore a t-shirt." "Oh no...can you stay for a little while?" "Yeah, little while. But not too long."

So we did a little bit of gallivanting. We did some yoga, I climbed some trees and hung upside down like a monkey, and there were indeed a few instants of perfect grace. But honestly I was getting a little cold too, and every once in a while the passing headlights of a car would blind us, and Martin, although he was a good sport about it, had goose-bumps that were beginning to resemble goose-Alps, and then I had to go to the bathroom, so I had to run and find a spot that was shielded from the view of whizzing cars, and so most of the time we were just distracted by our little bits of discomfort.

We'd also both been exercising all day, and our rapidly chilling leg muscles were beginning to groan at the notion of the forty minute uphill bike ride home. So pretty soon we left, and took the bus home.

Which goes to show that although those magic moments might be unearned, you're also not allowed to demand them; they follow a schedule of their own device. And yet, though the evening was a study in petty woe, best of all I remember that moment when I hung by my knees from a branch and laughed, and an entire galaxy of cherry blossom stars swirled above me, and Martin reached to hold my hands, his face an even mixture of happiness at my delight, and "Holy shit, I'm freezing my fucking ass off."

God

2005-05-05T21:49:00.000-07:00

Every indie rocker knows the drill. You fall in love with a band that nobody else has heard of. Their music speaks to you as if the lead singer was your Siamese soul-twin, separated before birth sometime in the ether. You go to every one of their shows and the audience is small enough that you soon begin to recognize all the other fans. You gaze fondly at them under your greasy bangs, knowing that they, too, must be kindred spirits, having also somehow discovered this artistic elixir in the chaotic universe of rhythmic pablum.

Like any love, yours is composed of passionate and tumultuous contradictions. You're torn between an evangelical lust, a fervor driving you to press burned CDs into the hands of anyone (that is, everyone) whose lives might also be changed by the music - and also a burning Othello-like possessiveness . For, as your band's popularity grows - as they sign to a major label - as you begin hearing them on the radio - you begin to realize that your identity as #1 fan is being compromised by all these brazen, ungrateful newcomers. They call themselves fans even though they don't have all the lyrics to all the songs memorized. In fact, some of them think the songs mean totally different things to what they actually mean! Concerts that used to cost you $5 now cost $50. And when you shell out the cash to go, you no longer feel like you're in a living room with 20 of your closest friends that you haven't met yet. Instead, you feel like you're in a gigantic Roman coliseum with a bunch of dangerous strangers pumping their fists for the next animal to be ripped bloodily apart. And when you say, "I'm a fan of X," people smile vacantly and pay no heed, because after all, who isn't?

I think religion is a little bit like that.

Let me explain.

For the longest time - before my afternoon in Dumbarton Oaks - I never understood why my friend Blair didn't like to talk openly about her Christianity with me. All she'd say was, "I can't tell you anything except to find some quiet and ask the question with an open heart and an open mind. Don't try to argue, just listen."

But now I understand her defensiveness. There's a certain class of people - which includes most of the people I interact with as a 20-something in DC - for whom the mention of a spiritual path is pretty much akin to confessing a fervent, enduring belief in Santa Claus. You can chat about your threesome relationships or your hot handcuffed sex last night or your journeys to S&M masquerade balls or your exploits as an amateur stripper all you want, and your friend will pat you on the back approvingly. But bring up a belief in God - not just a vague cultural penchant for attending church in search of a fleeting warm fuzzy but a hope that a belief in God will ultimately influence every part of your life - and they become visibly uncomfortable. You can see the play of emotions across the face: "Is she serious? Wow, I never thought she was a God freak. I thought she was sensible. I wonder if I'm going to offend her. She's probably pretty sensitive about a wacky belief like that. Better change the subject."

Then, for a little while, until they manage to forget your embarassing revelation, they treat you with the excruciating care that you might give a recently released psychiatric inmate. Sure, she seems normal. But she believes in something beyond the material world! For all I know, she might fall down to the ground frothing at the mouth any second!

It's rather annoying. But in a strange way, I find the absolute lack of any kind of institutional support of faith in my life to be rather comforting. I was raised without religion; most of my important peer groups were rabidly secular and enjoyed mocking Christianity (a birthday present I got once: a King James Bible with a hole cut out of the pages in the middle to fit a bag of weed inside.) For most of my life, I was certainly one of the snooty Santa-smirkers.

And yet, despite the inauspiciously rocky soil, I found God. And I know that the faith is mine, mine, mine, and it is real. There wasn't any cultural or peer pressure - quite the opposite. And so, when I read books about spirituality, or meet the rare person my age who also has real faith (of whatever denomination or lack thereof) I gaze at them with those same welcoming indie-rock eyes.

If I grew up in a religious family, going to church all the time - if all of my peers expected me to have a certain belief system - if faith came to seem like a guilt-laden obligation rather than a wondrous and unexpected emancipation - how would I ever figure out if I actually loved it, or if I just thought I liked it because all the radios were playing it?

I feel very grateful about that.

The yoga teacher, the artist, and the rat

2005-05-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

TIME: Selected Saturdays, Sundays, Friday and Thursday evenings LOCATION: Your local art galleries' open houses EQUIPMENT: Penchant for small talk, perhaps a Ziploc in your purse to steal cheese cubes OPTIONAL: Dead rodent

Every so often all the art galleries in the area get together to organize "gallery-hopping" days, of which the Dupont Circle First Fridays are probably the most famous. And sometimes galleries have receptions, open to the public, to promote a new artists' work.

I was walking past 15th and P one afternoon last fall when I noticed that the art gallery on the corner was having an open house. It was in the basement of the building, slightly lower than the road, which perhaps explained why there weren't any people there. So, always being up for a chat with an artist and free snacks, I wandered in and accosted the gallery owner. He was a mid-thirties classic Dupont Circle well-groomed type, and he was happy to walk me around his brightly coloured photo-realistic paintings (which I liked; some of them were powerfully emotional). After some chat about his artistic vision, I commented that I liked the colour scheme in his living room (he'd painted each wall a different vibrant colour.)

Immediately, laser-blue sparks kindled in each of the artist's pupils, and I recognized the passionate flame of the obsessively house-proud. Yes, he'd had to knock down that wall over there, and he still wasn't sure about that window, it might need some adjustment, and the garden had taken years of work to get it right, and he still wasn't sure about the left corner with the shade-bearing perennials, but overall he was pretty happy with everything. "But the one problem with this house," he added lugubriously, "is the neighbors. They're absolute slobby pigs."

"Oh really?" I asked sympathetically. "I thought it was getting so ritzy around here."

"Not at all. You would not believe how horrible my neighbors are. They dump trash everywhere. In the street, in my yard...they have no conception of public responsibility. I've been trying to speak out about it but frankly it's really starting to bother me."

His aura was becoming vermillion, so I changed the subject to gossip about my landlord at the time, who was the owner of the Fondo del Sol gallery on 21st and R (I lived in its basement for a summer.)

FLASH FORWARD SIX MONTHS:

I'm out to dinner to celebrate graduation from my teacher training program at Tranquil Space. There are about six of us from the training program, along with one of our teachers, Lisa, and her fiancee. Lisa is a good-humoured and engaging woman, but I'd only ever talked with her in the context of her teaching me; now we were both drinking martinis.

I had my attention turned to a different conversation, but I vaguely heard Lisa's husband exclaiming, "Oh, tell the one about the rat!"

I'm ever eagle-eared for a good story, so I urged Lisa, "Tell it, tell it!"

"Well," Lisa said, "I have this crazy neighbor. He's totally obsessive and insane."

"Where do you live?"

"On 15th and P. He owns this art gallery - have you noticed it? You can see the paintings from the street. They're really ugly."

"Yes, I do know that gallery, in fact..."

A furrow appeared between Lisa's lovely eyebrows.

"Well, this guy is nuts. I was leaving the house one day, and I had this bag full of junk mail that I grabbed on the way out. I threw it away in the public trashcan on the corner. When I got back to my house that evening, there was a note from my neighbor pinned on the door. He said that he'd been watching me throw away the trash in the public bin and it was inappropriate, those bins were public and not for our private residential trash. He'd also pinned the CVS bag and a few of the pieces of junk mail to the door as well."

"So he actually went and looked at your trash?"

"Yep. Well, I went and talked to him and told him I didn't think it was inappropriate for me to do at all. And I kept on using the public trashcans. Well, he kept on watching - his studio windows face right onto the corner - and every time he noticed me throwing something away there, he'd leave it on my doorstep!"

"Wow. That's so bizarre..."

"Well, one day I had a mouse in my apartment that got caught in a trap. I'd been away for the weekend, so it had been dead for a few days and smelled pretty rank. So I wrapped it in a plastic bag and waited until I knew that my neighbor was in his studio watching. Then I threw it away in the street corner trash can. I never got another note again."

Living language - a craigslist conversation

2005-05-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

As a poetry lover I'm a big believer in a living language, and tend to err on the side of flexibility when it comes to neologisms, new grammar patterns, and the casting-off of grammar distinctions that don't add a lot to the meaning. For example: who/whom? Who cares? The context should make it transparent anyway, so as far as I'm concerned, let it wither; perhaps we can use those valuable brain cells to concentrate a bit harder on Auden's love poetry. As for ending sentences with prepositions, its avoidance can sometimes cause sentence structure to become really lame and twisted, so it actually seems like a destructive rule to me. English's loss of thee/thou does make me a bit sad, since there was a genuine emotional shade of meaning that was lost and is impossible to convey as succinctly today with the vocabulary we have. It might also be nice to have two different "we"'s - one that encompasses the person being addressed, and one that excludes them. (On that note - the use of "their" for a gender-neutral pronoun despite its purported plurality - I say why the hell not. None of the other solutions have caught on, and chanting "his or hers, him or her, she or he" is just so annoying.)

Of course some standardization is useful for efficient communication, especially in environments like business where people from a wide variety of backgrounds need to interact smoothly and seamlessly with each other. But I suspect there's a natural linguistic marketplace going on there - people will adapt to the "prestige" dialect to the extent they have to in order to gain status, if they want to. But we should never lose track of the overwhelming fact that language is a tool that people use to communicate. The communication is sacred. Humans expressing their ideas to one another is marvellous - the tool they use to do it is irrelevant except insofar as it aids that communication.

So, a craigslist conversation:

*******************************************************

Converse vs. "Conversate"

Reply to: anon-71362946@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-05-02, 11:37PM EDT

I met a man at a friend's party. An absolutely gorgeous black man--tall, sexy, well-travelled, etc. We emailed a bit and made plans to meet up again. He called me while I was at work and left a message. In his incredibly deep, sexy voice he said he loved meeting me and was looking forward to "grabbing a drink and conversating a bit." I was instantly turned off. I just can't "conversate" with someone! I can converse, but I can't "conversate." I know that I'm being picky, but I'm an editor and language is very important to me. It's just not sexy people. Not sexy. Now I'm seriously considering whether or not I should call this guy back. Stupid? Perhaps, but it's how I feel.

************************************************************
my post:

Converse vs. Conversate (Shakespeare did it)

Reply to: anon-71430204@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-05-03, 12:25PM EDT

So the issue here seems to be that a man used a word that was not part of Standard English, and the woman who he was talking to thought it was evidence of mental deficiency because he either didn't know or care that the word was wrong (although he seemed, otherwise, intelligent and charming). It's a rather interesting story that speaks to a lot of our philosophical assumptions about language: it's either correct or not.

But if you go back and read a Shakespeare play - do people talk like that now? Not only vocabulary but basic grammar is completely different. Is our language today the end result of centuries of stupid people making grammatical mistakes? Or is it a complex cultural evolution of linguistically creative people, adapting their living language to their changing technology, culture, and even just phonetic fashion?

I notice that "conversate" is listed here as a "neologism":
http://www.langmaker.com/db/eng_conversate.htm

Of which Shakespeare had thousands:
http://www.hull.ac.uk/php/cetag/1dbnewords.htm

This article by an anthropologist on Ebonics may also be relevant:
http://fsweb.berry.edu/academic/hass/ejohnson/eb/hooked~1.txt

My favorite quote from it:

"Are ebonics and other dialects of English simply incorrect, sloppy speech? American schools, particularly in the northern United States, have treated AAVE as a form of language requiring remediation by speech pathologists or special-education teachers. But linguists have known for some time that non-standard dialects, such as AAVE and Hawaiian Creole, to name another example, are consistent, legitimate varieties of language, with rules, conventions, and exceptions, just like standard English. These dialects do not carry the prestige of standard English, but they influence and enrich the standard language, keeping it vibrant and constantly evolving. Examples from black English abound: in an article on ebonics, the New York Times cited Richard Nixon's use of "right on!" "Rip-off," "chill out," and "dis" are other popular borrowings. Hawaiian gives us "aloha," and Hawaiian Creole expressions permeate travel brochures as well as the English of the islands. Furthermore, we know that all speakers of a language are able to adapt it to fit changing social circumstances. Given sufficient exposure to new situations, all language users can switch between prestige and non-prestige forms, between formal and informal ones, between intimate and polite ones, without explicit instruction or conscious translation."

So perhaps this gentleman's cultural adaptation to "prestige" English hasn't encompassed "conversate" yet. Or perhaps he thinks it sounds cool (it does sort of roll off the tongue, hey?) and just plain enjoys saying it, being a linguistically playful individual, and recognizes its side benefit of screening out up-tight, close-minded people who are unimaginative and inflexible enough to judge him for it, despite the multitude of other positive markers of his character.

Scaling up the doctor blog - a plea to the internet

2005-05-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

www.dcdoctors.blogspot.com is now on the Google radar screen - yesterday there were four people who accessed the site by doing searches for specific doctor names (all happened to be good recommendations, by the way). I realize that this is rather insignificant in the order of things, but I know that it would make me feel good if, among the search results of various databases of doctor addresses, I actually found something personal, written by a well-meaning stranger, that would reassure me about the human element of the decision I was trying to make. If only this kind of website existed on a large scale, with some kind of thoroughness (and perhaps information about health care coverage) and with some kind of database organization that would make it easily searchable. Because mine, right now (and four search hits notwithstanding), is nothing more than an emotional salve for my own petty trauma.

I really think this would be a valuable nonprofit project. It would probably be pretty tech-heavy (maintaining the online searchable database) but would also have a marketing component (outreach to doctors' patients to get them to share their experiences - and to get people to use the website) - and it would have to have some pretty strong leadership to maintain scrupulous objectivity in the face of what would probably be some heavy pressure from the health care establishment. If I was a tycoon philanthropist, I would totally fund it.

The www.leapfrog.org site looks pretty good, but only rates hospitals. What I'm envisioning would be similar to the www.epinions.com website, but for doctors.

C'mon DC - you're full of overachieving world savers! Somebody should start this!

The doctor vendetta

2005-04-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Martin teases me, "You're just doing that doctor blog because you have a vendetta against Western medicine." To which I reply, "Yeah, that's totally true, but I'm turning it towards something positive, aren't I?"

I have a lot of strong feelings about the health care system, caused by a combination of my yogafied disdain for non-holistic health solutions, and a series of bad experiences with doctors over the course of my life. But I'm a bit tired of ranting about it. So I'll excerpt some of the letters I've been getting about the project.

It occurs to me: lawsuits against doctors seem to currently be one of the strongest influences on the way that the system is set up; a lot of the cost, inconvenience, and dehumanization is connected to doctors covering their asses in case they get sued. And yet I strongly suspect that lawsuits are connected to an existing feeling of rage/disempowerment on the part of the consumer. If you have a warm family-type relationship with your doctor and suffer as the result of some slipup on their part, you might still sue them, but I'm willing to bet that it's more statistically unlikely than if you've already been stewing with resentment about being treated like a number and not having any attention paid to you - in which case you think, "Screw 'em. Might as well take 'em for all I can get, it's what they do to me." I wonder if there are studies on this? Somehow trying to correlate surveys of patients' attitudes about the friendliness of their doctor with the number of legal problems faced by the doctor's office?

It also occurs to me that you rarely hear about lawsuits related to baby-sitting, and most people seem entirely comfortable entering into this rather risky informal relationship. How can the cottage industry of baby-sitting exist without a strangling thicket of red tape? Is it that people have managed to maintain an informal code of trust and honour? What's missing in the health care world?

So, a few stories. The outrageous thing is not that these stories exist; I'm sure that there are bad eggs in any profession - especially a profession that requires you to maintain an obsessively Type-A achievement-oriented competitive personality for ten years of schooling to even qualify for it, and then expects you to suddenly learn how to display human warmth. The outrageous thing is that we have no way of holding doctors accountable for these stories.

From Jamia:
"Dr. Pineda in Dupont is a good doctor and gives good print outs of your ins and outs, but she told me I was getting fat and needed to exercize and eat better after I went from 105-109 or something while ON my period. She is a hater of skinny women. More women at my job who went to her reported the same thing, although bigger women had no problems. If you're skinny.
don't see Pineda... or else you might need to see a shrink for your newly acquired eating disorder."

From Volha:
"I had a fortune (or misfortune) to visit quite a few in different countries. It is fascinating how dentists have different standards. I come from a post-Soviet country, where at the method to deal with a problematic tooth was to simply remove it. There weren't enough fillings for everyone, and even if you were lucky to get one, the rumour was that they were white cement and fell out in several months.
Well, things are a bit different now. Private dentistry is also prospering. But having gone to the dentist I always want to know what they are doing and why. Although American dentistry is considered to be the best in the world, I feel like a number when I go to dentists, because they are so busy, and have no time to look at the human body as a whole, to pay attention to the patient. Instead they just look at the mechanics of how things should be done. I recently had a sensation that my tooth had affected my sinuses, they felt infected. The specialist I went to barely listened to me, suggesting it was an allegy to the blooming season (I don't have allegies of this kind) and making plans to treat my other tooth. I thought that she might have been a good specialist, but maybe too specialist. I went to a general dentist, who didn't dare to disagree with her...After I expressed my distrust that they were addressing the problems, I could see differences in their opinions. I asked more questions and I got more explanations... The downside of this, expenses and the maximum benefit on every insurance!
Shouldn't I be able to go to a dentist who could honestly tell me what he or she thinks and not treat me like I woudn't understand, not pretend like s/he has all the answers and work with me to find a solution? If you know of such a dentist, I would like his/her number!
On another thought, I never went to dentist school and if they wanted to mislead me, it would be very easy to give some seemingly reasonable explanation. So, I don't know what is the balance here. If anyone has figured that one for themselves, I would be interested in hearing!"

From Heather:
"The GWU-Medical Faculty Associates office has a problem with confidentiality. When I was attempting to make an appointment, the receptionist refused to schedule me unless I told her exactly why I was making the appointment. While my concern was not a big deal, it was still not a regular annual. I still felt more comfortable remaining private about my reasoning. The receptionist, while making a huge fuss about my difficultness, directed me to speak with a Triage nurse, who was not much better. This nurse did close the door to the main lobby, but kept the adjoining door to her own receptionist open, which was once again open to the lobby! What's the point in that!?
After this ordeal, the next available appointment anyway was a month away. By this time I told the nurse that I would not like to be seen by this hospital because I was worried about their lack of confidentiality and empathy towards the patients. The nurse smirked at me and said, "You can always close my other door." With a mixture of rage and embarrassment, I smiled, thanked her for her time and was on my way.
Not only do I not recommend this office, I would also encourage anyone who feels more private about their issues to phone for appointments rather than make them in person. This might sound obvious to most people but I have lived and worked in a hospital environment my whole life and never have I come across a problem like this. Anyone in the medical field is completely aware of confidentiality issues and I was surprised that in a University setting like George Washington Hospital employees were not adhering to this ethically important issue."

From Julie:
"I have mild eczema and a family history of skin cancer, so I wanted to find a good dermatologist in DC to keep an eye on things. When Marilyn Berzin saw me, I told her about my conditions, showed her prescriptions I had from a previous doctor and was going to ask her questions about whether I needed them, whether any came in generic brands, etc. She did not even examine my skin, but asked if I was interested in botox or skin peels or some such disgusting thing that a (then-)28 year old shouldn't even be thinking about. Once she saw that I wasn't interested in them, she was halfway out the door and I literally had to grab her arm to ask her a question. NOT worth it. Avoid her unless you're interested in Botox."

By the way, check out the Leapfrog Group, which perhaps might succeed in bringing a bit of reform to this system:
www.leapfroggroup.org

The Cold Speculum, or, "Turn Your Head and Cough"

2005-04-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

I recently had to find a doctor in the DC area for an infected cut on my foot and it was a very frustrating experience. I'm pretty healthy (and have a New-Age hippie level distrust of Western medicine), so I hadn't been to the doctor in a year and a half. I had a list of names
from my insurance directory and nothing else to go on. It turns out that although Google is very helpful for stalking that person you went on a date with last week, doctors are still a blank book.

I chose a name at random and ended up having a very bad experience. This is ridiculous. There's no reason for the health-care industry to be so insular, opaque, and disempowering to the consumer. It's just not good economics! We shouldn't have to rely on word-of-mouth to
pick a good doctor.

So, doing my little bit to spread some information into the internet, I started a blog for reviews of doctors in the DC area. It's at:
www.dcdoctors.blogspot.com

If you have any doctors you'd like to recommend (or dis-recommend) please shoot an email to:
doctorsindc@gmail.com
It would be great if you could provide as much contact information as possible, reasons why you like or dislike the doctor, and anything else that might be relevant/funny for a new patient. And please pass this around to anybody else you know who might be interested.

With the current Blogger design, this website is pretty hard to organize or search right now. If it starts to get big, maybe I'll have to think about making it more useful...any suggestions?

Borf

2005-04-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

I was walking through Dupont Circle with some yoga friends last night and we noticed "Borf" painted on a stop sign. The conversation inevitably turned to this mysterious and ubiquitous graffiti artist. "You're the researcher, Zoe, why don't you look into it?" Karoline said. So I did.

Borf is an artist who used to have a gallery on the www.stencilrevolution.com website, but it no longer exists. I only found a few references in the Google cache of old webpages, but nothing that's maintained.

There is an interview with Borf on the Visual Resistance site where he expounds his political philosophy (How did they get his email address??):
http://visualresistance.org/wordpress/?p=94

This DCist article is full of rumors with no substantiation:
http://www.dcist.com/archives/2005/01/10/who_is_borf.php

This article in the North Carolina Observer has more information about Borf's geographical proliferation, but as the Visual Resistance site complains, they don't actually seem to understand what stencil art is:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/2078610p-8458533c.html

If you want to see a bunch of Borf pictures, check out:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/borf/

But I really like the little robot going "Borf borf borf" here:
http://www.wrybread.com/gammablog/gammablablog.php?p=1252

The definition of Borf:
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/computing/borf

Borf is also a villain in old arcade games.

My own theory: Borf is not just one person! He is a meme who lives in many hearts and souls. Perhaps there is a bit of Borf in all of us...

Namaste,
Zoe

PS. Mary, wasn't able to find anything about your Russian story with
the poison, although this Russian definition seems to match the
English one:
http://bikman.ru/projects/progs/borf/

Conversations Overheard at Dumbarton Oaks

2005-04-14T13:38:00.000-07:00

As I was wandering through the cherry blossoms (barefoot with dandelions in my hair), I heard a man's voice talking about something. Suddenly he exlaimed, "No touching!" Then, more quietly, he kept on talking about whatever it was. Again, "Absolutely no touching!" When I got closer I saw that he and a woman (probably his wife) were both stretched out on their backs on their grass, and he was talking to another man sitting nearby. His wife, an arm's length away, was reaching out and poking him in the stomach with a silly grin on her face. "No touching! No touching!! No - Oh. Hi." He'd looked up to notice me watching them with a smirk. Then his wife reached out for one more poke. I burst out laughing. Then some other bystanders, also sitting in the cherry blossoms, who'd noticed the interaction, started laughing as well. A group of strangers, guffawing in the grass.

******************************************

A couple walking past.
MAN: (says something irrelevant)
WOMAN: By the way, did you notice how fast I got ready this morning?
MAN (amused): Yes, I noticed.
WOMAN: I just wanted to make sure -
MAN (even more amused): I understand.

******************************************

ME, on the phone with a friend: Holy smoke, this is ridiculous! The sun is shining, the flowers are blossoming, the birds are singing, butterflies are flapping past, and happy little kids are playing in the grass. It's like the Garden of Eden here, dude!

A couple sits down next to me on the bench.

WOMAN: Sorry to disturb your solitude!
ME: No problem.
MAN (reaches over to shake my hand): Allow me to introduce us. I'm Adam, and this is Eve.
ME: Nice to meet - NO WAY!
The man and woman laugh.
ME: Wait, are those really your names?
WOMAN: No, we overheard you on the phone.

A STORY ABOUT THE BODY

2005-04-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

By Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl--she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.

Dating the enemy

2005-04-11T20:15:00.000-07:00

By way of background:

I had a tricky transition in middle school.

My family lived in Indonesia for three years, until I was 11. Then we moved back to the States just in time for me to start eighth grade. My family travelled around a lot and I always enjoyed it, but if I'd known about the culture shock in store for me with that particular move, I would have jumped out of the airplane's emergency exit while it was still on the runway in Jakarta, and spent my life scrounging for leftover coconuts and giving people tricycle rides for a few rupees, rather than face the American Middle School Experience.

I was completely unprepared for it. I was sincere, enthusiastic, studious, and respectful of authority. I didn't like to watch television; I hadn't seen any recent movies from the past three years; I hadn't heard of any pop stars (I really liked Leonard Cohen and Beethoven, though). I liked to read books (and kept lists of all the books I read, as a personal record of self-improvement). I had no concept of fashion - in fact, I tended to wear the same outfit every day: a tie dyed tshirt and a pair of pumpkin orange, three quarter length spandex leggings. I'd spent the past three years in Jakarta eating mangoes, writing poetry, and playing with our family's menagerie of pets. And I was two years younger than most of the people in my class, having skipped some grades - so I was emotionally and physically underdeveloped.

My first day in school, sitting on the bus and listening to peoples' conversations - pop culture references, slang, and gossip flying around - I realized that they might as well have been speaking a foreign language.

But even so, I might have avoided the worst of seething teenage inferno that befell me, were it not for the psychological nail in my coffin: I was arrogant. I knew I was smarter than most kids my age, and I was proud of it. Walk into an American middle school with an attitude like that, and you'll be eaten alive faster than a goat falling into an Amazonian piranha river.

That's the subtext of all those cult 80s movies with the scenes where the jocks beat up the geeks: the geeks think they're better than everyone else. They might not say so when they know they'd be beaten up for it, but if there's one thing that a homo sapiens is an expert at sniffing out in another homo sapiens, it's a superiority complex. And there's nothing that pisses us off more. Unfortunately, when you're a smart kid being tormented by everyone around you, and you spend all of your time alone hiding from the jeers, it only reinforces your solipsistic self-aggrandizement.

So, middle school was hell. I was even more sensitive as a child than I am now, and I felt afraid everywhere I went. I was so stressed out and full of self-hatred that my face erupted into violent acne. Whenever anyone looked at me, I thought they were imagining something mean to do to me. And often, I was right. When I walked into classrooms, I'd always check the blackboards with a lump in my throat to see if there was a chalk caricature of me waiting there - complete with little dots for the pimples And during recess, I used to sneak out into the woods behind school to eat my lunch so that I wouldn't have to sit alone in the cafeteria.

Seeing as how I had no friends, I wasn't privy to any of the girl gossip about menstruation, although I was well educated on the mechanics of it (my mum was a biologist). And although I was pretty sure that most of the girls in my class had gotten their period, I didn't think about it much until one day, in social studies class, when I went up to the blackboard to write something down. People in class started snickering.

I was used to people laughing at me, so as usual I didn't respond, and hung my head as I walked back to my seat. At the end of class, one girl pulled me aside, and whispered with the utmost pity, "You've got your period, Zoe, you bled all over your skirt. You should go in to the nurse."

I went to the bathroom to check and, sure enough, red everywhere. If I'd been sensible I would have gone in to the nurse and asked her to call my mum and take me home. But for some bizarre reason - I can't remember why, but I think the effort of human interaction seemed too much, or perhaps I was ashamed to ask my mum for help - I just tied a sweater around my waist and went through the rest of the day like a zombie. The news travelled fast about what was up with me and people stepped aside as if I was a leper. I wish I could recount some juicy insults but I can't actually remember many details of the afternoon.

(If I ever have a daughter, one thing I'm gonna be sure to do is have lots of nice feminist pagan-type rituals to celebrate her first menstrual cycle, so that she associates with with joyful transitions and pride in her womanhood, instead of shame, dread, and terror.)

***************************************************

From the happy present, this all seems so banal, the stuff of the aforementioned 80s movie cliches: a big move, being picked on in school, an embarassing period incident. I didn't live through a war; I was never sexually abused; nobody important to me died. But at the time, and not having any wisdom or perspective on life, it felt as though I was in a small black room with the walls closing in on me. I wasn't getting along well with my parents, so I spent about three years without having a meaningful conversation with anyone about anything. And human beings need to have relationships with each other; we need constant reminders that there's a solid world besides the one in our heads. An outside perspective is a bit like a buffer in a chemical solution, keeping it in equilibrium. Without it, we can go crazy. I think that my years of profound loneliness warped me in ways that I'm only now beginning to understand.

And, not to sound like a Luddite, but I would have traded in cars and electricity and appliances and running water and heat for just one friend. In a second. Wouldn't have even had to think about it.

Anyway, things got better through high school, and even more in college, and I started to learn some social skills, and one day it dawned on me that people actually considered me to be charming and socially desirable, if eccentric. But during those lonely lunches, I'd made two fierce vows to myself: I'd never take part in a clique or exclude anyone who was lonely, and whenever I met anyone, I'd ask myself one question, "If they had known me in eighth grade, when I was ugly and pimply and a social pariah, are they the type of person who would have been mean to me?" If I thought the answer was yes, I'd never accept them as a friend. And whenever I do become close with anyone, I feel the need to tell them the stories about my time in school. It was long ago, but it still feels very relevant to my identity.

I was having some pillow talk recently with a guy I'm dating, as lovers do, and we were swapping stories about our childhood - nothing heavy, just silly stuff. Then he told me a story about a girl he used to pick on when he was in middle school. "One time she left her bag out, and I saw a box of tampons in it. So I stole a tampon, and I dipped it in some ketchup and left it on her seat. Then I yelled to the class, 'Look there, what's that?' People were teasing her for months about it."

My skin turned to ice, but I didn't say anything about it then. And when I thought about it later, it got me to meditating on human beings' remarkable ability to change. This guy is no longer a bully; he's sweet, open-hearted, and generous. He no longer takes pleasure in other people's pain.

And my changes have been no less dramatic. I'm not a sulky teenage girl anymore. Besides the modicum of social grace and the absence of Vesuvian pimples, I don't believe that the world is out to get me, and I've realized that the pinnacle of human accomplishment is not being smart. Being smart is a nice trick, sort of like being double jointed - although occasionally more useful. But the human being truly worthy of respect is someone who is good, and who has an open heart. It was a dramatic priority shift, when that dawned on me, and perhaps my school tribulations were all worth it, if that was what it took to drive home such an important lesson to me. (Although I must admit, if you sent me back to 1991, with foresight, I'd still be sorely tempted by the tricycle and the coconuts.)

But if I can admit such change in myself, how can I deny it in another? In yoga teacher training one weekend, I remember that we were talking about the concept of non-attachment: to material objects, to habits, to people. Our teacher said, "And over time, we learn that one of the things we must let go is our attachment to our personality. We are not the same as our thoughts, or our personalities."

So I broke my vow. I'm dating the enemy.

The Next First Time

2005-04-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

Have you ever dipped your hand in water
To catch a fish? In the same way, lover,
I think our souls have been in hot pursuit
These past few million years.

The last life: two butterflies in the shelter
Of a flat leaf, from rain. And, once,
My mother. You held me and held me until I ran away.
Another time, strangers passing in the street.
Scarves flapping on that windy day. One hot look,
Not quickly forgot, was all that would hold me
For the next century.

Faster and faster in a backward spiral:
Deadly rivals -
Partners in a race -
A lion and a gazelle -
A mosquito feeding from my blood -
Two brothers napping -
The soldier who killed my father -
The man who pulled me from an icy river -
A hunter, pausing, to chew the juicy leaf of my basil bush -
Two bumblebees bobbling slow to circle the same rose -
The rock trips my horse-
Slow mud crabs miles under water -
Green lichen on an ocean stone -
Two specks given life by lightning -
Each of these lives just a flicker from one fire,
Which consumes equally betrayal, friendship, longing, lust,
Grief, pity, love, sweetness, salt.

You kissed me in the shower. A waterfall
Off your nose, down your shoulderblades, off your cock.
And then we hugged until bones cracked,
Trying to get close enough
But it didn't work.
Now I lie alone in bed and think your breath
Tickles my cheek.
Next time will I know you?
Will I see you for who you really are
In all the earth, the wind, the rain, the fire?

Tango tango tango

2005-04-06T10:50:00.000-07:00

LOCATION: GW Lisner Auditorium TIME: Saturday, April 9, 2005, 8:00pm EQUIPMENT: $25 (discounts for seniors, students & groups) OPTIONAL: Fire in your soul

I've never really mastered any kind of formally rigid dance, but watching Latin dancing is enough to kindle a Vesuvius in the loins of even the most rhythmically challenged person. You walk differently for days.

So, go!

Pan American Symphony Orchestra presents
Todo Tango IV
Featuring world renowned Bandoneon Player Raúl Jaurena and Tango singer Marga accompanied by professional Tango dancers Pablo and Carolina and the Pan American Symphony Orchestra

he Pan American Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Sergio Alessandro Buslje, presents an extraordinary evening of symphonic tangos, from traditional tangos to the Nuevo Tango of Astor Piazzolla. Joining the orchestra is Raúl Jaurena, master Bandoneon player, who recently performed at Carnegia Hall with the Berlin Philharmonic and with Yo-Yo Ma, brings the authenticity of the tango of Buenos Aires to the concert hall with his incomparable skill on this most difficult of instruments. He is enthusiastically complimented by the passionate singing of the talented Venezuelan Marga Mitchell who demonstrates such depth of feeling in her interpreations that you are transported to a smoky cafe near the docks of the port city where tango was born! Of course, no tango show would be complete without dancers, and this show features a pair who promises to enthrall with their sensual and graceful "jotas" and "ochos" -- steps authentic to Argentine tango.

The show features compositions by Argentina's best-known contemporary tango musician, Astor Piazzolla. When Piazzolla returned to Argentina after long stays in New York City and Paris, he transformed the tango into a modern form that was noticeably influenced by classical composers such as Stravinsky and Hindemith, and also by American jazz. At first scorned and rejected in Argentina for what was believed to be a corruption of the nation's most loved music, Piazzolla was responsible for the renaissance of Argentine tango, and by the time he died in 1992, he had written over 300 tango compositions and played to standing room crowds across the globe. Tonight's performance includes Piazzolla's Balada para un loco, Tangazo, Oblivion and Verano Porteño.

The Care of the Soul

2005-04-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

A wonderful interview with Thomas Moore. His ideas have more layers than a red Spanish onion!

********************************************************************************

CARING FOR THE SOUL
a conversation with Thomas Moore

The recent book Care of the Soul got our attention right away. Such a simple yet provocative title. Reading further, the subtitle is A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness In Everyday Life. We began our research on the ideas and works of Thomas Moore, and found that he was not talking about an other-worldly reality but about the mysterious and infinite depths of a person or society in everyday life, where the strongest emotions and the most important thoughts reside. Moore has stretched our view of soul and revived its rightful place in our lives.

Thomas Moore is a writer and psychotherapist. Over the past fifteen years he has become a leading teacher and lecturer in the United States, Canada and Europe, in the area of archetypal psychology, an approach developed by James Hillman, his friend, mentor and colleague. Moore edited and wrote the introduction for A Blue Fire, an anthology of Hillman's writings. He is the founder of The Institute for the Study of Imagination, a non-profit educational organization that sponsors lectures, workshops and publications on imagination. He has published a book entitled The Planets Within: A Renaissance Psychological Reading of Astrology, as well as Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (HarperCollins 1992).

MICHAEL TOMS: Perhaps we can begin by hearing you tell us how to recognize soul. I know it's difficult to define it, but how do we recognize soul?

THOMAS MOORE: Soul likes to be connected. When you're with somebody--a friend, or even a family member--where you really feel the connection, and it's not just based on some kind of common work or something you can actually express and define clearly, but you can feel the connection, heart to heart, it doesn't even have to be terribly emotional, but that kind of connectedness is one sign of soul.

There is so much emphasis in today's world on change and personal growth. A whole psychology has developed out of being in contact with one's inner child and one's inner adult, going back into early childhood and bringing up old memories and old experiences, as a way to become a more whole person. You suggest that that's not necessary to be a whole person. Could you talk a little bit about that?

We have to make some distinctions about this. It seems to me that soul loves the memory of childhood, loves the stories, loves the characters. So if I'm doing family therapy, I want to hear those stories, the stories of the uncles and the aunts and the mother and father and grandparents. And even before them, the stories of the family, the places where we lived, all that kind of thing. In fact, that's exactly what dreams do; dreams take us back to those characters and places, a good indication of where the soul likes to be.

But that's different from trying to change oneself and become better by somehow healing that person or that childhood, or certainly blaming what happened in childhood. That's not a soulful way of imagining family or the past, to say, "I am who I am today because my father was alcoholic, or there was abuse in the family, or people were distant." I think that this blaming of the family is one of the causes of difficulties with our families, the fact that we can't find the love and connections of family. It seems to be a healthy thing because we're finding the roots of our current problems, but I think that's an illusion. It's one thing to try to contact the family in order to change; it's another simply to honor and respect that family, and to take it as it is. Again, the soul likes the particulars--the way this family is--not some abstraction that sounds romantic and wonderful.

MT: You wrote that "All families are dysfunctional."

TM: Yes. If we say that certain families are dysfunctional, that's like losing our own soul; that's like saying, "My family isn't," or, "My family is, and I can blame my family for being dysfunctional." In either case we have lost that sense of the shadow, the gaps, the holes in every family. It's in the very nature of family to fail at a certain level. Even in the Judeo-Christian myth of Adam and Eve, they fail--the mythological parents fail. That's a necessity. It's really a wonderful image--if we could understand it, feel it deeply enough, and take it to heart, then we wouldn't expect our families to be perfect.

MT: So if we're focusing on a single parent: "Hey, this parent was very bad, or they didn't really do well by me," and so forth, in some way we're out of balance, we're not recognizing the good parts of that parent because we're focused on just the negative qualities?

TM: That's one way of looking at it--we're not dealing with a complicated person. Here's another soul word--complexity. Soul remains in complexity. We're with people who are very complicated; everyone's complicated. If we think someone is simple, then there's something wrong in our perception. I've never met a person who wasn't complicated. To care for the soul means, then, to live with that complexity.

It seems every single institution in our society is moving toward a simplistic view of what human life is. And that's where soul vanishes, because soul is complicated. I can see the motivations for moving away from soulfulness--it would be nice if life were simple. It would be very nice if we could blame somebody for who we are and not have to face it ourselves, not have to deal with our own complexity. But that's not the way it is. We lose something of utmost importance when we give in to that temptation to oversimplify.

MT: You brought this up in your accounts of dealing with some of your clients--we define ourselves by a label, saying, "I'm an incest survivor; I'm an alcoholic; I'm a recovering Catholic." And the label is like a self-limiting definition of who we are, that may prevent us from being whole.

TM: Exactly, because it is a label, an oversimplification. It's a psychological fundamentalism. It's one story, just one story, that a person might believe in. When one takes a story like "I'm a child of an alcoholic," and professes belief in this story, that's very much like a religious fundamentalist saying, "This is what I believe in and everything else doesn't make any sense," or "I'm going to be defensive about everything else." Taking that position is a defense against the complexity of the soul.

MT: It's like saying, "It's that way because it says so in the Bible," and it's like interpreting these lines as meaning one thing and one thing alone.

TM: Right--whereas life is never that simple. That story may be compelling because it provides an explanation. But soul does not thrive on explanations. An explanation, from a soul point of view, is an avoidance of complexity. The soul doesn't want explanations. It wants reflection, constant rumination, constant storytelling, images without end, nuances, interpretations without end, never a final solution to anything, never one story that will explain anything, because that's not what it's about. The soul is poetic.

If we take an experience like jealousy and treat it as if it were just a plain emotion, there's no fantasy around that. As a therapist, what I do is try to hear about jealousy. I want to hear all the stories of it, as much as I can, because it's in the stories, and in all the images, and even in dream images that seem to focus around it. All those images, then, show the soul moving in this jealousy. And that's what we have to do, because it's going somewhere, it's moving somewhere. Jealousy has a fulfillment, then. It's like an initiation, a ritual itself. If we just say, "I've got to be free of these painful feelings," then we don't get that initiation of the soul. I'm not saying just surrender completely to these things but, rather, enter them with imagination, see the poetry of them, let them speak.

MT: So when one is in, let's say, a deep depression, there's no real answer to that. There's nothing you can say to a person to take them out of the depression, other than to say, "You have to live this, and in some ways welcome it into your life."

TM: Yes. You have to be a host, in a sense, for soul. One of the most important roles of ego is to host the soul, to give it a place, to clear the decks in life and say, "OK, I'm going to allow myself to feel this. I'm going to give myself a place where I can talk about it." I may want to go and talk to a friend who I know won't try to save me from it, who will just listen to me and talk about it, or maybe go to a therapist who can listen and not try to save me from it too.

MT: In some ways it has a very Buddhist quality, of really experiencing the suffering, going into the suffering.

TM: Yes. It's going into it with imagination. It's not going into it just because it's good masochistically to suffer these things. There's nothing masochistic in what I'm suggesting here at all. I'm trying to suggest being active, and imagination is a very active thing. You host these feelings, you give them a place actively, so you're not their victim. If you're feeling victimized, then you're probably not using enough active work of your own.

MT: So it's not the old Christian adage, "It's good to suffer."

TM: Oh, absolutely not. That's masochistic, and it doesn't do us any good whatsoever. It's very active. Where we can get confused is that we've been sold a bill of goods here that when we have a painful experience we need to "get rid of this thing" somehow. We know that we can get rid of physical pain through various drugs and so on. And we think that the soul works the same way, that we can get rid of these things just by some therapeutic method, or some chemical or other. That's not really being active with imagination. That's being literal with our activity.

What I'm suggesting is something much more subtle. It deals with the subtlety of soul, which is to be active in the sense that I'm going to listen carefully to this emotion of mine. I'm going to talk about it. I want to hear what other people say about it when they're not trying to get me out of it. All of that brings so much imagination to the thing that it does its work. Then you actually come through it instead of around it.

MT: One of the references you made in Care of the Soul, Tom, was a reference to Ingmar Bergman's movie Fanny and Alexander. I thought it was a great analogy, the two family situations. Maybe you could just tell us about that for a moment.

TM: As I remember the film, there are two families. One family is full of life and vitality and color and a kind of bawdiness all the way through, which is also part of soul. This is family as you find it.

MT: There's the light and the dark also present in that family.

TM: The light and the dark. It's not a clean place. This is not what you might call the ideal family at all. But there's vitality, and there's food, and there's music, and there's laughter. These are all signs of a soulful family. Then the film shifts over to a bishop's dreary, gray, moralistic, awfully oppressive home. The contrast shows what happens when we move from soul. Soul is not clean and neat. But when we move to something that is more ordered and has lots of principle--as with that bishop's life where there's a whole tradition behind him of living a very principled, clean life--the soul has just vanished. The color is gone. The humor is gone, and nobody wants to live in that.

It's not just about churches that do this to us. Psychology does this to us. Psychology has a terrible moralism, puts a tremendous burden on us, takes a lot of color away when it tells us that we should be healthy emotionally. I don't think care of the soul has anything to do with emotional health. You can be a very soulful person and be nuts. (laughter) Really!

MT: I'm sure we have lots of them in the mental institutions.

TM: Well, of course. It makes no difference. A lot of very interesting and very soulful people have done crazy things in their lives. We put a terrible burden of health on us. Health has nothing to do with soul. That's something else.

It's more important to stay with the traditional qualities of soul, one of which is pleasure. Whenever people in the past have described soul they've always talked about pleasure, and that's different from health. You might say that the purpose of your activity in life is you're going to really take care of yourself now for awhile, but for pleasure's sake--deep pleasure, not just quick entertainments and things that distract you. I'm talking about really deep pleasure, the kind of pleasure you get from really listening to some music that you like, of whatever kind; or of talking with a friend, where it really stirs you; or seeing nature in a way that really touches you. That kind of pleasure. I'm talking now like a true epicurean, I think. Epicurus talked about pleasures that were lasting, as opposed to the pleasures that go by very quickly. That's what I'm discussing here as a goal, rather than health.

MT: Fast food versus slow food?

TM: Slow food! Very good. Slow dining, right? (laughter)

MT: Like the French. They turn dining into an experience. It's not just eating.

TM: Absolutely.

MT: One of the things you said that you enjoyed doing and had become a soulful activity for you was washing the dishes. I'd like you to explain that to me.

TM: Did I say that? (laughter) I don't know how that got in there. Well, it's a fact. I hate to confess to this, but I do like washing dishes. I have a hard time with dishwashers. There's something about that--it's a way of being in touch with things, where it gives me a lot of pleasure to touch and to see a thing get cleaned, where I've been eating. I enjoy that whole process. It also gives me a time to reflect, and that's an important part of housework. Housework is an opportunity to meditate that is not abstract--where you're not trying to shut the world out--in fact, just the opposite. By allowing the world in, it invites a certain kind of meditation that is not therefore too ethereal. It's very concrete.

MT: So it's important to build in pauses in our life where we have time to step back and just reflect.

TM: If we just live our lives with care--care of our homes is what we're talking about now--then, yes, there are all kinds of opportunities for meditation that is focused right around home, to home spirits, to the gods and goddesses of the home. I don't think we think of this very much any more, but many traditional societies have. There are spirits of the home. But that can be thought of in a way that's not terribly soulful. If you think of it more soulfully, I think you'd say, "Well, yes, at least for me, when I'm drying those dishes, I'm inviting a certain connection to my home that I would not have if I didn't do that work. I would be divorced more from my home if I didn't do the work around the house."

MT: Let's take that phrase from the Bible that one learns--I went through Catholic school and I learned in the third or fourth grade about the rich man getting through the eye of the the needle.

TM: It's more difficult for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of the needle."

MT: So there's this imbuing, early on, of the idea that somehow having a lot of money is going to prevent you from getting to heaven.

TM: Hell, yes, but I don't think soul is too happy about getting to heaven. I think soul has to be on this earth. So it's true, it's going to be very difficult to be in heaven if you're chasing after a lot of money. That's one of the things you have to pay in order to go after money. You lose heaven, but you get a lot of soul.

MT: So it's OK to lose heaven?

TM: Oh, yes.

MT: Here we have a one-time Catholic monk saying it's OK to lose heaven. That's great.

TM: Well, just think about that. I'm not judging either side of that. If your purpose in life is to be heavenly--you like the sky world, you like to live in the air, and that's a certain kind of spirit--that's fine, it's great. If that's what it is, then you probably don't want to have much money around because that's a hindrance, it ties you down. But if you like living on the earth, if that's your pleasure, then, yes, it would be very difficult to be in both places. Money keeps you grounded on earth.

MT: What about your phrase, "living art-fully"? What does that mean, to live artfully?

TM: Now, we're moving to a slightly different direction. I'm trying to say here that caring for the soul requires a kind of craft. It's not something that just happens by osmosis or by wishing it to happen. It's a day-to-day thing. It means that whatever we do everyday we can do thoughtfully--this will sound Buddhist to you, too--mindfully. We can live with thoughtfulness about the very simple things, and with an artist's aesthetic sense, so that caring for the soul does not require any kind of health. We can instead, then, move toward a sense of art, that we can live artfully instead of healthfully. That would mean, then, that we use our imaginations to deal with our problems, even to be artful about them, instead of just rushing to someone to get rid of our problems--to use a mind that has some craft, to have a sense of balance and beauty and working with our lives poetically.

That sense, the artist's sense, is very different from the mechanical sense that we usually bring to our problems. For the most part we're auto mechanics of the heart--I'm not saying anything against auto mechanics, but we think of our souls mechanically. I don't think we even are aware of how mechanical our language is, but it's extremely mechanical. If we move instead to an artful base for our dealing with these issues, we come up with very different solutions.

MT: In the same way we think of our hearts as a mechanical pump.

MT: Exactly. We think of our bodies as all kinds of machines--the brain as a computer, for example. All of these metaphors have a great effect on the way we relate to our bodies and to the world around us, because we do think of the world around us mechanically too. Problem-solving is really a mechanical approach. I never want to use that word "problem-solving." I don't think it's necessary to solve any problems. The point is to be artful about them.

Just as a painter will take some very painful experience and put it up there on a canvas--not just the lovely things but the painful things--or photographers tend to photograph some of the tragedies. They go to the fronts in wars, and they photograph accidents. Then they show us, and these are beautiful. They are beautiful because we get an aesthetic point of view on ordinary human experience, including the tragic. That's a good guide for how we might care for our souls, instead of thinking that we have to get our wrenches out and put in a new piece where some piece has failed.

MT: So by following your adage here, the more soul we have in our life, the richer our life will be.

TM: Absolutely. Yes. You'll feel the richness of it, the texture of it. You don't find abstract meaning and you don't feel "above it all" and saved, in that general sense--saved from life. I quote a Keats poem where he says that the point is to feel existence, not to be saved from existence.

On the 'ho' business

2005-04-04T22:11:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the DC Craig's List discussions a lot recently, for some reason. It's like watching a train wreck. I'm particularly fascinated by the "Casual Encounters" section, where the broke college girls meet the sugar daddies. It's like watching a National Geographic documentary on primate sexuality.

And for some reason I even post there, arguing with the lunatics.

RE: RANT: How the 'ho' business works............
Reply to: anon-66954748@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-04-04, 10:46PM EDT

You wrote:
If you need a 'donation' and you are a non-pro (posting to CE/W4M). Let's say that you really are a college girl or some chick down on her financial luck. You don't get a pic 1st..sorry. YOU are advertising a service.....so fuckin advertise(yourself--with YOUR pic in an email)! Stop looking for a 'customer' to send you a pic if they reply to your posting. As long as their color, size, shape, age, turns out to be GREEN, that's all you need to worry about. It's not about you appraising the donator, it's about the donator appraising you and seeing if YOU are worthy of their hard-earned cash. That's how the 'ho' business works.

I wrote:
It seems to me that the 'ho' business is illegal, hence I do not believe there is any official governing body dictating its rules. Since this is true, I believe that the 'ho' business works any way that its providers and consumers work out between themselves, according to the laws of supply and demand. If a girl wants to demand that a guy send her a picture, jump through a hoop, and shave his head before he hires her, she's free to do so. She might not get any clients, but she's certainly free to try. And the more sexually desirable, experienced, and charming she is, the more she's going to get away with in terms of demands upon her clients. That's the way that supply and demand works.

And, for your part, you're free to hire the services of anybody you want to (who's also willing to do business with you.) That might mean skipping the girls who demand pictures up-front and only hiring girls with lower standards.

You're also free to post rants about "the 'ho' business" on Craig's List, fueled by your insecurity about being so ugly that even prostitutes reject you. Of course, it's not going to do you any good.

Take your headphones out

2005-04-04T19:53:00.000-07:00

I love music. I love dancing to it, making out to it, lying in bed with the lights out and listening to it, going to live concerts.

But I don't like listening to it as I'm walking down the street. I believe it's a waste, because the streets have their own music.

My friend Rikhil loves to walk around listening to his iPod. He said once, "It's like you're on a different plane when you're listening to music. You're checked out of reality. What's more, you can instantly look around and detect the other people who've got their headphones in. You sort of nod at each other. You're each in the same plane."

It's not natural for a human being to be in an urban environment. We evolved to live in tribes of 30-60 people, all of whom we were close with. Our natural instinct is to make eye contact and acknowledge other human beings near us, to tune in to their energy and aura.

In a city, this can be terrifying. But it can also be exhilarating.

I believe that these are all messengers:

--The man wobbling across the road with a gaping tear across the backside of his dirty jeans. He looks at me and spits onto the pavement. My skin crawls all the way from my skull to the small of my back.

--The Midwestern tourist family. Their jeans are pale, their backs are broad; both the mother and the father consult maps as they walk down the street. After they've gone ten feet, they stop, look all around, and then walk back in the same direction.

--The fellow biker who zips past me as I take a right turn. He calls, "This is such a beautiful day!"

--The gorgeous woman hugging herself and gazing dreamily at the ground as she floats along. She looks up at me and winks.

--The man walking his poodle. Try as I might, I cannot detect a single detail that does not contradict the stereotype of a fabulous Dupont Circle gay yuppie. His poodle is immaculately groomed, with a shiny leather collar. He's whistling to himself.

--The woman rushing to work in the morning. She's wearing dusty sneakers under her stockinged skirt suit, her hair hasn't been brushed yet, her purse is falling off her sloping shoulder, and a bulging supermarket plastic bag dangles from one hand as she half-runs, banging uncomfortably against her leg. She bumps against me and mutters, "Sorry..." as she hurries on.

--The construction worker who calls to me from a cloud of dust, "Hey, can I have your number?" I look him in the eye and say, "Nope."

All of these strangers, and thousands more, are all messengers. Sometimes the message is disturbing, sometimes it is life-affirming. Usually, if you think about it a little bit, you can figure out why the message is eerily appropriate for you right exactly then.

And ultimately, I believe, you figure out that all of the messages were the same. What is it? Dear reader, I hope someday we'll know.

IF GOD INVITED YOU TO A PARTY

2005-04-04T19:31:00.000-07:00

If God
Invited you to a party
And said,

"Everyone
In the ballroom tonight
Will be my special
Guest,"

How would you treat them
When you
Arrived?

Indeed, indeed!

And Hafiz knows
There is no one in this world

Who
Is not upon
His Jeweled Dance
Floor.

--HAFIZ

Ride your bike out to the Billy Goat Trail

2005-04-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

LOCATION: Billy Goat Trail, Section A (Great Falls National Park) TIME: Sprrring! EQUIPMENT: Yourself, bicycle, tasty tasty lunch OPTIONAL: Adorable golden retriever to bellyflop into the river after your sticks (don't I just wish)

If you want a day of exercise and gorgeous nature near DC, there aren't many better things to do than this. The Billy Goat trail hugs the Potomac River, and although it's still very close to Bethesda, you can almost pretend that you're in the middle of the wilderness (except for the bedraggled families trudging along with their pudgy, red-faced, Nintendo-addicted ankle-biters in tow, loudly complaining that they want to GO HOME NOW!!!, who are all too common on sunny Sundays). There are plenty of rock scrambles along the trail, and even more off the trail, and the terrain is varied and beautiful. There's a place where you can sit on a mini-cliff and watch kayakers practice their moves in a protected patch of white water. What's more, when you get to the little beach, it's perfectly safe to swim in the river in the nook of the rocks, as long as you don't go out too far (don't tell the park ranger I told you this).

Carless DC folk often complain about not having access to real nature, but as long as you've got a bike, this is a totally do-able long afternoon. What I would recommend is to get on your bike and enter the C&O Canal towpath in Georgetown. Then you just ride along the canal about 12 miles, and the entrance to the trail will be on your left after the widewater (see map linked above). You lock up your bike outside the trail, walk the loop (about 2.5 hours if you don't stop, which, of course you should stop! Sit on a rock somewhere and meditate! Oh, and eat the gourmet lunch you were foresightful enough to pack).

Then bike home and take a bubble bath. (Or, my latest discovery: Oatmeal bath! Just throw a handful of rolled oats into the tub. It's totally moisturizing and you can pick up handfuls of oats & rub them on yourself to exfoliate. Plus, how fun is it to bathe in porridge?)

Hooray for spring!

Take aerial pictures of the Mall from a kite

2005-03-30T07:50:00.000-08:00

LOCATION: National Mall (or any good kite-flying spot) TIME: Of your life! EQUIPMENT: Camera, kite, camera frame and suspension rig

Make is a new magazine by O'Reilly Publishers that details all kinds of geeky projects. This one shows you how to rig up a camera to hang from a kite-line so that you can take aerial photographs. An excellent adventure for the spring.

http://make.oreilly.com/images/01/KAP_mini.pdf

Another kind of Nirvana

2005-03-25T16:20:00.000-08:00

LOCATION: Nirvana Restaurant, 1833 K St. TIME: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Douglas Adams EQUIPMENT: Healthy appetite, and $9.95 plus tax & tip

This is my new favorite place for lunch in the area. They serve a vegetarian buffet, with regional specialties from different parts of India depending on the day of the week. (So far I've tried Wednesdays - from Gujarat - and Fridays - from Rajasthan.) The food is delicious, and quite different from standard Americanized-Indian restarant slop.

The hostess - she's the owner, or the owner's wife, or the main chef - is outstandingly proud of their home cooking and regional authenticity, and hovers over the buffet, answering questions about the food. We praised an appetizer consisting of hard-to-identify little nuggets on Rajasthan day, and her cheeks glowed with a mother's fire. "They're made of chickpea flour, and wheat flour, and rice, and cabbages, and spices," she said. On Gujarat day, however, we requested naan, and her eyebrows swiftly drew together. "Naan is not a bread eaten in Gujarat, also not strictly vegetarian - has eggs," she explained (forgivingly: we were ignorant, but at least we wanted to improve ourselves). "In Gujarat they eat little puffy breads, you can see in the buffet. Regional distinction is everything is very tiny and delicate - cute food. Of course maybe they eat thirty of those little breads. But each one has to be cute."

And if you have to wait for a table, there's a couch with a selection of Indian newsmagazines, allowing you to discover that Indian political cartoons are totally adorable.

The Fortunate Isles

2005-03-25T05:55:00.000-08:00

A few million silvery fish children swim
Across his belly. He gasps. I'll have to wash
It off my sheets. We hook our limbs
And rock, and sigh. If he got me pregnant then
Perhaps I'd kill it. I haven't ever had to make
A real decision - on, oh God, so many things.
Are all those choices still curled away
Like the seeds in my belly, most never to be born?

My life is like an old map of the Ocean Sphere
With curly maelstroms of foam,
And gothic script to label the unknown:
Dragons, five-headed men, Leviathan who could snap
Your ship with one shrug for his toothpick,
And even Earthly Paradise toward the antipodes
(Though perhaps just the mapmaker's
Merry whiskey dream...)
I wait in the sphere of his arms.
We smell of morning bed: sleep and sweat and crotch.

Or perhaps my life is like waiting to catch a wave:
They pull and roll on past and leave you behind,
Until finally the fortunate foam grabs you,
You're lost in the rush of its flying fizz and then,
Crash - it dumps you home.
Seneca said,
"There will come an age in some distant future
When the Ocean shall loosen its shackles
And the earth shall lie wide open.
And Typhis shall discover a new world.
And no longer shall there be an end to the earth."

One more day swells inside us and around us.

Wake up

2005-03-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

I sometimes have ominous dreams of apocalypse. The world is going to end - for various reasons - and I'm on a desperate mission to save it. There's a jar of magical uranium on a shelf ten miles away, and if it falls and breaks, the universe will explode, and people's eyeballs will drip down their cheeks like tears. Or my dear friend is in grave danger, trapped in a cave underground, and I've got to rescue her before she suffocates. Or I myself am fighting to defend my family's home, waving my sword against three fierce onlookers who want to chop us into soup-sized pieces.

Usually the rescue attempt never quite succeeds. I arrive just in time to see the uranium jar topple, in slow motion, far away across the room, or I dig down into the cave only to find my friend already dead, or the warrior I'm fighting hacks my arm off, and then they all surround me. In the moment just before kinetic disaster descends, there's a moment of stillness and swirling, overwhelming horror. My heart thumps, my mind races in terrified denial: Oh shit I'm going to die this is real in just a few seconds there will be nothing, nothing at all if only I'd - oh I made so many mistakes I could have avoided this - oh God it's too late it's too late - and then I wake up. It's usually not with a scream but with a gentle gasp.

These sound like nightmarish dreams, but the mornings that follow them are wonderful. I can't describe the sense of blissful oceanic relief that follows the dawning realization that it was just a dream. It wasn't true! The world remains! My friend is not a worm ridden corpse, she's well and happy and probably eating her breakfast right now! My left arm is still attached to my body - I can wiggle it and feel my fingers - and I'm alive, alive, alive. On the days that follow these terrible dreams, colours are brighter, tastes are sweeter, everything in the world is more vivid and precious, and the sense of wondrous, shocking gratitude never quite leaves me.

Occasionally, when I have these dreams, they become lucid. That is, I'll realize I'm dreaming, even though I don't wake up. When that happens, they instantly lose their dread, and become interesting movies. Ah, I'll think to myself, even as I frantically dodge and dance during the swordfight, that's not actually my left arm lying there severed on the ground, pumping blood. This is just a dream! I can wake up whenever I want. But I think I'd like to see what happens next.

The last stage of the yogic journey is samadhi, or enlightenment, after which you acknowledge that everything in the world is simply maya, or illusion, and you recognize Atman, or the universal spirit, in all things. I wonder if it's anything like that: waking up from an unhappy dream.

Watch Short Cut to Nirvana

2005-03-11T11:39:00.000-08:00

What: "SHORT CUT TO NIRVANA"... a pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela
Where: E St. Landmark Cinema in Washington DC
When: Opens on March 11th for two days (unless you bring the crowds…)
11th and E Streets NW
(202)452-7672

Who: Filmmaker Maurizio Benazzo will be present for Q&A’s on most weekend shows

Watch the trailer at: www.shortcuttonirvana.com

"SHORT CUT TO NIRVANA"
An exhilarating, insightful, uplifting and often hilarious journey of discovery
to the biggest event in History - the Kumbh Mela. Held every 12 years where the
holy Ganges and Yamuna meet, this incredible festival brings together 70
million pilgrims and many of India's great spiritual leaders, including the
Dalai Lama.

Daily: 2:15, 4:40*, 7:10* and 9:20* on Friday and Saturday.

Behave yourself at house parties

2005-03-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

LOCATION: Your generous friend's home EQUIPMENT: Yourself, helpful attitude NOT OPTIONAL: Offering

I guess it's a bit of a cultural difference, or - well, I'm not really sure. When I was growing up, my mum was always having dinner parties. There's not a better place in the world for good conversation than in someone's home over a delicious meal. So, having grown up with this delightful ritual, I pretty much had it drilled into my head early on: YOU DON'T SHOW UP AT PEOPLE'S HOMES FOR PARTIES EMPTY-HANDED!!! Perhaps you are coming straight from your whaling boat where you've spent the past three years in an epic fruitless quest for a malevolent white whale, and you haven't even had a chance to clean the harpoon stashed in your backpack, which is crusted with ooky bits of whale intestine. You still stop off at the corner store and get SOMETHING.

Apparently, this little bit of wisdom hasn't reached DC. My beautiful friend Jaiva threw a big party at her house last weekend, with an 80s theme. When I arrived around 11pm, the party was in full swing, Jaiva had set up projectors to beam movies and PacMan animations against the wall, and the sound of people chattering was loud enough to drown out the music. Yep, everyone was having fun.

Except Jaiva.

She's an awesomely laid back California girl, so by neurotic DC standards her expression wasn't anything to remark upon, but I could tell she wasn't a happy camper. "I think we're going to run out of alcohol pretty soon," she said. "People just haven't been bringing much."

While we were discussing the alcohol problem, a guest came up and tugged on her sleeve. "Uh, the toilet's broken. You've got to come look at it."
'
"It's probably just stuck or something," Jaiva said distractedly. "Did you play around with it?"

"Nah, I don't know, you have to look at it."

So Jaiva ran upstairs and flushed the toilet for her guest. Then she moved a potted plant from a corner after someone knocked it over. Then she tried to fix the sound system, which wasn't playing music loud enough. Then she did five other things that I didn't notice.

For heaven's sake! As anyone who has thrown a good house party knows, it is a LOT of work: the set up, the hostessing, the real-time troubleshooting, and, most of all, the cleanup of the drunken mess the next day. I used to live in the basement of an art gallery last summer, where I'd throw some parties just by myself, and I've had some mornings where the combination of the sordid mess, the piles of stinking beer bottles, and the incredible contrast - from the jovial crowd just a few hours ago, to the lonely, squalid pigsty that it was my job to tackle all by myself - set me off into pathetic little fits of hysterical, self-pitying tears.

And yet, house parties are infinitely better than bars. You meet so many more people, so much more easily, and they are usually much nicer and more interesting than the average bar denizen. It's much cheaper (even if you include the cost of your MANDATORY OFFERING). And you have all the comforts of a home: couches to sit on, comfy bathrooms, even bookshelves to raid if you're feeling overwhelmed by the crowd and want to take a fifteen minute breather for a drunken reading of some Eliot poetry.

The host of a house party knows this. They want you to have a rockin' good time, and they want you to meet cool people, otherwise they wouldn't have invested so much effort in providing you the opportunity for it. And there are wonderful benefits to being a host. It's fun to share your home and offer people hospitality. It makes you smug when people praise you for your crazy parties.

Deciding to throw a party is a cost-benefit analysis: you weigh the fun from the party and the glory of hosting against the pain of the cash, time, and energy it takes to throw it well. People assign different weights to the equation, naturally, and if you happen to have someone in your group of friends who tilts towards hosting - for heaven's sake, treat them well! As a prospective host, your decision on whether to throw the next party is based on your experience of how painful the previous ones were. If you take advantage of your generous friends and friends-of-friends, nobody's going to be willing to throw house parties, and then everyone is going to have to hang out at noisy bars, sulking and feeling bitter about their $7 martinis and the fact that they can't hear anyone else speak, and it's a half-hour wait just to get the bartender to notice you.

This has turned into a rant, and I'm sorry for that, but I've just got to say: I love my friends, and I love having dinner parties for them, but when people don't let me know if they're coming, or they say they might and then flake out and never let me know, or nobody brings anything and I worry that I'm going to run out of food and wine - it really sucks, and it stresses me out.

There's another kind of party - and I've had these as well - where there's something in the air, and all your guests are good. They let you know they're coming, and then they come, and they bring so many drinks that you end the evening with more alcohol than when you started, and they spontaneously help to clean up, and, if it's a dinner party, some of them do the dishes; and if the toilet breaks, they spend a bit of time figuring out how they could fix it without having to bother you. When that kind of party happens, even if your house is still trashed at the end, you don't mind, and you clean it up in a happy daze, because you feel that your efforts were appreciated, and you don't feel like you were taken advantage of. And then you start planning the next party right away.

But if you have too many of the bad kind of party, you start to get bitter. And then your acquaintances hail you in the street and call, "Zoe, when's your next party? Soon, right? I just love your parties!" and you make a lemon face and think to yourself, "Yeah, you just love showing up at my door empty handed and drinking all my booze and eating all the fruit in my fruit bowl and breaking stuff and hiding it so you don't have to confess, and then stumbling home leaving me with all the mess. That must be really great for you."

So here's to spreading the house party love, and facilitating each others' hosting efforts, and to a DC where everyone is willing to invite people over to their homes, and we spend many more evenings enjoying each others' company by candlelight over a home-cooked meal, or dancing with friends in somebody's living room, and the hosts never, ever regret it the next day.