My mental circus, inside and out.

A few weeks ago, high winds from a tornado came tearing through Emma's town, twisting and uprooting many huge trees.  A friend at her meditation circle said that she had bought a condo for the woodsy view, but twelve trees were ripped out by the winds.  She said, "That was my lesson in impermanence."

Emma had planned to travel this summer, but for various reasons, including her own negligence at preparation and planning, has resulted in the blissful opportunity to just stay home.   Her own trees survived, though the neighbor's porch awning was smashed.  And parts of the garden are magnificent because of the rain, the lavender, the dogwood.    Emma is feeling much less need to prove that she is somehow different, somehow extraordinary, all delusions of the self anyway.  Everyone in the neighborhood putzes around in their gardens, expecially the seniors. . .there's an Obama meeting down the street tomorrow. . people have peace signs out on the lawn.  There was the brief appearance of a McCain sign but it was quickly disappeared.  A woman in a wheelchair walks her small dogs every morning.  Mothers come down the street pushing strollers.  Twice a week, Emma goes over to Horsh'ssmall apartment (weird, given how wealthy he is) and has sex for four or five hours, whcih is somewhat exhausting for overweight, midldle-aged people like them, so they've had to ration it.  Horsh, being a complete workaholic, doesn't want to go anywhere except to serve as a marshal at a local golf match. . Emma has no idea what a golf marshal is or does, but it all sounds very Republican.   And hilariously, Horsh made a comment to Emma when she happened to  wear a skirt that he preferred that to "proletarian jeans."  It's all highly amusing, the incongruity of it, but that, as Freud said, is the basis of all laughter.

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 25, 2008 21:17 | link | comments (2)

Last week, Emma went to the National Conference on Media Reform with her son, his girlfriend (who is about to go off to Northwestern for a graduate degree in journalism), and her friend Gerry, one of those people who channels a lot of native anger into politics.  Emma's son says that Gerry watches too much Air America where the participants throw around their conspiracy theories in an echo chamber.  So Gerry, who has ideas, spent time chasing Ariana Huffington around trying to get an ear.  Emma wonders why part of the left has degenerated into conspiracy theories, especially as she was observing one woman who kept trying to grab the mic during the panel with Catherine Crier to preach about the 9-11 conspiracy.  You don't really need to waste your time obsessing about a conspiracy theory to see what is wrong with America: greed, hatred and delusion.   Anyway. ..  it is well worth watching Bill Moyers give the keynote.  And the lineup was fantastic:  Naomi Klein, Amy Goodman, Phil Donohue, the guy who founded FAIR.   The conference got the attention of Bill O'Reilly (not surprising, since there was plenty of direct O'Reilly baiting going on) who called the attendees a bunch of loonies.  Hard to see Moyers as a loonie.

Emma felt obligated to blog about that, given all the talk about the people taking the media back and making it more democratic.

Other than that, it is summer.  The days are gorgeous.  Emma is well-fucked.  She has discovered the wonders of texting on crackberry, err, she means blackberry. The garden is growing.  The neighborhood is idyllic.  A black man may be the next president. The kids are preparing to move out and finally start their own lives.   Wow, good karma!

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 16, 2008 20:52 | link | comments (2)

The Worldly Dharmas:

Pleasure/Pain

Gain/Loss

Praise/Blame

This appears to be a good time for Emma to think about the worldly dharmas.  She encountered the worldly dharmas in three different texts this week, at just the right time when she was feeling beaten up by both praise and blame, that roller coaster ride of ups and downs that probably take place in any given week, and even in any given hour of meditation.   Of the three dyads, she would have to say that praise and blame are most compelling right now, having mostly to do with Emma's attachment to work, and she feels uncomfortable wth both of these.   When she sat down to meditate, she found praise and blame roiling along through her mind, praise for herself that her breathing was slow and restful, followed by blame that she was about to cough in a room full of other meditators in her vipassana group.   So many of her thoughts are chained to praise and blame, even in the microcosm,  that it seems worth observing to figure out why that is.   And everyone around her is deeply caught up in these states, too.  They drive the workplace, and to some extent, Emma's family life.   Emma wonders whether, given the low salaries in academe, praise and blame are more compelling there than in the corporate world, which is more tied to loss and gain.   But she supposes some mix of  all the worldly dharmas are present in everyone, and cause a lot of very temporary joy and suffering.

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 21, 2008 20:37 | link | comments (2)

Emma would just like to launch a complaint againt the condom.  She recently read a study which found that people don't like condoms, primarily because men lose their erections trying to get them on.  Well, surprise.  Emma always wonders why social scientists spend their time proving what everyone already knows.  Can it be that healthcare providers and educators really don't grasp this and need a study to prove it? Now maybe, when a man is 25, the condom is easy to put on.  After all, it is still possible for a man to get rock hard instantly when he is 25, but when he is 54, and he has to stop, look around on his desk for where he put the damn things, and now struggle to get this annoying, numbing piece of plastic on his softening member, the whole business spirals into a  steady state of flaccidity.  In fact, reminded of how he is getting older and wondering whether he shouldn't take up running to get the blood flow up, he may go stomping around in anger and there goes the mood.  At that moment, risking a deadly disease seems preferable to facing the inevitable facts of our decline, even the benefits of being able to go long and slow.   Let's just state this plainly.  We don't want to be reminded in this way that we are getting old! Emma has been sad to read the depressing failures of the Phase III drug trials for microbicides that would much more effectively prevent the spread of STDs. This would be an incredible benefit to humankind, even on the very tiny scale of Emma's sex life. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 16, 2008 23:07 | link | comments (2)

Emma had not planned to travel this summer.  She was going to stay home, putz around in the garden, be a grandma.   Act her age.  But then this friend of hers, an engineer, is building a water tower for a rural community in Honduras, and Emma is going to lend a hand, help out with her rudimentary Spanish.  (Not that she has that much hope of translating complicated directions for plumbing systems.)  Emma believes that people are born with personality traits,  and she was born always needing to see what was on the next block, across the next field, over the mountain, in the next country.   maybe because of  traces from whatever stream of consciousness led to this birth,  maybe because one side of her family was always on the frontier, at least until Kansas when they reversed direction.   Most people seem happy staying in one place.  Horsh wants to know why Emma doesn't stay home and spend her dollars in the American economy.

And speaking of the American economy, a friend of Emma's has suggested that everyone take $10 from their tax relief money and give it to a democratic candidate.  Just so the Republicans don't get back into office with their wars and their imperial strategies and their creation of global food crises and their screwing of the middle-class and the poor.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 28, 2008 20:37 | link | comments (1)