Chilly in Tibet

I watched the documentary "10 Questions for the Dalai Lama", then went to my yoga class tonight, which relaxed me and helped me get my perspective back. What does a financial hit I can weather matter when other people are dealing with much more serious problems? It's not as though it's keeping me from having the essentials I truly need. It really is only money, but when you've been raised in this culture it's easy to forget that from time to time.

Tibet

I'm sure there are a lot of people who know more about this than I do, but I'd be willing to bet that I know more than the average American would on the subject.

I think the tight Chinese control over the media pertaining to recent events in Tibet tells us everything we need to know. They want to get things in place to put as positive a spin on the situation as they can manage before any foreigners see anything firsthand. In one respect, I understand that they're trying to keep their image as positive as possible leading up the Olympics, but on the other hand, it makes their statements regarding what's happening in Tibet a lot less credible.

Another thing I think hurts the Chinese government's credibility is their statements regarding the Dalai Lama. They claim that he's actually the brains behind the violence, which doesn't square at all with everything I've ever read about him from anyone except the Chinese government. There was a representative from the Chinese government (can't remember his name or position) who said in one news story that he'd be willing to talk to the Dalai Lama regarding a peaceful resolution to the situation if the Dalai Lama would agree to two things up front, both of which the Dalai Lama has already publicly agreed to. And yet there's been no meeting, and it doesn't sound as though there will be one.

I'm hard pressed to think of a situation where rioting would be justified, especially on the part of Buddhist monks (if those were, in fact, Buddhist monks, which I have a hard time believing based on that behavior), so there may be blame to be laid on both sides of this equation, but I still think the Chinese are handling Tibet poorly and need to reconsider their actions. While you can rule people with force in the short term, it simply doesn't work in the long term. You've got to speak with them and get some level of cooperation. I think the rest of the world needs to step up and show them just how unacceptable the Chinese handling of this situation is in the eyes of the world community. The exact means will depend on the country, and how far they're willing to go.

Chilly (Follow Up)

Well, the repair guy has been here and gone. Got to give him credit, in that he got here much more quickly than I would've expected. It was probably within an hour or so of my original call.

The news is as bad as I'd feared. We'll have replace the furnace , though they can get us functional again for the short term (repair guy needs a part and will have to come back). It's a bad financial hit, but at least it'll be a selling point once we're ready to sell the house.

Chilly...

At the moment, I'm freezing my backside off. Something went wrong with our house heater last night, and the temperature's slowly been dropping ever since. I'm calling for a repair guy in a few minutes, but have no idea when they'll be able to get here.

I'm very worried about what they're going to find, and what it's going to cost us. On the bright side, I was on vacation anyway, so I didn't need to take any unexpected time off, and it's a little warmer now than it's been in recent weeks. Also, while I had some things I wanted to do, it's not as though I had anything essential scheduled.

I'd like to be able to say that I'm doing fine, in a spirit of non-attachment. After all, it's not as though I can do anything about the situation at this moment. Whatever needs to be fixed needs to be fixed, and will be fixed when the repair guy gets here. But while I'm not spiraling into a fit of depression as I might've done in the past, I have to admit that I am experiencing some anxiety over it. We'll see what happens...

Back on Track

Monday, Tuesday, and about half of Wednesday were the same as the last two difficult weeks, then it was as though someone flipped a switch and the incoming work went back to usual levels. Very weird. The respite allowed me to get my feet back under me and bring my total workload back down to almost average by the end of the week. This is a Very Good Thing because I took some time off this upcoming week, just because I had vacation time to burn and thought it'd be good to take a break sometime in the spring, and I really dislike leaving with a lot of potential messes for others to deal with while I'm gone.

The only firm plans I have for this week are to go to my yoga class on Wednesday, and to meditate and do some yoga each morning while I have the time. I have a lot to do around the house, so I'm likely to spend a fair amount of time staying here and getting things done, but I'd also like to just relax a bit and get my writing back on track again.

My wife asked what I was going to request from Netflix, since I'd have some extra time and might want to watch some movies. I replied that I'd requested "Ten Questions for the Dalai Lama" and "Saw II" from Netflix. She laughed, and I have no idea why. ;-)

So now let's see if I can get back on track this week, feel a bit better and get some things done.

Mindfulness, Games, and a Rough Two Weeks

It's been a very rough last two weeks at work. Most of my work involves two car accidents with one or two people who've been hurt, with the occasional multi-car or serious accident, but for the last two weeks there's been a flurry of wild four and five car accidents with several people injured in each car. Some of this can be explained by recent bad weather, but in most cases it was just the driver responsible for the accident having an inexplicable lapse of attention. People must have their minds on other things. There is usually a brief run of claims like this in the spring when the weather improves. However, it's much earlier than would be usual for that, and I've never seen so many injuries (many of them serious) in such a short time. Hopefully this is just some weird blip and things will get back to our normal level of overload so I can dig out to some degree.

Some friends of mine occasionally host tournaments of the Magic: The Gathering card game for their friends, and did one this past weekend. I do well enough when we play with our own decks, but for some reason I'm no better than average when we play tournaments. I think I've finally figured out why. Tournament formats level the playing field, in that all of the players are operating with identical size pools of cards. There are some people in our circle of friends who've been playing the game longer than I have, but not many, so my card collection is larger than most of them. I've realized that I've come to rely on deck construction to win rather than actually being able to play the game well, so when the playing field is level, my results aren't very good. The embarrassing thing to admit is that my main problem is a simple lack of paying attention, which leads me back to the Buddhist idea of mindfulness. So not only can I enjoy the games as games, I can also use them as a sort of spiritual exercise by using them to cultivate awareness.

All of this ties together, believe it or not. After an initial period where I was tearing my hair out at work and rushing around, I made a decision to slow down. I didn't feel as though I could afford to do that, but I was finding that I had been rushing to the point where I was making mistakes and actually taking more time because I had to go back and fix things I'd done previously. I found a pace that still seemed to be workable, though it's still going to take at least a few days to bring my desk back to some level of order (assuming the work load goes back to normal, which I don't think I can count on). The key thing here is that it wasn't so much the working pace that mattered; it was more about paying increased attention to what I was doing and ultimately being more efficient.

I'd planned to focus on the concept of Right Speech this past week, but frankly, I've been doing a poor job of it due to stress. I become aware of saying things I probably shouldn't, but the words are coming out even as I realize there's a problem with them. The more aware I am of how/when I'm making mistakes, the more I find. It's funny and ironic that the more aware I become (and in essence the more progress I make), the more I feel like a complete newbie who doesn't know anything.

Beowulf and 30 Days of Night

I'd really been looking forward to both of these, and can't give either one better than a mixed review.

"Beowulf" is a lot of fun to look at, and makes good use of the flexibility the computer-generated sets give the director. There are shots in this movie that would be entirely impossible to pull off in a live action film. On the other hand, the story itself isn't very interesting, even taking liberties with the source material. For all the gore and violence, it ultimately feels empty. The featurette showing how it was done was better than the movie itself, and you can see how this technology is likely to result in much more entertaining films down the road. I wouldn't recommend this movie unless you're interested in seeing how it was made. I'd give it a four out of ten, and consider it a passable rental flick. Add another two to the rating if you have a real interest in the technical aspect, and add one if you need some help in picturing what Angelina Jolie looks like naked.

"30 Days of Night" has some very flavorful vampires speaking some weird, Eastern European-sounding language. The creative people behind this film said they were trying to make vampires scary again. That they did; there are some nicely scary shots here, emphasizing vampire as predator, not seducer. However, they utterly failed to make the vampires (or anyone else) logical. Why would vampires make a particular effort to get to a place where there are 30 days of night only to seemingly eat most of the population on the first night, then hang around forever trying to find the last few survivors? They could've done that anywhere! And I can't imagine predators wasting as much food as they did here. I realize that a horror movie is about scares more than necessarily figuring out a sensible ecology of the vampiric species, but when the logic is this weak, my suspension of disbelief is damaged to the point where the scares don't work for me. I no longer care enough to be scared.

The first twenty or thirty minutes of the movie contain some of the most obvious set-ups for later elements that I've ever seen. I understand that if you want to use something later, you have to establish its presence earlier in the film, but it was as if they didn't even try to make those things appear to arise naturally. The main characters suffer from the usual horror movie cliche of doing really stupid things, because if they don't, there's no story. This happens over and over. I really wish that people who made horror films would show a little more respect for the genre by having characters actually make sensible choices and the scary stuff happens anyway! There's a lot to like in the look and behavior of the vampires (and just a hint of the underlying vampire culture), but there were just too many gaping holes in the internal logic for me to really enjoy myself. I'll give it four of out ten because I liked the look and feel of the vampires, but I didn't like anything else about this one.

Gary Gygax

Wow. It's hard to describe how I felt when I read that Gary Gygax had passed away this morning. I can't say that I was a big fan of a lot of his work, but we're talking about one of the two guys who started the entire roleplaying hobby. I started with one of his creations, Dungeons and Dragons, as virtually all of us did. It's not an exaggeration to say that he had a huge impact (at least indirectly) on how I've spent a lot of my free time over the last thirty years or so. D&D was my system of choice for roughly my first ten years of roleplaying, so I'd say I got more than my money's worth of fun out of those earliest D&D books.

A moment of silence, then, and a symbolic tip of my hat to Mr. Gygax for the many hours of enjoyment with my friends that his creation gave us all.

We Are What We Do

I was speaking with a co-worker from my yoga class this past Friday. She was expressing some frustration with the meditative part of the class where we're supposed to empty our minds as much as possible. She felt she was somehow failing because whenever she'd try to empty her mind, she'd find herself thinking about something at work, or a place she had to be later, or something her son had said that morning. I explained to her that I'd been meditating virtually every day over the last year or so, and that while I was gradually getting better at emptying my mind during meditation, my experience was much the same as hers. Part of the point was to keep trying, and to understand that she wasn't going to be able to completely empty her mind in the matter of a few minutes when she'd only been working at it once a week for about six weeks. She seemed to feel a lot better after we'd talked, and I was glad I'd been able to have that conversation with her before she reached a point where she'd have given up. She'd been seeing only that she wasn't reaching the goal, and not seeing the value in the process itself.

With most things, we spend a lot more time with the process than we do with the end product, and therefore it's important to recognize that the process itself has value. One of the things our yoga teacher said during the meditative part of the class on one occasion was the simple phrase "We are what we do". I like it. It's concise and powerful with truth. It reminded me of the importance of making good use of your time right now, which includes rest, socializing, and other things that some people might consider a waste of time. The point is to recognize that every moment is a choice, and that you should try to make each one the best choice you can.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen

I've finished my Don't Rest Your Head scenario, and I think that'll be the title. I'll put it away for a couple of weeks, then get it back out to see if it still looks good to me.

I had a couple of surprises along the way writing this one. I thought it'd be a lot like my Sorcerer material, but the surreal feel of DRYH definitely takes it to a different place. The DRYH approach to character generation strongly shaped everything I did, and refocused where I was going with the characters at one point when I thought I might be getting seriously stuck. I liked that. There might be another story or two ahead for me set in the Mad City.

This brings my new TOON idea to the top of the project list, and it's already well started. This one shouldn't take more than two weeks' focused effort to finish, but I've got another Grandmother Spider session upcoming, and I'll have to put some time into that, probably before I can complete the TOON scenario. Still, it'll probably be finished by the end of March.

Then it's on to my two GURPS projects that I plan to run in 2009. I might try alternating working on each one so I don't get bored of either of them along the way, since there's no immediate need for either of them.

In keeping with my recent creativity spurt, I might even take some time away from the two GURPS projects if something else inspires me along the way, since that approach seemed to work for a while. I just have to make sure I actually complete something once in a while.