Renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world, but accepting that they pass away.

-Aitken Roshi

One of my best, brightest students told me yesterday that he was being pressured into taking a part time job at McDonald's this summer. He's sixteen years old.  In the last 3 years, I've gotten him from "Mary Had a Little Lamb" to playing Khachaturian and Kabalevsky, and I just couldn't fathom the idea of him serving me a burger ( Read more... )

I decided to keep my name.  I looked into it, and realized that it would be a huge pain in the ass to change, passports, bank accounts, home loans...and  I when I communicated that to FC, he was like, fuck it, keep your name.

It seems that we both thought that there was some magic button you could push that would make it all easy, but it seems that ( Read more... )

It's been almost two years since I've had television in my home. We own a TV set. We use it to watch DVD's and play the occasional video game, but there is no cable service and no antenna either. This keeps the FC and I blissfully unaware of world events ( Read more... )

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

So over the weekend, I rented a car to attend a conference at Penn State (more on that later, hopefully). As I was driving home through the sunny Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, the birds chirping and the slopes covered in goldenrod, I got a call from my fiance ( Read more... )

Albert Hoffman died today at 102 years old.

What? He was still alive?

The first time I tried acid, I just so happened to be taking a course titled "The Sociology of Deviance."  I was 19 years old and living in a townhouse with one of my music school buddies and a pet beagle.  Back in those days, we were having crazy parties every weekend and trying ( Read more... )

I was having a fabulous day.  Spent some time in the yard cleaning leaves out of the pond and edging the stones around it.  Went to the gym.  Did a little bit of reading when I came back, reading the recently published memoirs of a parapsychologist I met last summer.  FC came home and we decided on grilling out while he did more edging.  After ( Read more... )

Centuries ago, I stood cold and rigid before Pygmalion, until Venus brought me to life with a single breath ( Read more... )

My bank account was way too depressing to look at this morning. I always play it close to the edge financially, and Martin Luthor King day (a bank holiday) might just have pushed me over ( Read more... )