It's a warm day in Indiana, warm for winter, no snow on the ground and the sun is shining directly into my eyes as I write this. School resumes on the 13th and until then I'll be here working on various writing, reading, and music projects, sleeping in and trying to remember how to cook, and after the New Year going up to the meditation center to do some sitting and some service work. So, I've posted more this year than any year since 2007. Being in school surrounds me with interesting people and ideas, and its rigor keeps me firmly entrenched in habitual content production, whether I like it or not. This is one reason I've written so much. The other is that is that the writing took on an urgency that I've rarely felt before, convinced that I could change the material future directly with words. Over the Fall I continued to indulge this impulse, and my system, rewired over the Spring and Summer, is still grasping for reasons and causes to explain the disconnect between my ideas of what love can accomplish and reality as it played out.

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My gizmo is probably just tired. To put it another way, while I like to think that all my experience mediating, adademicing, and articulating the minutiae of my feelings has given me a modicum of control over the future, I think what it's really done is helped me write more words, with the end goal of typing a single word that makes everybody's computer explode into a terrific light of happiness. This sent to me recently by a friend, translated from the Kurundogai, a book of Tamil poetry compiled around 2AD:

It was midday in summer. There was some butter on a rock; it was melting in the heat of the sun. There's a person who's supposed to be watching the butter--to make sure it doesn't melt. He's just watching it melt. He can't do anything. He has no legs, no hands, he can't speak, so what on earth can he do? He's just watching the butter melt. Like this, love has spread over my body like a disease.

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I turned 35 in November, which is significant not because of the number, but because I had never really considered my life beyond the age of 34. I guess I assumed that certain things would happen by this time and that I would naturally be a different person...no need to plan as my future self would take care of that. I assumed that I would have found some kind of stability in my work and romantic life. Neither has happened. On the one hand this could be seen as a failure, where on the other it means that I'm in the bonus.

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 “He had elbow pasta, and I had shell pasta, and I told him how my shell pasta was better than his elbow pasta, and he was pretty upset about that. He loves elbow pasta. But I disagreed. I think shell pasta is better. I don’t care. I will stand by that. Shell pasta.”

-Metta World Peace (formerly known as Ron Artest) in response to a reporter's question about an altercation during the game.

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I finally got a smart phone. I've made an Instagram account and signed up for Twitter. So far I've posted three pictures to Instagram and nothing yet to Twitter. Still not sure about that one. But even better, I finally have a camera that can take real pictures and videos with, like this one:

Thus I move into another diaristic area of media consumption. It seems to be where people are, so I'd like to be there too. Or at the very least, I'd like to be able to capitalize on the three times a week or so that I have the impulse to take a picture, and share it with my three (so far) followers.

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After dinner on Christmas, all of us still sitting at the table, my aunt pulled out a pack of "wish papers." Thin little tissue papers that you first crinkle up, and then roll into a structure that will stand vertically on a flat surface. In this case, our plates. You then light the paper on fire from the top and as it burns down you make a wish. When the flame reaches the bottom the heat propels what is now ash into the air, and if you can catch the ash as its falling back to earth you get your wish. We did this, first my brother and then my aunt. We made our way around the table (my mom didn't get her first wish but on the second try she got it), including my brother's 18 month old son. He wanted "more" (which he indicated with a hand signal) and so my brother and I both lit one more and made one more wish. The ash rose and fell, and landed in our hands.