loop de loop

this christmas's travel is beating my prior christmas travel hell. during that trip, an old woman used the emergency exit handle to support her as she sat down, inflating the emergency slide onto the luggage handlers. 24 hours later i made it to my destination, travelling through four different cities in a pattern reminiscent of needlepoint on acid.

but, today, was worse. i boarded a plane for charlotte, north carolina, arrived just fine, sat waiting for my next plane to find out it was cancelled. when i inquired about alternate flights they offered me a flight in FIVE days! i laughed out loud and said, quietly, no. they offered to fly me halfway around the country to a destination only 850 miles from where i was trying to get. so, they ultimately flew me back to where i started and said, good luck. pondering my options.

getting ready

getting ready to go to new mexico for holidays tomorrow. crazy busy. finishing film. emptying basement. doing end of year financials. too many things in one day.

crewdson

a friend recently turned me onto to the photographs of gregory crewdson. they're fantastic, highly contrived, look very much like film stills, and many use film actors as their subjects. i like the eerily lifeless quality they impart, despite all the color, fog, fire, water and other elements that make up life. crewdson's gallery in new york has an online presentation of his work here. there is a show at williams college contrasting crewdson's work with the paintings of edward hopper.

wiki

been setting up a wiki today. wikis are cool. the best example is wikipedia, a user written encyclopaedia. the one i set up is for a small film festival that i help organize. we needed a way to help collect comments and keep track of where screeners were for each film. a wiki is a pretty good solution. i'm impressed by the depth of the coding behind the wiki i used, mediawiki. it's the same wiki code that wikipedia uses.

challenge

"i had a problem before i had a problem, that's the problem." —ruth quirk.

results

i'm back from mental surgury, intact and happier. my ten day vipassana retreat was painful, ecstatic, frustrating and revelatory--generally mind-blowing. it was, along with the first retreat, one of the most fascinating things i've experienced. i got a little better at meditating, got a little better grasp of the technique and theory. the picture here is of the teacher, goenka-ji, who delivers the courses via audio and video recordings, assisted by live teachers. i highly recommend this program. dhamma.org

the central teaching is that through equanimity and awareness you can perceive and alter the mind/body interface and ultimately eliminate impurities in the mind that cause suffering in oneself and consequently in others. i find this tremendously inspiring. what can give more hope to someone than the understanding that their misery can be eliminated and that the technique to do so is simple and requires no devotion to objects, people or gods, making it accessible to anyone, with or without religious beliefs?

during this retreat, i discovered a heap of issues, not unlike the unattended laundry pile in my bedroom, that i need to work on. it's humbling to see the amount of crap lurking in my brain, but i also feel grateful that i've been shown it so that i know it needs work. vipassana (and yoga) seem to be the silver lining of the relationship trouble i've experienced the past three years. there is no teacher like pain.