Katie's photos and journal

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04/15/09--15:53: annica (chan 1691538)

I got a spiffy new computer in January. It's light, it's pretty, it's fast. I could kick butt in any laptop cafe gathering, if I were inclined to such habits. Unfortunately, all that flash has come with a downside. Tomorrow, for the first time in the Apple product owning portion of my life, I'll be taking something in for warranty service. I have an appointment at a facility called the Genius Bar. Hmmmm. (But before this I have a doctor's appointment. You know you're in trouble when a visit with an oncologist isn't the scariest part of your morning.)


09/28/09--14:56: Please tell me this is going to stop (chan 1691538)

I'm wondering if there is something to this Mercury retrograde thing. Last week was scary and this past weekend continued the trend. Machines doing weird things, people acting whiggy and then Saturday.  What kind of person breaks their toilet tank then goes back to bed while it floods their apartment? I know. Don't ask.  We need cool. We need rain. We need some time off.


10/31/10--12:03: Digital dukkha (chan 1691538)

This past week was a bit hectic. I looked forward to making it to the weekend. And as this sort of week goes along, one's mood brightens as one gets closer to Friday.  That mood brightening phase was severely curtailed on Thursday afternoon when our home internet network went down.
In our household we have four people and we each have at least two, internet connected devices that we use on a regular basis. We don't necessarily spend a lot of time online, but we have became dependent on that form of communication in our work and social lives. And it is something we take for granted, like turning on the tap and having water come out.
On Thursday afternoon, the digital water stopped coming out. There were general cries of dismay and demands that the women ( the computer literate members of the household) do something about it! Unfortunately, the women had other things on their plates so the best we could do was get one computer connected. The expectation was that come Saturday, serious effort would be applied to the problem. To give an idea of how much we looked forward to this, me and the other female housemate got into a big argument over who would get to duck out of this job and do the more pleasant one of scrubbing toilets.

We had an outside family member with more technical expertise look at the problem on Friday afternoon. Even though he couldn't figure it out either, his best guess was that it wasn't the fault of our elderly router.  So early Saturday morning we went to our nearest Apple store and bought a new router. He was right, it didn't fix the situation but the purchase of a new router earned us a free call to Apple tech support. An hour and a half on the phone with Apple tech and every possible configuration later, the router still wasn't working properly. It was suggested that we contact our ISP.
It was now my turn to get on the phone. First I gathered some information from the web site via 3G device.  I called the dreaded AT&T. This conversation was much shorter though some of the time gap was made up by spending twenty minutes on hold. After asking a few questions, the lady said there was nothing they could do for me. They didn't offer advice on setting up third party routers. I suggested she look at the ATT website which contained detailed instructions on how to configure Linksys, Netgear and other third party routers. The response to this information was We don't support Apple products.(??! hello, iPhone??!!) And my response was Gee, maybe I'd better start looking for an ISP that does since we have mostly Apple stuff.
That pretty much ended the conversation. I hung up. And as if by magic, literally seconds later, our whole system came back up, from the biggest iMac to the smallest Touch. I don't mean to sound ungrateful but it was positively weird.
Another thing that was a cause for pause was the household reaction. The undercurrent of anger and frustration was immediately replaced with open smiles and good cheer. Even the cats looked more relaxed. This was followed by a few nervous jokes about addictive behavior, and then the house returned to the usual Saturday afternoon peace.



01/11/11--19:08: Who or what do you trust? (chan 1691538)

Christopher Hitchens is a well known, rather militant atheist who is dying of cancer. Because of his public stance on religion, I’ve heard that some of the people who disagree with him seem to be hoping for some sort of death bed conversion. They expect that after decades of thinking otherwise, Mr Hitchens, when facing the terrors of death, will be motivated to call out to a god he has been uninterested in contacting previously. I guess this is the no-atheist-in-foxholes model? The problem with this theory is the guy in the foxhole probably hadn’t given his spiritual beliefs much serious thought until the situation became dire. Mr. Hitchens, on the other hand, has given the matter a great deal of thought. He seems to have it well worked out.
I am not an atheist. I follow a Buddhist practice. Some people, even some Buddhists, would like to classify us as agnostics but that doesn’t work. While we do believe in experience over, say, dogma, we also believe the essential nature of things is knowable. it Is the enlightenment we seek.
Unfortunately, on the path to enlightenment, there a lot of details on which one can get hung up. My particular hang up is anatta, defined as the lack of a true, permanent self inherent in, constituted by, or owning factors of body and mind. I have no problem with the aggregates. They are just parts of the process. But when they all come together, what is this thing that walks and talks and eats and shits and gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and shows up at work, Monday through Friday and sometimes weekends and hugs my(?) grandson and picks it’s nose? And why all these memories? On the death of this body, are they to be lost, as one poetic person suggested, like tears in rain?
I know this feeling of ownership, this ego, is the cause of a lot of trouble, a lot of unhappiness. But how does one let go, make that leap into what seems like thin air, when you can’t see where or if you are going to make a safe landing?


03/01/11--11:11: small thought for the day (chan 1691538)

I’ve been feeling a bit oppressed lately. The whole family has been sick with a wretched flu. It’s all you can do to hack your way through the day then collapse into bed at night, hoping for some sleep so you can get up and do it again tomorrow. It’s easy to fall into feeling sorry for yourself. The other day I saw this little clover growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. It was speckled with tiny yellow flowers. It has found a way to do it’s thing from under hundreds of pounds of concrete. I, on the other hand, get to watch helplessly as my body is hijacked by a virus whose volume is probably too minuscule for measurement.


03/21/11--11:45: This is what comes of too many rainy days and too much knitting (chan 1691538)

Lately I have been thinking about fortune, good and bad. We humans seem to be very attached to keeping score. If something bad happens to a person, we want to come up with a reason why. If they are someone we consider to be not a particularly nice person, some of us think they are paying for their sins. If they are a virtuous person, we are conflicted because we think God/fate is being unfair. Some Asian spiritual traditions have the concept of karma. Maybe you are a good person now, but sometime in the past you weren’t and that behavior created the negative energy that is coming home to roost. Good things may happen to bad people because they have some past good karma to burn.
I look at all the score keeping and while it provides some satisfaction, it leaves behind an unsavory residue of self-righteousness. And that can cause people to get carried away, like the folks who picket soldier’s funerals, attributing the deaths to the picketer’s perceptions of moral decline in the country. You died because God hates homosexuals and you are being punished for being insufficiently homophobic? We think the score keeping is about the other person. We seldom think about what is says about us.
Besides the problems involved in being self-righteous, I would argue that it isn’t all that satisfying either.
I like to think that whatever happens, it’s just the way the universal energy is flowing at that particular time. The flow has repetitive tendencies. Most people die when they are old. Risky behavior is usually damaging. Genuine kindness and compassion mostly lead to positive outcomes. While these tendencies are somewhat comforting, they also set us up for disappointment when we experience exceptions.
But still under all this, what is all the score keeping? Is this the search for meaning? Do we need this? If we could accept the flow of energy, could we live happily, from one moment to the next, without meaning, without further explanation?


08/02/11--16:20: This is all rather vexing. (chan 1691538)

A few days ago we were wondering if LJ was coming back. Now I get a note saying they are adding more time to my paid account. In addition to what they gave us last time. At this rate, I may never have to pay again. And I’m receiving advise from a friend to set up a shadow account in case the next shut down is permanent.  It’s all a bit disconcerting, no? Live Journal, like a lot of other things, seems to be lurching from one crisis to another. I wouldn’t mind losing my words, but there are people who write much better than me who might very much. I wouldn’t lose my pictures because I still have them on my own hard drives.  BUT, they aren’t organized on those hard drives the way they have evolved here. Yes I would miss that. Once again the Universe is telling us to not become attached to impermanent things, especially electrons in cyberspace.


09/21/11--20:47: This is what comes of too much work and not enough rest. (chan 1691538)

 For a few years now I’ve been reading various pundits in the blogosphere and a lot of them seem to think that the United States has become a crazy country. We are becoming an increasingly fat people while our popular idols are becoming increasingly skinny. We love our cars more than we love our children. We love our dogs more than our children. We love our guns more than our children. We elected one president who was suffering from dementia and another who claimed that he spoke to God. Our favorite meal is a bag of cheese doodles washed down with a liter of Pepsi. Our model city is Las Vegas. Our most popular venue is Walmart and omigod! the people you see in that place!
 The only argument I have with the above assertion is the time frame. The craziness isn’t a recent event. It’s been like this all my life, and probably longer. But I can only vouch for what I’ve personally witnessed.
 When I was a small child there was an insanity going around the country called the Red Scare. An alcoholic US senator with a closeted gay lawyer as sidekick, held a nationally televised inquisition. Many lives and careers were ruined. People who should have known better were checking under their beds for communists.
 And let’s not forget the cars, steel monsters with huge tail fins and even bigger engines, which consumed lots of gasoline and produced corresponding amounts of air pollution. Also, the metal dashboards, lack of seatbelts, and lax enforcement of the drunk driving laws made for some serious carnage on the nation’s highways.
 Flying saucers. All sorts of people were spotting unidentified flying objects. The government investigated. Hollywood weighed in with movies, good and bad. My favorites were The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet. The latter gave me nightmares. People who should have known better were checking under their beds for little green men.
 These things occurred during the decade of the 1950’s, a period described as wholesome and conservative. And peaceful. Except for the war in Korea, those kids who wanted to go to Little Rock High School, Rosa Parks, the coup d'état in Iran, Senator McCarthy, and lots more stuff, you get the picture.
 The USA didn’t become nuts recently. And it wasn’t caused by computers, cell phones, video games, psychedelic drugs, food additives, television, bad parents, sugar, rock and roll music, slasher movies, too much sex, too little sex, too much religion, too little religion, fluoride in the water, working moms, plug in your favorite excuse here.
No. We’re nuts because that’s just the way we are.