Today I went to my first-ever anime convention, not without trepidation, seeing as, although I will occasionally watch an episode or two, I'm not an anime fan by an stretch of the imagination. Also, my only knowledge of what to expect came from stories a friend regaled our high school English class with about how to pick up chicks in the hotel hot ( Read more... )

My final week living in Austin this summer is drawing to a close. It's been an adventure...all in all I'm glad beyond glad that I took the plunge. My finances are in shambles but that's not important--now that surgery's not in the cards there isn't much I need to be saving for except grad school, and without surgery that's twice as much money I can ( Read more... )

Prayer beads! Yay ( Read more... )

I meant to come out to my dad today about my religion. I didn't. We had lunch, we talked and joked, and while I was thinking of it throughout I never mentioned it even though I've been meaning to for a while ( Read more... )

I sit several times a week at the Austin Zen Center. I attend church once a week at a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I love the entire Zen Buddhist tradition for its liturgy, its mysticism, and its loving sangha. I love UU for its pluralism, its humanism, and its sincerity. Both are part of my life, and I am grateful that each is such that I ( Read more... )

Gender is like air, or ideology--it's all around us, we use it every day, but we only see it when it changes ( Read more... )

Well, here in the US these days we don't get too many monks and/or nuns and/or monastic types of unspecified gender--not like medieval Europe where it seemed like every town had a nunnery or modern-day Myanmar/Burma (where they're still numerous and culturally significant enough to be a political as well as a spiritual force). But here and now we ( Read more... )