One of the many nice things about Nepal is the ready availability of cheap Thai and Chinese pirate DVD box sets. Where you'll spend $30-50 a season for shows in the States, I got the entire original Star Trek (for example) for $15, and all 10 seasons of Seinfeld for $35.

Stay positive.

Sigh.

I know it's amazingly stupid and completely reckless, but I still think there's something to be said for riding without a helmet. Especially in a place like Kathmandu, where the roads are bumpy snaky things that you can't move all that quickly through anyway; the wind in your face, nothing shutting out the world around you, just you and the ( Read more... )

So the swastika is an extremely important symbol in "Hinduism," and given the state of the Nepali educational system it's a fair bet that he thought World War II was fought between the Hatfields and the McCoys. All the same I'm not entirely sure that the giant swastika I saw emblazoned on some guy's t-shirt was an appropriate choice of decoration.

So it's almost 3 in the afternoon and I haven't eaten since breakfast, which was late (by Nepali standards) at 9. Part of me feels like I should eat, but I'm not really that hungry and I'm on a roll--I've been writing for hours now. At some recent point it hit me that I am absolutely allowed to be as eccentric as I'd like, I can eat whenever I'd ( Read more... )

"Tibetology" and Matthew Kapstein can both go to hell: I study Dharma, motherfuckers.

And if anyone asks I'm still Catholic.

I asked a shopkeeper friend of mine to pray for me because an old girlfriend I've been trying to get back together with started seeing someone else. He asked for some details and I told him that we'd been split up for a while, that it had (mostly) been my idea and, somewhat sheepishly, that I'd seen other women since ( Read more... )

I'll put it this way: you're never going to get anywhere until you come face-to-face with the fact that you don't want to be enlightened, you don't even want to be happy--you want to have the things you have, forever. Unfortunately they don't last, and even if they did you'd get bored with them after a while. Welcome to life.

Pema Chödron says that bodhicitta, "awakened mind," is our soft, wounded heart, the thing that happens when you're disappointed or let down or frustrated or upset or angry. It's not those feelings per se, but the agitation that ensues from them, the sense we try to repress that things are somehow fundamentally not okay ( Read more... )

You think religion is about someone else? "Wouldn't it be a nice idea if we were all kind to each other." You and your cowardice ( Read more... )

If your God is an old man in the sky, he's dead. God is dead as long as you think he's alive, fear he's alive, believe in him, don't believe in him (though in that case it's more of a living death)--you think God is something other than this, here, now, and that's why you're so scared, that's why you're so dissatisfied, you're in love with your ( Read more... )