Getting ready to return to the San Francisco Zen Center for the 9-week Fall Practice period. I am excited. There was an orientation meeting last night, where I got a look at about 30 of the 50 participants. It's a larger group than I did the summer intensive with, so we'll see how the dynamics are. Maybe Aaron will finally start showing up for his shift on dishes....
Deep into my newest venture (quit selling books and CDs on Amazon) which is pimping out my apartment. It looks like I have it sublet nearly the entire 9 weeks. So much for Thanksgiving at home; I'm figuring McCormick and Kuleto's will take care of me and my friends, turkey-wise.
Work? I call it trabajo. It's going fine. There's some pleasure in doing something well, even something Byzantine and not all that significant. On the other hand, how else will all those UC Berkeley Extension students find their classes and continue developing their skills? I have a list of courses I think I might try out, on my quest to determine what I really want to do with my life.
Classes Judy May Take:
- Presentation Skills for Training Professionals (in case I want to start doing media training again. HIRE ME - only $500 a half day.)
- a Certificate in Finance (I've met a lot of those morons -- and they make a lot of money)
- Leadership Management (I don't know what I am thinking here; neither leadership nor management appeal to me, but I wrote it down, so I guess I'll look at it)
- Applied Market Research (finally learn to read and understand a company annual report. Imagine!)
- Brand Management (There may be more to this than the bull-puckey I've seen. I lived through two branding projects at Sun. Results of the first: "talk like Tom Hanks in Apollo 13". Results of the second (and boy was that expensive!): "look at our pretty photos. They are large, colorful, and provacative. Look, Mennonites roller-blading! Monks on a roller-coaster! Don't ask me what this has to do with IS managers, computer servers and storages, or developers that we hope will keep our UNIX platform alive and provide us with a competitive differentiator in a market of dinosaurs." I shared my chagrin at a recent meeting with volunteer group, and the brand guy volunteered that yes indeed Sun is floating RFPs for yet another round of the Who Are We exercise...Good luck, Sun!
- Biocemistry
In addition, I've figured out the following key lifestyle choices:
- Shopping
- Sitting still on a cushion, facing the wall
- Siphoning money out of my possessions
Strangely, and I hate to mention this for fear it will be corrected: Sun paid me again. I have no idea what they're doing, but it's always a pleasant surprise when they've dumped more money into my checking account. I figure, I suffered from the organizational incompetence when I worked there; perhaps I can benefit from it, now that I don't.
OK, off to wash shirts and pack things into a bag that's far too small. Peace out.
JAD
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Cafe Gratitude and ritual flensing
Ever wonder what a ton of petroleum jelly would look like if you put it in a big mold, let it harden to a semi-solid state, and then took away the mold, letting it ooze out over the deck of a Japanese whaling ship? Well, now you can. The only hitch is, you have to get to the SFMoma museum before tomorrow, when the Matthew Barney exhibit ends.
Barney's stuff is pretty wild. He's into documenting the process of creating art, so his previous works include videos of him clinging to a wall, drawing, while attached to the floor by a rubber restraint. Hence the title of his latest works, "Drawing Restraint." It takes a good bit of athleticism which, fortunately, he has. Evidently he was inspired by hypertrophy, which my brochure describes as "the process by which muscle tissue grows larger after having been broken down through strenuous exercise." Barney's been at this for awhile, so this is #9 in the Drawing Restraint series. He hangs the resulting pictures in frames of self-lubricating white plastic. They are pretty.
This installation hosts the snowy deck ooze, along with a 25-foot-long baton of shrimp shells, rebar, and petroleum distillates and two recreations of a flensing deck (where sailors hack blubber off a whale with a "flensing" blade -- a curved knife on a 7-foot stick), complete with barnacles. All are props from his feature-length movie in which he and his wife, the singer Bjork, undergo a ritual flensing on their wedding night. This takes place on a giant Japanese tanker (yes, whaling vessel) after a tea ceremony which I swear was in real time (i.e. interminable). After they've hacked each other to bits in a sensuous but detached display of mutual destruction, they swim away as whales. Show over.
Last night I dined at Cafe Gratitude before seeing Berthold Brecht's anti-war play, Mother Courage. The food's pretty good there -- all fresh, vegetarian, organic. But it's the menu that keeps me going back. They name their dishes with self-affirming titles like, "I am loved," "I am dazzling," and "I am kind." It's sortof hard to choose. The kicker comes when your waittress returns with, say, a mixed green salad and pronounces, "You are Fulfilled."
Thank you, very much.
The play was pretty good, too.
You wouldn't believe how much work unemployment is. Today I have to sign up for Cobra, open a Personal 401(k) using the EIN number I got from the IRS on Thursday, and read a 68-page blueprint for my volunteer branding project. That, and I started work at UC Berkeley this week, editing their Spring catalog. It'll take me through the next two months, and then I'm hoping to pick up seasonal work at a retail store where I will basically just hand over my paycheck and take home beautiful things -- at a significant discount, I hope.
My sister had her baby this week, a healthy 8-pound, 8-ounce girl whose name will soon be revealed. Our mother says she's beautiful, but that "maybe that's her grandma talking." I'm sure she's right.
Last tidbit: Been taking lots of tests lately, and assessing my career options using the career transition services Sun pays for. According to the personality tests, I'm a hardcore introvert. Who knew?
Barney's stuff is pretty wild. He's into documenting the process of creating art, so his previous works include videos of him clinging to a wall, drawing, while attached to the floor by a rubber restraint. Hence the title of his latest works, "Drawing Restraint." It takes a good bit of athleticism which, fortunately, he has. Evidently he was inspired by hypertrophy, which my brochure describes as "the process by which muscle tissue grows larger after having been broken down through strenuous exercise." Barney's been at this for awhile, so this is #9 in the Drawing Restraint series. He hangs the resulting pictures in frames of self-lubricating white plastic. They are pretty.
This installation hosts the snowy deck ooze, along with a 25-foot-long baton of shrimp shells, rebar, and petroleum distillates and two recreations of a flensing deck (where sailors hack blubber off a whale with a "flensing" blade -- a curved knife on a 7-foot stick), complete with barnacles. All are props from his feature-length movie in which he and his wife, the singer Bjork, undergo a ritual flensing on their wedding night. This takes place on a giant Japanese tanker (yes, whaling vessel) after a tea ceremony which I swear was in real time (i.e. interminable). After they've hacked each other to bits in a sensuous but detached display of mutual destruction, they swim away as whales. Show over.
Last night I dined at Cafe Gratitude before seeing Berthold Brecht's anti-war play, Mother Courage. The food's pretty good there -- all fresh, vegetarian, organic. But it's the menu that keeps me going back. They name their dishes with self-affirming titles like, "I am loved," "I am dazzling," and "I am kind." It's sortof hard to choose. The kicker comes when your waittress returns with, say, a mixed green salad and pronounces, "You are Fulfilled."
Thank you, very much.
The play was pretty good, too.
You wouldn't believe how much work unemployment is. Today I have to sign up for Cobra, open a Personal 401(k) using the EIN number I got from the IRS on Thursday, and read a 68-page blueprint for my volunteer branding project. That, and I started work at UC Berkeley this week, editing their Spring catalog. It'll take me through the next two months, and then I'm hoping to pick up seasonal work at a retail store where I will basically just hand over my paycheck and take home beautiful things -- at a significant discount, I hope.
My sister had her baby this week, a healthy 8-pound, 8-ounce girl whose name will soon be revealed. Our mother says she's beautiful, but that "maybe that's her grandma talking." I'm sure she's right.
Last tidbit: Been taking lots of tests lately, and assessing my career options using the career transition services Sun pays for. According to the personality tests, I'm a hardcore introvert. Who knew?
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