It's a new semester. All week it's been, "No running in the halls!"
New books to figure out. New names to learn. One of my classes, there's a girl named Cherry and a girl named Strawberry. Blueberry dropped out. (I'm not even lying.)
That's not to say there haven't been a few good things to read this week as well. The article telling us about how one out of every 100 Americans is behind bars, found through Objectify This. The presidential hopefuls on msnbc.com, of course.
And the Best Buddhist Writing 2007. Two excerpts from the essay entitled There's No "I" in Happy by Matthieu Ricard:
"...A person whom we consider today to be an enemy is most certainly somebody else's object of affection, and we may one day forge bonds of friendship with that selfsame enemy. We react as if characteristics were inseparable from the object we assign them to. Thus we distance ourselves from reality and are dragged into the machinery of attraction and repulsion that is kept relentlessly in motion by our mental projections. Our concepts freeze things into artificial entities and we lose our inner freedom, just as water loses its fluidity when it turns to ice."
...
"You are napping peacefully in a boat in the middle of a lake. Another craft bumps into yours and wakes you with a start. Thinking that a clumsy or prankish boater has crashed into you, you leap up furious, ready to curse him out, only to find that the boad in question is empty. You laugh at your own mistake and return peacefully to your nap. The only difference between the two reactions is that in the first case, you'd thought yourself the target of someone's malice, while in the second you realized that your 'I' was not a target."
Take that, negativity! You're only a mirage created by my mind's egotistical habits.
On Tuesday as I walked to work, I found myself trying to convince myself of the following:
I am everything. I am the world. I am the rocks beneath my feet. I am the sidewalk. I am the snowflake as it tries to follow the car. I am the wind current. I am the air passing through that woman's lungs. I am that woman. I am the force of gravity, I am the electromagnetic force combating gravity. I am not the center of the world...these things are me. I am a small part. I am insignificant--I am everything. I create the world around me. The man walking in front of me creates the world around him. He is me. I am him.
...Actually, at that point it got kind of personal, but it was interesting while it lasted.
3 comments:
You work at a stripper school?
Haha.. No, these are names the foreign teachers probably suggested to these girls. In fact, Strawberry's name was Kerry but when she heard that Cherry was in the class, she asked to change her name. She thought I was joking when I called Blueberry's name later.
Some of the kids use their Korean names (I've had a Sunwoo, a Seawoo, a Jinho, a Dohyung..) but most of them use English names. There are a lot of kids named James or Amy.
Some of them change their names constantly. I have one girl who changed her name last semester from Sierra to Sera-Sera to Kim-Sera to Miss Cleaner. Now she's Sera Toe.
Miss Cleaner? What?
I like to change my name, too, though I haven't in awhile (been going by my real name for a bit).
Everything's in the blanket, yo.
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