Monday, October 25, 2021

What I've learned since moving to D.C. (some of which should be obvious): 0201

10001.  Apparently, you shouldn’t have a big steak dinner (specifically at Voltaggio Brothers Steak House in MGM National Harbor) before playing a concert;
10002.  Apparently, Tom DeLonge likes (red) wine;
10003.  “Blink-182” wouldn’t exist if Tom DeLonge hadn’t been expelled from (Poway) High School;
10004.  I can say I heard “Angels & Airwaves” play “Losing My Mind” (live) for the second time ever;
10005.  Ilan Rubin, the drummer for “Angels & Airwaves” is also the drummer for “Nine Inch Nails;”
10006.  If you have a craving for kettle corn, buy yourself a bag of O Organics “Sweet & Salty Organic Kettle Corn” from Safeway;
10007.  Set aside some time to talk and to think about the illness or other crisis and how it should be managed every day.  Do not talk or think about it otherwise.  If you do not limit its effect, you will become exhausted and everything will spiral into the ground;
10008.  When worries associated with the crisis arise at other times, remind yourself that you will think them through during the scheduled period;
10009.  The parts of your brain that generate anxiety are more interested in the fact that there is a plan than in the details of the plan;
10010.  Don’t schedule your time to think in the evening or at night.  You won’t be able to sleep.  If you can’t sleep then everything will go rapidly downhill;
10011.  Aim high like Pinocchio’s Geppetto.  Wish upon a star and then act properly in accordance with that aim.  Once you are aligned with the heavens, you can concentrate on the day.  Be careful.  Put the things you can control in order.  Repair what is in disorder and make what is already good better.  It is possible that you can manage if you are careful;
10012.  People can survive through much pain and loss.  But to persevere they must see the good in being.   If they lose that they are truly lost;
10013.  Every day, the prayers of desperate people go unanswered.  But maybe this is because the questions they contain are not reasonable to ask god to break the rules of physics every time we fall by the wayside or make a serious error.  Perhaps in such times you can’t put the cart before the horse and simply wish for your problem to be solved in some magical manner.  Perhaps you could ask, instead, what you might have to do right now to increase your resolve, buttress your character and find the strength to go on.  Perhaps you could instead ask to see the truth;
10014.  What had we each done to contribute to the situation we were arguing about?  How was I wrong?  The problem with asking yourself such a question is that you must truly want the answer.  And the problem with doing that is that you won’t like the answer.  When you are arguing with someone, you want to be right and you want the other person to be wrong.  Then it’s her/him that has to sacrifice something and change not you and that’s much preferable.  If it’s you that’s wrong and you that must change then you have to reconsider yourself – your memories of the past, your manner of being in the present and your plans for the future.  Then you must resolve to improve and figure out how to do that.  Then you actually have to do it.  That’s exhausting.  It takes repeated practice to instantiate the new perceptions and make the new actions habitual.  It’s much easier just not to realize, admit and engage.  It’s much easier to turn your attention away from the truth and remain willfully blind;
10015.  You must decide whether you want to be right or you want to have peace;
10016.  You must decide whether to insist upon the absolute correctness of your view or to listen and negotiate;
10017.  You don’t get peace by being right.  You just get to be right while your partner gets to be wrong – defeated and wrong;
10018.  More than 50% of the surface of the brain is devoted to processing visual information.  Closing our eyes frees up the energy associated with that 50% and allowing our brains much needed recovery.  We can tap into the unconscious processes that help us connect with our innovative ideas and solve problems more efficiently simply by decreasing visual input;
10019.  The adult brain, a mere 2% of body weight, is responsible for around 20% of oxygen consumption;
10020.  An Atkins “caramel chocolate nut roll bar” tastes like a “Baby Ruth”( candy bar);
10021.  To seek peace, you have to decide that you want the answer more than you want to be right.  That’s the way out of the prison of your stubborn preconceptions;
10022.  Perhaps true prayer is the question, “What have I done wrong and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?”
10023.  There is no enlightened one.  There is only the one who is seeking further enlightenment;
10024.  Proper being is process not a state; a journey not a destination.  It’s the continual transformation of what you know through encounter with what you don’t know rather than the desperate clinging to the certainty that is eternally insufficient in any case;
10025.  Always place your becoming above your current being;
10026.  Remember those who have nothing and strive to be grateful;
10027.  You may be blocked in your progress not because you lack opportunity, but because you have been too arrogant to make full use of what already lies in front of you;
10028.  He who has many material things may be described as rich, but he who knows he has enough and is at one with the Tao might have enough of material things and have self-being as well;
10029.  To give is to do what you can to make things better;
10030.  If we put ourselves in order perhaps we will do the same for the world;
10031.  Strength in the face of adversity is very different from the wish for a life free of trouble;
10032.  When everything has become chaotic and uncertain, all that remains to guide you might be the character you constructed previously by aiming up and concentrating on the moment at hand.  If you have failed in that you will fail in the moment of crisis and then god help you;
10033.  The best way to fix the world is to fix yourself;
10034.  Failure to make the proper sacrifices, failure to reveal yourself, failure to live and tell the truth – all that weakens you;
10035.  The terrible suffering of unfortunate souls becomes attributable, by their own judgment, to mistakes they made knowingly in the past: act of betrayal, deception, cruelty, carelessness, cowardice and, most commonly of all, willful blindness;
10036.  To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is hell.  And once in hell it is very easy to curse being itself;
10037.  Lay’s “Magic Masala” chips are tasty;
10038.  There are a lot of burger places in Toronto;
10039.  Chip bags in Canada seem to use less packaging;
10040.  There are black squirrels in Toronto;
10041.  Billy Bishop (Toronto City) Airport is right next/within walking distance to CN Tower;
10042.  Dr. Clive Hamilton, a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, set out to study the “suffering rich” and found that 4 of every 10 people earning $80,000.00 at the time felt “deprived;”
10043.  Another recent survey in the United States found that 45% of those with a net worth (excluding their home) over $1 million were worried about running out of money before they died.  Over one third of those with more than $5 million had the same concern;
10044.  He is richest who is content with least for contentment is the wealth of nature;
10045.  When communities grow beyond the point where every individual has at least a passing acquaintance with everyone else, our behavior changes, our choices shift and our sense of the possible and of the acceptable grows ever more abstract;
10046.  Community ownership doesn’t work in large-scale societies where people operate in anonymity;
10047.  The size of human societies and cultures matters because larger societies will naturally have more concentrated social power.  Larger societies will be less democratic than smaller societies and they will have an unequal distribution of risks and rewards;
10048.  Human nature functions one way in the context of intimate, interdependent societies, but, set loose in anonymity, we become a different creature.  Neither beast is more nor less human;
10049.  Apparently, Norfolk(, Virginia,) had a techno scene . . . until all of the illegal Europeans were deported;
10050.  Apparently, Dan Deacon (the deejay) hangs out at “The Auld Shebeen( Irish Pub & Restaurant)” in (Old Town) Fairfax on Wednesday nights for “Transit Party;”

No comments:

Post a Comment