(no subject)

When John Daido Loori was a monk at the Los Angeles Zen Center, he remarked one day to Maezumi Roshi: "I have resolved the question of life and death."
"Are you sure?" Maezumi asked.
"Yes," replied Loori.
"Are you really sure?"
"Absolutely," Loori answered.
With that, Maezumi threw himself violently upon Loori and began to strangle him. Gasping for breath, Loori struggled to escape, but to no avail. Finally he swung back his fist and struck his teacher, knocking him aside.
Maezumi rose to his feet and brushed himself off. "Resolved the question of life and death, eh?" he laughed, and walked off.
Later, still bearing the marks of his teacher's fingers on his throat, Loori passed a senior monk, Genpo Sensei.
On seeing his bruises, Genpo did a double take. "Told Roshi you'd resolved the question of life and death, did you?" he said, and strode away laughing.

--from Sean Murphy's One Bird, One Stone: 108 American Zen stories, Renaissance Books, 2002. Reprinted in The Sun, October 2002

Tired

So, having come down on Tuesday, yesterday at 3:55 myself and Erin leapt onto a train to London, passed through Whitchapel on the tube and ended up in East Ham (near West Ham, and quite possibly in the vicinity of North Ham and South Ham), where we met my old friend Ravinder (probably my oldest friend, in fact). He's a doctor, currently on paediatric rotation at the Royal London hospital, and the man who showed me round Body Worlds a week or so ago.

He then took us to his house (a 1930s residence, butchered by the lacking DIY skills of recent occupants, which he is trying to return to a more traditional look). There we snagged Karenza, his girlfriend, and we headed off to Ikea, to look at sofas. We then grabbed food (Ikea swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce are to die for) and headed for the cinema - to find that the shopping centre cinema stops showing before 10pm. So we headed for his local cinema, to find that that showed a whole raft of films at 10pm, followed by more at 12:00. As we'd arrived at 10:10, this was less than useful. So we went for cocktails instead, arriving back at his house at midnight(ish).

We collapsed at that point (well, Erin insisted on reading until 12:45, but she never sleeps until 2am) and I slept right through the night. Right through the night, in this case, meaning 5am. When I woke Erin up so that she could grab a shower. (Oh, and I woke at 4am for about 20 minutes, because I was worrying about trains). Ravs kindly gave us a lift to the local tube station, from where we caught two tubes to Liverpool Street Station and Erin departed for Edinburgh, via Stansted Airport. And then I tubed to Victoria, caught a train to Rainham and arrived back at the parents house at about 8:50.

I feel tired. In fact, scratch that, I feel downright wacky. The parents are back from their week away in about 6 hours, and the place needs a definite tidy before then. And tomorrow I have 2 days work to catch up on, so that'll be that day gone. I was going to work today, but I'm having problems focussing on the screen right now.

Coolness

Erin's most recent work is finally seeing print - she's writing a fortnightly piece for the BBC!

The BBC! It's so cool!