Friday Miscellany

Things I'm currently worried about:

• Last weekend I had a dream in which I was Kevin Spacey. What the hell does that mean?
  
• I think my bladder's shrinking. Every morning this week it has woken me up 40 min before my alarm goes off. It never used to do that. Darn it.
  
• Sudan. My email keeps telling me I should be concerned, but I haven't read them closely, so I'm not really even clear on the situation. Maybe I should add that to the list below.
  

Things to do this weekend:

• Clean out the back bedroom.
  
• Move grandma's fabric stash from the car to the back bedroom.
  
• Learn something about Sudan.
  
• Pay my student loan.
  
• Finally clean up my template.
  
• Maybe learn to make real bullets so I don't have to use these asterisks.
  

Collected thoughts on being lost:
From Thoreau: "If a person lost would conclude that . . . he is not lost, he is not beside himself, but standing in his own old shoes on the very spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there . . .how much anxiety and danger would vanish."

From my friend Dave:

I like the Thoreau quote, too. I think it covers much of my own feeling about being lost... i think "lost" often means you can't relate where you are to someplace you already know - not just to be able to get where you're going, but to be able to get anywhere you know about. There's a difference between being somewhere you've never been before, and being truly lost. My response to being "lost" is, if at all possible (i.e., not with a panicky spouse who can't stand being lost!) just settle down, relax, and drink in this strange new place that i've never been before and may never be again.

I suppose that's another aspect... that "lost" is a place you come to on your way to somewhere else. Lost is a transition point, a point of no importance except in the panic it inspires. You aren't lost when you're at a destination. And destinations are a place we often/generally plan to return. The place where you are lost is a place you only go once (or will only pass through again once you find the route to your destination). Lost is a place people never mean to be. I mean, even though you may be "there" in the Situationist sense, you aren't "there" in the Zen sense. The Zen master is never lost, only taking a different route. :} Being lost is not a function of where you are so much as where you are not, and if your consciousness is trying to be somewhere else, you're blowing your Zen saving throw or something. The panic sets in when suddenly you are forced to be "there" in a place that wasn't supposed to be a "there". It's cognitive dissonance, to use psych terminology. Hmm, i guess i had two points there. Maybe more.