The last few days have been all over the place: housesitting in the 'burbs; golf in the mountains; advising work; drama teaching; an hour-long train ride to Geelong to buy a book that was no longer there; an hour-long train ride back; a brief appearance at a birthday party, and a couple of other things that I suspect I've already forgotten about. The train ride was absurdly pleasant: there was nothing else to do but sit and read, so I sat and read.

I was reading Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, and I soaked up its useful advice on a variety of important topics. These included whether "online" should have a hyphen, what the word "hacker" really means, and - the really big one - what "POTS" stands for.

...

Something that I've recently realised is that by publishing my innermost thoughts, other people can read them. I guess that's self-evident, but I'm only now starting to work out what it means in practice. Recently I met an intriguing woman, and invited her out for dinner. I told her about SoFo, and she went off and read through a lot of what I've written here. When we met up for dinner, she had questions for me. Fairly specific questions. Questions that depended on knowing certain things about me. Very quickly it became obvious that we had ourselves an unfair distribution of knowledge.

An unfair distribution of knowledge?

Yep. It's my new metaphor to describe the modern world.

I'm really, really proud of it.

And now, apropos of nothing in particular ...

Buddhism vs. relationships

Buddhism teaches non-attachment. When you're overcome with desire, Buddhism tells you to simply observe your reactions, and to label what you're feeling. So when you're meditating, you're supposed to think "ah. So this is desire." And by observing and labelling, you gain some detachment. Instead of being overcome with desire, you simply observe how desire feels, and thus let the feeling pass.

In other words, if you're interested in relationships, Buddhism is useless.

As I sit here meditating, I observe what I'm feeling, and label it. "Ah. So this is a lack of interest in Buddhism."