Zen for Breakfast

Have greeted the morning sunshine with alarming cheer, especially considering the state of my influenza/chest cold/haggard body. am apparently still paying my dues for being so incredibly drunk in church on Easter morning. What can I tell you... at least I wasn't the one who threw up the sacrament and traumatized some innocently pious elderly woman in the downstairs ladies' room. Now that's some good sin work. (Nicely done, Miss Shrock. I am, as ever, your biggest admirer).

Thanks to a most direly needed script for Tussinex (a rather potent psychotropic cough substance whose origin I am convinced has some roots in the dark arts) and a whopping 36 hour nap between Tuesday and Thursday, am actually feeling most refreshed. Although my voice is still locked in "transgendered male" pitch and the hacking cough is reminiscent of the whooping jaybird, I truly can't complain. The worst is over. AND I finally finished reading Liz Gilbert. Am now eagerly devouring the entire AK Press* collection.

*Note: AK Press is a SF, CA based publishing co with strident anarchist ideals whose anthology includes works as varied as "Dispatches From Hell: A Vegan's Guide to Love, Sex, Relationships, and Other Suicidal Tendencies" to Marx's Communist Manifesto to a library's worth of Noam Chomsky to my personal favorite title, "Orgasms of History: 3000 Years of Spontaneous Insurrection." Love that. Reminds me of that scene in Amelie when our favorite little gamine heroine announces sweetly that 15 people are currently having orgasms at that precise moment in time. Brilliant.

Amazing how I have so rapidly transformed myself from the compassionate, provocative thinker whose steps were feeling more sure-footed than ever on this little tightrope walk of life (me, last night, finishing Gilbert's Indonesian stories) to this daytime yuppie slut who keeps giggling like a schoolgirl at the mention of orgasms and sex in general. My internal clock is a bit troubled by the recent skewered sleep pattern, I suppose. Yet how I longed to hold on to that feeling of contentment, feeling of (dare I speak it?) wisdom that had somehow crept into bed beside me in the night hours... It's moments like these when it suddenly becomes all too clear just exactly what the Yogic masters mean when they declare that desire is the root of all problems. Simply the fact that I wanted something (even just a feeling) to stick around guaranteed that it was about to shag-ass out the metaphorical door. Alas, Louise Gluck had this one right: "Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances." Well, perhaps she said that, I honestly don't remember to whom to attribute the quote but oh I do love the idea...

It's always so fascinating to discover the historical/lingual (lingual? is that correct?) roots of words. It's as if you discover an entirely new language or decipher a hidden code that has been staring you face-to-face the entire time... For example, paradise originates from ancient Persian and literally means "walled garden." (thank you liz gilbert, your painstaking research is now mine to fully appreciate and exploit at lackluster dinner parties - hurrah!)

Spoke with my parents this morning. Realized that I had best leave my mother a message so she wouldn't panic at the shocking site of my name on her caller ID at seven in the morning. And then proceeded to wake my slumbering brother at Purdue. Conversation went a little som'n like this:

Peter: [groan/grunt sounds] h... hello?
Me: Oh hey! What's... wait... hey, man, did I just wake you up??
Peter: ummm... [more groaning... and probably scratching, let's be honest] yeah. you. did.
Me: Oh wow, man, I totally thought you'd be up already... don't you have class now?
Peter: Allison. It's. Friday.

Hmmm. Whoopsie-daisies. Probably serves him right for taking such pleasure in torturing me awake all those childhood years, years of waking to a glass of ice water being poured on my face or my sheets stripped or a rousing human percussion instrument involving my head and Peter's fists. Hmmm. Don't feel so bad now that I think about it. Karma's a bitch, eh bro?

Anyway, will close with this (Liz Gilbert of course, page 260 of Eat Pray Love):

As I focus on Diligent Joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once - that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-breeding act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you truly free to serve and enjoy other people.