What's New:

I'm playing music with real people again, twice a week.

My sister's coming to town for a visit in three days.

There is snow here.

The jeans I'm wearing.

I read a passage in a Jon Kabat-Zinn book that got me re-motivated about keeping up my daily yoga and meditation practice, which from infrequency had started seeming like just work:
"If, from the meditative perspective, everything you are seeking is already here, even if it is difficult to wrap your thinking mind around that concept, if there really is no need to acquire anything or attain anything or improve yourself, if you are already whole and complete and by that same virtue so is the world, then why on earth bother meditating? Why would we want to cultivate mindfulness in the first place? ... [O]ne reason we might want to practice mindfulness is that most of the time we are unwittingly praciticing its opposite. Every time we get angry we get better at being angry and reinforce the anger habit. ... Every time we become self-absorbed, we get better at becoming self-absorbed and going unconscious. ... Practice does make perfect. Without awareness of anger or of self-absorption, or ennui, or any other mind state that can take us over when it arises, we reinforce those synaptic networks within the nervous system that underlie our conditioned behaviors and mindless habits, and from which it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle ourselves, if we are even aware of what is happening at all."

The video to the Shins single Phantom Limb, from their third album, which comes out January 23. I can't wait! Well, I can and I am in the sense that I refuse to download the record and listen to it before it arrives in stores, but it's a serious struggle.

The sweater I'm wearing.

We saw this display in a basement window of the house beside the vacant lot that used to hold the house that Paul Gailiunas and Helen Hill used to live in, before they moved away and it subsequently burned down. I'm assuming it's in tribute to her. The black figure is a stuffed crow.


My favourite internet radio station: KUSF from San Francisco.

- Andrew