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Hey Jimmy. You're a sight for sore eyes. I thought I had slipped into another dimension that was void of all but me and the only way of communicating I had was through the chair. So either I was mistaken or welccome to the alternate universe. At least Kira wears tight leather pants in this universe. I tried posting a comment butwas told that the comment thingy is no longer avaiable. Rebirth is good.
Ashok Hi everyone. Working on the rebirth.
jimmy The Chair has been likened to a phoenix in the past - that it always rises from its own ashes. Seems to me tha the phoenix got it wrong. Rising from ones own ashes sounds real painful (because one has to be reduced to ashes in the first place). The real trick is to rise from anothers ashes. As the non-Klingon said 'It is a good day for someone else to die'. But hey, wouldn't that be something else - a mythical creature that rises from the ashes of whoever it burns down. A dragon with many bodies. All with one mind. Then the hero's task would be to find and kill the original dragon. Where is everyone? Is there a party raging somewhere I know nothing about?
Ashok Feb 13-19 is Random Acts of Kindness week. Please contribute acts of kindness at random. A smile, a coffee, a helping hand. Collection points all over. As the man said, 'Welcome to the Chair Republic where no act of kindness goes unpunished'. Just joking. That does not happen in the Republic, no it happens at my work. No matter how far back one bends to satisfy an end user the result is always more demands or blame if things go wrong (user error usually). Still one can not allow end users to overcome ones own buddha nature. That part that feels love and compassion for all end users. Must say though that mine own buddha nature concerning end users has shrunk to a dot. Reminds me of a story at BPE a long time ago about a point that the protagonist had shrunk his vision to and a pigeon bursting into flames. It disturbed at that time but time heals all wounds. [An aside: sheltering from the rain in an arcade near Liverpool Station, the staff of a shoe repair shop were wearing t-shirts that read 'Because time wounds all heels'. Brightened up the rainy day). What might be an act of kindness in the Chair? Leaving a comment perhaps?
Ashok There was an article in the Sunday Times on 8th Jan about healing through the teacher plant ayahuasca. Shamans developed this particular drink consisiting of 2 plants and apparently it has been used in Southa American Indian culture for hundreds of years. Yesterday I attended a talk at Conway Hall about seminars being run in Brazil. These are 8 or 12 days seminars at which the plant is taken 3 or 5 times. In the audience were about 20 people who had taken taken ayahuasca at these seminars or elsewhere. Talking with them afterwards I found them to be well adjusted stable people. The 3 presenters, facilitators on these seminars, all were glowing with health and seemed happy. All this has left me preplexed. How can a drug give good long terms effects. People who have taken this plant refuse to call it a drug. Anyone here who has partaken of this or similar plants and would like to tell us about their experiences? http://www.ayahuasca-healing.net/
Ashok Patience is a virtue I have yet to discover. The latest example of this is the fortune file with many variants of UNIX. The normal use of this is to put the firtune command in the startup sequence and enjoy a joke everytime one logs on. Of course me being me I save the file in txt format and purused large chunks of it via the Notepad. The project is suffering but wht the hell, first things first. Here is a joke copied at random. Two male flies are buzzing around, cruising for good-looking females. One spots a real cutie sitting on a pile of cow manure and dives down toward her. "Pardon me," he asks, turning on his best charm, "but is this stool taken?" Smmoth talking fly!
Ashok Things progress from seed to tree, from egg to chick to chicken to nuggets. The march of time is relentless. If only we had a few timeouts. Wouldn't that be something - able to leave the field for a while, rejuvinate oneself and enter the fray much refreshed. Although the Buddhists and Hindus say this is what we do. Only trouble with that view is that one has to die to refresh oneself. Seems an awful waste, giving up so much to start all over again. Still nature doesn't have to be efficient. After all there is no competition to nature. Wonder what a world with two competiting systems of nature would be like? Perhaps we could flit between the two experiencing different natural laws. Born in one nature and dying in another. Wild.
Ashok Hi again fellow chairites. The 10 days 'outing' came to an end this morning although today was the the 11th day. Too compilicated to go into here but if some day we meet for a drink the story may be told. (We should develop some rules/protocols for chairite meetings. I propose a first rule - the person telling a story gets a extra drink (not slurpee) paid for by the rest of the meeting. Please register your vote for or against this rule. Also the call goes out for other rule proposals) And a hard 10 days it has proved. This was my second such outing and the first one I had breezed through. This one was hard hard hard. No talking for 9 days, no books, no TV, no Internet (gasp!), the food bland and no eating after noon but it was my knees that suffered the most. Worthwhile? Most definitely. Will I do it again. Yes but not for a while. Couldn't get 10 days off work in a hurry anyway. Well I don't really hav much to say but if I was a man of few words I could have said all this by just not posting at all. Actually I am a man of few words. Limited voculabary that is. Just that I tend to use the same words again and again and again and again and again. Oops there I go again and again and again and again. (This post has nothing to say and it stopped being funny before it started but I've started so I'll finish (if it wasn't for all these interruptions)). Is there really or ever was a drink called slurpee? Hell of a name - I mean who would want a drink that say that it like slurring pee? The image of slurrin this drink through a straw with crushed ice on top. Enough to put me off my Pepsi for an hour or so.
Ashok What a busy weekend that has just been! Saturday must have done about 30 chores including putting a shelf together for Lakshmi. You understand that putting a shelf together for me means a very different thing from a shelf being put together in, say, the Philippines. For me it is just putting screws through pre-drilled holes rather than the measure twice cut once thing there. Although I probably found it harder. Still the finished product is holding up a hi-fi and books and numerous little miniatures (is little redundant here?). Then dropping the teenager (only just - he's 20 in Feb) to university on Sunday and packing when I got back. Yes packing for my 10 days holiday starting tomorrow. Going alone and mostly staying silent. The annual outing of the noise abatement society? Not quite but close. Day 9 and the last 3 evenings have been hard. Today I can almost taste the smoke on my tongue. That's what I miss most - the taste. Not a whole lot of difference in how I feel. The mild pain I used to experience in my thoat is gone. Oh and also the irritation I felt in my lower lungs is gone but apart from these nothing. No jump in energy levels. No great return to taste buds. I find I am having to breathe deeper to fill my lungs. But the smoke compass is gone and I feel rudderless.
Ashok Recently saw the Hayao Miyazaki cartoon Spirited Away. Wonderously creative. Had previously seen Princess Mononoke. Rahoul prefers that one to Spirited Away. Says there is more adventure in Princess. But we both agree that Howls Moving Castle (Miyazaki's latest offering) is not in the same class as either one. Been to the Red Cross shop again and walked out with Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller. Started it. Starts off good. Will post when I finish it. Although it might be a while before I finish this book. Two other books have entered my life - Book 5 of the Ramayan by Ashok Banker and Catch 22. Had seen the movie a long time ago with Alan Arkin and never got round to reading the book. It's surreal sometimes when switching books, reading a book with a mind mood generated by another one. You almost expect characters from one book appear in the other one. 6th day and I'm hanging on!
Ashok Happy New Year Chairites! January the 3rd 2006 and I just had a colleague say to me that January is rushing away! I knew time was passing at a faster rate (1.0298... times faster) for me but to see the end of Jan on the 3rd day is fast even for my (usually) speeded self. Still each to his or her own speed I say (now isn't that a more chairite way of saying different strokes for ...). I have found a sure way to slow down time for all those people out there who are living such fast lives - give up smoking! The days drag when you don't. My 3rd day smoke-free. Last yea I held out for 10 days and then thought myself strong enough to have one and one only. Ha! This time at least 21 days before I fool myself into thinking that again. (I hear that one chairite is running a book on when I crack. (The smart money is on 9!)).
Ashok Tuesday 27th Dec. and 4 days to go to the end of the year. If this mood persists it is going to be a very poor start to the new year that one has staked so much on. Small things are irritating the shit out of me and I don't mean laxatives. Only the 'small things' just refuse to go away - they just go carping on and on and on. Man I'm at breaking point. Something better give soon or I'm going to smoke something seriously damaging. A friend rang today. Wanted to carry on a conversation that we had to break off when the train pulled into the station and we went our separate ways two days before Christmas. And that is the highlight of today. Would you believe it - a phone call is the highlight of my day. Stuck in traffic for over an hour, tramping up and down Ikea for over two hours and all we buy is some hangers. A pile of ironing, son costing me £900 for a laptop, my papers 'tidied' away and now lost, achiles tandon hurting, my seasonal ticket and driving licence washed with the trousers and the film I hired turned out to be seriously bad. Some days are just sent to test us. And let me tell you yours truly is feeling sorely tested indeed. Still where are my manners, going on about myself. How was your Chrsitmas? Hope all were visited by the big man in the red suit bringing all manner of presents. I bought myself a ghost bubbles gun - shoots bubbles filled with smoke. Only discovered later that it needs 6 AA sized batteries, not included. Why am I not surprised?
Ashok Found a book in a graveyard I was passing through last week. Love in the time of cholera. Just over half way through it. Now I understand what it was doing in a graveyard. There surely must be residents of the graveyard who are faster than that book. So sloooow. Wonder if I'll ever finish it or will I end up in said graveyard before reaching the last page. Must be the season of bad books. Bought a book in a charity shop the other day. So bad. The Magicians Assitant. Still one has to buy something when in a charity shop. The guilt is worth the two pounds I paid for this book. Only thing is that the reviews on the back cover make it out to be some sort of enchanting book. All about how the author is some sort of wise person who understands human nature. Humbug I say. Humbug (I say again). Wonder when this drought will break.
Ashok The weekend is about to start a day early. Tomorrow off and I'm travelling to collect my son form university. End of term. Lots of stuff tocarry back hence the car trip. His excuse not mine. It is the end of the first term for him. As he put it 'the freshers week that lasted seven'. Paying for it now though he is. Having to cover 10 weeks work in 3. I'm finding it hard to sympathise when he tells me that he is snowed under. Well seven weeks of fun will do that to you. Another ear coming to an end. Of course I mean year (just can't be borthered to backspace). The fattened turkeys are being led to the chopping block to chop off their block. Turkeys must hate Jesus. Whatever did we, they think, do to him that his birthday celebrations are our death sentence. But that is what you get being a turkey in this world. Not even Jesus can save you. Still I have it on good authority that all turkeys killed in the service of Jesus are automatically awarded a place in paradise regardless of their other actions. My new year resolutions are starting on the 10th of January this year. The usual suspects - exercise, give up smoking, write, meditate, meet friends more, turn up to work on time, eat less.... The depressing list goes on and on. 'tis a game I play with myself - add a resolution each year and then recite them all at the start of the year. In my 51st year the list is 40 long. Had 11 care free years before the madness took me. The phrase about making a rod for ones own back springs to mind. Obviously a spring loaded rod. Wishing all a frantic shopping weekend (the last before Christmas). Gobble gobble.
Ashok Amazing. Just read about ADHD and decided that this is exactly what I have always suffered from. Lack of attention, impulsiveness (adn an inability ot spall), easily distracted. Shit that is me to a T. Although to decribe myself as a T is to flatter myself. Haven't been that slim for many a years. An O better describes me but to say that something describes one to an O is just absurd. A single letter to encompass a whole life - can't get more efficient than that. Of course, thinking about it, ADHD is in good company, I tend to recognise myself at least once a month in an article describing some condition symptons of which are inaptness. Wonder what the condition of thinking oneself inapt is called? No doubt I will find an article in 6 months time which will describe this very condition. Well that is the next 6 months taken care of. Now what can I do while waiting for that article?? (did I mentiot that inability to make up ones mind is a sympton of ADHD?) Just been down tot he 1st fllor to partake in a glass of mulled wine. The organisation decided to thank us for the year of hard work with a glass of wine. THe borad of directors are giving themselves bonuses but we are the lucky ones! We get alchol albeit a glass of warm mulled wine. Oh and not to forget the mince pie. As one colleague remarked the filling is good but the pastry is jsut a covering. Said colleagues wears amazing rings. The other day it was a tulip shape with 4 sharp points, sharp enough to put out an eye, and standing more than an inch high from her finger. Today it was a book with the papers being ruffled. Again standing about an inch high. A jeweller in Venice makes them and each one is a one-off. Nobody messes with this colleague. A firey Italian woman who reads and writes (and probbly thinks) in 6 languages and can think on her feet. Not fair. I could have made 6 languages if it only was for the ADHD. ADHD sounds so much more acceptable than the real problem - laziness.
Ashok 
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