I have an eye infection.

Tuesday I stractched my eyelid near the inner eye area. It got infected. First it was a flat red, then a pink mound of almost
one half an inch..running down onto my inner nose. All you have to think about is what the Kilingon's look like. This creation
took about 4 days until Saturday. I went to the emergency room. Got a shot in my butt muscke (!) of antibiotic.

Now I am still dealing with it. IT itches. It burns a little. I should be resting my eyes. It looked better after I'd had some sleep.

Happy DIwali

I think it started on Friday: Diwali, the Festival of Lights and the New Year in India. It goes on for several days. I have a friend
from India who took me out to Diwali dinner. Usually Diwali is spent with family and friends. But my friend has no family here
and his car is in the shop, so he didn't feel like going down to the San Jose area to be with friends of long standing. Actually,
I've know him for almost six years.

We went to DOSA on Valencia. They serve DOSAS which are crepe-like, long and filled with vegetables. They are dipped in
some sauces. Yum.

I also went to do a video shoot and forgot to charge the camera battery. Oh well, I got 5 minutes of my friend's performance.
It was at LIfetime Books which is on Polk Street. What sweet place! It has a staircase winding down into it from the second
floor. The book emphasis is metaphysical mostly. The performance was interesting. My friend sang about Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party and then went on to Mary Magdalen.

Forgot to mention the Bridge School concert I went to last night. I loved the Trent Reznor ensemble. He has a string quartet
behind him...heavy on the cellos. Everybody else rocked hard and soft, but with Neil Young at the center of it all, the message
was often political. Yay. Does anyone think that Trent Reznor's music is political? Should there be a difference?

It was supposed to be a haiku.

I've been having trouble with blogger.com recently. They haven't posted my latest
blogs to the blog. It's weird. Can anyone explain why this is happening?

Meanwhile, I tried to change the heading with a haiku. It didn't print out the way
I wrote it. It looks kind of dumb. But maybe I should write more haiku. I miss
writing poetry.

Port of Shadows

Grey, white, black, fog
Swirls by you in fashion-
Like sweetness, a new
Flavor of obscurity.

Nelly, you stand in a
Cellophane coat. White.
You just happen to be
There at the rendevous.

He sees you and it's
Instant passion, love not
Unadorned with past surrender
And soon-to-be death.

Let's play where's the blog?

Last night I blogged about painting...sort of. I was thinking about so many things that my original idea left my mind when I sat down to write. This happens now and then and makes for a writing exercise, at the least.

I'm wondering if anyone else who blogs has found their most recent blog in another area than the actual blog. When I went into "search blog" and typed in the title "About Painting," the blog came up--by itself with my little picture in there.

Today it was really hot. I was so happy. Got to walk around the room for a while in my barefeet. Yay. Not many kids. Didn't have to go out to the recesses except in the morning. Made bats from stencils to teach color.

Tonight I need to read from some texts for my classes. Tomorrow night we'll see UN CHIEN ANDALOU which is one of my favorites. I used to love Dali. I still do, but I can't paint like that myself. I'm more of an Expressionist...black and white and colors. Tablas.

I have two choices: read about the Maya or about the technology of early sound films.

About Painting...

I was lying down on the couch and looking up at one of my old paintings on the wall. It's from 1998, and I did it in the garage of my old house I used to rent. I lost that house after having lived there for 9 1/2 years. The landlord sold it to a woman with enough money to buy it. By the time he sold it, I was painting upstairs in the dining room. That was so great. The garage could get really cold!

In any case, this painting could use some work. But I'd rather leave it as is because it's part of a gallery project sponsored by an organization that used to exist in San Francisco for people who had suffered physical and emotional abuse as a child. The place was called The Morris Center. This painting was selected as one of about 70 that
they chose in all to represent feelings of recovery and bliss.

To me the painting is unfinished. However, it does give a sense of calm. I want to take the painting down and start working on a new one RIGHT THERE. My landlord would freak. He has very inexpensive carpet on the floor, and I paint in oils. Oh well.

I've been painting in a little watercolor book. My subject matter for the past three or more years has been the two drums that make up the "tabla." To me this image allows rhythm to flow through the painting in different ways. Color has alot to with the sense of time and space, too. But painting a musical gift is fun for me since I play guitar and love to play music with other people. My tabla playing needs a lot of help now. In the old house I used to play all the time and for a short while had a trio (guitar, tabla, didjeridoo) called BHAKTI. We played at Day of the Dead in 2002 at a gallery in the city.

I feel tired. Got to get up early for work! Earlier in the evening I thought I had something to say about painting. I did, and now I'm remembering how I was going to start writing about it. Tomorrow.

Oh....Love.

Harold Pinter is a great playwrite. Whenever I forget my proper ways of conveying
meaning through this medium, I find myself often so full of it that I can't find
anything. Thank you, pinter.

To remove any suspense, I will expose the goal: to convey the deepest feelings one
can have about karma and what it feels like to always be in debt. Amma says that karma
is like having a debt to pay. Even in this life we accrue more debt. Thoughts are
what get me in trouble, I think. I'm not the kind of person to express verbally what
I'm thinking about too often. Writing used to be the best way for me to let it go--especially in high school and university. The kind of writing I do now is for
individualized education plans. I try to be objective. I don't write, "So and so is a cute 5-year-old..." Stay away from comments that subjective. The way any person looks
is a matter of opinion. Not everyone agrees that Bush looks like a liar. Do you know
what I mean? There are so many cruel people in the world that it is often very
difficult to distance oneself and ignore it all.

Oh yes. Back to karma. Debt is pretty cruel. The Buddha was correct. Dharma should be something welcome. I often consider dharma and karma the same. It seems that I'm constantly paying back as I go. Well, there's my job, for instance. Working as a schoolteacher is very difficult work emotionally and physically. This is the only profession that pays its members to take over 2 months off--paid!

Meanwhile, my love life is such shambles. I know I have to let the Moises thing go.
Tonight I went to a party where this woman who's supposed to be my friend wore one
of his set of earrings. She said, "Oh, he's a cool guy." My response was less than
casual: "There are cooler people in the world than him." The whole Love of Ganesha
crowd seem so caught up in who is holier than thou. Why do I feel so distant from them? Why do they all make me feel so lonely?

It's now close to one year since Moises and I got together. I was very vulnerable.
I hope after this past year since January that I have become less accessible than
I was last year at this time. The space between lovers was great a year ago. Such has not been the case this year, and I'm happier for it, but I lost someone, too (the eccentric guy from London). I have a friend I see now and then. I like him. He has the same birthday as I do. We are from different countries and different religious traditions. My birthday is December 24th. In this country, no one's around on the 24th. One year, about 3 years ago, I spent my birthday totally by myself the whole day and night. I wanted to do it because I never had. The birthday always had to be spent with family up until I was 30 (and beyond that) and then it's been spent with
friends.

I am digression-free now. Sorry for the interruption. This was supposed to be about Love. This is where Moises, Amma, the Argentinian guy I met today who is a friend of Moises, the woman wearing the Moises earrings, all this stuff comes up as a test. Am I over the weirdness of still thinking about someone who is a karmic test. The debt has been paid. The way I can keep the creditors at bay is to stay neutral to anything that has to do with this man. Earrings? Who cares? My love is for myself first. Being a faerie is really hard on the plane of the humans. If you've ever read THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI, you will know what I mean. The faerie world is where I've come from. It's still possible to be human and not get caught up in what
humans do to hurt themselves and others.

Using the camera.

Tonight I worked as a camera person for cable access channel 29 here in San Francisco. The show was their "open mic." What a joke. Now, I don't make fun of musicians unless they're just too stuck on themselves. Such was not the case with this group. They were humble people playing instruments. There was a female impersonator singing to a couple of songs on cd. There was a guy who imitated Jeff Buckley's style of singing who wasn't too difficult to listen to. But Randi and Jack of the trusty Bargain Basement Band stole the show in terms of heart. Randi does not have a good voice. But she can wail like Janis and was around when Janis was around. She sings songs about people taking over their governments and leading themselves. She sings about medical cannabis. She herself has mild cerebral palsy.

I don't know. I guess I had fun playing with the camera and getting a good shot. But I hope that next time there will be some variety in the musical people represented. The guy who soloed played in the band the last time. And the jazz band had the same bass player that played the last time. The only women represented was Randi.

This past weekend I went to a show because I was invited by friends. I saw John Mayer, Sheryl Crow and Marjorie Fair. I liked Marjorie Fair best. The commercial sounds of the other two didn't move me. Marjorie Fair sings about life with underdistorted guitars. They had put together some lyrics which one could relate to.

Tonight I heard and saw Kurdestani music.

What does it mean to say that you "saw" music? You cut it in half (no, fifths)? Have you ever heard Kurdestani music? I saw the film CROSSING THE BRIDGE set in Turkey and about Turkish music. (There is one Kurdestani musician represented.)

Tonight I was supposed to usher at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason with my friend. She kind of gets on my nerves sometimes. It's probably the fact that she says weird, under-handed, competitive comments that makes it so. Now, I realized when I got home (I never went to the bathroom while I was at the theatre) that my butt-cleavage was showing most of the evening.

Perhaps I was inspired to wear my clothes thusly because I was so full of desire. There were many men I find attractive at this event. I met the first one backstage. At first, we had to sit with a man from Persia, and he and my friend were talking politics and he was using the word "us" for Ablurrika and my ears were literally begging for prozac until my friend found out we could go backstage and eat the food for the musicians before the show.

"Do you play doumbek?" I heard a woman ask someone to whom my back was turned. He answered her that he did play a drum. I was fascinated by that and the fact that his spirit was so open, so faerie-like, that I was confused. He was in his early thirties with shoulder-length wavy hair. I had never met anyone from Turkey nor had I met someone who whose culture was also Kurdish. This was all too much. He gave me this really genuine smile and I sort of let loose this snarly smile that I never encountered in or on myself before. What was this about?

So, as I sat and heard the lecture before the concert, I pondered my earlier ghastly behavior. The lecture was given by one of the musicians who described the soul of the music and a particular song's message. One of the songs was prescriptive for human interaction: soul meets soul and repects it on that deepest level. Later on, I was talking to a person who was working there and said that I thought Ablurrikans were the most self-indulgent in terms of bad moods and being unfriendly. He agreed with me. I'm looking for a discussion.

Still processing the ashram.

I read the post from last weekend pre-ashram visit. Forgot to mention the good things. There was a spot on the floor for me to sit and meditate. When the bhajans started, I was dancing as a sat. It felt so relieving. My meditation was on joy: the bliss of freedom from worry or care but still involving them in the process of being in the moment. Perhaps that was what was so helpful about this time. I really stayed in the place where I went in my mind and that was where I was.

It really helped when I had to talk to the old lover who is a young guy from Nicaragua. What he told me didn't bother me, but he seemed so ready to jump on my balloon when when I talked about some of my housemate problems. He's living in a commune. He sleeps with someone different every other night. At least I don't even have to say hello to this housemate who is one of 3 that I live with; four people and three cats.
But, in any case, I was happy with myself that I didn't trip or wonder about this person anymore. I saw another guy I kissed AT the ashram back in 2002. He is from Montreal but has been in this area off and on. He said "Hi" and that was all that was good...seeing the soul of the other person and greeting it.

The ride back to San Francisco was fused with talk of free and fun sex at Burning Man. One of the guys from Love of Ganesha (is it a coincidence that he's from Paris?) was recounting all the woman he had sex with in the desert. There were also the women who wanted to have sex with him. He and my friend were talking sex. Amma
knows there are many forms of love.