You Are Not Alone

Mingyur Rinpoche on the Two Basic Kinds of Suffering
(only five minutes, but very powerful simple explanation, especially of self-suffering)

Underneath, most of us think we suck.
Most of us think we are an exception.
Meditation won't help us.
Yoga won't help us.
Medication won't help us.
Because we are beyond repair.
Beyond help.

Lately, I have come to realize how much of a drain this part of me is.
This part that takes tremendous energy to sustain - a lot of the energy I think I don't have to do things to help pull me out of the cycle. It's reiterative, a closed loop.
It's Samsara. 90% of our suffering is what Mingyur Rinpoche, in the video above, calls self-suffering.

Credit Where Credit is Due

(The photo is of a stack of books on my desk awaiting my entry into various documents I call "quotes to use for __" [fill in the blank specific book or teaching project]. I have a whole set of online interviews/documents I also keep in files for use in teaching/writing...)

Yesterday, a student who does both academic and non-academic writing and publishing mentioned that she's taking a short course at the university about how to use Endnote so it can do all of your attribution and bibliographing for you. For a long time now, I have suspected (since I graduated from college in 2000) that there must be programs that could do these things for me - help me find quotes (yes, I already use Google Library and even Amazon at times), attribute them, sort them.

I read. A LOT. 

Old Age, Sickness and Death

One of our cats has been sick for almost a month now.

It's scary and hard - he's only four years old, but we got him when he was about one and had been living on the streets, literally. Friends of ours rescued him, and he's a super cat - snuggly if jittery, soft and affectionate. I named him "Drala" which is Tibetan for "above aggression" which is used to mean "Magic." He's definitely his name in all uses.