This Island Life.

Aug 24, 2001
Hey, I'd like to appologize for that last post. I realize that nobody cares about geeky shit. I'm gonna make a real effort to only write substantative entries from now on. Honest. Sorry.

I've been reading Huxley's "Island". It's chock-full of philosophy and extremely useful "cheat-sheet" style life lessons. Consider the following:

"We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way."

He also does a good job of matching personal temperament to functional spiritual practices. When considering a man in deep trance, intoning the same 7 words over and over again, the main character asked if that was what he would recommend for a young person just being introduced to a spiritual path. The other character replied, "Not unless she were unusually jittery or anxious.", and recommended meditation instead. It's all in chapter eleven.

The book is really fantastic. Everybody should read it. "Island" gives the dominant world philosophies an even-handed working over, and in an easily digestible and non-threatening way. My mom should especially read this book.

An extremely fun game that I bought the other day, that Natasha and I just played for the first time tonight, is Taboo. It's a ton of fun. Everybody who visits me in the next few months will be subjected to hours of it each day. You have been warned.

Earlier in the day at the "503" coffee house we played Chess/Trivial Pursuit. In order to successfully attack a piece, the offending player had to successfully guess one out of the questions on the trivial pursuit card. That was a lot of fun too. I'm really good at Chess and she's really good at Trivial Pursuit, so it worked out. She knows the names of all these obscure silent movie stars. Blows my mind.

Maybe I'll start inventing games. Hmmmm.... If any of you internet weirdos have good game ideas, mail em this-a-way. Fusion games are welcome too. (ex: chess/trivial pursuit) One rule: alcohol can't be a primary aspect of the game. (ie: no drinking games) That would be too easy.

Because if anything, I'm a challenge.