(or: meaning is antimemetic) I'm lying in my living room and my coffee table's freighted with stuff. Lots and lots of books, loose notecards, baggies, coasters, a hat, a plastic bag, a notebook, a water bottle, an XBOX controller, a couple shoe horns. So very much| Joe Cecil
I. Defining connection I seek connection but I don't know what it is and I want to. At a meditation retreat this summer, I attended a series of classes or workshops about "spacious connection." I've attended other similar courses with this group before. I've read a lot about social skills| Joe Cecil
On a flight recently, I found myself talking to the passenger next to me. It took me a while to initiate; I wanted to speak up and had plenty of opportunity, but something held me back. But I did end up talking to him, and I found a particular approach| Joe Cecil
I read a fair number of meditation books. In the last three years since I started meditating, I read about 15-18 such books. Searchless Responsiveness is one of the densest. It has five "interstitials" — stream -of-consciousness interludes between themed sections. These are a page or two long,| Joe Cecil
A prime example: "What will I order for dinner?" If there's a question among N options, then they appear about equally good according to different criteria. The consequences are minor — the (dis)pleasure of one night's meal. Nobody else is likely to care much about this decision. There are many| Joe Cecil
In short: Because as soon as one's focused on getting, which is the exact reason one would enter a dating "market" space in the first place, one tends also to notice and emphasize not having. Then one feels bad about that, and in your misery one| Joe Cecil
I did an exercise recently over two consecutive days, a Wednesday and Thursday, where I wrote down experiences I might like to have on a date. I ended up with a little over 5 notebook pages (perhaps A5 paper size?) of ideas. Later in the week, I ended up journaling| Joe Cecil
I just upgraded my Ghost install to v6 on Ubuntu, and it took some problem-solving. I tried upgrading my Ghost install from v5 to v6, but my Node version was too old. I needed to install nvm under the ghost user. I did this a "bad but official" way: # First,| Joe Cecil
It's not that I am drawn to something that isn't real, or isn't realistic, or might not happen. The same way that everything dies, everything was born. Everything that is, wasn't, until it was. And screw the odds. It's the way that when I have a fantasy, I avoid looking| Joe Cecil
(for straight dating, anyway, and ignoring the problem of cheaters among other things) When people set out to pursue romance, they usually do it by putting their "best selves forward." That is: Their most generally appealing selves, not their most strongly appealing selves. That means hiding everything about| Joe Cecil
They say you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and that applies to listening, too. Be careful who you listen to. Truth matters, and it's not the only thing that matters. It's not the same as wisdom. To me, wisdom means taking the truth| Joe Cecil
I recently reread large chunks of Models (previously), and what struck me is that (A) there are a lot of ideas worth trying, and (B) to make effective use of all that, I need some way to resurface those ideas over time. Realistically, there's no way to incorporate| Joe Cecil
Some people are hard to love in the sense that they do not believe or accept love when it is offered. I've known people like this and I know other people report similar experiences. They are (in Visa's sense) wretched, down bad, not forever but at| Joe Cecil
There's a line early in Pema Chödron's Living Beautifully that stuck out to me where she says (citing a neuroscientist) that emotions naturally last only a few seconds — that (as I understood it) we prolong emotions by our own choice. That rings true| Joe Cecil
It amazes me how much of my life is downstream of reading a Harry Potter fanfiction for the lulz on a whim when I was fourteen. I had been decidedly Christian; I became an atheist because of that fanfiction, first briefly then lastingly. I had been raised conservative, and at| Joe Cecil
Yesterday I listened to a Zan Perrion recording. I like listening to Zan. I don't agree with everything he says, and a lot of it I think is better taken metaphorically than literally. But his talks are great food for thought about the kind of guy I want to be,| Joe Cecil