Beginning a Meditation Practice at EBMC

Today I went to a meditation retreat at the East Bay Meditation Center.  I don't know if 'retreat' is quite the right word to use, since for me it was a head on confrontation with my anxiety riddled mind and my own compulsive behaviors.  Fortunately, I was able to do this in a very supportive environment and with a great guide, Mushim.  Rather than coming off as a stern disciplinarian, she was really warm and funny, telling stories of her own experiences and challenges concerning meditation in ways that made the class laugh out loud more than once.  The rest of the class were all very friendly and, for a group of  beginners (the topic was "Beginning a Meditation Practice"), they got into it pretty deeply.  Not much shuffling around or complaining of an inability to focus properly, not even from me!  My new year's resolution is to cultivate a meditation practice,  and I felt that today was a very important first step towards doing that.  Afterwards I definitely felt a reduction both in the amount of anxiety I felt and in the need for external stimulation.  Looking forward to more of this soon.  

Habitat For Humanity - Up on the joists

Today I went to volunteer at the Habitat for Humanity site in Daly City.  I was working a lot this week and decided to unwind in a time honored but not particularly healthy fashion by drinking lots of beer, smoking cigarettes and playing virtual dj on turntable.fm till 3 in the morning.  Needless to say I was feeling pretty raw when I got up this morning.  Thanks to Katie, who was nice enough to lend me her car, I got there on time for the safety talk.  Me and  Nick, a Parisian who created I pad apps for kids, got put on a crew to work on the developing roof.  I'm normally apprehensive about heights and being a little hungover and sleep deprived definitely intensified it, but I was able to hold up ok.  Much as I would like to say I carried myself with a cat-like grace walking across the joists and hammering nails into the girders, in truth I came across more like a paranoid, 500 pound gorilla.  For most of the morning, we placed and nailed girders across the joists mainly for the purpose of their absorbing the flames in the event of a possible fire.  After lunch I was happy to get down from the ladders and work on creating new girders by hammering blocks into pieces of plywood.  After doing this for a couple of hours, I found myself really getting into the idea of 'letting the hammer do the work' as they say, and - to wax a little philosophical - remove the idea of myself as someone forcing a nail into wood and instead just watch as the hammer and nail do what they're designed to do under a pair of hands.  I've been reading some stuff about zen buddhism this week, if you can't tell!  Anyway, it turned out to be another good experience and I'm excited for the opportunity to go back and do more.  Especially when they put in the elevator!  If you're looking to get some knowledge and practice about what it takes to build a home, you can't go wrong volunteering with habitat for humanity...

Make:SF - Mini Theremin

This Tuesday I went down to the Tech Shop, only a short bike ride away from my girlfriend's house, to check out the Make:SF monthly meeting.   I went to one about 6 months back and had fun putting together a musical pen called the 'drawdio'.  This time around we were learning how to make an arduino controlled mini-theremin, though in truth the chip we used had been pre-programmed and there was no real use for the arduino unit I borrowed from my co-worker earlier that day.  It's probably for the best, since in the last six months I had apparently forgotten how to solder (again), never mind trying to write a program.  I struggled my way through the steps of what I initially thought was going to be an easy project and at the end, thanks to some good advice from the project coordinators, I got the thing to work. 

Nile Rodgers - The Record Producers

The Record Producers is a fantastic BBC radio show I just found out about featuring interviews with the great pop producers and track by track breakdowns of their biggest hits.  It's the music version of watching your favorite movie with the director commentary turned on! Here is an episode featuring Chic's Nile Rodgers