Trust the Chinese to hit culinary home runs. I stumbled upon Xi’an Famous Foods (http://xianfoods.com/) after getting a haircut in Chinatown. The cumin lamb noodles were fantastically spicy, as the sweat beads condensing on and around my nose testified … of course, the soup was spicy too, but piping hot, which as you may know only magnifies the spice factor by, oh, 5x.

Space

Watching out the caboose of the subway tonight. Leaving 50th St. on the uptown C train, the glow of the platform slowly draws distant, and an envelope of darkness subsumes the view. I feel this is as close to casting off from the safety of a space station into black nothingness as I can get in terrestrial life.

Time

My introduction to Philip Glass was Satyagraha at the Met yesterday afternoon. I loved the visuals, especially the giant, tattered beasts doing battle, which to me represented the collective egoic structures in conflict. The music, though, was simply boring. There was essentially a single repeated motif for each scene, each of which lasted approximately 20 minutes. That’s a lot of repeating. It’s also not a lot of interest. The music lacked a critical dimension – variation – that the stunning imagery unfortunately could not compensate for.

I think that will be my last Glass.

Depth

It is possible to live more deeply while requiring less “clock time”. Osho calls this burning the candle from both ends, not in the sense of exhausting oneself through effort, but by bringing intensity and awareness into every moment. Every time I harmonize the rhythm of my body more with nature, I feel possibility of intensity begin to open. Each time it drifts, the opening begins to close, mostly without my awareness of it.

I look for those who create spaces. There are many who only know to fill them.

• I downloaded v1.0 of the Gaelyk template. Documentation suggests that you should be able to easily import this into Eclipse; however, no .project or .classpath files are to be found. Surprise surprise! They are present in the v0.7 template zip – just not in v1.0!
• Out of the box, I’m getting a compilation error. Apparently both the spock and gaelyk-spock jars are required for the samples to build. Of course, downloads of pre-built binaries are nearly impossible to track down. I guess I have to build my own spock (dumb). gaelyk-spock has a CI project with binaries available at http://hashcode.co:9001/job/gaelyk-spock/ .
• Now I’m trying out gradle. I was hoping to get started without having to learn yet-another-build-framework, but it appears impossible. Now I’m seeing that “gradlew eclipse” may generate the Eclipse files I need. However, before I even get there, gradle seems to want to download the entire internet. Reminds me of maven.
• Ok, that generated Eclipse project files … but now I get a dialog saying that the version of Spock that was downloaded for the project is incompatible with Groovy 1.7.x, which I have installed. Oh brother. And now … a different dialog is telling me to go to http://versioninfo.spockframework.org for more information.
• And now, “gradlew build” fails because an expected file “dataStoreGroovlet.groovy” is nowhere to be found. Great. Found a copy here: https://github.com/glaforge/gaelyk/blob/master/template-project/war/WEB-INF/groovy/dataStoreGroovlet.groovy
• Getting a bunch of spurious errors like under “Google App Engine Problems” in Eclipse. It claims that “sdk-1.5.5″ jars are missing from the lib directory. While true, nothing in my project should reference those stupid jars – “sdk-1.5.2″ jars are on my classpath. WTF? Ah, figured it out – the “App Engine SDK” is listed under the “Libraries” tab of my “Java Build Path”. But still have an error. Disabling the GAE plugin wholesale gets rid of this error. Works for me for now; I guess I can use gradlew to build and run. gradle is damn slow, though.
• What’s up with the Gaelyk documentation? When you drill down into a section of the tutorial (e.g. http://gaelyk.appspot.com/tutorial/template-project), you can’t proceed to the next section – you have to go back and click on another part of the index! Lame!
• Yep, when I try to start GAE from within Eclipse, I get: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to locate the App Engine agent. Please use dev_appserver, KickStart, or set the jvm flag: “-javaagent:/lib/agent/appengine-agent.jar”
• Seem to have gotten rid of the Spock version complaint by installing the Groovy Eclipse Plugin 1.8 Feature. Whew, that was really frustrating to deal with.
• Adding the -javaagent flag solved my inability to start up the server from Eclipse. Followed advice of this page: http://www.pakzilla.com/2009/12/07/upgrading-to-google-app-engine-java-sdk-1-2-8/ . Woohoo!
• Editing the build.gradle file seems quite wild-west. For example, I wanted to add a new Maven repository for Objectify. The documentation (http://gradle.org/current/docs/userguide/artifact_dependencies_tutorial.html#defineRemoteMavenRepo) says you can do something like this:

  repositories {
      maven {
          url "http://repo.mycompany.com/maven2"
      }
  }

  But it doesn’t work. This DOES work:

  repositories {
      mavenRepo urls: 'http://repo.mycompany.com/maven2'
  }

  I hate not being able to trust documentation. And as it appears these repository handlers are pluggable, there is no mention of any specific implementations in the reference ( http://gradle.org/current/docs/dsl/org.gradle.api.Project.html#org.gradle.api.Project:repositories(groovy.lang.Closure) ) … grrr!!!

A memory suddenly flashed in my mind – one of those indelible instants. Walking down some street in Cuenca, I saw a beggar sitting quietly by the side of the road. I can’t recall exactly, but he had some disabling deformity. Quietly is important – he seemed almost contented, completely at ease. He said nothing.

I had two dimes and a quarter in my pocket. I took the two dimes and pressed them into his hand.

That was the crucial moment. The way he received the coins from me was so special – it was so gentle and innocent, like an infant curling its fingers around your pinky, not knowing why – just something to grasp softly. It was as if the money melted away, and all that was left was the intention to give, just the idea of giving floating there in the air between us. Not even gratitude in his response – not even the seeking that is inherent in gratitude. Simply the acceptance of a flow. I have never had someone receive something from me like this.

Immediately I felt vexed. Why had I only given him the dimes, and not the quarter? What was the use of that lousy quarter to me anyway? Just what sort of miser was I? And then …

Just how do we decide who we give to, and how much? Why is it we give our friends much, those who typically are not lacking in material things, yet begrudge the needy of little? And a stranger can become a friend in an instant – one moment we feel we would never give him anything, and the next we are ready to invite him into our home! How can this change of heart be reconciled? Is there rhyme or reason to how these lines are drawn?

In Quito, I was walking down the street, and a lady was passing by. She had a scowl on her face, and was looking at nothing in particular. I thought, my, what a distasteful person! Yet for some reason I decided to smile at her. This was a little unusual in the sense that it is always easier to smile at someone who is already smiling, or who at least appears receptive.

Seeing my smile directed at her, suddenly, her expression completely changed! The scowl erased, her expression transformed with a broad, beaming smile! No trace of anything but joy?!

I was shocked! – I couldn’t believe it! – how utterly total the change was. I could not believe this was the same person who had just conveyed the essence of a dark thundercloud. Are we all like this – we teleport from this state of mind to that, this emotion to the other, this understanding of the world to that? Like a toad that jumps away every time you reach out to grab it – there is no pattern, all is changeable and uncertainty? The mysterious woman who calls Mr. Wind-Up Bird … her voice would change without warning …

An article in Harper’s a while back proposed an idea which I instantly saw truth in – Americans – and all people really – have an honest desire to do good, to enact philanthropy. But something in the fabric of society, in the confluence of expectations or whatever, is blocking us from being able to carry out our altruistic intent. It’s a double whammy – we feel crappy because our desire to be good is never fulfilled, only frustrated – and the good deeds themselves never get done, to the detriment of others and the environment.

Indeed, you can’t do anything right when you do good. It’s never good enough. When you do something nice, the feeling immediately gets diluted with the realization that you didn’t go as far as you could have – you could have been nicer, more generous of your time / energy / resources. The devilish seed has somehow been planted – you always second-guess anything that might be construed as good. Was it enough? Was it truly selfless? (It only has value if it was?) Doing good is a logical workout, and an exhausting one … to the point that it seems less tiresome to not even bother …

I would like to see things from the vantage point of a beggar. Not the angsty, unsettled beggar who is grasping and conniving, a “striving beggar”. Not that contradiction – how ridiculous it sounds! although we have all met them. But the beggar who has seen and accepted and merged with the vicissitudes of people, their moods, their motives, their emotions. Who has through this interactive experience come to understand changeability in the core of his being. Who completely accepts that sometimes people are, and sometimes people are not.

A beggar like this has seen many things, and can impart wisdom with a single, guileless brush of the hand. A beggar like this, in reality, is rich.

What cost me my life, what turned it into that empty shell, I believe, was something in the light I saw at the bottom of the well – that intense light of the sun that penetrated straight down to the very bottom of the well for ten or twenty seconds. It would come without warning, and disappear just as suddenly. But in that momentary flood of light I saw something – saw something once and for all – that I could never see again as long as I lived. And having seen it, I was no longer the same person I had been.
Lieutenant Mamiya, Wind-Up Bird 208

The penetration of the vertical line, just a ray of light coming into your darkness of horizontal life, is the beginning of enlightenment.

You will look the same but you will not be the same. Those who have a clarity of seeing, to them you will not look the same either – and at least for yourself, you will never look the same and you can never be the same. You will be in the world, but the world will not be in you.
Osho, Maturity 90