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.

One such Wikipedia loser posts on his user page, “I am presently an unemployed Aerospace Engineer …”. Oh guardian of objectivity, if you are unemployed, how can you be an Aerospace Engineer?

• 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!!!

The sweat beads instantly on my skin when the wind sweeps in, hot and heavy; nevermind that I’ve just rinsed off with a cold shower. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken such a leisurely pace on two wheels. The yellow machine moves at a crawl, never rushed or out of breath. Its bones creak and clatter as I pedal; I grip the unsheathed metal ends, because the rubber grips have migrated towards the center of the handlebars, and they seem content to remain there. (The whole thing wobbles as if the earth were shaking if I use them instead.)

The soft serve place is called “Sweet Spot”. When I pull in, there’s a car at the drive-thru window, and a family of six seated at one of the hexagonal benches, enjoying – mother, father, and four daughters, including the red-faced little one who gets a slushie one strawful at a time. I get a small cone with vanilla and mint Andes pieces, for $1.85 . Two pretty girls hold down the fort, smartly closing the window shutters each time they move away from the counter. Probably a summer job. It should be shaded where I sit down, but the sun is so low its rays cut right under the roof.

A little later, I’m drifting down the shoulder with a lime green HyVee bag slung over my right shoulder. It’s got chips, hummus, water, an organic avocado, and rectangles of juicy watermelon inside. It’s Sunday, so the cars are driving even slower than usual, and most family-owned stores are closed. I stop by at a gas station to get some change – quarters I need for the laundry machines in the basement. (A dollar to wash, a dollar to dry.) A boy who would seem like a tough guy elsewhere, smiles disarmingly as he passes, and says, “Hi!”

When I get back to the visitor’s dorm, I turn on the room AC immediately, throw my clothes into the wash downstairs (the quarters are stuck at first; however, pumping the coin release magically produces two more quarters than I put in!), and return to enjoy the avocado and chips, and of course watermelon. The avocado is much softer than I remember it seeming in the store, but when I open it, it’s perfectly ripe inside. It’s getting dark out, and I’ve closed my window. The screen is busted – there’s a gaping hole at the bottom. (It’s fine during the day, but, as I found out last night, leaving it open in darkness will surely usher in unintended guests …)

Somehow, at this point, I’m inspired to write my first blog post in who-knows-how-long (without looking).

How can you call that love!

Do I remind myself, or counsel another?
In this dream,
do I call out to every conflicted lover
who shields her eyes from nature
in the name of constancy?
Or is this voice raised against my own fear?
Yet another possibility -
a war cry against all we are taught to hope for.