So many people (Carolyn most of all) have been riding my ass to go back to school to get my ticket punched. The idea of going back to school has always seemed like a practice of circular logic. When someone told me that I needed to go back to school, I would ask them, “Why?“. They would reply that if I did go back to school, I’d be able to do what I want. I would then reply that I’m already doing what I want and that shelters, centers and programs aren’t built by initials after one’s name. I’d also then point out that when it comes to trans stuff, I’m the one that’s gotten pulled into court as an “expert” on TG issues, I’m the one that put programs together and that I’m just one of many folks that are regularly brought in to teach people with letters after their names about TG issues. I can argue why Maslow was wrong and I can say that given a choice between Jung and Gestalt schools, I’ll take Gestalt (mostly due to my exploration of Buddhist theories of anatta, the 5 skandhas and vipassana practice).

In some large ways, I tend to think that school has nothing of significance to offer. This argument has held water for a long time now.

Recently, Carolyn has changed tactics and said that if I hope to make systemic changes that I have to be a part of the club. In other words, people with letters after their names only listen to other people with letters after their names. I’ve found this to be true to some extent. I recall sitting down with a group of officials with the State of Texas to talk about programmatic efficacy in the language of Jargon. Toward the end of the meeting, the main State Rep asked me which school I graduated from and was visibly suprised when I said that I didn’t have a degree. I also noted that he treated me differently for the rest of the meeting.  The idea that Carolyn has been pushing is that while I can dedicate my life to putting Band-Aids on TGs after they have been run over by a dysfunctional system, I could do much better by influencing the dysfunctional system on top of indulging my Band-Aid fetish.

This is the best argument I’ve heard for jumping through hoops school offers.

I’ve been thinking about this for months now. I’m still pompous enough to really believe that 90% of what I will attempt to remember for a test will be a total waste of time and energy and only matter in that it will help me get letters after my name so that I will be taken seriously by the shallow people who seemingly believe in the following Truths as made clear by poet Wendell Barry:

1. Educated people are more valuable than other people because education is a value-adding industry.

2. Educated people are better than other people because education improves people and makes them good.

3. The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money.

4. The place where education is to be used is called “your career.”

5. Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, or counted does not exist.

6. The so-called humanities probably do not exist. But if they do, they are useless. But whether they exist or not or are useful or not, they can sometimes be made to support a career.

7. Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.

8. The sign of exceptionally smart people is that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their “field” or only to themselves. This is very impressive and is known as “professionalism.”

9. The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.

10. The mark of a good teacher is that he or she spends most of his or her time doing research and writes many books and articles.

11. The mark of a good researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.

12. A great university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than teachers.

13. Computers make people even better and smarter than they were made by previous thingamabobs Or if some people prove incorrigibly wicked or stupid or both, computers will at least speed them up.

14. The main thing is, don’t let education get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don’t stay home with them and get in their way. Don’t give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don’t teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.

15. A good school is a big school.

16. Disarm the children before you let them in.

17. Of course, education is for the Future, and the Future is one of our better-packaged items and attracts many buyers. (The past, on the other hand, is hard to sell; it is, after all, past.) The Future is where we’ll all be fulfilled, happy, healthy, and perhaps will live and consume forever. It may have some bad things in it, like storms or floods or earthquakes or plagues or volcanic eruptions or stray meteors, but soon we will learn to predict and prevent such things before they happen. In the Future, many scientists will be employed in figuring out how to prevent the unpredictable consequences of the remaining unpreventable bad things. There will always be work for scientists.

Anyways… Last night was interesting in that it was a lesson in Karma.

Since Jenny is in Thailand, she asked me to use her car while she is away (otherwise it would have sat unattended for months on end). Since I tend to have issues with my car from time to time, I really appreciated the offer….

I have a old drunk that lives above me. I like him and we talk from time to time. So, I came straight home after the meeting last night. When I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed that he was stumbling around outside his front door. I thought to myself that he must be drunk again. So, I parked the car and walked to the trunk of the car to get my bag out. Normally, I keep my work bag in the car but for some reason, I chose to put it in the trunk when I got out to go to the Thursday Social. When I pulled the bag out, I noticed a first aid kit in the trunk and remembered that Ray had tolk me about it when he had brought Jenny’s car to me a while back.

As I walked up to my apartment, I noticed that my upstairs neighbor was sitting outside his door or the ground with his head hung down. Then I noticed that his window was broken. I asked him if everything was okay… But he just started to mumble something. I walked upstairs to find him sitting in a pool of his own coagulating blood. His shirt was covered in blood, his pants were soaked with blood and the pool of blood that he was sitting in was quite large.

I asked him what happened and he said that he had tried to break the window to get into his house because he had locked himself out… But that he had cut himself. He raised up his arm… and he had severed the vain that runs along the inside of your elbow. I was amazed at how calm I was. He had what looked like stings of meat hanging off of his arm. Anyway, I told him to apply pressure to his arm and went back to Jenny’s car to get the first aid kit. I walked back upstairs and bandaged up his arm an elevated it. Then I called 911 even though he told me that he didn’t want to go to the hospital. So, to make a long story short… The ambulance took him to the hospital. He came back home today and thanked me. He showed me his stitches and told me that the paramedics told the doctors that he was only alive because I had bandaged him up and got him to a hospital.

The only reason I had access to an emergency kit was because Jenny loaned her car to me. My personal first aid kit consists of a box of Band-Aids that’s 2 years old and a bottle of hormones. So… that was my girl-scout moment of the day.

I was wasting some time and stopped by nordstrom.com, saw this and thought it was so funny that I had to take a screenshot. Anyway, I thought I would share this with you all:

So what is so interesting about this page you might ask? Irony says I!

“Samsara” is the Buddhist term for the state of delusion from one moment to another – the complete inability to see the truth of the way thing are… to not really know what causes your suffering. Here is the actual page.

Since I’m a Buddhist, I like hearing Dharma talks and since I listened to the following talk, I’m thinking about my primary beliefs and where they came from. In Buddhism, one of the main ideas is that one should never accept anything upon faith. No holy teachings, no teacher and no philosophy should ever be allowed to convince you that you need faith in order to understand something. Faith leads to a suffering.

How many beliefs – about myself and the world around me – were formed, not upon my own direct experience, but on faith in what someone told me? At one point, I fervently believed that devils and gods could tell me what to do or give me what I want as long as I did what they wanted me to do. I used to believe that Buddhism was the best way to gain an understanding of one’s self. As I heard in a Dharma talk, “All beliefs – ALL of them – will always be proven true.” If I believe that the world is flat, I will certainly find evidence to back up my view. If I believe that a man named Jesus or Ala is the only way to salvation, I will surely find that I am correct.

Beliefs define our sense of self and when we fight for our belief, we actually defending who we think we are. This is why so many are willing to die for their belief. It is a big reason why we are willing to emotionally harm and physically injury others. Just as any personal belief can be proven true, any belief can be proven false, which means that most everyone’s sense of self is very vulnerable. This is why my Dharma teachers strive for “emptiness” (AKA, openness ) and it is why I like to listen to Dharma… To be reminded that I can only count on compassionate knowledge – that which has been tested by me and found to be beneficial to myself and to others.

The Buddha asked Malunkyaputta to imagine a man who had been wounded by a poisoned arrow. The Buddha told him to them imagine that the wounded man’s friends and relatives sent for a surgeon but when the surgeon arrives, the wounded man says: ‘I will not let the surgeon pull out this arrow until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble or a brahmin (priest), or a merchant or a worker…tall, short, or middle height…brown or golden-skinned…whether he lives in such a village or town or city…whether the bow that wounded me was a long bow or a cross bow…’ and so on.

The Buddha then explained that before all the wounded man’s questions would have been answered he would have died. The Buddha’s point is that getting caught up in what isn’t really important instead of putting energy into what is important is… basically useless.

Today I am struggling with understanding the desire to complain about something without having a corresponding desire to address the issue. The above Buddhist story has always stuck with me and I found myself thinking about it today. I was recently talking to someone who expressed some frustration with me because they felt as though I wasn’t listening to them because after they expressed frustration with an issue they frequently have, I began to turn the conversation towards solutions to the source of the frustration.

When I talk about a problem, I want someone to listen attentively to my problem, have what I said restated by the person I’m listening to so that I feel understood and then I want to work on solutions because I feel the other has a good understanding of my problem. It seems that to do otherwise would be an attempt on my part to keep my frustration… or worse, increase my frustration.

My part in all of this is that I tend to want to save people. Saving people isn’t my job (ok, to a degree, it is… but you know what I mean). My job is to resolve my own dramas; to find and maintain balance in the face of a world filled with drama – without hubris. The way that I work with problems is not the way others work with problems and I think I just need to learn to be okay with that fact. My own confusion of frustration is tied to my want to change someone who doesn’t want to change LOL!