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i am not my khakis

"You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."

This morning i woke up and spent 4 hours agonizing over a choice. the weather has dropped to the low 20s and i have purchased two winter coats thinking i would return one and this morning was the day i was supposed to return one. the problem is that i wanted both of them and the decision took so long (and is ongoing) because of my desire and need to define myself by my possessions. i don't blame the anxiety on the rucksack life, but i do think it has made things worse.

when i was in college, this would no be a problem. i would have two winter coats. i didn't need that one coat which expressed who i was, that would be impossible, but maybe the conglomeration of coats and jackets would be a good representation of who i was even if no one article was.

it seems like money. the people who have it all and the people who have nothing are most satisfied. the people who buy and consume everything and the people who have no possessions have the least amount of stress. and right now, i feel like i am right in the middle.

it's been a long time

i will not even begin to cover everything that has happened since july, so in short:

i made a last minute decision to move to Pittsburgh and go to CMU for a Master's in Human Machine Interaction. I still don't have my loans. Me and Clarissa are separated.

more later.

Tobis, and why I shouldn't wear a bandana anymore

It must send the wrong message. I was sitting enjoying my fruit salad. It was hot, so I had my bandana twisted, soaked with water, and wrapped around my neck to keep me cool--one trick that has stuck around since Peace Corps. A man of about forty, wearing a violet headwrap, asks me for some food. I hand him my banana and then a series of questions follows:

Can I sit down?
my first mistake was saying yes. The rest of my answers are pretty obvious and don't need to be written down.

Can I be your wife?
Then can I be your faggot?
Are you Puerto Rican?
Do you have a light?
Where are you going?
Don't you think its wrong to use the bookstore's waterfountain without buying anything?
What is your name?
Do you have a wife?
Can I have that bandana?
Where do you live?
Does your mother wear make-up?
Does your father keep track of who you talk to?
Can I come into the bathroom with you?
Do you have a light?
Can you take me to get a light?
Can I shake your hand?

Of course there were a few statements, inbetween all of the questions:
I am a vampire.
My mother was raped by 50,000 men.
I am a proctor for the army.
My name is Tobis.
My name is Lawrence, because Demons want to keep me dead.
There are 15 demons, one of them is ghetto, a few are royalty.
I used to think I was a transvestite because my vagina is so small.

At the end, I made the second mistake to shake his hand. He wouldn't let go, and eventually I pulled my hand away from him, went to the bookstore and washed it as thoroughly as I have ever washed anything in my life.

20 Minutes of Meditation: Everything Excites

I know what your probably thinking... "A post about meditation is the MOST boring idea ever." But, I have actually had just as many great life altering inspirations and realization from sitting for 20 minutes as I have had from college or therapy or sky diving. A few days ago I started to meditation again. Over the past year and a half I have been meditating and quitting and meditating and quitting ad naseum. I try to stay consistent but to sit in silence focusing on my breath for 20 minutes everyday must be the hardest thing ever. I remember when I first started, terror would enter my mind after about 10 minutes. It was a strange experience, but it felt like for the first time I came in contact with my true naked self, and that self was scary. For 21 years, thoughts, experiences, sensations clouded my mind and kept me occupied and distracted from the truth, and coming in contact with that truth was like getting pulled out of the matrix at too old an age.

Anyway, after starting again, I realized that everything excites. Every thought, every feeling, every physical input seems to excite. Of course your mileage may vary, but once I finally settled into a relaxed state of concentrating on the breath, for the first time, instead of watching a thought arise in my head and following that thought, I noticed what happened to my body as the thought arouse, and it turned out that my breath quickened. I watched my body instead of my awareness several times, with smells and sounds and random thoughts, and almost always, my breath quickened. It made me wonder if our entire life is filled with constant bombardments of excitement, because for some reason it doesn't seem healthy. It made me wonder if, since we do think when we sleep, are we still excited at night? Anyway, back to the "real" world.

Cancel T-Mobile With No Fees Thanks to Rate Hikes Several Months Ago!

If your were like me, you probably saw an article in March telling you how to cancel your T-Mobile service because of the new 15 cent price for SMS, but were too late. I just saw this article two days ago, and was seriously happy until I read the TMobile Terms and realized that if the article was posted on March 22nd, and TMobile says you have 14 days to get out of the plan from the time of the notice I was seriously out of the time frame. Anyway, I decided to give it a try, and sure enough I was told that I missed the boat. But I didn't stop there. I asked the rep how I was informed and he said through my normal monthly bill. I then said that I got electronic billing and had no paper bill. Apparently, TMobile never told use tree hugging techno junkies who do all their billing online that there was a rate hike.

So if you want to get out of your tmobile contract, maybe to hop on some of that tasty tasty EVDO, and you get all your bills electronically, give it a shot, it's not too late!

GTD Tip: Don't Save Bookmarks

At least not in the usual places, such as del.icio.us or in your favorite web browser. I thought about this when there was a recent thread on Lifehacker.com (I think) about where people keep their bookmarks. If your a GTD nut like me, you should know that simple is best. Have the fewest data capture devices, pare down your inboxes, and keep all reference material in one spot. Repeat: keep ALL reference material in one spot. What does that mean? That means your bookmarks shouldn't be separate from the rest of your system! If all your reference material is in a wiki, then why keep bookmarks apart?

Four months ago I decided to clean out my del.icio.us account completely, all 350 links worth. What I did was I integrated those links into my already standing reference system, which is just one HUGE OmniOutliner file. If I find links that are relevant to a project, why not just dump that link right into your OmniOutliner file or folder? Then on top of having your bookmarks either in reference, someday/maybe, or projects, you can also do what I do, and turn your Firefox bookmarks into a new inbox. For me it works. If I see something on the interweb I think is interesting, I bookmark it and go about my business. Every few days I open all the bookmarks into different tabs and go one by one trashing, moving to Omni, or doing immediately (like signing up for yet another networking site).

Anyway, that's my method, and I'm not sure why all other GTDer's aren't doing something similar.