Q & A

Morning meditation:

Oof. Today was one loooong hour-long hour. I was really impatient for some reason, even more than usually. Maybe it's because today I meditated at ~11:30AM instead of the usual 9:00AM, and my brain had already had time to sink into the afternoon mindset, apparently one of ADD. Also, there were lots of distracting sounds today. Planes, trains, automobiles, humming refrigerators, ringing cellphones, garbage pickups, the walls crackling from minute changes in temperature, pretty much everything you could ask for except for the ice cream truck and carolers. And Santa Claus.

I did have a couple of interesting moments when I felt curiously misaligned with my body, as if I had drifted over a couple of inches, but was also simultaneously in the original spot. It was a tricky feeling to hold onto, because the moment I'd notice it, I'd snap right back into place. The day I can hold it I'll probably end up blaming it on excessive calorie intake.

I was thinking yesterday that God is a lot like the Placebo Effect. It doesn't really matter whether he's a sugar pill or an antibiotic or a big jolly bearded guy in a cloud, riding a dinosaur. If you manage to believe in him, even if you're tricked into doing so, you can extract benefit for yourself. Or harm of course. Let's forget about God for a second, and just think about the Placebo Effect. Basically it says that whatever you believe, happens. Like, if you take a sugar pill thinking it's a cancer cure, you have a 99.99% chance of being cured (Note: figures are not to scale). Or if you jump out of an airplane and believe you have a parachute, but you really don't, then you're totally screwed. Actually...ignore that last one. OK, if you believe in Santa, your parents will give you presents addressed from him. If you believe in a wrathful and vengeful God, I will come shoot you in the head. If my physician tells me my lymph nodes are OK, I will believe her, and they'll stop spraying fountains of blood. So you see that the Placebo Effect is very powerful. And now I forget where I was going with this.

A joke my friend Pei wrote about me:

It happened as mark was in primary school...
teacher : mark, how come u r late again!!
mark: I met a lost 3 year-old kid by the railway on the way here.
teacher: come on... pls use a better story next time.
mark: I did send him home.
teacher: where is his home?
mark: ya when I asked him that, he was pointing to the railway. So I put him on the rails.
teacher: .......

(my reaction)
Mark: that's good!
Pei: when I was thinking of u, I thought, mark, he is a baby-killer... here we go...

A joke I wrote about my friend Pei:

Pei: talk dirty to me, I love it when you talk dirty to me.
Mark: mm...your apartment's so dirty, so dirty, I'm going to go clean it right now!
Pei: yea baby! you know what turns me on!

Yea...that may take some background to understand.

And one more about Pei (we're collaborating on a joke book that only the two of us will understand):
Pei is walking down the street. She sees a 5 year old kid and his mother. The kid must have been misbehaving, because the mother is beating the crap out of him, spanking him like there's no tomorrow.
Pei: ah...I wish I had a kid.

(today, in the kitchen)
Mark is peeling a clementine. Michelle walks up and puts her hand out, demanding some. Mark shoves the whole clementine in his mouth.
Michelle: Mom! Mark stole my clementine!

I tried writing some more jokes today, but in a different style. I tried posing a question and then thinking of responses from different people, with the responses caricaturing the answeree. I can't really tell if it's funny, and you'd have to know the people reasonably well to understand what I'm getting at, but it made me crack up when I wrote them:

Question: You have 24 hours to live, what do you do?
Mom: 24 hours...that's 12 movies!
Dad: 24 hours...that's eight 3-hour meditations. No, wait! Twenty-four 1-hour meditations!
Mark: 24 hours...can I at least get an extra half-hour to blog about it after?
Grandma: 24 hours...do you know what happened in Israel in only the last 3 hrs? No? Well let me describe it to you in gory detail for the next 24.
Boris: 24 hou...(snore)
Pei: 24 hours...that's enough time to try 240 new sex positions!
Manlin: 24 hours...how fast do they deliver chocolate?
Zhang Xiao Yi: 24 hours...damn, my parents are going to kill me when I tell them!
Chun: 24 hours...OK, first 5 minutes - call my Mom and Dad to tell them the news. The next 23 hours and 50 minutes - plan out the remaining 5 minutes. Aha! Not a minute gone to waste!
Tina: 24 hours...wow, life sucks.
Mario: 24 hours...that's time enough to learn 3 new Chinese words, forget 5 Russian ones, and start learning three new languages!
Igor: 24 hours...Renata! What am I doing for the next 24 hours!?
Frank: 24 hours...no problem. I have a business plan just for the occasion! It's a franchise. We're going to have 12 stores open within the first 10 hrs and we should be up to McDonald's scale by hour 24.
Serge: 24 hours...that's enough time to build a successful family, right?
Perry: 24 hours...convert as many Christians as I can to antheism. Now that's time well spent.
Lucy: 24 hours...bull. I bet I can live longer than that.

Question: What will you do when your son's begging you for a new toy he doesn't deserve?
Mom: don't give it to him, but then cry myself to sleep at night.
Dad: don't give it to him. Instead, make fun of him till he develops a serious psychological disorder.
Michelle: I have a son? That means I had sex! EWWWW!!!
Grandma: buy him every toy in the store. Oh, wait! Did you say son or grandson?
Mark: my son? Did the condom break? This is a completely unrealistic situation! Fine, I'd probably go get a DNA test then, see if he's really my son. There's no toy in existence that a son of mine wouldn't deserve. Ah, he's already so much like his father.
Chun: tell him he can have the toy in installments. Get him planning his life early on!
Mario: how old is he? 5? Trade him in for five 1-year-olds. No! Half of a ten-year-old!
Pei: give it to him. I love him, so why wouldn't I buy it? Wait, that's not how you raise children?
Zhang Xiao Yi: Chinese children know better than to beg for toys. I knew I shouldn't have married an American. They're inferior!
Manlin: play mind games with him. "You really want that toy? You don't not really want it? You wouldn't want not to not want to want to not have it?" Hehe.
Tina: toys? Yay! Mine mine mine mine! Phew, OK, sad now.
Igor: oh Christ. Renata!
Frank: wait, how did he get out of his cage?
Serge: buy myself a new car. And a new house. And then work harder and earn more money so I can buy the toy. Man, where does the money go!?
Perry: you know those noise-canceling headphones? What did you say? I can't hear you.
Lucy: beat the little devil half to death. Studies show it's optimal for his development.

Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Mom: because we're vegetarian.
Dad: it's a reincarnation of a nomadic tribesman, come on dude, ask me something harder.
Mark: I told you ten times already! Don't tell me any news unless it's good news! I've heard this all a million times. People are dying, there's war and povery, blah blah blah.
Michelle: a chicken? Where?!? I'm scared. Wait, are chickens dogs or insects?
Grandma: a chicken? Do you know that ten people were blown up in Israel today?
Igor: Renata, didn't we discuss this the other day? What did we decide?
Chun: aha! All part of my plan for getting into medical school! Check!
Frank: I don't know, but someone grab that chicken! The chicken/turkey exchange rate is climbing faster than my blood pressure!
Paul: hahaha! Someone saw a chicken! That's so crazy, man, that's so crazy!
Mario: I don't know, but I trust it. I'm getting outta here.
Pei: chicken? Who cares about chickens? Ask me about fish.
Tina: crap, I had this at my Google interview...and I remember getting it right...what was it!?...ugh!
Manlin: mmffhhahmm...sorry, was eating chocolate. Umm... (pause) did you get that? My MSN died. No? I said "maybe there's better Internet connection over there?"
Serge: a chicken crossed my road!? Where is it? Give me that chicken, we have some words to say to each other if you know what I mean. Quickly, before I forgive it!
Perry: don't even get me started. And no, chickens were not created by Jesus, they were created by a little thing called evolution, heard of it?
Lucy: did you know that chicken blood is green? I swear. It's true. Fine, look it up nay-sayer. It's not true? No way!