I miss having friends over to watch football. I should start enjoying sports in more social environments.

Brushing up on my JavaScript today. Gotta actually get some stuff done for a website I’m working on.

By the way, I find it depressing that I missed two days right after I noted that I had a streak going. I jinxed it! Oh well, let’s try it again.

Hey, look, I have a blogging streak going. And… that’s all I’m going to note for today. Metablogging, I guess.

Soul Calibur IV >>>>>>>>>>>> Super Smash Brothers Brawl

So so so so so glad I didn’t sit DeAngelo Williams, who scored 29 points for me. This, along with Ray Rice’s 30 points, Visanthe Shiancoe’s two TDs, and Green Bay’s shutout has given me a huge lead. I’m up 131 to 80-something. And, I still have Philip Rivers to play. I’m running up the score like the Patriots.

P.S. Eagles lost to the Raiders. Wtf?
P.P.S. Picked up Shiancoe as a free agent last Friday. Definitely my most genius move of the year. Or really, my only genius move of the year.

DeAngelo Williams has been a fantasy bust. I’m highly tempted to bench him, and put in LeSean McCoy, because I really like his matchup against Oakland, and I’m pretty damn desperate for a win. I wish I had watched either of them play so I could get a better idea of what to do. I’m probably not going to bench a stud, even if he is struggling. Look what Roddy White did for me last week! (Didn’t get me enough points to win the game…)

I’m nearing the end of my singular effort to meditate every morning. I’m getting close to the end of week 4, and at 30 days, I’ll just arbitrarily declare that I have a new habit. It’s time to start plotting for my next habit-change, and I worry that it may be too ambitious to work, but I’ll test it out anyway. My goal is to conquer my internet addiction, to limit my time on social network sites, blogs, and sports sites. I’m currently developing a plan, which I’ll reveal in due time. I figure chronicling this on my weblog will help keep me accountable.

I’ve forgotten how IE is so frustrating. Well, it’s not as bad as IE6, but I still hate internet explorer.

When Odysseus faced the Sirens, he had his men tie him to the mast. He didn’t chastise himself for a lack of self-control. Perhaps cunning is more important than willpower.

I’m reading this: Matthew Berry’s Week 6 pickups. Yeah, it’s fantasy football advice, but if you don’t care about fantasy football, I still strongly suggest you read the intro. It’s about how many times he failed on his way to success, and it’s pretty inspiring.

I’m watching this, which my friend Trevor shared on facebook, on how mass protest in America has been neutered:

Now that I’m not in college, it suddenly requires more effort to meet new people. What are some good ways to meet new people?

Calvin Johnson and Desean Jackson just scored a combined 0 points for my fantasy football team. Haha. This one may get ugly.

EDIT: Evidently Calvin Johnson got injured. It’s nice how just playing a bit of poker has started to inure me to bad beats.

Wow, Frank Rich is on fire in this column: Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco. He burns McCain and makes a good case against a troop escalation in Afghanistan. My favorite line:

Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is poorer, even larger and more populous, more fragmented and less historically susceptible to foreign intervention.

Let’s hope that Obama tries to live up to the Nobel Peace Prize through his actions in Afghanistan. Yet given Obama’s history with foreign policy, I am skeptical. It will probably require more than a prize to change his mind; it will require a loud citizenry.

My experience with Adsense was a failure. It can’t read comics, and even if it could, I doubt the ads would be relevant. I just made a special k pun, would you like to buy some cereal? I wasn’t making any revenue, so I decided to give Project Wonderful a shot. So far, so good, I think. I’ll be making a larger number of pennies per day.

I’ve also moved forward on future t-shirt sales. I just ordered one for myself to see how it turns out. If all goes well, I’ll be taking pre-orders within the next few weeks.

It’s amazing when a thought dissolves into nothingness. First, you’re thinking really hard about something, and then… there’s nothing. No thought. The old thought has vanished. This is an impressive ability to have, and meditation will help me cultivate it.

I had once come to the conclusion that a negative thought pattern must be replaced with a positive thought pattern. Admonishing oneself to “Stop it!” rarely achieves its desired result. Focusing on negative behaviors isn’t a good way to get rid of them, so it’s better to compliment oneself on the positives. However, there now appears, to me, another path: Stop thinking.

Yelling “Stop it!” at a runaway train will still get you run over. But imagine standing in front of the train, silently outstretching your hand, and then having the train disappear. Thoughts, after all, are not solid objects. With much practice, this trick would become effortless.

I return to this:

When fighting with enemies, if you get to feeling snarled up and are making no progress, you toss your mood away and think in your heart that you are starting everything anew. As you get the rhythm, you discern how to win. This is “becoming new.”

Anytime you feel tension and friction building up between yourself and others, if you change your mind that very moment, you can prevail by the advantage of radical difference. This is “becoming new.”

Careful practice of meditation will make it much easier to “toss your mood away.”

I have several half-finished books laying around. My goal for this month is to finish them. And I need to refrain from picking up new books/old books while I’m doing this.

I joined the twitter today. You can follow chalkboardman. My plan is to just post my random thoughts. If people want to know when updates are up for The Chalkboard Manifesto, then they can join the facebook group, subscribe to my rss feed, or just check the website.

I went home thinking that Brett Favre had broken my heart again. First, he beat the 49ers, and now he was going to crush my fantasy hopes. Instead I log-on to find out that… I tied? Did this really happen?

2-2 looks much better than 1-3. But 1-2-1? What does that even mean? I’m not sure if I should feel depressed or relieved.

Well, I guess it’s better than a loss. Thank you Clay Matthews — a USC product — for that touchdown. Everybody else on my fantasy team, except Rivers, was allergic to the end zone.

UPDATE: This morning ESPN took away two points from me. I’m 1-3. %#$^&!

I recently re-read The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. These passages stuck out for me:

The long sword seems heavy and unwieldy to everyone at first, but everything is like that when you first take it up: a bow is hard to draw, a halberd is hard to swing. In any case, when you become accustomed to each weapon, you become stronger at the bow, and you acquire the ability to wield the long sword.

“Mountain and sea” means that it is bad to do the same thing over and over again. You may have to repeat something once, but it should not be done a third time.

When you try something on an opponent, if it does not work the first time, you will not get any benefit out of rushing to do it again. Change your tactics abruptly, doing something completely different. If that still does not work, then try something else.

Thus the science of martial arts involves the presence of mind to act as the sea when the enemy is like a mountain, and act as a mountain when the enemy is like a sea. This requires careful reflection.

When fighting with enemies, if you get to feeling snarled up and are making no progress, you toss your mood away and think in your heart that you are starting everything anew. As you get the rhythm, you discern how to win. This is “becoming new.”

Anytime you feel tension and friction building up between yourself and others, if you change your mind that very moment, you can prevail by the advantage of radical difference. This is “becoming new.”

I am down DeAngelo Williams, Roddy White, and DeSean Jackson. I still predict victory. Go Banana Grabbers!

One of the laptops in the household wasn’t connecting to the internet. This was curious because my laptop connected just fine, even when placed in the same location. I had no idea what the issue was. The settings were correct, the password was correct, and I was running out of things to try. After 10 minutes of dicking around with the laptop, I went downstairs and unplugged the router. I put the power cord back in, waited a few minutes for all the lights to go on, and then went back upstairs. The internet was now working fine.

I suppose this story could be interpreted as a parable. During negotiations, maybe when the problem seems intractable, talk with a different person. Or, try fixing the problem from the other end when one is doing any sort of problem-solving. Maybe the way I solved this problem says something profound.

Alternatively, maybe it just means that whenever you have any problem with the internet, try resetting the router.

I’m not sure how this politics thing is supposed to work. Someone says something out of line. You get them to apologize. And then what? You get a point for making them apologize? Where exactly can you redeem these points?

Meditation is really hard. When I’m not daydreaming, I’m narrating. But the moments when I snap back to the present moment are a good start. Furthermore, it seems as if I’m on my way to making this a habit. That represents progress, as well.

I really like Mike Singletary:

All I know is right now, when I look at the situation we had yesterday, we go on the road, we play a team, we lose, you come back, you’ve got a choice to make, do you dwell on that – ‘Wow, I wish we would have won the game. Man, I wish we would have done this differently. Man, I wish we would have done that differently.’ No. I think you take it. You’re man enough take it. You chew it. You spit it out. You learn from it and you get ready for the next game. You get ready for the next opportunity. I think winners let it go. Winners move forward. I think losers sit there and just wallow in it and talk about it all week. And, it screws you up for the next opportunity going forward.

I really loved this piece, “Professor Noonan? No Thanks,” attacking Noonan’s writing style.

I particularly enjoyed this paragraph:

Of course, Noonan has spent her career demonstrating that this distrust and disrespect are well-earned. Her writing traffics in the prosaic and the vague. She does not get to the point. Instead, she hovers above the point, looking down in a manner that is supposed to be magisterial and dignified. She sighs softly, clucks her tongue, and tosses words in the general direction of ideas.

That last sentence is gorgeous. It’s a refreshing way to express the idea that her writing is weak. The verb “tossing” is key. I just can feel how weak and absent passion her prose would be.

I went to Davis this weekend, and I didn’t get a chance to make any last-second changes to my fantasy football roster. I have a feeling this “having a life” thing may interfere with fantasy football domination.

I’ve been doing some IT work for this company in Vegas, and today is the first time that something worked on the first try. This being my first time working with Windows Server 2003, I had so many issues figuring out how to get things to work. And not only did one thing work on the first try, but a second thing worked on the first try. Furthermore, this second thing was something that I wasn’t sure would work in the first place. I am so shocked. I must have some luck; I should go play some poker.

Tonight, I line-danced in another man’s shoes.

No, that isn’t a contrived metaphor, but a literal description of how I spent my night. They wouldn’t have let me in wearing my flippy-floppies.

Today’s meditation session wasn’t great. My mind was racing. Sometimes I would take a breath and it would interrupt my thought with emptiness. That felt good.

By the end, I hadn’t achieved the state that I would like, but I did feel really calm. I felt equanimity, which was good, and something I haven’t felt in a long time. I have been craving. And I had been leaning toward a philosophy of constant craving and goal-setting and ambition. I don’t outright reject the latter two, but after feeling equanimity… Hell, it’s a lot better than craving. It may even be more productive, but I’m not sure. Sometimes I write great things when I’m filled with emotion.

Okay, I guess I don’t have to choose to live completely one way or the other. In any case, it would be good to cultivate this equanimity. It feels good to switch things off without distracting one’s self with television. (Note: I still love television.)

Today was fun. I tried out meditation, for like 10 minutes in the morning. I figured I’d try to start small and ease back into it after not doing it for years. I thought about different events, but then tried to focus back on breathing. What was odd, though, was that my mind kept narrating things. I kept thinking about how I’d tell the story of my meditation session. It was not very productive, I’ll tell you that. I think meditation will help me become more mindful and cure some of my resurgent narcissism.

I spent the rest of the day hanging out with my friend. It took us somewhere around 4 hours to film 3 lines. This wasn’t because we were lazy, but because there was a lot of prep to do. Part of it was making hats. At one point, I noted, “You know, if we had jobs, we could just buy hats.” I guess (relative) poverty forces you into creative fixes.

Afterwards, we watched the season premiere of House. I fucking love television. Lately, I’ve been struggling with being authentic. I went on a hike the other day. It was fun, and I want to do more stuff like that. I want to be exciting some days, but I also want to be a guy who uses some nights to just sit at home and enjoy some television. I had a good time watching TV with my friend. I really, really miss my old roommates and watching TV with them.

… well, I’m done writing this. I just realized how much I miss everyone who was in my life back at JHU. Wow.