Entry the first

Reading (on train): Control of Nature
Reading (last night): The 'way of the icecube' passage in Nothing Special
Eating: cereal for breakfast, a larabar at 11, a Chop't East Hampton Cobb at the desk for lunch

Just back from the gym, where I did 30' at 3.2mph, on a 15 incline, and 150# pulldowns, 2 2 2 2. The long hard road to being able to do a pullup begins. I am following the one hundred pushups program, on the easiest setting, for pulldowns, with the hope that I will be able to crank up the pulldown amount and/or lose weight to the point where the two numbers converge and pullups will happen. I actually found the pulldowns pretty easy, although I wouldn't have wanted to do more than two in a set. The walking was ok, although I started to feel desperate / caged by the end - an email telling me that JS had called did not help there, as I have been totally procrastinating a minor drafting task for her for four days. I still haven't called her back. My legs did not hurt much despite doing a watered-down version of Mark Twight's "easy" workout on Saturday (60 air squats, run 800m, 60 air squats) and running 2 miles with The Wife and La Monstrita on Sunday. I was hurting yesterday but I feel fine now.

I was not so focused this morning. The drafting is not happening and I need to get cracking on the Chinese legal research too. Instead I read about the Dunblane massacre and its perpetrator.

I meditated last night for 16 minutes and will be going up to 17 tonight. I kind of lost my nerve with about a minute to go, cracked my wrist and checked the time, and I'm not sure what triggered the 'spasm' (as Joko, following Benoit, calls it) but I wasn't able to stay with it and having a learning experience. I think it might have been thinking (competitive thoughts) about JB.

I also had this bizarre dream the night before last - I had to meet someone at an inn, which was in Queens. I took a cab over the bridge (from Manhattan) and descended into a kind of sprawling rural slum, with dirt roads and huge overhanging banyan trees, the sort of landscape you'd expect to see in Burma or Cambodia. The road was swarming with streetwalkers, hundreds of them, all clearly Southeast Asian. We got to the inn, which was a little two-and-a-half story farmstead next to the road, and I walked past some more hookers who were sitting around the courtyard and started climbing an exterior ladder to the attic / loft. As I got to the top, I looked down and realized that I had climbed past the two people I was to meet, two Buddhist monks, who were sitting on a porch on the second floor. They noticed me at the same time, and gassho'd, and I gassho'd back, feeling incredibly relieved and open.