Stuff I Didnt Know

"The sense of lack can never be satisfied, only transcended."

"How does motivation relate to acceptance? This is subtle and may have to sit with you awhile before it sinks in. When you are motivated to satisfy any desire that comes from a sense of lack, you are essentially rejecting yourself because you are attempting to avoid the feeling of lack. The nature of the dualistic experience is such that no amount of 'satisfaction' will be effective, and the lack is affirmed and perpetuated, instead of being finally transcended."

"Often the attempt to escape from lack through satisfying it in one form or another is not apparent to us. We assume we act normally, we think we have needs, we rationalize our behavior, but the truth is that we are attempting to avoid feelings, rejecting ourselves. After blame, wrong motivation is the next largest area of blindness that keeps us in suppression."

(did you read that? blame keeps us in suppression)

"This type of motivation is referred to in the classical literature as the problem of desire. Most desires are considered as keeping us in bondage. Release from desire, not the satisfaction of desire, is a major part of liberation. Release from desire comes about by processing the desire impulse and whatever negative feelings may be behind it instead of being motivated by them."

"...our efforts are all self-defeating because they affirm and perpetuate the very thing we are trying to avoid. We are trying to avoid one side of the dualistic experience by escaping into the other... When you resist the pain, you stregnthen it by feeding additional energy to it... Simply be aware of your negative moods; accept and experience them. Let them dissolve by neither opposing nor being motivated by them."

"If you understand that you cannot avoid the negative, you will cease to be motivated by it. You will accept it and end its compulsive influence."


Some shrink left me alone with this book "Emotional Clearing" by John Ruskan. I was kind of skeptical but the first few times I opened it were eerie. After having a little internal fit about something one day and doing something kind of rash about it, I sat down with the book to calm my mind and opened randomly to a page that was titled, "Acting Out". Another day I was waiting for my friend to come over to my house and he was 45 minutes late; I was pacing the floor and finally just sat down and randomly opened to the page entitled, "Impatience".

The author blends modern psychoanalytic theory and transpersonal pyschology with eastern philosophy and spirituality. Talk about calling you on your shit and nailing your butt to the wall. It reads like a cross between a fortune cookie and a talk with your Higher Self. Ouch. Here's some more odd nuggets for you to digest, if you can handle.


"The pain that comes as a result of dependency must be accepted and experienced in order to grow beyond dependency - it is the only way."

"Worry is the condition of thinking about feelings instead of feeling the feelings."

Karaoke Rocks

Play this and you will die laughing! You have been warned.

I Will Always Love You


(The video player not work in your Internet Explorer browser so you might want to download a real browser (link) instead and play it from there if you're on IE).

URGENT UPDATE:

Same guy doing "12 Play" by R.Kelly

Ruthless Reviews

I was trying to describe this scene from this random Jean Claude van Damme movie trailer I saw years ago to CC and Tim; I remember the clip from TV years ago and it used to make me pee my pants from laughter every time it came on. JCVD is standing in a kitchen, his flawlessly sculpted posterior facing the camera. Some kind of rocket-launched explosive suddenly comes into frame and his only way to avoid it is to do the splits in mid-air from a perfect standing position so that both of his heels end up on the kitchen counter, perfectly perpendicular to his body, and not a second too soon as the cabinets explode beneath him (I have looked thru every JCVD trailer to find this clip and I can't find it anywhere so if you know which movie its from i would love to know and i wont even tell anyone that you were the one that knew i promise, although i think i have a grand total of 3 readers so process of elimination might implicate which is of course completely beyond my control).

Point being: in trying to find the clip Tim pointed me to RuthlessReviews.com because they have an awesome guide to bad 80's action movies. Score!

Their guide to bad 80's action movies *rocks* because they have nailed the genre and review each film in a formulaic manner so befitting these films. They review them each by breaking them down this way:

Tagline
Entire Story In Fewer Words Than Are In This Sentence
Homoeroticism
Post-Mortem One Liner
Novelty Death
Corpse Count
How Bad Is It Really?
Stupid Political Content
Does It End With An Atomic Blast?
What You Learned

Here's where it gets personal: I realized as i was going thru the reviews that the formula kind of applied to the plot of my last job, now that it is far enough in my rearview mirror to be funny instead of mildly traumatic. Now I won't name names but I think enough of you know the rough outline of the plot for this to be pretty... funny.

Without further ado... here is my Ruthless Review of my last job:


Tagline
"You see, Lauren, /* insert company name */ is different."


Entire Story In Fewer Words Than Are In This Sentence
Lost with no map and the cap'ns gone mad.

Homoeroticism
Cap'n and his first mate, of course ye swine!

Post-Mortem One Liner
"You know I can't comment on that."

Novelty Death
When Josh freakishly predicted his random demise days before it actually took place at the bloody hands of the cap'n. You're freaky, dude.

Corpse Count
Are you counting firings? Or quittings AND firings?

How Bad Is It Really?
If you have to ask, you'll never REALLY understand.

Stupid Political Content
Who needs politics when there are hordes of 1) horny teenagers and 2) lost children to merge in our brand new mega-app that brings together the most profitable demographics from both of our hottest products!

Does It End With An Atomic Blast?
Depends if there is a coke-fit in the third act or not.

What You Learned
Like Tim's grampa says, "Never take a sh** on your own time."

Call To Action!

I have been so inspired the last coupla days thinking about Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez donning a sombrero and serenading the people of Mexico in his speech about why he only hates the Mexican government, not its people. It was a such ballsy, touching show of camraderie and understanding by a world leader that I think we would do well to demand such panache from our American leaders. Perhaps something that could show the unity of spirit with which we have touched to people of the middle east in our crusade for democracy... perhaps a presidential dervish spin? (snicker snicker)

Holy Wars

I am currently in the middle of trying to solve this css layout problem at work and came across an article discussing the various approaches to solving this problem that people have come up with in the past where the author refers to a solution that he hopes won't start a geek "Holy War" which is further defined on css-discuss.com as:

Extract from [the Jargon File]:

"The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are relatively minor."

I just thought that was kind of eye-catching.

And Politics: Latin Style

Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez donned a sombrero and sang with a mariachi band to show the people of Mexico that his spat with Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, whom he has accused of being "the great empire's lapdog", extends only to that country's president and not its people. ""How great the people of Mexico even though they are alongside the most powerful empire. That's why we say, 'Long live the people of Mexico, we are with you.'" Link

Vigilante Justice: Internet Style

A few months ago Russia's biggest spammer was found bludgeoned to death in his apartment. I guess I'm a peacenick; I was satisfied to just quit using hotmail when I couldnt take the spam and Lamisil ads anymore.Link

The funny part is that I found the link to the story on FuckedCompany.com...

Here's an excerpt:

Russian-language media, both online and offline, has made little effort to conceal one central thought when dealing with the spammer’s demise: that somehow the late Mr. Kushnir got what he deserved. “The Spammer Had it Coming”, one headline reads. “Spam is Deadly”, “Ignoble Death Becomes Russia’s Top Spammer”, “An Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem” - 84 Russian-language news captions on Kushnir’s murder, retrieved by the Yandex News search engine within a day of the event, seem to share the general feeling.

It's an interesting point of view, isn't it, Bill?

Splat

I'm feeling chatty tonight, so I'm gonna chat you all up a little bit. Tim and CC and I were watching a show last night about these new mega-buildings in tokyo and singapore (or taiwan i can't remember) that could be the cities of the future if the engineers can figure out how to build around all of the myriad problems caused by buildings of that magnitude and scale, buildings the size of cities.

So of course that conversation led to a conversation about jumping off of tall structures. I mentioned to Tim that i ran across this crazy graphic the other day on a surfing site of all places. I guess its kinda relevant in an oblique sort of way; surfing > ocean > suicide. Or is the train of logic more like surfing > suicide > ocean. Depends on your confidence in your surfing abilities I 'spose.

So here is a fascinating graphic that depicts the position on the bridge of all of the suicides that have taken place on the Golden Gate since the first jumper in 1937, 10 weeks after it opened.

The first thing that caught my eye is the fact that the overwhelming majority of suicides have taken place on the side of the bridge facing the bay, not the ocean. Which is interesting. It's a really grandiose way to go, when you think about it; from that vantage point it's like being on a huge stage, nosediving at terminal velocity with the entire bay, the entire city spread out before you, somehow watching you, its vast expanse of anonymous residents egging you on.

Random Wednesday-ey Stuff

From the 1985 movie "Bliss":

"The entire economy of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer."

True dat.

Hey music fans, you might want to check out a site called pandora.com It is like music.yahoo.com in that you can rate music and the player will get "smarter" as you go along, which is exciting, but instead of it being based on what other people listen to, its built on the building blocks of the music itself, its ingredients. It bills itself as the Music Genome Project and seems to draw on a library of music that is very diverse, which makes for interesting listening. Way cool. You can check out my list of favorites here:

http://www.pandora.com/people/redridinghood23

Although there's nothing you can really do with my list other than bask in its beauty right now (the site seems to be under rigorous development right now; i am playing music right now on my mac and it didnt even seem to be ported to macs yet a couple days ago), you get the idea of where they're going with this thing... Super cool.

Favorite (Crazy) News Feed

For all of you out there with RSS readers (you know who you are) I would like to recommend a news feed - "New York Daily News Online -- Home" (http://nydailynews.com/front/index.rss). They have the craziest headlines I have ever seen. Here is a sampler from *just today*:

I was a slave - nanny
A former nanny hit a Long Island couple yesterday with a federal lawsuit, claiming she was treated like a virtual slave and subjected to regular beatings and racial slurs.

Hero saves woman & is stabbed six times
A hero mechanic suffered six stab wounds yesterday when he tried to stop a man who was knifing a woman in Manhattan, neighbors and cops said.

Pair fights robber, then a mystery man kills him
A Brooklyn bodega manager bashed a would-be bandit in the head with a religious candle moments before the robber fled to the street, where a mystery gunman sprayed him with bullets, police said yesterday.

Tot-drown mom 'good-hearted' - lawyer
The Brooklyn mother who left her two young sons alone in a bathtub long enough for one of them to drown is not a "monster" - just a hard-luck woman who made a bad mistake, her lawyer said yesterday.

He's charged in '85 gun slay
Exactly two decades after John Starkey was found murdered in his family's Fire Island home, police said they have arrested the man they say shot him.


You can't even make up stories this intense. New Yorkers are a different breed. And apparently shouldn't be allowed to have knives. Or religious candles (except if used in self-defense).

Been There Done That (Brain-Eating Frogs)

Defamer just ran this hilarious article about Joaquin Pheonix's trip down the red carpet at the premiere for his new movie about Johnnie Cash "Walk the Line". This is what happened when talking to an AP reporter:

Out of the blue, Phoenix suddenly changed the subject, asking, "Do I have a large frog in my hair?"

Reporter: No, no.

Phoenix: "Something's crawling out of my scalp."

Reporter: No, you look great.

Phoenix: "No, but I feel it. I'm not worried about the looks. I'm worried about the sensation of my brain being eaten. ... What did you ask me?"

We here at GYEOut (and by "we" I mean "me" and "the voices") totally understand; I once (and by once I mean for about a year) thought that there were little black plastic tabs of LSD coming out of my forehead. But I got over it. And am fine now. Really.

More Beating of the Dead Horse

UN says Halliburton Should Repay Iraq $208 Million (BBC). The International Advisory and Monitoring Board said the work by Halliburton had been either overpriced or insufficiently documented.

Its recommendation came after it conducted an audit on contracting work by Halliburton's KBR unit in 2003-04.

Thanks, Dick.

Bizy Bizy Soooo Bizy and a Present For You

Sorry I've been neglecting the blog... for those of you who don't know I told my old job (Wavemarket) to shove it and started a new job at Yahoo, Inc in Sunnyvale. This week was my first week, and what a week it's been! At first I thought it was creepy, the Yahoo campus... everyone running around, so happy, so peppy, so very... uber. I went to my first project management meeting and it resembled a ping-pong tournament PING PONG PING PONG POINT MATCH NEXT; that is to say it was so tight and well-oiled I think it may have singed my hair. By the end of the week I realized that the creepiness I had been feeling at the beginning of the week was actually the feeling of having worked at a dysfunctional company leaving my body.

I'm not allowed by contract to recruit anyone from my old crappy shithole job at EgosRUs.com, but there's nothing stopping you from asking me to get you a job where I work. It's good, really really good.

Here's an mp3 present from me to you. It's from the Bloc Party > Remixed album. The first one is called "Like Eating Glass" and the second one is called "Helicopter". Have a great day!