Productination

“You guys are falling behind. I just did 6.” I messaged my friends, “Where are you guys?”

I was in Starbucks, sipping a steamed milk with white chocolate syrup. I had been caffeine free for a week (a topic for another post). An old Asian woman who could have been my grandma starts smiling and looking at me.

“Hello!” I say. “Hi!” she replies.

When you’re in a really good mood, people can just sense it, and stuff like that happens to me all the time, I swear.

“We’re outside your apartment, yo.” F said.

Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” bumped through my car stereo as I drove back to pick them up. Me, F, and K, aka the Sex Pirates piled into my car and we sped off towards beautiful Santa Monica.

We were pumped, because we knew that today was going to be a landmark day for the Sex Pirates.

We were each going to talk to 100 girls.

Click here to read the thrilling conclusion to “Make 100 Girls’ Days” Day

Greetings cyberland,

Sitting here in my boxers with the lights out, my backlit keyboard and LCD the only illumination in the room, I’m codin’ code and drinkin’ drinks. My eyes are royally strained, and I am tired as fuck, hunched over in my hard plastic chair. But, just a few minutes ago I was overcome with a feeling of gratitude and appreciation. It’s hard to put to words the intellectual content of that moment, but I just realized that truly, there is nothing else in this world I’d rather be doing, and there is no other person I’d rather be.

It wasn’t the act of coding or sitting here either, or anything connected to my actions. In fact, there are a lot of things that are more fun or pleasurable than what I’m doing right now. Nor do I think I’m a perfect person, I know I am far from it. I can see all the fun I could be having, I can see all the areas of myself that I want to improve, and I’m still rock-solid OK with what I’m doing and who I am right now.

For me, this feeling used to be incredibly rare. I used to plague myself constantly by wishing I was doing something better, worrying I was missing out, or wanting to be someone other than me. This would manifest itself as getting bored waiting in line, getting angry at traffic or the weather, or totally beating myself up for staying in on a Saturday night. It wasn’t until after a lot of work on myself that I was even able to see that I was doing these things, and then later still that I allowed myself to appreciate my life just the way it is. The good news is, I’m feeling it more and more often, and I am glad. Like all sensations, however, I know that this too will pass, and I’ll probably shortly find myself checking out and perhaps not appreciating my life again.

Appreciating my life the way it is does not mean I’m complacent or apathetic. Just the opposite in fact. I am quite ambitious when it comes to working on myself and my life, but the thing is that I can totally enjoy the process. My goal is to be able to appreciate my life 100% of the time. I know this is lofty, but I think I can do it. And if I don’t, I won’t beat myself up about that either.

I can appreciate that sometimes, I won’t be appreciating.

When I went on a 10 day meditation retreat, the facilitators really stressed that the path to enlightenment is long and hard, and that it is nigh impossible for a “householder” (that is, someone who has a job and obligations other than attaining enlightenment) to become a Buddha in one lifetime. I don’t believe in reincarnation. I also don’t really want to give up being a householder, so I may never reach enlightenment. That’s OK with me. What I know for sure is, I have this lifetime to live, and I want to spend it as freely as possible. Being completely OK with feeling both “negative” and “positive” sensations gives me more freedom to act instead of going on tilt whenever something confronting comes up.

And so, what have I been doing? How am I able to appreciate my life so much more frequently now? Well, it’s been a combination of things:

1. Doing more stuff I really love. A lot of people I know don’t even appreciate the good things in their lives, let alone the not so good things. It is pretty easy for me to appreciate things that are fun and pleasurable but hey, everyone has to start somewhere. The only danger in this is that I could have easily become attached to these “good” activities and the feelings associated with them, which would just make me more miserable when I’m not doing them. So, I was careful to remind myself, “Yes, this is fucking awesome. But this too shall pass…”
2. Putting myself in challenging situations on purpose and practicing staying composed. This has taken the form of approaching girls who look really cold or unfriendly, having those “confronting” conversations I’ve been putting off for a long while, and just generally doing things that scare me, while practicing being OK with whatever feelings come up. Training myself to remain composed in tough situations allows me more room when these types of situations naturally arise.
3. Seeing opportunities in challenges. This is more of a mindset shift than any sort of behavior change, but basically, whenever I encounter difficulty in life, I try to step back and see what I can learn from it. An example: I walked into work two weeks ago and my boss handed me an assignment, saying that we needed to get it out the door that day. He had never given me such a short deadline to do something this big. So, as I’ve been doing a lot lately, I said “Awesome!” and got to work. Instead of getting stressed out (my boss seemed kinda tense), I saw it as an opportunity to prove my chops. I knew that I could do it, and I also knew that I wouldn’t beat myself up if I couldn’t. And so, I finished with minutes to spare. This hints at another important topic I’ll write about more later, which is that belief influences reality.
4. Meditating. The type of meditation I practice focuses on
   1. Becoming hyper aware of my body sensations
   2. Remaining equanimous to all of them

   I don’t practice it nearly as much as I would like to, but even just the retreat gave me so many lasting benefits. I will post a full review of the retreat in the future.

An old friend recently told me that she pretty much stopped feeling regret or beating herself up for mistakes she made in the past. I told her that I think that’s wonderful and asked her how she arrived at her breakthrough. She told me that after years of running through her old habit pattern, she finally realized that being run by these feelings was simply not profitable. It cost her a lot of time and energy that she now spends on more valuable things.

What are some things in your life that are easy for you to appreciate? What are some things in your life that might not be so positive that you can still appreciate? As homework, I want you to practice appreciating one new thing about your life every day.

Let me know how it goes.

Yo. Just a quicky mid-week update as I grind out my final CS 118 project. In preparation for a long series of sleepless nights, I bought a lot of caffeinated beverages. Here are some pictures I took before my descent into madness began.

More pictures after the jump

HAY GUISE. Thanks for checking out my newest and greatest blog. It’s going to be awesome.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what my first post is going to be about. I was attached to the idea that it had to be epic/legendary.

In the end, I decided that I was overthinking it and thus, just started writing.

You are reading the results.

It’s been a while since last I kept a blog, and I’m about ready to kick this bitch back in. And so, without further ado, I give you:
K Deezy Is All Up Ins (part I)