The Perfect Meeting

Somehow I missed yesterday's meeting for NY Indie Publishers. I went to the McNally-R. bookstore where it was to be held but was told there wasn't a meeting.

Every rare once in a while (hope it gets more frequent) I get a strong feeling about something beforehand. Before this meeting I knew two things (no idea how I did), I was supposed to go and I wasn't supposed to go. So I was curious, I went.

This is what I found there... it doesn't matter to where you get (the most beautiful private beach or a grimy subway platform). It doesn't matter if there is or not a payoff for being there, just having followed your intuition makes it a wonderful place to be. This is Frost's Road Less Traveled, to me.

I sat down and listened to a couple of poets at the poetry reading which took place when my meeting was supposed to happen, then walked around the bookstore. Nice enough place.

Perhaps there was a payoff though. Found a book that I might not have found in Barnes and Noble. Framed by my mindset, it took more significance. In a future post, I may talk of the book. For now let me say this, it feels good to be intuitively connected to the greater world and that matters most. Yet, sometimes the book you find at the end of the process is more than just a book.

Perhaps we need to count the importance of things differently (it can be the smallest shift). Then we might recognize the path that is laid out especially for us, notice the giant's beanstalk we were overlooking, climb our own personal Jacob's ladder. (OK, lol, am I just kind of blabbing this last, unedited-out paragraph most only because I want an excuse to include this wonderful picture?)

And dear reader, trying to notice you intuitive feelings just once today is worth more than studying 100 books on it.

Right now, what do you notice within? Listen. What you notice is often less important than that you took notice.

Credits - photo of natural ladder from sitting rock on flickr (he interestingly calls it Guide); Mendocino beach photo from Rita Crane on flickr; selecting a book photo from Roberdan on Flickr.

My Son's Last Tooth-Fairy Letter

Hello My Dear Sage,

I see through the window when you are not looking, when you are sleeping, when you are practicing music, when you are looking at the tv or computer.


And sometimes I pretend to be a bug or a window-ledge bird so I can take a longer look. (Oh, don’t worry, if the me-bug gets squashed, I don’t get hurt – it doesn’t work that way)...

When I look, I see a happy boy whose father is trying to make into a hard working person. Well, try to be both.

I have retired but you also are retiring childhood and this is the last time I will be leaving you with a letter and a gift and yet, I will think of you from time to time and visit you unawares between the stuff I do that retired people and tooth fairies do.

I have never shown a picture of myself to anyone but as I am leaving, I will give you the only one. (I took it myself, so, sorry I aimed a little low. Well, perhaps that is best anyway)...

I have seen quite a lot of things in my journeys, but you have been my very favorite client, child, friend-though-we-have-never-met.

There were these identical twins in Idaho (or was it Wisconsin?) whose mother could finally tell apart when they lost different teeth, this one spelled “L,” look closely...


(P.S. and her name is actually Lauren which, you know, begins with “L.”)

One nice and rather strange boy wanted to grow up to be a tooth fairy and asked to be apprencticed...














I saved this letter that I especially liked...

One girl’s mom made this for me. Her dad had died earlier in the year. I found it under her pillow with a letter the little girl wrote. In the letter she asked if I would marry her mom to make her mom happy...


Another girl asked for two gifts when her goat lost a tooth the same week as she did...

I got the idea for this photo-letter when I saw your dad late at nite working with photos. I guess we learn to be funny when we are around funny people, nice when we are around nice people?

I know your dad wasn’t going to reserve your Halo 3 on time so I did for you as a farewell. Remember me sometimes. The receipt is below this screen, I paid for it under your dad’s name at the 83rd Street Gamestop.

Enjoy it (but don’t forget to eat and sleep) lol!

You are quite a sage already, little one,
Dusky

Credits: photo of boy in blue cap from starfire on flickr, many credits to yet be given.

1000 Pictures, 1000 Cranes

My wife's name in English is 1000 pictures because her mother, Saddako, liked to draw and paint watercolors.

1000 means a great amount and we love round numbers, Arod's 500th homerun and Matsui's 100th occurred last month with fanfares (both are Yankees). And in Japanese tradition, if someone (or some friends) make 1000 paper cranes, it will bring luck, healing, good results for a cause.

YOU GET TO SEE THIS POSTING IN PROGRESS, LOOK INSIDE MY BRain...















I am returning to this unfinished post after a couple years. I wonder how many people will dig through the pile of my old posts to read this little note?

Anyway, I am not going to tie together all the things I was going to here. But I will finally explain this picture, why my brain is a picture of a sideways girl.

What below, here where we run around and eat, is masculine; is feminine above, in the dimension where we connect to others as who we are, not what we do, also called heaven or the above. And vice versa, the feminine is masculine above.

The scope of what feminine and masculine are is beyond this small writing. If you are interested, study the left and right qualities of the sephirot, or better acquire a rare teacher who is willing explain.

Cold Brewed Green Tea?

I read an article on cold brewed coffee and as we alike Joe Torre prefer green tea (my wife is Japanese), I thought I would give cold brewed green tea a try. We loved the cold green tea we bought from Jas Mart in Manhattan but it was a tad expensive because my wife, my son and I go through it like water.

I put six tea bags into a gallon of water and placed it in the refrigerator. (You need to let it steep in or out of the refrigerator for a couple of hours, and... you don't even have to take out the tea bags! The tanic acid which comes out by over-steeping in hot water isn't found here and you can drink the concoction for days.) The result was terrific. It had a lighter, cleaner taste, more refreshing like cold water. The refined aspects of the tea were not destroyed by the brewing process. We love it!

I love when we use four jasmine tea bags and two regular green tea bags but my wife's tongue has a Japanese sensibility and it is too perfume-y for her.

The photo is of hot matcha green tea but I couldn't resist the beauty.

Here is the article on cold-brewed iced coffee, if that's your cup of tea...

June 27, 2007
The New York Times
Iced Coffee? No Sweat
By CINDY PRICE

BEFORE I go telling everybody that the secret to great iced coffee is already in the kitchen, my friend Keller wants me to confess: I didn’t know from iced coffee until he showed me the light.

It’s important to cop to this now, because not a summer goes by that he does not painstakingly remind me, a rabid iced-coffee drinker, that he’s the one who introduced me to the wonders of cold-brewed iced coffee. The funny thing is, when the subject came up we were holed up in a summer rental with three friends off the coast of Puerto Rico, on a tiny island not exactly swimming in upmarket coffee houses.

Our first morning there I brewed a blend from the local grocery in the coffeepot, laced it with a little half-and-half and sugar, then let it cool. Classy, I thought, carrying the pitcher to the table. “I’ll just take it hot,” he mumbled, while I blinked in disbelief.

Clearly, this boy didn’t know any better. A drink has a time and place. Surely he didn’t subscribe to drinking hot coffee in summer?

“No, I only drink iced coffee if it’s cold-brewed,” he said.

For five days we watched him sullenly sip his hot coffee on a broiling Caribbean island in the dead of summer. We chided him for his pretensions, ridiculed him, tried valiantly to break him, but he patiently waited us out. Once we tried it we would understand, he explained. Like friends disputing a baseball stat in a bar with no access to Google, we had no way to settle the argument.

Two weeks later, back in Brooklyn, I saw a sign: “Cold-Brewed Iced Coffee Served Here.” Fine, then. I threw down two bucks and took a sip. Though it pains me to admit, the difference was considerable. Without the bitterness produced by hot water, the cold-brewed coffee had hints of chocolate, even caramel. I dropped my sugar packet — no need for it. The best brews hardly need cream. It really is the kind of thing a gentleman might spend five days in hot-coffee solitary confinement for.

Most days I’m too lazy to hunt down the elusive cold-brewed cup. But recently I discovered an interesting little fact. Cold-brewed coffee is actually dirt simple to make at home. Online, you’ll find a wealth of forums arguing for this bean or that, bottled water over tap, the 24-hour versus the 12-hour soak. You can even buy the Toddy cold-brew coffee system for about $30.
But you can also bang it out with a Mason jar and a sieve. You just add water to coffee, stir, cover it and leave it out on the counter overnight. A quick two-step filtering the next day (strain the grounds through a sieve, and use a coffee filter to pick up silt), a dilution of the brew one-to-one with water, and you’re done. Except for the time it sits on the kitchen counter, the whole process takes about five minutes.

I was curious to see how it would taste without all the trappings. The answer is, Fantastic. My friend Carter, something of a cold-brewing savant, turned me onto another homegrown trick: freeze some of the concentrate into cubes. Matched with regular ice cubes, they melt into the same ratio as the final blend.

Very fancy. Can’t wait to tell Keller.

Credits -
Photo of matcha supplied by michenv's flickr photostream.
Photo of iced coffee supplied by disneymike's flickr photostream.

The New School Year Blimp

On the first day of this year's not-school (my son of 12 stays home with me and also learns from music teachers, an art/cooking teacher, and a swimming instructor), we were watching Kiki's Delivery Service which features a blimp prominently. We looked up and saw the Goodyear blimp circling around and around our window! We took it as an omen that this would be a good school year. (We measure our unschool year from when my wife goes to teach high school.)

credits -
Photo by Langston McEachen from LSUS Archives which was supplied by mikerosebery's flickr photostream. The photo was taken in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1948.

Study Plans - Turn on Your Long Term Memory

Here is a small article from Time Magazine by Catharine Rankin, enjoy...
Do you try to learn things by blocking off a large chunk of time and going over and over the material until you've got it? Or do you study for short periods of time with breaks in between? Experiments with a variety of animals, including humans, have shown that spaced training - short blocks of learning repeating the same material and separated by rest periods as long as thirty to ninety minutes - works better than does training without breaks. Genetic studies with fruit flies, mice and sea slugs have demonstrated that spaced training triggers the development of long term memory by turning on a gene called CREB. When this powerful learning-and-memory gene is experimentally turned off or blocked, memory fails to form; if enough extra copies of the CREB gene are added, long-term memory is triggered after a single short term session.
I have had this up on the inside door of our cupboard for years.

Photo Link - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jayswww/

Learning is a Two Step Process

I hear that practice at music schools is changing a bit. I hope so. At places like Julliard you would try to grab one of the limited number of practice rooms. Ok, you mananged to get one, so you camped out and practiced for hours so you wouldn't lose having a place to play that day.
Now, I hear, they take more breaks.
When we learn, it is a two step process. (1) Take in information. (2) Incorperate the new information into what we already know and believe.
If you study math for 2 hours then read history for a while, you won't find you retained the math as well as someone who took a break and shot hoops or napped afterward. Yeah, that's why people do well when they memorize right before bed. Learning is a two part process.
It is interesting that even exercise is a two step process. First you run, swim or lift weights. This makes small tears in your muscles. Then you rest at night or over a few days. During your resting, the small tears are repaired as new muscle tissue grows to connect them. It is the complete process of exercise (tearing down) and rest (repair) that is important.
Look at my post on Study Plans which quotes a Time Magazine research article showing how you learn as much studying in little bits as those who plod on unceasingly. Then you might want to get off the computer and take a walk or make a dagwood sandwich so you'll actually remember what you read...

Credits -
Photo from aaroscape on flickr.

Why Ancient Sounds?

Ancient Sounds is the title of a Paul Klee masterpiece. The name also reflects my interest in music. When you choose a career, you should look at the small clues. Do you like the smell of wood shavings and sawdust, then think perhaps of being a builder. As a child, I loved the sound of one even one piano key struck. And I have found that this deep down resonance has stayed with me. Klee had to choose between being a violinist or visual artist. I hope he choose what gave him the truest small pleasures, I think so. But not even creating great works such as his could ever make up for giving up what you were meant to love doing. Choose wisely.

Credits -
Photo taken from WebMuseum, Paris.

Please click on this Klee photo to see texture.