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I just sent this to some folks in an online game, and figured I'd share here as well....

Did you hear the one about the monk in the monastery?

This monk joins a monastery where they have this really strict no-talking rule at the dojo. The monk is allowed to say only two words every ten years.

After living there for ten years, the monk goes up in front of the sensei and says, "Food bad!" The teacher writes these words down in a journal filled with the two-word quotes from each of the students, and puts the journal on the shelf until the next time.

After this monk's been there for another ten years, a total of 20 years, the monk returns to the sensei, and says, "Bed hard!" The teacher writes it down in the journal and puts it back up on the shelf.

Another ten years pass, a total of 30 years, and the monk returns to the sensei for another decennial meeting. The monk says to the sensei, "I quit!"

The sensei looks briefly through the journal and says, "Well, I can see why. You've been complaining ever since you got here!"

LOL!


lyrics: "The artist aims for a miracle. The painter wills his pictures to move off the canvas with a separate life. Movement outside of the picture, and one rent in the fabric is all it takes for pandemonium to sluice through."
from Apocalypse by William S. Burroughs


chant/prayer/mantra: Complaining all the time.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Jokes, sacred texts, theological sources

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I just had a very enlightening talk with the director of Episcopal Community Services here in San Francisco. He blessed me with a lot of knowledge about (among many other things) how their organization works, and some suggestions of what it would take for other groups to start up. He also gave me a brief tour.

During the course of our conversation, he mentioned the National Alliance to End Homelessness, so I want to make sure to add that to my bookmarks, and share it here as well. To be clear, I support ending homelessness, and think its an absolute travesty that there is such an economic disparity in this country/world that there are people who own buildings (through bank foreclosures, etc) which sit empty, but don't even know that they own those buildings, and there are others who literally sleep on the sidewalk. It's a further travesty that creating homes for ALL of the people who are homeless in the US would cost less than $100 billion, which is about as much as the US government spends on war every two months.

I could go on about my thoughts, but I have other work to do today.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: classism, homelessness, personal bookmarks, USA