A Bucket of Coins

I'm notorious in my family for emptying my pockets of change just about anywhere. I've lived in apartments where you could find enough change in the sofa, tv stand, windowsill or coffee cup to get a pizza at any given time. Now that I'm attempting to be a responsible adult, we have a tea tin to collect our spare change.

I've never been one to pay for things in change. We've been using CoinStar for a few years now. It's an ATM like machine that takes your change and gives you cash back. They've got locations in the US, Canada and the UK. They generally take 8.9% as a counting fee. It's always been worth that to me, but now they've got an even better deal. At certain machines, you can get Amazon gift certificates for your spare change, and they will waive their counting fee. You can find a location near you at the Coinstar website. Look for "eCertificates".

Roxy's 21st Birthday

Today is Roxy's 21st birthday. Dammit, he's gonna wanna go drinking tonight. Worse, all the bars have St. Patrick's Day cover charges AND March Madness is going on. Man, we're gonna be hungover tomorrow. Roxy Riley, the Mayor of Roxybury. We'll make an art film of the experience: "Mrrr-ooooow. Muuurrrrow." (It's my 21st birthday. Wanna buy me a drink?) "Mur-row-row!" (Kiss me, I'm Irish.)

Happy birthday, old man.

Strange

I've been commuting to my latest job for just over a year now. A year of blasting the iPod on the Pike and treating the people around me like cars, not people. Not so long ago, I didn't have a car and my modes of travel were the train and the sidewalk.

You don't look at a car and invent a life story for it. I used to see thousands of strangers' faces in a week. I sort of miss that. The car life keeps everything familiar. You could go weeks without seeing anyone or anything unfamiliar between your house and your workplace.

Yin and Yang

My cousin Derek came over with my Uncle George for a visit the other night. All three of us have some experience with meditation. Uncle G. does yoga. Derek has been part of a Buddist community center, and I've done Taoist style qi gong standing meditation.

Derek said that he didn't understand the point. Stillness in and of itself is interesting, but he didn't want his whole life to be so still and calm. He's a professional musician. He loves the chaos of a solo. He felt that he couldn't be chaotic when he's been meditating. And vice versa. When he's playing beautiful crazy unordered music, his life became disordered as well.

I pointed out that meditation is not an endpoint, but learning a skill. You want to be able to move from stillness to chaos at will. He'd never thought about the balance of yin and yang in everyday life and the role that meditation plays in this.