Coupland

There's an interesting Douglas Coupland interview on Nerve today. "Interesting" assumes that his novel Generation X and other books resonates with your thirty-something brain. It certainly did for me back in the day (1991). I remember reading the book going, yeah, yeah, yeah, that has nothing to do with me and then suddenly "wham!" and he seems to have nailed my humble little 24-year old existence in a single paragraph. He seems to still have that gift:

Roger's life seems so bleak. Do you think that's individual to him, because of his drinking and his loneliness, or is that an inevitable part of aging?
I know too many Rogers. As you get older, the number of doors open to you goes down so quickly, whether by inertia or bad decisions or good decisions that went wrong, and you just end up in this Rogery place. There's this thing that happens I think around thirty-eight where people hear the final door slam and then they change — quit their job, move somewhere else, go get their Master's degree, they'll split up and recombine in some unexpected way and — fuck it, I don't know how I'd reinvent myself right now if I had to.

I suppose he's just describing the usual mid-life crisis, but it does seem to describe that phenomena with a Gen-X flair. Did I mention I was 38 when I quit my IT job and started the store?

Anyway, I'll get this blog back on track today when I take some updated photos! The game room is clean and we've got a beautiful wall of fancy playing cards to ogle at.

I'm feeling much better after a Qi Gong massage session last night. My professors always told me to watch for the word "energy" when people talked about religion, as it's a fuzzy generic word that doesn't mean anything. Qi Gong claims to increase energy flow, so I'm obviously suspicious, but you can't argue with the excellent results.

If they didn't occasionally claim bizarre supernatural abilities or attributes, more people would be into this stuff. I remember being at a lecture on Chinese Buddhism at UC Berkeley with a bunch of Westerners and a Chinese monk I knew. The talk was going great, about how Buddhism addresses suffering, fits into the modern world so well, jives with science, and then, bam!: Supernatural powers and flying through the sky. It would be like your parents acting hip and cool around a girlfriend and suddenly they flip open a book of you with naked baby pictures. "Whoa! I don't even know these people! I was just came in looking for the restroom."