From the Daily Dharma:

October 23, 2009
Tricycle's Daily Dharma

Being a Buddhist Police Officer

For thirteen years I was a law enforcement officer. In the dark humor of that environment, we called ourselves “paid killers for the country.” No one else wanted to be in out boots. I did not identify myself as a Buddhist; I was not aware that the way I behaved and experienced the world fit squarely with the Buddha's teachings. It is clear to me now that we could have been, and were, instruments of karma. But skillful action, discriminating awareness, karma, the law of causality were not terms in law enforcement basic training.

For a Buddhist in police work, the most important thing is to be constantly aware of ego. It is not your anger, not your revenge, not your judgment, no matter how personal the event. I was paid and trained to take spirit-bruising abuse. I endured things of which the majority of women in America will never even dream. For me it was not judgment, in the Western sense, but discernment. This kept me, and others, alive and healthy. This discernment allowed me to act skillfully in crisis. The law of causality allowed me to know that if I could not stop the perpetrator of violence or pain or loss, that some other vehicle would reach that person—karma.

- Laurel Graham, from “Vajra Gun,” Tricycle, Winter 1998

I think a lot about right livelihood. For me, it means not only not causing harm, but also finding purpose and meaning in my work. Like most challenges of this magnitude, I rarely fulfill them perfectly. But I do strive toward them.

Being in relationship with a veteran has given me a new perspective on the life of a soldier -- a warrior. I've always had a sort of fascination with this archetype. I view the realities of being a warrior with a mixture of horror and respect. It's a way of life, a mindset, that in some ways I wish I were more able to stomach. What I've realized, though, is that being a warrior -- a soldier/a police officer/a litigator/a fighter -- doesn't always mean fighting.

People who have been trained in competitive conflict and who have seen "action" have about them a quiet assurance in their own abilities, as well as a healthy respect for the consequences of violence. It's one of the things that I find so attractive and admirable in M, and it's one of the things I wish I had more of in my own self.

This morning I was indulging in a bit of self-flagellation about my writing, or lack thereof, and I remembered something cheqyr said to me some months back.

It was something along the lines of "it doesn't really matter how you write, it's the act of writing that's important."

So who cares if I'm not writing my three pages a day every morning? Oh, right, my inner perfectionist, sitting in her walnut-paneled library with her hair up in a bun and her steel-rimmed glasses.

I saw Shortbus last night. Polymorphous perversion, I think that was the term some L7 headshrinker came up with in the 60s to describe anyone who isn't a candidate for membership with the Family Research Council. Polymorphous couplings, real people having unsimulated sex, the importance of female orgasm, John Cameron Mitchell (of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame), a script that was developed by the actors themselves and not approved by a ginormous movie studion -- what's not to love?

Watching it made me feel a bit nostalgic, somewhat regretful. Shortbus takes place in New York City, and in typical New Yorker fashion, the characters and indeed the film itself exudes that confident, annoying assurance that New York is indeed the center of the universe. In my 20s, long before 9-11, I had aspirations to move to NYC. The more I got to know the city, though, the more it overwhelmed me. I grew up in a bedroom community about 45 minutes away by Metro North express train, but very rarely took advantage of my proximity. Later, when I was living at the end of the Hudson line, I fell in love with the place. Later, my love for the place evaporated in the cold, hard light of things like the cost of living, especially compared to my earning potential at the time.

I settled on Boston because it had some of New York's cosmopolitan feel but wasn't as intense and sprawling a place to live. Every city has its sprawl -- its purgatorial rings surrounding its juicy center. Boston may not be as big a Tootsie Pop as New York, but you won't break your teeth trying to get to the chewy center.

Sometimes it seems that people's favorite pastime is to dump on this city, though. While I was waiting for the cross-town shuttle in Harvard Square, two folks started in on the old litany of complaints about My Fair City: it's too segregated, the streets don't make sense, it's not as cosmopolitan as New York, bla bla bla bla bla.

Maybe it was the annoying timbre of the woman's voice, maybe it was that I was going to be late for my meeting, maybe I hadn't had enough leafy greens. Maybe it was because I, a white woman who actually enjoys talking to people of different nationalities, had engaged both of these brown-skinned people in conversation only to watch the conversation devolve into a diatribe about how generally inferior my chosen home town is -- and how racist and segregated to boot. Whatever the reason, I got fed up. And I didn't want to keep silent.

"They want it that way," said the pleasant young man (possibly Latino or Pacific Islander) on his way to work in Central Square to the Indian woman on her way to Beth Israel for a cardiac stress test.

"Who is this mysterious they?" I countered. "Did to think that maybe the white people in this city don't want it to be segregated either?"

They looked at me in shock.

"People love to complain about Boston. It really irritates me. I chose to live in this city, not New York. And you did too, apparently. If you hate the place so much, why don't you leave?"

"I don't think that's very fair," countered the woman. "You can't just follow it up with a prescription like that. It's free speech, you know. You don't have to talk to me."

"You're right, I don't. But it is free speech, and I'm free to tell you how annoying it is when people come along and complain about my town. It's not New York City, it's Boston."

"Oh, I love Boston-" said the nice young man, the same nice young man who'd been complaining about the pattern of the streets and the nasty Powers that Be intent on preserving their lily-white neighborhoods. But his attempt at peacemaking got lost in the shuffle. The woman didn't hear me.

"I wish you luck with your appointment," I said, firm, final, trying -- for my own sake, not hers -- to return to some level of cordiality. And stormed off until I was out of earshot.

What does this all have to do with the movie Shortbus? At one point, one of the characters, suffering under the weight of a profession she's grown to hate, agonizes over her predicament.

-What if I don't have enough money to live in the city? Where would I go? Fresno?

I have no strong desire to live in Fresno. But I'm sure that there are people there who make art. There are people all over the world, and there are other cities too. New York is awesome. I know that. It's got things you won't find anywhere else on the East Coast. But it's not the only game in town. Even in Fresno, I'm sure you can find artists and kinksters and perverts. Thanks to the power of the Intartubes, you can probably find them that much faster.

The reason why this issue affects me so much, of course -- the reason why I raised my voice to some poor woman at a bus stop -- is because my relationship with New York is deep, complicated. Long-standing. In another life I may have ended up in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn. Riverside. In another life I would be able to take mass transit 24 hours a day. Would smell that particular salty-muddy smell of Long Island Sound, the confluence of fresh water and salt, that smell I remember from my childhood. Smell it and live in it, along with the smell of hot dogs and car exhaust and hope and desperation. Would live and work and walk and fight and elbow my way through crowds of people, a different mix of people, brown and blue-black and lily-white and all the lovely tones in between, live in a place where the Boston Irish don't predominate. Live on a grid.

But I don't. I live here, a gentle little city built on cowpaths, a conglomeration of villages still with their separate boundaries, a mass transit system color-coded and sprawling like a web built by a drunk spider. A place where you can drive 20 minutes up the road and go cross-country skiing for $30, or live your whole life jammed up against your neighbors and car-free. A place where gay couples can legally marry, where indy bands and artists thrive and work and play, a place where health care is a right and not a privilege.

But I grew up in the shadow of New York City. It's my white whale. It's a dream I used to have, a fantasy that needed to stay a fantasy. It's someplace I like to visit once or twice a year. It's not my home.

My home is here, with all the web of community and love and memories I've built here for the past decade. My home is here, with Army Guy.

Which is the other reason Shortbus makes me nostalgic. Nostalgia isn't the same thing as memory. Nostalgia filters memories through a pink filter. It erases all the angst and loneliness, all the alienation and uncertainty, and leaves just the glamour, the excitement. The fantasy of youth.

Youth isn't wasted on the young. Only the young have the resilience and the stamina to put up with it. As much as I like to look back fondly on my 20s, I wouldn't relive them.

And I wouldn't re-make the choices I've made. Well, maybe the ones around unsecured debt. But not the lovers, the relationships, the moves, the experiences. I don't regret my wild and crazy past, and I don't regret my commitment to Army Guy.

"I'm afraid you're going to build up a head of steam over all these parts of yourself I'm asking you to give up," he said.

The fact that he even cares about that makes me love him more. He'd never steal the skin of a Selkie. He'd sit on the shore and talk with her until she folded it up of her own free will and tucked it into the thatch of their house.

Woke up only slightly reluctantly this morning, all the alarms blaring and the kitty purring. Thought about a blog entry I might write about the night before.

Army Guy calls just a little after 7:00, and I answer the phone saying, "Just ten minutes!"

"Wake up Frances!" he shouts into the phone. Our own little ritual.

I get up.

I get to get up today.

I get to drive to work -- I get to have a job to drive to!

I get to have supportive conversations with my reports.

I get to see the beautiful puffy clouds.

I get to do some real work.

I get to enjoy springtime in Boston.

I get to be alive.

The Good
"Remember how you said that the beef stew was a little thin for your taste? Well, I added some stuff to it and cooked it down, and now it's nice and thick. Do you want me to save you some?"

"You know, sometimes I think you have the impression I don't like your cooking. I think you're a good cook."

"I know. But it's not just enough to be good. I'm a perfectionist. It can't just be good, everything has to be faaaaabulous!"

"Well, you already are fabulous."

"Awwww! I'm going to eat the last of the stew for lunch."

The Bad
Transgender Day of Remembrance. My cousin out in California and I had a falling-out because I kept trying to raise his awareness about trans issues. Regardless of what you think about trans genitalia, or whether trans sex is "real sex" (take a wild guess as to where I stand on that issue), I think we can all agree that transfolk have the right to, you know, live. Without being beaten, maimed, or murdered. I think that the ability to walk down the street undisturbed is a basic human right we can all agree on.

More information here: http://gender.org/remember/day/index.html
(and no, visiting the site will not make you queer).


The Roomba
Yet another reason for me to get a Roomba (I need to amass a good amount of them in order to overcome that "but we're in a recession" voice in the back of my head):

Link in case of embed failure

I can't imagine my timid kitty would ever actually ride the thing around the room like that. But still, soooo cuuuuuute! Robot friends!

Army Guy is studying for a licensing exam, so I don't get to see him as much as usual. But absence makes the heart grow fonder. And I'm so heart-burstingly proud of him, both for his discipline and his general smarty-pants-ness.

Five things about him in particular that are awe$ome:

1. He said the icon that goes along with this post made him smile. He saved it to his desktop and named the file "cute girl."



2. He sent me a picture of a tree in the midst of fall-color changing, colored extra red by a firebox light.



3. Whenever I walk down the bike path near my house, I think about a night in the summertime when he told a story about being outside, feeling the breathing of the trees.



4. He sends me hugs and kisses via SMS.



5. He buys me comic books.

"Do you love me?" I asked him. In the dark. Fearful.

"Yes, I love you," he said, surprised. "Why would you think I didn't love you?"

I rose up and kissed him. "I just like to hear it," I said.

If you spend your whole life dealing with mysterious man-disappearances, with a sudden slippage when you least expect it, perhaps it's logical to expect it to keep happening.

In finance, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

In psychology, past behavior is the most reliable indicator of future response.

Of course, I've never invested in Army Guy before. Nor was he one of those other men who mysteriously disappeared.

Wish me luck.

I'm wearing puffy sleeves, which should effectively camouflage me.

"Stay on the phone," he said. "There's something in the mail here from you. I thought you might want hear my reaction when I read it."

"Yes, I would like to hear your reaction," I replied.

It was very hot, sweltering hot, and the power was off in my apartment. I shucked off my pants and lay on the bed. He made coming-home noises, unidentified clunks and knocks.

"There's a dragonfly motif," he said.

"Yes, there is." I realized I was holding my breath. I took a deep one in, let it out.

He read it.

"I don't know what to say."

I held still. Somewhere far away my heart was beating. My face felt hot, my body very still.

"I think I'm... almost there," he said.

I took another breath. "I don't want you to say it until you're ready to say it. Until you're sure. I was waiting until I knew you felt the same way. But... well, the other night, you said that you were afraid about it being reciprocated, and I wanted to let you know... It just felt like we were playing a big game of chicken. I didn't want to say it until... I just figured I would tell you."

"How does your stomach feel right now?"

I paused, took stock. My body felt very still. I could feel my heartbeat in my hands, and my feet. "I can't really feel my stomach. It's more in my extremities... oh. There's my stomach. Yes. It feels kind of flip-floppy."

"Well..."

Another pause. My face still felt hot.

"I remember telling you that it would happen. I knew that it was going to happen, I knew a long while ago. And... it happened."

"It sounds like you're talking about a car crash or something. But really. It's just the opposite."

"Yes. It's something good."

Another pause.

"You don't have to--" I stopped myself. "There's no hurry. I just wanted to let you know." I looked at the spider plant on its stand next to the window. The air was hot and close, and I could feel the beating of my heart. "You'll notice that I'm avoiding saying the words myself."

"I'd rather tell you to your face. But... I do love you."

And then it was my heart itself filling up.

"And I love you." I thought I would cry. I wished he were there so I could put my arms around him. But he was on the other side of town.

"So we should figure out which movie we're going to see," I said.

I walked through the heat to the T with a silly smile on my face, bouyant. I played a very girly song about four times in a row and walked to its beat. An hour later, when I saw him in person, the initial swelling had subsided. But I was still happy. He was standing at the entry to the movie theater reading Time. I put my arms around his neck and kissed him.

"Tell me to my face," I said.

"Let go of me," he said. I took my arms from around his neck.

He looked at me from that high-up place where he goes sometimes. "I love you," he said.

"I love you," I replied. I felt shy.

We kissed. And walked in to the cool, cool theater and watched Kung Fu Panda.

Anyone following me on Twitter or Gchat (waves to la_directora, nex0s, and fei_hong) know that I've been doing rather painful, deadline-driven work. Actually, it's the kind of work I did for the first 10 years of my career in web development/multimedia development/Internets-smartypantsness. It's fun, challenging work: coding, interpreting a design that either I or another graphic designer created, refined, and got approved by the client. I just happen to not have had to do nearly as much of it since I went to work for El Hugamundo Gigantico Company as a team lead. Mostly what I do now is go to meetings, make lists, check things off lists, try to predict when things will get done, explain why things did not get done when I predicted they would get done, write memos, send emails, and tell team members and vendors to do stuff.

I love working with vendors. It's like being the recipient of excellent customer service but without having to fork over my own cash.

I love telling other people what to do. I'm sure you're really surprised to hear this. In the past two years however, I've also discovered that managing involves more than just telling people what to do. Employees, especially highly skilled programmers, often won't just do what you tell them to do. They want to know why. And you'd better have a damn good answer or they'll find a way to not do it.

The good thing about getting back to this kind of work is that it shows me point-blank how fucking difficult it is to code. Coding is a creative act. Anyone who has actually coded, scripted, or programmed knows this. The other so-called "creatives," who draw pictures and write words, like to laugh when a programmer busts out with that claim (I can think of one particular retreat with the publications department of a large travel company), but that's just because they're threatened by the idea that they might be irrelevant. As a former English major, I know all about that fear. And not only is coding a creative act, but it's being creative in a language that changes a hell of a lot faster than English, or French, or Chinese.

These last two weeks have also really impressed on me the awesomeness of my team when it comes to actually making deadlines. I wish I could say the same. Of course they hem and haw and hedge their bets, but I also let them know I'm going to pad the timelines a bit in my project plan. Because shit goes wrong. And trying to predict how long it will take to develop a particular application is a bit like trying to predict how much money I'll need to invest if I want to retire at age 65 (hahahahaha) without having to eat beans and rice for the rest of my life. IT is fundamentally chaotic, and the more complex the systems, the more chaotic it becomes. And we live in a world with very, very complex systems. Cf. teh intarwebs.

The good news is that the company I currently work for understands that stuff happens and deadlines need to be extended. I've been working flat-out to try to get something ready for release this Friday. But as the week wore away and the time allotted for actual QA got smaller and smaller (now you understand why so many Microsoft upgrades have more bugs than an organic strawberry patch), I could feel my blood pressure rising.

Just this afternoon, I learned that the event that required the deadline has been pushed back a couple weeks. Which means that my deadline suddenly went from OMG MUST MAKE IT CANNOT PUSH IT BACK NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN to well, maybe ok, another week or so. Also, the business owner initially did not want to spend any more money on outside vendors, which is why I ended up coding the whole thing myself. But when push came to shove, they were willing to consult with the @w3$ome design-build firm that helped us with wireframes and visual designs on some thorny CSS-related issues.

Which means that stressed-out Okelle who thought she was going to have to miss Army Guy's birthday dinner tonight is suddenly happy Okelle who has enough time to finish her work. And everybody likes a happy Okelle.