Runcible Blog

• I wouldn't go so far as to call my room a fire trap. After all, the fire won't be trapped -- I will be.
• Sometimes I don't think. The other day I had sand in my shoes, so what did I do? I dumped the sand on the floor under my desk. Now there's sand all over the place.
• One bad thing about wearing shorts is that I have to find matching socks. It's harder than you think.

• It's funny how something trivial like a haircut can affect someone's approachability. I know that whenever I have normal length hair, strangers make eye contact and ask me for directions or the time of day. If I cut my hair, fewer people approach me. Now that I have a pseudo-mohawk, the effect is even greater. The first day at work, some people seemed afraid -- as if I were packing heat. Look out! Others tried not to acknowledge my existence.

  I suppose if there's any point to anything that I do, maybe it's challenging stereotypes. Most people take their body modifications and hair styles to the extreme: they have an image to fill (badass biker, the goth look, punk/hardcore/whatever you call em, etc.). And perhaps they change their personalities to accommodate their physical appearance.

  Personally, I think a sort of nuanced approach is much more interesting. I mean, I don't like punk music at all, I'm definitely not an alpha-male, and I'm about as "straight-edge" as possible (though I'd never ever call myself that). Yet I'm not shy about piercings or tattoos (I'm thinking about getting my next one soon).

  It almost seems that my appearance and my character contradict each other. Or maybe they don't. Maybe that's the point. Subconsciously, I want to make it very difficult for anyone to know me by my appearance. It's like my own personal daily prank on the world. The other day at the recording studio, when the engineer asked if I wanted a drink, Scott said I was a whisky drinker (he knows I don't drink), to which the engineer replied, "Yeah, I figured." I laughed to myself. "I fooled you!"

  Life is more rewarding when you have to spend some time to get to know someone. My guess is that if anyone bothered to look past my scary visage they might be surprised that I'm not exactly one-dimensional. Then they'd be in on my prank. heh.

  Either that or they'd think I'm crazy. What the hell do I care?!

Anyway, now it's late. Here's a quote that I find particularly meaningful. It's the 10th phase/gate of the "10 Ox Herding Pictures" -- metaphors for the phases in Zen training. This quote resonates so much with me that it'll be part of my next tattoo -- a permanent reminder of how to live: