Christ-miss

I'm home for Winter Break. Yesterday I did some Christmas shopping and went for acupuncture. The acupuncture was really good, and I fell into this odd halfway dreaming/halfyway consciously thinking about something state. It's happened before, and this time I snapped out of it when I realized I'd been "thinking"/dreaming about a couple people named Susan and Terry, and they didn't exactly correspond to anyone I know in real life. (I don't have any friends named Terry...)

Today I've been in kind of an odd funk because it doesn't really feel like Christmas much at all - but I think the odd part to me is that I'm not really bothered by it; I feel like I should either be more excited about the season, or I should be more upset that I'm not excited. I'll settle for the neutrality, though.

My Christmas shopping is almost done. I at least know what my last couple purchases are going to be, and where to get them. The next few days are going to be pretty hectic - a good friend from high school is visiting, then I'm visiting Colin for a couple days, then back here for Christmas and a couple weeks of just relaxing - and reading, writing, art, music, and code.

I have a whole stack of books I want to get through: I just finished Cryptonomicon, and I'm about halfway through A Prayer for Owen Meany; when that's done I'm going to dive into The Gunslinger, and maybe Great Expectations or something else.

Cryptonomicon was brilliant, incidentally. There are some places where Stephenson's ideas seem a bit too contrived, or where it feels like he goes a bit too far in adapting other people's ideas and passing them off as his original thoughts, but overall I felt that it was a really well crafted story full of geeky analogies and insight, and some interesting "history."

I'm still not sure how I feel about A Prayer for Owen Meany. It's not what I expected - not that I had a really good idea of what it was that I was expecting. Christmas figures heavily in the part of the book I just finished, so it seems like a Christmas story in some ways, but I don't entirely understand where it's going yet.

Also, I had some really interesting experiences these past couple weeks. I've always been kind of wary of modern medicine - not that I hate or distrust science or anything like that, but I definitely reaffirmed a lot of my sentiments about medicine. It wasn't the most pleasant experience at all, but in some ways it gave me a lot of reminders and insights into the things that a lot of people go through all the time. It really changed, on an emotional level, the way I'm going to perceive people who are dealing with certain types of challenges. I would hope that on an intellectual/outward level I've always been at least accommodating, if not kind, but I feel like I have a much different level of understanding now, and that's worth something.

Lastly. I listened to a Zen lecture on the dangers of over-thinking things while I was driving home from CMU. The master made some interesting points: if anyone repeated things to us as much as we repeat our own thoughts to ourselves, we'd get really, really, annoyed with them; it's not always true that thinking about a problem will solve it - in a lot of cases thoughts clutter up that other mental space and make it harder to actually see the truth in a situation. It made me realize that some things are never going to be solved or changeable, or even really healed, by thinking about them excessively, and it seems like there's a lot to lose by staying in the "as soon as I handle xyz I can concentrate on abc" mindset. I'm not talking about avoiding problems that need to be dealt with; I'm actually talking about letting hard problems interfere with just getting on with life. All of that seems pretty simple, but hearing it helped me quite a bit.