Monday March 22, 2004

Yay.  It’s all fixed now.  Less confused people overall.  My nifty password-protected website has been kind of rearranged on the back end, but most people won’t notice (except hackers and bots).  Let me know if I screwed up anywhere and entire sections of the website no longer exist.  Thanks.

Oh, if you’re asking me for the nifty password, please just email me.  I’m going through some Xanga-comment-replying-anxiety, wondering who might want the nifty password but only managed to state the request in the form of a Xanga comment.  =8  I’m tempted to just post it here…  Nah…

Had a nifty jujitsu convention weekend in Sacramento.  I think I was considerably more laid back (um, lazy?) than last year, when I tried to go to every single class, skipping lunch(es), water, rest, and conversation in the interest of saturating my brain with new knowledge.  I think that was generally a good thing that I took it a little easier this time around, but at the same time, I don’t know if I’m walking out with any more satisfaction than last year.  Random recollections: singalong in the car, entering the world’s friendliest Safeway (“Hi! Can I help you?  Oh, that’s the bakery over there.  Would you like me to walk you over there?  Is there anything else I can do for you?  Oh, you found what you were looking for?  Great!  Thank you!  Have a nice day, Mr. Chan!”), watching Mr. Anderson defy gravity while fending off multiple attackers (as usual), eating from the same half-dozen batch of cranberry-orange muffins from Safeway for brunch three days straight (hey, it’s still good!), realizing that my car trunk actually makes a pretty good cooler (the bananas and drinks actually stayed cool in there while the rest of the car baked in the sun), working with Ky (who taught me a lot about grappling last year) again, checking out Vivian’s high school “baby kittens in formaldehyde” collection, having Prof Musselman poke fun at me incessantly (“Needs more rice!”) in front of hundreds of other jujitsu students who probably had no idea what he was talking about, the workshop at the convention called “Rock & Roll” which was not what I imagined it was supposed to be about *at all*, having some of the tastiest salmon I’ve had in a long time for dinner, making another stellated dodecahedron at the banquet table to entertain myself (and other folks) as we sat through over an hour of speeches and award ceremonies, watching the Iron Chef (asparagus ice cream… hmm…) with Vivian and her parents, looking at my convention notes from last year and having little idea what much of it meant, the loudest kiai contest, making sure I remember that Sensei Schuster promised us each a $20 if we come back next year having read Kurt Vonnegut’s book “Cat’s Cradle” (I can smell that $20 already… would it be messed up to actually ask him for it next year?  Hehe.), bantering with the gas station attendant-scalpers who told me they don’t give change on Sundays.  I have about 3.5 hours of video footage, to be pared down to maybe 1 hour… Ack, so much to update in my jujitsu notebook.

Met up with the Stanford Hospital Senior Chaplain today to interview as a volunteer for the spiritual care service.  I can’t believe I still got lost trying to bike to the hospital.  Anyway, I experienced a few neat surprises there that make me a little more confident that this is what I want to do, at least to try out, if I can at all help it, which at the very least means that all my Monday nights in May are now booked.  I think I was prepared to be asked whether I could stomach potentially disturbing sights in the hospital, but I had to admit that I hadn’t really thought about whether I was accustomed to dealing with unpleasant smells emanating from patients’ rooms, and from, well, patients.  I had also always thought that services like this had to be specifically requested, but apparently the hospital is actually required to make at least a first contact with every patient to ask what spiritual needs they might want.  So interesting. 

Nifty.