Talk about bad taste in clothes.
Why I'll take the first job I get offered. I have a second interview down in San Mateo on Monday. I do like the people: they're nowhere near as freaky as my friends, but my prospective boss thought Greg (boat owner who tried to kick me and Mona off in the middle of nowhere on the Mexican coast) seemed like a "selfish bastard", and when he asked why I wanted to work there, the other guy interviewing me said, "Well, obviously you want the money." So it would be fine somehow, I'd work out how to get enough time to do aikido. There are a few dojos around; one of them is Aikido West, which is a good place to train but might have some interesting interpersonal aspects. It's also Aikikai style instead of Iwama, so there's no telling how much it might mess with my Iwama training, but there are worse things, and it's all aikido. (Besides which, most dojos in the world are Aikikai instead of Iwama, so even if I'd rather study Iwama it pays to learn stuff from other schools.)
Up with the sunrise, against my will
Pre-caffeinated mind clouded like the day
But the air is wet
With California's version of winter
And my little laughing Buddha statue laughs at me.
Every night now before I sleep I read out loud the Heart Sutra and another piece called The Identity of Relative and Absolute, and it helps me focus--also helpful during the day when I need to settle my mind for a nap. The more I study Zen, the more I'm amazed at the subtlety of it, the shades of meaning that exist before words, inexpressible in language. For me, unenlightened and in fact not even doing zazen very often, it's like having a 3-dimensional map on a table, with hills and valleys, and running my hand over that map in the dark. I can feel the gradations and differences and changes, but with the lights off I can't see what the whole thing looks like.