A Meeting with the Buddha

I had been trying out a variety of different liquors throughout this one week where I was testing my limits. The idea somehow came to me that I could try being responsible when inebriated, and I could try letting loose when sober. I could respect the balance on both ends (as inspired by The Substance) instead of always conflating letting loose with heavy inebriation.

So it was that at the end of a week of heavy binge drinking while doing responsible things like not eating junk food while drunk or telling my friends when I’ve had enough for the night instead of going “Aw fuck it, let’s see where this one goes!” as I usually did, I decided to try this special whiskey my friend had left behind when he returned back to the US. My friend had warned me about how strong it was, and I felt queasy. Did I really need to do this at the end of a long week of binge drinking? Couldn’t we wait until the next week, until we were more certain this wouldn’t affect our daily and weekly routines?

My rebellious side was adamant that I had to do it to cap off a week of responsible irresponsibility. Either this would break me and the nice responsible routine that I’d set up for myself, in which case I’d know what my limits are, or else I stick the landing and show myself what I am now definitely capable of. If I failed, I had the rules in the FML to cushion my fall and climb my way back up again. If I succeeded, I’d know that I don’t need to rely as strongly on the rules as I did before. Regardless of what was going to happen, this is what it means to feel empowered to break the rules and make mistakes.

My plans for the day, if I had stayed sober, were to:

1. Move some of the remaining things over from my old apartment to my new one
2. Wash and dry this throw blanket I got from some friends leaving Cambodia
3. Review my daily bit of Khmer vocabulary

I decided to try having a nice swig of the whiskey the first thing in the morning as I watched the sun rise over Siem Reap. It was indeed every bit as strong as my friend had warned it was. My ego started dissolving a bit as I walked the streets towards my old apartment with my duck umbrella to shield me from the sun and a bag to bring back supplies in. I envisioned a random stranger using the FML as a guide to living a day in my life in the style of Being John Malkovich. I recalled how at one point in my life, I had gazed out at the pyramids of Giza from my hotel window and wished that someone else could take over and live my life, because I clearly wasn’t doing it very well and my cushy life was being wasted on me. But of course that was impossible because even the Buddha himself, if he were stripped of all his meditation techniques, wisdom, experience, and personality, and made to live my life with my psychology — in other words, if the Buddha were me — he would struggle and suffer just as much as I do. He was not the Buddha by dint of arbitrary divine status, but because of the particular path he’d happened to follow in life.

I was glad that I do finally feel like I’m living my own life half-decently. But surely that reasoning went both ways: If the Buddha could be me and be indistinguishable from what I am now, then I might as well be the Buddha. Not in any privileged sense, of course; everyone else in the world could lay claim to being the Buddha in this sense, and I think that fits well with the idea that we are all part of the same Oneness, the same Source of universal consciousness. (In case you’re wondering, I greatly enjoy entertaining such unfalsifiable ideas, but I wouldn’t personally proclaim them to be the truth with any degree of confidence.) If I were the Buddha, what would I be doing with my life?

So it was that somewhere around this point, I got the sensation that the Buddha had decided to pay me a visit and see how he would live my life if all he had to work with was a mind and body as unenlightened as mine. That’s my own phrasing; the Buddha was of course very understanding and kind in his appraisal.

Cleaning up the biggest mess of my life

I made it into the old apartment and found it a complete mess. It was empty, but it was a mess with sand and dirt everywhere from the termites that had infested the place before the exterminator came. At least no termites were falling from the ceiling when I used the bathroom this time.

I went to the kitchen and took stock of the remaining inventory. There were two columns of remaining items on the cabinets below the kitchen counter, one plastic condiment basket on the counter, and everything in the fridge. The main thing on my mind was this heavy pot that represented my mental aversion to the task of finishing the move. I clearly had to get that out of the place, or else the whole trip would feel quite trivial. I thought about only getting that pot out, but the Buddha reminded me that I had brought along a big bag precisely because sober me had planned on moving a whole lot more back home. Fair enough. I grabbed a few bottles of oil and sauces and put them in the basket to take back home.

The basket’s only half-filled, the Buddha noted.

Fine. I stocked it up with a whole bunch more items from around the kitchen, including a half-finished bag of vermicelli rice noodles. Now this looked like it made a proper dent in the task. One trip of this size every day would definitely have me moved out by the end of my lease.

I put the basket and the duck umbrella into the bag, and I grabbed the bag and the pot and headed downstairs to wait for a tuk-tuk. It reminded me of the beauty of coding: you put things into a neat abstraction like the bag, and all you have to worry about at that point is the bag. With the severely limited number of mental bits I had at my disposal at this stage of inebriation, every little bit of abstraction counted.

The tuk-tuk arrived and I got in. As I set the bag down on my seat, I noticed that there was something wet coming out of it. I lifted it to discover to my horror that the entire bottom of the bag was flooded with soy sauce. The soy sauce bottle had been one of those Kikkoman containers that have openings on the side allowing you to pour soy sauce out without unscrewing anything. When the basket tipped at some point, so did that soy sauce! Fuck! I quickly set the bag on the floor of the tuk-tuk, where it continued to seep soy sauce onto the floor. God damn it, this was very literally a leaky abstraction.

Once we arrived, I tipped the driver an extra 10,000 riels for the mess and apologized in Khmer. He said it was fine, drove up a little further, and rinsed his tuk-tuk off. I got inside my building and put the bag next to the trash cans. The whole bag, my hands, and even my sandals were positively slathered in soy sauce. Oh fuck man, I’ve really done messed up this time.

This happens, said the Buddha. You overestimate your capabilities, you make a mistake, and things blow up. And then… you clean up.

Right. It was time to run a salvage operation. I went up to my apartment bringing only the pot, which had largely escaped the debacle. I trekked small bits of soy sauce along the way; the cleaning lady would know exactly whose fault this mess was. Thankfully the trail wasn’t that obvious on the dark exterior flooring. I got in my home and quickly went into the bathroom to rinse off my feet and shoes.

Now I wondered how to get the rest of the bag back up. I couldn’t carry the bag directly because there was still so much soy sauce continually dripping out of it. I decided I would take another bag down, get as many of the items from the first bag as possible into this new bag, and bring it back up, making multiple trips if necessary. It sounded like a potentially stupid plan, but it was a workable plan, and I didn’t need sober Amos or anyone else to think that I was smart. I had only so many bits of mental capacity to work with, which is of course a statement that is always true, but it was a statement that was also easier to accept than usual given how much more obvious it was than usual.

So I went down with a fresh bag and took out the contents of the old bag one by one. It was without a doubt the single most disgusting mess of a mistake I’ve ever made in my whole life. My hands were absolutely caked in soy sauce and dirt. I may have made plenty of mistakes, but not even in childhood can I remember one as viscerally disgusting as this one was. I felt like I was cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

This is the biggest mess you have ever made in your entire life, affirmed the Buddha. If you can recover from this mess, you can recover from any mess.

I threw the soy sauce bottle in the recycle after draining what was left of it on the soil (I hope the tree likes soy sauce), threw the old bag and the vermicelli noodles into the regular trash, and carried the new bag up. I hopped in the shower and rinsed myself off along with each of the other items, include my duck umbrella. My poor Duckbrella was leaking soy sauce from every fold, even — and especially — the wrist strap. God, I’d never thought my shower would be turned into a decontamination chamber.

Working through the hardest workday in my life

After all that was done, I got dressed with some fresh clothes. I had put the throw blanket in the wash before I headed out earlier, so I now hung it on the drying rack before starting on my Khmer vocab for the day. Wait, what? Was I really going to do vocabuarly review now, instead of when I sobered up again?!

Yes, answered the Buddha. We are going about our regular day just as if we were completely sober. Remember, sober Amos only let you drink today because he trusted you to follow through on your tasks. We are going to honor the trust that was placed in you.

Fuuuck. The enormity of that dawned on me. I hadn’t done my vocab review the previous night because that had unexpectedly turned out to be my rest day for the week, so I now had two days’ worth of Anki flashcards to review.

Come on now. We are going to get through these 20 flashcards at a time, but we are going to get through them.

I was staring at the first word trying to remember what it meant.

That’s a fail. Review the answer and move on to the next card.

“But I’m drunk as fuck right now! I’m thinking slower than usual,” I protested.

Doesn’t matter. If you don’t know a word within the first five seconds, then you don’t know that word. Doesn’t matter if you’re drunk or not, we are not going easy on ourselves just because we’re drunk.

It took a long time to get just the first two out of twenty flashcards right. I was getting distracted by so many random thoughts popping into my mind. “This is impossible. I can’t concentrate.”

Doesn’t matter. Remember what we do with meditation. Once we notice that our mind has drifted, we bring it back to the task at hand. No need to beat ourselves up about it, we just let those thoughts go and return our focus back to the task at hand.

“But I’m about to have a life-changing epiphany.”

Doesn’t matter. Your life can change later. Right now, we are focused on doing this task.

“But this is going to take forever! I’m never going to finish!”

It’s 8 AM now. We are going to sit here for a full workday. If you still aren’t done by 4 PM despite an honest day’s effort, then you may go. But you know that you are going to be done by 4 PM, because you will have long been sober by then. Sober Amos is not an unreasonable boss — he understands if you truly tried your best and failed. But this is not trying your best. Work on your flashcards until they’re done or until it’s 4 PM.

“But this is going to take such a long time, and there’s no more of that whisky to be had! I was looking forward to kicking back while drunk, but at this rate I’m going to be sober by the time I’m done!”

Doesn’t matter. People work their entire lives without getting the retirement benefits they were promised. Doesn’t mean you stop maintaining the systems that support life.

“Yeah, and if their jobs are as tedious, meaningless, and artificial as these flashcards are, then maybe they should stop doing their jobs too.”

Sober Amos finds learning and reviewing Khmer to be important and meaningful activities that are necessary for a comfortable long-term stay in Cambodia. We will honor Sober Amos’s values.

“No seriously, this is such a contrived and unnatural way of learning a language. We should be doing something natural like the automatic language growth course that J. Marvin Brown taught.”

As crude as this method of language acquisition may be, it’s one that works. If you know of a better way to retain Khmer knowledge, you may bring it up with Sober Amos when you meet him. But as of right now, we will work with the best system that Amos and his friends are aware of.

“I’m feeling hot. I want to get up really quick to turn the fan on.”

Very well.

I did so and sat back down. “Ugh, now I’m feeling cold.” I got up, turned the fan back off, and ended up pacing around the room for a few minutes as my mind drifted off to other things. I finally caught myself and returned to the desk. I felt warm again.

Doesn’t matter. Last time you got up to turn the fan off, we got off track for a few minutes. We’re not getting up any longer until you finish these first twenty words.

I finally finished the first batch of words, got up to turn the fan back on, and took a 5 minute break on a timer. I spent the break just sitting on the couch thinking a wide range of thoughts. The timer rang, and I went back at it.

That was until I thought of my ex and the breakup and got really sad.

Take your time to grieve. Don’t suppress your feelings. Cry if you need to. But after you are done crying, you must return to work.

I cried my fill. Then I started getting up to blow my nose on some of the tissues on the living room table.

No. You were not responsible with getting up from your desk, so now your desk-leaving privileges have been revoked. It may not have been your fault; you may not have intended to lose track of the task after you got up from the desk. But regardless, trust was placed in you, and that trust was not met, so that trust has now been revoked. You will sit in that chair until you are done with these next 20 flashcards.

“But my nose is completely stuffed.”

So blow it on your shirt. You are not getting up.

“That’s disgusting.”

It’s disgusting, but you can wash your shirt afterwards. It’s not the end of the world. You are not getting up until you are done with this next batch of flashcards.

“I really don’t want to blow a whole wad of snot into my shirt.”

So then breathe through your mouth. You are not getting up.

“This is so freaking uncomfortable.”

And you will work through it all the same. You’ve experienced working while uncomfortably hot, working while uncomfortably cold, and working while uncomfortably annoyed at the task. Now you will experience working while uncomfortably breathing through your mouth. It is just another state of mind for you to work in. The work of life does not stop because of discomfort.

I made a typo while reviewing a flashcard.

That’s a fail.

“But that was a typo!”

Doesn’t matter. You are drunk. We can’t be certain if it was a legitimate typo, or if you simply don’t actually remember the word. We are not letting ourselves off easy just because we are drunk; in fact, our standards for our work must be higher precisely because we are drunk.

I duly finished the next twenty words, put a toilet paper roll on the desk, and used the bathroom. Cognizant of time slipping by, I declined to take a further 5 minute break. I wanted to get everything done with as soon as possible.

Batch after batch of flashcards were finished until I was finally down to my last twenty.

Steady now. Don’t rush these. Take your time to properly finish your work up.

The last twenty were some of the hardest. There were a lot of completely new words because I have Anki set up so that new words are scheduled for last. There were also all the hardest words that I kept getting wrong throughtout the session, because I also have it set so that I have to get unfamiliar new-ish words right twice in a row, with the second time some 10 minutes after the first (except towards the end when there’s not enough cards left to wait 10 minutes before a second review). I laughed when I saw the monster card for “clothes hanger” that had two long Khmer words, ស្មាហាលលខោអាវ and ទំពួកហាលខោអាវ. Hahaha, oh boy that one’s going to be a doozy! Except that one surprisingly wasn’t even that hard to recall; somehow, a short word like ជំពូក (“chapter”) turned out to be the hardest of all to remember.

I was so fucking proud of myself when I was finally done with it all. YES!!! I slammed my fist on the table. I couldn’t believe I actually fucking did it. Sure, I was no longer maximally drunk, but it wasn’t like I missed the peak. I merely experienced what it was like to work while peak drunk, same as all the other states of mind I experienced working through.

This was the most challenging work day you’ve ever had to work through, the Buddha said. If you could work through this while drunk, you could work through anything.

It truly was the single hardest day of work I have ever done in my life. I have never been worked so hard by so strict a boss — but I have also never had a boss that respected me so deeply so as to bring out what he knew I was capable of.

Resetting the most annoying Chromecast failure in my life

I’ve been wanting to learn how to crochet. But as I prepared to watch a video on crocheting on the living room TV, I found that the Chromecast wasn’t responding to the YouTube app at all. This had happened before, and the only way I could find to fix it was to completely reset the Chromecast, which was something I was not in the mood for at all. Nor did I want to create an unsightly mess of wires by pulling out the HDMI cable, the HDMI-to-USB-C connector, and plugging all that into the TV and the laptop. Fucking hell, I was just going to watch it on my phone.

No. The Buddha stopped me. Where do you want to watch it?

“On the living room TV.”

And how do you want the TV to display the video?

“By casting through the Chromecast.”

So take the time to reset the Chromecast so that you may watch it on the TV the way you want to.

“But this keeps happening. I’ll have to reset the Chromecast again at some point because somehow the damn connection keeps permanently breaking. Google must not be paying so much attention to this old version of the Chromecast anymore.”

Are you ever going to use the Chromecast again?

“Yes, I suppose sooner or later I’ll want to use it badly enough to reset it once again.”

Then that time is now. You live in an age of magic. Do not be afraid to spend a few moments of your time to fill your life with magic. Time the reset process and see for yourself how long it truly takes to give yourself the magical viewing experience you want.

I started the timer. I slowly and calmly walked over to reset the Chromecast. Five minutes into the setup process, it somehow failed on connecting to the Wifi. I hit “Retry,” and it failed a second time. This had never happened before.

I’ve noticed that sometimes my other devices would fail to connect to the WiFi as well, so I reset the router, and reset the Chromecast again. I changed the language on my phone from Khmer back to English so that I could actually properly read the error messages; I could use the phone in Khmer for most regular tasks, but technical error messages were too much for me.

Everything was finally working again with this setup. I stopped the timer. It had taken just over 14 minutes.

“Everything about this is so stupid,” I ranted. “A billion-dollar corporation like Google should really keep old versions of Chromecast supported enough to not require frequent resets. It was working so well a few years ago. The router manufacturer should also engineer their devices for an uptime that lasts way longer than 48 hours.

I mean, it’s the 2020’s, man. Do you really expect your average consumer to spent 15 minutes getting things working every single time they want to sit down for a goddamn YouTube video?!”

That all may well be, but you are allowing the shortcomings of others to sabotage your appreciation of the age of magic that you live in.

I knew the Buddha was right. Two centuries ago, it would’ve blown someone’s mind that my magical handheld device could control a magical portal on the wall to display an audiovisual story of my choosing from the largest interconnected repository of human knowledge to ever exist. I, meanwhile, was about to let less than 15 minutes of effort stand between me and having the magic happen in the exact way I wanted the magic to happen.

You have never have such a difficult time setting up the TV before. If you can set it up in under 15 minutes while drunk, you can set it up anytime.

Every single thing on this day, without exception, was objectively harder than it would’ve normally been, and the Chromecast showed that it wasn’t just because of the alcohol. And yet, the Buddha was making me trundle right through it all instead of accepting my fate as I usually did. And he was right. To this day, I have never dreaded resetting the Chromecast again — and I’ve also finally taken the time to swap in my own superior router that doesn’t require any resets.

Further difficulties

I watched and rewatched the crocheting video on the TV. It was annoyingly difficult to learn how to do the UK double crochet (aka the US single crochet). God, did we really have to go through this today?

Do you want to know how to crochet? the Buddha asked.

Yes.

Then learn. You have not faced the frustration of learning a new skill in a long time. If you can learn to do the double crochet while drunk, you can learn to do anything.

God, why was this day such a goddamn hard one? All I wanted to do was to just fucking get drunk and have fun. This was like The Ceremony all over again.

Nobody said living your life would be easy.

Ugh. I was so tired of doing annoying things. Can’t we just stop doing annoying things?

If you are tired, then rest, the Buddha said. But do not shirk away from living the life you want to live just because it would require effort.

Sigh. I knew that the Buddha’s idea of “rest” would be staring at the wall and meditating rather than scrolling through my phone, and I was in no mood to stare at the wall. As such, I tried, and I tried again… and again… and eventually got the double crochet working! I had successfully taken one small step in my journey towards crocheting, and I could feel the Buddha nodding with approval.

It was time to go for dinner. I could already tell that my dinner plans were going to involve going out into the uncomfortable evening heat. God, why couldn’t we just order in?

Would you rather be exploring a new restaurant, or eating takeout from inside your home?

“Well, I’d rather be exploring a restaurant, but I mean, the heat and the walk to get there —”

If you want to explore a new restaurant, then go and explore a new restaurant. If you want to eat at home, then go and eat at home. But do not eat at home because you fear the effort involved in getting to a restaurant.

You deserve to live the life you want to live, but that will not happen until you respect yourself enough to put in the time and effort required to live that life.

So it was that I got dressed and went out for a nice evening walk. I saw the pretty night lights of the city, made my way across the bustling evening traffic, and found an interesting new restaurant. I walked inside, ordered an anchovy salad, ate and paid, and went out for a stroll by the river before eventually returning home.

I was long sober by now, and absolutely bone-tired. I showered and went to bed.

Well done. You have finally found the courage to live a full day of your own life.

I had indeed. Fuck was it a challenging day, made all the more challenging by just how intoxicated I was, but it was also a fulfilling day. If I could live such a day while drunk, I could live such a day while sober.

Reflections

I am of course fully aware that all of this was happening entirely inside my head. That being said, it is unfalsifiable whether or not the Buddha had “actually” visited me in some metaphysical sense, and therefore I will choose that as my whimsical headcanon because:

1. That was my subjective experience at the time
2. It helps me value the lesson if it feels like it was taught to me by the Buddha himself, rather than something that my subconscious cooked up. (But why should I value my subconscious less than some abstract idea of a historical personage?)
3. It seemed uncharacteristically wise of me. As a friend said, this “wisdom” was just being nontoxic, but this was uncharacteristically nontoxic of me. I am wary of overly attributing wisdom to myself because that makes me feel as if I no longer need to learn as much from life, so this is a way of blaming someone else for the lesson.

Armed with a new sense of resilience, a couple of days later I tried journaling about how my day went at the beginning of the day, and editing it again with how it actually went towards the end of that day. While the actual course of the day would of course get increasingly detached from my initial predictions, the exercise helped in setting my intentions for the kind of day I wanted to live, because otherwise it can be hard sometimes to tell whether I would’ve truly wanted something if it weren’t for the amount of effort involved.