keith’s new self

Yo! Check out my new blog.

I’m retiring Wordpress and saddling up Drupal 5.

Yeehaa!

posted: 2:58 am

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Health update - my CT scan last week was totally clean - no more yucky tumors.

Blog update - I’m switching to a new a blog system soon - so comments are disabled for now.

I haven’t been blogging much - maybe it’s cause there’s nothing to complain about. Married life is great, my new job is really good and low stress.

Take care everyone. I wish you peace of mind and good health!

posted: 9:10 am

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Here’s some exciting news - Krista and I got married in Yelapa, Mexico on January 11th. It was a beautiful ceremony - just us and a couple friends on the beach. Our friend and teacher Scott Robinson lead the ceremony. We had a dress, rings and cake made by wonderful people we met down there - thank you! It was a profound and moving experience, beautiful in its simplicity.

Click here to see photos of the wedding.

Click here to download a slideshow (has music and our marriage vows). You might need Quicktime to play it.

posted: 10:41 pm

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blogging from puerto vallarta airport. just experienced the classic baggage loss scenario. our checked bags are somewhere out there in the world, and we have to navigate the inscrutable, labyrinthine world of international air travel and telecommunications to find them. fun. also we somehow managed to get in to the country without going through immigration. we actually had to track down the immigration guy to get our tourist visas. mexico is hilarious. oh well, hopefully our baggage joins us soon. i’m making a beeline for the beach.

oh yeah - free wireless in airports rules. for some reason it feels comforting right now.

posted: 9:42 am

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Even though I haven’t written anything in a while, it feels like quite a lot has happened.

I quit my job at Sxip, and I am now working from home for a web development shop in San Francisco called Projectzero, with the end-goal of building open-source grants management software called Solpath. So far I am really loving it.

Pretty good healthwise - definitely still in recovery. Eating a raw food diet for the most part. Been meditating more and cleaning a lot (!).

Enjoyed many holiday festivities in the Homeland (Langley, BC). Krista and I spent Christmas Day in Tofino at the yummy Wickanninish.

Had a wicked good New Years Eve with brother Gary at my old pal Matt’s new penthouse.

My good friend Dustin quit his job at BOBJ and became a Buddhist forest monk. Go Dustin!!!

I bought a shiny new black MacBook laptop.

Today I made fire starters with Ryan using an old recipe I learned in boy scouts (dryer lint, cardboard egg carton, candle wax), which make lighting fires in Ecovillage stoves oh so easy.

Tomorrow I leave for Mexico (Yelapa and Mar de Jade, near Puerto Vaillarta) for a meditation retreat. Bueno!

In other news, I’d like to give this blog a bit of an update. It needs a new name, a new theme, and I think it would like to become a bliki (think: blog + wiki). Also I think I’d like to merge it with my geek blog, and let the chips fall where they may. It feels a bit weird to have a hidden geeky blog - like I’m living two lives. Non-geeks will just have to filter out the geeky posts. Or maybe I’ll make a geek filter of some kind. Whatever inspires me to write!

That’s it for now. Hasta luego, amigos!

posted: 11:55 pm

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I met with my oncologist Dr. Savage today, and I’m very happy to say that my cancer is in remission. My scans came back totally clear, so no further treatment is needed. I’ll be going in for checkups every three months to monitor things. Thank you to everyone who’s helped me along the way through this. Will write more later - I need a nap.

posted: 3:23 pm

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posted: 1:06 pm

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The last chemo I had has left me a bit more wiped out. I think I can understand somewhat what being “shell shocked” must be like - there is a feeling of violence done against my body that’s hard to shake - that is being imprinted on a cellular level. The more chemo I get the more emotionally intolerant I become of it - basically it just wears me down emotionally. It feels like I need some time to just release all this poison and violence - a reprieve.

Spent Sunday on Gambier. Watched an incredible storm pass over in the morning, and it was clear and warm in the afternoon.

posted: 11:52 am

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Just had chemo 12 of 12. Crossing my fingers that I won’t need any more this lifetime. I feel good. I have a battery of tests booked towards the end of the month, to see how my insides look. Feels like a major transition point in my life. I read a sad and touching story in the Globe and Mail today by someone who is dying of lung cancer at 44 (non-smoker, otherwise healthy). It reminded me that this last chemo does not mean that I’m out of the woods, and that taking things one day at a time is the only way to go. Sounds cheesy, but every day really is a gift. It’s funny how most people (me included, of course) have to face death before really getting this (and I still don’t feel like I’ve really got it). Perhaps that’s one reason why we create these kinds of situations. Our culture is not comfortable with mortality, but we have access to spiritual traditions with the power to get us through tough times. The transformation of my own spirituality has been one of the most significant consequences of getting sick, and I feel like I’m only still seeing the tip of the iceberg. To really take on and embody the spirituality that transcends physical mortality seems just as daunting to me now, and it looks like a lot of work, not just a intellectual exercise, but a daily practice of contemplation and repetition, with no guarantees of success. Faith and hope, which were before just dead words, have become more compelling and alive to me.

Simone Weil, a 20th century Christian philosopher, has been giving me a comfort and insight recently. I’m reading a book called Waiting for God, which is a compendium of her spiritually-oriented letters and essays. I’m not a Christian, but I find that her ideas and insights reach beyond her own tradition. It’s making me want to learn ancient Greek. If anyone reading this would like to teach me, or know anyone who could (I’ll pay for it of course), please let me know.

posted: 9:01 pm

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These days it seems like everyone is like “OMG - I wish someone would break down the stages of human communal life using some kind of teleological framework.” And so I’m like WTF? and do it in Blenz while I wait for chemo. Succinctly:

Prokaryote - living with parents
Life begins in someone else’s house. Either you grew up in a tidy house, where you couldn’t wait to escape the tyranny and rules, or you grew up in a messy house, where you couldn’t wait to escape the chaos and disorder. Either way, the transition out of this phase is marked by the disappearance of direct parental influence on your behavior. You somehow manage to graduate high school and hit the road. You soon find yourself in…

Eukaryote - college social dorm
In this phase, personal responsibility is known only by its complete absence. In this institutional Gomorra all needs your are provided for, allowing you to focus entirely on reckless libertine experimentation. After the first week, all indoor environments smell like stale beer, pizza, and puke. The common rooms all have a patina of compressed mouldering beer and cheese that the strongest industrial solvents cannot remove. Someone tries to use your building’s communal vacuum to clean up their own vomit, after which all vacuuming ceases. There seems to be an unspoken, ongoing contest of who can throw the biggest piece of furniture through a dorm building window. You build furniture out of stolen beer kegs and milk crates, which become little islands in the sea of filth that is your bedroom. You learn to have sex very quietly in order to not wake your roommate, sleeping only feet away in the same room. Those that survive this phase move on to…

Invertebrate - college mature housing
The names for this phase differ, but the concept is always that the least stable Eukaryotes have all dropped out or been expelled, so the better-adjusted two-thirds of the bell curve can get serious about their studies. This phase is marked by the introduction of non-hierachical communal living, which is constantly confused and provoked by your roommates’ shifting liberal arts education - the internal dynamics can be reduced to the sum of the forces of the topics being studied (read: fanatically adhered-to) that week. Nietzsche, Deleuze and bell hooks argue over who should clean the toilet. Your more uptight roommates distribute multi-page self-indulgent manifestos decrying the leaving of empty tuna cans in the sink. Your house has no toilet paper for two weeks, and no one does anything about it. The next few years are a haze of libertinism and cramming, with the scale and scope of the libertinism diminishing year after year, along with your idealism. You don’t buy drugs yourself anymore, but you’re happy to indulge if anyone’s got any. You apathetically slouch into…

Vertebrate - post-post-secondary shared accommodations
This phase is similar to Invertebrate, except that you no longer live on campus, and your mattress is now on the floor. People have begun to group themselves based on the beliefs and desires that have congealed out of the undifferentiated collegiate soup of hedonism and utopian ideology. Most conflicts arise from the programmed tendencies of the Prokaryote phase and play themselves out over and over again. Three possible configurations emerge:

• Perfect tidiness - anal-retentive, light-sleeping busy bodies group together in oases of perfect order. Chore lists are made and followed. Dust is banished from the kingdom. Three different kinds of Febreeze in the cupboard.
• Perfect messiness - a garbage pile with walls, calling this place a health hazard is an insult to germs, which are tidier than this. That half-eaten pot of macaroni-and-cheese has been on the stove for three years, and will still be there when the building is condemned and demolished.
• Imbalance - most of humanity exists here, playing out the human drama. Inevitably you have the tidy folks, who assume alternating roles of jerk or victim, fighting the untidy folks, who would rather suffer the endless complaints and tirades of their tidy roommates than wash a cup or turn the music down.

Mammal - intentional community
“We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Those that transcend the Vertebrate phase may achieve a communal lifestyle that is tenuous balance of relaxed mindful self-awareness and self-responsibility. This is obviously quite rare. Housemates overcome their programmed selfish behaviors, allowing for genuine community and sharing. This phase is marked by an in-between level of cleanliness that is neither totally sloppy nor maniacally clean, pooling and sharing of resources, Mac laptops, the sound of bubbling water, and feng shui.

Human - total spiritual oneness
Seeing that the manifest and spiritual realms are not-two, the %0.000001 of the population who achieve this state stop the wheel of death-and-rebirth and sit on a thousand-petal lotus while being perfectly ordinary. You take out the garbage, and the garbage is taken out. “The Bachelor” is on. You tape it. You hear the toc toc of bamboo wind chimes on the porch. Leaves fall, one by one.

Thus concludes my analysis. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Having solved this problem, I hope we can all move on.

posted: 5:45 pm

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