le tour

I met Eric Mueller at Church of Chai last Sunday, over croquet discussions. He's a friend of Belinda's and lives out in Colorado. Eric is working on a very interesting project called "Tour de Happiness". He's got a monster Harley cruiser, and is riding around the country for 2 months documenting how people define, find and create "happiness". What Eric told me is that he's basically tried to live his life with happiness as the objective. This tour is an exploration of what that objective means to different people.

One of the more profoundly engaging ideas that I received (indirectly) from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, (mostly by way of other peoples' interpretations of what he said), was that the purpose of life is to enjoy. That translates to "the meaning of life is to find your happiness". Simple and yet insanely tough. There are a lot of things that make me happy. To keep my life in the path of being happy, though, is really not very straight-forward. But I'm going to try documenting what makes me happy as a stake in the ground:

1. Cooking - and I don't mean looking up a recipe and following it: I mean the art-form of the culinary deviants. Take, for example, Saffron Sauce, which I created yesterday with some help from the Internet. And some Vodka and some hella good canned tomatos (I'll get to that in a bit). I may have to post the recipe sometime since I'll probably forget it in a week. Then there's the stuff that my friend Rafael comes up with which inspires me to no end. He's a artist (canvas sort) but also a culinary adventurer who's given me ideas that I could not possibly have come up with on my own. Like baked endives. And kimchi-arepas.

2. Writing - and I don't do too much of this, which is why this bullshit here stinks so. But that's where the croquet crap comes in.

3. Traveling - which is the only reason for me to have a job really, coz without The Man paying for my life I can't really go experience Nagaland and Lesotho and a million other places that I know are just changing faster than I can get there.

4. Cool coding - like ruby and perl. It's just great fun to get some code going that works, you know?!

So, here's an experiment - I'm going to try to figure out how to generate an income using the things that make me happy (which should have been the objective all along); rather than the things that I know will make money!

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