Phillip and I went to separate libraries to play Neopets again. We played a game called Armada. Neither one of us had read the rules, but quickly caught on to how the game is played. Phillip won. He would have won by a smaller margin if I had seen that last move I could have made.

When I first tried yoga, I did so for the spiritual benefit. Before my computer time today, I visited the yoga books in the Central Library. I thought about how odd it seems to me that they're shelved next to the exercise and diet books. That must be a Western attitude. I really hadn't considered yoga as an exercise. Lisa has never talked about any physical benefits to yoga.

For the first time since starting yoga, I woke up this morning with a small amount of pain and stiffness in my neck. I hope that isn't a bad sign.

On the bus ride to the library, four black teenagers got on downtown, sat down somewhere behind me, and launched into a rap song in unison. They were quite good at it. Then an interesting thing happened. As I listened to them, I began to think that they sounded very much like Tibetan Buddhist monks chanting. I'm serious. They had the same rhythm and pitch as Tibetan monks. I'm sure that if those young men were to read this, they'd laugh their heads off.

I wore my "new" Birkenstocks downtown. I realized that I've never worn sandals very much in my life. The Birkenstocks are very comfortable, and I felt like I was walking around in my socks. I commented on that to Phillip when I got home, and he replied, "That's 'cause you're wearing socks with your sandals." Later, I walked over to Top Pot for an afternoon latte. I wore my Birkenstocks without socks. It feels better without socks.

I had a hectic day at work today. One of our key people was out sick, so I was pulled off the clinic floor and into the office to help out with a huge workload. (Even though my clinic sees a lot fewer people than my previous clinic did, and performs a much smaller variety of procedures - which lead me to my initial fear that I wouldn't be as busy - my present clinic is a lot more thorough. Not to bad mouth my previous clinic, but I now look back on it as being rather sloppy.) I worked through lunch - eating at my desk. Then I stayed ten minutes late to finish things up, which made me miss both the 60 and the 9. I don't like to walk when I'm feeling rushed, so I caught the later 60 and got home just about twenty minutes before I had to leave for yoga class - not enough tine to sit and relax, really.

I got some personal meditation done on the yoga floor before class began. That helped to mellow me down.

I learned to anchor the four points of my hands and feet tonight. There were a couple of positions, involving balancing on one hand and one foot, that I just couldn't do, so I sat them out - which is perfectly acceptable.

At the end of class, Lisa, the instructor, immediately walked up to me and said, "Thank you." I gave her a puzzled look. She said she was glad to see someone brave enough to try something entirely new to them, who jumped right in and is sticking with it. At first, I wasn't sure how to take that. Did she mean that she was glad to see someone stick with something they weren't doing very well at? Then I realized that I hadn't seen her thank anyone else. I'm not the only newbie in the class, and I've noticed other people sitting out a lot more positions than I had. Maybe she really did mean it as encouragement and praise. Then I decided not to think about it and just enjoy the feeling. Yoga does feel very good.

Our Prius is a good car to drive home from a yoga class. It's so calm and quiet, even when James Brown comes through the radio.

I had that recurring dream again this morning. The dream is different every time, but the overall story is the same: A group of us are on a road trip in unfamiliar territory, and we've stopped to consult a map to figure out our best route ahead.

This morning, none of my fellow travelers are visible, except for an occasional hand pointing at the map. The map is the only thing I see in the dream. The freeway goes due south to Desolation Park, but there's a cutoff right before the park. We could follow the cutoff west to the ocean, and then drive south along the coast a little ways, and then curve back east to the freeway. The cutoff would take us a little distance south of Desolation Park, and we've have to go back north to get to the park. But, someone points out, that's a long detour out of our way. Should we just continue south after we rejoin the freeway, and forget about the park? Or should we skip the ocean loop and drive straight to the park? End of dream.

I was stuck in a paradigm. There was a "crucigrama" in the back of ¡Piensa en Español! Think Spanish! Magazine that I was hesitant to start. The problem I faced was that, instead of typical crossword clues, la crucigrama gave English words as clues and expected me to fill in the Español word equivalents. I could see no way to solve la crucigrama except with a dictionary, and that's where the paradigm came in. It seemed so wrong to solve a crossword puzzle with a dictionary. But, as Phillip pointed out to me, the object of the game is to learn Spanish, not solve a puzzle. So I sat down with my Español/English dictionary and discovered that it's not as easy as it first appeared. It is, in fact, both a puzzle and a learning tool. What I overlooked is that there are sometimes more than one word to describe a thing. The theme of la crucigrama is "Ropa." 1 across is "slippers." Is that "zapatillas," "babuchas," or "pantuflas"?

The sun came up this morning as I rode the 60 to work. I had an odd feeling of isolation - of not wanting to interact with people. I'm back to reading How Soon Is Never?, and it's fitting with my current mindset perfectly. I'm wearing my jacket every morning now. The summer of '04 is over and with it, one of the stranger chapters of my life. My life has moved from in-my-face uncertainty to a sense of routine.

It's a dilemma. I finally finished From Russia With Love on the bus home today - and it ended in a cliffhanger. Now what do I do? Do I go with my earlier feelings that I've gone one Bond novel too far, and move on to books more in my current mindset? Or do I put the next book - Dr. No - on hold at the library, and learn what happens to 007? I didn't say it was a big dilemma.

I do agree with the reviews I've read that this was one of the best James Bond novels. (Is it really the best in the series, as they say?) It had great character development - with well-rounded emotions. It had terrific moments of suspense - What do you do when a Russian spy, and an expert marksman, has you trapped in a berth of The Orient Express, and he has a gun pointed right at your heart, and you've earlier given him your gun because you thought he was an English spy working with you? It had a focused, believable plot. It had the risky premise of having Bond not show up until the second half of the book. Plus, there was that unexpected ending.

Meanwhile, an interesting thing is happening in my reading of ¡Piensa en Español! Think Spanish! Magazine. I am starting to make more and more correct guesses about Spanish words I don't know. Once I get the gist of an article, I can pretty much figure out the sentences - and the dictionary is used more and more to confirm my translation, rather than look up words beforehand. It's a feeling of accomplishment.

For instance, in the article I'm reading about Viña del Mar, Chile and its "Festival de la Canción" (Festival of the Song), I came across the sentence: "Es transmitido a todos los países de Latinamérica y algunos de Europa." and I can figure out that it's saying something like: "It is transmitted to all the countries of Latin America and most of Europe." (I was close. "algunos" is "some.")

I enjoy it when I read an argument that changes my mind on an issue. I'm serious. It's not that I enjoy having my opinion changed. The enjoyment comes from finding a well crafted argument that causes me to look at an issue in a new way. I even enjoy an argument that doesn't change my opinion, but still brings up good points I hadn't considered before.

When the "revised" Star Wars films were shown in theaters (when was that?) - with "better" effects and added scenes - I, being a film purist, was shocked. Why mess with history, I thought - these films are considered classics and landmarks of cinema. Leave well enough alone. Then, this year, Mr. Lucas "revised" THX 1138 and released it to DVD. When will this madness end?

There's an interview with George Lucas in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, about the "revised" Star Wars trilogy that's being released on DVD this week. Now, my mind is changed - to a point.

(George Lucas says he prefers the word "completed" to "revised.")

Entertainment Weekly asked: "What's the line between restoring a film and altering it? Obviously, the versions of the Star Wars Trilogy and THX 1138 on DVD go far beyond what we saw in theaters." George Lucas answered, "Film is so expensive, and it's run by corporations. They just take it away from you, and it's frozen in time at the point it's yanked from your hands. I've been lucky enough to go back and say, 'No, I'm going to finish this the way it was meant to be finished.' When Star Wars came out, I said it didn't turn out the way I wanted - it's 25 percent of what I wanted it to be. It was very painful to me. So the choice came down to, do I please myself and [finally] make the movie that I wanted, or do I allow the audience to see the half-finished version that they fell in love with?" Then, later in the interview, he said, "Nobody seems to mind the [idea of] a 'director's cut.' But to go the next step and say, had they given me another $50,000 to finish these matte paintings, this is what the film would look like - that's not changing your mind."

So why, exactly, is it that I can enjoy the "director's cut" of Blade Runner - with the voice-over removed, the unicorn dream added, and the stronger suggestion that Deckard is a replicant - and even consider it a better film than the original version I saw in the theater, and yet be outraged by a different version of Star Wars? One reason is that when Star Wars was released in 1977, it was amazing to see such cutting-edge special effects - things that had never been done before, like showing a space ship flying through space by moving the camera instead of the model space ship. Those special effects altered the way films were made from that point on. To go back and say that the film would be better if those 1977 special effects were done with 2004 computer graphics is quite different than to say it would look better with better matte paintings.

I own E.T. on a two-DVD set: One DVD has the original version that was shown in theaters, and the other has Steven Speilberg's "remastered" version. That's the way remastering should be done, I think - with the original preserved.

Still, if I were asked to read my "Second Chances" story, I'd read it the way I originally wrote it, not the edited version that was printed in The Sun.

I read my "meditation" story to Writers' Group today, and it got a good reaction. Barbara and Don both commented that they felt relaxed just hearing it - which was exactly what I was trying to achieve.