INTERPRETATION: I don’t believe in my own grandiose notions of personal transformation and progress

Possible side effect..

Propecia comes in 1mg doses

To save money, you can get Proscar, which is the same exact drug except

1) it’s for your prostate
2) it comes in 5mg doses

If you cut it into 4 pieces, voila! You have 1.25mg propecia! (this is very well known)

“Imagine a leaf floating high in the sky, and let it drop slowly, just as fast as your unconscious mind readies itself to relax. If you’re not ready, don’t let the leaf drop. Let the leaf move honestly, unconsciously. When it hits the ground, that means you’re really ready to let go and enter a nice state of trance.

I would “cheat” and use this image to get my mind to chill. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t

Not interesting in and of itself. What’s more interesting is the grandiosity associated with the thought. At the moment, I thought the leaf drop would become a famous hypnotic induction, and this trip report would become the canonical Vipassana trip report (I imagined many retweets). What a marvelous idea, to go on a retreat, suffer a little, kick all your bad habits, and come out with instant and automatic fame!

My name literally means “tall tree”..

Anybody ask you who I ammmmmm

Not an actual thing

The homesick day-counting game that I discovered at summer camp and perfected at the 1997 Maccabi Games in Pittsburgh. It goes like this: “I’ve spent 2.5 days so far, so just three more of those chunks. But if you coun’t the orientation and maybe the ride up (at a slight discount but still part of the overall captivity experience), it’s more like 3 days, but the denominator will increase as well so…” Every single way you can count to ten, I did it.

After 8 days this turned into about 15000 words, my very own Spandau Diaries (Albert Speer’s prison memoirs, written over 20 years on squares of toilet paper)