Got a bit o’ shut eye, existential dread and e-mail (I like mutt! Woof!)

- 4 minutes read - 832 words

I’m up at 6 a.m. and feeling sorta awake. I feel that my living on the travel run has caught up with me, my lymph nodes are the size of walnuts and I keep sneezing thus, I cannot sleep, thus I type.

I hope that work’s requirements will allow me to check out some tunes on the shared Mac users’ iTunes shares, slurp some green tea, and parse my bazillion emails.

I have to be honest, I’m dreading that. I eradicated my mail quota before I left (it’s good to be king) so there’s no telling how bloated my inbox is with people sending me mails that want to ‘get buy-in’ or ’leverage synergies’ or ‘what the hell happened to X’.

Then again, you really can’t dread things too much, or else you will not be worrying about Who Moved your Cheese; no, instead you will come up with some sort perverted view toward your cheese (Spencer Johnson, send me a mail if you want these here idears):

The Paranoid

  • Someone is out to move my cheese again!

The Hostile

  • Motherfucker better not move the cheese again!

The Apathetic

  • Fuckit, I don’t care if you move my cheese

Nigel from “The Young Ones”

  • I don’t want want you to move my legumes

Samuel L. Jackson, [this one’s for you Dave Chappelle] moved my cheese

  • Move my cheese again, motherfucker I dare you I double-dare you

Okay enough whimsy.

As the Baghavad Gita reminds us, we cannot change the conditions of the world of illusion that we find ourselves in, we must simply accept what the law of karma has dished out.

I tell you my friends, accepting that you are incapable of changing a good many things is certainly an important key to happiness. I had a tight connection on the JFK → SFO changeover on the flight.

I had two options, I could sit there on the plane and plan how to get out of the plane, how I had to haul through the baggage, how there would be a good long line of other wearied, sweaty travellers. I could have dwelt on that idea for the whole 7 hours of that flight.

Instead I put it aside and during the taxi, I just sat there and focused on my breathing. I needed my mind to be alert, my muscles ready, but dreading the fact that it was a tight change wasn’t going to get my anywhere. Instead it was going to needlessly stress me out for the last half hour of the flight.

You can let wrong thinking really upset your life if you’re not careful.

On the plane this lady bumped a guy and he sloshed wine over himself.

Now, to be fair, I think she was really way too relaxed about the fact that she did so, not offering to help, not really even showing contrition (although, did she speak no English? Was she just rude? Don’t know).

But this guy he got all worked up about it and stayed mad. He was really angry.

He was slinging his hand about and muttering. He was doing what I call the normative confirmation eye-search [commonly seen from children]: a wronged person looks around to other people in the immediate area for valuation of “yeah you got screwed” or “get over it”. I pretended to be reading, I didn’t want to help him dig the ditch he wanted to keep digging himself into.

Afterwards he stayed mad. Now international air travel brings out all sorts of levels of irritation and weariness - but I could feel his hostility making him a slave. With each mutter, gasp, “Geaagghh” his misery grew bigger.

The man wanted to be miserable. He wanted to be a slave.

How sad. Surely this is the compassion which compel the Boddhisattva to stay in the world.

So that large aside aside, what does that tell me about the mountain of e-mail waiting? I can either put myself into a slave relationship to it or I can think about mastering it. It is my moira to face this heap o’ mail.

So thinking about mastering it, I was thinking about how to smarten up my mail reader mutt.

I should write a patch so that one can implement

  • virtual folders based on RegEx search
  • better IMAP caching

Well, to make the former work you would certainly need the latter (for those of us using client / server protocol versus POP slurping of mail {hello the server is the network? (OK, just kidding, don’t want Sun Mikey fans [ do you still exist? ] getting all up in mah grill) ).

I hacked up some patches for IMAP access for Mutt a while ago, I’ve not handled some irritating bugs in the hack – I really would like to learn how to patch up Mutt (and in general, other open source apps..). Regrettably my C skills aren’t that stellar – that’s on the list of things to improve in.