Yesterday, I went to the park with some friends. Going to the park, forest, woods, grassy fields, creek, river, lake, beach, ocean or mountains is my absolute favorite thing to do and I'm up for it almost anytime of the day or year. Well, I guess I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Before going to the park, my wife, one of her co-workers and I went to see Inception. Excellent film and even better score. In fact, I can only think of a few scores that I like better: The Mission-my personal favorite, Lawrence of Arabia, Psycho, Last of the Mohicans, Legends of the Fall, Rudy, Cape Fear, Born on the Fourth of July and, of course, Jaws. It made it into my top ten, so that's pretty good.
After the movie, my wife and her buddy decided to go to a wax museum. I'm not a fan of museums that don't include the names "history", "natural" or "national", so I decided to head to the park to meet some friends. We set up some shading tents, got the tunes roaring and started setting up some of the prepared food that we had brought. Before I knew it, I was tempted by my old friend, makgeolli.
Unfortunately, I let it win. All day we sat there; from 12pm to well past 9pm, drinking, laughing and having a ball. By the time I made it home, I was plenty drunk and went straight to bed. Apparently, my tolerance for booze has weakened over the past few years and it has certainly sat out the past few months, so let's just say that I was a mess. My wife, however, wasn't too angry or anything and helped me into bed.
Getting into bed wasn't the problem though. I woke up this morning at 2am and smiled a little because I thought that it was early Sunday morning. Of course, my alarm went off three hours later and the urgency of Monday landed heavily on my red crusted eyes. I was still smashed, but had no option but to go into work and teach. My first class doesn't have that many students in it and since it's the end of the term, they usually start to flake out. Not today. No, sir. All of them were in there and ready to learn. The problem was, I wasn't ready to teach. My hearing was all weird, my eyes were blurry and I felt like I had to poop every few minutes. I did in fact.
I taught my first two classes and then called it a day. I had to go home and sleep it off. Cancelling classes is easy in my position, so I didn't care about that and probably should have cancelled them all. I did care, however, that I had not only broken my Jain rules, but I did so in such an extreme way that I made my body sick which ended up interrupting my daily responsibilities. That was not very Jain-y of me.
Or was it?
During my recovery yoga session and meditation this afternoon, I started to think about how sick I was early and how foolish it was for me to intentionally poison myself in the name of a cause--that being "fun". However, Jainism, to me, seems to be more of a punishment or mortification of my body and flesh than a beer. I'm certainly killing myself slowly by partaking in unhealthy habits and behaviors, but don't some of these rituals equate to violence against myself?
Regardless, I broke one of the rules and now am having to pay the price.
Karma.
Sorry to read this one!
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