The last post was a drunken post, mostly because I had been at a bar, and when at a bar, people drink.

I look at the half empty bottle of vodka in my room, realizing I had just bought this bottle on Friday, even before the last bottle was finished, and think: you're not an alcoholic if there's no one around to notice you're an alcoholic.

So if I die of liver disease, and then people find out how much I drank, at that time then I'll be an alcoholic. Go me.

Talking about dying is no longer dramatics. It's just sinking in deeper that it's the natural course of things. Being dramatic about death is not going to stave it off, it's not going to make living life any more bearable. When the idea of death sinks in as a philosophical reality, even depression becomes petty.

Not S.A.D. distortions, those have an actual cause, and I can link that depression with the weather and realize it's temporary, dependent, cause and effect, impermanent, and will change with the weather. But general melancholic depression and angst withers away as petty with a better grasp on death. Just death. Not *death*.

I have to give part two of an oral report on the Tibetan Book of the Dead in class tomorrow, which might explain the drinking and the death, since I hate public speaking. It's very basic since I'm giving the report in a language that after a year and a half of studying, I'm no where near conversational.

Last time I gave a watered-down history of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in broad strokes. Tomorrow I'll say something about the death betweens, the part about positive and negative aspects, and how basically the book is really an explanation about what we're trying to do in life to attain liberation.

These are short reports, 5-10 minutes. My past report topics have included: lomography, Burma and its evil military junta, slideshow of a Burmese refugee camp, shakuhachi, next year's U.S. Presidential election and the possibility of either a woman or black man winning following the disaster of Bush, the Gnostic Gospels and the role of women in the early Christian movement, the possible future options of the relationship between Taiwan and China, the legality of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Star-Spangled Banner.