2015 mix CD, part two

As anticipated, the second 2015 mix CD (of my vanity project of creating mix CDs for every year I've been alive) wasn't easy to put together. The first CD came together surprisingly fast and easily, and that probably caused most of the difficulty with the second disc. My satisfaction with it locked in the track list and didn't give me flexibility to move things around between the two discs. 

So that's how not to make a double-disc mix. Collecting songs for 2016, I am already playing with song order, but I'm doing both discs simultaneously to avoid limiting options later.

I found it hard recognizing the segues, which shouldn't be hard. Also elusive was identifying placing of songs, either beginning, middle or end, which also shouldn't be hard. Probably a case of thinking too much.

This mix largely came together by finding two or three song segues by similar type and then jigsaw puzzling them together in a way that flowed. In the end, the final track list does succeed with satisfactory segues and song placings that I hadn't been able to see initially.

The biggest thorns were finding the opener and closer. There was a parade of songs that became final candidates for those positions, only to be ultimately rejected; almost all of them having not been considered for the mix at all, and then not staying on the mix when rejected.

2015 mix CD, part two:

1. Warm Hole (Brown Eyed Girls)
2. Drama (Nine Muses)
3. Joker (Dal Shabet)

4. Not an Easy Girl (Lizzie (After School))
5. Twenty-Three (IU)
6. Radio (Baechigi) (audio only)
7. Don't Be Such a Baby (Sistar)
8. Just for One Day (JeA (Brown Eyed Girls))
9. Oh Boy (Red Velvet) (lyric video) (official audio)
10. Traveler (f(x)) (lyric video) (official audio)

11. Like Ooh-Ahh (Twice) (full stage camcorder)
12. Vibrato (Stellar)
13. Sorry (Park Bo Ram)
14. Please Just Go (feat. Whee In (Mamamoo)) (Louie (Geeks)) (lyric video) (audio only)
15. I'm Ill (Hello Venus)
16. Five More Minutes (Hyosung (Secret)) (audio only)
17. Dice Play (Brown Eyed Girls) (official audio)
18. Don't U Wait No More (Red Velvet) (official audio) (music students react)
19. Skip (Tahiti)
20. You and Me (Kisum)
21. Give It a Little Shake (High Soul x KissN)
22. Sleepless Night (Nine Muses)
23. Can You Feel It? (feat. Youngji (Kara)) (Goo Hara (Kara))
24. Only You (miss A)

2015 mix CD, part one (audio files uploaded for zip download)

My brother offered me a slice of pizza.

My dreams are just going haywire! There is no consistency nor any indication of anything except total chaos; full metal subconscious implosion. After months of whenever my brothers appeared in dreams, it was confrontational, lukewarm or cold at best, and then one of them is offering me pizza?! The greatest offering of all?! Am I a king, a god?!

"Hey, you want a slice?", lifting a slice out of the pizza box for me.

I've been hampered by several days of full-blown insomnia which hasn't happened in a while. Insomnia has been recurrent, but not this bad. Mostly one- or two-offs and then a period of recovery. Even one night of insomnia hits hard and despite full nights of sleep following, waking up and days are still rough. This recent bout might be a real mess.

I try to force myself down into a dream state during insomnia, and when I do: a) it doesn't last long before I wake up again; and b) the dreams are nothing, they make no sense; they're like flipping through radio stations driving through a foreign country. If dreams are the antennae of our subconscious, I'm picking up random shit from wherever.

If that hasn't been brutal enough, Taipei's summer heat is out of control. Summer months used to be prime riding season despite summer heat. I like hot weather. I usually thrive in hot weather and San Francisco was lame for its cold summers.

Two summers ago, I still went riding during the summer, but I felt the heat and noted it. Then last year; I looked at my GPS records of riding last year and wondered why I stopped riding after a spring that looked like I was gearing up for the bigger climbs.

It took a while to figure out it was the heat that stopped me. About May or June, it came to pass that I would try to take my bike out and was met with a wave of heat that said, "hell no". Going outside was like stepping in front of a blast furnace, and if it felt like that just outside I figured any kind of ride would be nothing short of masochistic. Same thing happened this year.

The few people I've spoken to have agreed that Taipei has been getting hotter just these past few years. It's unbearable to stay outside for any extended period of time. Going outside means going from one air-conditioned space to another.

I have started jogging after my gym membership ran out in June. Looking back, what a useless thing that gym membership was. I'd never do anything like that again. Within a week, I was going out in the evening for jogs and I've been going for jogs about five days a week since then.

It's not running, I go too slow to call it running. I'd say to call it running, I'd have to be doing 8:30 miles at slowest, maybe 8:45, and I've touched on that, but mostly I've been going upward 9 minute miles, which is a solid jog. Anything slower than 10 minute miles is a plod. I've gone plodding a few times.

And short. Three miles is the usual, with four mile jogs thrown in one or two times a week. I've plodded five miles once and hope to do more of those, but only once it starts getting cooler. But I'm not going to be ambitious at all. My age prevents that, as well as bad nutrition and lots of alcohol.

Twenty years ago, my goal was 7:30 miles over 4 or 5 miles, with reality more like anything under 8 minute miles. These days going slow as comfortable is fine and preventing injury is priority, although since it's me, some problem is always going to come up.

addendum 2:  I don't know if there's any connection between my dreams and efforts to generate compassion, but in a strange turn-around I had a full night sleep with positive feel-good dreams. That's strange because this is insomnia recovery sleep, which should be dead sleep with no dream recollection.

The two dreams I remembered were love related, both involved women I can't identify and were probably just archetypes; one or both may have been K-pop idols as the archetypes.

One was in a college dorm room-like setting, clean (in contrast to recent dream patterns) and there were other people there. I was lying in a bed when a woman crawled in basically saying she had gotten hints that I had feelings for her and she knew what her feelings were for me and she wanted to make things clear. That's it.

The other dream was like a date in an urban setting, a feel like Philadelphia, and the feelings were more ambiguous. We were on a date, buying tickets for something but she insisting on going dutch and not allowing me to cover, so there was no feeling of commitment or that she even liked me. It's just that it was a date.

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I have no desire for love or to have or pursue any "love interest". Dreams involving love I think are more a product of a basic human desire to be loved. I imagine on a basic level there is not a human being, however self-hating or cynical but without psychopathic pathologies, that doesn't mind being loved.

And I'm not that self-hating or cynical. It's just that on a practical level, it's not something I desire nor something I'd pursue or succumb to as an attachment. I accept and don't reject that love is a very important and powerful human component, including on spiritual and psychological levels.

So if there's a subconscious, psychological battle going on regarding compassion and manifesting in my dreams, I'd say my mind is fairly equivocal and flexible. Dreams can be hostile or they can be pleasant; either can manifest from trying to engage compassion. And considering my psychology, that makes perfect sense.

About cultivating compassion, the only interaction I have with other people is when I'm out and about in public. The only direct contact I have with people is when ordering food or buying something at a convenient store.

I don't have friends, I don't work, I only know one person in Taipei with whom I meet about three or four times per year for coffee or a hike. I don't have to deal with any interpersonal conflicts at all.

Virtually all my interactions with other people are indirect and abstract. When I'm out and about in public, I'm always listening to music (I turn it off when I interact directly with people). It is with these people that I gauge my ability to cultivate compassion.

What does it mean to cultivate compassion? First of all, it doesn't come naturally for me. I'm quick to judge (which is bad) and quick to be critical (which is bad). Since it's not natural, it's not visceral but more intellectual.

But that's not even right. When I say it doesn't come naturally for me, that's the result of current situation and experience and the cynicism that comes with experience. I look at my behavior and attitudes when I was younger, and I think it's fair to say I had a natural compassion towards people. I even used to consider myself a romantic, just to emphasize how much I've changed.

In my current situation, cultivating compassion is to look inside myself and locate and examine the energies of how I feel towards other people, and bending them towards the positive. To not be hostile, to want non-harm towards other people; to not be an agent of negativity in other people's interactions.

I've found that cultivating compassion is also key towards loosening my grip on my own ego and sense of the importance of myself. It's kind of embarrassing noting that this is something I struggle with when for many people it's natural and obvious.

Very important to the cultivation of compassion is recognizing emotions as energies within our bodies. That's also part of mindfulness training. When you feel an emotion, locate and identify it as an internal energy that is just as real as heartbeats, blood flowing and breathing in and out.

Once you do that, you can put a rein on emotions and not let them control behavior. It's no longer a matter of feeling anger or any emotion and accepting the emotion for what it feels like and reacting no matter how irrationally.

When you recognize it as energy, you can think of it as E. As in the equivalent of mass times the speed of light squared. How emotions fit in with Einstein's equation may make no sense, and that's fine. It kinda doesn't. But if you can visualize emotions as energy and abstractly consider it against E=mc², then you can start processing it as a physical property of the universe, as something controllable and not so mysterious.

According to the equation, a small amount of mass transferred into energy yields a huge amount of energy. So thinking of emotions as energy, that can be looked upon as a huge amount of energy. None of this to be taken literally, just to think about.

Full insomnia last night. I stopped posting about insomnia because I thought what I had posted already got the point across. It has never stopped and has been recurrent (and likely a continued detriment to any employment). What was different about this bout is that in the few times I slipped into dreams, the dreams were particularly brutal.

I mention this in conjunction with my previous post where I mentioned dreams having become unpleasant and distasteful. This time they felt downright persecutorial and hostile, like my mind conspiring against me and attacking me.

I don't know if there's any relationship with the compassion meditation I recently employed, whereby I go about trying to generate compassion in any, even the most superficial, interaction with people when I go out. The meditation is even preemptive, trying to anticipate a normally negative reaction and steeling myself to be compassionate (not hostile) no matter what happens.

I found it feels great! I'm still forcing it as a meditation, where my normal, natural psychological state would be negative. But really, it feels so much better to force myself to generate compassion than to naturally accept being negative.

(I have a feeling if I looked far back into the archives of this blog, I'll find that I've already posted something pretty much exactly like this before).

It just seems suspect that I experience unpleasant dreams that prompt me to want to develop more compassion, only to be followed by overtly hostile dreams. Maybe it's a psychological, subconscious battle going on. That would be interesting. As it is, I'll stick to compassion and if it's my subconscious reacting against it, I'll give it time to get used to it.

addendum: Maybe I couldn't control irritability as a result of the insomnia, but on this day the attempt at compassion/non-hostility was a total fail. Impatience, intolerance, self-righteousness ruled. Not that anyone noticed, it's not like anyone turned and looked at me like "what an asshole", but I noticed.

I've noticed common themes in my dreams lately. Like messy living quarters, even bordering on squalid. Disgusting floors, old buildings. Internal conflicts with other people in the dream that aren't confronted or resolved. General dissonance, chaos, mess. Dissonance with my environs. Dissonance with the absence of people in my life.

One recent morning, the feeling from the dreams was so distasteful that when I awoke, I finally didn't try to push myself back into a dream state even though I was having trouble sleeping. I was like, "fuck it, I'm not going back into that", and got up.

That's what I do when I have trouble staying asleep in the morning; when I can't just fall back to sleep and it's pretty much back-end insomnia. I can force my consciousness back down into a dream state, which is and isn't the same as getting back to sleep. When I wake up again, it seems like I was asleep, but it's not to be mistaken with restful sleep. It's very shallow and dominated by the dream state.

The nature of these dreams suggest that I'm obviously still disturbed by many things on unconscious levels despite mindfulness training and striving for Buddhist ideals of cultivating wisdom and compassion. No surprise there, since despite trying to cultivate transformation, I clearly cling to many negative conceptions and habits (karma).

I can still resort to being an asshole. Or if not overtly exhibiting asshole behavior, I act in a way that makes me feel like I was being an asshole. I was thinking like an asshole. I judge people by their behavior. In my mind I impose how I feel people should behave in this world on other people. Even giving someone a cold, judgmental stare is no good. And I did that recently.

I connect this with the dissonance in my subconscious. This outward hostility and judgment has very much to do with all the subtler levels of mind and stains them and makes them ugly. I need to make compassion and kindness more of a daily mindfulness meditation.

It has to be happening at every moment every day when I have to interact with other people even in the most superficial way. At every moment when I'm out, I have to be generating compassion to any and everyone around me. There can be no let up, even when I'm not interacting with anyone.

It's not easy. In the past, I've justified aggressive and asshole behavior by thinking of it as a "fierce" element which can be compassionate, especially when safety is involved. Sometimes being mean or presenting an illusion of danger alerts people of the need to pay attention, the theory goes.

But maybe that was just an excuse to allow primitive anger emotions to arise, despite being mindful of my emotions and claiming to myself I wasn't being angry. So many complex levels of conceptual thinking may be preventing progress. However I justify negative behavior, the bottom line is those excuses aren't in my job description.

My dreams are telling me something. I can't fool myself with sitting meditation and mindfulness practice and think there isn't a lot of ugliness in my karma that I can't work on. Even with limited time in my life, even with the implicit negativity of placing a limit on the time in my life, I can work on the ugliness and put compassion and positivity as a foremost meditation in my daily life.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the most recent interactions with my cousin have ended in disappointment. She leaves for Switzerland next week and we're not going to meet up before then. Shortly after my last posts in June, she left the country for the U.S. to her previous home in Sedona to do whatever she needed to do.

Ironically, after all that talk about helping and being there, nothing came out of my asking her to help me get my computer fixed. She mentioned her brother could definitely help me with that, but she didn't do anything to further that. She didn't jump at the chance to help me in the rare occurrence of me asking for help when in a disadvantageous situation (mind you, it's not the first time).

In July, the problem had grown to the point that I was asking her when she'd be back, leading off with whether she could help me get my computer fixed. We had a short exchange, during which she never mentioned helping me with my computer, and the content of our exchange had me calling her out that she didn't want to help, so nevermind.

Her then saying she'd help was the most insincere offer to help imaginable. It was so insincere that I can't even call it begrudging. A begrudging offer to help is more sincere than what she offered. A begrudging offer to help is sucking it up and realizing one has to do something.

Her saying she'd help was more like "uh yeah, whatever". I didn't even want her help after that and my former Chinese teacher hooked me up in two days with a repair shop that was half a block away from me. I pass it just about every day.

That was just coincidence. She knows what neighborhood I live in, but she doesn't know my address and didn't know the shop she called was so close to me. But that coincidence seems to underscore how useless my cousin was in this matter. Even if she tried, she couldn't do better than my Chinese teacher did without even trying.

My cousin contacted me two weeks after she said she'd be returning to Taiwan, long after my computer was fixed, giving me her brother's number and saying he was available to help me with my computer. She could have done that from Sedona in June, she didn't need to wait to come back to Taiwan if she wanted to help me.

I'm not close or in contact with her brother, but we're on good terms. There's no awkwardness between us. Even though I posit my relationship with him through her, he's still my cousin and we've never had trouble relating as such. If she sent me the same message in June, I'd have called him.

Needless to say, I blew my cousin off. I was disappointed in her. I wouldn't be surprised if she is disappointed in me for whatever reason. For blowing her off. For just responding, "That's OK, I got it fixed already. Look me up if you're in town". No, we weren't going to meet up before she left.

Mind you, we've disappointed each other in the past and we've always gotten over it. It doesn't directly affect any future contact we have, although I have doubts about whether we will have any future contact.

My funds won't last beyond next May and I doubt she'll visit before then. I have some reserve, but I don't plan to exhaust every penny, and I want to leave a certain sum for my landlord, her uncle, to make up for any expenses resulting from my disappearance, if it comes to that.

Basically I don't hold anything against my cousin for not wanting to help. In this matter, that is. She has been helpful in the past, in matters more convenient for her I suppose. If I profess to hope to cut karmic connections between us, then of course I can't hold anything against her. She did me a favor by not helping by . . . just lessening.

If she eagerly and effectively helped, I would have been happy and satisfied and thought of her in a certain positive, possibly attached, light. As she did it, I realize I can be just kind of "meh" about her despite our past closeness.