Realized as I got off the subway at 7:03 this evening that it was exactly twelve hours to the minute after I'd got on the subway this morning. That's a long day's work for The New School! A fun day, though, starting with an energetic discussion of Ambedkar, whose take on the Buddha and his Dhamma addressed all our concerns that the standard view of "Buddhist modernism" is altogether too white and too middle class. Followed meetings with students, fielding e-mails from others, making a pitch to our Arts and Civic Engagement program about the wonders of Outside the Wire's Job performances, and a little reading of the Platform Sutra in preparation for the East Asian Religions class. This class, encountering Chan for the first time, was explosive fun, too, as instructor N let it feel its way to realizing just how radical this tradition is (or seems to be on paper...). Then two hours of Shared Capacities, our university's quixotic effort to do Gen Ed without doing Gen Ed, which started with a most encouraging meeting with the group reviewing the university for our accrediting body and concluded with the first moving draft of the animated logo we've commissioned for it... and, giddy with exhaustion, home. Still, a good day.
