i recently switched allegiance to wordpress, making me a blogger ex-pat. i was chatting with thomas and he said “easier” while describing wordpress. i was sold immediately.
as you can see, the new blog is called hungry ghosts. i first heard of the term while taking a japanese ghosts class with thomas (i suppose i owe the new blog and the name to him). 
if my memory serves me, in buddhism, hungry ghosts refer to people who led selfish, spiritual-less lives in want of meaning or significance. because of a wasted life, such people return as hungry ghosts as pictured above. their appearance is certainly disconcerting; seemingly decaying skin and enlarged bellies juxtaposed to pencil thin necks. oh and they also look like monsters. because of its gravely reduced size, a hungry ghost’s throat cannot accommodate succulent morsels of food (such as french fries or the goodness that is dim sum, for example) without an extreme sensation of pain. maybe that wouldn’t be such a horrible thing if not for the curse of an insatiable hunger. what a fate! to yearn for that which you indulged in long after you have died, and never to truly understand what was needed in the first place.
the other time i heard the term was from a wolf parade song called ‘”dear sons and daughters of hungry ghosts”. despite these two references, i do not have a ‘hungry ghost obsession.’ i don’t particularly have an urge to save people from this fate or to save the world, which finally brings me to my next topic.
loose transition aside, i wanted to briefly mention the novel Ishmael by daniel quinn. within its pages, you and the protagonist learn how to save the world. at the very least, it’s well written and engaging, philosophical and historically re-interpretative (c’mon i just made up a word). anyway, there’s also a talking gorilla (sort of). in short, i recommend this book.
(grammar police, is it ‘a’ or ‘an’ before words beginning with ‘h’?).
