Brian D. Buckley

In a cafeteria where I eat lunch most days, a sign attached to the register says:

Please note that credit cards are not accepted as means of payment.

This bothers me.

I don’t care about them not accepting credit cards. It’s the words that drive me crazy. So that they can drive you crazy too, let’s break it down.

There are twelve words. The first three are:

Please note that

This is entirely useless. It’s a note; you’re already reading it. You have to be in the process of noting to even encounter their please note in the first place. It’s like putting up a sign that says “Sign.” Drop it.

The next five words are:

credit cards are not accepted

This is less egregious, but still full of fluff. Are not accepted? Just say “No credit cards” and be done. Five words down to three.

Finally, we have this monstrosity:

as means of payment

Yes. We can’t accept credit cards as means of payment. Credit cards for starting tarot decks, for picking locks, for infringing on Apple’s “rounded rectangle” patent, any other use is fine, just not for payment.

Payment is what you do with credit cards. It’s in the name: “credit.” Four more pointless words cannot be imagined. Drop them.

From twelve words, we’ve hacked it down to three:

No credit cards.

Or four, if we want to preserve the politeness:

No credit cards please.

A cut of 75% and 66.67%, respectively.

Life is short. Messages should be too.

This public service announcement brought to you by the Heartless Unpleasant Misanthropic Bureau of United Grammarians, HUMBUG.

I’ve had my eye on the Rosetta Stone language software for a while now. Everyone says it’s great, but $500 is a little steep, even to learn a whole new language. They dropped the price by almost 50% over Cyber Monday, though (the deal’s still going on now), so I had to try it.

I got Spanish, the language I took in high school and college, and the only foreign language where I know more than a handful of words.

This is hardly my first stab at language software. I’ve written before about Duolingo being the bee’s knees (and free to boot). But Rosetta Stone does offer something I haven’t seen anywhere else: immersion.

Aside from the menus and other little messages, there’s no English. You don’t translate anything. You just learn Spanish.

You see the word “gato” on the screen, and a voice says it. There’s a picture of a cat. Okay, so “gato” means cat – except you don’t have the English word “cat” in there cluttering up the works. It’s just “gato” and the picture. You can think purely in Spanish. This is a subtle distinction – translating vs. straight learning – but it does make it easier to get in the zone.

The production values are as high as you’d expect for software that costs a quarter of a thousand dollars, which is good, because the pictures have to be clear and match precisely the phrase you’re trying to learn. They are, and they do. And a variety of different voices pronounce the words, which is nice.

The biggest problem I’ve run into is voice recognition. I guess it’s state of the art, but the technology still isn’t quite there yet. Often it correctly recognizes what you’re saying, but it fails frequently enough that I finally turned it off. Fortunately, that’s easy to do and doesn’t penalize you.

Is it worth it?

Too soon to tell. I’ve only used it for a week so far, and there’s a massive amount of material. At half an hour per day, it should take over a year to complete.

But so far it seems good. And if I do, in fact, become fluent, then it was worth every nickel.

I have joined a sangha, a Buddhist community. A sangha is roughly the Buddhist equivalent to the Christian idea of a “church,” though in this case, it’s less overtly religious. (Buddhism is a practice, and it can be a religion; like many other Buddhists, I follow the practice, but I do not see it as a religion.)

This particular sangha is called Treeleaf. Specifically, we practice Zen Buddhism, and even more specifically, we practice Soto Zen Buddhism. It’s not the only path to enlightenment, but it’s a path that works.

Treeleaf is an unusual sangha, because it’s all online. It’s designed to accommodate the thousands of people worldwide who want to practice with others, but don’t live close enough to a physical sangha. (In my case, the closest sangha is the Buddhist Temple of Toledo, which isn’t particularly close.)

We talk to each other on forums and via e-mail. We watch our teachers lecture on YouTube.

Why join a Zen community?

For me, it’s about taking the practice to the next level. It’s about motivation and encouragement. And it’s about clarity.

I’ve read seven or eight books on Zen and Buddhism in general, but that can get confusing. Each author has a different perspective, a different tradition, a different focus. Not that any are necessarily wrong, but it helps to be consistent. A plane and a ship can both get you to Argentina, but if you read a few chapters on sailing and a few chapters on piloting, you’re going to end up awfully lost.

One set of teachers, one community, one focus. Simple.

I still read the books, of course. It’s still important to get other perspectives. You just have to be able to keep the other perspectives, in perspective.

And you know what? My practice has improved. Both in meditation and in daily life, it’s getting easier to find the still point in the midst of the daily storm.

The path leads all sorts of interesting places, doesn’t it?