Thank You, B

We Interrupt This Period of Silence to Say

That my migraine is currently at the level that it is even hard to read. But this is not a blatant ploy for pity—in fact, without even trying I've dumped so much self-pity on the market that the need has been swamped and the dollar of self-respect has actually sunk lower than the Canuck dollar, although they still have to pay more for the overpriced books that I'm not reading (assuming that they follow the prices printed on the covers).

A Zest for Migraines

It's 2:59 a.m. and I'm awake.

It's actually not such a bad time to be awake if you're trying to cram just a couple more precious moments with friends into an all-too-short weekend, or have come across a book that's so good that the five pages just before bedtime have mushroomed as bedtime fled to the horizon. But I'm awake because I'm in migraine-land and have reached the no-sleep-for-you stage.

I did sleep for a few hours after the self-healing-through-positive-daydreams stage (which featured three fat and happy brown wiener dogs, courtesy of a recent Dog Whisperer episode.) Then I woke up, realized that I wasn't going to be able to go back to sleep, lacked the coordination to knit, and didn't have much of an attention span. So the answer was clear: time for the interweb.

1st on the order of business was to google my name. The results included a bunch of Italian hotels, a couple of letters to the editor (my parish priest reads the editorials avidly, and feels that more letters need responses than he would be allowed to publish personally, so he assigns topics to members of his flock) and my amazon.com wishlist.

2nd was to make my wishlist private. And while I was there, I had a couple of presents to shop for. Over the last year or so, shopping for presents has migrated to my will-be-more-fun-tomorrow-or-maybe-even-next-week list, which causes some embarrassment since next week tends to mean a few months from now, yet the occasion which needs to be commemorated with a little something rarely skips through time quite so fleetly. Why is tomorrow so much more propitious for spending money? (Answer: it stinks to try and remember how much cash is in your checking account today, it also stinks to have to transfer money or go to the bank not that you could at 3 a.m., and making difficult decisions like whether to sign up for a free trial-membership of amazon prime [which would get the presents to you on time but would also require that you remember to cancel it within a month] is not-so-nice).

3rd was to scandal-monger. Can I still consider myself morally superior to the great unwashed since I consciously sabotaged myself by only looking at the City Journal's appraisal of the New York governor/Jersey Girl embroglio?

Now I've triggered a second wave, so I'd better lurch bedward.

You're Not Deep*

A few months ago my little brother played Young Pilgrims by the Shins for me, and I liked it well enough to request Chutes Too Narrow for Christmas, and my middle-little brother came through with it when gifts were flying thick and fast. I've been listening to and enjoying it, but the sentiment of the title song is jarring.

Of course I raised to gather courage from those
Lofty tales so tried and true and
If you're able I'd suggest it 'cause this
Modern thought can get the best of you.

The idea that faith is a matter of "if you're able" is really irksome, as is the implication that this ability will be lost as one grows older, presumably experiencing and suffering more. He goes on to suggest that he's had to develop a lot of character in order to live this way:

But I learned fast how to keep my head up 'cause I
Know there is this side of me that
Wants to grab the yoke from the pilot and just
Fly the whole mess into the sea.

In fact, the reality is the opposite. Modern thought does not produce character. Any immature idiot can be a despairing cynic, but one must first have suffering, then endurance, then character, to finally be able to hope. (Romans 5:3-4). And the promise of hope is in the love of God, which in fact we already have.

Perhaps this catches me because I have had much more suffering since becoming more devout. Suffering tears away the appearance of things, revealing the inner truth. This is not easily borne,† and really requires the Divine Mercy. It's in the devil's interest to keep a non-Christian away from truth and thus more easily lied to, so the amount of suffering of a Nietzsche devoté is probably minimal. But there is a lot of laceration, the pain of which must be respected but certainly not admired.

However, if the young pilgrims are Evangelicals of the cockeyed optimist variety, it is probably better to let their ruthless cheerfulness steamroll past us poor mortals who still suffer in this valley of tears.

* This is an annoying song reference, but only Mrs. Bear will get it.
† Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality. (T.S. Eliot)

This Isn't What You're Thinking

A friend is getting married and confided her concerns over natural family planning (NFP) to me. Because I am an INTP (emphasis on the P, which stands for Perceiving but would stand for Enthusiastic Gatherer of Useless Facts if that could be condensed to one letter), this has been all the prompt I needed to read up on NFP (or the Billings Method) on the internet and ask a friend (an ENFP, or extroverted natural family planner) for book recommendations.

The friend came through with a few possibilities, and I was in the process of saving the titles the way I normally do (that is, by adding them to my amazon.com wishlist), when I realized how that was going to look if anyone happened to pull it up. And my birthday's coming up, so that would have been pretty likely.

So I'll save them here:
Your Fertility Signals (user friendly)
Taking Charge of Your Fertility (only obsessively P people will be interested)
and a good website is Couple to Couple League.

Reminiscent of Cherries

Why, when I worked at the lottery, did no one admire my tables so green?

The Tapestry of Life

I had a post, but now all I can remember is that it reminded me of cherries, but I'm not sure if it is the fruit or the wood. This reminds me of the sin I wanted to confess* but could only remember that in some way it struck me as being similar to salt and pepper, but I couldn't figure out if it was as the seasonings or the color.

I might have just thought of the post first when a commercial for "The New Yankee Workshop" was on saying that they would make a small cherry-wood table.

They say that intelligence is all about seeing the manifold connectedness of this tangled web we live in. This post alone should qualify me to found an uber-Mensan† group.

* The faithful are also not supposed to reveal what was said in confession, so I may have to delete this post.
† For those of you who are not uber-Mensan, the term, when both parts are translated from the German, means "the Over Cafeteria," which translates literally as "over eaters" or into idiomatic English as "foodies."

Conspiracy Theory #5869

The patents for all document shredders are also owned by the publishers of all junk mail.

Also possible but somewhat more difficult to prove: the publishers of junk mail are owned by ITI (Identity Thieves, Inc.)

But shredders are necessary because of identity thieves, so we're back where we began, which means we have the hooped-snake, which is a symbol of eternity. But the only eternal being is God, and God is truth, therefore this connection can be taken as infallibly proven through first principles, which are more certain than mere experiential proofs.

Q.E.D.