Thursday, August 28, 2008

Mother Teresa

Today is the day to start the novena to end on Mother Teresa's future feast day (Sept. 5) if you are so inclined.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The End of the Affair

Graham Greene is revisiting his old topic of the sins of those who love being much better than the sins of those who don't love, but it is fascinating and really well done when the two people contrasted are lovers, rather than dreary as in The Power and the Glory. And now it is moving into an even better topic: the discovery that one is loved when one could hardly deserve it less.

The book visits a topic I've been mulling over. Are the easiest people to love those who find it easy to be loved? I read somewhere that when God begs us to be as little children what He is referring to is how they just assume that people will love them, so they accept His love. But for adults there is amour propre and self-consciousness and woundedness and all the rest.

Time and Old Ladies

My job has segued into having some customer interaction, and I feel like I wasted the last two days trying vainly to help fightin'-mad old ladies who were too confused to fight their way out of a paper bag. I didn't need to spend so much time with them, but I felt so badly for them, having had the same feeling of baffled impotence and knowing that old-lady-ship is in my future, too. One old lady owned four standard dachshunds, so she was also worth the extra effort. Just so long as I don't get in trouble for wasting time.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Eye on the News

Theodore Dalrymple muses on Solzhenitsyn.

Incredibly important legislation to pray for (God bless George W).

Cat Ladies

There are lots of cat ladies out there. By which I mean women who own more than eight or so cats at once. There are also cat men, or at least men who take their wife's many cats to the vet, but these are but a tithe of the population.

This phenomena really confuses me, since I have owned cats in the plural and the only one who was happy with the situation was the dominant one: the other lived what she viewed as a stunted life, unable to really develop her potential until the first had moved on. This is nothing compared to three or more cats in the same house while the situation is actually made worse if the animals are allowed outdoors as well, since that always increases cat's negative behaviors.

When I'm entering a couple of new records for a person who was already pretty well into the double digits, I find myself musing at what a homecoming there will be. The owner, believing their household to be more than ever one big happy family, carries the new animals bodily into an atmosphere already thick with feline hostility. Cats range through the rooms, strung out with stress and frustration since no matter how many times they mark their territory the interlopers Just Won't Leave. And although the human is excited to have saved another furry life from the grim reaper, the other inhabitants are saving their party until the census count debits their house and credits the happy hunting grounds.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Lots of smoke, no fire

A fellow employee who started around the same time I did appears to have shuffled off this mortal coil, by which I mean that my boss mentioned he was not longer with us and I would get to be trained in some of his tasks as well. (This is actually really fun. Her approach to training an assistant is for that assistant to meddle in pretty much everything, which I totally approve of.) And this event, though sorrowful, was by no means unexpected, since his approach to the job was more of a sociable solitaire-playing sort that made sure his facebook profile never suffered from his employment. He was very successful at this, and his friendliness does make the loss sincerely lamentable.

The funny thing is that I spent the rest of the day feeling furtive and more or less like a rabbit that expects a dachshund to come bursting out of a nearby bush. I turn my cellphone off while I'm clocked in, and have been getting up early to make business calls before work and then follow-up on my lunch break. I feel guilty about making coffee while being clocked in (unless this computer is frozen). I am almost always entering data within two minutes of clocking in, and only allow myself to look up dog breeds/colors that need to be researched for data entry purposes, rather than ones that look interesting (again, unless the database is frozen). Email is, of course, verboten. And if I am criticized on the conversation front, I would expect such criticism to take the "so, how's life as a mute" angle. And yet I spent the rest of the day guiltily trying to remember if I'd given the ax any excuses to come looking for me now it had whetted its appetite.

The moral of today's story, children, is that for some of us the guilty conscience is more or less a perpetual motion machine, whirring away in the void.

Friday, August 15, 2008

I have been through long deserts of data today.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Thoughts on pet names

I see a lot of pet names in my line of work (about 500-700/day), and am forming categories for them. The following is an unscientific as possible.

There are a lot of names based on the animal's color (Blackie, Patches, Snowball*), which somehow strikes me as a cliché which that classic cat name, Kitty, eludes. I haven't come across any canines named Dog but have seen a couple named Kitty.

Macho female dogs such as boxers and pit bulls are often given ironically girlie names such as Baby Girl, and a dog named Killer is either a pit bull or a chihuahua. For a while I thought that Bella was reserved for non-ironic use (especially appropriate for golden retrievers), but then ran into a spate of German Shepherds and boxers sporting the name. However, Isabella is reserved for small, pretty dogs or for cats.

In the unexpectedly popular name category, hoards of female dogs come when they hear "Hannah", and Scooter is seen as eminently suitable for both dogs and cats of either sex.

A huge number of Americans think highly of themselves as pet owners and name their dogs Lucky. Classic people names such as Molly, Maggie, and Sammy are probably in the top ten. There are occasional literary references, such as gray cats named Gandalf, but not as many as I would expect, and so far none from books which were not also made into movies (Mr. Darcy can hardly be escaped). And one elderly lady from California sent in information to license George Clooney and Brad Pitt (the Siamese and short haired cats) but forgot to send any money. George W made an appearance, and a few chihuahuas have been named Paris.

If I ever have to sue for emotional abuse, it will be over the enormous number of pets with sickeningly cutesy names, but I will leave that shame for their owners and not retell it here. There is also a less alluring subset of the population which gives their pets names like Stinker and Fart, and if I could tell them a thing or two it would all center on how words have power over us and influence our emotions and affections, so they probably love the animal less than if they had given him another name.

And so far my favorite name for a cat was Potlicker and for a Jack Russell Terrier, Chase Little Foot.

*Although these names are also gives to animals of different coloring but not in a way suitable for irony (such as the brown dog named Blackie), which boggles the mind.

Friday, August 08, 2008

Damn Newfangled Technology

I am currently trying to learn Spanish, at least enough to get me safely to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe* and back again. I am aided by a bargain computer program/audio cd set which I purchased tonight at the local used bookstore, along with a delightful Spanish textbook circa 1943 (authored by that pillar of the field, Arthur Romeyn Seymour of Florida State College for Women). The audio CDs were nice, and I discovered that if one relaxes the tongue and moves it closer to the teeth but kind of flat on the palate it is possible to trill one's rs (very exciting). The textbook I have not tried yet, but it looks like it's full of my friends Mr. Grammar and Mrs. Vocabulary. The computer program is very slick (I guess that's the Platinum part) but seems to have been devised by the KGB with the Devil consulting. The activities have no apparent end, no way of telling whether an end exists if one is simply willing to give it enough of your life, and no way of knowing what the connection to any future exercises (should you live to see them) is. It does have a fun thing which compares your pronunciation of the word to the ideal (it turns out my computer has a built in microphone, God bless it). Unfortunately, it's not clear what the comparisons mean or whether this is an unending keeps-going-as-long-as-you're-having-fun thing, or whether some kind of explanation of results and moving on to a new skill is supposed to happen.

I wasn't expecting to feel so much better about my purchase so quickly, but I was bemoaning the loss of $29.98 for the darned thing, and now I see that I paid about 11/20ths of amazon.com's price, so I suppose I could be in more pain. I suppose that what I'm going to have to do is click the "show me how" button, which is too bad since directions are for sucks.

*Hope is in the very beginning stages of springing eternally; if you are of a Newtonian turn you could say it is a nascent curve.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Someone Else

The day is drawing to a close and I am sitting on my bed, following a two-year-old's advice, and feeling that I've finally hit on the safe course of action.

About 45 minutes before the end of work, I stubbed my big toe badly on the open door of the filing cabinet. My immediate feeling was that this was Someone Else's fault, which quickly shifted to the belief that Someone Else was going to keep me from wearing sandals at work if they found out. Perhaps more importantly, I just didn't feel like dealing with both the toe and new coworkers. (Though a nicer toe or nicer coworkers would be hard to find: it was just the mixture that was too rich). So I got the papers I had come for, went back to my desk, observed that the blood matched the toenail enamel pretty closely, and was also emerging at a slow ooze (having to come from under the nail), so I felt that No One Would Know. And no one did. I was highly productive until quitting time, and then the Venerable Volvo of Virtue and I enjoyed our evening drive home. (The Volvo of Virtue is like that: prone to enjoying things, I mean. We do not have air conditioning, so we enjoy the gentle breeze coming through the sunroof. And we feel that the freeways are vulgar, so we enjoy the backroad which winds twixt heavy industry and golf courses. Finally, we always enjoy WRR101.1, one of the highlights of Dallas culture.)

After a couple of hours my toe began to complain again, so I went in search of a receptacle suitable for soaking it and some hydrogen peroxide (I have not re-stocked my house, partially because I'm not sure what I have in my storage unit, and partially because I'm feeling stubbornly opposed to the idea of spending the money. Eventually I'll feel like it would be fun to spend money on hydrogen peroxide but there's no need to rush these things.) The two-year-old daughter of a friend told me I needed ice and wanted me to get ice from her freezer Right Away. I wanted to marvel more at her worldly-wise ways and resisted. Her mother suggested that I line a pot with a plastic bag, fill it with water and hydrogen peroxide (provided by her) soak my foot in it, then boil some water in the pot to kill any foot-germs that may have soaked through. Again, sound advice. On returning home, I soaked the foot until I felt like I'd had my foot in cool water in a plastic bag in a pot for the better part of my young life, dealt with the interesting problem of being in the living room with a lot of water and no towels, cleaned everything up, and set the pot to boil.

A while later, as I lay in bed saying my evening rosary and thinking about Solzhenitsyn (I started a novena to St. Joseph for him 1. because when is it NOT a good idea and 2. I figured Solzhenitsyn would be in favor of it), it seemed to me that the air was not as cool as it should be, so much so that I imagined I smelt something burning. I thought about little Samivel, the best dachshund in the world, who had alerted me when this very air conditioning unit had gone into a blue funk some four years ago, and about the subtle smell which had floated through the air on that occasion. And although I knew the air was warm simply because I had not set the thermostat correctly, still the aroma lingered. Two seconds later I was out of bed and running down the stairs.

This is the second pot that I have boiled dry in a week. This is again clearly Someone Else's fault. But as long as I'm concerned with Someone Elses, I figured I might as well follow the advice of the two-year-old one, and am now happy in bed with ice on my foot and a P.G. Wodehouse book next to me.

Another Hero Gone



Solzhenitsyn is perhaps my greatest hero. I loved Pope John Paul II, but didn't think of emulating him in more particular ways than growing in love for Christ. I don't think I really want to make a dichotomy between saintly and secular virtues (both men are remarkable for both anyhow), but Solzhenitsyn has been very inspiring in a kind of nitty gritty approach to life: his discovery of friendship amidst suffering (see First Circle), the joy of work for its own sake (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), and pure stubborn cussedness in the face of evil (Gulag Archipelago—his admiration for women's capacity for this kind of suffering in action is humbling.) I remember a friend in college reading her favorite passage aloud, the passage where Solzhenitsyn regrets that he and his neighbors each waited quaking in their individual beds while the KGB slowly gathered them in, rather than banding together in the darkened entryway with crowbars and camaraderie to give the KGB a welcome that would do it a great deal of good. This passage had not caught my attention when I first read it, but really, there are few places I'd rather be than crouched in the shadow with a friend and the cold iron, waiting to make evil take notice of virtue rather than vainly hoping that somehow my own little bit of the good would be overlooked. This was a couple of years before 9/11, which briefly awakened our nation to the falsehood of that commonplace lie which encourages conciliating evil in the hopes that after the bad guys got what they wanted, they would move on and leave you to gather up the bits of your life. Where this breaks down is when the bad guys want your very life, or are at least not opposed to you losing it. This shift in public mores is encapsulated in the robbery/murder scene of Batman Begins, but I digress.

The irony in the above photograph is that Russian officialdom (i.e. Vladimir Putin, aka Mr. KGB) is honoring him. Unfortunately, this is only lip service. A Ukrainian student of mine said that no one in the former USSR likes Solzhenitsyn: they liked the old days of security, and didn't like being told what bad things they'd done. And he couldn't understand why Solzhenitsyn would term Putin's Russia Russia in Collapse: "Why would he say such a thing? Putin is so powerful. We wish we could be like him."

And yet Solzhenitsyn has won in other ways. His Gulag is still inspiring friendships. One day, as a freshman in college, I overheard an acquaintance listing her favorite authors. I listened closely since I had just discerned my own list of four. She said, "Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Harry Wu, ..." [I could hardly breathe: this was almost my own list (mine contained a different Chinese dissident), just one name was needed to clinch the deal] "Solzhenitsyn." Ten years later, we are still best friends.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Update

The case of the persistent pop-up windows has been solved, thanks to Bunthorne. It turns out that the website promoting devotion the the Divine Mercy didn't like me linking to their picture of the Divine Mercy and decided to shut me down as long as the link remained. I'm not sure how the link interfered with their mission of bringing the Diving Mercy to the attention of as many people as possible, but for us is not to question but merely to do. And in the meantime, if I suddenly start spouting in Latin, it is not because I went back and actually learned a foreign language, but rather that Bunthorne has not forgotten my password yet.

I spend most of my days listening to my iPod and the conversation of the others in my room. This conversation is pretty interesting, and I could probably apply for a number of sociology research grants for this work if I could just produce a paper at the end of it. Mostly it's summed up by "There's no class like low class." I'm kept pretty well occupied trying to diagnose the vast array of emotional ailments.

And in craft news, I got to make my little brother's habit rosary, and am very happy with the results. If all goes well, I will post a picture of it.