Land of the Hidden Premise

Brought to you by the subconscious

2009-06-23T20:51:00.003-04:00

The other day I was laughing at the antics of our customers (they do the cutest things, like mailing stuff without envelopes) and wondering if this was contrary to charity when I realized I was also humming "They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love! They will know we are Christians by our love."

A Second Coming

2009-06-01T19:16:00.003-04:00

Blog posts have been slouching toward Dallas to be born a bit slower of late. This is at least partially because of my incredible non-existent immune system which only bestirs itself when it realizes that its archenemy—the thyroid—is still loitering around my throat. It takes a pretty laissez-faires attitutude towards sinus infections and such, and I have to admit that it leads a pleasant and undisturbed life. The same cannot be said of me. But a few different people have asked about my blog in the same week, so I decided to resurrect it.

I've been watching my clothes dry in the Texas heat and thinking of the woman who lived across from my church in New Jersey and always line-dried her enormous white cotton bloomers where church-goers (and anyone driving on the very busy road) could not fail to be flagged down by the myriad flutterings. The association was of many white flags of surrender, but since this estimable woman was waging a highly succesful war against the scourge of grandmothers-in-thongs, they seemed in the end to be so many outposts of traditional feminine victory, where the bow of surrender is in fact victorious.

Touching on Dachshunds

2008-12-13T14:58:00.007-05:00

So you've heard the one about the irresistible force meeting an immovable object.

Now to a dachshund I am an irresistible force: if I want to pick it up, I will pick it up. The dog may try to make it harder for me to pick it up by hiding under beds, etc., but in the end the human will win and the dog will be bathed. And similarly with being an immovable object. A dachshund could try to make me move myself by sitting in the center of the room and staring fixedly first at me, then at its food dish, but if I were asleep there is nothing it could do to move me: to it I am an immovable object. So for something to be absolutely an irresistible force it must be stronger/larger than anything else and similarly for an immovable object (the first in an active, the second in a passive way). The whole point of an absolutely irresistible force is that if one exists an absolutely immovable object can't (and vice versa) unless they were the same being in which case there would be no conflict. [Pause here to reflect on Dr. Dolittle's Push-Me-Pull-Me.] So really the whole question was silly but in a pretentious annoying silly way not a fun one, so we should just return to the part of the discussion which was enjoyable, which is how nice it is to have dogs around and why I don't have them now and why in the Harry Potter movie I just saw absolutely NONE of the protagonists took advantage of being around a gorgeous Neapolitan Mastiff, not even patting it on the head. I mean really, if they're going to waste riches in that way they really shouldn't be allowed out of Gryffindor dormitory.

Update on Obsessions

2008-11-25T20:33:00.002-05:00

Yes, we're obsessed. We always are. All that changes is the object. Today it is "Tuesday Morning" by the Pogues, which seems to us to sound like happiness.

Other standard obsessions (Dinosaur Comics and the Fugly blog) have been satisfyingly worth the space they've occupied, while the other (Theodore Dalrymple on City Journal) has been too coy about making his article available, so I end up reading other articles and then thinking out elaborate blogs on them when I should be sleeping but then forgetting it all when blogging time rolls around.

Bloggiversary

2008-11-22T13:00:00.000-05:00

We are within one week of my three-year blog anniversary, and since it's the first time that I've remembered that I had an anniversary within a few months of it occurring, I felt I should commemorate it.

Today at work

2008-11-19T21:43:00.001-05:00

Someone applied for bankruptcy protection against their animal licensing fees.

It's the $10 that makes all the difference.

Overheard in the Land of Low Expectations

2008-11-18T20:27:00.001-05:00

"I like a man that works."

"Mmmm-Hmmm, I do too!"

Implausible Plausibility

2008-11-14T20:30:00.007-05:00

I keep telling myself that I'm not addicted, I'm only watching because I want to, etc., but a couple weeks ago I decided that I hated Ty-Ty Baby and all the rest, and yet have I fallen behind in the shenanigans in would-be model world? In a word, no. The episodes have been watched and what's worse, I have opinions about them. And yet it's all so implausible.

Apart from ANTM, these two sites have been keeping me busy. What they have in common (other than awesomeness) is that I totally love them. I haven't been feeling great, so I'm not usually in the best of moods when I get home, but two hours spent supine† reading these greats usually has me ready to face the world without shaking it until the stuffing and the squeaky toy come out.

†cf. The Waste Land line 295.

On Temperance

2008-11-09T13:36:00.005-05:00

I read the packaging my food comes in. Not just the nutritional label and ingredients (which are studied intentionally) but also the type that takes up space on the back of the box. Usually I regret this, but never so much as with Cheetos bags. In fact, I usually try to keep my eyes unfocused (a trick I learned for Magic Eye pictures) while handling the object to make reading harder, but sooner or later the thing is read and the weight of the world is on my shoulders. My first impression is always that the authors would be shocked and amazed if they knew their words had been read. Advertising type usually is not fit for human consumption, but this reminds me of the kind of thing 8th grade boys write on a chalkboard at the end of a long field trip in which a lot of sugar was consumed, and they feel the need to work off the high spirits before the teacher comes to erase it all. Generally the theme is best described as an aggressively-conceived campaign for crack cocaine in which the only downside is that if you eat cheese snacks until you have split yourself open from mouth to elsewhere (like the fellow in The Inferno) you must at least pause while you figure out if namebrand snack foods exist in the afterlife.

But all of this needs to be changed to the past tense. A few weeks ago a new bag of Cheetos forced itself upon me, and I found they'd fired the 8th grade boys and hired a Victorian spinster, one Miss Letitia Sprue, author of "Why Too Little Is Better Than a Feast: A Moral Fable." In earnest terms it urged me to eat 21 and no more (repeating this several times, by the end of which I had begun to figure out that they wanted me to eat 21 pieces and then stop). At the bottom was a little coupon which, if clipped out, filled in, and mailed, would automatically enroll you in The Temperance League, which would send you pamphlets on "The Demon Rum (Which Can't Be Imbibed Moderately, Unlike Name-Brand Cheese Snacks which Are the Soul of Moderation.)"

Meaning Good and Bad

2008-10-08T20:09:00.004-04:00

I just read "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok, which I never read partially because I thought it was fruit of the propaganda arm of the Black Panthers. (Sometimes associations are no less strong because utterly unfounded: I should perhaps clarify that the book is about the friendship of two Orthodox Jewish boys in Brooklyn during and immediately after WWII.) One of my roommates just loaned it to me and I was enthralled. Partially it seems like a fictional meditation on Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." The main character's father frequently talks about finding meaning in suffering, especially after news of the holocaust breaks on American shores. And ideas about psychology run throughout the book, primarily in heavy skepticism of Freud.

I love Viktor Frankl. But one thing I've been thinking about is that it's true that man must find meaning in his suffering in order to be at peace, but so many times that meaning is very harmful and the peace is only the apathy of despair. The main character's father, an utterly admirable man, is so distraught over the destruction of European Jews that he insists they must make meaning for themselves by making the Messiah come (or at least forcing the good associated with the coming of the Messiah to happen) through Zionism. The other meaning he made for himself was a distinct elevation in the role of teachers and rabbis in the American Jewry, since it was the only one left in the world: this was a good and constructive meaning. But the first was harmful in so many ways, partially in the theological evil of shoving God aside, and partially in the assumption that the only way for the horrific loss of life to be redeemed was through the establishment of Israel, whatever the costs. And I didn't realize that the costs had included terrorism by Jews against the British.

When the state was formed and the Arabs responded with more terror, the people in the book were flabergasted, which fits the hazy impression I'd had of people's actual reaction. But Macchiavelli and the Old Testament have already explained what has to be done to successfully displace another nation: even their newborn babes have to be thrown from the city walls. Macchiavelli pointed out that if you're determined to do evil to someone, you must utterly destroy them, as otherwise they will have nothing to lose and will make it their sole aim in life to destroy you and this state of affairs will remain until one or the other party is quite gone. But who can read that passage from the Old Testament without horror? Commentators from St. Augustine on have agonized over the correct interpretation of the verse: endorsing it as a practical course of action for the present would be unconscionable. Yet that is the choice that must be made when one group desires to usurp (not to rule over, which is much more easily done) another. This desire on the part of the American settlers was the driving force of the long, drawn-out tragedy summed up by the game "Cowboys and Indians."

And we (countries who participated in the vote in the United Nations) should have been able to see that this was the choice we were making, but that would have meant the loss of that "meaning" for the suffering of the holocaust. This is what I mean by a bad meaning: it pushed us into an evil action and fear of losing that meaning kept us from admitting to ourselves how bad the action was. Now it is made and reversing it could well be as bad as making it in the first place. You'd never want to be cruel to the heartbroken Jews who agitated for the state of Israel in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust: as Viktor Frankl says, the only normal response to an abnormal situation is an abnormal one. But it was a bad meaning to make for ourselves.

Dinosaur Pennames

2008-10-03T21:46:00.002-04:00

I've been loving Dinosaur Comics lately. I was trying to remember what it reminded me of, when I realized it sounded just like my youngest brother, and for one crazy second I imagined him being the *secret* author. Now I think it's probably just by someone from the west coast who likes to say totally a lot.

I'm so ashamed

2008-09-16T23:38:00.002-04:00

But Freud tells me I'm well on the road to pushing knickknacks in from the edge of small occasional tables (and other similarly tragic behaviors) with all this repression, so here goes: I really like the reality TV shows like America's Next Top Model, Dancing with the Stars, Project Runway, and so on (this is in the order of my liking for them, too, I think). Now it's time for me to return to Mr. Conrad, with whom I am having an passionate dalliance since I don't have a TV. But to paraphrase a girl from work, just because I'm seeing him doesn't mean I wouldn't leave for a TV were one to appear in our apartment.

I Like Ike

2008-09-12T21:58:00.005-04:00

There is a 100% chance of rain tomorrow, and the 14,500 stubborns in Galveston who've exempted themselves from the mandatory evacuation are being told that they face "certain death." I need to go to the laundromat tomorrow as our dryer is AWOL, so I guess this is just a little spur to get up early enough to be done and back home by 1 pm (when the fun is really supposed to start.) I'm kind of looking forward to it, as I won't really need power tomorrow, and as long as the plumbing works life should be good. The sky at sunset was gorgeous this evening, featuring the main colors from a spreadsheet chart I'd been working on earlier.

And in more important news, I got expensive shampoo and conditioner since my hair is long enough that it needs encouragement to avoid knots ("If you don't talk to your hair about tangling, who will?"). This will be totally fun to try (what will the smells and textures of these epithelial condiments be?), and I expect to be combing admirers out of my "long luscious hair"* starting tomorrow.

*A quote from a girl on the subway, NOT referring to another girl. At first I thought the young man's obvious lack of interest was because she was making him sound like even more of a fruit than he was, but I misjudged him. He suddenly awoke from his coma when the girl said she supposed his long luscious hair had very little product in it: as it turns out it had five and his lack of interest previously was that the connection to himself† was a little more tangential than he found appealing. In the end, the girl was a sympathetic character as she was at least trying to be congenial, while the young man seemed to have found someone he really liked (himself) and was too entranced to notice others.

†It had been a story of another young man with similar long luscious hair who had been made to cut it off.

Early Morning Songbird

2008-09-02T19:37:00.007-04:00

I've been listening to a lot of Johnny Cash lately, which comes up in unexpected ways. One is that I'll find myself a couple of bars into "If I were a carpenter..." while in the shower in the early morning. Then I realize what I'm doing: "did anyone hear?" as I look guiltily around the tiles and shower curtain (as if the absence of a visible audience will prove that no one did hear.) Of course, since it's early morning and I haven't yet wrested my iron self-control away from Mr. Sandman, these thoughts are also said out loud (remember, this is only about twenty minutes since I've realized that yes, I am the kind of thing that can do something about that alarm clock). And for about the same reason, the entire scenario repeats at least once more before the shower is over and I can escape downstairs (and away from my soon-to-be-sainted roommate who is usually attempting some of tired nature's sweet restorer).

Of course, once downstairs the urge to sing does not recur. There are probably deep-seated psychological reasons for this (and physiological reasons, since I'm not the kind of thing that can sing and eat breakfast simultaneously). Also interesting from a psychoanalyst's point of view is why some songs are so very popular for ablutionary singing ("Oh Bury Me Not" is a perennial favorite) without overlapping the playlist ("Hurt" and "The Mercy Seat.") "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" shows up reliably on both, but I think that's because I really like the bit where he locates his dog before he rejoins his arm.

I'm not going to ask my roommate if she's heard me. Once when I was thirteen, a lady who was staying with us told me I had a lovely voice and that she'd particularly enjoyed the rousing version of "Dixie" and it was years before I could shower when company was at the house.

2008-09-01T22:32:00.006-04:00

I've been watching a bunch of "Arrested Development" on Hulu (free but apparently legal with lots of commercials), and enjoying it overall. However, the most recent episodes (last half of series two) were yet another proof of how much the TV/movie industry needs a "Christian consultant" to help them produce Christian characters who are more caricatures (realistic portrayals are not the series' forte*) and less Frankenstein's monster. These last episodes featured evangelical-episcopal-Catholic Baptists.

*Someone also needs to tell them that gun rights enthusiasts are usually NUTS for gun safety.

Mother Teresa

2008-08-28T19:51:00.002-04:00

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

The End of the Affair

2008-08-27T20:13:00.002-04:00

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

2008-08-27T20:05:00.003-04:00

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.

Eye on the News

2008-08-21T20:50:00.001-04:00

Theodore Dalrymple muses on Solzhenitsyn.

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

Cat Ladies

2008-08-21T19:45:00.003-04:00

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.

Lots of smoke, no fire

2008-08-19T22:08:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-08-15T20:29:00.001-04:00

I have been through long deserts of data today.

Thoughts on pet names

2008-08-13T19:29:00.004-04:00

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.

Damn Newfangled Technology

2008-08-08T23:38:00.005-04:00

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.

Someone Else

2008-08-05T23:39:00.004-04:00

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

2008-08-05T18:52:00.007-04:00

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.

Update

2008-08-03T16:27:00.003-04:00

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.

So smooth

2008-07-07T11:38:00.002-04:00

And into the elevator with no thought of the kung fu he leaves behind.

And Now for Another Something Completely Different

2008-07-06T17:39:00.002-04:00

I am now in Dallas, and will be starting a new job ("Office Work") on Wednesday. I'm darned excited about it, but a little too tired to say anything further for the nonce.

Incredibly Hulkish

2008-06-24T21:36:00.002-04:00

Today I continued my researches into the lives of superheroes. It may surprise my readers, but my desire for martyrdom at the hands of communists has close competition from my longing to be a superhero. (I would be the first superhero with a mascot, which reminds me of the lovely dream I had last night where there were guinea pigs, rabbits, and chinchillas everywhere, so I just scooped up and hugged promiscuously as I went about my daily business, and was only saved from snuggling two precious skunks by the fact that my arms were already full of piggies.)†

Anyhow, I feel the Hulk's pain. I, too, have a raving beast lurking inside me, only it is unlocked by injudicious food choices (well, those are the things I can avoid.) The migraine burst out a few days ago because I stopped taking vitamins, ate some fake sugar, then ate some real sugar. None of this was on any large scale, but then again the poor Hulk explodes in green madness when he gets shoved: for some of us, suffering is entirely disproportionate to the cause.

I've really enjoyed these superhero movies. The fun bits lull the mind, which allows some quality, meditative thinking during the slow bits (i.e. dialogue, the last 40% of fight scenes or the last 75% of car chases). In fact, what the Hulk has to accomplish by sitting cross-legged and wiggling his diaphragm is brought about in me simply by watching him jump around destroying buildings.

Work awaits me early tomorrow morning, so ho for bed and responsible sleep. And in dreams what shall come to give me pause? Probably an enormous green guinea pig.

† WHAT does this say about my subconscious???

Time Is Passing

2008-06-22T23:27:00.001-04:00

So why am I no closer to owning twelve dachshunds at once than I was this time last month???

Google's Black Box

2008-06-22T22:43:00.002-04:00

Apparently Google's exact search formula is proprietary information and thus not available to puzzled bloggers, but it must involve something seriously weird. If you google "fruit vs vegetable", this post comes up in the top ten. Seriously weird as the intended audience was precisely one person, and the only proof I have ever received of the post having been read was from that same person, which was pretty okay with me since I put about as much time into the post as it took to type, and I type faster when I think less.

An image search of some sort (I haven't figured out what, yet) pulls up one of my favorite posts, but again the wider world has not really been knocking down my door begging for more of this special brand of something. So why do the fashion-hungry from Tel Aviv end up on my threshold?

"Jesse tree pictures" will again bring me up in the top ten, again with no apparent links.

A brief look at Wikipedia on PageRank tells me that a) Google does not live by links alone and b) something else that I don't really want to bother understanding right now and probably isn't important. Maybe showing up on Google is roughly equivalent to Aristotle's assessment of prophetic dreams: if enough of it happens, sooner or later a couple will ring true.

Now why am I not the first result if you search "dachshund Catholic communist"? (Actually, it's a fun and informative site on dachshund stamps.)

What a Nice Day

2008-06-18T21:28:00.003-04:00

The plumbing fiasco involved tearing out portions of the newly-built wheelchair ramp and bring in a $1200 machine to send a camera through the sewer pipes. It turns out there is a chunk of wood in the pipes which was catching non-flushable paper products which someone has been flushing. The wood is several years old and is probably a relic of one of the many remodels. The plumber did angioplasty on the pipes and managed to shift the wood, as well as the sludge, but at some point the wood will probably need to be removed. For now *we* need to avoid flushing non-flushable items.

The phones (which had shorted out from the flooding) have been repaired, and the wireless internet has been fixed. It turns out we had a faulty router, so for the first time since I moved here I can download software updates and watch on-line videos of cute animals without continually resetting my internet connection. The FiOS guy was even nicer than in the commercials.

And I didn't have to cook dinner. Since we couldn't use the toilets in the main house, everyone went over to the second house and we got pizza from the best pizza place in Chambersburg, whose owner asks us to come by and get whatever we want whenever we want it, gratis.

Now we are back in our little house, all cozy and ready for bed. The downstairs is still a disaster (the second bout of roto-rooting sent even more sewage into the basement, and the cleaners are back and working as we speak), and we're praying the insurance will cover the damage. On the plus side, I will get to learn tiling when it comes time to replace the ruined flooring. I've heard that the key is not to eat the thinset or grout, no matter how much they look like icing.

And it was a beautiful, cool day, with patches of sun and rain, which I got to enjoy while drinking coffee and watching the plumber tear apart the decking. To be honest, I had a great time.

How Insufferably Dreary

2008-06-18T14:27:00.003-04:00

At one point in Love in the Time of Cholera, the upstanding husband pushes aside the dinner his wife had prepared, saying, "this was not made with love."

Frankly, there are few things which seem more horrible than this.† But it does seem like going from the frying pan into the fire to be then trapped in an eternal groundhog day with an elderly Basil Seal (who is, I believe, simply the Ideal of Modern Man, enfleshed).

†In close competition is the husband on HGTV who, while showing off his master bathroom, said, "This is something we always wanted, a shower for two people, very romantic." Perhaps he figured that his bride had no interest in privacy since she was allowing national TV to go through her house.

Today I Was a Helpless Woman

2008-06-18T14:11:00.003-04:00

Yesterday my shower was interrupted by urgent knocking. My co-worker's voice, kind and apologetic but determined to be heard, came through the door asking me to please stop showering as the sink downstairs was overflowing. I finished up quickly (not wanting to repeat the time in grad school when I forgot to finish washing my hair, then had to take an emergency rinse-shower five minutes before a class in which I was giving a presentation), then went downstairs where I was met by the bucket brigade. Apparently the accumulated filth of hours had been too much for the sewage system, and it had given vent to the overflow of its burden all over the basement floor. The plumber (a stop-gap job: our regular maintenance savior was out of town for the day) was called in, he diagnosed it as a problem restricted to the washer, and told us to feel free to shower. He'd be back in two days to fix the washer.

Today buckets were set forth just in case the plumber had been mistaken, and when I went downstairs after my shower (the fourth of the day) to see if it needed emptying I was met by a scene from Genesis. I took one look (and smell), turned on my heel and called A Man (the real one this time, as he had returned riding in a white Cadillac). I felt like a failure for doing so, but a great part of wisdom is knowing the limitations of one's own powers.

The Man came, saw, exclaimed, called rotorooter (one of my favorite words) and the carpet cleaners, banned us from using any water in the house, and generally made me feel like I'd been right to wring my hands and wail. Now I can return to Mr. Henry James and the joys of escaping solid mercenary provincialism with a light heart.

Choler with Some Melancholy

2008-06-17T15:27:00.009-04:00

I gave up on Señor García Márquez, feeling that there is only so much outrage that a human frame can sustain at one time, even one as accustomed to it as mine. I'm going to hold off on further reading/ criticism until I've lived in Colombia for a while, which I hear is an important first step for proper appreciation. I'll leave the posts up as a case study in the choleric-melancholic temperament when it takes a literary turn. The choler gives rise to outrage, the melancholy to intense criticism, and the two together to strong reactions. Yes, even to me it sounds like I'm writing quotes for my future hagiographer.

This week my library bag includes two P.G. Wodehouse, two Isabel Allende, and three Henry James. I'm reading The Ambassadors right now. It hasn't taken him long to get down to brass-tacks. We're on page 21 and it is clear that this is a book about how a Yankee feels in Europe (i.e. about like a Westerner feels in the Northeast or a Southerner anywhere that doesn't involve mud and cotton, and I say this with the highest respect for these two substances, the equivalent for the Westerner being dust and weed). Slot A is "relative hick" and Slot B "relatively cultured", but with Southerners it's complicated by the fact that they're the only ones with any manners.

The two P.G. Wodehouse were The Catnappers and The Plot that Thickened, both excellent specimens of late Wodehouse (also known as his Dachshund Period, as the artist portraits of those years all involve a fat standard dachshund). I should have exercised some self-control and saved at least one for last, but instead I ignored Leah and went straight for Rachel. (Does anyone else think, "And finally for Rachel!"* when they turn their dinner-plate to the last remaining item, which is also the favorite one?)

In looking for the above photograph, I found the following libelous article from that venerable rag, Time. It is loosely inspired by a real event, which is that Wodehouse was taken prisoner by the Germans (along with all other male British subjects under the age of 60) when the Germans occupied the area of France where he, his wife, and his pekingese were living. While prisoner, Wodehouse made five broadcasts for the German radio, intending to assure then-neutral Americans to his relative well-being. The broadcasts were used in the United States as examples of brilliant subversive propaganda, being highly critical of the Germans,

One day, an official-looking gentleman with none of the Labour Corps geniality came along and said he wanted my car. Also my radio. And in addition my bicycle. That was what got under the skin. I could do without the car, and I had never much liked the radio, but I loved that bicycle. I looked him right in the eye and said 'Es ist schönes Wetter' [all he knew of German]- and I said it nastily. I meant it to sting.

but in England no one knew what their content was, and that ignorance was used to stir up patriotic fever by execrating Wodehouse. The news media and politicians involved should never be mentioned again without acknowledgment of their evil deeds (William-Connor-curse-him) which caused the kindly Wodehouse much pain. In the 1970s, England seemed to feel badly about it and made him a knight. Now our savvy modern media has returned to the original judgment but with important progress: the slander of a good man no longer serves patriotism.

*The allusion is both to Genesis 29 and to Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Tinkyada brown rice pasta

2008-06-14T21:59:00.005-04:00

Usually when I hear someone say that a gluten-free pasta is just as good as wheat pasta, I think "what have they been doing to their wheat pasta?" I left a regretfully supercilious comment on Hélène's blog to that effect (regretfully as in apt to cause regret in its author, as in fact it has). It turns out that she should have responded "what have you been doing to your rice pasta?" In my defense, what I was doing was following the package instructions. The company's enemies placed a bit of foul libel entitled "energy saving cooking instructions" that reduces the rice pasta to more of an emetic than food, which I mulishly followed. But when cooked like normal pasta, with salt and at a rolling boil for a short period of time, it really is delicious.

It's good to be wrong now and again, if only for the novelty.

Housekeeping

2008-06-09T17:58:00.004-04:00

I just updated my blogs list to delete hybernating blogs and add new friends. If you were deleted (or added), and feel upset about it, let me know and I'll reverse the change. Also, let me know if you want to be deleted or added.

Also, does anyone know how to edit the template to make my left column wider (preferably without making the right column narrower)?

Light Reading Masquerading as Literature

2008-06-06T13:33:00.004-04:00

I'm trying to calm myself down again with regards to my friend Gabriel García Márquez. I just started The Autumn of the Patriarch, and have one more of his books to go.

Basically, it doesn't seem fair to expect a modern author to have a concept of form, or to require their concept of sexuality to have continued maturing after high school. It is the essence of modernity that neither of these happen. And it's not my Colombian friend's fault that I heard somewhere that the worldspirit of Literature moved to South America after 1960, so that I approached the books hoping for something more substantial than a Harlequin. And he does do a fairly good job on the political and cultural levels*. He just doesn't know much about love and friendship—again, not his fault that I'm most interested in human nature as revealed in relationships and motivation. It's also not his fault that I get huffy when I feel like my healthy worldview is being subverted. And I am desperate for light reading material, so this is me trying not to be opinionated.

*Not that I'm a good judge: what I know about South America could be written on a 3x5 card, and most of that would be about capybaras, and most of that would be speculations on whether they'd ever been domesticated and if so how willing they are to be hugged†.

†According to Wikipedia: "Capybaras are gentle and will usually allow humans to pet and hand-feed them." Oh boy.

Love Among the Elderly

2008-06-05T11:29:00.006-04:00

As the title suggests, my imagination has been entirely occupied with Indiana Jones 4 and Love in the Time of Cholera. The conjunction led to the story of the frat boy who could only have sex* if he and his paramour du jour were listening to the Indiana Jones themesong. This disability provoked a certain amount of mockery among the shallower of the sorority girls, but eventually...well, actually, the reason that I'm not turning this into a full story is that I don't really want to think about it long enough to complete the plot. Anyhow, it sprang forth fully formed from my splitting headache in the middle of a conversation about Indiana Jones with a person who absolutely could not be told what I was laughing at, but I succeeded in switching the laughter for a choking sneeze and my reputation for spiritual elegance was maintained.

I went to the Indiana Jones movie wanting to spend a little time away from the house on my day off and hoping vaguely that it would be better than the Star Wars prequel (which my dad took us to see at the discount theater, and which I thought was not worth his dollar, though it was fun to go out with them.) My requirements were met and I had a lovely evening. The movie dealt with the protagonists' aging in a fairly classy way. Otherwise, my main critique was that Shia LeBoeuf sounds like a black woman, not a white man.

Cholera does not get off so easily. The supposedly happy realistic marriage is not very nice. It confuses the little every day services of love with love itself. There's nothing great about cooking meals for someone unless you love him. The act itself is certainly not love! The same goes for all domestic acts, whether done with a casual acquaintance, paid professional, or spouse. The author halfway understands this, remarking that the heroine had become a glorified servant, but then saying that this was love. The main character (of the triangle part) is a kind of elderly Basil Seal (but somewhat more solvent), initially sweet in a geeky kind of way but by the end of the book he's raped and seduced his way into so much tragedy that really the only appropriate finale would have to be violent and bloody. "He clasped her to his withered chest and wheezed sweet nothings into her ear. Suddenly, the last manatee leapt on board, clenching a conquistador's sword between her teeth. She decapitated everyone on board, then lay down to nurse her young amid the flaming wreckage of the riverboat framed by the treeless banks." Yes. What actually happens: no.

I have more to say on Gabriel García Márquez and the word love, but will save it for another post.

* I like to maintain the tone of the blog, but I'm afraid I just can't write "make love" here, as it is so far from being true. Further, Guy Crouchback has forced me to write "sex" instead of "gender", and bunthorne writes "sex" whenever he means "six" and he's even more of a prude than I am.

What Will Everyone Think?!?! *

2008-06-01T23:43:00.003-04:00

But isn't it nice that they're thinking at all?

* Or, what the SJ says to the NT.

I take that back

2008-06-01T21:25:00.008-04:00

I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, and decided that I either like it or don't hate it, and will need to read a bunch more Marquez to figure this out.

I wonder how much of the strangeness was Gabriel Garcia Marquez and how much was just Colombia. I've known a few Colombians, and I'd just like to say that whenever in my presence they were leading lives of exemplary order and chastity. Of course, they were seminarians and I was teaching them ESL, but all that proves is that a lot of Colombians are seminarians who want to improve their English. Marquez, on the other hand, portrays Colombians as people who want to get in unfortunate sexual situations with others (generally human) who are probably related to them.

One interesting internal* discussion was comparing the banana company of Macondo to the aluminum factory in my hometown. It was a draw as to which was more evil, and I don't know what my hometown was like prior to the infestation. It does seem that bad as industry is, a large city without it is doomed to become a sinkhole of destitution and misery.

My budget dictates that further researches will have to be carried out at the library, so I'm mentally preparing myself to pay off the late fee. Maybe I should go for some "talk therapy" to work through this issue.

"You see, it makes me feel like someone is standing on me, like some man—a solitary man—maybe, standing on my neck."
"And how does that make you feel?"
"Um, like I'd been born with the tail of a pig. [Sob]"
"Let's work through this. Why a pig? And why a tail?"
"Oh my gosh, it all comes back to my dream where my mother's silk poke was made from a sow's ear, doesn't it?"

*Because interesting to no one else in my immediate vicinity and philosophizing is best done in person.

An Excursion to Colombia

2008-05-27T17:23:00.007-04:00

I've been reading One Hundred Years of Solitude since yesterday. I kept hoping for some turn for the better, but the slow erosion of greatness by the world just grinds on. Finally I realized what was happening. This is The Sound and the Fury transferred to Colombia, with a touch of The Snopes Trilogy and a smidgeon of Absalom, Absalom!

But this book doesn't seem to be as great as Faulkner. The characters are born the way they die, each generation massively static and the only change coming from a falling off between generations. It is profoundly fatalistic, depressingly so, but not very true to human experience.

Gabriel García Márquez is also not very funny. Perhaps he is in his native language—much of Faulkner's humor is untranslatable—but he seems too sincerely absorbed in beating his dead mule to stop and tell a funny story about little boys shooting at each other or a cuckolded husband accidentally carrying the intruder across country on his back when what he meant was to get at the man's innards with a butcher knife.

This lack of humor may not seem very important, but mankind is terribly ridiculous, so much so that a humorous author with no pretensions at realism (such as P.G. Wodehouse) hits bullseyes while an author ready to deny in the name of realism that man is capable of laughter (such as Thomas Hardy) is only readable when he lands far from where he aimed. In fact, Faulkner's increase in greatness is matched by the increasingly comic (in both senses) nature of his work.

I'm about 3/4s of the way through, and if I stop reading I have to work on a budget. And I don't really want yet another unfinished book on my hands. Yet I've got my computer on my lap and Microsoft Excel is open, so it looks like my fate is decided.

On the root of all evil

2008-05-23T22:00:00.003-04:00

Some friends have been talking about how useful Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey is. I like makeovers and I like money, so I figured I might like it. My only debts are school debts (which I prefer to think of as a non-traditional dowry, equivalent to the groom losing twelve camels to a strange pestilence on his wedding day) and a six dollar library fine, but I have been wanting help on making a good budget so I went to Barnes and Noble to look into it. And, lo and behold, the only extant copy is a hardback retailing for 24.99ish. The slap in the face is that all the sequels are in paperback for at least ten dollars less. After gathering the pieces of myself up from around the store (where they'd been strewn by an explosion of indignation to the tune of "How is THIS going to save me money??!!?"), I ended up with a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a latté, and a People magazine. A quick, furtive slink got me out of the store before the realization that I'd spent the same amount of money on something useless could catch up with me.

Charity Bootcamp

2008-05-13T12:57:00.002-04:00

With regard to yourself, reality matters, perceptions don't.
With regard to others, their perceptions matter, reality doesn't.

Or said another way,
When attempting to communicate, it is what is received that matters, not what is transmitted.

Memory

2008-05-11T22:25:00.007-04:00

[Inspired by "The Judgment of Memory" by Joseph Bottum in March's First Things.]

I'm no longer homesick for home, but in some way that is a loss. It used to be a very deep and real part of me, such that I would feel like I was really one with the land, mountains, and trees. I would wake, aching with longing for those fields edged with snowy pines, only to be greeted by the eternal southern summer which had been thrust upon me by my own choice.

Perhaps my continual revisiting of home in stories is a longing for a place and knowing that I do not have it. The home of my childhood was very different from the home of my early adulthood, the one light, the other dark. But in both I felt a deep resonance between myself and my physical surroundings. Each turn brought me to a granite cliff remembered from early childhood, to the hill where the car ran out of gas on the way to the hospital for my mother to give birth to my older brother, or the apartment where a truck's windshield was shot out the week before we moved in. I loved them because I knew them, and whether or not the situation was primarily good or bad fell by the wayside.

And yet, since leaving I've found that I really love places that used to be the essence of foreign. My feeling for New York City was once best expressed by O'Connor's Judgment Day (oh, for home's early morning slant of light!) But now that I've visited it, I find that I really love it—though I can't quite believe that it likes me. Like Jed Tewksbury in A Place to Come to, I want to be very clear about the situation: I am a redneck gawking at the big city, even if that's not really the case. And so I find myself choosing stories which prove that point, like the neighbor who wore a new pair of jeans for his daughter's wedding rather than going down to Riverfront Park for Handel's Fireworks Concert each summer with my dad.

What I am looking for in the past is my identity in the present: where did I come from and where am I now? And this because I hope that the future holds a place to come to.

Real and False Unity

2008-05-07T21:16:00.003-04:00

A few years ago I tried a gluten-free diet, but under the unpleasantness of the diet allowed myself to be convinced that the separation from others was too onerous a burden, both for myself and the others from whom I was separated.

I now realize that this is only so much bunkum. The fact of the matter is that the symbolism of eating together really has nothing to do with what is eaten. Each proverb about breaking bread is matched by one of sitting down at table together. What is important is that all are sitting together and eating—it is no more necessary that each person eat the same kinds of food than it is that each person eat the same amount of food. Strangeness and rejection only enter into the matter when one or the other group refuses either to sit at table or to eat at all when doing so.

Community, family, and togetherness are often taken to mean "sameness." The fact is that the mystery of unity, as achieved on the natural level through eating together or on the supernatural level by eating the Bread of Life together, addresses plurality as found in diversity. This is not a nod to multiculturalism. The Trinity is one and many, diverse but not distinct. There is no discord or loss in the Trinity, even though the three Persons are not exactly the same (just consider the diversity of Processions). Therefore, this desire to impose unity through sameness is not even excused as an understandable response to the discord caused by the fall. A certain amount of diversity of interests, talents, and so on, existed even before the fall ("man and woman He created them") and is a source of great joy. It is the otherness which calls one out of oneself to delight in another. Diversity of gifts causes interdependency, which then allows love to flourish in ways which cannot be discovered without the occasions which dependency brings about. And considered from the perspective of the fall, being imperfect and mortal, and thus dependent on others is in fact the thing which saves creatures from rejecting love through pride. Each time humans favor pride, they fall flat on their faces very quickly, are forced to turn to others, and then Love has another chance.

I'm not an addict

2008-04-30T22:15:00.003-04:00

A Study in Psychology Featuring Dogs

2008-04-30T21:26:00.006-04:00

The Dog Whisperer* is not about dogs, but rather about the dysfunctional emotional lives of the average American, as projected by the husbands onto the wives onto the dogs.

*Just in passing: never once has a dachshund starred. Coincidence?

A Weight of Time

2008-04-28T21:13:00.004-04:00

I've had a bunch of migraines lately, so apart from very slowly working through Pope Benedict's speeches from his visit to the U.S., I've done very little reading. This is a source of enormous grief to me, and leaves me with huge chunks of time with only three options available to me, and all of them have certain problems when done for hours on end each and every day. These are sleep, eat, and spend money.

Today I decided on the spend money option. I rented The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. I watched the former this afternoon while crocheting (my femininity could hardly have been happier with the entire situation, especially since I'd just finished painting my toenails.) I just want to say that Jason Bourne (the film version, not the book version) is God's gift to me.

Someday I want to be able to run, climb, and elude bad guys like he does. I leave driving off the list, since I already drive like him. At least, I, like Bourne, leave a trail of screaming wreckage behind me, and though I remain cool and collected the whole time, my passengers do not.

Cameras

2008-04-27T23:35:00.003-04:00

I'm kind of ruthlessly single-minded, as well as being an inveterate introvert, so having a camera when people are around means that either pictures won't get taken, or people won't get talked to. And with scenery the situation is about the same (and not conversing with a good bit of landscape is a serious sin). But when I look at cool pictures like Gaffentine's, it makes me wish that the situation were otherwise. (Ahem, let's just assume that the only thing holding me back from producing great art is not happening to have a camera with me.)

Of course there's also something about the scenery out west. Hot cross buns do I ever miss mountains.

Happy Feet

2008-04-27T22:14:00.006-04:00

We watched Happy Feet tonight. Frankly, it was more revealing than a barrel full of Rorschach tests. When a person sits down to tell a story about penguins with the moral "We should rethink our fisheries policies"* and it comes out as an anti-religious anti-classical music pro-rock'n'roll-and-specifically-R&B eco-fable (while relocating the desire for the mysterious to technology-superstitions, i.e. aliens), you get a pretty clear idea of what happened in the black box of their imagination. What's sad about this is that it forms the imaginations of all those watching it.

Thank God mine has already been irreparably formed by the golden age of The Far Side.†

*Not a shocking thesis. A twenty-minute monologue from John Flory on the subject still haunts me when I'm awake at 3 a.m. Apparently the regulations, such as they are, simply encourage rape and pillage tactics during the "open" periods for different fish. I can feel perfectly comfortable on my soapbox here, because I never eat seafood (this is said with great complacency.)

†See if you can re-create the links between this post and one of my all-time favorite examples of the "Good Idea Meter"‡ having gone wonky.

‡The "Good Idea Meter" reads either "Good Idea" or "Not Good Idea," but sometimes the needle's choice is unreliable. The chances of getting it right should be one in two, but sometimes they end up being much lower.

Free at last

2008-04-26T21:38:00.005-04:00

Gluten-free, that is.

After saying that unlike Joni Mitchell, I did need the piece of paper to keep my love true, I went and shacked up with the diet as soon as the blood was out of my veins. Ten days later I got the results, which were negative. Mr. Gluten-free and I sat in the back of the bus and looked awkwardly at each other while the camera panned out.

So then this afternoon when I was faced with a number of delicious Trenton pizzas, one thing led to another, and I found myself with two slices of pizza inside me. At first it seemed like a truly brilliant idea, whose genius was only rivaled by the pure grace of execution. Then my brain got hep* to the situation, and hit me between the eyes with a super fantabulous migraine. It was the companionable, clingy kind. I spent the next few hours moving between my bed and the bathroom (where my gut, disagreeing with my will, was busily de-gluten-ing itself), but the migraine stood by me in both locales.

No, I don't have celiacs. Yes, I am gluten-intolerant. I'm actually incredibly happy, because this means I am not doomed to a life of being as sick as I've been recently. And I expect to be met in heaven by 1) Jesus 2) all the animals I've ever loved and 3) a truckload of freshly baked bread.

*This word always comes out kind of sly and sidelong when I say it, because I'm worried that people will assume that "layers of irony = 0", and this makes me act guilty. I have the same problem when I try to explain that God is three persons to people of simple worldviews. Really, I'm just trying not to talk about processions and mysteries, and then I feel like I'm trying to pull one over on them, so I usually end up saying something like "Okay, and God is—Whoa, look at the deer!—three persons."

The Meaning of Life

2008-04-24T22:03:00.005-04:00

Who knew that the interwebz had the key to a happy and fulfilled life?

But apparently I have an unshakable belief in the internet being What I've Been Missing, since night after night I spend 45 minutes religiously* clicking through the same pages, motivated by a deep yearning after something undefinable.

Or perhaps not so mysterious.

I swear, I didn't intend to end up here. This post was supposed to be about foolishly wasting time in superficial interactions rather than meaningfully relating to people who live nearby or praying. But I suppose for me all roads lead to a Rome where a dachshund is pope.

*Coincidental word choice? I think not.

A friend wants to know

2008-04-23T21:44:00.003-04:00

Has anyone seen a children's missal for the Vatican II Mass which is well-made and not cartoony?

This is totally not unreasonable

2008-04-23T21:24:00.005-04:00

Does anyone else feel mildly rejected when they leave a comment, and the blog remains blank except for one line: "Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval."

I feel like I laid my little food offering before the gods just to see them kick it over to the dog saying, "I'm sure that'll be great if the dog doesn't die from it."

Earthly things to yearn after

2008-04-22T21:19:00.003-04:00

Wodehouse and Dickens

2008-04-20T13:51:00.003-04:00

My favorite Dickens character is Mr. Samuel Weller (pronounced Samivel Veller) from The Pickwick Papers. My roommate and I were so taken with him that when we were gifted with the best little brown dachshund in the world, we named him Samivel.

Yesterday and today have been considerably brightened by the P.G. Wodehouse novel, Sam the Sudden. This Sam is also an energetic capable sort of man, and I've spent the novel hoping that he would sit down and write a "walentine." While waiting, I've laughed even harder than the time my little brother told me about the Craig's List Santa and the cooler of beer back home in Hillyard.

But the touching love scene (in which the heroine reveals that she wouldn't mind if the hero alienated a rich uncle by staying in England in order to court her) gives the meeting of my two favorites:

'What?' he croaked huskily.
'I said why—do—you—not, Samivel?' whispered Kay.

I ♥ Benedict

2008-04-20T10:47:00.002-04:00

Texts of the Holy Father's talks and homilies for the U.S. visit.

On Discretion

2008-04-19T21:12:00.003-04:00

[In the voice of God.]

The soul can therefore place neither laws nor limits to its love for me. But its love for its neighbor, on the contrary, is limited by certain conditions. The light of discretion (which proceeds from love) gives to the neighbor a conditioned love. Such a love, being ordered aright, does not cause the injury of sin to self in order to be useful to others. For, if one single sin were committed to save the whole world from hell, or to obtain one great virtue, the motive would not be a rightly ordered or discreet love, but rather indiscreet. For it is not lawful to perform even one act of great virtue and profit to others by means of the guilt of sin.

Holy discretion ordains that the soul should direct all its powers to my service with a manly zeal. It should love its neighbor with such devotion that it would lay down a thousand times, if it were possible, the life of its body for the salvation of souls. It should endure pains and torments so that its neighbor may have the life of grace, and give its temporal substance for the profit and relief of his body.

This is the supreme office of discretion, which proceeds from charity. So you see how discreetly every soul who wishes for grace should pay its debts. That is, it should love me with an infinite love and without measure. But it should love its neighbor with measure, with a restricted love, not doing itself the injury of sin in order to be useful to others.

This is St. Paul's counsel to you, when he says that charity ought to be concerned first with self, otherwise it will never be of perfect usefulness to others. And this is because, when perfection is not in the soul, everything the soul does for itself and for others is imperfect.

—St. Catherine of Sienna, Doctor of the Church

Today

2008-04-19T15:47:00.002-04:00

I had hoped to go watch the Pope drive down 5th Avenue this afternoon, but Mr. Migraine said No.

Instead I am trying to heal my iPod, which accidentally lost the files for everything except Barron's Mastering German and The Complete Works of Bach.

At least there is still a German-theme to my day.

This cries out to be made into a joke...

2008-04-19T13:16:00.004-04:00

From my decaf Espresso can (El Pico brand): "With all our fine Latin flavor!"

...but I don't have any Hispanic or classicist friends who are close enough not to be offended.

Late Have I Loved Thee

2008-04-15T11:45:00.005-04:00

I posted on The Shins' song Young Pilgrims a bit ago, but Guy Crouchback took me to task for being too severe. And it's true, I was. There is a wistful yearning in the song, as though the band really wishes they could be one of the Faithful. Thinking it over, I realized that I don't have much patience for people who lack faith, having always had it myself. I temporarily chalked this up to my natural virtue, but the truth hit me in the middle of the coffee shop at Barnes and Noble yesterday.

Faith, hope and love are supernatural virtues, meaning that grace as well as habit is required for their formation. But we were created for union with God, which means we were intended to be always full to overflowing with these best of all attributes. Their loss is due to wounds, and these wounds cry out for healing.

How can one heal rifts through the very substance of one's being? Not through ratiocination. These wounds are healed through authentic experiences of beauty, goodness, and truth. Perhaps this is what St. Francis pointed to when he exhorted his followers to preach always, and only if they must, use words. The beauty and goodness of the life of the Christian are the best witnesses, and the best medicine. Words are only as strong as the meaning attached to them, and the wounded person has a false meaning attached to these words.

The happiest moment of my life was the moment when I realized that "good" is said of God, not because He happened to take that side of the opposition but could conceivably have taken the side of "evil," but because He is Good in the deepest and truest sense of the word, and it is not possible for Him to be evil: and that if it were possible, "good" would not really be good.

I needed to have my sense of "good" healed in order to love. A dear friend needed to see that beauty existed in order to start her journey toward faith. St. Augustine's conversion began with a struggle to understand good and evil (starting from being a Manichean) to believing in real goodness (Neo-Platonism) to finding true beauty in Christ (Confessions books 7-10).

It is heartbreaking to see loved ones struggling on without faith, hope, or love, and it would be so easy if a cleverly turned phrase were all that they needed to be made whole. In fact what they need is to be loved and accepted, always through prayer and if possible through companionship, while waiting for Love to come for them.

St Peter Chrysologus

2008-04-15T11:37:00.003-04:00

I appeal to you by the mercy of God. (Romans 12:1)

Listen to the Lord's appeal: In me, I want you to see your own body, your members, your heart, your bones, your blood. You may fear what is divine, but why not love what is human? You may run away from me as the Lord, but why not run to me as your father? Perhaps you are filled with shame for causing my bitter passion. Do not be afraid. This cross inflicts a mortal injury, not on me, but on death. These nails no longer pain me, but only deepen your love for me. I do not cry out because of these wounds, but through them I draw you into my heart. My body was stretched on the cross as a symbol, not of how much I suffered, but of my all-embracing love. I count it no loss to shed my blood: it is the price I have paid for your ransom. Come, then, return to me and learn to know me as your father, who repays good for evil, love for injury, and boundless charity for piercing wounds.

[From today's Office of Readings.]

I Watch Online Videos Late at Night

2008-04-14T22:42:00.002-04:00

But I'm not ready to admit I have a problem.

Hallmark

2008-04-14T22:15:00.005-04:00

I went to Hallmark today. I always put it off because I feel like an idiot trying to pick out which card is least offensive to me (and I hope its destined recipient). This usually narrows down my focus to the "Belated" section, and then I usually just get the one with the cute dog on it. ("Why is a wiener dog threatening to pee behind my couch if I don't have a happy birthday? Is this what happens when you graduate from college?") At least there's a rhyme or reason to my selections (When Is a Dachshund Not Appropriate? *Rhetorical Question*), unlike my little brother who went through a phase of giving everyone Congrats-Girlfriend pregnancy cards, regardless of age or sex.

I also needed another box of Thank You cards, which is difficult because they can't say "Thank You" on them. (I read Miss Manners at an impressionable age.) But I want authentic Thank You cards because they're small and don't require me to think of much to say.* I had one contender in my hand when a woven pattern in pearlized off-whites caught my eye: "Ostentatiously unobtrusive—perfect!"

I just realized that it was probably intended for weddings, which will just enrich the sub-text for the recipients.

*People usually guess what's happening if you write in letters two inches tall.

2008-04-14T21:10:00.000-04:00

I'm about ready to stop checking this blog—there are never any new posts.

Do it for Jesus

2008-04-02T20:40:00.002-04:00

Our residents have been having trouble with selfishness. It's very easy to spoil the disabled, because it can feel cruel to deny them anything when they already suffer so much. And it can be difficult for them to do things for others since they can hardly do things for themselves. But all human beings need to give up the self for the sake of love, and it's denying the residents the basic dignity of humanity to imagine that they cannot sacrifice for Jesus and others.

I'd started my campaign by convincing J to offer the front seat to M for an outing, explaining that it was a wonderful way to show she loved M and also Jesus. J was obliging, fully ready to do something she'd get praised for, and sure she loves M, so why not? Then we got home and she stopped still, working things out: we're home, no one will be riding in the front seat again tonight, and she still hasn't ridden in it. In the full grip of the anti-climax she seemed to be saying, "You said this would be so great, so why does it suck?" So of course tears came next, and I realized that "You'll get your reward in forty years after you've died!" was not going to soothe the troubled waters. She gave up something tangible, and really only something else tangible was going to fit the bill.

But today at the Steubenville bookstore I found "Sacrifice Beads" in every color, so now everyone in our houses (including staff and some of the volunteers!) has their very own, with instructions on how to use them. In a shocking denouement of self-knowledge, I found that my own beads did not fly by as quickly as I was expecting. We'll need to return to the topic of dying to self and then getting to move a nifty bead incessantly over the next few weeks, but my hope is that in the end everyone will have some acquaintance with a short list of nice things they can do for others to show that they love Jesus.

Thank You, B

2008-03-29T17:11:00.000-04:00

We Interrupt This Period of Silence to Say

2008-03-28T21:56:00.004-04:00

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

2008-03-14T02:59:00.005-04:00

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*

2008-03-10T22:53:00.009-04:00

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

2008-03-08T23:01:00.005-05:00

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

2008-03-01T22:02:00.002-05:00

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

The Tapestry of Life

2008-03-01T21:54:00.012-05:00

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

2008-03-01T21:39:00.005-05:00

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.

Regular Habits

2008-02-28T22:00:00.003-05:00

Can you tell what time I check my email and (perhaps) blog?

Gibbering from the Sheeted Dead

2008-02-28T21:49:00.003-05:00

You Are a Question Mark

You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible. You love learning.

And while you know a lot, you don't act like a know it all. You're open to learning you're wrong.

You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more.

You're naturally curious and inquisitive. You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises.

Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought provoking.

(But they're not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!)

I tried to take this quiz, then found I was too tired to be able to come up with the answers, but had already invested too much emotional energy to be able to let it go, so Mrs. Bear told me the answers. (I was going to say "Let me copy from her sheet," but actually she gave me an entirely new set of answers. [I wrote this before I discovered that I'm the same punctuation mark as she is—will the teacher suspect?])

At least I didn't ask her, "How's my stomach feeling?" I get asked that a lot each day. Usually I answer, "You feel great," which seems to bring comfort. Once I questioned the existential validity of the question, which seemed to bring pain.

Notes from the Underdog

2008-02-26T21:38:00.003-05:00

Wow, finally the capitalists have produced something which caters to ALL of my obsessions at once: communist revolutionary dachshunds (with a dash of Johnny Cash.)

Feel free to buy me as many t-shirts as you wish, just be sure to ship with a dachshund inside it.

Adoption Propaganda

2008-02-26T21:30:00.002-05:00

Okay, insanely cute. I'll take all five.

Thank you, Guy Crouchback!

Memento Mori II

2008-02-21T21:39:00.002-05:00

Our parish priest signed all 1700 copies by hand without complaining or even pointing out to my boss that he was doing it because someone hadn't had him sign the original.

He is totally going straight to heaven, which is something that he did point out so that the 1700 second-class relics he just produced could be cherished properly.

Immunizations and Formula, STAT

2008-02-21T21:10:00.003-05:00

I've been reading Twilight over Burma, and keep getting the feeling that this is the straight man (à la Gracie Allen, rather than the brother who was happy in Kansas and didn't need to move to San Francisco) with George Burns's part played by Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief. In the first, an idealistic, western-educated Shan prince tries to modernize his country in a decade, before disappearing into the jungle in the custody of the army. In the second, the place is Africa and the time span a few months.

Apart from that and the author's regrettable decision to forgo a ghost-writer, the book is a very enjoyable real-life Cinderella tale ended by a military coup.

J.G. Ballard

2008-02-19T21:12:00.002-05:00

This article has made me wonder if I want to risk the modern sensibilities (i.e. lots of sex) in the search of possibly enjoyable literature. I'm also wishing that some sociopath hadn't run up a big library fine so that this quandary inevitably involves money. I will probably start with this one, which has the plus of involving my favorite topic (concentration camps) and, unlike the sequel, is not rumored to have my least favorite topic (clinically reported mortal sin scenes).

Memento Mori

2008-02-19T19:27:00.006-05:00

I am dying. Actually, that would be a relief. I am conspicuously not dying but if there were any justice in this world anyone who felt this way would be halfway between the mortician's and the cemetery. In fact, I bet you can get some quality rest on that cold marble slab. (A friend tried to sell me on the idea of a healing Mass involving being slain by the spirit, and I found myself wondering wistfully if you can rest up while lying on the floor. At the moment I am awakened in the middle of the night by an intense feeling of exhaustion.)

I really don't know why I feel this way, which is frustrating. As Viktor Frankl says, for suffering to be bearable it must have meaning, and this has none. The most basic of tasks takes just a wee bit more than would be required to climb the northern face of the Matterhorn, but the result looks like something blown out of one's nose while mostly asleep (possibly not even bothering with a tissue, not that I would do something so foul). For example, my boss sent me to get color photocopies of a mailing we're sending out. It was my day off, but I can't write so what the freakin' hell else should I do but run errands. She and the bookkeeper (incidentally the word in English that has the most double letters in a row) had said something about 15 times 5 making $75, which initially translated in my mind to 75 color copies. I was pleased that the copies had only cost $36, but as I was loading the 2000 envelopes and 75 copies into the van, a feeling of numerical discrepancy came over me. So I called my boss, asked how many copies she wanted, was told 1700, and went back for another 1625 (making me late for an appointment with my boss' daughter, which then made her late for a potential wedding reception site, though she was very sweet about it). The total for the second batch was about $630, but as the clerk cheerfully pointed out, we'd made an easy $60 on our rewards card. My boss halfway coughed up her skull when I told her the total. On the bright side, she doesn't yet know (and I don't have to tell her) that we forgot to get the parish priest to sign the original, so we now have 1700 papers waiting to be signed in colorful blue ink.

No cloud is so dark but lurks a silver lining.

Pale Fire Revised

2008-02-18T21:39:00.004-05:00

[Spoiler alert!]

I just finished Pale Fire, and am really enjoying turning it over in my mind. It ends up being about the relationship between a poet and a madman, laying their two creations side by side. The poet was by far the kinder and more human of the two, and in fact his tolerance of the poesis of madness accounts for the remarkable kindness shown to his eccentric neighbor.

It is clear that the author of the second portion is a lunatic, (probably paranoid schizophrenic, as he is overly cautious in unreasonable ways while being reckless in reasonable things, hears voices, and has fits of hysterical grief), but what was not immediately clear was whether he was also royal. I couldn't understand why the killer waited for the poet at the madman's door, but just remembered that it was the madman's rented door, rented from a judge on sabbatical whose appearance at dusk was probably very similar to the poet's.

2008-02-11T19:19:00.000-05:00

I just added a new category which lists the books I'm currently reading or have just finished. I'll consider giving a book review if requested. :)

Adulthood

2008-02-09T21:51:00.000-05:00

At college a professor told the story of how he knew he was an adult when both he and his wife had a terrible case of the stomach flu, yet someone still had to change his son's poopy diapers.

The story has lingered in my imagination, strongly linked to the response: "YES! Adulthood! I bet it rocks!"

But now this same situation (minor differences, beginning dialogue: "How do you flush the toilet?" "Oh, you know—show me!" "I'm afraid to." [Internal, unprintable response]) has happened for me—because, yes, my fabulous immune system let me in for a worse case than anyone else had and which has just returned after a day's intermission—and somehow the whole thing really doesn't rock as much as I'd expected. I think I was imagining the graduate degree and vocation came part and parcel with the re-exposure to the same thing that made you sick in the first place. Or at least that there would be balloons and dachshunds. Or dachshunds the shape of balloons. Or even salt and pepper shakers.

It's Meme O'Clock

2008-02-04T21:43:00.000-05:00

Mrs. Bear tagged me for a book meme.
1) Take the nearest book of more than 123 pages.
2) Find page 123.
3) Find the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences.
5) Tag some folks.

So the nearest book was The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and I'm not up to page 123 yet, so I hope this doesn't spoil anything:

'Naturally,' William said, 'all this means nothing. I don't believe anyone entering the choir passed behind the apse, and therefore the corpse could have been here for several hours, at least since the time when everyone had gone to bed.'

'To be sure, the first servants rise at dawn, and that is why they discovered him only now.'

Hmm. Well, there's certainly been enough foreshadowing that the corpses would be flying thick and fast, so I suppose that didn't ruin anything.

Now just imagine how interesting things would have been if this book had been a few inches farther away, since the next closest book was my journal. Yes, I do number my journal pages because I feel like it makes me less likely to be eaten by dragons or smothered by giant toads. The real question is whether that page has actual sentences, since I usually affect more of a James Joyce-y style. And on looking it up, it's all about how I should imitate St. Francis more and with more joy, which probably means that I was anticipating a gatekeeper beating me and throwing me into the dark, and feeling like that would not be the highest happiness.

I tag Anika and Hélène.

A New Milestone

2008-02-02T21:36:00.000-05:00

At 2 am this morning I was awoken by a knock and heard, "I need you." One of my charges had the stomach flu, so I got her settled over the toilet for what I imagined were dry heaves. But in fact, while one end tried but produced nothing, the other end quietly filled up all vacancies. Poor little thing. The worst part was that she was scared and didn't understand what was happening. It took an hour or so before I had her and the bathroom and the laundry cleaned up (some I just threw away). I learned how to clean all sorts of stuff out of all sorts of places. All in all it was not that bad, but something that I'm hoping will not be repeated soon. On the bright side, even if the stomach flu rages through the rest of the house, everyone else will be a little more prepared to deal with it on their own.

Not Available in Stores

2008-01-29T13:40:00.000-05:00

There is a foolproof sign of when exhaustion has become equivalent to intoxication. It happens to me while watching the commercials on HGTV. Although the images and text of the commercials cover different subject matter, they all break down to the same basic three stages, and almost certainly employ the following quotes subliminally. Why else would anyone hire a tubby, bearded fellow who shouts and has no credentials other than that he is the perfect cover for the whispered insinuations?

Stage 1: Uncertain cynicism:
"Oh that's just ridiculous."
"But they wouldn't sell it if it weren't worthwhile."
"Well, I suppose it does have real-life applicability and it's not TOO expensive."

Stage 2: Cautious enthusiasm
"They just doubled the offer!"
"How can they afford to do that?"
"Can I afford not to buy?"

Stage 3: Let me at the phone
"They just added a free gift/tripled the offer!!!"
"Act now, think another time!"

I knew someone who shopped non-stop on QVC. She really believed that QVC offered the highest value and quality, and she appreciated the "easy-pay" system which just took a small amount of money out of her bank account each month for three months without bothering her at all. In general, her possessions did have a very uniform and marked theme: gimmicks. Each item justified its existence with one small, well-defined, and generally spurious reason. One shirt could be balled up in a pocket, then worn without being any less attractive than if it had been ironed. One kitchen utensil used a complicated process to turn out perfect little cubes of garlic—and nothing else (of course, they're not crushed, so the resulting dish is not as flavorful).

Now, Charles de Konick says that living things are organic, meaning "having tools." He delights in how a tool provided by nature, such as a hand, was perfectly adapted to innumerable tasks, while a supposedly multi-function man-made tool, such as a Leatherman, did anything poorly. I think of this with perverse pleasure when buying things (especially kitchen utensils) that can be used for as many different tasks as possible.* This combines with love for Lady Poverty to make a wooden spoon (3 for a dollar at Target) a thing a beauty and a joy forever.

QVC is clearly a fan of de Konick but not of Lady Poverty.

*Major exception to the rule: coffee makers.

From Helénè

2008-01-28T19:50:00.000-05:00

You Scored an A

You got 10/10 questions correct.

It's pretty obvious that you don't make basic grammatical errors.
If anything, you're annoyed when people make simple mistakes on their blogs.
As far as people with bad grammar go, you know they're only human.
And it's humanity and its current condition that truly disturb you sometimes.

The It's Its There Their They're Quiz

Over the Top

2008-01-28T19:21:00.000-05:00

Anika not-so-recently posted about the thrills of being single (as opposed to being matched to the available options). It's hard to keep from being struck by the paucity of what society dishes up for the single girl. A recent City Journal article touches on the same topic. It seems like the choice is between a man who has cultivated success in the world to the extreme detriment of his character and a man who has not gotten into drinking, being mean, looking at porn, etc., but has also not done anything other than keep his couch from floating off. And somehow it's not surprising that the girls don't find themselves panting after either option.

Or, said another way, it's like being of the educated class and living after World War I with a dash of a zombie movie. Everyone's fiancés, brothers, etc., are dead—but in this case they're still walking around.

March for Life

2008-01-23T12:30:00.001-05:00

The March for Life in Washington DC.
Lord, have mercy on us.
A good day to be Catholic.
A not so good day to be crazy Latin-Masser.
Also a good day to be Orthodox.
From the top of Capitol Hill (the Washington Monument is in the distance).

Amazing Grace

2008-01-18T22:36:00.000-05:00

I just saw a movie that makes me feel like both politics and movies are not necessarily garbage-ridden gutters breeding moral filth. I'm not sure I like feeling this way, primarily because I doubt it corresponds to reality (though I wish it did). I suppose this would be cynical idealism. But the movie, Amazing Grace, is worth seeing anyhow.

Advice?

2008-01-17T11:09:00.000-05:00

My erstwhile laptop (a Dell Inspiron 600m) may be dying. I have thought this before, and it has risen from the ashes, but it is nearly four years old, which is getting near the honorable age for retirement. It has been everything that one hopes for from a computer and more. In fact, it is more like typing on my best friend. I looked to eHarmony to find another perfect match, but apparently they really just have boys on the brain.

My reservations about this computer is that it is susceptible to viruses and the Microsoft programs wage war on other, often better, programs (here I am thinking of Firefox). In fact, iTunes runs into a startup conflict that I haven't been able to pinpoint, but which has made me shelve my iPod for the nonce. Would it be a good idea to move to an Apple laptop? The cheapest is $1099, whereas a decent Dell runs about $699 (the cheapest is $499—is the extra $200 necessary?).

Here are my criteria:

Long-lived. I would like it to last at least four years, and to be reasonably compatible with new accessories (like iPods) at the end of those four years.
Durable. I've dropped this laptop more times than I can say.
Portable. I've taken this laptop everywhere and therefore used it more than any other computer I've had. I prefer a smaller, lighter computer to one with a high-quality but heavy wide-screen.
What I actually use a computer for is the following:
- Word processing and spreadsheets
- E-mail and blogging
- Music, videos and pictures (but I'm really not discerning about sound and video quality, and I like it that way because I can be happier spending less.)
- I do like to be able to run a lot of programs at once.

As you can see, I clearly do not need something state-of-the-art. However, I do use it a lot, so probably don't want to go completely bare bones.

Boys on the Brain

2008-01-15T12:52:00.001-05:00

I got a CD in the mail Saturday and asked J if she'd like to open it for me. She did, and when she pulled the CD out and saw the picture of the band on the front (four guys looking intentionally geeky—I'd given in to temptation to revisit the early 90s) she said, "Boys, huh? You've got boys on the brain!"

That night we went to Catholic Underground New Jersey. One of the singers during the coffee hour was a handsome young man, and he dedicated a song to M. When we were leaving, M (an always bubbly 40 something resident) gushed goodbyes to him and finally made two big kissy noises to him. He looked shocked and then turned bright red, while she continued to overflow with her natural ebullience.

I guess I'm not the only one with boys on the brain.

Apology to St. Paul and the Angels

2008-01-15T12:48:00.000-05:00

Mrs. Bear's rebuke recalled me from crankiness inspired by the whole St-Paul-and-man-and-woman thing (a problem because I am still worldly in my identity) to my initial intention in posting about chapel veils. What I was thinking was that there must be some reference in some other part of the Bible to angels and glory which would be a clue as to why women should cover their heads for the sake of the angels. Off hand all I can think of is that angels veil their glory constantly for our sake. Whenever they appear to humans, their glory is so great (and even there their appearance is not as they actually are) that the humans are terrified and the angels have to tell them not to be afraid.

Any ideas?

Gaurdian Angels

2008-01-15T12:45:00.000-05:00

On Sunday I told the girls about guardian angels. K was bemused and delighted that the someone had been protecting her ever since she was born.

Does anyone know anything about "naming" your guardian angel? I read somewhere that a saint recommended it, and although it sounds a little presumptuous, it might help K have more of a relationship with her guardian angel.

Bulk

2008-01-14T21:28:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading "The Count of Monte Cristo." My primary feeling is that there was a lot of it. It's like a man that I could have had a passionate (but short-lived) love affair with if he just weighed 800 pounds less.

Hmm

2008-01-14T20:27:00.000-05:00

Today someone put a chapel veil in my mailbox. It had my name on it (misspelled, but only slightly), a holy card of St. Catherine of Sienna, and nothing else. My housemate who is also a young woman and a parishioner did not receive one, at least not that she mentioned. She's not super communicative, though, so it would not be shocking for her to listen to my fount-of-off-the-cuff-information-on-chapel-veils and speculation as to the mysterious donor without volunteering that she also received one. The chapel veil itself is pretty. It is white and about large enough to wrap a midget in. I like to think that the beauty of my "long luscious hair" (quote from a New York subway story that is percolating through the blog filter) prompted the gift. Someday I'll have to comb the men out of my hair, but for now the residents love playing with it.

But this brings me to the bigger problem of chapel veils. St. Paul says "That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head, because of the angels." (1. Cor. 11:10). Now, not to be disrespectful, but if St. Paul were my student, the paper would be returned to him marked "unclear causal link." The preceding verses explain that man prays with an uncovered head because he is the glory of God, woman with a covered head because she is the glory of man. The angels thing was evidently the ace up his sleeve. I don't mind covering my head for the sake of the angels, I'd just like to have an idea of how they got tangled up in the God-man-woman thing.

I might go ahead and wear it. I've thought about it before, but haven't carried through and parted with actual cash money for the thing. Someone in college also said that you shouldn't wear a chapel veil if it would be a distraction to others, but I'm starting to feel like the others need to take some responsibility for their own distractions. This reminds me of another story caught up in the blog filter, about the phlegmy man who sat behind me and spent all of Mass trying to clear his airways. He had an ingenious two-step process in which the mucous was torn from its foundations by being alternately sucked in and blown out (but apparently never removed from his system). Over and over again I found myself marveling that any woman was willing to countenance such noises, especially since a production like that while upright bodes ill for the nocturnal experience. Then my sinfulness (for having such thoughts in Mass) would smack me in the face, and I would pray fervently to the Divine Mercy until the phlegm was shaken from its home again, when it all started over. All in all, I reflected as I left the church, it was a pretty successful prayer experience.