Coffee in the Morning

I love the sound of coffee-making. Not the grunts and crashes of cleaning and refilling — that's what Aristotle was thinking of when he spoke of pity and fear, but he didn't spell it out because he didn't want parents to pull their kids from his school — but the noise happiness makes when it bubbles over.

Autumn

Basic things like work and trips to the grocery store are tricky right now ("Dear Immune System, wish you were here. Love, me"). Work closed 2 hours early yesterday, and although I have the most wonderful boss in the world who would've totally allowed me to stay until I'd finished my quota, I didn't want to be the only little kid stuck inside while all the others played, so I worked ahead a little and came in early. At this point in my life, that is enough challenge for one week, but I also needed to get to the big-fancy grocery store to buy gluten-free rolls for an offering to the Thanksgiving table, and a drive into Dallas on the eve of Thanksgiving is a sobering thing.

I decided to take the back roads, and fell right into one of those unexpected idylls of everyday life that are as delightful as they are unforeseen. As I pulled out of the parking lot at work, I noticed 3 or 4 trees which had turned a beautiful red, apparently overnight. The route was mostly residential, and mostly very nice residential, through neighborhoods just old enough to have mature trees.

In Texas, the trees are capricious. Some turn red, others don't turn at all, and some are just a sickly in-between. You don't know what will greet you when you glance up from traffic — the ordinary or the beautiful — and even the beauty rises up out of dead lawns. This framing lends a savor and poignancy to fall that entirely eclipses the boisterously overfilled spring.

The way home led into the remains of the sunset. It took me a long time to learn to look up for beauty, but in Texas the sky holds terrible and wonderful things. Winds unfelt below had pushed and pulled the clouds into sweeps of pink and grey.

The entire drive was an experience of how God's goodness is so great that rather than being good in spite of the limitations, He causes the limitations to work with Him.

Robot Parade

It just took me three (3!) times to prove to blogger than I'm not a robot and should be allowed to comment on a friend's blog. I find these things stressful and difficult. Combined with the correct sign-in credentials requirement, they create a barrier to entry in the commenting market which usually results in a text "LIKE" to the author.

Now the funny thing about this is that I've never gotten the whole robot-cult thing. My strongest reaction to a robot was one featured in a Mr. Rogers episode, and I think the reason I liked that was just that I liked all his field-trip episodes. I've watched a tidy few sci-fi films in my day, but if asked why they featured so many robots I would have said that robots have lots of wires and electronics in them and geeks like that sort of thing.

It turns out there's a deeper human experience theme here, which I first learned about when I told a friend I'd liked the movie AI (Artificial Intelligence — this was forever ago). In fact, I'd liked the little dance the robot did, and liked going to see it with my brother, and felt like I probably should like it especially since one or the other of us had shelled out actual hard cash to see it in the theatre (a compelling reason, also the reason I liked The Blair Witch Project), but in retrospect I'm not sure that really qualifies as liking the movie.

My friend responded with enthusiasm that it was a great movie because it tapped into a universal fear and experience of feeling like a robot. Shock overcame what little tact I'd earned at that point, and I exclaimed, "What?! Why would anyone feel that way??" My friend lapsed into hurt silence which was made worse when it became clear that I honestly wanted to know, so I've never learned what is behind this phenomena: how does it happen? Is medically unnecessary hormone therapy behind it? Is it a result of public schooling? Water from plastic bottles? Being allowed to watch Transformers at a young age despite the resulting nightmares? Watching Transformers at a young age and NOT having nightmares?

I feel like I can navigate the universe of Dostoevsky and Faulkner ("How does it feel to be a deeply impoverished share-cropper who's murdered an old money-lender in St Petersburg? Oh, I've *been* there"), but the popular blogger who admits to feeling like a computer leaves me flummoxed. Maybe this is related to those mysterious phlegmatics, except that phlegmatics are fairly rare and this is apparently a common experience.

Zombies, on the other hand, are hilarious, readily understandable, and should be imitated every day for at least two hours after waking. I'm especially good at the shower scene from Shawn of the Dead.

Restricted Career Choices

In recent years it has become easier to tell people what I can eat than to try and give an exhaustive list of what I can't. Now that lists are such a big part of my life, I find more and more of them. So here is a list of career choices that are off limits until my body is more reconciled to the whole eating project.

Covert Ops: Not only is an umbrella tip full of plutonium not necessary to remove me from circulation, but I have to broadcast the identities of my own personal kryptonites pretty broadly to anyone attempting to prepare food for me. "Whoa, there, Mr. Kindly KGB Officer, that's not SUGAR-YEAST-GLUTEN-FISH you're sprinkling on top of that salad is it? Because that would *seriously* mess me up, my friend."

Politician: There are more and less tactful ways of refusing to share a meal with another, and you can do your best to put everyone at their ease by smiling contentedly at them while they eat ice cream and you pound back yet another tall ice water, but the fact is few things are less conciliating than il dieto restrictivo. On the other hand, some voters might be refreshed by scandals not involving roly-poly little bat faced girls, so it could be worth a shot.

Diplomat: Inquiries about ingredients generally get translated as "My country wants nuclear war with your country."

Actor: There's a story that Tom Hanks refused to chew tobacco for a baseball movie, so the props guys had to come up with a blend of herbs which produced a similar expectorant. Happy ending to that story, but not even the most talented purveyor of things-which-seem-to-be-but-aren't can make spinach, cheese and beef look like a cupcake on camera.

Food Critic: Actually, I changed my mind on this one since the primary purpose of a food critic is to make restauranteurs long for sweet sweet death served up on a platter with a garnish of parsley, and this end is admirably accomplished by the restricted diner.

NB: I could eat the afore-mentioned dish, as long as the platter had been thoroughly washed first.

Can't I Just Have a Little Miracle?

Willa Cather's "Death Comes to the Archbishop" has a scene where the Holy Family miraculously provides food and shelter to a missionary who would have died otherwise. The character says afterwards that perhaps miracles are not an unusual circumstance but rather the lifting of a veil on the spiritual reality undergirding everyday life. As an undergraduate, I was so taken with this that I found an excuse to include it in my senior thesis.

But this conceit is actually exactly wrong. There isn't a miraculous and somehow kinder movement beneath the plain-jane mediocrity of 2012 Texan life. The fact is that the natural order is the rule rather than the exception not because God doesn't want to make it too easy for us, but rather because it in itself is the most perfect expression of His love and kindness. How can this be?

The primary reason is that God is greedy. Greedy to see His beloved sons and daughters exercising the gifts which are peculiarly His own, particularly practical love and the creative work of salvation. Love is not something you feel while sitting alone in your room thinking about Jesus and puppies. Love is an action where you choose the good of another as though it were your own good (enter caveat that this good for the other must be consistent with what is good for you). Of course, humans are finite and imperfect beings, and so the work of their love, even when infused with grace, will be less perfect than what God would have done through direct action. But His direct action would not have built up love between souls, and also would have restricted the work of salvation to Himself.

An example: You and your husband are sitting exhausted at the end of the day. Your toddler has climbed up into her chair at the table to have another go at the dinner that wasn't worth finishing an hour ago. Peace reigns until a key portion of dinner escapes to the floor below, and a keening sound of loss pierces the air. Wouldn't it have been nice if the bread could have been miraculously exempted from gravity so that it moved sideways to the table instead of down to the floor? And not wildly unreasonable, since you're only asking for a temporary reinstatement of Aristotelian movement toward natural place.

After a short discussion over who could best get up to recover the bread without doing a violence to themselves, one of you returns order to your toddler's world. The small act of service builds up your child's love for you, in a "I take it for granted that my parent is a demi-god" sort of way, and also builds up love between you and your spouse, possibly in a "I feel kind of guilty and a little defensive" sort of way: this is just because human actions are always imperfect, and it doesn't negate the real good. The most important thing is what happened in your soul when you were able to comfort the grieving and succor the overwhelmed. Because God just shared with you His own special role of working for the salvation of souls.

Brought to you by the subconscious

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I like a man that works."

"Mmmm-Hmmm, I do too!"

Implausible Plausibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.