is painful. behold, my room, the many-piled domain of entropy. at least I found my watch.
experiences of the weekend have validated previous observations that balconies are superior to porches and, indeed, many other manifestations of architecture. in more than just the literal sense. my conclusion draws its support not just from a multitude of daytime sunshine and evening conversation upon my balcony, but the same from Kat and Paul's balcony as well. indeed, it seems that the older and more worn a balcony is (and, perhaps, the more precarious), the better. additionally discovered over a weekend of graduation in Houghton, is that balconies are wonderful places to sit in the cool of the evening and listen to Great Big Sea.
balconies also maintain a better entropy than rooms. between the wind and the rain, that which is untended is caught up into a more natural and unsuspended entropy than that which is left in enclosed spaces. there is no artificial prolongation, no long, haunting empty shell clinging motionless.
and that is the rambling of the day.
--
I have decided to continue this round-table political discussion in a place where it will not consume my rather limited creative space here. Abbreviated ponderances and succint considerations on the reified nature of "government" in this debate, whether or not "governments" have a responsibility to act, and if the focus of "righteousness" is personal piety or communal action, will follow in short notice as time permits.
14 May 2006
09 May 2006
For a good conversation...
You wrote that at 7:54 am? AM? I'm lucky if I can remember to put my clothes on forwards at 7:54 am...--Tegan
Yes, dear Tegan, but I am just getting off work at 7:54 am, so my clothes are already on and generally forwards.
...UN...---Just About Everybody
I find this interesting--I think perhaps you who mentioned this are reacting to what you expect to hear...erroneously anticipating the arguement. I never once mentioned the UN in my last post. What I did argue is that governments wield unique capacities to act and responsibilities that individuals, and groups, do not and should not hold. For instance, the governments of the world have created a system by which cruel and abusive dictators, such as Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic, can be brought to justice--something else no individual or non-governmental organization can accomplish. Notice, you alluded to the successful humanitarian intervention to the tsunami by nation-states: Australia and America. The relief could not have been achieved without the close interaction between the governments and the ubiquitous NGOs--non-governmental organizations. NGO's played a vital role--but so did governments. NGOs cannot negotiate trade treaties, tamper with the international and national economy, or help bring stability and peace to anarchic and semi-anarchic situations.
I could care less whether the United Nations or an ad-hoc coalition of the willing are the medium for actions that cannot be accomplished nongovernmentally. Please be careful to read what I write--not what you automatically assume your fallen liberal relative enshrines in the warm and fuzzy cloud world of his ideology. I am not an ideological liberal. I am a practical humanitarian discovering that classic American conservative thought is simply not compatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ.
...impose utopia...
(see above) I never claimed to attempt to impose utopia. What I am trying to do is have active compassion for my neighbor by attempting to establish some semblance of justice and peace in places where people are suffering and dying for the lack. Please don't try and make me into some idea of a cardboard cutout grinning liberal that exists in your head. It demeans the both of us.
The fact that many of the material goods we buy were made elsewhere: who would pay those people for anything if they could not sell things to those Americans who have money to pay? Would they be richer or poorer if no American money was spent in their countries?
Let's creatively rephrase that question. "They should be greatful, those miserable bastards, that we give them anything at all for their lost childhoods, destroyed health, shortened life expectency, miserable working conditions, constant fear of unemployment..."
You have not yet opened your mind to the possibility that the urban poor are a result of economic changes in the world--changes forced by powerful economies in the west (that's you, and me, and everyone we know). The very existence of western economic superpowers and international trade produces changes in national and local economies. Quasi-subsistence farming becomes untenable. Western firms, with capital, introduce mass-production farming, edging small-plot farmers into poverty. The livelihood of hundreds of families becomes the livelihood of a manager, a few tractors and a score of hired hands. Where do those families go? They cannot compete, so they have no way to make bread. No money to send their children to school with. No land, because corporations take what they cannot buy, harnessing their economic power to secure political power through the cooperation of corrupt local officials.
During the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the problem was apparent--the abuse of cheap labor, unhealthy working conditions, minor miners, etc.--were next door. So Christians made a stink and the government changed the rules. Now, the injustice is easier to ignore because it is far away--but it is still our problem. We are involved in it, it is wrong, so why are the Christians like you doing nothing to change it?
Is it bad or good that Americans buy cotton which is grown in the US? Is it bad or good for the government to tinker with the market by subsidizing a crop in that way?
I believe in freedom. Americans should be able to buy cotton grown in the US if they so desire. I don't belive there is, ethically, any inherent justice or injustice in either subsidization and economic control or the laissez faire. I do believe, however, that there is something injust about the use of power to benefit one person or group of persons at the expense of another person or group of persons. That is what angers me about the United States--not that she is rich, or powerful, but that she bases that wealth upon injustice and uses that power to further her wealth at the expense of others. Sometimes to their detrimental and impoverishing expense. Sometimes to the point of impoverishing other countries and destabilizing their economies.
Since when did governments ever do anything but tax people, blow things up, and punish those who disobeyed their (the government's) rules? Can you think of even one instance where the government has been successful in "fixing" anything like you suggest it has the power to?
and
How do government offices visit people in prison, train people to become self-reliant?
You are apparently suffering from a critical lack of imagination. I work for a government-funded agency that provided emergency medical care within eight minutes of a telephone call. We work with government-funded people who will put out any fires that threaten your house and property. Your water is delivered to your tap, clean and drinkable, by the government, and whisked away to be safely recycled by the same government, after you've used it. The government makes sure you have a nice, green, oxygen-producing national forest to go to so that you don't have to vacation someplace paved. I went to college and learned self-reliance in part due to a government loan. The library that you enjoy was made possible...by the government. Government job-retraining projects were part of the conservative welfare revolution that decreased the welfare roles and made more people...self-reliant. This is a short list. Stretch your mind a little.
Let's look internationally. National governments have cooperated to put both Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor on trial for the crimes they commited while they were in positions of power. Until recently, national governments cooperated to stop the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons, a hazard to us all. It was the United States government, acting in concert with other nations, that acted so ably to assist those devastated by the December 2004 Tsunami. National governments participated in an international ban on the trade of ivory, stemming the demand that drove both and elephants and rhinocerouses almost to extinction. Governments and coalitions can provide a neutral force to enforce cease-fires, disarm warlords of their private armies and return power to more representative, less thuggishly self-serving governments, and defend neutral places such as refugee camps where noncombatants can live safely and recieve medical attention, clean water, and food.
And finally...the United Nations (I will finally bring her into the discussion) regulates and overseas the internet internationally so that Jeff can join this discussion from Tanzania. It does so with such effectiveness--that you didn't even know it was involved.
Next, I don't see why you as an individual couldn't get together a group of like-minded people and find a way to smuggle in food, water, and medical care to hurting people. If others are smuggling weapons, bullets, bombs, and other such truck into the country, why can't someone smuggle in the things those people really need?
Again, you suffer from a lack of imagination. You cannot smuggle in healthcare, education when there is no peace. People cannot carry on with life when they live in the constant and real fear that someone is going to ride into town, take their food and belongings, rape their women, and force their children to execute their parents and grandparents. This is not hypothetical--this is actual, documented, widespread.
You cannot smuggle in peace. Nor can you smuggle in economic justice and opportunity when governments and organizations with money, guns, and the power they bring are happily taking part in economic injustice at the expense of people's economic opportunity. Not to mention the economic and political injustice that we, the world's most powerful nation, are actively involved in.
You said intervening personally would get you killed. So? The Iron Curtain came down because individuals stood up for their faith, got imprisoned, slain, were beaten, and somebody managed to get out and tell about it. If nobody has the guts to get imprisoned, then who will the government send to act on their behalf?
No. The Iron Curtain fell because it was opposed and considered unjust by many people, including Ronald Reagan, a head of state who used the power of both the United States government and coalitions of other national governments to resist, undermine, and promote change within the Communist Bloc. People had been standing up for their ideas, and dying in droves, for a long time before the Iron Curtain fell.
Additionally, it's not a matter about having the guts to be imprisoned for some lofty ideal. It's about wanting to be live in peace and instead being subjected to anarchy, genocide, banditry, rape, slavery, child-soldiering, and famine, but not being able to do anything about it. Those who "stand up" for anything against armed mobs lay down quite quickly and permanently and those in power do not care. In the Iron Curtain, they learned to care, because even in the Iron Curtain it was unacceptable to openly slay large segments of the populace. Not so in anarchy and failed states.
And Finally...
As for Christian symbolism, Jesus didn't appeal to the government to fix anything. He appealed to the people, the people who had nothing, to be generous with each other. Jesus didn't preach to the rich, he spoke to the poor, the needy, and the destitute. He advocated a world without government, not a world with the perfect one. He advocated a world in which everyone was self-governing.
Does your Jesus speak to Lazarus about embezzlement and abuse of tax-gathering status? Does not your Jesus advise wealthy young men from Arimathea? Were there not bureaucrats and centurions in thoselarge crowds of people? Wasn't Jesus' ministry supported by a group of wealthy women? Does the Jesus you know address the injustice of women being stoned for being found in adultery...while the man with whom she was committing adultery was not being stoned? Does he not say "Render onto Caesar what is Caesar's"?
Remember that Jesus lived in an occupied country where religious courts handled much of the day to day governance, and Jesus had an awful lot to say to those religious leaders about their justice and their concern for the poor and helpless. Remember that the national government was not a democracy, but a puppet monarchy, in which the people had no say whatsoever. Remember that economies were to a larger extent simple and local, without the massive centralization of power and resources that exists today.
Yes, dear Tegan, but I am just getting off work at 7:54 am, so my clothes are already on and generally forwards.
...UN...---Just About Everybody
I find this interesting--I think perhaps you who mentioned this are reacting to what you expect to hear...erroneously anticipating the arguement. I never once mentioned the UN in my last post. What I did argue is that governments wield unique capacities to act and responsibilities that individuals, and groups, do not and should not hold. For instance, the governments of the world have created a system by which cruel and abusive dictators, such as Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic, can be brought to justice--something else no individual or non-governmental organization can accomplish. Notice, you alluded to the successful humanitarian intervention to the tsunami by nation-states: Australia and America. The relief could not have been achieved without the close interaction between the governments and the ubiquitous NGOs--non-governmental organizations. NGO's played a vital role--but so did governments. NGOs cannot negotiate trade treaties, tamper with the international and national economy, or help bring stability and peace to anarchic and semi-anarchic situations.
I could care less whether the United Nations or an ad-hoc coalition of the willing are the medium for actions that cannot be accomplished nongovernmentally. Please be careful to read what I write--not what you automatically assume your fallen liberal relative enshrines in the warm and fuzzy cloud world of his ideology. I am not an ideological liberal. I am a practical humanitarian discovering that classic American conservative thought is simply not compatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ.
...impose utopia...
(see above) I never claimed to attempt to impose utopia. What I am trying to do is have active compassion for my neighbor by attempting to establish some semblance of justice and peace in places where people are suffering and dying for the lack. Please don't try and make me into some idea of a cardboard cutout grinning liberal that exists in your head. It demeans the both of us.
The fact that many of the material goods we buy were made elsewhere: who would pay those people for anything if they could not sell things to those Americans who have money to pay? Would they be richer or poorer if no American money was spent in their countries?
Let's creatively rephrase that question. "They should be greatful, those miserable bastards, that we give them anything at all for their lost childhoods, destroyed health, shortened life expectency, miserable working conditions, constant fear of unemployment..."
You have not yet opened your mind to the possibility that the urban poor are a result of economic changes in the world--changes forced by powerful economies in the west (that's you, and me, and everyone we know). The very existence of western economic superpowers and international trade produces changes in national and local economies. Quasi-subsistence farming becomes untenable. Western firms, with capital, introduce mass-production farming, edging small-plot farmers into poverty. The livelihood of hundreds of families becomes the livelihood of a manager, a few tractors and a score of hired hands. Where do those families go? They cannot compete, so they have no way to make bread. No money to send their children to school with. No land, because corporations take what they cannot buy, harnessing their economic power to secure political power through the cooperation of corrupt local officials.
During the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the problem was apparent--the abuse of cheap labor, unhealthy working conditions, minor miners, etc.--were next door. So Christians made a stink and the government changed the rules. Now, the injustice is easier to ignore because it is far away--but it is still our problem. We are involved in it, it is wrong, so why are the Christians like you doing nothing to change it?
Is it bad or good that Americans buy cotton which is grown in the US? Is it bad or good for the government to tinker with the market by subsidizing a crop in that way?
I believe in freedom. Americans should be able to buy cotton grown in the US if they so desire. I don't belive there is, ethically, any inherent justice or injustice in either subsidization and economic control or the laissez faire. I do believe, however, that there is something injust about the use of power to benefit one person or group of persons at the expense of another person or group of persons. That is what angers me about the United States--not that she is rich, or powerful, but that she bases that wealth upon injustice and uses that power to further her wealth at the expense of others. Sometimes to their detrimental and impoverishing expense. Sometimes to the point of impoverishing other countries and destabilizing their economies.
Since when did governments ever do anything but tax people, blow things up, and punish those who disobeyed their (the government's) rules? Can you think of even one instance where the government has been successful in "fixing" anything like you suggest it has the power to?
and
How do government offices visit people in prison, train people to become self-reliant?
You are apparently suffering from a critical lack of imagination. I work for a government-funded agency that provided emergency medical care within eight minutes of a telephone call. We work with government-funded people who will put out any fires that threaten your house and property. Your water is delivered to your tap, clean and drinkable, by the government, and whisked away to be safely recycled by the same government, after you've used it. The government makes sure you have a nice, green, oxygen-producing national forest to go to so that you don't have to vacation someplace paved. I went to college and learned self-reliance in part due to a government loan. The library that you enjoy was made possible...by the government. Government job-retraining projects were part of the conservative welfare revolution that decreased the welfare roles and made more people...self-reliant. This is a short list. Stretch your mind a little.
Let's look internationally. National governments have cooperated to put both Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor on trial for the crimes they commited while they were in positions of power. Until recently, national governments cooperated to stop the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons, a hazard to us all. It was the United States government, acting in concert with other nations, that acted so ably to assist those devastated by the December 2004 Tsunami. National governments participated in an international ban on the trade of ivory, stemming the demand that drove both and elephants and rhinocerouses almost to extinction. Governments and coalitions can provide a neutral force to enforce cease-fires, disarm warlords of their private armies and return power to more representative, less thuggishly self-serving governments, and defend neutral places such as refugee camps where noncombatants can live safely and recieve medical attention, clean water, and food.
And finally...the United Nations (I will finally bring her into the discussion) regulates and overseas the internet internationally so that Jeff can join this discussion from Tanzania. It does so with such effectiveness--that you didn't even know it was involved.
Next, I don't see why you as an individual couldn't get together a group of like-minded people and find a way to smuggle in food, water, and medical care to hurting people. If others are smuggling weapons, bullets, bombs, and other such truck into the country, why can't someone smuggle in the things those people really need?
Again, you suffer from a lack of imagination. You cannot smuggle in healthcare, education when there is no peace. People cannot carry on with life when they live in the constant and real fear that someone is going to ride into town, take their food and belongings, rape their women, and force their children to execute their parents and grandparents. This is not hypothetical--this is actual, documented, widespread.
You cannot smuggle in peace. Nor can you smuggle in economic justice and opportunity when governments and organizations with money, guns, and the power they bring are happily taking part in economic injustice at the expense of people's economic opportunity. Not to mention the economic and political injustice that we, the world's most powerful nation, are actively involved in.
You said intervening personally would get you killed. So? The Iron Curtain came down because individuals stood up for their faith, got imprisoned, slain, were beaten, and somebody managed to get out and tell about it. If nobody has the guts to get imprisoned, then who will the government send to act on their behalf?
No. The Iron Curtain fell because it was opposed and considered unjust by many people, including Ronald Reagan, a head of state who used the power of both the United States government and coalitions of other national governments to resist, undermine, and promote change within the Communist Bloc. People had been standing up for their ideas, and dying in droves, for a long time before the Iron Curtain fell.
Additionally, it's not a matter about having the guts to be imprisoned for some lofty ideal. It's about wanting to be live in peace and instead being subjected to anarchy, genocide, banditry, rape, slavery, child-soldiering, and famine, but not being able to do anything about it. Those who "stand up" for anything against armed mobs lay down quite quickly and permanently and those in power do not care. In the Iron Curtain, they learned to care, because even in the Iron Curtain it was unacceptable to openly slay large segments of the populace. Not so in anarchy and failed states.
And Finally...
As for Christian symbolism, Jesus didn't appeal to the government to fix anything. He appealed to the people, the people who had nothing, to be generous with each other. Jesus didn't preach to the rich, he spoke to the poor, the needy, and the destitute. He advocated a world without government, not a world with the perfect one. He advocated a world in which everyone was self-governing.
Does your Jesus speak to Lazarus about embezzlement and abuse of tax-gathering status? Does not your Jesus advise wealthy young men from Arimathea? Were there not bureaucrats and centurions in thoselarge crowds of people? Wasn't Jesus' ministry supported by a group of wealthy women? Does the Jesus you know address the injustice of women being stoned for being found in adultery...while the man with whom she was committing adultery was not being stoned? Does he not say "Render onto Caesar what is Caesar's"?
Remember that Jesus lived in an occupied country where religious courts handled much of the day to day governance, and Jesus had an awful lot to say to those religious leaders about their justice and their concern for the poor and helpless. Remember that the national government was not a democracy, but a puppet monarchy, in which the people had no say whatsoever. Remember that economies were to a larger extent simple and local, without the massive centralization of power and resources that exists today.
08 May 2006
lettin' ya'll sit in around the infamous Holcomb dinner table
What's with this recurring theme that because we in America have it good someone else has to be getting the short end of the stick? I never understood that thought process and still don't.
Also I think getting into situations in other countries militarily, providing the situation isn't really effecting the US, is getting into a fight that was never ours in the first place. Personally going and trying to help solve the problems that these troubled peoples have is the best way to show compassion in my book.
It's just too easy to sit back and say, "that's too bad, we should send the government in to fix it . . ." Especially when there is plenty of junk going on here at home that needs fixing.
Anyway, my two bits.
David
Dear David,
excellent questions. Here are my responses:
i) people around the world are obviously and continually getting the short end of the stick. Americans are obviously, in a material and political sense, ridiculously and incomparably wealthy, with only Europe for comparison. You are arguing from a standpoint where the two can be separated. I, along with good Marxists everywhere, argue that they cannot, especially when you consider how interconnected the world economy is.
Almost everything you wear today is made somewhere else. Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, just read the tags. Taiwan, economically and politically, is doing all right. Indonesia and Malaysia...not so much. The reason the American clothing market can function with the opulence that it does is sheerly because children under the age of twelve work in sweatshops for a pittance This is the ugly truth about the world economy: people with power can exploit people without power in order to make more money for themselves. During my research on agricultural subsidies, I discovered that American cotton growers were being paid to the tune of billions of dollars by the federal government to grow cotton. This allowed them to charge ridiculously low prices, driving North African cotton growers into poverty and bankruptcy--wreaking havoc on their already fragile economies. All so that Americans could have the most prosperous and successful economy in the world.
If you ever want an interesting conversation, I will give you my friend Tegan's phone number; ask her why she does not wear a diamond engagement ring. She is rather passionate about the awful and quite hazardous conditions that exist in diamond mines in Africa, the disproportionally ridiculously low wages the workers are paid, and the integral role diamonds play in the illegal arms trade--a trade which results in massive amounts of AK-47s and bullets which end up in places like Rwanda and the Sudan. Which brings me, after a short digression, to your second question.
--short digression--As I hope I made clear, you cannot separate our prosperous economy here from suffering and misery over there. It does not aid matters that our political power is brought to bear on foreign economies in order to gain preferential and often unfair advantages for our economy. American's are demanding "fair prices at the pumps" when in reality, we enjoy some of the lowest gas prices in the world, due to effective diplomacy and interference in the affairs of foreign powers. Also consider South America, where the United States felt free to meddle in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, assisting in the toppling of governments and tinkering with their economies. If their problems can not be justly laid at our doorstep, we can at least admit to playing a significant role in their creation. We are inextricably linked to the rest of the world, and while our prosperity and wealth and peace are good things, they are not good things if they exist because of unjust relationships with other nations and the abuse of power and position. A great South American painter once portrayed a successful executive in his well-panelled office, behind the stereotypical massive desk. But his desk was not held up by wooden drawers and legs--it rested on the backs of shackled and crippled poor people. Does our prosperity rest on the back of shackled and crippled poor people? You as a Christian should be immediately concerned at this prospect, for whether across the street or over the sea, the poor are your neighbors--this Jesus was adamant about.
But that is digression. What is point nubmer ii? It had to do with AK-47's, I believe.
ii) Once more we arrive at the issue of power. People with guns have power that people without them do not have. People with governments have power that people alone do not have. With that power comes an ability that transcends the power of the individual. I, as an individual, am powerless to stop a bullet or a bomb or a torch from setting fire to a hut. As an individual with a gun, I can perhaps kill a few people, but I cannot prevent the government of the Sudan from funding these janjaweed militias and I will not last long against any concerted group. And as an individual, I cannot stop the illegal international arms trade, that puts guns and machetes into the hands of mobs everywhere. And I, as an individual, cannot set up a hospital or a safe zone or a refugee camp--I have no power to do so.
But governments do. Governments exist because there are things that established authority can do that individuals cannot: regulate competing interest, protect the weak from the strong, provide education and healthcare to those who cannot afford it. Governments can also protect "public goods" (things like clean air and water, public safety, national forests) that can be destroyed or taken from everyone by individuals or small groups.
Individuals in destabilized countries such as Somalia and certain regions of the Sudan, as well as in Rwanda during the genocide, have no choices--they cannot choose to live in peace or choose to not pollute their wells or choose to live healthy lifestyles with good medical care. Those things are taken from them by individuals and small groups of people with power--economic power, and the power that comes from wielding armed force. They can chose to take up arms--if they are available--and fight with one group or another, but they cannot choose to live in peace unless they live under a stable government who has an interest in their peace.
I cannot as an individual do anything about that. I cannot even feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the lonely and imprisoned, give the thirsty clean water, or care for those in need of medical attention--because governments and gangs and ideologues will kill and/or rob both me and the people I would try to help.
But governments--and leagues of governments--can stop the illegal arms trade, denying militias like the janjaweed access to the basic element of their power: bullets. They can pressure corrupt indifferent governments to become governments interested in the welfare of their people. They can provide safe-zones for refugees and protect aid convoys and delivery zones. They can not only pray for the peace of the proverbial Jerusalem, but actually do something about it.
I am intentionally adopting the language and imagery of the Christian Scriptures because I am trying to remind you of the Christian imperative to love, and serve, our neighbors; to champion the cause of the helpless and the poor. Christ is not a capitalist; he is not an American; and most importantly, he does not believe in leaving people to their own devices or their own messes. Rather, in the midst of our mess, he left Heaven to come help us reconcile to each other and God and heal this wounded world. For his pains he was ignored, villified, and painfully put to death--yet He came with aid anyway, and continues to this day working to usher in a Kingdom of Heaven, a place without injustice, hatred, war, death, plague, inequality or famine. It was the hope of this kingdom that propelled him during his earthly ministry, and it was the proclamation of that kingdom that he made the focal point of that ministry. He described his mission as bringing healing to the sick, freedom to the captives, good news to the poor people, and wholeness to the brokenhearted, all wrapped up in the favorable year of the Lord. And he left hanging unsaid the next verse which rang in the memory of his audience: ...and the day of the vengeance of our God.
The vengeance is easy to find in the works of the prophets, from Amos to Isaiah. It is vengeance upon the wealthy and powerful who exploit and abuse the helpless. Read the prophets and see how often the welfare of the helpless--"the widows and fatherless"--is God's cetral, sorrowful, angry theme. The rich rarely do well in the prophets, and we are the richest in the world today. Even we, little brother, of modest and unostentatious means among our fellow Americans, are wealthy beyond compare in the eyes of two-thirds of the world's six billion people. We ought to bear our wealth carefully, as those who will give an account of our actions as stewards to a master with a fondness for charity and involvement in the cause of the helpless.
Sincerely,
Dan
Also I think getting into situations in other countries militarily, providing the situation isn't really effecting the US, is getting into a fight that was never ours in the first place. Personally going and trying to help solve the problems that these troubled peoples have is the best way to show compassion in my book.
It's just too easy to sit back and say, "that's too bad, we should send the government in to fix it . . ." Especially when there is plenty of junk going on here at home that needs fixing.
Anyway, my two bits.
David
Dear David,
excellent questions. Here are my responses:
i) people around the world are obviously and continually getting the short end of the stick. Americans are obviously, in a material and political sense, ridiculously and incomparably wealthy, with only Europe for comparison. You are arguing from a standpoint where the two can be separated. I, along with good Marxists everywhere, argue that they cannot, especially when you consider how interconnected the world economy is.
Almost everything you wear today is made somewhere else. Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, just read the tags. Taiwan, economically and politically, is doing all right. Indonesia and Malaysia...not so much. The reason the American clothing market can function with the opulence that it does is sheerly because children under the age of twelve work in sweatshops for a pittance This is the ugly truth about the world economy: people with power can exploit people without power in order to make more money for themselves. During my research on agricultural subsidies, I discovered that American cotton growers were being paid to the tune of billions of dollars by the federal government to grow cotton. This allowed them to charge ridiculously low prices, driving North African cotton growers into poverty and bankruptcy--wreaking havoc on their already fragile economies. All so that Americans could have the most prosperous and successful economy in the world.
If you ever want an interesting conversation, I will give you my friend Tegan's phone number; ask her why she does not wear a diamond engagement ring. She is rather passionate about the awful and quite hazardous conditions that exist in diamond mines in Africa, the disproportionally ridiculously low wages the workers are paid, and the integral role diamonds play in the illegal arms trade--a trade which results in massive amounts of AK-47s and bullets which end up in places like Rwanda and the Sudan. Which brings me, after a short digression, to your second question.
--short digression--As I hope I made clear, you cannot separate our prosperous economy here from suffering and misery over there. It does not aid matters that our political power is brought to bear on foreign economies in order to gain preferential and often unfair advantages for our economy. American's are demanding "fair prices at the pumps" when in reality, we enjoy some of the lowest gas prices in the world, due to effective diplomacy and interference in the affairs of foreign powers. Also consider South America, where the United States felt free to meddle in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, assisting in the toppling of governments and tinkering with their economies. If their problems can not be justly laid at our doorstep, we can at least admit to playing a significant role in their creation. We are inextricably linked to the rest of the world, and while our prosperity and wealth and peace are good things, they are not good things if they exist because of unjust relationships with other nations and the abuse of power and position. A great South American painter once portrayed a successful executive in his well-panelled office, behind the stereotypical massive desk. But his desk was not held up by wooden drawers and legs--it rested on the backs of shackled and crippled poor people. Does our prosperity rest on the back of shackled and crippled poor people? You as a Christian should be immediately concerned at this prospect, for whether across the street or over the sea, the poor are your neighbors--this Jesus was adamant about.
But that is digression. What is point nubmer ii? It had to do with AK-47's, I believe.
ii) Once more we arrive at the issue of power. People with guns have power that people without them do not have. People with governments have power that people alone do not have. With that power comes an ability that transcends the power of the individual. I, as an individual, am powerless to stop a bullet or a bomb or a torch from setting fire to a hut. As an individual with a gun, I can perhaps kill a few people, but I cannot prevent the government of the Sudan from funding these janjaweed militias and I will not last long against any concerted group. And as an individual, I cannot stop the illegal international arms trade, that puts guns and machetes into the hands of mobs everywhere. And I, as an individual, cannot set up a hospital or a safe zone or a refugee camp--I have no power to do so.
But governments do. Governments exist because there are things that established authority can do that individuals cannot: regulate competing interest, protect the weak from the strong, provide education and healthcare to those who cannot afford it. Governments can also protect "public goods" (things like clean air and water, public safety, national forests) that can be destroyed or taken from everyone by individuals or small groups.
Individuals in destabilized countries such as Somalia and certain regions of the Sudan, as well as in Rwanda during the genocide, have no choices--they cannot choose to live in peace or choose to not pollute their wells or choose to live healthy lifestyles with good medical care. Those things are taken from them by individuals and small groups of people with power--economic power, and the power that comes from wielding armed force. They can chose to take up arms--if they are available--and fight with one group or another, but they cannot choose to live in peace unless they live under a stable government who has an interest in their peace.
I cannot as an individual do anything about that. I cannot even feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the lonely and imprisoned, give the thirsty clean water, or care for those in need of medical attention--because governments and gangs and ideologues will kill and/or rob both me and the people I would try to help.
But governments--and leagues of governments--can stop the illegal arms trade, denying militias like the janjaweed access to the basic element of their power: bullets. They can pressure corrupt indifferent governments to become governments interested in the welfare of their people. They can provide safe-zones for refugees and protect aid convoys and delivery zones. They can not only pray for the peace of the proverbial Jerusalem, but actually do something about it.
I am intentionally adopting the language and imagery of the Christian Scriptures because I am trying to remind you of the Christian imperative to love, and serve, our neighbors; to champion the cause of the helpless and the poor. Christ is not a capitalist; he is not an American; and most importantly, he does not believe in leaving people to their own devices or their own messes. Rather, in the midst of our mess, he left Heaven to come help us reconcile to each other and God and heal this wounded world. For his pains he was ignored, villified, and painfully put to death--yet He came with aid anyway, and continues to this day working to usher in a Kingdom of Heaven, a place without injustice, hatred, war, death, plague, inequality or famine. It was the hope of this kingdom that propelled him during his earthly ministry, and it was the proclamation of that kingdom that he made the focal point of that ministry. He described his mission as bringing healing to the sick, freedom to the captives, good news to the poor people, and wholeness to the brokenhearted, all wrapped up in the favorable year of the Lord. And he left hanging unsaid the next verse which rang in the memory of his audience: ...and the day of the vengeance of our God.
The vengeance is easy to find in the works of the prophets, from Amos to Isaiah. It is vengeance upon the wealthy and powerful who exploit and abuse the helpless. Read the prophets and see how often the welfare of the helpless--"the widows and fatherless"--is God's cetral, sorrowful, angry theme. The rich rarely do well in the prophets, and we are the richest in the world today. Even we, little brother, of modest and unostentatious means among our fellow Americans, are wealthy beyond compare in the eyes of two-thirds of the world's six billion people. We ought to bear our wealth carefully, as those who will give an account of our actions as stewards to a master with a fondness for charity and involvement in the cause of the helpless.
Sincerely,
Dan
03 May 2006
letters to family and friends
dear steve--
let me reiterate: this gentleman prosposed nuclear genocide, the armed appropriation of others' resources, the merciless execution without trial both of "terrorists" and their innocent families, all for the sake of a more comfortable and prosperous American existence with no regard to the expense the rest of the world is forced to bear in order to make that existence comfortable.
that is neither acceptable, practical, nor tenable. its only tenuous connection with the term "solution" is that which can be drawn to ideas such as "The Final Solution."
also, as Tegan put excellently and I shall briefly reiterate, the "problem" is not bad guys fighting bad guys, but the attendant famine, disease, rape, pillage, slaughter, conscription of children into armies, and horrible cost borne by those who have conflict thrust upon them.
this is not a war of armies. this is a war of mobs of men (and children) with guns. there is no optional involvement: you don't choose to lose access to medical care, food, your own land, your life, your family. the people with the guns chose for you. fight and die, or run and die, there are you options. the world is not as pretty and safe as life in America. they can't "just get a job" over there.
so, "tying up our military to solve other people's problems" is more like "sending our armed forces into harms way to protect those who cannot protect themselves" and takiing an effort to tend to the helpless and suffering--sounds a bit like widows and fatherless that the old testament prophets got all bent out of shape about. refugees and malaria patients and the like.
your militant liberal brother,
dan
jeffrey--
thank you for some salient points. as usual, while i remain in the realm of rhetoric and theory, you actually have some concrete historical data. bravo, I shall have to tame my biting criticism of the evil American capitalists for the moment.
and good thought about that ticket...
your sheepishly militant liberal brother,
dan
dear self--
the most amazing conclusion that i have drawn from this little exchange is the revalation that this blue-collar American advocated a morality that was actually more despicable than that of a standard jihading terrorist. let me reiterate: death squads, summary execution of family members, nuclear warfare...
at least a suicide bomber has some notion of self-sacrifice for a greater good while defending home and country. at least he claims some sort of moral code.
perhaps the logic of a terrorist is not that difficult or alien to our civilized way of life as we would like to believe. I may be "peevishly self-involved," but I also may be closer to genuine evil that I'd like to believe.
self
and finally, on a lighter and more important note
dear gustav and fellow pennsylvanians,
i extend my sincere condolences for the psychological trauma you must have experienced last night. while it was my hope that our own Buffalo Sabres would find victory in your hallowed arena last night, we did not in our wildest dreams anticipate the most humiliating drubbing your Philadelphia Flyers were made to endure in their own horrifyingly hushed stadium last night. three unanswered goals in the first fifteen minutes of game time was really a tough blow, but when your first goal of the night, just before the end of the second quarter, was immediately answered with our sixth of the night, that was just cruel. to lose 7-1 on your sixth, and unfortunately las game of the playoffs, must be an unbearable agony in light of the hope rekindled by your recent victories.
it must have been difficult. i wince imagining it. in your honor i sall contain my gleeful grinning for five minutes of somber silence and petition our father in heaven to restrain his partying as well and grant you some respite for your troubled souls.
-now-a-sabres-fan-cuz-the-wings-just-got-knocked-out-of-the-playoffs-by-some-two-bit-canuck-team,
dan
let me reiterate: this gentleman prosposed nuclear genocide, the armed appropriation of others' resources, the merciless execution without trial both of "terrorists" and their innocent families, all for the sake of a more comfortable and prosperous American existence with no regard to the expense the rest of the world is forced to bear in order to make that existence comfortable.
that is neither acceptable, practical, nor tenable. its only tenuous connection with the term "solution" is that which can be drawn to ideas such as "The Final Solution."
also, as Tegan put excellently and I shall briefly reiterate, the "problem" is not bad guys fighting bad guys, but the attendant famine, disease, rape, pillage, slaughter, conscription of children into armies, and horrible cost borne by those who have conflict thrust upon them.
this is not a war of armies. this is a war of mobs of men (and children) with guns. there is no optional involvement: you don't choose to lose access to medical care, food, your own land, your life, your family. the people with the guns chose for you. fight and die, or run and die, there are you options. the world is not as pretty and safe as life in America. they can't "just get a job" over there.
so, "tying up our military to solve other people's problems" is more like "sending our armed forces into harms way to protect those who cannot protect themselves" and takiing an effort to tend to the helpless and suffering--sounds a bit like widows and fatherless that the old testament prophets got all bent out of shape about. refugees and malaria patients and the like.
your militant liberal brother,
dan
jeffrey--
thank you for some salient points. as usual, while i remain in the realm of rhetoric and theory, you actually have some concrete historical data. bravo, I shall have to tame my biting criticism of the evil American capitalists for the moment.
and good thought about that ticket...
your sheepishly militant liberal brother,
dan
dear self--
the most amazing conclusion that i have drawn from this little exchange is the revalation that this blue-collar American advocated a morality that was actually more despicable than that of a standard jihading terrorist. let me reiterate: death squads, summary execution of family members, nuclear warfare...
at least a suicide bomber has some notion of self-sacrifice for a greater good while defending home and country. at least he claims some sort of moral code.
perhaps the logic of a terrorist is not that difficult or alien to our civilized way of life as we would like to believe. I may be "peevishly self-involved," but I also may be closer to genuine evil that I'd like to believe.
self
and finally, on a lighter and more important note
dear gustav and fellow pennsylvanians,
i extend my sincere condolences for the psychological trauma you must have experienced last night. while it was my hope that our own Buffalo Sabres would find victory in your hallowed arena last night, we did not in our wildest dreams anticipate the most humiliating drubbing your Philadelphia Flyers were made to endure in their own horrifyingly hushed stadium last night. three unanswered goals in the first fifteen minutes of game time was really a tough blow, but when your first goal of the night, just before the end of the second quarter, was immediately answered with our sixth of the night, that was just cruel. to lose 7-1 on your sixth, and unfortunately las game of the playoffs, must be an unbearable agony in light of the hope rekindled by your recent victories.
it must have been difficult. i wince imagining it. in your honor i sall contain my gleeful grinning for five minutes of somber silence and petition our father in heaven to restrain his partying as well and grant you some respite for your troubled souls.
-now-a-sabres-fan-cuz-the-wings-just-got-knocked-out-of-the-playoffs-by-some-two-bit-canuck-team,
dan
01 May 2006
so this one time at a Billy Graham Jihad...
been dyin' to say that for such a long time. in light of what happened last night, I feel no qualms whatsoever. BBC (you can hear it on NPR after midnight) sparked a discussion with my medic in which I amazingly maintained a restrained tone of voice.
highlights include:
-the solution to the Darfur issue is to let them kill each other. there are too many bleeding heart compassionate people in the world.
But, sir, women and children are being massacred by government-armed, American-oil-company-backed militias. American corporations actively destabilize, subvert, and aid in the corruption of weak governments in order to exploit such situations.
-it's not my problem.
But, sir, the price of oil would go up.
-then we should just go in and take it. we're the most powerful nation on the globe. why should their problems interfere with our economy?
Umm...remember Vietnam? you know, how completely impossible it is to invade and control a country that doesn't want you there? besides, isn't that robbery? we're having a pretty damn difficult time just maintaining stability in Iraq right now. We're stretched really thin. I don't think you can really manage that.
-we should have just nuked 'em.
What?!!
-yeah. nuked 'em and taken the oil. problem solved. situation stable.
Nuclear warfare? Aren't you worried about fallout, nuclear winter, radiation contamination?
-nope. I'll be dead before that's a problem.
Right. Ok. what about our relationships with other countries around the world? Wouldn't that jeopardize our economic ties, peace treaties, etc?
-we're America. we don't need them.
Hmmm. Ok. what about terrorism? That would probably get a huge boost from nuking an Islamic country in the name of exploiting their natural resources?
-Terrorism? there'll always be terrorists. Tell you what would make it a lot better though. We should just find the terrorists, haul them out in the street, and shoot 'em right in the heads.
I think that would make the problem worse.
-No. Not if you take them and their families out into the street and just execute 'em all. That would take the wind out of a lot of their sails.
Okay. So. Let's recap. Nuclear genocide, international armed robbery, subversion of foreign governments, and execution squads. Not to mention the military takeover of other countries. "Might makes right?" I ask him.
He agreed.
"Is this what you teach your children?"
Yep.
-----
Damn.
The world's greatest democracy is wasted on f****** g**d*** idiots. peevishly self-involved ones to boot.
--the previous conversation has been neither embellished nor exaggerated in the slightest, nor did the interviewer employ leading questions or excite exaggerated reactions. somehow the interviewer managed to remain calm and conversational throughout. he remains as flabbergasted as you no doubt are.
Dan Perrine...now I understand you. now I understand.
highlights include:
-the solution to the Darfur issue is to let them kill each other. there are too many bleeding heart compassionate people in the world.
But, sir, women and children are being massacred by government-armed, American-oil-company-backed militias. American corporations actively destabilize, subvert, and aid in the corruption of weak governments in order to exploit such situations.
-it's not my problem.
But, sir, the price of oil would go up.
-then we should just go in and take it. we're the most powerful nation on the globe. why should their problems interfere with our economy?
Umm...remember Vietnam? you know, how completely impossible it is to invade and control a country that doesn't want you there? besides, isn't that robbery? we're having a pretty damn difficult time just maintaining stability in Iraq right now. We're stretched really thin. I don't think you can really manage that.
-we should have just nuked 'em.
What?!!
-yeah. nuked 'em and taken the oil. problem solved. situation stable.
Nuclear warfare? Aren't you worried about fallout, nuclear winter, radiation contamination?
-nope. I'll be dead before that's a problem.
Right. Ok. what about our relationships with other countries around the world? Wouldn't that jeopardize our economic ties, peace treaties, etc?
-we're America. we don't need them.
Hmmm. Ok. what about terrorism? That would probably get a huge boost from nuking an Islamic country in the name of exploiting their natural resources?
-Terrorism? there'll always be terrorists. Tell you what would make it a lot better though. We should just find the terrorists, haul them out in the street, and shoot 'em right in the heads.
I think that would make the problem worse.
-No. Not if you take them and their families out into the street and just execute 'em all. That would take the wind out of a lot of their sails.
Okay. So. Let's recap. Nuclear genocide, international armed robbery, subversion of foreign governments, and execution squads. Not to mention the military takeover of other countries. "Might makes right?" I ask him.
He agreed.
"Is this what you teach your children?"
Yep.
-----
Damn.
The world's greatest democracy is wasted on f****** g**d*** idiots. peevishly self-involved ones to boot.
--the previous conversation has been neither embellished nor exaggerated in the slightest, nor did the interviewer employ leading questions or excite exaggerated reactions. somehow the interviewer managed to remain calm and conversational throughout. he remains as flabbergasted as you no doubt are.
Dan Perrine...now I understand you. now I understand.
21 April 2006
o me, o my, i heard me ol' wife cry
yeah. best concert ever. somehow we scored fifth row tickets to a sold-out Great Big Sea show by showing up fifteen minutes after doors were supposed to open. rock on us. those guys can throw a concert...basically sang along to every song and now my throat is gone. but how can you not when they throw "General Taylor" out there right after "I'm a Rover" and "Donkey Ridin'" and "Excursion Around the Bay..."
and "Patty Murphy" and "Mari Mac" and "Jack Hinks" and "Lukey" and "Consequence Free"...
and a boatload of quite awesome new songs. including two about horses falling through the ice, and that beautifully thoughtful one about whether it's better to have a mermaid with the top half woman and the bottom half fish or the other way 'round...
so we sang real loud. and then when they did a brief montage of verses from eighties hair ballads and such...they stopped singing and let us carry along with Whitesnake, Summer of '69...yeah.
So, by the time the second encore rolled around, they came out and shushed the audience to the first complete hush in three hours and laid out a beautiful "Ol' Brown's Daughter" completely a capella, completely sans amplification. Complete and total awesomeness.
yeah. what a night. how could such a night be any better? well, i did get a sunburned scalp from clambering around at letchworth after cooking venison burgers on the first fire of the summer...
not a bad end to a slothfully uneventful week.
oh, yeah. and spent the first night of the season outside. underneath the crisp, clear sky full of Houghton stars. in the back of my truck. let the legendary travels begin.
with a nod to Joss Wheedon, I give you...the Lady Serendipitiy.
and "Patty Murphy" and "Mari Mac" and "Jack Hinks" and "Lukey" and "Consequence Free"...
and a boatload of quite awesome new songs. including two about horses falling through the ice, and that beautifully thoughtful one about whether it's better to have a mermaid with the top half woman and the bottom half fish or the other way 'round...
so we sang real loud. and then when they did a brief montage of verses from eighties hair ballads and such...they stopped singing and let us carry along with Whitesnake, Summer of '69...yeah.
So, by the time the second encore rolled around, they came out and shushed the audience to the first complete hush in three hours and laid out a beautiful "Ol' Brown's Daughter" completely a capella, completely sans amplification. Complete and total awesomeness.
yeah. what a night. how could such a night be any better? well, i did get a sunburned scalp from clambering around at letchworth after cooking venison burgers on the first fire of the summer...
not a bad end to a slothfully uneventful week.
oh, yeah. and spent the first night of the season outside. underneath the crisp, clear sky full of Houghton stars. in the back of my truck. let the legendary travels begin.
with a nod to Joss Wheedon, I give you...the Lady Serendipitiy.
04 April 2006
loooopity loo
well. so. this friendly lady is Maureen. she works for the University of Buffalo. see how she looks friendly, competent, engaging, professional? yes.
now. attend to the young man. perhaps not so competent, professional--but well compensated with friendliness and perhaps overenthusiastically engaging. yes. he is coked out of his mind on a friendly little relative of diazepam--known to the layman as valium, or Madame V. serendipitously, Madame V was joined on her stroll through my circulatory system by the ever congenial nitrous oxide, also known as "laughing gas." or even better, "irrepressible giggling like a schoolgirl for no apparent reason gas." our young man had just attempted--and failed--twice in valiant and perhaps overambitious attempts to stand on his own two feet. it's hard when it feels like you have three or four very groovy feet--of which one, the ex-hippie-zebra-from-florida appears slightly enamored of the green penguin. and if you thought he had an odd sense of humor stone sober...
to make things more interesting, a "short term amnesiac" had joined the pharmaceutical mambo-ing through this young man's bloodstream.
so. short term amnesia being what it is, if you recieved a telephone call this morning from said young man, he does not remember it. at all. nor could he even remotely be considered responsible for what he did or did not say, or any confusion so resulting. and, finally, he hopes that you derived as much enjoyment from the experience as he did. because he had an absolutely fine birthday morning.
with all the swank in my voice...thank you Maureen. such a lovely maiden of the moonshine mist...
now. four wisdom teeth lighter, and eight days of sick leave ahead of me...it's time to sit back, slurp down the ibuprofen-laced slurpees and enjoy this season of-- in the grand words of Dan "Perm" Crandall--maxin' and relaxin'.
yeah.
03 April 2006
the cross on my back
or "tatoo pt. II"
twilighttreader:
well, "this girl" was once upon a time a good friend of mine, so I should preface with a dear affection for an old friend. but. I also have pretensions towards being an intellectual. and i think ideas are important. so here's what I think.
Why? because trendy things entail a safe and easy form of "meaningful" self-expression when one leaves college and enters law/grad/hard knocks school and discovers the sheer difficulty of actually doing anything even minutely creative or important--of simply surviving in a system of pragmatic acquiesence to forces beyond your control.
It's a cog in a wheel in a transmission in a factory "sticking it to the man" without actually losing it's coveted little coggish place or recognizing its utter dependence on the system. Refuge through empty symbolism which you convince yourself is important. a lot of religious fervor works like that. Self-convincing action to artificially enliven a disappointing futility and rescue the self-concept from the oppression of being considered pretty insignificant by forces like nature and macroeconomic systems and socialized mass behavior.
Identity through contrived spiritual experiences. A coping mechanism in the place of humility.
Of course, I'm probably reading my own experiences and psychology right on top of hers. She may be validly experiencing something very spiritual, something she chose to express from deep conviction of its importance. For her sake I sincerely hope so. Because if not, she's compensating around an important bit of reality rather than facing it. And as we learn in the medical profession, compensation without action to address a threat is a losing game.
And for my sake, I hope she never reads this :)
twilighttreader:
"The ironic thing is that you can turn on the TV and see any number of celebrities and such who are patently not Christians sporting the iconography, be it with tattoos or "bling" or whatever. Why this girl things that inking a cross on her shoulder is making such a bold statement is really beyond me."
well, "this girl" was once upon a time a good friend of mine, so I should preface with a dear affection for an old friend. but. I also have pretensions towards being an intellectual. and i think ideas are important. so here's what I think.
Why? because trendy things entail a safe and easy form of "meaningful" self-expression when one leaves college and enters law/grad/hard knocks school and discovers the sheer difficulty of actually doing anything even minutely creative or important--of simply surviving in a system of pragmatic acquiesence to forces beyond your control.
It's a cog in a wheel in a transmission in a factory "sticking it to the man" without actually losing it's coveted little coggish place or recognizing its utter dependence on the system. Refuge through empty symbolism which you convince yourself is important. a lot of religious fervor works like that. Self-convincing action to artificially enliven a disappointing futility and rescue the self-concept from the oppression of being considered pretty insignificant by forces like nature and macroeconomic systems and socialized mass behavior.
Identity through contrived spiritual experiences. A coping mechanism in the place of humility.
Of course, I'm probably reading my own experiences and psychology right on top of hers. She may be validly experiencing something very spiritual, something she chose to express from deep conviction of its importance. For her sake I sincerely hope so. Because if not, she's compensating around an important bit of reality rather than facing it. And as we learn in the medical profession, compensation without action to address a threat is a losing game.
And for my sake, I hope she never reads this :)
02 April 2006
myspace blues
So I have an old friend who I rediscovered last week (through myspace--go figure--and I just got an account so that I could comment on my little bro'sspace) who happened to just be finishing the process of getting a tattoo--an outline of a cute cross on the right shoulderblade to be precise.
But--for all of you more interested in the tawdrier details of my romantic life rather than the higher world of philosophy...skip to "Part II" below, where someone propositions me on mySpace, and quandries ensue.
Now this tattooing is a pretty serious move from a conservative, Christian homeschooled girl, whether or not she's in law school. I mean, we weren't just reading "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" in high school--we were mad hardcore Eric Ludy fans. "When God Writes Your Love Story." Which, if I may digress, absolutely blows. He doesn't. He doesn't write anything. He just kind of sits there waiting for you to do something, and there you are waiting for him to do something, and there's this awkward silence...
Well. Anyway. She's got this tattoo now, against the advice of her parents, etc, etc., and decided to explain it. On Myspace. I for one, am thinking she'd better not have any serious agnostic or faith-shaking experiences for the rest of her life, because, hey, you've got this permanent tattoo, and people will always be asking, and you'll be either bitter or ashamed. And carrying a cross of bitterness on your back is probably a bad idea. Unhealthy psychologically.
At any rate. "I sincerely wanted to permanently and publicly identify myself as a Christian. It's a personal thing - I've struggled in the past with being ashamed of my faith, and this is my way of telling myself and the rest of the world that I am no longer, and will never again be ashamed of my relationship with Jesus."
Well. Okay. This helped me finally resolve some of my ambivalence about calling myself a Christian. I am not ashamed of my faith. But I am pretty ashamed of a lot of other peoples'. The church across the street is advertising on that little church-sign of theirs a "Christian" coffeehouse. Which pretty much guarantees that it will be lousy, contrived and uncomfortable. Quite frankly, if I could go through life without ever again being called Christian, I would be quite happy. I would actually be free to live the life my creator made me to live and the mysterious, often vaguely ominous but always fiercly beautiful, holy ghost calls me to. The last group to publically and permanently take up the cross as part of their bodily attire was during the Crusades, and we all know how that went. You will never see a tattoo of the cross on my body because I would rather cut off my right hand than identify myself with what passes for "Christianity" today. I will take up the cross in my lifestyle, thank you, since I have tried enough to avoid it to know that such a feat is impossible anyway.
well. that gets that off my chest.
Part II.
And then I checked my mySpace mail. Now, keeping in mind that I started this whole mySpace thing as a fun way to get back in touch with a bunch of old friends who, I happened to discover, were using said electronic forum, know (O gentle reader) that I whimsically chose to make a good time of it and not reveal my identity easily.
So the myspace space lacks my actual name, and the picture I used on my profile is from a certain Shakespeare play in which I was topless, clad in yellow harem pants, with flowing black hair and a "Dark Egyptian" complexion courtesy of a ridiculously brown, liberally applied sponge. And I had a beard. And I was attempting to imitate Ben Stiller, of the Derek Zoolander "Blue Steel" fashion.
Suffice to say, it's not a very...representative...picture of me. and I'm flexing what little bulk Iwas in posession of as well. I still had abs back then...or so I like to think.
So I check my mySpace mail, to see if said old friends have written me back with confused queries as to my identity yet, and some lady in Albany, (blonde, young and attractive, with a healthy social self, if the picture tells any truth), pops up in my Inbox. she is, as mentioned, cute and presumably in posession of a healthy enough social existence to not be an internet obsessed mySpace stalker mind-job. the subject line reads: "heyyyy buddy..." which is precisely the sort of thing I'm well known to say. I'm sure you're all quite aware of my little fondness for elipses.
so I open the letter.
And so on. Now, as many of you know, I am completely vain and ridiculously vulnerable to flattery. Especially when topless. But, quandries (and insecurity) begin striking me immediately. They always do. I no longer have flashing black hair flowing like sheep down the mountains (the sheep being black, and the mountains being my masculine shoulders except that it was never that long...more's the pity) I have a self-buzzed crop of red hair with a sparse, rather mundane goatee.
And, if I get her greeting right, I also am no longer "Buster Brown." More apt perhaps would be Wanker White, or Poppa Paleface. I am, after all, the child known for a rare ability to blind airline pilots at will by merely wearing a bare-midriff t-shirt (not that I have ever committed such an abomination...but think about it.) (on second thought, no, please don't.) (for the sake of your sanity and your bright future, I implore you, stop. the effort will leave you a broken man.) (or woman.)
And please to not even be mentioning my "EMS tummy" which has become much more...comfortable with its "lounging by the fireside in a dressing gown with wine and a quiet, self-satisfied belching and tummy-scratching" self. At least I don't have "EMS ass" yet.
hmmm...caught under false pretences, and I wasn't even trying. I guesss the lesson to take away from this is...
I'm that good. [polishes fingernails on shirt] can't fight the moonlight, baby...
[addendum and disclaimer] This has nothing to do with the previous two posts, and the firestorm on controversy surrounding the mysterious identity of the lady Nissa. just got this mySpace thing this morning. Amazing things can happen in my life and have nothing to do with women. Truly! I know it is hard to believe, but there is life without estrogen! And it's quite good!
But--for all of you more interested in the tawdrier details of my romantic life rather than the higher world of philosophy...skip to "Part II" below, where someone propositions me on mySpace, and quandries ensue.
Now this tattooing is a pretty serious move from a conservative, Christian homeschooled girl, whether or not she's in law school. I mean, we weren't just reading "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" in high school--we were mad hardcore Eric Ludy fans. "When God Writes Your Love Story." Which, if I may digress, absolutely blows. He doesn't. He doesn't write anything. He just kind of sits there waiting for you to do something, and there you are waiting for him to do something, and there's this awkward silence...
Well. Anyway. She's got this tattoo now, against the advice of her parents, etc, etc., and decided to explain it. On Myspace. I for one, am thinking she'd better not have any serious agnostic or faith-shaking experiences for the rest of her life, because, hey, you've got this permanent tattoo, and people will always be asking, and you'll be either bitter or ashamed. And carrying a cross of bitterness on your back is probably a bad idea. Unhealthy psychologically.
At any rate. "I sincerely wanted to permanently and publicly identify myself as a Christian. It's a personal thing - I've struggled in the past with being ashamed of my faith, and this is my way of telling myself and the rest of the world that I am no longer, and will never again be ashamed of my relationship with Jesus."
Well. Okay. This helped me finally resolve some of my ambivalence about calling myself a Christian. I am not ashamed of my faith. But I am pretty ashamed of a lot of other peoples'. The church across the street is advertising on that little church-sign of theirs a "Christian" coffeehouse. Which pretty much guarantees that it will be lousy, contrived and uncomfortable. Quite frankly, if I could go through life without ever again being called Christian, I would be quite happy. I would actually be free to live the life my creator made me to live and the mysterious, often vaguely ominous but always fiercly beautiful, holy ghost calls me to. The last group to publically and permanently take up the cross as part of their bodily attire was during the Crusades, and we all know how that went. You will never see a tattoo of the cross on my body because I would rather cut off my right hand than identify myself with what passes for "Christianity" today. I will take up the cross in my lifestyle, thank you, since I have tried enough to avoid it to know that such a feat is impossible anyway.
well. that gets that off my chest.
Part II.
And then I checked my mySpace mail. Now, keeping in mind that I started this whole mySpace thing as a fun way to get back in touch with a bunch of old friends who, I happened to discover, were using said electronic forum, know (O gentle reader) that I whimsically chose to make a good time of it and not reveal my identity easily.
So the myspace space lacks my actual name, and the picture I used on my profile is from a certain Shakespeare play in which I was topless, clad in yellow harem pants, with flowing black hair and a "Dark Egyptian" complexion courtesy of a ridiculously brown, liberally applied sponge. And I had a beard. And I was attempting to imitate Ben Stiller, of the Derek Zoolander "Blue Steel" fashion.
Suffice to say, it's not a very...representative...picture of me. and I'm flexing what little bulk Iwas in posession of as well. I still had abs back then...or so I like to think.
So I check my mySpace mail, to see if said old friends have written me back with confused queries as to my identity yet, and some lady in Albany, (blonde, young and attractive, with a healthy social self, if the picture tells any truth), pops up in my Inbox. she is, as mentioned, cute and presumably in posession of a healthy enough social existence to not be an internet obsessed mySpace stalker mind-job. the subject line reads: "heyyyy buddy..." which is precisely the sort of thing I'm well known to say. I'm sure you're all quite aware of my little fondness for elipses.
so I open the letter.
"Hey there buster brown...
"So i guess the time has arrived for me to start using this site. I can resist no longer...Let the games begin! I took a look at your page and well, I liked what I saw... ;p"
"So, my name is C-----, and I'm from Albany, New York. I think us crazy kids should be friends. Cause you seem pretty nice, and smart, and possibly cute! (it's so tough to tell in this cruel digital world.. :)
And so on. Now, as many of you know, I am completely vain and ridiculously vulnerable to flattery. Especially when topless. But, quandries (and insecurity) begin striking me immediately. They always do. I no longer have flashing black hair flowing like sheep down the mountains (the sheep being black, and the mountains being my masculine shoulders except that it was never that long...more's the pity) I have a self-buzzed crop of red hair with a sparse, rather mundane goatee.
And, if I get her greeting right, I also am no longer "Buster Brown." More apt perhaps would be Wanker White, or Poppa Paleface. I am, after all, the child known for a rare ability to blind airline pilots at will by merely wearing a bare-midriff t-shirt (not that I have ever committed such an abomination...but think about it.) (on second thought, no, please don't.) (for the sake of your sanity and your bright future, I implore you, stop. the effort will leave you a broken man.) (or woman.)
And please to not even be mentioning my "EMS tummy" which has become much more...comfortable with its "lounging by the fireside in a dressing gown with wine and a quiet, self-satisfied belching and tummy-scratching" self. At least I don't have "EMS ass" yet.
hmmm...caught under false pretences, and I wasn't even trying. I guesss the lesson to take away from this is...
I'm that good. [polishes fingernails on shirt] can't fight the moonlight, baby...
[addendum and disclaimer] This has nothing to do with the previous two posts, and the firestorm on controversy surrounding the mysterious identity of the lady Nissa. just got this mySpace thing this morning. Amazing things can happen in my life and have nothing to do with women. Truly! I know it is hard to believe, but there is life without estrogen! And it's quite good!
01 April 2006
my fair lady
well.
okay.
i give.
there is a new lady in my life. and though it pains my stoic pride to admit it, she has inspired sheepish grins, unabashed rejoicing, and even little fits of giggling lately. Dr. Gallman introduced me to her the other night; it was a serendipitous meeting, completely unplanned...I'd almost decided not to go the International Banquet.
almost. it's a good thing I did.
funny enough, I'd just talked to my dad the other day, musing a littley amusingly about "the list"--attributes I didn't want to compromise on, traits I'd always admired.
"the ability to head off into the wilderness and carry her own weight is a plus...you know me, pop, so high-maintenance frills and frippery aren't important. I want a girl who just kills you grinning there, mud splattered on her face, miles from the beaten track, and doesn't need to be showered and shaved and tucked into bed every night...doesn't need a lot of coddling, doesn't need new accessories every payday...the kind where scratches and scars just add character and make you love her more."
and then a day later I was talking to Doc Gallman at the International Banquet. Wham. Bam. Slam. She hit everything on the list. And more.
she's just as old as I am--born in 1983, just hitting her prime. she grew up in America, but she's Japanese by birth and Japanese by family. That makes me excited more than anything--I've always gotten along best with cross-cultural sojourners, and I admire the reliability, practicality, durability, economy and grace of her Japanese heritage. Of course, maybe it's just the closest I'll ever get to being a samurai...
sure, other people may not think she's much to look at--but I find beauty in her simply graceful lines. she is elegant without being ostentatious--solid and durable where it counts, not plastic or a sporting a quick-fading faddish style.
and she's only got 90,000 miles on the engine--her people are well renowned for living well into their second or third hundred thousand miles. best of all, she's not only got the manual transmission, but the four-wheel drive as well, and the super-gas efficient, super-long lasting 4 cylinder engine. everything I've been looking for for over three months now, right under my nose, and for a lot cheaper than anything else out there.
here she is with the gracious and kind Dr. Gallman, last fall. isn't she lovely? I couldn't be happier. hongera for me!
ps--I have the next eleven days off of work...so I'll be alive during normal waking hours. and probably bored. and super-drugged up, because my wisdom teeth are getting pulled Tuesday. so you should call me. 716.698.4358. now you have no excuse.
okay.
i give.
there is a new lady in my life. and though it pains my stoic pride to admit it, she has inspired sheepish grins, unabashed rejoicing, and even little fits of giggling lately. Dr. Gallman introduced me to her the other night; it was a serendipitous meeting, completely unplanned...I'd almost decided not to go the International Banquet.
almost. it's a good thing I did.
funny enough, I'd just talked to my dad the other day, musing a littley amusingly about "the list"--attributes I didn't want to compromise on, traits I'd always admired.
"the ability to head off into the wilderness and carry her own weight is a plus...you know me, pop, so high-maintenance frills and frippery aren't important. I want a girl who just kills you grinning there, mud splattered on her face, miles from the beaten track, and doesn't need to be showered and shaved and tucked into bed every night...doesn't need a lot of coddling, doesn't need new accessories every payday...the kind where scratches and scars just add character and make you love her more."
and then a day later I was talking to Doc Gallman at the International Banquet. Wham. Bam. Slam. She hit everything on the list. And more.
she's just as old as I am--born in 1983, just hitting her prime. she grew up in America, but she's Japanese by birth and Japanese by family. That makes me excited more than anything--I've always gotten along best with cross-cultural sojourners, and I admire the reliability, practicality, durability, economy and grace of her Japanese heritage. Of course, maybe it's just the closest I'll ever get to being a samurai...
sure, other people may not think she's much to look at--but I find beauty in her simply graceful lines. she is elegant without being ostentatious--solid and durable where it counts, not plastic or a sporting a quick-fading faddish style.
and she's only got 90,000 miles on the engine--her people are well renowned for living well into their second or third hundred thousand miles. best of all, she's not only got the manual transmission, but the four-wheel drive as well, and the super-gas efficient, super-long lasting 4 cylinder engine. everything I've been looking for for over three months now, right under my nose, and for a lot cheaper than anything else out there.
here she is with the gracious and kind Dr. Gallman, last fall. isn't she lovely? I couldn't be happier. hongera for me!
ps--I have the next eleven days off of work...so I'll be alive during normal waking hours. and probably bored. and super-drugged up, because my wisdom teeth are getting pulled Tuesday. so you should call me. 716.698.4358. now you have no excuse.
27 March 2006
amazing things
are happening.
indeed.
-------------
[edit]
a) wow. a thousand impassioned cries for justice, equality, and the kingdom of heaven, and what does it take to get you all to talk to me? someone to drop the "msichana" bomb. blood in the water...
b) some of us have real jobs, and we can't log in every five minutes to keep up with the latest gossip.
c) yes. sure. my meaningless and pathetically miserable existence, hunched in a darkened upper room with only my books and the meagre light of candles to keep me warm, could only be brightened by the advent of civilizing femininity. How have I borne the awful cares and toils of this world without the tender hands of a woman to lift me up from my cares and sorrows and make me complete? O, John Eldredge, I am the man without woman, without captivating romance and adventures, without hope in the world! Deliver me from my boredom, my listlessness, the vanity of my existence, for the bane of the single man is to know nothing but sorrow and a chasing after the wind...
d) yah know, i must have been so eagerly awaiting the joys of miscommunication, excruciating sexual tension, a strained and broken budget, differing mores and expecations, clashing gender roles, mood swings, emotional firestorms, blind mistakes with horrifying consequences, polite-relationships-with-her-obnoxious-friends, failed expectations, more miscommunication, isolation from friends, agonizing weeks of breaking up and getting back together only to break up again, not to mention something to do with all of my overabundant spare time!
e) I must be longing to escape the hell of singleness, with its mild stresses, cordial relationships, time for reading and laughing and watching movies, casual wardrobe, open and flexible schedule, freedom of expression, freedom to go and do without fear of offending some arcane and twisted feminine logic...
ya'll are hilarious.
except.
y'all are kinda right...
but I really have to go to work now. it's a twenty minute bikeride and I have twenty minutes to get there and I don't have my boots on yet.
I shall write more...baadaye.
:)
indeed.
-------------
[edit]
a) wow. a thousand impassioned cries for justice, equality, and the kingdom of heaven, and what does it take to get you all to talk to me? someone to drop the "msichana" bomb. blood in the water...
b) some of us have real jobs, and we can't log in every five minutes to keep up with the latest gossip.
c) yes. sure. my meaningless and pathetically miserable existence, hunched in a darkened upper room with only my books and the meagre light of candles to keep me warm, could only be brightened by the advent of civilizing femininity. How have I borne the awful cares and toils of this world without the tender hands of a woman to lift me up from my cares and sorrows and make me complete? O, John Eldredge, I am the man without woman, without captivating romance and adventures, without hope in the world! Deliver me from my boredom, my listlessness, the vanity of my existence, for the bane of the single man is to know nothing but sorrow and a chasing after the wind...
d) yah know, i must have been so eagerly awaiting the joys of miscommunication, excruciating sexual tension, a strained and broken budget, differing mores and expecations, clashing gender roles, mood swings, emotional firestorms, blind mistakes with horrifying consequences, polite-relationships-with-her-obnoxious-friends, failed expectations, more miscommunication, isolation from friends, agonizing weeks of breaking up and getting back together only to break up again, not to mention something to do with all of my overabundant spare time!
e) I must be longing to escape the hell of singleness, with its mild stresses, cordial relationships, time for reading and laughing and watching movies, casual wardrobe, open and flexible schedule, freedom of expression, freedom to go and do without fear of offending some arcane and twisted feminine logic...
ya'll are hilarious.
except.
y'all are kinda right...
but I really have to go to work now. it's a twenty minute bikeride and I have twenty minutes to get there and I don't have my boots on yet.
I shall write more...baadaye.
:)
23 March 2006
yeeeah killing time so's i don't fall asleep
triads
books i just bought:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
-How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer
groceries i just bought:
-fresh hummous
-hummous mix in boxes
-six pack of Pete's Wicked Wanderlust Cream Beer
books i just finished:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Snow Leopard by Peter Mathiessen
-Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
firsts this week:
-pub crawl on St. Patty's day
-buzzed by red-tailed hawk in cemetary on the way home from work yesterday morning in the middle of the city!
-got paid to watch a troupe from Mexico perform various ethnic (and awesomely rhythmic) regional dances.
books i'm halfway through:
-King Lear
-Bread and Wine by Plough Press
-A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi
cool grown up accomplishments:
-clean, orderly room with visible floor for over a week now
-set up serious appointment to inspect/possibly buy a truck to live out of for a year
-planning schedule for summer w/multiple engagements BEFORE the first day of spring
excellent new tunes on miPod:
-Wayfaring Stranger by 16 horsepower
-Sunday Bloody Sunday covered by Pillar
-It's Too Late by The Streets
my wicked awesome drinking vessels
-handmade Paul Christensen awesomely-massive pottery drinking mug
-pink nalgene with flower and pink lid
-stolen cafeteria cup with "I was stolen by a sinner" written on it in black magic marker by the indescribably profound Ben Howard
ladies i thought were really cool but turned out to be elsewhere enamored:
-girl i never asked out, and it was way too late
-girl i finally made up my mind to ask out only to discover that i had made my mind up...too late
-girl i was just about to ask out, but discovered i was: just too late
films recently watched:
-Pulp Fiction
-Hero
-Blackhawk Down
excellent articles:
-living with constant wireless interaction: "Continuous Partial Attention"
-Zakaria on Iraq: "Apalling but not Hopeless"
-William Jennings Bryan: when a promising leftist Christian populist social movement was nipped in the bud in favor of the urbane secularists, setting the ground for today's culture wars...possibly.
great conversations this week:
-Elinor Ostrom-ish analysis of potential incentive programs for EMS workers and difficulties posed by current Computer Aided Dispatch system with new (my new) supervisor; also perverse corporate shareholder-driven cost-cutting incentives in the absence of market-driven quality control due to the nature of EMS work and public contracts in the urban/suburban economic divide
-Surprise reacquaintance with old Paramedic friend Geoff Boone from Houghton Volunteer Fire Department days, over patients at the ECMC of a random.
-Inanely cheerful banter and rediscovery of The Streets with friend who only last week was sailing (metaphorically) through rough waters under iron skies.
quotes:
-Voltaire:
-Stephen Levy:
-The Streets:
notes to self:
-there is an infinite supply of irresistably great deals on tantalizingly clever books, cds, and dvds, which are capable, if not carefully monitored, of making swiss cheese of drastically finite budgetary resources.
-ask out the next encountered "fly bird" without the customary four or eighty weeks of introspection, uncertainty, tentative get-to-know-you-first thing. absolutely no mandatory 40-day waiting periods, homeschool inexperience be darned!
-eat cheese! and hummous! listen to crazy apocalyptic gothic folk music while chatting aimlessly with friends! listen to backlogged NPR podcasts while doing nothing really productive! and do it more often! life is bueno!
places i would still rather be right now
-Tanzania with my brother
-Tanzania with my sister-in-law
-Tanzania with my darling neices
pictures that keep me happy in my exile
-neices playing in the Indian Ocean
-yeah, it really does get that green and beautiful and warm, and good people actually sit outside for the fun of it and don't get frostbite. and birds sing too.
-just look at those crazy people!
enjoy!
books i just bought:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
-How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer
groceries i just bought:
-fresh hummous
-hummous mix in boxes
-six pack of Pete's Wicked Wanderlust Cream Beer
books i just finished:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Snow Leopard by Peter Mathiessen
-Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
firsts this week:
-pub crawl on St. Patty's day
-buzzed by red-tailed hawk in cemetary on the way home from work yesterday morning in the middle of the city!
-got paid to watch a troupe from Mexico perform various ethnic (and awesomely rhythmic) regional dances.
books i'm halfway through:
-King Lear
-Bread and Wine by Plough Press
-A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi
cool grown up accomplishments:
-clean, orderly room with visible floor for over a week now
-set up serious appointment to inspect/possibly buy a truck to live out of for a year
-planning schedule for summer w/multiple engagements BEFORE the first day of spring
excellent new tunes on miPod:
-Wayfaring Stranger by 16 horsepower
-Sunday Bloody Sunday covered by Pillar
-It's Too Late by The Streets
my wicked awesome drinking vessels
-handmade Paul Christensen awesomely-massive pottery drinking mug
-pink nalgene with flower and pink lid
-stolen cafeteria cup with "I was stolen by a sinner" written on it in black magic marker by the indescribably profound Ben Howard
ladies i thought were really cool but turned out to be elsewhere enamored:
-girl i never asked out, and it was way too late
-girl i finally made up my mind to ask out only to discover that i had made my mind up...too late
-girl i was just about to ask out, but discovered i was: just too late
films recently watched:
-Pulp Fiction
-Hero
-Blackhawk Down
excellent articles:
-living with constant wireless interaction: "Continuous Partial Attention"
-Zakaria on Iraq: "Apalling but not Hopeless"
-William Jennings Bryan: when a promising leftist Christian populist social movement was nipped in the bud in favor of the urbane secularists, setting the ground for today's culture wars...possibly.
great conversations this week:
-Elinor Ostrom-ish analysis of potential incentive programs for EMS workers and difficulties posed by current Computer Aided Dispatch system with new (my new) supervisor; also perverse corporate shareholder-driven cost-cutting incentives in the absence of market-driven quality control due to the nature of EMS work and public contracts in the urban/suburban economic divide
-Surprise reacquaintance with old Paramedic friend Geoff Boone from Houghton Volunteer Fire Department days, over patients at the ECMC of a random.
-Inanely cheerful banter and rediscovery of The Streets with friend who only last week was sailing (metaphorically) through rough waters under iron skies.
quotes:
-Voltaire:
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
-Stephen Levy:
"A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger's wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you're always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. The anxiety is contagious: anyone who winds up talking to a person infected with CPA feels like he or she is accepting an Oscar, and at any moment the music might stop the speech."
-The Streets:
"We first met through a shared view/she loved me and i did too."
notes to self:
-there is an infinite supply of irresistably great deals on tantalizingly clever books, cds, and dvds, which are capable, if not carefully monitored, of making swiss cheese of drastically finite budgetary resources.
-ask out the next encountered "fly bird" without the customary four or eighty weeks of introspection, uncertainty, tentative get-to-know-you-first thing. absolutely no mandatory 40-day waiting periods, homeschool inexperience be darned!
-eat cheese! and hummous! listen to crazy apocalyptic gothic folk music while chatting aimlessly with friends! listen to backlogged NPR podcasts while doing nothing really productive! and do it more often! life is bueno!
places i would still rather be right now
-Tanzania with my brother
-Tanzania with my sister-in-law
-Tanzania with my darling neices
pictures that keep me happy in my exile
-neices playing in the Indian Ocean
-yeah, it really does get that green and beautiful and warm, and good people actually sit outside for the fun of it and don't get frostbite. and birds sing too.
-just look at those crazy people!
enjoy!
12 March 2006
my day!
it must have been my day!
a) i like drizzling rain
b) it was gospel choir day at the Catholic church down the street
c) the ladies in front of me at Tops were foreign so I politely asked them if they were speaking Kiswahili (in Kiswahili) and we had a pleasant conversation. in Kiswahili. and they were impressed. so was I. still decently functional...
a) i like drizzling rain
b) it was gospel choir day at the Catholic church down the street
c) the ladies in front of me at Tops were foreign so I politely asked them if they were speaking Kiswahili (in Kiswahili) and we had a pleasant conversation. in Kiswahili. and they were impressed. so was I. still decently functional...
11 March 2006
ooofff
there are so many forces arrayed against human happiness--I wonder if I will leave this place alive. so many people are crumpling. the light in their eyes dies and they are just flesh walking around. the harsh winter bores right through their souls and consumes them--heartless they tread the earth neither seeing nor knowing until their bodies stop.
it's like we are in a fight with great violence for the survival of ourselves, our souls, and we are reeling and blinded and if that is not enough, all around us those who have succumbed to the disaster have become agents of its brutality. they reach out with cold eyes and decaying limbs and teach cruelty to the next generation.
it's a good thing I have a balcony. I think I'm renaming naming my (relatively) new room from the Stronghold of Solitude to the Stronghold of Refuge. it has an attached balcony (half of which is something of a bog) which has recently become the place to sit, drink beer, bundle up against the cold and hurt communally. disappointment, loneliness, emptiness, the silence of God, the cruelty of people--strike right at the will to live. you feel yourself getting bitter, harsh, apathetic, like the very people who wound you and use you and look you in the face afterwards and expect nothing from life but cynical laughter and whatever can be had by manipulation, trickery and power.
so, we've been taking refuge on the balcony, hunched against the frigid wee hours of the morning, waiting for the sunrise. it's a sacred place, set aside with no other purpose than communing. symbolically, it gives us a place in the harsh elements but removed above them--a safe place but not a hiding place, a strategic vantage point but not a retreat. gather, regroup, commit, tend to the wounded, never give up. without committment, without community, we will not make it out of here alive.
yeah, i like my balcony.
it's like we are in a fight with great violence for the survival of ourselves, our souls, and we are reeling and blinded and if that is not enough, all around us those who have succumbed to the disaster have become agents of its brutality. they reach out with cold eyes and decaying limbs and teach cruelty to the next generation.
it's a good thing I have a balcony. I think I'm renaming naming my (relatively) new room from the Stronghold of Solitude to the Stronghold of Refuge. it has an attached balcony (half of which is something of a bog) which has recently become the place to sit, drink beer, bundle up against the cold and hurt communally. disappointment, loneliness, emptiness, the silence of God, the cruelty of people--strike right at the will to live. you feel yourself getting bitter, harsh, apathetic, like the very people who wound you and use you and look you in the face afterwards and expect nothing from life but cynical laughter and whatever can be had by manipulation, trickery and power.
so, we've been taking refuge on the balcony, hunched against the frigid wee hours of the morning, waiting for the sunrise. it's a sacred place, set aside with no other purpose than communing. symbolically, it gives us a place in the harsh elements but removed above them--a safe place but not a hiding place, a strategic vantage point but not a retreat. gather, regroup, commit, tend to the wounded, never give up. without committment, without community, we will not make it out of here alive.
yeah, i like my balcony.
03 March 2006
huh...
I'm losing Lent this year. I can't think of anything I can really fast--I need my meagre strength and focus for work, so I can't do anything that jeopardizes food and sleep. I guess I could give up beer--but I think it plays a really important part of my social life right now, and my social life is more than a luxury--it's part of my duty, my calling. I want to give up my bike--the discipline of walking everywhere would be phenomenally awesome. It would slow me down, I'd discipline myself to plan more, and I'd experience so much more of the world around me instead of just flying by. I'd also walk through a lot of shady neighborhoods after dark, and I wouldn't be able to get to the classes I kind of need to take in order to keep my EMT certification. So, scratch that.
I can't think of anything else that could be profitably fasted--anything that is unbalanced or unhealthy or in need of perspective and discipline. Except, maybe, my solitude--I spend too much time alone, too much time on the nocturnal schedule (it's been four months now) by myself. I need to fast being alone--I must be the only person in America who doesn't have a deficit of quiet solitude and reflection.
What I really am sad about, though, is missing Ash Wednesday. I just finished six twelve-hour overnights in a row, went to an employee meeting on my night off, and today I'll start another five straight. The whole entrance to the season just got lost. I wanted to go to St. Joes, I wanted the priest to take the ashes of last Palm Sunday's branches and mark with the sign of execution. I wanted to know, wanted to remember and kneel and ponder in stillness, that "dust you are, and to dust you shall return."
I can say it and write it a thousand times and still not know it. The death is in me; I am decaying, and today or tomorrow or another tomorrow I will finish decaying and return to the earth and be forgotten. It is certain, and when I knell in that quiet place and hear those words, I know that certainty and it is a part of my life, and I will keep somber celebration of my mortality until ignoring my impending death is no longer a part of the pattern of my day to day life.
This is why I love prayer and ritual. Ignoring my place in the world--my smallness and my impending death--is a frantic and sickeningly empty way. On Ash Wednesday I bear that truth on my forehead and for a moment, in the quiet of that cathedral, in my life. And with luck and repetition, I will begin to laugh at myself and my self-importance later when I catch myself living out some myth of my own importance and significance of business for impressing others, or ignoring some person's humanity because it feels inconvenient. And maybe some day the grace of a thousand Ash Wednesdays will transform my life until I carry that certain truth about myself around with me every day as a part of me.
Yeah. I missed Ash Wednesday. I guess I'll have to celebrate it on a Friday instead...
I can't think of anything else that could be profitably fasted--anything that is unbalanced or unhealthy or in need of perspective and discipline. Except, maybe, my solitude--I spend too much time alone, too much time on the nocturnal schedule (it's been four months now) by myself. I need to fast being alone--I must be the only person in America who doesn't have a deficit of quiet solitude and reflection.
What I really am sad about, though, is missing Ash Wednesday. I just finished six twelve-hour overnights in a row, went to an employee meeting on my night off, and today I'll start another five straight. The whole entrance to the season just got lost. I wanted to go to St. Joes, I wanted the priest to take the ashes of last Palm Sunday's branches and mark with the sign of execution. I wanted to know, wanted to remember and kneel and ponder in stillness, that "dust you are, and to dust you shall return."
I can say it and write it a thousand times and still not know it. The death is in me; I am decaying, and today or tomorrow or another tomorrow I will finish decaying and return to the earth and be forgotten. It is certain, and when I knell in that quiet place and hear those words, I know that certainty and it is a part of my life, and I will keep somber celebration of my mortality until ignoring my impending death is no longer a part of the pattern of my day to day life.
This is why I love prayer and ritual. Ignoring my place in the world--my smallness and my impending death--is a frantic and sickeningly empty way. On Ash Wednesday I bear that truth on my forehead and for a moment, in the quiet of that cathedral, in my life. And with luck and repetition, I will begin to laugh at myself and my self-importance later when I catch myself living out some myth of my own importance and significance of business for impressing others, or ignoring some person's humanity because it feels inconvenient. And maybe some day the grace of a thousand Ash Wednesdays will transform my life until I carry that certain truth about myself around with me every day as a part of me.
Yeah. I missed Ash Wednesday. I guess I'll have to celebrate it on a Friday instead...
28 February 2006
i'm sorry the bliss of your existence...
was interrupted by poor quality coffee. whether or not your coffee is laced with blood should always be a secondary concern to consumer quality, not to mention your miserly power-hungry pursuit of near-extortionate market prices.
read the provocation
a) Vive Hugo! his country has a long history of being pushed around ("dictated to?") by the United States. he donated millions of dollars worth of oil to New Orleans poor in the wake of Katrina. And it's pronounced "Ooh-Go," by the way.
b) Adam Carman has now joined Jason Schambach on my list of Houghton people who strain out gnats while swallowing camels, pleased to play around as if they had big ideas and important causes while playing havoc in others' lives over inconsequential and oversimplified, overpompous pontification. There are more important things in life than chapel scanning and paying a few extra cents for gas. I am generally tolerant of childish idiots--until they begin running amok, frustrating others, destroying communities, and making life rougher for people for whom life is difficult and unbuffered already.
c) people at Houghton live such wealthy f*****g existences that they are completely removed from complicated things like earning honest bread, sustaining spiritual lives independent of a church-camp-like structure, or dealing with people and things who do not fit into neat little good guy/bad guy perfect-individualistic-capitalist black and white worlds.
d) speaking of people without the luxury of pompous moralizing and ideological faith in capitalism, what would the impact of a boycott on the Houghton gas station be on the local folk who work at that gas station? are you comfortable with causing them to, oh, lose their jobs or take pay cuts to add a notch to your ethical-ego-belt?
e) there's a bigger world out there, Adam. one where sixteen-year-olds OD on heroin (for the third time) and nasty corporations burn families off their lands and out of their houses and people are mainly occupied with finding a way to make it to tomorrow or next year. I don't care if you're rich and stupid--at least you contribute to the trickle-down. but when you start f*****g around with people's livelihoods and dismissing with self-congratulating laughter the hard work of people trying to make it easier for the economically poor to get just a few of the advantages you take for granted...
then you have a Jesus problem my friend, and you have a problem with me.
read the provocation
a) Vive Hugo! his country has a long history of being pushed around ("dictated to?") by the United States. he donated millions of dollars worth of oil to New Orleans poor in the wake of Katrina. And it's pronounced "Ooh-Go," by the way.
b) Adam Carman has now joined Jason Schambach on my list of Houghton people who strain out gnats while swallowing camels, pleased to play around as if they had big ideas and important causes while playing havoc in others' lives over inconsequential and oversimplified, overpompous pontification. There are more important things in life than chapel scanning and paying a few extra cents for gas. I am generally tolerant of childish idiots--until they begin running amok, frustrating others, destroying communities, and making life rougher for people for whom life is difficult and unbuffered already.
c) people at Houghton live such wealthy f*****g existences that they are completely removed from complicated things like earning honest bread, sustaining spiritual lives independent of a church-camp-like structure, or dealing with people and things who do not fit into neat little good guy/bad guy perfect-individualistic-capitalist black and white worlds.
d) speaking of people without the luxury of pompous moralizing and ideological faith in capitalism, what would the impact of a boycott on the Houghton gas station be on the local folk who work at that gas station? are you comfortable with causing them to, oh, lose their jobs or take pay cuts to add a notch to your ethical-ego-belt?
e) there's a bigger world out there, Adam. one where sixteen-year-olds OD on heroin (for the third time) and nasty corporations burn families off their lands and out of their houses and people are mainly occupied with finding a way to make it to tomorrow or next year. I don't care if you're rich and stupid--at least you contribute to the trickle-down. but when you start f*****g around with people's livelihoods and dismissing with self-congratulating laughter the hard work of people trying to make it easier for the economically poor to get just a few of the advantages you take for granted...
then you have a Jesus problem my friend, and you have a problem with me.
24 February 2006
lazy thursday
ahhhh...
funny how it takes a whole day off of complete sloth just to get around to being able to take the second day off and get something done. cleaned my bike and listened to all the stacked-up NPR podcasts I haven't listened to of late. which is wonderful because now I want to spend a lot of money on books and movies and music. those rags behind the bike? they started off perfectly white. good, quality downtime...
interesting stuff:
blogging, marriage, and the new electronic world
dreds + violin = awesome
brokeback...to the future
king kong: children and violence
in lucia's eyes (cassanova's lost, bitterness-inducing first love)
michael w. smith in a really interesting social justice film about faith and class?
russian vampire movie grosses more in two weeks than Lord of the Rings
and, finally, the two you should delve into:
mercy killing in new orleans
recently my medic and i sat down and watched the two great ambulance movie classics of all time: Mother, Jugs and Speed (with a young Bill Cosby) and, more importantly, Bringing Out the Dead (with an excellently chosen Nicolas Cage). (yes, Mr. McSteele, I finally watched it...freaky doesn't half describe it--scary was that nothing that happened really surprised me)
working nights on the street is a different experience--very different. there are no soft covers on sharp edges, no blurring and no buffering and no carefully constructed upbeat conclusions to anything. it's a revolving door of ugly, harsh realities that you cannot alter or make pretty enough for normal society, but you will experience again and again and again without any sense of closure until you find yourself laughing at a bad joke while doing CPR on some guy who fell over dead in front of his family, wondering if you'll get the call over quick enough to get lunch before the India Gate closes.
one of the most un-American things you have to do on the job is expressed, appropriately, by the borrowed French word "triage." it's when you step into a situation where you have to decide who you try to save and who you leave to die. then you make those decisions and there's absolutely no way you can even come close to knowing for sure whether you made the right decisions or not--it's not clear cut, there's no slow-motion replays, or clever omniscient narrators. just a lot of educated guesswork and three seconds to make a choice.
it's not American because it's neither victorious nor heroic--you admit defeat, and not just defeat, but defeat due to failed systems of infrastructure, supply, and support. the outcome has everything to do with institutional and situational factors that are insurmountable by individual actors, heroic or not.
on the seventh floor of New Orleans' Memorial Hospital, choices were made to inject critical patients with enough morphine to put them to sleep forever, in the face of dwindling supplies, rising heat and floodwaters, and the chaotic uncertainty and miscommunication surrounding possible evacuation. the doctors and nurses were in a triage situation--they made decisions based on the guesswork and information they had. it's something that makes perfect sense to me--but I do not know what it sounds like to people outside the emergency healthcare system.
watch Bringing Out the Dead: its slow descent into the absolute insanity of bureaucratically institutionalized emergency management is not pleasant--but it's accurate and ungarnished. and enlightening, in a nasty fashion. visit a few city nursing homes and take in the ever-present smells of human urine and decaying people. then you can talk about the ethics of mercy killing and assisted suicide.
dada
in that vein, the dada phenomenon has once more entered my consciousness. the "Christian" worldview tends to present upturned noses to dada art, at least in my experience. to put it briefly, without rant, dada is important. it began, during the bloodshed of World War I, as a response to the absolutely blood-chilling insanity of life in a world that was assumed to be advanced, logical and modern. it was a protest against the gruesome horror and lunacy of existence in the kind of world that could produce chemical and trench warfare, the mental reduction of people and their interrelations to the cold numbers of the mechanistic social sciences, and the inhumanely barbaric actions of "civilising" colonization.
there's definitely a place for dada today. people are waking to a terror about their existence--that our lives are embedded and ingrown with the ugly and the evil and the meaningless, our very society is dying under the weight of an illusory happiness. popping up from Fight Club to I [Heart] Huckabees is the idea that a true examination of our existence will be a horrifying nihilistic trip into cynically twisted ideals and empty significance.
i think that there is nothing more Christlike than the unveiling of emptiness, sickness and insanity of the society we live in and, to a large part, uphold and create with our actions. it's truth-telling to examine and reproduce the things we take for granted to be good in such a way that their vanity and depravity and insanity are plainly and inescapably obvious. to my limited understanding, that's what dada did in its time, and we are ripe for that self-examination, unpleasant and shocking as it may be, in times where it takes more and more effort to ignore or explain or drug away the absolute insanity of our lives.
go dada!
ps--podcasts aren't just for iPodders--you can download then to any computer and, with the appropriate media player, listen to them through your computer's speakers. NPR is an amazing treasure trove of fun things to listen to.
pps--for those of you in western new york--Nils the Norwegian paramedic introduced me to 970AM, where their overnight content is broadcasts by the good ol' British Broadcasting Corporation. if you're up late and want good international news and commentary--tune in!
funny how it takes a whole day off of complete sloth just to get around to being able to take the second day off and get something done. cleaned my bike and listened to all the stacked-up NPR podcasts I haven't listened to of late. which is wonderful because now I want to spend a lot of money on books and movies and music. those rags behind the bike? they started off perfectly white. good, quality downtime...
interesting stuff:
blogging, marriage, and the new electronic world
dreds + violin = awesome
brokeback...to the future
king kong: children and violence
in lucia's eyes (cassanova's lost, bitterness-inducing first love)
michael w. smith in a really interesting social justice film about faith and class?
russian vampire movie grosses more in two weeks than Lord of the Rings
and, finally, the two you should delve into:
mercy killing in new orleans
recently my medic and i sat down and watched the two great ambulance movie classics of all time: Mother, Jugs and Speed (with a young Bill Cosby) and, more importantly, Bringing Out the Dead (with an excellently chosen Nicolas Cage). (yes, Mr. McSteele, I finally watched it...freaky doesn't half describe it--scary was that nothing that happened really surprised me)
working nights on the street is a different experience--very different. there are no soft covers on sharp edges, no blurring and no buffering and no carefully constructed upbeat conclusions to anything. it's a revolving door of ugly, harsh realities that you cannot alter or make pretty enough for normal society, but you will experience again and again and again without any sense of closure until you find yourself laughing at a bad joke while doing CPR on some guy who fell over dead in front of his family, wondering if you'll get the call over quick enough to get lunch before the India Gate closes.
one of the most un-American things you have to do on the job is expressed, appropriately, by the borrowed French word "triage." it's when you step into a situation where you have to decide who you try to save and who you leave to die. then you make those decisions and there's absolutely no way you can even come close to knowing for sure whether you made the right decisions or not--it's not clear cut, there's no slow-motion replays, or clever omniscient narrators. just a lot of educated guesswork and three seconds to make a choice.
it's not American because it's neither victorious nor heroic--you admit defeat, and not just defeat, but defeat due to failed systems of infrastructure, supply, and support. the outcome has everything to do with institutional and situational factors that are insurmountable by individual actors, heroic or not.
on the seventh floor of New Orleans' Memorial Hospital, choices were made to inject critical patients with enough morphine to put them to sleep forever, in the face of dwindling supplies, rising heat and floodwaters, and the chaotic uncertainty and miscommunication surrounding possible evacuation. the doctors and nurses were in a triage situation--they made decisions based on the guesswork and information they had. it's something that makes perfect sense to me--but I do not know what it sounds like to people outside the emergency healthcare system.
watch Bringing Out the Dead: its slow descent into the absolute insanity of bureaucratically institutionalized emergency management is not pleasant--but it's accurate and ungarnished. and enlightening, in a nasty fashion. visit a few city nursing homes and take in the ever-present smells of human urine and decaying people. then you can talk about the ethics of mercy killing and assisted suicide.
dada
in that vein, the dada phenomenon has once more entered my consciousness. the "Christian" worldview tends to present upturned noses to dada art, at least in my experience. to put it briefly, without rant, dada is important. it began, during the bloodshed of World War I, as a response to the absolutely blood-chilling insanity of life in a world that was assumed to be advanced, logical and modern. it was a protest against the gruesome horror and lunacy of existence in the kind of world that could produce chemical and trench warfare, the mental reduction of people and their interrelations to the cold numbers of the mechanistic social sciences, and the inhumanely barbaric actions of "civilising" colonization.
there's definitely a place for dada today. people are waking to a terror about their existence--that our lives are embedded and ingrown with the ugly and the evil and the meaningless, our very society is dying under the weight of an illusory happiness. popping up from Fight Club to I [Heart] Huckabees is the idea that a true examination of our existence will be a horrifying nihilistic trip into cynically twisted ideals and empty significance.
i think that there is nothing more Christlike than the unveiling of emptiness, sickness and insanity of the society we live in and, to a large part, uphold and create with our actions. it's truth-telling to examine and reproduce the things we take for granted to be good in such a way that their vanity and depravity and insanity are plainly and inescapably obvious. to my limited understanding, that's what dada did in its time, and we are ripe for that self-examination, unpleasant and shocking as it may be, in times where it takes more and more effort to ignore or explain or drug away the absolute insanity of our lives.
go dada!
ps--podcasts aren't just for iPodders--you can download then to any computer and, with the appropriate media player, listen to them through your computer's speakers. NPR is an amazing treasure trove of fun things to listen to.
pps--for those of you in western new york--Nils the Norwegian paramedic introduced me to 970AM, where their overnight content is broadcasts by the good ol' British Broadcasting Corporation. if you're up late and want good international news and commentary--tune in!
20 February 2006
heroin
i think we create panic and feed on it. we want to fear, and there is a little masochist inside each of us that wants to feel pain. bored old ladies make up a different ailment every day so they can go to the hospital and break the routine. young mothers fake seizures on the way to the hospital for the same reason their young daughters fake being raped--significance. pity. attention. tragic posturing. importance.
basically the same reason, on a night like tonight, i'm tempted to binge in a little "i'm lonely in the big city" blogging, or perhaps some "my tragic history" indulgence, or mainline some "let me tell you about my childhood" misery. i didn't realize until putting on my uniform that Powers was planning on covering for me tonight so that I can take his Friday night shift and he can enjoy a night out with a beautiful lady. so sit here long enough and the ennui sets in and off runs the heart to the public pity medium to try to convert excess boredom into cheap significance via emotional gluttony. you aren't bored while in the sick throes of angst and over-worn-out personal tragedy.
huh. i'm a funny-lookin' person in the mirror.
so, Plan A down the drain, it's time to work on Plan B. I have decided that I am altogether too serious and dour. the Kingdom of Heaven is no place for the mopey/self-obsessed. it is an all-out party replete with wine, women, and song (and, hopefully, hibachis and steak...) and party poopers are frowned upon. I have discovered, to my dismay, a certain weakness in the celebration-side of life. Put me in a room with angst-ridden-sense-of-importance junkies and I will passionately be bitter about all the evil and bad isms that keep people frowning and shuffling along. But call up the dance and light the candles and pour out the alcohol of choice and I am stiff and looking for my bitter coffee. Declare a feast and I sit awkwardly and try to make polite conversation or introduce some subject that I can frown and feel important and sophisticated while discussing.
And there's Jesus over there whoopin' and hollerin' and making more wine when it's obvious everyone's had enough and pulling grouchy old Aunt Edna out on the dance floor for a cha-cha and I am at a loss for what to do because being important is not important while celebrating. rejoicing and laughing and playing games and other childlike traits--they are important.
So I need to get a lot better at celebration, which generally involves a deflated ego and a good bit of unsober gleefulness and laughter and--hah! Nickleback just started playing on my pretty little iPod. Case in point. Nickleback is a popular band that makes its living making sad-tough-guy music about how my girlfriend broke up with me and my family wasn't perfect and I'll never be allright and I'm angry and I'm sad and--dim shadows, empty whiskey bottles, browns and grays and dust always fading to black. Couldn't make a dancing tune to save their lives. God save us from seductive preprocessed canned some-one-else's-misery to titillate our carefully safe, carefully cultivated, carefully bored, carefully cool lives, and somehow empty selves. God save us from people who's favorite words (followed, of course with weighty and important sighs) are "God save us..."
Well. I'm going to try to find some way to redeem this evening that involves
a. laughter
b. absolutely nothing "serious", "important", "weighty", or "tragic."
c. unless the "tragic" could also be categorized under "schadenfreude".
d. because as the merriest of monks and ascetics knows, weightiness, dourness, seriousness and other forms of self-importance are bad.
e. and rejoicing is good.
p.s.--check out the hilarious Mormon guy's faux pas on Jeopardy
basically the same reason, on a night like tonight, i'm tempted to binge in a little "i'm lonely in the big city" blogging, or perhaps some "my tragic history" indulgence, or mainline some "let me tell you about my childhood" misery. i didn't realize until putting on my uniform that Powers was planning on covering for me tonight so that I can take his Friday night shift and he can enjoy a night out with a beautiful lady. so sit here long enough and the ennui sets in and off runs the heart to the public pity medium to try to convert excess boredom into cheap significance via emotional gluttony. you aren't bored while in the sick throes of angst and over-worn-out personal tragedy.
huh. i'm a funny-lookin' person in the mirror.
so, Plan A down the drain, it's time to work on Plan B. I have decided that I am altogether too serious and dour. the Kingdom of Heaven is no place for the mopey/self-obsessed. it is an all-out party replete with wine, women, and song (and, hopefully, hibachis and steak...) and party poopers are frowned upon. I have discovered, to my dismay, a certain weakness in the celebration-side of life. Put me in a room with angst-ridden-sense-of-importance junkies and I will passionately be bitter about all the evil and bad isms that keep people frowning and shuffling along. But call up the dance and light the candles and pour out the alcohol of choice and I am stiff and looking for my bitter coffee. Declare a feast and I sit awkwardly and try to make polite conversation or introduce some subject that I can frown and feel important and sophisticated while discussing.
And there's Jesus over there whoopin' and hollerin' and making more wine when it's obvious everyone's had enough and pulling grouchy old Aunt Edna out on the dance floor for a cha-cha and I am at a loss for what to do because being important is not important while celebrating. rejoicing and laughing and playing games and other childlike traits--they are important.
So I need to get a lot better at celebration, which generally involves a deflated ego and a good bit of unsober gleefulness and laughter and--hah! Nickleback just started playing on my pretty little iPod. Case in point. Nickleback is a popular band that makes its living making sad-tough-guy music about how my girlfriend broke up with me and my family wasn't perfect and I'll never be allright and I'm angry and I'm sad and--dim shadows, empty whiskey bottles, browns and grays and dust always fading to black. Couldn't make a dancing tune to save their lives. God save us from seductive preprocessed canned some-one-else's-misery to titillate our carefully safe, carefully cultivated, carefully bored, carefully cool lives, and somehow empty selves. God save us from people who's favorite words (followed, of course with weighty and important sighs) are "God save us..."
Well. I'm going to try to find some way to redeem this evening that involves
a. laughter
b. absolutely nothing "serious", "important", "weighty", or "tragic."
c. unless the "tragic" could also be categorized under "schadenfreude".
d. because as the merriest of monks and ascetics knows, weightiness, dourness, seriousness and other forms of self-importance are bad.
e. and rejoicing is good.
p.s.--check out the hilarious Mormon guy's faux pas on Jeopardy
a little after the fact
yup. one more valentines day spent alone. or, in this case, working, with a decidedly unattractive male medic, so that Powers could go watch Cirque de Soleil from a corporate suite and hit on wealthy lawyers. oh well. Happy St. V's and to all good luck and good night!
05 February 2006
goodbye vocabulary
so yesterday morning i couldn't sleep even though i knew i would pay for it later. so instead of sleeping the morning away in preparation for work, i curled up in my sleeping bag in my not-so-comfy comfy chair next to the big windows in my room and pulled back the curtains a little (the room is cold enough as it is) and drank cider and listened to Christmas music and watched the rain fall. i love rain, especially watching it fall as all the typically inconsiderate aspects of life tiptoe around selfconsciously because "ssssshhh--the rain is talking!" and I love Christmas music because it is, and i didn't get to listen to any at all except for a few snatches on the radio about how grandma's drunken stupor led her into the path of an inconsiderate grass-guzzling all-brawn no-finesse H3 of a reindeer.
except that it was actually yesterday afternoon, cause there i was trying to sleep days again and i screwed up my sleep schedule again so that now i want nothing more than to wake up around ten a.m. and go to sleep around three p.m.--the former being four hours into my off-time and the latter being just about when it's time to get up and get ready for work. but spending yesterday afternoon watching the-rain-fall-with-a-cup-of-hot-cider just doesn't quite cut the mustard. you're missing half of the great experience that i had, and i wouldn't want to rob you of that.
well. and now i'm sitting here wondering if i can type another five hours until bedtime, because i have to stay awake until about six or seven so that i can sleep and get up at six (that's a.m., as in the actual morning) for my eight to midnight overtime. yeah overtime. that should be me into bona fide overtime for this pay period, and then everything else extra that i tack on is time and a half!
and i used to get excited for christmas break. i warn you all: be ready for the ensuing gosh-darn-i-feel-old-what-do-they-teach-children-in-schools-these-days posts, because i'm sure i shall age all of my characteristic grace, and i seriously think my arthritis in my right hand is flaring up. booh-yah--anyone want to talk about the price of perscription drugs?
in other news, the "email me" is fixed. so you can email me now if you don't know my address. and i got to drive to Pennsylvania and back last night, lights and sirens the whole way! made a two-hour trip in an hour-fourty, in the pouring rain! yeah backroads! picked up a little newborn Am-let (that's little Amish lad) and drove him back, just as fast, and now he breathes a lot easier. hoo-ray for me!
except that it was actually yesterday afternoon, cause there i was trying to sleep days again and i screwed up my sleep schedule again so that now i want nothing more than to wake up around ten a.m. and go to sleep around three p.m.--the former being four hours into my off-time and the latter being just about when it's time to get up and get ready for work. but spending yesterday afternoon watching the-rain-fall-with-a-cup-of-hot-cider just doesn't quite cut the mustard. you're missing half of the great experience that i had, and i wouldn't want to rob you of that.
well. and now i'm sitting here wondering if i can type another five hours until bedtime, because i have to stay awake until about six or seven so that i can sleep and get up at six (that's a.m., as in the actual morning) for my eight to midnight overtime. yeah overtime. that should be me into bona fide overtime for this pay period, and then everything else extra that i tack on is time and a half!
and i used to get excited for christmas break. i warn you all: be ready for the ensuing gosh-darn-i-feel-old-what-do-they-teach-children-in-schools-these-days posts, because i'm sure i shall age all of my characteristic grace, and i seriously think my arthritis in my right hand is flaring up. booh-yah--anyone want to talk about the price of perscription drugs?
in other news, the "email me" is fixed. so you can email me now if you don't know my address. and i got to drive to Pennsylvania and back last night, lights and sirens the whole way! made a two-hour trip in an hour-fourty, in the pouring rain! yeah backroads! picked up a little newborn Am-let (that's little Amish lad) and drove him back, just as fast, and now he breathes a lot easier. hoo-ray for me!
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