The Wild Winds of Fortune

I have been trying to postpone posts on hot-button topics until I can form coherent sentences about them.  Occasionally, this means waiting until I calm down enough that I am not frothing at the mouth.

Antonin Scalia gave an interview to the California Lawyer.….

……..

……..

Nope, can’t write the post yet.

Dear Jonathan Larson, wherever you may be,

I love your work, man. Rent should have been the opening act of a career that would have staggered the world. That it was a swan song is heartbreaking.

But, and I realize that I am picking the smallest of nits here….

“Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Six Hundred” is not the number of minutes in a year. It is merely the number of minutes in 365 days. The actual number of minutes in the year is Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Nine Hundred and Sixty. Those extra 360 minutes? They are the reason we have leap years, to realign the calendar.

Yours truly,

A geek.

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Dear Pandora People:

I have been listening to your “Classic Broadway Show Tunes” for about ninety minutes. During that time you have played four different songs from Les Miz — and “On My Own” twice — three songs from Phantom, and you played Julie Andrews singing “The Sound of Music” from two different and nearly identical recordings back to back. Not to mention playing two different versions of “All That Jazz.” And while Josh Groban is magnificent, he is not singing show tunes here. Neither is Straight No Chaser.

You guys need to work on the randomizing algorithms, or get a wider variety of show tunes in your databases.

Edited to Add: And in what godforsaken universe does “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train (as much as I like Train) belong on this channel?

Sincerely,

Cranky.

I think this says everything I would want to say about the shooting in Arizona:

The Not-So-Little-Drummer Boy went back to school earlier this week. After several days of concentrated effort, I have mostly exorcised the inappropriate use of the word “like” from my vocabulary.

At one point while he was here, I challenged him to go an entire day without saying “like.” “I can’t do it,” he replied. “I’ve tried.” In frustration, I growled “You sound like a Californian!”

There was a stunned silence. Then my born-in-Palo Alto, raised-in-Mountain View son answered, “Mom… I am a Californian.”

Oh, yeah. Forgot about that.

This is a retraction, sort of.

I have removed my post about the Gifford shooting as being premature: we do not as yet know motivations. That said, I stand by my statements about the invidious nature of the far-right rhetoric. If this guy was not influenced by the Tea Partiers, it is only a matter of time before someone is, as can be seen by the history of the most radical elements of the anti-abortion movement, with its singling out of doctors who were later shot by fanatics influenced by their hatred.

One of the recurring themes of fundamentalist American Christianity is how “persecuted” they are. They seem to have a personal investment in finding themselves persecuted, to the point where they define “not being able to establish a theocracy, and not being able to force our religious beliefs down everyone else’s throat” to be persecution.

You want real persecution? Try the places in the world – Iraq, Algeria, to name just two — where being a Christian can be a matter of life or death. In Egypt, for example, militant Islamists bombed a Coptic church on New Year’s Day. Angry Copts responded with violence of their own — understandable, but not necessarily helpful.

What is remarkable about this story is its aftermath: on Epiphany, thousands of Egyptians surrounded Coptic churches to act as human shields to safeguard the worshippers inside.

It gives one hope for humanity.

He looks around, around …..
He sees angels in the architecture,
Spinning in infinity,
He says, Amen! and Hallelujah!

Paul Simon, “You Can Call Me Al”

Yesterday, my “planned pleasant activity” was a trip into the City to walk the Labyrinth at Grace Cathedral.  Although I struggle mightily with faith these days, to the point where calling me a “seeker” would no longer be accurate, walking the labyrinth centers and heals me, if only for the forty-five minutes it takes for me to do it.

I need centering lately.  I have confusion to overcome, losses to grieve, fears to face.  I have people to forgive and people to ask forgiveness of.

When I walked into the Cathedral, I walked into a moment of wonder.  A liturgical dance troupe was moving through the sacred spaces carried along by the soaring piano strains of Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring.”  I stood entranced.

I have a somewhat jaundiced view of liturgical dance.  I have seen it done poorly — painfully — enough to distrust the concept.  But these dancers were professionals.  They managed to hit the elusive combination of art and spirituality.  They wove a clear and beautiful story through their movements.

I watched them as they finished their dance.  It was clear to me that I had stumbled upon a rehearsal — a final rehearsal by the look of it.  The only other observers were the dancers, the pianist, and one or two other souls who had wandered in from the chill late afternoon air.

In many ways watching a rehearsal is better than watching the performance.  There is an intimacy, a groundedness that is lacking when there is an audience.  The dancers seemed to be dancing only for each other, and to the glory of God.  During the service, they were costumed in white silk, but during the rehearsals they were in street clothes.  They could have been anyone come in to dance, as David did, before the altar of the Lord.  They were not “otherwordly,” they were us.

I have been in such spaces before.  In 1995, the Rocket Scientist and I went to Germany for a conference, on what I jokingly came to call the “Beer and Churches Tour.”  We went to a lot of cathedrals, in various parts of Germany and the Netherlands.  Many of them were quite beautiful, and had been carefully maintained and filled with visitors who spoke in hushed tones.  Moving, if a little detached.

And then we saw Magdeburg.

Magdeburg is in what had been East Germany.  The outer walls showed the pockmarks where bullets had hit them during World War II.  It was a staggeringly beautiful building that had been allowed through all the years of Communist rule to lapse into some level of disrepair.  There was scaffolding indicating that there was renovation going on, but it still seemed to be in the future.  It was a Gothic cathedral, though, calm and strong.

When RS and I entered the cathedral, we were one of maybe four or five people in the church.  We were soon followed by a larger group – maybe thirty — that filed in behind us.  We paid them no mind, and wandered off down the nave and the side aisles.  Back in the distance, we could hear small scufflings and other noises from the group.

Suddenly, the air swelled with song.  The group that we had been ahead of was a choral group from a university, who had chosen the cathedral to record their music because of the acoustical qualities of the space.  Even their warm ups sounded ethereal.  When they began singing hymns, it was as though the stone angels on the walls had opened their mouths. It was a moment to send chills down your spine.

It was magic.  And yesterday, as I stood and watched the dancers, I could almost hear the angels in Magdeburg singing to me again. I wanted to cry.

As Al would say, “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!”

Definitely take the time to read the parking garage signs more carefully.  The garage at Grace Cathedral is not $2.50/hour, as you misunderstood it to be, but $2.50/every twenty minutes.

That ended up being a more expensive church service than you reckoned on. Not that you still wouldn’t have done it, just that you would have been a lot more zen about things when the attendant told you that you owed him $22.50.  Or you would have expended a lot more effort in finding street parking.

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, act I, scene iii 

 Last night, The Red-Headed Menace (RHM) was talking to the object of his affections on Facebook Chat.  I happened to glance over and catch part of their conversation.  They were discussing the upcoming semester in language arts.

RHM:  What do you think of the poetry unit?
OA: I hate it.  I hate writing.
RHM: I do too.

Wait, what?!  This is the kid that has always written poetry for the sheer joy of it.  The kid who wrote an actual honest-to-God sonnet (a Petrarchan sonnet, with proper meter and rhyme scheme) when he was in eighth grade for some girl he had a crush on.  This kid loves to write. (He has more problems with prose: capitalization and spelling are not his forte.)

I broke in and asked him about this.  “Oh, I hate school-type writing,” he said with a hangdog look.  Yeah, right.  I took the proper parental course of action and counseled him, much as Polonius did Laertes, to simply be himself. I told him that he needed to know that people liked him for who he was, not for some facade he chose to show them.

The truth is, though, is that so many of us do this.  We seek approval from others, especially people who love us, and sometimes that gets in the way of being honest about who we are.  We pretend to have attributes we don’t, or to be less flawed, than we really are.  Maybe we don’t lie, but we’re less than revealing.  We become afraid that somehow we’re not good enough.  So many of us suffer from “impostor syndrome.” Or, alternatively, some of us dwell on our flaws, thinking, perhaps unconsciously, that it is better to drive people away than to be left.

Well we all fall in love
But we disregard the danger
Though we share so many secrets
There are some we never tell
Why were you so surprised
That you never saw the stranger?
Did you ever let your lover
See the stranger in yourself?
Billy Joel, “The Stranger”

Billy Joel notwithstanding, the hardest thing I have had to learn in my *cough* forty-something *cough* years is to not lie about who I am.  I work hard on being myself around people.  This does not mean I divulge everything about myself, but it does mean that I do not let the fact that I have been told that I am intimidating and a bit scary make me change the way I am in the world.  If some people can’t deal with me the way that I am, it’s their loss.  I have come a long way from the girl who was counseled by her high school friends that she was “too smart,” and who would have given her right arm to know how to act dumber so that people would like her.

I only hope my kid figures this out.  Because he is pretty damned amazing, and deserves to be surrounded by people who understand and appreciate him.

EchidnaBoy has requested that his nom de blog be changed.  Normally I would have laughed at him and said, “Not a chance, Bub,”  but he does in fact valid reasons for asking.  So, in the future, my youngest son shall be referred to as ….

The Red-Headed Menace.

(He hates that one, too, but doesn’t have any valid objections to it. His suggestion of Godzilla Kid failed to fly.)

Asking a judge who has ruled against you and in support of same-sex marriage to recuse himself on the basis of his wife’s activities is not going to fly.  I could have told you that.  As could have a lot of other people.

According to Scotusblog, “[Judge Reinhardt] described [his wife] as ‘a strong, independent woman who has long fought for the principle, among others, that women should beevaluated on their own merits and not judged in any way by the deeds or position in life of their husbands (and vice versa).’  He said he shared that view, and suggested that the law does so, too.The challenge to him, he added, ‘is based upon an outmoded conception of the relationship between spouses.'”

My kind of guy.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
  T.S. Eliot, “The Rock”

Tonight, the Rocket Scientist, our friend the Resident Shrink, and I went to a pub in San Jose and played bar trivia.  We won, handily.


It takes a certain type of mind to be good at this game.  A mind like a magpie, prone to picking up new pieces of  information and storing them in back recesses from which they tend to burst forth like springtime cherry blossoms at the drop of a proverbial hat.


There is something soothing in knowing facts like these.  They are verifiable, certain.  You can look them up.  They are  unambiguous. We live in a world where there is chaos all around and what we know seems to be built on shifting sands, and all too often the media treat scientific fact as a matter of “controversy” when there is none, simply because some religious zealots can’t cope with it. In such a world, to know that New Guinea is the second largest island in the world, or what animal is called “ursine,” or who drove the getaway car in “Bonnie and Clyde” seems like an accomplishment.


It is meaningless.


It is meaningless because these facts cannot change the world.  Knowing these facts can’t cure cancer, can’t discover life on Mars, can’t help feed the hungry.  Knowing such facts can’t help you change minds about the war in Afghanistan, or help you convince people that the Tea Partiers are dangerous and that most of the swill that they spout is an affront not only to the U.S. Constitution but to teachings of the God they profess as their Lord and Savior.


It can’t help you function in the world. It can’t help you get a job. It can’t help you weather the economy.  It can’t help you… do that much.  We can’t all be Jeopardy! champions.


Such facts are merely information.


There are other types of minds: minds full of knowledge that can synthesize information into larger understandings of the world.  Minds that can discover, that can analyze. Or wise minds that can provide insight into the human condition.  Minds filled with depth and compassion.


Most days I feel I have a magpie mind.  I long for a mind which can discover truths.  A mind which can see deeper patterns. Hell, even just a mind which can master basic organizational skills and motivational techniques would be an improvement.


I long for wisdom, or failing that, knowledge. All too often, I think all I have is information.


That doesn’t seem like enough somehow.

The first decade of the millennium is well and truly gone.  Thank God.

The past ten years saw the worst attack on American soil not inflicted by ourselves.  A date so horrible that it is not necessary to delineate the year when referring to it: “9/11”.

It was a horrible, earth changing event.  It led to a vast array of changes; many, but not all, of which were desperate attempts to create an illusion of security in a bewildering sea of ill-perceived threats.

If you had told me ten years ago that we would have a country in which otherwise sane people would argue that it is sometimes acceptable to torture if you feel threatened enough, and where individuals that the government admits are not guilty of any crime are being detained against their will, I would have thought you crazy.  If you had told me that people would be arrested for disrupting the speeches of one president simply for wearing critical t-shirts, while protesters would march outside the public appearances of the next toting rifles, I would have thought you not only crazy but ceritifiable.

In 2001, “tea party” was a play date for your daughter and her stuffed animals.  Sarah Palin was mayor of an  unheard-of little town in Alaska.  Barack Obama was an Illinois state legislator and a professor of Constitutional law.  Guantanamo was simply a naval outpost in Cuba.*

People who are now called “socialist” and “communist” were called slightly left-of-center back then.  In the past ten years, it has been acceptable to call thoughtful, intelligent, patriotic Americans who simply disagree with the prevailing domestic or foreign policy “traitors.”

And in other, less important ways, the world has shifted as well, although those have not been as seismic.

In January 2001, I had not yet gotten my first cell phone.  It was before the iPod, let alone the iPhone or iPad.  Most of the time I went to actual bookstores to purchase reading material. “Reality” tv was in its infancy: the words “voted off the island” had not yet become part of the American vernacular.  Matt Damon was a promising dramatic actor and screenwriter, not an action star.  Daniel Radcliffe was a child — not yet a star — who had just finished filming Sorcerer’s Stone.  Peter Jackson was best known as the guy who made “Heavenly Creatures,” for the not that many people who knew his work.  (LOTR zealots also knew him as “the guy we are going to have for lunch if his movie screws up our Bible”.  Arguably, the films are much better than the book.)  3-D movies were gimmicks, not the wave of the future.

All of which is to say, the world has changed so much in ten years.  Life has become so much crazier then it used to be.

Here’s hoping for a better decade ahead.

*The failure of the Administration to close Guantanamo, and its continued opposition to detainee releases, not merely infuriates me, it makes me ill.

My resolutions, in no particular order:

1. Pay attention to what other people tell you about yourself. They are bound to be more truthful and accurate than the voices in your head.

2.  Corollary to the above: take care of yourself, physically and mentally, no matter how difficult or annoying it is.  If these people are telling the truth, then you deserve it, and they deserve to have you around for as long as possible.

3.  Stop fantasizing and start dreaming — and work on making the dreams concrete.

4.  Forgive.  Forgive yourself and forgive others.  With one exception, there is no one who has hurt you so much that you cannot forgive them.  Apologize.  There are people out there whom you have hurt. Tell them how sorry you are.

5.  Let. Go. Of. Outcomes. 

6.  Every once in a while, take a walk on the wild side.  You’re not dead yet.

7.  Always take the detour for the chinchilla races.

8.  Finish the damn book, already.  Even if it is never published, heck, even if it is never submitted for publication, it deserves it.  And while you’re at it, make sure you write or blog every single freaking day.  Period.

9.  Spend time every day in gratitude for the blessings you have in your life, and the people who surround you.

10.  Speaking of those people, reach out and rebuild or strengthen the connections you have, especially with your friends.  It’s a funny thing, the Internet, which actually allows people to keep in touch with each other.

11. Become more purposeful in how you live your life.  Become the mother / wife / friend / writer /  person who you are meant to be.

Notice that “Become more organized” is not on the list.  Even I know a lost cause when I see one.