The red lines that stripe
my back speak.
From the corners of their mouths
a meandering ribbon of blood.
They tell of rich detail
beyond forgetting,
of tapestries that fell like
waterfalls from the ceiling,
of strings of popcorn teeth turning
the doorway into an instrument,
of the lash, the lash
my lover
held.
I meant to do something to celebrate Pentecost. Something with strawberries to represent tongues of flame. And balloons. I would probably have instagrammed it.
But this is a busy time of year for teachers. Our whole family was still recovering from Atticus’s surgery and subsequent grumpiness. And, if you must know, I feel a certain amount of ambivalence about Pentecost. On the one hand, there is the presence and the mother-comfort of the Holy Spirit. On the other hand there are things like speaking in tongues and flames and a wind so strong it can knock people down (or not). Not to mention that this is a difficult week to talk about rushing wind.
What I like about Pentecost is the reminder that God can go and be everywhere. Surely God’s presence guides us every day as we strive to bear a message of love and justice and righteousness and forgiveness into a world that seems unjust and unforgiving. There is beauty in the idea that God, like the wind, will not be contained. I recognize that wildness and restlessness within myself, as part of being an image-bearer, and I am reasonably comfortable with the idea that God’s pursuit of us is reminiscent of wind in speed and persistence. But I have never experienced God in dramatic or violent ways, and for that reason I think I will stick with quieter metaphors: a still, small voice. The refreshing breeze that signifies the arrival of summer evenings, when the heat edges off and you lift your hair to feel the cool on the back of your neck. I am content to celebrate God’s presence and the beginnings of the church in a quiet way, to light candles and hold the knowledge that I am beloved.
In my life, there are moments surrounded by books and others spent chasing behind a boisterous toddler. I feel the steady presence in a sacred place, carry it with me in my heart. For there is no place we can go that the Holy Spirit will not go with us. Happy Pentecost, friends.
(us, at church, on Pentecost)
There are very few large animals left on earth. I don’t mean elk large, I mean elephant large. Once there were many. Blame whatever you like for the decline, but the facts are clear. Being large is difficult.
Being small is easy or at least easier. Small things are more easily swapped in and out. Small things are more easily changed. We often talk about how much time it takes to turn a large ship around. We don’t often talk about how to design a more easily turned ship.
The answer of course is in what you want to do with your ship. If you want to go from Vancouver to Beijing turning isn’t an issue. Efficiency is. On the other hand if you want to go fishing in different spots every day turning becomes a big deal.
So how many things are like big ships these days? I can think of a few but not many. In an information age where organizations need to pivot on a nearly constant basis to keep ahead of the curve, the ability to turn becomes a big deal.
This isn’t the only concern. Large organisations inevitably grow power structures. Not the sort of power structure that small business owner has. A small business owner affects the lives of a few people and has skin (and soul) in the game. Large corporations affect thousands of people and are run by people who often don’t have any skin in the game at all. Think of the high-profile CEO who goes from company to company effectively gutting each one and earning a huge paycheque and bonuses along the way. In the worst case scenario, these executives are actively defrauding their stakeholders. Think of Enron.
This isn’t just a problem in the corporate world. It’s a problem in every organisation. The power problem doesn’t stop at companies. It infects governments, nonprofits, and even churches. Washington, DC is an example of an entire city build around power structures. Tell me if that town is sane, let alone getting its job done.
The power problem isn’t just about skin the game. It’s also about the structures that grow to support the powerful. Structures the powerful themselves create. They may not even know they’re doing it and yet it happens.
Take for instance the church. I want to pick on the church because I have skin in that game — I attend one and care about the wellbeing of the church in general.
Leave aside the Catholic church for a moment, which has a very obvious and historically problematic structure (let’s just say the child abuse scandal is not exactly an aberration). Let’s even leave aside the very structured Orthodox and Anglican churches. Let’s instead focus on the problems of the modern Anabaptist Protestant church.
On first blush the Protestant problem would seem to be not enough structure. Some of my Catholic friends are eager to point out that we’d have a lot fewer odd cousins in the Protestant family if we were allowed to take them out behind the barn and shoot them. This is not to say that the power structure isn’t there. It’s just not as obvious. Instead of being centred around the Pope or synods or classes (etc, etc), the power structure often centred around a single local church which expands outward to a movement which forms and organisation and on it goes.
This happens constantly. A single pastor rises above the rest, his church grows, he forms a church organisation, it grows, and eventually the whole thing collapses. This sometime happens under the auspices of existing denomination structures, other times outside of them, and other times organisations form vague associations.
No matter how it happens, the concentration and creation of power happens alongside. Then comes the books, the teaching tours, the conferences, the radio sermons, the ministries, the money, the salaries, the whole deal.
Again and again this leads to corruption in the church. The simple reason is that power insists upon itself. Even without realising it. There’s an entire cottage industry that exists solely to funnel money into these various organisations and therefore influence to their founders. When we talk about the rise of the CEO pastor, this is what we’re talking about. The rise of pastors who look and sound like businessmen, churches that are concerned about cash flow and market share, and organisations whose reasons for existence are dubious at best and essentially money laundering at worst.
I think of these things in terms of mission. What is the mission of the church? Does your church do that? Does your organisation do that?
For instance, you’re a CEO pastor. You have a church of 1000 people. You want to reach 1000 more people. What do you do? Well, a satellite church with a video feed from the main church of course! Ah, technology. Then another, then another, then another.
At what point did it seem to you that a video feed to a satellite gathering is better than setting up a new church with a new pastor? The point was when you realised that you were the main attraction. Call it what you want. Think of yourself as an excellent teacher. Whatever you need to justify your face being on that screen. Think of it as easier, cheaper, better, whatever. Either way, there you are.
Then you write a book. After all, the people in your extended congregations need to increase their personal piety, don’t they? So you write a book and sell it. Suddenly you have this money and this exposure you maybe didn’t have before, especially if the book becomes popular outside the limited audience of the screens your face reaches.
Then you start taking your face on the road. Conferences, teaching tours, a radio show, maybe even a TV show.
Then the real money starts to roll in. None of this is bad, none of this is evil. You’re reaching thousands, millions, even tens of millions of people!
You probably thank God for all this exposure, but you start pulling down a salary that says you really thank yourself. Then you meet some opposition in your organisation. Maybe someone objects to the CEO mentality you have. Maybe the situation starts to snowball.
Or maybe you find yourself signing into a hotel with a hooker and some blow, because (paradoxically because the demands of being a CEO pastor mean you have less free time in aggregate but more unaccountable free time in strange places).
Maybe your church is accused of actively covering up a child abuse scandal.
I don’t know. Either way, here you are, the CEO, the only thing holding this machine together. Maybe you fall apart, maybe you don’t. Either way, the damage begins. Or maybe you just die one day. Either way, things start to change.
What if, instead, we did things differently?
What if we had no CEO pastors with star power and teaching organisations and radio shows and book tours? What if we just cut all that stuff out?
I’m sure the personal piety of the average Christian would remain the same (pretty low in my case; you can be your own arbiter). I’m sure the impact of your book and your radio show and your array of satellite churches would be replaced by something else.
What if we decided that small was beautiful? Churches of, say, 200 – 300 people. What would that look like?
If I had to pick the most successful type of organism in the world, I’d have to say bacteria. Prokaryotes reproduce mainly by asexual binary reproduction. That is to say they grow, then they split. And they do this incredibly fast.
What if, instead of trying to be some mythical multi-headed beast, churches just got too big to be churches anymore and split off into two new churches?
I’ll tell you one thing that’s for certain: There would be a much better ecosystem of small churches. Instead of one church failing and orphaning thousands of people, a church could be gracefully shut down and folded into the (hopefully) myriad of small, local churches.
True, our “reach” might not be as great, but I think our impact would be. Instead of concentrating on a million people or 10 million people in our state or province or city, we could concentrate on the thousands of people in our communities, in the places we actually live and work. We could take ourselves out of national politics (and so very many people would heave a sigh of absolute relief) and put ourselves back into the realm of service on a local level. We’d be a much more welcome and less offensive group of people if we did that, I can assure you.
We’d also avoid all the problems associated with celebrity pastors and their seemingly inevitable downfalls.
It seems to me this is the better path: Smaller, nimbler, less visible, and more effective churches.
The helpers have been in the news a lot lately: the people who ran towards the bomb blasts in Boston, the neighbor with McDonald’s. As much as I would want to be the person who runs to help after a bomb goes off, the truth is that I think I might have run the other way looking for safety. To follow this train of thought is disconcerting. Would I have helped get those women out of that house in Cleveland, or would I have held back and not wanted to get involved? What would I do if my students and I were actually in danger? Am I content to report to my superior or will I be the person who calls the police? In retrospect it is easy to say of course I would have done the right thing, that I would even have known definitively what the right action had been. The truth is that I probably see smaller-scale tragedies every day and let them slide. I fear I would be out of practice if I encountered something greater.
My unwillingness to dive in could probably be attributed in some ways to my introverted nature, but as I have thought about it the past few weeks, I wonder if there isn’t something else going on as well. I was raised in a church that taught certain things about men and women. Women’s lives should center around the home. They are to submit to their fathers or husbands or their church leadership simply because of their gender. Men have certain roles and women have certain roles and neither the two shall meet.
This was a damaging message for me to learn as a young girl. When we teach–whether implicitly or explicitly–that women are weak and passive then we are directly creating an environment where young women don’t learn how to stand up for themselves or to stand up for others. When we teach girls and women that they are the weaker sex, that men are the leaders, that they have to submit, then we are teaching them that they are less than. I believe this is why I am not the first to jump to help others: I was taught to to think of myself as someone who needs help, not as a helper. I see myself as vulnerable while others are strong.
Even Mike was surprised when I brought this up. I don’t present myself to the world or consciously think of myself as someone who needs to be rescued. I knew even as a teenager that those princess in the tower books were not for me. But I absorbed those messages just the same, took in the idea that I should wait for directions.
This is also a damaging message for boys to learn. There is a lot of talk in churches about depending on God alone, but the truth is that we are teaching both men and women to depend on men. When women must rely on men to make decisions it is surely no surprise that they learn to need help rather than being helpers themselves. It’s also no surprise that these same men learn to treat women as inferior instead of as equals.
As I listened to this week’s sermon that focused on courage, I thought about how Biblical heroes like Daniel and Esther were brave and flawed. I have no idea what I would have done if I found myself in those stories. My husband is someone who advocates for me by encouraging me to stick up for myself, and the support I have gotten from him and from my church has helped me to realize the importance of being an active helper. At the same time, I know that not everyone has such a wonderful partner who will walk beside them and shine a light when things are dark.
When I ask myself whether Jesus would have wanted me to hold back from helping others because of my gender, I have to answer that question with a resounding no. As I try to learn a new way, I see that we as a culture still have a lot to learn.
“You Can’t Have It All” by Barbara Ras
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.
When I moved to Missouri in 2003, I was shaken and disoriented. It felt like I had been in a prolonged period of free fall, and Missouri is where I finally hit the ground. It knocked the breath out of me.
In that sleepy town on the muddy banks of the Mississippi, I felt loneliness and sadness and confusion with blinding clarity. It was as though every nerve had migrated to the surface of my skin, and even the pressure of the humid air was painful.
Of course, I didn’t really let any of that on to the people I met. At work I was bright and cheerful, bringing in bundt cakes and pies to share–to win everyone ever. At church I smiled and was interesting, jumping immediately into serving in the children’s ministry.
But at home, in that quiet little townhome on Stardust Drive that I shared with two new roommates, I couldn’t always keep my mask from slipping. It was a season of crisis, of deathss and car accidents and sickness, all happening to family and friends in Virginia. The 900 miles between my family and me might as well have been a million. More than once the roommate whose room was next to mine slipped into my dark room and held my hand while I sobbed.
“I’m sorry,” I choked through the tears. She just nodded.
One day that roommate came home and told me she had a surprise for me. She was always up for an adventure, a trip to a darkened, supposedly haunted theatre, a late-night drive looking for the northern lights. Even her car was exciting, a low-slung yellow sporty thing that made me smile in spite of myself.
She grinned as she drove, and I fiddled with the air conditioning vent, hoping I could pull some excitement up past the sadness. She drove through a drive-thru and got us both ice cream. I licked a sticky blot of vanilla off of my wrist as she drove down St. Mary’s Avenue. Where was she taking us? We turned onto Bird street and passed blocks of worn, dingy houses. Mark Twain Elementary was quiet, the lawn patchy and dry. And then she pulled over, rolled down the windows and turned off the car. I looked around.
There was nothing here.
At first I was annoyed. I could still be sitting in my room feeling sorry for myself. But her wide smile told me I was missing something. Finally she pointed out of the window to the green street sign directly in front of the car.
Virginia Street.
“This is as close as I could get to taking you to Virginia,” she said. Her smile softened. Hopeful.
I dipped my face down, could smell the sweet vanilla from the half-melted ice cream in my hands.
This was the nicest thing anybody had ever done for me.
“Thank you,” I said quietly. She smiled, turned on the radio, and we sat in silence and ate our ice cream, a whispery breeze carrying the scene of fresh cut grass through the car.
I left Missouri seven years ago, but I still remember the kindness of that roommate. She saw my brokenness and pain, and instead of shielding herself from it, she walked into it. She took me home the only way she knew how.
I am reminded of her when I see people in my life who are sad and lonely and hiding. I think of her when I must make the choice. Do I turn my back?
Or do I go to Virginia Street with them?
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Laura told me she was pregnant… and I felt happy about it. But also confused. I said, “What about the birth control?” She hand-waved it off. Dream me accepted this, but real life me is getting a bit suspicious of Dream Laura. We had a baby and named her (of course it was a girl) Corina.
Last Tuesday, Atticus and I showed up at the surgical center before 6:30 (yes, that is in the morning) for him to get a second round of tubes. He’d had three ear infections in the two months since his first set fell out, and those ear infections were making all of us miserable. So, tubes. And, for good measure, let’s take those adenoids out, too.
I was less frightened this time, knew better what to expect. He snuggled into me on the surgical bed, and I laughed at him as the medicine started taking effect and he went from normal to WOAH to MUNCHIES in about 30 minutes. The only time I got worried was while I was waiting for him to wake up, when I heard other kids crying. After they released us, I stopped to get him a milkshake and then we had a low point when he threw up on the way home.
The truth is that I like taking care of him when he’s sick. I made him comfortable on the couch, got him whatever food and drink he wanted, and set him up with the iPad. I have less patience for that in-between stage, the cranky time before he is actually well again. That in-between stage lingered for about a week, so my Mother’s Day started at about 4:30 in the morning, when I forced Atticus to take a pain reliever and then settled into his (too small for me) sleeping bag on the floor of his room. As I listened to him sleep, I felt sorry for myself and thought up facebook statuses about how breakfast-in-(sleeping)bags should totally be a thing. Also mimosas.
And then I spent a fair amount of time staring up at the ceiling and wondered if I had made a wrong turn somewhere. He’s being awful to me, is this because I am a terrible mother? Am I a terrible mother because I want him to go away so I can get some sleep? And how terrible am I for feeling these things on Mother’s Day of all days?
In the give and take, ebb and flow of daily life it is easy to forget that what we are building is a relationship. Not a one-way system of parenting where I funnel my (questionable) wisdom into his brain and he does what I say. We are playing the long game, where we learn from each other, get mad at each other, forgive one another, love one another. A relationship is a long conversation. Thankfully our conversation has resumed and no longer consists of one person yelling NOOOOOOO a lot.
The crazy monster beast levels of stubbornness and orneriness (his and mine) have receded to normal toddler/parent levels and it is so nice to have my boy back. That is what is saving my life this week. What is saving your life this week?
In the office:
SIGH. It’s going to be a long six months.
One of my pet peeves is when teachers tell students to be quiet because this is a library. Not anymore, I say! These days the library is a dynamic learning environment. Despite the silence you remember from your childhood (when I got in trouble at both my school library and the public library for volume choices), libraries aren’t the fortresses of quiet that they used to be.
As our students’ use of technology changes our schools, the ways they use the library have shifted. This spring, as I did my inventory, I focused on moving books and furniture around to make things more inviting for my students. At one point it looked like this:
But now it looks more like this:
Things are a little bit tidier and I am happy with how the space is being reinvented, but a few weeks ago I realized that my students don’t like for things to be too organized. When the books look too nice on the shelves, they are hesitant to mess with anything. All of us are afraid of what it looks like in that first picture, but my students don’t really like the second one, either. I have higher circulation and more students making connections with books when I keep the library somewhere in between. Not too cluttered but not too organized. Lived in.
“Lived-in” was also the phrase I used to describe the feeling of inhabiting my own body a little bit more. I needed the reminder that the goal is not perfection but being welcoming and comfortable while allowing for change and progress. I will take my loud and slightly messy library any day over a perfect, quiet one. Thankfully, it seems like my students feel the same way.
As part of our ISO certification process, we’re working toward nailing down our processes, trying to make a production queue that works and that doesn’t have a constant churn of rush jobs at the front.
Part of that is writing down a list of work interruptions — jobs that became rush for one reason or another, and were pushed to the head of the line.
I’m only writing down the really serious ones, where work is radically re-arranged or someone is screwed to please someone else.
Either way, it’s become abundantly clear that not only are there quite a number of these work interruptions happening per week, there are also sometimes several per day… and most of them come from the same direction.
This is going to be a hard problem to solve. Because that direction is the top.
I had planned to find something other than this, but it’s really my favorite poem for Mother’s Day.
“The Lanyard” by Billy Collins
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy lightand taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truththat you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
the image
a carefully posed
set of glasses
pen
between fingers
ink that spills
from grizzled
mouth-
corners
oh you must be a ship
in rough
sailors about
to
cast themselves
on the mercy
of a fevered
quatrain
I spotted a crack in the logic of law
but said nothing. I am not enough
to accuse, I am not enough to dissent,
but I am enough to break.
But said nothing, but did something.
It is enough, though it is not enough.
Perhaps there is no such thing as
“enough” but instead a constant
turning away from the wheel.
I was in college or university. I was living with a few other guys in a loft above maybe a restaurant. I was on the track and field team (!!!) and I looked good. It was one of those dreams that’s not quite absurd fantasy land but also not quite any place that exists. The town the college or university was in was basically the town Gilmore Girls was filmed in, with maybe some Disneyland thrown in. It also strongly reminded me of historic Montreal.
I’m not sure what I think about the idea of “thin spaces”. I’m not sure what I think matters.
Either way, I love old churches. I love their ambiance, their sense of place, and even sometimes their ornateness and sublimity.
I guess I have to qualify old. I love cathedrals, mini-cathedrals, and micro-cathedrals. Not places in love with fabrics, gunmetal, and bright lights.
Give me dark wood and stained glass any day instead.
(This post was inspired by one Andrew Peterson posted on the Rabbit Room blog today–one of my favorite blogs out there!)
Six years ago, I stood in a softly carpeted hallway with my hand resting on a cold doorknob. I was trying out a breathing exercise a friend had taught me.
“Breathe in the pretty pink. Breathe out the ugly gray.”
In. Pink. Out. Gray.
The office was all dark wood and leather and framed diplomas. She was all pink lip gloss and blonde hair and pedicured toes. She gestured to a chair, told me to have a seat. I breathed in the pretty pink and blurted out the ugly gray.
“I have daddy issues and I think I’m emotionally stunted.” She raised a perfectly groomed eyebrow and nodded.
It took me years to work up the courage to visit a counselor. As a child I held my feelings tightly, shielded them in my hand with the same carefulness as when I caught fireflies and brought my face an inch from my cupped palms, seeing the flickering light between my fingers. As a teenager I worried so much I made myself physically ill. In college I struggled with spells of sadness that I never called depression–but there were mornings I woke up crying. And then, in a span of five years I lost my stepfather, graduated from college, got a job, moved to Tennessee, got another job, moved to Missouri, got ANOTHER job and moved to Colorado.
When I arrived in Colorado, I felt breathless. And not just from the altitude.
I made friends quickly, but felt raw and exposed. I was endlessly afraid of being replaced. I was overwhelmed and overwhelming. I was damaged goods. So I finally decided I needed a counselor. A rent-a-friend who could solve all of my problems.
I still remember the first time I worked up the courage to tell a friend I was going to counseling. She audibly gasped and said “Oh my gosh, what’s wrong?” The weight of those words covered me, shame settling like ashes on my skin.
Things got worse before they got better. My “issues” bubbled up, and I felt like there was too much wrong with me. I was broken. I couldn’t be fixed. But my counselor, with her shiny lip gloss and red toenails, walked with me, guided me, and celebrated with me. For four years I saw her several times a month. I filled one journal, and then a second, the ink on the page feeling like poison I had leeched from my body, my mind, my spirit.
I still go to my counselor for an occasional “tune-up” (my words, not hers). And while the weight of shame lessened over the years, there is still a part of me that wants to keep that chapter of my life tucked neatly into a corner, out of sight. Even writing this, I’ve had to force myself not to edit out the details–I made myself leave in how long I went, how often, the present tense visits.
But then I remember that scared little girl I once was. The one who kept the ugly gray inside, where it made everything dirty and dusty. The one who was so afraid that she pushed everyone away and then cried over the ensuing loneliness. The one who lived in the dark.
Six years ago, she finally stepped into the light. Blinking and disoriented. But with her face turned upward. The breeze tickling her skin.
Breathing in the pretty pink.
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Where are we going, Mama?
Where ARE we going, Atticus?
To the library!
That’s right!
Atticus is in a phase where he asks questions that he already knows the answers to. Here’s a random sampling: What are you doing, Mama? What’s in your mouth? What’s that noise? Where’s Daddy? Librarians patiently answer the same questions over and over, so I am particularly well-suited for this part of the job. (Random sampling: Where’s the bathroom? Why isn’t my projector working? Do you have any Diary of a Wimpy Kid books? Answers: The door by the exit. It’s not plugged up. They are all checked out.)
He has questions about Big Bunny, too. Where’s Big Bunny? When I turn it back on him, he knows: She’s under a rock. Back there. I buried Big Bunny before Atticus got home that day so he didn’t see her body (or the box). He looked for her cage and confusion crossed his face. We were careful to say things like, “She died,” and, “She won’t be here anymore,” because we like to use real words for things. His little hand held mine trustingly as we walked to the back of the yard, his bright eyes searching our faces for answers about what he should do next. When Mike knelt down next to the grave, Atticus imitated him. He’s proud of the rock he put on her grave and he likes to visit it every few days.
I assume these questions are a security thing, that he wants to be sure that nothing has changed, or he likes asking when he already knows the answers (me too, kid). Maybe it’s like hiding when you know you are going to be found or reading the end of the book first. He has faith that we will answer him, over and over and over. We hold him when he cries, we pick him up when he falls, and we say the same things time and time again. He trusts recklessly, inspiring us to respond without holding back.
“On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
Day 5. Still mostly quiet and sleeping. Skin is darkening. Feathers visible under the skin.
Closeup #1 of those developing wings/feathers.
Closeup #2 of the wing/feather development.
Those downy tufts on the top of their heads makes them look like old men!
No, it’s not a buttonhole. It’s the eye slit widening. A few more days until they open.
All lined up, waiting for food.
The post Baby Robins 2013: Day 5 appeared first on Stay Curious.
I get it. You’re a python/ruby/java engineer, and you’re building your awesome webapp. The problem is, a webapp needs CSS. And you know… just enough to realize how little you know.
CSS is complicated. It’s not a programming language strictly speaking, but you would probably rather it was; you have learned new languages in the past. But CSS is off in its own little world, a wildly complicated set of rules. Sure, you can usually make a page do what you want. Other times leave you completely baffled and out of your element. You wish you had time to read up on how to do it well, but you have code that needs writing.
So here you go. Here are a handful of nice and easy rules for you. Follow these, and your CSS should be… more presentable than if you didn’t. It will be more maintainable into the future, and that front end engineer your startup will hire as soon as it can afford to will thank you. (Because that engineer may be me!)
#billing .dialog if you’ll likely want the same CSS for dialog boxes later on; just use .dialog. (This isn’t completely absolute: if you know you’re dealing with an exception to the rule, keep it specific.)!important. Like tribbles, these things are born pregnant, and will multiply faster than you can imagine. Instead, take five minutes to learn how selector specificity works and use the browser dev tools to see which rule is overriding the one you want.Say you have generic dialog box .dialog { color: blue; }, which is overridden on your billing page with a special rule #billing .dialog { color: red; }. If you later find yourself adding another rule like #account .dialog { color: red; }, STOP!
Instead, make something reusable: .dialog-important { color: red; }. Then you don’t need to touch your CSS yet again when you encounter a third page that needs the same thing!
This isn’t really my thing.
I sat in my car in the church parking lot, twisting the tarnished ring on my finger until it pinched the skin. I looked down the line of cars and counted. Ten cars. Mostly mini-vans. A small group. People would notice me.
Sometimes I get uncomfortable at “women’s events.” They can occasionally feel over-wrought. The sincere emotions of other women can make me itchy. And the more tears they shed, the more I shut down. It’s not them. It’s me. Boy is it me.
But I walked inside, into the dark sanctuary lit by fake flickering candles. I scratched my arms. Cushions for kneeling were scattered in the front of the room. I scratched harder.
The night started with music and I slipped to the side and stood by the windows. They faced west, toward the jagged mountains and softening blue sky. The sun was weakening. I could stare at it, only squinting slightly.
I sat on one of the cushions and lightly touched my fingers to the cool window. The sun slipped lower. The mountains grew darker. The sky morphed into the fuzzy pink color of the dryer lint when a red sock is mixed in with my whites.
That’s pretty, I thought.
I sat there for twenty minutes. Long enough to watch the mountains turn inky black. The sky blazed with orange the color of a campfire.
And in the languid blink of an eye, it was over. The sky went from fresh bruise to dark. No color. Just velvety dark. I leaned my forehead against the window, cooler now. I shifted on my cushion, lightly scratched my arm.
This isn’t really my thing, I thought.
But maybe it should be.
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Day 4. More misty rain. Eye slits widening. Wing feathers noticeable under the skin. Tiny robin feet!
See if you can find the worm that the mother robin left in the nest for the babies to eat!
The post Baby Robins 2013: Day 4 appeared first on Stay Curious.
Day 3 and another chilly, damp day for the baby robins. The mother stayed on the nest most of the day. I checked them in the morning (sleepy heads) and at dusk (sort of hungry, but mostly sleepy). This group seems to be developing slower than last year’s.
The post Baby Robins 2013: Day 3 appeared first on Stay Curious.
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always, always — home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country — all of us –
facing the stars
hope — a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it — together.
This is the last stanza of the poem that Richard Blanco wrote for President Obama’s second inauguration. I kept trying to figure out when I should post it, kept putting it off as not quite right, not yet. And now it’s the end of National Poetry Month so I guess we will conclude the month with it. If you used the inaugural poem as a chance to take a break and maybe go to the bathroom instead of listening to someone read poetry, I encourage you to read it now. To me, it is a powerful reflection on the things that unite us as Americans (and, really as citizens of the world). We have varied experiences and yet our hearts are moved by the same bravery, the same tragedy. Despite our differences, some things connect us all.
A long time ago, on this very blog, I posted that I was not really a person who liked poetry very much. And it was the truth. I had no use for telling the truth slant, I wanted it straight. But as the world and my heart have grown more crooked, I better understand this circuitous path. If you are interested in discovering more poetry for yourself, my number one tip is to ask the people around you what poems they like. Not only will you learn something about them, you will also have an entryway into that particular poem, through the person you already know.
There are so many more poems that I want to share that I will probably post them on Sundays for a while. Thank you for indulging me for a solid month (minus a few days here and there). I hope one of these poems connected with you in some way.
We have been trying this new thing where we take Atticus into church with us. It’s been successful as far as church services with a two-year-old go. He is suddenly able to sit with us and play quietly for part of the time, and he likes the music. Plus, he gets to take communion and I am super into that.
But, you know, having him there means that we are distracted in the permanent way of parents, ears attuned to his noises. This is troublesome if you think, like I used to, that worship is more about stillness than about motion. This is a season of our lives that is about exploring the outside world rather than examining ourselves, and parenthood has been about motion almost from the very beginning. I had twinges in my belly at 16 weeks and the predictions that he was going to be an active boy came true. We rocked him to sleep (and became those people who rock themselves without knowing it). He preferred to run from his very first steps, which, of course, means that we are still running after him. He plows his grocery cart into the wall and smashes his trucks into one another. I stuff diapers and Mike makes dinner and we wipe Atticus’s nose. There is less stillness in our lives than there used to be.
One of the things that resonated with me from the very beginning of motherhood, before I could even feel those first kicks, was part of the preface of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
I am not totally present in church when I am there with Atticus, but I think the act of being there is enough for now. We are making space for our church community to be a priority; even if I don’t hear every word of the sermon, I am learning from the people around me how to make my very flesh a great poem. Yesterday I watched another parent make all those familiar movements – soothing and wiping and caressing. You could never mistake that for inattention.
Day 2. I was able to see all four baby robins, but they are really very snuggled together. Today was chilly and rainy. I expected to see them eating today, but mostly they slept. I try to only look in the nest in the morning and night so that they are not disturbed too much, but really, every time someone leaves the house, the mother flies to the nearby tree and leaves the nest for a few minutes.
Here’s the honeysuckle vine on our front porch. Can you find the nest?
Look closely and you will see the mother bird’s beak. She’s done a terrific job keeping the warm and dry this weekend.
Eye slits are starting to form. They will continue to spread across the eye before they are able to open.
Four sleepyheads. Look at that baby chicken neck!
If you look close, you can see the beginnings of where the feathers will start to emerge.
Not as sharp as I would like, but this closeup of the down shows off the tiny spurs that hold air.
The post Baby Robins 2013: Day 2 appeared first on Stay Curious.
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
So goes the quote, supposedly (though this is disputed) by Eleanor Rooseveldt.
But this is the sort of thing that only nerds could believe. Only people who view their bodies as a regrettable extension of their minds, and communication as a sort of small-bandwidth wifi useful only for the propagation of information.
There’s an entirely relational dimension missing here. People have always talked about people. People have always talked about events. Because those things are important. Because they’re relational. And because relationships are important.
This reminds me of what Sir Ken Robinson said about education:
Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. They become disembodied, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.
We have baby robins again this year! Last year I documented the 12 days of their development from hatching to leaving the nest. You can look through the archive here (reverse order of date, so scroll down to see the earlier images).
Four robin eggs in nest. The nest is built in our honeysuckle vines on our front porch.
Baby robins Day 1! Hatched on Sunday, April 28th. So far 3 of the 4 eggs have hatched. Last year they hatched on April 27th!
The post Baby Robins 2013: Day 1 appeared first on Stay Curious.
“Happiness” by Jane Kenyon
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
From the ScienceOnline website:
As a young nonprofit, we are charged with demonstrating broad public support for our organization so that we can maintain our 501(c)(3) status. So, in addition to seeking larger individual donations, and applying for grants, we need donations from a broad donor base. Here’s how we can do that. We are asking for donations of $20.14 from 2,014 individuals before the beginning of the year 2014. Will you be one of the 2,014?
WHO WE ARE
ScienceOnline® is a non-profit organization that facilitates conversations, community, and collaborations at the intersection of Science and the Web. We do this through online networks, face-to-face events (both global and grassroots), and projects such as ScienceSeeker (our online tool to find science content on the web) and The Open Laboratory (our annual anthology of the best science writing online).
Our conferences bring together scientists, journalists, and other stakeholders for meaningful conversation so they can build trust and learn to understand each other. This results in better communication about the science to the public and to policymakers – from both the journalist and the researcher.
We build and support this community that encourages one another, networks, brainstorms, mentors, learns and is generous about sharing data and information. This results in joint projects, leads for job opportunities, and information about potential funding sources.
We enable connections between researchers in diverse fields of science by bringing them out of their specialized conferences and tapping into their shared experience of using the internet to do and communicate science online.
WE REACH PEOPLE
In January 2013, we had 450 attendees present at our annual conference (we keep attendance small to ensure good interaction). But there are currently 5,699 unique Twitter users who continue the conversation online with the conference hashtag! This community stays in touch via the hashtag all year.
We are looking for ways to include more people in the conversations about science communication and doing science on the web. There are three areas we are currently working on: local satellite groups (both in the US and abroad); regional events and topical events (e.g. ScienceOnline Climate in DC in August, ScienceOnline Oceans in Miami in October), and resource tools for professional development.
This year we also added 24 global Watch Parties to our flagship conference, multiplying the number of people adding content to the conversation. We are looking to increase our global reach with creative ways to include distant groups.
Our website maintains an archive of videos captured from our various events so that we can serve and empower the community with an ongoing, free, resource.
WHY WE NEED YOU
We’re all in this together. Our goals overlap. We (and you, we think!) want science to be done well, to be communicated accurately, to effect change, and to be accessible.
The conversations, relationships, collaborations, and communication that come out of the ScienceOnline projects, events, and community will do that.
We think you want to see science communicated effectively. You can ensure that we are able to create the atmosphere and provide the tools needed to allow the ScienceOnline community to grow and be effective. Come join us!
Please be one of the 2,014 and contribute $20.14. Click here to donate.
The post ScienceOnline Needs our Help appeared first on Stay Curious.
Yes, I know there’s no comment section. Yes, I know this is an egregious oversight. I’ll be working on it tonight. I hope to have something to look at soon.
Here’s the sequel to my endeavor into visual story-telling! Hope you enjoy! (And the quality is bad. I’m definitely still trying to figure all of this out!)
(And if you haven’t, watch Part 1. It will make more sense 
)
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Kathleen Norris read this poem last summer at the Glen – David Dwyer was her husband and she wrote about his death in Acedia and Me.
I think fans of Madeleine L’Engle will particularly like this poem.
“The Higher Arithmetic” by David Dwyer
In heaven, I do not know that there are angels,
but I know there are numbers there, and light.(Arithmetic and heaven are both uncountably
full of light). Inaccessible cardinals, there,
will lord it over mere infinities;
the naturals will dance among the reals . . .
Apart from numbers, how little we know.There is no largest prime. The Halting Problem
is formally undecidable. Every subset
of a well-ordered set is well-ordered itself. And so on . . .Such things are true, even easy to prove.
Are there uncountably more, unknowably other
true things about the world?I had to go away. A woman I love
(and this is true, too,) put an icon
of an archangel into the glove-compartment
of my car. I haven’t looked, but I know it is there,
as I know there is no largest prime.Raphael,
she said. His numberless wings cloak all of us
poor travelers who do not know, but are not lost.
The angel, she said, of happy meeting, after all.
Geof responds to my previous post. He generally agrees, but goes on to say this:
Take, for instance, a self-driving car. One of the assumptions we have is that allowing computers to drive cars will allow a lot more cars to be on the road, since computers are better drivers than humans (a fact I don’t want to dispute). But imagine we do fit 30% more cars on the road. Imagine a traffic disruption. There will surely be far fewer traffic disruptions because computers are better drivers than humans. But when they do occur, they will cause massively more congestion than now, because the system will have been optimised that much further.A driverless car will be best implemented when it communicates with its peers in a networked way that mimics the old CB network band: “Get off at Exit 351 and take US 31 north; I-65 is a parking lot.” But there’s fragility, of course: not all cars will have humans out of the loop, not everyone will have a car that communicates in the same way, there will be network outages, etc. That’s why peer-to-peer on open technologies will make that work.
See, my technological bias is showing. But I will also admit my own bias against driverless cars: I’d rather drive, and if not, I’d rather take mass transit to have it be worthwhile.
I thought a bit about this when I was writing the original post. This is very true. If we allow cars to function like nodes on a network (the internet model) and route around damage to the network, we can probably mitigate a lot of the potential problems of driverless cars that operate in a vacuum, informationally sealed from the surrounding vehicles. Basically we start treating cars like packets.
I see a couple problems. Even assuming that all cars on the road are driverless (there are no pesky humans behind the wheel ever), we’re always designing our transportation system for peak loads. One of the points of driverless cars is to distribute peak load more evenly, and therefore optimize drive time by taking different routes that make sense depending on the situation. However, if the system is optimised so that peak load and a problem co-incide, there might not be anywhere to go to route around damage. That is to say, if the network is fully optimised, at peak loads, there’s a fine line between completely fine and completely chaotic. And building new roads makes laying fibre look like playing with LEGO.
The other thing I’ve though about is how focused we are on designing for and controlling a certain set of parameters. For instance, we might optimise for peak load, for shortest travel time, etc, and in order to do that we might have to network cars and let them talk to each other. And we’ve seen what that looks like with PCs. What happens when you take previously un-networked things and connect them to a network? It’s a hard thing to do. If we do network driverless cars, it’s likely that a lot of the damage to the network will suddenly take on a very much more sinister aspect: Hacking. We’d do well to consider the example of casinos: They design for and control their gains and losses so that the house always wins. Except when losses come from directions they simply can’t control for. Fire, earthquake, employees suing their bosses, catastrophic losses of life, etc. I worry that we might design for and attempt to control the variables of traffic without considering the very real possibility of damage that come from a direction we weren’t expecting.
Maybe we’ll find something even more exotic when we’re done making the perfect car. What I actually hope is that we rediscover the train. We may find that once we have the perfect driverless car, gas is too expensive to actually run a car. But that would mean we’d have to reconfigure our entire way of live. And that’s a lot less likely to happen.
“homage to my hips” by Lucille Clifton
these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top
Middle school is the worst. Puberty is kind to very few of us, which is why you won’t find pictures of me at age 12 on display.
Even before the loose limbs and the big teeth, I struggled to inhabit my body. Was I awkward because I didn’t play sports, or did I not play sports because I was awkward? No one knows for sure, but I can’t throw a ball, never really learned how to swim, don’t know how to dance. If you need a couch-sitter, I’m your woman. Otherwise, you should probably look somewhere else.
I anticipated a lot of sitting with my feet up while I was pregnant, but it turns out that pregnancy is all about physicality. We say that pregnant women glow, but I didn’t expect the ways that everything changed about simply being me. It was different to dress myself, to go to the bathroom. My hair and my fingers grew thicker. I had to ice my feet and my belly became bigger and more unrecognizable every day. It wasn’t over after giving birth, either: there was the nursing and the healing and the waking to attend to his needs. Let’s not talk about the hormones.
My body is a little more lived-in these days. It turns out that growing a person and feeding him makes things a little different, and I don’t just mean physically. I inhabit my body a little bit more, am more present in its boundaries. I have more respect for its strength. Jogging and yoga are still quite enough to push my limits from time to time—no zumba here. But in a surprising turn of events, I am learning to enjoy the physicality of play. Atticus wrestles with me, rides airplane on my feet, and gives me boom hugs. I hide in the bathroom and jump out as he giggles. We do our silly dances together.
The girl who had to be told to go outside is finally learning the discipline of play. Oh, sure, I played as a kid—with my Barbies, or Legos, or on a swing. But Atticus is teaching me how to play hard, with abandon. With this practice comes a new sense of being present in my own skin. I have to admit that I like it.
Visual storytelling is not something I have experimented with very often. And that’s just what this video is. An experiment. Which, frankly, is terrifying. I don’t like new things! But it was a fun practice (even if the execution is VERY lacking and I couldn’t figure out how to put music to it!)
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I have a few. I’m part of a generation or a class of people that grew up using technology to facilitate their lives in a way the previous generation never imagined, but I’m not so fully integrated into tech that I can’t live apart from it. It’s not yet part of the air I breathe, if you will. I see an upcoming generation raised on smartphones and tablets, and I don’t think they’ll have these techno-biases simply because they’re not living on the bleeding edge and don’t need to make any assumptions about their technology. My generation on the other hand seems obsessed with using tech to solving Big Problems, as if we somehow need to justify the existence of all these things. Of course we don’t. So without further ado, the list:
Today’s technology is better than yesterday’s technology.
This is part techno-utopianism, part confirmation bias. Lots of crappy technologies exist today that won’t exist tomorrow. A few crappy technologies persist into the future. But very few crappy technologies persist from very far in the past into the future. There’s a process of winnowing out. Thus an old technology is probably a good technology. The older it is the longer it has persisted and the longer it is likely to persist. I’m sure you can come up with a few examples. Today’s technologies may seem better only because they’re novel: Older technologies tend to be invisible until they’re replaced.
Technology is going to solve a lot of Big Problems.
This may be true. It may not. It may be that technology actually causes a lot of Big Problems, or that people trying to solve Big Problems with new technologies actually cause more Big Problems than they solve. (Take, for instance, the car; it solved a lot of huge problems like an overabundance of dead horses and horse shit in the streets, but contributes massively to climate change.) The assumption that technology will solve Big Problems isn’t an assumption that has been borne out, at least not yet. And we don’t really understand what might happen if we do solve these problems using technology.
Take, for instance, a self-driving car. One of the assumptions we have is that allowing computers to drive cars will allow a lot more cars to be on the road, since computers are better drivers than humans (a fact I don’t want to dispute). But imagine we do fit 30% more cars on the road. Imagine a traffic disruption. There will surely be far fewer traffic disruptions because computers are better drivers than humans. But when they do occur, they will cause massively more congestion than now, because the system will have been optimised that much further. What if we put this infrastructure in place only to find that commute time remains the same or gets worse, maybe even much worse? We’ll have to console ourselves with the fact that we can now do something other than driving (I would much rather read a book than drive, for instance), and purposefully forget about that other, older technology that already solves the same problem: the train.
Or take the internet. It hasn’t really solved a whole lot of Big Problems, though it has solved a lot of smaller ones that we forget about. For instance jobs like the travel agent, the journalist, and (hopefully soon) the real estate agent. Which leads me to my next point.
Technology makes us all richer or at least better off.
A lot of people have been taking stabs at why we seem to keep getting better gadgets while we get poorer. There are names for this, like The Great Stagnation. We wonder why the internet hasn’t created a whole lot of jobs like the last big technological revolution, the car, did. Instead of creating jobs, the internet has massively optimised our economy. And there seem to be less jobs to go around as machines start doing all the things that well-meaning but rather dull people used to do.
We assume that the internet (for one example) will make us richer, though there’s really no evidence for that. It has certainly made a few people very rich, but unlike the industrial revolution, the information revolution has very much concentrated wealth in the hands of a very few (inventors and the PHD holders they hire). There’s very little halo effect there. Where Rockefeller could become massively wealthy and also lift the standard of living for the millions in his employ, the headcount of Google and Apple together is something close to 125,000. That’s it. Consider Samsung Electronics (not even the entire Samsung Group), which has similar revenues to Apple but actually makes physical things and has almost three times the headcount. It’s not at all obvious that the world would be better off with more Apples and Googles than with more Samsungs.
I need the newest thing.
This is one of my personal failings. I feel like a poor person because I have a 3-year-old phone. It still works in its own way. But it feels like a dinosaur. I also have a laptop, a desktop, two tablets, and an e-reader. And yet without fail, each of those electronic devices seems old and decrepit roughly six months after I’ve bought it.
Yet every time I buy a new device I find something new to hate about that device. I become used the foibles of my old devices. And that takes a while.
But comparing the newest thing with other newest things isn’t particularly obvious. It makes more sense to compare, say, an e-reader to the thing it’s trying to replace (the book) rather than other e-readers. And it’s not patently obvious that e-readers are better than books. On an individual level they’re almost certainly not. A book with its sights, smells, and tactile sensations is an experience, and a pleasant one. It never runs out of battery, can be read at any viewing angle, and can be easily marked up (which is more important than you think!). An e-reader on the other hand fails at all these things. However on a meta level and e-reader can hold all my books, is searchable, and connects to the internet. Are these features enough to make the switch? Well, it depends on who you are and what your use case is. The answer to that question isn’t as obvious as Amazon might hope.
Or take a tablet. They’re wonderful devices for a lot of things, except when it comes to replacing really old technology. This all ties into the concept of a “paperless office”, which we’ve all been trying and failing to do for decades now. It turns out that writing on paper is one of the most useful and basic technologies around. While the tablet may (and should) kill the MP3 player, the laptop for certain uses, the CD player, the desktop for certain uses, and other things like that, it turns out that it absolutely blows at replacing really basic technologies like writing. Writing on a tablet isn’t easy. Again, it’s not obvious that if we replaced all paper in the world with a boatload of tablets we’d be better off for the substitution.
So these are my technology biases. I’m sure I have more. What are yours?
“The Wedding in the Courthouse” by Kathleen Norris
I don’t like weddings
When you live here
Long enough
All the spindly legged girls
Grow up like weeds
To be mowed down: matrons
At twenty-five, all edges taken off.
When the music starts
They’re led down the aisle
In their white dresses
And we celebrate sentiment
And money.There’s only one wedding
I’d go to again
I happened to be on an errand
At the county courthouse
And Lucille came running:
“Will you be a witness?
We need two,
And the girls can’t leave their desks.”They’d shown up
That morning, no family or friends.
Not kids: he looked about thirty
And she just a little younger.
They couldn’t stop smiling.
She might have been pregnant,
But you couldn’t tell.
It might have been the denim jumper
She was wearing.I can picture Lucille
Chain-smoking: surprised
And pleased
To interrupt routine.
And the Deputy Sheriff,
A young man, blushing,
Loaded gun in his holster,
Arms hanging loose:
He looked at his shoes.
But it’s the words
I remember most. It was as if
I was hearing them for the first time.
Lucille put out a cigarette
And began: “Dearly beloved,”
And we were.
“Release” by Adelaide Crapsey
With swift
Great sweep of her
Magnificent arm my pain
Clanged back the doors that shut my soul
From life.
Fourteen years ago, Mike and I went, as usual, to a friend’s dorm room for our regularly scheduled Tuesday night TV watching. But instead of teenagers with big words and romantic triangles, there were images of a school surrounded by police. Columbine.
The high school I graduated from was nothing like Columbine, much smaller and more rural. But that did not keep me from being afraid. The talk (much of which turned out to be wrong) of jocks and outcasts, the fact that students were shot in the library, the familiarity of the idea of a school–these things had me panicked. I had seen scary things in the news before, but this one hit so close to home that I sat in my college classes and calculated the fastest way out, fear in the pit of my stomach if someone walked by the open door of the classroom. I prayed and sang out loud any time I had to drive home in the dark. I worried about my brother, who was still in high school, and the bomb threats his school began receiving. I felt silly, because of course I didn’t know anyone there. Of course I wasn’t directly affected. But the world was suddenly an evil place and I was not sure how to fight the darkness.
Eventually the fear receded and I was able to function again, but I felt twinges of that same panic last week when the news was relentlessly bad. I was afraid to go to work on Friday because the anniversaries of Columbine and Oklahoma City and Virginia Tech loomed large over an already dark and heavy week. And I felt shame for feeling that way, safe in my North Carolina home.
What helped me last week was not when people dismissed my fears, but when people affirmed them. The world is a scary place sometimes. I’m edgy, too. It’s understandable that you are scared. This has been a tough week. Those were the things that cut through the fear and the shame and made me brave. I say these same words to Atticus all the time: it’s okay to be afraid. But it was nice to have someone say them to me.
Today is a sick day. A headachey, lay on the couch and nap and drink tea day. I’ve found in the last few years that I tend to read poetry on those quiet, gray days. Today I was reading through the collection Poetry 180 and came across this poem (which is a poem I also read recently on my friend Kari’s blog). And it made me sigh and pull my quilt up to my chin and smile. I hope it does the same for you.
God Says Yes To Me
–Kaylin Haught
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked htat up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
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I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I can kind of hear the psychic promptings of Chris Hubbs, so here goes.
I was in Boston nine days ago.
I was there for a conference with my friend, excited to be back in one of my favorite cities. I love Boston, love its history and its brownstones and its friendliness. I love Paul Revere’s house with its soft floors that give ever so slightly when you walk across them. I love the salty, briny smell at the harbor. I love its cobblestone streets and the T, slightly dingy and worn, rumbling underground and then sliding back into the sunlight.
My friend and I spent one morning roaming the streets of Boston. We walked across the Longfellow bridge, the wind blustery and making our ears ache. We explored Beacon Hill then stumbled across the Freedom Trail. We crossed another bridge, laughing at how we had no idea where we were. But we didn’t care. We were in Boston. That night as I sat on my bed at our hotel, nursing the blisters on my feet, I looked out at the Charles River and smiled at our view. Boston.
I can only imagine that’s why the bombing at the Boston Marathon shook me so much yesterday. That same friend and I frantically messaged each other back and forth.
We were just there.
We walked down that street.
We took that T.
My God, we were just there.
I felt just on the brink of tears for most of the afternoon, eventually turning off the coverage when I felt battered by too much information. I wondered if anybody I had met at the writer’s conference was affected? How many of those daring journalists covering war were now covering a different war–one fought on the streets just outside their homes, by an enemy too cowardly to reveal itself.
I’m glad I was just in Boston. Glad I had just walked those streets, just felt that Boston breeze on my cold skin. I’m glad I laughed in her restaurants and exclaimed over and over “I love Boston!” And yet I mourn the lives that were lost, the security that was shattered. I hate that someone took a joyful occasion, a race where people push their bodies hard down cobblestone streets, past monuments to heroes, and tainted it with death and fear.
My God, we were just there.
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I know. I’m going to be that girl who doesn’t blog for months and months and then comes on here and is all “Oh guys, I’ve just been so busy. Is anybody even reading this blog anymore? Haha, tap tap, is this thing on?”
So instead, I will just tell you about my last few years and my time working on my MFA at Goucher College. But, you know, I have to add a little something. So this story about grad school will be told with the help of GIFS. Because I’m ready for some story telling that has more than just my words (oh my dear goodness, so many words!)
Getting a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Non Fiction involves two things really. First, lots and lots of writing.
Writing in the morning. Writing at night. Writing on your lunch break and vacations and all day Saturdays holed up in a coffee shop, begging people to come visit you, to distract you, because you will do anything, ANYTHING to procrastinate.
And when you’re not writing, you’re reading.
Great teetering stacks of books are everywhere in my house. They are on my nightstand. Scattered across my coffee table. Outside of every room, in the trunk of my car, stuffed in my sofa cushions. I wish any of those were exaggerations. I have read books about serial killers in Chicago, a girl growing up in a funeral home, elephants in a Tampa zoo and people fleeing the atomic bomb.
And the memoirs. Oh the memoirs. I read so many memoirs. And they all seemed to have one thing in common. Lurking on the page, somewhere, buried among stories of poverty and adventure, was an alcoholic. When I would find him or her, I would sigh and mumble “Seriously? Another one?”
All of that writing and reading took a lot of time. My first semester, any sense of balance was elusive. Weekends were consumed with schoolwork, and I rarely had time with friends. I would spend entire weekends in my pajamas, emerging on Monday morning bleary and unbalanced. Basically, that first semester of trying to blend everything came out looking like this:
But it did eventually get better. I made weekly social outings a priority, and gradually I found some kind of rhythm.
Writing one’s thesis is a wild journey. Some weekends, I would start so well. I would have so much momentum, would sit at my laptop and go nuts, would write pages of stuff and think:
But sometimes, you get so much momentum, that you just can’t keep up with yourself. Writing blitzes like that often ended in staggering face plants of perceived failure.
But a lot of the time, I never even got to the momentum. I doubted and floundered.
But my saving graces were my amazing mentors, my patient friends and the incredibly supportive writers I worked with. Oh, and coffee. Coffee also helped tremendously.
It’s hard for me to believe that after nearly two years, I am almost finished with grad school. A few days ago I sent my thesis off to my first and second readers and I did this:
Immediately followed by this:
Finishing up my time at Goucher is certainly bittersweet. I will miss the community of grad school, the motivation and the deadlines that helped push me to be a better writer. I will miss having a mentor who I can email with my latest question about grammar or chronology or other equally mundane tasks that I simply couldn’t think through on my own. But in the meantime, I will celebrate…
And I will revel in completing this goal before I set off on my next adventure!
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A few months ago I was contacted and asked if I wanted to write a review of Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes by Shauna Niequist. To back up, though, I should explain that an earlier book by Shauna, Bittersweet, kept me from losing my mind when I was in Haiti in 2010. The night after we flew in political riots broke out in the capital, so for three days I was stuck at a hotel where I spent hours at a time on my bed, my feet propped up in my windowsill, trying to catch a sticky breeze, reading Bittersweet. Shauna wrote with honesty about hard things, which is exactly what I needed as I tried to push a constant drowning tide of fears out of my mind.
So you might say, I’m a Shauna Niequist fan. I was excited to get her book in the mail, and excited to read a memoir (yay) about food (yay) and hospitality (yay).
The book is broken down into a series of essays in four parts, and includes recipes, menus and a discussion guide. I will start with saying I think Shaun is a lovely, lovely writer who infuses her writing with care and love. You might say she writes on the word level, as she cooks on the ingredient level (see what I did there?). Which, as a fellow writer I certainly appreciate. I loved sentences like this one: “The light is fading, the sky bleaching from blue to white and then, warming to the softest blush pink, like ballet tights, like a rosewater macaroon.” I could see the things Shauna wrote about, could taste the food she described.
That leads me to another point. Right or wrong, when I read a memoir or a collection of personal essays, I want to like the person I’m reading about. Yes, I want to see their flaws and sometimes I want to disagree with them, but at the end, I want to feel like they are a new friend. Again, this is not how everyone approaches memoir (and a lot probably has to do with the fact that I am a people-pleaser writing my own memoir!) And there were so many times with Bread and Wine that I set the book aside and sighed. “I wish Shauna would invite me to dinner,” I thought. “I wish I could go out to a fun restaurant with her.” In short, I wished Shauna Niequiest would be my new friend. (Shauna, call me!)
But I will say that, as the writer of my own life story, there were some essays that seemed almost out of place. Perhaps that was a chronology issue at times? While I enjoyed the writing even in those essays, I wondered if they belonged in another collection, particularly the few that didn’t have recipes attached to them. I stumbled in places where I was pulled back and forth in time between scenes, and just craved a little smoothing out of the bumps.
I used to throw a lot of parties. I would make heaps of food and cram too many people in my town home and collapse on the couch at the end of the night, drained but happy. The last few years I haven’t been able to do many of those parties, and reading Bread and Wine made me miss that. It made me pull out a notepad and begin planning my own dinner party.
And as I thumbed through the recipes in Bread and Wine I smiled at the thought of cooking some of those foods for my friends.
I wanted to cook a plate of gaia cookies and take them to my friend Krissy as she sits at home loving on her new baby boy.
I wanted to set a hot plate of sweet potato fries in front of Brianne and eat them with her while we sit on my couch and catch up on life now that she lives in a different state.
I wanted to cook up Shauna’s potato salad for Katy and her husband Brett, and sit outside in the sunshine and laugh and drink beer and eat hamburgers smoky from the grill.
And I think that is the beauty of Bread and Wine–the reminder that sharing a meal with those you love is nourishing on so many levels.
I received a review copy of this book but all my opinions are my own
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I wish I had bought cast iron cookware long before now.
Laura went shopping this weekend and happened upon some very nice new cast iron cookware for fairly cheap. I’ve been on the lookout for used cast iron for some time, but it seems like used cast iron is getting pretty rare as people snatch them up to sell on the internet.
Either way, there’s something wonderful about cooking with cast iron. It’s not really one thing, more like a combination of things, and probably also an extremely favourable comparison to the free cookware we’ve been blessed (and cursed) with until now.
I’ve been frying with a non-stick (I think teflon) skillet for a while now, and if you know anything about teflon coated pans, you know they’re thin and light. After all, you’re not supposed to charge a teflon coated pan with heat, as teflon degrades at high temps. Because the pans are so thin, they warp easily, especially in challenging circumstances like deglazing (which is virtually impossible anyways, as there’s nothing to deglaze from teflon). To be fair, Laura got the pan for free from her old job. So it was free. But that’s about the only point in its favour.
My other set of pans are heavy-bottomed stainless steel. So not exactly non-stick in any real way. They charge with and hold heat fairly well, but even with all precautions taken, things like eggs just stick and don’t like to come off. Again, these pans were free. We inherited them from Laura’s still-living parents when they threw out their entire kitchen. They’re decent enough pans. They’re old-ish and quite nice for what they are. But they’re still just too light and too sticky to cook certain things.
So aast iron (pre-seasoned in this case) can be a little rough, but it’s wonderfully non-stick, and makes cooking steak and other meats an absolute revelation. (Even for eggs: my first over-easy was a bit tough to flip, but it was exactly the way I like my eggs.) For instance, I’d always had trouble controlling the temperature of our other pots when pan-frying a thick steak, so I’d end up with a steak seared to death on the outside and cool on the inside. Or tough all the way through. Either way, no fun to serve or eat. It sucks to have to ruin a perfectly good steak by cutting it in half lengthwise so it will cook all the way through.
I pan-fried my first steak on cast iron today, and it was perfect. Absolutely perfect. The outside had a perfect crust, and the inside was the medium-rare I love.
We also got a cast iron dutch oven, something I’ve wanted since the ceramic glazed cast iron piece of crap from Loblaws crapped out (the ceramic started chipping off the lid into the food… not fun).
Oh, and these things are heavy. Seriously. If we ever experience a home invasion (which we won’t, at least statistically; we live in Canada) it will be my weapon of choice. This is a problem if you’re used to tossing your stir-fries, but frankly I’m not that fancy yet. I like the heft of it. The pan just stays where you put it. No fuss with the thing moving about the kitchen as if it had a mind of its own like our other pots and pans.
I almost posted this poem on Friday, but I opted for William Carlos Williams instead. Today our pastor read it during his sermon, so it seems I should post it after all.
“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I was listening to CBC News the other day when a financial report aired, and I was struck by how useless most of the metrics they reported are, at least to me. And to most everyone I know. They reported a lot of stock prices, talked about the exchange rate, tracked the progress of the major exchanges, gave an inflation update, etc, etc. Do I care about those things day-to-day? No. I’m not a day trader or a currency buff. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of people I know (aside from enthusiasts) who can actually use that information.
So why does the news still report this stuff?
I know these things are economic indicators and that they tell certain people certain things. But the news isn’t for the 1%. I’m sure those people know about this stuff long before I hear about it on the 6:00pm news.
Wouldn’t it be better (though I’m sure a lot more work) to track something a little bit more useful to me? For instance, instead of telling me about rising wheat prices and 2% inflation, tell me, for instance, how much bread I can buy with a couple dollars. Or something. Instead of reporting on the unemployment rate, why not give me a labour statistic I can actually use, like what high-quality job sectors are currently experiencing labour shortages?
“Peace on Earth” by William Carlos Williams
The Archer is wake!
The Swan is flying!
Gold against blue
An Arrow is lying.
There is hunting in heaven—
Sleep safe till tomorrow.The Bears are abroad!
The Eagle is screaming!
Gold against blue
Their eyes are gleaming!
Sleep!
Sleep safe till tomorrow.The Sisters lie
With their arms intertwining;
Gold against blue
Their hair is shining!
The Serpent writhes!
Orion is listening!
Gold against blue
His sword is glistening!
Sleep!
There is hunting in heaven—
Sleep safe till tomorrow.
I saved this poem for Poem in Your Pocket Day so I could tell you all about it, but the day was long and my time is short so I will have to save it for another day. This is the poem I carried today. The news in the world has been bad, and it has been hard to hear the music, but I believe it is there.
Surface tension is cool.
So just in case you were thinking about throwing some GPUs in your home computer and mining Bitcoins, I wouldn’t bother. Not only will you barely break even based on current electricity rates, the amount of Bitcoin you can mine with your GPU is likely to radically decrease soon.
What’s happening is dedicated hardware is coming online. ASIC (or spplication-specific integrated circuit) rigs are starting to be built and bought and, though some thought they might never be, shipped.
This means that a massive amount of dedicated computing power is suddenly going to be pointed at the Bitcoin network, which means that the difficulty of mining new Bitcoins is going to rise.
Right now, the only way a person with a off-the-shelf GPU can mine and get anything at all is by joining a pool. The days of individual miners actually mining Bitcoins on their lonesome is absolutely over.
When this new ASIC hardware starts coming online, as I believe it already has, the difficulty will increase again and GPU mining will be (essentially) done.
Use your GPUs to render desktops and games again, folks. That is, after all, what they were made for.
Here’s my favourite GIF ever:
I present it with no comment.
I was hiking in the North Georgia mountains on the night that a bomb blew up in Centennial Olympic Park. This was long before iPhones and even regular cell phones were something of a novelty. We were oblivious and when I got home I turned on the TV to see if anything interesting happened in the Olympics during the day. We were shocked when the coverage was not a recap of the day in the Olympics but instead wall-to-wall coverage of the explosion, of death, of injury, of fear. It took a couple days for the horror to wear off, but after that the feeling was replaced by anger and defiance. They can’t do this to us.
I went with some friends to Centennial Olympic park a couple days after they re-opened the park and apparently the whole city of Atlanta had the same idea, too. This seemed like a great idea when I was young and didn’t have children. It was elbow-to-elbow people inside the park. If there had been a follow-up bomb the casualties would have been double or triple that original incident. That’s fine, we as a city were out to let people know we weren’t going to be afraid.
I don’t know a whole lot of people in the Boston area, only a few. The ones that I do know, however, are tougher and harder bitten than us here in Atlanta. If we were tough and defiant, I expect they will be even more so. I hope double the number of people turn out for the Boston Marathon next year and I hope justice is swiftly brought to whoever caused this. I don’t just hope the people of Boston will be brave,because I know they will, it’s in their blood.
I hope that’s not a picture of a rectal thermometer. I have no idea.
I’ve got the sneezing, the sinus pressure, the sore throat, the cough, the whole lot. Ruined my weekend.
And I’m pretty sure I caught it from Audrey, who seems to be a never-ending source of potential disease. No-one ever told me that when you have a child you basically have Patient Zero living in your house.
If stress reveals who we are, then I am a completely awkward middle school student. Difficult news renders me unable to move, words frozen on my tongue. After my dad died, I thought I had learned which things were helpful to say; in my head, I am a paragon of grace and kindness when called upon to support others in the face of adversity. In reality I fear I act more like the Tin Man before he got his oil.
I was not prepared for how I would feel when my dad died. Is that the most obvious sentence ever written? Of course none of us are ever ready for the horrors of illness and the permanence of death. I like road maps and lists and I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to go, how I should be feeling. I didn’t want to have to make any decisions. I was overwhelmed and I failed to say and do many things, some of which I regret very deeply. Part of grieving is accepting these things as they are. Part of my continuing grief is that I don’t seem to be able to overcome these inadequacies.
Over the weekend I read a gorgeous, haunting book about grief by Meghan O’Rourke called The Long Goodbye. In it, she tells the story of her mother’s death and weaves in different resources on grief and grieving from poets and playwrights and experts in the field. She puts words to many things I thought and felt. Perhaps it would have helped me to have such a beautiful balance of research and experience in my hands, something to guide me. This is a book that should be tucked in a basket for a friend along with other comforts: a warm blanket, a bottle of wine, a box of chocolate. It made me feel less alone.
I emailed Meghan and thanked her for her words. I told her about my dad, and that I wished I had had her book to read a few years ago. She graciously emailed me back, saying that she was sorry about my dad and thanking me for writing her. I realized upon reading her response that I hadn’t offered my own condolences to her, and my insides seized up. Awkward again, of course.
—
Meghan O’Rourke also has two books of poetry. Here is one of her poems as part of my poem-a-day National Poetry Month extravaganza. I highly recommend her book The Long Goodbye (which I purchased with my own money upon fortuitously finding it at the local used bookstore).
“Once” by Meghan O’Rourke
A girl ate ices
in the red summer. Bees
buzzed among the hydrangea,heavy as plums.
Summer widened
its lens.You would not believe
how happy she was;
her mother pulled herthrough the pool till her hair
went soft. Below,
cracks spread in the vinylwhere her mother’s long legs
scissored; above, wet faces
in the sun smiled.At dusk, lamps were lit,
Vs of geese swept past,
fresh sheets shiveredon the laundry line,
and as the nights grew crisp
our souls unfolded.Then winter arrived.
The parents bent over the daughter
tucked in her bed….Creaking from the cold,
the black walnut’s roots
swelled beneath the snow.When spring came, the home
had tilted into the tree’s
long, crooked shadow. Nothingwas the same again.
It is quite possible to love the moon,
because the moon is so far away,
illusive, a perfect sphere,
a Form that flies at night.
It deifies description.
Throw away the telescopes,
the moon whispers.
And especially the rockets,
it whispers.
Throw them all away.
It is also possible to love the earth,
though the earth is a close,
rough-hewn marble,
a set of dull knives that kill
on purpose or accident.
It does not speak except to say,
Build the telescope,
and build the rocket,
and you will see how
difficult it is not to die.
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May 24, 2013 01:15 AM
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