I have not read all 530 blog posts I created over many years, but I did read some, and I have come to the conclusion that I should return to blog on this site, because the archive of these posts gave me a walk down memory lane, which was overall a real pleasure.

No one subscribes to a random blog these days. So what.

I have no social media anymore. So what.

Can I tell you something astonishing?

God told me something. I don’t know what to make of it. He told me to write a book a year every year for the next 20 years. 

He said nothing about readers. He said nothing about publication. He said nothing about content.

I wish I had some better ideas for what to write about. One hope: that beyond the many words I write in a journal day after day (two journals, to be more precise—the difference in purpose of those journals is unclear to me), writing something I publish on the web several times a week, and reading some of the other 530 posts I’ve made in the past, should surely give me a few ideas for what to write a book about.

-Robby

I write something every day.

Most often I write by hand, most recently with my favorite sharpie retractable gel pens, black, 0.7. I write in notebooks. Since 1985, when Mrs. Yoder, my 10th grade English teacher made us, I have written nearly daily. We used spiral bound steno pads in that class, and she made us write a minimum of three pages a week. I think I always wrote more, sometimes making up stories, sometimes just write about my life and what was happening.

I write a lot about writing, and often about not writing, or more to the point, not writing a book.

I have to write. It’s how I think.

My journals for the past year have made their way also to OneNote, where I sometimes ebed photos, clip quotes, hyperlink to articles I like, and so forth. I don’t know why I keep two different kinds of journals with no discernible difference in writing style and no carefully articulated purpose for either.

I keep a little spiral notebook in my man-purse for times when I feel the need to write when I don’t have my regular journal or my iPad handy. I do not journal using my phone.

I like best the feel of the pen on paper. But typing also feels good, too. Especially in OneNote, the white letters appearing on the dark background.

So why blog?

All the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written the past nearly 40 years have been for not audience at all. I haven’t actually imagined the audience a new blog might find. By facetiously calling myself an independent journalist, which is of course true, I aspire to some sort of story-telling on this site. How frequently or of what topics I will write, besides more meta-blogs like this one, I do not know.

I am creating a website, and this blog will be embedded in the website. The website will have other pages dedicated to other things.

But this blog, white background, simple black type, will be the primary place some of what I write for public consumption is published.

P.S. I take requests. Feel free to comment and make one.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

1. Yoga.  
2. Read The Epic of Eden 
3. 250 pushups
4. 50 pullups
5. 30 minutes on the elliptical
6. Print handouts for tomorrow's Sunday School class--Week 6 of The Epic of Eden.
7. Watch basketball, including Bethel vs. MVNU.  We lost.
8. More reading, including Dave Isay's Callings.
9. Channel surf.
10. Dogs to the park.  Video below.

Somehow I’d forgotten how much I had written and posted on this blog going back nearly a decade.  In case you, too, my faithful readers, had forgotten, check out my archives. 

All I can say is, wow.  Just.  Wow.

And now it’s been a nearly five years since I last added anything to this completely arbitrary collection of musings, linked articles, images, videos and such. 

Going forward, I have no plan to turn this into a carefully organized, thematically coherent, anything… I’m just going to post things and put them out there and see what happens.  But if I do ever manage to write something worth sharing with a wider audience, I fully intend to post it to Medium.

Someday I might create a website, because as I think about it, I’ve produced a lot of stuff that might be of some use to someone in the world somewhere.

But for now, this is merely an announcement of my return.

For anyone who cares, entries will be numbered by the year.entry.  That is, 18.1 means, first entry of 2018.

Completely unrelated, here’s a video I watched this morning.  Since we had a snow day today, and since we’re starting Dante in LIT 227, I gave this as an assignment for Monday.

From NYTimes:

However you slice and dice the history, the strategery, and the underlying issues, the decision to live with a government shutdown for an extended period of time — inflicting modest-but-real harm on the economy, needlessly disrupting the lives and paychecks of many thousands of hardworking people, and further tarnishing the Republican Party’s already not-exactly-shiny image — in pursuit of obviously, obviouslyunattainable goals was not a normal political blunder by a normally-functioning political party. It was an irresponsible, dysfunctional and deeply pointless act, carried out by a party that on the evidence of the last few weeks shouldn’t be trusted with the management of a banana stand, let alone the House of Representatives….

So for undeluded conservatives of all persuasions, lessons must be learned. If the party’s populists want to shape and redefine and ultimately remake the party, they can’t pull this kind of stunt again. If the party’s leadership wants to actually lead, whether within the G.O.P. or in the country at large, they can’tlet this kind of stunt be pulled again. That’s the only way in which this pointless-seeming exercise could turn out to have some sort of point: If it’s long remembered, by its proponents and their enablers alike, as the utter folly that it was.

We won a league game 12-1 in a five inning mercy killing on Thursday night.  We finally knocked the ball around the yard a bit.  Nothing too exceptional here except our 9 run second inning which sort of put the game away.  We’re using a very soft ball for league games this year, which helps the pitchers.  In 8 games we have just one homerun.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t hit any more the rest of the season–the balls are that mushy.  But for the sake of competitive games and saving pitchers from wicked line drives, I fully support the ball choice. 1/3

 In tournament play we use much harder balls.  Last night we won our first game of the Plangger Invitational 4-0.  We got an excellent pitching performance and played nearly perfect defense.  They loaded the bases with no outs in the third, but we managed to get out of it unscathed. 1/3

We play today at “3:00”–the " " meaning  it will likely be sometime after 3 due to long games earlier in the day or even a little rain.

It occurred to me this morning at breakfast

Split a double header last night.  Lost 8-2 in our first game.  Scored 2 in the first and then gave up 6 in the bottom of the first.  Only got 3 hits all game.  In the second game we were down 2-0 going into the bottom of the seventh.  We managed 3 bunt singles, a hit by pitch, and a two run single to win 3-2.  We discovered a weakness.

We won 7-6 in nine innings on Thursday, our first league victory at last (1-3).  I played second base for a while, which is nice.  You have to be so much less “perfect” there than at shortstop.  I switched to shortstop 10 years ago or so, and I won’t be all that sad when I no longer play there.  I’m a center fielder, really, who is capable of playing middle infield.

2/5.

 Not much to say about this one.
We gave up 7 runs in the first inning of both games in our double header and never got going after that.  Pitching fail to start, offensive fail after that.  L 11-1, L 8-0.
At least it was a nice night.

Irony = let’s simulate a school shooter so we can prepare for something that will very likely never happen.  But today, let’s go ahead and have school even though we got a foot of snow overnight.

We lost our first league game 3-4 to Trinity Green.  We played fairly well defensively, and they probably helped us out with a few botched plays in the field.  But most importantly, the temperature was reasonable and I felt comfortable playing.  Note to self: no more 40 degree games for me.  2/4 3B.

Smalltown Fastpitch * Early Bird Tournament (May 11-12)* Coldwater, MI

With temparatures consistently in the 40s all weekend and a frigid wind much of the time, our first tournament came off without my getting frostbite or seriously injured.  So I count that a victory.

Game 1:  Smalltown 4  Hastings Blues 5
After taking the lead in the top of the seventh, we walked the leadoff man in the bottom of the inning and the next batter crushed a high, inside pitch over the 290+ foot fence in left.  (1/4 3B)

Game 2: Smalltown 10 Westerville Capitals 4
Back on a real fastpitch field, we managed to hit a couple homeruns and beat a good, young Canadian pitcher.  (2/4 BB)

Game 3: Smalltown 20 Wabash 9
The wind picked up after a brief rain storm and the temperature managed to drop, but somehow we ground out this slugfest anyhow launching six homers in six innings.  I got plunked twice and walked twice and scored four times.  (0-1)

Game 4:  Smalltown 4 Thunder 11
After scoring four first inning runs, we couldn’t manage another as the Thunder homered five times to beat us by the mercy rule in five innings.  One of the coldest mornings I’ve ever played softball.  (1/3)

I scored 8 runs on the weekend, walked 3 times, was hit twice, had a triple, and went a modest 4/12 (.333).  With my 43 year old creaking knees and worn out achilles', I’m not dissatisfied with the weekend.  But I know why there aren’t any everyday players in the major leagues my age.  It’s not that they can’t hit anymore, it’s that the first month and half of the season is played in nearly winter weather, and there comes a point when you just can’t stay loose enough to move.  Next game is Thursday in Benton Harbor.  I expect it to be warmer.

Season Record:  2-2

by Wendell Berry

"The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath.  It is not an interlude but the climax of living."

"Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade--not outside it.  The Apostles complained rightly when they said it was not their meet [meant] they should leave the word of God and serve tables; their vocation was to preach the word. But the person whose vocation it is to prepare the meals beautifully might with equal justice protest: It is not meet for us to leave the service of our tables to preach the word.  The official Church wastes time and energy, and, moreover, commits sacrilege, in demanding that secular workers should neglect their proper vocation in order to do Christian work--by which she means ecclesiastical work.  The only Christian work is good work well done.  Let the church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is Church embroidery, or sewage-farming."
 

"The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end-product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making."
 

Chapel for academic credit.  Attend chapel for two days of the week.  Meet for small group discussion with a faculty mentor on the third day.  Research paper and weekly reflection papers or online forum discussion posts required.  3 credits.

(Note: faculty mentor would get 1 hour of load credit).

I hope we all do understand that all this crap I write is unproofed first draft crap, written fast and furious when I have a few moments from all the other crap I gotta do.  We do understand that.  Don’t we?

Several years ago I discovered the most helpful little book on academic writing I’d ever seen.  It’s called They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing.  I loved the book for the ways it simplified–through the use of basic templates–how academic writing at its best, works.

My freshmen could read it and apply the concepts right away in their essays. The results were almost immediate as they began practicing the art of “starting with what ‘they say’” as a way of setting up what “I say”–that is, framing your own argument as a response to what others have said or might say.

I adopted the book solely because I thought it would help my students write better essays.  And it has.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that something deeper was perhaps subtly being communicated to my students through the book–something I’m guessing I responded to unconsciously when I first read it.  What the book actually encourages is the practice of virtues of humility and charity.  I listen to (or read) what others are saying; I summarize as clearly as I can what they say, playing the empathetic “believing game,"; and only then do I respond.

I think the authors of the book mean to encourage liberal minded civil discourse, and I’m certainly with them.  We need that.  But what I’ve come to recognize is this: civil discourse isn’t enough for me and for my Christian students.  Ours is a higher calling.  We must read and write lovingly.

Alan Jacobs' book A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love is a wonderfully dense, insightful book that I take is, in part, a call to charitable academic discourse.  It’s subtly that, and it’s also more than that.  Jacobs' suggests that if the great commandment includes loving neighbor as self, then as readers (or listeners) we may well have a responsibility to treat the books we read and their authors as neighbors.  “Love your neighbor as yourself,” right?  And who is my neighbor?

Perhaps it’s that book (or poem, or blog, or chapel address) or that author (or speaker) I’m inclined to think doesn’t really have that much to offer me.

What might reading and interpretation look like when governed by the law of neighbor love?  And what might my less than charitable or dismissive responses to some of the texts or authors I’ve read (or speakers I’ve heard) suggest to me about how far I have to go as a disciple of Christ who desires to be perfected in love?

Jacobs' book is well worth the effort it takes to read, and it is one I will come back to again over the years.

That is, if you count the two volumes as only one book.  Of course this is again a re-re-re-read (at least).

I quit facebook a couple months back, and I like some of my “friends” a lot better now that I don’t have to read their moronic status updates. 

I bet some of them like me better, now, too.

Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves. (re-read)

One of my favorite passages from the book.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. 

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness.  It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason "I knew thee that thou wert a hard man."  Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness.  If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he as not.  We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour.  If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
 

5 Rounds

15 pullups
20 situps
25 pushups
30 squats

12:10

"I recently observed a man from whom I believe God wanted to rid the strength of the self nature.  It is my perception that although what he says is true and comes from the inward work of the spirit upon his heart, his intellect is so powerful that it overpowers the gentle work of grace without his even knowing it.  Therefore, some of the truth of what he says is lost.  People are won more by the annointing that flows from a heart full of grace--by the weapon of love--than by powerful argument. 

Aren't the truths that you speak analyzed too much by the intellect and further polished by the imagination?  Their effect seems to be lost because they lack simplicity and directness.  Like a song, they sound wonderful; but they do not substantially reach and touch the heart.  There is no annointing. 

Aren't you always looking for something clever or novel to say?  Aren't you really showing off the power of your intellect rather than standing back and letting the simple truth speak for itself? Consider what I have said, and the light will reveal much to you.  Am I speaking to simply? I only want to speak the truth and the truth alone."

 



[youtube www.youtube.com/watch


And I don’t care who knows it…

Most of the time, I do not feel 43.  34 maybe.  17 sometimes.  12, too.  But far less often 43.

People who are younger than I am, often by a fair number of years, I still think of as my elders.  Nearly all professional athletes, for instance.  Why is that?

Today is my birthday, which may make it a day for sober reflection, as if every day isn’t already such a day.  One day closer death, one day closer to my last basketball game, one day closer to retirement, one day closer to the bike crash I surely will one day have–because I don’t intend any time soon to quit biking, and if you bike long enough, you will fall off sometime–and so on.

In my 43rd year I’d like to eat more vegetables, especially those grown in my own garden.  I’d like write more worthwhile blog posts, or at least funnier ones.  I’d like to revisit Wrigley Field to see the Cubs play an afternoon game.  I’d like spend more summer evenings strumming my uke by the campfire.  I’d like to join a Sunday School class again (why, five years ago, did we move from a church that gave up on adult Sunday School to one that had given up on adult Sunday School?).  I’d like like to dunk a basketball one more time–but I’m not holding my breath on that one.

 I’m looking forward to it.

Dog-Heart by Diana McCaulay

1.  Review of the X-Files episode I watched yesterday, one from Season 3 about what I think Charles Williams would call “Co-inherence” and that would make Lief Enger proud.
   
   
2.  Our vet bill yesterday for Morgan, which (incorrectly) included a $159 bag of food.
   
   
3.  A story of how my brand new basketball shoes that I love got a tear in them the first day I wore them.
   
   
4.  How cool I am for starting a “5 year diary”.
   
   
5.  Sydney’s new remote control SUV.
   
   
6.  Jeanie’s amazing ham and cheese quiche that I had for breakfast.
   
   
7.  The superiority of the Humanities major to all other majors in humanities sub-disciplines.
   
   
8.  My new novel.
   
   
9.  How badly I need a haircut.
   
   
10.  My visit to the dentist yesterday, where I had a conversation about almonds with my dentist.  (We like!!)
    
    
11.  How very randomly but usually several times a year I get heartbroken and homesick for Jamaica, even though I loathe almost everything about city living.
    
    
12.  The conversation I had with Sydney the other day about what language we will speak in heaven.  (She also wondered if I thought grandpa Kip would take care of Morgan in heaven until we joined them.  We’re preparing ourselves for the inevitable–Morgan will likely not live all that much longer.  Not that he’s sick; he’s just old. Incidentally, I do.)
    

June 8, Lord willing, J. and I will run in our first half-marathon together.

I probably won’t put one of those 13.1 stickers on my car, even though I’d kind of like to.

Maker of heaven and earth, space and time, entering this new year I put my hope in you, trusting that you will provide whatever I need for body and soul and turn to my good whatever adversity you send me.  Thank you that you are able to do this because you are almighty God, and that you desire to do this because you are a faithful Father. Amen. (Heidelberg Catechism 26)

"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?"  (E.M. Forster, Howard's End, p. 30)

1.  Read Augustine.
   
2.  Read paper by T. Erdel.
   
3.  Ate three eggs and toast.
   
4.  Walk in the woods with Sydney and Morgan–Sydney saw and correctly identified a blue heron.
   
5.  King Gyros.
   
6.  Pumpkins at the pumpkin patch.
   
7.  Watched two episodes of American Colony Hutterites.
   
8.  Workout: (Bike 30 mins; tabata sets of push ups, sit ups, renegade rows; bike 15 minutes)
   
9.  Tigers baseball and ND football
   
10.  Blog
    
    

Strained or pulled or–who knows, maybe tore?–a calf muscle playing basketball yesterday. Nothing major, just a little painful pushing off and landing.  Gonna go easy on it a little while.  Still, there’s a lot of other body parts to exercise, so tonight’s workout will be:

P90X Chest and Back + ab ripper X

Shouldn’t cause any problems for my moderately sore calf.

We make up our own workouts patterned after actual crossfit workouts.  This was Tuesday’s backyard workout for Jeanie and me.

Homegrown Filthy 50

50 wall ball shots
50 box jumps
50 push ups
50 squats
50 pull-ups (d.b. heavy pants for J)
50 double unders (100 regular jump ropes for J)
50 kb swings (25#/15#)
50 burpees
50 situps

J’s time= 22:02  R’s time= 17:24

By now Penelope, Icarius' wise daughter,
Had set her chair across from the suitors
And heard the words of each man in the hall.
During all their laughter they had been busy
Preparing their dinner, a tasty meal
For which they had slaughtered many animals.
But no meal could be more graceless than the one
A goddess and a hero would serve to them soon.
After all, they started the whole ugly business.

Did p90x workout tonight–shoulders and arms.

Played basketball at noon for an hour.  Won 4 lost 1.

Today’s physical exercise included:

14 mile bike ride in what I can only describe as perfect weather.  (Ok, it was a little windy at times, but who cares, really?)

“Helen”
3 rounds of
400 meter run (3 laps in my back yard)
21 KB swings (30# dumbell for me, 20# for J)
12 pullups (12 chair dips for J)

My time: 7:15 (shaved 41 seconds off my time from 8/2)
J’s time: 8:30 (shaved 49 seconds off her time from 8/2)

“Perfect you are, beyond all change, and today does not reach its end in you, yet it does end in you, since all days are in you, nor could they have a course of transit not defined by you.  But your years never run out, your years are a single today; and our days, no matter how many–not only our own but those of all before us–run their course through it, with their own being and identity, while you alone are identical with yourself, so every tomorrow to come, every yesterday gone, is made in your today."

Augustine, Confessions, 1.II (Garry Wills, trans.)

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.”

Spent fifteen minutes scrolling through Facebook feed, reading status updates and comments–something I almost never do.

What a colossal waste of time.

Being the day when we celebrate wordiness, redundancy, and general wastefulness in an effort to purge it from our souls and go back to living simple, economical, and celebratory lives.  This would be the only day of the year Fox News and MSNBC would be allowed on the air, for instance.

And then someone went completely mad and decided to cut down all the trees that gave wonderful shade to the parking lot of the Bittersweet Library branch.  Tragic.

Child's Play

“The Missionary Church is a fascinating blend of five traditions–Anabaptism, Pietism, the Weslyan-holiness movement, the Keswickian-holiness movement, and evangelicalism.  It could be argued that the fifth one, evangelicalism, entails the other four.  But evangelicalism also includes many other traditions, some of which were historically opposed to the first four.  For example, if other evangelical traditions going back to the Reformation no longer persecute Anabaptists or burn them at the stake, they may still be antithetically opposed to Anabaptist viewpoints.  So evangelicalism both includes the four traditions, and yet also affirms other traditions that would strongly oppose them and, at a minimum, push them to the margins of the evangelical life and thought, if they could.

Within the United States, the evangelical movement faces a particular danger, that of confusing national identity with political interests with the Christian faith.  Traditions such as Anabaptism and Pietism have resources to illumine such matters and bring evangelical responses into line with biblical teachings on church and state.  But if other, self-proclaimed evangelicals effectively silence voices from their Anabaptist and Pietist wings, they risk an enormous loss of biblical insight.

So several questions remain for the Missionary Church.  Will she genuinely affirm those traditions which gave birth to her and shaped her for many decades?  Will the richness and insights of each tradition be celebrated?  Or will she cut herself off from her own roots in exchange for new ties with alien traditions from within the larger evangelical family?  Will the Missionary Church be driven primarily by biblical categories, or by the social, political, and cultural ones that have sometimes overtaken the evangelical movement in the United States?  The temptation may be to exchange the hard teachings of the first four traditions for a softer, generic evangelicalism.  The suggestion here is that it would be a tragic mistake for the Missionary Church to exchange her birthright, which is a richly flavored stew of thoroughly biblical traditions, for a bowl of bland baby pablum that bears the consumer-oriented “Made in America” brand of generic evangelicalism.”

(Timothy Paul Erdel, “The Evangelical Tradition int he Missionary Church: Enduring Debts and Unresolved Dilemmas” in Reflections, Vol 13-14, 2011-2012).

Tonight, I am proud.

Jeanie did p90x “chest & back” with me tonight, and did a great job attempting the six sets of various kinds of pull-ups that workout calls for.  No, she can’t yet do a pull-up, but with assistance and jumping she did at least five “negatives” for each of the six sets.  Impressive.  Additionally, she surprised herself by getting off her knees for the push-ups and doing real ones.

There’s no way she could have done anything like this in June.  Get your tickets for the gun show now.

"Sometimes when a student tells me that being on campus is painful, that a course is too difficult, that an idea is too upsetting, that a program is too offensive, I respond by talking about my friend Jesper. Were Jesper to follow the easy, painless path with massive pieces of mountain, were he to limit his activity merely to the exterior, then the forms inside never would be revealed. To release the treasures hidden in a twenty-ton block of marble, Jesper has to break through the surface, cut into the interior, saw, strike, and gouge. It is only after that brutal, even savage process has been completed (during which a beautiful form gradually emerges) that Jesper can refine the work by burnishing its surface. It seems to me that the hard treatment Jesper inflicts on those rough blocks of freshly quarried stone is analogous to what happens to some of our most successful students as they learn. Students who take the familiar route, who choose to follow the path of least resistance, who avoid the difficult course or stay away from the controversial lecture, who never feel tension or pain, who never test the ideas or challenge the beliefs they carried with them to college not only miss the very point of education but also diminish their potential. For those willing to push themselves, to dig deep rather than skim along the surface, the rewards (at least in retrospect) can be profound. But while the heavy excavation is in progress, they may feel a lot of pain. 

On my wall hangs a small photo of an elegant, slender sculpture that Jesper named after me.When advisees tell me they are uncertain or confused, or that learning hurts, I reach into a cabinet to retrieve a picture of the artist standing next to the block of freshly quarried marble from which “Aaron’s Rod” may have emerged, note that students can be at once both sculptors and sculptures, and suggest that we get to work." (Aaron Shatzman, "When Learning Hurts")

trees hang limp in the sultry August mid-morn
damp from last night’s showers
and I feel like they look

"If you understand your own place and its intricacy and the possibility of affection and good care of it, then imaginatively you recognize that possibility for other places and other people, so that if you wish well to your own place, and you recognize that your own place is a part of the world, then this requires a well-wishing toward the whole world. 

In return you hope for the world’s well-wishing toward your place. 

And this is a different impulse from the impulse of nationalism. This is what I would call patriotism: the love of a home country that’s usually much smaller than a nation." (Wendell Berry)

"His mother decides that she wants a dog.  Alsations are the best--the most intelligent, the most faithful--but they cannot find an Alsatian for sale.  So they settle for a pup half doberman, half something else.  He insists on being the one to name it.  He would like to call it Borzoi because he wants it to be a Russian dog, but since it is not in fact a borzoi he calls it Cossack.  No one understands.  People think the name is kos-sak, food-bag, which they find funny.

Happy birthday, Jorge Luis Borges.

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

"Nothing has any value but the love of God and doing His will.  There is no happiness outside of Him.  The joy born from giving yourself totally to Him no man can take from you.  My only desire is to completely give myself up into the hands of God without any idea of turning back or of fear of what may happen to me."  (Jeanne Guyon, Intimacy With Christ, p. 13)

Smalltown Fastpitch ended its season last night with a victory in the league tournament championship over the Twin City Gray Sox, 10-9.  With two outs in the bottom of the seventh, our pitcher took a hard one hopper off the face. While he split blood, we looked for the tooth, but didn’t find it.  His brother came into the game to strikeout the final batter for the win.  Just before we snapped a picture, I asked B if the tooth was knocked entirely out or just broken off.  He said, “I don’t know,” proceeded to show me.

“Your tooth isn’t missing,” I said.

It was still very much there in his mouth, but there was a much larger gap than normal.  I suspect the tooth is pretty loose and may be fractured below the gum line, but no wonder we didn’t  find the tooth in the dirt around the pitcher’s mound.

In the last five days we took home a lot of hardware.  Church league tournament champs, NAFA world series A consolation bracket champs, NAFA world series AA-major 3rd place.

Final season record was 28-26.  The Gray Sox finished their season 25-2 and as the MASA D-state champions.  Not bad for their first season together to say the least.

They call this one “Jared."

800 meter run (6 laps around back yard)
40 pull-ups
70 push-ups

4 rounds

My time: 29:39

Jeanie substituted/scaled and did four rounds of 800 meters, 40 situps and 40 push-ups (on knees).  Her clock failed, but I would estimate her time to be 34 minutes.

I’ve never been to an actual Crossfit gym (or I guess its “box” not “gym”).  I’ve only ever done one workout with the Pilot Crossfit  club at my college.  And I only occasionally do “official” Crossfit workouts from thee main website.  But I think I can fairly say that I do “crossfit” (lowercase).

One of the things the Crossfit cultists rave about is the “community” aspect.  I’ve never been that fond of working out with a bunch of other people, and have always preferred to grit it out on my own.  That’s why I like P90X a lot.  You go to the basement, pop in the dvd, push play, and let er rip.  I’ve been doing these P90X workouts off an on for five years now, and they are still great.

This summer, J decided she wanted to get fit.  So we’ve been doing my own brand of “crossfit.”  The other day, for instance, we did Chelsea, which is 5 pullups, 10 pushups, 15 squats, every minute on the minute.  It’s good workout.  We scaled it for J, since she still doesn’t do pullups (it’s one of her goals–be able to do actual pullups), substituting “heavy pants” (a bent over back fly with dumbells) for the pullups.  Had I given her this workout two months ago I would have heard a series of “I can’ts” come out of her mouth.  But not anymore.  She’s motivated.  Every day she asks me, “so what’s my workout today.”  I’ve enjoyed it this summer–working out in this fashion with J.  I’m proud of her.

So here’s today’s workout.

4 rounds
One lap sprint (in the backyard–roughly 130 meters)
30 squats
One lap sprint
30 sumo high pulls
One lap sprint
30 chair dips
REST one minute

She may complain, but less than she used to.  She’ll do it.  Tomorrow she’ll ask me for a new workout.  We’re going to keep right on doing these workouts we make up or rip off from the Internet (here’s a really cool website called  “WOD shop”) for as long as we are physically able. I feel great–maybe the best shape of my life.  She feels great–maybe a little sore.

Get your tickets.

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

This week was my week again to mow the grass at church.  We have an enormous property, and it typically takes five to six hours to mow it all on a very good industrial riding mower.  Of course, today and tomorrow will likely be the hottest days of the summer, which makes mowing miserable.  So rather than wait for things to warm up, I got started at 6:45 this morning. 

I remind you, we’ve not had much rain, and no one irrigates the lawn at church, so it’s pretty much a parched wasteland of dead brown grass with enormous green weeds every so often.  It looked to me like last week someone didn’t mow an acre or so behind the pond and another acre in the back of the property–my clue was not that the grass was long, but that those parts had been overwhelmed by deep purple clover.  So I mowed them, in the process awakening a zillion tiny bugs from their peaceful slumber to swarm my face, mouth, eyes, ears, and hair. 

Normally, I very much enjoy mowing. But today’s experience was an exercise in frustration.  Between the ever increasing heat, the swarms of deer flies, those stupid shoot like weeds that were the only thing I was actually cutting–and even so, only about one in three of them actually cuts when you ride over them with the mower–I gave up after a couple hours and called it good enough.

We need some stinking rain.

This fall I will begin my 14th year of teaching English at Bethel.  I don’t know where the time goes other than to say that the present has a way of becoming the past very quickly.That will be fourteen years worth of essays I’ve read.  Sometimes I wish I would have kept some stats.  Here are some estimates.

Essays read/graded: 25,000
Portfolios graded: 1400
times reading the Odyssey: 25
add/drop forms filled: 120
student drop in office visits: 4200
committee meetings attended: 260
lunch time basketball games played: 4680
photocopies made: enough to wipe out a forest
number of times I’ve worn a tie: 0
number of times I’ve taught Lolita: 2
number of  Speech (COMM 171) sections I taught in 1999-2000: 5
number of sections of COMM 171 I’ve taught since 2004: 0
Office moves: 1
Office rearranges: 16
times I’ve wanted to quit and become a peach farmer who writes nature poetry:13
plagiarism cases I reported: 30
plagiarism cases I dealt with myself: 200
Bethel softball games attended: 45
chapel speeches: 7
faculty retreat presentations: 5
dissertations completed: 1
number of visits Morgan has made to my office: 23
humanities major graduates: 6
humanities major graduates prior to 2010: 0
days of class missed due to sickness: 13
snow days: 3

“For when she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used.  For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.”

-Wendell Berry, “A Consent”

I was fitted for contact lenses last Thursday and have been wearing them a bit each day since then as prescribed.  I have two complaints.

First, my eyes are a little gummy.  I don’t want to say dry, even though I’m sure that is how they will want me to describe it when I have my follow up visit this Thursday.  Dry is what the lawns in my neighborhood are.  Dry is dusty.  My eyes feel more like mud and less like dust.  It isn’t intolerable, and I’m sure the right kind of eye drops would make this minor complaing ever more minor in time.  If this were the only complaint, I don’t think I’d be complaining.

Second, they don’t help me see any better.  As a matter of fact, for things like reading, I see considerably worse than without them.  I don’t have particularly bad eyes.  Slight astigmatism and a bit of near-sightedness.  Things at a distance aren’t as sharp as they might be.  When I put on my glasses, I can see the individual grass blades at a distance or the leaves in the tree tops much more sharply.  I wanted contacts because I didn’t want to wear glasses to play basketball or softball.  But now I’m thinking my eyesight is not that bad afterall, especially considering that it is obviously worse with the contacts. I will be telling the doctor this on Thursday.

There may well be something wrong with me. Yesterday I was one of roughly 75 people watching a men’s fastpitch softball game between the Argentina national team and the Hill United Chiefs of Kitchener, Ontario streamed live online. And all the while wishing I was playing. I suspect at least a few of the others watching were wishing they were playing as well.

Next weekend.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOAH2XWkhEc&w=560&h=315]

This morning we did a “family workout”–Sydney, Jeanie, and me.  Here’s what it consisted of.

I’ve been to so many chapel services at Bethel over the years and heard so many speakers that they all start to sound the same.  Occasionally someone says something that stays with me for a long time.  What tends not to stay with me is who said it.  So, somebody sometime at some Bethel Chapel service in the last fifteen years or so said this:

“We don’t read the Bible to finish; we read the Bible to change."

I always liked that.  Even though I’m kind of fond of the “read the Bible in 90 days” or “a year” or other Bible reading plans, the problem with them is this: I don’t want to get to day ninety and say, “DONE! Yay me.  Now I can get on with life now that I’ve read the Bible in 90 days."

Occasionally I tweet about some “P90X” workout I’ve done.  I like this workout program, even though I have never really committed myself to strictly following the program for 90 days.  I’ve been doing the workouts semi-regularly for almost five years now, and they’re terrific.  I didn’t want to get to the end of 90 days and say, “DONE! Yay me.  Now I can get on with life after P90X."

Which is why I like crossfit. It just sort of goes on forever and ever with constant variety with no end in sight.  But I’ve sort of used the Tony Horton workouts that way anyhow, so I was predisposed to liking crossfit before I even knew what it was or tried one of the workouts.  What I also like about the crossfit workouts is the insanely high level of intensity they typically ask of you and how short they are.  Most workouts are 15-20 minutes, but some incredibly great workouts take less than ten. 

So here you go, exercise lovers.  Try one of the P90X workouts “crossfit” style.  I recommend the legs and back workout.  Instead of following the video (which you don’t need once you’ve done the routine a few times; you can remember–and if you can’t, it takes a whole two minutes to write the names of the exercises down on a little piece of paper), set your stop watch, say 3-2-1 go, and crank out the workout for time.  Here’s how I do it.  Each pull-up set is 12 reps (96 pullups total for the workout).  Each leg exercise is 25 reps.  You do the wall sits for the time Tony prescribes.  And you complete the “sneaky lunge” sequence at a reasonable pace.  And when you finish the workout, you record your time.  Next week you try to beat the time.  It’s fun and it reduces the workout to–well, lets say if you’re in decent shape you can crank it out in less than 25 minutes.  It would be nearly impossible to do it in less than 20, but some stud might surprise me here.  When I do it this way I use 20# dumbells–and if that’s too much for any of the exercises, I only use one of them instead of both.  Saves the trouble of figuring out how much weight is just right for the workout, since the goal here is not merely building strength but cranking your heartrate way the heck up.

You can do the same thing with the chest and back workout or the shoulders and arms workout.  Suddenly they become both strength and cardio workouts–in other words, more like crossfit.

I’ve also found that doing PlyoX “tabata” style (20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds of rest; this will leave you in oxygen debt very quickly) while it shortens the workout–really increases the intensity.

I keep looking at the P90X2 videos on youtube and I’m tempted, but it’s expensive for all those medicine balls and other crap you gotta buy.  The beauty of P90X was how minimalist it was in terms of equipment.  Pull-up bar and dumbells.  While the stability and core strength you’d get from this kind of training looks impressive to me–it looks like the kind of training professional athletes (NBA players, even) would do–I’m cheap.  What can I say.

So here’s to one of the best things about summer vacation for a college professor: exercising.

Tomorrow, tune in  for my rant on the relationship between exercise and remaining semi-productive as a “scholar” (gosh, I hate that word).

p.s.  Today’s workouts were P90X chest and back; ab ripper x. 

Rhetorical question (which means I have a pretty definite answer in mind):

Is there something seriously wrong if on Sunday, May 27, 2012, everyone in your congretation knew that Monday (May 28, 2012) was Memorial Day and felt somehow that it was a Christian duty to celebrate America’s military might, but in the mean time, no mention was made that it was Pentecost Sunday?

For some reason, most men’s fastpitch leagues and tournaments refuse to use those easy to see neon yellow softballs they use in the women’s games I’m watching hour after hour on television this weekend.  When they make me president of the world of men’s fastpitch, I will declare that forever more these easier to see balls will be used. 

Having played in a few tournaments where these balls are used, I can say that major difference comes during the twilight hours in the field when it can be very difficult to see a batted ball.  And that’s where the game is most potentially dangerous with third basemen and pitchers exposed to rocketed line drives. 

When I write my book about men’s fastpitch softball, there will be a chapter dedicated to the ball itself, its evolution, its varieties, its color.  It will be a substantive chapter.  I’m serious.

Sydney is six now.  Yesterday was her “Fancy Nancy” birthday bash with friends.  Let’s consider the sugary things they ate.

1.  Fancy rainbow jello
2.  Fancy frosted sugar c ookies
3.  Fancy pink pearl chocolates
4.  Fancy chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting
5.  Fancy pink lemonade
6.  Fancy dippin dots ice cream

Needless to say there was not shortage of energy, which the little girls expended in the kiddie pool, the bouncy jump house, dressing up fancy, and painting their very own ceramic tea sets.

Tomorrow is opening night for the Smalltown Fastpitch season.  We play in Bremen.  I look forward to seeing you all out at the ballpark supporting us this season.  Additionally, I look forward to monkeys flying out of my rear end, the day when Bethel College has a 5 billion dollar endowment, and a world where no one on the Fox News network ever says anything bombastic and asinine.

We’ll have fun playing whether you show up or not.  I’ve been taking batting practice in my backyard since mid-March, and I got new batting gloves.

p.s. Morgan responded well to the 24" chicken wire and has lived to chase wiffle balls another day.

When your dog can no longer jump at all (aged hips and arthritis in the hind legs) and when your real concern is not really with the rabbits or deer that might destroy your garden, the chicken wire need not be more than 24" tall.  You do not want your marigolds, watermelons, peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, beans, scallions, cantaloupe, or cucumbers destroyed, nor do you want to have to send your beloved almost 11 year old dog to an early grave, so you spend a few extra dollars on chicken wire and stakes to prevent unnecessary deaths. As an expense, it seems well worth it to you.

I’m grateful that I live in a time and place where dentistry is practiced by trained doctors and not by quacks.  That I live in the age of ibuprofrin, vicodin, and antiobiotics.

I’m grateful, though I’m sure I will miss the healthy version of it, that next Friday I will be rid of this infected, fractured tooth forevermore.

I’m grateful that one bright day I will either have no need of teeth anymore OR that I will have teeth restored to resurrected perfection.

Pain is relative.  But there is no pain quite like tooth pain.

"Gratitude ... goes beyond the "mine" and "thine" and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy."

-Henri Nouwen



Sydney likes playing the opening riff of this song on the piano.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YdQBkxf4kU&w=420&h=315]

Bolgia 10: Falsifiers.

Where the plagiarists are punished.

"The act of knowing is an act of love." 

"The known seeks to know me even as I seek to know it; such is the logic of love . . . I not only pursue but truth pursues me. I not only grasp truth but truth grasps me. I not only know truth but truth knows me. Ultimately, I don't not master truth but truth masters me." (Parker Palmer, To Know as We Are Known)

"When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy." (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 46)

2/27 - 138
2/28 - 151
2/29 - 140
3/1 - 223

to be continued

“…the original and authentic meaning of the word “professor” is “one who professes a faith.”  The true professor is not one who controls facts and theories and techniques.  The true professor is one who affirms a transcendent center of truth, a center that lies beyond our contriving, that enters history through the lives of those who profess it and brings us into community with each other and the world.” [113]

-Parker Palmer, To Know as We Are Known

Some people enjoy a coffee break.  I, myself, cannot stand coffee, its aroma, its effects on my stomach (I’m guessing here, since I never drink the stuff–but other high caffeine beverages have a “flushing” effect on my system that is more violent than I tend to like), its price. I suppose I could take up smoking and take smoke breaks.  One of my housemates when I was a student at Drew took up pipe smoking during his comprehensive exam year. He had no classes and it gave him a reason to go outside and have a smoke every couple hours to interrupt the endless monotony of study.

I have, from time to time, been in the habit of taking a “free throw break.”  I stop what I’m doing, go outside (or to the gym), and shoot some free throws. 

Today, for the first time in many weeks, I took a free throw break.  Made 48 in a row and 64/67.  Wearing gloves. 

The breeze was at my back.

1.  30 minute bike interval (while watching “X-Files”, of course)
2.  5 minute medicine ball (10#) ball handling drills
3.  10 minute speed rope intervals (50 seconds of jumping, 10 seconds of rest, 10 intervals)

Sydney’s lunch order:

• Peanut butter and jelly sandwich
• apple slices
• carrots and dip
• and, if you happen to stop at McDonalds, some french fries would be nice.

I’m a relatively consistent crossfitter/P90x-er.  I’m not a fundamentalist/legalist when it comes to these workouts, so I don’t really do everything exactly as prescribed or when prescribed, but I have followed Tony Horton fairly consistently (at leas the workouts–screw the diet; eating “whey” is for commies) through a couple of almost 90 day sessions.  I almost never do Kenpo.  I rarely do the entire YogaX workout.  But I like the program and the workouts work.

I started attempting some of the named crossfit workouts last summer and fell in love the high intensity of crossfit.  I’ve never fallen in love with Olympic lifting, mostly because Olympic lifting and I haven’t really had a first date. Nor do I have the equipment at home to do them.

I know crossfit is designed to be done as a community, but my problem is the crossfitters at BC crossfit right when I’m playing basketball, and the reason I would do crossfit is to maximize my enjoyment of basketball, not because I have some desire to become a superstar at the crossfit games.  Excuses aside, I actually enjoy working out alone.

All that to say I did the P90x chest and back workout plus ab ripper x this morning.  I wonder if I’ve done this particular workout fifty times yet?  I wouldn’t be surprised. I did it for the first time back in August of 2007.    I bet I’ve done it at least a dozen times a year since then.  If you follow the 90-day program you do this workout five times in 90 days.  I have not been through the 90 day program ten times, of course, but this is probably one of my favorite of the routines, thus my wondering about the 50 times in a little less than five years.

So what does tomorrow hold?  Were I following the 90-day program, tomorrow would be Plyometrics.  It’s a great workout.  But I think I’m going to to a 15 minute interval set on the jump-rope and maybe some yoga and then shoot some hoops.  Maybe watch an episode of the X-Files on dvr while riding the stationary bike.

See–not a legalist.

1.  Someone named Adele won a bunch of Grammy awards the other night.  I did not watch the show.  I had never heard of this person until the next morning when they mentioned she won a bunch of awards. 

2.  I am a professor of English.  Consider the so-called “classics” I’ve never read.  This is not an exhaustive list. 

• Every novel written by Charles Dickens except A Tale of Two Cities.
• Every play by Shakespeare except for Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing .  (Note: I have a prejudice here.  I think Shakespeare wanted people like me--who cannot act--to see his plays performed.)
• Moby Dick.
• To date, I've never been able to finish a novel by Jane Austen.  I've tried.  She's funny, but after awhile I just don't care about the characters anymore and would rather watch X-Files reruns.
• Paradise Lost.  I know what it's about and I read "excerpts" in college.  Reading excerpts usually helps convince me that I don't really care to read something.
• The Faerie Queen.  Ditto.
• The Brother's Karamazov.  Once again, I tried more than once.  Then I read what Nabokov said about the author and agreed.  Here is what he said in an interview:

Interviewer:  Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar." Why?

VN:  Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

• War and Peace.  Someday maybe.  Someday.
• Any novel by Faulkner or Hemingway.

I do not understand “gaming.”  At all.  And I don’t care.

Perhaps that’s how they–the obsessive gamers–feel about literature, sitting in the back of the classroom daydreaming about the gaming they are missing out on while they’re stuck in class.

1.  Playing shortstop in a fastpitch game on a 70 degree Saturday in June.

2.  Eating a giant brisket and sausage sandwich and washing it down with a monstrously huge coke.

3.  Walking in the woods with Morgan–his legs restored to perfection.

Instead, I’m grading.  Nothing that horrible about grading.  It’s just not as much fun as the above, or about three hundred other things I could list if I didn’t need be grading.

A Meeting
by Wendell Berry

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”

One thing I appreciate about the prayer is that Merton doesn’t make bold promises to God; instead, he says “I hope."

I think I will continue to pray this prayer.  I hope my student’s will, too.

My students seemed to deeply appreciate this prayer from Thomas Merton’s “Thoughts in Solitude.”  It is sometimes called the “Prayer of Abandonment.”  I like it, too.

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain
where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and that I think I am following your will
does not mean I am actually doing so.
But I believe
the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire
in all I am doing.
I hope
I will never do anything
apart from that desire.
And I know if I do this
you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
I will trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear,
for you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.

"My Lord Alcinous, what could be finer
Than listening to a singer of tales
Such as Demodocus, with a voice like a God's?
Nothing we do is sweeter than this--
A cheerful gathering of all the people
Sitting side by side throughout the halls,
Feasting and listening to a singer of tales,
The tables filled with food and drink,
The server drawing wine from the bowl
And bringing it around to fill our cups.
For me, this is the finest thing in the world."
                                     -Odysseus, Odyssey Book 9

In my top ten coolest reggae songs of all time.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rb13ksYO0s&w=420&h=315]

Gosh I miss Jamaica sometimes.

At Bethel we have what are called “FYE” (Freshmen Year Experience) blocks–two courses blocked in a single time slot on Tuesday and Thursday of the fall semester that two professors teach teach. Cristian and I teach FYE together.  FYE is a sort of a misnomer because it only runs the first semester.  Nevertheless, since the program was begun eighteen years ago it has had a fairly dramatic impact on student retention and has enriched the overall Bethel experience.  While it is not a unique program–there are many similar across the country–it is one of the things that makes the Bethel experience unique. 

Often at the end of the semester our students have expressed their sadness that the block experience ends with the semester.  More times than I can count, students have told me during second semester that they “miss block."

We’ve been thinking a lot about SYE (Sophomore Year Experiences) that might build upon the FYE.  There are many things that could be done, but lets just say that at our institution curricular changes don’t come easy.  One day driving into school I had a brainstorm about a way to “reconnect” with my block during second semester that wouldn’t require any curricular change.  All it would require would be permission to meet one day per week during chapel (for chapel credit) during the second semester of sophomore year.  The VP for Student Enrichment liked the idea and gave our block permission to give it a trial run.

So yesterday Cristian and our two “block mentors” (Karli and Cassie–the best FYE student mentors in the history of the program) started brainstorming together about what this thing might look like.  We set a launch date, came up with a name (“B7 Reconnect”–FYE Block 7, reconnecting on many levels), talked about how to generate excitement about it, and discussed themes and topics that might be most helpful to sophomore’s in college–something in the general neighborhood of life calling or vocation and our identity in Christ without using such tired and over-used lingo as that.  Anyhow, I’m looking forward to the many layers of “reconnection” that may be possible in a setting that is as “un-classlike” as possible.

I love my work.  It’s the place God has called me–as Buechner says, it’s the place where (my) deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

p.s.  This song just started on my Last FM reggae station, and I’ve been singing it to my wife. :-)

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

Free to good home:  two knees afflicted with mild patelar tendonitis from years of basketball.  As a bonus, I’m willing to throw in two achilles heels with chronic bursitis and two arthritic ankles. Left heel has noticable haglund’s deformity.

Sometimes in the middle of the day I have to break the monotony of checking things off my “to do” list, take a walk over to the gym, and make 150 shots. 

And then I can go back to checking things off my “to do” list and it doesn’t seem so tedious anymore. 

Just finished making 150 shots.  Just checked “write blog entry” off my “to do” list.  Next item on my “to do” list: “Make new ‘to do’ list.”

I’m considering the pros and cons of a standing desk or stand-up desk.

Pro: No more sore rear end.
Con: Potentially sore feet.

Pro: Novelty. First person in my office wing to have one.
Con: Weirdo.  First person in my office wing to have one.

Pro: Apparantly standing is better for your back.
Con:  My back is in relatively good shape compared with my ankles and achilles heels.

Pro: Might be able to get rid of my current really ugly desk.
Con:  Current really ugly desk weighs slightly less than a dump truck.

Pro: I like to read and write standing up.
Con: I would have to purchase ($) and assemble the stupid thing.

Pro: Would have to reorganize office.
Con: Would have to reorganize office.

Decision:  Undecided.

The best thing about crossfit is that you can invent your own crossfit workout and call it a crossfit workout.  Here’s the one I invented and then did today.

100 rep. jump ropes
10 wall ball shots with 25# ball
10 pull-ups
10 jump-knee tucks (a move borrowed from p90x)
10 sumo high pulls with 30 pood kettlebell

As many rounds as possible (AMRAP) in 15 minutes.

Exhausting.  Felt great!

I read this short story–very short story, really–by Raymond Carver yesterday, and now I can’t get it out of my head.  It is quintessentially minimalist, and yet it managed to grab me at a gut level with its raw emotion.  The story is called “Little Things” (read it now!!).  It is getting dark outside, and inside, too–where a couple fights as he packs his bags. He wants to take the baby. She refuses him. They struggle physically, pulling at the baby, trying to pry the child from one another’s arms.  The story ends ambiguously: “But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard. In this manner, the issue was decided.”  As I read, Carver managed to make me feel for this couple, even though I’ve no idea what “little thing” has caused them to be so furious with one another.  And I felt for this little thing–this child caught in the middle, pulled two directions, somehow certainly harmed by the actions of these two wounded people. 

I guess I am reminded that there are little things that, over time, become–or will become–big things.

Ya, I’m the guy who listens to “Keane” radio while he tries to think of something to blog about.  At least today I’m that guy.

It’s not really working for me. In fact, all it’s really doing right now is delaying me from what I could be doing: shoveling the drive, riding the stationary bike and watching a rerun of the X-Files (ya, I’m the guy who watches reruns of the X-Files 3 or 4 times a week while riding bike), or grading some papers.

So what I’m saying is that “Keane” radio on Last FM isn’t really “muse” music–it doesn’t much inspire creativity, as you are plainly witnessing right now.  Allow me to change the channel and let’s observe what happens.

There. “Elton John” radio.  “Your Song.” 

Kind of makes me feel like writing a blog entry called “Your Blog."

“I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind
that I put down into words
how wonderful life is
while you’re in the world."

That didn’t really inspire anything much after all, I guess.  Next song…

“Maggie May” by Rod Stewart.

That reminds of a summer job I had after my freshmen year of college.  I cleaned the floors at the Kroger at Broadmoor Plaza in South Bend, six nights a week from 11 p.m. - 5 a.m.  I would dust mop, then scrub, then buff, then dust mop again.  It didn’t take six hours, usually, but my boss wanted me to put in six hours.  So I did.  Once a week they would shut the store down for three hours and I would wax the floors.

One of the night cashiers there was named Maggie–maybe thirty, thin, light brown hair, pretty smile.  Nice.  I remember one night this song came on the radio that softly played throughout the store all night.  One of the guys who stocked shelves started singing, and before long, all five of the guys who stocked shelves made their way to the front of the store, belting the song at the tops of their lungs at her, to her great embarrassment.  Only two of them really knew the lyrics, and none of them could sing. 

It was beautiful.  I scraped stickers off the floor in the produce section, and smiled to myself.  Smouched (Huck Finn’s word for “stole”) one of those ginormous gumballs from the bulk food section, and hummed along.

Thank you Last FM.  I’d forgotten.

It’s “Gold Rush” time. 

I’m not the biggest TV buff I know, but I do kinda dig Discovery Channel’s reality show, “Gold Rush.” Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but each week I watch the show hoping these guys hit the motherload somewhere deep in the bowels of Quartz Creek, Alaska.  Instead, I watch for an hour and discover that when it comes to gold mining, if it can break down, fall apart, or go wrong–it will.  The show could be called “A Series of Frustrating Events.”  So why do I like this?

I’ll never be a gold miner.  I’ll never know what it is really like to rough it in the Alaskan wilderness.  I’ll never drive gargantuan dump trucks, dozers, or front end loaders.  But the show does give the impression that its showing us a little of what it might be like to mine gold.  It’s intoxicating.  It’s maddening.  It’s enough to make you thankful that no matter how bad of a day you’re having, you probably didn’t have as many things go wrong as these guys did in any one hour show.

Yesterday I quoted from Rasselas. Might as well go for it again, since it seems relevant here.  Prince Rasselas is bored in the Happy Valley–bored because he has everything he wants. While it might seem like happiness is getting everything you want, the prince points out that he is unhappy precisely because he has nothing to struggle for, nothing to strive after, nothing to desire.  Rasselas says, “I fancy that I should be happy if I had something to pursue."

I like this TV show because these guys are relentlessly pursuing gold. I’m not all that interested in relentlessly pursuing gold, myself.  But I do know that we all need something to pursue.  Every week I watch them endure disappointment after disappointment, and only occasionally a small triumph or a glimmer of hope.  And yet they press on.  They seem happy.  I think it’s because they have something to pursue.  I need something to pursue, too.

So I keep on the lookout for little things that might awaken me from my contented slumber, and I pursue them.  A hundred free throws in a row.  Thirty unbroken pull-ups.  A doctorate.  A new humanities major. 350 blog entries in a year–one a day with a reasonable assumption that there will be a dozen or so days when I’m somewhere with no Internet connection. The entire Bible in 6 months.  That sort of thing.

There is that inevitable let down once you’ve reached some goal.  If these guys strike it rich by the end of the mining season, the show won’t be quite the same for me any more.  I hope they do, but I also know that if they do, that’s the end of the show.  I’ll make a hundred free throws in a row again someday soon. Then what?  Do it again.  Hit 50 3 pointers in a row.  Who knows.  I just know I’m the kind of person who is happiest struggling and striving my way towards something.  Kind of like the guys on “Gold Rush,” I guess. Call it restlessness if you want, but it beats the boredom of happy valley.

"Nothing," replied the artist, "will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome." (Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson)

Every semester I have to come up with some new idea for a literature seminar. Every semester I agonize over this decision–over choosing a topic to spend fifteen weeks with, over finding something that I’ll be energized enough by to enjoy and to facilitate, and something that maybe a few students will find interesting enough to want to explore together. I’m not as successful in my choices as I’d like to be, and sometimes I’m surprised by the responses. There have even been times when I’ve feltl like something wasn’t going so well, but it turned out by the end of the semester the students were expressing much more appreciation than I could had sensed throughout the term.

• Post-modernist literature
• Myth and Archetype in Literature
• Nobel prize winners
• Nietzsche and the novelists
• Clashes of culture
• Survival literature
• Love and friendship
• Literary Friendships
• Bringing life to literature
• Modern European masterpieces
• The Sermon on the Mount and Story
• C.S. Lewis, Samuel Johnson and the Great Conversation

1 small bag of doritos
4 miniature reeses peanut butter cups
1 half glass of pink lemonade
9 baby carrots with ranch dip
Two thirds of a miniature ice cream sandwich
and… some baked goldfish crackers

She has put in a request for for mama to pick her up a “slurpee” on her way home from her meeting.

Ok. So am I a good papa for insisting that she eat some carrots–as if they would counterbalance all that garbage and ease my conscience a bit? Don’t answer.

I do remember the feeling of being half starved at the end of a school day. I remember in middle and high school going home finally after a practice close to dinner time feeling woozy, grumpy, with a splitting hunger headache far too many times. I can’t imagine that as the healthiest way of existence, either. I don’t feel so bad that a famished little girl ate a bunch of junk food this afternoon. I suppose a peanut butter sandwich on whole grain bread, an organic apple, and some of those baby carrots might be a snack Dr. Oz would want my daughter eating, but I also don’t think she’s taken any years off her life today by eating all this junk. And she’s happy as a lark. :-)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHcP4MWABGY&w=420&h=315]

I’ve seen them perform this song in concert five times, now, and every time its felt like the Kingdom was upon us.

"My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." (Mt. 26:38)

"Through the prism of my tears I have seen a suffering God.  It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live.  I have always thought this meant that no one can see his splendor and live.  A friend said perhaps this meant that no one could see his sorrow and live.  Or perhaps his sorrow is his splendor."  (Nicholas Wolterstorff)

In blog entry #11, I commented on “Visigoths” and the visigothian idea of grades. See that entry here. http://robbyprenkert.blogspot.com/2012/01/11-on-visigoths.html

We asked the class whether they thought–considering their graduating class–the Athenians would outnumber the Visigoths. I suppose the value of a question like that isn’t so much in the answer we get to the specific question, but to the discussion the question sparks and the perspectives it reveals.

I think it would be fair to say that most of them felt that the majority of their classmates were in the Visigoth camp, and seem to show few signs of relocating themselves.

Taking a bit longer view, I remain hopeful. My teaching partner and I think that seeds do get planted, and that sometimes–maybe even years later–students and former students slide on the scale and become a little less “V” and a little more “A.”  Of course, the two categories are not Christian, but a robust faith will always push one toward the “A” and away from he “V.”  t

Sadly, a superficial faith may very well slide a person deeper into visigothian territory.  But that’s a thought for another time.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdKa9bXVinE&w=560&h=315]

The first reading assignment in every class I teach is the syllabus. The first thing I do the second day of class is take questions students have about the course after they’ve (supposedly) read the syllabus.

Sometimes, I feel like the guy in the video. Not all the time. Not even most of the time. But every once in a while.

Not necessarily this semester. :-)

Here is, by far, the best insight from class on Tuesday.

We read Neil Postman’s “My Graduation Speech” for class, a speach where he contrasts two groups that come to be metaphors for important ideas–the “Athenians” and  the “Visigoths.”  It’s a fantastic little piece and will only take you five minutes or so to read.  You should read it now if you never have.

http://www.ditext.com/postman/mgs.html

We asked the class think about their own (future) graduating class at Bethel, and then to speculate whether they thought the Athenians would outnumber the Visigoths.  One student suggested that a barrier to being an Athenian was actually “grades.”  My teaching partner chimed up right away and said, “That’s great!  Grades aren’t a value of the Athenians–grades are a value of the Visigoths."

I was reminded of Phaedrus' proposed university without grades in Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  But that’s an entry for another time.  (btw, You should read that book, too, but not right now.).

So grades are a visigothian idea–I like that. Some of our supposedly “best students” are Visigoths in their approach to education. And who do we have to thank for that?

It wasn’t students who invented the idea of grades.  It took a group of Visigoths called “professional educators” to up with that one.

My Monday’s are tough.  It’s all relative, of course.  A high school teacher would look at my schedule and go, “big woop–I do that every day.”  So I’m not complaining. 

I thought if I scheduled my Monday heavier, the rest of the week would be smooth sailing.  But there could be a downside to having four classes spread out over 12 hours, with a back-to-back-to-back from 3pm till 8pm.  Let me borrow a term from fitness: “recovery.”  The rest of the week may be so much lighter and easier, but I’m so spent from the marathon Monday that I’m worthless for a few days.

Or maybe that’s all just over-reacting, because yesterday was worse than most Mondays will be because somebody scheduled a two hour meeting in the middle of the day that ended up being emotionally exhausting.

I’m not worried.  But I will let you, my two readers, in on a little secret.  Listen: Usually I write my blog entry the day before I post it. I didn’t have time yesterday to write today’s.  So this is how bad I write “first draft.” 

Speaking of a blog about “nothing”–eh?

She knocks at my office door, enters.  She is the student who shows up far too infrequently to class, and in what little writing she has submitted, she gives just a glimpse of a life teetering on the brink of chaos. 

“I wanted to recite psalm,” she says. 

It is an assignment–memorize and recite ten psalms over the course of the semester.  This is her first–somewhere at the midpoint of the semester, and considering her lack of work and attendance thus far, and our recent interventions to encourage her to come to class and to do the homework, I take this as a positive sign that she is making an effort to turn her semester around. 

“Which one?"

“Psalm 6.”  She is pretty and extremely bright.  But her eyes have an omnipresent, weary sadness about them.

I flip to Psalm 6 in our textbook–The Message–so I can follow along as she recites. 

^1-2 Please, God, no more yelling, no more trips to the woodshed.
Treat me nice for a change;
I’m so starved for affection.


^2-3 Can’t you see I’m black-and-blue,
beat up badly in bones and soul?
God, how long will it take
for you to let up?


^4-5 Break in, God, and break up this fight;
if you love me at all, get me out of here.
I’m no good to you dead, am I?
I can’t sing in your choir if I’m buried in some tomb!


^6-7 I’m tired of all this—so tired. My bed
has been floating forty days and nights
On the flood of my tears.
My mattress is soaked, soggy with tears.
The sockets of my eyes are black holes;
nearly blind, I squint and grope.


^8-9 Get out of here, you Devil’s crew:
at last God has heard my sobs.
My requests have all been granted,
my prayers are answered.


¹⁰ Cowards, my enemies disappear.

Disgraced, they turn tail and run. 

She does not stumble.  She does not pause awkwardly searching for the right word.  She recites flawlessly, as if she has written the words on her soul, and allowed me for just a moment to peer into it.  It is beautiful.

“Wonderful!” I say, and she manages a half smile.  I pause.  “I like this psalm.  Why did you choose it."

The sad eyes mist over, she glances at the floor, and then quickly back up.

“Because it’s exactly how I feel."

I take it she means especially the first seven verses.  Now I fight back tears.  “You keep praying that prayer,” I say. Then, as if to set her free from what must feel like confinement–the office of her professor–I say, “Thank you, for this. I needed to hear this psalm.” And she’s gone.

She does not make it to the end of the semester at my college, and I do not know where she is now.  It wouldn’t be all that hard to find out, for we live in a world with Facebook, a world where virtually no one disappears forever anymore. I have thought of that day from time to time since then, but I had forgotten the psalm until this morning when I read it again and remembered and wanted to say to the sad eyed one, “I remember you, I have thought of you, I will pray for you."


And “Thank you.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j8mr-gcgoI&w=560&h=315]

He slips out the backdoor of his office and into the movable stacks.  Most employees have but one way in and one way out of their offices.  His office, in the bowels of Bowen, has a second doorway out and directly into the literature section of the library–into a large room with the highest concentration of books of anywhere on campus.

Were he a poet there might be a metaphor to work here.  Sometimes he likes to shut the main door to his office and crack open the door into the library to let in its cooler air.  Perhaps in a magical realist story, more than just cool air would work its way into his modest, windowless office when he opens this door to another world. 

Libraries have always enchanted him.  He walks past a stack of books a hundred times without noticing, then the hundred and first time some book title captures his eye, and if he is not careful (and why should he be?), he finds himself standing for a half hour cracking open a book cover, inhaling its cooler air, transported to another world.

One day the library will likely claim the faculty offices in the northeast corner of its building, and the English department will be relocated elsewhere.  This will be a sad day for him–the day he loses his windowless office with its secret passageway into a world of worlds.

Or not so much on cars in general, “On My Car.”  Or, “On My 1999 Blue Ford Escort.”  The one that is just about ready for the graveyard, I think.  It’s served me well. I don’t drive it all that much–back and forth to work, in the summer to softball tournaments and games, occasionally to the store. It hasn’t even made it to a  hundred thousand miles yet, but it runs like it’s a lot older. The kind of miles I put on it all these years are the hardest kind of miles on a car.  A mile or two here, eight or nine miles there.  Hardly gives the poor thing a chance to warm up.

I hate the very thought of buying a new car.  And I vowed after I bought a new care ten years ago that I would never buy another “new” car.  That’s not what I mean.  I hate the thought of buying any car.  I don’t trust people who sell cars, I don’t trust myself to not get ripped off when I buy a car, and I don’t like spending money in such large sums.  Leaves me depressed for days.  And cars–a car is just something that takes you from one place to the next without your having to sweat or breathe heavy. 

If there were decent bike lanes or even if I could trust the rest of the idiots who drive cars all over the place, I’d bike to work most days and maybe find a way to eliminate my reliance on the car.  But there are no decent bike lanes from where I live to where I work, and experience biking that route has given me no reason to place my trust in idiots.

I could buy a house somewhere closer to where I work, a thought I entertain nearly every day driving home.  But remember what I said about big purchases leaving me depressed?

So, I will buy a car.  Or maybe, J. will buy us a car.  She actually seems energized by the wheeling and dealing and excitement of car buying.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

• I turn 42 today.
• Jackie Robinson wore #42.
• One time in a summer league basketball game in Bourbon, I scored 42 points.
• 42 days into 2012, I will have written 42 new blog entries.
• My world literature class will meet 42 times this semester--41 classes and a final exam period.
• Volume 42 of the Great Books of the Western World includes the major works of Immanuel Kant. I've never read it.  I don't plan on wasting my 42nd year doing so.
• Psalm 42 begins, "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God."
• 42 feet is a perfect distince between home plate and the pitchng rubber in wiffle ball.
• "Cholly was beyond redemption, of course, and redemption was hardly the point--Mrs. Breedlove was not interested in Christ the Redeemer, but rather in Christ the Judge." (p. 42, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel of lost innocence you should go to the library right now and get).
• Say "Tea for two" really fast about 10 times and I bet you'll almost say 42.
• I've always found Matthew 5:42--"Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you"--harder to follow than I would like to admit.
• 6 x 7.  Also 41 + 1.
• 24--the number I wore in basketball most of the time--backwards is 42.
•  A Double Quarter Pounder from McDonald's contains 42 grams of fat.
• If gained 42 pounds--perhaps by eating 42 Double Quarter Pounders a week for the next 42 days (6 weeks)--I would weigh 225 pounds.
• I just did 42 push-ups, so I could say that I just did 42 push-ups.
• Apparantly this guy http://youtu.be/tRe1wFIACw8 has a 42 inch vertical.  He definitely has a really cool Alfalfa hair thing going.
• I would bet 42 dollars that fewer than 42 people will actually read this blog entry.

She makes things.  She makes things all day long.
I consume things.  I consume things all day long.

I read books.
We read books together, too, but then she surrounds herself for an hour or two with a million markers and crayons and paper and glue and staples and scissors, and she makes her own book, which she gives away to someone as a gift.

She delights in making the cheesy scrambled eggs and toast…
that I will eat, while I channel surf.

I plug my new headphones into the computer and listen to my favorite station on Pandora or Last.Fm,
while she sits down at her keyboard and hammers out another song she’s taught herself to play.

In the beginning, God created…
And all day long, so does Syd, bearing His image with gladness.

Life is a journey.
All journeys quests.
Every quest has the same purpose–that purpose is to deepen the self-knowledge of the quester.
Self-knowledge is never merely additive; it is always transformative.

Maybe?

The Spirit intends to investigate our whole life history, layer by layer, throwing out the junk and preserving the values that wer appropriate to each stage of our human development . . . Eventually, the Spirit begins to dig into the bedrock of our earliest emotional life . . . Hence, as we progress toward the center where God is actually waiting for us, we are naturally going to feel that we are getting worse.  This warns us that the spiritual journey is not a success story or a career move.  It is rather a series of humiliations of the false self.  (Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God: An Introduction to Centering Prayer, 82-84).

Two dogs—both medium sized mutts of indistinct breed—live in a cage behind the house a couple backyards over.  They are too far away for me to read the expressions on their faces when Morgan and I play ball in our spacious fenced backyard, but they sit on the roofs of their homes inside their kennel and stare our direction.  Sometimes they bark.

I’ve never seen anyone take them on a walk. I’ve never seen anyone throw them a ball.

I’ve only ever seen them in that kennel. 

I don’t understand why anyone would want to keep a dog—never mind two dogs—penned up 24-7 in the far reaches of their backyard.  The dogs apparently are not starving, for they have been there well over a year now.  But surely they must be depressed.  All that open space, so many smells, so many free creatures roaming the woods and trees and yards just outside their pen, yet there they sit.

When all creation is one day redeemed and made new, I have a strong suspicion that those two dogs will be there, too, and that there will be no more cages, and that they will run free, and not grow weary.  

My prayer is that I would be as heartbroken for my caged human neighbors, whose lives must be no less tragic.

Considering how many words have been written–especially in recent years–on leadership, it is striking to me how precious few truly wise words have been written on the subject. Apparently there’s a market out there for books on leadership, when most of what you need to know could be learned by reading very old books that don’t have “Leadership” in the title (i.e. The Bible, The Iliad and The Odyssey, etc.). Spend your time with them, and if you have any imagination at all, you’ll learn more about leadership than any hundred modern books. We don’t need “leadership” seminars. We need to read the Great Books.

And, maybe, we need to read Parker Palmer.

Everyone who draws breath "takes the lead" many times a day. We lead with actions that range from a smile to a frown; with words that range from blessing to curse; with decisions that range from faithful to fearful . . . When I resist thinking of myself as a leader, it is neither because of modesty nor a clear-eyed look at the reality of my life . . . I am responsible for my impact on the world whether I acknowledge it or not.

So what does it take to qualify as a leader. Being human and being here. As long as I am here, doing whatever I am doing, I am leading for better or for worse. And, if I may says so, so are you.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INPs-LmKL1A&w=420&h=315]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrpSjXo6ah0&w=560&h=315]

I have always found sunny days in November ominous in their loveliness. Something about long shadows all day connotes a mood of perpetually dying day. And if November’s trend were to continue, might not the sun sink behind the horizon forever and the world slip to eternal darkness?

I love them and and loathe them. I’d like to say they are better than the nostalgic gray cold we had Sunday, but I’m not so prejudiced. I love them both more than I loathe them. Time passes with persistence, and perhaps even a bit of grace. Why worry?

“In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automatic teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. the system hardware, the mainframe sittiing in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies."

-Don DeLillo, White Noise

Today I read the best student paper on the Odyssey I’ve ever read in ten years of teaching the poem. The best thing: it’s a student who took my Written Communication course and who continues to show improvement as a writer. Persistence and practice pays off.

How awesome is this song; how awesome is this band?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6g4t93uuus&w=420&h=315]

5 pullups
10 pushups
15 squats

As many rounds as possible in 20 minutes.

My score = 24

“Yes, it is the dawn that has come.  The titihoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying.  The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.  The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there.  Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret."

She approaches with stealth, quietly as he reads an ancient epic on the recliner.  The sun has made its way to the horizon, and he would like nothing more than to rest, reliving glorious feats of gods and men.  She whispers.  “Papa, we should go outside and play baseball.” How can he resist.

“Guess what, Sydney.  I ordered you a present.  It’s going to come in the mail in a few days.  What do you think it might be?"

He sees that she knows instantly, but she pauses anyhow, pretending to think about.

“Maybe some new wiffleballs?"

She’s right.

They play ball as the last day of summer turns to night.  And she hits many homeruns.

    When Christianity came into the world, it did not need to call attention (even though it did so) to the fact that it was contrary to human nature and human understanding, for the world discovered that easily enough. But now that we are on intimate terms with Christianity, we must awaken the collision. The possibility of offense must again be preached to life. Only the possibility of offense (the antidote to the apologists’ sleeping potion) is able to waken those who have fallen asleep, is able to break the spell so that Christianity is itself again.

    Woe to him, therefore, who preaches Christianity without the possibility of offense. Woe to the person who smoothly, flirtatiously, commendingly, convincingly preaches some soft, sweet something which is supposed to be Christianity! Woe to the person who makes miracles reasonable. Woe to the person who betrays and breaks the mystery of faith, distorts it into public wisdom, because he takes away the possibility of offense! Woe to the person who speaks of the mystery of the Atonement without detecting in it anything of the possibility of offense. Woe again to him who thinks God and Christianity are something for study and discussion. Woe to every unfaithful steward who sits down and writes false proofs, winning friends for themselves and for Christianity by writing off the possibility ofoffense. Oh, the learning and acumen tragically wasted. Oh, the time wasted in this enormous work of making Christianity so reasonable, and in trying to make it so relevant!

    Only when Christianity rises up again, powerful in the possibility of offense, only then will it need no artful defenders. The more skillful, the more articulate, the more excellent the defense, however, the more Christianity is disfigured, abolished, exhausted like an emasculated man. Christianity ought not to be defended, at least not on the world’s terms. It is we who should see whether we can justify urselves. It is we who must choose: either to be offended or to accept Christianity. Therefore, take away from Christianity the possibility of offense or take away from the forgiveness of sin the battle of an anguished conscience. Then lock the churches, the sooner the better, or turn them into places of amusement which stand open all day long!

• Soren Kierkegaard

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yswz5MtGey0&w=560&h=315]

Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only
true explanation of it; the only true way of acquiring it. Truth is
not a sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts,
but a life. Truth is not a property of thought that guarantees
validity to thinking. No, truth in its most essential character
is the reduplication of truth within yourself, within me, within
him. Your life, my life, his life expresses the truth in the striving.
Just as the truth was a life in Christ, so too, for us truth must be
lived.

Therefore, truth is not a matter of knowing this or that but of
being in the truth. Despite all modern philosophy, there is an
infinite difference here, best seen in Christ’s response to Pilate.
Christ did not know the truth but was the truth. Not as if he did
not know what truth is, but when one is the truth and when the
requirement is to be in the truth, to merely “know” the truth is
insufficient – it is an untruth. For knowing the truth is something
that follows as a matter of course from being in the truth,
not the other way around. Nobody knows more of the truth
than what he is of the truth. To properly know the truth is to be
in the truth; it is to have the truth for one’s life. This always costs
a struggle. Any other kind of knowledge is a falsification. In
short, the truth, if it is really there, is a being, a life. The Gospel
says that this is eternal life, to know the only true God and the
one whom he sent, the truth (Jn. 17:3). That is, I only know the
truth when it becomes a life in me.

• Soren Kierkegaard

Couldn’t win a stinking game last week.

10-0 this week.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13aTWulSMPE&w=560&h=315]

Three rounds for time of:
25 Push ups
25 Pull ups
25 Dips
75 Squats

16:36 as rx’d.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=481XQAOA_6s&w=420&h=345]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd60nI4sa9A&w=420&h=345]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6t594P6myw&w=420&h=345]

Crossfit, “Murph”

Run one mile.
100 pullups
200 pushups
300 squats
Run one mile.

For time.

33 min, 12 seconds.

Ouch.

Tomorrow, Sydney has her first day of kindergarten. That makes today the last day of summer vacation. She said she wants to play in the park, walk in the woods, play baseball, and ride her bike. But then some cartoon on tv demonstrated how you make juice pops in the freezer, and that got added to the list of things to do.

We’ll giver her a shot, Syd, cuz there are only so many days of summer vacation in a lifetime, and we ought to make the most of em.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk3sLHZzZRI&w=560&h=349]

Gotta love Harry Belafonte.

I’m not very good with a chainsaw to begin with. But after I figured out that I had installed the chain backwards–so that the teeth were facing the wrong direction–cutting up wood became much more enjoyable.

Still, I wouldn’t want to do it for a living.

In August.

Perfection.

Last night we played two innings before the storm hit. I went 2-2 with a three run homer. We were ahead 6-1.

Season totals: .428, 12 HR

We play tonight in Bremen. Then I play with the Outlaws Thursday at 4:00 p.m. at Belleville complex in South Bend in the ASA Men’s Major.

Strategic
Learner
Ideation
Intellection
Context

www.strengthsquest.com

I had a rough day hitting-wise on Saturday. I went 3-13 with an inside the park homerun as we went 2-2 with my pick-up squad. Virtually every time I hit the ball hard it went right at someone. I have a theory about this: it evens out over the course of the whole season. I have stretches where almost everything I hit finds a hole, too. Maybe I’ll have one of those stretches during the last month of the season. Hope so.

My first ever crossfit workout.

“Angie” is …

100 pullups
100 pushups
100 situps
100 air squats

For time. You do them in order (have to complete the pullups before you start pushups, etc.). You can take breaks, but the clock is running.

Time: 19:09

Gotta learn to do kipping pullups.

41/m/185#

Last weekend we finished second in the Michigan ASA state tournament in Moline. We went 5-2, and lost to the Fat Boyz from Marquette in the winners bracket championship and then again in the final “if” game.

We played well and won several close and two extra inning games in the tourney. We have to move up to a new classification–A/B for next year–because of our performance in the tournament. I played well overall; went 14/28 (.447) with 3 homeruns (10).

I am playing with a pick-up team tomorrow in Battle Creek. Next week I’ve been picked up to play in the Men’s Major world series in South Bend with the “Outlaws.” Should be fun. We play the Quad City Sox on Thursday, August 4 at 4:00 p.m. at Belleville Park.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Sharing Button Widget: “AddThis is a free way to boost traffic back to your site by making it easier for visitors to share your content”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkRNz0tR7tc&w=560&h=349]


[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4XahjfsyJs&w=425&h=349]

We swept a double header on Tuesday night, and I had one of the wierdest nights at the plate ever. I was 1/3 on the night with 7 walks. So that’s a really good on base percentage, but it was a bit of a frustrating night, because I would have liked to swing a bit more.

We play in the state tournament tomorrow night at 6:00 p.m. in Moline, MI.

Saw her bring the house down with this song one late night at Cornerstone in 1999 (I think).

With Dave.

Ten years, it’s been, my friend. Miss ya.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9HIC4HaTj8&w=425&h=349]

A lot of fastball (that’s the Canadian term for fast-pitch softball) has been played since I last wrote. Seven games actually. We won five of them and lost two. I was 9/23 (.433) with one very long home-run (7), which I’m going to tell you about, because it occurred to me after I hit it that I will very likely never hit a softball that far again the rest of my life. I’m 41, remember.

The right-field fence on the diamond we were playing on was 275', which is actually long for fastball (they’re usually 235'-260'). About fifteen paces beyond the right-field fence, there’s a picnic shelter/roofed pavilion. The 2-0 pitch I hit landed at the peak of the roof. My coach said he thought it went 350'.

The next morning, leading off our game, someone from our dugout yelled, “Let’s go, Pavilion.” As I’m batting, the umpire laughed and said, “Pavilion… I like that. I got to tell the story of your home-run over beer last night.”

So no matter what happens, there’s always going to be that one time I hit a colossal bomb onto the picnic pavilion in Frankenmuth. Which is nice.

…

p.s. I’m not even sure it was the longest home-run of the tournament. I saw three others that went, what I thought was, at least as far. But they didn’t land on the roof of anything.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgzCZ7lJbrc&w=425&h=349]

Won 12-7 on Tuesday night. 3-4 with a walk and a double. Scored 3 runs. We play in Elkhart tomorrow night and in Frankenmuth Saturday and Sunday.

http://d.yimg.com/m/up/fop/embedflv/swf/fop.swf

"The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy and remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think of it as bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort."

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HagzTRmUBIE&w=425&h=349]

…“Dr.” in front of the name of anybody but a medical doctor, veterinarian, or dentist.

The rest of us just don’t deserve to be called “doctor” and it’s laughably pompous for academics to insist the we be called such.

That is all.

Won 10-0 on Thursday night in Benton Harbor. 1-4 with my 6th homer of the season. Next game Tuesday night. Tournament in Frankenmuth–home of the most ridiculously overpriced hotels in the state of Michigan–next weekend. Luckily, I’ll be driving in from Port Huron and not staying in a hotel.

My approach to education would be like my approach to everything else. I’d change the standard. I would make the standard that of community health rather than the career of the student. You see, if you make the standard the health of the community, that would change everything. Once you begin to ask what would be the best thing for our community, what’s the best thing that we can do here for our community, you can’t rule out any kind of knowledge. You need to know everything you possibly can know. So, once you raise that standard of the health of the community, all the departmental walls fall down, because you can no longer feel that it’s safe not to know something. And then you begin to see that these supposedly discreet and separate disciplines, these “specializations,” aren’t separate at all, but are connected. And of course our mistakes, over and over again, show us what the connections are, or show us that connections exist.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8za1x–cN4&w=425&h=349]

Monday, July 25 @ 7:00 p.m.
Prenkert’s house

We will be discussing Mark Richard’s fantastic memoir, House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer’s Journey Home. Don’t miss this one!!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9gxrExNBQQ&w=425&h=349]

My “pick-up” team and I went 3-0 in pool play on Saturday, in what was most likely the hottest day on which I’ve played three games of softball. The heat index was 101 when we started our game at 11:00 a.m. I didn’t check it after that. Suffice it to say, it was brutally hot.

We lost a heartbreaker in the bottom of the 7th 4-3 in the first game on Sunday, ending our tournament. I played shortstop the whole weekend and went 8-13 (.453) with two triples and a couple walks. Not bad.

My team plays Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Tomorrow I play softball in Wabash, IN. I would like to explain why.

My regular team (Smalltown Fastpitch) is not playing in Wabash. Instead, I have been “picked up” by another team (Goshen Gators), who happen to be short some of their regular players for the weekend. This happens fairly regularly throughout the course of a season. As a matter of fact, this season my own team has picked up at least one player for each of the tournaments we have played in.

Here is another interesting thing about this particular tournament. The winning team takes home a cash prize. That’s not normal. Neither is the format of the tournament.

We play three games in “pool play” tomorrow (11, 3, & 5). Based on our performance in pool play we will be entered into a single elimination bracket on Sunday. The top two teams from each pool go into the “gold” bracket. The bottom two teams from each pool go into the “silver” bracket. By the end of the day Sunday there will be a silver champion ($300 cash prize) and a gold champion ($500 cash prize). It’s not much, but it’s a lot more than any other tournament I’ve ever played in. Not sure who they found to sponsor this, but kudos to the people in Wabash.

Hope we don’t lose all of our games.

p.s. Don’t you feel enlightened about the workings of men’s fastpitch softball now?

Such is the way of the world
You can never know
Just where to put all your faith
And how will it grow

Gonna rise up
Burning back holes in dark memories
Gonna rise up
Turning mistakes into gold

Such is the passage of time
Too fast to fold
And suddenly swallowed by signs
Low and behold

Gonna rise up
Find my direction magnetically
Gonna rise up
Throw down my ace in the hole

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Js2Ef5Ojg&w=560&h=349]

Turned on my computer today for the first time in a week. Here’s what you’ve missed.

1. Went to Port Huron. Watched a lot of fastpitch softball. Went to the beach.
   
2. Went to see U2 in Lansing. The acoustic version of “Stay (faraway so close)” was a highlight, but as always, “Where the Streets Have no Name” brings the house down.
   
3. Went 1-3 with two walks in a win on Tuesday night. The smell of something dead and decaying–from somewhere beyond the rightfield fence–was oppressive.
   
4. Started Phase 3 of P90X. Got tickets?
   
5. Mowed the 73 acres (ok, slight exaggeration, but it does take about 6 hours) at St. Mark Missionary Church.
   
6. Drove to Benton Harbor to play an inning and a half of softball before we got rained out.
   
7. Hosted reading group at my house. We sort of talked about “The Things They Carried.” What a great book.
   
8. Had a long meeting discussing some curricular changes.
   
9. Read I and II Kings. Observation: There were a lot of evil kings.
   
10. I could go on, but you probably don’t care about the rest.

I bet my ticket we’ll hear this one.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi52HjJbwVQ&w=560&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCY9OEmObig&w=560&h=349]

Moved to 12-9 on the season with our 8-5 win last night. I played centerfield and went 2-3 (.426) with a double.

Now let me mention one of the best ways to determine how well a fastpitch game is played: time. On Saturday night we lost a game 11-8 that lasted easily two and half hours. That is bad. Last night, our game took an hour and twenty minutes. That’s much more like it.

It’s not that I wish to hurry my recreation along. But sloppy play typically slows the game to a snail’s pace. Last night’s game had a couple of errors, but it didn’t have countless wild pitches and walks and pitching changes. It also had one very long homerun hit by our opponent’s left fielder–a hanging changeup got launched about 330 feet.

Notre Dame, October 2001

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgnVHxE171M&w=425&h=349]

So, next Sunday night I’ll be going to my 5th U2 concert. It will be Jeanie’s 4th. But I’m envious that she actually saw one of the Joshua Tree tour concerts. Anyhow, leading up to this, songs I’d love to see performed (again) in concert.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVR7s-25Bio&w=425&h=349]

Long story short: We finished second in the Rich Plangger Invitational this year.

After winning our game Friday night [see Diamond notes (4)], we won 5-2 on Saturday morning. I went 2-4 and scored a couple runs. That guaranteed us a spot in the elimination round on Sunday, but we still had one more game of pool play late Saturday night. We lost a marathon game in the sultry, mosquito infested Benton Harbor midnight, 11-8. I led off the game with a homerun (5), and then went 0-3 the rest of the way.

On Sunday morning in the elimination round we won a tight game 3-2 against Jack Daniels from Ohio. I hit the ball hard all game, but had nothing to show for it (0-4). We dropped the championship to Munger, MI, 11-8. I went 2-4–the two balls I hit hard were outs, the two I didn’t hit hard were hits. Go figure.

Numbers:
Tournament record = 3-2
My tournament hitting stats = 8-20, 3 HR
Season Record = 11-9
Season hitting stats = .415, 5 HR

Below is me about to connect. I believe that ended up being a line drive right to the second basemen.

Buddy Holly lives!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPs9WMWlbaU&w=425&h=349]

We won our first game of pool play last night 11-3 in five innings. We played one of our better games of the season. We’re 8-7 now, with pool play games today at 2 and 8, and single elimination tomorrow if we qualify. I went 3-4 (.456) with two homers (4). Made an error at shortstop that cost us a run. I’ll try to do better today.

Just because cigar box guitar has to be one of the coolest instruments ever.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsnXQ99RX7k&w=480&h=390]

We played (sort of) a nine inning game last night. The other team only had 9 players, so we provided them with the three extra fielders each inning while we batted. We lost a 14-7. I played shortstop (for both teams) and for one inning rightfield (for the other team). Went 4-6 (.424) with a homerun (2) and three RBI. We play our first game of the Plangger Invitational tourney at 9:00 p.m. on Friday night, and we complete pool play on Saturday with games at 2 and 8.

Trivia: Most fastpitch players wear metal spikes. I’ve never been comfortable in spikes. At 41, I’m much more in danger of catching a spike and blowing out a knee or turning an ankle than I am of slipping in my turf shoes, which are way more comfortable than any cleats or spikes I could buy (thanks Boombah! http://www.boombah.com/s.nl/sc.26/category.304486/.f )

In honor of Sydney, who figured out how to play this song on the piano app on mama’s phone ALL BY HERSELF this morning.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCjJyiqpAuU&w=560&h=349]

Last night we won 4-3 in extra innings. We scored 3 in the first and didn’t score again until the bottom of the 8th. With no outs in the bottom of the 8th we got a bunt single followed by bunt that was mishandled and then thrown away at first base leaviing us with runners at second and third. Our number nine hitter hit a cue shot in to no man’s land between the pitcher and the first baseman that scored the winning run. So not only did we score without hitting the ball out of the infield, we scored without hitting the ball past the pitcher. I played shortstop and went 2-4 (.395) and scored a run. That makes us 7-6 on the year.

We play tonight in Benton Harbor if the rain stops and we host a tournament this weekend starting Friday night. Here’s the tournament schedule. http://www.michiganfp.com/2011-tournaments/2011-rich-plangger-invitational

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_FRFp2iBco&w=425&h=349]

Due to the overwhelming interest (expressed by the thousands of readers of this blog) in my fastpitch softball playing exploits, I have decided to add a regular feature here called “diamond notes."

Let’s see.  I play shortstop and lead off most of the time, though on occasion this season I have played some centerfield.  I’m hitting .385 with a pitiful 1 homerun after twelve games.  My team, “Smalltown Fastpitch” is 6-6 on the season.  Our next game is Tuesday night in Benton Harbor.  Ya, I drive 50 miles each way to play softball, since there’s basically no men’s fastpitch to speak of in Indiana anymore. 

On a wierd note, I have hit three foul ball homeruns this season.  That might double the number of foul ball homeruns I’ve hit in my career.  I’ve no idea what to make of that.

Last night we won our game 10-1 and I went 2-4 with a triple. I played centerfield and we had three high school baseball players in the infield.  Perhaps there is hope for the future of men’s fastpitch afterall.   

Interesting weather observation: it was 75 degrees at my house when I left for the game.  It was 58 at Plangger Park in Benton Harbor when I arrived an hour later.  Lake breeze, I guess.  That just a day after the high temperature was 98 in Benton Harbor.

"...depression demands that we reject simplistic answers, both "religious" and "scientific," and learn to embrace mystery, something our culture resists. Mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart: the deeper we go into the heart's darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God. But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can "straighten things out" makes us feel powerful. Yet mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes--and when we pretend they do, life becomes not only more banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work."

"One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to "fix" it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerless, which is exactly how a depressed person feels--and our unconscious need as Job's comforters is to reassure ourselves that we are not like the sad soul before us."

“I’m strangled by your haunted social scene
Just a pawn out-played by a dominating Queen”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR7a0Gm379E&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BFIfmhCzSw&w=560&h=349]

From “High Fidelity”–opening monologue.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij5sKrHRlN8&w=560&h=349]

Best song I heard on Pandora this morning, hands down.


[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5_p3iLqChQ&w=560&h=349]

p.s. I still need a nickname. How cool is “Paperboy” as a nickname?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPRyaCiOkzU&w=425&h=349]

Today’s song–just because I love Neil Young more than anyone probably should.

Will I see you give
more than I can take?
Will I only harvest some?
As the days fly past
will we lose our grasp
Or fuse it in the sun?

How do you get a name like “Lead Belly”?

Comment with nickname suggestions for me. I’m in need of one.

Until then, enjoy a classic.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBSv8Y-Gm-8&w=425&h=349]

And now, let the real fun begin.

Here’s a song for today, just because. What’s my connection to this song? Well, I like playing it on guitar for one thing. For another, it reminds me of a certain citrus-sy soda I used to drink when I was a kid–one that never failed to give me a tremendous gut ache.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANncUPxfnOI&w=425&h=349]

This song is incredible…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8A9Y1Dq_cQ&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pi7JFn1Cyg&w=425&h=349]

“Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9M37qeA_oM&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8APTMRfDmKY&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q6DdTcqGy8&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nszR0tfp4Es?rel=0&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5djkVhLjw18&w=425&h=349]

“Every good book should be entertaining.  A good book will be more; it must not be less.  Entertainment . . . is like a qualifying examination.  If a fiction can’t provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities."

–C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TXNSipWUiE?rel=0&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjmzSaiDobQ&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIjkW6iyXNo&w=560&h=349]

It never ceases to cheer me up.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzZWSrr5wFI&w=425&h=349]

Not the album version, but a great video version nonetheless.

U2, The Joshua Tree, “Where the Streets Have No Name”

Only problem… the song makes me cry every time I hear it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFnpsrMqEVA&w=425&h=349]

Stupidest category so far. On the other hand, this song is better than most you hear on the radio right now.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqUsMZ96j3M&w=560&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTrNQCYh70Y&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPa89K_viiM&w=425&h=349]


[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY7LFzhup1o&w=560&h=349]


[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZTpLvsYYHw?rel=0&w=560&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NXnxTNIWkc&w=425&h=349]

• Percentage of Americans in 2009 who believed the free market "is the best system on which to base the future of the world": 74
• Percentage of Americans who believe so today: 59
• Percentage of Chinese who do: 67

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vWONJigv5A&w=425&h=349]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSD4vsh1zDA&w=560&h=349]

Do yourself a favor and watch this.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

Sydney and Papa’s favorite dancing song…

http://youtu.be/xcbYD_MTDcY

“Minglewood Blues” - Old Crow Medicine Show

Ya… I do.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

“Johnny Too Bad” - The Slickers

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

If you know me at all, you know where this reminds me of.  Am I supposed to explain all of these?

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

AND…

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

“Most students . . . feel that they must first have something to say brefore they can put it down on paper.  For them writing is little more than recording a preexistent thought.  But . . . writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive."

• Henri Nouwen

Gogol Bordello - “Start Wearing Purple”

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

Hard to single out just one. When I was like 13 years old they played this stupid song to death.  I turn off the radio anytime I hear it now. 

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

“The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write.  To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.  Thus, creative writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves, “I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write.” Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes one has, in trust that they will multiply in the giving.  Once we dare to “give away” on paper the few thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden underneath . . . and gradually come in touch with our own riches."

-Henri Nouwen

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

1.  NBA playoffs virtually every day.
2.  It’s not hot yet.
3.  It’s not really that cold anymore.
4.  It stays light until 9:00 p.m.
5.  Kiddie Kollege on Tuesday and Thursday with Miss Rachel.
6.  No classes for me.
7.  Clean office (in process).
8.  Hitting wiffleballs every day.
9.  Reading many, many pages just for the fun of it every day.
10.  No papers to grade for four months.
11.  Fastpitch softball begins again.
12.  The Cubs, no matter how bad they are, still have a chance to redeem the season.
13.  Morgan laying in the sun on the back deck.
14.  Walks in the woods.
15.  Biking.
16.  P90X with renewed intensity.
17.  Did I mention the NBA playoffs?
18.  Playing the uke and the harmonica
19.  Dandelions.
20.  Burning leafs left over from last fall.
21.  Veggies growing in the various containers and raised beds.
22.  Vacuuming the pretzels, cheerios, cinnamon toast crunch, french fries, and other filth from my car because I  finally have the time.
23.  The daily office.
24.  Reading group begins, again.
25.  Church softball.
26.  Lunch time basketball.
27.  Shooting hoops in the driveway.
28.  Memorial Day weekend.
29.  The bouncy jump in the backyard.
30.  Sydney’s fifth birthday.
31.  Jeanie counting down the days to the end of school.

“Osama bin Laden, as we all know, bore the most serious responsibility for spreading divisions and hatred among populations, causing the deaths of innumerable people, and manipulating religions to this end. In the face of a man’s death, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibilities of each person before God and before men, and hopes and works so that every event may be the occasion for the further growth of peace and not of hatred.”

• Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, on the death of Osama bin Laden.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

“One must not put a loaded gun on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” - Anton Chekhov
 
“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” - Anton Chekhov
 

"Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. I can explain this best by an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on." (Neil Postman)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S02AFoXIZeY?rel=0&w=640&h=390]


http://www.hulu.com/embed/3rYcuIGR6AnsnyX-S0p7Yg

The point is not that she feels unsafe.
The point is that she once felt safe, and now does not.
And the point is also that she now feels unsafe because that which was concealed has been revealed.

And there’s no crying in baseball.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPqYnC-SW5w&w=640&h=390]

Hilarious.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PCN7A0QWDc&w=640&h=390]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRxFINZ24X4&w=480&h=390]

Just for fun and since I’ve not been writing much at all lately, the next few days (until I get bored with it), I’ll be posting some of my all time favorite movie scenes, in no particular order. This is classic; I cackle every time I see this.

Questioning Campus Safety’s Gun Policy The following is an opinion piece published in The Bethel Beacon, the student newspaper of Bethel College, Indiana, my alma mater as well as where I currently teach. Bethel students, staff, and faculty with a valid Bethel email can access and comment on the article here. Others will have to simply leave their comments below. http://cramercomments.blogspot.com/2011/03/questioning-campus-safetys-gun-policy.html

The Sunset Limited


[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0MSitTAYyA&w=640&h=390]

Pull out my phone and turn on the “sneaky fart” app.

Ya, my daughter thinks the thirty or so different and very realistic sounding fart noises are hilarious. You do what you gotta do in the morning.

http://www.freeware4android.net/sneaky-fart-download-25819.html

Is it possible to get a back ache just looking at your driveway on a morning like this?

Prediction: two more big snows before spring.

Readers of this blog will see I’m not very good at predicting anything weather related.

Later today, if I don’t actually end up with a debilitating back ache, Morgan and I will take a walk in the woods.

It is not necessary to have more than one sentence in any paragraph, nor does a blog entry need a true central focus. Thesis statements are overrated, you know.

Ok, my intuitions were proven incorrect like two minutes after I posted the previous blog.

Daytime classes are all cancelled tomorrow at Bethel.

Noon hoops is on.

At 9 p.m. this evening, Jeanie got the text announcing no school tomorrow. We should all be so lucky. Alas, I will get no such text tonight, and I’m betting I will find myself in front of a class full of students who, having banked on a snow day, will have not read the assignment for the day. Ok, I wouldn’t bet my next paycheck or anything. Let’s just call it an intuition.

By the way, I did p90x, chest, shoulders, and triceps tonight. Guess what I’m bringing to the party?

Driving home last evening, I noticed something on the western horizon. The sun. The time: 5:45 p.m. It’s a small thing, but the early sunsets of winter are slowly coming later and later, and that makes me happy. I don’t measure winter in degrees or inches of snow. I measure it in daylight. I can handle more cold days and more snow days, and who knows how many of these there will be.

But one thing I can count on–the days will get longer, sun will set later. I’ll take it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Qw3S7ukzA?rel=0&w=480&h=390]

Lord willing, I’m going to China! (I hate exclamation points–too much like laughing at your own joke; but I felt that sentence warranted one.)

Anyhow, I’m going back to China. Last trip was Spring of 2004–the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Wong Fu Jing, Silk Market, etc. Best part is hanging with the Bethel students, though.

Worst part is the nearly crippling jet lag that hits upon your return.

Worth it, though.

Some rule changes needed in both college and the NBA:

1. Eliminate media timeouts.

2. No live ball timeouts. If the ball is in play, you cannot bail yourself out of lousy play by calling timeout. The only time a timeout can be called is either when the clock is stopped or after a made basket before the ball is inbounded.

3. Each team would be allowed 2 full and 2 30-second timeouts per half.

4. Halftime reduced to ten minutes.

p.s. And though it’s not a “rule” change, in college, the officials need to do a much better job of protecting shooters by calling the foul when there is contact. I don’t mind that they let some contact go un-whistled when the offensive player is clearly initiating the body contact, but it’s gotten bad, and the quality of basketball in college has declined dramatically in the past ten to fifteen years in part because of it (and mostly because of AAU–but that’s another story).

Some ways to improve the NFL:

1. 10 minute quarters.
2. Each team would be allowed a 20 man active roster.
3. To be eligible to kick a field goal, a player must have played in the previous offensive play. (effectively eliminating kicking specialists).
4. Deepen the end zone to twenty yards, goal posts stationed at back of end zone.
5. All games played outdoors on natural grass.
6. Eliminate 2-minute warning.

Tune in next time for rule changes that would improve basketball.

Something happened to my hip while playing basketball today. I don’t know if it’s possible to sprain your hip, but that’s what it felt like–the awful tweaking of a joint when it twists or extends in a direction it should not.

It does not hurt sitting here watching free NBA league pass on television, but it’s torture walking up the stairs. So I will stay here under my sleeping bag, fire roaring a few feet away, Steve Nash torching the Wizards on TV.

Jeanie says I complain too much about my aches and pains. She has the highest pain threshold of any person I have ever met.

To write 300 blog entries in one year, one must average 25 entries per month, or about 5.8 entries per week.

I shall have to pick up the pace. Should I write more about “everything” or more about “nothing,” and under which category does this particular entry fall?

My office is nearly twice the size it was for most of last semester, and I cannot begin to tell you the difference that space has made for my state of mind. I hadn’t realized how crowded and cluttered I had felt until now, having been given room to stretch out and air to breathe these past several weeks. I felt this same way when we moved out of a house that was crammed in between two other houses a few years back. It is cliche to say that you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of a boy, but there may be something to it in my case. In the country there is space, and I have realized that I need the room to bloom and grow.

I mean no metaphor, here. I am simply thankful for a bigger office in which I feel much more at ease entertaining the visitors who happen to drop in. Perhaps I am more hospitable now, which is good, since I am sure that I have entertained angels unaware.

I sure hope so.

“If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average."

-Derek Walcott

I’m thinking of a possible new topic for a seminar in literature next fall. I’d call it “Bethel Favorites” and have a dozen different faculty, staff, and recent alumni pick a favorite literary work. The seminar members would read and discuss the work, but the faculty, staff, or alumni would come and present a guest lecture on how and why they “love” the piece of literature, how it speaks to them, how it has enchanted or mentored them over the years.

The implicit thesis of a course like this would be that our favorite works say something about what we are. “Tell me what you read, and I will tell you what you are.”

The kind of sleddding/tubing–ours are neither sleds nor tubes but more like the things you see in the picture–that produces the most ecstatic laughter in my four year old daughter involves great crashes at the bottom of the hill. Sydney lies on her inflated “Rudolph the Reindeer” sled and I plow into her full bore, sending her and Rudolph hurtling, powdery snow showering us both.

Her riotous laughter, contagious.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKL4WxTqHzw?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=640&h=385]

1. Shoveling the driveway three times (okay, me twice, Jeanie once).
   2. Scott Johnson’s funeral, with its symbolism of flight
   3. Caleb Laidig’s dunk
   4. Bethel beating Huntington–twice
   5. Finishing ENGL 150 syllabus
   6. Witnessing record breaking snowfall
   7. Jeanie’s Jamaican style brown-stew chicken
   8. Watching “Wipeout” for five minutes
   9. Completely ignoring the NFL on tv
   10. Ice cream cake and popcorn

“By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes."

-2nd Witch, Macbeth, Shakespeare

A Nation of Cowards - The Atlantic

Today was the…

1. First MERT meeting of the semester.

2. First class of the semester: “Sermon on the Mount & Story."

3. First office hour of the semester.

4. First time sledding this year.

5. First day of the rest of my life.

“Papa, I just had to come in and say I love you."

I guess it couldn’t wait until I finished my shower. That’s okay; I’ll let it slide. This time.

Number of of posts on this site in 2008: 47

Number of posts on this site in 2009: 107

Number of posts on this site in 2010: 96

Number of posts on this site so far in 2011: 3

Number of posts the author of this site has set for himself as a goal this year: 300

Number of days this year the author of this site will likely have absolutely nothing to say: 365

Number of entries this year in which the author will reference p90x: 93

Percentage of entries in the history of this blog that have been fictional or semi-fictional: 89

Percentage of entries in 2010 that were simply quotations from other authors: 62

Percentage of entries in the history of blog that have been true: 99.44

Number of times the author of this entry has fabricated a statistic: 5

Percentage of Bethel College students who should faithfully read this blog: 0

Number of walks in the woods author of blog has taken with his dog this year: 1

Percentage of those walks in which he accidentally trespassed onto private property: 100

Number of other human beings encountered during those walks: 0

Perfect temperature in Celsius for walking in the woods during January: -3

Favorite number: 33

Number of homeruns by author during 2010 fastpitch season: 11

Year of career high in homeruns (18): 2008

Number of times author has been runner-up in the World Series of Wiffleball: 2

Number times author has been world champion in the World Series of Wiffleball: 0

Most free throws author has ever made in a row: 125

Next best: 89

Most three pointers author has ever made in a row: 37

Shoe size: 11

Number of books read cover to cover in 2010: 49

Number of episodes of the Wonder Years author watched today while working out: 4

Age as of today: 40

Age as of tomorrow: 41

Reason #1:

Because if I don’t workout hard on a regular basis, it becomes painful to play basketball and nearly impossible to concentrate while trying to read and comment on essays.

Reason #2:

Because I like being able to do more than five pullups without feeling like I want to pass out.

Reason #3:

Because I can’t help myself; it’s a habit now.

Reason #4:

Because I like bringing two guns and a six pack to the party.

Reason #5:

Because if those people on the commercial can do it, why can’t I?

Reason #6:

Because I like sweet baby ray’s barbecue sauce way too much, and if I didn’t burn A LOT of calories virtually every day I might be ginormously fat.

…. to be continued….

Today, Sydney hit the longest homerun of her relatively short wiffleball career, a towering bomb to left-center field. I tossed one to her at the knees and out over the plate and she let go with the smoothest left-handed swing I’ve seen her make, head perfectly to ball. Crack! Papa laughs.

Not just because it’s January and we’re playing wiffleball, not just because Sydney is four and requested wiffleball, but because his daughter cackled as she raced around the imaginary bases in our frozen backyard.

“Good pitch, Papa!” she said, as she picked up the bat. “If we played for the Cubbies, we’d be stars.”

1. The N.F.L.
   
2. Video games
   
3. APA style documentation
   

In Defense of the Liberal Arts: The therapeutic Left and the utilitarian Right both do disservice to the humanities.

Victor Davis Hanson
December 16, 2010 12:00 A.M.

The liberal arts face a perfect storm. The economy is struggling with obscenely high unemployment and is mired in massive federal and state deficits. Budget cutting won’t spare education.

The public is already angry over fraud, waste, and incompetence in our schools and universities. And in these tough times, taxpayers rightly question everything about traditional education — from teachers’ unions and faculty tenure to the secrecy of university admissions policies to which courses really need to be taught.

Opportunistic private trade schools have sprouted in every community, offering online certification in practical skills without the frills and costs of so-called liberal-arts “electives.”

In response to these challenges, the therapeutic academic Left proved incapable of defending the traditional liberal arts. With three decades of defining the study of literature and history as a melodrama of race, class, and gender oppression, it managed to turn off college students and the general reading public. And, cheek by jowl, the utilitarian Right succeeded in reclassifying business and finance not just as undergraduate majors, but also as core elements in general-education requirements.

In such a climate, it is unsurprising that once again we hear talk of cutting the “non-essentials” in our colleges, such as Latin, Renaissance history, Shakespeare, Plato, Rembrandt, and Chopin. Why do we cling to the arts and humanities in a high-tech world in which we have instant recall at our fingertips through a Google search and such studies do not guarantee sure 21st-century careers?

But the liberal arts train students to write, think, and argue inductively, while drawing upon evidence from a shared body of knowledge. Without that foundation, it is harder to make — or demand from others — logical, informed decisions about managing our supercharged society as it speeds on by.

Citizens — shocked and awed by technological change — become overwhelmed by the Internet chatter, cable news, talk radio, video games, and popular culture of the moment. Without links to our heritage, we in ignorance begin to think that our own modern challenges — the war in Afghanistan, gay marriage, cloning, or massive deficits — are unique and not comparable to those solved in the past.

And without citizens broadly informed by the humanities, we descend into a pyramidal society. A tiny technocratic elite on top crafts everything from cell phones and search engines to foreign policy and economic strategy. A growing mass below has neither understanding of the present complexity nor the basic skills to question what they are told.

During the 1960s and 1970s, committed liberals thought we could short-circuit the process of liberal education by creating advocacy courses with the word “studies” in their names. Black studies, Chicano studies, community studies, environmental studies, leisure studies, peace studies, women’s studies, and hundreds more were designed to turn out more socially responsible young people. Instead, universities have too often graduated zealous advocates who lacked the broad education necessary to achieve their predetermined politicized ends.

On the other hand, pragmatists argued that our 20-year-old future CEOs needed to learn spreadsheets rather than why Homer’s Achilles did not receive the honors he deserved, or how civilization was lost in fifth-century Rome and 1930s Germany. But Latin or a course in rhetoric might better teach a would-be captain of industry how to dazzle his audience than a class in Microsoft PowerPoint.

The more instantaneous our technology, the more we are losing the ability to communicate. Twitter and text-messaging result in economy of expression, not in clarity or beauty. Millions are becoming premodern — communicating in electronic grunts that substitute for effective and dignified expression. Indeed, by inventing new abbreviations and linguistic shortcuts, we are losing a shared written language altogether, in a way analogous to the fragmentation of Latin as the Roman Empire imploded into tribal provinces. No wonder the public is drawn to stories like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, in which characters speak beautifully and believe in age-old values.

Life is not just acquisition and consumption. Engaging English prose uplifts the spirit in a way Twittering cannot. The anti-Christ video shown by the Smithsonian at the National Portrait Gallery will fade when the Delphic Charioteer or Michelangelo’s David does not. Appreciation of the history of great art and music fortifies the soul, and recognizes beauty that does not fade with the passing fad.

America has lots of problems. A population immersed in and informed by literature, history, art, and music is not one of them.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXLHUThBib8?fs=1]

Quite possibly, the best song of the 1980s.

One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels.

Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

God help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, haealthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguised old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between two figments. Oh, I may do many things!

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/10/go-with-god

“To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible. Whatever the practical source, the end result is the same. You are privileged to enter a time—four years!—during which your main job is to listen to lectures, attend seminars, go to labs, and read books.

It is an extraordinary gift. In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college. You may well be thinking, “What is he thinking? I’m just beginning my freshman year. I’m not being called to be a student. None of my peers thinks he or she is called to be a student. They’re going to college because it prepares you for life. I’m going to college so I can get a better job and have a better life than I’d have if I didn’t go to college. It’s not a calling.” …

You cannot and should not try to avoid being identified as an intellectual. I confess I am not altogether happy with the word intellectual as a descriptor for those who are committed to the work of the university. The word is often associated with people who betray a kind of self-indulgence, an air that they do not need to justify why they do what they do. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is the dogma used to justify such an understanding of what it means to be an intellectual. But if you’re clear about your calling as a student, you can avoid this temptation. You are called to the life of the mind to be of service to the gospel and the Church. Don’t resist this call just because others are misusing it.

Fulfilling your calling as a Christian student won’t be easy. It’s not easy for anyone who is serious about the intellectual life, Christian or not. The curricula of many colleges and universities may seem, and in fact may be, chaotic. Many schools have no particular expectations. You check a few general-education boxes—a writing course, perhaps, and some general distributional requirements—and then do as you please. Moreover, there is no guarantee that you will be encouraged to read. Some classes, even in the humanities, are based on textbooks that chop up classic texts into little snippets. You cannot become friends with an author by reading half a dozen pages. Finally, and perhaps worse because insidious, there is a strange anti-intellectualism abroad in academia. Some professors have convinced themselves that all knowledge is just political power dressed up in fancy language, or that books and ideas are simply ideological weapons in the quest for domination. Christians, of all people, should recognize that what is known and how it is known produce and reproduce power relations that are unjust, but this does not mean all questions of truth must be abandoned. As I said, it won’t be easy.”

–Stanley Hauerwas

“The Lord is wonderful."

Marilynne Robinson, Home


[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esx916cb2Rs?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]

“And besides,” he almost writes, “This book is my mentor. Don’t you see? For you to want to throw it out the window is like saying you want to hurt one of my nearest and dearest friends. I met a Jesus I never knew in this book; the one who says, ‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross!’ (171). Can’t you see I need a Jesus who says such words? How desperate I am for the Jesus who suffers beside me through my dark night of the soul.”

Robby Christopher Prenkert, On the Wonder of Mentors Never Met: A Memoir of a Reading Life, Part I

Rage:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon–
The Greek warlord–and godlike Achilles.

Homer, Iliad

“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out. Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine."

Alex, in Everything Is Illuminated

The world of machines is running
Beyond the world of trees
Where only a leaf is turning
In a small high breeze.

Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths, 1988”

He closed his eyes and the night ran together in his mind and he remembered the rifle in the corner and thought: I’ll throw it in the creek tomorrow. I never want to see it again. He would be asleep soon. He saw himself standing on the hill and throwing his rifle into the creek; then the creek became an ocean, and he stood on a high cliff and for a moment he was a mighty angel, throwing all guns and creulty and sex and tears into the sea.

Andre Dubus, “The Intruder”

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the windowpane”

John Shade, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov


and a bonus quote, since I missed yesterday…

“My commentary to this poem, now in the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many subliminal debts to me."

Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

“It was a dark and stormy night."

Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

So let us leave. Let us get to the Plymouth with an impolite quickness–let us fly, as witnesses of eras past might say. Because at home, the hard and escalating war has paid a visit. And it’s Swede, my darling sister, who has met it at the door.

Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Every man has within his own reminiscences certain things he doesn’t reveal to anyone, except, perhaps, to his friends. There are also some that he won’t reveal even to his friends, only to himself perhaps, and even then, in secret. Finally, there are some which a man is afraid to reveal even to himself; every decent man has accumulated a fair number of such things. In fact, it can even be said that the more decent the man, the more of these things he’s accumulated. Anyway, only recently I myself decided to recall some of my earlier adventures; up to now I’ve always avoided them, even with a certain anxiety. But having decided not only to recall them, but even to write them down, now is when I wish to try an experiment: is it possible to be absolutely honest even with one’s own self and not to fear the whole truth? Incidentally, I’ll mention that Heine maintains that faithful autobiographies are almost impossible, and that a man is sure to lie about himself. In Heine’s opinion, Rousseau, for example, undoubtedly told untruths about himself in his confession and even lied intentionally, out of vanity. I’m convinced that Heine is correct; I understand perfectly well that sometimes it’s possible out of vanity alone to impute all sorts of crimes to oneself, and I can even understand what sort of vanity that might be.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

"…I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp."

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6t594P6myw?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]

Crying, in the loneliness of the night
Dying, in the emptiness of this life

Sweet, sweet mercy
Shine on me.
Can you hear me?
Please, be near me

Michael Pritzl, “Sweet Mercy”

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters

That’s the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

p.s. The most beautiful novel I have read (three times now) in some years.

“I just met a wonderful new man, he’s fictional but you can’t have everything."

-Cecilia, in The Purple Rose of Cairo

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself alone in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.

-Dante, “The Inferno”, The Divine Comedy

“You cannot teach creativity – how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.”

-Mario Vargas Llosa (Nobel Prize Winner, 2010)

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


-Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”

He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself.

-Flannery O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First”

He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

Flannery O’Connor, “The Artificial Nigger”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDwQaVZuAjI?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]

October
And the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear
What do I care
October
And kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on
And on

Now that I’m dead I know everything. This is what I wished would happen, but like so many of my wishes it failed to come true. I know only a few factoids that I didn’t know before. It’s much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.

Since being dead–since achieving this state of bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness–I’ve learned some things I would rather not know, as one does when listening at windows or opening other people’s letters. You think you’d like to read minds? Think again.

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbdtq75xhlk?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]

“When I read the Bible, I find that I relate to the sinners, more than I relate to the saints."

Michael Pritzl, The Violet Burning


“Ditto”

Robby Prenkert, ‘everything and nothing’

“Good!” Johnson said savagely. He thrust his head forward. “Listen here,” he hissed, “I don’t care if he’s good or not. He ain’t right!"

Flannery O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First” (Rufus Johnson speaking)

‘Why is it that really beautiful people think everyone else in the world exists merely for their amusement?'

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad


p.s. Is it bad that my blog is made up now almost entirely of words penned by authors I force 19 year olds to read in my classes?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFJUKIULsxk?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]

you’re so far away
and i won’t see you any day soon
we came a long way
and now you want to fly to the moon
all alone going your own way
i thought i owned your love
and now you say

ache, ache beautiful for me
go along and ache
ache beauty babe

Michael Roe, “Ache Beautiful”

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

—William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow


(Salvador Dali, “The Persistence of Memory”)

In the Palace at 4 A.M. you walk from one room to the next by going through the walls. You don’t need to use the doorways. There is a door, but it is standing open, permanently. If you were to walk through it and didn’t like what was on the other side you could turn and come back to the place you started from. What is done can be undone. It is there that I find Cletus Smith.

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

My younger brother was born on New Year’s day, at the height of the influenza epidemic of 1918. My mother died two days later of double pneumonia. After that, there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.

-William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

Yes it is the dawn that has come. The tithoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand. The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.

Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country


p.s. We might move in the direction of “emancipation from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear” if we shut off right wing talk radio and the Glenn Beck program and read good books and the Good Book instead. Or even just took a walk in the woods.

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."

-Leo Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”

Long ago, when I was a young man, my father said to me… “Norman, you like to write stories?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” Then he said, “Someday, when you’re ready… you might tell our family story. Only then will you understand what happened and why.”

(Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It)

“How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?”

-JM Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

Sydney: “I want popcorn and ice cream."

Mama: “How about one or the other."

Sydney: “No, I think I want both.”

Burnt up a big brush pile in my back yard last night. Why is there so much pleasure to be had watching a big pile of sticks burn? Especially in the dark.

I like the “Cook’s Special."

Probably going to need a ride an extra twenty minutes on the bike tomorrow morning—I ate a whole small pizza myself tonight. Man, it was good.

This is my 200th post on this blog.

Big woop. Check out my nephew Calvin’s blog. He’s got like 8 gazillion posts and he’s only 9.

Let’s hope it never comes to this.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtIG4TuVnvg?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=640&h=385]

“If you abide in My word [hold fast to My teachings and live in accordance with them], you are truly My disciples. And you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.” Jesus, John 8:31-32

Tony Horton says something like the same thing. If you DO what I’m telling you, you’re a real student of muscle confusion. THEN you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

I watched the infomercial two years ago, and I got the facts. After two years of holding fast to his teachings, living in accordance with them, I know the truth. It’s liberating, dude. My body doesn’t ache like it used to.

And as a bonus, when I asked Jeanie if she noticed any difference in the way I looked, she said, “Oh yeah, big time.”

That’s what I’m talking about. :-)

Do not look for God in your story. Look for your story in God’s.

We are (essential) sub-plot in God’s meta-story.

“It takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible.” -Eugene Peterson,Eat This Book

I say, it takes the whole novel to read any part of the novel.

It takes the whole life to read any part of the life.

Have I mentioned lately how little I care about NFL preseason garbage? Truth be told, I care very little about NFL season garbage as well.

If we must talk about a meaningless season long before it starts, let’s talk about the upcoming NBA season. This year, my two favorite NBA teams are any team that Steve Nash plays for and whoever is playing the Miami Heat.

Actually, the only thing better than the Heat losing would be Lebron James coming down with a season ending injury and the Heat going on to win the championship without him.

And then never returning to a championship with him healthy and in the line-up.

Does it take anything away from my achievement of 200 posts for the year if many of them say very little, if they are very short, and if I post more than once in a day. Like, today, for instance. Like, this post, for instance.

See?

Please doubt me… you’ve no idea how much trivial drivel I’m capable of writing and posting. I dare you.

In the year 2009 I had 107 blog posts. To date in 2010 I have 33 (counting this one). What does this tell me?

1. If I hope to catch up to last year’s number I better get busy.
2. Maybe I should write shorter entries.
3. There’s really not much to say that hasn’t been said a thousand billion times before.
4. I should set a goal.
5. That goal will be 200 posts in the year 2010.

You doubt me? Please say you doubt me.

He walks with a limp now—arthritis in both a front and a back leg give him the creaks when he stands. He does not chase the ball in the yard more than once these days, preferring to chase it down, chomp it in his labrador’s soft mouth, and then rest, triumphantly with his prize in the cool grass. He sleeps more than he used to. When he runs, which he still does every time the UPS man drives anywhere near the neighborhood, or the cat next door saunters across the neighbors back deck, or I turn on the waffle ball pitching machine to take a little BP, he runs noticeably slower than he did a year ago.

But he is still graceful in the water, and he will swim for as long as I am willing to throw the toy into the lake for him to retrieve.

For this reason, too, we will spend a few more days at the beach in Ludington this summer.

I wonder if he dreams, like I do, of a heaven—perpetually sunny and sixty-five—where no one would think to put up a sign saying “no dogs allowed” on any beach?

"Lectio divina is not a methodical technique for reading the Bible. It is a cultivated, developed habit of living the text in Jesus' name. This is the way, the only way, that the Holy Scriptues become formative in the Christian church and become salt and leaven in the world. It is not through doctrinal disputes and formulations, not through strategies to subdue the barbarians, not through congregational programs to educate the laity in the “principles and truths” of the Scriptures–not in any of the ways in which the Bible is so commonly and vigorously promoted among us as an impersonal weapon or tool or program. It is astonishing how many ways we manage to devise for using the Bible to avoid a believing obedience, both personal and corporate, in receiving and following the Word made flesh." –Eugene Peterson

“Mark out an area outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourselves. Along with your weapons have a stick with you. After you relieve yourself, dig a hole with the stick and cover your excrement.” (Deut. 23:12-13)

Last week I drove to Benton Harbor to play in a church league fastpitch softball game, and ever since then I cannot get out my mind this impossible hope of someday having a local church fastpitch league to play in again.

When I was fourteen, I played in my first fastpitch softball game, on my dad’s church team at the Prairie Camp. In those days my church could field two full fastpitch teams. Because men who played softball played fastpitch softball. Since then I’ve had an overwhelming passion for the game. I love watching it played by the best players in the world where the pitching is virtually unhittable. I’ve played a few games with and against world class competition, but more often, these days, I play regularly on a travel league team that’s middle of the pack.

But that’s not my hope for the future of men’s fastpitch. Playing in that church league game in Benton Harbor, which could only be described as the lowest levels of men’s fastpitch, reminded me again that the lowest level of men’s fastpitch–like a local start-up church league I daydream about–is both more fun and simply better than the highest level of slow pitch softball (where enormous, steroid charged, beer-chuggers hit blooped in pitches three hundred feet with $400 bats–how stupid).

Last night playing church league slow pitch softball at Cedar Road Missionary Church, all I could think about was how much more fun every player on both teams could be having if we stopped the game right where it was and declard that for the rest of the night and for the rest of the season we’d be playing fastpitch.

So what that no one really knows how to pitch; we’d learn. So what we don’t have helmets–no one wore helmets to play softball until the late 1980s. So what we don’t have any catchers gear…okay, maybe we’d need some catchers gear. And we’d need move the bases in to the correct distance and the pitching rubber would have to be moved forward.

None of these are impossible obstacles to overcome. All we need is the will to try it.

I’d even settle for a happy medium called “modified fast pitch”.

It wasn’t great body surfing, but it was body surfing nonetheless. Three days in a row on three different beaches in Ludington, Michigan. Sweet.

Smalltown Fastpitch captures invite title

Smalltown Fastpitch of Benton Harbor beat the Munger Firemen 3-2 in the championship game of this weekend’s Rich Plangger Fastpitch Invitational.

The game was a rematch of last year’s Class D state championship, also won by Smalltown Fastpitch.

Browning Chabot was the winning pitcher, throwing a four-hitter with five strikeouts. Robby Prenkert’s RBI single in the top of the seventh inning drove in Brent Chabot with the winning run.

Smalltown was 4-1 in the tournament, losing to Munger in a pool play game on Saturday.

The team won its other two pool play games to advance to Sunday’s single elimination round.

Smalltown beat the Goshen Gators 3-2 in one semifinal and Munger beat DC Current of Bremen, Ind., in the other semifinal.

Rich Plangger and his son Rick were honored for their long time contribution to local fastpitch softball.

http://www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2010/06/22/sports/1519867.txt

Jamaica Gleaner News - Jamaica needs more, Bruce - Lead Stories - Monday | June 21, 2010

This is my friend Courtney, who speaks the truth with conviction. There is a serious crime problem in Kingston, but the solution cannot simply be “lock ‘em all up.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUU6jbBmJ6U&hl=en_US&fs=1&&w=480&h=385]

They’re supposed to be the two best basketball teams in the league playing in a seventh game for the championship. But they look awful on offense. They miss shots; they fumble the ball; they stand around; they dribble too much.

My assessment: The Lakers and the Celtics are tired of each other and just want this thing to be over with.

Crying out loud, it is the middle of June.

1. Wake up, watch soccer–Chile v. Honduras.
   2. Drink juice, take vitamins, check e-mail and facebook (while watching soccer).
   3. French Toast and newspaper.
   4. 25 minute bike ride.
   5. P90x Chest/shoulders/triceps while watching soccer–Switzerland’s huge upset of Spain.
   6. Discover leak dripping into basement from kitchen plumbing, rig dehumidifier and fans to blow dry.
   
   Who knows what the afternoon may hold. Bet on soccer, though.

5. Notre Dame football (just because it’s local–not because I’m an avid ND football fan)
   4. Women’s college softball world series.
   3. Chicago Cubs baseball.
   2. Any basketball game where Steven Nash is playing.
   1. World cup soccer.
   
   The most hopelessly boring sports to watch on television:
   
   5. The Winter Olympics
   4. The last two minutes of 95% of NFL football games
   3. Poker (why is this even on tv, and why is it on ESPN?)
   2. Cars driving around in circles (I think they call it Nascar?–is it even a sport?)
   1. All but the last two minutes of any NFL football game.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UbGSPx486E&hl=en_US&fs=1&w=480&h=295]

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/309295/may-13-2010/glenn-to-the-mountaintop

Two words….

GORAN DRAGIC.

http://www.southbendtribune.com/article/20100502/News01/5020310/1129/News

I play softball against and sometimes with this guy.

http://http//laporteassemblyofgod.com/components/com_sermonspeaker/media/041810%20Jeff%20Kling.mp3

God is good.

R. is not an avid blog reader, but he does read one blog religiously. Not many days ago his favorite blogger posted the following brief entry.

"One difference between Glenn Beck and me: while we both assume people are greedy, I happen to think that greed is evil." (http://robbyprenkert.blogspot.com/2010/03/compare-and-contrast.html )

He--that is, R.--has been reading Nietzsche, as well. He thinks that he could write a reply. "One difference between Nietzsche and me: while we both assume people are greedy, I happen to think that greed (the will to power) is evil."

Which leads him to a related and obvious thought, of course. It is not so much the fact that Nietzsche and Beck share a worldview that troubles him. It is the masses of unthinking evangelical Christians who have so blindly devoured Beck's Nietzschean, 'anti-Christ,' rhetoric that worry him.

Four kinds of flowers, two ducks, new leaf buds, and two butterflies.

Morgan took a little dip in the Baugo Creek.

Sydney picked flowers for people she loves.

One difference between Glenn Beck and me: while we both assume people are greedy, I happen to think that greed is evil.

1. Amare Stoudamire is playing like a man possessed right now. Unfortunately, Jason Richardson can’t make a wide open dunk.
   
   2. I’m very glad that my parents never acted like some of the Spring Arbor parents I sat near at the Bethel game on Saturday. Yikes. Can you say long future in counseling for those poor children?
   
   3. Speaking of that Spring Arbor vs. Bethel game, one of the stupidest calls I’ve ever seen–a double foul on a drive to the basket. Charge on Ryne Lightfoot; block on the guy trying to take the charge. On the radio afterwards, Ryne joked that the refs called a “blarge.” Dumbest call in the history of basketball. Looked like a block from where I sat, but that’s not the point. Has to be one or the other–it can’t be both.
   
   Happy last day of February, everyone. I’m on spring break.

A bee gets nearly 5 million miles per gallon of honey.

If only my 1999 Ford Escort would run on honey.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123289433&ft=1&f=1025

Sydney has been teaching herself to whistle. Every so often I’ll hear an airy whistle from the other room. It usually takes me a second or two to realize that “hey, that was pretty good.”

I like that she keeps practicing and slowly but surely she seems to be getting better at it. Most of the time she just blows air out her (incredibly cute) puckered lips, and there isn’t much of a whistle. But every now and again she nails it. She’s not “working” at whistling–you couldn’t call something that one does with such a spirit of leisurely indifference, work. She’s just learning to do something for the pleasure of it, simply because she can. I don’t know why she decided she wanted to whistle. She never asked to be taught and never announced that she had a plan. She just started trying.

I love that.

Splendid news. A couple days ago I discovered that we actually get the SciFi channel. Call me “Mr. Observant.” Anyhow, the splendid news is that every few days this channel shows reruns of “X-Files.” So now I can DVR “X-files” and get my conspiracy theory/paranormal/“the truth is out there” fix every now and then.

On a related note, I’m also recommending my readers try tuning into this late night talk show called “Coast to Coast” sometime.

www.coasttocoastam.com

Not that I’m a regular listener by any stretch of the imagination–I think I heard a part of the show one time while driving home from New Jersey in the middle of the night many years ago. So “the truth is out there” but apparently so are the crazies.

It was this article that got me intrigued.

www.theatlantic.com/doc/20100…

Pull-ups are hard. Some varieties are easier than others, of course. Reverse grip chin-ups are, for me, easier than wide grip or close grip overhand pull-ups. Corn-cob pull-ups are brutal (pull up, chin to the left, chin to the right, chin away from bar, and then back down again).

But I like them because they're hard and because after I have done six or eight sets of them I can tell I've done something good for my body.

A professional physical trainer once told me that if you could only do two strength exercises, pull-ups would be one of them.

Squats would be the other.

I can't say anything in praise of squats.

So I wake up in the morning and I drink a cup of 1/2 water 1/2 acai berry juice. Eight ounces of this stuff has 1000% (that’s right, 10 times what you need) of your daily value of vitamin B12 and 200% of your daily value of Vitamin C–this among other things. Supposedly this stuff is loaded with antioxidants. Who knows. All I know is that I feel energized within a few minutes of drinking the stuff and hopping on the bike.

Here’s the downside of waking up each day, drinking a big cup of watered down acai berry juice, and then riding a bike for a half hour. Riding a bike in the morning makes me very thirsty, so I drink a lot of water while and after I ride the bike–which is healthy, yes, but drinking that much makes me pee a lot. A lot.

Like, I went to the bathroom four times between 7:30 a.m. and the start of my class at 9:00 a.m. In fact, I went to the bathroom at Syd’s daycare after I dropped her off around 8:25. I went to my classroom to log on to the computer and double check if the song I wanted to play would work from that computer, and by the time I finished that little test run and started to walk to my office I had to go again. After a few minutes in my office, I headed back to the classroom. On that walk I felt the urge again. Fortunately, this rate of bathroom visits does not continue throughout the day.

And so I would like to give a shout out to acai berry juice, a morning bike ride, and a lot of water. Flush the system, loosen up the creaky joints, crank up the metabolism, and energize my aging body.

Playing basketball at 40, some days are better than others. And probably that’s not even true. It’s not that some days are better than others, but that some days I have brief stretches where I feel that all is right with my game. Not whole days, just brief, fleeting, moments. These moments are fewer and farther between, but they still happen on occasion.

Today I had a few moments on the court where I felt I could do no wrong. The moment passes, but while your in it–at 40–you relish it more than you once did. No one watches; no one cheers anymore. And yet, somehow, I find these moments–at 40–even more satisfying than moments I had in jam packed gyms at 18 or 21.

I keep playing basketball for moments when it all comes together–feathery light on my feet, a step-and-a-half faster than the game, my thrown-together team, the ball, and I as one.

I ride a stationary bike for half an hour every morning right after I get out of bed to make it more likely that moments like these can continue happen. I go to the gym by myself for 45 minutes on Tuesday and Thursday, to see if I can manufacture moments like these. I do more pull-ups, and push-ups, and crunches, and arm curls, and so on and so forth (they call it “P90X”–maybe you’ve seen the infomercial, too) then I’ve ever done in my life, to prepare my body for moments like these.

Is this pathetic?

I don’t care. Live a moment or two like these and you won’t care if anyone thinks its pathetic. Instead, all you’ll know to do is thank God you’re alive and well enough to cherish them.

Today we got new light fixtures in the basement and a new motion sensitive outdoor light in the back of the house. We got the leaky drain pipe under the kitchen sink replaced, and the clothes washer drain that always backs up, snaked and repaired. We got Sydney’s dresser drawers adjusted so they don’t stick anymore, and a bunch of worthless electrical outlets replaced.

You must be thinking, “Wow, what handyman you are."

Nice thought, but, no. Rob–Jeanie’s sister’s boyfriend–is a handy man. I am mostly worthless when it comes to making simple updates and repairs.

On the upside, I’m smart enough to know that the people who owned the house before us were also worthless when it came to making simple updates and repairs, too; and smart enough, besides that, to stay out of the way of someone who knows what he’s doing.

Nevertheless, I have to tell you that I do feel a bit less “manly” for my inability to make simple electrical and plumbing repairs around the house.

p.s. The other day I did 79 pull-ups and 342 push-ups.

40

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjtpplE39_g&hl=en_US&fs=1&&w=425&h=344]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWYtkn_8D-g&hl=en_US&fs=1&&w=425&h=344]

“Too many steps; that’s just too many steps.” (Sydney, after watching Bethel Lady Pilots basketball on Saturday, and apparently listening carefully to Bobby Morton as P.A.)

“Papa, I wanna go down stairs and watch ‘The Office.’ I like Michael Scott."

What's a papa to do but drop everything and fulfill such a worthwhile wish?

A man, standing in front of classroom full of MBA students, rips pages from an economics textbook.

“Papa, what is Michael Scott doing?” (Sydney)

Beginning in 1959, Umberto Eco contributed a monthly column of wit and parody to an Italian literary journal. In the 1960’s the columns were collected and went through two editions. Some of them have now been translated by William Weaver and will be published in paperback in May by Harcourt Brace & Company as a Helen and Kurt Wolff Book under the title “Misreadings.” The excerpts below are taken from a piece titled “Regretfully, We Are Returning Your . . .” – reports from professional readers of manuscripts submitted to publishers by agents or hopeful authors.

“The Bible.” Anonymous.

I must say that the first few hundred pages of this manuscript really hooked me. Action-packed, they have everything today’s reader wants in a good story. Sex (lots of it, including adultery, sodomy, incest), also murder, war, massacres and so on.

The Sodom and Gomorrah chapter, with the transvestites putting the make on the angels, is worthy of Rabelais; the Noah stories are pure Jules Verne; the escape from Egypt cries out to be turned into a major motion picture. In other words, a real blockbuster, very well structured, with plenty of twists, full of invention, with just the right amount of piety, and never lapsing into tragedy.

But as I kept on reading, I realized that this is actually an anthology, involving several writers, with many – too many – stretches of poetry, and passages that are downright mawkish and boring, and jeremiads that make no sense.

The end result is a monster omnibus. It seems to have something for everybody, but ends up appealing to nobody. And acquiring the rights from all these different authors will mean big headaches, unless the editor takes care of that himself. The editor’s name, by the way, doesn’t appear anywhere on the manuscript, not even in the table of contents. Is there some reason for keeping his identity a secret?

I’d suggest trying to get the rights only to the first five chapters. We’re on sure ground there. Also come up with a better title. How about “The Red Sea Desperadoes?”

“The Odyssey.” Homer.

Personally, I like this book. A good yarn, exciting, packed with adventure. Sufficient love interest, both marital fidelity and adulterous flings (Calypso is a great character, a real man-eater); there’s even a Lolita aspect, with the teen-ager Nausicaa, where the author doesn’t spell things out, but it’s a turn-on anyway. Great dramatic moments, a one-eyed giant, cannibals, even some drugs, but nothing illegal, because as far as I know the lotus isn’t on the Narcotics Bureau’s list. The final scene is in the best tradition of the Western: some heavy fist-swinging, and the business with the bow is a masterstroke of suspense.

What can I say? It’s a page turner, all right, not like the author’s first book, which was too static, all concerned with unity of place and tediously overplotted. By the time the reader reached the third battle and the 10th duel, he already got the idea. But this second book is a totally different thing: it reads as smooth as silk. The tone is calmer, pondered but not ponderous. And then the montage, the use of flashbacks, the stories within stories. . . . In a word, this Homer is the right stuff. He’s smart.

Too smart, maybe. I wonder if it’s all really his own work. I know, of course, a writer can improve with experience (his third book will probably be a sensation), but what makes me uncomfortable – and, finally, leads me to cast a negative vote – is the mess the question of rights will cause. In the first place, the author’s nowhere to be found. People who knew him say it was always hard to discuss any changes to be made in the text, because he was as blind as a bat, couldn’t follow the manuscript, and even gave the impression he wasn’t completely familiar with it. Did he really write the book or did he just sign it?

“The Divine Comedy.” Alighieri, Dante.

Alighieri is your typical Sunday writer. (In everyday life he’s an active member of the pharmacists' guild.) Still, his work shows an undeniable grasp of technique and considerable narrative flair. The book, in the Florentine dialect, consists of about a hundred rhymed chapters, and much of it is interesting and readable. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of astronomy and certain concise, provocative theological notions. The third part of the book is the best and will have the widest appeal; it involves subjects of general interest, concerns of the common reader – salvation, the Beatific Vision, prayers to the Virgin. But the first part is obscure and self-indulgent, with passages of cheap eroticism, violence and downright crudity. But the greatest drawback is the author’s choice of his local dialect (inspired no doubt by some crackpot avant-garde idea). We all know that today’s Latin needs a shot in the arm – it isn’t just the little literary cliques that insist on this. But there’s a limit, after all, if not in the rules of language then at least to the public’s ability to understand.

“Critique of Practical Reason.” Kant, Immanuel.

I asked Susan to take a look at this, and she tells me that after Barthes there’s no point translating this Kant. In any case, I glanced at it myself. A reasonably short book on morality could fit nicely into our philosophy series, and might even be adopted by some universities. But the German publisher says that if we take this one, we have to commit ourselves not only to the author’s previous book, which is an immense thing in at least two volumes, but also to the one he is working on now, about art or about judgment, I’m not sure which. All three books have more or less the same title, so they would have to be sold boxed (and at a price no reader could afford); otherwise bookshop browsers would mistake one for the other and think, “I’ve already read this."

There’s another problem. The German agent tells me that we would also have to publish the minor works of this Kant, a whole pile of stuff including something about astronomy. I would advise against getting involved with a man like this; we’ll end up with a mountain of his books in the warehouse.

“The Trial.” Kafka, Franz.

Nice little book. A thriller with some Hitchcock touches. The final murder, for example. It could have an audience.

But apparently the author wrote under a regime with heavy censorship. Otherwise, why all these vague references, this trick of not giving names to people or places? And why is the protagonist being put on trial? If we clarify these points and make the setting more concrete (facts are needed: facts, facts, facts), then the action will be easier to follow and suspense is assured. Genuine writing has to keep in mind the old newspaperman’s five questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? If we can have a free hand with editing, I’d say buy it. If not, not.

“Finnegans Wake.” Joyce, James.

Please, tell the office manager to be more careful when he sends books out to be read. I’m the English-language reader, and you’ve sent me a book written in some other, Godforsaken language. I’m returning it under separate cover.

This week’s column is written by Alvera Mickelsen, a founding member of Christians for Biblical Equality.

“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24, TNIV).

Genesis chapter 2 begins by telling how God created the garden of Eden; how God created man from the dust of the ground, giving him the work of caring for it and the command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest he die; and how God brought the animals he created to Adam to be named. This is followed by the account of God creating Eve from the side of Adam and bringing her to Adam, who said, “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man” (v. 23).

Then comes an astonishing statement that has been ignored from the beginning of time. Genesis 2:24 says “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (emphasis added). This seems to imply that the husband will become part of the family of his bride which, in the society of biblical times, probably meant joining her community.

Yet, beginning after the fall in Genesis, the woman was expected to leave her parents and become part of her husband’s family. In the story of Isaac and Rebekah, for example, Rebekah left her family to go to the land of Isaac. This pattern is repeated over and over in the Bible and carries on today. Consider our contemporary wedding ceremonies, which often include the line “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” The bride’s father then answers “I do” or “Her mother and I.” The implication is that the bride leaves her family and the protection of her father to go with her husband and become part of his family.

Most of the world follows a patriarchal social order—where a male is recognized as the head of the family and kinship is traced through the male line. Inheritance of material possessions usually follows the male line. The stronger this pattern is, the greater the prevalence of wife abuse and violence toward women. For evidence we need only examine strongly patriarchal societies such as those in India and in the Middle East.

But this is not what God designed. Suppose that our world practiced the command in Genesis 2:24—given even before sin entered the world. How would marriages look different? Wouldn’t a married couple who came under the care and supervision of the bride’s family be much less likely to experience wife abuse? Her family, including her father, would be nearby to protect her!

Interestingly, the command in Genesis 2:24 was important to the Apostle Paul, who quoted it in Ephesians 5:31 directly after his instructions to husbands to love and care for their wives as they do their own bodies (v. 29). Yet, this command in the creation story is rarely mentioned in our churches. In my scores of years going to church, I have never heard it discussed—even though it is repeated in the chapter of Ephesians that talks at length about submission. I have heard dozens of sermons on the importance of a wife submitting to her husband but never once about a husband leaving his parents to be united with his wife!

We all need to try to read the Bible with fresh eyes—not assuming that whatever interpretation we have heard in the past is the only valid one. Romans 12:2 reminds us, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world [such as patriarchy?], but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (emphasis added).

Alvera Mickelsen

…101st blog entry of 2009, and my 150th total entry on this blog.

Wow. Should this even count?

In my ENGL 101 class today I had my students do a writing warm-up exercise, something we do every day at the start of class. Usually I post a prompt of some sort up on the screen—a picture, a quote, a question—and invite them to write a response. There are not right or wrong answers to these prompts; the point of the exercise is to get in the habit of thinking on the page. It’s a ritual, a way of practicing the discipline of writing our way into our feelings and thoughts. Last class the prompt was this: “Writing is like…” I invited the class to think metaphorically, and then to elaborate on their comparison(s), encouraging the exploration of their analogy. Today’s prompt was this: “Writing is like praying.”

This sparked a good conversation about the ways in which writing is like prayer, its practice, its purpose, its effects. I would like to see us explore the connections between prayer and writing in the days ahead.

One of my course aims is this: "To write Christian-ly." I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that. I think I have tried to encourage my students to write ethically, to respect and empathize with the reader, to writing charitably, to examine their subjects through the lenses of their Christian faith. But what about an approach to the practice of composition that is prayerful? Might that not be an even better skill to foster and facilitate? Can I teach it unless I practice it myself?

Next class I'm going to show them the steps of St. Ignatius Loyola's "Examen"—a method of prayer that may have some connections to writing. Does writing well require us to begin from a position of hope and gratitude? In the epic tradition, the poet always invoked the gods—"Sing Muse, and through me tell the story…" That's how the Odyssey begins. Why not, even if I don't explicitly state it in the piece itself, begin my own essay (or blog entry) with that sort of invocation? Would I write more clearly if I began by asking God to make me aware of my writing "sins" and to cast them out? Does writing well involve and examination of my conscience? What would asking pardon for my "sins of composition" look like, and what effect would such confession have on a writer and his writing? Is revision like repentance? Would I write better if I entered the process trusting the Holy Spirit to guide me, and not merely leaning on my own understanding?

Anyhow, here's Ignatius's Examen. I see links; but I see through a glass darkly. I'm going to experiment with it for awhile, and be alert to its connections with and implications for the writing (and reading, too) process.

METHOD FOR MAKING THE GENERAL EXAMEN

It contains in it five Points.

First Point. The first Point is to give thanks to God our Lord for the benefits received.

Second Point. The second, to ask grace to know our sins and cast them out.

Third Point. The third, to ask account of our soul from the hour that we rose up to the present Examen, hour by hour, or period by period: and first as to thoughts, and then as to words, and then as to acts, […]

Fourth Point. The fourth, to ask pardon of God our Lord for the faults.

Fifth Point. The fifth, to purpose amendment with His grace.

They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW54W9y6-eU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1&w=425&h=344]

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you."

• Rita Mae Brown

“Fiction is history that might have happened. History is fiction that did happen."

- Andre Gide

MUTUAL SUBMISSION IN SELF-SACRIFICIAL LOVE

This week’s column is written by Allison Young, as part of the “Short Answers for Challenging Texts” series. Allison holds a BA in Biblical and Theological studies from Bethel University and an MDiv from Princeton Theological seminary. She served as a theological intern for Christians for Biblical Equality in the summer of 2007.

Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, people have never hated their own bodies, but they feed and care for them, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband (Eph. 5:18-33, TNIV).

With great gusto, and over, and over, and over, Sydney sings…

"Go Cubs go, Go Cubs go—

Hey Chicago whaddya say

The Cubs are gonna win today."

Maybe next year, Syd. Maybe next year.

Herta Mueller wins 2009 Nobel literature prize
(AP) – 10 hours ago

STOCKHOLM — Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller has the won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature.

The Swedish Academy, which has picked the winner annually since 1901, said Thursday that Mueller “who with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."

The prize includes a 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) prize and will be handed out Dec. 10 in the Swedish capital.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth join Israel’s Amos Oz at the top of the buzz surrounding the Nobel Prize in literature, especially after the most prominent judge broke from his predecessor and said U.S. writers are worthy of the coveted award.

True to tradition, the secretive Swedish Academy won’t even reveal who has been nominated ahead of the announcement Thursday.

To avoid leaks academy members avoid discussing candidates in e-mails or in public. When they must — such as when they dine out together — they use quirky code names, like “Chateaubriand” for last year’s winner, Jean-Marie Le Clezio of France.

Britons Doris Lessing and Harold Pinter, winners in 2007 and 2005, were “Little Dorrit” and “Harry Potter,” while Orhan Pamuk — the 2006 winner — was simply dubbed “OP,” initials that Swedes associate with a domestic brand of liquor.

“It’s sometimes when we meet in public spaces and public environments and then we have to resort to code words but it isn’t that frequent,” Peter Englund, the academy’s permanent secretary, told The Associated Press in an interview.

Academy members have also been known to use fake covers to camouflage their books whenever reading in public.

Sometimes even those feints aren’t enough. The academy suspected a leak last year when Le Clezio surged to No. 1 in Nobel betting a day before the announcement.

“We have taken a number of measures to see that it isn’t repeated this year,” said Englund, who used to work in military intelligence. He declined to describe the measures.

This year British betting firm Ladbrokes is giving the lowest odds to Oz, German writer Herta Mueller and a trio of Americans: Oates, Roth and Thomas Pynchon.

The academy keeps nominations secret for 50 years but nominators — language professors, former Nobel laureates and members of literature academies worldwide — sometimes make their submissions public.

This year, Danish literature professor Anne-Marie Mai revealed she had nominated Bob Dylan because she was upset about Englund’s predecessor’s critical remarks about American literature.

Before last year’s prize announcement, outgoing permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said the U.S. was too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world.

Englund struck a different tone, telling AP Tuesday that in most language areas “there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well."

On Thursday Englund will announce the winner at the academy’s headquarters in Stockholm’s Old Town.

The last American winner was Toni Morrison in 1993. No writer from South America has won since Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982. The last North American writer was Canadian Saul Bellow, who won in 1976 and was a resident of the United States for much of his life.

Dylan is believed to have been nominated several times before, but doesn’t quite fit the profile of a Nobel literature laureate. Besides primarily being a songwriter, his mass following could also be considered a minus by the Swedish Academy, which often chooses writers who are unfamiliar to the everyday reader.

However, Dylan is considered by many prominent literary critics to be a major poet, his song lyrics worthy of serious study.

Dylan’s literary merits aside, Nobel watchers note that anyone can be nominated for the six Nobel awards in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics, but that doesn’t mean they have any chance of winning.

The list of unsuccessful peace prize nominees includes dictators Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

“There are some completely crazy nominations,” said Mans Ehrenberg, who sits on the chemistry prize committee. He said occasionally committee members get e-mails “from people who think they should get the prize."

That violates a key Nobel rule: you can’t nominate yourself. New Zealand literature professor J.M. Brown tried to get around that rule in 1905, when he nominated Godfrey Sweven, which turned out to be his own pseudonym.

British wartime leader Winston Churchill missed out on the peace prize despite two nominations, but his oratory and his works of historical scholarship earned him the literature prize in 1953.

Spanish poet Angel Guimera y Jorge was nominated for the literature prize 17 consecutive years, but never won.

The Swedish Academy receives hundreds of literature nominations every year, whittled down to a shortlist of five names by May. Those authors are studied carefully before a winner is selected in a majority vote.

Known in Swedish as “De Aderton” — the Eighteen — the academy members are Swedish writers, book critics, linguists and literature professors.

Right now there are only 15 active members. One seat is vacant and two members have boycotted meetings since the 1990s because of internal disputes, including over whether the academy should condemn death threats against British writer Salman Rushdie.

Englund said there usually is animated discussion between academy members before the vote, though they try to keep things civil.

“There are never sort of cutthroat debates and people getting really angry and storming out of the room,” he said.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair falls out and the teeth decay.

-Flannery O’Connor

How quickly they forget the lessons of Sunday school
LEONARD PITTS JR.
The Bellingham Herald 9-22-2009

“Thou shalt not bear false witness …” — Exodus 20:16

Jim Wallis wants to take Glenn Beck to Sunday school.

On occasion, the Fox News host has spoken of his daughter, who was born with cerebral palsy. According to Sojourners, a faith-based organization Wallis co-founded and leads, Beck recalled last month how doctors warned that the baby, if carried to term, might never walk, speak or feed herself. That was 21 years ago and she is now a miraculous young woman who defied the dire expectations.

Beck has suggested that under health-care reform, the government would be empowered to euthanize children like his. But who is Washington to decide whether a life is worth living? “That’s for God to decide,” he is quoted as saying. “Not the government."

From this, we learn two things. The first is that Glenn Beck believes in God. The second is that Glenn Beck lies. You’d hope those things would be mutually exclusive.

For the record and for the umpteenth time: no version of health-care reform being contemplated by Congress mandates death for the old, the disabled or the infirm. That’s a canard. It is mendacity, prevarication, bald-faced lie.

In other words, politics.

The art of the untruth is, after all, the life’s blood of governance. As a brief spin through PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checking Web site will attest, no party, ideology or politician has a monopoly on lying. Lying is as bipartisan as it gets.

And yet, the lies that have characterized the debate over health care are in a class all their own — not simply because they are outrageous, but because they are designed specifically to enflame and terrorize. As such, those lies are deserving of special rebuke. Last week, they got it.

Sojourners, which calls itself the nation’s largest network of progressive Christians, says its members sent out thousands of e-mails to five of the biggest offenders: Beck, his fellow Fox personalities Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy and Bill O’Reilly, and radio host Rush Limbaugh. Each e-mail said the same thing in essence: stop lying. Wallis, a celebrated theologian and author of “The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post — Religious Right America,” says Sojourners is trying to redeem things people “really should’ve learned in Sunday school.”

“For example, Sean Hannity said we’re going to have a government rationing body that tells women with breast cancer, ‘You’re dead. It’s a death sentence.’ That’s just not true. So instead, in our e-mail we told the story of a real person, a real woman who was denied her breast cancer surgery because of her health provider’s discovery of a pre-existing condition called acne.”

He adds, “A lot of the things the talk-show hosts say will happen are ‘already’ happening because of the behavior of the health-care providers. They’re not true because of health-care reform, they’re true because of the present system.”

It is not, says Wallis, his intention to accuse everyone who opposes health-care reform of lying. Nor, he says, is it his intention to promote a given proposal. All he’s trying to do is reframe health care as the moral issue it is, and restore verities we all learned in Sunday School. Or Hebrew School. Or Islamic School. Or, heck, kindergarten.

That it’s wrong to lie, wrong to pick on the vulnerable. And that we have a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves, the ones Jesus called “the least of these.”

Those are simple, sacred and profound principles. But you wonder if the simple, sacred and profound still have power to sway us. Obviously, Jim Wallis has faith they do. I hope he’s right. Yet what a spectacular leap it takes to believe the tiny whisper of conscience might be heard over the shrill outcry of America screaming at its mirror.

That is in itself a sobering measure of how far we’ve wandered from the things we once knew as kids.

… and with enormous gusto, Syd sings:

“Don’t let Satan Whoof it out,
I’m gonna let it shine!
Don’t let Satan Whoof it out,
I’m gonna let it shine,
let it shine,
let it shine,
let it shine!!"

And ten thousand angels, and one grandpa, listen in. Laughing.