If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
—Goethe

When I was just old enough to know that I should control myself in the company of my elders but young enough to know I could still get away with being obnoxiously rambunctious and what was to my parents embarrassingly honest, I found myself confronted by a crisis of conscience.

At that point in my life, I thought of “department stores” as something like cubby holes, only bigger, where adults walked around like they knew what they were there for, while I hid giggling inside the circular standing racks of women’s blouses just because I knew that somehow it was something I could never get away with someday. My mother and I had gone to one such department store, and there in the midst of an aisle was standing a ridiculously irate toddler. He wanted something, clearly, from his mother; or rather, for her to buy him something—you know, I wasn’t clear on how all those transactions worked at just over half a decade old—and I crept up to investigate. I was an extremely shy child, you understand, but I just had to know what that kid was screaming about—and it ended up being something that I thought was utterly ridiculous. I thought to myself that he ought not to have been screaming about something so stupid, so utterly needless. But then, it hit me: maybe that’s how Mom thought of the stuff I wanted….

That didn’t make me want it less, whatever “it” might have been—and I would whine, beg, flash those doe eyes kids and seductresses share, and tug at her blouse to get it (thereby prophetically setting my path before me as a philosopher who would disprove the Socratic knowledge-as-virtue tenet). But that was only because I knew I could get away with it.

Another time, in a J. C. Penney, around the same age, the horrifying fate that must befall all firstborn sons and their poor distraught mothers occurred to me: I got lost. Here in these suffocating cubby holes, these cold, gridded floors with their fake tile and unyielding, Astroturf-esque carpeting that comprised some system that I just couldn’t grasp, I had gotten distracted by a diamond necklace or some such at the jewelry counter. Obediently not touching the glass, I stared in wide-eyed wonder at this sparkly rainbowmaker; and when my reverie broke, I turned to find—men, women, racks of clothing, an infinite sea of “stuff” and “things”—and precisely zero people who were my mother.

Knowing that this was when the “little kids” always panicked, I gathered myself, determined to outstay the anxiety with faith that Mom would realize where I was and come to rescue me from my present state—uncertain, hands clasped behind my back, rocking from the balls to the heels of my feet across the line between pseudotile flooring and stiff beige carpeting. Finally (probably after all of ninety seconds), my resolve eroded and I wandered at a near-gallop past all the places I thought she had been, only to find myself more lost than before, somewhere between “soft shiny things Dad likes on t.v.” (lingerie) and “things that would make Mom sneeze a lot” (perfume)—my sense of direction has only marginally improved since then. It was somewhere around this time that I passed the escalator, that great unmanned beast of a machine I’d heard of trapping my peers’ feet and ceaselessly moving people to and fro, up and down. Presently, I gave up hope, and began to tremble, then to softly weep; for it had been an eternity, and I had moved from the spot I’d been left besides, against all admonitions I’d ever received to the contrary. Lost to my curiosity, inadvertently abandoned light years from home, at the top of the gaping maw of an unfriendly peoplemover, a bad son for making my mother worry (and God only knew what Dad would say when we got home), I presently gave up hope. I felt more vulnerable standing, so I walked very slowly, sobbing quietly into my sleeve, embarrassed at the looks I got and still anxious about (not) being rediscovered—

But then there was a certain man who greeted me sheepishly. He was an elf to my hobbit, tall and thin and full of years yet still youthful somehow. (Looking back, he couldn’t have been any more than in his late twenties.) Kind but somehow timid eyes regarded me beneath a concerned brow framed by a close-cropped shock of black hair; he was dressed in a suit with shoulder pads the likes of which no one has seen since 1989. A regular joe, just a customer in the store, he had found me and asked me if I was lost. Yes, I replied, but truth be told it was Mom who was lost, or both of us, or—oh, I didn’t know! And he smiled a half-smile that bespoke what I later understood to be amusement and a gentle kindness tempered by the social awareness that he was trying to exude extreme professionalism and yet was talking to a lanky wet-faced six-year-old in the midst of a department store in the middle of the afternoon. Still nearly smiling, he offered to help me find my mother. Having grown up with pure, 1980s archetypes of what good and evil looked like (the former with geekiness, silliness, bombasticism, or at least, self-consciousness, and the latter with cigarette-smoking, sleazy self-assuredness, and sly turns of phrase), I trusted him for his half smile and his youth, which won out over his height and suit-wearing.

Rising in a small elevator with no more than this stranger who wore the look of kindness and pathos, my eyes dried. I steeled myself, drawing up my chest and clenching my fists; and with all the power of every bit of manners that had been drilled into me, I thanked the man straight-faced. But it was the kind of caricature of a straight face that I fancied must have looked like Jean Claude Van Damme in every movie in which I’d ever seen him, so I couldn’t help but smile, then giggle in spite of myself.

In what seemed a miracle tantamount to Philip being translocated by the Spirit, the two invested parties found each other upon the opening of the elevator doors. My mother was, as she tells it, “boo-hooing,” thinking she’d lost me forever, and I thought how interesting, how meaningful it was that she was just as upset as I had been (”—and then some,” I’m sure she’d interject). She thanked the man profusely, but kept crying till we got to the car, and even as we were pulling out of the parking lot. Finally, pitying her and thinking she must be going through the same thing I was going through in the store (only outside the store, that whole adults-thinking-abstractly thing), I patted her leg softly and said, “It’s okay, Mom, I’m right here, now. I love you!”

Vanitas-Viciosa © 1991 by Elsie Russell

I learned a lot in those department stores, from the ridiculously chainsaw-loud crying toddler who was murderously desperate for something inconsequential, and the half-smile man in a suit who, though a tall stranger, neither offered me candy nor tried to seduce me into his car. I learned that adults have different priorities than I did; and that if I were to earn worth and respect in their eyes—not as a child, not as a human being, but as someone real, someone worth hearing out—then I was going to have to really think about the things I wanted, and the things I did around them. And I learned that not all strangers are evildoers and “bad” to talk to, and purposed thenceforth to be kind to children when I became an adult—because maybe they would feel suspended in eternity, abandoned in deep space, just like me. In short, I began to really ponder how I came across to others, and how important it was to think and be conscious of how I should interact with what, years later, I would learn Sartre and Camus dubbed the Other. Indeed, how important was maturity itself—to act one’s age was not enough, but to act more than the age that one looked! (In my case that was quite a disparity, being very tall for my age.)

Just a couple of years later, this concept was gilded into the floor of my psyche.

As was the custom in earlier times, my father’s side of the family went on a sojourn from the far reaches of South Carolina to a quaint little town near its center, a town famous for slow talkers, the wisdom connoted by grey hairs, and a recently-restored historical Opera House. We all gathered at Thanksgiving and Christmas at the Matriarch’s house—dearly beloved and much-respected mother of my father—a barely-modern one-story embedded like a fine gem in the residential district of what could be called the “downtown” of this minor city. We drove for what seemed like days to reach this little house: all the cousins would be driven by their respective parents, and all would park on the lawn because there was so very much of it. I got in trouble if I parked my bike on the grass at home; so I surmised there was some rule of which adult children were aware, approximately phrased, “You can do whatever you want, within the restraints of your own self-discipline.” (That I would have abused this rule only served as a reminder that I wasn’t “old enough.”)

There was a peculiar, warm mysticism that hung around this abode and the activities to which it was a witness, like a wreath of pipe-smoke might ever ring the smiling avuncular face of an ancestor’s informal portrait. Bounded by a shallow drainage ditch I always thought of as a creek on two sides, and buttressed by a lush and meticulously cared-for, award-winning rose garden on the rear, this was a mysterious little oasis of fellowship with all the cousins born of Grandmama’s seed. Many lessons were learned, many deep thoughts found their birth on the granite steps of that old house. Whenever we would get together, I soaked up the experience with all the voracity a curious youth could muster, and attempted to varying degrees of success to act years ahead of the age I looked. The youngest cousin save for my sister on my father’s side of the family, I knew that the more mature and calm, the more understanding I not only acted but truly was, the more respect I would gain from my cousins, who I knew somehow, someday, I would consider my peers. If we were ever to have a relationship in which I didn’t look like a stupid, whiny, desperate toddler in their minds, it would have to be up to me not to act but to be an adult, with all the pains and responsibilities thereunto pertaining, whatever that meant.

A den view from the kitchen, off of which is also the dining room.

So when one Thanksgiving in my eighth year I sneaked into the dining room to see the usual preliminary spread of homemade rolls and so forth, I was surprised to find a scalloped porcelain dish filled with a grand bundle of small, purplish-black orbs, around which was what looked like an expertly crafted domino-cascade of very expensive-looking seeded crackers. Set aside in the official dining room, whose walls were paneled with a richly-stained wood, it sat on a pristine crimson tablecloth that covered what I knew was an ancient, hand-crafted table whose particular veneer matched the shade of the China cabinet—an inconceivably old set of shelves on which were priceless, sparklingly ornate vessels of lead crystal and Sterling silver that were apparently designed to look practical, but were never in my lifetime touched, let alone used. I lingered over these tiny fishy spheres, segregated to a place of honor amongst these majestic sundries. Something about the whole arrangement seemed perfectly ridiculous, perfectly adult, to me. It wasn’t chip dip—there wasn’t enough of the purple stuff for one to pile it liberally on each cracker and have enough to go around, and I’d never seen the likes of this anywhere in the grocery store. It looked foreign, and smelled fishy; and had it been on the floor with no crackers, even lacking felines at any gathering in this place of gathering, I would have fancied it cat food. But to my young senses, you must understand—this look was the look of very adultness; this smell was the bouquet of sophistication. This wasn’t the usual salsa, and it certainly bore no kinship to sugary, processed “kid-food” I held in such contempt as a child. Growing up, the “kids’ menu” was my enemy, not only because of disappointingly-sized portions and disappointingly-fried selections were frustratingly insufficient to satiate a rapidly-growing preadolescent boy, but because I resented the symbol of a whole “world” that adults had made up for kids, to keep them contained, manageable, and happy only because of an ignorance about what they were missing. If adults could do it, I wanted to do it—including being thoughtful and doing things that made me really uncomfortable without a second thought. To possess the courage not to complain about anything, but to learn from everything—this was the lofty ideal to which I held adulthood, the bedrock criterion of maturity to which I aspired.

The rest of the family was scattered about the kitchen and den in pairs and trios, talking mostly about what I considered mundane mathematical nonsense that adults liked to talk about when they couldn’t find any other creative way to fill the air (the insufferably dry conversation, including words like “debits” and “credits” and “annual withholding” was the only part of adulthood I didn’t idolize). Knowing somehow they thought it rude to stop talking once they’d started, I seized the opportunity to test the waters by first wading out just a bit: I had a fancy cracker. It was brittle, tough, and seedy; and left a taste in my mouth quite different than the Saltines I had known from times of illness. I didn’t like it at first; but this sentiment was crushed with all the swiftness that I realized my own reaction—and in my anger at being a child, schooled myself: “No, this cracker is a symbol of adulthood. Adults eat these thin crackly wafers, you silly child!” I acquired a taste for rye, right then and there, by force of will.

Growing still more brave, I withdrew another from the domino-arrangement and plunged it into the purplish-blackness in the center of the plate; and, with a heap of the slick-looking fishy stuff, crammed the whole thing into my mouth, suddenly afraid I’d be discovered and embarrassed—not for eating prematurely, but by the awareness that I, a then-prepubescent child whose age could be numbered with a single stroke of a pen, was trying so hard to be an adult. But, half-cowering, chewing ferociously, I tried to get a handle on what I was tasting: little bursts of salty fishiness were exploding quietly like muted firecrackers of sophistication in my mouth; crunching on the rye, the crisp taste of grown-up reality! I reveled in the experience as much as in the taste—as when at a stranger’s wedding reception one hears an otherwise intimate toast by a tipsy groomsman transmuted by champagne into a wisecrack about the groom’s lavatory habits and, despite his ignorance, one finds himself laughing.

Before I realized what I’d done and came back to myself, I’d finished off almost the entire bowl of the mystical purple spheres that had hailed anonymously from the Adult Realm. Fulfillment yielded haltingly to the second round of the aforementioned shame as I realized I would be found out. I made peace with my decision to own my gluttonous misdeed when asked, so that I didn’t seem even more the child. Meanwhile, I weaved my way sheepishly through the discussion of insurance policies and football scores into the den, to at least appear as though I was on my way to doing something meaningful. But the only people in the den were staring into the television. Rapt to near-sacrilege at what seemed to me a bunch of bullies in helmets running over each other to the elation of a crowd who apparently felt that a dome was technically no occasion to use “inside voices,” and since to sit still was a punishment mete for breaking vases and not for independent volition, I went off to explore—

—Until I got called with great authority back into the dining room. Demanding an explanation, my aunt and parents had realized that the one who had single-handedly pilfered all the tiny fish marbles and spicy unsalted crackers was none other than I. Blushing, I apologized and attempted to explain away my private ambitions of sophistication by the highly plausible excuse that I had just been hungry and impatient.

My aunt, however, was thoroughly amused and, chuckling earnestly with understanding eyes, bent down conspiratorially to explain that the reason I’d been called in with such gravitas was that I had just eaten caviar with rye crackers. She asked gingerly, tenderly as though somehow seeing yet not laughing at my plight to be an omniscient adult, whether I knew what the word “caviar” meant. Though sorely tempted to lie, my curiosity directed my tongue to the negative. She explained the concept, bracing herself visibly for a starkly and altogether childishly negative reaction, that it was a French word for “fish eggs.”

Having steeled myself against an answer lesser children (and other poor mortals) might have found disgusting, the barest flash of a grimace was replaced with a proud and authentic declaration that I enjoyed it, and to prove it presently took another triumphant bite! Fledgling freedom over arbitrary internal schemas, innovation over familiarity, sophistication over naiivete, adulthood over childishness—this was my victory, an initiation, a step from naiiveté to experience! Everyone laughed; but I felt they were laughing with me, anticipating my future…. Twelve adults—and one child well on his way.

Obviously, I came to realize that adulthood was not nearly so ideal as I’d anticipated, as must be the course of all who live with any awareness of themselves and of others. The point is not, however, that starry-eyed youth inevitably fades, but rather that it makes all the difference how we conduct ourselves in light of our failures—and those of people and the circumstances in which we find ourselves—to meet our expectations. If, knowing that every member of the category of persons broadly called “adults” has any number of unemulable character traits, and that with tragic frequency we show the vestiges of the self-seeking, careless, petulant brats we once were—does that give us license to stagnate, or impetus to change?

Sophistication need not mean jadedness; complexity need not mean waste; and the changing of tunes from “Twinkle, Twinkle” to the Song of Experience need not mean a transition into a minor key. Those who consciously insist on the bliss that is ignorance say so only until they realize that to say so is to minimize the gift of awareness of Himself, of others, and of the universe God gave man. Infants can’t even handle honey, and children find steak hard to swallow, but women and men know that caviar on rye is finer than reconstituted American on Saltines. Indeed, is the gift of marital coitus, that singular instantiation and signification of Christ and the Church, accompanied by the love a couple is commanded and delighted to show one another, for children? Little ones are precious beyond words to God and to Man, and cannot affirm that ignorance is bliss precisely because of the blessedness of their state; but an adult who allows the child within to reign into the ripeness of age is merely pining for the womb, or the grave.

David J. Grossman, Quaternion Julia Set (7). [Info: Julia set.]

A quaternion fractal that does not morph over many iterations is more than an anomaly; it’s a mathematical impossibility. Even so for humans: to settle instead of striving, to exist instead of thriving, to complain instead of acting, to criticize instead of creating, to remain children instead of maturing, to choose ignorance instead of truth—in so doing, we try to keep the variables of our experience from iterating—i.e., we fight the complexity and dynamism with which we were intended to live. Empower yourself by empowering your brother and sister; encourage your neighbor by being better than you are; and love your family by authentically forgiving more than just their peccadillos—and overcome the temptation to pit one against another by being even-handed through all the vicissitudes that cause you or your brother to stumble into childish ambition and resentment.

Are we content to live slothfully yet miserably within our own narrow parameters we in our frailty have tried to impose upon the world and so bury the talents we’ve been given, or do we push ourselves to learn, to grow, to love, to forgive, and to do all the rest of the things that entropy and flesh would have us neglect? Do we claw in vain at the riverbed of Time to hold on to the familiar and the comfortable, and so spend our lives always on the brink of death by drowning in our own arbitrary rules—sentencing ourselves to suffering that is unique to the self-willful failure to adapt and grow, to forgive and let go, to take on the new and the dangerous if it will mean change? The human—not the spirit, the body, or the mind, but rather all these and the private world of his experience—was meant to adapt, to flourish under pressure, to endure, to grow and move at the same pace as the rock onto which he was born, hurtling through space and time.

It is by the power of God’s grace that we have what we have; and by the very same that we are empowered to grow beyond our natural limits of selfishness and hatred into humility and brotherly sacrifice. May 2007 prove for you a rich glass of edifying challenges: great with grace; abundant in love; full of dynamic lessons and rediscoveries of eternal Truth, a canvas for your creativity and a template for personal growth.

Technorati Tags: challenges, relationships, grace, innocence, ignorance, sophistication, vanitas, Christ, personal growth, archetypes, anecdotes, childhood, experience, aging

These are all based on assumptions that we hold that pertain to our daily lives. I will be soon posting a list of my “assumptions” as well, though of course these will be for public discussion and will not be unchallenged in the sense that I am asking you, my beloved readers, to consider your “assumptions.” Do you know of any off the top of your heads?

I thought that she was implying the question of whether I would be willing to keep track of what she told me worked for her and what did not.  It’s not in the job description, but hey, if I suffer from memory loss when I’m her age I would hope that some kind young lady working at my favorite supplement shop would do the same for me, right?  So I agreed.

But when I did so, she immediately grasped the bottle of Co-Q10 to her sternum with her left hand and stiffly held out her right arm, fist clenched.  Then she closed her eyes.  I was dumbfounded.  Peeking out of her right eye when I didn’t respond in the slightest, she said, “Um?  Push my arm down.”  Like it was the most natural thing to say at such a time as this.  I asked her what she meant, and she just repeated herself; so, not wanting to abuse this fragile woman, I used the two first fingers on my right hand and  gingerly pushed down on her wrist, whereupon her arm didn’t move.  She then corrected me, “No, push it down—hard!”

What?

So I did, right?  It was difficult to press down her arm, but she eventually let it fall, then proceeded to test another package of Co-Q10, this time by taking the blister pack out of the box and clutching it to her bosom again.  We repeated the procedure.

She explained to me afterward that if the medicine would work for her, I wouldn’t be able to easily push the arm down; but if not, her arm would fall immediately.

What—?

When I had rung her up, she proceeded to give me a tract about God’s Simple Plan of Salvation from so-and-so Baptist church.  I do not hesitate to point out that this is nowhere in Christendom, especially not in Baptist churches; it struck me as peculiar precisely because this seemed more similar to something like a Wiccan superstition, in which the magnetic energies would react in our bodies to those in the supplements or some such thing.

When I later asked my manager about it, he said that there were at least one or two people who had a similar superstition who came in every other day or so.  Some of them did the arm thing, but most of them would only close their eyes and hold the supplement to their bosom to see if they fell backwards; if so, it would not work for them, but if they held their ground, it would work.

I have not been able to find anything on this via Google, mostly because I don’t know what to Google for.  Queries such as “ridiculous superstitions” and “superstition medicine hold to chest” and such don’t seem to produce much of anything.  So my question to you is, have you ever heard of this?  And, if so, would you be so kind as to explain its origins?

Technorati Tags: supplementation, superstition

I tried giving her the benefit of the doubt: I figured, well, maybe she just doesn’t understand the foundations of our objection to her objection, right? So I tell her plainly, “But ma’am, aesthetic considerations should never come before your own good health.” Surely that’s something to which we can all agree.

She cocked her eyebrow at me with all the seriousness and candor as if I had suggested to her she dumpster-dive for a seven-course meal. “Sure they should!”

I admit, I was flabbergasted. I don’t even use that word, let alone exemplify it, but maybe once or twice a year! Later, when I had time to laugh it off outside of her presence, I realized that I was genuinely curious to hear her justification of that. It’s a matter of course to hear someone justify doing something that feels good in the physical realm while being detrimental to one’s mental or spiritual faculties (e.g., smoking pot, overeating, fornicating, &c.)—but to hear that matters of taste (primarily a physiopsychological and highly subjective value judgment that may or may not affect anything but whether people laugh at you for wearing a black belt with brown shoes) win out over matters of one’s own good health (also physiopsychological, and arguably foundational to other kinds of well-being and societal usefulness) was just a little too much.

Isn’t this one reason why Europeans hate Americans? That our selfish, fat, concupiscently inclined bodies rule where better judgment ought, even in matters as simple as taking care of ourselves on a basic level?

HOUSE: … I convinced her she’d be better off without me.

WILSON: You’re an idiot. You don’t think she’d be better off without you.

HOUSE: Right.

WILSON: You have no idea why you sent her off!

HOUSE: —Don’t do this—

WILSON: This was no great sacrifice! You sent her away because you’ve got to be miserable.

HOUSE: That kind of psycho crap get your patients through the long nights? Or’s it just for you? Tough love make you feel good, helping people feel their pain?

WILSON: You don’t like yourself. But you do admire yourself. That’s all you’ve got, so you cling to it. You’re so afraid if you change, you’ll lose what makes you special. Being miserable doesn’t make you better than anybody else, House. It just makes you miserable.

House, M.D. is my guilty little pleasure. I don’t own a TV, and as a rule I don’t watch television. But between this and 24 the small screen has me locked in, at least when it hits DVD. Anyway, I enjoy House because of moments like this in which I not only love/hate the main character, but identify with him to the point that for a second I don’t know whether the look on my face is a grimace or a smile. I think many in academia (and diagnosticians on this character’s level are inevitably still academics, whether abiding in the ivory towers or not) fall prey to this; or at least, I have. This sense of being damaged and proud of it, jaded and happy about it. “Better because I’ve hit bottom.” Tyler Durden syndrome, or something. I wonder: is this a problem for psychologists or theologians?

AROUND 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn’t ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes — desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes.

The old adage “good things come to those who wait” isn’t untrue.  Check out this study.

Technorati Tags: Mischel, marshmallow, self-control, success

And by the way, if you get this, you’re a geek. If someone doesn’t do it first, I’m making a teeshirt.

Technorati Tags: psychology, cognition, language, linguistics, avatar, personality, Internet, geek

The thing that struck me about this song in particular is that it’s sung in a minor key, an almost archetypically tribal sort of song that I imagine being sung for a fallen Saxon hero, especially as it is on the live album (in a way that is, of course, not caught on the studio recording; but you still can get a feel for the mournful tone, especially in the last chorus).

For me, innocence has been something of a long-lost memory; but I have gotten only what I wanted in my foolishness several years ago; I forsook the singular pursuit of the Gospel for the knowledge that can only come by pain, that peculiar fall from grace that one chooses consciously so as to Know (experientially) rather than to Believe (even if it’s the truth). What struck me about this song in particular was the sense of one’s crying over oneself, a new and less pure self still able to mourn the loss of an old “self.” “Empty shell inside of me: I’m not myself, I’m a replica of me—” This is the essence of emotional self-awareness, being able to recognize one’s own fall and to mourn it, so as to move past it. I have not been able to do that; I have not been able to believe I have been or am worth crying for, either by myself or by another. Much like Aristotle’s definition of a happy (eudaimon) life, it is only once all the deeds and circumstances of my whole life have been tallied up can I be called a “happy” person, or allow myself a blessed existence. I don’t even like Aristotle; why would I agree with him here? Yet only after I am dead may I be mourned.

A friend of mine had recently blogged about her experience that she had had, a “word of knowledge” if you will regarding her own beauty in Christ, that she had worth and was beautiful. Everyone needs and, I believe, has this experience at some point in his or her life; but needs this consistently, and to believe it is not revoked. It has been said that women need to feel beautiful; and I believe it. Women who do not believe in their own beauty and who are not consistently supported in that are driven to eating disorders and anger issues; but men need it too. Men need to know that they are good leaders, that they are beautiful and efficient, effective and truly excellent at whatever it is they are best at, whatever it is that they are trying to be. Men and women both, though, need to know that they are beautiful for who they are, not just because of what they can or do produce to be used. They need to know that there is substance to their purposes in life and that they are not “done” on Earth. Everyone who understands this dilemma and still doesn’t take his or her own life understands intuitively, if not explicitly, that there is a purpose to his or her life in just this very sense.

How does one lose this sense of being worthy of mourning by oneself or by another? For me it came by a series of decisions that I can remember beginning to add up at a Fall Retreat at my church in the late 1990s. I was still considered a “youth,” if a bit old, and I sat listening to the speaker talk about some “youth issues” and whatnot one night. There, as the sun set into a dark, cold hillside, I listened to the speaker’s illustration about romantic love. In this particular situation, he held up a stereotypically-shaped red construction-paper heart for all to see, and he showed us that giving ourselves wholly to other people when Christ should be (or have been) the focus is like tearing up bits and pieces of that heart: he ripped a corner off. “You know that girl you dated and gave too much to?”—Another piece came off. “And that friend who convinced you to smoke?”—another piece. “How about that guy you never told anyone about?”—He looked the girls over and solemnly tore another large chunk off. Eventually, he was done, and the red, full paper heart, now a foreign amoeba lying dead on the floor, was the despised bit of nonsense that dwells in the believer when he or she sins—the way I had, I thought.

I then turned, gradually, to outward confirmation. I had entered the realm of women already; but they became my sole crutch, the crux of my value. But how easily does “Thou, my beloved” turn into “Thou hateful wretch!” Much after this long-past fall retreat, a girlfriend told me she loved me unconditionally. I knew it wasn’t true, but it gave me a cold chill to think that we could all make promises like that, which would ultimately fail. I don’t believe in unconditional love from any human; to do so, in my opinion, is an invitation to destruction and chaos. Believing so, we will test, wittingly or un-; and, testing, will find that the human heart is “exceedingly wicked” and fickle, and in fact places many conditions on its love.

So the eternal love of God becomes corrupted and localized into a human being, a singular woman, whom I ultimately have disappointed; and between us both pass the tacit words, “YOU have failed ME, to whom you’ve given your heart. You were but are not; the period in which you have done me good was brief and now over.” What then of the tender moments? Burned away, leaving by the flame of tearing two souls from one another a proud and tender bitterness like char, bleeding sap on the scorched side of a tree, where blessing and forgiveness used to flow.”

How can we deny this statement power, this position of finding love in a “lover” instead of God, the Lover of Alll and Over All? We start from a position of “you were crafted in the imago Dei, you are human, you therefore have worth.”

But that becomes quickly, “You [the lover] have worth to me.” This secondary worth flows from anything that we find desirable externally in that person as it relates to us. Exempli gratia, “You are beautiful, and I appreciate your body; you are strong, and you can protect me; you are poetic, and my soul cries for someone to touch it tenderly and not with the cold blade of logic; you are literary and I, too, am well read; you are an available mistress, and my wife is too busy and frigid to have me; you are good at taking dictation, and I need a secretary.” Whatever.

Then, gradually as we recover from lust and greed, selfish pride and utter deceit, we rediscover in those things their worth for that person, purely as they uniquely manifest the Imago Dei— the way that such-and-such a person is beautiful insofar as they are made in the image of God, and insofar as they uniquely show what they are, “from” God. This happens at various rates in various areas of a person’s life as it relates to the other’s. For instance, if you are going through a period of learning about the grace and beauty of Christ in acts of service, it may strike you as particularly beautiful for me to make you dinner, whereas it would normally not.

But what of the ultimate result of the vast majority of relationships? “I love you” is answered with, “Aye, so you say now, but know you not the words with which you’ll curse me in the soon-coming day when we part company?” And so the constant knowledge that you have to prove yourself has altogether replaced the “unconditional” love of before, and the genuine, non-quote-qualitified unconditional love of Christ which has long been forsaken.

So the love of the Other is revoked. And with it, the promises, the love, the forgiveness, the grace, all human-conveyed and human-retracted. And, left alone with these pieces of a paper heart, what is one to do? Only to seek first the Kingdom, and, failing that, seek ultimately the Kingdom once one has had his or her fill of pain. Only then can we understand that we are worth something, not conditionally, but eternally. If God is love, and Love never fails, then emotion and temporal girl-boy love can’t be the benchmark by which other Loves are examined.

Here’s to regaining that sense of worth that will allow us to mourn over our pasts and forge ahead to genuinely joyful and productive futures.

The few days in which I was moving in were some of the worst, most harrying of my life. Seriously. A friend of mine had an away message on his AIM account not too long ago that read something along the lines of, “There is no worse hell than moving.” I disagreed, till that last night. It was 05:45 and I had passed over the “be-out-by” deadline by a day already: I was sweating that ammoniated, salty sweat of extreme fatigue; and alternately standing unsteadily, loading things into boxes, and becoming infuriated over the Sisyphean task before me. I had turned the A/C off in the apartment to conserve energy, but I shouldn’t have. Wisdom told me to turn it down to 60°F, but I left it as it was. Later, the only thing keeping me awake was raw anger; I wasn’t even upset about anything in particular, I was just enraged, lest unconsciousness take me.

And I agreed with my friend, there really is no worse thing to face in that sense. In the physically-taxing, why-am-I-here’ing futility of moving, one finds in his physicality the prison actualized that I pictured it to be from my first taste of Cartesian dualism in high school: just as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Case thought of his body as a carrier for the mind, a stupid piece of meat, so did I think of it thus; a damnable prison to be ruled over and destroyed to continue. Sleep and exhaustion became absurdities in those early morning hours, when I’d had three hours of sleep over the past 50+ and had had to present a final project in my psychology class. Necessity of sleep, like the existence of spiders, became evidence of a fallen Creation; if only I had something to block the adenosine receptors perfectly, to kill all the other physiological needs for sleep in my brain, I would be all right. But I didn’t. The authority of the body was dragging me down, and I got to the point I was slinging fists into walls, objects, freezer doors: I didn’t care, I was a poorly-oiled machine that was moving objects into boxes and carrying those boxes to the vehicle that would take them to the new apartment. What a hateful time. I was grateful that it was as short as it was. I ended up doing well in the class and moving just fine (with the help of my dear mother, who drove down to gather stuff for me as I passed violently into unconsciousness to sweat out the ammoniated sweat of someone hatefully punished by his own body).

That’s only one small piece of what made last week one of the longest of my life. It is a week that shall live in infamy; you know the kind. It’s one that’s a concatenation of several eternal days filled with strife back upon you get to look later in life and laugh, sweat on the brow no matter how hot, and say: “At least it’s not as bad as it was then.”

So thanks for those of you who wondered where I’d gotten to. I’m back, and the regularly scheduled daily-and-then-some-posts should be flowing again as of today. Note: I haven’t decided whether I’m going to backpost; but if you see anything on the main site between now and the 26th of July of this year, that’s a backpost.

What is it that makes these social networking sites so popular? What is it that MySpace taps into that we’re all about? Is it the personality that we get to convey? Sure, geeks mock it, but we’re supposed to: of course these sites aren’t proper HTML, of course they’re obnoxious, of course they’re poorly designed, but they are some peoples’ only web presence. What about the good part of these sites? Behind the bling, behind the pseudonyms, behind the glittery GIFs and quasipornographic personal images lurk real people, people you and I used to know, and have forgotten. Isn’t that something?

But what good is it, and what impact does this have on the future, if any? I wonder if it doesn’t help de-romanticize our pasts. High school suddenly seems a lot less “back then” when you know what all your former colleagues are doing now, doesn’t it?

Technorati Tags: friendship, aging, psychology, social networking

Jan Johnstone from Kincardine, Canada writes: It is a huge ethical dilemma. Once the drug companies get a hold of it, it becomes marketed as a fix for everything. I remember reading advertisements in People Magazine for a popular antidepressant. Part of the script was aimed at getting rid of those pesky sad feelings of grief. Don’t feel blue, ask your doctor for this. But feeling grief and sorrow is a good thing, unless we all believe that certain emotions and states of being are more desirable. Dito for this drug. Our memories, no matter how painful, are important. This drug if marketed should be limited. I could see uses for it but it should not be the pancea for all bad memories. I think there could be uses for it, especially around people who have bad memories around torture.

Technorati Tags: medicine, memory, ethics, propranolol, anxiety

“But before you go, I wanted to ask you something—” he said with a catch in his throat. He was reeling with a torrent of sweet memories that had lately turned bitter and hurt him so. He swallowed and looked pensive for half a moment before looking her in the eye: “Did you ever love me?”

She could see the pain in his eyes, the hurt, even the anger; she understood. “Yes,” she said; “I loved you, to the extent that I knew what love was.”

Change the genders around if you like; it’s often the same. I submit to you that if this (fictitous yet, I would imagine, altogether familiar) former couple were altogether honest with themselves and each other, the answer she gave wouldn’t need to be qualified so.

Astronomically speaking, the most accurate, most correct way to ask for the time is to ask, “What is the current sidereal hour of this day in terms of time zone relative to Greenwich Mean Time, specifically as the radioactive decay of uranium-235 is measured at their official laboratory by highly precise instruments?” But by that time, the person you were asking has furrowed his brow and begun to walk away, blinking and looking around for witnesses should you try anything shady.

Someone I knew once argued with me heatedly and at length, deep into the night, as to the nature of love and whether one could ever be truly “in love” more than once, whether having (truly—let’s assume we’re not actually completely confusing lust and love here) loved someone was an impediment to loving someone else in the future, and all the rest. This rested on the insistence of this person I knew that it would, in said person’s opinion, be “better” for their lover to have slept with a thousand members of the opposite sex than to have loved even one. I think this is based on a fallacious idea of love. You can even find part of our argument, from days and weeks later, in the Forums, regarding God’s will and marriage.

I have for the sake of what I thought was peace denied the love I had for some for the benefit of one; but I doubt that it was necessary, if only I were able to explain what Love is all about. Love is not overzealous dedication to one person to the exaltation over a relationship with God; it is not tainted with selfish gain; it is not only shared between lovers proper; and it is not even giving of one’s own morality and humanity to save another from him- or her-self. All of that involves selfishness and setting oneself up above Christ, seen properly. That kind of love was not God’s best by any means, and it was not any kind of reflection of how Christ loves the church.

Long ago when I was young and unjaded, I used to confess to that kindred spirit of mine, at every subsequent church retreat we’d go to together (he at my behest), when I was crying in my bed for his salvation, talking with him, pleading with him to accept Christ–”I have more faith now than I ever have. I realize now that what I used to have wasn’t even faith at all, really!” And he’d answer tenderly, but bemused—”But Michael … you say that every time!”

When we were children, time was whatever the clock said. Then we learned about time zones. Then we learned about leap years and Daylight Savings Time. Then we (some unfortunate ones of us) went and pulled our hair out over some astronomy class at USC and learned about all the rest of the aforementioned nonsense. Same thing with love. Love is a feeling of Mom’s arm around you when you skin your knee—then it’s an act of the will like you learn in Sunday school, where you do something nice even though you don’t want to—then it’s a highly nuanced and largely painful process of dying daily to self that involves both the will and the emotions over the course of an entire lifetime of commitment to another’s best interests.

Thus, while “Affirmative insofar as I knew what love was” is perhaps the most correct answer to us when we ask if a lover Loved us, it doesn’t make sense to split hairs and I think it might cheapen it. Married, we’ll look back on this and laugh, if we’re not drinking so deeply of our lovers not to look back on it at all. Just like, when we get to heaven, we’ll look back on even our fondest, dearest, most self-sacrificial moments in holy matrimony, when the Spirit was singing most clearly through our hearts to the weary ears of our dear spouses—and almost scoff to think that we actually believed that was what Love in all or even most of its fullness looked like.

Though it seems that the benefits of loneliness—coping with only one set of emotions and thoughts, and so forth—outweigh sometimes the danger of love, C. S. Lewis contends that love (not the feeling, the act of will) is integral to the human experience, and without it, we are dry and unable to fully live.

I have long thought that being lonely was easier, more familiar, than the dangerous and often tragic dynamic of loving and being loved. But I’d like your opinion.

Eat This, Not That at a Summer Picnic. Links directly to the “Printable” version, a great little list of things to eat and not to eat. Who knew potato salad was such a foul offender? (BTW—notice the fine print, amusingly enough, which points to Women’s Health as the source of the article. They can do that because they’re owned by the same company, but I wonder how many catch it.)

10GB of gorgeous wallpapers. This is page 78 of I-don’t-even-know-how-many. I’ve been using 005 as my background for months now; YMMV. Enjoy all these gorgeous shots.

Don’t watch this or this if you’re easily offended or have a weak stomach.

Ellen Feiss, of Mac: Switch ad campaigns, is in a French film. No, it’s not just you. She’s cute, end of story.

Why Geeks/Nerds make the best boyfriends. What, didn’t you know?

Soaked your cellphone? Throw it into the oven for five hours on 125°.

Educate yourself about illegal drugs; make sure you retain this knowledge by not doing them. Actually, the Lycaeum.org is better for this sort of thing.

Daily Show commentary on MySpace courtesy of Demetri Martin. Look his stand-up comedy up on YouTube.

PhoneTrick.com? Plug in your info, real or not, and call your friends. Or enemies, you know. (Also a good way to find your phone if it’s gone missing somewhere in your car or apartment!)

The Restaurant Selector! Fairly excited about this site because it actually has listings for Columbia, SC. If it has listings for one of the least-esteemed states in the union, it just might have listings for your city. Check it out; ratings and descriptions along with addresses for all.

That’s all for now; enjoy!

It’s because it seems to me a sign of a lack of respect for the person as they are if someone dubs another with a nickname. It’s like the difference between “Jesus Christ per se” and “my Jesus,” to some extent—that’s not inherently disrespectful at all, just indicative of difffering worldviews, right? It doesn’t diminish the divinity or person of Christ to claim Him as one’s own. Same with nicknames, but in a way that might actually diminish that person.

For example. When I go to work at places, I often introduce myself as “Mike,” not Michael. Using my full first name gives a sense of intimate familiarity. There is to me a shaving off of part of myself to truncate my name; you shan’t know “Michael,” thinker, dreamer, writer, student, son … but as my coworker you will know the Mike that gets things done, the efficient and dynamic coder (or whatever) who will write programs for you and shoot the bull with you at lunch break. If we end up going for drinks after work sometime, call me Michael.

Same with the last name. There is one person on this earth who can call me “Phillips” without my taking offense, and that’s because she and I have been best friends for more than a decade. It’s used in the Army because it’s the closest thing you can come to a statistic; I remember wearing my father’s old, too-small black trench coat to my classes my freshman year of college because I was bedarkened of mind and affect, and didn’t want anyone to know me; “You shall know me as Phillips, not as your intimate colleague Michael.”

Understand, too, that I was given a ridiculous nickname in middle school, and some still call me by that; back then, it wasn’t funny, and it’s still not, but it does have enough time between the dubbing and the present to lend some joviality to the nickname.

On most forums or sites, you will know me as tek1024; tek as a truncation of my old ICQ moniker “Technophile,” lover of both technology and techno (music); and 1024 as the beautiful “round” number 2^10, representing my history in computer science and enjoyment of the different mindset of “hacking culture.” But even with this self-given nick, you don’t know me; you merely see a side of me, a splinter of myself that I present, like a résumé tweaked for a certain job description.

And there is a difference between nicks given to oneself and those given by others; but for me, they all signify a hiding of myself (if I coined it) or a “making less complicated than the whole” if given by another. For instance, my nickname from middle and high school describes that aspect of me that was the outgoing entertainer, the track-and-fielder, the high-jumper who jumped over the hoods of cars and beds of trucks for fun and amusement.

So it’s difficult for me when friends dub themselves differently, because I don’t want to come across as disrespectful. It’s only recently that I’ve been exposed to a nickname that empowers, that gives another meaning. A friend of mine has just such a nick she gave herself; it’s difficult for me to adopt it, not merely because of habit, but because something in me catches when tempted to say or type it: “No! I will respect you for who you are, all of you, by your full first name!” But it’s taken as more respectful if I do use it, in this case.

When it comes down to it, perhaps this giving of nicks to oneself comes from a desire to more accurately depict one’s full self, like the first name. As intimate as it may be for someone to call me by my full name, intimately, quietly, with the authority of our relationship, it is still only a designation, a serial number, until we reach Eternity.

Revelation 2:17 says of believers, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.”

In Hebrew, to name someone was to describe their essence; thus Jacob, for instance, was “the supplanter,” literally “One who grasps the heel,” and sure enough, not only was he the second-born grasping the heel of his brother at birth, but was by God’s own Providence the favored son on whom the blessing rested. In the same way, the Hebrews called God “Ha’Shem,” literally “The Name,” because to pronounce the very essence of God with unclean lips was very literally to commit blasphemy. Doesn’t it make you wonder what will be written on that white stone? When the Lord whispers in your ear, if you believe and persevere to the end, your full name, not a quasi-unique phonetic designation given by your biological parents, but your very essence intoned!—what will it say? It makes even our full names merely nicks we use for a while, shards of our whole selves.

Kevan has designed one that is particularly useful, sleek, and accessible; I recommend it if you want to give it a go.

What’s curious is that, though the Johari can be for your friends and acquaintances a nice way to pass three minutes while complimenting you, the Nohari is something that almost no one touches. When I posted both links from my IM away message, I got more responses than I expected from the former, and only two from the latter.

Both individuals who responded know that I trust them enough for them to lay bare my heinousness before me. It fulfills Proverbs 27:6,

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend,
But deceitful are the kisses of an enemy.”

Now, I don’t recommend going around stabbing and punching your friends; because you will then be in jail with no friends, and rightly so. But I know that there are a few friends I can remember throughout my life with great fondness and respect because they called me on my bulls—t and didn’t let me get away with dishonesty or bile like some yes-men employed by a corrupt dictator.

It’s a really, really common thing for guys to console other guys in a roundabout way. If they are just enough of a friend to be your yes-man, they’ll get you riled up, let you spew as much nonsense as you can, and then agree with you—”Ya dude she was like totally a total —tch, fah rill.” Then they’ll buy you another round. In light of Mt 12:36 and all the rest, why would you want a yes-man? But there was one time more than half a decade ago that I was going on and on about what “she” had done to me, &c., the usual indignation at that stage of grief—and my friend asked me pointed questions about what exactly I was upset about, and about what perhaps I’d done to “her” (I frankly don’t recall the exact person, isn’t that something?). Not only did it de-fuse (and diffuse!) my anger, it shamed me and brought me back to reality. I didn’t like it at the time, and I pouted like a kid for about twenty minutes that he wasn’t “with me,” but I appreciate that one time more than all the rounds I was ever bought by friends who weren’t willing to come through for me with an honest word for fear of my reaction. (Thanks, Dan. )

If you have the such and such, then, I recommend putting aside two and a half minutes some rainy afternoon and sending out links to both your “windows.” (And for the remainder of the hour, pestering your friends to fill out both….)

Technorati Tags: friendship, wisdom, breaking up, johari, nohari, humanism

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates they have a concept of time opposite to all the world’s studied cultures — so that the past is ahead of them and the future behind.
[…]

This is a highly interesting phenomenon.  We’ve always taken for an axiom of psychology that peoples all over the world have used the position of “forward” to conceive of the future and “rearward” for the past.  What, then, of these peoples of South America, who defy this axiom?

Technorati Tags: cognition, language, South America, tribe