Loma Loma Loma

Spring semester senior year: An interlude.

2011-03-12T10:39:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I can't believe I'm getting married. Especially in the midst of the extended—well, nightmare seems like too strong of a word, but dull dream sounds too pleasant; waking tedium? Coma of boredom? No, a coma would not be nearly stressful enough. Whatever it is, it's my last semester of college, and it's never. ending. It's strange to be so happy and miserable at the same time, all of the time.

This week is a good example. I spent half of my spring break working/doing homework and the other half wedding-planning. Somehow I've become the go-to person for staff and faculty at school writing their dissertations, and so I've been working closely with two over the past week, and have promised to do another in the next couple of weeks. These on top of the two dissertations, master's thesis, and book manuscript that I did in January-February. Daniel and I are also taking a geology class at a community college that has a different break than ours, so we drove down Tuesday/Wednesday to go to class.

On top of all that, I have a term paper due Monday, so I spent hours painstakingly researching and typing out eleven pages on a subject I didn't choose and couldn't care less about. Right now, I'm halfway through Monday's assigned reading, trying desperately to think of intelligent things to say so I can look like I'm paying attention in class even though I want nothing more than to stand up and say, "I hate William Wordsworth" and walk out and go do something more productive with my life, like read Slate articles.

I ask myself often what I'd rather be doing at the moments in which I'm struck most forcefully with this overwhelming sense of inescapability, this immediate and oppressive frustration that I'm trapped, proscribed, forced to prodigally spend my moments in soul-sucking pointlessness. Common triggers: comments from my precious classmates about the text we're discussing ("Have any of you heard of Hegel? He's this guy who wrote about the slaves uprising"), fifty pages of lit crit/aesthetic criticism of the Romantic Era/Heidegger to get through after I've been running from 8 am to 8 pm and before I can get in bed, professors who interpret things wrongly or who don't know the answers to questions when they should (I'm revealing my intellectual arrogance here, but I had to explain Nietzsche in class recently. I pay an awful lot of money for this education—is it too much to ask to have well-informed professors?).

So what would I rather be doing? I have such a hard time answering this question in anything other than the negative. I'd rather not be paying extraordinary amounts to be talked down to and subjected to flat-out incorrect information as often as I am. I'd rather not be compelled to spend twenty hours of my free time on term papers that a professor will spend five minutes reading. I'd rather not be stuck in the myriad little absolute monarchies of the classroom, induced to pay fealty to the profs and figure out the specific ways in which each one must be succored. I'd rather not have the tyranny of letters lorded over my head, not be induced to beg for extra credit or perform spectacularly on every single task or complete every single assignment or lie awake at night fretting about the points I lost on the last test. I'd rather be paid for my efforts.

Was I always this smug and bitter? Past blog posts/journal entries incline me toward yes. But does it help if I say not all of me is like this?

I attended the senior women's retreat a couple of weekends ago, and one of the icebreakers involved answering personal questions in little groups: "What is your favorite place?" I thought and thought of a place in which I was always comfortable, a place to which I could steal away when things were too hard or loud or much. My dorm was nowhere near this, nor was my parents' home, where my bedroom has been reappropriated and where every corner belongs to someone else. No coffee shop in the city provided such asylum for me, no park or cliff or nook. I didn't realize how uncomfortable I was in my own life.

There was an image in my head, though. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how often I retreated there. When it was my time to speak, I decided to be honest. "My favorite place doesn't exactly exist yet." And I tried to describe what I saw in my head, a clean place, where all the space was mine, where I knew the last time the bathroom had been scrubbed and the floor had been vacuumed, where the couch was large enough to curl up on, where it was quiet, where everything had a place. Where I could come home from work and not do homework. The philosophy prof who was in my circle liked my answer, what with all its not-yet-existentness, joking that I "won" that round. But I was serious. I am serious.

So I guess that is what I would rather be doing: sitting in whatever little apartment I can manage to afford, working forty or fifty hours a week instead of, well, how would one calculate my normal schedule? Eighteen credit hours of class time, plus ten hours at the library, ten hours as an administrative assistant, about ten hours for the newspaper (depending on the week), and various and sundry hours grading as a teacher's assistant and freelance editing. And then I do homework. Supposedly, a student is supposed to have double the number of credit hours of homework outside of class, which would put me at thirty-six hours of homework. Good thing I'm a fast reader. But even if you estimate half of that, I'm responsible for sixty-six hours' worth of work, on a light week. A full-time job would be a (major) break.

So after working that full-time job (or multiple part-time jobs; I'm realistic), I'd like to come home and do things that aren't compulsory. And it would be nice if Daniel were there, too. That is what I'd rather be doing.

Port 6: Puerto Vallarta

2011-02-12T16:49:00.000-08:00

We disembarked at Puerto Vallarta and piled onto a bus that would take us along the coast and into the mountains. We stopped halfway there to marvel at the coastline.

A day of ziplining was awaiting us. We suited up and began the path of 14 ziplines.

On the trail between ziplines. It was more than a little exhilarating to hook in and coast over trees and rivers through the Mexican jungle.

Daniel's nephew Sean coming in for a landing. Can you see how long the line is? I've been ziplining before, but never for such expanses.

The whole group geared up and ready to go.

Afterward, we sat by the river and watched others swim in the freezing water.

The ziplining establishment had a little animal hut with tiny monkeys like this one.

There were some wild animals, too—including these iguanas we spotted.

We rode the bus back to the town and walked the streets, stopping for fish tacos and carne asada for dinner.

We found the last cathedral of the trip. They were one of my favorite parts of each city we visited.

We strolled along the beachfront malecón, taking in the sights of the city.

Right before sunset, we caught these acrobats, who climbed to the top of this pole, wound themselves up, and then spiraled down in unison.

The sunset along the beach was fantastic.

Statues lined the waterfront. Daniel took the opportunity to interact with this one.

We spent our last pesos on a jamaica drink and some caramel-like candies. Then it was back to the ship for a couple of days at sea, and our final port—San Diego.

Port 5: Mazatlan

2011-02-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

Daniel's dad had arranged in advance for us to take a van tour of Mazatlan. Mazatlan Frank picked us up from the port and took us to the northernmost edge of town and back, giving us an idea of the rich, the touristy, and the working class. It was an enlightening trip.

We stopped inside the cathedral in the middle of town and marveled at its sheer size.

The cathedral was adjacent to a popular shopping area, and we walked through the rows and rows of vendors.

We watched the cliff divers ply their trade. That man perched at the top of the stairs plunged into a shallow dive at the bottom of those rocks.

We walked the streets of Old Mazatlan, an area that has been restored and rejuvenated in recent years.

A theatre in Old Mazatlan.

We stopped by the home of an artisan couple that doubles as their gallery. I was excited to see the saltillo tiles that we have at home paving their floors.

The roof of their house contained a fantastic mosaic wall.

An example of the beautiful restoration. Mazatlan Frank explained to us that the bars on the windows, present on almost every single house we saw, were not so much a reaction to violence as a cultural tradition born out of the need to keep the doors and windows open during the hot months.

We headed up to a beach well-known for its surfing and could see the city stretch back southward along the coast.

After this, we drove through a gleaming gated community, perfectly groomed everything and white, white mansions repeated over and over, cars with American license plates sitting in the driveways. And then we headed over to the working class areas where, Frank explained, people begin with small single-level homes and eventually save up enough money to build another level on top of their flat roofs, a project he was currently in the middle of. The houses were much more colorful.

We ended the day with a sunset overlooking an island.

The whole group!

And back on the ship, we gathered once more for dinner and company.

Port 4: Topolobampo

2011-02-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

When we stepped off the ship, a vast swath of asphalt spread before us. A giant billboard of taxi fares stood upon it. We decided to take our chances and walk.

The tiny, tiny town of Topolobampo (population 250?) was a mile or two away. We strolled the streets and encountered a decidedly untouristy village.

An extensive market was set up, with piles of vegetables, slabs of fresh meat (with the occasional cow head), and a little family of chickens, among other things.

When we were satisfied with our Topolobampo experience, we sought out a bus that would take us to Los Mochis, a larger city about forty-five minutes away. The tour guide we read beforehand had warned of the desolation between the two towns, including thirteen-foot crocodiles that apparently made it uninhabitable. We didn't see any of those rush by on our bus ride, but we did see the lonely expanses.

We were quite proud of the paltry 16 pesos we paid for our bus fare, about $1.20 and far below the $20+ a taxi would have been.

Los Mochis was a full-fledged city. We located a Best Western and put the laptop we had lugged along to good use in the hotel lobby. Living without internet access on this trip was rough; we spent a good hour and a half there catching up. We then traipsed about the city, wandering through shops and grabbing some fish tacos from a street vendor.

I don't know why this place was called El Debate, but it was ripe for a debate pose from Daniel.

We located the cathedral and peeked inside.

We successfully navigated the streets and found our bus stop again for our return trip. Those are bins of herbs and spices behind us, each labeled with the ailments and diseases it promised to cure.

Back in Topolobampo, I was ready to tromp back to the ship. But Daniel had seen a church on the top of a hill, and he insisted it would take fewer than ten minutes for us to reach it. I didn't believe him, but lo and behold, he was right.

We made our way past all manner of houses, and we enjoyed the view at the top.

If you click on this picture, you might be able to make out the white cross at the top of the hill, marking the church. This is a view of the hill on our way back to the ship.

A fiesta was waiting for us on that asphalt expanse. We watched a group of children, herded by nuns, as they had their way with the piñata.

And we returned, exhausted but well-traveled. We walked a good four hours, which probably puts us around ten miles on foot. It was a good day.

Port 3: Guaymas

2011-02-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

In Guaymas, we piled into a shuttle to get from the port to the city proper. Daniel's nephews are in the foreground here.

The church lay in the center of town, adjacent to a square that would later fill with an ice rink and a band.

We walked the streets, getting a feel for the "gritty" town that the tour guide told us to expect.

We discovered the historical bank building that Lonely Planet said someone should hurry up and restore.

I don't know what this means, but it looked pretty gritty.

Daniel got a couple of funny stares for his headband, which I had crocheted him (we just happened to wear matching crochet accessories that day). I enjoyed it to no end.

We realized, walking through the streets and seeing pastries called "Rosca de Reyes," that the date was January 6, Epiphany. It explained the remaining Christmas decorations—for traditional Christians, the Christmas season wasn't over yet.

Daniel and I noticed the town library and decided to check it out.

It turned out to be a single room with a relatively small collection. We were very excited about the liberation theology book we found.

Along the waterfront, little boats were docked.

We rested for a while before Daniel's dad suggested we take a boat tour around the harbor.

The boat was cozy, and our tour guide was quite friendly.

We motored past tightly packed shrimping boats.

The islands in the harbor were completely coated in cacti. Eagles perched on the whitened tops.

A fort from a nineteenth-century war remained on one of the shores.

We set sail early in the evening, so we gathered on the deck to watch the launch.

Port 2: Loreto

2011-01-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

The travel guide said Loreto receives only five days of clouds, and we seemed to dock on one of those days. I considered us lucky.

We strolled the Malecon and found our way to the little strip that formed the tourist section.

I almost felt bad for delighting in how picturesque the old, worn buildings were.

The mission in the center of town was a striking example of 17th-century architecture. Loreto was the first settlement in Baja California, and the church was built in 1697.

We saw this striking contrast more than once. In such an isolated place, I can imagine how vital it must seem to be connected.

We had some wonderful fish tacos and guacamole at a little restaurant. This was the appetizer.

Vendors were everywhere. I almost wish I had spent more of my tourist dollars here.

On the way back to the ship, we spotted a door, just hanging out in a lighthouse. Decoration? Suggestive metaphor?

We reunited with everyone at dinner. Here, with Daniel's brother Josh and his sister-in-law Sarah.

Port 1: Cabo San Lucas

2011-01-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

After a day at sea, I was almost surprised to see land, and such gorgeous land at that.

We found a water taxi to take us to Lovers' Beach, one of the main attractions.

It was a happening place.

We floated out to Los Arcos to say hi to the seals and check out the view.

The water really was that amazing shade of turquoise.

I didn't get any fantastic underwater pictures, but you get the idea. Fish everywhere.

Daniel and I snorkeled for a bit.

We had very fancy equipment.

We wandered over to the Pacific side of the beach.

Then we explored the caves nearby.

Back on shore, we made the rounds in the touristy strip before heading back to the ship.

Water, water everywhere . . . and lots to eat and drink. It was a cruise, after all.

2011-01-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

Daniel and I went on a cruise to Mexico with his family during the last week of Christmas break. I'd never been on a cruise, and I'd never properly been to Mexico (does diving in Mexican waters count?), so it was a novel and stimulating experience for me. We watched some phenomenal sunsets.

The ship was large and mazelike. It was like being on a floating hotel.

We got to dress up every night for formal dinners. Angelica lent me her beautiful thrift store dress, and complete strangers were commenting on it.

It was wonderful to sit around a table with Daniel's parents, brothers, nephews, and sisters-in-law every night and get to know everyone throughout the trip. I'll post each port we visited as I work through the pictures!

Gett[y]ing our money's worth.

2011-01-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

After Christmas, Daniel and I went to the Getty. We looked at art! And made art! Exciting times.

Self-timer in the garden!

Daniel had never been, so we traipsed through all the galleries and paid homage to the greatest works. We were especially taken with an exhibit featuring absolutely gorgeous illuminated manuscripts from Belgium and the Netherlands. Then we frollicked on the grass. Totally.

The twins gave me the greatest Christmas presents ever—hand-me-ups, including these jeans. How great is it to have younger sisters who get too cool for their clothes?

Flying children! The art we made were sketches in an interactive exhibit. The docents set us up on these ingeniously designed benches that held our easels as we attempted to sketch out sculptural figures placed throughout the room.

There's something so otherworldly, almost utopic about the Getty. I always leave feeling happier than when I came.

Christmas, Barr-none.

2011-01-21T22:18:00.000-08:00

There was a tree, with presents.

And freshly made potica.

And lots of Christmas music.

All in all, it was a very Barr Christmas. We looked like poster children for knock-off snuggies. And were very warm.

Rachel had posted a link to my Facebook profile a couple of weeks before Christmas to an Etsy site featuring crocheted beard hats. I relished the challenge, and created that masterpiece that she's sporting above.

Mom and Dad opening my presents to them.

Mom and Dad gave us all matching rings inscribed with biblical references. I liked the idea of us all being connected in a little way.

I showed Shannon the rudimentaries of crocheting. It's the gift that keeps on giving. We spent the rest of the day making tamales and cuddling in our Cozy-Ups. And watching movies. Lots of movies.

Doing the zoo.

2011-01-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

Angelica had given me two tickets to the San Diego Zoo from her internship, and these expired at the end of the year, so Daniel and I made sure to use them during finals week.

How much does Daniel look like this meerkat? These guys loved him—they ran up to him as soon as we walked over.

There were aviaries everywhere. I didn't remember there being so many birds. I hadn't been to the zoo for eight or so years, so it was almost like experiencing it for the first time.

The bonobos were quite . . . active. We watched, feeling a little voyeuristic peeking at such humanoid creatures.

I love okapi. They don't even seem like they should be real.

It was a grey and drizzly Thursday, so there were few crowds, and no line for the world-famous pandas. This was the most exciting thing the pandas did.

The mirrored door at the panda exhibit was more entertaining.

Daniel likes the polar bears.

I gleefully climbed on top of this prehistoric cat.

We spent quality time with the elephants.

Angelica observed this exhibit during her internship this summer, and as soon as Daniel and I walked up to it, my phone rang . . . and Angelica was calling. She didn't even know we were at the zoo. We enjoyed the confluence. I found the fake animals that, Angelica said, people from all over constantly thought were real.

Daniel and I happened upon an extended chorus from the African singing dogs. This might have been my favorite exhibit of the day.

I've never seen so much of the koalas. They were all over the place. And they brought me back to my early childhood, when my stuffed kangaroo and koala were my most prized possessions (the Ks, you know).

They may not be as cuddly and sweet as they seem to be, but what animal is?

Late-October likenesses (socially sanctioned dress-up).

2011-01-01T07:00:00.001-08:00

I've wanted to dress up as Jan Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring pretty much since I read the book/watched the movie back in high school. It's hard to find socially sanctioned occasions to dress up like four-hundred-year-old paintings, but for this year's Samedi Gras on campus, I finally got the chance. I put on my pearls, pulled down the curtain from my bedroom, and found a scarf-wrapping tutorial online. We spent about five minutes at Samedi Gras (nothing will ever top sophomore year, apparently), but I got some nods of recognition while we were there.

Angelica also got in the painting spirit, getting gussied up as Frida Kahlo. She was bashful about the eyebrow, but I thought the effect was uncanny.

Engagement post (Facebook redux).

2010-12-30T12:27:00.000-08:00

This is long-overdue, I realize. But I figured the Facebook version was largely sufficient for informing our general circle of our engagement; this post (like all of my posts, really) is, on the whole, for posterity (until the computing cloud collapses, of course. Then I'll just have my Microsoft Word archive copy).

So one weekend in October, Daniel told me we were going on three dates (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). I had a little inkling of what this meant, and admired his ingenuity. Friday night, we had Thai in Coronado, and Saturday morning, we helped with distribution and cleaning up the children's room at church. Then picked up lunch and headed out to La Jolla. I was in a somewhat dour mood, having had a much larger than usual pile of newspaper articles to plow through before we could leave, and being just generally unable to relax and enjoy myself. Even the coffee we got didn't do much to alleviate my moodiness. But I gave it my best shot, and soon I didn't have to try to fake it.

We tiptoed among the tidepools. I was dressed like a Scottish highlander, so Daniel gallantly held my purse.

Last picture before we got engaged!

First picture after we got engaged!

Daniel proposed in quite possibly the most low-key way ever, rolling over next to me on our blanket in the park after our picnic lunch and grinning, "So . . . will you marry me?" Instantly, my moodiness drained away, and a flash of some of the most intense happiness I've ever felt replaced it. It was a little unreal, and it lasted for weeks. I can still channel some of the glow I felt.

Daniel, sweetheart that he is, had scouted out the area and found an alley where we could finagle some self-timed shots.

We're both wearing rings (Daniel's here was temporary; his real one came a couple of weeks later). We had previously discussed the diamond issue at length before deciding we felt most comfortable with something else, and so we found a white sapphire seller on Etsy that satisfied our ethical, economic, and aesthetic concerns. The final choice was Daniel's, and I think he did quite a good job:)

Our day was, adorably, a recreation of our first date, and we ended it at the first restaurant we ever went to together, a little Italian place in La Jolla. We spent the rest of the night making ecstatic phone calls and celebrating with our friends at a little party back at my apartment. It was fairly wonderful.

Life grab bag [August to October].

2010-11-24T21:31:00.000-08:00

A lot happened in the end of summer and first half of the semester, but here's what I've got pictures of.

Daniel and I went on a lovely date in Balboa during the summer, stopping by to peer in the telescopes of the weekly astronomy group that meets among the museums Wednesday nights.

The twins came to campus for their seventeenth birthdays. We hit the town and had dinner at Sushi Deli.

I think it was the first time at a sushi restaurant for all three of them. Best. miso soup. ever.

We did some hardcore thrift store shopping and also had a pleasant lunch at Con Pane the next day.

For Constitution Day, Daniel and three other debaters formed a panel and held an audience-friendly debate on the issues surrounding immigration law. Daniel was surprisingly witty and comfortable in front of a large group. I deeply enjoyed it, but I also think Constitution Day is one of the best days of the year, regardless of its state compulsion.

On Free Museum Day (a Smithsonian production, I think), we printed tickets for both the Natural History Museum and the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center. Mac and Daniel gleefully explored the hands-on exhibits.

We spent some quality time in the wood block building area.

Angelica and her friends constructed edifices as well.

The optical illusion section. The Natural History Museum's gemstone exhibit was by far my favorite part of the day, but pictures were not allowed, so the brilliance of the sapphires, amethysts, diamonds, opals, and precious stones I've never heard of will have to be imagined floating in my head in this picture.

Daniel has a knack for finding periscopes.

My advisor asked some literature students to participate in a music/poetry night held by music department faculty in October, and I gladly agreed. I drafted a short introduction to William Blake and read a couple of his poems as a preface to art songs of his works. I'm not on stage very often, so that look on my face is a little excitement and mostly relief at having dispatched my duty adequately.

Day 9: Home by way of the 1 (and 101, and 60, and 215...).

2010-10-17T14:49:00.000-07:00

After maybe four hours of sleep, we rose at 6 and departed within a half-hour. We stopped in Santa Cruz and Monterey, catching coffee at the little bagel place we had visited the summer before on our first road trip together.

Our plan the summer before to take the 1 up the coast had been derailed when some maintenance issues set us back. This time, though, we were determined to make the drive.

And of course it was totally worth it. Click on this panorama to get an idea of the scope of the view.

We tried to stop whenever we could. There was some traffic and construction, but it still flowed pretty well.

Wildflowers.

We traded [awkward] pictures with another couple.

Daniel being coy.

We stopped for sandwiches in Cambria and asiago cheese bread in San Luis Obispo. The bread turned out to be one of the best parts of the day. I'm not even kidding. It was delicious and wonderful and we definitely ate the entire loaf for dinner.

Daniel drove and ate the bread and I took pictures of the bread. Barbara and Ciera, taking the eight-hour route, called us for a Lady Gaga dance party via phone when they were in San Diego County and we were just leaving SLO. Daniel and I started to flag once we hit LA, and by the time we neared Fallbrook, at hour fourteen, we were pretty punchy. But it had been a really good nine days—desert, mountains, forests, wine country, cities, beaches. And asiago cheese bread.

Scientists as Theologians by John Polkinghorne.

2010-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

In my ongoing effort to look like I know what I'm talking about with a minimal amount of commitment, I checked out the shortest book in the library by a man visiting campus for our lecture series next month. John Polkinghorne is a physicist turned Anglican priest who stands in the space of tension between science and theology. I care about very few things more than this very intersection. I think it's this borderline obsession that saves me from intellectual hipsterdom. Here, anyways.

My cheat sheet of compelling ideas:

Polkinghorne describes the failure of the Enlightenment project in terms of good-enoughness:

We have to stick our necks out if we are to be able to see anything. The Cartesian and Enlightenment programme of the search for clear and certain ideas as the basis for unshakeable knowledge has simply proved to be a failure. It would have been nice if it could have succeeded, but we have discovered painfully that it has not. I am sufficiently postmodern to recognize that this is the case.

This acknowledgement, however, does not lead me to intellectual despair, for my second observation is that our minds are so constituted, and we live in a world itself so constituted, that intellectual daring in the pursuit of a strategy of cautious circularity proves capable of yielding reliable knowledge. I say that not because the world had to be that way, but because, as a matter of contingent fact, it has proved to be so. The defence of critical realism depends upon an appeal to historical experience rather than to metaphysical necessity. We do appear able to gain knowledge of what is the case. (16)

Pardon the extended extract, but my science-theology fixation extends to epistemology, and I often find it hard to function intellectually because I get struck by these moments of existential-postmodern despair, often right in the middle of class, and this often because I'm thinking through a response I never actually say out loud because I've been sucked into the "but how do we know that Heathcliff represents intuition and Linton represents socially constructed culture? Isn't that an anachronistic application that cannot apply to the meaning of the text because Brontë could never have attempted such? Aren't you presupposing a Platonic ideal? How can we assert a transcendent meaning without first establishing a philosophy of the human? What are you even talking about? What am I talking about? How can we ever say anything about anything?" (There are more steps in a brain rant like this, but I'll spare you.)

Polkinghorne locates his own philosophy of the human in the very striving for the transcendent that humans exhibit. Suicide, sadness, and a protest of death are, in Peter Berger's phrase, "signals of transcendence," bespeaking what Polkinghorne calls "that dimension of openness to something beyond us which I have called spiritual, and which carries in the midst of time a hint of eternity" (26). Polkinghorne links this to the emerging perception of the universe developing throughout the twentieth century, the viewing of the world "in terms of dynamic becoming rather than static being. . . . The God of the Bible is One who is active in and through the unfolding drama of history" (27).

Polkinghorne also attempts a deft working-out of the implications of chaos theory and the manner in which a non-deterministic universe at the atomic level can be understood to be non-deterministic at the macroscopic level as well: "Chaotic systems are not totally disorderly; their future is contained within the confines of possibility" (35).

The manner in which God can be understood to be involved in creation, on Polkinghorne's view, has much to do with the actual existence of the universe. The why does anything exist, the Hawking "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" must be answered this way: "The central concept of the doctrine of creation is divine ordaining and sustaining, not divine initiation" (44):

A concept of central importance in relation to an evolutionary world is that of creatio continuua, continuing creation. . . . One could summarize the theological significance of an evolutionary universe as its being a world allowed by its Creator to make itself. Doubtless, God could have produced a ready-made world, but he has done something cleverer than that in allowing creation's history to be the exploration and realization of its God-given fruitfulness. (44-45)

Theodicy has much to gain from the scientists, Polkinghorne argues. Suffering is a necessary contingency of divine openness: "Exactly the same biochemical processes that allow cells to mutate and produce new forms of life will allow other cells to mutate and become malignant. . . . The happenstance of the world can be extremely painful and diminishing, but it is at least delivered from being seen as the express imposition of the divine will" (48).

Polkinghorne continually affirms the deity of Jesus Christ, asserting, "However mysterious and difficult to articulate . . . it seems to me that an indispensable Christian insight is that in Christ the Creator actually shared in the travail of his creation" (70).

He ascribes to the early Christians an almost scientific approach to understanding the person of Jesus: "It is important that early Christian thinking on the natures of Christ arose in the context of a struggle with experience, and not as the result of some unbridled metaphysical speculation. All the scientist-theologians are concerned with a Christology 'from below,' building on the evidence. I believe that a strong incarnational Christology is the best attempt to make sense of the data of Jesus' life and death and resurrection, and the Church's experience of him" (71).

And though our modern secular reasoning cannot countenance the full humanity and full divinity of the Christ, the early Christians' conclusions can still be seen as worthy interpretations of reality: "Divine and human natures in one person, and the coinherence of humanity in Christ, are mysterious ideas, uncongenial to the secular twentieth-century mind. They have arisen in Christian thinking, not from an obscurantist urge to mystify, nor from a fanciful propensity to speculation, but from the struggle to do justice to actual Christian experience" (73).

Polkinghorne gives evidence for the historicity of the Gospels, including one of my favorite arguments: "[I]f the tale were concocted, then why, in the male-dominated ancient world, were women assigned the leading role?" (76).

He also solves, or at least provides an explanation for, a dilemma regarding the bodily resurrection of the saints first brought to my attention by Daniel's math/chemistry major roommate: "[H]e regards it as problematic what will happen to us because that atoms of our corpses will disperse with time. It is difficult to see where the problem lies, since we all recognize that there is nothing specifically significant about those individual atoms. After all, they are changing all the while in the course of our lives. It is the pattern that is me that will be re-created by God in the new environment brought about by his eschatological act of general resurrection. We shall be resurrected, not reassembled" (77-78). Amen.

Day 8: From Mammoth to Sacramento, and a summer Winters wedding.

2010-10-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

We left Daniel's parents and brothers in Mammoth early Saturday to make the journey to the wedding of our friends Jeff and Angela. We paused by Mono Lake for a little breather before the long haul.

Daniel let me drive stick for a while under his careful guidance. I felt bad that I couldn't shoulder more of the driving on this trip, but me driving stick was way more tiring for both of us than having Daniel behind the wheel for most of it.

We passed through Lake Tahoe and through untold miles of mountain roads. It was a long drive. There were a lot of trees. I realized how citified I've become. I used to spend whole summers in the mountains and leave wanting more, but one week in the wilderness now made me crave buildings, cityscapes, people. I started snapping pictures of the edge of Sacramento as soon as we passed Placerville, out of sheer joy. Metropolitan living has ruined me for rural life.

Of course, once we hit the city I wanted nothing more than a cup of coffee. We drove through downtown Sacramento, passed the Capitol building, and found this charming place courtesy of mobile Yelp.

Urban life tastes like dark coffee in a white ceramic cup.

Daniel and I changed quickly in the car on a dirt road among wineries (not recommended) and made it to the county park where the wedding was to be held in plenty of time. Barbara was bridesmaided and ready to go.

We grabbed some votive beeswax candles and helped with the finishing touches on the setup

Barbara had had a total of one hour of sleep the night before, so that she could finish knitting the groomsmen's ties. Best. bridesmaid. ever.

Angela and her father walking down the aisle.

Husband and wife. Daniel and I had spent many stimulating evenings with Angela and Jeff as part of a reading group Angela held in anticipation of theologian William Cavanaugh's visit to campus last semester. We were glad to be able to celebrate this next stage in their lives with them.

My dapper wedding date.

Daniel tested the photo booth that Ciera ran.

Seven hours in a car does beautiful things to your hair.

Daniel and I sat at the debate table, here with Ciera and Kim, waiting for our turn at the carne asada spread.

We danced under the stars. This is my "Oh look! You have a camera!" face.

All danced out.

We saw the couple off to their Duke University grad school adventures in theology, and headed up to Barbara's house for a couple of hours of sleep.

Day 7: Trolley ride to Twin Lakes.

2010-10-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

After our lengthy hike the day before, we decided to spend our last full day in Mammoth at a leisurely pace.

Daniel and I said goodbye to his parents at the town shopping center and hopped on a trolley.

For whatever reason, we love trolleys. Monterey, Balboa Park, Mammoth—if it's free, we'll ride it.

Mammoth's trolley system is surprisingly convenient. We were able to ride from town out to nature and back to our condo quite easily.

Maybe it's the way the light filters in on a trolley that is the appeal for me. And the fact that Daniel is a captive subject for my camera assault: "Here, look thoughtfully out the window." Hah.

We decided Twin Lakes would be our destination. Daniel found dandelions.

We walked along the lake and admired the waterfall (the same one that we visited on day 2, but below this time).

The water was clear and green and blue and we would have spent more time there among the dragonflies and sunshine, but the mosquitoes were too much even for seasoned hikers like us.

We waited by the trolley stop in more beautifully filtered light.

And then we came back and did our favorite evening routine. How did people ever vacation without WiFi? Oh, and we didn't mean to match; it just kind of happened. Definitely not the first time.

Life update, and the classic problem of the dishes.

2010-09-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

Let me just say at the outset that I am definitely writing this instead of an analysis of Wuthering Heights right now. It's okay. My class was cancelled. I don't have to feel guilty about not utilizing my time surplus to its most productive extent. The analysis can wait. The analysis can wait.

Sometimes I don't recognize myself. Three years of undergraduate endeavor has turned me into—or brought out of me, rather—a producer who can't sit still, who isn't happy without doing two things at once, who doesn't have time to get bored because all time must be occupied well, who squeezes 60 or 65 hours' worth of work into a week and still has (a little) time for friends and boyfriend. I'm at a nadir in time demands right now (my two second quad classes haven't started, and neither of the editing projects I've agreed to have begun yet), but I still feel the pull of "Be productive! Be productive! Or you'll never get everything done!" tugging at the edge of my consciousness. It's all I can do to make myself write a whiny, confessional blog post.

But that's not to say I haven't been busy. Things just seem to happen; responsibilities just seem to fall in my lap. And I can't say no to an opportunity—and I even tried to this semester, just to see if I could. Nope. My planner is a better recorder of my recent life than my short-term memory is:

August 26: PW pictures 7 am—I'm on the campus newspaper for the fourth year. Who else would want to take responsibility for the shaky writing and indefatigable typos? This of course also includes waking up at an unconscionable hour for staff pictures because "that was the only time all eleven of us could meet." Good thing I don't have a morning routine.

Rob meeting 9 am—I edited a paper for a professor going to a conference (the same professor whose dissertation I edited last summer). He's one of the most helpful people I've ever met, and he's gotten me several jobs through his referrals.

Grading 2 hours—Another professor asked me to be her grader this year, making her the third prof I've graded for. I love grading. It's the most flexible, mindless task I have.

WC 1 pm to 4: 30 pm—I'm continuing the position I had over the summer because the person I was filling in for moved across the country. I'm an administrative assistant according to my job description, and every day is different: scheduling, phone calls, mailings, inventory, and lots and lots of InDesign as of late, because I'm creating a journal out of the past two years of senior honors projects. I'm also working on my own senior honors project, editing a collection of essays about life after college for women, as part of my position.

September 14: Meet prof 8 am—One of the jobs that my helpful prof got me is editing yet another dissertation. This one is set to start whenever he emails me his first chapter.

September 17: Department party 6 pm—The lit department holds a giant party every year at the home of one of the profs (a strikingly modern and eco-friendly home designed by an architect-husband, incidentally), and this year, my roommate and I brought a swath of not-really-affiliated people to crash. We laughed at the costumes some people elected to wear, jumped on the trampoline, and cringed at the karaoke. Good times.

September 21: Coffee meeting 9 am—I received an email a couple of weeks before this from a professor who said he had passed my name on to a man looking for student editors. I got in contact with the guy and found that he was looking for a more creative, hands-on editing experience than I normally give, so I told him I might not be the best person for the job (see? Totally tried to say no). But he said that after looking at my resume and talking to my references that I had invaluable experience and insight. So I agreed to meet with him in the coffee shop on campus. He was eccentric but apparently well-to-do, and he was willing to pay me just to read through his manuscript and give suggestions, so I told him I'd do it. I'm supposed to get the manuscript this weekend. We'll see how it goes.

September 23: Coffee meeting 9 am—Another professor told me he had given my name to a student of his who was interested in editing. She was a nursing major, he said, but her real passion was editing. I told him I'd be glad to meet with her and give her any advice I could. So we met, and I felt the strange feeling of being an expert of sorts on something. I've so often been the interviewer, not the interviewee, and it was a little exhilarating to be sourced for information.

September 29: Career opportunities seminar 4:15 pm—A professor emailed me a couple of weeks ago asking if I would appear on a panel to talk about my internship experience. I told him I didn't have much but that I'd be glad to do it. So I showed up with nothing but my internal resume, introduced myself by observing that I knew everyone in the room (I did) and saying that some of the audience members might just as well be in my spot, and gave a rundown of all the non-campus publication gigs I've had during college. The other three panelists were either in or finished with grad school, and I can't imagine I was that helpful to the seminar, but the host prof summed up my advice as "take initiative and make contacts" and one of the other panelists said he was a little jealous of the internships I've had.

Dinner 6 pm—The Point Weekly staff has dinner at the university president's house every year, so I jumped in the car right after the seminar and went to a delicious meal and schmoozy conversation—super entertaining.

And I think we're caught up. The only major obligations I have on my calendar right now are a dress rehearsal tonight and a performance tomorrow night for a poetry reading/concert a professor asked me to participate in. I'm introducing William Blake and reading two poems by him right before they're sung. What a good time.

Are we at the classic problem of the dishes yet? This semester has been longer than I thought. When I began this entry a half-hour or so ago, my hands were still crinkled from washing dishes. This wouldn't be worth noting if some of the dishes had been mine. Or if this hadn't happened every week since the beginning of the semester.

Here's the thing: I tried to let the dishes sit. I did. I came home yesterday from seminar/dinner schmoozing, and there was a sinkful of dishes. I wanted to do them very much. But I restrained myself. Even when I saw the mug of tea that had molded. But I woke up this morning and blundered into the kitchen as per usual, and I could smell them. There's nothing more revolting in the morning than smelly dishes. So I did them. All of them. Except for the molded tea. I considered it for a moment, then picked it up, hesitated over the desk of my roommate, and finally plunked it down next to her computer.

How long should dishes sit? Twenty-four hours? Two days? Because at the two-day mark, I can't stop myself from doing them. At the beginning of the semester, the sinkful of dishes didn't surprise me, even when none of it was mine. Four people make a lot of dirty dishes, I reasoned. I have some spare time—why shouldn't I help my roommates out?

But then I started noticing whose dishes were whose. And I started noticing who actually did the dishes. And it became increasingly apparent that two of my four roommates made a worthy effort to keep things clean, and two of them did not. And guess which two I share a room/bathroom with? I'm fine with neither of them making an effort to clean the bathroom—I understand that I probably have a higher standard of cleanliness than they do, and that their powdery makeup on all of the flat surfaces might not bother them, that maybe they don't notice when the garbage can is overflowing, that it doesn't occur to them to disinfect one of the germier places in a house, that refilling the toilet paper isn't a priority for them.

But the dishes happen at the crossroad of our apartment. When you neglect them, you're neglecting the space of four people instead of two. And you're making it harder for them to function. And I'm more than a little offended at the discourtesy.

I don't want to be in this situation. I don't want to be the passive-aggressive roommate. I've considered email, pointed Facebook statuses, sticky notes—but I've refrained. And yet I just can't bring myself to a face-to-face confrontation. I don't want to create resentment. And I don't want to make my roommates' home hostile to them. Why should I require everyone around me to uphold my standards of cleanliness? I don't require that they work as many hours a week as I do or get the sort of grades I do. Why would I expect them to be as concerned with hygiene as I am?

But the molded tea is on her desk. And it's going to stay there.

Day 6: San Joaquin Ridge hike.

2010-09-19T20:49:00.000-07:00

This was the longest hike of them all—a consistently uphill trail from the Minaret Summit trailhead over a broad, gravelly rise.

I was clearly prepared and well-seasoned by this time.

Exciting chair-like tree formation.

Farmhand.

The mountain lupine carpeted the ridge and met the sky over every hill.

Tiny flowers peppered the pumice-dirt; everything was smaller and more exposed at this elevation.

The trail ended at Deadman Pass, 10,242 feet above sea level.

We stopped for lunch and shade. Mark explored the snowbank that Daniel and I are looking at in the picture above this one.

We rested.

And then we geared up for the pleasantly downhill walk back.

Butterflies were everywhere, including in this picture.

The rounded vistas were striking, and the distance we covered almost daunting because we could see so much of it at one time.

We happened off the trail at one point to discover this igneous outcropping.

So much volcanic rock!

And so much snow—in July.

Snowball fight.

Daniel plucked some flowers for me and I stuck them in my hair<3

After we returned, Daniel and I decided to frolic in the meadow behind the cabin like we'd planned on doing all week.

The meadow became golden in the rays of sunset that peeked over the mountain range.

And later on, Daniel caught me doing laundry. I can't tell you how great it was to have a washer and dryer.

Day 5: Panorama Dome hike.

2010-09-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

We were exhausted after the previous day's excursion, so we opted for an easier hike, to Panorama Dome.

I adore SLR shots of wildflowers. Adore them. That's why there's an embarrassing amount of them in the file from this trip.

Looove them.

Panorama Dome lived up to its name. The curve of the earth was rather astounding.

I have this thing for lichen. I don't know what it is, something about the bright lime green in the middle of nature. Love it.

On top of the dome!

Mariposa lily. We saw these everywhere.

Daniel and I decided to take a short cut that turned out to be rather longer and more painful than we expected. But it was beautiful.

Following the deer paths through the scratchy manzanita, we came across an actual deer.

Deer!

The hill we conquered. We had more than our fair share of battle scars from the undergrowth. So much for a shortcut...

We ended the day at an overlook. If you look closely, you can see the cabin we stayed in, on the left.

Day 4: Inyo Craters Hike.

2010-08-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

Daniel carried the Camelbak on this hike.

We walked a short trail out to a set of three craters created hundreds of years ago. Love the formations that occur because of volcanic activity.

The first crater just dropped hundreds of feet into the ground.

At the bottom was a turquoise pool of water.

We walked over to the second crater, located right next to the first. It was larger and had a greener pond at the bottom.

Then Daniel, Mark, and I began the scramble up the sheer face of the third crater. If you look closely, you can see a blue figure in the center of this photo, Daniel's mom.

The scramble was short but exhausting (as you can tell by my exhausted face). And it turns out this crater had a lot less room to stand on.

Or none. We literally straddled the ridge.

It was a little bit of a shock to find such a steep edge at the top. And the views were just as unexpected.

We climbed inside the crater, a less steep descent.

We found an easier path through the opposite side of the crater.

Mark pointing at the tip of the crater ridge, which he climbed to (in sandals, no less) and which Daniel and I decided we'd stay just underneath.

Afterward, we drove over to June Lake and had our lunch.

And played on the swings.

Then Daniel's dad gave us a tour of the area.

We glimpsed a waterfall that looked strikingly like bird droppings.

We also rounded Mono Lake.

We stopped at Convict Lake to skip rocks and watch the sunset.

And then we headed back for a wonderful dinner and dessert.

Day 3: Devil's Postpile to Rainbow Falls.

2010-08-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

We took a shuttle out to the trailhead.

Devil's Postpile was formed in a specific chemical reaction following a volcanic eruption. The spew hardened into these towering geometric shapes.

We hiked up to the top and found a tiled roof of hexagons.

And then we continued hiking.

Pretty columbine hid under fallen logs.

We passed the San Joaquin River.

It was quite swift and a little dangerous-looking.

Daniel's delightful photo skills.

Unripe gooseberry.

Mariposa lily. These sometimes grew singly, sometimes in great bunches.

The last leg of this hike wound through an area that burned in 1992. It's still struggling to regrow.

The charred trunks were startling against the mountain blue sky.

And at the end of the trail was Rainbow Falls, an aptly named waterfall that continually throws a rainbow band outward.

We hiked down into the glade and ate lunch by the cascading water.

And then we hiked back up.

Daniel made faces.

I was captivated by a chickadee.

Cute.

Silly tree.

Magical wildflowers.

And a return shuttle to round out the trip.

Day 2: Crystal Lake hike.

2010-08-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

We visited this beautiful waterfall above Twin Lakes before beginning our hike.

The hike had superb views around every switchback.

Action shot. Daniel's dad used to come up to the Mammoth Lakes area multiple times a year during his childhood, so he knew all kinds of great things to do.

Piles of iced-over snowdrifts still lay in the shadows in July.

Gorgeous little wildflowers stuck their heads up along the way.

We could get only knee-deep in the Crystal Lake waters. It was quite toe-numbing.

Mammoth Mountain is volcanic, so you can find pumice everywhere. Litmus test: It floats!

I was the Camelbak carrier.

My signature pose, of course.

We found a delightful snowy overhang frozen mid-fall.

And we went butt-sledding.

The way down was just as beautiful.

Day 1: Kaitlin and Daniel do central California and a little bit of Mammoth.

2010-08-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

We left mid-morning, ready for hours and hours of driving excitement.

We met my friend Emily for lunch in her hometown Palmdale, catching up on her end of college and beginning of career point in life. Sadly, we took no pictures with her (I hate being that awkward person who asks for pictures of inauspicious occasions, but always regret it later anyway). We did get a picture of the awesome rocks that line the highway on the way out of Palmdale.

There were a lot of fantastic rock formations on this leg of the trip.

And a lot of flat land. I started getting a little antsy with all the flatness. Daniel mocked me for being overwhelmed by the sublime. I told him there was nowhere to hide.

I did pass this oasis with care.

The mountains rose higher as we neared Mammoth.

We stopped by a bona fide earthquake fault and peered into the unnerving blackness of the little crack.

Between the curves on the 1 near Big Sur.

2010-07-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

Sallying fourth.

2010-07-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

We always say we're going to take pictures of the four of us, and this time we actually did it. Angelica and Shannon just happened to look like models here. Cute.

Homeschool pose. You can tell I was homeschooled the longest.

It took an embarrassing number of tries to get this photo. I've spared you the less successful ones.

After church, we drove out to Canyon Lake for a celebration with Mom and Dad's friends from their Messianic Bible study.

There was so. much. wonderful food.

The four of us were challenged to a young v. old bocce ball game.

It was quite serious, as you can tell. We had the lead for most of the game, but the more mature ladies pulled it out in the end, 10-9.

We jumped in the neighbors' pool for a bit.

Water volleyball!

A group gathered for a rousing game of chair volleyball after dinner.

We were willing spectators.

Shannon was coaching Mom on how to take a good picture. "Anyone can do it, Mom!" See?

The only reason I'm not in this one is that I took it.

We watched fireworks on a pontoon boat out in the middle of Canyon Lake.

You can't tell from the photos, but there were hundreds of boats floating out there with us, and the shoreline was filled with celebrants blasting the Beach Boys and Lady Gaga. It was quite festive.

We were really, really close to the fireworks.

I will confess that I actually don't like fireworks at all, so I concentrated on taking pictures and texting.

I captured the smiley face!

It was a really fun way to spend the evening.

Our gracious hosts. They know how to throw a party!

Angelica's birthday festivities, part II.

2010-07-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

The beach Barrs met up with the desert and mountain Barrs for a belated birthday dinner for Angelica on Saturday.

Rachel was actually happier than she appears.

We had hamburgers and oven fries and a small portion of this giant cake.

Shannon is a master of the what's-on-your-plate pic.

Angelica got a lot of clothing for this birthday. She picked out the shirt she's wearing (and a couple of other things) at a random and delightful $2 sale we happened upon one night last week as we were grocery shopping.

After dinner, Mom and Dad gave us a tour of their flourishing garden. They've been productive with their daughters away.

They have some absolutely gorgeous produce.

Mom weeded and Angelica watched. I took pictures.

And drank coffee and posed with Rachel. Sisters!

Jumping in.

2010-07-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

Angelica and I drove up to Daniel's house Friday night on our way home for the holiday weekend. We ate guacamole made from his family's avocados and jumped in the pool for a night swim. My camera kind of worked underwater at night, but it was fantastic in the sunshine the next day.

The wind blew drops of water back up off the vanishing edge.

Bubbles!

I couldn't open my eyes underwater because of my contacts, but I got to look beautiful in these goggles.

My camera focused on the surface of the water in this picture, and I'm quite excited about that.

Sparkles!

Mermaid!

Daniel jumping into the pool.

Floating! Clearly, we had a lot of fun with this.

It was so nice to relax with Daniel and his family. They take care of us so well!

Angelica curled up with a book in the sun, and Daniel's brother Mark joined her for a conversation.

Angelica and I were rested and refreshed and ready for the rest of the weekend. We got home Saturday just in time for dinner and birthday part II.

Loff, loff, loff.

2010-07-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

Daniel made an impromptu trip down Thursday for a dinner picnic in Balboa Park.

I was very, very happy about this.

Daniel brought sandwiches from Con Pane and dark chocolate with toffee.

That's the Cabrillo Bridge in the background. We're going to find all the bridges in San Diego, I just know it.

We frolicked in the gardens while the sun set. Really. We frolic when nobody's looking.

Balboa is like the San Diego Central Park. You'd never know we were in the middle of a city. Until you noticed the freeway drone just beyond the redwoods.

I'm telling you, we're going to find all the bridges. We stumbled upon this one in the canyon behind Cafe Bassam. That's what happens when you get coffee only at night—you miss the Maple Canyon bridge.

Daniel then took me up to the top of the Hotel St. James, which is a PLNU thing I hadn't done in my three years, making it high time.

And the views of downtown were spectacular.

It was a spontaneous and beautiful evening, filled with things I loff:)

Angelica's birthday festivities, part I.

2010-07-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

For Angelica's actual day of birth, we dressed up and tottered on heels (well, I did, at least) to the Cheesecake Factory. I like how our lineup here is like a band, Mahogany and the Light Brunettes or something.

Daniel was fortuitously in the city for a meeting with a politician for whom he had interned during a state senate election (to discuss the homeless initiative ideas we viewed at the architecture show), so he was already in a suit. This was fortunate, because it's normally impossible to get Daniel into anything besides a t-shirt and shorts:)

Angelica loves dressing up, and she loves chocolate. This was a good choice.

What a cute and delicious table.

Composition demanded that I be in the middle. Should have worn black.

And Angelica's birthday festivities continued into the weekend, as well they should have. A post-post is forthcoming.

The rest is history.

2010-07-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

On our last June Saturday, Daniel and I were driving through San Diego neighborhoods with no aim in particular, weaving up and down old hills with spectacular views and custom houses that alternately look vaguely European and vaguely Cape Cod and definitely modernist, when we took a turn that planted us right in the middle of the Mission San Diego de Alcalá, which, as you'll discover if you google it, is California's First Church.

We actually see it every Sunday off the 8 when we drive to church, and we had thrown out vague aspirations to check it out at some point, but our inadvertent stumbling-upon was the sufficiently serendipitous occasion we needed.

The grounds were well maintained, and the lushness provided a buffer from the city that spread out below the mission's hill.

One of the mission's artifacts: a wine press used for Eucharist for hundreds of years.

This is one of the few places in California where you're confronted with the weight of years that make up human history. As the West Coast Plymouth, San Diego can exhibit at times its three centuries of European colonization. But the Europeans (and South Americans, and Asians, and Africans) themselves often live among millennia of visible civilizations. Our native North Americans left very few traces to remind us of our brevity, and the subsequent urbanization of our area lends a permanency we'd do well to divest ourselves of.

This was our first summer Saturday without our fantastic routine: church distribution, fun activity, philosophy class. After a fairly busy July, we might get back into the first two, but my nerdiness will sorely miss the philosophy class.

The mission was surrounded by paths that wound around the hill.

We took a couple of them.

We later resumed our San Diego exploration, happening upon a street with my name on it—literally. We're not the first Barrs in California, and I'm sure we won't be the last.

Open Mind, Open Heart by Thomas Keating

2010-07-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

It sounds like a strange self-help book, and on a lot of levels it seems like a strange self-help book, but Keating is striving for something deeper, and at moments he achieves it. A proponent of contemplative prayer, Keating was instrumental in reestablishing a mode of Christian worship that had been lost in all the Enlightenment mess for hundreds of years. Keating's description of the practice is simple: Spend twenty to thirty minutes twice a day clearing your mind of thoughts. That's it. It's not a visionary or ecstatic experience: "What is the essence of contemplative prayer? The way of pure faith. Nothing else. You do not have to feel it, but you have to practice it" (11).

Keating is at times trite and spacey, but he drifts into clarity and insight at moments: "Contemplative prayer is a way of tuning into a fuller level of reality that is always present and in which we are invited to participate" (37). He draws on the disciples' waiting in the garden: "Jesus said, 'Watch and pray.' This is what we are doing in centering prayer. Watching is just enough activity to stay altert. Praying is opening to God" (39). And he says the effects of this practice are subtle but life-altering: "[Y]ou must look for the fruit in your ordinary daily life, after a month or two. If you are becoming more patient with others, more at ease with yourself, if you shout less often or less loudly at the children, feel less hurt if the family complains about your cooking—all these are signs that another set of values is beginning to operate in you" (38-39).

Keating's emphasis on the everyday, his deep conviction that the contemplative life does not need to be lived out in a cloister, pushes forward the immediacy of his thought. And despite the looseness and the therapyness (and the spotty copyediting), he at times almost convinces me:

"The union that one discovers in contemplative prayer will not be reserved to that time. Moments of silence will overtake you in the course of daily life. Reality will tend to become more transparent. Its divine Source will shine through it. . . . As the unconscious is emptied out, the awareness of the deepest level in us is also an awareness of the deepest level in everyone else. This is the basis for the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself. . . . Augustine had a phrase for it: 'One Christ loving himself.' That is a good description of a mature Christian community. You are aware that a power greater than you is doing everything. Then everything begins to reflect not only its own beauty but also the beauty of its Source. . . . Divine love is not an attitude that one puts on like a cloak. It is rather the right way to respond to reality. It is the right relationship to being, including our own being" (102-103).

Afternoon commute.

2010-07-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

I love the sparkle days, the glittering expanse of ripples on a giant’s salt sea pond, and the water conversations of unperturbed paddleboarders that float up to me as I walk home.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel

2010-06-28T12:46:00.000-07:00

This was a quick read that merits at least a quick review. I started the book a month ago at the recommendation of my friend Barbara, and then had to shelve it as I read all that philosophy that's posted below, but post-class the catch-up was fairly brief.

Sobel chronicles a chronological development of a chronometric device that could tell time across an ocean (only for a book about clocks could you write such a sentence). She pulls in little historical details that add life and depth to John Harrison's obscure struggle to gain recognition and a 20,000-pound prize for his inventions.

I think one of the images that will stick with me from Sobel's book is her description of the first clock Harrison crafted, as a country carpenter in his teens:

"It is constructed almost entirely of wood. This is a carpenter's clock, with oak wheels and boxwood axles connected and impelled by small amounts of brass and steel. Harrison, ever practical and resourceful, took what materials came to hand, and handled them very well. The wooden teeth of the wheels never snapped off with normal wear but defied destruction by their design, which let them draw strength from the grain pattern of the mighty oak" (64).

We're famous! Not really, but the reporter from the U-T really liked us.

2010-06-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

June 18, 2010 | Photo by John R. McCutchen

Point Loma Nazarene University students Angelica Barr, Daniel Nadal and Kaitlin Barr look at Shawn Benson's "Requisite Domestic" project which looks at opportunities help the homeless community. Benson's project is part of the New School of Architecture & Design, Graduate Showcase.

Angelica, Daniel, and I stopped downtown Friday evening at the New School of Architecture to see our assistant pastor's master's thesis presentation. We weren't the only ones who thought it was phenomenal. Shawn got a write-up in the San Diego Union-Tribune and we got to be in a featured photo on the U-T website (see above).

I took a couple of pictures of my own. I think we were all amazed, not just at the sophistication and innovation of Shawn's project, but also at the spatial thinking that we had to figure out how to do to comprehend his designs and ideas. We're hoping Shawn will get an audience with the city to have his plans heard.

All of the presentations were impressive, and we milled with the beautiful art people and drank coffee with whipped cream in it and tried to wrap our wordy brains around the image-speak that these architecture students had created. And as we walked the blocks back to our car, we all agreed that Shawn's work had made us see the city differently.

Graduating at 16 runs in the family.

2010-06-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

Angelica and I rushed up to Hemet after work one night last week (in rush hour traffic, of course), but totally made it in time to see the twins graduate.

All four of us have now graduated in the Ramona Bowl. It's a familiar sight.

Stepping up to receive their diplomas.

And freshly graduated.

The twins are actually three months younger than I was when I graduated, so they're officially our family's youngest grads.

Mom and Dad are very excited that they got four daughters through high school.

This was our attempt at an awkward family photo. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who's good at being awkward.

And this was our sweet "Can you believe there's four of us?!" picture.

Daniel joined us at our celebratory P.F. Chang's dinner afterward.

Clearly we were the ones who were meant to be twins.

I love this picture purely for its weirdness.

The twins came back to school with Angelica and me, and we tried to show them a Point Loma good time: OB, burritos at the cheapest place we could find, Tuesday night distribution on the streets downtown, yogurt at Figi, Target and thrift stores, dorm time.

Rachel made us egg rolls one night, which we all enjoyed immensely. But oh Young Hall, you are so hard to cook in. Still, what a sweet line-up.

Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor

2010-06-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

This book was far too long and complex for me to do it justice in my haphazard posting, or for us to even discuss it thoroughly in a four-hour class. So I'll just preserve here a couple of the points and passages that struck me without any pretense of adequate summary.

From our class discussion and my reading, I've tentatively understood Taylor's perspective in this manner: The Cartesian self is rendered non-functional through our actual experiences. Further, we know that there is a moral dimension to the ethical ordering of our lives, because we are constantly making value judgments, no matter what we might say we are doing.

"My underlying thesis is that there is a close connection between the different conditions of identity, or of one's life making sense, that I have been discussing. One could put it this way: because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a 'quest.' But one could perhaps start from another point: because we have to determine our place in relation to the good, therefore we cannot be without an orientation to it, and hence must see our life in story. From whichever direction, I see these conditions as connected facets of the same reality, inescapable structural requirements of human agency" (51-52).

Taylor, though not explicitly writing as a Christian, interjects what he clearly views as the solution to the otherwise insurmountable Nietzschean critique of liberal modernity:

"For Plato, once we see the Good, we cease to be fascinated by and absorbed in the search for honour and pleasure as we were before, and we will even altogether want to renounce certain facets of these. On a Christian view, sanctification involves our sharing to some degree God's love (agape) for the world, and this transforms how we see things and what else we long for and think important" (70).

In his conclusion, Taylor states this outright:

"Only if there is such a thing as agape, or one of the secular claimants to its succession, is Nietzsche wrong" (516).

I appreciated Taylor's support of my thesis from my Victorian lit term paper last semester:

"This is the powerful alternative morality that knocked such a breach in Victorian religion. It was not some supposedly logical incompatibility between science and faith but this imperious moral demand not to believe which led many Victorians to feel that they had to abandon, however sorrowfully, the faith of their fathers" (406).

I also found Taylor's location of the solution in Dostoevsky fascinating:

"Just as 'no one is to blame' is the slogan of the materialist revolutionaries, so 'we are all to blame' is of Dostoevsky's healing figures. Loving the world and ourselves is in a sense a miracle, in face of all the evil and degradation that it and we contain. . . . It is not an accident that Dostoevsky's positive figures have to go through the experience of modernity. . . . Dostoevsky's healing grace lies beyond the modern identity, not anterior to it" (452).

A post that never got posted.

2010-06-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

I found this unposted draft dated 11/2/09, 9:09 pm. This was a tea date at The Living Room, and of course Daniel was making fun of me for pulling out my camera to capture the tea leaf man who appeared on my bag-fastening wooden stick, but I'm kind of glad I inadvertently captured the moment too.

The quotation that I was going to put here was too long, so look for it at the end.

2010-06-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

Daniel and I have a little summer routine going. Friday nights, we make dinner with friends. Saturday mornings, we go to distribution at church. And Saturday afternoons, we don't take our environs for granted. This was a particularly beautiful day.

Well, the afternoon gloom at Mission Beach was beautiful in its own way.

And the evening sunset on campus was glorious. This view from the road going down to Young always looks to me like the background of a Renaissance painter, da Vinci maybe, especially in this light.

The best thing about June gloom is that it often gives way to sunsets filled with broken clouds.

And here is us watching the sunset. Why do I love this picture so much? Because of the resemblance to the one below.

This has been a running joke with my sisters and me for a while. Daniel and I were watching the top ten SNL clips of the year in between packing up my things after finals, and my roommate, peeking over our shoulders, said, "Daniel, I hope this doesn't sound weird, but you kind of look like Bill Hader." Hehe.

"[B]ecause we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus demonstrate our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form[.]" — Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
<3

In lieu of a Whose Justice? rehash, a moment.

2010-06-10T21:32:00.000-07:00

I had a moment, inside the building behind these flowers actually, and it might have been from the coffee (it was probably from the coffee), but I was flipping through publishing release magazines looking for recent books related to Wesley or holiness theology that we might want to add to the Wesleyan Center collection (that's what they pay me for), and a surge of joy welled up in me at the depth and scope of Christian scholarly work that is being done today. How much broader my world has become at school. If nothing else, college has taught me that there are Christians who are more intelligent and well-read than I will ever be. And this is a comforting and sustaining thought.

Fun with finals week part IV.

2010-06-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of doing things that we did the year prior, Daniel and I went to Con Pane for chocolate bread and coffee and then drove out to the cemetery. This year's outing was preceded by distribution at our church and succeeded by a graduation party for a friend, but the middle had pictures, just like last year.

I like to think of this one as an ironic senior high school picture. I hope that's not offensive. I contemplate my own mortality a lot.

Ooh, model face. Too bad my finger marred it.

Strange and beautiful flower. I'm always surprised when I come across a plant or animal that I haven't seen before. I don't know why, at 21 years old, I should feel like I've encountered every living organism on the planet. Angelica was just telling me about these Vietnamese leaf turtles she was working with at the zoo—the females have a special band on their eyes, so the males go around putting their eyes up to the females,' looking for a good time. Who would have thought such things existed?

Oh dear, this is self-indulgent. Good thing no one reads this blog. I just think this is one of the better pictures taken of me, ever. Thanks, Daniel:)

I can't believe I'm living here all summer. I'll never inhabit a more beautiful place.

Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I by Charles Taylor

2010-06-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

In an effort to trace the development of Charles Taylor's thought, we read a collection of his earlier essays in philosophy class. It wasn't the most enthralling work, but I found a lot of valuable points in it.

On the myth of individualism that underlies the modern conception of identity and the nation-state:

“The community is not simply an aggregation of individuals; nor is there simply a causal interaction between the two. The community is also constitutive of the individual, in the sense that the self-interpretations which define him are drawn from the interchange which the community carries on. A human being alone is an impossibility[.] . . . Outside of the continuing conversation of a community, which provides the language by which we draw our background distinctions, human agency of the kind I describe above would be not just impossible, but inconceivable. As organisms we are separate from society—although it may be hard in fact to survive as a lone being; but as humans the separation is unthinkable. On our own, as Aristotle says, we would be either beasts or Gods” (8).

Taylor argues that our biological impulses are socially channeled into mitigated forms of expression, a very freeing thought. On this view, we are not controlled by our biology; rather, we have raw biological experiences that can be shaped and ordered according to the communities in which we exist:

“Thus I believe that there are links between the rather groping remarks about identity in this paper and the much more fully developed notion of a ‘cohesive self’ that Kohut and Ernest Wolf have introduced. . . . [S]exual libido is not seen as a constant factor, but rather sexual desire and excitability have a very different impact on a cohesive self than on one which has lost its cohesion” (44).

Our feelings are not opposed to reason; they are intertwined and causally involved with reason, an essential component of what constitutes humanity:

“If we think of this reflexive sense of what matters to us as subjects as being distinctively human—and it is clearly central to our notion of ourselves that we are such reflexive beings; this is what underlies the traditional definition of man as a rational animal—we could say that our subject-referring feelings incorporate a sense of what it is to be human, that is, of what matters to us as human subjects” (60).

Emotion, as with all biological impulses, is again socially ordered and constructed, meaningless without the meaning that is created through culture:

“There is no human emotion which is not embodied in an interpretive language; and yet all interpretations can be judged as more or less adequate, more or less distortive. What a given human life is an interpretation of cannot exist uninterpreted; for human emotion is only what it is refracted as in human language” (75).

Thinking is an embodied phenomenon, not the disembodied experience purported by Cartesian Enlightenment thought:

“[T]he ‘principle of embodiment.’ This is the principle that the subject and all his functions, however ‘spiritual’ they may appear, are inescapably embodied. The embodiment is in two related dimensions: first, as a ‘rational animal,’ that is, as a living being who thinks; and secondly, as an expressive being, that is, a being whose thinking is always and necessarily in a medium” (85).

Art and religion carry truths that are later articulated by philosophy:

“Philosophy does not only build on its own past. For in earlier ages, the truth is more adequately presented in religion (e.g., the early ages of Christianity), or art-religion (at the height of the Greek polis). In coming to its adequate form, philosophy as it were catches up. True speculative philosophy has to say clearly what has been there already in the images of Christian theology” (92).

The heresy of gnosticism is possibly a direct antecedent and certainly an analogous form of the Cartesian disembodiment and modern individualism:

“In both its Greek and Christian roots (albeit a deviation in this latter stream), this has included an aspiration to rise above the merely human, to step outside the prison of the peculiarly human emotions, and to be free of the cares and the demands they make on us. This is of course an aspiration which also has analogous forms in Indian culture, and perhaps, indeed, in all human cultures. My claim is that the ideal of the modern free subject, capable of objectifying the world, and reasoning about it in a detached, instrumental way, is a novel variant of this very old aspiration to spiritual freedom” (113-114).

Our perception of the world is wholly contingent on our biological context. The Cartesian ideal of perception is ultimately impossible:

“In showing the development of intelligence, from its most primitive forms to its most advanced, genetic psychology leads almost inexorably into an attempt to show the link between intelligence and biological function in general. . . . And related with this is a view of mature consciousness as evolved out of lower life forms and out of the processes of life. . . . The mature form is the product of a series of transformations on more primitive forms, and cannot be fully understood without a grasp of these primitive forms. . . . If we see our perception of objects, space, causality, and so on, as skills which we have to acquire, and which we acquire in part through our commerce with objects, as being capable of manipulating things and being affected by them, then the very idea of a basic building block of perception makes no sense. . . . What is immediately seen can no longer be distinguished as something separable from the interpretation a subject brings with him because of his knowledge, understanding, and culture” (145).

The development of language is a continual process of transcendence:

“[T]he potentiality for this kind of transcendence is implicit in linguistic capacity in this sense; it is the fundamental ability to disengage our awareness of things which, whatever the concepts which mediate this disengagement in the first case, allows us to examine these things in such a way that we discover new more adequate modes of description. . . . Something of the same relation that holds between languages, or between ordinary and specialist terminology, also holds between different stages of a child’s vocabulary and conceptual and reasoning capacities as he grows up. Transcendence is, in this sense, a commonplace” (152-153).

Language constitutes community:

“Language creates what one might call a public space, or a common vantage point from which we survey the world together” (259).

Fun with finals week part III.

2010-06-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

We'd been planning to rent a kayak from the rec room for ages, and during Wednesday of finals week we finally got a chance to. We launched from La Jolla Shores and tooled around toward the cove before resting in the kelp beds for a while. Sea water lapping through kelp leaves isn't a sound you hear very often. It was fantastic.

The kayak was $15 for one day (uber cheap), but we didn't have to return it until the next day at 6 pm, so after my Thursday final, we drove the five-minute trip to Shelter Island and set off into the bay.

I was proud of our kayak-launching skills. We didn't even flip.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've gone kayaking, but I adore it. It's physical activity that doesn't hurt (at least if you paddle as slowly as I do).

It helped that it was a gorgeous day. We headed along this shoreline to the end of the harbor, by the little-known Kellogg Beach that runs parallel to Rosecrans, waving to our history professor's boat, Boethius, and the little kids we passed.

Two days of non-academic activity. Success!

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

2010-05-31T07:00:00.001-07:00

This is the first major work by MacIntyre that I mentioned in the Canticle post and the second assigned reading in the class I'm sitting in on right now. I'd read portions of After Virtue a couple of semesters ago and I even used it in a term paper or two, but it was helpful to sit and read it straight through. MacIntyre is a joy to read in part because his prose moves the reader forward with the authority of someone who knows what he is doing, but mostly because the things that he says make deep-down, core-level sense.

On why politics are so aggressive and national issues so irreconcilable:

"It is precisely because there is in our society no established way of deciding between these claims that moral argument appears to be necessarily interminable. From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence perhaps the slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate" (8).

On the fundamental incoherence of the modern conception of individualism:

"Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles, and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited" (68).

On the existence of human rights without a moral context:

"[T]here are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. . . . [T]here are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument" (69).

On what happens when most people try to understand themselves in relation to the world:

"When those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises" (114).

On the ability of narrative to allow us to create a coherent understanding of the world:

"[I]n determining what causal efficacy the agent's intentions had in one or more directions, and how his short-term intentions succeeded or failed to be constitutive of long-term intentions, we ourselves write a further part of these histories. Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human action" (208).

On seeing what's there, and what isn't.

2010-05-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was uploading pictures from my camera and frowning a little at how washed out they were. "You can fix that, you know," Daniel told me. He toggled the contrast and brightness levels in Microsoft Picture Viewer and suddenly my whole perception of the world changed. This is a little bit of an exaggeration. But this does reveal my unfortunate ignorance of the visual arts. Here I was thinking that my pictures always looked dull and unfinished because everyone else had a better camera than mine. Everyone else probably does have a better camera than I do, but I quickly discovered that I could at least make what I've got a lot more enjoyable to look at.

Monday of finals week, a group of friends and I got half-price Frappuccinos (greatest Starbucks promotion ever) and went down to the park in Liberty Station to do some studying. I spent about five minutes reading and then decided that any more effort wasn't going to significantly increase my performance on my test the next day. So I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures of whatever I saw. I heart macro settings a lot.

This is a lamppost, if you were wondering.

To demonstrate the radical difference just a little toggling can do, I have reproduced below two pictures of myself.

Before:

Here we have a nerdy girl taking self-timed pictures of herself in the park.

But with some photo editing, we have a really cool skirt and a magical world. Right? I do love that skirt. Angelica bought it at a thrift store but gave it to me because she thought it was too big on her. I thought it was too small on me until I tried it on again months later and it fit! I had to wear it. I had my Victorian lit final that day anyway. It just had to happen.

And below I am a guinea pig once again.

Before:

The original has a dismal industrial canal vibe, and I look like a seriously lost individual.

But with some contrast, and probably saturation and brightness or something, I can be lost in a technicolor wasteland. It's superb.

Altering my photos has an effect that is not unlike the sensation I had when I first put on my glasses (just about a year ago). Everything is clearer and brighter, and I am rediscovering details and images that I've been missing for so long.

I wondered briefly, after I discovered how this worked, whether changing my photos was on some level unethical, as if I were trying to alter reality. But I soon realized that my perception of cameras as capturing reality was faulty. Many (most) of my pictures don't look like what I see or what I am trying to portray. In a lot of cases, editing the photos actually creates an image that is closer to what I was perceiving and how I was perceiving it.

And some pictures, like this one, don't change too much even when I adjust the settings significantly. If anything, they just become a little more real.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

2010-05-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting in on a summer class in part because half of the reading list was on my list of books I need to read this summer, and in part because Dr. Wright is teaching it. The title, if you can believe it, is "North Atlantic Philosophy at the Limit of Modernity: The Parallel Projects of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor." MacIntyre, you'll recall, is the philosopher over whom Daniel and I bonded when we were first dating, or pre-dating, if you will. Daniel was reading MacIntyre because Dr. Wright recommended him, and I was reading MacIntyre because my philosophy prof, Dr. Thompson, recommended him, and it was just a joyful little confluence of reading recommendations.

Dr. Wright's first assignment was a 1959 Catholic science fiction novel (quite the genre, I know) that influenced MacIntyre's first major work and that gives valuable imagery for the subsequent course material, pictures upon which to hang the ideas that MacIntyre and Taylor present.

The director of the library walked by while I was reading Canticle and told me he became a librarian in part because of the book. One of the most meaningful functions of fiction is its ability to put into a few short scenes concepts that would takes pages of non-fiction prose to elucidate. With that in mind, I'm just going to catch a couple of the most important passages that I found in Miller's novel.

A fantastic picture of Taylor's concept of enchantment:

"In his own mind, there was no neat straight line separating the Natural from the Supernatural order, but rather, an intermediate twilight zone. There were things that were clearly natural, and there were Things that were clearly supernatural, but between these extremes was a region of confusion (his own)—the preternatural—where things made of mere earth, air, fire, or water tended to behave disturbingly like Things. For Brother Francis, this region included whatever he could see but not understand. And Brother Francis was never 'sure beyond a doubt,' as the abbot was asking him to be, that he properly understood much of anything. Thus, by raising the question at all, Abbot Arkos was unwittingly throwing the novice’s pilgrim into the twilight region, into the same perspective as the old man’s first appearance as a legless black strip that wriggled in the midst of a lake of heat illusion on the trail, into the same perspective as he had occupied momentarily when the novice’s world had contracted until it contained nothing but a hand offering him a particle of food. If some creature more-than-human chose to disguise itself as human, how was he to penetrate its disguise, or suspect there was one?"

The conflict of the secular perception of humans and the Christian view:

"'Look at him!' the scholar persisted. 'No, but it’s too dark now. You can’t see the syphilis outbreak on his neck, the way the bridge of his nose is being eaten away. Paresis. But he was undoubtedly a moron to begin with. Illiterate, superstitious, murderous. He diseases his children. For a few coins he would kill them. He will sell them anyway, when they are old enough to be useful. Look at him, and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization? What do you see?'
'The image of Christ,' grated the monsignor, surprised at his own sudden anger. 'What did you expect me to see?'
The scholar huffed impatiently. 'The incongruity. Men as you can observe them through any window, and men as historians would have us believe men once were. I can’t accept it. How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?'
'Perhaps,' said Apollo, 'by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.'"

An excellent inversion of the anti-intellectualism often associated with Christians:

"A young monk who was studying for the priesthood stood up and was recognized by the thon.
'Sir, I was wondering if you were acquainted with the suggestions of Saint Augustine on the subject?'
'I am not.'
'A fourth century bishop and philosopher. He suggested that in the beginning, God created all things in their germinal causes, including the physiology of man, and that the germinal causes inseminate, as it were, the formless matter—which then gradually evolved into the more complex shapes, and eventually Man. Has this hypothesis been considered?'
The thon’s smile was condescending, although he did not openly brand the proposal childish. 'I’m afraid it has not, but I shall look it up,' he said, in a tone that indicated he would not.
'Thank you,' said the monk, and sat down meekly."

History repeats itself, as the novel so skillfully illustrates. Try to build the kingdom of heaven on earth and it will end only in destruction:

"Too much hope for Earth had led men to try to make it Eden, and of that they might well despair until the time toward the consumption of the world—"

A perceptive acknowledgment of the gnostic heresy:

"Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. 'You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.'"

And, of course, the unbelievably incisive ending scenes, with the recognition of the secular need to eliminate suffering and the depiction of the competing allegiances of the state and the church:

"Abbot Zerchi groped for a sharp reply, found one, but swiftly swallowed it. He searched for a blank piece of paper and a pen and pushed them across the desk. 'Just write: "I will not recommend euthanasia to any patient while at this abbey," and sign it. Then you can use the courtyard.'
'And if I refuse?'
'Then I suppose they’ll have to drag themselves two miles down the road.'
'Of all the merciless—'
'On the contrary. I’ve offered you an opportunity to do your work as required by the law you recognize, without overstepping the law I recognize. Whether they go down the road or not is up to you.'"

More fun with finals week.

2010-05-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

So about three months prior, Daniel tells me that he's going to a Ben Folds concert in May. "It's during finals week, and the tickets are $35, but I feel like I've earned it," he told me. I asked him if I could go with him. "Well yeah, but I wasn't sure if you'd be interested," he said. Not interested in going with Daniel to his second concert ever and seeing a guy he's listened to for probably a decade? Come on. I'd go even if I didn't like Ben Folds. So we went.

Confession: It was my first "secular" concert, so I was right there in inexperience. And it was actually even better than I expected it to be. We were one or two bodies away from the stage, and a solo Ben Folds is just a genuinely good performance. Daniel's been playing piano for like 15 years, so he could vouch for the skill. I knew when he played second one of my favorites, "Annie Waits," that I was going to enjoy myself. And when he stood up and asked the audience how he looked because he just started wearing jeans this year, I couldn't stop laughing (see Christmas break post on what I gave Daniel). The whole standing for five hours straight thing was totally worth it.

Notes from Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation by John W. Wright

2010-05-24T09:08:00.000-07:00

This is quickly becoming a handy, accessible catchall for the quotations from books that I want to keep. The first non-assigned book I picked up after finals week was by my pastor and professor. Daniel had read Telling God's Story during one of our semester breaks, and he said it had deeply contributed to his understanding of Dr. Wright's sermons. I'm also sitting in on a philosophy class with Dr. Wright this summer, so reading something by him was doubly illuminating.

Much of the book is practical instruction for shaping sermons in a manner that follows a tragic arc, rather than the comedic arc that has become the hallmark of evangelical preaching. Wright is also concerned with the formation of the congregation as a group distinct in purpose and meaning from other social bodies: "When the church is no different from the neighborhood watch group in ethos or mission or consequences, it is much easier for a family to stay in bed to watch the neighborhood over the paper before the NFL games begin than to load the kids in the car to attend worship services at a small church, for which they provide the financial backing" (69).

Wright incisively explains the process by which we have arrived at the prevailing church format: "With no ecclesiology committed to the gospel teachings of Jesus or the Pauline or Jamesian ecclesial formation, the covenant of grace, which often begins embracing the poor, tends to become upwardly mobile. Because salvation is solely individual, the church moves toward the wealthy and the powerful within society as the preferred market for the individual narrative of salvation. By reaching the influential, it is hoped that covenant of grace will envelop more and more people through the resources and influence that power and wealth possess. Such a move requires that we leave a specific market niche to a broader, more general demographic market" (72).

Wright's critique of nationalism mirrors that of William Cavanaugh, who spoke at our school this semester. If the nation is the same as the church, we may as well just be active in the nation (73).

Viewing ourselves as Christians and not as, for example, Americans, is a simple and yet devastatingly revolutionary move that completely rewrites the narratives we have of ourselves and our place in our culture: "While the covenant of grace and the federal covenant eclipsed the biblical narrative, the Scriptures still remain to call forth a faithful people through the workings of the Spirit. . . . [This church] would understand that conversion is more than a personal experience of a personal relationship with God; conversion requires the incorporation of an individual into a new people, a new family and developing the necessary virtues to live as aliens and exiles in this new transnational community" (74).

I'm a big fan of subtle feminist readings, and so I appreciated Wright's characterization of North American society as divided into the managerial (gendered male) and therapeutic (gendered female) realms (129-31). On this view, the workplace and the areas of commerce as well as political action are hard, rough, managerial realms that necessitate the therapeutic realm, into which churches often fall.

"Balance becomes a key virtue for sustaining life within such a cultural arrangement. "[Robert] Bellah argues that contemporary culture isolates the managerial from the therapeutic in ways that did not exist earlier in history" (131). This results in emotivism, moral good residing in the judgment of the individual (132). "Whether the church embraces this context or develops into a peculiar people that discerns where and how to be different makes all the difference in the world" (133).

But the church simply cannot fit into this managerial/therapeutic binary. "The biblical narrative does not tell us how to negotiate between public and private realms, nor how an individual might live a meaningful, self-fulfilled life. These simply are not categories consistent with the biblical narrative. The biblical narrative reveals how individuals might become members of God's elect people in order to witness to God's love, a witness that can—and often does—involve suffering for righteousness's sake" (137).

"Within God's story the church does not aim to provide therapeutic services for disturbed individuals. The church does not exist so that individuals might seek intimacy with others, themselves or God. The church exists as a people, a distinct people, whose witness can bring opposition from the world through the fact of its nonconformity, but whose communal life provides concrete, embodied resources for support amid the resultant suffering" (138).

Fun with finals week.

2010-05-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

I always dread finals week and then enjoy it more than most of the semester combined when it finally comes. Last week was no different. The Saturday before, Daniel and I headed to Hillcrest to finally, finally try Hash House, which we'd attempted to do for months. Afterward, we drove around the Banker's Hill area for a while. Turns out there's a fantastic old footbridge hidden in the middle of the neighborhood.

I googled it later. Turns out it's called the Spruce Street Bridge and it was built in 1912.

It was gorgeous.

I was a little unnerved by how high it was.

San Diego can be a magical place sometimes.

Today the ocean looked like a rash of silver ants on piled cobalt dirt. Trust me.

2010-05-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

This is my commute—a twelve-minute walk from the dorm on campus closest to the ocean. It's like I'm rediscovering this place all over again.

I realized this afternoon stacking books in the library that I must have been going through caffeine withdrawals because, in between the moving and the starting jobs and whatnot, I hadn't had my cup per meal per usual, and I had a must-get-coffee-so-I-don't-fall-asleep-in-class moment, and then I had a revelation: I don't need to bring my A game to anything. No one's going to lecture me for 75 minutes and expect me to be alert and engaged the entire time; no one's going to make me responsible for arcane information and demand I recite it at arbitrary times; no one's going to assign a letter to my actions. I can be a little sleepy and a little dull.

This is the first summer in three years that I'm not taking classes, and a three-month stretch without homework is breathtakingly spread before me. Time to drop the textbooks and see what's outside my window.

2010-03-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

"For some years after this I wrote very little, and nothing regularly, for publication: and great were the advantages which I derived from the intermission. It was of no common importance to me, at this period, to be able to digest and mature my thoughts for my own mind only, without any immediate call for giving them out in print. Had I gone on writing, it would have much disturbed the important transformation in my opinions and character, which took place during those years."

—John Stuart Mill, from Autobiography

<3

2010-02-19T23:13:00.000-08:00

Yes, it was Valentine's Day, but it was my birthday for 21 years first. Daniel valiantly rose to the challenge and devised a day of our favorite spots in San Diego.

We exchanged presents in the cemetery out along the point, which sounds weird, I know, but we have a lot of fond memories there. As college students, we spend so much time with dead people already that it's a natural spot for us (I don't think I've read a word this semester that wasn't written by someone who died before I was born). The limitless horizon to the west and the sparkling city on the bay to the east also makes it one of the most stunning pieces of land, ever.

We drove into La Jolla and stopped for the sunset, just like last year. It was delightfully warm and the temperature just started to drop when the sun went down.

We had a twilight picnic on the grass by the cove and watched the other couples walk by. We ate a lot of chocolate.

We got coffee in downtown La Jolla, right next to this fascinating mirror.

We drove up to Balboa Park, another well-frequented favorite of ours. It's a little bit magical there at night.

This was from the next day, but it was so wonderful that it felt like an extension of my birthday. We saw Catharine MacKinnon, a brilliant legal theorist and women's rights activist, speak at USD on the ethical issues surrounding prostitution. She was passionate, articulate, and fantastically incisive. I'm so all about her it's not even funny.

Maybe it's not nostalgia. Maybe I'm just happy.

2010-01-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

I heart orchids a lot. I wasn't a "what's your favorite flower?" type until I stopped to actually look closely and well at orchids. This came, if I remember correctly, after I read the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, a novel in which orchids figured prominently. I read the novel, incidentally, because when I was in high school, writers in the Wall Street Journal kept calling things "Proustian" and I wanted to be in on the joke. Weird, that chain of causality—I like orchids because I used to be a fervent WSJ enthusiast.

Daniel and I went down to San Diego last week, partially to help with our church's homeless ministry because our pastor was worried enough people wouldn't show up, and partially to actually enjoy the city in which we spend so much time doing things besides enjoying (like working ten jobs, in my case. I updated my résumé this week and discovered that I had ten active positions last semester, nine of which were paid. I don't quite believe it myself, so I am going to list them here: editor in chief of campus creative arts journal, copy editor of campus newspaper, intern for literary agent, library assistant, teacher's assistant, co-editor with freelance proofreader, on-campus university press assistant, dissertation editor, freelance manuscript editor, transcription editor).

All that work was spread out, though, so I think I stayed between 25 and 40 hours a week. Oh, and don't worry, I kept my grades up.

Balboa Park was our only planned destination. Daniel had never seen the Rembrandt in the Timken (the last time we went, it had been displaced for a kimono exhibit), so we paid St. Bartholemew his due attention and then lingered in the botanical garden next door.

Outside was a bush full of munching caterpillars and a glistening cocoon with miniature gold beads. Gorgeous.

Running through my head this entire time was the Driftwood (of my ten jobs, the one that plagued me the most over the break). My advisor called me almost every day (including on Christmas) with updates and issues that needed to be resolved so that we could go to print. I couldn't do the edits from home because I didn't have a Mac, or an acquaintance who would let me borrow a Mac for 30 minutes, and it was these measly 30 minutes that were holding up production. My layout editor was getting married that week, but my advisor encouraged me to get a hold of her. I tentatively emailed her under his instruction, and she called me back, busy but willing to help. I told her I'd be in the area that day and would be willing to find her wherever she was so that I could enter the edits quickly and be out of her hair. But she never answered while we were down there, and I don't blame her.

For Christmas, I found for Daniel the pictured jeans. He hadn't owned a pair since he was (shhh) nine, so I made like commenter 21 on the Freakonomics blog post about what to get an economist and headed to Target. I even tried them on to make sure they were comfortable (which was his major complaint about the category of clothing, and not a completely unfounded one, it turns out. Spandex blends for females abound, but males are entrenched firmly in 100% cotton territory). I'm considering contacting all of our mutual friends in advance and telling them to pretend like they don't notice when he wears them, to prove to him that jeans are normal and not conspicuous and they look really good on you and you're not capitulating to social norms, I promise;).

Another in the great tradition of Daniel-trying-to-take-the-camera-away-from-me-because-he-doesn't-like-pictures pictures.

We shared lunch at Con Pane in Point Loma, continuing unintentionally to recreate our first quasi-date, sans bicycles. The people who told me Con Pane had really good sandwiches weren't lying. I already knew the focaccia was fantastic. Then Daniel, sweet, understanding Daniel, seeing how increasingly crestfallen I was becoming the longer my layout editor didn't call me back and the greater the prospect became that I would have to drive down to San Diego the next week to make just 30 minutes of edits, suggested we drive up the hill onto campus to see if we couldn't find a computer with a compatible program. So we did, and we didn't, and I was dejected. But then, Daniel thought of a solution. I could download a 30-day Windows compatible version of the program I needed onto my laptop, make the edits, and overnight the flash drive. Much, much happier, with the prospect of a solution in sight, I suggested we head over to OB.

We walked along the tide pools south of the pier and watched the surfers in the frigid water take the towering winter waves. We also saw a brilliant sunset. All sunsets are categorically wonderful, of course, but I favor the more orangey-blue ones over the pinky-purple ones (unless it's Valentine's Day, in which case the latter is entirely appropriate).

The afterglow reflected in the tide pools as we walked back. And then we headed downtown to meet our pastor and hand out sandwiches and water bottles to people on the streets, and we learned more about the strategic considerations of "the problem of the homeless," who, as our pastor wrote in the Union-Tribune last month, are neither a problem nor homeless.

Christmas at home. Insta-nostalgia part II.

2010-01-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

The Sunday before Christmas, we went to see the twins in their youth group Christmas play. Shannon is the third wise man from the left.

It was a series of skits ingeniously titled "Sunday Night Live." Dad made a cameo appearance as Charlie Brown, but it was so quick I couldn't snap a picture in time.

After the church candlelight service Christmas Eve, we had a wonderful feast.

The four of us decided to open our pajamas Christmas Eve so that we could wear them in the morning (we had picked them out on Black Friday).

We had been watching a ton of backlogged SNL skits online that week, so we had to reenact the surprise Christmas. Shannon was highly entertaining, of course.

Sweet action shot.

I don't know why, but yes.

Merry Christmas Eve.

Because of our recently acquired ginormous couch, we had to house the tree in the corner. There are a lot of presents when seven people give each other gifts.

We lined up and worked methodically through the stack.

Aww, look at the line of Forever 21 hats. Forever 21 became an anchor store in the Hemet Mall this year (I know; random, right?) so we got our share of cute and bright accessories.

Hehe. Possibly my favorite picture from the day. When we were at the dollar store (I love the dollar store), I stuck a couple of items in my mom's basket (I like to make her life easier, haha). This was the perfect addition to my pedicure collection (ha). The best part is the typo, though. I hope this callous remover will be gentle with my calluses.

Because Rachel got me a cute dress and Angelica got me cute shoes and Grandma gave me her cute necklace, Angelica tried to teach me to swing dance. All the cuteness in the world couldn't help me move coordinately.

Dad was ready to be green all over the place with his presents.

After the flurry, we gathered on the couch and I played school counselor and created a list of potential college majors for the twins. Now that's a true Christmas present.

December at school. Insta-nostalgia.

2010-01-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

Sad that so many ephemeral thoughts that I would have captured had I been regularly blogging this semester have dissipated into the aether. Actually, it's probably for the best. I'm trying to get the hang of this whole public sphere/private sphere thing. Here's a sentiment I can share with anyone who will listen: This is the view I had from my bed this fall, a view that will soon be radically different. Well, maybe not radically, as college-aged females all tend to shop at Target, but I will have two new roommates for the spring. Yes, I'm that girl. One of my roommates is moving off-campus, and the other is studying abroad in Spain. Amazingly, two more people have agreed to live with me.

Daniel and I did a fair number of Christmasy things in the craziness of the last two weeks of the semester. One night, we drove a couple of blocks into Point Loma and strolled Garrison St., a spectacular display complemented by the city lights skirting the edges of the view.

Less beautiful but just as arresting was eyelashes baby Jesus.

During finals week, we studied in the best Starbucks downtown (it has an unparalleled loft that looks out over the Gaslamp Quarter). Its only detraction was the neglect of the subjunctive clause in one of the promotional holiday signs, a problem that can be chalked up to corporate, obviously.

We went ice skating in Horton Plaza as well. I have no shame in saying that I'm a natural. It was a little crowded (though not nearly to the extent that it was a couple of weeks prior, when Angelica and I went to the PLNU Ugly Sweater Ice Skating event and the place was flooded with our hipster peers), but at night under the city lights, it was totally worth it.

Slightly belated second-day-after-Thanksgiving post.

2009-12-06T21:01:00.000-08:00

So we woke up Saturday and it was like a post-Thanksgiving miracle—which means it wasn't that great, but it was kind of fun. It hailed midmorning, giving us an almost-white ground for like 20 minutes.

Action shot.

And then it magically cleared up, as it is wont to do around here, and we packed up for a day trip to Oak Glen.

This shot isn't so clear because it came from the Riley's Apple Farm Facebook page, but you can see us in action making apple butter at the apple butter festival. They gave us a free jar for participating. Mmm.

We walked the fun little trail around the property and took self-timed photos.

And the rain/hail clouds made for a delightful sunset.

An only slightly belated Thanksgiving post.

2009-12-06T15:54:00.000-08:00

Yay for the last two weeks of school. I start to see moments of freedom because keeping up with all my homework for the past 15 weeks begins to pay off. And blogging is a moderately productive use of time, right?

Sherlock waited for Thanksgiving dinner with as much anticipation as we did. He didn't get to feast as well as us, though.

Shannon took delectable pictures of the food.

Mmm, gravy. I don't think I'd eaten gravy since last Thanksgiving.

Aww, all the women together again. I was in front of my laptop for most of the day, writing my 10-page term paper for my Shakespeare class on the conception of the self in Hamlet and the burgeoning individualistic humanism in the Renaissance. Meh.

Shannon's black-and-white rendering. We laughed long and hard at how small Mom looked in comparison to Dad here. Hehe.

And then Angelica and I took ridiculous pictures of ourselves. Angelica's going to kill me for posting these, but I can't resist (and she's right next to me doing her Spanish homework right now and she's completely oblivious...hehehe. I will say, though, that it's nice to have a companion for weekend coffeeshop outings. I used to do these by myself).

The last of my despised pieces.

2009-11-02T21:24:00.000-08:00

In Peet’s Coffee in Orinda. Context

As long as I’m happy. And we quibble with happy and joy until they are meaningless. And did they ever have any meaning? What small percentage of all the people who ever lived had the room and the place and resources and the recourses to devote their selves to the pursuit of happiness? The bulk of human existence has been the pursuit of the hand to the mouth and maybe another day.

And here I am, with my room at home and my room at school and my room at my friend’s place if I want to come over and stay a while. And here I am with my summers in the mountains and my winters at the beach and my spring trips to the East Coast. And here I am with my academic scholarships and jobs if I just want to apply myself a little and a home whenever I need to go back. And here I am with you can do anything if you put your mind to it and aren’t you going to graduate school and go to New York to get an internship because that’s where all the publishing is.

And here I am in a coffee shop with a laptop and a cup of tea really and actually and it’s not something I normally do but it fit in this moment because I didn’t want to go see a movie but I surely did not want to sit in the house on a perfectly nice Saturday afternoon. But I remember in that vital and immediate sort of way my father and I stopping for the first time at the cute little coffee shop in the converted train depot in the middle of our little town and ordering maybe some coffee and a bagel with egg and cheese and sitting on the patio in the wrought-iron chairs in the sunshine because there was always sunshine where we lived in the Southern California suburbs and the flowers and the fountain and wishing I were old enough to legitimately inhabit the scene, thinking and not just thinking but feeling viscerally that I did not belong there, that I was momentarily visiting a world that was not mine, playing at a person that was not me and could not be me as long as I remained thirteen and isolated in my independent studies and uninitiated into the vibrant urbane modernity that wavered somewhere in my consciousness as that thing that I wanted to be.

And I remember revisiting that coffee shop on my own years later on a warm night and grabbing a coffee and sitting on a high stool in the corner and writing something I don’t know maybe a reflection on a book I had read recently and realizing that my adolescent ideal was fascinatingly inaccurate. That all I really wanted was to be out of that town and that coffee shop with its pretenses at engagement, that maybe that place in the midst of thought and art and moving happening existed out there somewhere but it surely was not here. And I laughed at how silly I had been my thirteen-year-old self.

And I laugh now at how silly I had been my eighteen-year-old self. And tomorrow I will surely laugh at how silly I am now my twenty (and three months and twenty-eight days)-year-old self. Because what do I know? What do I really know about anything? How am I supposed to pass judgment on this whole world and evaluate it and rank it and decide what the best way for me to be in it is? How I am supposed to be happy? I’m positively paralyzed with the potential for happiness.

I’m not though. I’m posturing even as I say that. I don’t know exactly what it is that I want and I don’t know exactly where it is that I’m going, but I know I want something and I know I’m going somewhere. And that’s unfortunately vague but it’s true, truer than anything else I could say at this moment. And I all I really have now is an awareness, all I can cling to is this awareness of who I am and I am just me, but I am me.

I talked to my mom on the phone last night and that’s where that phrase came from. “Just as long as you’re happy,” she said. She says it to me more and more and it’s hard to step back from my parents and ask if what they’re telling me is true because it’s so much easier to obey them and accept what they say and do and imply as The Way the World Is and I don’t know what to say except that this is what I am saying. And before I wonder whether the pursuit of happiness is even a worthy pursuit I have to wonder about what happiness truly is.

It’s notoriously hard to define, I know because I’ve read the studies and scientific studies appeal to me because I like concrete, empirical knowledge and even though they contradict each other all the time and even though my illusions of objective observation have been shattered in the past year because post-modern thought somehow seeped into my head—okay, I sought it out actively in my search for a functional worldview, a search that rested strangely on the foundationless presupposition that there was a functional worldview out there that I could grasp, a presupposition that betrayed my own unavoidable subjectivity—I still can’t resist the seductive tug of the scientific method’s assertion of conclusion. And oh gosh, I know that minimizing commute time is the best way to increase happiness, and I know that having hobbies and interests increase happiness, and I know that many life tragedies that most think would devastate them actually don’t modify a person’s resting happiness rate all that much. And I still don’t know what it is. And I have this feeling that no one else does, either.

But assuming this happiness exists, and I do it all the time, assume that it exists, especially in my protestations to my mother that yes, I am happy, I am wildly happy and everything is going well, I just cannot bring myself to blindly agree that “As long as you’re” can end with happy. Just because the drafters of the Declaration of Independence said it doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because anyone said anything doesn’t mean it’s true. Who says?

I don’t know how to determine who’s right, and I don’t know whose authority I rest upon. And I once thought that reason was independent and rationality was obvious to anyone who had a pulse and a brain and then someone told me Descartes was wrong and I believed it. And I still believe it. And then someone told me that we don’t come into the world as tabula rasa, blank slates, that we are born in context and under the authority of a tradition and I knew intuitively it was true and I believed it. And I still believe it. And maybe all I have in my limited context is a slosh of intuition and reasonable reasonability and mostly sure and if it works pragmatism. And maybe it’s a little much for me to ask for more.

I looked out the window next to my granite-topped table and dark-stained wood seat and saw a sparrow perched on the sill in the shade. And mostly sparrows don’t catch my attention but I learned this week in my ecology class that sparrows are not native to California, that snails are not native to the United States, that the grass that grows on the hillsides around here came in the stomach of European livestock just a few hundred years ago. And if sparrows aren’t natural in their blind background ubiquity, what is? The Central Valley that feeds half the world was a swampy dry flood plain fewer than one hundred years ago. We made it, dammed up all the rivers and built a giant aqueduct and between the constant sun and the water-on-demand created an agricultural dream.

And we just make reality whatever we want it to be. Now ice plant grows on the beach and rice grows mid-state and I sit in a concrete building with my plastic and metal and type in a bath of electric and wonder what I was created to do.

And it’s fulfillment, right? The old question that surely someone asked from the beginning, someone who was fed on the backs of others and had the leisure time to sit around and sip delicately prepared hot drinks. There were less of them then but it does not make me any less privileged I think; if Maslow has any credence, fortunate is in some respects absolute. Because we can’t blather about meaning and vocation and purpose until we’re firmly entrenched in the middle-upper-middle.

It’s not that complicated. We can strip life down to the bareness of being and the answer will still be the same. And I know it even as I deny that I know it. Love.

And I know it even as I pretend I don’t that none of it matters, that even the pretensions that I wish I had the abandon to affect are hollow.

And the what then I should do still does not spread itself out in perfect lines and black and whites but the smudgy grey takes a little form.

And maybe the most general map is all I can ask for; maybe if I need a fertile plain, I can make one. Maybe if I want to be that person who legitimately inhabits the world I just have to say it and it is so. If civilization is our action upon the world, then reality is created in that space. And I am an actor.

And we are all actors. I think therefore I am has no longer any hold. I am who I am in relation to the other.

And suddenly everything is a simple syllogism.

I am who I am in relation to the other
therefore
love.

My despised writing part II: non-fiction.

2009-10-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

Philos

And so I was talking to Steph and she said something about where my general dislike of people came from and I guess I could trace it to the sixth grade when I entered middle school hopeful but a little fearful. I remember balancing on the curb along the street of my new house, looking up at the mountains that were so strange and comforting, and wondering what school was going to be like tomorrow, hoping I’d find some friends maybe like me but not daring to believe that it would happen. And on the first day, during science, I sat at the front table across from a girl named Srini who befriended me instantly because she knew I was smart and thus began my since-then struggle with being befriended by people I don’t particularly like.

What was hard for me with Srini was that she was Hindu and at eleven years old the only friend with completely different beliefs from my own that I had had had been Jewish and she moved to Florida after second grade (but gosh she was the coolest person I had ever met. Julia Horowitz had dark hair and she would wear threaded wraps in it with beads at the end that made little lines of color and her eyes were so dark they flashed like stars when she smiled and a there was a tiny beauty mark placed perfectly on her cheek. And she had a little brother Ezekiel called Zeke who was on my soccer team that fall. Sometimes during practice Julia and I would rifle through the piles of leaves that were beginning to collect under the bleachers on the field intending to press and dry the prettiest ones, which I don’t think we ever actually did.

We made fast friends in class that fall and I was at her house for her October birthday, and I remember her mom saying how grateful she was that Julia had made some friends so quickly, in time for her party. And I remember driving up to her house in Timberlake that first time, at dusk with the lights glowing and the ivy and the trees dark along her curving driveway. Timberlake edged Lake Erie, and it was green and leafy and eclectic. And Julia’s house was white with windows everywhere and inside was hardwood floors with rugs and dark and wonderful things everywhere, shelves and leather and family pictures in black and white. And out of the bay window in the living room we could watch the sun set over the water. And I wanted to snuggle in the cushioned bay window and read like Julia did. And the sill was lined with little bits of translucent green and white and blue sea glass that they had collected on strolls along the shore.

And I remember having dinner at Julia’s house in the dining nook with her mother and her brother. They had an avocado or two in the bowl on the table and I think I knew what it was but I’m pretty sure I had never seen one before; I certainly remember asking about it. And they had a little t.v. that you could watch while you were eating or cooking and I wasn’t crazy about t.v. but I was so intrigued.

And once Julia’s mother drove us to Cleveland and I watched the urban park areas in their summer greenness roll up and down out the window as we drove and we parked and we walked some colorful and artsy section, sparkling in its funky magic and sunshine. And we browsed through intricately stocked shops and her mom bought us little colored rabbit’s foot keychains. And I was suspicious of superstition and I was unsure she should be buying me something because I was just tagging along and so glad I could come but I was caught up in it all and it just added to my wonder. And Julia and I found a photo booth and took funny pictures of ourselves, flash flash flash, and we divided up the squares three and three and that was I think the first and last time I ever took pictures in a photo booth. And then she moved away but whenever I remembered her there was always a twinkling and a sense of something I wanted to be).

And so I went to Srini’s after school and ate steamed rice with butter that her grandmother prepared for us in her sari with a little patch of her belly showing and I ate with a fork and Srini ate with her hands (though once I tried it with my hands too and Srini clapped for me proudly) in her house of white, white couches with white pillows and white carpet and white marble with a crack where it had settled, perched as it all was on one of the most visible hills in our valley with some of the most striking views from the floor-to-ceiling windows. (And once when I expressed admiration for her house, Srini said she much preferred mine, the one in the “devel-UP-ment,” as she pronounced it, with its crazy paint on the walls and old circle chair and pictures and worn saltillo tiles. It was more comfy, she said. It looked “lived in.”)

The first time I came over, I was struck by the lifesize photograph in the foyer that was repeated in cloned forms all over desks and appliances and side tables depicting an imposing Indian man in a flowing tangerine saffron robe sporting a dark afro and smiling like everything was a giant joke and he knew it. And I thought maybe it was one of Srini’s uncles dressed up for Halloween, and I thought maybe someone had printed a bunch off and put them up everywhere as a practical joke. But I asked Srini and she told me that her family believed that God continually inhabited people, and that this man was the current God incarnate. And I wondered how someone so smart could believe something so ridiculous.

And so I felt I could never get close to her, that we didn’t share the things that were most important to me and so could never talk about the things that mattered most to me. And she was crazy and fun and I liked it but sometimes it was too much for me. And so I kept my distance, hung out with her when she wanted to but was mostly passive and undemonstrative and I wonder sometimes if she was ever hurt by it or if she just thought that that was just how I was. I hope it was the latter. But toward the end of the year I began to make friends with a girl who went to my church as well as school.

(I feel I should insert here a brief but upsetting friendship with Lauren, a girl I met in P.E. She lived just two blocks away from me with her mom, and she was quiet and pleasant enough, so we hung out a couple of times until her birthday party that year when her friend Alexis started picking on me even though we had just met and Lauren stood by and did nothing. [I remember sitting up in my sleeping bag that night and looking over at Alexis and thinking how nice she looked while she was asleep and wondering how she could be so mean when awake.] And Lauren offered some sort of apology the next week at school and it was the first time I had ever said it was okay when it wasn’t.

And I remember telling my mom about it and her saying I should have confronted Lauren and told her how much I was hurt and me insisting no, no, that’s not how you do it and thinking that this was the best way to deal with this sort of social situation and that it wasn’t really Lauren’s fault but that I just wouldn’t be friends with her anymore, that was all. And looking back I can see what poor inner resources Lauren had had to draw on, with four step-brothers she didn’t see much since her mom was divorced, and having little to do with her father, who had never been married to her mother, and thinking she was “a mistake” because that’s what she had been told, and spending nights at home alone since her mom was spending nights with the neighbor who waved to us as he watered his lawn across the street. And I still don’t know what the right thing for me to do would have been.)

Desiree went to my sixth grade Sunday School and she brought Christian magazines to school and she was tall and thin with long blonde hair and I thought we would make good friends. She did take part in an after-lunch competition with the boyfriend her mom didn’t know she had and another couple to see which could press their lips together longest while a group of classmates watched and counted. And I was a little scandalized and I privately laughed at her boyfriend Karl, who was shorter than her and whose ears stuck out so much that they were the only things that burned when he spent a day at Sea World. But no one was perfect and Desiree seemed fun and she was a Christian, right? And so we became friends. She served as my social educator; once when I tried to hold her hand as we walked between classes, just as I had done at recess with my friends in elementary school, she batted my hand away and told me we couldn’t do that.

And so we laughed together in church and I spent summer afternoons at her house floating in her pool and stealing quick breaks out of the blinding sun into the equally blinding dark through the sliding glass door inside the maze of rooms that seemed more sprawling than mine but so much more windowless that I decided I’d rather not live there, had I the choice (which was rare, because I almost never chose my house over someone else’s). And we went to summer camp together and something happened, I think she ditched me for other people or something, but it was okay because I got to know some other people and Desiree and I were fine by the end of the week anyways. And we hung out some more and I was delighted to start school with a real friend and so glad that things were finally working out.

But a funny thing happened as soon as we were back with all the other seventh-graders. We would be standing in a circle, or maybe it was that I came over to join a circle, because Desiree would tell me to “go stand over there, I’m talking with my friends.”

And I could take this a couple of times, but I couldn’t take this forever, and by September 11th the world was falling apart and I had no one to share it with. I woke up that morning and put on the radio like I always did and that’s when I heard it but I had no one to tell about this and at that point I didn’t really understand the ramifications, had barely ever heard of the World Trade Center, but I walked into my parents’ bedroom and the t.v. was on and my mom was crying and I had no one to share the tragedy rush and the uncomfortable profundity of the moment.

And I went to school and tried to join the excited chatter of the group on the steps of the band room but just couldn’t and in English class my teacher had the news on because no one still really knew what was going on and all the girls around me could talk about was what Carson Daly was doing right now in New York and I put my head down and I wrote about it because there was nothing else I could do.

It's been a long eight weeks...

2009-10-18T18:43:00.001-07:00

I would like to tell you a story. A story that will lead to another story, incidentally. I am, as some of you may know, the editor in chief of our campus creative arts journal, which features fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photography, art, music, and film (we're extending our deadline, by the way. Send your entries to driftwoodplnu@gmail.com. You don't have to be affiliated with the school!). We hadn't received too many entries for the first few weeks of the semester, so I wrote up a short story one weekend and decided to submit it to the fiction committee so that they would have something to judge. I also grabbed a couple of non-fiction pieces I had written over the summer.

We judge blindly, so the committee members (a.k.a. people my age who I pretty much teach in a class once a week) didn't know the pieces were mine. Well, as soon as the first judges' eyes hit my writing, moans and exclamations could be heard throughout the classroom. "I don't understand this . . . This is not grammatical . . . I don't think this is even a word . . . Look how long this sentence is! Eleven lines! . . . This is hurting my head."

Well, I was a little shocked. I had no idea my writing would elicit such visceral reactions. I sent my pieces to my advisor for the class, a professor of creative writing, and he told me I had good ideas but just needed some basic improvements to make my pieces more reader-friendly. He lent me a book on narrative craft, and I skimmed it and decided I would never be able to write anything decent and was glad that my writing minor isn't a major. I tried to work on my pieces but I really couldn't find the cracks in their surfaces and so just ended up breaking up a few large paragraph blocks and adding a scene to my story. I'm going to time-release publish the pieces here, since they'll probably never be read by anyone and, I'm pretty sure, will not be featured in a campus publication anytime soon.

Without further ado, the despised short story:

Discrete Math

Michael Massey knew that everything could be contained in a pencil and it bored him. He could count all the items there were and he could write out that number and all of existence would be contained on that piece of paper and really, what was the point?

Just now, Michael was counting. Stitches. In, loop, hook, through, out. Twenty-seven. In, loop, through, hook, out. Twenty-eight. The lengthy crocheted rectangle lay in his lap, growing steadily as his math class progressed. Twenty-nine. His professor was a nice guy, but he didn’t teach much. Michael liked the repetition and the yarn curling around his fingers. The low clouds out the window on his right cast diffuse light over the classroom, sharpening the outline of the professor’s silver hair as he leaned against his desk discussing his weekend, the burnt orange plastic chairs peppering the classroom, the tiny hairs twining out of the thin line of mossy yarn that pulled out of the skein in the backpack beneath him.

He reached the end of the row and hooked up to begin another. He held the equation on the board in his head, calculating steadily while keeping his count of stitches. Michael wasn’t delusional; he didn’t really think he could count everything, but it was undeniable that it was possible, and the sheer quantification left him lost. If the world is indeed a physical entity existing right now, then there is a fixed number of things in existence at this given point. The universe held little import for him. Physical existence was finite; even an infinite universe would be a finite infinity, bound by itself.

He didn’t care if his line of reasoning didn’t make sense to anyone else; he rarely articulated it to himself. But it was a truth that had knotted so tightly around the core of his being that he had resigned himself to it as an inescapable inevitability. Wonder in others was ignorance. All the world was knowable if you had just the mind and the time to do it, and a thing known has lost all its power. He longed for limitlessness.

Michael was thin and dark-haired and adequately prepared for his college education. He was majoring in mathematics because he could do it well. He assumed he’d be a moderately-liked high school math teacher and that would be that. He took only brief detached joys in the startling abstractions of well-formed equations. That he didn’t care about what he was doing and secretly considered it all futile bothered him only occasionally.

Michael started as a door slammed across the hall and students garbled down the stairs on their way to lunch. He gathered up his looping work, a single line that you didn’t see if you didn’t think about it, and walked down the hallway.

The campus was small and well funded. Oaks and maples and the odd pine gathered near sweet little bricked and gabled buildings. Michael walked the neat sidewalk past the circled fountain where students reflected off the still olivey stone pool.

Sarah was waiting for him outside the dining hall. It had gotten a little darker and colder and the low clouds were autumny and she just wanted to curl up somewhere warm with him. But she didn’t let herself know that. It wasn’t that Michael didn’t like to touch her. He just wasn’t a touchy person. And she wasn’t, either. Or she didn’t spend a lot of time touching other people, anyway. And she was fine, and always had been. She could smell the leaves drying.

The scarf he was making was for her, of course. He liked the thought of something he had spent hours fingering and fashioning draped around her neck, liked the way the green would nestle in her brown hair. He liked her. She was a computer science major, and she was a girl with all the regular girl aspects, and once in a class that they had shared she was reading the exact book he had just finished a week before, satirical science fiction, and that was sufficient. He had invited her one night to climb on top of the auditorium and they sat in the dark watching bits of light play on the surface of the lake that lay along the edge of the campus.

They collected their meals and sat together, alone. Michael looked up from his sandwich over the chattering cafeteria and nodded to his roommate a couple of tables over.

“I asked Richard about that program thing you were talking about and he said he could help you,” Michael said.

Sarah sipped her coffee and her glasses fogged over her green eyes for a moment. “I figured. He’s been hanging out in Professor Welling’s office for a week.”

Sarah worked in binary, lived and breathed in binary, thought in binary. It was how she knew she liked Michael, and not Richard. Michael read in his spare time: 1. Richard didn’t: 0. Michael worked inconspicuously, did what was required of him and didn’t let anyone else know: 1. Richard didn’t: 0. Michael didn’t have stuck-out ears and blank blue eyes: 0. Richard did: 1. Michael was programmed for her. It wasn’t that she disliked Richard. It wasn’t often she devoted much space to disliking anyone. Memory was too valuable.

“I was thinking about walking out to the lake tonight,” Michael said, his fingertips like pads gripping his cup of milk.

“Oh yeah?” she replied.

“You can come with me if you want.”

She hated having to invite herself along and rarely hesitated when he outright asked her to accompany him somewhere. “Okay.”

They finished and parted on the cafeteria steps, the air chillier now and dark brown spots appearing on the concrete as silent drops hit the ground. Sarah gave him a flickering wave, reaching her hand toward him, and half smiled. “See you tonight.”

He raised his eyebrows briefly and nodded. “Yes.”

Michael walked back to his dorm building later that afternoon, hands customarily clasped around the straps of his backpack. He glanced through the glass window of his mailbox out of habit and stopped to reach in when he saw a sliver of envelope. The envelope was unmarked except for the logo of the campus poetry society in the corner. He opened it anyway and read the thin sheet of paper inside. “In celebration of National Poetry Day, a poem for you.”

Michael gave it a cursory read. He didn’t know whether Dylan Thomas was a student or not. It was a peculiar, repeating poem, and a line kept saying itself to him: “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

It meant little to him but it stayed there in his head anyway. He thought to the rhythm of the line as he plodded upstairs: “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

Sarah met him later that night outside his dormitory. The grass had left wet lines on her brown shoes. Now she could smell the rain that had fallen after lunch. The air was clear and edged and Michael was framed in the glowing doorway for only a moment before he was beside her in the dark.

They walked across the deserted campus, each with their hands buried in the pockets of their coats. It wasn’t quite time to resign themselves to evenings huddled in the moist, thick dorms against the cold, but it would be soon. Michael spied his usual path and led her through the dripping branches toward the water.

They rounded the ridge beside the shore and walked out among the lined trees. Michael pointed out an owl staring down at them. At the water, they listened to the quiet lapping and watched the lights of the campus flicker across the surface. A startlingly opaque moon floated in the center, trailing its shine in skips behind it.

Michael reached out around her and drew her close to him. He stood on the edge of the lake and knew he could count the stars if he just had enough time but for the moment he pretended he couldn’t.

A-maze-ing. (There was really no other title for this.)

2009-08-20T19:41:00.000-07:00

I was browsing Wikipedia a while ago and came across a genuine registered state landmark in my backyard, so to speak. I'm all about registered state landmarks, so when Daniel and I needed a destination for our last summer adventure, I knew this would be it.

Okay, so the Hemet Maze Stone is just a rock with an interesting painting on it, but some native peoples really, truly made it. And that's worth surrounding in not one, but two chain-link fences and barbed wire, apparently.

The view was nice. It was warm, but slightly overcast. Nice day.

We were really there. I mean it.

I learned last summer at the Diamond Valley archaeology museum that sunflowers are native to the San Jacinto Valley, and we got to see some up close.

One of the things that I love most about wandering through a deserty region with a macro setting on my camera is that the tiny elements that you'd normally pass by become fascinatingly intricate and genuinely beautiful when you can stop to see them for what they are.