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You know, studying the awesome lengths our ancestors in faith went to punish their bodies for the Lord is one of the more inspiring aspects of studying medieval history. I know; I know, you're wondering, So what's it going to be, Marvin? Bricking yourself up in the wall of a church? Corporal punishment for sneezing in worship? Naw, I decided to run a marathon instead.
The Richmond Marathon is a great event. Patrick Henry himself came out with a bullhorn to cheer us on. I grunted "Give me liberty or give me death" at him, and he said that he liked the sound of that that so much he'd have to remember it. A great gospel choir was singing where the course ran by Virginia Union. The race organizers add a few junk food stops to the usual water/gatorade stands. Gummy bears. Coke. Krispy Kreme donuts. Best of all, at mile 22, there were dudes out in the median of Fauquier Avenue handing out shots of Yuengling. You guys were my guardian angels!
Clay Marzo is one of the best surfers in the world, not only because his body is well-proportioned for surfing but because his Asperger's syndrome enables him to focus with laser-like intensity on becoming one with the wave. Naturally there's some interest around here in him. Both boys like this You Tube tribute, and I find the music and the video footage quite mesmerizing, to be honest... HT
So I turned 40 on Sunday. And last night I went to the U2 concert in Charlottesville. And there were no, I mean ZERO, young adults in the crowd. My brother-in-law quipped, "The only young people at this concert are here with their Mommies and their Daddies." It did look like a Mothers Morning Out event at Starbucks writ large.
Something else: I'm training for the Richmond marathon. And I had a nurse come over to the house to examine me for a life insurance policy. And if her measurements can be believed, I have lost eight pounds, but gained an inch in my waist size.
How is that possible? Is that what middle age does to you? Does everything sort of, you know, sag down and forward, and no fitness regime can stop it?
The concert, by the way, was mind-boggling. Bono's, "Is Thomas Jefferson in the house?" was clever and warmly received. Muse, the opening act, performed well. I hear that they have a great following in Europe, and their style was well-suited to warm up the crowd for U2.
If they come to a stadium near you, I urge you to get on that walker of yours and hobble out to see them.
One of the curiosities of western intellectual history is that the scientific revolution didn't happen before it did, says Norman Cantor's The Civilization of the Middle Ages. The reintroduction of Aristotle to the West planted the seed, but Thomas Aquinas, the most adept exploiter of Aristotelian thought, only used Aristotelian thought to confirm Christian Platonism. Cantor views Thomism as something of an intellectual cul-de-sac.
Proving Christian Platonism with Aristotelian method is a tour de force, but a lot of people at the time (the Franciscans) were unhappy with Thomism because they thought that religion was a matter of the heart and will, not reason and intellect. So to secure the revelatory basis for religion, they turned away from Aristotle, but they did use his methods for science. In the 14th and 15th centuries thinkers unknown to us were positing theories of inertia and gravity, but their theories never gained wide circulation because nobody was interested in funding their work. It was only when European military leaders started experimenting with artillery fire that anybody got interested in physics, because they needed reliable rules to predict how shells would fly through the air.
The more things change...
We visited the spectacular Smithsonian Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport last December. It really brings out the little boy in you. Walking down the corridor to the gigantic hanger containing the exhibits, you're looking down the nose of an SR-71 Blackbird. Cool. Intimidating. The museum also contains a Concorde (a frakking Concorde!), the Space Shuttle Enterprise (the prototype that never flew), and all kinds of space capsules.
There's also plenty of military aircraft, including the Enola Gay. As you walk through the exhibits, it's quite striking how quickly aerospace technology evolved during the wars. The stuff that was flying before 1914 is primitive compared to what was in the air just four years later.
Which makes me sad. If kids like it, it's cool, right? Dinosaurs, planes. Stuff that's bigger and faster is cool, especially to those who are slower and littler, and kids are the slowest and the littlest. It's just too bad that the leading reason why all this cool stuff is on display is that 20th century Europe was hell-bent on self-destruction.
I learned today that Jamie Frank, a guy who lived across the hall from me my freshman year of college, is in prison for raping a child over a six year period of time. He's not the only future felon I kept company with at N.C. State. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday of my spring semester I walked to Econ class with Chris Pritchard, whose murder of his step-father after our freshman year was chronicled in Joe McGinniss' novel Cruel Doubt and was the subject of a two-part made-for-TV miniseries by the same name. Chris even has a Wikipedia page!
When my high school history teacher learned I was a State fan, he sardonically replied, "State?! Don't you know you have to drive past Dix Hill (a mental institution) and Central Prison to get to State College?" Touché.
The connections don't end with my freshman year. Jamie was arrested while serving as a youth counselor at Barium Springs Home for Children (creepy), which I know sort of well as it's in Statesville NC, only a half hour drive from Salisbury, and it's a Presbyterian institution. And McGinniss, of course, wrote the great true-crime Fatal Vision about narcissistic Army doc Jeffrey McDonald who stabbed his family to death in my hometown, Fayetteville, North Carolina. And looking at his Wikipedia page, I learn that he also wrote a book about a certain senior senator of Massachusetts whose passing is today's top news story.
Well I'll be...
It was 22 years ago when I has hanging out with aspiring murderers and sex offenders. I don't remember vivid details of my freshman year of college so much as vague impressions. It was a rather harsh environment--males aged 18-20, although I have to admit I had no idea at the time how harsh, apparently. I really valued the two hours every Wednesday night I spent at West Raleigh Presbyterian Church. It was like the eye of a hurricane. The food was good, and I felt like I could be my true self there, rather than project a facade of testosterone-powered anger and sexuality which is sort of mandatory among young adult men (and which, if you know me, you know that I could never pull off very well anyway).
Oh, and did I mention that I met my wife at West Raleigh PC?
So, Gentle Reader, if you are unpacking your dorm room as you read this, my advice to you is to go to church and meet a nice girl. I know I sound like an old lady when I say that, but trust me, you can do a whole lot worse...
We'll wind up with a little Blues Traveler, which both I and the young adults I work with are subjected to on an hourly basis at The Casual Dining Chain You're Probably Eaten At Before. But I'm not feeling a bit nostalgic:
I'm definitely in the latter camp. Politically, everything's coming up roses. Brick by brick, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are laying the foundation for a progressive future.
But if you read liberal blogs you wouldn't know it. A lot of text there gets devoted to
righteous indignation at Ben Nelson not being fully on board with health care reform, or
jaw-dropping amazement at the cynicism or stupidity of GOP Senators who say things like, "Since there's CO2 in Coca-Cola, CO2 in the atmosphere can't be bad for you,"
but you know what? A health care reform bill, which contains a public option, and pays for it by taxing the rich, passed a committee vote this week! And did you know that the House also passed a bill to begin to deal with global warming, an issue that, let's face it, nobody but liberal eggheads like me cares about?
Remember the stimulus? Every liberal blogger out there couldn't devote enough bandwidth to obstructionist Republicans and craven Democratic centrists dooming the stimulus, but it passed! And so will health care reform. This has been a Democratic priority for half-a-century. With a popular President and 60 votes in the Senate, this time, we will not be denied. It will not be a perfect bill, and Ben Nelson will vote against it. But all we need is 51 votes to pass it, and we have 60 Senators. It's unthinkable that a Democratic senator would filibuster his own President's signature piece of legislation. Cap and Trade's prospects are dicier, but it's doable.
It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen without compromise. It doesn't happen without much sound and fury (signifying nothing) from the other side. True believers will always find the amount of compromise distasteful at best, an abomination at worst. But our political system is designed to foil the revolutionary and embolden the incrementalist. Despite the institutional booby-traps, we're poised to get good things done.
I don't envy the famed GOP discipline one bit. Yes, leading the Democratic Party must be like herding cats, but at least you've got a herd to lead. Republicans these days have disciplined themselves down to the irrelevant and laughable level of the People's Front of Judea:
So why blog? The last time I quit blogging I wrote,
But there's more to it than that. Blogging has encouraged in me a
rather superficial reading and writing style. I've become too focused
on the daily news cycle. My writing tends to be too reactive. And in
the end, unsatisfying. There's three and one-half years left for the
Bush administration to find news ways to amaze and confound me with
their mendacity, incompetence and cronyism, but there's only a limited
number of ways to point this out in writing. I'm tired of pointing it
out. Tired of reacting to them.
I was then where Michael is now. But I can't be where Michael is now because now, really, things are a whole lot better.
I'm not quitting blogging again, but when I have to pay TypePad another $50 this fall I will have to think about it. The things I read about at school don't lend themselves to blogging much, and after I've read at school all day I don't much want to read and write more at home. Blogging can be a way to think out loud, or carry on a conversation about academic work which is sadly an all-too-solitary affair, but medieval history and me don't seem to lend themselves to it.
Even if I did, there's the Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before where I wait tables, which takes a lot of time. Plenty of blogging material there, but I'd have to change a lot of identities to protect the innocent and guilty.
I'm glad that Lee still turns out short, thoughtful posts about theology and public policy that's free of the frankly pathetic intellectual snobbery on display at so many theological blogs. May his tribe increase.
I dreamed that I was at the restaurant where I wait tables, only the plates in my hand were full of German verbs like vergessen (to forget) and verlieren (to lose).
There's little time to spare for blogging while I complete a crash course in reading German. I can't say anything wittier about the language than Mark Twain did in The Awful German Language, but to tell the truth I don't hate German as much as Twain did. There's something pleasantly challenging about decoding a sentence like this one, on pp. 229 of Jannach's German for Reading Knowledge:
Dieses 1816 zuerst erschienene, spaeter laufend ergaenzte, 1838 ins Deutsche uebersetzte Buch hatte einen groBen Einfluss auf die Psychiatrie ausgeuebt.
Germans have "these", "those," and "which," and while they use commas more than English-speakers, they don't use any of these handy-dandy devices when they need them, like the above sentence which begins with a really long adjectival phrase. Literally translated, it is, as best I can tell:
This 1816 first appeared, later continuously supplemented to, 1838 into German translated book had a great influence on psychiatry exerted.
If you want to understand German, think of Yoda. Basically, Yoda speaks English with German word order.
As I said, "Pleasantly challenging." Runners (the good ones, anyway) know about anaerobic threshold, the point where lactate acid builds up in your body, and you experience pain. Improving your anaerobic threshold is key to improving your time. Now I don't bother with this much because I'm a lazy runner. I can pile on miles pretty easily, but making myself run faster is like pulling teeth. But learning German is my intellectual anaerobic threshold workout. It's difficult, but not impossible, and when I'm finally able to read some dead German theologian's horrible syntax, complete with passive perfect voice, and stemwinding adjectival phrases auf Deutsch, then I will feel a great sense of accomplishment!
And you're thinking the same thing you think when you're stopped in traffic one weekend, waiting for people in their 40s to trot across the street at a 15 minute mile, +6 hour marathon pace: Why is he doing that to himself?
Back to school! My January term began today. I am glad to return to the classroom. During Christmas break I picked up a lot of hours at The Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before where I wait tables. Maybe too many hours. I didn't uproot my family and leave my job to be a waiter. I needed the extra money, but I was starting to feel like I was majoring in minors.
I worked many double shifts last week, and thanks to the advice of a fellow waitress, I took to spending my breaks at a nearby park. The half-hour or so of looking at trees and geese alighting on a pond was a sight for sore eyes. Our restaurant windows offer a stunning view of a shopping center parking lot. Even better was a brief respite from the restaurant soundtrack. There were no sounds except for geese honking, kids laughing, or just silence.
It occurred to me that a lot of people have to live the way I've been living over Christmas break, in a world of asphalt and concrete, illuminated by artificial lighting, ears force-fed with crappy pop music. Others simply choose to live in this world. Even if you live in a home on a two acre tract of suburbia, if you leave home before dawn and return after sunset, and hire a lawn service to maintain your lawn, you're as bereft of nature as I've been lately. The last month has taught me to appreciate the Union-PSCE life, in which one can read a book in a beautiful library with big windows that open out to a lovely quad. And I appreciate my old life as a small town minister, classical music drifting in from my secretary's office, a garden to tend, and no traffic jams along tree-lined streets.
I'm going to try to get my blogging mojo back by doing a few short posts on my life as a waiter at A Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten In Before. This post is a naked appeal on behalf of my serving brethren for more tips. In Virginia, servers make $2.13 per hour plus tips. Notice that the base rate is considerably lower than the minimum wage. In fact, if my visualization of a number line is at all accurate, it's closer to zero than the minimum wage. So please, be a generous tipper.
It's actually easier on your brain to tip generously. Say you have a $35.00 bill. Ten percent is $3.50 (just move the decimal). Twenty percent is twice that: $7.00. But if you were trying to do 15%, you'd have to take half of $3.50 (What is that? Half of $3 plus half of fifty cents, added to the original $3.50?) See how complicated that is? So do us all a favor and leave a twenty percent tip.
Now you, Gentle Reader, are naturally wondering, What should I do if the service is bad? Well, Gentle Reader, why was the service bad? Was your food late? Was it cold? Perhaps this was your server's fault because he left it to rot in the kitchen window. But it might have been the cook's fault because he came to work stoned as a bat, or because she was too busy yelling at stupid waiters who don't know what they're doing. Leaving a small tip won't punish the cook.
So here's what you do, provided that the service has been good otherwise. You ask to speak to the manager. In this economy the manager is under extraordinary pressure to maintain a good customer base. He or she will probably throw in a free dessert or make some other gesture to mollify your understandable rage at having to wait to chow down on that Southwestern Chicken or whatever. The manager will find out who's to blame and address it. And you leave a nice tip. Then there's no collateral damage.
One last thing. If you come with a coupon, tip on the gross, not the net bill. We servers have to tip out the bussers based on sales, not on tips. The other day I waited on some cheapskate who had a $38.00 bill and a $30.00 gift card. He left me a ten dollar bill to cover the difference, plus the tip. He probably thought that a two buck tip on an eight dollar bill was mighty big of him, but I did the work of a $38.00 bill, not an $8.00 bill, and I had to tip out on $38.00, not $8.00.
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