For me, one of the best things about a major holiday is going to work the day before that holiday. Take today, for example, which is the day before Thanksgiving. Everyone is a little more relaxed, so you tend to make a little more time to chat with people. “Hey, you all ready for the big day?” you say. “You starving yourself so you can eat more tomorrow?” Then you tell each other what you’re going to do for the holidays — staying home with just a couple of family members, driving to a big family gathering in another state, having relatives over to your house, whatever. Depending on who you’re talking with, one of you might mention that it’s going to be hard this year because someone died in the past year, and you can say that because you know the other person is thinking about the same thing because someone in their family died in the past year. And maybe you talk about your favorite Thanksgiving food, or whether or not you watch the football game, or the Macy’s parade on television. Then, if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get to go home an hour or so early — or if you’re like me and can’t leave work early, there is at least less pressure and you can take time off in the middle of the work day and write a short blog post about how much you like going to work the day before a major holiday.
Category Archives: Arts & culture
My older sister does not get paid enough
For years, Internet users have been dealing with “trolls,” people who deliberately derail online conversations by writing cruel, crude, off-topic, and/or mean-spirited posts. Different trolls have different motivations, but generally the best way to deal with trolls is to ignore them — thus the Internet saying, “Please do not feed the trolls.”
But what happens when someone engages in “live-trolling”? For example, a male student showed up in one of my older sister’s college classes wearing a t-shirt that read “I [heart] vaginas.” This is a great example of live trolling — derailing a live conversation (in this case, a college class) with a t-shirt slogan that is obviously intended to piss people off, and distract them from the work of the class. You can read how Jean handled this situation on her blog.
Trolls are not very intelligent life forms, and need to be hit upside the head with a big stick in order to get their attention. When trolls appear on this blog (as has happened once or twice), I usually call them out, give them one chance to apologize, and then when they don’t apologize (trolls are notorious for acting hurt and misunderstood when someone calls them out), I delete their comments — there is no better way to stop the feeding of trolls than to remove their posts. I’m sorry that Jean is not able to treat live-trolls in her classroom the way I treat online trolls in this blog. She does not get paid enough.
You know you want to try this.
Bay Area Sacred Harp (BASH), the people I sing with most Monday nights, will be singing at the open house at Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse this Saturday. We’ll be there from 2-4 p.m. singing traditional 18th-20th C. American 4-part harmony — low-stress workshop, some instruction by BASH’s experienced singers, lots of (slow) singing, fun people to hang out with. And hey, it’s free.
Going what?
According to the BBC Web site, Sarah Palin has released a memoir titled Going Rouge. Then I read a blog post by Jim Macdonald at Making Light that pointed out a typographical error on the CNN Web site, which he quoted as follows: “In excerpts of her new book ‘Going Rouge: An American Life’ that we….”
I stopped and read it again. That’s not a typo, that’s just the title of the book, I said to myself. Finally it sunk in: I had read the title wrong. Sarah Palin, who sees herself as a rogue who uses rouge, titled her book Going Rogue. But she is no more of a rogue than Winnie the Pooh, who is cute and cuddly and a bear of little brain. Whereas Sarah Palin obviously does use rouge. And the phrase “going rogue” has an odd sort of sound to it; it doesn’t sound like something an American speaker of English would ordinarily say. No wonder I made the mistake.
It’s too bad she gave the book that title; it will inevitably be misread; there is already a parody version of the book which is indeed titled Going Rouge. Unfortunately, this little incident makes me want to compare Sarah Palin to another hapless vice presidential type: Dan Quayle. Which actually makes me feel bad.
Thinking about…
In the past two days, we have had two people call at the Palo Alto church looking for money and/or shelter. I’m not going to talk about the specifics of either of the people who came here, because they deserve their privacy. I will say that we felt compelled to call the police in one instance, and in the other instance the parish minister gave the person both money and a ride to the train station.
These two visits prompted me to think about some of the ways I evaluate people who come to churches looking for money or shelter, and I realized that I have never tried to think systematically about this subject. Nor am I ready to think systematically about this subject now. But I thought I’d share some random thoughts based on experiences over fifteen years of working in both urban and suburban churches.
- At one church, I could track the price of one hit of heroin by the requests we used to get for specific amounts of money. When lots of people needed eleven dollars to pay for a ticket from where we were to the VA hospital in another nearby city, I knew heroin was going for eleven dollars. When lots of people needed ten dollars to pay for a taxi cab to the unemployment office in the next county, I knew the price of heroin had gone down to ten dollars.
- When people I do not know get close to children or children’s play areas, and when they do not move away immediately when I ask them to do so, I am very likely to call the police, and it doesn’t matter how polite they may be.
- When someone asks me for money for a motel room because they just happened to be passing through town and suddenly got stranded overnight while their car is being fixed and their credit card isn’t working until tomorrow because a hold got placed on it when they filled up their gas tank, I am likely to believe them the first time — but when they come back six months later, obviously don’t recognize me, and give me the same story all over again, I am very unlikely to give them money.
- Sometimes people are normally polite to me, they make an effort with their appearance, and they actually attend worship service in a respectful manner. I am far more likely to offer help to those people, no matter how questionable or dodgy their story might be.
- I’ve had many people show their scars to me. Socially I am a fairly conservative New England Yankee, and having to look at scars kind of grosses me out, and makes me want to get rid of the person without hearing their story, and without offering any support. I have learned to not look at scars when they are displayed, so that I can concentrate on listening to the person instead of throwing them out.
- I once had someone ask me for money. He was wearing clothing that looked more expensive than anything I could afford. I didn’t give him money. He got aggressive with me. I’m still not sure if he was an upper middle class white guy who lost his job who was genuinely in need and had been reduced to begging and who was just naturally aggressive — or if he was a con man. Either way, I didn’t give him the money for a motel room for which he was asking.
I don’t know. I’m afraid I have gotten way too cynical about these things. Now whenever someone from outside the church asks me for money, I start with the assumption that it’s a con game. I don’t like that about myself.
Why do we sing in worship services?
So why do we sing in worship services? My Unitarian Universalist tradition comes out of Calvinism, and we started singing because John Calvin said we should sing the Psalms — you know, sing because it’s in the Bible. Well, now we’re post-Christian, and some of us are very critical of the Bible, so why do we sing in worship services?
I think many Unitarian Universalists sing in worship services because it’s a chance to promote their favorite theological doctrine. Shades of John Calvin! The humanists in our midst like to sing songs that extol the virtues of humanism, and they pout when there are songs that mention God. The theists and Christians in our midst want to hold on to the tradition of Unitarian Christianity and Universalist Christianity, and they pout when they have to sing songs that don’t mention God.
Maybe this is why I like to sing with the Pagans and the New Age types. They just sing, and it’s powerful, and changes the way you think and feel. They know that “sustained singing is an ancient technique for creating altered states of consciousness through hyperventilation, elevated blood oxygen, and cranial and somatic vibration” (Marini, Sacred Song in America, 93). They know you don’t have to be a trained singer to get all these benefits. And the Pagans know that you when you sing about topics like birth and death and the ultimate meaning of life, you will be transformed. I also like to sing with Sacred Harp groups for exactly the same reasons. Not because I am in complete doctrinal or theological agreement with Pagans, New Agers, or Sacred Harp singers, but because I want to sing with people who don’t care what you sound like and who know that singing is supposed to transform you.
A recent article in the Portland Oregonian makes this point eloquently. Read it and — well, yes, read it and weep. I did. I wish typical Unitarian Universalist hymn singing affected me like that….
Been there.
I heard on the news tonight that the national unemployment rate is up over 10%, the highest unemployment rate since 1983. That’s the year I graduated from college. I think that experience has shaped my assumptions about jobs and careers ever since:– I assume that I will not be able to find a good job, or any job at all, and I assume that finding a job is in large part a matter of luck.
I’ve been wondering about the people who will graduate from college this year. How difficult will it be for them to find a job? How will the recession shape this assumptions of this year’s graduates? And I wonder how this year’s college graduates will cope with their student debt. My final year of college cost a mere $7,000 — about $15,000 in 2008 dollars — but today that college now costs something like $50,000 per year. What will it feel like to enter the job market during the current era of high unemployment, when you have perhaps $100,000 in student loans to pay off?
Petty writers are not to be despised
Samuel Johnson, that 18th century English writer better known today by his reputation rather than by his works, published The Rambler, a twice-weekly periodical, from 1750 to 1752. I think of The Rambler as a sort of 18th century blog: Johnson took on subjects that others had already written about, expressed firm opinions that had been heard before, and often wrote about matters that no one would care about a year later.
In the issue from 6 August 1751 (no. 145), Johnson apologized for those writers who write for ephemeral periodicals. “These papers of the day, the Ephemera of learning, have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life, than more pompous and durable volumes,” said Johnson. We have little need to know what happened in ancient kingdoms, about which we expect little or nothing; we have a real need to know about events that shape our lives today. “If it be pleasing to hear of the preferment and dismission of statesmen, the birth of heirs, and the marriage of beauties,” he says, “the humble author of journals and gazettes must be considered as a liberal dispenser of beneficial knowledge.” And so we should not despise such petty writers, even though what they write will be forgotten tomorrow.
Today’s petty writers can be found on the Internet. You can read blogs about cats who are trying to lose weight. You can read innumerable blogs about babies, reporting when baby gets its first tooth, when baby takes its first step, when baby vomits for the first time. You can read a seemingly infinite number of political blogs which tend to report on what other political blogs have said, often using vituperative language and relying on ad hominem attacks as their primary rhetorical strategy. I can enjoy reading blogs about overweight cats. I don’t mind reading blogs about babies that I know. I won’t read political blogs myself, but I can understand why people are fascinated by them. I’d be willing to call blogs generous dispensers of mildly beneficial knowledge, if I can qualify that by adding that they can be too generous in their dispensing. And if I think of Twitter, Facebook, and other popular social media as micro-blogging, then these newer social media are even more generous in dispensing their ephemeral writings. In the last half minute, dozens of petty writers have been posting such ephemera statements as “Sad story at fort hood. God save the world.” and “grey’s anatomy, you make me cry everytime. and i dont cry over television shows!” to Twitter.
What would Samuel Johnson make of blogs and Twitter? Would he have despised the petty writer who just wrote “i’m saying doe, if Britney can have 100million$ music career basically doing what kim just did. why cant kim?? lol” in a tweet to Twitter? Or would Johnson have found some fleeting value even in that? If I’m honest with myself I often find such ephemera to be more vigorously written and more entertaining (in the short run, at least) than Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel. And I don’t even know who “kim” is.
Bitter chocolate?
Today’s New York Slime, er, Times has a kind of fluffy article on the celebration of John Calvin’s 500th birthday in Geneva, Switzerland. The story, titled “A City of Mixed Emotions Observes Calvin’s 500th,” mentions in passing some of the ways that John Calvin has been consumerized:
But the show [“The Calvin Generation,” a musical,] was one of a vast program of commemorations — theatre, a film festival, conferences, exhibits, even specially concocted Calvinist wines and chocolates — described by some who have tasted them as somewhat bitter — of the birth of John Calvin 500 years ago.
OK, I can understand exhibits and conferences. But a musical about John Calvin? What, does Calvin fall in love with one of the heretics he’s about to burn at the stake? Calvin commemorative wine I can sort of understand (maybe you could use it at communion?), but Calvin chocolates I find incomprehensible, bitter though they may be.