I keep coming back to my friends

I tried to pay attention in church on Sunday, but this was all I had.

Having a Terminal Child

I woke up again today
But as for why, I couldn't say
And when they ask me how I feel
I just have to lie

None of this is real to me
It never was, I'll never see
And when they ask me why it's so
I just say "because"

Yes, my child, you go to die
So I must fear each lullaby
As if each word might be the last
I sing in your ear

Still I sing, the past is long
There is still time for one more song
And if you lack for anything
I will stroke your hair

I will kiss your cheek
I will hold you close
I will keep you warm
I will breathe you in

I will give you strength
I will hear your sigh
I will love your life
I will close your eyes

Never heard this before tonight

Annabelle

I don't know what to say to my friends. They heard from the doctor. The word unfixable was used.

This song is about a woman who lost a daughter. I guess sometimes emotions just need to be felt and said and not explained or answered away.

I continue to pray for my friends and I hope you would too.

Pray for my friends

Although I don't have many readers, I hope they can take this in the spirit in which I intend it.

Two of my friends, Aaron and Tori Swank, had a baby girl recently, Olivia. They have three young children already. Olivia was born with health problems and is back in the hospital for heart failure. At this point the grapevine has not passed along whether it is operable or not.

This is about as bad as nightmares get. Please pray for Olivia and my friends, if you swing that way. Pray that she will be healthy, pray that they will be brave and loving toward one another and their children.

Does prayer "work"? According to my religion, yes and no. Yes, in that prayer is participation in the life of God (it always works on the pray-er). No, in that prayers do not necessarily give us magical control over the course of events. All things are in the hands of God, even us. But you can fight the crush of history, and you can even talk back to God; you just have to be prepared when God and history answer you in their native language.

For aspiring authors

If you want to learn how to write the beginning of a novel, do yourself a favor and read the first two chapters of The Shining by Stephen King. They're done from the Jack Nicholson character's (the psycho, we all know that from the trailers) point of view and his wife's point of view.

In two short chapters, we learn that Jack is going to be managing a hotel for the winter, that it is often snowed in for weeks at a time, that the last guy who did the job got stir crazy and blew away his whole family, then killed himself, Jack has an anger problem but conceals it beneath a glad-handing exterior, he hurt a student, abused his 3-year old son (now 5), is a dry drunk, his wife almost left him, his wife is afraid of going to the hotel with him, and their son is curiously insightful.

At the beginning of Chapter 3, we learn that there is a boiler in the basement that must be monitored constantly to prevent a massive explosion.

And yet another

So, I just had a very busy week trying to get a conference paper ready for ICIP (IEEE's image processing conference). We submitted on time, but I still have to go back and check my program for errors due to our weird data.

Even so, I still managed to squeeze in another Miles Vorkosigan book: Memory. So if you didn't hear me the first time or the second time, hear me now. Make haste to read this series. Haste!

Start with Cordelia's Honor, which is two novels (Shards of Honor and Barrayar) about his mom and dad, and then The Warrior's Apprentice (or the omnibus edition which contains it and the next in the series, Young Miles).

Haste!

Job search creaks to life; villagers dismayed

I never thought I would get it right, but I now have a resume, an easily modifiable cover letter, and a reasonably small, organized web site highlighting a few of my projects. And I've started sending it out.

I don't know exactly how to do this. I've got an MS in CS so close I can taste it, but every time I look at a great company's job descriptions, I gulp and go, "I know nothing." And do I stick to the great companies only, or go to work for some e-business consulting firm? And how would I find them if I did? Would I even want to?

Anyhow, I've sent resumes and electronically applied so far to Google, Amazon, and Adobe. I figure if I start at the top and work my way down, everyone will be happier. That, and I'm trying to pick places with a vision for research, for the future of computing, and for the Internet, with interesting problems to work on, and with appropriate compensation for a father and husband.

I have been thinking about Microsoft, which is kind of a special case. Yes, they do some amazing stuff. On the other hand, laugh at Google's "Don't be evil" if you want, but I am attracted to a company that has tried to stay true to a positive moral vision. MS's business practices, on the other hand, have been positively criminal. Embrace, extend, extinguish is holding back the whole computing world. After reading the anonymous, insider Mini-Microsoft blog, I feel better-informed about MS, but also concerned about MS's Machiavellian bureaucracy. I don't know if I want to swim in those waters with the sharks, or worse, become a shark, or worse, be a goldfish, drink the Kool-aid, and get eaten by the shark.

Anyway, I'm throwing this whole thing open for suggestions. If anyone has a good lead or company for me to try, some good advice, or anything you can think of, please let me know.

Mirror Dance

The other day, I finished the next Miles Vorkosigan novel after Brothers in Arms. It's called Mirror Dance. It's a 500+ page paperback. I ripped through the last 300+ in a day. It was riveting, even as a reread. Like I said earlier, read these books by Lois McMaster Bujold early and often.

Just wars

In response to this question on the Washington Post site:

President Bush is preparing this week to send more troops to Baghdad. Do you believe there is such a thing as a "just war"? Is the Iraq war "just"?

Just wars are possible. As a Christian, I believe that war is about defending the poor and defenseless rather than "the national interest", which is the root of all kinds of evil. At times, our national interest has intersected the moral mission. That's about as good as any war is ever going to get, from my point of view. Just war theory was created to address what kinds of moral missions can justify wars, and thus to focus on the means and intentions of wars as opposed to the consequences, and especially as opposed to the potential realpolitik gains of a war.

If you only see war as a means to preserve the national interest rather than a moral question, there are no just or unjust wars. There are only wars that work and wars that don't work. That's why we hear so much about incompetence when pundits discuss the failed Iraq war. I feel the need to get a bit deeper than this.

I don't believe war is a righteous tool for the apocalyptic defeat of "evil". It's too easy to throw around the label for political purposes, and it's too easy to demonize rather than empathize. In other words, I don't think that the titanic struggle against world terrorism can justify the war in Iraq at all, even in the alternate universe where al Qaeda was in cahoots with Saddam (the same universe where Dick Cheney has taken up residence).

The invasion and occupation of Iraq is not a just war. We bombed Saddam heavily before the war declaration. Blair and Bush discussed ways to goad Saddam into taking the first shot, provoking the invasion. There were no WMDs, but Bush and his advisors were willing to lie about that to the American people. We fixed the intelligence to fit the predetermined policy. We even invaded without a compelling national interest, for the amoral policy wonks out there, much less a compelling moral interest. In short, the casus belli was either a lie, or as nonexistent as the weapons.

All the other post-facto rationalizations for the war pale in comparison. All the post-facto "oops, did I just disband the army" "mistakes were made" talk is a red herring; how we went to war does not change the overwhelming failure to explain why we went to war.

We had an unjust, immoral war. Besides that, now we have consequences: genocide, mutilated bodies in the streets of Baghdad, morgues full to overflowing, religious strife, death, shattered lives. Wars always have these things, which is why we try to avoid them: in an immoral war, there is no upside justification for them. Now we have a failed state on our hands, one that is splintering along religious lines. The failure of Iraq has consequences for regional stability as well.

Leaving troops in Iraq is doing nothing but providing Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias alike thousands of targets. We are occupying their country. We are infidels. We can do better than leave our soldiers holding the bag on our leader's profound failure. We don't just have an unjust war. Now we have an unjust occupation, one that has cost more American soldiers their lives than American civilians in 9/11. It's time to say enough to the war and enough to the occupation.

Reviews

I finished a couple of great sf books recently.

One was Ursula K. Le Guin's first Hugo/Nebula sweep, The Left Hand of Darkness, a tale of a diplomat's visit to a planet where sexual differentiation does not exist; everyone is the same gender and has a monthly "in heat" cycle; childbearing is possible but the childbearing partner is randomly selected. Man, was it good. I can see it now as the forebear of American Gods, where the main story is interspersed with mythmaking and short stories, and also Foreigner, where the main theme, besides exploration of an alien culture, is communication and mutual understanding.

The story is very carefully crafted. Every point-of-view is individuated and solid. The plot is narrowly focused on the actions of just a few characters, but it's epic, grand, uplifting reading. The world-building is complex and its implications are thought out well. I didn't feel like it was anachronistic, even though it was written in the late 60s. At times, though, you could almost hear Le Guin banging the podium; I recall the time a character talks about how gender difference (and consequent sexism) causes war. Don't let that scare you away, though. Overall, it's fantastic, mind-bending reading.

I also finished Brothers in Arms, which is one of the many award-winning Miles Vorkosigan adventures by Lois McMaster Bujold. I love everything about these books, and this latest reread was no exception. They have it all. She's the author tied with Robert Heinlein for most Hugo-winning novels. Start with Cordelia's Honor (which is equal to Shards of Honor plus Barrayar), then The Warrior's Apprentice. See also her fantasy series starting with The Curse of Chalion for sublime takes on religion with all the rest of the killer Bujold stuff. I know I haven't said why all these books are so great. Just trust me, ok? And thank me later.

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean 2. I didn't hate it, but I thought it was pretty long. Hopefully, the next one will be the knockout that justifies the boring parts of this one. And here was something very Empire-Strikes-Back-esque about all the selling-out and dark sides in this number 2 movie. You can almost hear Yoda hobbling onto the Black Pearl with his cane and saying, "The Flying Dutchman!" [cough cough] "Remember your failure at the Flying Dutchman! Arrrr!"

I don't remember if I brought it up, but I also saw Talladega Nights, Will Ferrell's send-up of NASCAR. He really nailed it. I laughed a lot. Also, for adults only.

I finally saw Dark City. Everything it did well, The Matrix came along and did a lot better just a year later. The movies have pretty similar plots on the surface, but Dark City has a deranged Kiefer Sutherland where The Matrix has an awesome Laurence Fishburne. If you carry that analogy to the rest of the movie, that pretty much says it all.

The main character in Dark City plays a real jerk in The Holiday, a romantic comedy Sarah and I got to see for our 4th anniversary. It is about half bad and half good. They really wasted Jude Law, Jack Black, Cameron Diaz, and Kate Winslet with this script. I admire all of them as actors and was really looking forward to this.

Instead, the movie opened with an interminable exposition that does nothing except get the characters to the holiday (the women switch houses for two weeks, that is the story). This was pointless, unfunny blather. It wouldn't even have been confusing if the editor had whoops, just cut twenty minutes out of the movie, straight to Kate and Cameron at their computers, sobbing over their breakups and doing something impulsive, which the audience doesn't quite understand. (Audience of better movie says: I don't understand things that haven't been explained! Waah! Director of better movie says: Shut up whiners and eat your popcorn. Don't make me come over there.)

The other thing that riled me was all the meta-fictional stuff. Three of the characters are in the movie industry. Cameron Diaz makes film trailers. Jack Black writes scores. Kate Winslet's new best friend is a famous screenwriter. At every turn, the filmmakers remind you that you are watching a movie, from Cameron imagining her life as a trailer, to nice music setting a scene with Jack and Kate (you know the kind), which is all well and good until you see that Jack's character is playing the score you are hearing, to Kate acting like a strong woman based on advice from the screenwriter who gets her to watch movies with strong women in them, to Cameron quoting Sleepless in Seattle verbatim, to Jack writing theme music for Kate and her friend! And the worst part is, none of it works, at least not for me. The best thing in that list was Cameron's personal trailers, which were at least funny and in character, but it all pulled me out of the vivid continuous dream and set my teeth on edge.

In conclusion, the movie had some funny moments, but this is one for the Redbox ($1 rentals, mostly new releases; between this and NetFlix, Sarah and I have stopped going to the video store).

We watched Little Miss Sunshine on DVD. This is a funny, funny movie. Not for kids; it's easily rated R for "adult themes" and swearing. It's unpredictable and it made me howl with laughter. I was literally on the floor gasping at the end.

And last, for Christmas we went to see Night at the Museum. Run, don't walk, for this one. Kudos to this film's directors: it's very light as far as objectional content. There's a few jokes that will just fly over the heads of kids, but other than that, nothing gory or edgy. Just a museum that comes to life at night, with hilarious consequences. It's certainly worth a matinee, and in these troubled economic times, when is it ever worth full price to see a movie? If I'd had my choice of movies at the place we went in my wife's family's town, I probably would've gone to the new James Bond, but in hindsight, I don't regret the museum at all. Fun for the whole family.

It's a great vehicle for Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and the merry band of jokers. I don't know about you, but I loved Zoolander and I consider it very rewatchable. I was thinking about Zoolander as we left the theater and I wondered if this museum movie would hold up as well over repeat viewings as Zoolander does for me. In the end, I think it probably will. It's not a deep movie, but it's great fun. Plus, Dick van Dyke steals every scene he's in (and wait for the credits).

Story and reality

In college, a friend of mine (still a friend, I'd like to think, but we haven't spoken in a while) talked to me about the Gospel of John and had an interesting problem with the story of Lazarus. Lazarus was a dead man that Jesus told to get out of his tomb, then he was a live man who came out of the tomb. My friend asked, in effect, so, what did Lazarus say? Did he know he was dead? Did he see heaven? Why wasn't this played up more in the story? He thought, as far as I can recall, that this kind of thing made the story inconsistent.

What I failed to consider at the time is that good stories have certain qualities that reality does not. A story has a beginning, middle, and an end (more or less). A story has narrative impact. A story has unity of plot, character, and theme. A story doesn't have loose ends. A story skips the boring parts.

So what's interesting about the Lazarus story is that it serves a purpose in the gospel narrative (among other things, it explains why large crowds followed Jesus into Jerusalem for his Passion: because they'd heard about Lazarus), but for my friend it constituted a loose end. But loose ends don't belong in stories: they are the stuff of reality. If anything, and sure, maybe it's not that important in the long run, if the Lazarus story has a loose end, that militates toward its authenticity rather than against it.

A similar argument is sometimes made about the story (here paraphrased) when a crowd brings an adulterous woman to see Jesus (also in John's gospel). The crowd asks if they should stone the woman. Jesus writes in the dust with his finger, then says, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." This sucks all the hot air out of the angry mob and they leave the woman with Jesus. He says, "Does no one condemn you?" to the woman. She shakes her head, so he says, "Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more."

The interesting thing about this story is that there is a loose end. Never before or since has anyone determined what Jesus was doing writing in the dust with his finger. As the story stands, it has this detail that doesn't contribute to the unity. (As CS Lewis says, fulsome details used for added realism in fiction did not exist until the 19th century.) So, the argument goes, this isn't a story at all. It's just reality.

I was thinking about this on Christmas Eve. We went to a service where the infancy gospel narrative of Matthew and Luke was fleshed out in little family details. I thought to myself, we don't have this little stuff, whether Joseph said he loves Jesus so much. We don't have blow-by-blow accounts of the Creator of the Universe in Earthly Form messing himself. There are missing hours, days, months, and then most famously, a gap that is basically decades long in Jesus' life story. Talk about a loose end we would be keenly interested in!

But, and here is the trick, this is just like a conventional biography. Details are always chosen carefully for their importance, whether the story is fiction or nonfiction. Incidents are omitted or concentrated on based on the unity of the story of a person's life. Every once in a while, though, the story ends and reality peeks through a meaningless little detail.

Have a holly jolly Boxing Day

Hi people. I missed Christmas with all of you, so I hope you had a good holiday with family. Not to discriminate against people who had other holidays or gathering demographics; I am just projecting my experience onto yours.

We've had a great Christmastime with my wife's side of the family and I couldn't be happier. My chewy noels came out a little strong (maybe I need to replace some of the sugar (sugar:flour::3:1) with liquor or something) but I love them. They are brown-sugary/salty/nutty/powdered sugar bombs of pure addiction.

This year the family decided to get me a supergift instead of just one little gift, so this is it. It's an acoustic-electric guitar (that is, it has built-in electronics) and is vintage sunburst rather than plain pine or whatever color is in the picture. Needless to say, I am overwhelmed at everyone's coordination and generosity. I love you all. It is awesome.

Sarah kept the whole thing under wraps until Christmas morning, when I received very few individual gifts and began to think that something might be up, but I had to wait until about 5:00 for the big surprise. Sarah always got nervous, the past few months, when I'd talk about wanting an electric guitar. "Wouldn't you like to replace that worn-out acoustic guitar first? Wouldn't you?" she would say. "Okay, okay," I would say, a bit sullenly, and secretly, I would dare to dream for a moment. But honestly, I never really believed the family would do it, so I'd just plan on going to the pawn shop with a few Christmas bucks, and play George Harrison songs on the sad-looking electric guitar at Sam's Club, with its missing strings and wussy practice amp. Now I'll get to plug in with a really nice guitar at home and church. You all knew me better than I knew myself. Well done.

I've begun to think about separating out my posts by subjects so they are a little less large and more focused. So, next down the pipe, a little Christmas reflection about stories and real life.

Merry Christmas to all of you!

Christmas goes "hi-tech"

I swear, not one of us was drunk at the time.

God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Blue Christmas
What Child Is This
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

1. Play Christmas carols at Hastings
2. Post videos to YouTube
3. ... ???
4. Profit!

We played for about an hour, so these are just the highlights (although I thought I'll Be Home for Christmas and O Holy Night were also highlights). We have the whole thing on DVD, so if you want a copy, email me or Sarah.

Monday

Last night Stacy, Tom, Suzy, Sarah, and I went to Stacy's workplace, Hastings, which is a cafe/(video/music/book) (renter/seller) to play Christmas tunes. Suzy plays a mean hand drum, Tom was on mandolin, shaker, and harmonica, I had the guitar, and everyone sang. Some people from our church showed up and listened. We got a little applause from passers-through, too. Sarah made a video and we should be putting clips on YouTube any day now. It's starting to sound like we'll go to Hastings next year about once a month, and play U2 or the Beatles or Nickel Creek or whatever.

I recently catalogued most of my book collection on Library Thing, a brilliant site that links up your books to everyone else's collections and finds interesting patterns, such as who owns the most books in common with you, suggestions for books that are similar to one you enter, unsuggestions for books (given that you own a book, what's the book it is most unlikely that you also own?). Very fun, interesting stuff.

We'll fall off the earth this weekend, but I should post again before then.

It worked!

That brings an end to my best semester in the Master's program yet. I finished my thesis proposal, and made two programs that actually do something interesting.

One is a web crawler that many computers can contribute to at once. The more computers you put on (and it works over the internet, so that could be any number), the faster it will run. The major bottlenecks left are the bandwidth and storage of the central server.

The other one is a hierarchy browser that uses speech recognition, mouse, and ten-key for controls (specifically, to construct a grocery list by selecting items from this household products database). Thus, it is accessible to the blind and the paraplegic as well as to handed and sighted people. This project came together a lot in the last week, when I finally had major time to work on it. I was amazed that it worked the first time, practically the way I wanted to.

Also interesting to me is the fact that both of these programs are in Java. If you have well-documented, intuitive libraries to work with, it's a real snap to start making something interesting. I am also getting better at the Java GUI model, which makes at least a good deal of sense to me.

Once I can figure out how, I'll post the programs for public consumption. They both rely on the user's ability to install PostgreSQL (a database program), which is not all cream soda and sunshine, if you know what I mean. But they really are cool.

I'm considering something I haven't ever done before: paying money for a developer tool. The speech-recognition library I used was put together by some company. I'm about a week into the 30-day trial. It would be $16 to get a personal license, which I could use for research. Or, I can suck it up and learn Windows MFC, ATL, COM, and MS SAPI.

I also finished The Genesee Diary. One of the things that interested me most was the epilogue. After 7 months among the monks, where Henri Nouwen's world was beginning to quiet down a bit and he was getting serene, he returned to a hectic schedule as a teacher, writer, and priest. Six months later, he wrote this epilogue, that he had been hoping that the monastery would change him forever, that he would finally be single-minded, committed, wholly devoted to Christ. That's not what happened. Instead, he saw his time out of the world as something to look back on, to strengthen him with hope for a better life, and also to humble him in comparison with his life out in the real world. He quoted Jesus in a disturbing moment, where Jesus says that you can clean yourself out for a moment, but your demons will come back to haunt you worse than before.

I empathize completely. Not only does his experience remind me a lot of my summer among the Christians in Lake Tahoe, I also long for wholeness with God, that final inch where I tip over into unassuming love for him and the people close to me and the world in general. But I never do quite tip over. I feel the need to live on the edge of the religion and the world, touching both, as I was reminded by rereading a journal recently.

In a way, it was shocking when Nouwen wrote about this cold douse of reality, so different was the style from journal to epilogue. But in a way, it was gratifying and comforting. Not, that is, to think that mountaintop experiences are illusory or failures or impossibly idealistic. Plainly, I think there is more to idealism than meets the eye. Instead, to know that he walked the same road I am walking and felt like me, that it's all right to be out in the world and not feel satisfied with yourself or the world. We don't need to fit because we don't quite fit. We are citizens of another country. The question, of whether that country is the material world of the unconscious animals, the absurd world of existence, nonexistence, and death, or the strange world of the spiritual, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Knowing where you belong doesn't help you fit back into the world. Humans will never fit back into the world. But it can relieve the pressure of worry about not being able to fit, even at your best, into that which you long for desperately, or belong to deeply.

Slaughterhouse Five

I'm falling off the face of the earth until Thursday. One distributed web-crawler and one speech-enabled grocery list coming up.

I finished Slaughterhouse Five. It's a book about fatalism, about a man who has come unstuck in time and continually revisits and relives his life, out of order. But since he's already done everything he's about to relive, he is a little helpless against his circumstances. As aliens from Tralfamadore explain to him, events are as they are out of mechanical necessity, not by choice. (In a way, Heroes is also about this issue.) Billy, the man, is a prisoner of war when Dresden is firebombed. Was that, too, a product of environmental conditions and robotic performance? Should those deaths be shrugged off, like so many others in the book, with another "So it goes"? No, no, never. I can't live like that.

So I give you dueling poems. They can be reconciled if you believe in a fixed past, but a wide-open future. Like many issues in philosophy, such a belief may be a question of thinkers justifying something people have long intuited. Good luck with life for the next few days.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

***

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

AK: (I.9-11) Love in the time of Cachet Blanc

We're back! I had a rough time deciding how to write about this next section. But a passage from The Genesee Diary showed me the way. Like I said earlier, it's an account of a Dutch Catholic writer and priest who goes to spend seven months in a Trappist monastery, living as a monk.

Here's the passage:

Contemplative life is a human response to the fundamental fact that the central things in life, although spiritually perceptible, remain invisible in large measure and can very easily be overlooked by the inattentive, busy, distracted person that each of us can so readily become. The contemplative looks not so much around things but through them into their center. Through their center he discovers the world of spiritual beauty that is more real, has more density, more mass, more energy, and greater intensity than physical matter. In effect, the beauty of physical matter is a reflection of its inner content. Contemplation is a response to the world that is built in this fashion. That is why the Greek fathers, who were great contemplatives, are known as the dioretic fathers. [not diuretic - ed.] Diorao means to see into, to see through. In celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, we celebrate the presence of the risen Christ among us, at the center of our lives, at the center of our very being, at the heart of our community, at the heart of the creation...

Keep this in mind as we talk.

Mountaintop At The Garden. Levin meeting Kitty at the ice skating rink might be described best as a mountaintop experience.* In the full flush of his yearning to be joined to Kitty, he uses language that is religious in its fervor to praise her: "Everything became bright in her presence. ... The spot where she stood seemed to him an unapproachable sanctuary... He went down, trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking." And like someone who looks too long at the sun, he is blinded.

Here's a poem I wrote way back when. If I explain much about what it means, it'll be obvious who it was about. The title is the name of a place on the moon, originally thought to be a sea, and thus called Sea of Tears. One night I looked into the sky, which was quite clear, and saw an enormous silver ring around the moon. Think of it, if you like, as another take on Levin.

Mare Imbrium

Your halo crowning the dark skies
You're too far above me
I sought the sun and I found you
I stared so long my eyes hurt
When I looked around, your image
Was reflected in all I saw
You were imprinted in my brain
I staggered blindly and still your face
Stared back at me endlessly

Maybe you didn't know, when I went into orbit
Circling around, in empty space
Pulled by an irresistible force
I was not an immovable stone
I hate to think you ignored it.

Stay blameless
You'll remain pristine forever in my memory
That is what you deserve-
You never attacked
But maybe I did
And I burned out my own eyes
For sight of you

It's a little hard for me to write about this particular chapter, Chapter 9, because of stuff like this. Not God's gift to poetry. I see several changes to make ten-ish years later, including some ghastly punctuation, some clunky phrases. But I was idealistic enough then to believe that Levin was piercing the mystical veil and seeing Kitty as she is. I thought you could have "childlike serenity and goodness," "gentle, calm, and truthful eyes," "an enchanted world," if you only went on a quest for this perfect woman. This attitude spills from the margin, from my high school attitude, into my reading.

Only lately have I seen Levin's attitude being portrayed here as quixotic and a bit unreliable. I transcribed that passage on contemplation, though, because perhaps I have this exactly upside down. It's hard to tell whether visionaries are mad or geniuses. We could all be wrong. Even Tolstoy could be wrong, in a sense, about Levin. Maybe we have only the common sort of sight and he sees the things that are really important.

Faith is the belief in things unseen. That's the common point of view, straight from a quotable Bible verse. The spiritual realm that lies behind or permeates the physical realm is not accessible to our senses. But faith is also the seeing of things believed. Sometimes when I am in the church building, I imagine to myself, what if we could see through this physical thing to the spiritual thing behind it: a pristine church as beautiful as a Monet painting, angels singing in the rafters along with the congregation, the radiance of God shining in every person and from every corner. Sure, there are these brown wooden pews, and the water damage, and the PA is a little too loud this morning and they're out of stubby pencils. And now we must decide which view, which vision of the church is more essential. My instinct is to say that the first one is more real, even though it is, from the common point of view, wholly imaginary.

Once Levin's head floats off its shoulders, action that is altogether prosaic becomes gold-leafed. "Skate together?" Levin asks himself. "Is that possible?" The undercurrent of this action is not Levin's epic romantic destiny, though. Back on the ground, Kitty is frowning and turning things over in her mind. When Levin lets slip his intentions, saying to Kitty regarding the length of his stay in Moscow, "It all depends on you," she is shocked and runs away from him.

We are thus not surprised that she thinks of him as "her favorite brother", and says "I know that I don't love him." On this paragraph, the story pivots, and we grimly anticipate the failure of Levin's marriage proposals, and understand how loosely he is anchored to reality. To his credit, Levin is at least by turns hopeful and hopeless about his prospects. But again, this has more to do with his uncertain view of himself than anything Kitty might have said or done, which he might have paid attention to.

It's a pitiable situation; Tolstoy skillfully sets it up so we tensely await the reveal throughout the following action, until Levin asks Kitty, as he's come to Moscow to do, to fulfill his destiny, to be complete, to find Jesus and God and heaven and be burned up in the sun. Then, presumably, she will say no.

Coming Down The Mountain. Once the radiance of Kitty fades away, Levin finds himself down in the twilight of a dinner with Oblonsky. Quickly, he feels like he and his idealistic thoughts of beauty and truth and Kitty do not belong in this sybarite's world. A woman wearing makeup is the first target of his ire, but more follow over the course of their luxurious meal. "He was afraid of besmirching that which filled his soul." And if there's one thing that really smirches the place up, it's Flensburg oysters.

Levin can't tell Oblonsky all that, so he channels his discomfort into classic town mouse, country mouse talk:

O: "Well, naturally. But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment."
L: "Well, if that is so, I'd rather be a savage."

The friendly banter starts to unravel as Oblonsky brings the conversation back around to the Shcherbatskys, though. It's hard not to hear Oblonsky dragging a source of holiness for Levin down into a source of enjoyment for himself. Levin reaffirms, once more in religious language, both what this love means to him ("It is not mere feeling, but a sort of force outside me which has taken possession of me") and why he feels unworthy of it ("that we--who are no longer young and have pasts... er... not of love but of sins--that we find ourselves drawn close suddenly to a pure, innocent being!").

But in this affirmation we can hear Levin's confession that all the disgust he had directed outward at the evening, the tarted-up woman, the luxuries, and Oblonsky, the paunchy nobleman, also convicts him. I am tempted to say that Levin's opinion of himself is just as valid as his opinion of Kitty. Another phrase springs to mind: "in humility, consider others better than yourselves." Is Levin's attitude humility, or do we need a more destructive word?

As If. As if the night couldn't get any worse, Oblonsky talks about one of Kitty's suitors, the handsome, intelligent, young Vronsky, then forces Levin to talk about adultery. I have wondered for a while whether there is a subtext here that Levin is too old for Kitty. No one really comes right out and says it. It's all couched in terms of experience.

I'll leave the talk of Vronsky for another night. As for the talk on adultery, it's fairly predictable when you think about where they're both coming from, but it's fun to read. There are some great lines and moments in this chapter, and this is already getting long, so I'm going to cut this thing short.

I really like the moment when Levin is talking about how pure love should be, but all of a sudden he realizes that he is not so pure and becomes confused: "However, perhaps you're right. Yes, perhaps you are. ... But I don't know. I really don't know." This is the culmination of Levin's being pulled between the two versions of his love all day long, masterfully depicted by Tolstoy. Oblonsky has a great line in response: "You want the activity of every single man always to have an aim, and love and family life always to be one and the same thing. But that doesn't happen either. All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade."

Finally done! Hopefully the next installment won't take so long to get out.



* The reference is to the Transfiguration, a story in the Gospels where Jesus takes John, Peter, and James up on a peak, where they see him transformed and conversing with Moses and Elijah. (Incidentally, Wikipedia informs me that the Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican churches celebrate this event on August 6, a day I have always firmly associated with the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.)

I had a mountaintop experience in the summer of 2000, when I spent several weeks in South Lake Tahoe with Campus Crusade for Christ among adults in ministry and 80 like-minded students on a mission. I don't regret the weeks. They rank with some of the best I've ever had, and that's where I met Sarah Conrad from Utah. There was even a literal, yet symbolic mountain to climb where you could see for miles into the blue, Mount Tallac. I picked wildflowers to give to Sarah. I had a two-liter bottle full of them before Matt Stumbaugh educated me about zero-impact principles.

It was a perfect environment for living as a Christian and being close to God. There are all kinds of things I could say from here, like "too perfect...?" and "for that reason, to be mistrusted" but they're not quite true. The mountain is real, and the valley and the flatland are real too. What you learn on the mountain is for the rest of your life, but it requires a bit of translation to the rest of your life first.

Visualize whirled peas

And how did I forget finishing The Visual Display of Quantitative Information? It's a beautifully designed history and primer-by example of on how to visualize data (the medium is the message; it's a beautiful book), especially useful for scientists, but useful for anyone who wants to use graphics to explore data. You can read more about it here.

The guy who wrote it is Edward Tufte, a pioneer in visualization. He has a website.

I also recently happened across a site called Information Aesthetics, which showcases the creative display of data in the news and on the net. It's fascinating stuff; bookmark it, subscribe to it. Here's an example: the flow of user traffic through various pages on a single web site is visualized as a circle, with heavy lines for the most common pathways through. Sure, they're gorgeous, but they also show how people tend to use the website, which can provide insights to the site designer.

The post title is almost my favorite "visualize X" bumper sticker. One day I thought of one I liked better, and I told Sarah, and it cracked us up. If it doesn't crack you up, you obviously have an impaired humor system and you should get it checked out:

Visualize Using Your Turn Signal

Run! Don't walk!

NBC has a great show running called Heroes. I read somewhere that if Buffy the Vampire Slayer (one of the best shows) is like a comic book guy (Joss Whedon) doing a TV show, then Heroes is like a TV guy (Tim Kring) doing a comic book. It's layered and intricate, thoughtful and exciting, full of the surprises and connections that made Buffy so great, and it has a warm human heart at the center of a very intellectual, meta take on heroism and courage. Do not miss it!

Sarah saw a few episodes of Heroes out of order, then came back when I watched them all in order (I am a stickler about this kind of thing). She was constantly saying, Oh, I totally didn't get that before but now it all makes perfect sense. The order is important, and there's actual integrity that should be observed.

So, friends, welcome to the future of TV and the internet:
http://www.nbc.com/Video/rewind/full_episodes/heroes.shtml

There won't be a new Heroes episode on until January 1, so NBC decided to stream every episode online. Take my strong advice and watch them immediately. You have a few weeks to get through them.

To my mind, this solves the major problem until now with primetime serial adventures and dramas. There are a lot of these twisty shows now, like 24 and Lost. I watched 24's first 7 or 8 episodes, then I missed one, and I didn't want to pick up with a missing episode because the whole thing seemed so integrated and full, like a novel. You wouldn't read a novel with a few chapters missing out of the center, and however many years later, I haven't seen any more 24. The networks are obviously picking up on this, and they don't want to lose me for another five years by these little accidents of scheduling.

I felt the same way about it as NBC, but I didn't know they were doing this (up to now, I think they were only doing "this week's episode" for free online), so I downloaded about 7 using BitTorrent and taped two more on Scifi (which has a syndication deal or something) so Sarah and I could catch up. Is it that much different from what NBC did? If I had a TiVo, I'd just tape them anyway. The sooner the networks embrace time-shifting and file-sharing, the better off they'll be. There's a real sea change going on right now as primetime TV struggles to come to terms with the internet. I personally don't think they'll ever catch up, but it'll work.

And the last thing: if you watch Heroes online, you'll be watching (or ignoring) ads at the beginning of each segment (six per hour). NBC has found out how to make money on the internet, and it's uncanny how similar it is to how you do it with television sets.

And one more. There's an amazing Beatles album out there called Love. I'd only seen prancy, goofy commercials full of clowns noting the fact that the Cirque de Soleil is using it as a soundtrack for one of their shows. Here's what it really is: an authorized remix (or mashup, if you will) of the Beatles catalog by Sir George Martin and his son. Here's the site, where you can hear samples and interviews with Mr. Martin, Paul, and Ringo explaining why and how they made the album. Every song is full of cuts and quotations and pieces of other songs. The version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is just beautiful.

More books

I don't think I wrote about this at the time, but I finished Secrets and Lies by Bruce Schneier recently. It is a layman's introduction to the security technologies that underlie just about everything we do on the Internet, along with pluses and minuses. A major takeaway for me was that technology is the strong point, but deploying it and handing it over to people to use is the weak point. Security policies are only as good as the people who are implementing them. It's a little out of date now, but in some sense its philosophy on security is timeless.

I zipped through Salem's Lot, like I said earlier. I actually tried to read it once, maybe a year or so ago, but one early scene was so frightening (when Ben gets the globe from the house) that I couldn't read any more. Recently we got our tires rotated, which was sort of an excuse to buy a book for while I was waiting. Every time I read a Stephen King book, I'm like, "Where have you been all my life?" This one was an homage to Bram Stoker, but it was also a skillful multiple-person narrative about a small town. Sometimes his word choices are a little dubious, but I can't fault him for great, moving stories. He definitely deserves his bucks.

And of course, the list of his books that I've read is slowly growing... The Eyes of the Dragon, The Dead Zone, Misery, Carrie, the early four Bachman books (The Long Walk, Rage, which I think is also called Getting It On, Roadwork, and The Running Man). If I'm going chronologically, I think The Shining is up next. I've never read The Stand, but it's on my bookshelf too. Its size is a little intimidating.

I started Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and let me just say, Kurt Vonnegut, where have you been all my life? So it goes.

I have the 7th book in the Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh, Destroyer. The stories are about a human colony that has crash-landed, helpless and unable to return to the rest of civilization on an alien planet. The main character is a sort of linguist-diplomat who mediates between the remnant of humanity and the alien race that dominates the planet. The stories are sort of about language, about anthropology, about communication and the difficulties we face in seeing from someone else's perspective. They're very sophisticated, but magically, they're still engrossing, addictive, page-turning adventures. My mom put me onto these a long time ago. Thanks, Mom. The first one is Foreigner. I have several of them if you want to borrow them.

Only 13 shopping days left until Beethoven's birthday

I miss Peanuts. They're such classics.

We had a bangin December worship service today. It was all Christmas songs (except for Let Us Break Bread Together for communion). In fact, I think everything we played was a hymn. Tom, our mandolin/harmonicist/hand drum player said our beats were rocking. I thought to myself, "Beats?", but I suppose we did throw a few changeups on a swing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, We Three Kings of Orient Are ("Steve, play the drums like a camel walking through the desert" "Think caravan"), and a song about Mary sung to the tune of Good King Wenceslas.

We were going to end with Go Tell It On The Mountain, but as it turned out, we had something different today. We did communion at the end of the service, then our pastor, Don Emerson, read a statement to the church. It turns out that it was a long time coming, but he is resigning as pastor effective two or three weeks from today. He is in his 70s, so it's not so much surprising as shocking. This is, after all, the man that presided over my wedding, that I've worked with in Men's classes and financial classes and running the service and just life in general. When Sarah and I reached out for help, he was always there for us with a good word, faithfulness in prayer, and love. We'll miss him terribly.

As he put it, he's retiring for health reasons. He and his wife Carol spent the last several years (decades?) caring for Carol's parents, who were in their 90s by the end. They're moving down south to a warmer, dryer climate like Arizona or Texas. It sounds to me like a last grand adventure with his wife Carol. I wonder how I would live in a situation like that, what I would do to redeem the time.

It's a happy parting in some ways. He's not dying, but this enormous part of his life is ending. He's probably been a pastor for more than 50 years. We can all rejoice in the new things God will do in his life.

I don't know what the transition will be like at Maranatha. It's a strong community with many natural leaders, so I don't doubt we will sail ok. At the same time, it will feel a little funny because in all likelihood, Sarah and I and Alex will leave the valley this spring too. First the pastor, then us, and that means the worship teams will get reconfigured as one goes headless. And there's a pastoral search process, and maybe guest speakers delivering the sermons.

I wonder what it will be like to say goodbye. It might be a last goodbye.

I guess if you're reading this and you used to go to Maranatha, if possible you should come up to Logan for his send-offs. I think his last Sunday will be the 24th, if I heard right, but it might be the 17th. And no doubt there will be a bon voyage sometime soon. I will post more details as I become aware of them.

From The Genesee Diary

Did I really live my life or was it lived for me? Did I really make the decisions that led me to this place at this time, or was I simply carried along by the stream, by sad as well as happy events? I do not want to live it all again, but I would like to remember more, so that my own little history could be a book to reflect on and learn from. I don't believe that my life is a long row of randomly chained incidents and accidents of which I am not much more than a passive victim. No, I think that nothing is accidental but that God molded me through the events of my life and that I am called to recognize his molding hand and praise him in gratitude for the great things he has done to me.

Out and about

I've been working hard and reading a lot. I bought Salem's Lot to read while our tires got rotated and balanced and ended up gulping it down. And one of our tires was way out of balance.

I picked up some more library books about computers. I found one on JavaScript, which is the technology that allows you to program web applications. And I still have some about multi-threading and distributed programming (roughly, making your computer do several things at once and making several computers do several things at once). My class project for data mining is to take a web crawler and make it so it can split up the crawl for several bots to work individually.

A blast from my childhood: Scorched 3D, a fully-3D, beautiful, fun remake of Scorched Earth, perhaps the quintessential old-school tank deathmatch game. It is internet ready, so get out your funky bombs and hot napalm and blast away.

Thanksgiving was good for our family. I made mashed potatoes with Boursin, a soft cheese with garlic and herbs (instructions: mash a thing or two of Boursin into your potatoes). Sarah's grandmother made most of the dishes, but we all contributed a little. Sarah made a chocolate trifle (a word which will probably always make me think "beef, sauteed with peas and onions"); I crushed the Heath bars in their wrappers with the back of a spoon while our son slept upstairs.

I've been feeling really exhausted lately, but I'm still going to finish the next installment on Anna Karenina if it kills me. Coming soon!

Sick

Hi everyone. We've been a little sick with a nasty cold around here. Not the best week for it.

Yesterday, Sarah and I got to go out for a movie date. We get about two of these a year, so it was an event. If you ever want to just see and enjoy a movie in the theater, go to the late afternoon matinee on Wednesday (and avoid the kid movies and that crowd). Sarah and I practically had the theater to ourselves. Another couple came in after us during the previews, but the projector people still turned on the lights in the first few minutes of the movie, presumably to see if they needed to continue showing it.

The movie was Stranger than Fiction. As an aside, "Two thumbs way up" will always get me to a movie. I pay close attention to Ebert [spoiler alert!] and friends because they aren't afraid to give thumbs down to crappy or even dull, marginal movies, and because they at least have some editorial point of view. And they were right this time, this movie rules my world. I would see it again today if I could.

The acting was great. Will Ferrell, in particular, is just perfect. It's well-written and honest, and smart.

Unfortunately, everything else I want to say about this awesome movie would require me to spoil the ending. So go see the movie a few times, then hover over the following series of asterisks, full of spoilers, to see what I think. I had to use short sentences so the hovering works in Firefox, but be assured that there are a few paragraphs behind all these thoughts.

* * * * *

Postcards from your garden gnome

I've had a strange week. I feel unmotivated, but excited for the future. I feel full of malaise, but not depressed. I think Amelie (real title: Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain) was the right movie to see under the circumstances. It was fabulously French and weird and just note perfect.

I looked up tonight from Workout Mode and found I'd been dancing on a pad for about forty minutes. Those are 500 calories I'll never see again. According to Workout Mode.

Today I sang Alex songs about koalas and gorillas from his Baby Einstein picture books. They didn't actually come with music. That was all up to me. I have more songs going too. I got the good idea to just play and play and tape myself onto the computer with Audacity. Maybe those tunes that always bump around in my head will never get lost now.

Now that you've read this post, I assign you the task of auditing my papers after I die. Only you and the whole internet will know that there are secret songs on my hard drive. Plus all the flotsam and jetsam I wrote down lo these many years. It's in my will, you're legally bound now.

I've had pentameter lines running around as well. Here is one from a couple weeks back, when I took Alex and Sarah to his language giddyup class, then walked to the USU student center on a clear winter morning:

A sky so blue the towering mountains bow

It was really like that. And here's a quatrain from a sonnet yet to be completed, yet to be called "Hearing Things." I thought it up while I was walking to the grocery store and Subway for lunch, after listening to the song "Lullaby" on the new Dixie Chicks album while driving. [If you've known me for a long time, you might know that I used to describe my taste in music as "everything", with these two exceptions: "country" and "opera". Happily, I came around on the opera and I especially like the ones where people sing ordinary things in these opera voices. Like "Hooooney... Wherrre Is my Brrrrrrush?" "Wherrreverr you Left! It!" And I have heard that this Dixie Chicks album is "crossover" so I can still hate on the "country".]

I am not sure exactly which quatrain of the three in the nascent sonnet the following should be:

It's been a while since I have lived and breathed
A hearing thing within a world of sound
I feel the voices rumble underground
I feel them, though I never once believe

That third line isn't quite right, is it? I tried it as "I feel vibrations rumbling underground". I think a lot will depend on the other ten lines, and maybe that's why it doesn't fit yet. That, and the word "believe" is bothering me too. But I'll never change the first two lines, even if I live to fifty.

5:00 on the East Coast

It's just a few more hours until the election returns start coming in. I'm nervous for our country, as you could find out by reading a few of the posts I've tagged with "politics". I'm nervous that when the dust settles, we won't get accountability for the executive, the torture policies, the war profiteering in Iraq, the illegal spying on the phones and the Internet (and targeted surveillance of left and antiwar groups!), the signing statements, the run-up to the Iraq war, the loss of practical governance and good government, the wildly careening budget deficit, the corruption at the highest levels, the collapse of our foreign policy, and the abolition of habeas corpus and fair trials for the usual suspects in our forgotten terrorist prison cells.

This is a housecleaning moment for the United States. Vote for answers. The Republican Congress hasn't asked the tough questions. Vote for a Congress that will. The President has made clear his intention to stay the course in Iraq. Vote for a Congress that will make him change the course.

Crap

I worked all evening on an assignment that was due yesterday. I had the day wrong. And the teacher doesn't accept late work.

My consolation is that I did a good job, and it would've been on time.

Also, I had a positive meeting on my research, so that softens the blow. But I wanted my 5 points.

I've been working hard on Anna Karenina, Part I, Chapters 9 through 11. Should be ready soon.

Busy

I've been pretty busy with school.

I saw the first episode of Firefly the other night. It was rather good.

I made a nuclear pumpkin for Halloween. Sarah took a picture of it. (I did the yield sign too, but I wasn't as pleased with the results.) It is competing with the Batman pumpkin I did last year for my all-time favorite.

The discussion about Christianity in the last post continued.

I guess I should also say that I've been going back and tagging earlier posts that seem to fit into broad categories. So you could have all the Anna Karenina posts on one page, if you like. I've picked a few like books, movies, religion, politics. I'm not sure how to expose these labels to you the reader yet, nor if there's any way you could skip posts you didn't care about (like the Anna Karenina ones). But it's there if you can use it.

I am exhausted.

The wrong end of the problem

[I posted this to a discussion that criticized a liberal writer named Amy Sullivan. I don't really agree with Sullivan's arguments in general, but the post, by Matthew Yglesias, seemed to have grasped the wrong end of the problem of interfaith dialogue, to say the least. Read on for a discussion of minority status, worldview confusion, and hell.]

Following MQ's 1:02 comment, it is very different on my side of the fence. I'm a Protestant in Utah, surrounded by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I and people like me have experienced intolerance based on religion in America, the real kind, not the whiny "War on Christmas" stuff. For example, my relatives have been screened, obliquely but obviously, for their LDS religion or lack thereof in job interviews. At the same time, I recognize the earnest desire of my neighbors to be close to God.

One thing living here has taught me is that there is no dividend in criticizing people based on how wacky you think their beliefs are. As an example of a belief that was foreign to me, roughly, Mormons believe that eternal godhood, eternal family, and eternal procreation await in the best of three heavens for families who are faithful to the church's teachings in their lifetime.

But these beliefs don't seem wacky to them at all: they suffuse the air the Mormons breathe, or if you like, they are shot through the lenses through which Mormons see the world. It all seems very natural to them. If I tried to criticize their belief starting from Protestant premises, my argument would come across as nonsense to them.

And unfortunately, that's the way the post's argument comes across to me.

On the other hand, the evangelical view of this matter is, in fact, completely absurd. ... On this view, a person who led an entirely exemplary life in terms of his impact on the world (would an example help? Gandhi, maybe?) but who didn't accept Jesus as his personal savior would be subjected to a life of eternal torment after his death and we're supposed to understand that as a right and just outcome. That, I think, is seriously messed up. [excerpt from original post]

I bolded the key phrase. You are not supposed to understand. The believers are supposed to understand. Their belief coheres, has its own internal consistency and logic. It all seems absurd to you. It all seems very natural to them.

In fact, this very issue of damnation is taken up early in church history in a notoriously difficult passage in the letter to the Romans (chapters 9 through 11). It takes the view, first, that if God wanted to, he probably could have made a world where some people can not make it to heaven, in order to provide object lessons to the people who can. And, the argument goes, if you think that's unfair, tough, that would just be how it is. "But who are you, O man, to talk back to God?" You criticize what you do not understand. Put another way, given a prior assumption that Christianity is broadly true, your argument is arrogantly presumptive about the way God must work.

The second part of the passage is about what actually happened: God's careful plan, through the history of Israel and the action of Jesus, to instead offer mercy to all: "For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all." This is close to my view of the matter. How "mercy on them all" plays out in the real world is an exercise for the reader.

The meaning of hell in Christianity is not cut and dried. It has been controversial and difficult for 2000 years. But it will only be a confused muddle if you come at it from secular assumptions and ethical systems and presume to judge it from the outside.

In fact, it is the same muddle, in reverse, when Christians try to persuade you that you are in danger of hellfire because "the Bible says so". From their point of view, the argument is practically over. From your point of view, it has barely begun.

Sorry

I subscribe to this blog's RSS feed, so I am aware that several recent posts may have been reposted to your reader. Blogger is in the middle of an upgrade and I finally got on the bandwagon. I am going to change the site's template shortly too, so I hope for your sakes that my posts don't start clogging your reader like a broken copy machine.

Halloween always brings out the crazies, but now you can strike back: why not do something crazy and write a novel? November is National Novel Writing Month, and believe it or not, there is a community of hundreds or even thousands who plan to do just that.

If anyone knows how to cook with shiitake mushrooms, please tell me. I cut some up into a New Orleans pilaf along with some chicken, but I'm at a real loss as to where to go from here. Sarah said they made the kitchen smell like I was cooking diapers, and I thought they came out pretty well.

Goings on

Sarah and I watched two great animated movies yesterday and today: Over the Hedge and Monster House. The voice talent in these things is unbelievable. If I had to pick, I would recommend Monster House first. It is genuinely fear-inducing and funny, and doesn't talk down to you. I almost want to say it wasn't aimed at kids. The animations of humans (I guess this one was mostly motion-capture like Polar Express) were pretty amazing too. Over the Hedge is pretty funny, if not as ingenious.

We just finished the first season (six episodes) of 30 Days. It's by Morgan Spurlock, who did Super Size Me, where he spent a whole month eating nothing but McDonald's: experience a lifestyle foreign to you for 30 days. He lived on the minimum wage for a month, then did shows on a Christian dude who lives as a Muslim in Dearborn, a concerned mom who spends a month binge drinking like her coed daughter, DJs who live as hippies in an eco-friendly commune, and so on. They are thought-provoking and eye-opening shows, more so than their cousins, like Wife Swap. One interesting thing I didn't expect was that the thirty-day length of the experience really gives the subjects time to settle in and for the situation to evolve. These fantasy camp visits to another life turn into something else by the end.

I bought a book at the USU library along the same lines: it's called The Genesee Diary, by Henri Nouwen. It's an account of the 7 months he spent as a Trappist monk. I've never read a Henri Nouwen book all the way through, but I have wanted to for some time now. Cost to me: 25 cents. At the same stock-retirement sale, I bought a hardcover copy of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (I read and liked his Foucault's Pendulum a while back). Cost to me: $1.

There was a Tech Expo at the university today. I got a few leads, but the most positive one was the guy from the NSA. There were two guys at the booth, so I picked the scruffy one instead of the one in the suit. His name was Jack. His last name began with a J too, I think. One of those nondescript names They want you to forget.

The first words out of my mouth were name, degree (MS in Computer Science), and thesis topic (image steganography). He was surprised. He looked over my resume and said I would be a great fit. We talked about the unlimited resources of the agency, its ability to do blue-sky research because it's not in the private sector, the large number of research groups, and so on. He looked over my resume and recommended I get it online immediately, concentrating on expanding my list of computer skills so I pop up right away in their resume search engines. The background checks take 8 months, so I'd better saddle up if I want a job for next year.

As I explained to a friend later, it sounds like an ideal job for me, as long as I'm not spying on Americans.

I've followed that FISA stuff pretty closely, and I'm as sure as a lay person can be that the President essentially ordered the NSA to break the law with fig-leaf legal justifications, and then they did it. Not everyone at NSA, but enough of them, in collusion with AT&T and other carriers, to spy on ungodly amounts of internet and telephone traffic that should have been hands-off according to our surveillance laws.

I didn't bring all this up in my short conversation with Jack. It didn't seem polite. But I'm sure if I apply and they do background checks on me, it'll be pretty easy for them to find all the stuff I've written about them on this blog. Like I told my friend, I hardly know whether to teach people to hide from the NSA and encrypt their email, or to help the NSA spy on America's very real enemies (with proper legal safeguards, like warrants, firmly in place). My hope is that I can make a more informed opinion as I move through the hiring process (or get turned down early, whichever).

Research appeals to me more than software development. I'm not sure yet if a PhD is for me, but I am definitely looking at the companies like IBM, MS, and Google that have a place for research. My thesis process has been frustrating at times, but fabulous when it's working. I enjoy taking the problems one step deeper and gaining insight.

Vote on November 7.