"Nulla dies sine linea - but there may well be weeks."
Walter Benjamin, Post No Bills
It's true: your spouse never stops surprising you.
Today I learned that my wife of seven years can't stomach the sight of Silly Putty. We got one of the little eggs of silly putty as the toy with a kid's meal when we ate out today, and when I opened it for my little boy, my wife visibly grimaced, shuddered, and turned away, covering her mouth with her hand.
I mean, really, is Silly Putty that vile? I always liked it. Apparently she feels differently.
I didn't know that until today.
"That very night in Max's room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are."
Maurice Sendak
Where the Wild Things Are
Bono said there was a silence that comes to a house when no one can sleep; but the greater silence, in my experience, comes when everybody but me is asleep. The not-quite-three-year-old who didn't take a nap today dropped off to sleep with little trouble, and a diligent but exhausted wife was in bed before even her son.
I am sure that it is quieter when they are here and asleep than it is when I am home alone. Perhaps because I tread more softly as not to wake them. Yet even the animals seem to keep their peace at such times as this.
Add to this the still of winter outside my window, and you have a rare kind of quiet, the kind that makes standing at the sink doing the dishes a contemplative act. Going over my list of tasks for the night as the sink fills, a strange content falls on me. Perhaps because of the stillness in the house. But it is strange insofar as it comes when so many mundane tasks lay before me.
These are not the things that get in the way of life, it finally occurs to me. They are the stuff of life itself. Washing dishes and picking up toys and sweeping floors and tending to paperwork are necessary and natural parts of living in a corporeal world. And there is a shift in my perspective that makes sense of the content. If this world of matter and energy is not second-rate, if the creation is truly loved, then every element of existence in it, every necessary part of making one's way through a mortal life in it, every meal and every shower, every bit of the work of my hands by which I make my living and every pause I take to enjoy its many beauties, is a hallowed act. Like a monk scrubbing the monastery floor, washing the dishes becomes almost an act of worship.
If even so mundane a task as this can be hallowed, what then, O Lord, is unimportant in Thy sight?
I finish the dishes, wipe the counter clean, and set to a general tidy of the kitchen. In a pile of flyers that has come in the mail, I find a new issue of a magazine I subscribe to; immediately sidetracked (my wife will testify I'm prone to it), I spend several minutes perusing the headlines. And then I snap back to the task of tidying with an almost comic feeling of guilt. Not the normal I-should-stop-goofing-off guilt that comes when you get distracted doing monotonous work - a little greater than that. But not a heavy moral guilt, either. Rather, the sheepish kind of guilt that you feel when you find your mind drifting to last night's movie during the Sermon.
The countless toys in the living room don't even seem to test my patience when I get to them, but I don't notice this. Not until I am halfway through cleaning the first of two rabbit cages do I realize that I am not even hurrying. I've stopped to pet Dusty, rubbing the top of his head with the back of my index finger. He presses into it; rabbits love that, even though they almost always look frightened. This chore is not in the way. It is not an interruption, as it almost always has been on any other night. It is not a duty that delays a thing; it is the thing itself, right now, in this moment.
If this, too, is worth doing as unto You, what dare I deem trivial?
The rabbits tended, I sit before my laptop in the living room and tend to an insurance matter. I find myself being unusually thorough. It takes only a few minutes, but in that time all three cats have gathered in a circle around me, waiting on their nightly treat that is, in fact, just a vehicle for a medication that only one of them needs.
Treats for the cats. Then finely, dare I say lovingly chopped orange pepper for Timmy the Crab. For what are pets, after all, but creation entrusted to our care in a special arrangement? 'Until you have allowed your heart to love an animal,' Anatole France said, 'a part of your soul remains unawakened.'
Frustration and annoyance just didn't show up tonight. Could every day be like this?
The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night, and at the last a perfect end; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be with us this night, and for evermore. Amen.
Just watched the promo video for the iPad last night.
How is it that Apple does not yet own the world?
Nearing the seven-year mark, I can't help but smile for where I find myself now, against all prophecies and warnings of boredom and mediocrity and divergence. Those naysayers are for me like so many doomsday preachers, screaming from a soapbox and barely able to contain their eagerness to say I told you so. Like I'm just not even really in the particular world they are lamenting the end of.
It isn't hope or optimism that comes when I think of it. Rather it is the exhilarating quiet that falls on you when you see that things are in their place. The comfort of a confidence in things to come. The fermented fondness for the scars of storms weathered and the matured appreciation for the DVD and bag of chips of a Friday night that is blissfully routine.
So Pat Robertson has said his piece regarding this earthquake in Haiti. Apparently, it was their own fault for being such bad people, and God is punishing them, like he punished America for hedonism with 9/11. And once again, his word is being taken by many as the "Christian" stance on the matter.
And I think I can see why. There were two striking comments made over on atheistrev.com regarding this guy, and they're worth attention.
First: "Pat Robertson has a long history of making this sort of claim, most of which have only contributed to his influence and resulted in little blowback from mainstream Christians."
And second: "I understand that many Christians are reluctant to admit that Pat Robertson and others like him speak for them, but this does not change the fact that he does indeed speak for them."
The thing is, both of these statements are completely true. Which is a problem. Why do comments like his receive such little blowback? Of all the Christians I know, not one of them agrees with Robertson on the "reasons" for this earthquake. At best, they do try to take the stance that "he doesn't speak for us".
But he does. He is speaking for us, whether we like it or not, whether we agree with him or not. He makes these statements under the banner of the faith we profess. And we are, for all intents and purposes, powerless to stop him. So then, what do we do?
If you can't stop someone from speaking for you, then start speaking more loudly for yourself. And it will take more than a reactionary "No, I don't agree with Pat Robertson". If we do not share his stance on Haiti, then what stance do we take?
It seems to have gone unnoticed by the world that churches everywhere are calling madly for donations and support to go directly to relief efforts in Haiti (of note is ACT International). And yet somehow, one man's comments have constituted "the Christian stance".
We would do well to ignore Robertson and spend more time just helping. The authentic Christian stance should not be "Pat Robertson is an idiot" (though that may well be true). The Christian stance ought instead to be "Hustle with the help, because a lot of people in Haiti are suffering".
Do what you can.
Very often, the difficult decision that a parent faces is not "Do I run over there and physically stop my child, or do I try to discourage this behaviour verbally?" but rather "Do I run over there and stop my child, or do I quickly but quietly grab the camera?"
Usually, it comes down to a question of sequence. First, photograph the behaviour, because it is hilarious. Then put a swift and stern stop to it and tell the kid to never, ever do it again.
I love being a dad.
It is as though we forget, in winter, what a thunderstorm feels like. Not in the sense that we can't recall it, but in the sense that it leaves our minds and must be consciously recalled. There's that part after the rain has started, but is just spitting a little, not really coming down, as though the clouds haven't yet committed. And then there's my favourite part, that swift crescendo when the sky opens up all at once, the air is suddenly thick with water and the massive drops, moving earthward with real force now, make impact with elegant violence.
It is the closest thing to the feeling of prayer that I know of. If someone were to ask me if I find prayer relaxing, I would have to give them an emphatic no. It is not. At least not usually. And why should it be? To be a point of intersection of Heaven and Earth, to stand on the fault line, is not something we should expect to be calming. It is elegant and violent and tumultuous and wrenching and pulls you apart like it's making room between the two halves for something. Like a freight train passing right through the middle of you. The beauty of it is astounding.
Of course, individual results may vary.
I knew I should have just gone to bed last night. And I certainly should have known I would spend more than half an hour down there when I headed to my office in the basement, but I don’t know that it would have mattered. It had been too long already.
The one string had been broken for I don’t know how long. Over a year, I’m sure. I hadn’t even taken the thing out of its case for ages, let alone played it. At times I wanted to, but the broken string slammed the door on that, and on any given day, buying new strings just wasn’t on the agenda. And the room in the basement was so packed and cluttered that the guitar wasn’t even easy to get to.
But now a couple of the things that were filling that room have disappeared, out of my way. And with a package of new strings that my lovely wife bought me for Christmas (thank you, honey) on another good friend’s advice (thank you, too) in my hands, last night seemed just fine. It didn’t feel right, in fact, to wait any longer.
And so I played. Remembering, with difficulty, songs and arrangements I’d loved at one time or another. Ignoring the sting in my uncalloused fingertips and the fret buzz I couldn’t quite get my hand to eliminate during bar chords. Singing like there was no one else in the house, even though there was.
I never put the guitar back in its case. I found the old guitar stand, stood it in the corner, and let the instrument sit upright on it, displayed, in full view from anywhere in the room, something important that had been brought back from disrepair.
And important things have fallen into disrepair. Not all of them are as simple to fix. Some are not fixed with paint or metal or just-wanted-to-see-how-you’re-doing phone calls or long letters explaining where we stand, though those events might be a necessary part. There is a necessary plunge into the unknown that, on any given day, just doesn’t seem to be on the agenda. And the plunge doesn’t come for Christmas or a birthday. You have to lace on your boots and step out into the cold and go get it.
It doesn’t feel right to wait much longer.
If Ikea isn't a Behavioural Study masquerading as a furniture retailer, it should be.
First, their shopping carts. Most have two fixed wheels at the back, and will only travel in more or less the direction they're pointed. Not at Ikea. All four wheels on the cart swivel, which means you can point it straight ahead of you but sidestep to the left or right, and the cart still moves with you.
For three hours in that place today, all I could think was 'This is awesome. I feel like I'm flying a Viper'. And it would almost be a shame if there wasn't somebody watching on a surveillance camera, noticing how I would take unnecessary turns and circle things off-axis for no practical reason, all the while with my toddler in the cart.
Second, store layout = rat maze, complete with hidden shortcuts for the extra-smart. Not much more to say there.
Of course, then there's the assembly of Ikea products. I wonder sometimes exactly where in the packaging they put the camera. The funny thing about Ikea directions is that they actually do tell you exactly how to put the thing together, but they don't warn you about the subtle little never-in-a-million-years-would-you-notice detail in the picture that you've overlooked, and which won't become apparent until six pages later and usually involves a lot of disassembly and bad language to correct. Combine that with the fact that fourteen of the nineteen parts look virtually identical to anyone who isn't a mechanical engineer, and Ikea's senseless and irrational bias against the use of written instruction dissuades them from labeling the parts with stickers or something that say 'A' or 'LEFT', and you have hours of entertainment for clandestine observers, and heaps of fascinating data for psychological analysis.
Seriously, Ikea. If you're not watching us, it's a tremendous waste of an incredible chance.
You know, I had planned on making a first post to this new version that described all that was new within it. But I'm not going to. You will find the new features on your own. And probably a few inadequacies, too, so there's really no point in making any fanfare.
So let's forget about what version 2.0 does. What it is perhaps is of far more significance. It is a new beginning, a redefinition. This is not a makeover, not a facelift. Rather, it is as though the heart and soul of Broken Parabolic have been taken out of a sick and dying body and put into a younger, stronger, and more capable one, one which might stand a chance of letting it become what it needed to. Not in the manner of the young and strong elbowing the aging and weakened out of the way, but rather like a changing of the guard, the fresh spelling off the stalwart but tired.
And it feels good to welcome in this new form. I've been told by those who know me closely that I sometimes hang on to things for far too long, be they material or not. I had not thought of myself as resistant to change, but it turned out that I was. One might even say that I sometimes developed an irrational affection for things of no real significance.
Perhaps I'm getting over that.
Version 2.0 is not about a website. It's about finding my feet, seeing the path ahead, and the way in which I might walk it. It is a part of becoming.
And that is one of the many beauties of creating. You cannot create without recreating yourself, at least a little. Because when you are finished your creation, you will have become the person who created it. It sounds redundant, but it isn't. 'Helical' might be a better word.
So here's hoping the transition goes smoothly. But it probably won't.