Thoughts Said Aloud

Ironically, as my work becomes more important it seems to me to be of less importance. Counter-intuitive, but even as I do something that influences the decision-makers such that it directly impacts the bottom line, I can't call it rewarding because I have trouble seeing the excitement of the bottom line. I'm ashamed to admit that I feel more passion for sports teams than companies; a Reds loss is harder to take than a quarterly loss, even though the latter could directly impact me by my losing my job!

What's with that?

I think that the key is to see a job as attractive to the extent it does more than just feed yourself and your family. To the extent you give to charity it gives greater meaning to the job, although that requires a constant keen appetite for helping people, something not easily maintained. An example is my in-laws. They are sitting precariously financially, mostly through their own free choice, such that it gives greater motivation to save not only for our retirement but for others' in the family. On the other hand, when my appetite for helping others is not keen I'm more of a "spend it now, before everyone will have a claim to it". Including the government. (Of course, God has the true claim to it all.) Reading Ben Stein's book, poverty looks like "the new black" when social security is cut back drastically and pension plans begin to fail, as he argues will.

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According to Sister Donna Markahm, OP, a strong sense of mission is necessary :

If persons felt that they were simply part of a service delivery system, they were at far greater risk of becoming victims of burnout... regardless of all the efforts made to ensure a healthy workplace environment.

Mission makes it, I suppose. The old way they put out fires was to have the town gather and each person passes a bucketful of water to the one next to them. A service delivery system, if you will, each person sees little impact of their individual efforts but the burning house provides much impetus.

*****
As a lover of things systematized, I'm a sucker for levels and staircases and stepladders and interior castles. The last is a reference to St. Teresa's great work, which desribes the way to holiness, and even though I'm usually drive to despair by this type of literature since I’m inevitably at square one. But this one so far is encouraging in some ways. (Though Steven Riddle mentioned that the levels are not sequential and that you can bounce all around them, which pretty much means that you can't really systemize them can you?) It seems that through the first three levels we have to seek, to put in the sweat, blood and tears, and it’s only the 4th-7th mansions where God takes a very active role, even though there is a lot of suffering in the 6th mansion. This seems perfectly in tune with reality.

* * *

Chesterton had London (see post above), and we have Manhattan. My everyman’s book of the Poetry of New York (redundant title?) still holds sway. I can recall the fresh breeze from our perch atop a double-decker bus and the reassuring rumble and rhythm of bus and tour guide. I recall the bliss of the panels of the New York Public Library periodical room, fested with murals of NYC landmarks, which I pledged to re-visit after the tour was over but had not the time. (Still, sometimes the momentariness of a memory freezes it more permanently than had you lingered.)

I remember the gargantuan breakfasts at the hotel buffet, how good the eggs were, the cereal and the fruit and the omelette and… I never was one much for breakfast, my father being the one for that, and now here I am a fellow afficiando. I was merely behind him chronologically. (The Monday after NY we went to Bob Evans at 1pm for breakfast(!) and it was heavenly.) I suppose we become our fathers, though my mother's pessimism that makes me think we inherit the weak points of both.

I recall all the people swarming outside the hotel. You felt like you were in a movie, like you could just hang out outside the hotel and have entertainment enough. At night the amazing lights of Time Square were like a permanent fireworks display. It was like the mezmering colored lights of a Christmas tree times a thousand.

Boyle's Short Story

It's interesting to see the varied reactions on the 'net to a T.C. Boyle story titled Thirteen Hundred Rats from the latest New Yorker. I surfed the TC Boyle message board and some opined it was actually about rats - i.e. that the moral of the story is dogs are a better companion than rats. That's seems the one thing you can rule out given its mundaneness.

I think he was zeroing in on the idea of replacing children with pets, although one person actually thought it was about our "overpopulation problem", presumably meaning people. (I'm unsure about my own thesis, hence why I went to the forum in the first place. I could just be looking at the story through my "Catholic lens".)

Another person thought it was about how neighbors aren't neighborly enough. But in the story, the man's kids would've likely served the grieving widower better than pets or neighbors, at the very least by staying with him and cleaning his house.

The tell-tale sign of this horror tale is this snippet:

...we saw each other at the lake nearly every day in the summer, shared cocktails at the clubhouse, and basked in an air of mutual congratulation over our separate decisions not to complicate our lives with the burden of children.

The final lines - in which the narrator expresses gratitude for his wife and dogs - is perhaps somewhat ambiguous:

I was very tender with my wife afterward. We went out to lunch with some of the others, and when we got home I pressed her to me and held her for a long while. And though I was exhausted, I took the dogs out on the lawn to throw them their ball and watch the way the sun struck their rollicking fur as they streaked after the rumor of it, only to bring it back, again and again, and lay it in my palm, still warm from the embrace of their jaws.

"Jaws" seems an oddly harsh choice of word. The use of "exhausted" was intentional, implying (when coupled with an earlier anecdote in which he says that when he's home he "likes to give them as much attention as he can") that dogs could be burdensome too.

What interests me is how society has constructed itself such that everything is more burdensome. Perhaps that's a natural consequence of capitalism in which more is never enough. It seems as though a culture becomes more baroque as it becomes broke; would Thoreau's "Walden" have become a classic if not for its prescience concerning the necessity to "Simplify, simplify!"? (In Annie Dillard's latest novel there's a line: "Nothing about them was rich except their days were swollen with time." Do the poor have more time or less time? On the pro: they can disavow yuppie ambitiousness in living through their kids. Con: they may be working two jobs just to get by.)

Kids enjoy much less unstructured play time than tweny years ago with activities involving lots of ferrying to and fro by mom or dad. We have infrastructure-rich public schools in which character can't be taught, meaning the duty falls completely on the parents. Two-earner families create the need for day care and, unfortunately, fast food. Expensive parochial schools and nearly unaffordable undergraduate education complete the picture. It seems as though societies, like Judiasm in the ages before Christ, become more and more burdensome over time.

An in-law, who spoke of the scenerio where very imperfect parents (such as alcoholics and/or mild child abusers) pass on their imperfections to their children, who raise their children the same way and someone asked "How do you break the cycle?", and the in-law's answer was: "don't have children." I said "God". Grace may build on nature, but that doesn't mean grace doesn't have a say now and then.

I remember NRO's Derbyshire's comment about how 50 years ago in Britain children basically raised themselves, at least until they could be shipped off to boarding school. He made it sound like parental neglect was the norm. Is there a middle ground here?

So how to break the cycle of a society that makes having children seem increasingly burdensome?

I like dogs as next as the next guy but the narrator's replacement of dogs for humans feels vaguely apocalyptic, doesn't it?

Pictures--now featuring accompanying text!

I call this "Dog, Interrupted" because it sounds pleasingly pretentious. It was taken with my cell phone on a recent hike through a local park. Here our German Shepherd is eyeing something in the middle distance; perhaps he's attempting to discern the meaning of life or perhaps he's on the lookout for scat to smell. With a little photoshopping perhaps Obi's sloping head could match the slope of the tall grass.

* * *



I'm calling "Hammock in June" since I can't think of anything more pretentious. Here we see the juxtaposition of waves of Juney green with the astonishing white of the hammock. The hammock looks almost like the sloop of a sailship (I'm not entirely sure what the sloop of a ship is, but I liked the alliterative aspect of 'sloop of a sailship'. Perhaps I actually mean sail.

* * *



This is the doorway of an art gallery in NoHo ('north of Houston street') or SoHo ('south of Houston') in Manhattan. On the far left, you might be able to make out a farm scene. Something like a totem pole stands next to it. The girl in the black dress acts as a framing device along with the totem pole.

* * *



This was taken while walking through the Essex House, a hotel on Central Park that I had stayed at many years ago. I like statuary and I like the female form, so female statuary is exceedingly attractive.

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My wife took this shot in Times Square, and I love the look of this guy on the phone in the lower righthand corner. It's the look a native New Yorker might have, frank and perhaps slightly exasperated.

They Don't Make 'Em Like X Anymore

"They don't make 'em like Tim anymore. He was a product of a specific time and place and milieu." -paraphrase of Pat Buchanan speaking of the late Tim Russert on MSNBC

"The sobering irony is this: we, the second generation, have not been able to pass down the special quality of this inheritance to our children, the third generation; and it will not be repeated, ever." - Reid Buckley

Reid Buckley (William F.'s brother) has a book about his family, primarily concerning his mother & father. It's something that wouldn't have interested me much ten years ago, back when I thought brilliance was independent of family or society. I fear my attitude then was unconsciously something along the lines of: Bill Buckley was the shooting star; why read about the non-stars? (Though in his book Reid claims none of the children have quite lived up to William F. Buckley Sr.'s example.)

My then (very American) attitude of seeing anyone as capable of everything has changed such that now I have to guard against a creeping determinism, as if we're only a product of our family and society. Reid Buckley writes, "What we think, feel, do lasts for all time, is genetically and experientially continued in our children, even though our children may have no knowledge of us."

NRO's Uncommon Knowledge Features Tom Wolfe

Good to see Mr. Wolfe backing down from his famous "your soul has died" article. He sounds Walker Percy-like in his seeing language as the crucial dividing line between man and beast.

Amazingly optimistic about America, he's a pessimist about the novel, saying the latter will go the way of the epic poem. He's likely right, which if true would make the hand-wringing over the lack of Catholic fiction academic. No one today is upset by the lack of Catholic epic poets.

FRIDAY, MAY 09, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 5 of 5 Tom Wolfe and America? He loves the place, a position that puts him at odds with much of the charming aristocracy. He’s also an optimist about America — and American greatness. “The biggest problem,” says Wolfe, “is all the people who see a problem.” PERMALINK

THURSDAY, MAY 08, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 4 of 5 Tom Wolfe says evolution ended when man learned to speak — with the dawn of homo loquax. Where status for the beast of the field is determined by power, for man it is determined in innumerable ways because of language. And it is language that gives us rational thought. Wolfe asks, “Have you ever see an animal shrug?” PERMALINK

WEDNESDAY, MAY 07, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 3 of 5 Darwin, Marx, Freud, (E.O.) Wilson? Tom Wolfe says the common thread there is the power of the word — of ideas that change human history in large and obvious ways. PERMALINK

TUESDAY, MAY 06, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 2 of 5 Tom Wolfe says the ideas for his novels grow out of conversation — from what’s really happening. His critics have pounced on this, calling his novels more journalism than literature. But Wolfe shrugs this off: He says he doesn’t write for the “charming aristocracy” — the aristocracy of taste that believes the novelist must aspire to things the masses cannot understand. PERMALINK

MONDAY, MAY 05, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 1 of 5 Tom Wolfe begins by discussing the written word, in its popular forms. The master novelist and journalist says the novel is dying a horrible death, although non-fiction work will continue and the memoir will never die. He then talks about the subject of his latest novel (still in progress): immigration. PERMALINK

Newsweek's Sally Quinn & Communion

You know someone on the left has overstepped bigtime when America, a magazine perceived as being on the "liberal" spectrum of American Catholicism, gently chastizes you. More here, via TB.

I can understand what she did however, albeit I was much younger than she and not a reporter and religion editor. (Fr. James Martin gets it exactly right in that she should know better.) But I recall back in the '90s wanting to go to a mosque (in the same way I wanted to see the Kremlin during the Cold War; enemies fascinate) and not being particularly interested in whether or not I was allowed into one. The reason was because I knew Islam to be false and thus didn't have to honor their rules since they weren't grounded in reality. Of course this was an uncharitable view and completely disrespectful of the human person. It's easy to conflate the views a person holds with that person, as if they are no longer worthy of dignity and respect. Not to mention that I would like what I cherish to be respected even by people who don't believe in the truth of it.

Various & Sundry

Watched Gangs of New York again a couple days ago, an amazing cinematic experience. The visual effect is stunning and beautiful. It feels like you've gone back in time. While featuring gratuitous violence and nudity (thankfully TNT cut or otherwise obscured the nudity in the latest showing), the actor Daniel Day-Lewis is mezmerizing in his role and the visual art of it lets the story off the hook to some extent. (Perhaps if I had the patience to watch Moulin Rouge I would feel similar to the way Ham o' Bone does, who swears by it.) In one particularly memorable scene, set on the night before the New York City riots of 1863, a wealthy man is shown praying for mercy and the two poor tenants praying for justice and/or revenge. Pretty much the story of life here on earth.

National Geographic attempts to separate fact from fiction concerning the film, but after the Gospel of Judas debacle this is sort of like the National Enquirer opining on the truth in The Star.

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The cynical view of politics is that in a democracy politicians vie to buy votes.

This generally occurs by buying off different groups with favors, ideally increasing the number of groups, for the more people you can make dependent on government, the more power and influence and status government officials will have. Never underestimate the importance of status as a source of motivation.

But rarely has the buying been as naked as it has been this year. There is talk on Capitol Hill of a second stimulous package. As talk show host Bob Brinker says, it's no coincindence this is happening during an election year: "Never underestimate the ability of politicians to send money to their constituents during an election year." Don't be fooled into thinking they love you. They love you only for your vote. (If babies in the womb could just vote...).

* * *
In that Vatican URL I posted the other day, the link between poverty and depression was emphasized, the former causing the latter in many people. Which is all the more motivation to help the poor since mental pain is worse than physical. Their needs are also indirectly spiritual since, as Karl Keating wrote in the most recent "This Rock" magazine, if you're struggling to survive then doctrine or learning about God isn't going to be a priority. Keating seemed almost apologetic for all the time he'd spent on apologetics, quoting St. Augustine's "late have I loved you".

To actually see the conditions changes you according to a fellow who went to my high school. In our alumni magazine he writes of going to Cambodia (he received 42 vaccinations beforehand): "I'm going to remember those kids forever. It's something that changes you and you don't really understand why. It gets into you and you just have to do something. It was difficult to leave."

* * *
It's hard to be satisfied with helping the poor simply through income redistribution. Certainly welfare was a system that made things worse. The root cause of poverty in many countries is corrupt leaders; no wonder Richard Brookhiser says our best president was our first. At the very least it's hard to think of anyone in that office since who was as virtuous. So I guess all we can do is give to the poor and ask God to raise up "secular saints" like George Washington in those countries where the rule of law and economic system lay in ruins.

St. Thomas & Bureaucracies

Found the following prayer to my patron St. Thomas, whose feast day is Thursday, a prayer pleasing because it's charitably disposed towards he who received much guff for not believing initial reports of the Resurrection:

O Glorious St. Thomas, your grief for Jesus was such that it would not let you believe He had risen unless you actually saw Him and touched His wounds. But your love for Jesus was equally great and it led you to give up your life for Him. Pray for us that we may grieve for our sins which were the cause of Christ's sufferings. Help us to give ourselves in His service and so earn the title of "blessed" which Jesus applied to those who would believe in Him without seeing Him. Amen.

There seems a parallel in that just as we believe we were the cause of Christ's suffering though we were not there at Calvary driving in the nails, we also believe that He did it for us individually and not just mankind in some collective sense. Perhaps you can't have one without the other since sorrow for sins is magnified when we think He would've done it just for us and not corporately. (Small companies tend to be leaner and more efficient because bureaucracies in large companies obscure a given individual's impact -- mistakes have very little impact on the bottom line and rewards are felt less keenly.)

One difference between saints and sinners is that for saints it is all intensely personal: their sins were grievous because they were the cause of His suffering, and the salvation gained from the Cross was expressly for them.

That Jesus said "Blessed are you who have not seen and still believe" would imply - to continue the business analogy - that working for a large company is no excuse for not making it personal. And that, in fact, there is more merit in striving even when the impact of that striving is not perceived.

It's easy to think of St. Peter and St. Paul in binary terms: one as the positive to the other's negative. Heck, we could draw two tables on a piece of paper and make a parlour game out of their contrasting personalities and ministries. Then, if we get excited enough, we could take the division to its logical conclusion and form two rival factions within the Church, declaring to one and all that which saint you pick for the positive and which saint you pick for the negative reveals volumes about what kind of Christian you are, et cetera . . . It was probably already that way when the Church first started weaving the tapestry of the liturgical year, which is why She has wisely settled that we are to celebrate two different saints and two different martyrdoms in a single feast...If we go by Scripture alone, we notice that their only noteworthy encounter was a clash. Thank God for Tradition, which gives us the light of this Feast with which to interpret that encounter. In Sts. Peter and Paul, we have two pillars with one purpose: holding up the Church which Jesus founded. Knock down one pillar and you threaten the whole Church. If today's Feast were a fable, its moral would be: Unity. - Sancta Sanctis

"SMEAR: Barack Obama is a Muslim; not that there's anything wrong with that." - Terrence of "The Provincial Emails"

Small groups are things that trick us into believing we’re serious about making disciples. The problem is 90% of small groups never produce one single disciple, ever. They help Christians make shallow friendships for sure. They’re great at helping Christians feel a tenuous connection to their local church. And they do a bang-up job of teaching Christians how to act like other Christians in the [in this case] evangelical Christian subculture. But when it comes to creating the kind of holistic disciples Jesus envisioned, the jury’s decision came back a long time ago – small groups just aren't working. - Non-denominational church pastor via Terrence Berres of "The Provincial Emails"

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. - Aldous Huxley

[This] shows two sons demonstrating emergency field stretcher techniques on younger brother. (They tried to move me in it, but one of the poles broke.) - picture caption from Jim of Bethune Catholic that struck me as humorous

It takes but one bad idea to ruin a man or a state. The idea that mankind can control nature, and that nature concerns only matter and energy, has lost us belief in the divine order of the universe. Materialism with all its accompanying isms is a sorry substitute. To put it in religious terms, we have lost the covenant with God; we perforce must practice magic. What is magic but the pretense and effort to control nature toward some private end. That end is inevitably power. -Andrew Lytle via William of Apologia.

Education of Henry Adams Excerpt

Lyrical; like Ray Bradbury in "Dandelion Wine":

Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To the boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest -- smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns,cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes; nothing came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the children knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters of a spelling-book -- the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly revived on the boy's tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and color as sensual pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest. The New England light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens color.

The boy was a full man before he ever knew what was meant by atmosphere; his idea of pleasure in light was the blaze of a New England sun. His idea of color was a peony, with the dew of early morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea, as he saw it a mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli in a June afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples of colored prints and children's picture-books, as the American colors then ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies, were the cold grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy thaws of Boston winter. With such standards, the Bostonian could not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing. After a January blizzard, the boy who could look with pleasure into the violent snow-glare of the cold white sunshine, with its intense light and shade, scarcely knew what was meant by tone. He could reach it only by education.

Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass, or waded in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in the bay, or fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in the salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods and the granite quarries, or chased muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps, or mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills, summer and country were always sensual living, while winter was always compulsory learning.

Cycles in History

I'd always assumed that life for prehistoric man was Hobbesian - brutish, short & ignorant. I try not to be a chronological snob, but one has his limits, at least I did. I had no idea that the earliest cave art was as sophisticated as it was or that it used "the principles of stenciling and Pointillism" and the use of perspective - "a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age". A recent The New Yorker refuted "the Darwinian assumption that the most ancient art was the most primitive":

In that respect Chauvet was a bombshell. Its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennial with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a "classical civilization." For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been "deeply satisfying" - and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

We move on to the 21st century and see how unstable our civilization is by comparison. From a 2003 Vatican conference on the pastoral and medical aspects of depression:

In reflecting upon the history of Western thought my attention is directed towards the cycles that present themselves: they begin with the presentation of vital questions that can be summarised as belonging to three major poles – God, man, the world. Various thinkers try to provide relevant answers, these answers grow to the point of reaching brilliant solutions when it seems that mankind has attained his high point, and then one has the impression that specifically at that moment, which is not necessarily the culminating point in terms of time of that epoch because this can take place at the same time as strong moments, thought decays and becomes weakened in an almost total way.

In ancient Greece, after the great masters of thought such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, there occurred the decadence of the currents of scepticism, epicureanism and stoicism. During the Middle Ages, after the great thinkers who culminated in the Scholastics, Aberlard, St. Anselm, Duns Scotus, St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and others, there came nominalism, led by Occam. Modern thought and its great thinkers – the rationalism of Descartes, the empiricism of Hobbes, Locke and Hume, the idealism of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – was followed by the boredom of the Enlightenment, by deism, pietism, the Aufklärung and the Encyclopaedia, which despite their lack of originality could after a certain fashion be considered essays that provided a universal answer to the fundamental questions of God, man and the world. This decline in thought deteriorated during the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century...

So Many Moral Pitfalls, So Little Time

A few weeks ago I moved some of my 401K into an Emerging Market Fund given the lack of viable investment choices, but now I realize the fund invests in China. I think the primary country is Brazil but China is second. I wonder at the morality of this; If anyone has any links on this I'd be interested. I'm thinking I'm going to have to pull out.

On another front, I own a flex-fuel vehicle and from a national security viewpoint ignorantly thought filling the tank with anything other than pure gas would be a good thing. But then I read this...

Tips to Survive Torture or Bingo (excuse the redundancy)

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to dissolve the bingo bands that bind us (alliteration alert! (<--hey, that was also alliterative! <-Hey...)) in order to form a more perfect union...er, what I mean to say is that I am hereby declaring my independence from bingo and all its pomps and works.

Kim and I have decided to work part time whereby she takes a month and I take a month. This is euphoria-producing since we're both experiencing an advanced case of Bingo Burnout. (Google produces only 21 hits on "bingo burnout" but surely there ought be more. Heck, fellow blogger Jim is a victim too.)

Earlier this evening I tried to explain to Pat that I was quitting bingo because men are naturally lazy. I pointed to studies done of aboriginal tribes in which the men sit around most of the day and the women do all the work. Pat did recognize the truth in this, saying she does all the work at home. This presages a glimmer of understanding in the war between the sexes - men can't help that they're genetically disposed to being lazy.

But in fairness to myself it's not like I felt that way all night. No, I was rarin' to go at 6:45pm (late due to traffic; that's what we call 'bank error in my favor'). I hit the ground running, my wits sharp, my reflexes lightning. I could count change backward & forward. I could deal instant winners blindfolded.

Hindsight suggests part of this was due to the euphoria of having missed bingo last month for reasons unclear. I'm sure they were valid. Oh, yeah, it was my wedding anniversary! (Another bank error in my favor if'n (say like Smock) you're scoring at home.)

Yes I was fresh. Fresh from vacation and fresh from not having volunteered at bingo last month. I was tanned, rested, and ready as Bob Dole declared himself in '96 before he lost handily to Bill Clinton.

Yet around 7:45pm I noticed a slowing of my reaction time. I was counting tickets with unaccountable leadenness. I was slurring "King of the Mountain". And I couldn't think of a snappy comeback to the smart-aleck woman in the upper left corner (Kim, you surely know of who I'm speaking). I was off my game already and still had two hours to go. It wasn't promising.

But I knew what to do. I followed the instruction that I heard on Regis Philbin's show. Jim Carrey was on this morning and he mentioned how it took three hours every day to apply the make-up for one of his roles. It was so bad that he got advice from a CIA or FBI guy on how to endure torture. Part of the advice involved was never - NEVER - deny oneself food. In fact, anytime you think you're going to go mad you should eat potato chips or whatever food you love.

So I went to the kitchen and ate a brownie. It was so good (say like Kevin on "The Office").

I was also later revived when Carmen and Pat called me back to the kitchen in order to move a heavy coffee pot. This (as well as being called upon to open a jar) is something men love to be asked to do. First, it doesn't take long. Second, it's about the only thing men can do that some women can't. See how the sexes complement each other? There would be no war between the sexes if women did the work except for moving heavy objects or opening jars.

I was also amused by Carmen's outrage at being given a bad mark on her cleanliness report card. It was a bum rap for the popcorn maker had been cleaned and the checker had confused us with a previous Thursday. We floor workers bonded yet again with the kitchen workers (as if any further bonding was necessary) like fellow union workers outraged by some management scam.

After-bingo, like after-prom, was much fun. We prepared the hall for Vacation Bible School by moving a bunch of cut-outs. Matthew carried a Princess cutout and I took a pic with my cell phone but he denied usage of it on this blog, or at least he wouldn't cheerfully say 'yes' despite the fact that I told him he would not be identified by name.

Here we see Matthew obscured by a high-tech digital enhancement lest he be identified:

Fortunately Kim and Pat stood in the breach, offering the image below for our entertainment and again demonstrating the superiority of women. Unfortunately it was very dark in the hall by this time as someone had turned the lights off. Kim is holding a beer which makes it all the more priceless:

Consolation-Seeking: The Spiritual Equivalent of Materialism?

I recently read these comments from a letter written by the German poet Rainer M. Rilke:

"But about Spinoza a request: you know about my plans for a talk on how and whether God reciprocates our love. A note I recently read somewhere brought to mind the wonderful relation about Spinoza (I think) established through his insight that the act of loving God is independent of any reciprocal motion on God's part: so that I might not have to go any farther than this one path would take me."

Later I read an encyclopedia entry on Rilke and it mentioned that he came to the conclusion that because of God's immanence, man and God have need of each other.

This is background to how and whether people feel God's love, called by St. John of the Cross (and many others) as "consolations". If we seek consolations as materialistic women seek expensive shopping trips from their husbands, are we any different from one of the characters in the movie "Sex in the City", which Ross Douthat takes to task in the latest National Review?

[This] is what the movie is: a devotional for conspicuous consumers (“I’ve died and gone to real-estate heaven,” Carrie exhales), with mates and children reduced to mere accessories, flesh-and-blood equivalents of the Right Dress, the Right Purse, and the Right Apartment. “Women come to New York for the two L’s: Labels and Love,” Carrie opines, absurdly, early in the film, but from the shoe-closet scene on it’s clear which L matters most. Save for Nixon, the finest actress in the troupe, who wrings real humanity out of Miranda’s marital struggles, the women treat their men primarily as the means to a material end, whether it’s comfortable domesticity, high-end shopping, or really great sex.

The Sex in the City gals use rich men as a means to a material end; we have a rich God, and there's surely a tendency to want to use Him as a means to consolation.

Cardinal Egan...

...talks about definitions:

No one likes definitions of deeply human realities. For a definition can be cold and remote, or at least seem to be such. When what is defined is deeply human, one feels the need for a bit of poetry in the defining, lest the wonder of the defined be somehow lost.

Marriage is a case in point. It is a permanent, exclusive relationship of a man and a woman who seek fulfillment in acts of love, and especially in that act of love which in the ordinary course of events leads to the procreation of offspring. The definition is accurate, but the poetry is missing. Nor should this be a surprise. A definition of motherhood would never do the reality justice, and the same might be said of a definition of patriotism and so much else that is deeply human and inevitably entangled in feelings and emotions.

Of late, there is in our society a movement to change the definition of marriage. The reason, however, is not a lack of poetry in the timeless and classic definition, as some would suggest, but rather a desire to make marriage into something it is not...I might want to be considered an angel and to be recognized as such. Still, in point of melancholy fact, there are elements of the angelic that are simply not to be found in me.