bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Parental discretion is advised.

    My grandmother, bless her heart, is one of those people who goes about her day with a song in her heart.  Or at least on her lips, that is; she is constantly humming cheerfully, filling up the quiet with some little tune, at least every time I have ever been around her.  And that includes the time I spent three weeks with her in Europe and North Africa, when I was fourteen, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just something she does to drown out the chatter of all my relatives at holidays.

    I don’t know what she hums.  Just little tunes I don’t recognize. 

    I think perhaps my grandmother is smarter than I am.   Because I have inherited this from her, and I notice it more and more now that, instead of trying to wrap my mind around sets of n + 1 nonlinear partial differential equations, I’m at home doing things like cleaning out closets and cutting up raw chickens. 

    Only I never learned to channel it into humming.  And my brain is full of the music that I fed it when I was in college.  (Trying to wrap my mind around different partial differential equations, among other things.  I blame math.)

    This has some unpleasant results, for example, when I am standing at the kitchen counter spreading peanut butter on pieces of toast for my two hungry children who are standing right in front of me and I catch myself belting out

    I got big balls

    Big old balls

    Balls the size of grapefruit, balls the size of pumpkins, yes sir

    which is, of course, the first few lines of "Tiger Woods," by Dan Bern. Which just may be one of the catchiest progressive-rock tunes that ever emerged from the nineteen-nineties.  Which is, of course, the problem.  (link to audio)

    If I am really on my toes, I catch myself before I get to the part that goes

    I got a friend whose goal in life was to one day go down on Madonna

    That’s all he wanted, that was all; to one day go down on Madonna

    But let’s face it friends.  Am I really on my toes?  No.  I am not.  At these moments I ask myself:  Does Heather B. Armstrong, of Dooce, have this problem?  And then I think: If she does, I bet she doesn’t feel guilty about it.

    It’s not that every song I find myself singing aloud is sexually explicit or celebrates drug use or is otherwise unsuitable for children.   There are a few sweetly innocent songs too.  Like "I Love You, A Bushel And A Peck" from Guys and Dolls!  (If you can ignore the fact that the character who sings it is a burlesque-show stripper.)  And I think there are some… um… Beatles songs in there.

    Oh well.  At least I can blame some of this on my husband.  Cue piano:

    He sees his children jump off the stations one by one

    His woman and his best friend in bed and havin’ fun

    Ha ha!  No, actually, the Jethro Tull stuff — unlike, say, AC/DC, yes, thanks, honey — doesn’t tend to be in a key that I can easily sing in front of the kids.   But now that I’m learning the recorder, well.  Stand back.

    (No, actually there is some stuff equally burned into my brain that I can sing in front of the kids without embarrassment, at least until they turn thirteen or so, stuff that I have programmed into the manual override on my Brain Jukebox.  Thank goodness, yes, for They Might Be Giants.)

    This is, I think, related to the phenomenon that Dave Barry described so well in his book Dave Barry’s Bad Songs:  "[S]ongs evoke powerful feelings, both positive and negative.  I think the negative ones tend to be stronger because, as I noted in the preintroduction warning to this book, your brain, as part of its lifelong effort to drive you insane, insists on remembering the songs you hate and playing them over and over." 

    Except in this case, it’s part of my brain’s effort to warp my children, or perhaps even my grandchildren, who will someday grow up and reminisce to each other.  You remember that song that grandma used to sing?  You know, every year when she was carving the Thanksgiving turkey?  How’d that one go?

    Oh, that one?  Wait, wait, it’s coming back to me now.  What was it?  AC/DC?  Ah yes.  (Sings) "Dirty deeds and they’re done dirt cheap, dirty deeds and they’re done dirt cheap."  Remember how she always got that fake Australian accent when she sang that song?

    How could I forget?  Hey, remember that other one about the fat-bottomed girls? 

    Oh, yeah.  I can almost hear her now. 

    (pause) Hey, turn off that radio, will you?  And pass the turkey.

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  • This sounds like a yummy idea.

    Go to this post at The Girl Who Ate Everything and scroll wayyyy down, past the Hamsteroids, past the deep fried cheese, past the two tasty-looking pizzas, and get to the dessert:

    Even though we were totally stuffed from eating all the pizza, we decided we could shove in a dessert if we moved around our stomach contents a bit.  The crepe cake ($5) of about 10 crepes layered with light cream was a nice way to end the meal as it wasn’t heavy.  The flavor was milder than I would’ve liked (because I would’ve liked…more sugar), but the texture was great.  Each layer was soft and easily gave way to my spoon, but the cake held its structure until the last few bites.  It was rather impressive; I expected the layers to moosh apart and look like a mess.

    The picture looks yummy.  I’m tempted to try this as it sounds like a fairly uncomplicated, yet yummy, dessert:  cook up a bunch of crepes, ahead of time, layer them with (sweetened) whipped cream, and drizzle the stack with chocolate sauce or maybe raspberry. 

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  • “This form of worship has more than just a cerebral or emotional appeal. It appeals to the whole person.”

    Orthodox Christianity is attracting converts in the Twin Cities:

    To outsiders, the Orthodox churches — Russian, Greek, Serbian, Ukrainian, Romanian — that dot the landscape might seem like exotic hallmarks of a fast-fading ethnic past.

    In fact, an influx of converts is rejuvenating the Orthodox Church, here and around the country. Today, converts make up about half the students at the nation’s two largest Orthodox seminaries.

    The converts interviewed in the article cite telling examples of what attracted them:

    Lotti first encountered Orthodoxy as a college student when, on a lark, he worked for a summer at a Russian Orthodox monastery in Finland. "I thought the liturgy was strange but very beautiful," he says.

    "Almost every service included Psalm 51, the great penitential psalm: ‘Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love; according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.’ "

    "At first, I thought the repetition was crazy," Lotti says. "But after a week, I realized that I had memorized the psalm, which asks for repentance and rejoices in it. It had seeped into my consciousness, and the words became my own."

    People are drawn to the Orthodox Church for many reasons. But the primary attraction for converts such as the Lottis is a direct connection to the spiritual wisdom of the past. Michael Lotti gives examples: the ancient monastic tradition, the seven sacraments, the opportunity to have a spiritual guide or father confessor. "It’s like a spiritual ocean in which you can go deeper and deeper," he says.

    …

    The Rev. Harry Pappas of St. Mary’s Greek Orthodox Church in south Minneapolis says beauty plays a central role in Orthodox worship. "The integration of art, architecture, music, incense, vestments — it’s highly multi-sensory," he says. "This form of worship has more than just a cerebral or emotional appeal. It appeals to the whole person."

    Let’s see.  The attractions of Orthodox Christianity include repetitive prayer, connection to the past, a monastic tradition, seven sacraments, confession to a priest, art, architecture, music, incense, vestments.

    Tell me again why modernizing the liturgy is a good idea?

    "Unlike the old-time sanctuaries, which changed no more than the steeple, the environment in a thoroughly modern Catholic church is apt to change from week to week. And not just the flowers. Even the altar and the flexible seating can move. This change arises from a philosophy that the liturgy changes with both the seasons and the circumstances of the people."

    Uh-huh. 

    Side note.  The site linked in the above paragraph defines "liturgy" as "Greek for ‘work of the people,’" and I have no doubt that they mean to make a point by that.  An actual definition, rather than an etymology, would have been more useful.  From what I can tell, "liturgy" comes directly from a Greek word meaning simply "public service," and more distantly, from "work in a public building."  Unsurprisingly, "public building" comes from a word meaning "people," but that does not mean that "liturgy" is "Greek for work of the people."

    Etymological abuse bugs me.

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  • I’ll have to remember this one. Or maybe not.

    Neal at Literal-Minded parses "need to pee like a racehorse" and in the process mentions a way he likes to tease his kids:

    Of course, if need to pee like a racehorse is ambiguous in this way, so is need to pee really bad. I have fun attaching the really bad down low instead of up high, producing dialogues like this:

    Doug or Adam: I need to pee really bad!
    Neal: OK, go pee really bad!

    Now that I think about it, I suppose that’s not such a good thing to tell little boys.

    Nope.

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  • Quit harshing my mellow, man.

    Kathy Sierra writes a fascinating post:  "Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain." 

    The three reasons are:

    1. Mirror neurons: 

      It’s what these neurons do that’s amazing–they activate in the same way when you’re watching someone else do something as they do when you’re doing it yourself! This mirroring process/capability is thought to be behind our ability to empathize, but you can imagine the role these neurons have played in keeping us alive as a species. We learn from watching others. We learn from imitating (mirroring) others. The potential problem, though, is that these neurons go happily about their business of imitating others without our conscious intention.

      Think about that…

    2. Emotional contagion:

      "…social scientific research has largely confirmed the thesis that affect, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour can indeed spread through populations as if they were somehow infectious. Simple exposure sometimes appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur. This is the social contagion thesis; that sociocultural phenomena can spread through, and leap between, populations more like outbreaks of measels or chicken pox than through a process of rational choice."

    3. The nature of happy people:

      The idea [of skeptics] seems to be that "happy people" implies those who are oblivious to the realities of life, in a fantasy of their own creation, and without the ability to think critically. The science, however, suggests just the opposite.

      Neuroscience has made a long, intense study of the brain’s fear system–one of the oldest, most primitive parts of our brain. Anger and negativity usually stem from the anxiety and/or fear response in the brain, and one thing we know for sure–when the brain thinks its about to be eaten or smashed by a giant boulder, there’s no time to stop and think! In many ways, fear/anger and the ability to think rationally and logically are almost mutually exclusive.

    Kathy’s conclusion is "Be around the change you want to see in the world."  It’s a good reminder, too, that we do a disservice to the people around us when we coddle, feed, and broadcast our own negative attitudes.

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  • Disclaimer: I’m a little “biased.”

    Towards the First Amendment, that is.

    But with a single comment like this, any politician destroys nearly all good will and respect I might have for him.

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  • Now that’s foodblogging.

    A recipe for self-medication at Dooce.

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  • Bilingual signage.

    I stopped in Sears today, sans kiddos, to get a couple of pairs of maternity pants.  It’s been a while since I shopped there; the place has a new look; and one new thing I noticed was that all the signs for the different departments had a Spanish subtitle in smaller print.  For example:

    JUNIORS

            jovenes

    and

    WOMENS

    tallas especiales

    and

    MISSES

    ropa para damas

    The first thing I thought when I saw those signs was:  "Thank goodness.  Now I know what those categories actually mean."

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  • Harsh truths about Catholicism.

    From holyoffice’s livejournal:

    I, a card-carrying Catholic (in fact, I got my Popery ID card renewed just yesterday; you can do it at Triple A), would like to step in and offer some "red meat" for both sides to chew on.

    The problem, as I see it, is that there are a lot of misconceptions about the Catholic Church – but many of these misconceptions are actually held by Catholics themselves. So, in the interest of furthering a sense of understanding with my separated brethren, here are some honest-to-goodness, take-the-log-from-my-eye truths about Mama Church. But I will also do my part to correct some mistaken impressions about the church.


    CLAIM: Catholic belief is unscriptural.

    This is true. During every Mass, there are two readings from the Old Testament and two from the New Testament, including (always) a Psalm and a reading from one of the Gospels. But this is all for show. In fact, Catholics are forbidden from reading the Bible. The only Catholic who is allowed to own a Bible is the pope, and he won’t tell the rest of us what it says.

    There’s lots more.  h/t Orthonormal Basis, who has a spiffy new blog header of which I very much approve.

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  • The pause that refreshes.

    It’s Friday night.  What wild good times are rolling around the bearing household?

    The kids are watching a movie.

    Mark is building a bench for the mudroom.

    I am sitting on the futon blogging and enjoying a rare treat:  Mark brought me home a can of Coke from the vending machine at work.

    He also brought home two 12-packs of Guinness, full of widgety goodness, which he won in an office bet.   Technically that is a rarer treat.  I already had one of those.  (One bottle.  Not one 12-pack.)

    So, not bad for a Friday night.

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  • Holy crow’s ears, Batman.

    Heh.

    h/t Jimmy Akin. 

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  • An honest and raw look at the difficulties of natural family planning.

    In the comments on this post at Amy Welborn’s.   

    The whole discussion is excellent.  Comments from people whose experience was great, from those whose experience was not so great and so they quit, from those whose experience was not so great but they didn’t quit, from priests and seminarians, from people with medical difficulties, from NFP instructors.

    We’ve experienced NFP mostly positively, with a few very trying times during my brief periods of lactational amenorrhea.   All our pregnancies were planned, but then, we tend to practice NFP pretty conservatively, and Mark tends to be more conservative than I do about defining the edges of the fertile time (which, anecdotally from talking to people, seems to be less stressful on a marriage than when it’s the wife who wants to be more conservative). 

    One thing I can say unreservedly is that, although it has at times been very challenging, I don’t think we’ve ever been through a time when contraception has looked like a better option.   I can think of a few times when TOTAL ABSTINENCE has looked like a better option. 

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