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].

  • Entertaining Wikipedia article (unless you’re afraid to fly).

    Often, when our family takes a road trip, I bring along something to read aloud to Mark — usually a nonfiction book. I like books that spur conversation between us, particularly pop-science books that we can argue about and analyze. This is fun even when the book is really bad. On the way down from Minneapolis to Ohio last week, we read The Psychopath Test, which turned out to be perfect road-trip reading — entertaining, not entirely convincing (meaning that we had a chance to argue about it) and also, in general, food for thought.

    I didn’t have a book for the way back up, so I made do by following trails of links in Wikipedia to articles about things we didn’t know. We started from an article about the Mars robot that landed earlier, and from there to previous Mars lander missions, including the one that famously failed because somebody forgot to convert newtons to pounds-force — a mistake roundly mocked by everyone EXCEPT former engineering students because deep down, we all know THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I. If my life had been only a little bit different, I too might have broken NASA.

    Anyway, from there we went to a list of disasters caused by metrication errors, and that led us to what must be (since I love engineering failure stories) the most entertaining Wikipedia article I have ever read in my life: the story of the “Gimli Glider.”

    It is only entertaining if you know how the story ends, so let me give you the spoiler first. EVERYBODY SURVIVED, NO MAJOR INJURIES. There you go. Now the teaser: this is the story of an airliner that ran out of gas at 41,000 feet because Canadians had just started converting to the metric system. Now you can read and enjoy.

    I read this aloud to Mark, and we agreed that it could never have been made into a true-life disaster movie because no one would believe the chain of events. The aircraft was nearly uncontrollable — but by a remarkable coincidence, the captain was an experienced glider pilot. The first officer proposed landing at the nearest runway, which happened to be at a nearby closed air force base — which he knew well because he had once served there as a Canadian air force pilot. But he didn’t know that the air force base had been converted to a race track complex. Or that there was a race going on (think NASCAR, but Canadian) and the runway area was full of cars and campers. Also that there were cars racing on the runway.

    Anyway, if you thought the “Sully in the river” story was gripping, I think you should try this one.

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  • A different image of women’s fitness.

    Pausing on my long drive back from Ohio to Minneapolis to share a link: Check out this inspiring and interesting article on Olympic powerlifter Holly Mangold.

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    2 comments on A different image of women’s fitness.

  • Considering the method of protest, and setting aside the cause..

    I thought this was a good deconstruction of the notion of a “kiss-in” protest. It comes from Ann Althouse, who is on the record as a supporter of same-sex marriage. The title of the post is “A kiss-in should be a love-in or it shouldn’t be done at all.”

    Protests express opposition and therefore usually anger. Expressing love is inconsistent with anger. So if you’re going to use a gesture of love for protest, you’ve got a special problem. Appropriating an expression of love for hostile purposes is a dangerous matter…

    I’m looking at pictures from the Chick-fil-A kiss-in. These were people who wanted to demonstrate support for same-sex marriage. (I agree with them on that issue, by the way.) As their form of protest, they chose kissing — individuals of the same sex, kissing in restaurants that are associated with opposition to same-sex marriage. So the idea was, go where you think you are not loved — even though there’s no evidence that Chick-fil-A treats gay customers with less respect and friendliness than straight customers — and do something you think will upset them.

    Now, restaurants generally don’t want anybody making out, so you’ve chosen behavior that would be disruptive to a restaurant’s business whether the kissing couples are same or opposite sex. The form of expression is offensive and not like the old civil rights demonstrations where black people sat at lunch counters and were not served. They simply acted like customers — good customers — and the only reason it worked as a demonstration was that the store only served food to white people, the policy the protesters very successfully demonstrated was wrong. Kissing at Chick-fil-A does nothing to show what’s wrong about anything Chick-fil-A is doing. It’s just displaying hostility to the place.

    And it’s displaying hostility with kissing. So what have they done? They’ve perverted kissing, which should be an expression of love. Ironic, considering that the gay rights movement seeks to dispel the belief that homosexuality is perverted.

    It’s a challenge to protest with gestures of love. It can be done, but it can’t be done with hate or love is not love.

    This is a very important insight, and it is one that political and social activists of all kinds ought to take to heart. It can’t be done with hate or love is not love.

    In fact, we don’t even have to be talking about outright “hate” for the principle to apply. John Paul II famously wrote that the opposite of loving a person isn’t hating him, it’s using him. So it can’t be done to use someone, either, or love is not love. Even using him for something quite small and inconsequential destroys whatever traces of love there might be in the act of use.

    I am reminded a little bit of how, in an argument between a Christian and some other person, occasionally you’ll hear the Christian end the argument with something along the lines of “I’ll pray for you.” Quite possibly it’s a sincere statement, but the context leaves it tainted. To pray for someone is an act of love, true; normally to express an intention to pray for someone is an expression of love; but you get the feeling that this particular expression is primarily an attempt to score a rhetorical point. If that’s so, then this love is not love. It’s a kind of use: using the deity, invoking God’s name and the Christian’s intimate relationship with Him, as a way of saying “You are soooo wrong that only God has any hope of rescuing you from your benightedness.”

    Now, you may say that there is nothing illicit about praying for someone who is misguided, and therefore there can be nothing wrong with announcing your intention to do so. Perhaps there is nothing inherently wrong with making such an announcement, but you’d better be quite certain your intentions are pure as the driven snow — and consider what is the point of announcing that you’re about to take part in a charitable act, instead of just quietly going away and doing it, with the door shut.

    The lessons here apply to all kinds of protests, including the kind that you or I might make. If you’re using love to make a point, tread carefully… because love is the opposite of use. So it is pretty hard to “use” it and allow it to remain real love.

     

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  • Exercise can make you fat. So what?

    This Daily Mail article has been getting around — it’s a popular-press take on the theme “exercise can make you fat.”

    I am always kind of interested in how this particular idea gets reported in the popular press, because it strikes me that the tone is very important. Too much emphasis on the difficulty of losing weight through exercise alone, and the article can come across as saying “Why even bother increasing your activity when it is going to make weight loss harder?”

    And if the article suggests tips for encouraging weight loss while exercising, it runs the risk of making exercise seem even more complicated by introducing extra “rules” to worry about. The Daily Mail article, for example, suggests

    • Choosing “fairly vigorous aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling,” over weight training
    • Fasting for two to four hours before a workout
    • Instead of energy bars or energy drinks, consume “a bowl of porridge a couple of hours before a workout” and drink a half-liter (think two glasses, folks) of water with a tiny pinch of salt an hour before and during exercise. (Well, being Brits, the Mail also suggested drinking “squash” as an alternative to water. This confused me momentarily, but Wikipedia is here to help you.)
    • Choose intense, 20- to 30-minute workouts over longer, more leisurely ones.

    There is not a whole lot here, but I think the article could have been a little more helpful by repackaging it to counteract some of the most-often-perceived barriers to exercise.

     

    • You need less time than you might think for a good workout. A 20-minute, vigorous workout might be as effective as a much longer one.
    • You don’t need to have eaten anything just before a workout.
    • Skip the energy bars and energy drinks. Drink water.

     

    Anyway, it seems a good enough time for me to reiterate my personal advice regarding the interaction of exercise with nutritional behavior.

     

    • Don’t start an exercise program and a food-restriction program at the same time. Pick one and spend a few months on it before adding the other.
    • I recommend starting with exercise. If you’re starting from sedentary, begin with either two 20-minute sessions a week, or 5 minutes every day — whichever makes more sense depending on what you are doing and what fits into your schedule. Work up gradually from there. “Gradually” means “slowly enough to give your life a chance to remold around the exercise sessions as a permanent feature of your schedule.”
    • Evaluate your progress in the fitness program based on performance, not loss of weight or inches. You are not allowed to quit or change your fitness program because of any observations whatsoever about weight gain/loss.
    • The first metric of performance is “Did I show up for my scheduled session or not?” Once you have “showing up” pretty well down pat, you can move on to the second metric, which is “Did I finish my session?” After that is established, then you can work on lengthening the sessions, up to some sustainable, schedule-able level that allows enough time to work on performance. (Say, 45 minutes twice a week, or 20 minutes 5 days a week.) Then you can start increasing intensity.
    • Expect that adding exercise to your life will disrupt your appetite, but don’t worry about it — except, maybe, to repeat to yourself affirmations like “Energy bars are just expensive candy, and energy drinks are just expensive soda.”
    • A few months of showing up to your sessions and finishing your sessions, maybe even having worked them up to longer sessions and started to improve your performance, will have put you in a very different frame of mind. You don’t anymore regard exercise as a bizarre anomaly of the schedule that gives you license to have a bunch of extra snacks just because you exercised today. When you get to that point — when exercising really feels normal, whether you do it every day or only a few days a week — that is a good time to add in some kind of attentive nutrition program. Hold steady on the exercise habit, and begin.
    • If your exercise habit slips, back off on the food restriction. Also vice versa. Change one thing at a time.

    It isn’t terribly scientific, but I can’t see how it can hurt, considering that exercise has so many known benefits going for it even without weight loss, and (unlike diet-induced weight loss) exercise-induced performance improvement is something much closer to your direct control.

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  • “He answers all our needs.”

    Last Sunday, to accompany the story of the feeding of the five thousand, we heard Psalm 145. The antiphon was

    The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs.

    Isn’t that a remarkable thing to say? He answers all our needs. How, exactly, are we to understand this to be true?

    Because — I am sure there are a lot of people in the pews who could say, honestly, “No — I am not getting all my needs addressed. I don’t get what I need. Or I haven’t got it yet, and don’t see a way to expect it.”

    Accepting this strongly probable assertion makes the antiphon more than a little disturbing — stained by association, maybe, with the heresy of the prosperity gospel. The hand of the Lord feeds us and he answers all our needs — so if you remain hungry, needy, you aren’t one of us. Something’s wrong with you. Or else, it opens the singer to mockery: some Lord, eh? He didn’t answer when your needs came knocking, did He now?

    So let’s consider some plausible alternative interpretations of the line, other than “we never perceive a need because God favors us.” Because there’s some serious issues with certain attitudes that go with that interpretation.

    I’ll restrict myself to the English antiphon as it appeared in Sunday’s psalm, and not fiddle with translation issues here. In other words, I am just going to assume good faith and accuracy on the part of the translator.

    Possibility #1: the psalmist is confined to a particular community at a particular time of spiritual fruitfulness and material prosperity. When it was written, it could truly be said “He answers all our needs,” even if it is not so here and now.

    This might make the reader wonder, “If that’s so, then why sing it here and now?” but I think this possibility seems stronger the more experience one has praying the psalms in regular rotation as one does with the Liturgy of the Hours (or, indeed, with the Mass). It is said that whatever your situation, there is a psalm to fit it, but the corollary to this is that at any given time there are many psalms that don’t fit at all. You may be feeling on top of the world and wanting to express gratefulness to God for His abundant blessings, but if it’s Friday of Week III, you’re stuck with “Let my eyes stream with tears day and night, without rest, over the great destruction,” and so on. At first it is jarring, but eventually you figure out how to go with the flow, remembering always that this is the prayer of the Church, not the prayer of me, and someone’s life somewhere is intimately fed by this psalm, and we can all join in it whatever our situation.

    So we can understand this as: God answers someone’s needs somewhere, and we can join in acknowledging it.

    Possibility #2: We are to understand “needs” more restrictively here; not everything we might think is a “need” really is.

    In this case, the antiphon could even be turned around: it isn’t really a need unless God meets it. I am not particularly fond of this interpretation because I fear that it could be abused to minimize others’ real suffering. But there is some precedent for this, if you allow (first of all) that securing our salvation is the sole true goal in life, and (second) that the people of God who sing this song are aware of, and accept, the primacy of that salvation. Food, clothing, shelter, security, human kindness, can certainly help us along the path to salvation, but the Christian knows that they are not actually prerequisites. The martyrs had none of these at the point of the blade. You could say that the antiphon, interpreted this way, reminds us that the only true need is grace, and that God grants it abundantly.

    Caution, though: we should never assume that other people have no true need for food, clothing, shelter, security. The song says God answers all “our” needs. Quite possibly we can serve as the channel of grace to others in need of compassion, by helping to meet others’ physical needs. It is much easier to realize that salvation is more important than food when you are not hungry all the time.

    Possibility #3: The emphasis is on the word “He.” “It’s the hand of the Lord who feeds us; it’s He who answers all our needs.”

    I think this is the strongest candidate of all the interpretation. When our needs are met, it is God to whom we owe our thanks and praise. Whatever food we eat, our clothing, our homes, the people who care for us, the powers of our own and others that keep us safe — all of that is ultimately a gift from God. Sometimes it comes with the cooperation of others, other times without it; sometimes we ought to thank other people, too; but ultimately we owe God thanks for every good gift in our lives.

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    1 comment on “He answers all our needs.”

  • Twitblegging.

    Jennifer Fulwiler wants people to explain their blogs to her — in fact to plug them! — in 140 characters or less. I thought it might be fun to turn it around. Plugs are rationales for reading, and I figure I could use about five of them, so tell me — why do you read bearing blog, in 28 characters or less?

    ___________________________

    P.S. I am just going to ignore the little voice in my head that suggests such a question is too narcissistic to be entertaining.

    P.P.S. When I typed the last sentence my iPad autocorrected “voice” to “VCR.” That’s my internal dialogue for you: rapidly declining into obsolescence, repetitive, and prone to glitches when moved rapidly between environments of different temperature and humidity.

    P.P.P.S. Link fixed: now when you click on Jen’s name, it goes to her post instead of to the Amazon page of the book The Psychopath Test. I am sure Jen will approve this change.

    So, cough, anyway. 28 characters. Go!

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  • Mad dogs and humans.

    Interesting article about rabies, which until recently was 100% fatal in symptomatic humans — maybe — and the story of the last-ditch desperate cure that seems to work — maybe.

    There is something very compelling about the narrative, in which a physician who is completely inexperienced in rabies treatment, but faced with a young doomed patient, buries his nose in the books and comes up with a Crazy Idea That Just Might Work:

    [T]oday, after millennia of futility, hospitals have an actual treatment to try. It was developed in 2004 by a pediatrician in Milwaukee named Rodney Willoughby, who, like the vast majority of American doctors, had never seen a case of rabies before. (In the US, there are usually fewer than five per year.) Yet Willoughby managed to save a young rabies patient, a girl of 15, by using drugs to induce a deep, week-long coma and then carefully bringing her out of it. It was the first documented case of a human surviving rabies without at least some vaccination before the onset of symptoms. Soon Willoughby posted his regimen online, and he worked with hospitals around the world to repeat and refine its use. Now referred to as the Milwaukee protocol, his methodology has continued to show limited success: Of 41 attempts worldwide, five more patients have pulled through…

    Even though his specialty was infectious disease, Willoughby knew almost nothing about rabies. “For the board exams,” he says, “you only needed to know one thing: that it was 100 percent fatal.” He telephoned the CDC to ask if there was any treatment somewhere in the research pipeline—some promising new therapy, perhaps, not yet published in any medical journal. The CDC had nothing. Not one person had ever been shown to survive rabies without having gotten at least partial vaccination before the virus reached the brain.

    With less than a day to formulate a plan, Willoughby attacked the problem with quick but deliberate reading, using his limited time to review the basic neuroscience of rabies.

    …Willoughby laid out a last-ditch idea, the surprising result of his day of reading and thinking. The solution, he says in retrospect, had been “hiding in plain sight.”

    A pretty exciting story, but one that still remains largely unconfirmed by fundamental research. The article details some of the objections that have been raised by researchers. Still, when you are dealing with “100% fatal,” it becomes much more attractive to try the untested.

    On the same topic: I heard on NPR a week or two ago that there is a new nonfiction book out on rabies, called Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus. It sounded good, but I have to get in line for a copy at the library. The authors are a husband-and-wife team (he’s a journalist, she’s a veterinarian). I am looking forward to it, when I move to the head of the line.

    I am really in the mood to read something fluffy and light, which for me means “almost anything nonfiction.” I just barely managed to finish Kristin Lavransdatter in time to return it to the library before it went overdue, and while I enjoyed the book, it exhausted me as epic multigenerational literature tends to do. If it were not for the patronymics I would never have been able to keep track of everyone, but at least since I always had a clue as to whose daughter or son everybody was (Kristin is Lavrans’s daughter, get it?), I didn’t fall very far behind.

    Anyway, after having struggled through Kristin (a book which, at least, got better and more gripping the deeper I got into it), I polished off the deeply weird nonfiction book The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson in a matter of hours. This is part nonfiction and part introspection, a book about psychopathology and mental illness — or maybe it is more about the author’s investigation into psychopathology, since Ronson injects all kinds of commentary about his interviewees and his own reactions to them throughout the book. The style is mildly self-deprecating, and Ronson depicts himself as sort of star-struck by the people he is interviewing — he is forever being amazed that he has managed to score the interviews with this eminent researcher or that institutionalized criminal or this other possibly psychopathic CEO — and somewhere in the middle of the book I began to be convinced that the style was really just an act meant to guide the reader to conclusions about the interviewees. (Namely, that maybe the psychiatrists who study psychopathology are sometimes themselves psychopaths.)

    I think I will stop here before anyone draws any conclusions about the fact that I suggested books about rabies and psychopaths as beach reads. Ahem.

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  • Catholic geeks.

    Yesterday, SF author and blogger John Scalzi wrote a piece  entitled, "Who Gets To Be a Geek?  Anyone Who Wants To Be" that delighted me.  

    (The piece was in response to an article at CNN by Joe Peacock, believe it or not, disparaging — for not being genuine geeks — pretty, sexily-dressed women who come to events like ComicCon, including the ones who are hired by sponsors to work at the booths.  I am not the sort of geek who goes to that sort of convention, so I really can't judge the Peacock piece on the merits of its claims.)

    But I loved John Scalzi's response, because of the way he encapsulated geekdom:

    Geekdom is a nation with open borders. There are many affiliations and many doors into it. There are lit geeks, media geeks, comics geeks, anime and manga geeks. There are LARPers, cosplayers, furries, filkers, crafters, gamers and tabletoppers. There are goths and horror geeks and steampunkers and academics. There are nerd rockers and writers and artists and actors and fans. Some people love only one thing. Some people flit between fandoms. Some people are positively poly in their geek enthusiasms. Some people have been in geekdom since before they knew they were geeks. Some people are n00bs, trying out an aspect of geekdom to see if it fits. If it does, great. If it doesn’t then at least they tried it.

    Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think — and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking — that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It’s the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love.” When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.”

    Any jerk can love a thing. It’s the sharing that makes geekdom awesome.

    This is wonderful.  I mean, really wonderful.  

    For one thing, it neatly skewers the notion that being a geek is really all about being an outcast because The Greater World doesn't understand the stuff the geeks do understand.  If that were so, it would be impossible to be a geek about anything that happens to be, at the moment, popular.  The boundaries of geekdom would shift with the winds of popular culture.

    But you know, and I know, that being a geek is something about who you are, not about who accepts you or even about who accepts your interests.

    The reason that the world stereotypes socially inept outcasts as geeks, and geeks as socially inept outcasts, is because — these days, anyway — the world considers it socially inept to betray a deep interest in any subject.  To care about an idea, or a subject, and to care about getting the details right more than caring about what other people think.  

    Some people have the sort of charismatic personality or way with words — or other sort of attractiveness — that makes them perfectly able to publicly express enthusiasm in a way that infects others.  Not all geeks have this gift, because the world is mostly turned off by people who don't have the habit of disparaging deep interest.  The habit of cool — figuratively, being at most lukewarm about everything and everyone, because warmth betrays caring. 

    Geek and cool are opposites by nature.  And "cool" is highly prized today.  Fortunately, there are other ways of standing out — society's not so far gone that it doesn't sometimes appreciate the not-cool.  And so geekdom and outcasts are not identical sets.

    + + +

    Although once my husband called me "nerdy-cool."  Which is just about the most romantic thing I can imagine.

    + + +

    Here's another place I found the term "geek," or sometimes its almost-interchangeable synonym "nerd," is useful.  

    A few weeks ago when Bearing Blog Epidemiologist ChristyP was in town for a conference, she introduced me to a colleague, whose name I knew well because he has published numerous articles about natural family planning and about the bioethics of reproductive health.  

    He asked me, "How is it that you found out about NFP?"  

    I started with "Well, I'm Catholic –"

    He said, quite correctly, "That isn't a sufficient answer."

    I paused and said slowly: "I'm kind of a Catholic nerd."  Turned and looked to ChristyP — "That kind of sums it up, doesn't it?"  – and she indicated that it would do, at least for the purposes of that brief conversation!

    Thinking back on it, I believe it does suffice.  (I used "nerd" because I wasn't sure whether "geek" has too recent a vintage to mean something to this gentleman — indeed the usage frequency of "geek" has lagged about 8 years behind that of "nerd" since about 1980.  But I meant something exactly like the "geek" of Scalzi's piece.)   

    I mean, I think most of us who intend to live Catholic doctrine as if we really believed it, as written, to be correct sometimes use shorthand like "orthodox Catholic" to refer to others who decline to dissent in any way from Church teaching, but that term doesn't satisfy.  For one thing, it's easily confused with "Orthodox Christian" which is a distinct ecclesiastical community, or it may be construed as some weird kind of shorthand for Eastern Rite Catholics.  

    For another thing, it's often used as if it were the opposite of terms like "progressive Catholic" or "liberal Catholic" or "social justice Catholic", when that's really not so.  One can adhere to every bit of what's in the catechism and yet feel more affinity with liberal or progressive politics (remember:  we operate in every country in the world) or perceive that one's particular evangelistic calling is centered around topics that get classified as "social justice."  

    For a third thing, although it's useful shorthand in private conversation with others you agree with, I doubt that "orthodox" is understood the same way by the wider culture of English-speaking Catholics.   Self-identified Catholics dissent for a lot of reasons — many are intellectually honest, informed, and deliberate, many "own" their position, but others are lashing out in anger and hurt, while still others oppose a strawman.  I haven't taken a survey, but it strikes me that a large number of those people would take some umbrage at us toe-the-line types for claiming the term "orthodox."  And terms are no good in discourse unless you agree on the meaning.

    For a fourth thing, and I mean no disrespect — I don't think all the "orthodox Catholics" are also "Catholic geeks."  (And likely as not there are Catholic geek dissenters.) 

    But "Catholic nerd," though, or "geek," seems to fit the bill pretty well, and more precisely than just "orthodox" — at least for me.  With that term, I'm trying to get across that I'm interested  in Catholic theology, liturgy, and moral life.  I'm interested in getting it right, in being able to split hairs, because ZOMG I LOVE IT PLEASE COME WITH ME AND LOVE IT TOO. 

    It implies, I hope, not just that I wish to toe the line, but that I have, in fact, drunk the Kool-Aid.  TASTE AND SEE.

    In many ways a geek is a geek.  Others call us hairsplitting or even jesuitical (Jesuits:  Perhaps the original Catholic geek organization, regardless of where they find themselves today), but it's no less fun to pick apart difficult moral questions than it is to have passionate arguments about, say, literature or physics.  

    I mean, really:  there's a certain affinity among these:

    • having a passionate argument using fluxes and mass balances about the question "Does running in the rain make you wetter or dryer than walking?"  (real example I remember from the lunch table in graduate school)
    •  having a detailed email discussion on the question  "If a woman has suffered multiple ectopic pregnancies, is it licit for her to request surgical removal of the Fallopian tubes, because of a reasonable suspicion that there is something wrong with them, on the grounds that it is generally permissible to remove a 'diseased body part' and that the consequent sterilization is a secondary, undesired effect that is nevertheless permitted under the principle of double effect?  Or does double effect not apply, because in fact the directly desired effect is prevention of all pregnancies, this being the means by which the prevention of a specific disease in the Fallopian tube  is to be brought about?"
    • insisting that it's a vital blow to the preservation of American film culture that George Lucas whitewashed the fact HAN SOLO TOTALLY SHOT FIRST?

    All of these are the kinds of questions that only true geeks care about, at least deeply enough to argue about it at length instead of doing what other people might call "getting on with their lives."

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  • Imperceptible change.

    From today's Office of Readings (Prime).  I arranged the paragraph breaks and indentations to highlight the parallelism.

    We are afflicted…

    but we are not crushed;

    full of doubts, 

    we never despair.

    We are persecuted 

    but never abandoned; 

    we are struck down

    but never destroyed….

    While we live we are constantly being delivered to death for Jesus' sake,

    so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our mortal flesh.

     

    This is, of course, part of the "earthen vessels" discourse in Paul's second letter to the Corinthians (chapter 4).

     I am particularly taken, this morning, with 

    [F]ull of doubts, we never despair.

    The common conception of faith is that it is the opposite of doubt — that we have faith in just exactly the measure that enjoy freedom from doubt.  Not so.  

    It's true that "never despairing" is technically the flowering of the virtue of hope, but it's in the face of doubt that hope does all its work — and you can't tell me that hope only blooms where faith fails.  Doubt, therefore, cannot be a failure of faith.  

    Like the afflictions, persecutions, and blows with which it is made parallel in the passage, doubts are, I think, something that happens to us.  

    Faith and hope are among the possible responses to such doubts, those responses being something that is  engendered by us — that  comes from us – in cooperation with grace.   

    I maintain that it's quite unfortunate that fides — faith — has come in English to connote mostly "belief" or "lack of doubt."  Much better to think of it via its cognates fidelity and faithfulness.  These carry a connotation of action, of a series of decisions.  "Faith" in English has come to mean something that happens to you.  "Fidelity" and "faithfulness" still mean something you choose daily — like hope and charity.

    I'm also taken, today, by

    While we live we are constantly being delivered to death…

    and, along with it, the line a few paragraphs later that goes

    We do not lose heart, because our inner being is renewed each day even though our body is being destroyed at the same time.

    Probably those lines were originally meant to encourage and strengthen people who are looking death right in the face.  I come at it from another point of view, at least now.  If we are healthy and feeling pretty good, it is possible to forget that "while we live we are constantly being delivered to death."  

    It's true, though.  The cells die every moment.   The collapse has been going on for a long time.

    If only my inner being could be renewed each day, as imperceptibly but steadily as my body is being destroyed.    Hope is, I think, believing that it can be so; faith is deciding to live as if we are certain.

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  • Perspectives on the “day of rest…”

    …in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. A professor of political science, a professor of anthropology, a lecturer in English, and several other academics write thoughtfully about “keeping Sabbath” in the context of their professional and personal lives. Some excerpts:

    For a few years now, I’ve been drawn toward paying more attention to sabbath observance. …Going to Mass and brunch, calling my family, then jumping right back into ordinary work just hasn’t been cutting it for me. Something’s been missing.

    What I’m really looking for is both a greater sense of connection and a greater awareness that, though my work is important (at least, I’d like to think so!), it isn’t so necessary that I can’t take one day away from it each week to enjoy life and to focus on the relationships and non-work activities that add greater meaning and depth to it.

    +++

    There are a total of 39 forbidden activities on Shabbat, and the rules are so complex that volumes and volumes of heavy Jewish tomes have been dedicated to it. However, the simple answer for what it takes to celebrate Shabbat properly is this: we cannot be involved in any creative activity. We cannot do things such as cook, use a phone, light a fire (including using anything electric), ride in a car, garden, draw, write, sew, or carry anything (even a tissue in our pocket) outside a “private area” such as a house.

    Even when I attend a conference or a THATCamp, I keep Shabbat. On the face of it, many would regard attending a technology conference without one’s computer to be a waste of time. However, I have discovered that spending the day talking to others and really paying attention to what they are saying as they describe a project has allowed me to focus better than if I were following-along with my computer.

    Shabbat is an amazing gift from G-d, a gift that I cherish more and more as I get older and my life becomes more and more technological. It’s a day away, a day dedicated to reflection and celebration of the gifts G-d has given us, and it keeps me balanced.

    +++

    At some point during college, I decided that I would extend my observance of a day of rest to include homework. It was a personal decision, and I’d say that it’s been one of the best that I’ve made in the last 15 years. No matter how much work I have (and like all of us, I frequently have too much), I’ve decided that I cannot and will not do it on my Sabbath. That means that I’ve sometimes got a lot to do to get ready to take this day “off,” but I’ve found my life to feel much more balanced and happy knowing that I have at least one day every week where I will get a break and can really focus on my family and other people.

    One of the difficulties of academia is the fact that our job is never over. There’s always another article you could read, another 750 words you could write, or some papers you could grade. But if we tell ourselves that we can’t do these things on a certain day or that we won’t work after 5pm, then we buy ourselves a chance to get the rest we so seldom will take on our own.

    +++

    If you’re observing a strict religious sabbath, as my grandparents did, you have to plan your household cooking, chores, and other tasks so as not to interfere with that code. If you’re attending religious services, you have to plan for appropriate dress, travel time, and so forth.

    If you’re creating a sabbath ritual for yourself, secular or spiritual, you need to figure out what counts—what your own guidelines are going to be for both what you will do and what you won’t do on your sabbath. And then you have to plan to make sure that you get your non-sabbath activities done beforehand so that you’re not tempted to give in and work through the day.

    +++

    Read the whole thing. The conversation was inspired by a short post at Lifehack (not Lifehacker) about the importance of taking a day of rest to avoid burnout, and that post is also worth reading. (It cuts through the fog of “but what counts as ‘work’ and what counts as ‘rest?’ with the fairly simple rule “[On your day of rest,] don’t do anything that feels like work.” A little harder for mothers to get away with this one, but it could be adapted.)

    I am particularly taken by the notion that to take a day of rest you have to plan ahead — arrange your life so that it all works out. It is sort of obvious that this is true — at minimum you have to make sure that the work you might otherwise do on your day of rest, you do at some other time. But even if it is obvious, and even if I pay lip service to desiring a day of rest, I haven’t adequately arranged my life to make room for one. Priorities have a way of outing themselves, don’t they?

     

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  • Beer for beginners, part IV: Porter, pilsner and not-quite-pilsner.

    (part I, part II, part III)

    The next time I went to the beer store, I took with me an index card with a list of porters and pilsners.  This turned out to be a bit of a funny combination, because they are, of course, very different styles of beer.  On the other hand, it was a nice pair to have in the house, because between the two of them they cover a lot of ground.  After all, I was checking these off my list of versatile beers.  Porter is said to be good with roasted or smoked food, sausages, blackened fish, meatloaf, steak, and (intriguingly) brownies or vanilla ice cream.  Pilsner is supposed to go with Indian or Vietnamese or Thai food, tinned sardines or kippers, salmon, shrimp, caviar, proscuitto or other ham, and mixed hors d'oeuvres. 

    + + + 

    Porter first.

    I came home with Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter and Fuller's London Porter, which are both brewed in the UK.  Little did I know that, at least according to the folks at Beer Advocate, I was carrying home excellent examples of the style.  I liked it:  sweeter, deeper, not hoppy; and Mark did too.  We compared them, and decided that Samuel Smith's is rounder, and Fuller's dryer; I liked Samuel Smith's, but it's more expensive. 

    That was all well and good and I was ready to check "porter" off my list, but we had one more thing to try:  this notion that porter was a perfect match for vanilla ice cream.  "We have some in the freezer," I said.  "Let's try it."

    "Weird," said Mark.  "It's like the beer milkshake in Travels with Charley."

    I scooped a bowl of our ordinary grocery-store vanilla ice cream for each of us and opened one of the bottles of the Fuller's, pouring it between two jelly glasses.  We took a bite of ice cream and washed it down with a sip of beer and went:

    "WOW."

    This was, to put it bluntly, a revolution.  The stuff went with vanilla ice cream the way that good strong espresso does, or hot fudge sauce.  Amazing.  It didn't take long for us to polish it off. 

    The next time, we experimented with a one-vessel version:  we made a porter-ice cream float, and a porter affogato (affogato is something you usually do with espresso — you pour it over vanilla ice cream and eat it with a spoon).  The porter-ice cream float was prettier in the glass (WATCH OUT FOR THE HEAD) but it felt like the beer-to-ice-cream ratio was too high.  We liked the affogato better — maybe even more than the espresso kind, as it doesn't melt the ice cream as fast.

    I'm telling you, the porter affogato is your next fancy-but-super-easy summer dessert.   The only thing it lacks is an appropriate garnish to make up for how ugly it is in the bowl.  Maybe a good English shortbread cookie would do the trick.  

    + + +

    The pilsners we brought back were basic examples of the style:  Pilsner Urquell (which is sort of the "original" pilsner) and Summit Pilsener, which is local and therefore fairly easy to find around here, sometimes at a discount or as part of a sampler pack.  I was familiar with the pilsner style and have had both beers before, but we wanted to compare them.  Both are good, and in fact they were very similar, but I thought Urquell was a little bit better.  Possibly I would not have been able to tell the difference had it been a blind tasting.

    On a second trip we brought home a single bottle of Czechvar, which is what the Czech Budweiser brewery has to call its Budvar when it sells it in the United States (go figure).  We decided it was fine but with so many pilsners out there, we would not seek it out again.  

    That same trip, Mark pointed out a variety 12-pack from Spaten, a Munich-based brewery whose beers are widely distributed in the United States.  "This has a hefeweizen in it — Franziskaner Weissbier – and it's on sale."   We took it home and decided it was indeed a good find.  It also included the doppelbock Optimator, another nice beer.  (I'm not ready to study doppelbocks yet, so I simply considered it a nice preview of the style.  Trying to focus here.)

    More interestingly for my purposes, the box included four bottles of Munich Premium Lager, which at first we took to be a type of pilsner.   The Brewmaster's Table reviews it in the same section as pilsners.  But on additional research, we realized that it is not a pilsner, but a related type called Helles, aka Munich Lager.  I was interested, because it reminded me of one of my favorite beers I'd had in the past few months, the local craft brew Hell from the deservingly trendy Twin Cities outfit, Surly Brewing.  (The name is a pun:  Surly's other beers have names like Furious and Cynic and Abrasive and Schadenfreude, and of course "hell" is German for "light" and the name of the style "helles" is related.)

    Surly Hell is supposed to be not a helles but a Zwickel, which is a bit hoppier, but there's a lot of overlap in the classification, and in any case the world of Helles/Zwickel/Keller biers is distinct from the world of pilsners.  After a few evenings spent in the company of Spaten Munich Premium Lager, plus a little Hell, I decided that Helles lager is the pilsner I've been waiting for my whole life.  

    And although that is not, on the whole, particularly insightful, I was excited to learn it.  First of all, it counts as something I've really learned, giving me so far two new things I didn't know before:

    1. Porter + vanilla ice cream = YUM
    2. When it comes to clear yellow beer, forget the pilsner and give me a Munich-style helles lager. 

    Second of all, since it's more obscure, it now gives me something to say whenever I want to sound like a genuine beer snob.  "Oh, I drink a pilsner now and then, but I much prefer the Munich breweries' take on that basic style."  

    I am planning to print out a list of top Helles lagers and carry it around for future reference.  You never know what you might meet in a restaurant.

    Next up:  Belgian fruited lambic and saison.

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  • Being a marketing trend.

    I'm not usually one to read and comment on fluffy "demographic/marketing trends" stories, but this one seemed on-topic for bearing blog.  Via Kara, blogger and author of Hot Sweaty Mamas:  Five Secrets to Life as a Fit Mom, we have a profile in the Wall Street Journal of a marketing niche:  "Don't Hate Her Because She Finds Time for Being Fit:  More Moms Squeeze in Workouts as 'Me Time.'"

    Drea McLarty, a 35-year-old mother of two, awoke before dawn to run nine miles on a recent Monday, then made breakfast for the family, did some errands and headed to the park for an hour of Pilates. Later that afternoon, she had a personal training session with a client.

    "I really just love to be active," says Ms. McLarty, of Santa Barbara, Calif. "It's very addicting."

    Ms. McLarty is one of the growing number of mothers who carve out time to maintain a high level of fitness. They are a far cry from the stereotype of the full-time homemaker as stressed out and starved for time to herself, seeking respite in a hot bath, the television or chocolate. They are also emerging as a tantalizing target for consumer-product marketers.

     The term "fit mom" as used in the article is apparently a marketing term for the type of person the athleticwear companies are targeting, rather than a term for athletically inclined mothers in general.  At least I hope so:

    Fit moms spend nearly every free minute working out, cross-training for triathlons and scheduling regular boot camps and yoga….Most fit moms have enough money so they don't have to work at full-time jobs, but not so much that they have full-time child care. 

    This, plus being data-thin, makes the article kind of annoying.   Not to mention this breathless style:

    [Ms. McLarty] spends a lot of time in her minivan, where the back seat folds down to make room for her supplies—wet wipes, a change of clothes, snacks and a yoga mat. 

    (This is why the author of the article thinks a mom needs to fold down the back seat of her minivan? Maybe she found a really good deal on wet wipes at Sam's Club.)

    But the elite mother-athletes are only the hook for this article.  Whenever the marketers identify a certain type of person as the target, you can be sure that they also want to sell their stuff to us lesser beings who merely aspire to be the sort of person who might spend nearly every free minute working out… or who just want to look like one.  

    I realize that the point of the article is to highlight rising sales of certain kinds of athletic apparel.  Although my hat's off to people who manage to sustain a serious training regimen while leading a busy life, I would hate to think that anyone might read this and think that you can't be a "fit mom" without spending every free minute at the gym.  I'm not at an elite level of fitness — I run 9-and-a-half-minute miles, not seven-and-a-quarter, and believe me that's a big difference — but I am at a level that is satisfactory to me, while still challenging enough to be interesting, at a time commitment that isn't hard for me to keep up as long as I make it a high priority.

    On one hand, it can be inspiring to read about mothers who manage to make it work — fitness at a high, time-consuming level.  

    On the other hand, an intense lifestyle like this can seem impossible, while a more moderate level of fitness (like what I enjoy) is within the reach of so many more individuals and still SO worth it.    One of my pet peeves is this idea that exercise should be bimodal:  either you should be satisfied with "walking, the best form of exercise," or you should be some kind of an exercise addict who works out like a professional athlete.  Not to diss walking or professional athletes, but it seems like for the great majority of healthy adults, shooting for something in the middle — light, but deliberate, daily exercise or (my pattern) vigorous exercise two to four times a week — would hit the sweet spot of beneficial and realistic.  But we just don't hear much about that.  

    Even though women like me — who are reasonably fit and kinda sorta hope that someday we might find the time to increase our treadmill time — might be the real driver of sales of Luna bars and maternity sports bras.  (Speaking of which:  I'll believe that clothing manufacturers are actually courting fit mothers when it's easy to find a supportive athletic nursing bra that really works.  I only know of two decent sports bras that have straps that open in front, and they are not marketed as nursing bras.  While we're at it, how about a real maternity lapsuit?)

    As an aside, the article ends with a list of tips for fitting a workout into a busy day of child care.  I was rather surprised not to see a tip along the lines of "Join a gym that has child care,"  even in an article that focuses on people who have discretionary income to spend on such a thing.  Maybe that's too obvious to count as a tip!

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