This year something different than normal struck me.  Instead of new insights into Mary’s plight as a young girl becoming a social outcast for the glory of God, or trying to imagine Joseph’s thought process as he decided his dream was truly a message from God and not wishful thinking, or imagining the nature of the star leading the wise men of Babylon (not necessarily 3, and not necessarily kings) to Jesus’ very house, what hit me this year was more about Hanukkah.  It went something like this.

Since its inception, Hanukkah (חֲנֻכָּה‎) has always been celebrated at this time of the year.  You can read about the history here.  It’s a great story about the Jewish struggle between the testaments and God’s miraculous intervention.  It became an annual Jewish celebration in 167 b.c.e., which means it wasn’t mentioned in the Jewish Testament (although the Catholic Bible mentions it in the book of Maccabees; that book’s depiction differs from the Jewish version of the story in many ways).

In the Christian Testament, Hanukkah is referred to as the “Feast of Dedication” which is what the Jewish word Hanukkah really means.  The Gospels make specific reference to Jesus himself going to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Dedication.  On the other hand, they do not mention the celebration of Christmas as a holiday (not to be confused with the celebration during the event itself as depicted in Luke 2… it was not established as a holiday until centuries later).

WWJD?

There’s a notion running around many Christian churches that we only need to worry about those commandments which Jesus and/or Paul specifically mentioned (which is how we get out of worshipping on Saturday instead of Sunday, since worship on Saturday is one of the 10 commandments).  This notion also spills over to the feast-days.  We celebrate Passover in a modified form (butchered actually) in our celebration of Easter, but since no other holidays were celebrated by Jesus, and since Paul says we shouldn’t feel obligated to celebrate those holidays that don’t mean anything to us personally, as Christians we avoid the Day of Atonement and the other Jewish Holy Days.  And we have special contempt, especially as Protestants, for Hanukkah.  After all, it wasn’t even an original Jewish feast!  The event it is celebrating isn’t even in the Bible!  (At least the book of Ester provides the Biblical basis for the celebration of Purim, which, like Hanukkah, was not one of the original seven.)

And here’s the rub: if we ask the used-to-be-trendy question “what would Jesus do?”, we have the definitive answer within our own Holy Gospels: Jesus celebrated Hanukkah and ignored Christmas.  And he didn’t throw out the Seder when celebrating the Passover, either!

As Christians, we may have short-changed ourselves in the transactions that de-Judified our Christian celebrations.  Perhaps it’s time for us to reconsider Jewish tradition and religion and how it forms much more of the foundation for Christianity than we like to take seriously.

Being the helpful, everything-is-a-learning-experience type of uncle that I am, I expertly showed him how to arrange his limbs, in order, such that he could crawl and make advancements.  I was pretty sure all my efforts were lost, however, since he didn’t seem to make any progress that day.  Probably the lesson was too far over his abilities to comprehend what I was trying to teach him.

Or maybe not.

That same day, as I was holding him upright by his hands and teaching him to put one foot in front of the other, his mother remarked that she was afraid of the day he’d start walking, because then she’d be afraid he’d be outside around the pool and might fall in.  Having her baby remain immobile was just fine with her, and any help from me to make him more mobile was unnecessary and even a bit unwelcome, although she saw that my intentions were good.  In my always-helpful demeanor of “I know how to solve this problem for you,” I replied, “that’s why you should teach him to swim before he can walk.  I have some friends that have done that.  If he knows how to swim, then when he falls in, it won’t be a problem.  But the approach of keeping him away from the pool will just cause him to fear it and, perhaps, even bring about the very danger you are afraid of.”  She could see my point logically, but was aghast that I could be serious about suggesting such a perposterous stunt using her own child.

Later that morning I got the idea that it would be fun to teach him how to crawl up the stairs.  By this time I had decided that all my attempts to teach him to crawl and walk effectively were lost due to this little-one’s inability to comprehend my methods.  But it would be fun for me to work out the mechanics to see how one so little as a few-month-old infant would navigate a normal-sized stairway.  So I plopped him on the floor facing the stairs and knelt down behind him.

“I’m going to teach you to climb stairs now,” I told his unperceiving ears.

“First, take your right hand and put it on the first stair,” I said, as I took his right hand and put it on the bottom stair.

“Then, take your left hand and put it on the same stair,” I said, as I took his left hand and put it on the bottom stair.

“Now that you’re close enough, you can take your right hand and put it on the next higher stair,” I said as I made him do so.

“Now, you have to bring up the rear, so take your right leg and bring it up to the first stair.  You have to maintain your balance between your right arm, left arm, and left leg while moving your right leg, so you don’t fall.  That is the point, after all.  You don’t want to fall.  Falling hurts.  Hurting is unpleasant.  Do everythying you can to keep yourself from falling, aside from staying on the ground floor.”

The filght had 14 stairs in a straight shot with no landing.  We did this for all 14 stairs, all the way to the top.  At the top I showed him how to crawl forward before sitting up so that he wouldn’t fall down the stairs.  It was fun for me, but I was sure it was completely lost on my unassuming and defenseless little nephew.

Or maybe not.  It wasn’t until many years later that I was told the rest of the story.

A few days later my nephew really did learn how to crawl.  He was off and crawling like a bandit.  He crawled around the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, down the hallway.  He’d crawl a bit and then someone would bring him back to the living room.  Everyone thought it was a hoot to watch, as I expect is typical for new parents and their households.

At some point that very first day of crawling, my sister-in-law realized she didn’t know where her son was.  They looked all around the living room, behind the furniture, in the bathroom, in the downstairs bedroom.  Did someone close him in the closet when they didn’t realize he was in there?  Is he under the bed?

About the time she was growing frantic, she heard “Hey, come look!”

Someone (I don’t know who saw him first) was standing at the bottom of the stairs and pointing to the top.  My nephew had just completed his first solo climb to the top of the stairs, and was twisting himself into a sitting position at the top of the stairs.  This was the most fear-inspiring view my sister-in-law could have imagined.  His wobbly little frame was teetering on the edge of the top stair while he twisted adn fought to sit down, completely unaware of the fall that could hurt him with one false twist.

But he didn’t fall.  And they made sure he didn’t by racing to the top of the stairs and pushing him away from the edge.

When my neice was born, I wasn’t invited to the house as often.  They swear the two observations aren’t related.

For the most part, things went pretty well.  The branches I didn’t cut didn’t know what was happening at first, and were relieved that I didn’t change their status quo.  As such, they pretty much remained silent and said nothing to me.  Very peaceful; very relieved. 

The branches that were pruned had different reactions.  The former-leaders, who were all bushy and green and hogging all the sunlight from the poor underfed and sunlight-starved thicket beneath them, cried fowl and screamed with rage.  But, since they had already been snipped, they quickly died out, so I didn’t worry much about their discontent.  After all, they deserved it (as the remaining bushy-branches gossipped among each other when they thought I couldn’t hear).

Most of the budding leaders who now had their first shot at making something of themselves (when 2 minutes prior there had literally been no hope in sight) were more than excited for the opportunity, even if they really didn’t know what to do next.  Most of them were grateful.

But I’ll not forget the one bud who reacted negatively.  In fact, he had been second in line.  When I saw the two buds within 1/2 and inch of each other on the same branch, I decided to snip between them instead of above them, in case that would give that branch a better advantage in recovery (as would be the case were it a bottelbrush, for example).  I had thought the second bud would be overjoyed, since normally his older brother would be the one chosen to lead his branch into the new world order, leaving the second bud with the unenviable distiction of being an also-ran. 

But no, he was actually quite upset. 

“I was fine, thank you very much! Quite at peace with the fact that I would never amount to anything, sitting here not having to do any work, not having to perform any form of photosynthesis or otherwise contribute to my environment, which by the way wasn’t really contributing to me.  But no, that’s not good enough.  Along comes Mr. Master Gardener here and in his infinite wisdom I’m now left with figuring out how to make what remains of my meager branch grow, leaf out, convert sunlight into nutrition, and look beautiful for the rest of the world?  Thanks for nothing!”

At some point while I was bored with today’s meetings and pondering my irritation at this colleague’s insistence on invading my nostrils with his pungence, it suddenly dawned on me: this human being was engaging in cat-like scent-marking.  He was causing everything he touched to smell like him… a constant reminder that he’d been there, as if it were a small form of dominance, ownership, boundary-setting.  Whether I liked it or not, I had been pegged as someone who had submitted to this “king of aroma,” even if just sufficiently to shake his hand.

The irony is that cats (and other animals) do this with their own bodily scent glands, and other cats can use that individualized scent to identify that individual cat.  Cats are spreading their own scent.  In the case of cologne-enshrouded humans, they aren’t satisfied spreading their own scent, so they use the human invention of capitalism to purchase another human invention of a perfume or cologne, and, in true human form, try to “improve the world” by making it smell a bit more acceptable (according to their own preferences) but not taking responsibility enough to use their own self-identifying scent.

They must be ashamed of how they smell à là naturale.  Yet they have this animal-like subconscious instinct to let the world know they exist.  Since they lack charisma, smarts, or any other attributes which would cause them to influence the world around them through simple interaction and mutual engagement, they are driven to dominate the world around them using overpowering smell.

Something about this doesn’t smell quite right.

As my wife relayed the story to me, I immediately came up with the name “K-Bob”, which I though was rather clever and even acceptable, because it is after all such a manly name, along the lines of “beef kabob” or “k-pax”.

But my wife merely laughed and said, “yeah, well, you might very well think that, but she suggested the name ‘Cuddles’.”

The vet was concerned about how aggressive she was.  It had become commonplace for her to growl or hiss if we tried to pick her up.  This indicated to our vet that Kiri was probably more aggressive than we would be used to after Alex, and suggested that we consider returning her before we get too attached.

But we were attached.  We had committed ourselves to this feline.  Taking her back would be like returning her to the orphanage from which we rescued her.  Some rescue!  But what other option did we have?

All the best sources suggested that the best thing for an aggressive kitten was… another kitten.  The aggressive behavior is normal for some kittens, although unpleastant for human beings.  After all, both claws and teeth are sharp, and even if nipped in a loving sort of way, sharp is still sharp.  But kittens love to play rought with each other.

We asked ourselves… are we a two-cat family?  We might be… after all we had been thinking of getting a sister-pair earlier but complications arose and adopted Kiri instead.  We suspected it would be easier to leave two cats together in the house while we go on vacation because the cats have each other as company, so we would feel less like we were subjecting the cats to abandonment.  But finding the right playmate could prove to be a heartwrenching and fruitless endeavor.  And this was more about finding a mate for Kiri than for ourselves… something we’d never done before.  Both of us were afraid of finding a cute kitten we’d love, but that Kiri wouldn’t tolerate, and we’d feel obligated to keep both, solving no problem whatsoever but quite efficiently creating a few additional ones.

We decided that if we established guidlines and stuck to them, we should be OK.

So we established the following guidelines for our new selection:

1. The newbie should be a younger cat than Kiri, and a male (books indicate that opposite sex youngsters have a better time being accepted by the incumbent feline);
2. The newbie should appear to be outgoing and work well with other cats;
3. The newbie should be playful, because after all, the idea is for the two of them to play together;
4. The newbie should be human-friendly;
5. If the newbie doesn’t get along with Kiri within 2 weeks, we return the newbie.

So we set out to find Kiri a playmate.  And we did.  It wasn’t all that hard after all.  But it was hard to stick to the guidelines we had created for ourselves.

I found this book to be interesting and would recommend it for anyone interested in cognitive awareness and how to improve their decision-making abilities.

He compares the merits of exhaustive research versus intuitive decision making, and posits that we often let our perceptions influence our decision making more than we think.  In fact, too much data (exhaustive research) can sometimes cause us to make poorer decisions because we allow irrelevancies to influence our decision.

As someone who believes that intuition is important but first impressions are often completely deceiving, I’m always looking for ways to improve my decision-making abilities and would like to know when to trust my “hunches.”  I found this book to be interesting, and even helpful, in this quest of mine.  It’s not a recipe or step-by-step guide to understanding intuition; rather it’s a presentation of various cases in which decision-making was done well or poorly, and how it came about, blending in findings from various related studies.

For example, she loved the carpeting on the stairs. We had it put in for Alex when she started slipping while climbing the hardwood treads. In fact, other than a few area rugs, the stairway and the connected upstairs hallway are the only carpeted areas in our home… all else is hardwood floor or marble tile.

Kiri would race up and down the stairs. She loved racing down because then she could skid on the hardwood as if it were a frozen lake. We were afraid she’d hurt herself because she kept ramming into the walls at high speed.

Even funnier, she’d start from a stand-still, then take off so fast that her feet would be flying, running as fast as she could possibly run, but going absolutely nowhere because her feet were slipping on the hardwood floors; after about 3 seconds the friction would kick in and she’d be off like a shot. I called this the “Fred Flintstone maneuver” because it reminded me of how he’d drive the car with his feet.

Another time she was skidding to a stop on the hardwood floors, but in front of here was a wooden dining chair, and she was not going to stop in time. Fortunately she saw it and, although unable to brake, she could hop, and she hopped over the rung between the legs and stopped beneath the seat.

And hop she did… all over the place. She’d hop to the table, which is also slick hardwood, and she’d skid to a stop, but sometimes not soon enough to avoid falling off the other side. She’d hop onto a potted plant (bringing it crashing down upon her, after which she avoided that plant as if it had attacked her).

Since that time (it’s been about 3 months already) she’s grown from 7 pounds to 13. She’s a beautiful medium-hair grey tabby, but with the weight she’s no longer able to do much hopping or skidding, and certainly not the Fred Flintstone maneuver.

So we went looking for another name.  A name containing aspirations, ambitions, and something unique to her. Something she could recognize when we called her, and something that would be easy for us to say.

We found Kyra, Greek for Lady.  We like this name, and we think it has appropriate aspirations for a young female feline.  And we like its close resemblance to Kyrie, which means something completely different, but has a wonderfully mystical Christian connotation.

Of course I couldn’t handle the full name, so we use the diminutive of “Kiri.”

I’m already gaining insights of things from her approach, and certainly a lot of amusement.  So I’ve started a new category.  This category will document Kiri’s road in a bit more real-time than the Alexandra category, which is more retrospective (for obvious reasons).

In little league, I was never drafted to any level higher than the minimal age required, and I quickly learned that the best way to avoid the disappointment of not being drafted was to engage in reverse psychology: I wouldn’t try hard at tryouts, and wouldn’t be disappointed when I wasn’t drafted because that’s what I expected all along.  After all, I have never been very athletic.

In the summer after my 9^th grade, my father granted me the gift of sending me to the Baseball Camp at UC Davis.  There I was coached by some great coaches and played against some formidable high school players, some looking big enough to be pro ballplayers already.  But alas, the next year in high school, I didn’t try out for the team, assuming I wouldn’t make the cut.  After all, I have never been very athletic, and never was really all that good.

Somewhere between my high school and college years I realized that the formula for failure lies in not trying.  Trying doesn’t guarantee success, but not trying guarantees failure.  (Like I’ve said elsewhere, some things that are obvious to most people actually took me a long time to realize.)

Perhaps it was the “Back to the Future” movie which had come out about that time.  There was a scene in which the Michael J. Fox character’s girlfriend asked him why he wasn’t going to work all summer to save up for a dream truck he really wanted.  His reply was something like ”what if I don’t save enough money?”  I thought that was a ridiculously unrealistic statement.  After all, no one really thinks that way.  This was terrible hollywood writing at it’s “finest.”  Then—in one of those moments of clarity that happen not quite often enough—I realized that, in fact, I, myself, often think that way, though perhaps not so obviously.  I tend to put on a better disguise so it’s not as a obvious, fooling even myself.

So I mustered the courage to attend the college’s first baseball meeting.  The fact that it was a small college with no prior sports program gave me some courage.  The fact that it was a Bible college gave me even more courage.  After all, part of my new-found faith (which I had stumbled upon merely the year before) was to trust in God to overcome obstacles, a lot like Abraham, Moses, Gideon, David, Elijah, and Daniel.  I fully expected to be shown the door, but politely (after all, it was a Christian college, so I thought they would probably refrain from making me a laughing stock).  And the meeting was in the cafeteria, which made me think perhaps I could talk my way onto the team.  Fortunately, only 16 of us came to the meeting so I was accepted to the team and I didn’t even need to try out!  I got on the team just by showing up.  (I later learned that quote ascribed to various comics such as Woody Allen and Mel Brooks: “90% of success is in just showing up.”  Now it sort of reminds me of the story of Gideon.)

I noticed small improvements in my abilities.  Not necessariliy in by ball-playing, but in my ability to keep up.  For example, in the beginning I could’t even run around the field without stopping to take breaks and almost passing out at the end.  The coach had us running around the field 5 times before practice (he called it “warm-up,” but I called it “melt-down”).  By mid-season, I could run all 5 laps without taking a break.  I hadn’t noticed any improvement, but when I actually forced myself to remember my starting days, I could see that improvement had definitely been made.

One game about three quarters through the season I was playing right field, which was the safest place for me to play.  The batter hit a line drive right between me and the center fielder.  It was such a strong and fast hit that it was still angled upward well into the outfield.  I was sure it was too far away and flying too fast for me to get to, but I had just a moment earlier decided that I had to try my hardest for whatever happened, even if it was obviously useless.  This was obviously useless.  I took off as fast as I could, almost to prove that I couldn’t make it anyway.  Strange thing was, I entered into a time-phase shift and was running faster than was humanly possible.  It didn’t feel like I was running fast, but I could tell by the fact that I was actually getting close to the ball.

But alas, it was still too high, and it was still angling up.  Even though it now looked like I could get under the ball, there’s no way I could get high enough to catch it.  So, almost to prove that I couldn’t make it anyway, I lept with my last step.  I lept higher than humanly possible. I still don’t believe it.  I sailed like a deer.  But the ball was whizzing over my head.  Even with the superman-like leap, I was sure it was too high over my head for me to reach, and it was already passing by me.  I threw my left hand up, if for no other reason than to prove to everyone else that the ball was higher than I could reach.

That’s when it happened.  The ball hit my mit.  Right smack-dab in the pocket.  And since I wasn’t expecting it, it bounced out.  The batter got a trippple.  All because I didn’t believe enough to actually expect the ball to hit my glove.

My disappointment was intense.

Now, years later, I can see that my problem was not in lack of exercise, or even lack of trying, but in failing to visualize and internalize the improvement that I had been making all season long.  I still thought of myself as the scrawny kid that couldn’t even run around the ball field, even though I had long since improved beyond that.

If you want to be successful, you have to start by showing up.  Then you have to be ready to act when your hard work and training starts to pay off.

Otherwise you’ll merely drop the ball.

In November I attended an early-morning breakfast with a friend.  When we left the restaurant and headed for our cars, it was just becoming light but was quite foggy.  The light coming from the direction of the sun caused yellow streaks in the fog next to dark grey where buildings cast shadows.  The interplay of light on the slow-swirling flog gave me a sense of wonder that reminded me of “The Ghost of Dibble Hollow” and other stories I had read as a kid.  This was the first fog of the season, which was unusually late.  Since I try to make a habit of enjoying this type of thing, specifically to “experience the moment,” I remarked to my friend something like ”Oh, isn’t this fog great?”

To which my friend replied something like, ”No, I don’t like the fog.  It’s cold.  For example, I could never live in San Francisco where it’s foggy and cold all the time.  I’d go crazy.  I much prefer the warmer climate.”

Who was talking about moving to San Francisco?  In fact, I agree that, while San Francisco has it’s lovely times and places, the fog can be so cold, grey, and dismal for so long that I wouldn’t think I would enjoy it all that much.  But I wasn’t in San Francisco, I was in Pleasanton, and this was the first fog of the season (so it was “new” and “different”) and it was likely to be gone in a few hours, so if I didn’t appreciate it now I’d miss it altogether.

My friend’s simple but familiar reply caused me to realize that I, too, would have had a similar response not too many years ago.  So, I’m making progress!  And it gave me an insight into what happens to cause us to be blind to the “blessing in disguise.”

• If I insist on thinking that the current moment is a constant and will never get better, I will be depressed by the fog.  But if I take the grander view that says “this, too, will pass,” then I am freed to enjoy (or at least experience) the difference, the discomfort, the threat, the happiness, the confusion, the beauty, the quiet, the whatever. 
• Deciding what I like best and striving to make all things conform to that ideal is a sure way for me to begrudge most of my life, since it won’t reach my ideal.  The paradox is that I won’t even enjoy those few moments that do reach my ideal because I’ll be too busy trying to make it last, or trying to improve it, or perhaps trying to analyze it or evaluate it, and I miss experiencing it.
• Living in the past (whether negatively through regrets or positively through reliving memories) is a sure way to miss the current moment.
• Living in the future (whether negatively through worry or positively through daydreaming) is a sure way to miss the current moment.

“There’s a time for everything under heaven.  A time to build up, a time to tear down.  A time for sun, a time for rain.  A time for dancing, and a time for mourning.”  Now is the time for something.  What’s it the time for?  There’s an infinite number of thing going on right this moment… entering into our natural world and participating with it can be uncomfortable, but our technology and lifestyle have afforded us such protections from the elements that we can usually participate in it with enough shelter that we are not truly threatened or exposed.  The trick is to make sure we are not so sheltered that we are completely detached and oblivious.

My friend’s remark that foggy day has caused me to realize that I actually have acquired some success in living in the moment.  If you are also trying to figure out how to live more in the “now” and less in the past (memory or regret) or future (worry or wishful thinking), I can make the following suggestions that have worked for me:

1. Set a watch with a timer to go off every so often (perhaps every 30 minutes or every hour), and when it goes off, be disciplined enough to stop, look around, and “see” what’s going on;
2. Drive with the windows down;
3. Try to live without the air conditioner; instead open the windows and let the outside in;
4. If you don’t have anything to do, just sit and ponder a bit; become comfortable being with yourself in silence;
5. Take a time with silence… no TV, radio, iPod, or book.  Just sit.  Waste some time.  Get over the anxiety related to inefficiency.
6. When you are disappointed in the weather, watch it for a bit and maybe even go out and sit it in.  (I did this once in the pouring rain.  It unexpectedly hailed briefly.  It turned out to be fun afterwards to say “I’ve experienced a hail storm.”  Mind you, I live in northern California, not Texas.)
7. Whenever you remember to do so (the watch idea in #1 can help you remember more often until it becomes a habit), look around you to see what’s there that you hadn’t noticed.  Watch what people are doing, what plants are growing, what buildings are in the area, what animals are doing.  Just be a witness.
8. If you can’t sleep, instead of getting up and reading or playing on the computer, don enough clothes to be comfortable and sit outside and watch the stars and the moon (or the fog, or whatever’s happening that night, although I would suggest not sitting in the direct rain or snow).
9. Planning is important, and could be considered ”living in the future,” not “living in the moment.”  But there is a time to plan, which means we are living in the moment.  Planning is, after all, an inherently human thing to do, so there’s a time when it’s appropriate to do it!  The difference is whether we are planning because it’s the right time to do so, or because we are trying to fill in the otherwise “boring” moment.  Try to keep from incessant, obsessive planning.  There is a time to plan, but if we obsess in planning we miss the rest of the moment.

I have found since adopting these approaches that I’m much more aware of my surroundings, I appreciate the different types of animals (for example, I can now tell that there are many species of birds, whereas before I just thought they were small, medium, and large), I’m less annoyed by environmental issues, I’m less allergic to the world around me, and people are remarkably impressed by the wide spectrum of things I enjoy. I even enjoy being inconvenienced at times.

A different friend relayed to me a story of his neighbors who are from England.  It could be drizzling or pouring down rain, and while the rest of the street is totally devoid of people, his British neighbors are out there mowing the lawn, checking the mail, taking walks, and doing all the “normal” things, though wearing their slickers.  Their weather “over there” was almost constantly wet.  In their new home, the climate is warmer, which they enjoy, and it rains a lot less, which they also enjoy, but since they are so used to the rain from their earlier lifestyle, it doesn’t threaten them nor does it cause them to hunker down indoors all day (though after mowing their half-acre-sized front yard in the pouring rain, they often do go inside to sit by the fire and enjoy some tea).

The apple: it doesn’t fall far from the tree
        And so it must be with my father and me
I guess that the only exception is if
        The tree branch is hanging out over a cliff.

-Bob Smiley, 2009

Do you remember the days when the milk-man would deliver bottled milk to your front door?  Whatever happened to those days?  Those were the days when service was the normal way of doing things.  Mailmen walked the neighborhoods and delivered the mail on the porch mailbox, not to a curbside tin-can-on-a-stick where they can drive-up and deliver without getting out of their vehicle. 

Business used to be focused on minimizing customer work, not minimizing employee work.  That’s was “service” meant.

In those days, if you called a bank, you got a person that worked at the local branch.  They may have even known you when you told them your name.  Today, the caller gets a machine that finds numerous ways to prevent them from gaining access to a human, and once that machine in its infinite-loop wisdom finally does grant the privilege of being put “on hold” for a real-live person, that person is in a city far far away and possibly even in a different country.

In those days, my banker greeted me as “Hello Master Smiley” (yes I was a kid back then).  Today I’m greeted with “What’s your account number please?”  I’ve been reduced to a number!  And not even a single easy-to-remember number, but a long one, and probably a complex one.  “Bob” is a lot easier to remember than my social security number, which is strangely close to my phone number, and my office number, and my cell number.  Take a number!  But I digress…

Efficiency in the workplace has not helped customer service.  Oh, how I long for the good old days.

The other day I was lamenting these ideas with a friend, fairly loudly and pompously, extolling the offenses of the all-impersonal corporate profit-motive-that-is-out-to-dehumanize-us-customers-a.k.a.-victims, when I had a sudden flashback.  It was the milkman from my youth.

We used to get milk delivered to our door.  Mom would put the empty bottles on the front porch along with a note of how many to leave the next week.  The milk-man would exchange the empty bottles for filled ones, ring the doorbell, and he’d be off.  (I don’t think we ever saw the guy.  So much for the myth of “personal interaction in the old days.”)

For some reason, the day came when my mother decided to cancel the service.  I don’t know all the whys and wherefores (I think I was about 7) but we were a growing family and mom was already taking more trips to the store, so I can surmise that the local Lucky’s was probably less expensive than having bottled milk delivered.  Mass production, mass distribution, no delivery, all ways to save money that gets passed on to the consumer as lower prices.

When that dismal day came, mom left a note saying we didn’t need any new milk that week or in future weeks.  The doorbell rang twice instead of once.  When I answered the door, the middle-aged milkman (who looked like he drank too much of the milk himself) was there, dressed in his grey milk-man suit, grey hat in hand, asking me if I could get my mother.  He then asked her not to cancel the service.  From what I can remember from my eavesdropping, he had already turned in a few other cancellations in recent days and he was afraid he’d lose his job if there was one more cancellation.  He asked if he’d done something wrong, which of course he hadn’t.  He was almost in tears.  In the end, mom agreed to take bottles that day and call the office herself instead of sending in a note with the driver.  This apparently made the driver a bit relieved, but of course my mother now had to deal with the office crew.

Fortunately, back then when you called the office, you got a person.

She explained the situation, expressed disapproval of the milk-man whining his way out of taking the cancellation, and went ahead and canceled the account anyway.

Now that I’ve got some business experience, I can see that corporate efficiency was not the cause for the passing of the milkman.  Our free market society caused the innovation of grocery store chains who could maximize efficiency by running their own intra-store delivery services, purchasing large quantities at lower prices, and getting the customers to come to them.  Grocery stores were nothing new, but the refrigerator aisle was.

So the real cause of the passing of the milkman was that, when presented with the cost vs. service question, the predominate number of customers chose cost at the expense of service.  The dairies couldn’t afford to keep the delivery service going because it was no longer profitable.  No more milkman.

We (the consumers) are to blame.  Got milk?

One day the old German Shepherd starts chasing rabbits and before to long, discovers that he’s lost. Wandering about, he notices a leopard heading rapidly in his direction with the intention of having lunch.

The old German Shepherd thinks, “Oh, oh! I’m in deep doo-doo now!”

Noticing some bones on the ground close by, he immediately settles down to chew on the bones with his back to the approaching cat. Just as the leopard is about to leap, the old German Shepherd exclaims loudly, “Boy, that was one delicious leopard! I wonder if there are any more around here?”

Hearing this, the young leopard halts his attack in mid-strike, a look of terror comes over him and he slinks away into the trees. “Whew!” says the leopard, “That was close! That old German Shepherd nearly had me!”

Meanwhile, a monkey who had been watching the whole scene from a nearby tree, figures he can put this knowledge to good use and trade it for protection from the leopard. So, off he goes, but the old German Shepherd sees him heading after the leopard with great speed, and figures that something must be up.

The monkey soon catches up with the leopard, strikes a deal for himself with the leopard, and spills the beans.  The young leopard is furious at being made a fool of and says, “Here, monkey, hop on my back and see what’s going to happen to that conniving canine!”

Now, the old German Shepherd sees the leopard coming with the monkey on his back and thinks, “What am I going to do now?”  But instead of running, the dog sits down with his back to his attackers, pretending he hasn’t seen them yet, and just when they get close enough to hear, the old German Shepherd says…

“Where’s that damn monkey? I sent him off an hour ago to bring me another leopard!”

Moral of this story…

Don’t mess with the old dogs… age and skill will always overcome youth and treachery! BS and brilliance only come with age and experience.

Original source unknown.

He used to wake the house up at 6AM, insisting on being fed.  He had trained his humans well, and they usually rose at his nudging, fed him, adored him a bit, and went about their day.  Sandy was their alarm clock.  It was a mutually beneficial relationship, but in recent years, Sandy’s humans no longer wake at 6AM.

So I bought him a 2-bin timer-controlled feeder.  A battery-operated analog countdown timer manages the opening of the plastic lid of the compartment containing the cat food.  There are 2 compartments, each controlled by a separate timer.  At feeding time, the timer causes a lever to slide across a groove; then a hinge that had previously been blocked is now freed by the groove to pop open.

Since the timers are analog, they aren’t very exact.  It’s not like it keeps track of the time and pops open at the stroke of 6AM.  We have to reset it each night, and there’s wiggle-room.  As we’ve gotten better at setting the timers, the compartments open at a more consistent time each day, but there is still a variance due to the nature of the timer and the mechanism.  After all… it’s analog (which is just a fancy word for ”old fashioned”).

After the initial adjustment period, it worked well.  Sandy got fed early, and his humans could sleep in.

Sandy is one who has mastered cabinet doors, refrigerators, dresser drawers, almost anything except for canned goods.  The only thing keeping him from opening the sliding glass patio door is the sheer weight of the door, but opening mirrored closet doors are no obstacle.  He can get in and out of things in no time flat.  Once he figured out that the food dish was only a door, he started to try to get into it on his time instead of waiting for the timer.

So he wrestles with his feeder.  He swats it, pounces on it, bites it, licks it, sits on it, kicks it, pretends to ignore it, and then does it all again.  At times he’s been successful enough to take the thing apart, separating the dish from it’s base.  But the lid won’t open.  Even turning it upside down doesn’t cause the door to open.  (To me this is really quite surprising.  It just looks like cheap plastic.  It’s much more tamper-resistant than I would have thought.)  Eventually, after Sandy expends a lot of energy, the lid pops open.  Success!!  He dives into his food for two minutes and goes away satisfied that he was clever enough to get the lid open.

The next day he does it again, except that he starts a bit earlier in the day.  He pounces, swats, bites, whatever, and eventually it pops open.  He seems to be trying to perfect his technique to cause the lid to open more quickly.  After what seems like forever, the lid eventually opens again.  Success!!  (But as the efficiency expert, I notice he’s not making the improvements as quickly as he’d like.  In fact, today it took more work than yesterday… shouldn’t he be getting better as he goes along?  I mentioned this to him but he just pretended he didn’t hear me.)

Day after day he tries harder.
Day after day he thinks he’s been successful.
Day after day he fails to realize that the lid opens when it’s time to open, and not a moment earlier.

When the timer brings the lever and the groove into alignment, the lid pops open obediently.  The timer is not impressed by Sandy’s efforts, nor is it tempted to take revenge by slowing down and spitefully making the lid stay closed longer.  Yet Sandy persists in his attempts, apparently convinced that his efforts are what’s causing the lid to open sooner than it normally would.  Does he think the lid would never open without his clever maneuvers, despite the fact that, when it was new, it opened all by itself even if he wasn’t so much as looking?

His memory, his lust for food, and his desire to be his own master by controlling his environment, all consipire against him and cause him to gain absolutely nothing but frustration, broken nails, and greater hunger.

This reminds me of us humans.

At times it might be helpful if we just stopped, rested, remained still, and observed what happens despite our stillness.  Perhaps there’s a way out of this worrisom and laborious world we’ve made for ourselves.  Perhaps it’s right before our eyes.  Perhaps we don’t have to make it happen.  Perhaps the solution is already in place, we just have to wait for the Timer to make it happen.

Moral:

Does anybody really spend this much energy and passion discussing grammar?

Some people do.

1. The Tennessean had an article that I found heartwarming about a guy named “Bob Smiley” that ran a website to get sports equipment to people who couldn’t afford it.  I found it on a Google search, but the page wasn’t cached and the URL no longer existed, so this is a vague Bob Smiley but one I’m proud to hold the name of.
2. Richard Johnson’s blog mentioned a Bob Smiley that was governor of Idaho for a while.  Other than Richard’s blog, I’ve never heard of this other Bob Smiley.  I’m not sure about my opinion of this particular Bob Smiley.  I dont’ know who Richard Johnson is, but he’s got some great stories on his blog.
3. There’s a Bob Smiley up in Canada who recently helped a paper mill that was facing bankruptcy to be bought out by it’s managers and employees, against all odds, interested purchasers from overseas who were planning to shut it down, and even against the recommendation by the financial consultants helping the courts decide what to do.  This is a neat story about a community joining together to do what’s best for it’s survival; the story has only just begun.

So, there’s more to the name “Bob Smiley” than one would think at first passing.

I’m not sure which is worse:

1. The surprise that 2008 slipped away in the blink of an eye, or
2. The realization that I’m surprised this way every year, over and over again.

Seems like I need to adjust my thinking about time passage.

A few years ago I started trying to “experience” the seasons of the year in order to be more in tune with the passage of time.  As a result, I’m even more aware of how quickly the seasons turn, the sun’s path shifts, and the years go by.  Yet I’m constantly surprised by it.  This seems like a failure on my part to adjust my mindset to the reality around me.  After almost 45 years, you’d think I’d have a handle on the changing of the seasons!

On the bright side, I guess surprise isn’t far removed from awe, and it’s good to be in awe of the creation around us.

OK, I feel better now.  Thanks for listening.

Oh, and have a happy, healthful, prosperous, improved, and spiritually fulfilling 2009.

Then came electricity.

Now we flaunt our rebellious “we-can-improve-upon-God’s-design” attitude not only at God but at the entire Starry Host as well, by turning the earth’s dark-side into a bright star with all the lights we have turned on all over the country.

No wonder the average US resident isn’t in awe of the starry host… we can’t even see them through the haze of environmentally-offensive fluorescent luminescence! (… and all the bugs that are attracted to it adding to the atmospheric haze.)  And why go outside when I can watch TV all night from the comfort of my own room?  Or better yet: work all night.  A white-collar worker’s work is never done… just log in from home and continue working!  Thank God for Al Gore and the Internet!

God forbid we should have a dark street at night!  There might be danger lurking.  Our suburbs now have a rose-orange glow to them because of the always-on street lights.  (And in the interest of energy savings, we’ve dimmed them and colored them in a way to make them frustrating to actually try to see by.  They are bright enough to keep someone awake at night if it’s shining in their window, but not bright enough to see that pedestrain on the sidewalk clearly.  I think we missed our goal on street lighting, but that’s a topic for a different blog post.)

Ironically, our street lights, house lights, external building lights to shine on our office buildings, all of which shine so brightly to us, don’t make a spec of difference to the universe out there.  Do we show up as bright as a star?  I think not.  Based on satellite photos, our bright cities barely show up as pin-pricks on a dark map.

Yet, lighting has become one of our many towers of babel, in which we try to outdo God by our own invention.  Meanwhile, we are all changing our sleep patterns because we now have the electrical power to allow us to be up all night.

This is better than putting our neighbor first, returning good for evil, and stopping work when the sun goes down?
(For greatest effect, read that last line using a Barbra Streisand-like voice with a thick New York/Brooklyn accent.)

I suddenly woke up and cautiously stepped around it (being very careful not to make any changes in my noise patterns so my wife wouldn’t notice) and headed into the kitchen for a cup of coffee.  She’d see it on her way down the stairs and deal with it.  Alex was her cat, and she’s always pointing out that I miss the obvious, so I had plausable deniability.

While standing before the coffee machine saying my morning prayer (at that time in my life, it went something like “Oh God just keep me out of trouble long enough to have some coffee”) I winced at the realization of how inconsiderate this was.  This is how I show love to my wife?  This is how I show grace to Alex?  So I went back to clean it up.

And there was Alex, looking down at me from the landing, as if to say “that was a test, and you almost failed.”  She stepped down the stairs, sniffed cautiously at it (as if she didn’t know!) and then proceded to the 2nd stair from the bottom, looking up at me with her big green eyes.

I melted.  I smiled and stroked her, asking somewhat playfully, “did you have to leave it right in the middle of the stairs?  I mean, if you were going to drop it, why not leave it under a bed or somewhere where I wouldn’t have to deal with it?  You have a box… was there a problem?”  Suddenly I flashed on an image of cat poops hidden under the bed.  “Nevermind, Alex.  Thanks for being so considerate.  I’d rather clean up after you than have you hide it where we don’t find it until it’s too late.”

Then it hit me.  (Sometimes mixing life with morning prayers does that.)  This is what confession is all about.  If we put our spiritual poops in the walkway, they get cleaned up.  If we hide them, they don’t get cleaned up, and they just fester, start to smell, and are harder to cover up.  Eventually it will have to get dealt with anyway, so it’s best to deal with it while it’s still recent and, well, small.  Doesn’t take much to clean up a recent one… the old ones are the difficult ones.

It’s even better if we can just poop in the spiritual sandbox where we are supposed to, but on those days when we make mistakes, putting it front-and-center in the middle of the streets-paved-with-gold is a sure-fire way of getting it cleaned up and having all evidence of it ever existing wiped away quickly.  Isn’t that better than having the entire set of heavenly fumigators decend upon your spiritual house, turn over your spiritual beds, and spiritually disinfect everything using a spritiual house-tent?  Then not only the whole neighborhood knows, but they talk about it for weeks!

And in Heaven, ”weeks” could be a long time.

The grammar has a rule absurd
       Which I should call an outworn myth:
A preposition is a word
       You mustn’t end a sentence with.

—Berton Braley

I believe I’ve developed that discipline.  And I’ve had a lot of fun doing it.  So I’m going to continue with BobLog.

However, I’m finding that I’d like to write about some things that really belong in a different blog all together. For example, while I could include professional wisdom, only some of my readers would care, and those interested solely in my professional postings would find the rest to be drivel.  Same with my Bible-oriented postings (of which you’ve seen none in this blog).

So, I’m starting 2 new blogs.  Feel free to check them out, or not, as you think your interests may take you.

1. blog.stelyn.com: this will be my professional blog, centered around my IT Strategy Consulting.  IT professionals may be interested in this blog.  People who have worked with me may be interested as well.  I haven’t really started it yet, but it will be coming soon.
2. Bob’s Bible Blog (sonrisante.wordpress.com): this will be a blog completely centered around interpretation and commentary of Bible passages.  It will be a layman’s Bible commentary.  (I’m the layman.)  Notice this blog is on WordPress.  I’m trying it out to compare.
3. boblog.stelyn.com: this will continue to be the sort of thing it has been so far: things I find personally amusing, interesting, or helpful.  It will contain personal glimpses that would be considered “out of bounds” for the other two blogs.

Everyone who knows me knows that my spirituality is important to me.  Therefore BobLog will continue to ponder the relevance of Christian thinking in today’s world.  But as with the Crunching Snails or Purpose of a Cat’s Life posts, the BobLog approach will continue to be from the perspective of life looking outward.  My “Bob’s Bible Blog,” on the other hand, will be focused on Bible passages.  There is obviously some overlap, and in some cases I may decide to post an article in both blogs.  But for the most part, if the discussion centers around how to interpret or look at a Biblical passage, that will be posted in the BibleBlog; if the discussion centers around life or spiritual philosophy not necessarily centered on Biblical interpretation, I’ll post it in the BobLog.

James then follows up by saying “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”  (James 4:7)

For a how-to example from the natural world, watch this video.  It demonstrates how to take matters into your own hands and win a victory over the lion seeking to devour you:

(If you don’t see the video above, click here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj0jo-XLzHQ)

Since I’ve been paying more attention to birds lately, it occurred to me that I’ve heard birds making similar sounds.  This was definitely a car alarm; I could tell because I was listening through my upstairs windows and it was too loud to be a bird, and too regular, but I wondered whether these alarms were actually modeled from bird noises.  Still the owner didn’t turn the stupid thing off.  I was about to go downstairs, out the door, and down the street to find out what was going on, when it suddenly stopped.  A mocking bird fluttered by my window and perched on the gutter above. 

The the car alarm started again, only this time it was much louder and it was coming from my roof.

Was that a car alarm I heard? 
No, it was a mocking bird.
What was I thinking?  How absurd!
How talented that mocking bird…
– Unknown

I am standing on a sandy path leading to the beach; tufts of grass bigger and higher than me are on either side of the path.  I am a young boy of about 5.  A man (played by Brian Quigley from “Ballykissangel”) is facing me, ahead of me on the path, showing me a sealed bottle of champagne, saying “Do you see it?  Can you really see it?  Focus on it.  Do you see it?”

I start to say “yes, it’s a bottle of champagne,” but he stops me by saying “don’t say anything.  Don’t name it, that will cause the power to be lost.  Focus on it.  Don’t just look at it, really see it.  Don’t say a word.  Don’t speak it.  Don’t even think the word that means this.  Just see it.  Do you see it?”

It occurs to me that he is trying to use as few words as possible.  I don’t know why, but this seems to be important.  Asking him would require words, so I know that I can’t ask him why.  I will learn, but not through explanation.

Using biometrics, this advanced doorbell will will the fingerprint of the button-pusher.  With 4GB of embedded flash memory, virtually hundreds of fingerprints can be stored inside the doorbell casing.  Users can add or remove ”friendly” fingerprints to the doorbell’s storage using a mini-USB port, for connecting to their laptop computer, or a wireless access point to download from their desktop over a secure wireless network.

When the doorbell is pushed, the internal fingerprint database is scanned.  If a match is found, the doorbell knows that the button-pusher is a “known friendly,” and the doorbell actually rings.  If the person is not registered as a friendly, or if they are wearing gloves, the doorbell does not ring.

More advanced features are also available (at an additional price of course) for those customers so inclined:

• “Plus” option: an embedded speaker will bark “Go Away” (by default, but you can replace it with your own message using your own voice) if the button-pusher is an unfriendly.
  
• “Super Plus” option: in addition to the “Plus” features, unfriendlies are treated with a small electrical “buzz” shock.
  
• “Pusher ID” option: in the unlikely event that a friendly is recognized, a pop-up on your computer screen tells you who is pushing your button.  (Wireless network required.)
  
• “Professional Enforcer” option: a real-time FBI inqury compares the button-pusher’s fingerprint with all fingerprints on file.  If a match is found, an ID is made, and subsequent webservice calls to various agencies around the country provide a full personal profile, credit history, criminal activity, and all other data available through various crime and personal investigation services.  All reports are immediately downloaded to your desktop.  A desktop software component allows you to redirect such inbound reports to anywhere you like: your email at work, your smart phone, etc.  The desktop software has an outlook-style rules manager so you can do complex things like conditionally sending data to your local police department for immediate dispatch.  (Monthly fee required, in addition to a wireless access point with internet connectivity.  Note that false alarm fees may apply in some municipalities, so use the rules at your own risk.)

If you think you want to invest in this product, please call to setup an appointment.  Ringing my bell without a prior appointment may result in sore fingers.

Everyone asks “Is your glass ½-full or ½-empty?”  For a long time I could not figure out which was the optimist.  Does being an optimist mean the glass is half full? or half empty?

Everyone knows that optimism is important for a healthy life:
Survival of The Most Optimistic: Dutch Study Reports That Optimism Lowers Risk of Death

I’ve always thought of myself as an optimist.  I looked on the bright side of things… unless you were looking on the bright side of things, in which case I’d point out the flaw in your thinking (in order to help you overcome your weaknesses).  Once my boss said it would be simple to do such-and-such.  I said no way in hell.  My boss’s boss said, “Hmmm… the optimist says it’s easy, the pessimist says ‘no way in hell,’ I wonder if there’s somewhere in the middle?” 

I was offended.  I  was an optimist!  I worked hard to be an optimist!

External feedback to the contrary, yet I persisted in thinking of myself as an optimist.  People said I was pessimistic because I always wanted to know what things would cost before agreeing to them.  Counting the cost wasn’t being pessimistic, it was being realistic!  Looking for problems in order to solve them was not being pessimistic, it was being a good project planner! 

Eventually I realized that everyone else in the world thought that an optimist would see the glass as half-full.  But although I thought of myself as an optimist, I also thought of the glass as being half empty.  But I couldn’t figure out how a glass being half-empty was a pessimistic attitude.  I mean, I still have half the glass left!  It’s only half-empty!  Even more eventually I realized that my use of the word “only” reinforced the notion that I must be a pessimist.

Disheartened, yet always interested in truth, I resigned myself to realizing I must have always been a pessimist, although I had thought (hoped?) I was an optimist.  What a bummer.  Especially because people who called themselves “realists” said that I tended to see the world through rose-colored glasses.  I hated the smell of roses, so I could totally see why that meant I was a pessimist.  But it just didn’t compute.  These people calling themselves realists usually did so when I was trying to point out the bright side of things.  If I’m a pessimist, then these “realists” must be optimists.  Why were the optimists rebuffing me for trying to be optimistic?  Was it because they thought I was invading their territory?  If so, that was not very optimistic of them.  And I wasn’t meaning to, so it wasn’t very realistic of them either.  It wasn’t optimistic or realistic, it was just defensive.

After a few years of a successful career, I finally put all the pieces together.  The key was back in that word “only.”  My glass is only half empty.  That is so key!  I had previously deluded myself into thinking that the word “only” meant I was whining, and therefore pessimistic.  But it’s not whining… it’s a qualitative statement.  Many people think of it as a negative quality, but I think of it as objectively qualitative, neither positive nor negative.  As a software engineer battling the forces of evil (a.k.a. marketing and sales), it’s important to qualify one’s opinions.  My half-empty glass was qualified with “only.”

After all, my “only half-empty glass” means I’ve already partaken of the benefit of the first half!  So, not only do I have half of it left, I’ve had some it already.  It’s not some hope beyond reach… I’ve already reached it.  It’s not squandered, either, because I still have some left!  How in the world is this a bad thing?

I have come to realize that it’s those sales-and-marketing types that insist on optimism being represented as a half-full glass.  Who in their right mind is going to trust the interpretation of an analogy as critical as this one to a marketing-type?  These are the same guys that are trying to tell you you need something that you’re probably better off without, so why trust them in this?

On the other hand, if you ever meet a sales-and-marketing type who sees the glass as half-empty, you probably want to get out of dodge quickly because by their own judgement they are pessimistic, and a pessimistic marketing person is just plain confused, and that won’t help anybody.

So, I hereby justify my position: I’m the Optimist Whose Glass Is Only ½-Empty.

My father’s name was Robert Smiley.  He went by Bob.

I was not named after my father, rather I was named after my paternal grandfather, whose name was also Robert (my middle name is my maternal grandfather’s middle name; I guess it’s a way to represent both sides of the family).

Around the house, I was always “Robert” because my father was “Bob.” 

Once I got out into the workforce, I thought I could take the name “Bob,” but there were always complications.  At one point, I was actually working in the same office as my father, so I had to be “Robert.”  In fact, after a while they just took to calling me “Son of Smiley.”  Eventually they decided I deserved a name of my own, so they started calling me “Grin.”  But this is getting off topic.

When I moved on to a different place, my boss was Bob, so once again I had to be Robert.  This wasn’t fair, because in actuality his first name was Bernard, and his middle name was Robert.  I told him once that I thought if he wasn’t going to use his first name, he should at least use his real second name so I could use the nickname.  He said when I became his boss he would consider it.

I finally landed another job, this time in San Francisco, and lo-and-behold, there were no other Bobs!  So I was able to be “Bob” for once.  Once I was able to have it, I realized that it was strange to use a name that isn’t a true first name.  I always had to sign “Robert” because that was my official name.  My corporate phone directories, nameplates, and eventually email, were “Robert Smiley” because they were based on the official employment documentation.  So although I told everyone to call me Bob, I was using Robert as often as not.

By this time I was getting tired of the “formality” behind the name Robert.  And it doesn’t even sound nice.  The only thing sounding worse than “Robert” in English is “Robert” in French.

Then I landed a job in the Silicon Valley.  The difference when I moved there was that people actually knew me as “Bob Smiley” before I officially started work, so my email was setup as “Bob” and, since it was a startup without rigid controls and nameplates, I got to create my own nameplate for my office door using my own fancy printing techniques on the local HP printer.  Strangely enough, ever since then I’ve been able to maintain a “Bob Smiley” presence in all the companies I’ve worked in, even down to my email address of bsmiley@whatever_company_i_am_at.com.

Issue solved.  But not really.

You wouldn’t believe how many “Bob Smiley”s there are in the world today.  I’ve never met them, but I’ve spoken with some who have met them.  Every phone book has at least one.

One day recently my neighbor said to me, “my daughter heard you speak the other day… I didn’t know you were a comedian!”  That wasn’t me, that was Bob Smiley the comedian.  (Although I like to think I’m funny, this guy actually gets paid for it.)  This is the same guy that stole my domain name.  Seriously!  I wanted to get the URL www.BobSmiley.com as my personal site, and when I applied for it, it had already been taken by Bob Smiley the comedian.

I’m not the comedian: I’m the other Bob Smiley.

A few weeks ago a new client said “I like your golf column.”  I’m not the columnist, I’m the other Bob Smiley.

I’m not the country western singer, either.  I’m the other Bob Smiley.

When I was 19 I had a strange situation that I didn’t know how to handle.  I was volunteering at a radio station (KCLB) one morning and was talking with one of the directors there, a guy name Dave, when the phone rang.  I answered the call, “KCLB, can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak with Dave, please.”

“He’s right here, can I tell him who’s calling?”

“Yes, this is Bob Smiley.”

I almost replied, “No, sir, I mean you’re name,” but I caught myself and realized that he had meant that that was his name and for a second I thought maybe it was my father but decided it didn’t sound like him so it probably wasn’t and so I almost said “that’s my name too” but then thought that it might be too familiar to do so in a professional situation and I was confused and I didn’t know what to do and I thought this might be a joke on me and I didn’t like being the joke and then I realized Dave was waiting for the phone with a quizzical look on his face and the guy on the phone was silently expecting to talk to Dave and I was in a stunned stupor not doing anything so that made everything even more awkward so in a befuddled half-trance which caused Dave some bit of amusement I just silently passed the receiver over to him without saying anything.

That’s the only time in my life I’ve ever actually spoken with a Bob Smiley that wasn’t from my immediate family.

I’m not the guy on the phone… I’m the other Bob Smiley.

When I was in high school, I remember positing the notion among my friends that we shouldn’t rely upon our memories as much as we tend to.  The notion went something like this:

1. We decide we know something because we remember it to be true
2. We can tell whether it’s a true memory or a false memory by how solid it is in our memory
3. We think we can tell when a memory is not solid because the details are vague.  Sometimes we don’t realize how vague the details are, but once we do realize them, we declare that memory to be an “uncertain” memory.
4. Even when we lie, we know we are lying, so making up stories that are lies doesn’t change our certainty of the truth.
5. But there is absolutely no outside evidence that validates the functioning of our memory.  The only gauge of whether a memory is true is our own mind; this by definition is a conflict of interest.
6. Therefore, our memories should always be treated as suspect until corroborated by external evidence.

I then suggested the idea that a technology could be developed that would “insert” or “replace” memories with false ones.  But were this to happen, the mind, which is the keeper of the memory, would be totally duped  into thinking it was a true memory.

My friends thought I was crazy and suggested that I should have my brain checked to see if it had been replaced already.

It rang of science fiction, aliens doing experiments on abducted humans, etc.  And in fact there are a lot of very cool movies with this as a central technological quandary.  (Two recent ones I’ve watched which I liked were Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Jim Carey, Kate Winslet, 2004), which is an edgy love story, and Paycheck (Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, 2003), which is a B-grade action/drama placed in the near future.)

After years of learning how to make do in life, understanding that my memory isn’t perfect but it’s somewhat reliable and I can usually (though not always) tell when I’m remembering something partially, I had almost forgotten about my high school anxiety regarding memories and mind-altering.

However, recent experiences have caused me to realize that science fiction is not required.  Old Age is all that’s required.  Stir in an ounce of Alzheimer’s.  This dish will be ready before you know it.

I was born in New Jersey, but my family moved to Oakland before I was a year old.  When people ask where I’m from, it’s fun to say “New Jersey” and have them remark at how well I’ve overcome my accent! 

(Once I got into the Software Development scene and started interacting with people across the country, this backfired.  East Coasters would ask “What Exit?”  What in the world was that supposed to mean?  My ignorance at what they meant was an obvious give-a-way.  Eventually a friend told me they were talking about the New Jersey Turnpike.  I hunted it down in May of 1991 when I had some free time during a business trip to NYC: 41C.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, fugheddaboudit.)

Our first house in Oakland was on a hill where the back of the house (therefore my bedroom window) looked out over the MacArthur freeway and Mills College. 

I remember watching the ribbon-cutting ceremony from that window as the MacArthur freeway (I-580) was opened to connect with the Warren freeway (CA-13) and extend down to Castro Valley.  Since I was about 3 at the time, I’m not sure now exactly how much of it was new then.  I do remember that, when coming home from the downtown direction, before the freeway extension we had to exit the freeway at the MacArthur Blvd exit because that was the last exit; afterwards we could get off at the exit for the Warren freeway and make a couple of weird left-hand turns.  That’s also when we started using the freeway to get to San Leandro to visit some friends; prior to that we would cross over to the Nimitz (I-880) by way of the beloved coliseum and head south.

I lived in that house until Kindergarten, at which point my family moved to another location in Oakland where we stayed until my 5th grade. 

Timeline punctuation marks like that are convenient because they enable me to be somewhat sure of my age during a younger year’s memory.  If it happened in the first neighborhood, I was 5 or younger; if it happened in the second neighborhood, I was between 5 and 12; in the other city (which shall remain nameless because I never felt like I belonged there) I was 12 years old or later.  For even further precision in my youngest years: if I can place it in my first bedroom in that first house in Oakland, it was before I turned 4; my second bedroom was when I was either 4 or 5.  I know this because my younger brothers were born when I was 3, and after a few months they took over my room, I took over my parents’ room, and they moved downstairs to the newly remodeled basement-come-master-suite where they wouldn’t have to hear us.

As I ponder some of my memories from that first neighborhood, it occurs to me that how a child develops awareness, or at least how I developed awareness, is pretty sporadic and random.  For example, from a friend’s house who lived on the same side of the street but at a different angle, we could see a bright yellow ‘Motel’ sign.  It turns out this motel is on MacArthur Boulevard about a mile or so from our neighborhood (over the hill and 2 exits down).  I often saw the same motel sign when we passed it on the freeway, but didn’t make the connection right away.  I remember feeling like I had made a major discovery when I realized that the two were the same Motel sign, and that if I were looking out my friend’s window, I might even be able to see my car!  Was my friend looking out her window seeing me right now?

Being the obnoxious 4-year-old know-it-all that I was, the next time I saw that friend I actually told her that I had seen her in her window from my car seat.  She didn’t believe me (she wasn’t as stupid as I thought she should be, apparently).  She didn’t even believe that the motel sign would be able to be seen while you were driving around.  And how would you know it’s the same one?  Impossible! (Now she’s the one being stupid and obnoxious.)

I also remember that her name was Robin, which meant that for years I thought Christopher Robin was a girl.  It didn’t help that he actually looked like a girl in the book’s illustrations.

I loved Winnie-the-Pooh.  I had the books, I had the tru-vue disks with 3D stills, and I would sit for hours clicking through those stills.  I remember thinking how strange it was that the red letters looked so much closer to me than the blue letters.  But when the Disney movie came out, I was estranged by the hedgehog.  He wasn’t supposed to be there, and he added nothing to the story.  Such a “bother”!  I didn’t like the movie as much as I liked the book.  (When I was about 35 I realized that the hedgehog’s line “I’m not in the book, you know!” wasn’t referring to the phone book.  See what I mean by sporadic?  That took me a full 30 years to figure out.)

I remember my dad driving home in a brand new Spitfire Triumph on my 3rd birthday.  Dark green convertible.  We called it my car because he brought it home on my birthday.  We went everywhere in it.  (Actually, I was born on my mom and dad’s 2nd anniversary, so it was actually a present to himself on his 5th anniversary.  This was required because my mother was pregnant again and he needed a cool one-seater to commute to San Francisco in, while my mom could have the Rambler station wagon.  It was aqua-blue with a white top.  I know it was aqua blue because the color teal hadn’t been invented yet.  Someone once asked me if perhaps I just hadn’t know about teal at that age, my being so young, but I reassured them that it certainly had not been invented yet because back then I knew everything and teal wasn’t anywhere to be found.  It was all aqua-blue.  Some called it aqua-green, but they were wrong.)

My baby sitter was Rachel.  Rachel had an older sister Shirley and an older brother.  I don’t remember the brother’s name.  I do remember he had a huge iguana as a pet and I thought it was so cool because it looked like a dinosaur.  I don’t remember for sure, but I bet I was afraid of it.

One time the three of them took me to an A’s game at the coliseum.  It lasted 22 innings and I didn’t make it home until about 2AM.  At the time, it was the longest game on record.  It was against the Angels.  We sat in the bleachers, and Shirley kept yelling to Joe Rudy, “Hey, Rudy, I named my dog after you!”  It was true; she had a pug-nosed dog named Rudy.  (I was sort of confused by her comment… after all, the dog’s first name was “Rudy,” but the player’s first name was “Joe.”  Shouldn’t the dog have been named “Joe”?  “The dog’s last name is ‘Joe,’ ” answered the brother.  That made sense.  But I was also confused because I knew the dog first, so I wasn’t sure how he got the name Rudy before I had even met the Rudy guy.)

That was the same game where they took Vida Blue out after 14 innings because someone got a hit.  Major crime!  Before this it was a 0-score 0-hit game, so I guess they got nervous.  After all, 14 innings of pitching is a lot of fastballs!  Lots of fans left at that point.  “Is it time to go home?”  I asked.  I was hoping we weren’t going to go home.  I’m sure I was much more of a nuisance to the oldsters than I thought I was, but I was having fun.  Cotton candy, A’s pennants, hoping a home run ball would come our way, hot dogs, ice cream in those paper cups with flat wooden spoons that I can drop on the floor, shouting, yelling, hooting, hollering.  And besides, our dog had the same name as the center fielder!  Fortunately, we stayed until the end.

The score was 0-0 for all 22 innings, until someone hit a home run for the A’s just after 1AM.  (I don’t remember who hit the home run, but it wasn’t Reggie Jackson, because every time he got up to bat, they walked him intentionally; I remember Shirley yelling “don’t walk him!” over and over again, but apparently her powers of persuasion still needed some honing.)  That home run was perfect timing, because back then there was a 1AM curfew on A’s games, so that was going to be the last inning anyway, and the game would have ended in a tie.

When we got home, my mom told me that she had been listening to the game on the radio, and when Vida Blue hit the showers (I sill remember the cartoon on the light-boards of him slipping on a bar of soap) they announced that a lot of people were leaving in protest.  But she knew our crew wouldn’t be among them… we’d stay until the end.  I think she probably went to bed.

I remember one other thing from those days; in fact this is the memory that got me started on this rambling road. 

At some point while living in that first house, I discovered that there was this perfect location on the street in front of my house, peering between my house and the next door neighbor’s house, during sunset, that I could see the sun setting exactly behind the Golden Gate bridge.  This is hard for me to believe now that I reminisce about it, because we were low enough on the hill that I wouldn’t think seeing the bridge was possible.  But I distinctly remember it, and I distinctly remember verifying sometime later that it wasn’t the bay bridge, which was backed by the city-scape, not the ocean.  Now, I don’t remember being able to see the Golden Gate Bridge in the daytime.  I knew what the Golden Gate Bridge was, had been there a couple of times, and had been into San Francisco a few times since my dad worked there.  But one day I was watching as the sun went down, turning red from its normal yellow, getting quite big and football shaped, and it disappeared into the water.  At first I thought I could see it actually beneath the water as it sank down, but after watching it repeatedly for a few days I pieced together that it was merely a reflection of the part that was still above the horizon.  The silhouette of the bridge just added to the feeling of mysticism.  Somehow I had grasped that observing the sundown was a mystical event, an honor, and something to make time for.  For quite a few days, when it was sundown time, I’d scurry my little Skat car to that place by the telephone pole on the sidewalk between the two houses and watch it.  My heart lept with a longing that I describe as the sun dipped behind the bridge and into the ocean beyond. 

With many more years and a greater vocabulary, I would now describe that longing as a pang of guilt that I had frittered away an entire day in the sun without thanking it; a fear that the sun might not come back because we take it for granted; a start that it sets so quickly and the moment is over.  But even now, those descriptions don’t fully describe the sentiment.

I’ve felt the sentiment since then at various times throughout my life with other subjects of inspiration.  It’s a mix of appreciation, awe, and regret all at the same time.  Somewhat nostalgic, but often the inspiration for the nostalgia had no precedent, and therefore nothing to be nostalgic about.  The term “joy” comes to mind, as in C.S. Lewis’ “Surprised by Joy”, but without his definition of it being “something fleeting, something just around the corner, something that, once you become fully aware of it, it’s already gone” I would have thought that “Joy” was too frivolous of a word for it.

What I’ve found out was quite interesting.  So, let me set the record as straight as I can for those of you who, like me, were bobbing around in a primordial soup of ignorance related to Darwin’s publications:

1. The “Voyage of the Beagle” was a published work documenting the voyage and discoveries of the ship called the “H.M.S. Beagle.”  The “Beagle” had 4 voyages; Darwin was on the second voyage.  “Voyage of the Beagle” was actually 4 volumes:
   1. Volume 1 was the captain’s account of the first voyage
   2. Volume 2 was the captain’s account of the second voyage
   3. Volume 3 was Darwin’s “Journal and Remarks”
   4. Volume 4 was an appendix
2. The “H.M.S. Beagle” was a ship that looked like this:
   
3. The “Origin of the Species” was published much later, and built upon Darwin’s “Journal and Remarks” from his voyage on the Beagle.

You’ll probably go to church this weekend and listen to the Word of God taught by your pastor. So here’s the deal: Will you remember what he says five minutes after he’s done, and, if you do, more importantly, what will you do about it?

The biggest problem, as I see it, with the church in America, is that we are spiritually educated well beyond any corresponding level of obedience. We have become connoisseurs of fine sermons but we fall well short of any real implementation of the sermon’s content in the real world of our everyday life.

Sermon sampling is a sure way to spiritual lethargy, and I’m sure you don’t want that for your life. I certainly don’t. So here is a suggestion: Take a notebook with you to church, write down the main points of the message, and before you leave the service, write down at least one point of application that you will seek to implement that very week.

My Response

Moral

It’s more imporant to feel spiritually superior than to work on overcoming spiritual lethargy.

Learning to draw is more than learning the skill itself: by studying this book you will learn how to see.  That is, you will learn how to process visual information in the special way used by artitsts.  That way is different from the way you usually process visual information and seems to require that you use your brain in a different way than you ordinarily use it. …

The magical mystery of drawing ability seems to be, in part at least, an ability to make a shift in the brain state to a different mode of seeing/perceiving.  When you see in the special way in which experienced artists see, then you can draw. …

The exercises in this book are designed to help you make the mental shift and gain a twofold advantage: first, to open access by conscious volition to the right side of your brain in order to experience a slightly altered mode of awareness; second, to see things in a different way.

Many artists have spoken of seeing things differently while drawing and have often mentioned that drawing puts them into a somewhat altered state of awareness.  In that different subjective state, artists speak of feeling transported, “at one with the work,” able to grasp relationships that they ordinarily cannot grasp.  Awareness of the passage of time fades away, and words recede from consciousness.  Artists say that they feel alert and aware yet are relaxed and free of anxiety, experiencing a pleasurable, almost mystical activation of the mind.

(emphasis from original text)

To which I say… bring it on!

Last night I found this book on my shelves:

The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain:
A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence
by Betty Edwards

In keeping with my time-honored tradition of starting new things before I finish whatever I’m already working on, I’ve decided to start reading this book along with all the others.  I’ve always been interested in how the brain works, and the mystery of left-brain/right-brain operation is a mystery I’ve wanted to know more about for some time.  I can’t even remember which is which.  (I can usually figure out which one is the left side of my brain and which one is the right side of my brain, although it takes some careful thinking… but which one is used for logic & procedures and which is used for imagery I tend to forget.)

This is a book about learning to draw, so it’s probably more about artistic techniques than an actual study in right-brain operation.  But a quick read of the Preface causes me to think there will be enough brain-food in this to make it interesting.  It also helps that I am interested in learning how to draw better.  I always wished I could, even as a child.

In the Preface she mentions some of her own experience as she was trying to teach a class on how to draw.  She has found a way to “shift” into right-brain mode.  This is a practical application of the left-brain/right-brain knowledge.  Understanding the theory is one thing; actually making use of it in daily life takes it to another level all together.  I hope to get something like that from this book.

When I was a youngster we attended a Presbyterian Church in the town where I grew up.  I knew many of the Bible stories, and basked in the glow of my Sunday school teachers’ affirmations and compliments.  I knew about Noah, Joseph, and David-and-Goliath.  I knew from early feltboard storytellings about Jesus saying the children should be allowed to come to him, and remember seeing his feltboard image in his white robes that looked so much like a throne that I couldn’t tell where the throne stopped and the robe began.  (In retrospect, there probably was no throne; he was probably crouching in order to get on a level with the children.  But I thought it was a throne because, after all, isn’t Jesus supposed to be on a throne when he’s not in a manger?)

I can’t say the stories made any real impact on my life other than liking to show off that I knew answer when the Sunday school teachers informally quizzed us about them.  Knowing this stuff didn’t really help in school, and didn’t cause me to read the Bible to find out more… I just took what I gleaned from the stories people would tell, mull it over, and invent expertise on those particular stories.  Then I’d hope I’d never be asked about any stories I didn’t already know.

Were you to ask me about Jesus, who he was, why he died, and I couldn’t tell you.  In fact, I’d run from those types of questions.  Can’t we stick to the stories where I already knew the answers?

Were you to ask me whether I believed the stories were true, and I’d straighten up and wax eloquent with something significantly mature and philosophical, like ”I believe they are stories with truth in them.”  Were Noah and his family really the only survivors of a world-wide flood?  Probably not.  It was probably a localized flood, massive in scale, to the point of making them think it was world-wide.  Besides, how could a rainbow be a sign to them when they obviously would have seen a rainbow almost every time it rained!  (I was lost to the notion that it hadn’t rained before that… apparently that part never came up, or if it did, I didn’t latch onto it.)  Did Jonah really get swallowed by a whale?  Sounded more like Pinocchio to me.  I crafted just enough skepticism to appear wise (at least to the rest of the unwise like me).

During my 8th grade year, the youth pastor (”Buzz” was his name: perfect name for a youth pastor!) invited the youth group to start an early morning Bible study in his office before school on Wednesday mornings.  He said he’d bring the donuts if we brought our bibles.  I couldn’t pass up an offer like that!

The first morning, there were 4 of us.  After that, only 2.  I kept going because I liked the donuts.  Buzz often remarked that I was the only person he knew that “would eat a jelly-filled donut, donut-side first.”  How was I supposed to know which side had the jelly in it?  (It never occurred to me to ask him… I thought I was just supposed to know.)  I left at least one jelly stain on his office couch each week, as a memorial of my attendance.

This was my first real exposure to Bible Study.  We started with Daniel.  I had heard of “Daniel and the Lion’s Den” but didn’t know the story.  (Since I was supposed to be an expert, I’d never inquire into a story I didn’t know.  I’d just pretend to know it and make reference to it as little as possible.)  We discussed the dreams, what others said the images might be, and how likely those interpretations might be.  This may be why Daniel is now one of my favorite books in the Bible.  After we were done with Daniel we moved on to Ester. 

Both of these books deal with not being afraid to demonstrate faith in God.  I didn’t realize this particular point at the time, but my subconscious must have picked up on it.

Each Wednesday morning when our time was up, Buzz would drive us to school and drop us off.  I remember being self-conscious about my pastor dropping me off at school.  What if other kids saw me?  What if they asked if I believed in this stuff?  After a couple of worried weeks, I realized that I was being overly paranoid.  There was nothing on his car to indicate he was my church pastor, so I could just say he was a friend of my mother’s dropping me off.  But internally I obsessed to come up with an answer to the question, just in case someone were to accuse me.  I didn’t want to say “No, I don’t believe,” because the follow-up question would be “then why do you go at all?”  I didn’t want to say “Yes, I believe” because it wasn’t cool and I already wasn’t cool and I didn’t want to make it any worse than it already was and it was already pretty bad.  Besides, I didn’t really believe in God, did I?  Or did I?  I remembered believing in God when I was younger.  Was Christianity true?  I certainly didn’t think the Bible was any different from any other religion’s scripture.  Weren’t all religions basically the same?  The question for me wasn’t really whether any one religion was true, but whether God really existed at all (in which case I figured all religions would be true or all would be false).  

I could just say I went for the donuts…

For some reason my subconscious wasn’t satisfied with using the donuts as an excuse.  After a few more weeks of battling these imaginary aggressors accusing me of being uncool, I realized that I could tell the truth: “I don’t know.”  That would explain why I was going in the first place: to find out.  It would also mean I wasn’t wholly committed.  And, in a sense, it was true.  I didn’t know whether I believed in God.  And besides, they were giving us free donuts!  Why would I want to pass up free donuts?  (And not just one; I’d typically put away 3 or 4 on a morning, though only 1 would be jelly-filled.)

About that time I discovered the appealing term “Agnostic.” So, if someone were to ask me whether I believed in God, I’d say I was an agnostic!  Not that anyone ever asked me.

The problem was, I would do an internal duck-and-cover as I imagined that retort.  I didn’t notice it right away.  I was so relieved at having discovered a way out of my quandary that the relief overwhelmed the internal reaction.  But the next week the agitation was less subtle, and the week after that it was downright noticeable.  The self-proclaimed Bible expert realized that he was afraid that God was going to zap him with a bolt of lightning.  After all, that happened all the time in the Bible, didn’t it?  Maybe not a literal bolt of lightning… maybe it would be a figurative bolt of lightening that would take the form of a heart attack, right there on the school grounds as I was crossing the lawn to go to my locker.  I could see the headlines: “8th Grader Dies from Heart Attack.”  This brought up my fear of death… I feared the idea of dying because I was claustrophobic and was afraid I’d wake up inside a coffin; or worse: I’d be still from rigor-mortise and not be able to move at all; or even worse: I would never wake up!  (Perhaps this fear of death is why I had such a hard time going to sleep when I was a kid… well that’s something for a different blog post.)  So I did my usual trick about how to handle ideas I didn’t like to think about: I ignored them and distracted myself with something else, such as the homework I was supposed to do the night before but didn’t.

The next week… it happened again.  And then the next week again.  I couldn’t escape.  Was God going to zap me because I said I didn’t know whether I believed in him?  He’s not a very nice God if that’s the case.  (Cringe.  Duck-and-cover.)  In fact, he’s a scary God, and I don’t think I want to believe in a scary God.  (Cringe.)  So, therefore, I don’t believe in God, because he’s scary.  (Cringe.)

This went on week after week.  Then one week it hit me: not the bolt of lightening I had been expecting, but the “bolt from the blue” realization: if I was afraid that God was going to zap me, then I must actually believe that he exists!  Ha ha ha!  I did believe; I just hadn’t known it yet.  I felt quite relieved, because “if I believe, which I must do if I am afraid he’ll zap me, then he won’t zap me!”

So I was relieved that I believed in God, stopped cringing, and promptly forgot the whole thing.  

My belief in God didn’t change anything other than my thinking “somewhere out there beyond all the stars was some super-advanced life form that was probably too busy running the universe to know one bit about me.”  It didn’t change my life, nor my behaviors, other than removing from me the cringe I would experience as I thought about whether he existed.  I still used the term “Agnostic” to describe my faith, because after all, I didn’t know anything about God other than his existence, and I didn’t have proof.  I didn’t ask the question “Who is God?” but rather “What is God?”  Was God an alien life form? Was God an inanimate Force to be used by those with the strongest faith for whatever they wanted?  (Star Wars had come out right about then.)

Regardless, I see this event being the first step in what became my current level of faith.  I believed God to exist, whatever he was.  It wasn’t a rock-solid faith of any sort.  It possibly wasn’t faith at all.  Future years brought other incidents for me to think I’d “found God” once again.  So, it was a faltering, hesitant, first baby spiritual step in which I fell right over on my spiritual face and didn’t try to take another for a few years.

But my love for donuts has never diminished, and I will always hold them in high esteem because of the significant role they’ve played in my spiritual journey.  Yes, donuts are holey.  (”Holy?”)

In the U.S., we take certain technologies for granted which have been around for decades.  Our current technology advancements all ride upon the shoulders of the advancements we’ve made before.  Cellular telephony is an advancement of the telephone, which was an advancement of the telegraph.  Without telephone wires entangling the country, the wireless age would never have happened.

Yet in Rwanda, cellular technology is forefront in remote villages and areas that don’t even have electricity.  “I was in a villiage that had zero electricity and no telephones; no wires whatsoever.  But everyone had cell phones, and they all got great reception.  My Blackberry got better reception in Rwanda remote areas than in most parts of my office building here in the states.  I was able to remain completely connected through my Blackberry.”  Email, internet, and telephone, all without a local infrastructure we take for granted and consequently think of as a requirement.

“How do they charge their batteries?” I asked.

“Solar panels,” he replied.  “Instead of telephone poles and electrical pylons, they have solar panels and cell phone towers.”

I remembered another friend who likes to hike a lot and told me about solar panels made for taking on hiking trips.  They are light-weight so you can carry them along with your backpack, and they can charge your cell phone or laptop stored inside your backpack while you hike (not while you wait).  Putting these images together, I envisioned an Africa with people walking or biking from place to place talking on their cell phones and using a solar panel instead of an umbrella to shelter them from the hot sun.

In that case, it would be important to keep the birds from perching on your solar panels and leaving messes on them, because that would interfere with your energy throughput!

• Money
• Government
• Religion
• War
• Money
• Cars
• Industry
• The Wheel
• Computers
• Money
• Unions
• Schools (when I was in 5th grade)
• Bombs (all types, but we seem to keep making them worse)
• Credit Cards

But I have recently uncovered something that’s much more pervasive and seemingly benign than anything on that list.  This is a relatively modern invention that we attempted since prehistoric times, got a really good handle on during the industrial age, and have perfected in recent years.  Its idolatrous position in the westernized world had led us to completely revise our priorities.  It interferes with relationships, preempts good things from taking place, causes us to settle for “Good” when “Best” is just around the corner.  It promotes anxiety, worry, fear, and embarrassment.  It is used as a weapon for insulting, embarrassing, and harassing.  It is used as a prod to disenfranchise otherwise happy people.  It is definitely not an opiate of the people; rather it is a cause of suffering.

The same types of swallows return to Pleasanton each year as well, except that we don’t call them Swallows of San Juan Capistrano.  Instead we call them Mud Swallows.  This is because once they arrive, they immediately begin to build nests using mud from a nearby creek.

But the thing is, although it’s quite remarkable to us that they return to the same location on the same day each year, it’s not all that uncommon for birds.  Hummingbirds, too, will return to the same back yard they left a year ago, and will typically arrive on the same date as the year before.  Apparently weather has little to do with it; early or late spring doesn’t mean the bird shows up early or late.  Apparently it has more to do with the sunrise and sunset.

What I find remarkable is not the date-factor, but the location factor.  Whether hummingbird or mud swallow, they return to the same tree (or barn, or rock, or whatever) in the same field.

So, if you want to confuse a mud-swallow, here’s what you should do:

• Find the field they use as a homing location.
• Tear down the barn (or tree or whatever the birds use as their nesting grounds) and construct in it’s place a subdivision.  Be sure that the subdivision is made of cul-de-sacs that contains the same models of houses in the same order. 

For best results:

• You should have a minimum of 4 cul-de-sacs with at least 4 or 5 houses per cul-de-sac.  You can use 4 or 5 different models, but each cul-de-sac must have the same models in the same locations relative to the cul-de-sac.
• All cul-de-sacs should be given the same orientation.  For example, if one street faces north, they all should face north.  (An access road is usually required for this type of arrangement, but that’s OK because there will be no houses built on this access road.)
• Be sure to complete all construction between the time the swallows leave and before they return the following year.

In the photo at the right, notice that although 5 different models are used, each model is in the same exact location within the quintuplet, and all quintuplets have driveways facing the same direction.

I know this will work because I once bought a brand new home in this type of subdivision and was able to see the effect it had on the mud-swallows.  After they got over their initial confusion, they did indeed start to build nests.  Since the barn was missing, they started to build their mud-huts on the newly constructed homes.

From my upstairs bedroom window I could see them swoop in to build a nest under the roof above my window.  There were dozens flying to different perches around the cul-de-sac.  They would fly in, almost hitting the window, and pull up at the last minute.  Then they sculpted a bit more of their soon-to-be home, then fly off to get some more raw materials, and come back.

But an interesting thing happened… after about 3 of these round trips, they were no longer in my cul-de-sac.  Instead, they had moved east one cul-de-sac, repeating the same pattern.  After a couple more minutes, they again went to the next cul-de-sac over.  Finally they returned to my cul-de-sac and continued where they had left off about 15 minutes earlier.

I got the distinct impression that there were many more mud-huts built that summer than were necessary, and many were empty.  This worked out well, because most of the homeowners were out with hoses spraying down the mud-huts before the birds could finish building them, so the extra homes came in handy as a fall-back plan.

She dropped it off at the local neighborhood mailbox after the last pickup was scheduled on Wednesday, so it would have been postmarked on Thursday.  It should have arrived in my mailbox on Friday.

So of course we started lamenting the poor service of our local post office.  Deliveries take longer than they should. Sometimes they don’t arrive at all.  Too many things get lost in the mail, or misdelivered to the wrong house.  I laughed when I told her I had watched a Barney Miller re-run over the weekend; in the 1974 sitcom, Detective Fish sardonically remarked about the outrageousness of a 13-cent stamp!  He swore there was no one in the world worth spending that much money to send mail to.

But then I slipped into devil’s advocate mode (something I tend to do too easily) and reminded myself (and my friend) of the following points:

• In many countries, one would never presume to send bill payments through the postal service… they just aren’t expected to ever arrive; but in our country we consider it “delivered” as soon as we drop it off.  The postmark is as good as delivery.
• I heard a story about the postal service in Paraguay: if they get back-logged, they just light a match to clear out the warehouse.  This is probably an urban legend, but it tells of their expectations that their mail might not actually get through.  You can’t count on it, so don’t send important stuff.
• I’ve been in countries where the citizens tell me that they fully expect all their mail to be scanned before delivery, to be sure there is no anti-government plot afoot.  This causes them to be very careful about what they say or what they enclose in their letters about any matter whatsoever.  Once people think they are being watched for any reason, their communications of any sort (including personal notes) become more covert, because you never know what’s going to be used against you in a court of law (or whatever stands in law’s place in that country).
• In my neighborhood, I can pretty much count on the postal service delivering my NetFlix the day after NetFlix tells me they’ve sent it.  That means if I put a CD in my front mailbox for the mailman to pick up, 2 days later I’ll have the replacement (unless Sundays or Holidays intervene).  Most of the time when there has been a delay it’s been due to NetFlix operations, not the postal service.  After 3 years of being a NetFlix customer, only 2 have been lost, only 1 significantly delayed by the post office, and only 3 damaged (which wasn’t proven to be the fault of the postal service).
• If I’m sending a letter (or invoice, bill, or any other first-class package that conforms to standard postal dimensions) to anywhere in the SF Bay Area, it will pretty much get there the next day, and definitely by the day after.  (Faster even than sending Priority Mail… I tried it once.)
• If I move, my letters will find me for at least 6 months, often longer, merely because the postal service will forward it.
• I don’t know how much mail is processed on a daily basis, but I can envision it to be at least 10s of millions of pieces of mail each day.  We have 10s of millions of addresses to deliver to.  Given the combinations and permutations of such statistics, I’m amazed that we don’t have more lost mail than we do.

There’s always room for improvement and I certainly am not saying that the postal service can’t do better.  But when I start complaining about the postal service, I try to remind myself that most of my complaints come from a basic set of delivery expectations that, themselves, are based on past performance.  In other words, I’m taking our postal service for granted.

I’m glad that I can take my postal service for granted.  Sort of like telephone service.  And electricity.  And the Internet.  And so many other modern American conveniences that are so much a part of my daily life that I have no idea what life would be like without them.

“Etymology” means the study of the meaning of words.

“Entomology“ means the study of insects.

I’m sure the entomologist doesn’t care one iota, but were I an etymologist I’d wonder about the hidden relationship between the meanings of these two otherwise different words that causes them to sound so similar. 

Is an etymologist more like an Orkin man than he makes out to be?

He could not attribute it to any author: someone had left it on his desk anonymously.  I did a quick (very quick) google search just now and didn’t find it either.  So, I’m sure someone has it copywritten, but I cannot give further credit other than the magazine and column mentioned above.

Once upon a time, there was a little red hen who, scratching about for food, discovered there was a stray cow in the area.

She called together all of her friends and neighbors on the farm and said, “If we take care of this cow, we shall have good fresh milk to drink.  Who will help me feed the cow?”

“Not I,” said the duck.  “Not I,” said the goose.  ”Not I,” said the pig.  “Not I,” said the sheep.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen, and she did.  The scrawny cow prospered and fattened and her udders filled.

“Who will help me milk my cow?” said the little red hen.

“Not I,” said the duck.  “Out of my classification,” said the goose.  ”I’d lose my seniority,” said the pig.  “I would not qualify for my unemployment compensation,” said the sheep.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen, and she did.

Finally it was time to put the milk in packages, so it could be shared by all.  “Who will help me package the milk?” asked the little red hen.

“That would be overtime for me,” said the duck.

“I never was instructed in the procedure,” said the goose.

“If I’m the only helper, that’s discrimination,” said the pig.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen.  She packaged five half-gallons of milk and displayed them for all her neighbors to see.  They all wanted some.  In fact, they demanded their share.  But the little red hen said, “No, I can use the five packages of milk for myself and my chicks.  Maybe even for the rooster.”

“Excess profits!” yelled the duck.  “Capitalist powermongering!” cried the goose.  “I demand equal rights!”  shouted the pig.  “I accuse you of unsanitary procedures and improper labeling!” screamed the sheep.

Then they hurriedly painted “unfair” picket signs and marched around the barnyard, shouting obscenities.

The government agent came and said to the little red hen, “You must not be greedy.”

“But I earned the milk,” said the little red hen.

“Exactly,” said the agent.  “That is our wonderful free enterprise system.  Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as she wants.  But under government regulations, the productive workers must share equally with the idle.”

And they lived happily ever after.  But the little red hen’s neighbors wondered why she never again produced any milk.

The Aptera (lots of cool videos on their site):

The Fisker Karma:

She and her brother brought a king snake they had found in their ruralish yard into the kitchen to play with it.  I forget how she said it happened, but somehow it got away from them and it slithered into an open kitchen cabinet drawer and disappeared.  They tried to get it out but couldn’t.  “It must have slipped up behind the drawer and down into the cabinet area, or up into a hole between the cabinet and wall, or something like that.”

After a few minutes of highly objective deliberation and thinking on the subject, they decided it would serve no beneficial purpose to tell their parents.  Who would it help?  Certainly not their parents, nor themselves, nor the snake.

For a while she and her brother were afraid that they might open up a drawer and there it would be… but that never happened.  They never saw the snake again.

She laughed as she told me the story.  I replied “whoever bought the house after you moved probably went to refinish the kitchen and during demolition found a dead snake carcass in one of the cabinets!”

To which she replied: “My brother still lives in that house.  I asked him about it the other day.  ‘Do you remember that snake in the Kitchen?  Did you ever find it?’  He laughed.  ‘I hadn’t thought of that in years!’  But he’s decided not to replace the cabinets for a while.”

I hate crows.

Every once in a while, especially in the springtime or early summer, I am woken by a cacophonic orchestra of crows flying around outside my bedroom windows.  It is always a large group of them, dozens at least and possibly over a hundred.

A group of crows is called a “murder.”  Who ever thought that up?  Who knows why a group of geese is called a gaggle while a group of crows is called a murder?

The sound of a crow’s caw is not like the pretty sounds of other birds.  It’s raucous.  And when you get 2 or 3 together, it’s double- or triple-raucous.  So, get a full murder together having a raucous caucus, and that’s what it sounds like: bloody murder!  Not at all pretty.

While I have learned to enjoy being rudely wakened by mocking birds, jays, finches, or even woodpeckers, I cannot muster the same joy for being woke by a crow.  There is no redeeming virtue in a crow’s caw.  Screech owls make terrible noises, too, but they travel solo and don’t hang around long, so I can usually be awakened, recognize their distinctive call, wish him well, and fall back asleep.  Not so with a murder of crows.  It’s loud and it seems like it goes on for hours.

Even in daytime crows are obnoxious.  They are ugly.  They are big.  Not as big as eagles (see photo for comparison), but bigger than pigeons.  Big enough to be ugly.  They tend to travel in Sixes or Eights and look like roving hoodlums, or a neighborhood gang.  The biohazard piles they leave behind are quite rude.  The bigger the bird, the larger the dropping, I guess.  I hate the mess they leave in our back yard while trying to perch themselves on one of our swallow-feeders.  Who do they think has to clean up their mess?  And they scare all the smaller birds away!  I like the smaller birds, and I wish the crows would stay away!

What I thought was mysterious was that they would have these cacophonous murder conventions at night.  I can tell crows are not nocturnal birds because I see them so much during the day, sometimes having the same types of raucous caucuses.  If they are flying around during the day so much, why do they have murder conventions at nighttime that resemble a caricature of the shouting and hooting of the British House of Parliament in The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard?  Don’t they ever sleep?  Not only do I have to see their ugliness during the day but I have to hear it at night, too?

Then one day it happened… and during the daytime so I could investigate!  While I was outside gardening suddenly some crows went wild with that awful caw of theirs.  Others flew in from adjoining neighborhoods to take up the caw.  A murder convention was in progress!  And it was taking place not far away.  I had to see what was going on.

I slipped out of my back yard to the street, followed the noise to a side-street and about halfway to the next street.  All the birds were flying around a pine tree, circling and occasionally darting at it.  Most were just flying in the air and cawing wildly, while others were perched on nearby trees cawing at the pine tree; only a few darted.  None actually stayed in the pine tree that was obviously the center of attention.

Then the pine tree moved.  Rather, it looked like the pine tree, but when I peered more closely I could see that the darting was aimed at a particular branch, and perched on that branch close to the trunk of the tree about 30 feet above the ground and about 10 feet below the top of the tree was a silhouette of… something.  Another crow?  Were they running off a renegade crow?  I couldn’t see well, until one of the kamikaze crows darted close enough that it moved slightly: it was a hawk.  And it wasn’t giving up its position nor fighting back.  It was not intimidated by this murder of crows.

I remembered that the day before I had seen a baby crow in a neighbor’s backyard, and it was cawing and cawing and flapping its wings but not going anywhere, and a few adult crows would dart at me to make sure I didn’t try to harm the little one.  I was afraid a cat might take off with it, since we have many cats in the neighborhood.  Was this murder convention warding off a predator to keep their young safe?

Then I saw the lump at the hawk’s feet, on the branch it was perched on, and then I realized what was happening: the hawk had already kidnapped one of the baby crows.

Now I was more intrigued by the crows’ behavior.  These crows were stalking the hawk trying to get their baby back!  And when the caw for help went out, hundreds of crows from surrounding neighborhoods came to participate in the rescue.  It was a wonder to watch.  As I looked around, I saw even more passers-by about two streets over make a 90-degree turn to join in the program.  This was not a caucus… this was an emergency response team!  What started probably 15 minutes ago was still growing in size.  This was a major crow event.

Unfortunately they were not very coordinated.  A few would dart, but they darted individually and didn’t coordinate their efforts.  Each adult crow was interested in getting the baby crow back, but was afraid for his own life.  Understandable, but not very effective.  I tried to tell them that they should gang up together and have 5 of them bomb the hawk at the same time, and don’t worry about the hawk because 5 crows would be a match for a single hawk.  But they didn’t listen to me.  (How could they, with all the noise they were making?)

The sad part was that the baby was still alive.  Once I knew what was going on, I could hear the baby crows agonized and frightened immature caws for help that were distinctly different from the adult warpath caws.  I still couldn’t really see anything because they were in the shadows and about 30 feet up, but I surmised that the hawk had found protection in the tree close to the trunk and could stay there for as long as he needed while squeezing the life out of the little hapless crow.  Poor thing.  By now, even if the 5 kamikaze-wannabes had coordinated their strike to be effective, they would probably only cause the hawk to drop the little one, which would only fall to the street.

After watching this for another 15 minutes, I noticed that the group was disbanding.  Many of those who had joined from the surrounding neighborhoods returned, almost in reverse order of attendance.  I went back to my garden, and about an hour later realized that the cawing still continued, though it had subsided in volume.  I looked and found that in a different pine tree, this one on the opposite side of my house from the first one, about 30 crows were perched and having a convention.  The cawing was not nearly as raucous; it was less voluminous, slower in pace, more sparse.  It was sad.  I knew what they were discussing.  They were holding a trial.  It wasn’t a murder convention: it was a murder trial.  Unfortunately, the evidence was perfect, testimony faultless, judge and jury completely prejudiced, conviction immediate, and the authority of crows completely powerless to effect the punishment.

The crows were powerless.  They weren’t really powerless, but they thought they were, and they couldn’t cooperate enough to realize their powerlessness was imaginary.  So perception was the principle limitation to their reality.

So, what they thought was a murder trial was really only a murder support group.

Since that day, however, my opinion of crows has increased.  They protect their young, they come together in times of disaster, and they try to ward off an enemy.  They show courage in the face of danger and don’t abandon their fallen comrades.  And when there’s an untimely death, they grieve as an extended family.

I no longer despise being woken by a crow murder… in fact, my heart goes out to them because I figure a nocturnal predator has probably breeched the crows’ defenses and stolen an egg or a baby.  I now appreciate the sleek black of their feathers.  I see them helping their young and taking watch over each other.  And though they are big and the smaller birds shy away from them, the crows do not bully the smaller birds.  They aren’t a band of hoodlum gangsters… they are a neighborhood watch group!  4-6 of them do the foraging while 2 watch for threats… now that’s a community.

I like crows.  Not as much as hummingbirds, mallards, finches, or jays, but I like them.

I am no poet.  I have no connection to poetry.  I don’t understand why something is poetry and something else isn’t.  I’m naive enough to think that poetry should rhyme, yet I understand enough to know that it deesn’t have to.  But then, I also think the phrase “Iambic Pentameter” should actually be constructed of iambic pentameter.

I know not this poet (AJ Henchey), nor why this poem causes me to think I know the poet a smidgen.  I don’t but it does.  See what you think:

• http://www.allthesea.com/Seahorses.html
• http://www.mbayaq.org/efc/efc_se/se_ssh_sea.asp
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seahorse

And my favorite with regard to the pregnancy topic:

• http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2003/february/shorse.htm

Undertaking a brief research (standing on the shoulders of giants who have done the actual research; what I call research is merely reading the results of research of others… so much easier to do), I’ve taken away the following synopsis as inputs to accommodate in my fast-approaching new worldview.  The paragraphs below are excerpts from the Science in Africa page mentioned above:

Male seahorses … become pregnant for three weeks (during which time they cannot move around to search for the best food), go through 72 hours of labour and exhausting final contractions to release up to 200 baby seahorses. During this process the natural colour of the male seahorse drains from his body and he becomes white and pasty looking. The experience (yes, we have it on film) looks painful and I cannot imagine that he would want to experience a baby seahorse birth again. But, after a very short time, sometimes only hours, the male starts showing off his pouch, begging to be pregnant again.

The seahorses mate monogamously for the entire breeding season. Every day the pair will come together in a ritualistic flirtatious dance to reinforce their connection. While the male is pregnant he will move very little, which for a seahorse means not more than a few centimetres.

The male will eat food that happens to be in the area while the female will roam about in search of food. Regardless of this separation however, the female will always come back to the male to perform their daily ritual of entwining their tails and spiralling to the surface in a dance of celebration.  This ritual helps keep the pair synchronized reproductively. If a mate is removed or dies, it will take weeks to find a new mate, that is, if it is able to at all!

Due to the fact that it is the male that becomes pregnant it was previously believed that it would be the females that competed for the male partners. This however is simply not the case. Like in most species, it is the male that competes with other males to attract and defend his female seahorse. So, it would appear that the male actually wants to be pregnant.

So, the impact of all of this on my world-view turns out to be quite small.  My understanding of the biological difference between Male and Female needs the minor adjustment of “the one who becomes pregnant” to “the one who produces the egg.”  This is an easy shift, though one I might have to remind myself of from time to time.  Conveniently, this doesn’t affect humans (at least not yet, other than egg donorship pregnancy situations, which is still female-to-female), so my social interactions will not be affected.

But it also encourages me to think of the Seahorse Male as a super-anthropomorphed role-model for human fathers and husbands.  Consider:

1. It validates the role of the stay-at-home-dad and the working mother;
2. It salutes Bill Cosby’s approach to empathy during wife’s pregnancy, although as a human husband Bill was limited to forcing himself to throw up each morning and to inducing wild emotional mood swings;
3. Promotes the idea that the husband should do all he can to takes the load away from the wife… very much laying down his life for his beloved, especially if it allows the wife to go out shopping;
4. Removes the mother-child natural bond which often puts the father-child bond at a disadvantage, inspiring me to be a better and more-involved father (if a Seahorse can do it, I certainly can!);
5. Inspires me to think of marriage more as a partnership, with daily connection, dancing, romancing, and looking for food;
6. Challenges my thinking that a “good-size family”is 2 kids and a pet, and stretches me to consider something more like 100-150 kids.  (Such a family would also encourage the wife to do more shopping, so it’s a win-win-win situation.)

So, in the end, I didn’t need to change my worldview, just my understanding of the biology.

Thank God!  I was afraid I might have to do some major value-shifting.  “Another crisis averted!”

It’s about a 5-minute podcast, and I encourage you to listen to it.  It’s really funny, not at all gory, and there’s a moral to the story.

You can find his podcast here:

http://www.contrarianconsulting.com/the-snake/

In my (soon to be expunged) worldview, I have equated the “female” of a given species with the one who “gives birth.”  Were a “male” to be the one to become pregnant and give birth, my whole understanding of male and female, potentially even mother and father, would need to be revisited.

And of course, Sea Horses are just this breach in my worldview.  It’s not super-well-known, but nor is it a secret: the Sea Horse males are the ones that become pregnant and give birth, not the females.  Somehow, although the male gives birth, he remains the sea-horse daddy, not the mommy.  This does not fit into my definition of male/female.

My first step would be to determine whether it is indeed true.  There are lots of “urban myths” out there, and I certainly don’t want to architect something as valuable as my world view around a mere urban myth.  (A blog post, on the other hand, might be a perfect thing to architect around an urban myth!  Hey, what an idea…)  But I’ve heard this enough times from credible sources that, while I don’t know the full truth, I know there is some truth to this notion; so I need to seek out the fullness of the truth and then make my adjustments.

I don’t understand quite why, but my mother was livid when she came home and found this snake in its glass jar on the kitchen counter.  I mean, we lived in a rural area with snakes all around.  With 4 boys, one of us was always bringing in lizards, snakes, frogs, or something similar.  Why this particular snake was an issue for her, I don’t know.  Maybe because it was so much more slender than your average king snake.  She was afraid that it would escape, squeezing through one of the air holes.

“There’s no way!”  I said.  “Look how thick the snake is and how small those air holes are.”

“He’ll squeeze through,” she insisted.  “He’s got a soft body and they can squeeze through tiny places like that.”

“But not that small!” 

“I’m telling you,” she persisted.  “You need to take it outside now before it escapes.  What if it gets out, goes into your room, and eats one of your pet rats?”

“He won’t get out.”

“What if it bites the cat?”

“He won’t bite the cat… if anything he’d just slither away.”

“Oh, that’s a great idea.  He’ll slither behind the refrigerator or under one of the counters.  I don’t like that idea one iota.  I’ll be afraid to open up my own cabinets!”

“Mom, he won’t get out.  Don’t worry.”

Somehow, I got away without releasing the snake.  I don’t remember how I did it, but somehow I negotiated her into keeping it for the night.  I probably said I’d prove it to her or something like that.  But I remember the warm feeling of having had won, and the snake stayed in the jar on the counter in the kitchen all night long.

Except that, in the morning, the snake wasn’t in the jar.  The grass and dirt were there, the lid was screwed on, but there was no snake.  Somehow, it squeezed through the holes in the top of the jar.

I would have taken the jar outside right then and there to tell mom that I had taken the snake outside like she had asked, but she was already in the kitchen, saying “See? I told you it would escape!”

“Wow,” I said, trying to look on the bright side.  “I really didn’t think that would be possible.  How did he do that? That’s quite remarkable. Don’t you think? I mean, he must have shrunk his head and squeezed through. Talk about headache! ‘Give me Excedrin #10.’ He must have looked like a string of spaghetti when he was done.”

My distraction technique didn’t work.  “Well, maybe so.  I don’t know.  But I told you so.  Next time I hope you’ll listen to me.”  She returned to whatever it was she was doing.

I was surprised that she was taking it so calmly.  Yesterday she was freaking out when it was in the jar, afraid it would escape; now that it had escaped, she was calmly saying “I told you so.”  But, being the opportunist that I am, I recognized my good fortune and, before the tides decided to turn, hurried to catch the schoolbus.

30 years later, I think I’ve figured it out! :o)

I don’t like stepping on these little guys.  It’s not just because my shoes get gunky, though that’s a definite detraction.  But life is squelched with no real cause for it.  The foolishness of the snail (by being there in the first place) combined with the lack of awareness on my part was a lethal combination for that once-active critter.

Following the idea that this world and how it works hints at grander spiritual truths, I pondered this scenario for quite some time: what possible truth does this show me about God? or about Heaven? or about myself?

Foolishness
One thought is that this sheds some light on why “foolishness” is listed as one of the 7 deadly sins.  Foolish snail!  Keep off the cement!  Did it feel good? Could you burrow through it? Were you sheltered from the birds? All of these were danger signs which you ignored.  There’s a cement pathway that seems right to a snail, but leads only to death.  OK, so what’s the cement in my life which I insist on crossing?

Security
Another thought is how fragile our earthly homes are.  In our country, we tend to put a lot of security in our home, physically and emotionally.  A snail has no such need… he carries it with him, and it’s generally sufficient to protect him from the elements.  But step out onto the pavement when a bumbling pedestrian comes along and—whamo—your house isn’t all it used to be.  For a snail, losing his home causes him to lose his life.  If disaster strikes and I lose my home, will I survive?  Or will I be like a snail and die?

So far my speculation hasn’t been very comforting, so let’s look at the other side.  Does my general every-day approach to snails have any insights for me about God’s general every-day approach to me?

Does God Like Me?
I don’t care much for snails.  While I respect their place in the ecosystem, and certainly don’t wish to deprive them of life, I don’t want to raise them, wouldn’t be interested in keeping them as pets.  I’ve even been known to put out snail bait because I prefer roses to snails.  So, snails can live as long as they don’t get in my way and don’t do what I don’t like.  Is that how God feels about me?

Snails repulse me a bit… do I repulse God?  Am I as repulsive to God as a snail is to me?

Most of us are quick to answer “No! God loves me just as I am!”  Does He really?  Or is this just a feel-good statement we’ve adopted to avoid dealing with the question?  Are we confusing grace extended to us as “liking”?

Some of George MacDonald’s fiction books depict God being repulsed by us due to our selfishness, arrogance, and downright faithlessness.  Over time, by growing in faith and seeking to implement His ways in our lifestyle, we are transformed into beings of light and rightousness; but in the beginning we are not light and rightousness.  (Were we so, we would not need a savior.)  So, it is highly possible that God first sees us with repulsion, but loves us anyway, transforming us over time into something less repulsive.  Sort of like transforming a caterpillar into a butterfly (except that I never though of caterpillars as repulsive… you get the idea though).

Would God Crunch Me?
If I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time and God isn’t paying attention one day, will He crunch me (even if not intending to)???

Let’s face it, the differences of capacity between myself and a snail, whether considering physical size, mental capacity, spirituality, ability to manipulte the environment, or whatever, is not nearly so great as the difference of capacity between myself and the Almighty Creator.  Relatively speaking, a snail is probably closer to human likeness than I am to God-likeness.  (I say “probably” because I can’t prove it.  Yes, I’m chickening out.)

I can certainly see how one might come to this position, and in fact for a while (as a younger Christian) I even espoused it.  Jack-o-lanterns to ward off evil spirits, dressing up like witches, ghouls, and other horrific things, does not seem like an intuitive way to honor God, spread love, and build community.  The history of Halloween is riddled with the dark ages and heathen undercurrents.

This article seems to do a good job of describing why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Halloween.  I did a quick read and it seems to cover most of the bases I used to be concerned about:
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/halloween.html
(Note: I’m not endorsing that site in general since I’m not a regular reader and don’t know what else they say.)

But more recently I’ve started to change my mind about Halloween.  I admit, it probably started because I like to see the small kids dressed up in cute outfits, and they are so shy yet coming to the door of strangers.  I love small kids.  I like to encourage them, and I like to see them overcome their hesitations and fears and learn how to deal with the world.  Halloween is a time to interact with the kids, so my change in heart probably had something to do with justifying to myself something that I like, more than any real “spiritual awakening” on the subject.

But about a year ago, it dawned on me: this is the only time the neighborhood is out en force.  The parents are out with the younger kids, the older kids rove in packs.  I see some of them as individuals throughout the rest of the year, but the entire community is out on this one particular night.

I took stock of other holidays we celebrate here in these United States:

• Christmas: centered around the gift of God’s Son to a lost human race, one would think this would be a highly community-oriented celebration.  After all, He’s the one who said “Go forth into all the world…”  Instead, at Christmas we focus on our families.  Perhaps we go to church, which could be considered a community activity, but we then race back home or out to dinner to spend time with family.  It’s definitely not a community-oriented holiday.  A doorbell is an unwelcome intrusion.
• Thanksgiving: with the heritage celebrating the coming together of two different cultures, i.e., celebrating the establishment of community, in modern times this also has become a family-oriented holiday.  We leave our own neighborhoods and travel many miles and many hours to spend time with our families.  A doorbell is an unwelcome intrusion.
• 4th of July: this holiday might be considered community oriented, since it often involves barbecues and parties; but usually in some other community, such as at a camping sight or a summer vacation spot.  If the does doorbell ring, you won’t be bothered, because you won’t hear it anyway.
• Super Bowl Sunday: not really a holiday, but we treat it like one.  But again, instead of community, the focus is on friends and family.  It’s a community of sorts, but a selective community based on who we already know and like, not based on whoever happens to live in our, well, community.  And don’t worry: the doorbell will not ring.

But on Halloween, I have to plan on either answering the doorbell many times during the night or leaving the house entirely.  (Once about 10 years ago, in a different neighborhood, no one rang my doorbell.  I was relieved on one hand, but disappointed on the other hand.  My appreciation for Halloween has grown since then, so now I’d just be disappointed.) 

I see kids from my neighborhood and from surrounding neighborhoods.  The kids see me.  Kids get to interact with grups in ways that normally would be frowned upon.  (C’mon: dress up in some disguise, ring their doorbell, and ask them for candy?  Not going to be well-received on any other day of the year!)

And not all of the kids dress up as ghouls!  It’s usually the high-school kids that take that approach.  There are heros, princesses, mythical characters, and cute animals.  I like to guess who the characters are; I find I’m usually out of touch with today’s youth.  I also like to guess who the child beneath the character is… this is difficult because I don’t know most of them anyway!  But when I find one of them that I know from “beyond Halloween,” it’s a real joy.

Not everyone lives in the type of neighborhood where this would be “safe”; I realize that.  But, fortunately I do. So instead of being “in the world and not of the world” (a favorite verse used by many christians to justify avoiding something we don’t like), I’ll portend that ”Greater is He who is in [me] than he who is in the world.”  I’m not being flippant; I take biblical teachings quite seriously.

This year, a friend of mine who is much less mobile than I am will be visiting.  He’s unable to get to the door when it rings, let alone do so many times in succession.  So, weather permitting, we plan to sit on the front porch so he can see the kids too.  Who would think of doing that for Christmas?

The Paint Guy has been a friend for about 10 years now.  Each year around Christmas my wife and I get together with Mr. and Mrs. Paint Guy for dinner and gift exchange.  For example:

He said he saw it in an antique shop and, of course, immediately thought of me.  “Just a momento of our friendship.”  But I’m convinced there’s a hidden message for me in here somewhere…

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

When you think about it, perhaps the congregation of fools being there in the first place is what warns the angel to stay away.

I love waking to birds chirping as the sun rises.  I used to disdain anything that would disrupt my sleep, but I now find that I make a special dispensation for birds.  I wish I could fly like a bird; perhaps at some point I realized the hypocrisy in wanting to be like them but not liking them to encroach upon my lifestyle.

Around here we don’t have a lot of exotic birds, just a bunch of finches, jays, crows, etc.  We have a few owls at night, some hawks on occasion but not a daily sighting (and they are a lot smaller than I expect them to be), but we do have turkey-vultures that frequent the area.  Thrilling.  Those which thrive on death are right on our doorstep!

My favorite birds are hummingbirds, for many reasons.  They are colorful; they are territorial, so I can actually recognize some of them after a while; they return to the same place year after year; and they like to nest in our trees. 

One time there was a hummingbird nest right outside our window in a small bay tree.  It took us weeks to notice it, it was so small and camouflaged.  Only because we noticed that the birds darted at us whenever we got close did we eventually realize that something was up.  We found the nest and watched it from inside the window.  We watched the birdling hatch and eventually take its first flight.  During times between its hatching and flight, when the parent-birds weren’t around, I’d go out and look at it, until the parents came back and chased me away.  (They were surprisingly threatening.)

Once the hatchling took it’s first flight, we didn’t see them anymore.  I guess they moved on, probably to a more sensible area without giant people gawking at them.  But about a month later I was barbecuing in my back yard and I heard a loud buzzing like a giant dragonfly or wasp racing toward a bullseye on the back of my head.  Quite startled, I jerked down, flapped my arms to ward off the invader, and twisted my neck to see what was attacking me.  It was a hummingbird!  Closer to me than one had ever come before.  It hovered and looked at me, darting side to side a bit, and then flew away after about 30 seconds.  I think it was my little hatchling coming back to say “Hey, Friend!  Look at me, I can fly now!”  But he was not greeted in kind, and my swatting was not taken as a kind and welcome greeting between friends.  I never saw him again, and if he was in the area, he never came that close again.  I wish I had had eyes in the back of my head!

The next year the nest was in the tree to the left of the first one, this time with twins.  Such small nests, hardly providing any shelter from the elements other than falling.  The nests themselves are quite remarkable to behold, so tightly woven and small yet balanced precariously on extended branches.  Quite amazing.  But these twins were not as amenable to gawking humans as the previous hatchling, and I’m afraid I frightened them into premature flight.

Silly me; I had assumed that since the first birdling wasn’t afraid of me, these others would not be afraid either.  I was hoping that by exposing them to human proximity early enough, they would not be afraid.  But now that I think about it, they had each other for company, and as with human children, they were probably a good source of instilling fear into each other.  For the long minutes alone while their parents foraged for food, which would be the equivalent of many hours to us humans, they probably swapped fake horror stories about big monsters under the nest and giants coming forth out of the stone wall across the pathway (which was the stucco of our house) and so they were predisposed against anything looking like the hummingbird equivalent of a creature from the black lagoon.

The more I come to know about hummingbirds the more awe I acquire.  They are the only birds in all of creation that can hover while flying, even flying backwards.  I’ve seen seagulls hover, but only when there are strong winds and they balance their flight pattern against the wind, almost as if playing with the wind the way we humans might play in a soft stream by swimming upstream fast enough to stay still.  Hummingbirds can fly “still” without wind.  But they can also dart very fast and can fly at surprisingly fast speeds.  I would have thought the two were mutually exclusive: either hover or fly fast.  But not with a hummingbird… they can do both.

An eagle can acquire tremendous speeds when diving, but they don’t have the ability to turn on a dime or draw themselves into a hovering stop while still in the air, like a hummingbird can.

I liken the difference to be like that of a jet fighter (the eagle), or a smaller plane (finches, jays, crows, etc.), or super-modern helicopters (hummingbirds).  They can hover and assess a situation, but then take swift action when necessary.

In our 230+ year quest to build the perfect government, we have paradoxically built an electoral system in which popularity, eloquence, and quality marketing become the most decisive factors for landing the most important office in the most important country in the world.

In our 400+ year quest to build the perfect economic system, we have paradoxically created a situation in which no one really knows the best answer to the global calamity wrought about by that very economic system.  The very stock market which was supposed to be the “great new thing” of the modern economic era is now being bailed out by the very citizens it was supposed to make prosper.

In our attempts to provide the best medicine, to increase health and longevity, to be a nation free of disease and sickness, and to have the best healthcare system in the world, we now have the paradox of people who can’t afford to be healthy, doctors who can’t afford to participate in insurance plans, or, on the other side, doctors whose schedules are crammed so full to make ends meet that the patients wait for hours after their appointed time.

What started as a dream of an educated people has turned into an education system largely unappreciated by its benefactors (the students) and less effective than most others in the world.  It’s touted as a national priority, but the more we focus on it the worse the problem becomes.  We don’t give enough encentive to bring the best teachers into the profession, and in the name of student benefit we have put those that attempt the teaching profession at a stark disadvantage.

As we invent technology to improve our lives, whether television, computers, cell phones, or automobiles, our lives become centered on keeping the technology functional.  This is a paradox.

In my attempt to keep up with my favorite TV shows without having to rush to meet its scheduled telecast, I have purchased a TiVo.  While I love my TiVo, I have found that I spend a lot of time doing “TiVo Maintenance”, ensuring that it’s not going to record shows I don’t want, thereby removing a show that I want but haven’t watched yet.  I find myself in a paradox of having yet another To-Do list on my TiVo… and instead of having an hour with nothing available to watch, I now have too much to watch and have to set aside time to watch it before it gets deleted!

The very thing we look to for lifestyle improvement becomes a detriment and requires us to intervene to improve it.  And the more we intervene, the more intervention appears to be required.  This is a paradox.

This reminded me of one of C.S. Lewis’ articles in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics.  I’ve paraphrased part of his article here:

At this stage it occurred to me that I had stumbled upon a rather remarkable paradox… And yet, it seemed to me as I pondered it more, this may not be such a paradox as it looks.  Or, at least, it is a paradox which turns up so often that we ought to be accustomed to it by now.  Other instances began to come to mind. 

Until long after the time of the renaissance, nobody ever suggested that literature and the arts were ends in themselves.  They “created beauty,” they “provided diversion,” they “refined our manners” or “incited us to virtue” or “glorified the gods.”  The great music had been written for the masses, the great pictures painted to fill up a space on the wall of a noble patron’s dining room or to kindle devotion in a church; the great tragedies were produced either by religious poets in honor of Dionysus or by commercial poets to entertain the people on holidays.

It was only in the 19^th century that we became aware of the “full dignity” of art.  We began to “take it seriously.”  But the result seems to have been a dislocation of the aesthetic of life in which little is left for us but high-minded works which fewer and fewer people want to read or hear or see, and the “popular” works of which both those who make them and those who enjoy them are half-ashamed. 

By valuing too highly a real but subordinate good, we have come near to losing the good itself.

The more I look into it the more I suspect that a universal law is at work here. 
“One converses better when one does not say ‘Let us converse.’ ” ¹

The woman who makes her dog the center of her life loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog-raising.  The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication.  It is a glorious thing to feel for a moment or two that the whole meaning of the universe is summed up in the love of your life – glorious so long as other duties and pleasures keep tearing you away from them.  But clear the decks and so arrange your life (it is sometimes feasible) that you will have nothing to do but spend time with her (or him), and what happens?

Of course this law has been discovered before, but it can stand a re-discovery.  It might be stated as follows: every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made.

Apparently the world is made that way.

If Esau really got the stew in return for his birthright (see Genesis 26), then Esau was a lucky exception to this rule.  You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.  From which it would follow that the question “What things are first?” is of concern not only to philosophers but to everyone.

In my own life, I often find that those things I value most are being “squoze-out” by other things.  Time with my wife and family gets less plentiful while my job requires more attention.  TV becomes my dominant source of entertainment because it’s easy.

It is impossible, in this context, not to inquire what our own country has been putting first for the last few decades.  The answer is plain: it has been putting itself first.  To preserve “Civilization” has been its great aim; the collapse of civilization is the great bugbear.  Peace, freedom, a high standard of living, independence, transportation, knowledge, and entertainment – all of these, which are what we usually mean by “Civilization” [or the American Dream] have been our goals.

It could be argued that our concern for civilization is natural and necessary in a world where it is so imperiled.²  But let’s look at it the other way around:  what if civilization has become imperiled precisely because we have all made it our chief goal?  Perhaps it can’t be preserved that way.  Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it.

The hypothesis has certain observations to support it.  Regarding peace, one of the ingredients in our idea of civilization, many (though not all) would agree that a foreign policy focused on peace is one of the many roads that lead to war.  And was civilization ever seriously endangered until it became the exclusive aim of our political activity?  There is much rash idealization of past ages, and I do not wish to encourage more of it.  Our ancestors were cruel, lecherous, greedy, and stupid (like ourselves).  But while they cared for other things more than for civilization – and they cared at different times for all sorts of things: for the will of God, for glory, for personal honor, for doctrinal purity, for justice – was civilization often in serious danger of disappearing?

The only reply I can offer here is that if we do not know the answer, then the first and only truly practical thing is to set about finding out.

¹ “On cause mieux quand on ne dit pas causons”: poet John Keats, 1848.

² Keep in mind the Lewis was writing this during WWII, when Naziism was threatening to take over the world.  For the rest of the world, civilization was in great danger of being extinguished.  The fact that we no longer have such a threat of extinction may lead us to consider the possibility that we no longer have it in first place, and it has returned to its rightful place.  Given today’s economic and policital climates, however, I’m pretty sure we still haven’t figure out what should be first.

This ponderment was inspired by C.S. Lewis’ “First and Second Things” article from God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics edited by Walter Hooper, his life-long friend.  Comparing the 2008 election and surrounding world climate (stock market, housing market, Iraq and Afghanistan, health care problems, etc.) with his points about the political climate of his day, the greater truth is still quite applicable.  I’ve dumbed-down his words to fit my own style and changed the examples to be more New-Millennium American, but the basic text is plagiarized directly from his article, and despite the paraphrase, I believe the essence to be truly in keeping with Lewis’ original point.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the dentist’s chair is one of the best places to practice one’s faith in a Father God. 

If you truly believe that God is with you always, in Spirit and in Truth, and loves you and knows what is best for, that you and can handle any adverse situation because if God is with you who can be against you, then you have nothing to fear from being in The Chair. 

Try it sometime.

Listen, Lord: with Your muscle and my brains, we can fix this situation! . . . Oh?  You’d rather use my muscle and your brains?  Well, I guess You know what You are doing, Lord.  But I’m ready to consult with you anytime you want suggestions.  Amen.

from Don’t Sing Songs to a Heavy Heart:
How to Relate to Those who are Suffering,
by Kenneth C. Haugk, Ph.D.

Think of yourself as “having” or “experiencing” your emotions rather than “being” them.  Consider the difference between “I am angry” and “I have a feeling of anger inside me.”  The first identifies you directly as your emotion; it sounds almost as if that is all you are.  When you are your emotions, you may naturally be impelled to act them out.  In contrast, the language of “have” allows you to experience the emotions without feeling possessed by them.  You have the emotions; they don’t have you.

Uri then goes on to give examples of how to allow your emotions to help you deal with a present situation without making them dictate your actions, which so often leads to regretful results.  Overall it was (and will be) helpful to me during negotiations, whether business oriented or at home.  Negotiations are, after all, a part of daily life and the crux of all relationships.

But I cannot read an “I AM” statement without thinking of the burning bush.  When Moses had his “Bush” experience, he asked God his name, to which God replied “tell them I AM THAT I AM has sent you.”  He continued with “This is my name forever by which I am to be remembered: I AM THAT I AM.”  Depending upon your modern translation, you may be more familiar with slightly different wording, but the essence is profound.  God is what he is, whereas we humans change over time.

Yet I have found myself using that same proclamation as an excuse against self-improvement.  “I am only what I am, nothing more.”  This means “I am irritable; I cannot change.”  Or “I am foolish; I cannot change.”  Believe me, I’ve tried!  I am me; I am just what I am.  Don’t try to make me into something else! 

Notice the difference?  If I were perfect, such an excuse might be viable.  Same if I were helpless.  As a human, I am neither.

I remember Orwell’s book 1984 and the concept of right-speak.  At the time I rebelled against it tremendously.  I took his concept of government-sponsored diction used to control, manipulate, and deceive and generalized to a rebellion against all types of organized communication–including how I think about myself.  After all, if I can’t be “honest” with myself about myself, then who will be honest with me? and whom can I be honest with?  Starting from this seed of truth and courage, however, I quickly degressed into a world of lies and deceit in which I trusted no one because I could see how they were using right-speak.  My own language (to myself and to others) degraded to curt statements that caused more harm than good, even though my ultimate goal was a “good” one.  It’s as if I were trying to live by a standard where the goodness of the idea would be proven only by shining through the worst-possible description of it.  When this type of language became how I thought internally, it became a slippery slope leading to depression, separation, and low respect, both from myself and from others.

Fortunately, a few years ago I started a relationship that changed my thinking about my thinking.  I still agree that limiting our thinking to what is safe, acceptable, and pleasing is inappropriate.  We need to question authority, challenge tradition, and read between the lines when it comes to marketing and politics.  And there’s more marketing and politics out there than I’d like to admit.  Skepticism is a good trait when it comes to communications.  But I think there may be a point to shaping up how we think.  And as long as we are shaping our thinking ourselves, then the Orwellian concept is a different thing, since in that story the diction was established by a dominant outsider (the government).

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The first time I saw this was during my high school driver’s education class.  Some of the tests were based on this cartoon!  It’s a cute 7-minute video clip. 

It’s a humorous look at the changes we are tempted to undergo when sitting behind the wheel, our world having been transformed from one of casual interaction with other pedestrians to a steel-bound silo in which our lives speed up, our interests are more self-oriented, and our communication with others is reduced to gestures and the honking of horns.  Other people become obstacles to avoid (or mow over) instead of opportunities for relationship and interaction.

It’s not just automobiles… the direction our technology is taking us promotes this “siloization principle” conundrum.  More about that in another post; for now, pretend it Saturday morning and enjoy the cartoon.

Paint Guy: I’ve decided that I need to live out my faith while I’m driving.

Bob Smiley: Absolutely, driving is one place where “the rubber meets the road” when it comes to our faith.
[Of course I smiled at my own joke.  I tend to think I’m pretty funny.]

PG: So I have decided to let people change lanes when it looks like they want in front of me.  Always.  I used to speed up and cut them off, or merely stay put if I’m in the way, like everyone else does to me, but now I slow down and let them in.  And you know what?  I’ve found that I arrive with much more peace and feeling generally better.

BS: I know exactly what you mean.  [There I go being presumptuous again.]  I started doing the same thing a while back.  As long as someone has their blinker turned on, I’ve decided I need to let them in.  It’s what I would want them to do for me.  But they have to have their blinker going.
[Can you hear the superiority?  I was deaf to it at the time.]

PG: But I let them in even if they aren’t blinking.  If there’s any indication that they are trying to turn into my lane, I let them in.  It seems like that is more like ”grace.”  I used to require them to show their blinker, but I decided that was being “legalistic.”

BS: But… uh… yeah but… hey, aren’t you encouraging bad driving that way?  The rules were made for a reason, and if we don’t encourage the rules, then why bother to have them?

PG: Yeah, I know what you mean, but isn’t that what grace is about?

BS: [Well, what could I say?]

My paper cup is guaranteed good for the environment and has on it something called “The Way I See It #17″.  Apparently this is a series of contemporary observations and wisdom, and the different cups have different quotes, and I normally ignore them (as evidenced by the fact that I saw my first one today).

The Way I See It #17

The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you’re not good enough.  On occasion, some may be correct.  But do not do their work for them.  Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal.  Don’t take it personally when they say “no” — they may not be smart enough to say “yes.”

Keith Olbermann
Broadcast journalist and host
of MSNBC’s Coundown
with Keith Olbermann.

OK, this is such a cliche in today’s society that, while it rings with truth, it’s so blah that it’s only worth mentioning in the context of the fine print at the bottom of the cup:

This is the author’s opinion, not neessarily that of Starbucks.

So, Keith Olbermann, who doesn’t know me in any way, may think I’m “good enough,” but Starbucks, who does know me because I’ve frequented many of their locations to the point that some even know my standard order, reserves the right to be one of those to say I’m not good enough!

I just had a shocker that I’m calling a midlife crisis moment, which means “another incident that makes me realize that I’m older than I think I am.”  Here’s what happened.  I really hope someone can identify with this.

I logged onto an episode guide for Stargate Atlantis to see which ones I missed so I can setup my TiVO to record them.  I got distracted by cast biographies.  I get distracted a lot.

Lo-and-behold: the pretty new doctor that’s cute and smart, a nice young woman, presumably about 2 or 3 years younger than me, was born…

…2 WEEKS BEFORE I GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL!

And I think I can be fairly certain that, were we to ever meet, she would have no delusions of being about my age!  Does anyone have some coffee I can borrow?

When the Reaper arrived, Alex was coherent enough to recognize her and give a half-hearted attempt at escape.  But her health had deteriorated such that walking was almost impossible.  When we brought her back to the bed, she didn’t try to escape again, but snuggled with the Queen Mother, trusting in the one who has cared for her for so many years.

Felines approach misery and suffering with a stoicism that would put even Steven Segal to shame.  They call no attention to themselves; an outsider cannot even know for sure that the feline pain registers even work.  “Is she really in her final stretch?” we would ask each other.  “She looks so normal; just a little wobbly when she walks. Maybe she’ll be better soon?”

The vet’s examination confirmed that Alex was “ready.”  There was no possibility of improvement.  She could no longer engage in the activities she typically enjoyed: eating, pouncing up the stairs, even receiving affectionate strokes.  She no longer enjoyed being held becuase it hurt too much.  Everything was uncomfortable.  There was no telling how long she would continue to live on her own, deteriorating daily as mobility worsened, but recovery was not an option.  Cats can live for a long time in suffering conditions before their life fails them, but eventually the suffering wins and it becomes painfully obvious just how much suffering the cat had been withstanding so stoically for so long.  If she were to last through the weekend, the suffering might even increase to the point of being unbearable.

The Queen Mother’s final act of love and sacrifice was to instruct the Reaper to do the job she came to do.  The Reaper hates her job.  The Healer finds much fulfillment and happiness in making cat’s lives more livable.  The Healer’s final grace is to transform herself into the Reaper so that cats in their final stretch can be spared the worst of it.  The Reaper tearfully confirmed that the Queen Mother’s choice was the best one for the Princess, although the suffering the Queen Mother herself would undergo over the next few days as a result of this heartwrenching act would be a staggeringly high price to pay for making the “right” decision.

“Nap time, Alex,” the Queen Mother cooed to the Princess who was already cuddled in her arms.  It was a familiar refrain that the Princess had learned long ago meant that Mama was eager to share some peace and quiet with the Princess if she so desired; she usually so desired, and from the far reaches of the castle she would respond to the call by joining her Mother Protector in peaceful dreams and togetherness.  Now Alex purred a little heavier at the promise of respite and peace, and snuggled a little more. 

I looked into her deep green eyes, noticing the milky white clouds that had only started intruding a couple of days before, and said, “Alex, when you wake up, find Obie.  You’ll find her to be the perfect playmate, and you will have lots of stories to share.  Then wait for us; we’ll join you as soon as it’s our time.  You’ll be much happier after you wake up from your nap.  Just wait and see.”  Alex just looked back at me, trying to understand but probably not really comprehending anything more than “I’m going to take a nap; perhaps the pain will go away.”

As High Priest of my household, I had already said a prayer of dedication and annointed her with oil.  What we bind on earth is bound in heaven; what we loose on earth is loosed in heaven.  I prayed that God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, creator, redeemer, the one who knows each of us by name, Love himself, would receive Alex and keep her safe while patiently awaiting our arrival.

The Reaper’s methods were kind and peaceful.  With a small injection, she brought Princess Alexandra into a nice tranquil sleep in which she remained for a couple of minutes without pain for the first time in days, possibly weeks.  With the second injection, the breathing stopped first, then the heart stopped, then everything stopped.  Since she was already asleep, it was a very peaceful way to go.  It was very quick: a matter of 2 or 3 seconds.  The quickness of the response to the second injection confirmed to the Reaper that the Princess had already come very close to her end on her own.

There’s no Biblical text that tells us specifically about the state of animals when they die.  Do they go on to Heaven?  Is there a heaven for cats and a heaven for dogs, different from the heaven for humans?  Do they just cease to exist?  These are all questions pet-owners ask, and pastors hate to answer.  But the more I study the Biblical picture of heaven, the more I have decided (quite without a theological degree, mind you) that some animals, if not all, will be resurrected along with the rest of the world, and join us in that same Heaven which we will share with God.  God, who is Life and Love itself, who put each of the stars in its place and knows each one by name, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills (and knows each of them by name, if cows have names), knows the love we have for those we love.  Part of how we glorify him is through our love for our fellow creatures.  I suspect that He loves Alex greater than I can, even greater than the Queen Mother does.  Therefore, I suspect Alex will be among those who meet us when we arrive there ourselves.  There is good possibility that I am wrong; if so we’ll find out soon enough.  But I think there is a greater possibility that I am right, because the One who is Love is sure to love this wonderful creature much more than her mother or I do, just due to His nature, and we love her tremendously.

This photograph of Alex was taken around June 1, 2008, using my Palm Treo 755p Smartphone.

She’s had no great impact on the world.  We weren’t looking for her, but found her by chance.  Most of her life with us consists of napping, playing, sitting in the sun, and sitting with us while we watch TV.  She’s added a wonderful presence to our household, and we will definitely miss her.  This in itself seems to be enough for us to want to keep her alive as long as she wants to live.  Is that it?  Is there more to a cat’s life than eating and sleeping?

Is there more to my life than eating and sleeping, other than indulging in the occasional narcissistic blog entry and writing computer programs, neither of which makes any real impact on the world at large?

There’s a teaching going through the Christian community that goes something like “your purpose in life is to bring pleasure to God.”  Another way of saying it is, “God created you for His pleasure.”  The idea is that God is pleased with us by being a human being, not by the great works we accomplish.  After all, we are “Human Beings”, not “Human Doings.”  Part of being a human being is to do our work, and some of us aspire to great earth-shaking roles and accomplishments, but God, who is no respecter of persons, does not delight more in Mother Theresa than anyone else.  He is pleased with us because we live, because we exist, because we are.  And being the feel-good optimist that I am, I like this idea.  But being the doubting pessimist that I am, I have a hard time adopting the notion that God delights in me even when I’m not doing much of anything important.  Shouldn’t I be doing some great and grand thing to improve the state of the world?  Especially because God loves me and I have the Holy Spirit within me?

I look at Alex.  Unlike Garfield, she has accomplished great things in her life.  But the accomplishment I cherish the most is seeing her come to me or my wife and ask for affection.  The kitty that once was afraid of her shadow, then afraid of me long after overcoming many other fears, now comes to me, face to face, and says “I’d like some attention please.”  I delight in that.  She brings blessing to the entire household when she approaches us for a bit of relationship.

Alex seeks relationship with us.  She values me; she values my wife; and that is worth more to us than all the money we’ve spent on food, medicine, cat toys, and anything else.  That is worth more than all the years of restricting our travel so Alex wouldn’t be alone.

There are many lessons about life, and even God, that I’ve learned from Alex over the years.  But this one I learned today is probably the most significant.  If I can cherish Alex beyond all cost she has been to me simply because she sought out a relationship with me in response to my saving her from the Humane Society (which would have been a fate more ghastly than she’ll ever know), how much more can God cherish me simply because I seek out relationship with him in response to his saving me from a fate worse than death?  I tend to feel inadequate because I seek God on my own terms, in my own timetable, and expect him to be basically human in response.  I now see that such is exactly why God delights in me.  He knows me fully, so he fully knows what to expect from me.  I do not surprise him by my crafty thinking or wonderful accomplishments: He already knows I what I am going to say or do.  Nor do I disappoint him by my laziness, self-centeredness, or myopic narcisism: He already knows what my weaknesses are.

I’ve “known” this for ages.  Sort of.  But now, after seeing my own delight in Alex, I know it for real.  “I know it in my knower” as a friend would say.

Just as Alex is a cat seeking a relationship with me, not as a human, but as a cat-lover, I am a human, not a god, seeking a relationship with God, not as Almighty Creator, but as a loving Father.  I can’t relate to an Almighty Creator, but I can relate to a loving Father!  Sort of.

Just as Alex learned that some cat-ways of relating don’t work well with me because I would recede when she tried to be affectionate that way (such as nipping and clawing as kittens do to each other when playing), I have learned that God sometimes recedes based on the way I want to approach him (arrogance, self-centered, grousing).  I’d often feel shame about my fallenness.  But after the lesson I learned today, I now expect that God doesn’t hold my human approach to relationship with Him against me; He knows what humans are like.  And even if I never make any progress in becoming more like God in my ways of relating to Him, He will still delight in me (although possibly from arm’s length instead of an intimate embrace).

So, I’d say that there has been and continues to be more to Alex’s life than eating and sleeping; her purpose is to cause me to delight in her, and doing the normal-cat-things is what allows that purpose to be fulfilled.  Similarly I can now see that I don’t have to run for President or establish a super-duper community-based ministry in order to make God love me more; just doing the things I do and seeking relationship with him on my part-time, inadequate basis, is enough to bring him joy.  And what can possibly be more important than having Father God (who just happens also to be Almighty Creator and is the essense of life and reality, none of which I can really relate to) delight in me?

Nothing, I’d say.

So, I guess in answer to my original question, there is more to a cat’s life than eating and sleeping.  The purpose of a cat is to love and be loved, and show its family how much their Father loves them.

She has a terminal disease that, we expect, will limit her life to the next few days or weeks, although there’s a minor possibility she can continue at her current level of health for longer than that.  She’s had a long life for a cat, and I think we’ve done well with her.  When we adopted her, she was small, frail, afraid of her own shadow, and not in any way aware of her natural tendency toward royalty which was evidenced in her pitch-black coat, plume-like tail, or long flowing fur. 

We changed her name from “Tilly” (on the adoption papers) to “Alexandra” because such a name was so much more appropriate for a princess.  We hoped she would grow into it, and indeed she has.  She has certainly matured into the Princess of our house.

But now this wondercat who loved to race up and down carpeted stairs with hairpin turns, sending fear through her queen-mother’s heart as she leapt up onto the loft railing at break-neck speeds and then stop on a dime before crashing twenty feet below into the living room (probably the main reason we no longer live in a home with balconies; the cat loved it but the queen mother didn’t like the constant excitement) is having a hard time walking.  It seems that some sort of growth in the brain has been gradually increasing in size over the past many months, and about a week ago crossed the critical boundary that suddenly caused Alex to become dizzy and unstable.  Or perhaps it was a stroke.  She can only take 2 or 3 tentative steps before losing balance and slipping onto her side.  She’s losing weight because she doesn’t like to eat.  The one who loved to bask in the sunlight is now hunkering down in the darkest places she can find at ground level.

Conversations at our house are now mostly centered around her health and how to decide when enough is enough.  Putting a cat to sleep is not something we can do casually, but nor do we believe that we should make her suffering continue if she’s in tremendous misery when there is such a slim possibility of recovery.

We’ve investigated the options.  What we were hoping at first was just a dizzy spell that would go away within a week has now, to the best of the vet’s ability without specialized tests or scans that would require taking her over an hour each way to a place she’d rather not go, been confirmed to be fatal and irreversible, except possibly with brain surgery.  But a CT scan would be required to tell whether brain surgery is even an option.  The brain surgery would be highly invasive, nor is it guaranteed to be effective.  She might not even recover from surgery in a way that the quality of her life would be any better than it is now; in fact she would likely become much worse.  Add to that her age and other health issues and, even if she were to recover fully from the ordeal of surgery, her other health issues would be standing by, ready to pounce.

Daily, we now face the question of whether to “let her go.”  Another euphemism!  Is she suffering so much that it’s unloving of us to allow her to continue living?  We think she still has a desire to live.  We think this because she will still get up and eat some food and take some drink, even though it’s painful.  She doesn’t eat a lot, but she does eat, and she’s the one seeking it out.  She also purrs quite a bit when we are close by, although her purring is strained and pains us to hear it.  Putting her down now, we think, would be premature.  She can’t talk to us, but we think she’s telling us she still wants to live.

During these final days, I will be spending more time with my fine, furry friend.  She doesn’t like being coddled and stroked as much as she used to, but she does seem to like knowing one of us is around, as long as we aren’t making too much noise.  I’m sure our presense is only a small comfort, if any at all.  But at this point, companionship and watchfulness seems to be the best we can give.

I took this text from http://www.lightbulbjokes.com/misc/darksuckers.html.  Some minor edits I’ve made are marked with [braces].

The Dark Sucker Theory

For years, it has been believed that electric bulbs emit light, but recent information has prove[n] otherwise. Electric bulbs don’t emit light; they suck dark. Thus, we call these bulbs Dark Suckers. The Dark Sucker Theory and the existence of dark suckers prove that dark has mass and is heavier than light.

First, the basis of the Dark Sucker Theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. For example, take the Dark Sucker in the room you are in. There is much less dark right next to it than there is elsewhere. The larger the Dark Sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark Suckers in the parking lot have a much greater capacity to suck dark than the ones in this room.

[As] with all things, Dark Suckers don’t last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the dark spot on a full Dark Sucker. The dark which has been absorbed is then transmitted by pylons along to power plants where the machinery uses fossil fuel to destroy it.

A candle is a primitive Dark Sucker. A new candle has a white wick. You can see that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark that has been sucked into it. If you put a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, it will turn black. This is because it got in the way of the dark flowing into the candle. One of the disadvantages of these primitive Dark Suckers is their limited range.

There are also portable Dark Suckers. In these, the bulbs can’t handle all the dark by themselves and must be aided by a Dark Storage Unit. When the Dark Storage Unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before the portable Dark Sucker can operate again.

Dark has mass. When dark goes into a Dark Sucker, friction from the mass generates heat. Thus, it is not wise to touch an operating Dark Sucker. Candles present a special problem as the mass must travel into a solid wick instead of through clear glass. This generates a great amount of heat and therefore it’s not wise to touch an operating candle.

This is easily proven for lightbulbs too. When you compress a gas, it gets hot, right? So the light bulb gets hot because of all the dark being squished into the wires.

Also, dark is heavier than light. If you were to swim just below the surface of the lake, you would see a lot of light. If you were to slowly swim deeper and deeper, you would notice it getting darker and darker. When you get really deep, you would be in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the lighter light floats at the top. [This] is why it is called light.

Dark Suckers are only able to suck dark in a straight line. Dark, because of its mass, will not penetrate solid, opaque objects as it is being sucked by a Dark Sucker. When a Dark Sucker is operating, you will notice that dark that is behind a solid, opaque object does not flow through the object or around it to the Dark Sucker. Some of the dark will accumulate on the side of the object away from the Dark Sucker as the Dark Sucker attempts to pull it through the object. These residual patches of dark are often referred to as ’shadows.’

Some surfaces are able to function as secondary Dark Suckers by sucking the dark from behind solid objects at an angle and then rerouting it to the primary Dark Sucker. These surfaces have a property we refer to as ‘reflective.’

Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand in a lit room in front of a closed, dark closet, and slowly opened the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet. But since dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the closet.

So next time you see an electric bulb, remember that it is not a light emitter but a Dark Sucker.

Update: I’m not sure whether he wrote the original text above, but Roger M Wilcox’s website takes this to a new level.  You can visit his site at http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw/darksucker.html.

When I retired last night, they eye was still in the gulf about 30 miles from Houston.

I turned on the TV this morning to get an update and saw the devastation of Galveston, all the windows ripped out of the JPMorgan Stanley building in Houston, and the ensuing reports of damage and flooding throughout the area. 

The eye of the storm was over Huntsville, and the caravan was on its way into town.

The Buffalo Aqueduct had swelled into Buffalo Lake, where KHOU was reporting from.

The wind was still blowing, the rain was still falling, and people were needing to be rescued from places where they didn’t expect to be hit so hard, as well as places where they had no sensible to reason to be because mandatory evacuation should have applied to them as well as the rest of the town.

I was basically resigned to remaining indoors, starting a fire, and (sigh) reading a book for the day.  I picked up “The Shack” by William P. Young, which I started reading last night at the recommendation of a friend of mine.  My eyes ran across these words:

There is something joyful about storms that interrupt routine.  Snow or freezing rain suddenly releases you from expectations, performance demands, and the tyranny of appointments and schedules.

I could really identify with that, and I was ready to be released from my tyranny of appointments and scheduled.

But, it’s Saturday, so I already have a reprieve.

And I’m in Pleasanton, where the weather has been a nice 72-80 degrees for a few days now.

No rain in sight.  Wind is barely 1 MPG.

It’s a perfect summer day: not too hot, not too cold. 

Without the modern telecommunications technology that allows for live newsfeeds from around the world, near-real-time doppler and radar on the web, enabling me to see with my eyes what is happening thousands of miles away, I wouldn’t have even hae a clue that Hurricane Ike existed.  People complain that the world is getting less people-friendly.  I wonder.  Is it really getting worse, or is it just that we can track it with greater detail and precision, which in turn gives us more information, greater realization, and a higher sense of anxiety?

Here and now, my  world is behaving quite nicely.  Life is good.  There have been storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, fires, and earthquakes all over the world this year.  Somehow, Pleasanton (and the surrounding Greater San Francisco Bay Area) has been overlooked by the past year’s devastation.  It’s a given that there will be a time when natural disasters come here, too; we are not immune.  But this year was quiet for us while it was absolutely terrible for others.

For me, the trick is to release the anxiety about disasters happening elsewhere and enjoy the world while I can.  Then, when natural disaster does strike where I live, the trick will be to avoid crawling around wimpering “Why me?”.  I want to live in the hear-and-now, be it while life is good (like now) or during troubled times, whatever they be.  Experiencing the disasters with level-headed thinking, victimless mentality, and hope in the future sounds like a tall order, and I hope I’m up to it.

A close friend of mine insists that the blogosphere is for those who don’t have the talent or courage to get actually published.  Instead of going through the discipline of writing something coherent, relevant, and interesting for people to read, which is vetted by close friends and professional editors, and then most likely rejected, bloggers can bypass the whole potential for rejection by posting something on the web that, in many cases, is anonymous.  This seems harmless in itself, but then it shows up as an answer to a search engine query, and individuals have to spend time reading it before they can decide that it’s just plain old junk that never should have had any time spent on writing it, nor resources spent on uploading, storing, and indexing it, let alone have wasted their coveted time reading it.

There are professional writers out there who use blogs as an extension of their publishing.  This is of course different from the amateur approach I refer to above, and great value can be given to the world through those types of blogs.  Make no mistake about it, I’m an amature.  I don’t even know whether amature is spelled “‑eur” or “‑ure”.  So there!

My response to T‑m was a waffling, non-commital, back-stepping statement that went something like, “Well, my expectations are that if you are interested in reading blogs, you might check it out to see whether you like it; or if you are not interested in blogs, then you don’t bother to check it out.”  Then I mustered some additional courage, since T‑m is actually a friend of mine, and added, “If you do check it out, my hope would be that you would tell me what you really think, so that I could improve it as I go, or decide to abandon it all together if that’s what’s best for the world.”

Upon more reflection, my own purposes for blogging is to practice my writing skills, along all the lines mentioned above.  I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but kept putting it off due to no time or opportunity.  It’s time to make the time and opportunity.  Eventually I expect to blog for professional purposes (I’m an I.T. Consultant by trade), but my hopes for writing are more along the lines of fiction, telling good stories with tie-backs to observations about life.  For now, I just want to start writing to develop the discipline, hone my communication skills, and gain feedback from others about what is found to be interesting, thought-provoking, humorous, or boring.

Thanks for your feedback in this regard.

But I always find it funny when I go to pick up medicine at the vet.  My tendency is to say “I’m here to pick up medicine for Alex.”  Then they look at me with glazed-over eyes and say “what’s the last name?”  How am I supposed to answer that?  She doesn’t have a last name.  But within a split second I realize that she probably goes by my last name, so I tell them “Smiley”.  And of course, it all works out, and other than that awkward moment in the beginning, everything is good and the world returns to its normal self.

This time, however, I had a chance to prepare because another customer was at the counter when I got there.  So I thought to myself, “How can I avoid that awkwardness?”  I thought about asking for “Alex Smiley”, but that sounds so, well, just, well, you know, just not quite right somehow.  I had just come from my own pharmacy, where I don’t have this confusion, and I realized that the pattern I used there was that I asked for prescription by last name; sometimes the pharmacist then asks me for the first name, but not always.  I decided that the same pattern should work at the vet, after all I am picking up medicine, just like I do at the pharmacy.  If Alex is going by last names at the vet, that should remove all confusion, and more importantly, all awkwardness for yours truly.

Feeling confident (and a bit smug) in my newfound “normal” way to approach a somewhat abnormal situation, when it was my turn at the counter I calmly stated “I am here to pick up medicine for Smiley.”

To which the girl replied “What’s the last name?”  Almost before she was done a look of recognition lit up her face and she said “Oh, you mean Alex?”

I wasn’t sure whether I should be overjoyed that she knows my cat so well that she recognized the name, or dismayed that she apparently thinks my family’s surname would be a good one for a pet!

Other than that, I don’t know what to expect.  I don’t know what frequency I’ll blog in, what topics will be covered, or even how much drafting I’ll do before posting. (This post, for example, will be posted immediately without drafts.)

That’s why I called it “boblog“.  It’s a play on “Bob” and “Blog“.  What you get is what you see!

After all, what’s in a name?  The name “Bob” implies aimless floating along a body of water, with no direction or ability to propel, just being tossed by the waves.  So, let that be the guide to any expectations from this blog… it’s likely to be aimless and without propulsion.  Maybe even a bit wet.

All for now,

Bob Smiley
Pleasanton, CA