Personal Update

You know why most people stay in the same place and keep friends they've had from High School their entire life? Because it is stupidly hard to make friends as an adult. Making friends seems to be primarily about playing together. In school you have time to play and you have people your same age with the same schedule as you who you can make time to play with. Making friends then is as simple as saying - wanna come play at my house? As an adult I keep inviting potential friends over to play and we keep running into scheduling conflicts. It sucks.

I am determined to succeed. I keep inviting and keep rearranging schedules. I think I am on the brink of having a regular roleplaying group on Friday nights. *fingers crossed* Something has gotta give. It has never taken me this long to make social connections anywhere else I've lived.

I am in self-improvement life-changing mode lately. There are a variety of things I am actively working on fixing.

Writing for example. I've been whining that I want to write, but not actually doing it. There aren't any good excuses - I mean yes, I've been busy, but when is that going to end? So I've written it into my weekly work schedule and so far (2 weeks) I'm keeping it up. I've got a nonfiction book proposal germinating, I'm trying to hold up my end on a collaborative gaming project with Doug, and I am going to blog more. Like I'm doing now.

As an addendum to the writing more thing, I'm also reading more. Can't really be good at one without the other.

Another thing that has to change is my eating habits. For one thing I just want to be a bit healthier. I want to have energy to do things like play tennis or go hiking with my Youth Group. For another thing I have long felt that there were some serious ethical issues with the way we eat in this country. Just watched Food Inc last night and had my convictions deepened. I'm living in a major hub of corporate agriculture, I may even do some educating in my congregation about our food system and how, well, bad it is.

Obviously, since I'm listing all this stuff I'm adding, I also have to give stuff up. In truth I'm giving up some time-wasting. I am surfing random sites less, reading fewer blogs, waking up earlier and stuff like that. My biggest chunk of time is less WoW. I was playing it quite a lot out of boredom. I've cut back to basically raid nights and another hour for some daily quests to get the gold I need to raid. On the work front I've just gotten more efficient at some aspects of my job giving me more time to do things like write.

If this all sounds overly optimistic - worry not, I will probably fail at several of these self-improvement projects. Most of these have been ongoing for the last several years. I've made progress in fits and starts and then fallen back and then picked it up again. Part of saying it publicly like this is to shame myself into sticking with it.

File This One Under "Awesome!"

Talk Talk an internet broadband company in Britain apparently being run by mad geniuses has started a new program. They're sending ex-pickpockets into the streets of London to surreptitiously deposit small amounts of cash in people's wallets.

They're calling them "putpockets" and they are putting up to 20 pounds sterling in total stranger's pockets. The plan is to give away at least 100,000 pounds in small increments.

This story has everything: atonement for criminals, random anonymous generosity, inverting a common fear of pedestrians in urban areas.

The effect of this idea is to turn what would otherwise be dull, crowded, or even threatening daily commutes in the London Underground, into something exciting - even hopeful. Original and awesome.

Smells Like Rickrolling...

Stupid Obsessions Of Mine

1. I have floral wallpaper in my bathroom. Every time I'm in there I count how many blossoms of a particular color are on it even though I have it memorized.
2. I have never played a match of tennis, nor been to a live match, nor even watched a match on TV, but I follow the results of Men's Singles very closely and have been for the past 5 years. I am particularly obsessed with Rafael Nadal.
3. I check my email about 20 times a day.
4. I put my watch, cellphone, keys, and wallet in the exact same place every night before going to bed.
5. I feel like I have to complete every single side-quest and mini-game in computer RPG's which pretty much makes WoW feel like a bottomless pit to me.
6. When I make To-Do lists I check things off as I complete them, then cross them out as I complete "sets" of tasks, and then black everything out when the list is done. It feels like I accomplished more.
   
7. If I can possibly help it, I start every single day with a swig of orange juice.
8. I always eat red M&M's last.
9. Once I realized I had posted to this blog everyday for the first 10 days of May I felt like I had to finish the month that way.
10. #9 was the only reason for this post, but putting up one stupid obsession didn't seem like enough and if it was going to be a list then it had to have 10 things on it.
    

Graduation

The two best friars there ever were are graduating from seminary very soon. Doug and Nick have learned Greek and Hebrew, suffered through the Intro to Ministry series, become ethical, learned theology and read a ridiculous amount of self-important theologians, taken a stupid number of units in Biblical Studies, and managed to squeeze in the occasional good course too. They've put up with frustration and administration, they've also, frankly, gotten to live in some of the best weather on the planet. They've paid a crap-ton of money, and eaten infinite lunches at Java-Hut (hub, whatever).

Congratulations guys. I know it doesn't seem like a big deal. I know you're mostly just exhausted, disillusioned, and a bit stressed about what comes next, but you will very soon be MASTERS OF DIVINITY! (cue He-Man theme song)

Pink Shirts For Justice

These two boys deserve a medal. David Shepherd and Travis Price of Cambridge, MA, took a stand against bullying at Central Kings Rural High School.

After watching a fellow student get harassed and mocked and called (gasp) homosexual for showing up to school in a pink shirt, they decided they'd had enough of the bully culture at their school. They got online and spread word of a plan to have students show up en masse in pink. They bought 75 pink tank tops, and got as many people as they could to participate.

On the day, out of a student body of 830 students, about half were wearing pink. The bullies were predictably angered by the stunt, but the message had been made loud and clear.

It is a classic pacifist move - resist violence publicly and loudly (preferably in large numbers) by shaming the violent and showing them to be petty and ridiculous. Martin Luther King Jr. called it arousing the conscience. The more we make a public show of our peaceful conduct in the face of violence, the more we undermine the social acceptance of brutality.

Fearmongers and bullies in our media and government who want to persuade us that perpetual warfare and torture are the only way to keep us safe don't deserve our respect, but our ridicule. We should all show up outside the offices and homes of such individuals in pink shirts and shake our heads in benign disapproval at their childish insecurity.

Maybe I Do Believe in Heaven

Image Matters

Einstein said it, not me...

Thus Do All (Women)

Tuesday night I went to see Opera Colorado's production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte. It was superb. The music was great, the singing was better, and the blocking and stage direction were original and hilarious. I laughed the whole way through.

This isn't a review though. The show spurred some reflections on gender and fidelity I want to share.

The plot of Cosi Fan Tutte is very simple. Two young soldiers, Guglielmo and Ferrando, are in love and believe their ladies are loyal. Don Alfonso, an older gentlemen and a friend of theirs, believes all women are fickle in their affections and so he bets them that he can prove, by means of a deception, that the ladies are not trustworthy. The soldiers accept the bet and they lay out a plot where the soldiers will pretend to be called away to war, then return disguised as Albanian strangers and swap places to woo each other's lady, in order to test their fidelity. The ladies prove to be very resistant, but in the end they both fall for the Albanians, in time for Don Alfonso to reveal that it was all a ruse and win the bet. The moral of the story is - women are just like that and men should be tolerant, but go into a marriage with eyes open.

With a straight reading, according to a period understanding of the opera, it is wildly sexist - even mysoginist. However, perhaps accidentally, or perhaps because it is rich enough in its original libretto, it is capable of transcending its original meaning and conveying quite a different, even opposite meaning to a modern audience.

The reason is that the men are cardboard caricatures who never once question the morality of lying to their fiancees and proceeding even to seduce one another's girl. At the end of the opera they are just as guilty of infidelity as their women, but they never even realize it. In fact, they are worse than the women because they did it knowingly and even betrayed each other whereas the women were unaware they were being seduced by their sister's fiancee. The men demonstrate no moral volition at all. They are like children, asleep. The women on the other hand struggle mightily and movingly with their emotions and temptations. They are never under the illusion that their infidelity is anything but wrong. They face consequences and accept their responsibility. They are moral adults. The end result is that we end up identifying with the women and thinking of the men as capricious and cruel.

The reason this is interesting is it seems to point toward a shift in gender perceptions between 1790 and 2009 - and in both era's we are wrong. In a classic anthropology men are the embodiment of the intellect, while women are the embodiment of the libido. Don Alfonso wants the soldiers to be "enlightened" and go into marriage in a sober and rational way, aware that women are subject to fickle affections. To some degree these old gender roles still persist, but in some ways our modern thinking actually reverses this line of thought. Men are often thought of in our culture as driven purely by libido, unable to control their lusts and thus not responsible for their infidelities or sexual transgressions. Women by contrast are often held responsible for controlling not only their own libido, but the libido of the men around them.

The point is, watching Cosi Fan Tutte, we easily dismiss the gender roles it presents as wrong, but we miss the irony that we are just as wrong today. It's about time that Guglielmo and Ferrando learned to keep their penises in their pants and stopped blaming their women either for having fickle affections, or for failing to control every man's rampaging libido. When are the men going to grow up and become moral adults, themselves?

Absolute Disaster

I feel like I've been punched in the gut. My favorite team in sports, the San Jose Sharks, had their best season ever. The best season of any team in the league. And then they were eliminated in 6 games by the 8th seed in the 1st round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. WTF?

Excuse me while I go nurse my wounds.

I'm sure Nick is laughing himself silly, since the Blackhawks beat Calgary to advance to the 2nd round. Bastard.