The Story of Stuff
This online video comes to me from Fr. Vincent of the New Skellig Celtic Christian Community in San Francisco. Take a few minutes out of your busy day and watch it.
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25
Apr
24
Quote for the Day
After that for many days, without wind in her shrouds or foam at her bows, across a waveless sea, the Dawn Treader glided smoothly east. Every day and every hour the light became more brilliant and still they could bear it. No one ate or slept and no one wanted to, but they drew buckets of dazzling water from the sea, stronger than wine and somehow wetter, more liquid, than ordinary water, and pledged one another silently in deep draughts of it. And one or two of the sailors who had been oldish men when the voyage began now grew younger every day. Everyone on board was filled with joy and excitement, but not an excitement that made one talk. The further they sailed the less they spoke, and then almost in a whisper. The stillness of that last sea laid hold on them.
— C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
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23
My Little Hitchhiker
Yesterday I got a massage (after the events of the past week, I needed it). When I was driving home, I was at a stoplight on North Druid Hills Road in Atlanta, about to turn onto Interstate 85 north, when a wood wasp landed on my driver’s side mirror. It proceeded to climb behind the mirror into its encasement, with only its little wasp-butt visible to me. At that point the light turned green and off I went, onto the interstate.
I imagine the car going in excess of 60 MPH was a bit more than my six-legged friend had bargained for. It turned around so I could see its head and two front legs, holding on to the mirror, the rest of its body safely tucked behind the mirror in the encasement. It sat there like that for the eleven mile ride as I drove up I-85 to the I-285 interchange, where I headed east to Lawrenceville Highway.
When I got off the Lawrenceville Highway exit ramp, the light was red and I came to a stop. With my car stationery, the wasp promptly flew from the mirror to the window where it alighted for just a second, almost as if to wave goodbye to me. Then it flew away. I thought about it as I drove to the post office off Lawrenceville Highway, before heading home. The wasp was quite a few miles away from home now. Would it survive long in its new and unfamiliar surroundings? Could it somehow manage to get back home — perhaps by hitching a ride in a car going the other way? Is holding on to car mirrors a normal trick that wasps use to get around? Or perhaps it was just attending an Earth Day Celebration for the wood wasps out in the suburbs, and so hitched a ride just this one time.
And now, for proof positive that I am crazy behind the wheel of a car, here is a photo I snapped of my little hitchhiker with my Blackberry as I was driving on I-85.
Apr
22
Locking the Barn Door After the Horse is Out
Here’s a glimpse into the kinds of things that are happening in Carl’s and Fran’s world…
- We’ve issued fraud warnings with the credit bureaus, closed Fran’s checking account, and placed warnings on my and Rhiannon’s accounts (because the thief got our information due to my doing the taxes with TurboTax, and also helped himself to four books of Fran’s checks);
- We are shopping for a safe.
- We are shopping for a home security system.
- We’ve signed up for .Mac so that we can use its web-based backup feature.
- We’re setting up a professional account with Flickr so that we can archive Fran’s photos (the ones that we still have, thanks to having them archived on CDs; we realize that CDs are vulnerable to a fire, so we want a more secure way to archive them.
- From here on out, we will be scanning receipts and barcodes of new major purchases and archiving the PDFs of those items on iDisk; we’ll also be meticulous in saving receipts with owner’s manuals (let’s just say that up until now we have been very casual — read: disorganized — about this kind of thing).
Fran and I are aging hippies. Up to now we have gone through life with a rather smug sense of pride that we were not so gripped in the jaws of materialism that we had to armor ourselves with a safe, alarm system, etc. etc. Well, that pride now has been painfully purged away.
I’m writing all this not just to beat the breast of my own shame, but to shout out loud and clear: we suggest that you lock your barn before your horse gets out. I spoke with Linda, my agent, yesterday, and she said she would be telling my story to all her other authors — especially about having an offsite backup — because I’m living proof that an author’s worse nightmare really can come to call. Thankfully, I was in the habit of emailing files I was working on to myself at work, using Gmail: so my loss is by no means complete. But I’ve lost a lot of my most recent work, and I have the hassle factor of going through Gmail, downloading the various files (often the same file in different permutations) and piecing it all together. Kind of a literary archeological dig.
So do your backups my friends — and don’t just use a memory stick, which is what I was doing (and which like a fool I left plugged into my computer Friday morning, and now it’s gone). Do it. Every day. To an online destination.
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21
Ministry in the Emerging Postmodern World
Here is a succinct slide show that begins to describe the important distinctions between modernity and postmodernity, and what a difference that makes for people of faith.
I think it’s a few years old, but since it’s new to me, I figured it might be new to a few other folks as well. Thanks to the ever-resourceful Mike Morrell for passing it on.
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20
Trespasses
Fran and I went to church twice today: with my dad at the Lutheran Church we’ve been taking him to in Athens, and then later in the day at our home Catholic Church.
So twice today we’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” takes on an entirely new depth of meaning when reeling from being burglarized!
But it’s a good new depth. Fran and I were talking yesterday about how it’s stuff like this that puts one’s faith to the test. Sure, I’d love to be able to do all sorts of vicious things to the person(s) who perpetrated violence on our home and walked off with all sorts of stuff. I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say so. And still, I keep going back to “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” What does that mean, other than that I don’t get to be a “victim” any longer? Someone ripping me off is a hassle, an annoyance, a trial. But it doesn’t change who I am spiritually or where my values and my foundation truly are grounded. If it were to change things so easily, I’d have to ask just how solid my faith and my values really are.
I don’t want to give any impression that Fran and I are saints in the flesh. Trust me, I’m having a much easier time hanging out in the consciousness of desired revenge than in the consciousness of forgiveness. But I’m aware of that possibility of consciousness, and when I allow myself to be aware of it, it does seem to breathe a certain lightness and spaciousness into an otherwise most upsetting headspace. Hey, the guy walked off with my electronics and my intellectual property. But if I fall out of my sense of joy in Christ and of the love of life that ensues from that joy, that’s something I’m choosing to lose.
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19
Silver Lining
It’s way past my bedtime — but I wanted to just take a minute to post my first blog entry from my new MacBook. I’m two thousand dollars deeper in debt than I was this time yesterday (let’s hear it for a speedy processing of my insurance claim), but I’ve got a sweet new laptop to show for it.
Meanwhile, we just keep stumbling into freaky new rooms in this topsy turvy funhouse. Fran discovered that about 150 of her checks are missing. Looks like we’ll be closing our bank accounts ASAP.
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19
Point of entry
Here’s how the burglar(s) got into our house: through the window in our bedroom. I know this isn’t a great photo, but I took it with my Blackberry, as that’s the only camera we have at the moment.
The window was shattered, with broken glass all over our bed. The pane you see lying on the bed is our winter frame, which the intruder just pushed through. He cut himself, leaving drops of blood on the windowsill. We had a CSI person in our house yesterday, gathering up the blood and some fingerprint samples as well.
Added to the casualty list: my mini-disc recorder. Added to the blessings list: I found a CD backup I had made of most of my laptop files just last month, which means I have much more of both my financial records as well as my writing than I had initially thought.
Tonight we go to the Apple Store (I’m posting this from work). Proud American consumer that I am, I normally love to go buy a new computer. But we had already decided to hold off on getting a new Mac until at least next year, as we’re hoping to save for a nice vacation and do some work around the house. Now we’re just hoping that the insurance will cover replacing at least one of the computers and one of the cameras…
| 0 commentsApr
18
Job 2:10
I am posting this from my old iMac that I bought in 2002. It’s mighty slow and it crashes a lot, but for now, it’s all I’ve got. While Fran and I were at work today, someone broke into our house. They tried to enter through the bathroom window, but only managed to bust up the screen; then they successfully got through the bedroom window, breaking both the screen and the window pane in the process. They ransacked the bedroom, and alas, found about $150 in cash we had squirreled away; then they made their way through the house, helping themselves to our two newest computers, my iPod and Bose sounddock, our video camera, and both our digital cameras. They must have left through the sliding glass door out of our den; there were bloodstains there (apparently from the broken glass in the bedroom) but no sign of forcing, suggesting that they opened it from the inside.
What particularly hurts is that I kept my writing files backed up on a memory stick – and it was plugged into my laptop. It’s missing, along with both computers. So basically all the work I’ve done on the book over the last six months (along with all the other writing I had saved, as well as all our digital photos, Rhiannon’s medical records, Fran’s music and recipes) are gone.
Our blessings: we are all okay, as are all three cats. Both guitars were left. We have a friend working on repairing the window, and we do have homeowner’s insurance. Re-creating the book is mostly just a matter of re-doing the work I’ve done, and there’s plenty of material on this blog that will be adapted for the book, and it’s not due on my editor’s desk until St. Brigid’s Day 2009. We’re learning a hard lesson about doing online backups (if you’re not doing that, it’s time to start). But we’re trying to be thankful for our blessings. Although right now we’re all pretty slammed.
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18
Clutter Bulimia
We’re getting ready to have a large spring sale at the bookstore where I work. Selected titles will be discounted 30% — and “selected” means close to a fourth of our current inventory, so there are some real treasures to be found there. We’re trying to reduce our inventory level in anticipation of remodeling the book department, hopefully before the Christmas rush kick in six months from now.
Cleaning is not my long suit. I’m a packrat and a magpie, I love to fill my life with interesting books, magazines, CDs, and trinkets of various sorts. The end result is a chaos of clutter. Normally I just tolerate it, but I get antsy about the clutter when I get busy — and these days I’m very busy, between practicing the bass, writing a book, this blog and the forthcoming CCEL book group, and of course my job and family life. Yee haw! Ironically, it’s when I’m busy that I feel the urge to clear the clutter: when life is more relaxed (and I have more time to work on cleaning), I’m more tolerant of the mess.
There’s a link between creativity and disorder that I never fully understood until one day in the mid 1990s when my printer was on the fritz and I had a job that needed to get done in a hurry, and so I went over to a friend’s house to use hers. She is a prominent full-time artist here in Atlanta — she’s a college art professor and has had numerous showings and public installations — and she lives in a converted warehouse in the city that now functions as both her living space and her studio. When I went to see her and use her computer, I literally had to push piles of papers, books, etc. away from her desk just to see her Mac, let alone use it! Indeed, her entire office was a sea of clutter. Here was one of Atlanta’s most successful artists, and her work space was if anything in greater disarray than mine. It was a moment of profound liberation. At the risk of sounding Nietzchean, I came to the realization that artists have an entirely different relationship to the question of cleanliness and neatness than do ‘ordinary’ mortals. I started paying attention, and have noticed again and again how people who are high-functioning in the world of creativity often seem to be hopeless in the Martha Stewart department. It’s rather amusing.
But I’ve also come to see that I’ve got clutter bulimia: once in a while I have to stop everything and go on a binge of throwing things out, listing books for sale on Half.com, and generally trying to impose some small modicum of order on my pulsating clutter. It’s always a satisfying purge when it happens, and invariably I settle back into a more relaxed period of letting the piles grow, mold-like, pretty much everywhere in the house.
I can feel one of those turns coming on. Hey, it is time for spring cleaning.
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