I Used to Understand Much Better

Look! I said to my wife as we strolled around the suburban allotment right next to our woodsy circle of a road in the fall of 1999, I have a fulltime job. With benefits. For the first time in my life! And I managed it before I was thirty.

But really -- only by a few months.

And for a few months after I was thirty, things were going well. I was revising a paper that I had won an award for in graduate school. Several of my dissertation chapters were in various stages of revision, and my teaching record was good. I had joined the faculty development committee with my friend, Matt, the funny cognitive psychologist who, like me, appreciates character driven films.

We were sent by the provost to a convention to dialogue with other administrators about faculty development. Over dinners at night, we talked vigorously and excitedly, letting our conversations ramble across philosophy of language and the role of cognition in universal grammar to our newly born daughters, to why or why not Malone College was a good place to be starting our academic careers and whether or not we may start a transdenominational church. And we had a new friend, Rob who went with us.

I wish I could find Rob.

He was becoming a catholic and said that he was astonished at how together our lives were. How careful we had been about constructing our lives. When I listened to him talk about it, I felt like the lead character in an Ayn Rand novel. I felt Nichean Superheroic buds of wings starting to form on my broad grecian shoulders.

Which I should have been suspicious about, because up until that time my posture had been generally bad, and my ability to actually *choose* anything had paralleled the amount of agency I had exerted in choosing my own parents.

But on the other hand, as we nibbled at a Tapas Bar and gorged ourselves at an Italian Eatery, it was kind of nice to hear his story about my life. It was nice to have everything so *together.*

And when Rob told us about his life -- after all he was, like 42, forever older than us. It seemed a little sad. Probably because that's the way he told the story. He was finally converting to Catholicism after forever of thinking about it. His wife either objected or was confused about it (I forget which). His teenage daughter had stopped talking to him. And he had realized that almost everything that he had done in his life (a bunch of advanced degrees, an administrative position, another one, a vice presidency of something or another, which is what he had now) had been premised upon the advice of a few people who may or may not have had a very clear view of the whole picture.

Wow. I thought to myself. Kind of shitty to find yourself in that place when you're 42.

But soon afterwards, I realized how much I had liked Rob's story. Everything about it seemed true. And it seemed to make the crystalline career and research agenda that I was chasing .... feel pretty false.

And now I sit on the couch with a list of new years resolutions as long as two index fingers, using twelve point font, and I think:

Rob had it right.

LIfe is about such random connections. Who knows *what's* going on in that alternate reality, on that other extension of the yellow brick road. And we can't go back. And I don't want to. And I like the story I'm living in, but upon reflection it seems pretty fractured and absurd,

you know?

A Christmas Tsunami

I've not been sure how to say anything worthwhile on this blog this week -- about or in the face of the tremendous suffering on the other side of the world,

this sermon, which I found at textweek put together well much of the ambivalence and frustration that I've been thinking about....


Nine nights ago we gathered here to sing and celebrate
We told stories about a baby
A baby who would save the world
A baby whose birth was greeted by angels
A baby whose birth meant tidings of joy for all people everywhere
We spoke of God-made-flesh
Cute chubby baby flesh

...

What child is this who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping?
What child is this who laid to rest
in the mud and devastation of Aceh?
And what child is this?
And this?
And this?
Who knows?
Corpses everywhere
Battered lifeless unnamed corpses
Every now and then there is a scream
and one of the living gives a name to one of the dead
and grieves
and thousands more lay waste in the sun
some perhaps with no one left alive who knew their name

What can we say?
Who wants to sing of cute babies now?
Who wants to stand up and talk of the Word made flesh?
There’s flesh strewn all over the streets
Broken lifeless flesh
Beginning to bloat in the sun


read the whole sermon