Internal Mirror Plane

Sweet Miss Emily

My cousin (well, at least one of the many) is very sarcastic and very funny.

em3785: hey
em3785 returned at 10:51:16 PM.
jugglefire5: howdy!
jugglefire5: ready for school to be over?
em3785: how are you doing?
em3785: oh yes
em3785: all i have are finals
em3785: how about oyu?
jugglefire5: same! I've got a final for the paramedic class tomorrow, a molecular genetics final Thursday, and a take-home final due Wednesday.
jugglefire5: And Friday we're taking off for Kristin's wedding.
jugglefire5: which will be a relief.
em3785: i have astronomy on tuesday, accounting on wed., and macroecon on thruday
em3785: then we are taking off on friday too
em3785: i hate school
em3785: :'(
jugglefire5: I feel your pain.
em3785: good, i'm not the only one
jugglefire5: Emily, no one is alone.
em3785: hahaha, that is deep
jugglefire5: (too bad there's no "smart-ass" emoticon)
jugglefire5: hee!
em3785: i have always thought the same thing
em3785: they so need a "smart-ass" one
em3785: they do have a sarcastic one on MSN messanger
em3785: ^o)
em3785: doesn't work here though
jugglefire5: eww, what is it?
jugglefire5: it looks like a one-eyed person with a fishhook in the other eye
em3785: it is just a smilie that looks like it is thinking, oh that is my attempt to see if it would work on aol
jugglefire5: awww.
jugglefire5: it's kind of cute!
jugglefire5: in a Bride of Chucky sort of way.
em3785: hahahaha
em3785: i guess you could say that
em3785: :-jugglefire5: hee! I could.
jugglefire5: and I did.
jugglefire5: (cue dramatic music)
jugglefire5: so what am I helping you procrastinate on tonight?
em3785: all of it
em3785: how about me, what am i helping oyu procrastinate on?
jugglefire5: mol gen lab report. Mmmm. Drosophila DNA.
em3785: i'm so terribly sorry to pull you away from such an learning experience as Drosophilia DNA
jugglefire5: you should be. I was just reading about the gene lbm, which causes flies to be late bloomers.
jugglefire5: their voices don't start cracking and they don't start getting facial hair until the ripe old age of. . . oh, four days.
em3785: and the heart renching saga is on hold, what will we all do
em3785: hahaha
em3785: well we can't let that happen, we must do something
em3785: no facial hair 4 days, that can't happen
jugglefire5: hee!
jugglefire5: yep, it's pretty exciting here in the mol gen lab.
em3785: sucks to be you
em3785: :-D
jugglefire5: oh, whatever, little miss macroecon.
em3785: would you ever have guessed Astronomy would be a pain in the ass?
em3785: this dude thinking he is teaching astro physics
jugglefire5: "wait, you wanted ASTROLOGY."
em3785: i would say it is funny but it so hard to laugh when i am reading over 8 hours of his random notes, via the internet, and that is only for less than 50% of the test
jugglefire5: awesome!
em3785: no i didn't, thank you very much
jugglefire5: hee!
jugglefire5: you could be the next Miss Cleo.
jugglefire5: "I see your moon is in the Neptune house. . ."
jugglefire5: ". . . meaning you will hate finals and become enraged at professors with unclear and unrealistic expectations"
em3785: miss cleo doesn't have a chance compared to me, i can start throwing out genreally realitivity, hubble's law, and the cosmological-constant dark energy density...
em3785: but that fortune would be correct, i would have to give her that
jugglefire5: hee!
jugglefire5: holy cow.
em3785: what is hte hold cow for?
jugglefire5: the cosmological-constant dark energy density?
jugglefire5: I think my head just exploded.
em3785: i still don't know what that is, but it is all over the page i am on
jugglefire5: hee!
em3785: i don't feel so bad now
jugglefire5: holy cow, does Stephen Hawking understand that?
jugglefire5: probably not. And he probably came up with it.
jugglefire5: okay, happy studying.
jugglefire5: I am about to hit the hay.
jugglefire5: and then go to sleep on it.
em3785: ok, same to you
em3785: you do that
jugglefire5: if by the hay you mean my bed.
em3785: i heard hay is pretty damn comfortable....not
jugglefire5: hee!
em3785: oh well in that case
jugglefire5: good for midnight snacks
em3785: if you were a horse?
em3785: is there something you are not telling us?
jugglefire5: shhhh!
jugglefire5: our secret!
em3785: are you sure that was mono you had, or some horse disease thing
em3785: ?
jugglefire5: hee!
jugglefire5: rickets.
em3785: i don't know what that is
jugglefire5: I don't either. I just like the way it sounds.
jugglefire5: say it out loud.
jugglefire5: Rickets.
em3785: hahaha, only you
em3785: and like two other people i have ever known in my life, would get such a kick out of rickets
em3785: congrats for that award
jugglefire5: thank you, thank you very much. I'd like to send special thanks to all the little people . . .
em3785: and on that note....have a good night
jugglefire5: you too!
em3785: byebye
em3785: see ya this weekend
jugglefire5: I'll probably see you Saturday!
jugglefire5: wheeee!
jugglefire5: bye until then.
em3785: don't overdo it, einstein.
em3785: ta-ta.

It's not really a surprise, but . . .

Colin Powell is a really cool guy.

Choices and charity

Today at Mass it was made abundantly clear to me that I have a choice, as far as the Church is concerned, between Catholicism and my fiancee and son. A person can feel this sort of thing coming, but it was kind of a shock anyway, the great religious equivalent of a fellow waiter dumping a pitcher of ice water down the back of your shirt at the end of a shift.

So here's the thing: do I accept that ultimatum, and leave the Church, or do I take it into account along with all the many, many other political stances that the Church has taken and I disagree with, and stay? It's not a new question, but it's getting more and more urgent and ugly. What are J and I supposed to do with the kid if we stay? What am I supposed to do with my soul if I leave? There's no decent counsel, either: pro-flamer parties tend to consider the problem solved with empty platitudes like "How can G-d be against love?", while anti-flamer parties tend to consider it solved with exact and detailed answers as to precisely how He can and why there is no other possible exegesis. Neither takes the other seriously enough for considered debate, and anyone who tries a genuinely balanced analysis weighing both philosophical religious justification and philosophical personal justification is . . . well, is me, and is paralyzed, and is alone. J says that this is the best argument for why I should stay-- there really aren't any visible orthodox Catholic flamers anywhere, and the only way anything is going to change, whether for the whole of the Church or for individual religious flamers seeking to reconcile themselves, is for there to be a flaming ortho presence within the Church. Then again, there's a reason why none is currently present-- people get sick of the spiritual violence being inflicted upon them and (1) leave the Church altogether (2) leave orthodox Church practice [Newman Center, Dignity, I'm looking at you] (3) get used to celibacy or (4) kill themselves. Everybody chooses one or the other. You're orthodox Catholic or you're okay with your homosexuality, but you're never both for long.

It's easy to see why. No one likes being in this continual state of flux. It wears a person out, and it requires massive rationalization, and it generally damages you worse than you were already (whether that means pushing you further into flamerdom or pushing you further away from G-d). Expecting a person to subsist in the gray area is like asking water to stay on the way-less-concentrated side of a semi-permeable membrane-- it's possible if certain other conditions are present, but it's near-impossible to manage, it usually doesn't last very long, and no one's ever happy with it. Whiplashing back and forth just breaks a person, and unless a person's extraordinarily sunny, decisive, individualistic, confident, and guilt-free for an intellectually involved Catholic, a person will be getting whiplashed all over the place. It's difficult for ortho folks to say "Well, Ratzinger for the pope, along with all councils of bishops, strongly disapproves of this and renders it as tantamount to the denial of G-d's existence, but I don't really care, because it feels good, and oh look, there's an alternate exegesis by a feministy Dominican!"

In the end, though, I guess it doesn't really matter either way. The sky will neither fall nor open up and pour forth Almighty pestilence and rage, and the world will not be shaken to its set foundation, and there will still be pretty flowers and prettier people struggling along in need of a drink, or good soil to grow in, or sunshine and food to nourish them, and neither gardening nor ministry will fail.

It just hurts so bad to be attacked by the people you thought had your back.

In the morning when I rise

We've decided that the poor baby is probably going to grow up to be a priest or something. He'll be crying, I'll sing him secular music, and he'll cry harder. He'll be crying, I'll bust out with the Give Me J-sus, and he'll be all quiet and happy. This is not surprising given that he used to kick J pretty hard during hymns at Mass when he was in utero, or that he went to Mass outside for the first time yesterday and apparently got all wide-eyed and fascinated any time Easter played the organ. Now we just have to play him some Carlebach and see what happens, right, R'Josh?

Having children obviously opens up gazillions of new worlds, with your life going right off the edge of the map blissfully into Here There Be Dragons land, with you standing at the tiller beaming and doubting and being more clueless than you could ever realize. It's like jazz-- pushes you to imagine a fuller spectrum of possibilities. "It doesn't have to be a major triad." Your life doesn't have to be work and study and guilt, or even work and study and happiness with your husband or wife. The very open-endedness of that small breakable life tears the corners out of all your assumptions and tosses you far out into the sea and its wide pressing sky. You don't know a damn thing anymore, and you don't care, because in place of your arrogance and pride is this tremendous joy and responsibility and knowledge of the goodness in the world. There's this sense of being able to do anything. That's what the baby can do. The baby can do anything. By being constrained by all his physical limitations, he is totally unconstrained. He can be anyone, think anything, live any life, because he isn't to the point yet where he has to choose. He is pure and unlimited potential. The idea of watching him grow into whatever he may use that for makes a person shake a little bit inside, the way a person's soul kind of ripples sometimes at moments when G-d makes Himself very clear in the physical world. Have you ever set out walking in a big open field and felt the clouds rolling by above you and known, just known, that G-d is real because He is laying His hand down on you like an atmosphere, in that immense air, in depths of air you never could hold? That is how it feels. It feels like that same crushing and release and giddiness.

We in particular have plenty of grounding, though. Anybody gets pulled out of the stratosphere and into fits of frustration when the kid's eating pretty much non-stop with breaks only for diaper changing and hysterical wailing, but not everybody gets to worry about being torn into pieces if G-d forbid their wife dies and they have no claim on their own child, who consequently gets shipped off to the crazy angry damaged materialistic non-theistic mother-in-law. Not everybody can't tell their former fiance where they live for fear he'll kidnap the baby and disappear into a country where you don't speak the language. Not everybody gets to cross their fingers and hope that the health insurance from their full-time job will cover their child the way it would cover anyone else's, and not everybody gets to worry about living in the neighborhood where they do and being married to the person whom they are, and not everybody gets to arm-wrestle with Peter's Throne (or worse yet, evangelical vaguely-Christians) over raising up a good son with two mothers and no earthly father for him. A person starts to feel dragged and drugged and muddied and bloodied and beat up.

And it is precisely at that time, the time when a person is most worried and overwhelmed and angry and internally doubtful, that a person knows most profoundly the value of life, and of living. A person knows without even thinking about it that this tiny human currently occupying himself solely with projectile-peeing and marathon feeding sessions is worth every ounce of it. A person has this feeling of falling, of dropping to the knees, in acknowledgment of the solid simple fact that no matter what happens, it is necessary to try. A person, tepid before, emotionally timid, does not care anymore what happens to her heart. All the doors and all the windows get wrenched wide wide open, and fierce love roars out and in indiscriminately, not caring if the investment now means brokenness later, not caring about safety or security or self-protection, knowing full well that disruption is likely, and that it could kill, but still caring too much to let go. That is what it is like to be a parent, and the paradoxical moments of pain and clarity dunk a person headfirst into the mystery of the Cross. Anima Christi, santifica me. Corpus Christi, salva me. Sanguis Christi, inebria me. Aqua lateris Christi, lava me. Passio Christi, conforta me. O bone Iesu, exaudi me. And "Give Me J-sus" gently takes on such a dark, rich, essential meaning, spreading out from the marrow of a person's bones in quiet confidence.

I love G-d. I love my son. I love my fiancee. And as dramatic and grandiose as the statement may sound, it's really just a low-key faith in newfound knowledge: I'm starting not to care anymore whether one or more of those three facts helps destroy my earthly life. I don't think any of them will, but it's okay if they do.

Letter to the editor of the Weekly Standard

This morning, I read this article.

This morning, I wrote this letter to the editor, who will probably ignore it, but sometimes a person just feels a duty to respond.

Dear Mr. Editor,

I don't know if this information was available to the writer of this article at the time, but Ohio law did not, before the passage of Issue 1, make any allowance whatsoever for homosexual marriage, nor would the failure of Issue 1 result in legalization of the same. In fact, the Defense of Marriage Act, which coded almost the same anti-homosexual-marriage ideas into law, was passed in February. This rendered further legal action unnecessary, at least in the view of Republican governor Bob Taft and Republican US Senators Mike DeWine and George Voinovich, all of whom expressed their opposition to the issue. It is projected by these three, and by other lawyers, that the vague wording of this issue's second sentence will necessitate a good deal of clarification, meaning lawsuits and more judicial backlog. It may end up affecting senior citizens who live together to save on costs, as well as the property rights of any unmarried two people who own land or housing together. It may have effects ranging into health care powers of attorney, insurance, and/or child custody, and these effects will not be limited to homosexual relationships. In short, there are few reasons for a person to support this measure, even if he or she stands against homosexual marriage. However, because of the wide circulation of the same misinformation that your writer fell prey to, I do agree with your assessment that the issue probably contributed to a bounce for Bush in the polls.

Issue 1 passes, and not by a little, either.

So apparently 62% of the voting population of my state feels it's necessary to screw over old people and straight but non-traditional families in order to keep me from obtaining health insurance for my son or being able to stay with my fiancee when she is hospitalized.

But it's still a really nice day outside.