Lift Up Your Hearts!

Here are a few more quotes I pulled from Half the Sky before relinquishing it to the library.

Rape has become endemic in South Africa, so a medical technician named Sonette Ehlers developed a product that immediately grabbed national attention there. ... [The Rapex] resembles a tube, with barbs inside.  The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed.  When critics complained that it was a medieval punishment, Ehlers responded tersely:  "A medieval device for a medieval deed."

There's a certain poetic justice in the device, for sure, though I believe the inventor is slandering the medieval era.  One can only hope the women survive the mens' reactions.  Though rape is famously the "fate worse than death," I'm not sure the victims in Darfur would agree.

In Darfur, after interviewing several women who told of having been raped when leaving their camps to get firewood, we asked the obvious question:  "If women are raped when they get firewood, then why don't they stay in the camps?  Why don't the men collect firewood?"

"When men leave the camp, they're shot dead," one of the women explained patiently.  "When the women leave they're only raped."  In almost every conflict, mortality is disporportionately male.  Bult whereas men are the normal victims of war, women have become a weapon of war—meant to be disfigured or tortured to terrorize the rest of the population.

 (More)

Extra!  Extra!  Congressman cuts his own budget!

I know there are those among my readers who are inclined to disbelieve anything that comes from Fox News, but this story is confirmed by the left-leaning Orlando Sentinel as well.  U.S. Representative Daniel Webster has done what all politicians should do until the country is back on sound financial ground:  cut his own salary, and slashed his office budget, returning $360,000 to the Treasury.  And this isn't the first year he's done that.

“I learned as a father of six children and a small business owner how to live within my means by prioritizing my spending and doing more with less during tough times,” said Webster in a statement. “Washington needs to embrace the same approach by spending less rather than simply borrowing more, and I believe that starts with me.”

"If we're going to fix government it's going to have to start in our own house," he said.

Congressman Webster said if all 435 members of Congress would be a hawk about each dollar, it would save tens of millions of dollars each year.

"If it's appropriated, the rule is spend it. I don't believe that. I believe we ought to look at it as every dollar is important."

I've liked Dan Webster since my first contact with his office back in 1990.  It was he who was largely responsible for the bill that clearly legalized homeschooling in Florida, so I'm forever grateful, even if we have some points of disagreement.  He also eschews negative campaigning, and has a reputation for statesmanship, civility, and true bipartisanship.

Granted, his pay cut of $4700 is only 2.7% of his $174,000 annual salary, but would you voluntarily pay an extra 3% in taxes?  Anyone who considers that a triviality is welcome to try to out-do him.

It turns out that our own representative, John Mica, also returned appropriated money ($150,000 in the last two years), and another Florida congressman, Bill Posey, has given back money and also held his own salary to the level he earned when he was elected in 2008.  This kind of action ought to be bigger news than it is.  No, it's not going to solve our problems, but it's a step, and more than that, it's an important symbol.

If Americans must suffer to bring about a sane and stable economy, then those who have taken on the mantle of leadership, be they politicians or business leaders or entertainers, should ... LEAD!

Once upon a time, we gave normal baby shower presents, like everyone else.  You know, crib sheets and diapers and cute little outfits....  As time went on, and as we became more experienced parents, we began to change:  we started giving books.  I suppose a copy of Dr. Spock would have been considered a normal gift, but the books we gave were different, the kind that most people might never run into.  They were chosen from a mental list of books, accumulated over the years, which we had found to be especially helpful in the adventure of childrearing.  I had quickly become fed up with all the popular parenting books, which seemed to be describing ... well, I don't know who they were describing, but it certainly wasn't our children.  These books, taken in toto, did a much better job of understanding the little ones in our care, and of addressing our own particular needs and concerns.  I hoped by the shower gifts to spare other parents my own long and confusing journey.  This was pre-Internet, remember, and information was harder to come by than anyone born after 1975 can fully imagine.

After a while we learned to be more cautious in our giving, as we discovered that not every new parent is excited about getting books, let alone ones that are ... odd.  But I kept the list, calling it The Things Dr. Spock Won't Tell You; over the years, it grew and changed a bit in content, though not in philosophy.

The version I'm publishing now is old, having not been updated since 2005.  There are other good books I should add, and perhaps one day I will.  It should probably get a new title, too:  Does anyone read Dr. Spock anymore?  But it is what it is, and I'm only posting it because (1) the blog is a good place to tuck away old writings, and (2) I want to reference it in a later post.

One thing that will become obvious to anyone who reads the books is that they contradict each other in places.  So what?  I don't agree with everything in any of them; the path of truth is strewn with paradox.  The point was never to push any particular view of childrearing, but that in each book we'd found something of great value.  Take what is useful, and leave what is not.

Despite their differences, these books tend to have two things in common that undergird our own childrearing philosophy.  One is a great respect for children, and a conviction that we as a society have underestimated them in many areas, from the physical to the intellectual to the spiritual.  The other is a great respect for parents, the belief that "an ounce of parent is worth a pound of expert." (More)

Alasdair Neale guest conductor
Sarah Chang, violin

Gioachino Rossini:  Semiramide:  Overture
Samuel Barber: Concerto for Violin, op. 14
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E minor, op. 64

As much as I like music, it's not often a "happiness moment" coincides with a concert.  (Mostly because the particular kind of happiness I'm documenting is rare.)  But Sunday was a bright exception.  I had been particularly looking forward to the afternoon concert, because we've loved Sarah Chang's violin playing since she was playing on a quarter-sized violin.  But Ms. Chang's lovely performance was not the most memorable event of the concert.

Wow.

How often does the orchestra outshine the soloist?

We love the Barber Violin Concerto and we love Sarah Chang.

But hands down the best of the concert was the Tchaikovsky.  Porter called it, "possibly the best I've ever heard the Orlando Philharmonic play."  I don't care much for the modern habit of giving standing ovations so often that ordinary applause makes musicians think, "What did we do wrong?"  But this one was truly well-deserved.  The music came alive, it was meaningful, it was powerful—and what's more, it looked as if the musicians were enjoying themselves.  This is hardly an obscure piece—and yet I can say that I've never heard a performance of Tchaikovsky 5 that moved me more.

Plus, it really helped that the concert was at 3 p.m.  I'm far from my best and most appreciative when I'm struggling to stay awake.  Not to mention the earlier time is safer for the drive home.  :)

If I'd known, I'd have mailed a package to Switzerland last week.

The cost of mailing packages overseas has gone up—a lot.  The Priority Mail Large Video Box (O-1096L), about which I raved in Great News for Those with Family Overseas, is now a whopping $23.95.  How can the government keep pretending inflation is low when the price for this governmental service has nearly doubled in two years?

It's still cheaper than a flight overseas, but not nearly so much fun.  Good thing Vivienne's birthday isn't a week later!

You may wonder, considering how disappointed I was by Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, why we decided to go see The Hobbit Saturday night.  But we had a free movie pass that was about to expire; moreover, I was feeling more kindly toward the LOTR movies, having watched my nephew spend much of his Christmas vacation devouring the books—which I doubt he would have done without having been inspired by the movies.  So last night we ventured into our local theater for the first time in nearly five years.

Yes, we were disappointed.  Peter Jackson is consistent, and so am I.  I could very nearly simply quote my review of The Fellowship of the Ring for The Hobbit.  I fault it for the same lack of attention to the basic nature of the characters (though not as badly as in LOTR), the same gratuitous rewriting and addition of scenes, the same modern-action-film-with-swords emphasis on battles and chase scenes.  In the middle of a fight that wouldn't end, Porter and I looked at each other and said, "b-o-o-o-r-i-n-g."  So sad to feel that way about a movie made to honor one of my very favorite books, one I can read over and over again without coming close to boredom.

I'd read that The Hobbit movie was not intended to simply tell the story in the book, but would have some scenes added to include some of the backstory and tie it in more directly with LOTR, and I was okay with that.  That's not at all the same thing as directly contradicting the book, which, for example, the eagle rescue scene does in spades.

As in the previous movies, this one does hobbits and the Shire best:  believable, beautiful, noble, inspirational.  The other races are more caricatures and too alien.  The character of the dwarves (that's the way the word is spelled in the book, complete with explanation) is downright maligned.  Radagast is played as a drug-crazed hippie; elves are wrongly cast as vegetarians.  The trolls, goblins, orcs, and wargs are over-the-top in their ugliness and puerility, so that they come across as more disgusting than evil.  On the other hand, Gollum, though not the character as I imagined him, is very well conceived and acted (as he was in the other films).

There are some good lines, and some funny ones, though too much of the humor is of the snot-in-the-soup kind.

I've said before that an important key to good fantasy is that if you want the audience to accept an outlandish premise (e.g. magic), the rest of the story must be down-to-earth and believable (minus the magic, Hogwarts is a normal English boarding school).  Watching the credits, I commented that it sure takes a lot of people to make a movie.  With all those folks, couldn't they have sprung for two more?  A physicist and an EMT come to mind.  When big things fall or are thrown they look too much like models (with modern CGI there's no excuse for not doing better), and even dwarfs, to be at all "realistic," can't fall a few hundred feet, have massive timbers land on top of them, then get up and go about their business with no more than a brief groan.

Would I recommend The Hobbit movie?  Only for those who aren't likely ever to read the book.  I definitely wouldn't recommend it for grandchildren.  The PG-13 rating is well deserved (and frankly I don't think anyone, of any age, can benefit from so much violence).

Still, it has its good points, and I have to keep in mind how much stronger it is, even in its weaknesses, than most contemporary fare.

The best of the movie?  Bilbo and the Shire, the music (though it owes a lot to Braveheart), and the awesome New Zealand scenery.

Half the Sky:  Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

Inspired by the PBS documentary and the recommendation of a friend, I put myself on the library waiting list for Half the Sky.  As usually happens, it became available at an inconvenient time, and I had to return it to the library in a hurry.  That was back in October, so I'm trying to craft this review from my hastily-scribbled (typed) notes and quotes.

The book is better than the television show, if only because it features fewer American pop-culture icons and more real people.  It also, of course, gives more detail, though there is something to be said for the visceral effects of seeing and hearing the people behind the words.  Both left me with two distinct reactions, neither of which is probably what the authors had in mind.

When reading (or watching) these stories of unbelieveable brutality and oppression of women, the first, and no doubt intended, reaction is, "What are we doing to our women and girls, to the majority of the population of the world, to half of the very image of God?"  Particularly since the authors relate all these horrors while barely touching on the problem of sex-selective abortion.  And yet my lasting impression followed almost immediately:  What have we done to our men and boys?  Not everyone will agree, but I say that there is something even worse than the atrocities committed upon these women, and that is being the kind of person who commits such acts.  Ultimately, no solution to the problem of violence against women will succeed unless the rehabilitation of men is also addressed.

Not that women, as a sex, are innocent:

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains.  But it's not true.  Granted, men are often brutal to women.  Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughters' genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take thieir sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination.  One study suggests that women perpetrators were involved, along with men, in one quarter of the gang rapes in the Sierra Leone civil war.

But by and large, men have the power, and they use that power in ways that hurt women, even their own wives and daughters.

Some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending—by men.  it is not uncommon to stumble across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito net and then find the child's father at a bar, where he spends $5 each week. ... Roughly 7 percent of the total spending of the poorest people in Indias's Maharashtra State went to sugar. ... [I]n much of the world even some of the poorest young men, both single and married, spend considerable sums on prostitutes. ... [A]t least in Udaipur, the malnutrition could in most cases be eliminated if families bought less sugar and tobacco. ... If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do in beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries.  Girls ... would be the biggest beneficiaries.

Or, as my son-in-law succinctly put it, "Men can't be trusted to bring home the bacon rather than eating it on the way home."

Why not?  Why is it that when women in poor countries get jobs, they use the money to feed and educate their children, but men spend their incomes (and their wives', if the money isn't hidden from them) on beer, cigarettes, and prostitutes?  It was (is) not always thus:  men used to be proud to support their families, and many still are.  Perhaps in this country one can cast some blame on feminism, which robbed men of the assurance that their own sacrifices were essential to their families' survival.  But in many poor countries little of the bread ever made it to the children's mouths until their mothers began earning it.  Here's one theory:

[Quoting David Landes, the eminent Harvard historian] The economic implications of gender discriminaion are most serious.  To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but—even worse—to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men.  One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment.

(On a side note, while I applaud the movement in some Christian circles to encourage boys and men in chivalry, graciousness, and love, I cringe when I see how often this is taught through the idea that boys are superior to girls—sometimes even to the extent of being stronger and wiser than their mothers!  As Landes said, this is not only harmful to their mothers and sisters, and future wives and daughters, but to the boys themselves.  Here's an article I ran into recently that addresses a related problem, and has the lovely title, Why You Should Stop Treating Your Husband Like a Toddler, and ACTUALLY Respect Him.)

On the bright side, as men see the economic potential and power of their wives, they often come to respect them more, and then see the value in educating their daughters.  On the other hand, there's a clear risk that they will only see the economic value, and women will find themselves further enslaved, working at a job, running the household as usual, and funding their husbands' bad habits as well.

Half the Sky rightly celebrates the efforts of women worldwide to address the problem of their own oppression, but it will take both men and women, working together, to address the heart of the tragedy.

I'll leave my second, and quite different, take-away from Half the Sky for another post.  I was going to add some more quotes, but as they, too, are on a different subject, so that will make a third post—a record for one book review, I think.

A friend made this comment about the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision:  While some of us commemorate this sad anniversary, others actually celebrate it.  Naturally, that set me thinking.  It's the celebration, not merely of the right to abortion, but of abortion itself, that makes this issue so weird, and so inflammatory.

I could so, so easily support leaving all difficult medical decisions to the family.  Having experienced painful, personal, life-or-death medical decisions myself, I know I don't want the government making them for me.  Because, like it or not, in this fallen world there are times when the better (not to say good) choice is to end life rather than to prolong it, to take a life rather than to save it.

But in our society there are many people who glorify, not just the legality of abortion, but the procedure itself, and that's where they lose me.  If we cheer when a criminal is executed, if the homeowner gets a thrill out of shooting the housebreaker, if the wholesale destruction of an enemy town causes rejoicing, if "pulling the plug" on an invalid is an easy decision, if we can end a child's life without grieving deeply and without seeing the action as anything other than a last, desperate resort ... then we know that no matter how necessary the choice may sometimes be, our consciences have been compromised and cannot be trusted.  And therefore we sometimes, however reluctantly, let the government in—to set the boundaries we refuse to set for ourselves.

The bathroom itself is still under construction, but the shower was finished and functional in time for Christmas.  Porter and our neighbor did the construction, and if you have any questions about building a shower, Porter can tell you plenty that he wished he'd known before starting.

But isn't it gorgeous?  We put the seat and grab bars in with an eye to the future (and specifically for Porter's father's Christmas visit), but we find them helpful even now.  I love the handheld showerhead, and am lobbying for one in the other bathroom, too.  (Click on pictures to enlarge.)

In the midst.  Not pretty.  That worm-like thing in the second picture is a root.

The result!

It's been two weeks since a posted about a "happiness moment," and I was beginning to wonder.  It's not as if I've been unhappy, but I hadn't had any of those particular moments I'm trying to document.  Then yesterday I had two in close succession.

The first was sitting on the back porch, on my favorite swing.  It was early in the morning, and (at last!) cool enough to enjoy snuggling in my beloved Kevin Blanket (made for me many years ago by a then-young nephew).  There was a very gentle breeze blowing, so soft that I felt it only as a coolness on my face, but occasionally strong enough to move the leaves on the trees.  When I see that, I always think of two things:

John 3:8:

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it,
But you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes;
So it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.

and Christina Rosetti's poem:

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

And both make me smile.  Then my mind wandered:  How the Holy Spirit is represented in the Bible by such elemental images:  wind, fire, water.  How Christ, though described with a variety of images, both material and abstract (e.g. light, vine, truth) is most fully represented to us by elements that are distinctly human, living and festive:  bread and wine.  And both of those thoughts made me smile, too.

Later I had the same feeling just walking through the house.  As always happens when we have guests, the approach of our weekend visitors inspired a flurry of activity, of pushing cleaning and organizational project either to completion or at least to a point where the chaos is less noticeable.  With the visitors here, and further work impossible, I could walk into each room and simply enjoy the clean lines and reassuring evidence of work well done.  Such a moment is always worth savoring, and makes me smile even in remembrance.

Focusing on the Foundations
Concentration:  Physical
Category:  Health
Goal:  Consistent exercise

If I put exercise on my resolution list, I end up feeling guilty.  But I feel guilty if it's not on my list, so it might as well stay there.

Last spring my reasonably good exercise habit was sidelined by an injury.  Nothing serious, but it hurt to walk, and since walking was the heart and soul of my exercise, all things ground to a halt for half a year.  Longer than that, actually:  I was feeling better after six months, but by then I was out of the habit and into the holidays.  But in that time I could feel my body deteriorating, much more than ever before, so I know I must make this a priority.  And an important part of the plan must be alternatives so that minor injuries don't devastate the whole enterprise.

One thing I've learned is that for me, at this point in my life, I have to make the plan simple and easy.  Part of the struggle was designing a workable metric.  After all, "consistent exercise" is not a very specific goal.  In the end, I stripped it all down to time.  More than any specific exercise goals, I just need to get moving.  I almost reduced it still further to "exercise events," i.e. one point for every time I got out the door for a walk, or took the time to do some pushups, or whatever.  However, I did want to complicate things enough to include in some way the whole trio of "frequency, intensity, and duration."  And so, voilà! the "exercise-minute."

The exercise-minute takes into account the intensity of an exercise.  For normal walking, biking, and swimming, 1 minute = 1 exercise-minute.  For running, sprint biking or really fast swimming, 1 minute = 10 exercise-minutes.  I just made that ratio up; the point isn't to be specific in terms of health benefits, but to encourage activities that will provide more cardiovascular benefits.  In addition, I want to include other exercises, such as those for flexibility, balance, and strenthening my core and upper body, and I can't do (say) 30 minutes of pushups with the ease I can walk for the same time.  For the moment, I'm using the same 10:1 ratio for these; as I said, I need to keep it simple or I will spend all my time tweaking the metric and not setting foot out of the house.

Here's what the graph looks like so far.  Like the sleep graph (and unlike the reading charts), it's not cumulative; I want to see how I do from day to day.  I began on Monday, and have as yet done nothing but walk.  But a start is a start!

Kluge:  The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, by Gary Marcus (Mariner Books, 2008)

After reading Kluge, which only made my reading list because the author's Guitar Zero was unavailable, I'm all the more anxious to read the book that so impressed my daughter, because I found this one decidedly unimpressive.

I'll admit my prejudice up front:  Unless I've chosen a book for it's religious content, I don't like books that wear their faith ostentatiously.  Example:  A robust and glorious Christian faith shines better through every corner of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, without any direct mention of God, than the in-your-face faith of much of the "contemporary Christian fiction" genre.  Kluge makes this error loudly and heavily, and if it hadn't been for Janet's enthusiasm for Guitar Zero, I might have given up on Kluge.  To be honest, though, I have a terrible time dropping a book even if I've determined it isn't worth my time, on the thought that despite all appearances, the book just might get better.  And I'm glad I stuck with Kluge.

It's best, I think, to think of it as two parallel books.  One is Marcus's attempts to explain the quirks, foibles, imperfections, and out-and-out breakdowns of human mental systems, as failures of evolution.  Simply put, evolutionary processes, although able to produce remarkably functional, successful, and even beautiful organisms, usually stop short of the best.  With evolution, "good enough is better than perfect," and if a system works well enough to give a reproductive advantage, eons of selection are not likely to be unravelled even if a future organism would do better with a fresh start.  Thus as life evolves, new systems are layered on old ones, and the layers do not always interact in the most efficient manner.  The human brain is a "kluge," cobbled together from from parts as old as life and as recent as yesterday, and in human behavior, the rational, thinking part of the brain is often overruled by more primitive reactions.  I'm not doing justice to his thesis, but that's the gist.  This is the book I thought I was going to be reading, and like Made to Stick, is a good look at why we're not as rational as we think, how this weakness can be used by others to our detriment, and what we can do to mitigate the situation.

The second "book" is a fascinating view into the mind of a materialist.  I don't mean "materialist" in the sense of "consumerist," one who is driven by material desires, but one whose world-view is materialism ("a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter").  This is the in-your-face religion that I object to, and it begins in the second paragraph of the first page:

If mankind were the product of some intelligent, compassionate designer, our thoughts would be rational, our logic impeccable.  Our memory would be robust, our recollections reliable.  Our sentences would be crisp, our words precise, our languages systematic and regular....

And in the penultimate chapter:

It seems safe to say that no intelligent and compassionate designer would have built the human mind to be quite as vulnerable as it is.  Our mental fragility provides yet another reason to doubt that we are the product of deliberate design rather than chance and evolution.

This theme is repeated ad nauseam throughout the book:  If I were creating the world, I would have done X; since what I observe is Y, then there is no design and no designer (with or without evolution as part of the process).  Naturally, I rattled off several alternatives to his "my way or no way" argument with almost no thought at all.  (The world was created by a designer whose idea of the best design is different from his; the design was initially perfect but was later marred by other forces; there is/was a designer, but one who is not compassionate; it shouldn't be hard to come up with others.)

As put off as I initially was, this is actually as interesting as the other part of the book.  It was fascinating to see the world through the mind of one for whom evolution is not merely a mechanism, but a religion.  In many ways, Kluge is a remarkable attempt to make evolution answer the question that all religions and philosophies must wrestle with:  sin.  Of course Marcus does not call sin by that name, but that's what he's dealing with nonetheless.

To be human is to fight a lifelong uphill battle for self-control.  Why?  Because evolution left us clever enough to set reasonable goals but without the willpower to see them through.

In fact, Marcus deals with many of the great questions of mankind, and I find that commendable, even if some of his attempts to force answers out of evolution seem to me as stretched as the ancients' adding sphere upon sphere and complication upon complication in order to account for the motions of the heavenly bodies without considering that the earth might revolve around the sun.  Marcus wants a consistent, definitively explainable system—a desire as old as Job.

As interesting as his theories are, I don't like Marcus's ideal world.  He's much too enamored of computers, and repeatedly asserts that our minds are obviously defective because they don't work the way he would design them—like computers.  I like that our language is sometimes ambiguous, irregular, and unsystematic.  I'm glad I'm human, and not Vulcan.

Most of all, there seems to be no place in his ideal creation for free will (another difficult concept for any religion), which I believe explains much of the gulf between the intelligent, compassionate creator and the all-too-visible faults of the world we know.  It is also the capacity which—more than toolmaking, more than language, more than intelligence and the ability to reason—makes us truly human.

One thing that had impressed Janet with Guitar Zero was Marcus's humility.  Since I didn't notice that at all—"God should have done things the way I would have" is not exactly a humble attitude, and neither is "if you don't agree with me, there's something wrong with your brain"—I'm left wondering if it's a matter of personal growth over time (Kluge is the earlier book by four years), or the difference between his attitude toward something he knows he knows nothing about (music) and that toward his field of expertise (psychology).  Certainly Kluge has one significant mark of humility in my mind:  On the cover of the book the author is identified as simply "Gary Marcus."  I am not impressed by the habit of many authors of putting all possible letters prominently after their names:  John Doe, Phd, MD, LLD, etc.  Credentials are a good thing (Marcus is identified on the back cover as "a professor of psychology at New York University and the director of the NYU Child Language Center"), but I see no useful purpose in boasting about one's degrees on the front cover.

A couple of random quotes:

[Humans tend] to believe that what is familiar is good.  Take, for example, an odd phenomenon known as the "mere familiarity" effect:  if you ask people to rate things like the characters in Chinese writing, they tend to prefer those that they have seen before to those they haven't.  Another study, replicated in at least 12 different languages, showed that people have a surprising attachment to the letters found in their own names, preferring words that contain those letters to words that don't.  One colleague of mine has even suggested, somewhat scandalously, that people may love famous paintings as much for their familiarity as for their beauty.

Scandalously?  Not at all.  I thought it was obvious, and in large part a good thing, that familiarity with a subject increases appreciation which increases the desire to learn more which in turn increases familiarity.  It's a blessed cycle, unless there's something bad about the subject itself.  Isn't that a great deal of what parenting is all about, helping our children become familiar with, and thus inclining their hearts toward, the good, the true, and the beautiful?

Pay special attention ... to what some economists call "opportunity costs"; whenever you make an investment, financial or otherwise, ponder what else you might be doing instead.  If you're doing one thing, you can't do another—a fact that we often forget.  Say, for example, that people are trying to decide whether it makes sense to invest $100 million in public funds in a baseball stadium.  That $100 million may well bring some benefits, but few people evaluate such projects in the context of what else that money might do, what opportunities (such as paying down the debt to reduce future interest payments or building three new elementary schools) must be foresworn in order to make that stadium happen.  Because such costs don't come with a readily visible price tag, we often ignore them.  On a personal level, taking opportunity costs into account means realizing that whenever we make a choice to do something, such as watch television, we are using time that could be spent in other ways, like cooking a nice meal or taking a bike ride with our kids.

There's a lot more in Kluge I could talk about, but I'm thinking about opportunity costs now, so I'll stop here.

Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton (Dover, 2000, originally published in 1912 by the John Lane Company)

Orion is upside down.

My first view of the Southern Hemisphere sky; floating above a seemingly infinite abyss while snorkeling through crystal-clear water; reading C.K. Chesterton’s Manalive.   Awestruck, weak-kneed, disoriented, and just on the edge of fear.  How can I review a book that reviews me?

Reading Chesterton can be a lot like trying to drink from a waterfall.  I know I’m in the presence of a mind and a spirit much greater than my own.  There’s wordplay and swordplay; there are twists in the logic and logic in the twists.  It’s like riding a well-designed roller coaster, or skiing down a slope that’s just beyond your skill level.

I hear you muttering through your clenched teeth:  “Get on with it!  What is the book about?”  In a phrase:  the joy of being alive.

Okay, okay.  From the back cover:

Innocent Smith … is taken up by a fierce wind one day and dropped on the lawn of a boardinghouse inhabited by a group of disillusioned young people. … In the course of the book, Smith courts and remarries his wife repeatedly, lives in various houses, which all turn out to be his own, and attempts murder, but only succeeds in firing life into his victims. … Manalive is full of high-spirited nonsense expressing important ideas:  life is worth living, one can break with convention and still maintain moral and ethical standards, and much of the behavior that civilized man has been led to believe is wrong, isn’t wrong at all.

That’s about as good a summary as you’re going to get, though it is rather like trying to learn what a roller coaster is by consulting Merriam-Webster:  an elevated railway …  constructed with sharp curves and steep inclines on which cars roll.

You have to brave the ride.

Sometimes guilelessness can be cluelessness.  Sometimes it can be hurtful, too:  the art of the polite compliment is not one of my husband's strengths, and he is consititutionally unable to "throw" a game, even if his opponent is a small child.  But in a world of deception, the honesty is refreshing and reassuring.  If he says something nice to you, you know he means it; and if you beat him in a game—well, that's quite an accomplishment, much cherished by the more competitive members of our family.  At Thanksgiving, when much of his time is spent playing games with our nephews, I believe their goal is never so much to win as to "beat Uncle Porter."

And this is (one of the reasons) why I love him:  My brother came for a visit during the time our bathroom was radically torn up, with all but the necessary accoutrements removed.  We cleaned up before he arrived, but put only the minimal, essential articles back, since there was more work to be done after he left.  I noticed that Porter had included among the "necessary items" a clock that my brother had given us.  "That was thoughtful," I commended him, "remembering to put back D's clock for his visit."  Puzzled, he replied, "For his visit?  I put it out because I use it."

I don't plan an update on my Focusing on the Foundations progress every single week, but I will post periodically because knowing that I'll have to admit to failure is a significant incentive to diligence.

As you can see, by keeping my goals for the first week modest (i.e. just two), I've done all right.  The dotted lines are where I should be to be on track for meeting my goals; the solid lines show my progress.

The 10:00 bedtime definitely required some discipline to meet, but I only slipped twice.  Once (11:00) we had a guest for dinner, and were having such a good time I could hardly say, "Sorry, you must leave now; it's almost my bedtime."  As with many rules, this one will no doubt work best if I allow exceptions—as long as they are truly exceptional.

With the other (10:15, though it was actually 10:09; the chart is denominated in 15-minute increments, with rounding) I learned an important lesson.  There was a kitchen project I wanted to finish before going to bed, and I rushed around like a madwoman to get it done (almost) in time.  But then I was so hyped-up I lay awake for another two hours, totally defeating the purpose of the 10:00 bedtime.

The history reading has been going well, largely because I take the book with me in the car whenever I'm not driving, though I have been able to find some other times as well, which accounts for being slightly ahead of schedule.

Because I only started the chronological Bible reading today, I've left off that graph, figuring there's no point in cluttering up the post with a depressingly empty chart.  I'm only up to January 1.

I'll be adding more projects as time goes on, though not all of them will be as quantifiable as these.  That's a pity, because the charts and graphs really do help!