Lift Up Your Hearts!

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant (Crown, 2007)

It is good for me occasionally to read something written by someone I disagree with.  After all, I frequently find wisdom in unexpected places, and have been trying for five years to put my aphorism, "the wise man recognizes truth in the words of his enemies," into common usage.  (With spectacular lack of success, I might add.  A Google search nets seven results, all from my own blog.)  This book was difficult, and I haven't yet been wise enough to discern much useful truth, though by the end I was able to understand the author a bit better, I think—and to feel sorry for him.  He's ashamed of his background, he's afraid of the future, he's angry at the injustice he sees, and he thinks he knows where to assign the blame.

It was not my Christmas present.  I was only the courier, and if I don't like it, well, that's what I get for reading someone else's gift merely because it passed through my hands in the delivery.

Joe Bageant grew up in a small town in Virginia, not all that far from my own West Virginia/Western Pennsylvania ancestors.  Unlike most of his neighbors, he went off to college and, as my strongly right-leaning friend would say, became thoroughly drunk on the "Liberal Kool-Aid."  He became a hippie and a journalist and a hardline socialist.

Writing about his roots, he occasionally comes across as sympathetic to the sorrows of those who share his hometown, but mostly with a condescension that is difficult to stomach:  Surely the only reason they don't see the world the way he does is that they have been ground down by their corporate, industrialist, Republican masters who conspire to keep the serfs stupid, ignorant, poor, and sick!

By the end of the book I was convinced that his conflicted response to his own people—alternate sympathy and loathing—is due to his own self-hatred.  Sorry to go all pop-psychology on you, but he clearly has never forgiven himself for being white, and Scots-Irish at that.  To hear him tell it, all the troubles of the world are the fault of people who are white, of Scots-Irish descent, and/or Christian.  He himself is guilty of the first two, and if he managed to shed the last, to his embarrassment his own brother is a pastor—even one who admits to having cast out half a dozen demons in his time.  In an attempt to atone for these sins, Bageant indulges in what would clearly be branded "hate speech" and earn him the harshest opprobrium were the objects of his screed black, of Hispanic descent, and/or Buddhist.

The best chapter, oddly enough, is the one on guns, hunting, and the Second Amendment.  I say "oddly" because I dislike both guns and hunting, but appreciate Bageant's demolition of the standard Liberal gun-control reasoning.  Here he seems at last to understand his own people, even though he no longer has use for guns himself.  I suspect the recipient of this book will like this chapter a lot.

Although there are many places where I nearly threw the book across the room because of what I see as Bageant's ignorance and irrationality, he occasionally has some impressive insights:  as, for example, when he accurately predicted the subprime mortgage crisis well before it became obvious to the world.  On the other hand, Porter predicted that, too.  It's a lot easier to see that something is a house of cards than it is to do something constructive about it.

I'm also struck, again, by how much the far Left and the far Right have in common.  It's the Right that usually gets mocked for stockpiling food and water and otherwise preparing for the coming Doomsday, but Bageant is just as pessimistic.  He may see different causes for the impending disaster, but he's sure it's coming.  It's those of us in the middle who just keep on keeping on with life, expecting neither heaven nor hell anytime soon.

Here are a few quotes—then I have to go wrap the book.  :) (More)

Better Than School by Nancy Wallace (Larson Publications, 1983)

Child's Work:  Taking Children's Choices Seriously by Nancy Wallace (Holt Associates, 1990)

These stories of the education of Ishmael and Vita Wallace have been high on my list of favorite books since our own homeschooling days.  Recently I re-read them both, confirming my suspicions that the Wallaces—flying by the seat of their pants in an era when homeschooling was almost unheard of, and often illegal—discovered many of the principles now refined in Project-Based Homeschooling.

The last time I read about the Wallaces' struggles with onerous regulations and imperious school boards, I noted how blessedly out of date it was, for although there are still those in the United States who would make homeschooling illegal again if they could, for the most part homeschoolers here can rest in the knowledge that the right to direct the education of our own children is recognized in all fifty states.  This time, however, I read those parts of the books with renewed interest, since Switzerland, while much more advanced than the U.S. in some areas, is woefully behind us in this.  Some of the Wallaces' experiences and arguments may turn out to be relevant, or at least to give inspiration.

Don't you just hate it when you read an inspiring story from the past and have no idea what happened to the characters in subsequent years?  With Vita and Ishmael, at least, that question can be answered by visiting their Orpheo Duo website.

Here are a few, somewhat random, quotations.  You really need to read the books to get a good sense of the story, however.

Walking into the meeting knowing that we had a majority [of the school board] on our side was a lot better than not knowing what to expect, but I guess I really wanted more than that.  I wanted the whole board to admit that we were doing a terrific job with our kids and to be interested in our approach to education.  After all, there was a lot the public schools could have learned from us.  What disturbed me the most was that not only were two of the board members completely uninterested in what we were doing but they seemed to want the kids to go to school no matter what.  When I wrote about this to John Holt, he responded with some very insightful remarks that I'll never forget.  "One of the saddest things I've learned in my life," he said, "one of the things I least wanted to believe and resisted believing for as long as I could, was that people in chains don't want to get them off, but want to get them on everyone else.  'Where are your chains?' they want to know.  'How come you're not wearing chains?  Do you think you are too good to wear them?  What makes you think you're so special?'"  (BTS, 114-115)

 (More)

Project-Based Homeschooling:  Mentoring Self-Directed Learners by Lori Pickert (independently published at CreateSpace, 2012)

Janet's enthusiasm over Project-Based Homeschooling led me to be sure I read the book while I had access to it in Switzerland.  I had to get over some misconceptions, and I found the ideas intimidating, but I agree:  it's a must-read for homeschoolers, and in truth important for all parents.  Maybe for everybody.

The Misconception  Way back when, in our homeschooling days, a popular approach was called Unit Studies.  Here's an essay on unit studies as they relate to what's now called Classical Education; it give a pretty good idea of what they are about.  Basically, you pick a topic you hope your child will be interested in, and integrate the teaching of all subjects into a study of that topic.  At the time, I found the method too structured, too school-at-home, and too much work.  I assumed project-based homeschooling was a re-working of unit studies.

I was wrong.  There are similarities:  a child working on a project is integrating many disciplines and skills together.  But project-based homeschooling is an excellent example of why unschooling, well done, is absolutely not the "let the kid play video games all day" approach its detractors think it is. 

Projects of this sort are the child's idea and the child's responsibility.  That doesn't mean, however, that the parents are off the hook.  It seems to me that the work involved in observing and coaching a project is much harder than following a curriculum.  Which leads me to ...

The Intimidation  I love the ideas.  I really do.  But even as a do-it-yourself, lone wolf kind of homeschooler, this is out-of-my-comfort-zone thinking.  Probably because if Earth is my comfort zone, art projects are somewhere around Neptune, and so much of the examples here involve using art materials.  The author seems to think it natural to work through one's ideas by making a painting or modelling in clay.  I don't believe I've ever in my life even thought about doing that—and I've live a lot of years—so the idea of coaching a child to do so leaves me queasy.  Fortunately, Lori Pickert was kind enough to explain, in a comment on Janet's review, that "if drawing and painting make you nervous, there’s still building, writing, designing t-shirts and websites, putting on skits, making brochures and posters, etc. etc. etc.—it’s more about helping kids figure out a way to help others learn and along the way that reinforces what they know/don’t know and how you collaborate, share, etc."

Also, she's careful to give the neophyte a break:

Surprisingly often, people will champion self-directed learning for children but not allow those children's parents the same freedom and respect.  It's their way or the highway, and you had better start doing it the right way (their way) right away.  Your kids should learn at their own pace, follow their interests, and you should trust that they'll eventually learn everything they need to know.  You, on the other hand, should get with the program, right now, 100%, or else.  You don't need to have your own opinions or ideas; ours will suffice.  There's no time to experiment and see if these ideas work for you; take it on faith or you're part of the problem.

If your child deserves to learn at his own pace and have his own ideas, so do you.  Whatever you champion for your child, make sure you also give to yourself:  the right to follow your own path, work at your own pace, follow your own interests, make mistakes, and try again.  Whatever you want for your children, you are far more likely to help them achieve it if you live it yourself.

It's hard to do justice to the project-based homeschooling concept without taking a lot more time and effort than I'm willing to put forth at the moment—not to mention that I'd need the book, which presently is some 4500 miles away.  However, I do have some excerpts, which I copied down before relinquishing the book. (More)

3 Theories of Everything by Ellis Potter (Destinée Media, 2012)

It’s a good thing this little book is only 111 pages long, and easy to read to boot, because with our whirlwind sightseeing schedule—or what passes for whirlwind when 1.5- and three-year-old tornados are involved—there hasn’t been much time for reading.

The author is a former pastor of my son-in-law’s church, and that’s all I know about him because there’s no author blurb and I’m writing this “blind”:  we’ve had no Internet for two days.  And when it comes back I’ll be too busy/lazy to change the above.  [Correction:  I did find this short bio of Ellis Potter that covers a good deal.]

As I said, it’s a quick read, but well worth the attention.  Potter’s search for absolute reality took him all over the map, so to speak, two of the notable stops being as a Buddhist monk and as a Christian pastor.  3 Theories of Everything is a brief and admittedly greatly simplified look at Monism, Dualism, and Trinitarianism, its strongest point being the obvious respect Potter has for all three, despite having decided that Trinitarianism comes closest to describing the true nature of the universe.

I’ve had my fill of arguments that think to prove their premises by sketching a false picture of their opponent’s position and mocking it into oblivion.  What kept me reading this book, which had the potential to be just that, is that it isn’t.  Potter is not one of those preachers who sees nothing but irrationality and evil in other religious beliefs and practices, even though he feels strongly about the truth of his own.

Besides that, my favorite part of 3 Theories of Everything is the discussion of relationship as the heart of Trinitarianism:  God alone is God, and God is not alone.  Unity and diversity, relationship, love, service, obedience, and sacrifice existed in God Himself before the creation of the world, and thus are fundamental to the very nature of the universe.  Adam needed his relationship with similar-but-different Eve to be fully human.  We are not ourselves in ourselves, but in relationship with others.

Potter is annoying sometimes, a little too Baptist in some places and a little too patriarchal in others, but his humility makes this easy to forgive.

God Is Red:  The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China by Liao Yiwu, translated by Wen Huang (HarperOne, 2011)

After reading Liao Yiwu's The Corpse Walker, I knew I had to order God Is Red.  Being pressed for time Having grandchildren to play with, I'm going to take the lazy way out with this review and quote the dust jacket:

When journalist Liao Yiwu first stumbled upon a vibrant Christian community in the officially secular China, he knew little about Christianity. In fact, he'd been taught that religion was evil, and that those who believed in it were deluded, cultists, or imperialist spies. But as a writer whose work has been banned in China and has even landed him in jail, Liao felt a kinship with Chinese Christians in their unwavering commitment to the freedom of expression and to finding meaning in a tumultuous society.

Unwilling to let his nation lose memory of its past or deny its present, Liao set out to document the untold stories of brave believers whose totalitarian government could not break their faith in God, including:

• The over-100-year-old nun who persevered in spite of beatings, famine, and decades of physical labor, and still fights for the rightful return of church land seized by the government
• The surgeon who gave up a lucrative Communist hospital administrator position to treat villagers for free in the remote, mountainous regions of southwestern China
• The Protestant minister, now memorialized in London's Westminster Abbey, who was executed during the Cultural Revolution as "an incorrigible counterrevolutionary"

This ultimately triumphant tale of a vibrant church thriving against all odds serves as both a powerful conversation about politics and spirituality and a moving tribute to China's valiant shepherds of faith, who prove that a totalitarian government cannot control what is in people's hearts.

Because I can't resist and in order to make this a little more personal, here are a few quotations.

The surgeon's story is particularly interesting.

A critical skill of an ER surgeon is to diagnose fast and accurately, and then act.  You can't play games.  But as an administrator, none of the skills I had acquired applied.  They played by a different set of rules.  In my leadership position, I initiated some reform measures.  The school assigned me a ... car, but I asked the authorities to sell it and spend the money on the hospital.  I rode my bike to work every day.  I abolished the traditional big staff banquets during holidays and banned the use of public money for eating and drinking.  I also tightened up on reimbursing expenses.  All of those measures hurt the interests of other leaders; they hated my guts and conspired against me.  It was very frustrating and depressing. ... I got hold of a Bible.  I was examining my life at that time.  I felt extremely frustrated with my work as a deputy dean.  The Bible taught me to be in awe of God and to love, two important qualities that the Chinese people lacked.  Too many Chinese will do anything for trivial material gains and have no regard for morality, ethics, or the law.  How do we change that?  Can we rely on the Communist Party?  Can we rely on government rules and regulations  Apparently not.

Why does this description of the medical problems in Communist China sound just a little too familiar?

I couldn't work [at the big government-run hospital] out of conscience.  Say a patient, tortured by illness, sits in front of you, staring at you, hoping you can find a cure for him.  What kind of medicine should you prescribe?  Many meds do the same thing, but their prices can vary sharply.  I would prescribe the cheapest and most effective.  But if I continued to do that, the pharmacy and the hospital would be upset because I have undermined their profits, disrupting the cozy deal between pharmaceutical companies and hospitals.  When you break hidden rules and harm the collective interests of hospitals and doctors, you find yourself very alienated. ... As a Christian, I have to tell my patients the truth.  I cannot lie to get more money out of them.

American television isn't all bad.  Who'd have thought M*A*S*H could be an answer to prayer?

I told the minister that I would do [breast cancer surgery] for free, that I had done far more complicated surgery than what was required here, and he needed to trust me.  He looked at me in disbelief, as did the villagers gathering around us.  I'm not sure which of my assertions they had the most trouble believing.

I wanted to take the woman back with me to Kunming so I could use a proper operating room, but she didn't want to leave her home.  That night, I knelt and prayed, and as I was praying, an old American TV show popped into my mind—a team of cheerful doctors doing surgery while cracking jokes, a mobile army hospital, tents in an open field, the war in Korea. ... I felt inspired.  The next day, I bought some basic surgical instruments to supplement the ones I carried with me, and we did the operation in her bedroom.  Her bed was a wooden plank; no table necessary. ...  The room was very dark; even after we opened all the windows, it was still pretty bad.  I tied four flashlights together and had the grandpa hold them as operating lights.  That grandpa was strong and in great health.  He stood there for hours without moving, holding the light steady. ... It was a sweet feeling to be there with the poor villagers and to do God's work, though I never thought I'd ever have to perform surgery in quite those conditions.

From another man's story of life under Chairman Mao, evidence that if some of China's ills aren't that far from ours, some are almost unimaginable.

You are too young to understand what it was like.  We were treated much worse than animals.  People would torture us whenever they felt like it.  During the peak of the campaign, the government work teams fanned the sentiment of hatred.  Even the nicest and kindest peasants began to wave their fists and slap or kick us.  Toward the end, revolutionary peasants didn't need a reason to kill a landlord.  At public denunciation meetings, people became carried away with their emotions and would drag someone out and shoot him on the spot. ... Nobody questioned this ruthless practice or took responsibility. ... The work-team members didn't dare ignore the voice of the people.  Once people became brainwashed by Communist ideology and by Mao's propaganda, their thinking became chaotic.  All humanity was lost.  At its peak, even the work team found it hard to rein in the fanaticism.

Let me explain.  In this area, it was rare to find anyone who was not addicted to opium or gambling.  Only those who had embraced God had the stamina to kick their habits.  When I was a kid, I remember that people in this area didn't grow crops.  Instead, they grew poppies. ... They also gambled heavily.  This was a very strange phenomenon.  People's wealth switched hands very quickly.  In the afternoon, the person might be a rich landowner.  By evening he was homeless, having gambled everything away—his land, his house, even his wife.

When the Communists came, they banned opium smoking and gambling, and they banned Christianity.  Apart from working in the fields, people didn't have anything else to do in the evenings.  Political campaigns turned into a form of entertainment. They devoted all their extra energy to beating up people, killing people, and confiscating the property of others.  Those homeless drug addicts and gamblers suddenly became loyal revolutionary allies.  They didn't have to pay off their debts; their gambling and drug habits, their poverty, the practice of pawning their wives and children for drug money, their homelessness, everything was the fault of landlords exploiting poor revolutionaries.

Poverty became a badge of honor, and the children of the poor became the offspring of the true proletariat.  They felt superior to everyone else and were well fed and clothed.  They didn't even have to take any responsibility when killing someone at public denunciation meetings.  That was more fun than smoking opium and gambling, don't you think?

The Communist Party's policies might have been well meant, but the people who implemented them took a lot of liberties and interpreted them in their own way.  Random killing was quite liberating.

The stories of those whose faith saw them through the impossible years is humbling and inspiring.  As in The Corpse Walker, Liao Yiwu is careful to place more blame on past administrations than present, but he does give a glimpse into the struggles of the modern Church in China, including the friction between the official, state-controlled churches and the house church movement.  Perhaps the attitude of this new convert is also eerily familiar.

[T]hree religions are practiced in our home.  Everyone does his or her own stuff.  Why can't they form a uniform family religion so we don't have to fight all the time?  It's kind of strange.  As a kid, I would go with my dad to Buddhist temples and mimic the gestures and facial expressions of the Buddhist statues. ... When I was with my mom, I would attend services at an old church.  People sang hymns.  It was kind of grand and cool.

I prefer Christianity.  Buddhism is too regional, secular, and not cool.  Those old men and women, those wealthy businessmen or government officials, go to the temples, burning incense and praying for trivial stuff, such as more money, more promotions, and more luck.  Taoism is way too highbrow, not attainable.  I think Christianity is the only one that's all encompassing. ...

People in your age group are too political.  You guys are too interested in politics.  It's different with my generation.  Sometimes it bothers me.  I attended a house church one time.  When we were reading the Bible, a minister or a church elder suddenly stood up.  Without getting everyone's approval, he started to deliver a political statement and then asked eveyrone to pray for so-and-so who had died for the Lord, and then so-and-so who had been arrested by the government.  He also asked us to pray for the sins of the government.  He totally changed the mood of the gathering, making it depressing and tragic.  Several members started to cry after hearing his political plea.  I guess I was too young and didn't have that much experience.  I felt awkward.  I thought, Why don't we let God do God's work and Caesar do Caesar's?  Why do we always mix the two?  The government wants to politicize religion, and some Christians are doing the same thing.  These things kill my spiritual appetite.

What I Saw In America by G. K. Chesterton (originally published 1922)

In 1921, G. K. Chesterton embarked on a lecture tour of the United States, and "everybody who goes to America for a short time is expected to write a book," so he did.  This is no travelogue, however, but a set of serious essays inspired by Chesterton's observations.

It was only after graduating from college that I began to have an appreciation for the study of history.  During my school years, the world was divided into "math/science people" and "English/history people." Being both good at math and an avid reader of science fiction, I was clearly one of the former.  The reasoning behind this idea that one should not be good at, nor even interested in, all of the above escapes me as much as why I allowed myself to be so labelled.

While I would still choose reading and mathematics as of all the school subjects the most important for a child to master "early and often," I'd now put history a close third.  I know of no other way to counter what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery."  It is far, far too easy for us to assume that progress only goes in one direction, that we have come "sooo far" from our predecessors socially as well as technologically.  Reading history—especially writings that were current at the time—is the best way I know to understand that the people of the past were human beings like us rather than incomprehensible, unenlightened savages.  To use an extreme example, it is easy to hate Adolph Hitler, almost as easy to revile the German people (and others) for not rebelling wholesale against the evil he brought on, and pathetically easy to assure ourselves that we would never let anything like that happen today.  But never in all my schooling did I experience a serious attempt to understand historical events and situations as they were seen at the time by intelligent, thoughtful, normal people.  We are appalled when Hitler speaks of the "Jewish problem," but don't make the effort to figure out what it was about the circumstances that made the Jews a particularly acceptable scapegoat.  We're taught, as I was in school, that white southerners were evil to resist having their children bussed across town to attend black schools; I never had an appreciation for the many non-racially-motivated reasons not to place your child on that sacrificial altar until I spoke with someone who had lived through it.  By no means do I subscribe to the theory that in the attacks of September 11, 2001 we "got what we deserved," but if we—or at least our policy analysts—had been in the habit of looking at ourselves and our actions through other eyes, we at least would not have been so surprised.  

What I Saw in America is a great antidote.  Chesterton is so insightful that it's easy to think of him as outside of his cultural and historical surroundings, but he was writing nearly a century ago.  Think for a minute of what the world was like during his 1921 American tour.  (Maybe you do this kind of thinking all the time, but it's new for me.)  The Civil War was closer to 1921 than the Korean War to 2013.  Arizona and New Mexico had only been states for nine years, and last of the Indian Wars were but a few years past.  Prohibition was new.  Harding was the newly-elected president.  The Panama Canal was a mere seven years old.  Chesterton's essays glow with the perspectives of both another culture (British) and another time.

I don't claim Chesterton is always easy to understand, especially for someone who knows little about America in that era, and who doesn't possess the everyday knowledge he expects to be common to his British audience.  But he's always worth reading, nonetheless.  Very thought-provoking, but alas, not further-post-provoking at this time.  Life calls.

Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett and David Wilezol (Thomas Nelson, 2013)

It is the best of times and the worst of times for education.  From preschool through higher education, there has been a steady decline in the quality of public education in at least the half-century I’ve been observing it.  If my father is to be believed—and he was always a very reliable source—it’s been declining for a lot longer than that.  He was frequently appalled at my generation’s ignorance of basic history, geography, and literature.  (He’d have said the same thing about basic arithmetic, but he was surrounded by engineers.)  It doesn’t take much observation to realize that today the average American’s grasp of those subjects makes me look brilliant.

At the same time—and my father would concur—in some fields, for some people, knowledge and ability has soared.  As a science fair judge, he was blown away by the scope and quality of the research done by high school students.  His own high school had offered no math beyond trigonometry, and it was rare among high schools to offer even that.  My high school offered only one Advanced Placement course—and that for seniors—whereas our children had at least a dozen to choose from, beginning as freshmen.  And yet only a few students were actually prepared to take advantage of the generous offerings:  back in fifth grade, I would have said the expectations of their teachers were well below those of my own, and far below those of my father’s.

Despite the best efforts of educators to mush us all into a sameness at any level—better all low than some higher than others—there has always been an upper class and a lower class when it comes to education, and there always will be.  What I’ve been noticing is that the highs are getting higher, the lows are getting lower, and the middle class is rapidly descending—much as is happening with economic measures.

I’m hoping the economic situation does not lead to revolution, but there’s a crisis and a revolution coming in education and I say, bring it on! (More)

When Life and Beliefs Collide:  How Knowing God Makes a Difference by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2001)

As I mentioned before, I first read When Life and Beliefs Collide in personal circumstances that led to a great reluctance to tackle any of the author’s excellent subsequent books.  Only a few years previously, we had left the church which remains to this day both our best and our worst church experience.  Because James’ husband was in the leadership of what had become (or revealed itself to be; I’m still not certain which) an oppressive, even abusive situation, I had assumed that he and his family were in agreement with and partially responsible for the oppression.  This was confirmed in my mind when I read glowing, positive comments about “our church” in When Life and Beliefs Collide.  Re-reading it now, I’m amazed at how effectively that blinded me to the strengths of the book, how bold it was, and indeed how much of a risk James took in writing it.

This is a “women’s book,” written as it was in a situation where women, no matter how qualified, did not teach men, but as theologian J. I. Packer said, “[This] book seems to me to be a must-read for Christian women and a you'd-better-read for Christian men, for it gets right so much that others have simply missed.”  The heart and soul of James’ work is the importance of theology in the lives of everyone:  male and female, young and old.  Don’t let the word scare you into thinking this is a dry, academic subject:  as James says on the masthead of her website, the moment the word “why” crosses your lips, you are doing theology.

James makes many excellent points, every single one of which I missed the first time because of the prejudice I brought to my reading.  Mighty scary, that.

As usual in my reviews, the following quotations are not meant to be a summary of the book as a whole, but are instead ones that struck me for one reason or another and which I want to remember.

Many Christian men seek wives who know far less than they do or who have little interest in theology. The assumption is that a woman who knows less will make a better wife.  Her ignorance will be an asset to the relationship, or as another woman put it, “The less a woman has in her head, the lighter she is for carrying.”  This assumption leads women to conclude that the godly thing to do is hold back for his sake.  And so the age-old game carries on—a woman keeps herself in check to make a man look good.  It happens all the time.

How differently the Bible portrays women.  There they are admired for their depth of theological wisdom and their strong convictions.  Women in the Bible did not need anyone to carry them.  Their theology strengthened them to get under the burden at hand.  Contrary to current fears, these wise women did not demean, weaken, or overthrow the men.  They empowered, strengthened, and urged them on to greater faithfulness and were better equipped to do so because of their grasp of God’s character and ways.

Far from diminishing her appeal, a woman’s interest in theology ought to be the first thing to catch a man’s eye.  A wife’s theology should be what a husband prizes most about her.  He may always enjoy her cooking and cherish her gentle ways, but in the intensity of battle, when adversity flattens him or he faces an insurmountable challenge, she is the soldier nearest him, and it is her theology that he will hear.

Glory is the uncovering of God’s character—the disclosure of who God is.

I love that last quote.  I haven't thought much about it yet, but if it's a reasonable description of what is meant when the Bible talks about God's glory, many Biblical passages suddenly make a lot more sense, particularly the ones that appear to show God as a petty tyrant, concerned most of all with making himself look good at others' expense. (More)

Difficult Personalities:  A Practical Guide to Managing the Hurtful Behavior of Others (and Maybe Your Own) by Helen McGrath and Hazel Edwards (The Experiment, 2000, 2010)

When I was in college, I remember this complaint from the psychology majors:  taking the required Abnormal Psychology course convinced them that they—and all their friends—were abnormal and psychotic.  Reading Difficult Personalities is like that, or like reading a list of symptoms and convincing yourself that you have some deadly disease.  The book is an exhausting, if not exhaustive, description of difficult personality types, and it's impossible not to think, "Oh, that's just like him," "She does that all the time!" and "Oh, no!  Is that really what I'm doing to others?"  Worst of all is the section on the sociopathic personality, which will have you seeing sociopaths around every corner and looking askance at those you think you know best.  That may be a slight exaggeration, but it's pretty scary to realize that most sociopaths are hard to identify before it's too late and they've done extreme damage.

What makes the book more useful is realizing its limitations.  In this I was saved before the page numbers got into double digits, since the section on signs of extroversion includes that extroverts "tend to think out loud.  In talking, they find out what they think," and "often interrupt without realizing that they are doing it."  That is such an accurate description of dyed-in-the-wool introvert me that I wasn't a bit surprised to find that not only I but nearly everyone I know has some characteristics of most of the personality categories the authors analyze, even those that appear to be polar opposites.

Although meant to be accessible to a lay audience, the book reads more like a textbook:  quite technical, and frequently referencing the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  I think it might be more useful as a reference book than as one borrowed from the library for casual reading.  There are many suggestions for (1) dealing with someone who exhibits difficult personality traits (especially in the workplace), and (2) controlling one's own quirks and minimizing the damage done to others.  If I knew that I, or someone else, was clearly struggling with a particular problem, I might find the suggestions useful, but short of that I find the content far too broad—even contradictory—and overwhelming.  The authors do give some real-life, specific examples, but the book could use a lot more of them, and more examples of successful ways of dealing with problems, rather than just delineations of the problems themselves.

Traits covered include Extroverts and Introverts, Planners and Optionizers, Thinkers and Feelers, Negativity, Superiority, Bossiness, The Anxious Personality, The Inflexible Personality, The Demanding Personality, The Passive-Aggressive Personality, The Bullying Personality, and The Sociopathic Personality.  Each is discussed in terms of how normal people exhibit these traits, what is typical of someone for whom this is a significant pattern of behavior, what the person is thinking as he acts in that way, reasons behind such behavior, strategies for dealing with someone of this personality, and strategies for changing your own behavior if you see the trait in yourself.  Sometimes the authors point out the positive side of a particular disordered trait as well.

Here are a few quotations, in no particular order and of no particular importance other than they were the ones I typed up before getting tired of the exercise.

Some people prefer a relatively decisive lifestyle in which events are ordered and predictable.  ["Planners"] prefer to have closure and structure in their lives and make reasonably speedy decisions in most areas..  Deadlines are kept.  They like structure, routine and order, and they plan to make their lives reasonably predictable.

Others have a preference for a less structured and ordered lifestyle, characterized by keeping their options open.  ["Optionizers"] are reluctant to make decisions, always feeling they have insufficient information and that something better might come along.  An optionizer prefers a lifestyle that is flexible, adaptable, and spontaneous, and not limited by unnecessary restrictions, structure or predictabillity.

I sent the following quote to Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids, who is always berating "worst-first thinking."  Turns out it has a psychological category all its own.

Protective pessimism can take many forms, but essentially it is about always assuming the worst will happen and behaving accordingly.  Protective pessimists believe that if something can go wrong, it will.  If something bad can happen, it will happen, and it will happen to them.  Rarely do they expect good outcomes.  So they miss out on the joy of anticipation and dwelling pleasurably on the "nice" aspects, in case the gap between pleasurable "dreams" and the reality is too great. They are not game to tempt fate by hoping, dreaming, or wanting, in case they get caught unprepared by negatives.  They prepare for disillusionment, sadness and tragedy by protecting their projections with pessimism so they will not get caught by future disappointments.  Instead of living up to expectations, they live down, and are often negative in other ways.  Other people don't like being around pessimistic people because they can be contagious.

Mistakenly, bullies are often perceived as poor souls with a marked inferiority complex and low self-esteem who bully others because of inadequacy.  Research, however, suggests that few playground or workplace bullies are like this, although domestic bullies may be.  Bullies were once believed to be socially inept oafs, but research now confirms that they are more likely to be highly skilled people capable of sophisticated interpersonal manipulation of others.  They can send a victim over the edge without anyone seeing the "pushes" they use.

Only about 5 percent of the population has such severe problems with anxiety that their behavior would meet the criteria for a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. ... However, research suggests that maybe up to 30 percent of the population has an anxiety predisposition, that is, a mild to severe tendency to magnify threat and, too readily, release adrenaline and other fear hormones into their bloodstreams.  They often feel stressed all day with no real justificaton.

Early experiences of fearful situations can then create minds that are biased toward exaggerating the potential for danger.  They remember every frightening experience and, on being exposed again to similar situations or reminders of those situations, retreat from the threat or freeze in fear. ... [W]e have termed these people flooders as they are often flooded with fear.

• Flooders have a hair-trigger response to any situation that they perceive to be threatening, even if sometimes they are not verbalizing to themselves that a situation is actually threatening.
• They experience fear reactions to a great many situations that others would not interpret as threatening.  Because their body is often awash with fear, they train their brains to retain fearful memories, to selectively attend to potential threat, and to overinterpret situations as threatening.
• They tend to be less able to "turn off" the fear hormones once they are discharged into the bloodstream.  It can take up to 60 minutes for the body to return to normal after a strong adrenaline surge, and flooders have often had several surges in a row without realizing it.

That hit home to me more than anything else in the book.  Most of the authors' suggestions for dealing with the problem, such as "focus on facts and statistics to reassure yourself that the likelihood of a particular danger is less than you believe it to be," I don't find to be of much help.  I know that.  But in the fraction of a second it takes my body to react to the ringing of the phone, a loud noise, or even the quiet but potentially painful words, "we need to talk," there is no room for rational thought.  I know that it's only a very small portion of phone calls that bring me news of death or disaster, that most loud noises are harmless, and that few conversations actually require me to make difficult decisions or accept painful criticism.  But that knowledge only allows me to begin the process of calming the fear reaction after it has begun; it's not preventative.

["Successful sociopaths"] are no less sociopathic than the "unsuccessful" type, they just do it differently.  There is often no violence involved, although some pay others to be violent on their behalf.  They differ from the "unsuccessful" category in that they are adaptive, that is, they have enough skills and advantages to be successful by honest effort if they choose.  But they don't.  Out of greed, an overwhelming drive for power, and a thrill-seeking orientation, they choose deceit and dishonesty instead.  They are more likely to get away with their sociopathic behavior for a long period, as they are often charming, well-networked, and know how to exploit the system.  Their associates often cover for them, not realizing the extent of their antisocial and exploitive orientation. ... Sociopathic patterns of behavior are found in many powerful individuals who achieve political, entrepreneurial, sports, and business success.  But their behavior threatens the safety, well-being, and security of individuals, businesses, and our overall society.

One other thing I learned from Difficult Personalities:  As I had suspected, psychologists think we're all crazy, and the line between normal and abnormal is only a matter of degree.  It reminds me of a brain developmental specialist who said that everyone is brain-damaged, but it's more obvious in some than in others.

Asian buffet restaurants are kind of like IHOP as far as I'm concerned:  you need to go there every few years to remind yourself of why you don't go there more often.  The idea always sounds so good ... and the reality always disappoints.

We had a coupon for the new World Gourmet restaurant in town, so we went there after church on Sunday.  (The link is to the one in California, but it looks like the same thing.)  You can't say they don't have variety:  I wouldn't go so far as to say world, but there was what I'd call standard American fare in addition to the Asian food.  But as usual, the quality just wasn't there, nor can you expect it with all that quantity and variety.

Still, the selection was nice, the honey chicken was especially good, and—when I made a point to be the first one in line when the new batch came out—so were the French fries.  Whenever I'm in a place like that, I think of a football-playing friend of Heather's in high school:  he could really have done it all justice.  Me?  I took what I liked, and for once didn't eat too much.  Someone has to make up for the football players.

Cooked:  A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2013)

(This is a long post, with many excerpts from the book.  Consider it an appetizer.)

I almost always start writing reviews in my mind before finishing the book.  I'd planned to begin this one with, "I've never met a Michael Pollan book I didn't love.  Having made my way through the 468 pages, I can still say that with honesty, though honesty also compels me to admit the last quarter of the book was somewhat of a trial.

For all his interest in food, Pollan hadn't given cooking much thought.

Until, that is, I began trying to unpack a curious paradox I had noticed while watching television, which was simply this:  How is it that at the precise historical moment when Americans were abandoning the kitchen, handing over the preparation of most of our meals to the food industry, we began spending so much of our time thinking about food and watching other people cook it on television?  The less cooking we were doing in our own lives, it seemed, the more that food and its vicarious preparation transfixed us.

I see this less as a paradox and more as a repeated pattern:  the less we commit to and invest of ourselves in the heart and meaning of something, the more we extravagantly value the form, and set others to doing it for us.  When the marriage itself was the raison d'être of a wedding, a reception created and overseen by "women of the church" was sufficient to honor the couple and the guests.  Now we have devalued the marriage vows and it's the reception, professionally catered, decorated, and orchestrated, into which the time, money, and attention are poured.  The less we make music ourselves, in our families and communities, the more we value the concert tickets, recordings, and iPods that bring the work of the professional musician into our lives.  How many sports fans, ever-ready to critique the missed basket, the dropped ball, the faulty kick, get any closer to a real game than driving their children to practice?

But I digress.  What Pollan did was to get serious about cooking for himself and his family.

[The decline of home cooking] is a problem—for the health of our bodies, our families, our communities, and our land, but also for our sense of how our eating connects us to the world.  Our growing distance from any direct, physical engagement with the processes by which the raw stuff of nature gets transformed into a cooked meal is changing our understanding of what food is.  Indeed, the idea that food has any connection to nature or human work or imagination is hard to credit when it arrives in a neat package, fully formed.  Food becomes just another commodity, an abstraction.  And as soon as that happens we become easy prey for corporations selling synthetic versions of the real thing—what I call edible foodlike substances.  We end up trying to nourish ourselves on images.

It has been argued that it is more efficient to work an extra hour at the office, doing what we do well, and let restaurants do what they do best.

Here in a nutshell is the classic argument for the division of labor, which, as Adam Smith and countless others have pointed out, has given us many of the blessings of civilization.  It is what allows me to make a living sitting at this screen writing, while others grow my food, sew my clothes, and supply the energy that lights and heats my house.  I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking.  Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force.  And yet it is also debilitating.  It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.

Pollan divides his cooking adventures, cleverly and classically, into Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.  Fire is a dissertation into the earliest and most primitive cooking method:  meat over flame.  Along the way he explores the "cooking hypothesis," a recent theory that attempts to explain the development of Homo erectus, "the first primate to bear a stronger resemblance to humans than apes."

Anthropologists have long theorized that the advent of meat eating could account for the growth in the size of the primate brain, since the flesh of animals contains more energy than plant matter.  But ... the alimentary and digestive apparatus of Homo erectus is poorly adapted to a diet of raw meat, and even more poorly adapted to the raw plant foods that would still have been an important part of its diet, since a primate cannot live on meat alone.  The chewing and digestion of raw food of any kind requires a big gut and big strong jaws and teeth—all tools that our ancestors had lost right around the time they acquired their bigger brains.

The control of fire and discovery of cooking best explain both these developments. ... Appliying the heat of a fire to food transforms it in several ways—some of them chemical, others physical—but all with the same result:  making more energy available to the creatures that eat it. ... [C]ooking opened up vast new horizons of edibility for our ancestors, giving them an important competitive edge over other species and, not insignificantly, leaving us more time to do things besides looking for food and chewing it. ... [Anthropologist Richard Wrangham] estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four hours a day.  (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to watching television.)

By freeing us from the need to feed constantly, cooking ennobled us, putting us on the path to philosophy and music.  All those myths that trace the godlike powers of the human mind to a divine gift or theft of fire may contain a larger truth than we ever realized.

Yet having crossed this Rubicon, trading away a big gut for a big brain, we can't go back, as much as raw-food faddists would like to. ... By now, "humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows are adapted to eating grass," Wrangham says.

Pollan discusses animal sacrifice, and why fire-cooked meat-eating grew up as a sacred act, hedged in by a multitude of rules and governed by a priestly class.  From there he moves naturally to the modern barbecue, which retains obvious vestiges of those ancient cultures.  I dare you (unless you happen to be a diehard vegetarian) to read this section of the book without your mouth watering.  For the record, "authentic barbecue" has nothing to do with what you do when you slap a steak on your gas grill.  It is pork, pork alone, and preferably the whole pig, cooked with as many rules as any ancient sacrifice.  It's a pity I didn't know anything about barbecue culture when my in-laws lived in South Carolina! (More)

Make the Bread, Buy the Butter:  What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch—Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods by Jennifer Reese (Free Press, 2011)

In 2008, like many people, Jennifer Reese lost her job.  I don't know what that job was, but if it didn't involve writing, losing it was not a tragedy, but a blessing.  She's a wonderful writer:  clear, informative, and funny.  Definitely funny.

Faced with the opportunity to reconsider her life, Reese decided to focus on food, and the modern tension between do-it-yourself and buy-it-off-the-shelf:

Where is that sweet spot between buying and making?  What does the market do cheaper and better?  And where are we being deceived, our tastes and habits and standards corrupted?  Could I answer this question once and for all?  I didn't want an answer rooted in ideology, or politics, or tradition, or received wisdom.  I wanted to see the question answered empirically, taking into account the competing demands—time and meaning, quality and conscience, budget and health—of everyday American family life.

And so, over the next months and years, I got some chickens, which I loved; and some ducks, which I loathed; and some turkeys, which we slaughtered.  I learned to make cheese and keep bees and worried that the neighbors were going to call Animal Control.  I cured bacon and salmon, canned ketchup, baked croissants, and made vanilla extract and graham crackers.  I planted tomatillos and potatoes and melons and squash.  My son, Owen, joined 4-H and practically moved into the yard, while my teenage daughter, Isabel, refused to step outside the back door at all, especially after the goats turned up.  My husband, Mark, rolled his eyes at all of it except the homemade yogurt.  That, he ate by the quart.  At the height—or maybe it was the depths—of my homemaking experiment, I had pickles lacto-fermenting on the counter and seven varieties of jam, ranging from banana-chocolate to plum, arrayed in the pantry, and absinthe and Taleggio cheese mellowing in the crawl space behind my closet.  I was overwhelmed and a bit of a mess, but I had my answers.

Turkeys?  Homemade bacon?  This was no simple save-money-by-making-my-child's-school-lunch project.  But the results make for marvellous reading.  It's a treasure trove of recipes, too, and I would be tempted to add a copy to my collection, if I weren't busy trying to get rid of a vast collection of cookbooks gathering dust on the shelves because when I need a recipe and it's not handy, I immediately turn to Chef Google.

The answer to the question that drove me to reading the book, Why not make the butter? is a simple matter of economy.  Making butter is easy, and the result delicious, but cream is expensive.  Store butter is good enough that the author can't justify the extra expense of homemade.  "Unless," she adds, "you have a cow."

Reese might have chosen a different title:  Make the Bun, Buy the Hot Dog.  What she went through to make hot dogs leaves me all the more glad that Oscar Mayer now has a nitrate/nitrite-free hot dog that is delicious.

Make the Bread, Buy the Butter is much more than a recipe book.  For each entry, you get a story (often funny), a recipe, a difficulty rating, a cost comparison, and a "make it or buy it" recommendation.  Sometimes the answer is "both."  There's nothing like homemade mayonnaise, for example, but "Hellmann's has its place."

Maybe my favorite quote:

"Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself," Michael Pollan writes in Food Rules. ... "Chances are good it won't be every day."

Oh Michael Pollan, you underestimate me.

Finally, a longish quote from the Afterward, which sums things up well:

It's empowering to know I can cure bacon, brew vanilla, age Camembert, extract honey from a hive, and behead a chicken, even if I have no desire to do at least one of those things ever again.  Even if, in the end, I spent more money than I saved.  (A few costly projects like the chickens and the bees ate up all the savings of from scratch cooking.)  Big food companies flatter us by telling us how busy we are and they simultaneously convince us that we are helpless.  I am moderately busy, but not all that helpless.  Neither are you.  Everything I did in the course of my scratch-cooking era—with the possible exceptions of eviscerating poultry and stuffing hot dogs—was very, very easy.  [She must have blocked out the experience of making croissants:  "unbelievable hassle," though she still recommends making them, unless you live near a good French bakery.]

But the more helpless we feel, the lower those food companies move the bar of our expectations, and the bar is now very low at your local supermarket.  Trust me.  I have eaten my way through mine.  It makes me quite furious when I think about the sicketating powdered hollandaise sauce, the extortionate price of the vanilla extracts, the pathetic bread, the soups sweetened with corn syrup, the abomination of Pillsbury "creamy vanilla" canned frosting that contains neither cream nor vanilla.  It upsets me that we pay as much for these foods as we do.

Almost everything is better when it's homemade.  While this may have started out as opinion (though I'm not sure it did), I would now state it confidently as fact.  Almost everything.  But not everything.  Which makes me inordinately happy.  Because I think it's reassuring that you can walk into a supermarket and buy a bag of potato chips and a tub of rice pudding that are better than anything you can make at home.  I wish there were more foods like that.  I really don't want to spend my life standing over a stove, muttering about the evils of ConAgra and trans fats.  It seems a tragic waste to shape one's life around doctrinaire rejection of industrial food.  Which means, I suppose, both insisting on high standards most of the time and then, sometimes, relaxing them.

Jennifer Reese has a blog, The Tipsy Baker.  I haven't read much yet, but I'm sure I'll find it clear, informative, and funny.

Getting Organized in the Google Era:  How to Get Stuff Our of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right by Douglas C. Merrill and James A. Martin (Broadway Books 2010)

Did I really need to read another book on organization?  Maybe not, but a friend recommended this, and although much of it covers familiar ground, there are some useful points.

Douglas Merrill was formerly Chief Information Officer at Google.  With that and a Ph.D. in cognitive science, he has an unusual perspective on what he sees as a mismatch between life today and the kind of life our brains are organized to handle.  Whether it's all true or not I don't know, but it's interesting.

Part of what makes me doubtful of his analysis in places is that his world is so different from mine as to be barely comprehensible—if at all.  I feel some of the same disorientation I felt while reading Leaving Microsoft to Change the World:  certainly the age difference between the authors and me must account for some of the disconnect, but a large part, I believe, is that they come from the rarefied atmosphere of West Coast High Tech, and I do not.  It's a different world out there.  Thus some of Merrill's thoughts on how our brains don't fit the modern world fall flat because I don't fit the world he describes, either.

To help our brains out in a world they weren't designed for, Merrill has a number of suggestions, many of them excellent I'm sure.  For all his innovations, however, he often thinks inside his own box.  It is axiomatic, for example, that we all have smart phones.  Period.  And while he touches a matter dear to my own heart, the ill fit between the design of our educational system and the way children learn best, he sees it through the lens of an absolute need for school to function as a daycare facility.  Homeschooling isn't anywhere on his radar, not even to dismiss it as impractical.

Merrill also ramps up the volume on pull-quotes, which I already disliked in a book:  the book is replete with excerpts from songs that he likes—which might mean something to other fans of the same music, but which I quickly learned to ignore.

The second part of the book is both the most practical and the most interesting.  If it's a little biased towards Google products, that's understandable.  For example, Merrill loves Gmail, and uses it for far more than mail:  to-do lists, document storage, reminder messages, and as an organizer—taking advantage of Google's free storage and excellent search ability.

Search, in fact, is what he sees—I believe rightly—as a sea change in our organizational lives.  Until recently, systems needed to be designed for retrieval.  You organized your data (physical or electronic) into folders in such a way that you could most easily find it again.  (And sometimes fought with your spouse over why your system was best and his/hers was impossible to figure out.)  Thanks to Google, searching is now so efficient that you might as well leave all your files in one big pile.  Indeed, that's what Merrill does with his e-mail:  He doesn't ascribe to the "empty inbox" theory, but keeps all his e-mails there, labelled and tagged with keywords; with Gmail he can choose to see only the items with a particular label or set of keywords, just as if they had been in their own folder.  And with Gmail's search he can find almost anything.  Of course, this doesn't work with physical files—but it almost does, as he sends himself emails detailing where physical documents can be found, thus putting that information into his Gmail system.  Obviously, Merrill doesn't have the same reservations I do about putting so much important personal information in the hands of Google.

• Did you know that you don't have to have your own domain to take advantage of multiple e-mail addresses?  Simply include a + sign and another identifier between your e-mail ID and @gmail.com, e.g. myID+whitehouse@gmail.com if you want a special address to use when writing to the President.
• I rarely use my Gmail account, but nonetheless this has inspired me to take better advantage of the tagging and filtering options in Thunderbird, my own e-mail program, and has given me some ideas for better organizing my Firefox bookmarks.  I'm not giving up the wonder and the glory of my empty inbox, however!

Google Search itself is much more powerful than most of us take advantage of.  Here are a few he mentions, some of which were new to me:

• Use an ellipsis to specify a range of numbers, e.g. use "digital camera" $100...$300 to find digital cameras with a price between $100 and $300.
• Using Google to search within a particular site is very often more productive than using that site's own search.  A Google search of organization site:salemsattic.com finds posts at both this blog and IrishOboe that mention organization.
• Another useful search modifier is filetype, e.g. filetype:pdf will find Acrobat documents.
• Here's a new one to me:  the tilde.  "paris hotels" ~affordable searches for sites containing "paris hotels" and synonyms of "affordable."
• One of my favorites:  using Google for unit conversions, e.g. "100 USD in CHF" to find the value of $100 in Swiss francs, or "3 m in ft," to convert from meters to feet.
• Weather Paris is all you need to get the current temperature in Paris.  Weather Emmen, however, will get the data for Emmen in the Netherlands.  Instead, you have to type weather Emmen Switzerland, and even then it will be inaccurate; it always is.
• Time Emmen works just fine for either, however.  It's the same in both the Netherlands and Switzerland.
• I type in Southwest Airlines 259 and immediately get flight information with departure and arrival times, and gate information.
• I use Google Translate for longer blocks of text, but simply googling, "I love you" in German immediately retrieves, "Ich liebe dich."
• Define ameliorate retrieves a dictionary definition, with pronunciation and synonyms.
• Get movie show times and locations by searching for the name of the movie and your zip code.
• It can be a bit awkward, but you can use Google as a calculator:  typing (cube root 27)**2 +1 not only gives the answer, 10, but pops up a handy calculator widget as well.
• Here's my favorite new discovery:  I have bookmarks for FedEx, USPS, UPS, and other shippers to use when tracking packages, but I no longer use them.  I just type the tracking number into Google, and the relevant information pops right up.

And a few random quotes:

[A challenge with bookmarks is that] Web pages are sometimes ephemeral.  A page you bookmarked two months ago may no longer exist when you revisit it.  So if the information you find online is critical to keep ... I'd suggest you copy the Web page's content and paste it into an e-mail to yourself.  You might also copy and paste into the e-mail the Web page's address in case you want to go to that specific page later, assuming it still exists.  By the way, before you copy the content, it helps to click the "Format for printing" option many Web sites give you, as this usually eliminates ads and other stuff you don't want to copy.  Then send the message to yourself.  If you're using Gmail, you might also add a label to the message to help you find it later.

Our short-term memory can hold between only five and nine things at once.  With endless to-do items competing for our attention, plus the countless bits of information we gather all day, it's no wonder we're constantly forgetting things.  Shifting from one task to another complicates matters too, by knocking out what we had in our short-term memories.  That's one reason that our brains simply can't handle multitasking.

Adjusting your brain to new contexts is difficult to do.  Multiply the effort involved in each context shift by the dozen that you make over the course of a long day, and it's no wonder you struggle just deciding what to eat for dinner.

Lots of context switching during a day also adds stress.  If you're trying to focus on accomplishing a specific task, and you keep getting distracted, you'll get frustrated.  Once you reach frustration, it's just a short stroll to Stressville.  The more stressed you become, the harder it can be to focus.  Suddenly, you're reunited with your old friend, the downward spiral.

[T]hink now about the voluntary context shifts you make every day.  Maybe you're frequently popping out of PowerPoint and into eBay.  What's up with that?  Are you overwhelmed, intimidated, or just bored by the presentation you're working on?  Maybe something bigger is at work here. Have you always been easily distrated?  Could you be a closet procrastinator?  Whatever the reason, try to identify it and organize around it.

How ... can you get a panoramic view of yourself and of which limitations are real and which aren't?  You could look back at other projects you've completed recently....  Where did you succeed?  Where could you have done a better job? ... If you examine how you performed two or more projects, you may find patterns that offer insights into where you tend to trip yourself up.

Also, pay particular attention to what scares, stresses, frustrates, and angers you.  If you're like me, you experience those emotions when you're being squeezed by one or more constraints.  The more intensely you feel those emtions, the bigger the constraint may be.

Finally, here's Merrill's summary of his organizational principles.  The two I've highlighted are the ones I think most distinguish Getting Organized in the Google Era from the many other books in the field.

1. Organize your life to minimize brain strain.
2. Get stuff out of your head as quickly as possible.
3. Multitasking can actually make you less efficient.
4. Use stories to remember.
5. Just because something’s always been done a certain way doesn’t mean it should be.
6. Knowledge is not power. The sharing of knowledge is power.
7. Organize around actual constraints, not assumed ones.
8. Be completely honest (but never judgmental) with yourself.
9. Know when to ignore your constraints.
10. Know exactly where you’re going (and how you’ll get there) before you start the engine.
11. Be flexible about the outcome of your goals.
12. Don’t organize your information; search for it.
13. Only keep in your head what truly needs to be there.
14. Break big chunks into small ones.
15. Dedicate time each week to reviewing key information.
16. There’s no such thing as a perfect system of organization.
17. Whenever possible, use the tools you already know.
18. Add relevant keywords to your digital information so you can easily find it later.
19. Take notes to help you shift contexts later.
20. Group tasks with similar contexts together.
21. Integrate work with life instead of trying to balance the two.

Life of Fred:  Apples (and a whole lot more) by Stanley Schmidt (Polka Dot Publishing, 2012)

Grandparents like to buy presents for their grandchildren.

Grandparents especially like to buy books as presents for their grandchildren.

Grandparents love to give books about subjects that their grandchildren love.

Now it gets complicated:  What books do you give a grandson whose number one passion is numbers?

(video link)

So you ask, and you search, and you discover ... the many volumes of Life of Fred.  The story of little Fred Gauss, the five-year-old math professor at KITTENS University in Kansas, twists and turns through mathematics from basic addition through fractions, algebra, calculus, and more—along with an incredible assortment of other facts about science, history, behavior, and almost anything else Stanley F. Schmidt's somewhat quirky mind can think of.  It's not intended for preschoolers, but it's a story with a lot of math in it, so there's hope.  What's more, it's a story about a small child who thinks about numbers a lot—and children like to see themselves in a book.

So far I've read the first two Elementary books (Apples and Butterflies), all three Intermediate books (Kidneys, Liver, and Mineshaft), and also Fractions, the first of the fifth-grade books.  (Elementary and Intermediate takes the student through fourth grade, if you follow the suggested timetable.  Not that we trouble ourselves with things like that.)  I confess that I did not stop and do the math, but skipped the problems for the sake of getting through all six books in a day and a half.  If you really want to learn the math, you must do the problems and not just read the stories.  (It isn't that much work:  one of the features of LoF is its avoidance of drill-and-kill.)  If I ever get LoF:  Statistics, I'll be sure to work all the problems, because I never did understand statistics, despite getting a B in my college course.

I'll say this:  I like math, and I was a math major in college, but never until now have I read a math textbook at any level that I would be happy to re-read.  Which is good, because that's the way preschoolers like their books.

There are only two things that get on my nerves a bit about LoF:  (1) Schmidt makes no attempt to keep his opinions about life out of the books.  There's nothing either unusual or wrong about this; all stories and many textbooks have the same feature.  But some parents are bound to disagree in places, and should be prepared to discuss the issues.  Which would be a good idea, anyway.  For example, some parents have objected to Dogs (volume 4 of the Elementary series) because of the implication that some dogs die at the end of the story.  (2) Despite Schmidt's insistence on good grammar and use of language in the books, e.g. pointing out that "alot" and "alright" are not acceptable words, I've noted more than one occurence of "different than" instead of "different from," "associate to" instead of "associate with," and the use of "their" as a singular pronoun.  I know he's a math teacher, not an English teacher, but he could use an editor.  It's an opportunity to diverge into your own grammar lessons—but it's yet another reason to make sure you know what it is your child is learning.

What will a three-year-old think of Fred?  Will he enjoy the math story?  Will he learn anything from it?  Will our other grandchildren, who are old enough to do the problems woven into Fred's adventures, learn the math as well as the author advertises?  They already have a great math curriculum, but mathematics, like history, deserves to be learned from several angles.

Time will tell.  All can say at this point is that I certainly hope our grandchildren find Life of Fred to be valuable, because then I'll be able to read the rest of the stories myself.

The Man Who Was Thursday:  A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton (original copyright 1908)

We should have more such nightmares.  Wikipedia refers to The Man Who Was Thursday as a "metaphysical thriller," and I suppose that's as close as possible to giving it a label.  Like Chesterton's Manalive, this tale of anarchy and adventure is a wild ride, but it is shot through with goodness—not to mention Chesterton's characteristic mental gymnastics and wordplay.

It's hard to imagine that Garth Nix, author of the Keys to the Kingdom series, owes no debt to The Man Who Was Thursday in his use of the days of the week.  At least, having recently read the series on the recommendation of my grandson, it was obvious to me, especially since Nix throws in innumerable other literary references.  Equally obvious, and more signficant (because closer in intent and feeling), is the influence of the clothing in the final chapter on the gowns worn at the end of C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength.

Such is the nature of The Man Who Was Thursday that I can confidently quote a large section from near the end without fear of giving anything away:

"You! " he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last—you are the people in power! You are the police—the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I—"

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

"I see everything," he cried, "everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, 'You lie!' No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, 'We also have suffered.'"