Samuel has recently become a big Ben Folds fan. It started when Samuel discovered that Ben has a song with ‘Stan’ in the title. So, now when he listens to my iPod, he asks for ‘the Stan song.’ I carefully excluded this song from the playlist that Samuel listens to, but this past weekend, Samuel pointed out that I’d missed one song with objectionable lyrics. So, if Samuel starts using the F word, I guess I can just blame it on Ben Folds.
This MSNBC news article about cold-war era civil defense supplies having been found at the Brooklyn Bridge dredged up a childhood memory. I remember eating lemon hard candies that I thought were from civil defense caches. A quick Googling confirmed that they probably were indeed from a fallout shelter. The ones I remember were just like the yellow candies shown on this page.
The candies that I remember probably came from the grain elevator in Wichita, Kansas, that my maternal grandfather managed, which was a fallout shelter–though I’m not sure how the candies got from the shelter to my grubby little mouth.
Sorry the entries have been sparse around here lately. No particular reason; I’ve just been more focussed on day-to-day issues. Stay tuned.
So, Katie IMs me from home and mentions that our home (VoIP) telephone is not working. I respond: “So, is Internet access out also?” A second later I realize I asked her this via IM.
A small cool front moved through last night, bringing with it a thunderstorm and a little fresh, clear air. It made for glorious running weather this morning. I ran about eleven miles around Town Lake and up through west Austin (through Tarrytown to 35th, across MoPac and back down Shoal Creek).
At Auditorium Shores, I noticed on the side of the path a parked bike and an empty guitar case. A few yards later, Woode Wood was serenadiing the sunrise over Town Lake and downtown. I didn’t stop to listen to him, but just his presence there made my morning brighter.
This afternoon, I spent some time browsing through Crap Cars at Barnes & Noble. This little not-terribly-witty book profiles about 50 of the worst cars sold in the U.S. during the driving lifetime of your average B&N customer–the last 40 years or so. I was dismayed, though not surprised, to find in this book two cars that I’ve owned:
1980 Chevrolet Citation
1975 Ford Mustang II
I really dislike Valentine’s Day. I don’t mind telling or showing my loved ones how much they mean to me, but Valentine’s Day just seems like a totally artificial holiday. I’m anti-consumerist (to some small degree) and just generally passive aggressive. I don’t like anyone telling me that I must show my love on this day, and that I really ought to do so by buying specific (overpriced) items.
This morning, a well-meaning elderly lady was coming out of the coffee shop as I was going in. She asked me, out of the blue, “Have you gotten a Valentine’s Day gift yet for your wife? You’d better get on it. You should have seen all the men at the grocery store across the street.” It took a lot of restraint not to tell her to go to hell. I know she was just trying to be nice, but she really rubbed me the wrong way.
I did my graudate education in literary/cultural theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which means I was thoroughly immersed in deconstruction and post-structuralism: truth is relative, our thinking and reality are limited by language, human relations are all about power, etc. I was hit with Derrida in my first semester of grad school and the theories of Michel Foucault figured prominently in my dissertation.
Some would find it odd, then, that I became a Christian in the midst of this education, what with faith’s appeal to universal truth and the institutional nature of Christianity. I find deconstruction and post-structural theories interesting, useful and basically sound, but in retrospect, I think my embrace of faith represented an ultimate rejection of those theories. If you completely embrace those theories, the end result is hopelessness: we are each stuck in our own little reality–which itself might be an illusion–unable to genuinely communicate with others.
I guess I refused to go that far. I wanted and want to believe that there is some meaning to life. I’m not even sure that it’s God, but in a community of faith, I found a group of people who also want to believe that it’s possible to connect with others in a meaningful way (whatever that means).
Oh, I feel great ambivalence about the institutional nature of the church. And it’s damn hard to cut through all the crap that constitutes our daily lives to get to know others intimately, but at least the members of a faith community profess to believe it’s possible to do so. It’s that belief–that faith–that counts. And occasionally, I actually glimpse that connection.
This morning, I ran the 3M Half Marathon for the third time. I’m happy to report that I’m getting faster as I age. I ran it in 1998 and finished in 1:40:00. In 2001, I finished in 1:38:30. This morning, however, I finished in 1:36:00! That’s a 7:20 min/mile pace. Here are my general results and detailed results:
The half marathon is always a lot of fun. Here are some of the things I saw along the route this morning:
On Saturday, Samuel and I had a male bonding experience. We installed wire fencing around the bottom of our picket fence to keep his puppy Penny from escaping the back yard under the fence. Samuel and I went to Home Depot together to get the supplies, and then he helped me cut the fencing into strips and staple the strips to the bottoms of the pickets. He worked willingly and got tired before he got bored. Afterwards, he told Katie that he and I had had a really good time together.
I just wanted to document this experience to read again in eight or ten years when, I suspect, Samuel will not be so forthcoming with his help.
