February 2003

6:26 p.m.

I need to get out more.

10:12 p.m.

"The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

[. . . F]or them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures [. . .] had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

from The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis

Why does this blip on the radar of eternity seem so vast and convoluted?

from "Somewhere to go," Josh Doody

For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

2 Corinthians 4.17

We've got a long way to go yet—sometimes it seems this trial is beyond our capacity to endure. But the Beginning will come, and we will laugh at what once frightened us into tears.

Wake up! Wake up! The day is coming; the night is nearly over!

5:00 p.m.

Goodbye, Mr. Rogers.

6:11 p.m.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and Son he is worshiped and glorified.

If our relationship with God is a family photo, the Holy Spirit is the one holding the camera.

OK, maybe it's a bad analogy, but it describes what I know of Him: He makes possible our relationship with God, and yet is God Himself, and yet remains out of view. He gives us new life, He instructs us and He intercedes with the Father on our behalf.

Of the persons of the Trinity, humans are perhaps the least like Him; He is not easy to understand. We do not pray to Him or with Him, but by His agency, and if we cannot see Him working, it is because He is working inside us.

But maybe one day, when we are in heaven and have become real people, we will be able to see Him and thank Him for all He has done.

2:22 p.m.

I'd heard about Trillian, the instant messenger that allows you to connect to multiple chat services (Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, ICQ, IRC) simultaneously, but hadn't tried it out until yesterday.

It's one of the most useful and well-designed programs I've come across. I heartily recommend it.

5:01 p.m.

Saw my psychiatrist today. I finally got him to explain what the "psychotic" in "depression with psychotic features" meant. While it's fun to say (Hi, I'm psychotic!) I didn't feel it was accurate, seeing as how I don't have hallucinations or nothin' (thank the Lord).

It was a long explanation, and between his accent and my dopeyness, probably not all of it got across. The gist of it seems to be that I can be considered to have lost touch with reality by my preference for sleep and dreams over reality.

So I'm crazy, but just a little.

4:12 p.m.

Let's face facts: I'm disabled.

Thanks in part to depression and in part to the drugs used to treat it, I can no longer do some of the things to which I had become accustomed: reading or concentrating on a task for hours at a stretch, getting up before noon, leaving the house every day.

I suppose this is where I'm supposed to say something insightful and longsuffering. Well, I don't have anything of the kind to say. It sucks. I want my life back!

I'm angry and I don't know at whom.

6:15 p.m.

Whoever wants to save his life will lose it.

10:42 p.m.

LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat first?
COOKIE MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.

3:22 p.m.

Patience is something I need sorely.

I want to be better right now. I want to be engaged in something meaningful and productive right now.

But even Paul had to spend time imprisoned.

So I scratch another day on the wall.

7:30 p.m.

Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 has to be one of the most beautiful things to have ever existed.

10:00 p.m.

Allah is a terrible God.

His attributes seem to be a subset of those of the Christian God—all of the awfulness and holiness, none of the compassion, love and mercy. This is a God who has not known the humiliation of Incarnation, a God who is eager to send people to everlasting torment.

You could, though, say, rightly, that I saw in the text only what I expected and wanted to see.

Lord, open my eyes.

I know about the royal plural, but I still think it ironic that the God Who Has No Son should continually refer to Himself as "We."

We. We. We.

All the way home.

(couldn't resist)

3:20 p.m.

Michael J. Nelson, former host of the wonderful Mystery Science Theater 3000, has a Web site, updated weekly.

5:06 p.m.

[T]he kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.

Matthew 13.45-46

5:16 p.m.

We live in a wonderland and we don't even know it. We live in the antechamber to heaven and hell and are oblivious to the fact.

11:20 p.m.

The North Star is one of those coincidences that make you think seriously about an intelligent Creator.

11:25 p.m.

I revel in awkwardness. Which is good, because I experience so dang much of it, on a daily basis. Awkward pauses are a chance to step back from the conversation, look the other person in the eye and say "I recognize in you a fellow-sufferer."

6:24 p.m.

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make;

Henry V, 4.1.94

11:20 p.m.

We all rage at God, demanding he do more than he is doing. He remains quietly unthreatened, saddened beyond words that we think him cruel or indifferent, but unswervingly committed to the course he has set. He refuses to redesign the plot of the book, having already written the last chapter and knowing that the ending is very, very good and that every thread in our story is necessary to that conclusion.

from Finding God, Larry Crabb

6:30 p.m.

Many sick or dead birds, fish or small animals are also cause for suspicion.

from ready.gov, a new Web site by the Department of Homeland Security

If they mean to scare the pants off me, they've succeeded.

It's difficult to think of dangers more exotic and less tangible than radiological/biological/chemical attack. It's hard to believe we live in a world in which these things are possible.

Then again, two years ago, it would be hard to believe the Towers would be gone.

6:41 p.m.

A recent survey of blogs (that is, one other blog) found an infinity percent increase in usage of the new "cow" expletive (introduced here on 29 January), making this the greatest impact this blog has had on anything in the outside world, ever.

The English language is a beautiful thing.

9:24 p.m.

[Y]ou neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.

[. . .]

Where my Word is unspoken,
[. . . T]he wind shall say: 'Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.'

We build in vain unless the Lord build with us.
Can you keep the City that the Lord keeps not with you?

[. . .]

Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.

from "Choruses from 'The Rock,'" T.S. Eliot

4:13 p.m.

Number of American flags roadside between home and church (~3 mi. drive): 23

6:04 p.m.

Near the end of each Gospel, with the accounts of Jesus' resurrection from the dead, the transmission starts breaking up. The synoptics diverge—there's one angel, except maybe there's two, it's not quite clear who actually goes to the tomb or whether the women tell the disciples what they've seen—and Mark's ending may be bad data entirely.

I hope that what we heard through the static that precedes nearly 2,000 years of silence—that God has conquered death—still holds true.

Sometimes I wish things were simpler than they are.

6:22 p.m.

Ultimate reality is personal.

10:49 p.m.

Spent the night playing Super Smash Bros. with a friend.

Fun.

10:57 p.m.

"I have always—at least, ever since I can remember—had a kind of longing for death."

"Ah, Psyche," I said, "have I made you so little happy as that?"

"No, no, no," she said. "You don't understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine [. . . .] And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn't (not yet) come and I didn't know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home."

from Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis

6:22 p.m.

Happy Valentine's Day^TM.

8:14 p.m.

"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

Humans are really too strange to be animals. Think for a minute how truly bizarre and wondrous it is for us, the putative descendants of monkeys, to be capable of manipulating electrons and symbols in such a way as to allow me to share this sentence with you.

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

And think about nakedness. How odd that animals should find their bodies shameful to the point that being clothed can be considered their natural state.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Whether you believe in the veracity of the Genesis account or not, you have to admit it makes for effective myth. It is clear that there is something wrong with the human condition that needs explaining; something got broken along the way, so much so that it seems appropriate that man should fall barely three chapters into the world's story, and that the first human child should become a murderer.

So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

5:12 p.m.

Heck, I don't know. Any suggestions?

6:38 p.m.

There we go. Now, maybe that I'm done worrying what to call it, I can focus on making it worth reading.

Nah. I'll leave that for later.

10:18 p.m.

Things seem to have gone a little haywire. London's been in a panic; DC's in a panic, with rumors that the Homeland Security Advisory System's going to Red and people buying duct tape like crazy; we're in what Doc Searls aptly calls "diplomatic meltdown" with NATO and the EU and the UN; North Korea is just completely whacko and dangerous. Meanwhile our nation marches on to a pre-emptive war with Iraq.

Will someone please tell me what's going on and how I should respond?

To those of you with more experience at this living thing: are current events always this confusing and frightening?

Maybe I need to read less news.

3:18 p.m.

D'oh! There's already a blog called "Smoke Signals," and it's over a year older than mine.

There is no such thing as originality.

9:31 p.m.

You know what? I'm just going to keep the name until I can think of a better one. Surely the world is big enough for two blogs with the same name, for the time being.

3:18 p.m.

All's well that ends well.

6:11 p.m.

Received today a questionnaire from the Social Security Administration's Disability Determination Service, which requests more information about me than there actually is information about me. Example:

Describe your average day. Include household chores, food preparation, daily grooming, hobbies, medical visits, medications, exercise, errands, and child/adult care. Explain how your illness/injury affects these activities. State how your activities have changed since the illness/injury.

At first I thought of putting the questions and their answers online, seeing as how they'd be similar enough to the Friday Five, etc. and, hey, content is content, right?

Then I realized that both you and I would be sick of hearing about me in such detail. People in general are interesting, but not that interesting.

9:26 p.m.

I'll tell you a story a friend told me recently:

She saw a duck in a mucky, dirty pond, that finally flew up out of the pond and crossed a major road and some power lines—and she didn't think he would make it. But he did, just barely, and landed in (what she imagined to be) a beautiful, clean pond with other ducks in it.

She likened me unto that duck. I like that.

Gonna make it, just barely.

5:59 p.m.

Initial impressions of the Koran:
An Islamic society would be orderly, if a little grim.
Being an Islamic woman wouldn't be much fun.
In Islam it is possible to earn God's favor.
Islam is very simple, very doable: attend to your prayers, render alms, have faith in God and the Judgment Day. It doesn't ask of you impossibilites like "love your enemy" or "deny yourself."
The Koran can't seem to make up its mind as to whether the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) are OK, or hellbound.

If it's true there exists a "war of ideas" between Christianity and Islam, I'm glad to be a little more certain of which side I'm on.

4:50 p.m.

Lunched with my grandparents.

I'm proud to carry their genes.

5:20 p.m.

Decided I am going to learn how to program a computer, and to that end I am using PLT Scheme, as I've heard Scheme is a good beginner's language, and, as a text, How to Design Programs by Felleisen, Findler, Flatt and Krishnamurthi, which, through some act of academic generosity, is freely available on the Web.

Look out, computer! I'm gettin' ready to program the heck out of you!

8:25 p.m.

I use Ogg Vorbis to encode my CDs. Better quality than MP3 or WMA in the same space. Really. Try it yourself and see. Plus, it's patent- and royalty-free, so no being surprised by someone in the future affixing a price tag to encoding/decoding capability.

CDex is an excellent free tool that can encode in Vorbis.

I happily anticipate, however, the advent of hard drives big enough to allow our music to reside uncompressed on them. Let's hope that CDs aren't copy-protected to death, or operating systems DRM'ed to death, by the time this happens.

2:39 p.m.

This blog's one-month anniversary passed by unnoticed the other day.

Hooray, blog!

3:08 p.m.

Listening to Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart," which informs us that the "owner of a lonely heart!" is better off than the "owner of a broken heart!"

There's something special about how ineffably bad this song is, and some strange connection I have to it; if it were a person it would be my archenemy. My archenemy and my twin brother. (It is as old as I am, after all.)

Do you have any pet lousy songs?

12:52 p.m.

Don't you hate when most of the words in a sentence are hyperlinked, leaving no clue as to which is the item of interest?

2:46 p.m.

Been thinking.

To come up with Web sites for the "hyperlink" entry above, I used Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" on various words. "Leaving" produced this page, "Leaving Christianity," by and for those who've left the faith.

It scares me.

What am I scared of?

That my belief in life after death has kept me from enjoying life on this earth.
That my investment in Christianity makes it impossible for me to ever objectively evaluate it.
That the ex-Christians are right—there is no God; I've spent my life on a fantasy.
That I could fall away just as easily and completely as any of those former believers.

Our feelings can't tell us if God exists, and we don't have enough information to logically prove or disprove His existence. So it comes down to trust: who do you trust? Is Christ trustworthy? More so than His enemies?

I think so; I hope so. I've cast my lot with Him.

Time will tell who is right.

2:56 p.m.

"Remember, always, young man, that science which has become a great power in the last century, has analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred. But they have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous. Yet the whole still stands steadfast before their eyes, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Has it not lasted nineteen centuries? Is it still not a living, a moving power in the individual soul and in the masses of people? It is still strong and living even in the souls of atheists, who have destroyed everything! For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it still follow the Christian ideal. And neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has been only grotesque."

from The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

12:52 p.m.

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire...

"Shine, Perishing Republic," Robinson Jeffers.

1:10 p.m.

The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they
shine already.

"The Purse-Seine," Robinson Jeffers.

1:17 p.m.

Sometimes I fear that America, like Rome before it, must die and decay. Sometimes I fear that this process has already begun, that our nation peaked sometime last century, maybe with the Apollo missions.

And when I fear these things, I am glad to be so far away from the center, here in sparsely-populated New Mexico.

It's a little paranoid, but I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way.

8:27 p.m.

If you love animals—in whatever way—Pets or Food is for you.

4:15 p.m.

Started reading the Koran in English translation today.

I want to know what kind of religion Islam is, apart from suicide bombers and death-sentence fatwas.

That's a loaded way of stating it, but I've not yet seen any indication that there is any love or compassion or joy in Islam. It is completely alien to me.

7:54 p.m.

I'm sorry if that came across as uncharitable. I have nothing against anyone of Muslim faith; I'm just angry at some of the atrocities that have been committed in the name of Allah.

3:15 p.m.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

—Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

6:25 p.m.

Dinner at Kwan Den.

Cookie fortune: "You will be showered with good luck;" plus nine lucky numbers.

Kids, try this at home: Young Man's Book of Amusement.

10:30 p.m.

Went to a Bible study in Carlsbad, hosted in the home of the wonderful Paul & Janis Trone (whom I mention in part because Paul may be reading [Hi, Paul!]).

It's college age and up, so if you fit in that demographic and happen to be in southeastern New Mexico, give me a shout and let's see about getting you there.

When I was attending a few years ago, it was a high-school age and up Bible study; if that trend continues, in 2030 the middle-age and up Bible study will be led by a doddering old Paul. We'll have to shout our answers into his ear trumpet.

Having a good night.

2:37 p.m.

Went to the "Church in Artesia" today.

I don't think it's for me.

2:54 p.m.

NASA's Educator Astronaut program, which will undoubtedly be put on hold.

Remember, kids, even if you don't like your teacher, this isn't a one-way trip into space.

Ha ha. Ha.

5:10 p.m.

Columbia is lost. She was a fair ship.

Seven people lost their lives yesterday, while on that same day countless more died from much more prosaic causes: hunger, tuberculosis, heart disease.

Why does one ship matter so much?

It's as if the shuttle were built, not of steel and ceramic, but of the hope of the American people made solid. Hope and discovery and wonder; and they too perished in the ship's destruction.

Were wounded, rather, not killed.

Enterprise.

Atlantis, Discovery, Endeavour.

Challenger.

Columbia.

11:46 a.m.

New month, clean slate.

12:09 p.m.

Come back, Columbia.

You were the symbol of all our peacetime best. All our goodwill rode with you.

God save your crew.

8:59 p.m.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

"High Flight," John Gillespie Magee