Already Tired at....9:15

I feel very...slow today. Not dumb, just tired/bored. Part of it is work, because now that my replacement-in-training has arrived, there's very little for me to do, and it's pretty freaking dull. I sort of wish I could just leave early, but I really can't, not only because of the paychecks I'd like to keep receiving until mid-August, but also because I know Paul has planned on having me around to train Deidre for the next couple of months and I don't want to disappoint someone who's been such an awesome boss. Plus I'd miss Work-Heather, and I'd probably be incredibly bored without somewhere to be for eight hours a day, and, yes, there's the paycheck thing again. My mind runs in silly circles.

Then I was saddened thinking about how things will be changing when I leave for school. It's more than a little frightening to be moving to a city where I know virtually no one. Sean will be ten hours away, and my closest friends will be in New York--and I can count Heather among them, because by then she'll have moved back to Brooklyn, according to her plan. It's been so awesome to be living near one of my best friends this past year. The four of us spent college in different states, so being able to dash down to Heather's after work on a Tuesday to indulge in some Stew Leonard's frozen pizza has been a pleasure that I'll really miss.

It's sad, too, that I'm leaving Connecticut, the last of us to strike out for new territory, and who knows, maybe none of us will ever call this state home again. Rae will probably stay in Massachusetts and be a doctor, Heather will live the glamor life in Brooklyn, and maybe Sara will stay there too, or maybe she'll move on to some other city. I have no idea where I'll end up, years and years down the line when I have my doctorate, and that kind of unsettles me too sometimes, but that's part and parcel of the path I've chosen.

Sometimes it seems forever since high school, since we spent all day in the same building, passing notes, hanging out after school, having sleepovers on weekends. It's been a long time, and they're still my best friends. Sometimes I flash back to Jen telling me when I graduated eighth grade that Sara and I wouldn't be friends in high school--but we were, even though we went through several different phases in our friendship, and we're friends now, which is nothing short of amazing, and the same is true for Heather and Rae. I try to remind myself of that when I peer into the future and wonder what it holds for us, when I wonder if in the years to come we will indeed be fabulously middle-aged women sitting around in a coffee shop, like Rae asked in a text message once. I try to think of it when I have one of those moments where I realize how sad it would be not to have them in my life.

Maybe also this introspection and weird sad-not-sadness is also being brought on by the combination of me getting my period and having gotten officially engaged this weekend. Everyone can't help but comment, and I totally agree, that it's so weird that I'm actually getting married. This time next year I'll be his wife, and even though my name won't be different (sorry, Sean) I'll still be introducing him as my husband. It's a change, and it's weird in the way all changes are, even the awesome ones.

And it's sad that my parents won't see it. The changing, the leaving, everything new--I guess I feel like it's all happening out of sight for them. My dad saw me into the beginning of high school, and my mom saw me through almost to the end of college, but now this phase they've never seen, and they never will. Leaving Connecticut will be like saying goodbye to them yet again, and getting married will be the second major life event after graduation that I won't have any parents to witness. Of course, if my mom were alive I'd probably be even more worried about moving away, worried about being too far away if she needed me. Irony.

My Diamond, Let Me Show You It

...Yeah, I just Lolcat-ed myself in regards to my upcoming nuptials. But hey, as of yesterday, it's official, and we're engaged! Whoot! I told Sean I refuse to refer to him as my 'fiance,' though. That just sounds ridiculous.

Besides Sean's grandmother, who happened to be in the house at the time (and who was disappointed because she apparently wanted me to use one of her diamonds)the first people to find out were Richardson and his parents, for the sole reason that he had invited us out to dinner so he wouldn't have to hang out with them solo. They started mentioning this cruise that they had signed their family up for in May, and we look at each other and are like...what day in May, exactly, because...

Happy was very proud that she could say we started 'dating' in her house three and a half years ago. Obviously, we refrained from correcting her that we just hooked up in her basement that New Year's, and only actually started dating a week later. Either way, the Richardson casa did mark the start of it all.

So now Sean's parents know (his dad was like, 'but I thought you were already') and Carla has been emailed, and Sara/Rae/Heather got a group text message (Sean commented that Sara should have gotten a voicemail, to make up for the not one, but TWO times I left her a voicemail regarding a parent who had died on me) and it strikes me that I haven't told Jen, but when I tell her I have to call my aunts too, and I'm too tired for that. She'll probably just grunt at me "Congratulations, Bob" and then tell me everything the cat has been doing to torment her today. I tried describing her to Richardson last night with little success. She's just Jen, ineffable, inimitable Jen. Ah, family.

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Dude, I'm getting married! WTF?!

The Age of Reason, Part 2

And from the conclusion of Part Two:

"…Religion, by such means, becomes a thing of form instead of fact; of notion instead of principle: morality is banished to make room for an imaginary thing called faith, and this faith has its origin in a supposed debauchery; a man is preached instead of a God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing it.

A man, by hearing all this nonsense lumped and preached together, confounds the God of the Creation with the imagined God of the Christians, and lives as if there were none.

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter.

The only religion that has not been invented, and that has in it every evidence of divine originality, is pure and simple deism. It must have been the first and will probably be the last that man believes. But pure and simple deism does not answer the purpose of despotic governments. They cannot lay hold of religion as an engine but by mixing it with human inventions, and making their own authority a part; neither does it answer the avarice of priests, but by incorporating themselves and their functions with it, and becoming, like the government, a party in the system. It is this that forms the otherwise mysterious connection of church and state; the church human, and the state tyrannic."

… It has been by wandering from the immutable laws of science, and the light of reason, and setting up an invented thing called "revealed religion," that so many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable; and the changeableness of the will is the imperfection of the judgement. The philosopher knows that the laws of the Creator have never changed, with respect either to the principles of science, or the properties of matter. Why then is it to be supposed they have changed with respect to man?"

The Age of Reason, Part 1

Below I've posted some extracts from the pamphlet "The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine, known most widely to us as the author of the Revolutionary pamphlet "Common Sense." He wrote "The Age of Reason" later in life, living in France during the days of their Revolution, where he was quickly dismayed to see the ideals of freedom turned to bloody ends. Eventually the French imprisoned him as an enemy foreigner, and he passed the first part of the manuscript off to a friend as they hauled him off to jail.

According to Susan Jacoby, the writing of "The Age of Reason" was responsible for Paine's relative anonymity throughout much of the intervening two centuries. It was only in the 20th century that he was re-discovered by scholars; in the interim, he had been thoroughly tarred and feathered with the brush of secularism, atheism, blasphemy, and, most ironically, for such a staunch supporter of revolutionary ideals, lack of patriotism. "The Age of Reason" is a rational deconstruction of the claim of all religions to authenticity, but in particular, it is an attack on Christianity, which, unsurprisingly, earned it and its writer the full opprobrium of the Church.

The beginning and the end of the essay are the most powerfully written portions. The middle, where he basically goes book-by-book in the Bible showing how it's all nonsense, Moses didn't write Genesis, Luke and Matthew can't even agree on a geneology of Jesus, etc., is a little much, not in the least because that knowledge has become part of an educated reading of the Bible nowadays, even for many devout Christians. However, the passages where he defines Deism and where he attacks the way organized religion has clouded our perception of the world are quite striking.

And without further ado, from "The Age of Reason, Pt 1:"

"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

… Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all."

Creeping Up on 900 Posts

Anyway, ever wonder who those people are who manage to throw checks out? As it turns out, I'm one of them. Somehow, I discarded my federal tax return check and had to call the hotline to have them re-issue it. Sigh. So I'll be cashing that in about, oh, mid-July, if the government fulfills its 45-day promise.

This weekend Sean and I will be headed back to Pomfret to meet with the owner of Gwyn Careg, go over the estimate he sent me and maybe, just maybe, put down the deposit. Excitement! And on an unrelated carpe diem-ish note, below is a poem I enjoy.

To his Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell


Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Not on Secularism, But Thoughts Pt 2

My recent contemplation of my thoughts on religion and secularism has been provoking more and more of these little moments where I find myself mentally confronting another of those beliefs that has no rational basis, but which has managed to hang on determinedly in my mind all the same.

These kind of beliefs remind me of knick-knacks: they serve no purpose, take up space and are often kept around for purely sentimental reasons, but you know you still kind of like them. For example, why do I have in my den, among other things, a miniature carnival mask from Venice, a replica of the Eiffel tower, and a Native American pot? They're not high quality and I don't need them to remind me of where I've been; that's why I have photos. They're just tourist junk, but I keep them around all the same.

Anyway, in this particular instance the issues that came to mind were the existence of heaven, the immortality of the soul, and really, the existence of any soul at all. I was driving back from CVS on my lunch break and thinking about death (which is not that unusual, for me) and how I think it's kind of foolish for people to be afraid of what happens when you die. I mean, everyone fears the unknown, and of course we also fear the pain of dying, and what it means to be cut short from life, but really, if you're a good person, what do you have to be afraid of? If there is a God who has a heaven, you're probably going to go there. Alternatively, if there is no God or no heaven or just nothing, you won't know that until....ever. Because you'll be dead. End of story.

Then I stopped myself, because I started to question the assumptions that I was making. Does God, if he exists, necessarily have to have a heaven? My concept of God as a remote observer does not include the threat of eternal damnation, so I don't quite see that there would be the promise of eternal life, either. I find it entirely possible that there could be a God who offers nothing more than your single, finite life on this planet. Next, if I accept that there could be a heaven, what part of you resides there? Most religious authorities would say the soul. I'm not going to spend a lot of time going over the various concepts of the soul, but I think a lot of people would think of it as something that separates 'man from beast.'

Of course, then my question becomes the following: if I accept as scientific truth that humans emerged from so-called lower forms as part of a continuous (and continuing) process of evolution, instead of the dirt-and-rib creation myth, is it possible to identify a moment in that process where God stepped in and said "Well, the ape behind you had no soul, but you're a man now, so you have one. Go put on a fig leaf." It's kind of impossible to do so, especially since species don't evolve in an instant. There was never a time when there was one single homo sapiens that suddenly popped up among his soul-less Neanderthal relatives as the only creature on the planet with a soul. I don't believe God 'steps in' anyway. So this theory for the human soul doesn't make sense to me.

Alternatively, you could posit that what we think of as the soul is really just a by-product of evolution, a more highly developed sense of self-awareness that other species, given infinite time, would have at least the possibility to develop. This would obviously make a lot of people unhappy, because just as mankind clung so long to the theory of geocentricity as a way of underlining human exceptionalism in the universe, suggesting that our precious individual souls are nothing more an yet another evolutionary outgrowth would be a damaging blow to the collective ego of the species. Still, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. So, if I don't believe that God, at my conception, created a unique soul for me and sent it out into the world, how can I expect that, at my death, there is anything more special reserved for it than the same end the rest of me will meet?

The obvious and disillusioning implication of this theory is that if the soul does not have immortality and there is no afterlife, there is no chance that I'll ever see my parents again. That is a bitter thought, indeed. I remember being on the point of tears a few weeks ago in Zoi's Pizza when Sean casually mentioned, during a conversation on old age, that if I lived to be 85, when I died I wouldn't have seen my dad in seventy years. But like I said before, a lot of beliefs we keep because they're comforting, not because they're logical. Of course it's comforting to imagine my family waiting for me in heaven, but...I have to admit to myself that I don't really believe they are.

I think humans have spun tales of the afterlife for so long precisely because it is so terrifying to think that we have only this short span of life on earth, and that those whose are gone, are really gone. We want more--when haven't we wanted more of everything? Humans are frequently, if not inherently, greedy with food, money, status, and sex. Life is no different.

Viewed in another light, for those people who quake with fear at the thought of facing judgment when they die, this concept can really be more freeing than anything. What will you do with your life if there is nothing more beyond it? How will you use the time you're given, and how will you be remembered by the ones who loved you? To my mind, that's the only immortality we can hope to achieve. In that sense, then, my family is not only present, but enduring. As long as there are stories to be told of the Fat Man and Mrs. D., they'll live forever.

Gwyn Careg

Yesterday Sean and I visited the Gwyn Careg Inn in Pomfret, which was about an hour's drive from Sean's apartment. It was a pretty day and a very scenic drive, with more and more small farms as we got closer. When we turned down the inn's road, I looked to the right and there were two llamas grazing next to a fence. Awesome! You know I love the llamas.

The inn is, quite simply, fucking awesome, and we are getting married there. I knew this for a fact about ten minutes after we arrived and met Dennis, who along with his wife is the proprietor of the inn. He was really friendly and gave us a tour of the house, and the five suites on the second floor (his family lives on the third floor). The rooms were all awesome, especially this one two-bedroom suite with three queen size beds that could easily fit bridesmaids for the night beforehand...let's think about that, bachelorette party! The bridal suite was pretty awesome too, with a canopied bed and a huge baroque-style mirror.

Anyway, the inside is nice, but it's the 14 acres of beautifully landscaped grounds that are the real selling point. There's a lake, and there's a walled garden where people usually have the wedding ceremony (you can see my pictures here). As soon as we walked outside I told Sean "We're getting married here!" and he agreed. It's a very "us" place. Obviously, it's kind of out of the way, but it's been pointed out to me that people are generally pretty willing to go a little out of their way for a wedding, especially when there's food and possibly an open bar involved.

Now I just have to wait for Dennis to email me a quote, and figure out which is the best weekend in June for scheduling purposes. Sean will be graduating Notre Dame around mid-May, and we need enough time to get us both back to New Haven and put the finishing touches on everything. Sean thinks the 12th would be the better idea, but I'd prefer the 5th, for no other reason than I like the number 5 than the number 12. If I'm going to be celebrating this day for the rest of my life, I might as well pick something that appeals to me aesthetically, right?

Thoughts on Secularism, Part 1

I'm almost finished with Susan Jacoby's book "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism." In addition to filling in gaps in my knowledge about the way American society has grappled with the idea of the secular state as envisioned in the Constitution, it's really helped me draw together my own thoughts on religion and why I don't have one--namely, because I think religion, in all its incarnations, is essentially a barrier to human freedom, a freedom based on reason and logic instead of the fear of divine retribution.

I think people have a hard time envisioning a world without religion because we've been taught by the religious establishment that an irreligious culture is inherently more violent and more depraved, and that only religion can serve as a bulwark against moral chaos. People tend to think that morality can only exist within a framework of religious belief becuse so much mud has been flung over the centuries at people who live their lives outside of it. I don't think we need divine revelation to provide codes of proper human behavior. I don't think we need to be treated like wayward children by some paternalistic deity to know that killing and war are evil things, or that we should help the poor and extend rights to men and women of every color. Do I need the Ten Commandments to tell me that adultery is a bad idea, or that lying is wrong? Couldn't we figure that much out on our own?

Of course, to my mind, we DID figure that out on our own, because I don't think any religion's holy writings were inspired by God. I think it makes more sense that every religion is a man-made product of the time and people among whom it sprang forth, and reflects their understanding of what proper codes of behavior should be, reinforced with "by the way, this is Truth with a capital T, our God says so!" That, to me, is one reason why the God of the Old Testament, with his smiting of everyone who even looked sideways at the Israelites, wouldn't even recognize the touchy-feely "suffer the little children to come unto me" God of the New Testament if he passed him in a hallway. Different time periods, different cultural situations, many, many different writers.

So it's not that I'm saying that the moral codes on which many religions base themselves are inherently wrong; I just wish people would be able to remove the supernatural elements that keep everyone so at odds with one another. Forget the need to justify everything as coming from God in order to be right--trust human ability to determine what is right and wrong. Societies would be much more able to co-exist if we were emerging from a common, rationalist background, instead of vehemently defending this or that faith. Look at how much time the Catholic church spends claiming its supremacy over all other Christian faiths; look how much energy Muslims put into reviling infidels and apostates to their 'true religion.' Why do we have to assume that God intended to prescribe every inch of our behavior? Why were we provided with the capacity to reason, if not to make a better world for ourselves?

I do believe in God, incidentally. In my more cynical moments I wonder if that's because I find it too frightening to give up that last belief in an over-arching divine plan. On the whole, though, I don't find it incompatible with reason that there is a God. The universe began with the Big Bang, but who pushed the lever on that one? This is basically the "prime mover" argument, which provided the foundation of the Deism that was popular among America's founding fathers. In my mind, God set the wheel in motion and stepped back; he/she/it is a remote, though benevolent, observer.

I know that my frequent motto of "things work out the way they're supposed to" is not compatible with my ideas on God, and I recognize as irrational my persistent belief that in certain situations God 'steps in.' It's hard to shake it, not only because it's so ingrained but also because it's comforting--and who wants to give up what is comforting for what is more frightening? For example, it's easy to characterize my parents' deaths as having occurred because that was the way God wanted it, but really, let's be honest here, my father died because he was an overweight diabetic with too much stress, and my mother died because of years of anorexia weakened her heart, coupled with high triglycerides and diabetes. I don't believe God is sitting up there punching people's tickets.

I used to ask God to watch over my mom and keep her safe, because I was afraid of her dying and being left with no parents. I can’t really say that worked, obviously, but I still find myself nightly asking God to watch over Jen and Sean, because they’re the family I have left. I know I say it more for myself than anything, because as much as I do believe God is watching, I don’t really believe that God intercedes here or there on the basis of someone’s prayer. And yet I don’t consider it irrational to thank God for the good things that happen in my life. After all, if that prime mover had never begun this process in the first place, would I be here enjoying the fruits of creation? I like to give credit where I feel it’s due.

To bring this back to the subject of my post, Jacoby’s book helped me recognize that not only do I believe in a humanist morality based on reason, I think organized religion prevents people from utilizing their full faculty of reason and capacity for goodness. Religion convinces people of their own unworthiness and demeans them to a state where they have to rely on ‘divine revelation’ (transmitted through entirely fallible human conduits) to tell them how to live. Why else do Catholics say before Communion, “My Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed”? That accomplishes nothing besides keeping individuals in a state of intellectual and spiritual bondange. And people stay, not only because it's how they've been raised, but because it feels safe. Imagine how much freedom mankind has been willing to sacrifice in favor of being told what to do.

Weekend

This weekend I ventured into the hinterlands of Brooklyn to visit Jen for her birthday. It was lucky for me that it was a nice day; because of some construction the D dropped me off not at 20th Ave and 86th, about a five-block walk from Jen’s apartment, but at 20th and 63rd. Of course, it was worth walking thirty blocks to be greeted by Sapphire, aka “Feed Me,” who has, improbably enough, grown even more rotund since the last time I saw her.

As spending time with Jen goes, this weekend wasn’t bad—we didn’t even get into a single fight the whole time. Somewhat of a pall was cast by the fact that Bill’s mom is in the hospital and likely dying of cancer. Apparently it began as ovarian cancer and they didn’t catch it in time—she never went for the yearly OB/GYN exam, a reminder to all you ladies—and now she’s refusing chemo, pain meds, everything. It’s been very hard for Bill, who functions sort of as the paterfamilias in the absence of any more senior male members of the family. It’s also hard on Jen, because Bill tries to be one of those stiff-upper-lip guys and she doesn’t want to push, but she wants to be there for him like he was for her when our mom died. When she was trying to offer the kind of “you’ll make it though this” advice that I, personally, found extremely annoying to receive when you’re in the middle of a crisis, Bill pointed out that the situations are very different. It’s one thing to get the call that something awful has happened, and another to wait and wonder and not know, from day to day, if they’re going to die.

It sounds terrible, but I think it’s easier when there’s no hope. There was a difference between my dad’s and my mom’s deaths—when he collapsed and the paramedics were trying to revive him, I didn’t know if he was going to die or not. My mom said later she knew because his skin had turned a grayish color, but I didn’t know, so of course I was praying and hoping and making all kinds of deals with God, and I think that made it even more painful to get to the hospital and hear that they couldn’t save him after all. It was a terrible blow, too, to find out that my mom was dead, but it was already done with. There was no last, desperate chance that they might revive her and it would all be OK.

Anyway, in light of what’s going on with his mom, and it being Mother’s Day, naturally the conversation turned to death a few times. I was kind of surprised to find that Jen agreed with me that it was better for us the way our parents died. I thought she would have wanted to be able to say goodbye at any price, but she acknowledged she wouldn’t have been able to watch our mom waste away in a hospital bed. We also agreed that, when the times comes, that’s the way we want to go out. It’s the DiMarzo way.

However, I was also disturbed and saddened to find out my sister’s real feelings about our dad. I made some joking comment about how Bill is like him, and she got all serious and said that Bill never makes her feel bad about herself like he did. I was surprised, and naturally I tried to remind her about all the good times we had and how good a father he was, but she cut me off and told me that I’ve obviously glossed all the bad parts over in my mind and that I don’t remember things the way they really were. Which is not true—I remember the screaming fits that would start over nothing, I remember him making me cry, I remember being angry at him a lot of the time and swearing I’d never be like him. But what I also remember, and what Jen is choosing to forget, is all the laughs we shared and the fun we had, and how often he told us how proud he was, how smart we were, how we could do anything. My dad had flaws; he was depressed, he struggled with his expectations of what he wanted from life, and he took his frustrations out on his family. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t love us or that he wasn’t a good father. I know that a lot of who I am today is because of him, in a good way.

I also know that my relationship with him was different that the one he had with Jen. They were adversarial, always arguing, and Jen pushed his buttons on purpose, although she got mad and cut our discussion short yesterday when I mentioned that. I was the type to try to smooth things over with him, the type to try to avoid starting a quarrel, but Jen always had to get right in there and say something to set him off. She was the eldest, too, and everyone knows they get it harsher from their parents. I was younger, I never had any trouble in school, and I always tried to placate him as much as possible, so we wound up in fewer conflicts. I do remember him picking on her for things like her posture, her manners (which are still pretty bad to this day), the fact that she didn’t do well enough in math to make him happy. I remember a particularly hair-raising fight that came from her getting a C in math in high school.

Maybe it’s understandable why she remembers things differently; maybe he did make her feel bad about herself. But Jen also has a tendency to remember things in the most gloomy way possible—for example, her random assertion that she thinks we weren’t good daughters to our mom, or that she feels bad using any of the money we inherited because it was theirs and we don’t deserve it, or another gem that came out of this weekend, namely that my grandfather’s creepiness at the end “broke Mom’s heart” and contributed to her death. WTF? The man was senile! Yes, I’m sure it bothered my mom a good deal to be hit on by her father-in-law, but broke her heart is a little over-dramatic, and very….Jen.

Aside from the fact that I feel like my father’s memory is being a little tarnished by Jen’s over-dramatization, I also feel sad for her that she can’t draw on those happy memories. I guess I had always assumed that she told funny JTD stories too, and that she and Bill cracked jokes about him the way Sean and I do. I told Sean yesterday that sometimes I feel like Sean really knew him, even though he was dead long before we met, because of the way we joke about things he would have said or done. We talk about all my dead relatives that way: ‘Remember, your grandfather grew up a young Polish boy in Chicago!’ It’s comforting as well as being amusing, because it’s like they’re still around, they’re not just faces in photographs.

My personal favorite, of course, is Sean’s imagining of a little Mrs. D visiting her grown-up self and asking about the fate of her three deadbeat brothers: “What do you mean, we haven’t danced on their graves? What do you MEAN, we went first?!”

My Boss is Awesome...Again

So this morning I was kind of annoyed that in spite of my boss' return to the office after four days' absence, I still had absolutely nothing to do besides twiddle my fingers and roam the Internet's wild expanses, which, as this week has shown, gets old fast. Then as I was in the midst of a Wikipedia-fueled refresher course on the causes of the Civil War (see what I mean?) Paul called me into his office and had me shut the door. Ruh roh, you might say, except you are forgetting that Paul is (1) awesome and (2) thinks of me as some kind of office wunderkind who has the most amazing organizational skills ever. Definitely an exaggeration, but one that works in my favor.

Anyway, reason for the closed door was Paul decided to give me another raise, which is under any circumstances a reason of awesomeness. Then he tells me that he considered just giving it to me as a really nice bonus when I leave, but he decided that it would more helpful to me to be able to say to future employers that at my last job I was making X amount and have X be the largest possible number. So Paul is not only awesome, but thoughtful, too, even though I then burst his bubble by telling him the next time I'm negotiating a salary will probably be the better part of a decade from now, and they probably won't care what I was making the year before I started grad school.

We also discussed the issue of my replacement, the hunt for which started a few weeks ago and has already been a pain in the neck. We narrowed it down to two, but those two then neglected to send thank-yous after their interviews, and Paul is a big stickler for etiquette in these matters. I took the opportunity of asking where exactly he's planning on putting whoever we hire, for the three and a half months that I'll still be here. (I won't lie, foremost on my mind was protecting the fun times Heather and I have out front. It would be kind of difficult to share salacious stories of our pasts and make inappropriate comments about things posted on DListed if there's someone sitting right next to me, not to mention the adverse effect it would have on my own Internet surfing.)

To my chagrin, Paul said he thought he would put the new person at my desk and have me move to one of the two empty offices, to which I replied (in my mind) "Dear God, no." Empty Office 1 is what we call "The Batcave," a tiny windowless space in the back, with paperthin walls and a quirk of the heating/cooling system in there that results in the temperature being regulated by our next door neighbor's preferences. Empty Office 2 is the one next to Heather and I and is actually the largest one in the office, but it bears the taint of what befell the last two attorneys to occupy it. Namely, they're not in it anymore.

Thank God, though, that Paul is cool enough that he actually wanted my input on this. Future new person: welcome to the Batcave.

May Already

Time flies when you're having fun! Which I'm not, this week, because my boss is out of the office and left me with virtually nothing to do. Even the internet gets pretty boring after a few straight hours of impatiently checking DListed and Jezebel to see if they've been updated yet.

I also just remembered with great irritation that I forgot my book to read at lunch. In Paul's absence I'm deprived of my free New York Times, and I'm way too cheap to go buy one at the gas station. Yesterday I finished reading "Devil in the White City," which is a kind of narrative non-fiction that blends the story of the creation of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892 with the tale of America's first famous serial killer, a doctor who murdered dozens of young women (in addition to men and some children) who came to the city on their own looking for adventure and freedom. The book was extremely detailed and well-researched, and compellingly written, definitely on my list of recommendations.

Now I've moved on to Susan Jacoby's "Freethinkers," which is a history of American secularism, although of course I won't be reading any of it today because it's sitting on my couch at home. Tonight is also Thursday, which means one of the rare nights I'll actually watch TV. Ugly Betty and Lost, baby!

In Which I Have Baked

Successfully! It feels good to know that I'm not a failure at this, which was definitely one of my mom's gifts. I made Amish friendship bread from some starter that Sean's step mom Debbie gave me. It's basically a bag of goo that you have to "mush" every day for ten days, adding some flour and sugar in the middle while it does its business. I've discovered that fermentation of bread, like any other kind of alcohol production, smells kind of off-putting. It is not entirely pleasant to catch that scent wafting out of the cupboard in the morning as I grab my Cheerios, but how else would I remember to fulfill its daily mushing quotient?

The bread itself is good, it's basically a similar consistency to banana bread, it just tastes very sweet and cinnamon-y. Too sweet for my taste, actually. And I really don't think it's worth the time and money (3 eggs, 4 cups of flour, 4 cups of sugar, and a host of other surprisingly-expensive baking items go into each week's batch) to make bread that I could much more easily whip up with some blackened, frozen bananas. It is cool that it makes four separate starters each week, so I could pass three on and keep one. I plan on giving one to Linda and one to Mrs. Flanagan if I see her this weekend.

Sean comes home on Sunday! He's had a great trip thus far, and we've been fortunate to be able to talk a little every day, either by phone or email, so that I can assure Linda that her darling boy is safe and not having his kidneys removed in a bathtub full of ice. Last night in Killarney he even got to stay in a four star hotel because the two-star sister hotel he was booked into couldn't get his room ready in time. That kind of awesomeness is what traveling is all about!

Heather came back from Ireland last Sunday, and her little sister Hilary comes home from her Dublin study abroad tomorrow. Everyone's going to Ireland, it seems! Um, except based on what Heather told me, I feel confirmed in my opinion that it's not a place for me. On another note, all this talk of travel has given me the urge to buy another ticket to someplace, even though, yes, I obviously just came back from Italy, and the next place I go will probably be either Venice next year, if I study there, or Egypt with Sean. I wish, how I wish, we could go on the National Geographic Expedition to Egypt. You go to absolutely all of the awesome sites, you cruise on the Nile for a couple of days, and you get an Egyptologist as your guide! Incredible, right? So's the price--$14,000 for the two of us. Sigh. One can dream.

Sean's Irish Adventure

Not to be outdone by my trip to Italy last month, Sean took himself off to Ireland on Friday for a weeklong solo tour of the southwest portion of the country. Today he's in Kilkenny, where he made friends with a 50-year-old Englishman on top of a tower, with whom he has dinner plans this evening. That's just so Sean.

This weekend Sara and I visited Rae in Worcester, where we met her roommate and *cough* 'special friend' Dee, who has traveled extensively, including to everyone's favorite island of Malta. Interestingly, he presented a much different picture of the Maltese than what I gleaned from Carla's experiences; apparently he encountered a lot of sketchiness while he was there.

Included in our weekend sojourn to the "Land of the U-Turn" was a trip to a bridal store for some pre-pre-pre wedding shopping, wherein I discovered that two years is apparently not considered "early," as some people have actually bought dresses four years in advance! Sara and Rae found a full-length dress which they both liked, and the chocolate color looked absolutely awesome, except for the chorus of Jen-and-Carla voices who are clamoring for green.

I tried on two dresses, and learned that that lovely silhouette presented by most wedding dresses is not achieved by the dress alone; oh no, my friend, it requires an organ-squeezing corset, a voluminous petticoat (just like what a Victorian would have to wear, no lie--it's huge) and, in these dresses' case, a lace-up back that functioned like a second (and entirely unnecessary, since I could already barely breathe) corset. At the culmination of this process, I'll admit, one of the dresses was really pretty, had a long train, made me feel all Disney princessy, etc etc. Problem? I have no intention of being unable to bend, sit, eat or drink on my wedding day. My torso felt like it was made of iron, for crying out loud! I also have no intention of sweating my ass off in summer with ten pounds of fabric wrapped around me.

So, in conclusion--I really made no progress on that front whatsoever, besides deciding that I definitely want an ivory gown instead of white. White dresses are really kind of blinding, and let's be honest, this isn't much of a 'white wedding' anyway!

Tax Day

Today is the eighth anniversary of my dad's death. I don't have anything particularly meaningful to say, I just felt that I should mark the occasion in here somehow. Hard to believe it's been so many years.

On My Hatred of Weathermen and A Decision

How many times this winter were we promised storm-of-the-century-esque blizzards, only to wake up to an inch or two of snow? Similarly, I was apprehensive about our trip to Philadelphia on Friday because every weather service predicted heavy rains all day Friday and Saturday. Naturally, that didn't happen--Friday was cloudy, and maybe we saw a droplet here or there, but Saturday was absolutely gorgeous! I can't believe I spent so much time worrying over whether I should put the trip off in fear of having to see Temple in a downpour.

That said, the trip was great. Everyone warned me that Temple's in a rough area, and certainly when you get off the highway you're driving through blocks of a very run-down area. That changes dramatically, however, once you enter the campus area, where everything was well-kept, there were tons of people walking around and the scarlet T was emblazoned on everything from the manhole covers to the tops of high-rise buildings. We met up with two graduate students, both in the Phd program, who gave us a tour and answered all my questions. Sean and I couldn't help but feel like country mice at the mere size of Temple, which has tens of thousands of students to Fairfield's.....five? When they took us into the tech center that just had acres of computer rooms, I was laughing to myself because the library at Fairfield had maybe....thirty computers on the main floor? Yeah, small potatoes.

Most of the graduate students live outside Philadelphia in the suburbs on the PA side, although one of the grad students I met, Aliza, actually lives in Center City. That's probably what I'll be doing as well. I'm not a city person, and I guess it only struck me this weekend that I'll be spending the next five or more years in a city! It's OK, I should learn to live in a city. I like what I've seen of Philly so far. Saturday (we spent Friday night at Richardson's apartment in Cherry Hill)I went into the city via the ridiculously 70s PATCO train, and allowed myself the luxury of a taxi to the art museum, which gave me a pleasant, if brief, tour of Center City. The museum itself is gorgeous from the outside, and really impressive inside as well. I only had about an hour before I was supposed to meet Dr. Hall, so I basically took the museum at a trot. Bronzino's "Portrait of Cosimo I as Orpheus" greeted me on my way into the European art gallery. Ah, Mannerism.

I had lunch with Dr. Hall in the museum restaurant, a place I never approach in any other institution because it's always ridiculously expensive. This one was no different, although she graciously treated me to lunch. Still, $29 for one of the smallest lunches I have ever had, even if it was delicious. I told her my decision to come to Temple, and we had a really pleasant lunch. She's an older woman, very elegant looking but with a rather quirky, offbeat sense of humor that I liked.

So there it is--my decision is made. Now I have to email all my professors, and Dr. McHam from Rutgers who was sending me very persuasive emails. I liked her too, but alas, you can't have it all.

Anne of the Century

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables, one of my favorite books growing up. Jen and I had the whole set of seven books then. Only a well-worn copy of Anne of the Island (the book I loved most out of the entire seven-book series) endures from that collection, but I picked up a brand new set at a tag sale a couple of years ago. It's funny that I couldn't bring myself to discard the old copy of Anne of the Island, when I had a perfectly new one in the very same edition, the same cover and typeface and everything, but there's a lot of history in that volume. Its spine is cracked, its cover worn, and so many pages dog-eared because of the number of times I read it and dreamed of being just like Anne--beautiful, spirited, and seeing the magic in everything.

The anniversary came to my attention because Gawker had an item mentioning that Margaret Atwood had written an essay on the book for a London newspaper (there's a link to it here. It's a good enough essay, but the best thing about it was that it made me want to read the books again, which I did tonight, at least two of them: Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island. Apparently for Atwood the other books couldn't come close to the original story, but for me it was that first trilogy that really sparked my imagination and remained warmly in my memory. This is probably due in no small part to that fact that Anne's friendship and semi-turbulent courtship with Gilbert Blythe takes place over the course of these three novels--spoiler alert, they get engaged at the end of book three! Rereading those pages tonight, I lingered on this paragraph at the end of Anne of Avonlea, which has caught my eye before:


Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one's life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one's side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself through seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music; perhaps...perhaps...love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from a green sheath.


Yes, there's some parts of the books where the nature imagery and the romanticism of it all forces me to skip ahead paragraphs or even pages--I can handle only so many descriptions of sun-dappled fields, so many exultations over fields of poppies or a formation of clouds, before I get a little impatient. It's also true that the movie versions of Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea (although the latter, for reasons of narration, was really a patchwork of the second and third books along with some made-up elements) did a great deal to cement the books, and Anne herself, in my mind's eye. There will never be another Anne for me but the actress who played her in those two movies; the Anne drawn on the bookcovers is merely an approximation. The handsome actor who played Gilbert, meanwhile, was probably one of my very first crushes in life, and I have to confess that if I had to choose between the Gilbert of the books and the Gilbert of the movies, I'll take the cinematic version, because he's just a little more spirited than his literary alter ego.

I guess it's hard to separate the magic of the books and movies in my mind, because both have been mutually reinforced by re-readings and re-watchings (last night, too tired to start one of the books, I watched clips from both movies on Youtube). The movies' score never fails to stir me, and I can't really describe the way I feel when I hear it, especially during those scenes when she stands on the cliffs of Prince Edward Island, and the wind blows the long grass behind her.

I've always wanted to see PEI, even though I know it's not the pristine, untouched place it was a hundred years ago when LM Montgomery was writing. I'm sure I'd be disappointed by the tourist spectacle that they've manufactured there--Atwood writes about the "Green Gables" they've tarted up, which apparently even includes the cameo brooch Marilla accuses Anne of stealing in the first book. I also have no interest in seeing the Anne of Green Gables musical. In fact, I'm kind of sad I even had to write that phrase. Anne was never a musical girl, she was a dramatist, a poet--I never forgot "The Lady of Shallott" or "The Highwayman" after she recites both of them in the movies. Probably the more so for the former, because of the whole Elaine floating down to Camelot stunt. Come on, did anyone who read that book NOT want to hop in a skiff, make like a corpse, and float downriver till you spring a leak and have to cling to a bridge pier until your erstwhile enemy sexily rescues you? That was the stuff of daydreams when I was younger, I tell you!

That's what's amazing about these century-old books, the way they still have the power to affect me. I still feel close to Anne when I read them (she would have said "kindred spirits"); I still laugh when she pulls off a particularly clever reply or when Davy asks hugely inappropriate questions the way little kids do, and I still cry at some parts, especially when Ruby Gillis dies in the third book. She was a girlhood friend of Anne's and they've grown apart because Ruby is really only interested in guys, but everyone knows she's dying of consumption and she's too terrified to talk about it to anyone but Anne. It's just so heartbreaking to read as Ruby, who Anne later reflects has really stored up all her treasures here on earth, talks about her struggle with fate: "I'm so young, Anne. I haven't had my life. I've fought so hard to live--and it isn't any use--I have to die--and leave everything that I cared for."

You know, I always go back and forth on whether I want a daughter or a son (because, as you know, Sean and I only want one; we're like Communist China) and usually I'm all for the son, having been a daughter already, but tonight after re-reading those books it strikes me that I want to give those to another little girl someday, and watch them ignite the tinder of her imagination like they once did mine.

Almost April

My dad was in my dream last night, perhaps unsurprisingly so since I mentioned to Sean yesterday that today would have been his 58th birthday. All I can remember from the dream is that I was asking him if he wanted to visit my grandmother, and he was saying no; then I turned and there she was, sitting on a stool in front of a stove, pale and wearing a very ungrandma-like shade of dark lipstick. Meaning? Perhaps I like dreaming about dead relatives. I should have thrown my grandfather and my mom in there and then we could have had a real party!

Sean played one of his records for me yesterday, a song by Harold Arlen called "For Every Man There's a Woman," which included the following lyrics: 'For every prince there's a princess / for every Joe there's a Joan." I'm glad that was true for them, just as it's true for us.

The Season Is Over, 7-3

That would be the number of grad schools I got into versus those that gave me the old thumbs down. On the winning team we have Temple, Rutgers, Notre Dame, UMD, UMass, Boston University, and today's dark horse surprise, NYU! On the losing team (Boooooo Hissssss) we have Emory, Princeton and (sigh) Columbia. Oh well, you can't win them all, right?

On Older Posts

Sometimes when I read older posts on this blog I feel like such a tool. The immaturity, the selfishness, the all-too-frequent lack of punctuation and capitalization...sigh. Still, I've kept this journal going for seven years. Seven! It really has become a valuable asset--it reminds me not only of what's gone on in my life, but also of who I've been.

I was reading an article about David McCollough's (author of "1776") recent talk at Fairfield, in which he said that once public figures stop keeping journals, not only do historians lose a vital source of insight into their character, but it also means that those figures are no longer working their thoughts out on paper. That interested me, although I'm not sure that I agree. First of all, I can't imagine that every great public figure of history kept a journal. Napoleon? Really? What would he even need to work out? "To Do: Eliminate enemies, conquer known world, pick up eggs." I think McCollough simply benefited from studying a period of history in which diary-keeping was very much in vogue. I don't think we can assume that everything necessarily goes to hell just because some people prefer not to write everything down.

However, the quote also made me wonder how blogging will fit into the historian's milieu. For one thing, just how permanent is blogging? A physical diary can certainly be damaged or lost, but usually some care is taken to protect it. You really can't do anything to ensure the longevity of content you post online. If Blogger's servers one day failed (although I'm sure there's some kind of complicated back-up system) everything I've written in here for seven years would be gone forever. That's daunting. The same could apply to a public figure who used a blog in place of a diary.

There's also the issue of private versus public blogs. Barack Obama could have a secret blog no one knows about where he gives voice to all those un-politic things he wishes he could say but can't, and it could be a veritable treasure-trove one day to the eager historian looking for a fresh angle on an oft-studied figure, but if no one knew about it, the information would be gone forever. If the privacy settings were on, there's not even the chance someone could stumble over it one day the way people find old letters and Jackson Pollock paintings in their attic.

I guess the question comes down to whether this technology is reliable and durable. Will there still be an internet for us to use in thirty or forty years, or will we have moved on to some unimaginable other? If the internet is still around, will I still be able to access what I wrote here, decades before, or will it have long since become obsolete and disappeared, much in the same way that Sara's and my old Geocities-era webpages have been consigned to the electronic scrap heap?

Even more importantly--will I have any freaking clue what I was talking about in half of these posts? This one, at least, I feel that I can confidently answer...with a no.

Italian Hours

That's the title of a book of essays on Italian cities by the late-nineteenth century writer Henry James that Carla had in her apartment. He apparently spent a great deal of time living in Venice, as well as traveling around to other points of interest in the country. Everything he had to say about Venice was laudatory, except when he mentioned the rank smell of the canals in summer and when he complained about the tourists--in the 1870s, long before air travel made visiting Italy a possibility for so many people outside of Europe, and way, way before what we like to call "the Asian invasion," which anyone who has ever fought their way through one of their massive tour groups clogging a main traffic artery will recognize.

There were definitely advantages to being in James' Venice. There were actual Venetians to speak of, for one thing; nowadays, most people who work in the city live on the mainland and commute. It's hard to imagine him writing today of the "character" of the Venetian people. Like every other place, they've become diversified and spread out. Money seems to have been another plus, as a gondola ride (then the preferred mode of transportation rather than a tourist luxury) cost only a few francs,instead of 80 euro. It costs you 6.5 euro to go inside San Marco today, plus extra to climb to the top or see the treasure room, but no one had thought yet of entrance fees to a church in the 1870s, and James was free to stroll into the church every day as he pleased.

On the other hand, his Venice seems to have been in an even greater degree of decline and shabbiness than it is today. A recently unified Italy in those days had little money or time to spend on learning good techniques for preservation, and James writes of the 'horrors' that were perpetrated against many of the edifices, including San Marco, in the interests of stabilizing them in the lagoon. One of the most prominent characteristics I remembered from my first visit to Venice was that sense of decay--all of the houses seem to feature faded, chipped, or moldy exteriors, which gives the fancier neighborhoods an air of tragic grandeur, but makes the more prosaic areas look plain dingy. On this visit I was prepared for that, and I felt more able to appreciate Venice's beauty despite her obvious defects.