What Are You Reading? April 2016 Edition

April total:27

Year to date: 101

Fiction

Dandelion Wine        Bradbury, Ray

The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)        Rothfuss, Patrick

Brokedown Palace       Brust, Steve

Nonfiction

Popular Tales from the Norse Dasent, George Webbe

In My Father's Court    Singer, Isaac Bashevis

What Are You Reading? March 2016 Edition

March total:40

Year to date: 74

Fiction

Varjak Paw (Varjak Paw #1)     Said, S.F.

The Outlaw Varjak Paw Said, S.F.

The Screwtape Letters   Lewis, C.S.

Pride and Prejudice     Austen, Jane

The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1)    Rothfuss, Patrick

What Are You Reading? February 2016 Edition

February total: 17
Year to date: 34


Fiction
Interesting Times (Discworld, #17; Rincewind #5)           Pratchett, Terry
Code Name Verity (Code Name Verity, #1)       Wein, Elizabeth

Nonfiction
Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad     Anderson, M.T.
Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination    Rowling, J.K.

What Are You Reading? January 2016 Edition

I read a lot of books.  I've read even more since I graduated from college and got a part time job at my local library.  I track my reading on Goodreads but I've decided to post monthly updates here as well.

January total: 17
Year to date: 17


Fiction
Throne of Jade (Temeraire, #2) Novik, Naomi
Book of a Thousand Days         Hale, Shannon
Full Cicada Moon           Hilton, Marilyn

Nonfiction
Creativity, Inc.   Catmull, Ed

Where do you live?

My wife and I moved into a new apartment this week. We had lots of help loading the truck. Mormonism is good at many things, and helping those who move is certainly one-- several fellow congregants who know us only as passing acquaintances spent hours carrying heavy boxes due to our shared belief that when you are in the service of your fellow beings, you are in the service of God.

Moving has given plenty of opportunity to think about what my place of residence means-- in moving from one apartment to another, just a few blocks away, I'm leaving one community and congregation behind and joining another. Where I leave is not just geography, it's about webs of human relationships. My wife and I made many close friends in our old neighborhood, and decided to move in part because several families we were close to moved on, as transient college students are wont to do. While we had stayed in the same place, our community changed, and it was time to move on. 

Where has the time gone?

Six years ago, I started this blog. Four years ago, I abandoned it to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Almost three years ago, I returned, wiser and (for a while) quieter as I tried to process what I learned. Two years ago, I began posting again, with a greater sense of who I was and what I meant to say.

Two years ago I also began dating a woman who was smart enough to beat me at Scrabble, and kind enough to let me win sometimes. Who I could talk to for hours, about anything. Who has the wit and timing for a career in stand up comedy, but takes the serious things in life seriously. Who loves good music almost as much as she loves her family (and I know no one who has a stronger love of family). Whose faith in God led her to leave behind all she knew and face down opposition from those closest to her to do what God Required, and then used that faith to heal those relationships. 

And soon it seemed that all I had to say, I said to her, and all I wanted to do was be with her. 

And so I stopped posting, and wooed her. 

We've been married now for a year and a half, and I am happy every day, and grateful I could see the best chance in my life when it came my way. And now again I have new things I've learned, and new thoughts, and new things to say to the world. 

So here I am, and maybe you'll be seeing me more often. 

My New Favorite Typo

Usually, I spell things right the first time.  But four or five times in the past week, I've written "while" in place of "well."  Always at the start of a sentence, always followed by a comma.  I don't know what leads me to replace this space-filler with a temporal signifier, but I do.  I can't recall ever having done it before this week, but it keeps happening.

It's an odd slip, it is.  And isn't that a part of what life is made of.

Coincidence

Did you know that kiss and lips are identical in T9?  Well, neither did I.

What are you reading?

I read a lot of books (those less these days than at some times in the past) and a fair number of magazines and newspapers.  Also, blogs.  And lots of other internet things.  But there is one reading source which often escapes attention in regular discussion which is of great import here.  After all, no compendium of all things Mattathias-y would be complete without at least a passing reference to web-comics.

I also like print comics, which combine two of my favorite things (words and pictures) into a marvelous new thing. Web-comics add a third ingredient: the internet.

Back on the Blog

Sorry I haven't written in a long time.  I've been busy reading.  And living my life.  It's been pretty amazing in the past few years.

I'm not the same person who started writing this blog, but I'm pretty close.  I may be wiser.  I've certainly been more places.

Last week a good friend said she missed my blogging, and challenged me to start up again.  So here it goes.  Back to the blog.

How was your weekend?

Can we all speak straightforwardly to each other?

The first step is to speak.  Next comes speaking to each other.  Which seems to be something we're often poor at.  Often we speak past each other, or around each other, or we just insult each other while pretending that whatever position we've settled down on is unbeatable.  And then there's being straightforward.

But there are important questions we need to answer which we cannot answer alone, and which no amount of subterfuge or avoidance or beating around the bush will remove.  Things need doing.

So this is a very good question.  And I'm not sure what the answer is.  But there's always hope.

What were you thinking?

The source for this post is my recent project of "spring cleaning" on my gmail account... since I hadn't used it in two years, a fair number of unread messages, mostly from listservs, had piled up.  When I merged in all the messages I received as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had 1,637 unread messages.

The most interesting part came when I went through my "drafts" folder.  Which is a snapshot of ideas I was in the middle of forming two years ago:

Why waste energy?

I just got angry at the internet.

And I mean really angry. So angry I swore loudly, and I try very hard not to swear ever.

So angry my heart rate shot up, and is still up now, ten to fifteen minutes later. It's racing in my chest, as if I just went cliff diving or nearly got bitten by a rabid dog.

I let a webpage do this to me. Not the content of a webpage either. Simply the inefficient workings of a search function. I became spitting mad over poor web design.

What use are stories?

Last August, I had the singular pleasure of reading, for the first time, a few essays by Brian Doyle, as part of a class about essays. At the end of that class, I had another great pleasure and privilege: that of sitting in the room during a phone interview with Brian Doyle himself. Here are my notes:

"The reason that poetry is in the end the greatest literary art is that it’s closest to music. It can be easily abused. There’s more bad poetry than anything else.

To say something big in a small space is a great virtue.

Part of our training as writers is to write poorly, you have to learn the craft by learning what not to do.

A lot of early writing is about the self, it’s kind of self absorbed—maturity as a writer involves looking at the glory and beauty in other things.

What immortal hand or eye?

I'd never thought of fireworks and William Blake as things that go together, but watching the fireworks on Saturday, I couldn't get this stanza out of my head:

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?



Happy Independence, America. And keep on burning, tyger bright.

Carbon Monoxide

It's a well known fact that carbon monoxide is colorless, tasteless and odorless, as well as deadly. This lack of features is precisely what makes it so dangerous... there is no way to sense the slow seeping of carbon monoxide without the modern technology of a CO detector (or, failing that, the proverbial coal mine canary.)

What you might not have known is that when a carbon monoxide detector goes off in your house, while you can't smell the carbon monoxide, you will immediately smell the scent of your own fear. What does it smell like? As the alarm rings in your ears, you would swear that the pungent odor of your fear is exactly like the odor carbon monoxide would have, if it had any at all.

What's in a Name? (Part 2)

Last week I was volunteering with a project called Lose the Training Wheels, as a bike spotter. Their were about 15 of us volunteers, working together for a week. We had about thirty minutes of downtime between sessions. Almost none of us knew each other at the start of the week, but we developed the sort of easy break-room relationships that come with any project like this. We'd chat about sports scores, or colleges, or how well our riders were learning. Sometimes, we'd kick around a soccer ball or shoot some hoops.

But that's not what this post is about. Here, I mean to ponder the following phenomenon.

There was another Matt in the group. A Matthew, rather than a Mattathias, but we were both going by Matt. This caused the standard confusion on the first day ("Matt, you'll be working with Nathan... Oh shoot, there are two Matts.) This is fairly common, but what happened next is interesting.

The other Matt, it was clear, felt an instant connection because of our shared name. For the rest of the week, when he came in, the first thing he'd do was greet me with a "How's it going, Matt?" and a wide grin. During breaks, he'd come over to talk. Besides the name and the interest in volunteering, we didn't have much in common, but that didn't seem to matter to him.

Matt was friendly with everyone, but obviously felt that there was significance to our fellow Matt-hood. I don't think I felt it nearly so strongly as he did, perhaps because being a Mattathias has always made me feel different from other Matts, especially Matthews.

So what is it then, that makes a shared name feel like a shared nature?

What time is it?

I have a life-long animosity for alarm clocks.

This first became apparent when I was in first grade, and had to be up in time to get to school by Eight AM (I had been in an afternoon kindergarten class, blissfully free until 12:30.) I ignored my alarm clock completely, making my mother come time and time again to call, wheedle, and threaten me out of bed. When words alone did not suffice, she moved on to diplomacy by other means: tickling, dragging, repeated threats of ice cubes (I cannot recall whether these threats ever became reality, but from the force they carried I think they must have, at least once.)

Things did not improve with middle school.

Why do I procrastinate? (Part 2)

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in the past couple of years.

I spend a large amount of my time coming up with ideas for things to do. I have long lists of these things, of projects I want to work on and finish. I am fairly certain that I could work all day on these projects, and still have ideas left over.

And yet on an equally regular basis, I find myself telling myself that I have "nothing to do". Grasping for something to keep my attention, I will check my e-mail four to five times a day, check and re-check my favorite blogs, spend hours on facebook (I waste time off the internet as well, by staring at walls or sitting idle).

How do I reconcile the tremendous amount of things worth doing with my frequent claim that I have nothing to do? Clearly, I am lying to myself on a regular basis. But how do I break through this mental trap of idleness and keep myself engaged in things that matter?