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?

What is THAT?

This is a question my 5-year old niece asks pretty often.

Today she asked it to me when she and her parents came to drop off some perishable food before they drive to California for a wedding.

The that in question was my bicycle tire, which was hanging from the corner of a bookshelf.

"That's a tire for my bicycle," said I.

She pondered this.

"Why is it so huge?" she asked.

"I am a huge person, and so I need huge tires." I said.

She pondered this.

"And what is that?" she asked, pointing, "Is that the cover for the wheel?"

"No," said I, "that's the tube. It goes inside the wheel, to keep it fat."

She pondered this.

"It has a sticker on it," said she.

If not now, when?

Wrote a long letter to a good friend tonight.

I've been looking at the world with the intent to write it with a while now, which means that I'd see something or hear something and start writing a paragraph in my head, trying out how it would sound to describe it to Joumana.

Two months of that kind of thinking made for a six page letter. I think I enjoy letter writing almost more than anything else, so it's a pity I don't do it more often.

I'd kept putting off writing it, telling myself I didn't have the time, that I'd find time in the evening, that I'd find time over the weekend.

Finally decided that the only way to find time is to look for it. Strangely enough, as soon as I looked, there it was.

How did you get to be well read?

This question occasionally after people have known me for a few months, because I have a strong habit of making references to this and to that. I don't answer it very often.

The explanation is really very simple. I'm not well read at all. I'm just good at looking that way. I haven't read most of the books I'm familiar with. I don't have the depth or thoroughness of a classical education, or even simply of a dedicated reading program. And along with all the books I haven't read at all are the books I've only half-read: Les Miserables, The Sun also Rises, God in Search of Man... My apparent erudition comes largely from a few semi-encyclopedic, scattershot collections I've flipped through over the years: The Jewish 100, An Incomplete Education, a book my mother had with pictures and essay of great works of art in the Western tradition that I would sit with for hours as a child.

But this answer may just raise more questions: Why develop a passing familiarity with so many things? Isn't depth of understanding more fulfilling? And why read such collections so urgently at such a young age.

The answer to these questions is even more simple, and I share it far less.

I was raised by wolves.

But no ordinary wolves. No, these were highly intellectual wolves, for whom a pup unable to converse about Early Romantic Literature was a disgrace and a liability, fit only to be left alone to starve in the cold, harsh world of academia. From my earliest days, appearing well read was a matter of life and death.

It is fortunate, then, that I found so much pleasure in a matter which was essential to my survival.

Is it really possible to complete a goal?

♫ This question began my sister-in-law Nicole's g-mail status for several weeks. It continued, "The anticipation, work, and dedication is so all-encompassing that the completion still feels incomplete."

I know what she means. It's part of what I felt when I finished my Eagle Scout.

I wrote an essay about it, at the time, trying to make sense of how far I'd come and where I was going, trying to understand how something "finished" could still feel so far from done. I went through about four or five giant outlines, and then wrote the final draft in one crazy weekend, after coming home from a Model United Nations conference in Illinois.

I was looking at that essay a few weeks ago, because I was going to link to it on my other blog. And as I read it, I realized that if I wrote it now, it would be a different essay. And I wanted to sit down right then with my outlines and start it all over again. But that's my past. I have other essays to write. Maybe, someday, it will be time for me to come back to it.

Why make new mistakes when you can just perfect the old ones?

Every week, I have economics homework due Thursday morning. It takes four hours, at least. Every Wednesday, I suddenly remember that it's due the next day. Every Wednesday night, I'm up past two.

This is the seventh week. You'd think I woulda learned.

what does it mean that I've spent hours knitting a hedgehog for you?

This question is from the last post's comments, by the way. I don't really know the answer, but I did want to show off my knit hedgehog.

What did you get this year?

My birthday present from my Dad:

The Sacredness of Questioning Everything by David Dark.

I think it's apropos.

On the subject of gifts: Economists are very curious about gift-giving, and the question they like to ask is "Why don't we just give people money?" I read an interesting explanation of this in The Armchair Economist (by Steven Landsburg): He rejects one of the common explanations, which is that people give gifts to show that they're willing to spend time shopping, by pointing out that since time is money, it would make just as much sense to give them the monetary value of the gift you would have got and the time you would have spent getting it (or better yet, give them the money and use the time by taking them out to lunch.)

He suggests that the opposite is the case. People buy gifts to show that they don't need to spend time shopping. What? It's simple, he says: the better you know someone, the less time you'll need to spend shopping for them. You won't have to spend hours thinking "Will he like this? Would it look better in blue? What's his size?" You'll know. So buying someone a gift is a way of showing someone that you know them so well that it's really not difficult at all to be their friend. I rather like this explanation (Even if I'm not so sure that time=money is a universally true statement.)

Why suffering?

I’ve been reading the Book of Job, looking for an answer.
This question has been asked by person after person, year after year, struck by fire or flood or disease or war. Why, why, why?
Usually, the question is addressed to God. If humans knew, why would they ask?
And yet we also offer our own answers, and sometimes accept them. Two of the standard answers go like this:
1) It’s our fault. We’ve done something wrong, or our ancestors did something wrong, and we’re being punished by God. This is the view expressed by Job’s friends, who tell him that he’ll suffer no more if he only repents of a wrong he doesn’t know he’s done.
2) It’s God’s fault. Usually for not being there. After all, if there were an all-powerful, good God, he would prevent suffering, right? Those who accept this answer see suffering either as proof of God’s non-existence, or as proof against God’s benevolence. Job’s wife expresses this approach when she tells him to curse God and die, since his suffering is, in her eyes, a demonstration of God’s injustice.

The marvelous thing about the book of Job is that it rejects both these answers. Job is not at fault– he is the perfect and the upright man. Nor is God at fault.

Is Matt older than my Dad?

This is one of the questions my four-year old cousin asked my Grandma this morning, when he came over to play.

(He also asked her "Are you older than my mom?" which led to a visit to one of the family photo albums (The one with pictures of his mother as a baby.))

Little kids ask lots of questions, it seems, because they're still trying to figure out how the world works. Most adults have already given up.

(Or they've somehow gotten the dangerous notion that they understand it all, which can lead to some pretty magnificent missteps.)

So hurray for questions, and may we never stop asking them!

How am I supposed to answer that?

I'm taking a survey on undergraduate engagement. It's a pretty well-put together and thorough survey, designed to see whether college students are actually doing all those things that are reported to make college experience so great. It's useful information for my university, and for educators in general, but it's also a useful self-check for me, to see how I've been doing.

How often have I connected ideas from my different courses?
How often have I talked with my professors outside of class?
How often have I worked harder than I thought I could in order to meet a professor's expectations?

Most of these question are pretty easy to answer-- I either have or I haven't (although there is a four step scale: never, sometimes, often and very often.)

Here's the question that made me stop, open a new tab, and start writing this post:

How often have you "had serious conversations with students of a different race or ethnicity than your own?"

Would you like to Dance?

Because I do. Like to dance, that is.

I'm taking a formal dance class for the first time in my life. It's introductory social dance, and the number is Dance 180, which I like because it reminds me of 180°, which in turn reminds me of Poetry 180, the collection which moved me from reading poetry to writing poetry.

Dancing itself reminds me of the Indian weddings in California where I first learned the rythyms and movements of Bhangra, and of the times in my childhood when someone would just turn on some music and before you knew it the whole family was there, in the living room, dancing like crazy, throwing our arms and legs all over the place. From a technical perspective, none of us were very good, but when the music moves through you that doesn't matter.

What's in a Name?

Nearly every time I'm asked my name, my answer is immediately followed by another question, usually "Where's that from?" or "What does that mean?"

Recently, I've answered the first question by saying, "It's the Latin transliteration of the Hebrew name which Matthew is the Greek transliteration of" which is more honest than saying "It's Hebrew" but also may be more than most people want to know, and doesn't really give them much that's useful to go on.

When I have more time, I tell the story of Mattathias of Modin and his sons, the Maccabees. The way I tell this story has also changed considerably over time, and changes with my audience.

I don't think I've ever satisfactorily answered the second question, and I don't think anyone else has either. What does it mean that I am named Mattathias (and not perhaps Matthew or Methuselah)? Has the name become a part of me? Have I become a part of it?

What If none of the answers is right?

A while back, I had to take a grammar tutorial, which also included a grammar quiz. The rules were fairly simple: just choose the sentence with no mistakes. I was doing great until I got to a question where this was the only grammatically proper answer:

"Because it is a Catholic country, its government is a democracy modified by authoritarianism."

I don't know about you, but I have some trouble saying that there isn't a problem with that sentence. It may be grammatically perfect, but there's definitely something fishy going on there...