pilgrim.not.wanderer

Prayer has been unusually fervent and lively lately.  I may have never prayed with such intensity and sincerity.

Quiet times of meditation have brought me face to face with myself in an especially stark and unguarded manner.  Solitude has been very precocious.

If you pray, pray for my mother.  She’s in surgery Monday June 23, 2008.

How come my lowest grades are always for the annoyingly basic 200 level classes I have to take from time to time?  My lowest mark this past semester for a class called ‘Ethics and the Life Sciences’.  It was a 200 level philosophy course, with 140 students in it.  Most of them were not philosophy majors and took it because it is required for their science program, I guess.  I just needed a class that fit my schedule.

Anyway, there was a lot of hoopla before our first papers were returned.  Apparently done of us knew how to write a proper philosophy paper.  The prof was disappointed.  I wasn’t shocked.  The vast majority of students hadn’t taken a philosophy class before.  Naturally, I assumed I was safe.  Nope.  I got some bullshit mark and some comments on how to write a paper properly.  Hey, asshole!  Yes, you, the TA who marked my paper.  Guess what?  I know what a good philosophy paper looks like.  I write them all the time and am pleased with the grades I receive.  What a joke.  

What makes it worse is that it was a 4 page paper.  Who the hell writes 4 page papers?  4 page papers are infantile.  And so is my grumpiness, I suppose.

In other news, my best grade was for my seminar class.  It was half grad students.  Go figure.

I’m not bored.  

But recently I was thinking that boredom is a fowl and disgusting thing.  With all the horrors going on in the world, we in the West get bored.  Poor and pitiful us.  Only the ridiculously well-off can have the luxury of being bored.  How anyone can claim to be bored without feeling ashamed about it, is beyond me.  I’ve been known to be bored from time to time.  I have a feeling that this makes me a bad person.  The fact that from time to time I have shamelessly felt bored makes me feel ashamed. 

Boredom can’t be more than 200 years old, except amongst the very rich.  Now in the West we are relatively very rich.  And we are bored.  Pathetic.

I dislike going to Canada’s Wonderland.  I feel bad about it.  There is something pathetic about having to strap yourself to a roller-coaster in order to rise above boredom.  There is something wrong about living that kind of life.  

Recently I started to floss regularly.  I’ve always been told to do it.  I used to do it twice a year, usually after corn on the cob.  Now I do it daily.  It is strangely satisfying.  

Over the past day or so I’ve had 1000 hits to my Steve Paikin/Mark Steyn post.  (Scroll down.)  Wow.  Mark Steyn’s website temporarily had a link to it, front and center on his site.  (It is still there, but it is buried now.)

It is a great and wonderful thing to be Christian.  

Christianity is not an idealogy.  In a sense it is not even a religion.

It is a great and wonderful thing to be reconciled to God by God.  In and through His Church God encountered me and proclaimed the Gospel to me, offering Himself for my salvation and the salvation of the world.  

To be Christian is to be on the way to somewhere amongst a great company of redeemed sinners, a pitiful bunch, who are on the way and yet not yet there.

Allow me to be frank, maybe even rude.  We are a fucked up bunch, we Christians.  Forgive me for my frankness.  Seriously. The Gospel doesn’t require me to believe otherwise, and I believe it.  Christ came to redeemed the sick and the lost.  Here I am, sick and lost.  On to the way to the heavenly city.  If you are neither sick nor lost, move along.  This is not for you.

Whatever else I know, I know this.  It is a great and wonderful thing to be Christian.  Here I stand, happily.  On the way.

If you don’t understand this, if this scares you, I implore you to carefully consider what it is like to be me.  Imagine what it is like to be Christian.  Don’t right me off just because you don’t understand me, and I’ll return the favour.

I’m ready to live in the kind of city the environmentalists dream of.  Sort of.  I’m ready to walk or take the transit everywhere.  I’m ready for all the solar-panels and windmills.  I’m ready to live in the condo and avoid the suburban-sprawl nightmare.  The problem is that my city (and most Canadian cities?) are not capable of providing this kind of lifestyle.  And for the life of me I can’t imagine how they ever will be.  

Stop trying to raise my awareness.  Instead, focus on redesigning our cities.  I didn’t design my city and I’ll have next to no influence on its future design.  Thanks to your ‘awareness raising’, I’m inclined to live in the city you dream of.  (Maybe this has more to do with my personal tastes.)  But, in any case, that doesn’t get us much closer to actually living in that kind of city.

Shut up for second.  You run our culture and the rest of us are sick of it.  

You’re the reason why everyone is petrified of rituals and customs.  You’re the reason why good manners is considered shallow and impersonal.  Strictly for tea grannies.

We introverts thrive on rituals and customs when it comes to relationships.  We are shitty at small talk.  It is not that we don’t like people.  It is that, in the moment, we are never quite sure what to do.

Rituals and customs give us a way to communicate our intentions towards others and establish relationships.  

I used to know people who refused to ask “How are you?” when they bumped into friends and associates.  They thought that since they weren’t literally interested in those details at that moment, that it would be inauthentic to ask for them.  It would be an empty ritual.

That’s ridiculous.  Asking “How are you?” is ritualistic way of establishing a bond with that person.  That it is ritualistic doesn’t make it impersonal, empty or inauthentic.

I bet a lot of people think that I’m a cold, aloof bastard.  That’s because I suck at small talk and am disinclined to engage in “old fashioned” rituals of good manners, since I assume most folks think of them as quaint and inauthentic.

Not the TV show.  I’m thinking about my office.  I’m going get my own office at my school this September.  Well not my own.  I’ll be sharing with other grad students.

Anyway, I think I’ll really benefit from it.  As it is now, I find it very hard to be productive.  It think it will be helpful to be able to leave home and go to ‘the office’.  I’ll be able to put in a work day and then come home.  Sort of.  More so than now.  I think it’ll help a lot.

Confession - if I could afford it I’d wear a jacket and tie everyday at school.  I find the ritual of dressing up and heading to the office appealing.  Or at the least the idea of doing it is appealing to me.

Sometimes I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of madness.

Such is the way of things for philosophers who haven’t been taken captive by party-spirit.

For the rest of us the right philosophical path isn’t so obvious.  And so we are left with the decision: where will I spend my time and energy, philosophically speaking?  To make the choice for something is at once to say no to many many others.  The way forward is inherently risky.

Here we do not have the luxury of recourse to philosophy or reason as a guide, for the very question at hand is “whose reason and whose philosophy will I submit myself and be initiated into?”

I can only laugh at the hubris of those folks who rally around the flag of reason and enlightenment with tears in the eyes and their hands on the hearts.

Don’t take these ruminations as an endorsement of skepticism or unreason.  Quite the contrary.  I find myself evermore skeptical of skepticism.  Skepticisms of various kinds are traditions to be submitted to and be formed by.  

There are then three kinds of skeptics: (1) those who recognize this and take responsibility for it, (2) those who are ignorant and (3) those who are existentially dishonest.  

When I watch people fall ass-backwards into the soft and comfy chair of an old and friendly skepticism, I’m left cold and unimpressed.  Usually the folks who do this imagine themselves as brave and noble.  

Instead, it is the intellectual equivalent of downing a cheese burger.  Tasty, yes.  Rebellious, if you’re in room full of health nuts.  But it is hardly worthy of congratulations. And if you do it too often it will probably kill you.

The truly philosophical life is a kind of existential journey through a dangerous land.  And the journey begins with the questions like, Which of these maps will I trust? Whose report on the dangers which lie ahead will I listen too?

I strongly suspect that most of what gets passed off as philosophy isn’t.  

My apartment stinks like weed.  Actually I like the smell of weed and cigarette smoke in the spring.  Somehow it smells like summer.  I went for my first jacket-less walk today.  Feels good.

So I watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou again.  (And then again with the audio commentary.) Is it weird that every time I watch the scene where Zissou confronts the jaguar shark I cry a little bit?

I stumbled upon this a week ago.  I don’t remember who pointed it out to me. Anyway, he still uses Windows 3.1.  Amazing.   Do you remember Windows 3.1?  It had a pretty weird GUI as I remember.  Simple, but lacking so much I take for granted now.  I used it at school but my family completely skipped over it.  We went from a 286 running DOS to first generation Pentium running Win95.  Win95 was pretty exciting at the time.  Do you remember word processing on a pre-Windows computer?  I kind of miss that all blue screen.  (Not the blue screen of death, but that all blue screen of DOS WordPerfect.  Here it is:

Also, somehow I came across this as well: “Unchurched Americans prefer churches that look more like a medieval cathedral over contemporary church buildings, a new study showed.”