After winter's peak

I think we're past the worst of it! (Winter, I mean.)

I realize now that it was the same day I wrote the post "Living Together" that Angela found out that her father in Arkansas had died. It had seemed for the several days before that, that things had been "evening out" a little, in our domestic arrangement, but this event may have knocked us off balance a bit. Angela decided to fly down to Arkansas alone to attend to the funeral with her sister Capucine. She left yesterday and will be returning tomorrow. Between the stress of preparing for a trip to a place she was unfamiliar with, and having to miss the Financial Peace University preview scheduled for noon tomorrow, the atmosphere has been pretty charged and there have been a few unfortunate interactions.

I guess that's pretty much all there is to say about it... I look forward to warmer times.

More popular

If you look alllll the way back to the second or maybe third post in this blog, you will see that I was hoping to get "hired" by Blogitive, to mention companies in the blog for $5 a pop. The first time I applied, I had only made a few posts, and you couldn't find me on Google even if you entered the URL of the blog itself. Blogitive, needless to say, didn't find me very appealing.

I've been findable on Google for some time now, and I determined a week or two ago to write "at least three times a week" as mentioned on the Blogitive site. I also have accumulated a decent number of postings now. So I figured I'd give it another go. Again, no luck: the emailed reply stated that I need to increase my blog's "popularity". Go get yourself on FeedBurner, etc. etc., that should get you started.

So, with a sigh I accepted that in order to get paid (even relatively paltry sums like $5) for advertising, you have to give the paying person some confidence that someone, anyone, will actually see your ad. I'm pretty sure at least one person is subscribed to my RSS feed, but his viewing of an ad probably isn't worth $5 all by itself (sorry Josh).

So I found myself asking (a little stupidly, I guess) if I really wanted my blog to be all that "popular". I don't really know what that is like. I lead a relatively sedate life at the moment (as far as my own personal activities are concerned, that is-- there is rarely a dull week at my house); would I get too sucked in if things got lively in blog-land? In my fantasy world, I am able to provide comfortably for my family just by writing stuff. But the only way (correct me if I'm wrong here, someone) you make six figures writing stuff is to have quite a large number of people read what you write, all the time, and like it a lot.

It's an interesting question, now that I think about it: in the world of writing, is it a few millionaire columnists (Tom Friedman? Maureen Dowd? I wonder how much they make) and superstar novelists (Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz etc.) amid a sea of struggling scrabbling playwrights, journalists and would-be novelists? No one in between making a comfortable living of, say, $150,000 a year? (If that sounds high to you, remember that a free-lancer needs to buy his own health insurance and whatnot.)

I have to brag here a little bit, although under the circumstances perhaps it's a little foolish to brag about it. Back in mid-2004 when I was a new Presbyterian elder I was tilting at windmills trying to save this lump of a guy at church from ending up on the street (again). At the height of my crusade against the system I wrote one or two letters to the social work office where the person's case was being managed. I made enough of a pain of myself that I eventually found myself on the phone with the director of the department, two levels up from the caseworker I believe, begging me to back off and just let them do their job. But early on in that conversation, presumably to serve as a velvet covering on her impending blow, she told me that I write "beautifully".

When I do actually begin writing, I can write quite a lot of reasonably good quality material in a relatively short time. (75 page senior thesis in... what was it? 38 hours? Never mind that I got a C+ on it; I don't think it was because of the quality of the writing so much as because it was not very good historical scholarship. Dang that head of the Presbyterian denomination in Mexico who never sent me that perfect packet of revolutionary era periodicals that I believed he would send to a total gringo stranger, after one phone call, and with no referral of any kind. I wasn't even a Presbyterian at the time.)

What do you think? Josh? Want to collaborate on a novel? We'll be rich. You provide the idea, and I'll help you write it.

Racquetball, after a bit of a hiatus: today I won 2 games, Bob won 1. Cumulative record: Joel - 5, Bob - 6.

Living Together

A few posts back I mentioned that a woman named Tara Harrison and her one-year-old son Oni have come to live with us. As two interesting weeks have now passed, I'd like to offer some reflections. Initially, lover of drama that I am, I wanted to offer a sort of blow-by-blow (I mean that, um... figuratively, of course) description of our experience so far, but I feel the need to be sensitive to all four of the other members of my household, even though none of them are likely to ever see what I write, as least not for quite some time. So I'll try to talk somewhat more abstractly, while hopefully holding folks' interest.

I'm particularly interested in the idea of mergers of family units in the American cultural context, and how it might differ from similar endeavors in more "community-oriented" societies. First of all, how likely would it be for an arrangement like ours (a mother and toddler child moving into the house of a family comprised of a man, woman, and one slightly older child) to be made in an Arabic country? Or in China? I can only guess, but I think that it might be more common if the newcomers were related in some fashion by blood, and much less common if there were virtually no prior relationship at all.

Actually, Tara and Oni have moved in at least partly in order to provide some ongoing childcare services for us, and it might not be that uncommon in those other societies to have some sort of live-in help. But we have, from the outset, envisioned something a little more communal and familial.

Americans who are not (hint: like me) from the class of extreme wealth are a little ambivalent about the idea of "servants" or "help". There is the stereotype of the blue-blood matriarch who murmurs through barely parted lips, some disdainful comment about conducting any sort of personal relationship with "the help". There is a clear and firm division: we are the employers, they are the ones who do what we ask. Wealthy people are not servants in homes, and lower-income people do not employ servants in their homes. But what if there isn't such a clear class distinction between the holders of each role? Obviously, one half has a little "extra" money and the other half is in a state of more acute "need"-- or am I already betraying an American assumption that no one would choose to live with another family unless they were in dire circumstances?

I can't help but think of the phrase repeated many times in the bible, "the widow and the fatherless". It seems that a single mother is vulnerable in so many ways. She often struggles continually for honor, for basic physical safety for her child, for community, for any sort of sense that she "has a life". And of course, any family struggles, and for similar things.

After a couple has lived together for five years, and with a child for two years, the negotiation of the details of household life can become like a background activity that is so constant that (at times) you forget it's happening. Or to put it another way, the things that are being negotiated are so nuanced, and your confidence in running your household is strong enough, that you can forget that you will be back at "square one" if you bring in new people, especially an adult, and most especially an adult who is a parent. What time do we all go to bed? What do we eat? Where do we eat? When do we eat? What will be the role of the television? How many lights should be kept on? And on and on and on.

I personally struggle with the idea of "purpose" when it comes to groups in community. What are we trying to *do*? And when do we want to have it done by? What are the constraints on our methods for doing it? I like to think that although all of us have misshapen hearts, we are determined to persevere through to a consensus on these questions, one foot after the next, one day after the next, one bedtime after the next.

Lord, help us.

Whoa

Ok, any of you who know me know that I waited two, maybe three minutes after posting the previous entry before searching Google to see who else had used "Immaculate (mis)Conception". My first try was with "immaculate misconception". The top result of that was a movie with that title (out just in 2006!), the plot of which seems to only reinforce how incredibly profound and widespread the ignorance is.

Then I entered "immaculate mis-conception", and found this blog (which belongs to a Filipino librarian?), which led me to the Papal encyclical of Pius IX which laid out the doctrine in no uncertain terms-- in 1854!. Which reminded me that the Vatican took that moment in history to make all the (previously folky) veneration of Mary into "official doctrine". It's fascinating to read about; I think I saw it in Constantine's Sword by James Carroll. The Church was losing ground badly to liberal modernizing governments throughout Europe, so it seized upon the idea of the semi-divine Mary as a way to regain some influence over Catholic populations within those countries.

Gee whiz-- scan through that encyclical a bit. It's far worse for Protestants than I had thought. Look at this:

"Hence, just as Christ, the Mediator between God and man, assumed human nature, blotted the handwriting of the decree that stood against us, and fastened it triumphantly to the cross, so the most holy Virgin, united with him by a most intimate and indissoluble bond, was, with him and through him, eternally at enmity with the evil serpent, and most completely triumphed over him, and thus crushed his head with her immaculate foot." (from "Interpreters of the Sacred Scripture")

And then, what I think could be called the central statement of the doctrine:

"[The early church fathers] testified, too, that the flesh of the Virgin, although derived from Adam, did not contract the stains of Adam, and that on this account the most Blessed Virgin was the tabernacle created by God himself and formed by the Holy Spirit, truly a work in royal purple, adorned and woven with gold, which that new Beseleel made. They affirmed that the same Virgin is, and is deservedly, the first and especial work of God, escaping the fiery arrows the the evil one; that she is beautiful by nature and entirely free from all stain; that at her Immaculate Conception she came into the world all radiant like the dawn. For it was certainly not fitting that this vessel of election should be wounded by the common injuries, since she, differing so much from the others, had only nature in common with them, not sin. In fact, it was quite fitting that, as the Only-Begotten has a Father in heaven, whom the Seraphim extol as thrice holy, so he should have a Mother on earth who would never be without the splendor of holiness." ("... Of a Super Eminent Sanctity")

Now, except for the extremely rapturous and flowery language, I think this is pretty close to what I said in my earlier post. The fervor of the language in this encyclical is a bit breathtaking, and helps me to understand my own father's devotional stance a bit better. But set in its historical context, it seems quite feverish and perhaps even desperate.

So the reaction from Protestants against this is on two levels, to match the two levels (popular and realpolitik) of the Vatican's doctrine. The Protestant "common man" knows to reject any whiff of doctrine that is not "explicitly" derived from scripture, and in particular any doctrine that seems to encroach on the uniqueness of Jesus' claim to divinity, just as the Catholic "comman man" (or more frequently, woman?) clung to the image of a transcendental Mary. But also, realpolitik had been a driving force of Protestantism from the very beginning, as rulers appropriated it as a useful way to undermine the influence of Rome in their countries.

Check out Shia Islam sometime, for an interesting parallel. Relatives of Muhammad who were wiped out in power struggles following his death became somewhat more than human in the minds of those who belonged to the party, or faction (shia) that believed in those displaced relatives.

Immaculate (mis)Conception

I have no idea now why the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception came to my mind at some point yesterday, but it did, and following fast on the heels of that I remembered how much it irritates me that the vast, vast majority of people who would recognize the term, think that it is the technical term used to refer to the virgin birth of Jesus.

(deep breath) IT IS NOT! The actual meaning can't be understood without referring to another, much more fundamental doctrine, one whose acceptance across all the major branches of Christianity is as broad and (I believe) clear, as that of the Immaculate Conception is narrow and obscure: Original Sin. This is the belief that all human beings who are descended from the first couple, Adam and Eve, are stained with sin from the moment they come into existence, i.e., conception.

So here's the basic gist of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Jesus is God. Mary was Jesus's mother. Ergo, Mary is the mother of God. God is "holy", meaning completely separate from all evil, and unable to be in the same place at the same time as anything evil or impure...

I just realized the reason for the "necessity" of the doctrine. If Jesus came to die as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of all the human race--past, present, and future--then the only way a sinless "vessel" could exist to carry him from his *virgin* conception until his birth, would be for God, by divine fiat, to *prevent the stain of sin from falling upon that vessel upon that vessel's human conception*, i.e. to arrange that the conception would be immaculate (from Latin, unspotted). How could he do that? He can do anything. Ok, if he can do it for one person, why not all people? Well, now we get into thornier matters, but I imagine that the reason given would be something like "Because he wanted to save the rest of humanity through a different means." I.e., through the death of the sinless God-man, Jesus.

I have to confess that I haven't done my research on this (i.e., I haven't looked it up on Wikipedia) yet, so I don't know when the doctrine was first adopted, or if my guess as to the reasoning behind it is correct. I have a feeling it arose sometime within the first six hundred years after Jesus' death, and that it was at least partly driven by the usefulness of having a female divinity to set up against the female divinities in many of the indigenous religions that Christianity encountered as it spread throughout Europe. But it seems clear that the most important presupposition is that a sin-stained woman could never carry in her body a baby who is as fully God as he is fully human.

Protestants hate this doctrine, because it has no strong basis in the bible, and the idea that Mary's sinlessness did not make her divine in the same way that the divine Jesus was sinless, is just too subtle. And also pointless, to them, because they don't have the same way of thinking about the interaction of the "earthly" and the "divine" (e.g. "transubstantiation": the bread of the mass is transformed, each time, into Jesus' actual body, so that the priest can literally, not figuratively, offer Jesus up as a sacrifice again to God), and they have no trouble with the idea that a God-man could be born from the body of a sin-stained (i.e. normal) human woman.

I was tempted to launch onto a tangent, regarding what it could possibly mean, that Jesus is "fully God and fully human". But I think I've made my point, which is that the argument stems from different ideas about how God relates with "fallen" humanity.

I wish this ignorance about the Immaculate Conception were not so widespread, and even more, I wish that it didn't irritate me so much. But alas, it does. Maybe a little less, now that I've vented about it some.

Oh yeah, I'm also fully aware of how incredibly unlikely it is that I'm the first person to come up with the cutesy phrase I used for the title of this post. I'm too lazy to confirm its prior existence by looking it up on Google, and I'd like to linger a little bit longer in the delusion that I'm as witty as that.

May you live in interesting times

There is a (possibly apocryphal) "Chinese curse": "May you live in interesting times." Well, how interesting your times are certainly has something to do with how tuned in you are to what's going on in the world around you (cf. other saying "Ignorance is bliss"). I've decided in the last few weeks to drastically curtail my intake of news, and am instead listening to an Agatha Christie novel with the not so creative sounding title of "The Secret Adversary".

Result? My mind is not brimming over with interesting things to share with the reading public. Some of this is probably due also to the medicine I've been taking. The river of life flows on, swirling with eddies of trouble and pleasure.

On a diet, new house tenant/guest, company acquired by a large multinational consulting company, very cold, still in debt. What I'm really worried about though, is this: Will I have a chance to watch episode 12 of HBO's "Rome" before it expires from Comcast's On Demand menu?

A light departs

I feel led to share that Professor Alan Groves of Westminster Theological Seminary passed away on Monday February 5.

Many people die of cancer every year, and perhaps some even chronicle the process eloquently, but I think this year-long blog which articulately and warmly relates the story of a family facing the certain death of the father, is remarkable and very moving:

http://www.algroves.info

I particularly recommend the first few entries, leading up to and including the day (February 21, 2006) on which they discovered that a melanoma removed over a year earlier had metastasized to Al's lungs, and the last few entries before his death (from January 23, 2007 or so). I find them inspiring.

Racquetball rivalry

Today I played racquetball with Bob Stei for the fourth time. This is the third time we've played in the morning, and the last two times I've struggled mightily to get to the LA Fitness by 7am. (On other mornings I'm sometimes not even out of bed by 7.) We've played two complete games (to 15) each time, and here are the results to date:

1/8: Bob - 2, Joel - 0
2/1: Bob - 2, Joel - 0
2/6: Bob - 0, Joel - 2
2/8: Bob - 1, Joel -1

So (just in case you don't want to bother adding up those numbers) the standings so far are Bob - 5, Joel - 3. I should note that most of the first four games were pretty close, so don't be too impressed with my comeback from oblivion.

Phil was wrong

(Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog oracle, reportedly did not see his shadow this year. Tell that to the folks in Minnesota who've had windchills of -40 degrees Fahrenheit in the last few days.)

I considered other more witty or dramatic ways of saying this, but then that took too long, so I'll just say it: a lot has happened since I last wrote.

Everything up until December 23 is pretty much a blur of vague anxiety and dissatisfaction. The only thing that sticks out in my mind now is my interview at ARAMARK. That was a little interesting, but ultimately a bit disheartening, as I was never a viable candidate for the position, in retrospect. I had been determined, for about four months, to get a change in my work situation. By early December, I was riddled with anxiety because it looked like I had painted myself into a corner. My current group was showing me as unavailable after Jan 1 2007, in their planning docs, but I hadn't been picked up by the new group. So anyway, at the last moment I was pulled in for an interview at ARAMARK, and discovered that my lack of recent Microsoft experience pretty much made me a non-starter. So I just continued where I am, at Centocor in Horsham.

I was "officially" diagnosed with ADD in October, after taking tests in August and September. To be honest, I've read the report of the evaluation a million times, and I'm still not sure exactly how the psychologist tied the test results to the diagnosis. She also pointed out, primarily from my questionnaire answers but also possibly from her initial interview with me, that I have symptoms of depression and anxiety. So that's what it said on the report (paraphrase): "He has ADD and depression and anxiety; he could benefit from medication for all of that." So then I went to a psychiatrist to see about medicine and he more or less disregarded the part in the ADD evaluation that said "he doesn't have bipolar disorder", and decided from several answers in our initial interview that I had bipolar disorder and should go down that medication path-- Clonopin, Depakote, a few others were mentioned.

After discussing it with a few people I decided to drop that doctor and I went to another one, who requires that patients meet with him weekly for psychotherapy sessions if he is going to prescribe any medication. I met with him five times or so before getting around to "popping the question", i.e., directly asking him to prescribe me Adderall (for ADD). (It took me about that long to fully come to terms with the fact that he was never going to suggest anything to me, let alone suggest a medication.) He wrote me a prescription, I dropped it off immediately at the pharmacy across the street from our house, and several minutes after that he called me to tell me he had changed his mind and wanted to try me on Wellbutrin instead. All a little awkward, but no big deal. I have been on 100mg of sustained release Wellbutrin (aka bupropion-- ever hear of Zyban, smoking cessation drug? Same stuff.) since December 23.

Again, I'm a little leery of sounding overdramatic and breathless here (and honestly, I'm not feeling dramatic or breathless as I write), but as far as I can tell this drug has had a profound effect on me. I'm not sure I can remember one time since I started taking it, when my heart raced out of anxiety or fear over some situation. At least in the first week or two it made me a tiny bit "faster", in terms of my speed of response in conversation of a moderately complex and/or sensitive nature, so Angela was not excited at the prospect of my increasing the dose. (100mg is usually considered just a stepping stone to the normal therapeutic dose of 200-450 mg a day.) I am *way* less drowsy during the normal course of a day, which also means that it's much easier for me to "get by" on 5 or 6 hours of sleep many nights in a row than it used to be, and I have to watch out for slipping into a manic-type state. Also, sometimes I feel that Angela and play this parlor game of trying to determine the precise cause of my snippiness, when I'm snippy. "Is it the medicine? Is it the lack of sleep catching up? What?" But when crises arise (and boy, have a few arisen in the last six weeks), they don't tend to have the cascading effect of anxiety that troubled situations used to have on me. Heck, I used to have plenty of background anxiety and negativity without any crises. In sum: I'm glad I'm on it.

Um... That seems to be it, really. But three big things have happened in Joel-Angela-Abigail Land since the beginning of the year (four if you count Angela turning 40). First, Abby's right hand was injured in an accident with a door at church, on January 14. A few days later it was rewrapped and placed in a cast for three weeks, which ends today. A lot of you already know about all this and I don't feel like talking it about it much further.

Second, my father escalated into his first manic episode in over seven years, right around the same time that the thing happened with Abby, maybe a week or two earlier. He went into the hospital last week, the evening of January 30. He was going to be discharged this past Monday, but that was delayed as they waited for some blood test results to come back. So we're kind in uncharted territory, i.e., not sure how much longer he will be in a heightened state. Mom says that he didn't appear to change much over the course of the week or two he was in the hospital.

And finally, the night before Dad was admitted to Belmont, we began to help Tara Harrison move into our finished attic space. We moved stuff on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, and she and her son Oni stayed overnight for the first time on Wednesday. On Friday we had a party to celebrate Oni's first birthday. So far things are going really well, with typical adjustments and negotiations taking place. As far I as I'm concerned, it is a win-win-win-win-win situation. I.e., each one of the five of us is benefiting from this arrangement in different ways. So we'll see how it goes.

This is not much of a news flash, but it's been really cold for the last four days or so. And with that, I guess I'll wrap up for the time being.