Greener Pastures

Well, it's time for my thoughts to be expressed through a different outlet in the web of life.  Or at least, through a different URL; from now on, this will be the fountain of my intellectual vomit.  You'll note, if you're a long-time fan, that this is not the same address as my original blogspot account.  That old one is still there, but I'm not currently planning on updating it.  It was easier to just start over.

For all of you dedicated xanga users, I apologize for my betrayal.  Xanga has been good to me, but I don't like that only xanga users can comment.  Blogspot has no such restrictions, though I don't like its layout as much.

We'll see how this goes.  If I end up really hating blogspot, as has happened before, I'll move back here.  In the meantime, head over to blogspot for new posts.

For a while now, I've been harboring a secret about myself, one that some of you will probably find shocking, and many of you will not understand.  I decided to hold off writing about it until I had a bit more data to confirm my own abnormality, but at this point, further silence would do nothing but increase the fear and disgust of those around me.  Many of you will probably try to tell me that what I'm about to say is wrong, and that you must do what you can to turn me from my present self-destructive course.  I can only hope that one day you will all come to understand that my path, though different, is not lower than the ones you have all found yourselves on, and in some ways might well be higher.  I do not ask for your approval, as I know it will not be granted.  I ask only for your acceptance.

The truth is, I love Mondays.

Go ahead, let it out, all that hurt and frustration over the realization that we no longer share this commonality.  Time and again, mutual distaste has proven to be a better bonding agent than many other "positive" similarities.  A perennial housewife favorite such as the "Stitch and Bitch" is a prime example, as people come for the stitching but stay for the bitching.  I have been expecting your perception of betrayal, and am ready to take the full force of the blow.  Some of you are putting up wonderful false fronts about this, immediately calling me "progressive," and no doubt commending my strength and courage to those around you, while simultaneously making it clear that your support for my lifestyle choice does not reflect any similarity in your own.  I will condemn none of you, but I do implore each of you to search the dregs of your hearts for any festering bitterness or repressed loathing.  Hiding these deep-rooted animosities will hurt you in the end.  Then there are the few of you who have already realized this truth about yourselves, you have not expressed it openly.  Based on the inestimable euphoria I am experiencing this very moment, I can only urge you to do as I have, and to do so at once.  When people hide their true selves from the world, the deny their true strength.  Living a lie is not what man was meant for.

All joking aside, I do actually like Mondays.  I don't know why, exactly.  I just have a wonderful sense of energy and indestructability.  It's also the day on which I do about 80% of my work for the week.  Each morning that I have to get up at 5:30, I lose a little bit of my stored energy, so that subsequent mornings don't shine quite as much and my after-work productivity declines throughout the week.  Strangely, it always seems to get rainy on Thursday evenings.  And though I do like rain, it does tend to amplify my desire to sleep.

The long and short of this is that I like my four-day work-week.  My lengthy commute means that I generally end up spending close to ten hours per workday out of the house.  Since my job is almost as brainless as, and considerably slower than driving down a straight highway in traffic, I basically work a full-time job in four-day increments.  Having three days off in a row is great because I can spend two whole days lost in whatever interesting activity I please and still get all of my extracurricular work done.  This gives me all the recharge time I need for an excellent new Monday.

So I guess what's at the bottom of this is the need for rest.  What is it, exactly?  Why do we keep needing these strange bouts of relaxation (not to mention unconsciousness) in order to keep going?  And more importantly, why does God do this (I'm not going to say "need" here, as I'm not sure His rest is necessary)?

I can explain away a lot of the other questions, but that last one has me stumped.

Re-reading a couple of posts I've put up here, I realized that I've probably sounded pretty down on marriage of late.  I could quote myself, but I don't think I need to (look at the post regarding 300 and the one following it).  I think I perhaps misrepresented myself, and, though no one has said anything to this effect, I'm afraid people reading this blog think of me as a bitter, lonely soul disenchanted with all woman-dom.  This is partly true.

But only partly.

A certain amount of my distaste for relationships has certainly come from my own experiences with women.  If I had to sum up all of those experiences in one word, it would undoubtedly be "illogical."  I do not understand how women make decisions, but I am quite sure it is almost entirely different from my own method.  I say "almost" only because I do understand making decisions solely with one's heart, I simply choose not to do so most of the time.  I have certainly made choices that were difficult to explain to other people except to say that they just "felt right."  Most of the time, though, I need to be able to explain to myself exactly why they feel right, and make sure that those feelings are founded on something other than selfishness or foolishness.  And frankly, most of what I feel does end up being rather stupid when scrutinized.

As far as I can tell, women are not like that.  They just aren't.  I've had women look me in the face and say, in as many words, "I know you're right, but I'm not going to do what you said."  What sense does that make?  Is there any justification for a person knowing he's wrong and consciously deciding to go ahead with what he wants, just because he feels strongly about it?  Now to be fair, I've certainly known men who fall into this category (and several women who don't), and I've even fallen into it myself on many occasions.  But I don't do it all the time, I have little respect for other men who seem to, and I hate myself when I do it.  Also, I think it's something I've been less and less prone to as I've matured; it's an attitude I would expect out of a child, not out of a twenty-something adult.

I guess part of the issue is how to interface with someone who functions on this level.  Emotions simply aren't the best method of judgment, even though they do get things right on occasion.  It's like sniping with a shotgun; you're bound to hit something eventually, but even the best crack shot in the world will regularly miss.

I've heard the argument that following one's heart is the right way to go because that's how God speaks to us.  As far as I can tell, this argument is effectively equating emotions with what is commonly termed "the prompting of the Holy Spirit."  This argument seems like an excuse to get around making tough choices. 

The human heart and the Holy Spirit are not one and the same, though I do think they can look similar in many cases.  What I mean by this is that when one is truly prompted by the Holy Spirit, he will probably be entirely unable to explain exactly what it's like, except to say that Option X "feels" or "seems" to be the right one.  Prima facie, this does seem quite similar to the emotional decision-making that I earlier decried.  However, one has to look at what went on before the fact.  In the case of true prompting, there was almost certainly a large amount of scriptural study and prayer for direction that went on.  In the case of emotions, there was almost certainly not.  And while I freely admit the possibility of mistaking one for the other, they only ever look similar in the final stage, and they are nothing like each other in kind.

So am I saying that every girl I've ever dated fell into this trap, and that if they had only listened to God more closely, they never would have dumped me?  No, even I'm not that hubristic.  I'm quite certain one was being protected from a mess (which I certainly would have exacerbated had the relationship continued), and I bear her no ill-will.  One almost certainly made the decision based on emotions, but in that case she was probably doing me a favor, and I was likely dodging a bullet (we weren't very good for each other in hindsight, though I would have given every ounce of energy I had to keep things together).  One I'm uncertain of, though, based on her decisions since we broke up, she's a different person than she appeared to be (and than I wanted her to be).

I don't know.  It takes me a long time to get over heartbreak (averaging around one-and-a-half to two years at this point), and at least for me, those wounds never seem to heal fully.  I have to wonder if this just means that I should be a monk (and if you're reading this, Peter Hannah, though you're almost certainly not after swearing off all your Earthly possessions, I salute you!), and should spend my days reading, and writing, and being friendly but uninterested.  Some days this prospect is enormously inviting.

But then, somedays, my heart tells me otherwise.  I'm pretty sure that marriage is the pinnacle of human relationships, as I've noted before, and so keeping away from it is backing down from a serious risk with an amazing payoff. 

I just don't know how many times I can risk (and lose) the same heart before it's too beat up to fix.

So I've been reading Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Doug Wilson, and I have to say I'm enjoying it.  I'm reading it because I'm supposed to write about it on a job application (one of which is still not quite finished), and I figured I would be bored and probably a little bit angry at it.  I'm not bored, though I do occasionally get riled up when the book flirts with the standard "smarmy Christian" voice I've come to loathe (i.e. the "we have the Bible so we're the only people who can understand anything" mindset, which while true on one level, is entirely untrue on another).  So far, the author has made a good case for Christian education, which is something I've always had a love-hate relationship with.

The crux of the argument is that there's no such thing as an education divorced from worldview.  Thus, education from secular, or, dare I say, pagan sources is necessarily going to carry those beliefs along with it, regardless of the subject being taught.  This case is pretty easy to make regarding philosophy or history, but I think it holds even with more-concrete disciplines such as physics or pure math. 

I'll take geometry as my example, as it's mostly imaginary though it has real-world-approximation value.  Most people who study geometry study Euclid or some derivative thereof (i.e. I imagine a lot of them don't actually study Euclid so much as rehashes of his work; an unfortunately-standard practice of modern education).  As any good Johnnie (nepotism!) can undoubtedly tell you, Euclid is wonderfully logical, but it hinges very seriously on a seemingly-obvious, but actually-questionable postulate regarding the nature of parallel lines.  Good old Postulate 5 is the basis for a decidedly isometric understanding of space that, frankly, doesn't actually hold up under the scrutiny of modern scientific observation.  As far as I can tell, Euclid and Einstein are at odds with each other in a way that can't be reconciled without one of them being wrong. 

Now, you see what I did there?  I said, effectively, that at least Euclid is wrong (maybe Einstein too, but that hasn't been shown to my knowledge).  This is a puzzling statement, since geometry doesn't actually exist, and cannot therefore be said to be either true or untrue.  One might just as accurately claim that the Mona Lisa is untrue; the concept of truth doesn't actually apply in any way that makes sense.  Euclid isn't true or untrue, it's simply consistent.  I'm calling it wrong because, of course, no one actually leaves Euclid where it exists: in the mind.  As far as I can tell, Euclid's ideas are an art not different in kind from the works of Leonardo or Dali.  However, since they appear to be "true," we often take for granted that they are.  Of course, Euclid's geometry also happens to have a large amount of practical value, since the cases in which it diverges considerably from reality are ones in which it would have no practical value either way (i.e. one wouldn't have much use for Lobachevsky or Riemann while traveling at nine-tenths the speed of light either). 

What I mean by saying Euclid is wrong is that his ideas ultimately don't match up with the nature of things exactly (though, granted, they do provide great approximations in most cases).  He bases his assumptions so fundamentally on the idea that space is square that he doesn't even postulate it as such; it's a "given" on which his "givens" are based.  Any field of knowledge begins with these givens, and if Euclid, as one of the most rigorous logicians I can think of, has unstated givens buried in his work, how can we expect anyone else to avoid that same pitfall? 

Furthermore, what do those unstated givens say about the nature of reality?  Straight lines exist.  The universe makes sense on its own.  Humans can rationally understand everything given enough time and effort.  There's no magic in the world.  These conclusions are simply not true, though some may quibble over my use of the word "magic."

And let's be honest, it's givens akin to these that steer our thinking in most spheres.  One of the best rhetorical techniques I can think of is the unstated argument, which is when the rhetorician states an opinion as though it is irrefutable fact and then makes a claim based on that opinion.  At that point, he can either win or lose the battle over his secondary claim, but unless his opponent is shrewd enough to question his foundations, his initial opinion gets accepted without a struggle.  If this is a technique that works on adults, how can we expect children to wade through the unstated assumptions being thrown at them from secular sources?  And if I can make this case stick (assuming I have, of course) on a topic as benign as geometry, why would any Christian let his children be taught history or philosophy, or any other topic more broadly linked to Christian truths than math, by someone who doesn't share the same foundational ideas?  That's a difficult idea to get around, in my opinion.

However, I say this with a certain trepidation, because even Christians can have some entirely wonky ideas.  I remember being informed last year by one of my 8th-grade students, matter-of-factly, that the world was created in a seven-day period about six-thousand years ago.  While I don't think this impossible, and don't presume to know the truth is otherwise, I have plenty of compelling reasons to believe that the Earth is a lot older than that, and also that, whenever it was created, it wasn't simply "poofed" into existence during seven twenty-four hour time periods (and really, what sense can we attach to the word "day" when all is formless and void?). 

The problem here is that they think they know something, because they think the Bible says so.  While I certainly support the inerrancy of the Bible, I am far less convinced of the inerrancy of those reading it; even though the Bible never lies, people don't always understand what it's actually saying.  With a concept like the process of creation the consequences of getting it wrong seem negligible, but there are plenty of other concepts for which errors are not so harmless.  Hubris is a problem no matter who is in charge, and Christian schools are just as susceptible as secular ones.

That caveat aside, though, I do think Christian education is the way to go.  I'm becoming more and more at peace with teaching in the private Christian sector, and though my projected salary is a bit unnerving, I think I'll sleep better at night on a cheap, Christian-education fueled bed than I would on an expensive, sold-my-soul-to-public-school version.

So I've actually spent the past few days thinking about my last blog post.  Not the movie so much (though I'm still jazzed about it), rather the issue of man/woman interaction and its importance.

I'm not sure what to make of it, honestly.  Look almost anywhere in creation and you'll immediately find gender.  Sex is basically the goal of all lower animals, who end up doing all manner of ridiculous and embarrassing things to court mates (a fact that begins to sound eerily familiar when one thinks of a high school cafeteria or football game).  These tasks can include making strange noises, doing bizarre dances, and even putting shiny objects in a pile (again, eerily similar to many human practices, though sometimes more overt.  Sometimes).  While I like to think that we humans are different from the animals in this respect, I'm more and more convinced that we're really not.  We want sex, for whatever reason, and we do what we can to get it.

Now, speaking as someone who's never gotten it (and who knows plenty of people who have), maybe I'm not qualified to address the subject.  However, a lack of qualification has never stopped me from speaking my mind, so it certainly won't stop me from blogging it.  After all, anyone who reads this can only be doing so to get my opinion, whatever it's worth.

My gut reaction to this hypothesis (probably a theory, actually) is that, of course, this fixation on sex is a dirty, disgusting problem.  However, this merely betrays the facts (that sex really is a dirty, disgusting thing in a physical sense) and my own penchant for judgment, which is especially harsh on this topic.  The truth is, I see no indication that God designed things otherwise.  Procreation is a Biblical command, and sex is an obvious, necessary step in that process.  More explicit than that, there's the whole issue of Song of Solomon, which is still a great puzzlement to me since it doesn't seem to have anything to do with children, but plenty to do with <ahem> making them.  (Also, why is this in the Bible?  What's the point?  And how the hell did it ever get canonized?)  Of course, modern sexuality is grossly overdone, both in degree and in kind, and is fairly considered an aberration from the ideal.  At the same time, in an un-fallen world I'm quite sure Adam and Eve would have "done it."  Probably a few times, even.  Sometimes, maybe even twice in one day, though I hesitate to make such a bold, dangerous claim (read with sarcasm).  Properly understood, and kept in its place, sex is a great thing, though again, I have to go on the fact that other people seem to like it, as well as my own funny feelings at certain external stimuli (Vesper Lynd, I'm looking at you). 

Despite my insinuated bravado, I write that last statement hesitatingly, because there's a part of me that really hates the idea of sex.  Those of you who have met me know that I'm not a particularly warm person, and I like to think that I'm not flirtatious.  The truth is, I have issues being close to people.  Intimacy is something I want dearly, but that desire is something I tend to hate about myself.  It makes me feel weak, I guess.  Of course, I am weak, so maybe I just don't like the reminder.

Anyway, the waters are further muddied when I consider the image of Christ and the Church as a husband and wife.  Does this mean Christ has sex with the Church?  No, I don't think so.  Or at least, I can't imagine what that would even mean.  It does imply intimacy, though, on the level in which Christ knows all the faults and imperfections in his beloved, just as spouses no doubt come to know all of the blemishes and idiosyncrasies in their mates' bodies.  The relationship between God and Man is gendered, as is almost everything in the world God created, and the interaction between the two is described in gendered terms.

What, then is gender?  Why were things made this way and not any other?  Why don't people reproduce asexually (think splitting paramecium or budding yeast cells.  With humans, this would probably be kind of gross...)?  Why are people split into two groups with fundamental, far-reaching differences between the two, both in terms of capability and role?  And why are the relationships between these two halves so all-encompassing, so deeply moving that they drive their constituents to feats of both epic greatness and ultimate betrayal?

Maybe that last question answers the others.  Maybe we're split into halves because that demonstrates how incomplete we are by ourselves, and thus gives us an obvious need for something external to fill our respective voids.  Maybe God made woman so that man would be Man.  Then maybe, after cutting his teeth on the awe and movement of the love of a woman, Man would be suitably whetted for the infinitely deeper and more fundamental love of his creator. 

Maybe this explains Song of Solomon. 

Then again, maybe Solomon was just mad horny.