I Can Take Zero Five-Year-Olds in a Fight

Erin beat me up last night.

I was lying on the couch and she was playing with one of her toys, a hard plastic cube with holes in the side that she can push shapes through. And she was playing right near my head, and I'm sure she just wanted to show me something, and bam the whole weight of the thing falls right on my lip.

So I yelled a bit (not at Erin), and when I got back from spitting blood into the bathroom sink, Erin's looking up at me with the saddest eyes. Cheryl prompts her, "Tell Daddy..."

Erin starts to say something, but just then, the theme song for The Office comes on, so she dances to that for a bit. And when it's over, Cheryl prompts her again, and Erin looks up at me and says, "Sorry, daddy."

And she looks like she's about to cry, and that's what hurt me. I give her a hug and tell her it was an accident and I love her.

So that's the story of my bloody lip.

QOTD

You know, I’m not sure I see much of a difference between being treated to ads featuring the objectification of women, the emasculation of men, and the glorification of consumerism — and issue advocacy ads. Fact is, I might prefer the latter, no matter who they’re from. Still, it’s funny to see so many in the media treat the former advertisements as pure and holy and the latter as somehow corrupt.

The Super Bowl Depresses Me

This is the commercial event of the TV year. Ad time is expensive out the butt, and you know it's the most experienced, highest-paid ad firms that are designing these things. This ought to be the best we can do, in terms of making good commercials.

And this is what we get? I mean, fiddling beavers are great an' all, but can we really come up with nothing wittier than beer houses?

(And I was so offended by that ridiculous anti-choice Tebow ad. How dare she?)

Put Out into Deep Water

I've had a bad week. It's been stress, I'm sure, but for the first three days this week I was feeling overwhelmed and under-inspired--fed up with school and frustrated by not having anything interesting to say to a secular academic audience about the spiritual autobiographies I'm reading (not that I had anything interesting to say to a nonsecular audience either, but I wasn't trying to have something to say, so that's moot). And the frustration was making me generally mopey and uncomfortable and no fun to be around. But whatever--I've always felt God's grace most powerfully de profundis, and I've been trying to lean on Him.

So my penance this morning was reflection on this Sunday's Gospel.

I think the default understanding of this text is a call to evangelization, with Christ's pronouncement that Simon would now be catching men as the climax of this passage. Yes, certainly. But what spoke to me this morning was this text's being a call to deeper prayer.

After listening to Christ's word, the thing to do is to "put out into deep water." To go into the deep and dark places in my soul and cast my net, trusting in God that what I will find there will lead to His blessings. I need to open myself to Him, all of me, not just my daily life but everything I am, even when my daily prayer--my daily attempts to do this on my own--have met with no perceptible growth. Even when I've been fishing all night and caught nothing.

Of course when I cast out into the deep of my soul, I will have to confront the fact of my sin, more pervasive and perverse than I imagine in my complacency. This is Peter's confession in the Gospel. I cannot truly give God the reverence He deserves until I've cast off into the deep and met both my own sinfulness and God's abundant mercy, and until I do that, any argument aimed at the conversion of others (or my own self-justification), any attempt at "catching men" is premature.

I Have a New Computer!

For the first time in my life, I purchased a computer on my own with my own money, and now I get to play with it all day. It weighs 2.4 pounds and had Skype already installed. So now I will never get any work done.

Related, the comment spam prompted me to finally put up the word verification thing (it's not like hordes of folks are commenting, anyways). First the post, from almost 7 years ago:

eft the house with sixty two cords. eight for a coke to get change for the bus. two-fifty for the bus. forty four-fifty for lunch at tip-top (the taste of great times, the menu says). five for half an hour of internet.

i leave broke, but full of chicken sandwich that tasted just like momma used to buy at burger king, sundays after church.

nineteen eighty eight, take me back to nineteen eighty seven...

It's a great post. Now-obscure reference to Nicaraguan currency, fast-food in-joke that's less funny if you don't pronounce it "Teep Tope," Ozma lyrics. And this is the comment it elicited:

Technology really has become one with our daily lives, and I can say with 99% certainty that we have passed the point of no return in our relationship with technology.

I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside... I just hope that as memory gets less expensive, the possibility of downloading our memories onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I daydream about almost every day.

Oddly, oddly appropriate.

Beyond AIDS: A Journey into Healing

By page six, he's already invoked the "people in the middle ages thought the world was flat" myth, and misspelled the word "its."

I'm really looking forward to the next 139 pages.

Let's Count Your Snaps

Conversation getting dressed yesterday:

"Let's count your snaps. Ready? One..."

"One."

"Two..."

"Two."

"What's next?"

"Three."

"What's after three?"

"Four."

"What's next?"

"Five."

"What's after five?"

"Two."

"Really? What's after two?"

"Six."

"What's after six?"

"Four."

"What's after four?"

"Six."

"And what's after six?"

"Eat!" It was just about snack time, as I recall.

"Ok," taking the bait, "what's after eat?"

"Ate!"

Or maybe she meant "eight." Yeah, prob'ly that. But it sure sounded witty of her at the time.

Snow Day

(If you look really, really close, you can see my reflection in the drop.)

Girl is on a mission!

Do I look like my hat?

On a related note, can anyone explain what photographic effect is going on here to make Erin look like she's got an aura? Or is this just more proof that God has special plans for her?

In Which I Dream of Fish

This is a week old now. But I want to post it anyways because, as we all know, there's nothing more interesting than reading about someone else's week-old dreams.

Let’s see if I can get this down in 10 minutes before I start working.

The main scene was on a big ship, like a cruise ship. There’d been brought on board some large containers with dangerous contents, like giant animal crates. I was uneasy, but I knew they were supposed to fit in the cargo hold in the ship. Lots of people milling about. The things must have gotten out, and they were despair. Giant fish, like piranhas ten feet across, except the only one I saw up close had its jaw hinged almost all the way back at the tail, so it looked like Pac-Man. But they were slow. Grey and slow and oblivious, but dangerous. They all had names, like the different curses they all were. The only one I remember was called “The children shall become human.” It may have been “will become” or just “become.”

On the deck of the ship there was an older woman—old but not frail, in a grey and pink jacket, I think. She was sitting on the deck with her back to the outer hull and her knees up in front of her, head down. “The children shall become human” had gotten to her, though I didn’t understand how, or why that sort of thing should be despair. But I could see her, slowly fading into sadness from which, I knew how this would end, she would not recover. I was afraid.

Then the things were no longer on the boat, but in the water around it, threatening us silently. A girl jumped in. Long wavy hair and she treaded there in the water, purposeful but sad as the things approached her to—what? Bite her? Eat her? Drag her under? I had a vague idea she’d done it to save us.

Now the things were mermaids, or better sirens, and I knew they were going to be with us for the whole trip, wherever the ship was going. I stood at the bough and looked down into the water, as the wavy-haired girl sank (but didn’t go away, really) and I was afraid because I didn’t know how it was going to be possible to resist the sirens when they called. I knew they must be resisted, that they were bad or evil or just dangerous, but I also knew that if they called, I wasn’t supposed to be able to resist.

And I remember playing with something like watery peanut butter with coffee grounds in it, pushing it around the inside of a red peanut butter jar lid with a piece of wheat sandwich bread.

And that’s when I woke up, still with a sense of fear and impending despair. My alarm was going off silently—the radio tuner drifts sometimes, and it must have drifted overnight because before I went to bed I made sure to check that it was set to a radio station. But it was just 6 minutes past 5:00 (I’d planned to get up at 5:00). I was afraid to get out of bed.

Before the dream there were other details—talking with my father-in-law who at first looked like and then turned into Brian, and whom Cheryl referred to as “daddy,” which sounded strange to me.

I know where some of the details came from. The cruise ship from the episode of The Office we just saw. The wavy-haired girl was from a picture of St. Agnes I’d just seen. The coffee grounds were the fudge bits at the bottom of my malted milk last night. Sirens because we’d been talking about Ariel in class the other day. The children being human, maybe, because of today’s tragic anniversary. I have no idea about the piranhas.

If This Is My Last Post

it's because the snow is blowing sideways it's so windy, and right outside the window, there's a giant light post over the track, and I'm pretty sure that if it fell over, the writing center would be done with.

When I Got Home Yesterday

Erin didn't hear me at first, but when I stuck my head through the door between the kitchen and the dining room, she looked up from where she was at the desk in the living room. And she threw her arms up in the air, and yelled and ran, mouth open, across both rooms to give me a big hug.

Now that's nice to come home to.