To do

• Write and send AAR student rep. report at lunch
• Reply to Susie's note
• Find ticket and go to art exhibit this evening
• Go out to school and print ms. on Saturday
• 90th anniversary celebration at church Sunday; help clean up afterwards since I won't be helping with preparations on Saturday

It is finished

The evil deed is done. The ax has fallen. Our department has been wiped out—at least its current personnel have all been cut. But the company's lay-off procedures have advanced from its former slash-and-burn days. We actually get two weeks notice, and full-time employees (not me) get severance. The company is also offering employees assistance in finding work elsewhere, either within the company or externally. It's been a fascinating morning observing how the lay-offs are being executed. It's quite a shock for many people, I'm sure, but hopefully they will find something else soon.

Of course I feel somewhat apprehensive about what might happen next, but at the same time, I'm not too worried (at least at the moment). There are people working on arranging possible positions for me. Also, there is the whole other side of my life (i.e., school) that has been shoved to the periphery about which I need to be making some decisions, or at least some progress. So, a little goading probably is not a bad thing.

But it is difficult to concentrate today. Fortunately, my current tasks don't require full attention.

The end of the week

Well. It's here. The weekend, which will be just as busy as the week, only different. With the uncertainty at work, I'm working as much as I can while I can....When you're told to make sure to finish the department policy and procedures' manual soon, you know something's up.

On Monday I went to school, picked up the ms. I've been helping out with, and entered the edits my professor made. Now I just need to double-check a few things, and it should be ready to print. The problem is finding time to go out to school to print it when the computer lab manager is around, just in case. (Most recent word processing lesson learned: Make sure the Auto Correct/Auto Format feature "Match parentheses" is de-selected or else all the ’alephs that are typed by using the right parenthesis in the transliteration font will morph into a strange character, and you will have to double-check all the transliterated Hebrew words throughout the 600 page ms.)

The rest of the week I went to work. My boss will be taking a three-month leave, beginning next week. Signs of further change are obvious. Senior managers are meeting often behind closed doors. Senior managers seem to be having difficulty looking one straight in the eyes.

Tomorrow I'm meeting my aunt who is flying to So. Cal. from Washington to run in a half-marathon in Long Beach. Sunday I play the piano for two church services again.

With everything that's happening, last weekend I escaped into an Iris Murdoch novel, Nuns and Soldiers. I'd never read any Iris Murdoch novels before. I rather liked it, especially the ideas in it and Murdoch's depictions of the experience—with all its confusion and uncertainty yet powerfulness—of being in love. I marked quite a few passages.

Any artist who is not a beginner faces the problem of enlarging into a working space that runs between 'just begun' and 'too late.' The hard work lies in the middle, when preliminaries are done, and the end is not yet enclosing the form. This is the space which longs to collapse, which the artist's strength must faithfully keep open. Tim was vaguely aware of this, but he was idle and lacked confidence (p. 124).

Of course, I read the above in terms of being a Ph.D. student. Or this, about Anne, who had left the cloistered life of a nun, and whose faith was being re-formed:

Anne knew how terribly close, for human beings, all things spiritual lie to the deep fires of the demonic. Concerning this, she waited, she cultivated still the metaphysics of waiting. And she noticed in herself, like the slow growth of an innocent indifferent plant, a renewed impulse toward worship and toward some kind of prayer. What kind of prayer this new prayer would turn out to be she did not yet know (pp. 312-13).

Murdoch's writing is wonderfully concrete, for example, when she describes the Count, who lives alone and listens to the radio.

He hated television. He lived in a radio world. He listened to everything, news, talks, plays (especially thrillers), political discussions, philosophical discussions, nature programs, proms, symphony concerts, opera, the Archers, Women's Hour, A Hundred Best Tunes, Desert Island Discs, On Your Farm, Any Questions, Any Answers. At some times of the year the steadily changing weekly copies of the Radio Times seemed the most evident movement of his life's clock....At times, sitting alone at night and listening to the gale warnings, for Fastnet, Hebrides, Fair Isle, Faroes, the Count had sometimes upbraided himself for wanting so ardently to console his beloved (pp. 35, 116).

Listening to gale warnings for far away places reminds me of listening to traffic reports for freeways I won't be taking that day when my clock radio awakens me early in the morning.

Burrito Express

[Written Sunday, October 6, 2002] I'm sitting at Burrito Express, my manna-from-heaven source. I wonder how many bean and cheese burritos, spicy, I've eaten during the three years I've lived in this neighborhood? A bean and cheese burrito, spicy, is the ultimate in comfort and convenience food. It is hot, soft, fairly nutritious, and filling. The restaurant—except restaurant isn't quite the word, even though there are three tables with benches squeezed inside where you order and tables outside under an awning and surrounded by a wainscoting-level wall with a two-foot wrought iron railing fence on top of the wall—is excellently situated on my way to the freeway when going to school and on my way home when I come back. A traffic light conveniently lets one get back on the busy street after picking up a burrito. And a burrito, expertly wrapped, can be eaten with one hand while driving. Today I'm sitting in the lately hot late afternoon sun with my back to the busy street and have almost finished my burrito.

On my drive here via the cash machine, I wanted to write everything I saw and remembered, like Laura's Chinese notebook(s?). Except that I'm writing on the back of a print-out of my sister and brother-in-law's wedding registry. (I still have to get their gift; according to the Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, it is acceptable to give a wedding gift up to one year after the wedding.)

There was a woman I'd see when I used to hang out at coffee shops, back when I was a "real" student when I first moved to California. She had three or four journals she would hold up to her face and speak into as though they were dictating machines.

At the cash machine I heard two men talking behind me, and I knew they were speaking Armenian. I tried to figure out how I knew it was Armenian—it's sort of guttural and the diction is quite deliberate. But would I be able to identify it if I was in a place I didn't know there were people who spoke Armenian?

[Today] I wrote more but have recorded enough. I am tired and blank.

Gladwell articles

I just came across a site (via Arts & Letters Daily) that archives Malcolm Gladwell's articles from The New Yorker (and other publications). I've been carrying around the August 5 issue because I wanted to comment on Gladwell's article, "The Naked Face: Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them?"

What intrigued me, besides the people who are very skilled at picking up give-away clues from the subtlest facial expressions, is that certain physical expressions produce certain emotional effects—and not just the other way around. Two researchers, Paul Ekman and J. J. Newberry, sat across a table and "made faces" at each other in order to catalogue all possible facial expressions. They realized after making sad and angry expressions at each other all day, they truly felt sad and angry.

Catch-up entry

Sometimes when you don't do the things you should do on a daily (or even weekly...) schedule, you have to cram it all in 45 minutes when you're on your way to somewhere that takes 45 minutes and you've left yourself 45 minutes to get there. So this morning, when I was heading out the door at 9:15 to get somewhere by 10:00, my landlords, who live next door, said they wanted to install an overhead fan in my bedroom TODAY, and that they didn't know until last night that the installer would be available, which was why they were asking permission to go into my duplex today, as I was on my way out the door. Well, my house was in its usual chaotic mess, including a sink plus counter of unwashed dishes and a bedroom of heaped up clothes, not to mention a kitchen floor liberally sprinkled with cinnamon to discourage the ants who were attacking my unwashed dishes. I told them I was very unhappy for the short—no, non-existent—advance notice, and harumphed back into the house to tidy up at least a little. The clothes got picked up, many of them just thrown into the dirty clothes' basket because it was quicker than hanging them up. And then I washed most of the dishes. I was truly embarrassed by how long I'd let the dishes stack up. A good part of my irritation was at myself for being such a housekeeping slob; if I kept things tidier, I wouldn't have to worry about the landlords dropping by with no notice.

*****

Forty-five minutes later, fuming because I was so late, I drove the 45 minutes to Torrance (only possible when you can drive 65 mph on the 110 freeway through downtown LA) to a Lutheran church that was holding a forum as part of a multi-year study in the Lutheran (ELCA) church on homosexuality. One question being debated is:

Should North American Lutherans ordain gay and lesbian persons to the ministry of Word and Sacrament; and if so, should gay and lesbian pastors be required to be celibate?

The second question:

Should North American Lutheran clergy bless committed relationships between gay and lesbian persons; and if so, should these relationships be recognized as marriages?

I was particularly interested in how the presenters (one of whom is a Hebrew Bible [Old Testament] professor at a local Lutheran university) addressed the issue of scriptural authority within the Lutheran tradition. Lutherans, following Martin Luther, clearly have a "hierarchy" of scripture in which certain parts of scripture take precedence over other parts. How is that hierarchy determined? What is the "governing principle"? Does the principle come from scripture itself or from outside scripture? For Christians, what is the place of the Hebrew Bible? These are very basic, long-standing questions that have been investigated by others much more profoundly, but which I want to explore and formulate myself.

*****

Today it rained for the first time in months. It was a very happy event. Last Sunday a huge fire started in the foothills east of where I live and that I drive by on my way to school. Coming from work from the opposite direction on Monday, we could see the thick layer of smoke that had blown westward. That night and next morning the light from the sun was red from being filtered through the smoke, and my car and plants were covered with a dusting of ash. Tuesday afternoon I drove out to Claremont past the huge cumulus tower of smoke that had not yet been disbursed; the rest of the sky was much clearer than at home. Tuesday night the hills were red with flames in my rearview mirror as I drove home. Wednesday I drove to Claremont again; the smoke had been disbursed into a low blanket over the entire sky, and the hills were difficult to see. I watched a water-dropping helicopter land not far from the freeway, to re-fill with water I suppose. Driving home, the nearby foothills that had already burned were pockmarked with greyish ash. On TV I saw pictures of firefighters climbing up the steep hillsides carrying firehoses, arranged like the firehoses in those glass boxes in public buildings, strapped onto their backs. The first days of the fire it was over 100 degrees in that area. Thankfully, the weather is much cooler now, and the fire is reported to be nearly contained.

*****

On Tuesday night I was a substitute lecturer in a Hebrew class (which was why I drove out to Claremont at the height of the fire). On the drive out, my alternator decided it was just too hot, and it didn't want to function any more. Fortunately, I was fairly close to the mechanic I'd located in Claremont for the occasions my car can't make it home to my regular mechanic, and the engine didn't quit on the very-crowded-with-no-shoulder street. Fortunately, too, the mechanic was able to replace the alternator in time for me not to be late to my class. The class went OK in spite of the fire raging close by and my car trouble.

*****

Thursday evening we went out for dinner at Yujean Kang's with some business partners and our former colleague. It was an evening of excellent food and fun company. We had three appetizers and a number of main dishes including—my favorite—ants on a tree, crispy beef, chicken with squash, duck, Blue Lake green beans, and probably something else.

*****

I am tired of writing. This is why I should post on a regular basis, so I don't have to cram a week's worth of writing into one session....

Labyrinth



As my cube-wall partner says, Throw a question out into the universe and an answer will come back. Well, I suppose you have to be listening for the answer and then willing to take the step of at least provisionally identifying what you hear as an answer.

On Saturday I drove out to Pacific Palisades to walk a labyrinth built into the hill behind St. Matthew's Episcopal Church. I had never walked one before, and, no, nothing earth shattering happened. But I am intrigued by what could happen and why such a simple act could be profound.

Labyrinths have recently been "rediscovered" as an ancient practice that can help people cultivate a deeper inward life. The Episcopalian Grace Cathedral in San Francisco is a center reviving the use of labyrinths. Dr. Lauren Artress, who directs the program, has written a book, Walking the Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool, describing her uncovering of the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, replicating its pattern and measurements at Grace Cathedral, and then inviting people to walk the labyrinth.

At the Grace Cathedral site there is a directory of registered labyrinths, many of which are open to the public. Or, if you're driving on Pacific Coast Highway, stop by St. Matthew's and take a walk!