Nate Knows Nada

So in reading a post from Vernica yesterday regarding AKMA’s presentation at BloggerCon, I had a suspiscion of mine confirmed.

When I was home in the Bay Area a couple of weeks ago for the wedding,
I had dinner with a friend, and he asked me why it is I write this
blog.  “What’s the attraction?” he wanted to know.  I can’t
explain all of it, but I was able to finally stumble into the idea that
blogging is in part a form of prayer.

Writing has been a form of prayer for hundreds of years, in all the
spiritual traditions, in the work of the Kabbalahists to Teresa of
Avila and Julian of Norwich to Thomas Merton to the Sufi mystics to
Pascal’s Pensees.  If
I’m learning anything about prayer in my own life, it’s that it’s not
just in the form of sitting down, bowing the head, and trying to
replicate the prayer experience of my Sunday School past.  It’s
about talking to God in whatever way that’s possible for us.  The
limit is on our end, not the Holy One’s (blessed be He or She). 
In other words, God does not need us to pray in a particular way –
it’s we who need to pray in a particular way, due to our limitedness.

So when I write, I pray.  And sometimes when I pray, I
write.  And sometimes I mull over things in the shower and
suddenly realize that I am praying, as happened this morning.  For
example, I got a yucky e-mail from my dad last night, and I can tell
that all that’s going on in his life is rocking his world right now,
from my gayness to the fact that my grandfather appears to be
emotionally abusing my grandmother to the fact that my mom had major
surgery a couple of weeks ago to his idea that I won’t communicate with
him and my mom (what appears to have happened is that he hasn’t checked
his home e-mail account to see my response, and so he thinks that I am
in the process of cutting them off).  As he concluded, “I used to
think I had, on some level, a charmed life. If things were not
brilliant, they at least seemed to go smoothly, no real problems of any
kind. Now when I see how things are in my family, I feel like we are
all characters in discarded draft of a play by Tennessee Williams. When
I hear people occasionally talk of the second coming and the end of our
problem-filled lives on this earth, it seems a more welcome prospect
than I have ever found it before.”

So, as I stood in the shower, I was thinking about the situation and
how I had responded (I wrote back a couple of hours after I got the
e-mail), and I found myself hoping for compassion to deal with the
situation.  And then I found myself feeling thankful that I can be
around for my friend Edward, who’s dealing with the closet and love and
life and work, all of which are quite full.  And then I realized
that thinking through these occurences, reflecting on them, and perhaps
seeing the transcendent in them was praying.

Moreso, since I wasn’t in any sort of “prayer mode,” my mind was free
to listen, to “wander”, to do what and go where it needed to.

And I felt at peace with all of that, with yesterday.  And writing it out has furthered that.

Is it a bit scary to pray here, where others can read what’s going
on?  Yeah, but here’s the thing.  I believe that God is found
in each of us (panentheism), that each face is the face of God, and in my particular
religion, the face of Christ.  Bits of the God-spark live in each
of us.  By sometimes praying while writing and letting other people
read it, I’m not praying to any of you out there.  But we all may
be the agents of change for each other, working out our lives with and
for one another, helping to create the kingdom of God here on earth, in
our lives.

Or I could just be babbling on….  *grin*

Two quotes from Louis Menand’s New Yorker review of the new edition (15th) of the Chicago Manual of Style, which I have been coveting….

“Some people will complain that the new ‘Chicago Manual’ is too
long.  These people do not understand the nature of style. 
There is, if not a right way, a best way to do every single thing, down
to the proverbial dotting of the ‘i.’  Relativism is fine for the
big moral questions, where we can never know for sure; but in arbitrary
realms like form and usage even small doses of relativism are
lethal.  The ‘Manual’ is not too long.  It is not long
enough.  It will never be long enough.  The perfect manual
of style would be like the perfect map of the world: exactly
coterminous with its subject, containing a rule of every word of every
sentence.  We would need an extra universe to accommodate it. 
It would be worth it.”

“First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program. 
Its terribleness is of a piece with the terribleness of Windows
generally, a system so overloaded with icons, menus, buttons and
incomprehensible Help windows that performing almost any function means
entering a treacherous wilderness of  pop-ups posing alternatives
of terrifying starkness: Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut
Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do Not Show This Warning Again. 
You often feel that you’re not ready to make a decision so unalterable;
but when you try to make the window go away your machine emits an angey
beep.  You double-click.  You triple-click.  Beep beep beep beep beep.  You are being held for a fool by a chip.”

He then goes on to discuss Word’s propensity to get in the way. 
Especially funny are the bit about the paper clip (”Never, btw [which,
unlike "poststructuralism," is a word in Word spellcheck] ask that
androgenous paperclip anything.  S/he is just a stooge for
management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options….”) and the
blue underlining of URLs, which he notes, “There is undoubtedly a way
to reset this, but it is deep within the bowels of the machine, guarded
by dozens of angry pop-ups.  Microsoft wants you to go on the Internet.”

It’s amazing what a good piece of writing can do.  This is a
review of the Chicago Manual, for heaven’s sake.  It’s a generally
dull book, but Menand writes some of the freshest prose I have ever
read about the dull mechanics of writing.

My dad likes the paper clip.  In an e-mail to me, he once wrote,
“I am really quite amused by the little paperclip icon with the googly
eyes. It looks all around the screen, blinks, dozes off, twists itself
into different shapes, and seems a great deal like a small pet. Very
cute.”

I just typed a long but boring message here, but the computer erased it somehow.

So let me just say “G’mar chasima tova,” to all our Jewish sisteren and
bretheren.  May you be inscribed for another year….

A few new links over in the navigation section.  I read these folks enough that it’s time to recognize that.

Life seems to finally have settled into a routine for the
semester.  I’ve set a couple of days a week just for me, to get my
work done.  (Today is ostensibly one of those, but I haven’t done
much yet….)  I met my advisor yesterday, and the meeting was
really productive and encouraging.

Also, I bought a bike.  I want to ride with a group, but the
Harvard University Cycling Assoc. is pretty hard core, seemingly on a
path to get people ready to compete, which is something I’m fairly
uninterested in, I have to say. Also, with these early morning rides
and my lack of cold weather gear (yet — I’ll get some, but I just
bought a new bike…), I’m not so inclined to go.

But it’s nice to be in a routine — I know I need it, and it’s good to have some regularity back in life.

Oh, and the A’s beat the
Sox last night — it disturbs relationship bliss a bit, as BF is a
Boston fan, but I’m sure we’ll be just fine after the A’s move onto the
League championships.

All right, I’d better go read some Abe Lincoln.