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| Tuesday February 02 |
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[12:16 am] this semester...
...is well underway, and it's going to be another whirlwind of divers scholarly activities. Seminars I'm taking are Asian Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind (Reasons and Reductionism), and Kant's Critique. Although I'm basically back to bachelorhood, I don't feel as though I suddenly have gobs of time on my hands—there is plenty to do. I'm TA-ing four discussion sections out of a lecture-hall "Philosophy and Social Ethics" course, and finally feel as though I'm getting my "teaching legs"; after hemming and hawing my way through the previous three semesters being my usual mumbly fumbly self, I feel as though an appropriate "person-in-front-of-the-classroom" persona is beginning to emerge. It's all about selling yourself. Not such a bad thing, if that's what it takes to get the material across. I've also been getting a bit more involved in service opportunities at church, and at a ceremony just yesterday attained my Knights of Columbus second and third degrees (having joined in the first degree last September). I haven't actually done any K of C service yet, but expect to before long. They're a pretty super organization with a lot of swell guys.I'm looking forward to flying to Dallas this weekend where I'll spent a few days with my beautiful children that I have dearly missed, who will be driven up from Stephenville. It's great to have generously hospitable relatives there who can host us while I visit. My Mom is actually flying out there too. It should be a good time, plus my birthday and the Super Bowl is this Sunday. (When it rains, it pours!) There are still umpteen blog posts on the Catholic Church burning a hole in my pocket that I hope eventually to begin to unload, someday... |
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| | Monday January 18 |
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[10:21 pm] The Only Day in Existence (by Billy Collins; hat tip to Christie!)
The early sun is so pale and shadowy,
I could be looking up at a ghost
in the shape of a window,
a tall, rectangular spirit
looking down at me in bed,
about to demand that I avenge
the murder of my father.
But the morning light is only the first line
in the play of this day—
the only day in existence—
the opening chord of its long song,
or think of what is permeating
the thin bedroom curtains
as the beginning of a lecture
I will listen to until it is dark,
a curious student in a V-neck sweater,
angled into the wooden chair
of his life,
ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,
quiet as a goldfish in winter,
serious as a compass at sea,
eager to absorb whatever lesson
this damp, overcast Tuesday
has to teach me,
here in the spacious classroom of the world
with its long walls of glass,
its heavy, low-hung ceiling. |
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| | Tuesday January 12 |
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[11:46 pm] transitions
Movers came out a few days before Christmas to move out Deidra's and the kids' stuff and send it off on its journey to Texas. I spent Christmas at my parents' in California with the kids, while Deidra was with her parents. Then I flew back to Dallas with them, dropped them off at the airport with their Mom, and spent New Year's with my grandparents, aunt, uncles, and cousins there. On New Year's Day I flew back to Connecticut and came home to a pretty empty house. That the kids don't live here anymore is something that had to gradually set in, with grief. That they're my children, and I'm their father, and I can't be there most of the time to be their Dad continues to feel just wrong. When you bring your own children into the world, it's with no thought, ever, that they're going to be children of divorce. That's a real grief that's going to need time to find a permanent place. In order to get through over the long haul, feelings that acute will have to be sublimated somehow, but not ignored or left to molder over.
It's not like I'll ever not be their Dad. Which is to say, I have to work with the situation as it's been given me and act like it on purpose. In ways both good in mercy and bad in principle, they're going to grow up not really knowing any different. I've been talking to the kids on the phone a lot, and will come visit them a few times this spring, as well as for a spell over the summer. It will help a lot that when they get a computer, I'll be able to video chat with them via gmail or Skype (the one everyone talks about but with which I've had no personal experience). Continuity will continue, in whatever ways are available to me, and the fatherly concern that makes for the grief will also make for the motivation for it. I'll just have to keep being a presence in their lives in whatever way I can, even as I move on to a different life.
A whole new life is what it is, too. A passive-aggressive sham of a marriage fell to an EPIC FAIL of one, and my finding out on August 24th of last year that it was too late was, well, too late. Not much else about that that would be appropriate to expound upon here, but in any case I'm back with my own life to live and establish, and with what really seems like quite a different outlook and set of values than it was for the 25-year-old me.
When I was 18 (ach! was I ever?), I looked back on my life up to then and realized it could be divided rather neatly into three six-year periods (imagine having only just that extent of life experience to work with!). Going forward from there, it's kind of interesting that it's continued to roughly fall into six-year phases. My seven-year "attempt" at "marriage" doesn't fall neatly into one of them, but one represents most of it. It seems like my adulthood so far has only taken the form of a long and fitful birthing, only to really start now, as a newly single and unyoked person (legally, the proceedings have basically just begun but should conclude in relatively short order). Putting it all out in terms of those six-year periods outlines how I look at it retrospectively.
1976–1982: Pre-Singapore
1982–1988: Singapore
1988–1994: Post-Singapore
1994–2000: College and Limbo (awful period)
2000–2006: Settling
2006–2012(?): Transitions
(Nice how the end of the current stage coincides helpfully with the end of the world!) Most of the divisions should be self-explanatory based on labels and then-ages. The last two need some explanation. "Settling": firstly trying to settle with graduate school in organic chemistry and it not "taking" to me—okay, that's still "limbo," in a way... but then settling in Austin with a long-term job, deciding it was time to find me a woman and "settle down" that way. Then I discovered philosophy and a few years later decided I needed to be doing that for a living. (Start of "Transitions" stage.) I went for it. And went for it again. And moved for it, and started to do it. And having found that the "one holy, catholic, and apostolic church" had been there waiting for me all along, decided it was worth my while to up and join it. My "marriage," being basically that only in name all along and my having done nothing to make it anything else, crashed out. And now I'm at the beginning of a big "Reset," more impassioned and motivated than I have been before, by my Catholic faith and chosen academic vocation, no longer waiting for life to "really" begin nor marking the time with nothing to break me out of the stupor of passivity. The future is bright, the challenges many and humbling. Thank you. This has been blog post #450. Good night. |
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| | Tuesday December 29 |
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[12:54 pm] on love
In the undergraduate "Philosophy and Social Ethics" course I TA'd for this last semester, we spent the last few weeks discussing Plato's Symposium, which is all about different conceptions of what love is. It's pretty all over the place, and is really only all about eros, of "The Four Loves". And the course lectures didn't distinguish between these, but talked as though eros were materially equivalent to the English "love." So without those distinctions, it can seem as though when we're talking about the characteristics of eros, that these are the characteristics of love, simpliciter.
In any case, some of what is discussed in the Symposium, and in lecture, does apply to how the Judeo-Christian monotheist (like myself) conceives of love in the eternal, God-rooted sense of agape—in other words, what must be the most fundamental "kind" of love—and that can also be manifested in the best of human relationships. One thing that was brought up in lecture at some point, I don't remember the specific connection to Symposium, was the idea of some sort of self-reinforcing love between the mutually loved. This was something I thought worth emphasizing to the students in my discussion sections, because I think that really gets at what love is really supposed to be. I drew the below diagram on the board illustrating how it's supposed to be, and what happens when agape, charity, loses its place in the relation.
As I've discussed before, persons are essentially relational, and so human persons, as such, are meant to have certain interpersonal relations with one another. (This much should seem obvious, at least from a commonsensical standpoint.) The dispositions that are already there between people, that instance their essential relationality, make it the case that there is the potential for either situation A or situation B, as represented above, obtaining.
In situation A, which could be described as a part of the "Beatific Vision" of heaven itself, there is an upward spiral in which each person tries to outdo one another in pleasing the other, giving ever more inspiration to agape, which itself plays an indispensable role in the relation: without it, each person will be looking to see whether they are being loved as part of deciding whether, themselves, to love. Agape is thus a necessary condition for heavenly love, whose ecstatic perfection knows no bounds. Situation A is, in fact, what an ideal marriage looks like.
And thus, the given interpersonal relations that make for the possibility for situation A obtaining entails also the possibility of situation B obtaining. In B we find what is wrong with all human relationships that go wrong; all kinds of insecurities keep people from withholding love until they are first loved, and there is a self-reinforcing cycle there, too, a Cycle of Resentment, that takes the form of a downward spiral. And I think this really applies to a large part of the Problem of Evil: why does God allow all the pain that comes from broken relationships that are instances of B above? Because, as just mentioned, the possibility for A entails the possibility of B. The possibility of B cannot be ruled out without also ruling out the possibility for A.
Given the topic of Love, the professor in this class discussed a lot of the content of the Symposium in the form of "love advice," more or less. For the students in my discussion sections, I only had to add to that a cautionary note from my own experience, which I shared with them at the very end of our last discussion, in the form of another diagram, this here. I dearly wish someone had put something like that to me many years ago. |
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| | Friday December 04 |
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[7:35 pm] more kids
John continues to grow like a weed, while remaining a finicky eater. He has been sleeping a lot lately, such as going down for his nap in the late afternoon and then sleeping right through the night. I don't think I've mentioned that a few months ago he graduated from using a booster seat at the dinner table to not using one at all. Like he did with the high chair, he just seemed to get really fed up with it, so going straight to the big-boy chair was the answer! He has sort of lost interest in going "potty" these days; the novelty has worn off and he's over it, except occasionally if we suggest it... and if he doesn't say "no," which tends to be his stock answer to everything. John is pretty sensitive, and seems to find a lot of things "scary" ("keh-yeh"). He's scared of the dark and shadows, and of anything emphasizing the eyes. You know how in a cartoon when somebody's in the dark and only their eyes show up? When that happens, even in his favorite show Calliou, he gets terrified and cries. Laurel, by the way, loves Dinosaur Train.
John continues to pick up more and more words and phrases, always surprising us. Awhile ago I had noticed a bit of a stuttering tendency in him (not that big a surprise, really), and for a spell it seemed to get rather pronounced and severe (which really upset Deidra). Now it's gone back to being more subtle, but still there. Hopefully with therapy or whatever that can be taken care of. I know for me, over a period of years at a certain point in my life it was the very bane of my existence.
Laurel is multi-talented, in case you hadn't figured that out. She loves to dance and to sing, and is very artistic. She loves to draw, and has taken advantage of the drawing tools on the computer (the AppleWorks program, specifically) to make a number of quite striking creations, a generous sampling of which, them being in electronic form, I can share with you...
"Rainbow Girl"
"Talking"
"They Both Need to Go to the Bathroom"
"Black & White"
"Opening a Door"
"Very Happy Girl"
"Two Mermaids"
"Red Dress"
"Army Man"
"Sprinkle Sparkle Girl"
"Red Girl with Blue Dress"
"Sun-Lipstick" |
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| | Tuesday November 10 |
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[11:16 pm] kids' stuff
Yikes, another month come and gone since my last stopgap post. Time for another stopgap post. I won't even try to describe how busy I've been, but...John has been (adorably) picking up all the polite expressions. He says "kee-ko" (thank you), "koo-me" (excuse me), and I think maybe some form of you're welcome, too. His latest little thing is to say "Oh." when we tell him something. He's getting noticeably bigger, but I don't know how, seeing as how he hardly seems to eat anything, especially at dinner. Laurel has lost three teeth, in rather quick succession, on the lower row. She's enjoying her ballet class, and seems to have picked up some nice moves from it that she displays in her everyday around-the-house dancing, which anyone who had spent any time around the Steve & Holly Newman household when any of my sisters were little girls would immediately recognize. She has been doing some pre-reading school work in Kindergarten, and her reading skills are coming along very well—she can read lots of words now! |
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| | Wednesday October 07 |
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[8:21 pm] John's latest
John now goes pee-pee on the potty! From time to time he says "poo-poo payeh" and wants to sit on the potty, and usually he pees some. Good to see developments on that front... in any case, he couldn't possibly be more difficult to potty-train than Laurel was!
John's quite a communicator; he's very intent about telling us things he's been doing, showing us stuff, etc. But he has a way to go with his enunciation, so it takes a bit of decoding to understand him... one has to know that "beyeh" is bunny, the aforementioned "payeh" is potty, "geyeh" is glasses, "hayeh" is hiding, and "deyeh" is strawberry (go figure).
There's also a clutch of vocabulary that John has picked up directly from Laurel, including: "Eee uuup!" (Pick me up!), "Wait!", "Me too!", "Don't go!", "My [noun]!", and "Hey!" |
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| | Tuesday September 08 |
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[4:59 pm] not just yet
Thanks for checking in. Now that the semester's fully on, I'm too busy to blog at the moment. When I do, don't expect any narrative on matters at the homefront for a while at least. I've got plenty still to say on matters spiritual, at least, so hopefully I'll find time for that at some point. |
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| | Tuesday August 18 |
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[1:04 pm] one month on...
I've had a busy last month, hence the lack of posts since then. We had our big Texas vacation, to Dallas, Austin, and Stephenville. It was nice that it was direct flights to and from DFW from Hartford, but traveling with young kids sure is an undertaking. John had his own seat on the airplane for the first time, which made things a bit easier. When it came time for beverages, he got his own apple juice, which he was excited about, so that at the end of the trip, on the day we flew back, I told him we were going on an airplane (which he calls "bau"), and he grabbed my face and turned it toward him and said "bau... akoh ju!" He was excited about getting his own apple juice again! Saw lots of family and friends on our trip, and I also had plenty of work to do. A month or so ago I got hooked up with a Korean company that scientific researchers from all the Korean universities send their research papers to to get edited by a native-English speaker. So they need people like me who can edit and also grok the science. I think they were really looking for PhDs, but some persistence on my part convinced them I could do the job, and I've been doing one or two papers a day for them. Anyway, this is really a godsend since it's much more straightforward and less of an attention-suck than the assessment-item-writing type of stuff I'd been mostly doing on a freelance basis, which is just awful: you have to keep track of all kinds of guidelines and state standards and back and forth with the editors and revisions and trying to write items to EXTREMELY SPECIFIC specifications. I was hating it. This editing stuff, though, I can just plough through (carefully, of course) without blocks of hours and hours of frustration and hating life. Just download and upload, and they even figure the payment automatically and automatic-draft it to my bank account. And it's typically much more interesting than trying to come up with a dozen or so variations on "the sun heats things up", since the research papers are cutting-edge science. And I can get enough that it fills all my freelance-work needs. So it's, as I said, really a godsend.
Over our vacation I also got my presentation ready for the conference I presented at in Philadelphia soon after we got back. I took a 4-hour train ride to and from Hartford, which worked out nicely, got to stay in a pretty nice hotel, and see some parts of Philly I'd never seen. Not that I really got time to sightsee, as the conference sessions kept things pretty busy. Some presentations were quite interesting, others less so (there is a certain lack of rigor that I notice, perhaps partly owing to the lack of competition in the field); it was an interesting mix of philosophers, theoretical chemists, and historians, from graduate students (at least two other presentations were by grad students) to professors emeriti. It was also quite international, with participants American, British, French, Belgian, German, and Estonian, at least. The Chemical Heritage Foundation is a very well-appointed facility with a nice little museum section. The last talk was by previous Nobel Prize winner Roald Hoffmann, whose talk I had to leave early from to catch my train home, but it was just as well because it was rather boring and seemed to be going nowhere. My own presentation went well, but only eight people were in the audience (seven, after partway through). I was in one of the parallel sessions, and having to compete with the main organizer of the event, who is much more established in the field, and on the sexy topic of the question of the reality of chemical bonds. So I figured in advance that it might be like that, but my talk was well-received, and overall at the conference I got to make some good connections.
So now I've got less than two weeks until the fall semester begins(!), and I'm continuing to plug away at that editing, and also plan on souping up a previous term paper to submit to another conference for this fall. We still haven't been to the beach in Connecticut, and it's been pretty hot lately (with no A/C! Argh!), so we're hitting the beach today! |
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| | Saturday July 18 |
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[2:58 pm] more kids and stuff
For the 4th of July we lit some fireworks in our backyard, some of which were pretty impressive. I don't think I've ever lived in a place where you could light small fireworks in your backyard. John called them "candles" ("da-doh!"), and tried to blow them out after they sputtered away. He's a blowing-out-candles fiend. Loves to climb up to the table when we light candles for dinner and blow them out if we're not looking. That's one way he can exercise power, I guess! He says "boh-ow!" (blow out) On Sunday the 5th we went to Putnam for their fireworks at the park, which was crowded but pretty low-hassle; managed to finagle some parking not far away. When they started, though, John got scared and started to cry. So I brought him back to the car and we pulled up to the street and watched them from there, and he seemed to feel a lot safer. Then we picked up Deidra and Laurel right off the street, so that worked out nice. They were good fireworks, too, and lasted a good 30 minutes.John continues to put together two-word phrases, like "go car" and "light on". He likes to walk down the stairs all by himself with the light on, and turn the light off when he gets down to the bottom: "light off." (On and off sound just the same out of his mouth, though!) John says "baby" when he sees a picture of one, or a stroller or baby carrier even if there's no baby in it. He also identifies himself as "baby," pointing to his face when he says it. John is still quite a finicky eater, overall, but he is "fruit boy"—loves all kinds of fruits. It's our fallback for feeding him if he rejects everything else. He especially likes watermelon. No, loves watermelon. And it's so funny how he says it—"wah-mleh-mleh," with pronounced tongue action on the "l"s! He's been getting increasingly impatient with his high chair, too, and today I dug out the old booster seat that Laurel used to sit in. He said "baby" when he first saw it, and seemed to enjoy sitting in it. John, like his father, seems very much on the "J" side of the perceiving/judging axis of the Myers-Briggs spectrum. True to form, he very much likes closure. Literally, as applied to doors. He loves to close doors and says close! ("koh!") upon doing so. Laurel just concluded her twice-a-week swim lessons at the Mansfield Community Center this week. Although she had some trepidation about it in advance, she came to really enjoy it. She wouldn't do all the things that were necessary to pass and move on the next stage, though, like put her face underwater, and jump into the water and be caught by the teacher, so next year she'll just take it again. Last week she was in Vacation Bible School in the mornings at the Congregational Church not 100 yards from our house, so it was good for her to have something to do while school was out. The phrase "Vacation Bible School" is so weird to me—what's the message, when the word we use to put together "Vacation" and "School" is "Bible"? :-) Deidra and I are having kind of a difficult phase with Laurel—she's very willful, finicky, demanding, contrary, and difficult to handle, no less now than, like, two or three years ago. She does irritate to a significant extent, too, jumping all over us and still using us as human beanbag chairs no less than when she was a toddler. I guess it's an age where we tend to think, "okay, get over this, grow up already," and being at once patient and firm is really a challenge for both of us when she seems to take every opportunity to fight us on stuff. The kind of parents we both want to be is where the primary interaction is based on a relationship with her, letting her be her, and not simply "managing" by means of command and discipline and such. She's still a sweet girl, though, and we appreciate her for that. In less than two weeks we'll be leaving for our Texas trip, taking in Dallas, Austin, and Stephenville. Should be a good time seeing everyone, and hopefully it'll help us appreciate our 85-degree weather here! I'll have to do work over the trip, though, freelance bill-paying work as well as preparing for my presentation at the ISPC conference next month (which starts two days after we get back from Texas), at least whatever I don't get done by the time we leave on the 30th... |
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