Timor mortis conturbat me

It was time to renew my driver's license. Luckily, I didn't have to retake the written test; just had to look into the black box and read line 5. So with a faded portrait of Jesse White looking on (there's something extra-imperial about the fact that it was faded), the woman behind the counter rattled through her questions, checking off my answers with looping flicks of her pen.

"Has your license been suspended or canceled in this state or any other state."

"No."

"Do you have a condition that could cause you to lose consciousness."

"No."

"Do you want to be an organ donor."

I felt a rush of fear. This question.

* * * * *

I remember the first time it caught me off guard. I was getting my license for the first time; since these things are scheduled by your birthday, it would have been almost exactly twelve years ago. I didn't know that this person, this interchangeable processor in the basement of the county courthouse, would want to know what should be done with my body after I died. "Do you want to be an organ donor." My dad was with me, and I looked over at him. He shook his head and quietly said "No." I was relieved and unsettled. But the interchangeable processor didn't judge; she had moved on to the next question. It was over except for the lingering sense that I had somehow been weak; somehow faithless.

The question has been asked at least twice since then, and I've always been caught off guard. I've always said no and felt like a jerk. A cowardly, relieved jerk.

* * * * *

"Yes."

I felt like an idiot. A thoughtless, careless idiot.

The woman behind the counter looked me in the eye for the first time. "By saying yes, you acknowledge your agreement to donate your organs. Your next of kin has no authority to alter this decision. Do you agree?"

"Yes." I wanted to turn around, but I was too ashamed to make the train stop. My wife isn't comfortable with me changing our phone service to a different provider. And I just gave her rights regarding the disposition of my body over to the state of Illinois.

Idiot.

* * * * *

I don't like my new picture as well as I liked the old one. I wasn't ready when they snapped the photo. My mouth is smiling, but my eyes haven't caught on yet. (Those weak, misshapen eyes. Who's gonna want 'em?) I guess I was ready enough. I'm just going to have to go with it.

What is this a list of?

Earth-identical gravity and atmosphere on other planets
one ecosystem for a whole planet
human-alien cross-breeding without scientific intervention
flaming explosions and sound in a vacuum
light-speed travel
space storms
sexy sexy aliens

In this Moment, I’m the Anti-Jacobs

When you want to open a new document in Word 2007, you have to tell it whether you want a new document or a new blog post. I wanted to find out how to circumvent that time-wasting step (I never want to create a new blog post in Word). Googling did not give me a solution. The only posts I found were about how cool it is that you can post to your blog from Word. Er . . . okay. I guess you can use an iron to make grilled cheese, too, but isn't it kind of messy? I couldn't resist trying it out, so this is my first post published

<Word crash>

<Error reporting/>

<Document recovery/>

</Word crash>

from Word. Funny, Firefox tends not to crash in the middle of posts like that.

Alan Jacobs would ask why you want to use a program with all the overhead and complications of MS Word to write a blog post, which is essentially pure text. I mean, you can throw in some italics or bold, but it's just as easy to do that in Blogger if you really need to. Word can do things like small caps, but do those make it through all right to the web? I guess we'll see. Update: Nope.

By the way, Ctrl+N takes you directly to a new document, without asking if you want to blog. Save those precious seconds. Spend them blogging on trivialities.

Why O Why Did I Ever Leave My Home?

I spent a good chunk of my free time over the last couple weeks re-re-re-learning some basic chords on the guitar so that I could perform at my church's variety show night. Mrs. Chaka and I sang Green Pastures. I did a solo performance of One (inspired by the Johnny Cash version, but my octave of choice was more like Bono's).

Since I was getting my callouses back, I played around with a song that regularly gets stuck in my head: I Sang Dixie, by Dwight Yoakam. It belongs to a subgenre of country songs that I like to call "Why O Why Did I Ever Leave the South?" See also, Detroit City, Smoky Mountain Memories, perhaps even I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow belongs in this category ("I left my home . . . I'm bound to ride that northern railroad").

Laments about having left the North are, on the other hand, conspicuously nonexistent. Is no one sad to have left the North? Can Northerners not sing? Did they just not leave the North? Do they thing about things like Purple Rain instead?

Well, when I sing Man of Constant Sorrow, I sub in "Minnesota" as "the place where I was borned and raised." (It bugs me that Dylan didn't. Colorado? What does that have to do with anything?)

You could say that the real source of the Southerner-in-exile laments is the economically driven migration of workers from the rural South to industrial Northern cities (that theme is pretty blatant in Detroit City). But if that's the case, we should find similar genres of music for other migrations: Are there African American blues songs about longing for the South? Mexican songs about the harsh life in los EE. UU.? Traditional Native American chants about the joys of homey Siberia?

Well, are there? You tell me.

The Four Spiritual Laws in the Ancient Church

HT: Kouya Chronicle. I do not demean the first law. It is true. God does love you and has a wonderful plan for your life. His definition of wonderful may differ from yours.

Me and Hats

An accurate description of my predicament, from a Lileks screed:

"I love the era of fine hats, but I know I would have looked like someone in a Munchkin production of The Maltese Falcon.”

AT&T Technical Support: We Support You, Technically

Call center guidelines:

Assume the caller is an idiot
Assume that the caller's problem isn't AT&T's problem
Look for the quickest way to tell the caller that it isn't AT&T's problem
Empathy implies liability--try to get the caller to empathize with you
The magic words "I do apologize for the inconvenience" make everything okay

Taking a Guess at Nyungwe

David Ker posted the first five verses of John in Nyungwe and asked if his readers could figure out any of the words. Here are the verses and my notes:

1 Pakutoma akhali fala ndipo falalo likhali pabodzi na Mulungu. Ndipo iye akhali Mulungu. 2 Iye pakutoma akhali na Mulungu. 3 Bzinthu bzentse bzidalengedwa na iye, tsono palibe ciri-centse cidalengedwa mwakusaya iye. 4 Mwa iye mukhana moyo. Ndipo moyoyo ukhali ceza ca wanthu. 5 Ceza cikhabvunika mumdima. Mdima ulibe kucikunda.

Some nouns are easy: Mulungu is “God,” ndipo translates logos (whether it specifically means word, message, reality, etc., I don’t know for certain). Mdima seems to be “darkness,” ceza is “light,” wanthu would be “people,” and moyo “life.” None of these appear to have case endings. I guess the reduplication of –yo in verse 4 is something other than case.

I would guess that pa- is a prefix/preposition corresponding to “in.” Kutoma would then equal “the beginning.” I guess that bodzi is also a morpheme (“in bodzi with God”). The prefix/preposition mu- also overlaps with English “in.” Na seems to correspond to “with.” Ca also looks like a preposition, relating “light” to “people.” Perhaps “for”?

I don’t see an article.

Iye and –khali are doing a good bit of work, which suggests that they mainly convey grammar rather than semantics. I’m going to guess that iye is a pronoun (“he”) and the –khali words are forms of “to be.” Akhali goes with words of the class containing ndipo (masculine?) and ukhali with words of the class containing ceza and mdima (feminine?).

I notice possible morphemes bzi-nthu, bz(i)-entse, c(i)-entse, and wa-nthu. Could –nthu (or a chunk of it) mark the plural?

Bzi- appears with both nouns and verbs. Bzinthu bzentse should correspond to “all things” and bzidalengedwa to “were created/came to be.” Bzi- alternates with ci- on the verb for coming to be (dalengedwa). Do bzi- and ci- mark semantic classes?

While I’m on verbs, cikhabvunika must be “shines/has shined” and kucikunda “overcomes/has overcome.” Both have the ci-. If the translation preserves the distinction in tense between these two words, the reduplicated ku- in kucikunda looks like a tense marker. But there ought to be a pronoun in that clause with the antecedent ceza, so maybe ku- is a pronominal prefix.

Ulibe ought to be the negation in the last clause. There’s a palibe in verse 3 that could negate things coming to be apart from him.

That’s probably as close as I can get. I’m particularly intrigued by the bzi-/ci- alternation. And the fala words stumped me. Here’s my gloss:

In-beginning was fala word falalo was in-bodzi with God. Word he was God. 2 He in-beginning was with God. 3 Bzi-things bzi-all bzi-came-to-be with him, but not ciri-ci-all ci-came-to-be apart-from him. 4 Mwa him in-himself life. Word life was light for people. 5 Light ci-shines in-darkness. Darkness does-not it-overcome.

Hanging in the Hallway

A post over at the Evangelical Outpost has as good an explanation as I've seen of what I think evangelicalism ought to be. Lewis' hallway metaphor, though not designed with evangelicalism in mind, captures the situation well.

It seems, though, that there are a lot of people living in the hallway nowadays. Living in the hallway has its downsides, of course, but the hallway has its own unique culture. It seems to me that it's often full of exciting people, people who are perhaps oddballs in their own rooms.

I met my wife in the hallway, in one of those mainstays of evangelicalism known as parachurch ministry. Once you fall in love with someone from another room, it complicates things. Heck, once you come to respect someone from another room (which hopefully happens antecedent to falling in love with said someone), it complicates things.

The hallway is laid back. People who would *freak* *out* if a woman started talking in one of the rooms are cool with her talking in the hallway. It's the hallway, man, it's no big deal. There are some women who talk in the rooms, but people tend to avoid them when they come into the hall.

As you can see, I've run out of things to say on the topic. We can be done now.

Neo, I Renounce Thee!

I want to apologize to Stanley Fish for the post that referred to him as a Crypto-Neo-Calvinist. I was being arch/ironic/trivial/unearnest, but I felt chastened when I read his series of articles about being tagged with the term neoliberal. One of his points in the articles is that neoliberal is a term without a clear definition; it's a term whose main purpose is to deride the opponent ("Take that, you accursed neoliberal"). It's a term maliciously assigned and never gladly received.

I realized after reading his article that by using the term Neo-Calvinist, I had endorsed a similar rhetorical ploy (albeit ironically). I could hide behind that ironic distance, but I want to come clean. I'd like to renounce the word, and while I'm at it, I'm considering renouncing any ideological term beginning with "neo."

You may be wondering, Where the heck is this coming from, Chaka? Let me explain. Neo-Calvinist was floating around in my head because I had recently read Scot McKnight's post on the Neo-Reformed (HT:Between Two Worlds). I have to say, McKnight's description of this ideological group resonated with me. After spending my college years in Minneapolis (where John Piper has a distinct presence on the evangelical scene) and subsequent years in one of the centers of evangelicalism (the Trinity-Wheaton nexus), I think there is validity in McKnight's picture of reformed complementarians trying to squeeze out "the rest of us."

I say that without malice. I say it as someone who has been blessed and nurtured by a very reformed, very complementarian church (one of the founding elders was Wayne Grudem, who could be McKnight's posterchild for the Neo-Reformed). As much as I have benefited from people and churches associated with these positions, I have also felt from them a pressure to set these positions at the center of Christianity and push other positions to the margins (or off the page entirely).

I'm trying to say here that I have sympathy for McKnight's portrait without positioning myself as an opponent of reformed complementarians. However, I feel convicted that I have at one level already positioned myself their opponent by using the term Neo-Calvinist. Like neoliberal, neoconservative, and perhaps all neo- prefixed ideological categories (perhaps originally including neo-orthodox?), to use the term is to judge those so termed.

The recursiveness is satisfying for insiders and frustrating for outsiders. I instinctively knew what McKnight meant when he wrote, "Those who were all riled up about the blurb are the NeoReformed -- ironically, they were wondering who I had in mind when I used "NeoReformed" in the blurb." From the inside, it is obvious who the opponents are; they make themselves known by their opposition. Yet from the outside, this seems like a massive strawman argument.

By the way, the term fundamentalist, in my opinion, falls into this category as well. That's why I prefer to use it only of those who would use it of themselves.

In Which Our Narrator Chickens Out at the Seafood Counter

I like to pride myself on my provisioning abilities. I.e., I know how to plan, shop for, and cook quality meals at low cost. One of my primary techniques is to let the sale items in produce, the meat counter, and the deli direct my planning.

Another technique is to do some of the processing myself. I already have a great set of knives (thank you to my colleagues in the Special Order department at Marshall Field's for your generous wedding present!), so my policy on chicken is: buy them whole for $1.00/lb, cut them up myself, and find a way to cook every piece. (Though I haven't made schmaltz yet.)

These principles at times require fortitude. This week, Valli (the Platonic ideal of a grocery storeTM) had whole trout on sale. And asparagus. I quickly found a recipe that used these foundational ingredients and put them on the shopping list.

There I stood at the seafood counter, staring into the aghast expressions of the trout. $2.99/lb for the whole thing. But just a few feet over, at $5.99/lb, were the trout fillets. Hmm . . . fillets don't look back at you while you cut them up. And I've never really attempted to fillet a fish . . .

It was then I discovered that the price of my self-processing principle was about $2.00.

Overstepping My Bounds

I can't resist linking to this. As a Protestant, I suppose I have no right to judge whether or not someone is Catholic enough to be Catholic, but let's think this through:

You don't think the pope is God's spokesman.

You characterize the Catholic hierarchy as "the hierarchical institution set up, not by Jesus, but by men who hijacked his name and in many cases perverted his teachings."

You see the hijacking starting with Paul's first letter to the Corinthians [!].

Hmm . . . you may actually be too Protestant to be Protestant.

I like to think of most categories in terms of prototypes and marginal members (x is prototypically Catholic, y is more marginally Catholic) rather than in Platonic terms (x is a member of category Catholic if and only if x has quality y). But still, I wonder what possible qualities McElvaine could have that make him even marginally Catholic.

Stanley Fish, Crypto-Neo-Calvinist?

Stanley Fish continues to defy my perception of him. I would expect to read something like this on Justin Taylor's blog, or John Piper's: an explanation (even a winning explanation) of God's grace and forgiveness as wiping out the debt of bankrupt human beings. Fish is a Milton scholar, of course, so it's not shocking that he knows Reformed theology in depth. There is a little bit of scholarly distance in his tone, but I'd say he presents the point of view appreciatively, if not in outright earnest.

I'm only sad that the radio spot and Christian financial planning books mentioned aren't the ones published by my company. :)