Entries in Life

As I told my tweeps, I did 50 miles today. This brings me to a total of 140 miles for the week — closer to where I want to be, but not quite there yet. I hope to get 40 miles in tomorrow and then settle back down to 30 miles/day for the rest of the week. And, at this point, I can tell you that I probably won’t make that goal.  I know 20 miles/day is reasonable for me, but adding another 10 miles is pushing the envelope.  At least right now it is.  We’ll see how I do tomorrow. Since I’ve been riding more and talking about it, I have encouraged several other people to consider taking it up.  A friend of mine is a manager at the Panera Bread about 10 miles from here.  He has seen me in there enough times (a little more than once a week for the past couple of months) that, combined with rising gas prices, he was seriously considering getting a bike and riding. Another acquaintance (at the Thursday morning study group (I leave at 5:45 to get there for the 6:30 start) was impressed that I was riding in the city.  “Oh, you just have to have confidence and act like you belong,” I said.  “Cars are like dogs, they can sense fear.”  She seemed to be considering expanding her riding options on the half recumbent she shares with her husband. Its amazing, really, how doing something you love can affect other people.  I love to ride and, while I’m not going to convert anyone who is dead-set against getting on a bike, some more ambivalent cyclists are thinking “Hey, I could do a little bit more.”  People who are absolutely terrified of riding will begin to think about some of the statistics I cite for them.

Jim pointed to this article on Mommy Guilt and wondered if mothers in his own church would concur. Well, I’m not a mother (but I’m married to one) and I’m not in Jim’s church, so what I say will be absolutely meaningless.  Still, I can’t shut up.  So here goes. There is so much in the Ms. McCleneghan’s piece that I want to take issue with.  Where to start? First, I should point out that fathers have guilt, too.  We don’t have a cute name for it, at least I’ve never really heard other fathers complain about “Daddy Guilt”, but, all the same, I imagine most dads from the last 20 years feel a little guilty.  For me, I wonder “Am I spending enough time with the kids?” (I work at home, for pete’s sake!) or “Am I providing enough stimulation for the kids?” And lets not get started on the unfortunate fact that I accidentally broke my 11-year-old daughter’s nose this spring.  So, yeah, dads get guilt. But you know what?  Most of it is bogus. If I feel guilty about repeated physical abuse of my children, that’s one thing.  That is valid guilt.  I should feel guilty. And the guilt should be my sign that I need to turn around and do something differently. But disposable diapers? Formula vs. breastfeeding? The world isn’t perfect and we can’t live perfect lives.  And we shouldn’t feel guilty because of that.  But I’m sure I don’t need to tell an ordained minister that. Which brings me to my second point.  I’m gonna go out on a limb a little here, but I feel it is a sturdy one. Prayers of confession should not be done corporately. If the only time for you to practice confession is in a corporate setting, then you’re doing it wrong.  In the Orthodox church, everyone is encouraged to go to a spiritual director and (perhaps separately) individual confession. The spiritual director will tell you “Why are you beating yourself up about this?”  And then your confessor, if you really feel the need to confess your guilt about disposable diapers, will patiently stand with you and listen to you confess your guilt over disposable diapers to God. And then he’ll tell you Now, having no further care for the sins you have confessed, you may go in peace. See, corporate prayers of confession are wrong because they’re generic.  They don’t address my guilt or the things I need to change.  No wonder Ms. McCleneghan is tuning out.  It should be her sign that something needs to change. (Of course, I had to go look up the Methodist Prayers of Confession and I suppose that in some ways they are similar to the prayers prayed during Forgiveness Vespers so you can see I’m even more full of nonsense than usual, but I still maintain that the missing piece — private confession — would be a great way to get rid of silly parenting guilt.  Guilt needs a release valve.  Confession is meant to be that valve.)

(Found this sitting in a queue from a while back.  For some reason, I posted this on LiveJournal, but not here. Now is a good a time as any to get it out of my system.) The recent revelation that Mother Teresa was a doubting Thomas almost the entire time she worked in India but yet remained faithful shows the lie that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens would like to promulgate: belief in God is comforting.  (And here, I thought we were still struggling with Catholic Guilt.) While I’ve no doubt that some believers gain primarily comfort from their belief, the religion that Jesus teaches isn’t very comforting at all. “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” And, of course, any Mennonite knows that Martyrs Mirror is filled with stories of people who endured a great deal of suffering. My own children have listened to the lives of many martyrs in the Orthodox lexicon of Saints, Nikolai Velimirovich‘s Prologue — so many that whenever they hear the Emperor Diocletian‘s name mentioned, they can tell you the end of the story. Perhaps some people make Christianity out to be a nice bedtime story, but anyone who pays attention to what Jesus said or what Paul wrote knows that any comfort offered isn’t the whole story: we are called to live sacrificially. Which is exactly what Mother Teresa did. What strikes me most among discussions like this one is the idea that Mother Teresa had an obligation to announce her doubts to the world.  “She’s a public figure” the thinking goes “and she kept this from us?” Well, no, her struggle with doubt or the lack of God’s Presence was her own and she kept it between herself and her spiritual confessors.  If she wanted to announce her doubt and be done with it, she could have done that without making her life any more uncomfortable. Mother Teresa was doing something completely foreign to most of us.  Jack Welch was a better humanitarian.  Mother Teresa was not a humanitarian and Christopher Hitchen’s was right to discredit this notion of her.  Jesus said “You will always have the poor” and Mother Teresa understood this to mean that we should be more concerned with loving the poor and having compassion for them than with giving them a handout. “You take care of their tomorrows, I take care of their todays,” she said. Secularists who don’t know Mother Teresa won’t appreciate the way she chose to use her money.  Evangelicals won’t appreciate her Gospel.  Atheists see her doubts as her hypocrisy. But there is something else going on, also.  She identified with the poor in the same way Christ identified with us.  She emulated his compassion. And of course isn’t that the whole Problem of Evil all over again?  As Judas pointed out, the money spent on the perfume Mary poured on Jesus feet was a year’s wages — surely there was a more practical use for it.  Surely Jesus could have done more than forgive sins, couldn’t he?  He was God, after all, shouldn’t he have done more? Mother Teresa is someone many people can admire from a distance.  Most will be repulsed by her, though, if they take a closer look.  She shows us exactly why true religion isn’t comforting.

Via Jim’s Shared Items comes this gem:

According to Psalm 37:21, “The wicked borrow, and don’t pay back, but the righteous give generously.” The money you gave to me was borrowed against your debt. As I see it, this is neither wise nor just.

Like some other commenters, I can’t agree with the list of “people owed” but I absolutely agree that this is a foolish, even wicked, use of government money.

“Forgiveness is the final form of love.” — Reinhold Niebuhr I went and saw “As we forgive those” tonight. It is an amazing account of the process of reconcilliation that some people in Rwanda are going through. The documentary focused on two different genocideres and the reconciliation that they sought with the surviving members of their families they attacked and murdered. Two women whose families had been killed struggled to forgive the men who had killed their families. The process of reconcilliation in “As we forgive those” covered what happened after the Gacaca courts.during reconcilliation workships run in cooperation with the Prison Fellowship in Rwanda. One of the projects the former genocideres participate in is building homes for victims of their crimes. This is especially poignant since they often destroyed those homes during the genocide. (I have to admit that I only saw the last part of the movie. The listing of screenings gave a contact email and said it was being shown by Church of the Apostles in Fayetteville, NC. I sent an email, got a response, found the date posted on the site was wrong, and got a showtime. But no location. So I naturally assumed it was at the Church of the Apostles. No one linked to their website. If I had gone to the website — or even known it existed — I would have realized it was showing 20 minutes away from the church. Anyway… if you post information, make sure it is all connected.) Besides the excellent message of reconciliation instead of retribution, the Church of the Apostles seemed to be using the film as a sort of evangelism. The minister.stood up after the film and said, essentially, “See what Christians are doing? You might have a bad impression of the church, but We ain’t all bad!” I thought it was a bit too pathetic. Still, I think this is a great film for any church to show or sponsor. And it’s great for people outside the church, too. The message is universal.

Forgiveness isn’t human. It is divine. (from the trailer)

It was only because I read about the award that I even found out about the documentary “As We Forgive Those“. The documentary covers two widows facing their families’ killer’s and asks “Can survivors truly forgive the killers who destroyed their families? Can the government expect this from its people? And can the church … fit into the process of reconciliation today?” The last bit seems the most poignant to me. I’m not sure this sort of national reconciliation would work at all if it was merely a civic duty. I’m hoping to see this next week.

Rich Mintz (richmintz.com seems empty) gave me a great tip for keeping focused. He’s a Mac user and OS X makes it easy to get the computer to say the time every 15 minutes. It isn’t so easy on Ubuntu, but it is doable. Since I put this in place, I’ve found that it does help me focus more. It can also help keep me from working too late (not that it has yet). Anyway, here is the bit of magic that you need:

(crontab -l;echo "0,15,30,45 * * * * (echo it is now;date \+\%I:\%M\%p)|espeak --stdout|sox -q -V0 -t wav - -t alsa pulse")|crontab -

Update:

(crontab -l;echo "0,15,30,45 * * * * (echo it is now;date \+\%I:\%M\%p)|padsp espeak")|crontab -

will also work, but you may get emails filled with error messages from cron. Breaking it down

1. (crontab -l; ...) | crontab -
   This part dumps the current crontab out, appends the new line (elided here, see the next step) and then, with the “crontab -” after the pipe, creates an entirely new crontab with the results. This way, we just add a new cronjob to the list of ones you may already have.
2. echo "0,15,30,45 * * * * ..."
   The first part of any crontab file gives a schedule for execution. Since I just want this to run every 15 minutes, I haven’t set up anything besides that, but you could tell it “only during business hours during the work week” which might look something like “0,15,30,45 9-17 * * 1-5“. I recommend you RTFM for help on that, though.
3. (echo it is now;date \+\%I:\%M\%p )
   Print out two lines that are what you’ll hear. If you don’t want to hear “It is now”, then you can leave out that echo statement and the parenthesis. The date command just formats the current time in HH:MM AM/PM time format. One problem is that at the top of the hour you have “00″ which the synthesizer reads as “zero zero”. Oh well, all is not perfect.
4. | espeak --stdout
   Every 15 minutes when the cron job is run, espeak reads the bit from date and produces a wav file with the sounds that your computer should play. Normally, espeak would just play this out on your speakers, but you might be listening to music. If the speakers were otherwise engaged (by, say, Rhythmbox), then you won’t hear the sound and cron will send you an email full of strange error messages.
5. | sox -q -V0 -t wav - -t alsa pulse
   To get the sound to mix properly with other sound apps, it has to play out through pulseaudio (the new, default sound server in Hardy). Strangely enough, even though pulseaudio was supposed to Fix the Linux audio mess once and for all, we still have to jump through hoops.

There is a chance that saytime will just work for you. But, because of that “audio mess” that still exists in Ubuntu, it didn’t work for me.

Tomorrow, May 27th, marks four weeks with my new bike. Its a great relationship. I’ll hit 420 miles tomorrow. That makes just over 100 miles a week. I’d like to do more. Last week, in North Carolina, I was able to get about 40 miles every other day. I know I can hit 20+ miles a day here, but I’m not sure I can hit more than 30 miles/day just yet. I haven’t ditched my old hybrid, but I’ve left the child seat on it. Now, when I want to go riding with the kids, or take my 3 year old, I can just pull down the old bike and away we go. Last week I realized something I hadn’t understood before. Whereas driving drains energy from me and I get irritated by the amount of gas I use (however small), cycling feels empowering and, because I’m not irritated, I go more places. Like I said, its a great relationship.

You know what? I like the way Rwandans do bureaucracy — completely open to the world. We walked right into the Ministry of Health and found the person we needed to see. No bothersome identification checks. No screening. Just plain trust. Contrast this with our visit to the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda. A squat building built to be impervious to almost any attack. Two ID checks. Two metal scanners. No laptops. Bah! Well, some journalism interns from Canada are in Rwanda and, when one decided he needed a contact at the Ministry of Infrastructure, he was a little surprised:

Jean Pierre, our program assistant here in Rwanda, suggested we just go to the Ministry offices and ask around. I was skeptical; surely security wouldn’t even let us through the door without a contact or an appointment. But much to my surprise we walked right in the front door and after asking around I found a man who has worked in road safety for over a decade: the perfect expert.

Tim Bray is arguably very smart in technical areas. He leads the list of authors on the XML Spec, after all. But just because he can do amazing things with angle brackets doesn’t mean you should trust his opinion on anything else. I wasn’t too surprised about his opinion on Kosovo, even if I did disagree, but now he’s advocating deposing dictators, without all the “Republican cronyism, corruption, and stupidity”. Um, yeah. I think this is how the neo-cons started, isn’t it? Someone like Tim Bray thinks “Well, wars aren’t all bad, just the way they are doing them. If I were in charge, I could do it right. And, of course, the targets I would pick would be the right ones.” Update: If you still think there is a possibility that instigating a war is sometimes OK, read Aaron Swartz’s “Intentionality of Evil“.