Entries in Life

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, this week is Cheesefare week and last Sunday was Meatfare Sunday — the last Sunday to eat meat before fasting begins in earnest.

What struck me this year, though, were the first two sentences of the Epistle this Sunday:

Brethren, food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.

Right when I could get bogged down in legalism and judging others, they have to give me this thought: I’m no better off.

They really know me.

Related to this, Fr Stephen writes about the scandal of the Gospel in a way we don’t often think of it:

…the radical forgiveness of everyone for everything…

When I showed my kids my last post they said I should write about some of their experiences.

I should post a picture here of my kids. I know they don’t look like your typical Mennonites, but neither do they look very asian. But, yes, I’m biased and I see them every day, so I could easily be missing something.

First there is the silly, thoughtless racism. Kids are still saying “Ching Chang Chong” to anyone they think of as Chinese. The first time a kid said this to my wife I was surprised. She gave them quite a tongue-lashing, though. I’m surprised that my son reports kids’ say this to him. This is, as he said, just ignorance.

Some people are simply curious. My 7-year-old daughter says a boy asked his brother to ask her if she was Chinese. This isn’t really prejudice, just kind of cute curiosity.

One guy really annoys Ginger with his stupid, racist comments like bugging her about Miss May, a Chinese substitute teacher as if Ginger knows this person’s personal details. Even though the school offers Chinese as a spoken language (what one of her friends called “chink” accidentally before correcting herself) for students to learn, some still ask her if she can speak “Asian” — as if it were one language. They also think that my children all go to the same church with the other Asian children.

Which is weird because even though we have a Mennonite background and name, we attend a Greek church.

I think a lot of this comes down to tribalism. Just by getting married, Alexis and I haven’t stuck with the tribe. And when we started going to a Greek church, that was yet another non-tribal activity. In a small town like ours, People aren’t used to those who don’t stick to their tribe’s customs, and they’re curious and (sometimes) rude as a result.

Moving to Lancaster County has been interesting.

First, “Hershberger” isn’t such an unusual name. It is a Amish/Mennonite name, after all, and this is Lancaster County. There are a few of them here.

Since we came here 8 years ago, my wife has had to deal with people who were not expecting a Vietnamese woman when she introduced herself as “Alexis Hershberger” over the phone to them.

But even better has been this encounter that she related to me recently.

woman: Do you go to the Vietnamese church?

Alexis: No, we go to the Greek Orthodox church.

woman (surprised): Oh, when did you and your husband come to the States?

Alexis: We moved here from New Orleans 8 years ago.

My 9th grade daughter has a cell phone. On it she is TXTing to her friends (if we let her) late into the night. She thinks the TXTing abbreviations are a big deal and is surprised when I use them.

Girl, IRC was the birthplace of TXTing.

Question: When is a person sure of having arrived at purity?

Answer: When that person considers all human beings are good, and no created thing appears impure or defiled. Then a person is truly pure in heart.

The person who is genuinely charitable not only gives charity out of his own possessions, but gladly tolerates injustice from others and forgives them. Whoever lays down his soul for his brother acts generously, rather than the person who demonstrates his generosity by his gifts.

Rebuke no one, revile no one, not even those who live very wickedly.

Let yourself be persecuted, but do not persecute others.

If zeal had been appropriate for putting humanity right, why did God the Word clothe himself in the body, using gentleness and humility in order to bring the world back to his Father?

St Isaac the Syrian

Did you know there is a Shampoo conspiracy?

I didn’t until last week when Brandon Harris, a designer at Wikimedia, shared his hair care tips during a Reddit AMA.

This led someone to quote a bit of the Wikipedia article on Shampoo:

Shampoo has only been used with fervor since the 1970s^{[citation needed]}. Before then, either regular soap was used a few times a month or, just after the early 20th century, shampoo was used only a few times a year. It was in the 1970s that shampoo use became prevalent. Ads featuring Farrah Fawcett and Christie Brinkley asserted that it was unhealthy not to shampoo several times a week.

I mentioned this to my dad, a long-time Prell user. He was surprised. This didn’t fit with his memory. He said that in 1963, when he was first married, he used Prell and Head and Shoulders. It looks like this is one of those times my father was setting trends. Fourteen years later, in 1977, the New York Times reported that those two shampoos were the most popular (according to a footnote in the Wikipedia article).

I think its impressive how little it takes to generates a controversy. The No poo wiki page is (like the first linked article in this blog post) filled with assertions with nothing to back them up. I would expect to see a controversy around articles like Creationism (and, indeed, Creationism’s talk page is filled with warnings about the proper place to debate the validity of the topic) but there is quite a lot of discussion on Shampoo’s talk page. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people become so impassioned about (what I consider to be) a prosaic topic.

Today, I’m in New Orleans for the NOLA Hackathon for MediaWiki. As I walked through Lafayette Square where the Blues and BBQ festival was setting up. I thought, wistfully for a bit, about how much I love New Orleans and how much I miss leaving here.

Scandals, page 1

That lasted until I sat down in PJsand looked at the front page. The top three headlines each reminded me of the corruption and cronyism that Louisiana and New Orleans are known for: Public defenders are ambulance chasing, an audit of a 13 year old construction project reveals invoice padding, and a local businessman pleads guilty to bribing the sheriff.

So, I’ll visit, I’ll enjoy hacking MediaWiki with my friends, staying with my sponsors (who live next door to my old home here), enjoy the food, and then, when it is all over, I’ll enjoy returning home to the quiet Lancaster County, PA.

So, this morning I was going to my Thursday morning “Early Risers” study group hosted by my (Orthodox) church with my neighbor, a Mennonite peace activist (see $10.40 for Peace for his most recent effort) and it was raining.

Since I don’t follow news, except the big stories that hit the Interwebs, I didn’t realize that we were getting the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee. But we were.

So, at 6:15am as we passed through a low point, we saw a trailer park near a creek flooded, its residents standing at the roadside watching the water threaten their homes.

We got to the study group at 6:30AM along with a few others but my priest, who usually leads the group, wasn’t able to make it because of flooding on the road. So those of us who got there continued in his absence.

On the way back home at 7:45 the highway (US 222) was closed, so we took the slow road (PA 272).

Along the way, we passed the trailer park again. This time the flood waters had clearly reached some of the homes and were just about a foot from the road. But we slugged on and soon we were safely home.

Shortly after dvfmama left for work in Lancaster, but she soon returned. All the roads out of town (we live on a hill) were closed. Evidently, our children’s school got the same message: school was canceled due to the flooding.

(Here come the graphs!) My neighbor gave me links to some charts of the flooding. And it is pretty striking. The amount of rain in the past few days has caused local rivers to rise significantly, and meant that they’re carrying a lot more water. In some sense, because I live on a hill outside of a flood zone, this was a nice reminder of New Orleans, but still, it is good too keep in mind that others suffered.