Fungible Convictions

Just remember, for all the focus on Jesus on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, he wasn’t alone on either day. He was one of many crucified by the Roman government, and as he died on Golgotha, two men died on either side of him. Despite the Christo-centrism of Easter, it took centuries for him to be widely recognized as a) the son of God and b) the son of God who was unjustly killed for what amounted to sedition. Instead, on the day he died, he was to Romans just a criminal—and to a small group of friends an inspirational leader.

The point being: anyone can lead the life Christ led during the three years of his ministry. Being Christian isn’t a precondition for being kind. Believing in God isn’t necessary for selflessness. All that’s needed is a sincere belief that your actions have an effect on the world around you.

The Christmas season has started off with a bang. Today Lindsay is baking cookies for a friend’s party tonight, we’re about to get our tree from the church across the street, and it turns out that Christmas came early/late, as today Lindsay found a gift I bought her last year that I had hidden on top of the washing machine—where we keep the Christmas ornaments.

But on Sirius-XM, they keep playing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and I can’t get over how, if you take away the cheery music, it just sounds like the ravings of a virulent anti-communist threatening his children:

You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I’m telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town

He’s making a list
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out Who’s naughty and nice
Santa Claus is coming to town

He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!

O! You better watch out!
You better not cry
Better not pout
I’m telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town

Santa Claus is coming to town. You’ve been warned.

And now all I want to do is play guitar, listen to Planxty, and work at a Jesuit school.

The song I played as the wedding’s prelude, it went well. The only dissatisfying thing about it was that, after Patrick’s “men-folk” party two nights before, I had to drop the song down a step and a half because my voice hadn’t quite recovered. It was supposed to be capo’d at 3, but I left it open. Here’s a video Lindsay took—I had to trust her when she says that people could actually hear me, because the Flip camera didn’t pick up much.

And I’m serious about wanting to work at a Jesuit school. They’re not perfect places, but they feel like home. That’s what being with my high-school friends last weekend reminded me most—of an environment that rewards faith, openness, and a willingness to try, fail, learn, and try again, and that’s what home is like to me.

So now thanks to a few roundabout connections, I have a meeting set up with the head of public affairs at Boston College next month. I’m not headed anywhere (don’t worry, MIT!) But it’ll be one of those conversations where I ask how I can use the next twenty years to get his job.

This past week was a complete wash at work, what with one supervisor away, the other supervisor just having left MIT, and everyone else still recovering from the Future of News and Civic Media conference that we hosted the week before. But a week like that was needed, desperately. And it leads, after a few more days, into my first real vacation since my trip to Ireland in the spring of 2007.

With Lindsay and me trying to save for a house, vacations for the foreseeable future will always be to Easthampton, NY, where her family has a lovingly unpretentious second home. We’ve been looking forward to it for months. We’ll take Gatsby, we’ll see Lindsay’s parents, and we’ll even get to see a couple of friends on the last weekend there (starting their own well-deserved vacation as we end ours). We’ll sleep a lot. We’ll walk Gatsby a lot. We’ll barbecue. It’ll be great.

Meanwhile, mostly Gatsby-centric, the latest photos to share…

Gatsby’s was in her shedding season a couple weeks ago. This was the result, after having swept the week before:

Around the same time, my mom was in town, meeting Gatsby for the first time:

Lindsay’s friend/coworker Courtney just got a Boston Terrier/Pug mix named Cagney, who visited us today and was tough keep still:

Not that Gatsby is any better:

And mysteriously, despite loving to chase squirrels, we bought Gats a stuffed squirrel at Petsmart this afternoon, and this is how we found them soon after:

Lastly, completely unrelated but just because I’m proud of it, a Photoshop/Illustrator job I did showing MIT’s most famous building partially underwater:

We took the Gats to Fresh Pond again today, and she was SO. WELL. BEHAVED. There’s a long way to go before she doesn’t bark and lunge at dogs on Mass Ave., but this time at Fresh Pond she was friendly with dogs and kids alike.

So when we got home, we rewarded her with our favorite drink: a delicious martini. I think she’s got the look for such a dignified drink, don’t you?

I’ve mentioned Joseph Williams’ Style: Towards Clarity and Grace before—it’s the best writing guide for anyone who already fancies himself a good writer. While Williams’ book has its flaws—he apparently has no idea what a gerund is and keeps conflating it with a participle—Williams does a remarkable thing: he has it make sense that, when you’re a good enough writer, you can break every rule you learned in high school and college English.

My favorite example of this, as I was going back through the book tonight, is a quoted passage by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a passage Williams introduces with:

Having emphasized how important it is not to interrupt the flow of a sentence, we should now point out that some accomplished writers do exactly that with considerable effect.

Then quoting Geertz‘s two very long, very hacked up, yet very elegant, clear sentences, he drives home the point that interrupted writing can be beautifully written:

To argue (point out, actually, for like aerial perspective or the Pythagorean theorem, the thing once seen cannot then be unseen) that the writing of ethnography involves telling stories, making pictures, concocting symbolisms, and deploying tropes is commonly resisted, often fiercely, because of a confusion, endemic in the West since Plato at least, of the imagined with the imaginary, the fictional with the false, making things out and making them up. The strange idea that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described, that its very nature demands we talk about it without fuss—a spade is a spade, a rose is a rose—on pain of illusion, trumpery, and self-bewitchment, leads on to the even stranger idea that, if literalism is lost, so is fact.

Gorgeous.

Lindsay and I took Gatsby to her first obedience training class on Thursday, and the three of us looked like idiots compared to the other owners and dogs. The other dogs must have gone to puppy school as well because they all knew how to sit and lie down—and their training probably went better because THEY’RE NOT SO DAMN PICKY ABOUT TREATS.

We actually had to pull the teacher aside and ask if the class would be a waste of money: if all the other dogs were more advanced, we would understand if she catered the class to them, even if that meant leaving Gatsby behind. I left in a really bad mood. I felt exactly like I did in Physics class when I sat behind a guy who went on to be a scientist at Stanford.

It didn’t help that The Gats was nervous being around so many other dogs for the first time.

But we kept up with the basics the last few days, trying to train ourselves too. Lindsay and I needed practice being consistent with our commands, terminology, and reward-delivery. For example, it should go:

1. “Gatsby.”
2. “Sit.”
3. Butt hits ground
4. “Yes!”+Treat

But too often it comes out as:

1. “Gatsby. Here. Look’it.”
2. “Si’down. Sit, girl. Sit.”
3. Butt possibly hits ground.
4. “Good! Alright! Good girl.”
5. “Andy, grab me a treat.”

Today is the first beautiful day of the season in Cambridge. So the three of us went with our friend Elizabeth to walk around Fresh Pond, which is a big, big dog-walking destination. Gatsby was great. She sniffed butts without barking. She walked without pulling. She even stuck a toe in the water.

We got home about an hour ago and gave her a bath. We dried her off. She shook water everywhere. We stepped back into the hall. And then for kicks, Lindsay said, “Gatsby, sit.”

AND SHE SAT!

Lindsay walked a few steps back and Gatsby followed.

“Gatsby, sit.”

AGAIN.

Then I did it a couple times, and for the third time I had Lindsay record this:

Margie at New England Dog Training Club: we’re aiming to knock your socks off next week!

Via BoingBoing via Kottke:

This gorgeous video was made by improvising a camera-stabilizer on an empty plane seat and shooting timelapse of the squiggles made by the cities the plane flew over. The creator, Flickr user Ettubrute, sez, “On my night time flight back to SF from Amsterdam, I noticed that the lights from cities were making the clouds glow. Really spectacular and ethereal – it was really seeing the impact of urban environments from a different perspective. Each glow or squiggle represents one town or city! …We were around the midwest at the beginning of the clip, and there were fewer cities once we hit the rockies. the bridge at the end is the san mateo bridge.”