Magic decoder

I have been blogging in this space for more than 22 years. Almost a third of my life? When I began in 2004, blogs — online diaries — were having a moment. People wrote about science and parenting and hobbies and teen-aged angst. MySpace was a year old, and reaching a global audience. I ended up on what was then Blogspot and is now Blogger for reasons that now escape me. There were monetized mommy blogs and science blogs and hobby blogs and blogs that started and after two posts stopped. There was WordPress for the blogger who wanted to micromanage every aspect. There were readers that tracked the blogs you read, letting you see updates at a glance. And then there weren’t. MySpace had a meltdown and lost more than a decade of users’ content. (Always back-up!) And a couple of years ago, MySpace became read only. The rise and fall of blogging. 

Now there are Substack and Medium. Blogs by another name.

And here I am, still blogging. Still on bare-bones Blogger. I have written 2140 posts, 300 of them remain in draft. A total of 653,464 words. How do I know that last? I learned Python and wrote a few hundred lines of code to take a feed.atom file (what Blogger gives you for a back up) and turn into a tidy Scrivener project, each post in its own document along with any images, tagged with its publication date and carrying its metadata along. I can pull up all the posts from 2015 and turn them into a cleanly formatted file (PDF or Word or RTF or…). I can collect all of Barnacle Boy’s adventures. [His comment: “My whole childhood is on there.” Not quite, see below!] Or everything I tagged “Ignatian.” I can mine my own data. How many em dashes have I used over the years? It’s like having a magic decoder ring.

Why have I kept up the blog all these years? The tag line at the top of my blog says (in Latin , because everything always sounds more profound in Latin, right?): Tenet insanabile multo scribendi cacoethes.“An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many.” It besets me and certainly the blog scratches my itch to write, the need to wrap words around what I notice.

Writing is thinking through your fingers, said Isaac Asimov. I write to think through things, to clarify and sharpen my ideas, my arguments. It’s what was so devastating to me before I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, when my typing mysteriously became glacial and writing by hand impossible. Denied my usual tools to write, I felt stripped of my ability to think. Ideas swirled around, but it became harder and harder to capture and refine them. (Note the absence of posts in early 2024. Note also my gratitude for the diagnosis and the medication that has given me back so much.)

The blog is a seed bed for my writing over all. On occasion it has led to opportunities to write for print, more often I can pull a phrase or return to an experience years past in a new piece of writing, the details kept fresh in a post. I certainly could have kept a private journal or written some version of morning pages, but the discipline of writing cleanly and clearly for a public audience, no matter how tiny, made those bit and pieces richer.

Because the blog is public, and not anonymous, I have tried never to write anything I would be ashamed of seeing on the front page of the New York Times. Or to write about students or colleagues or family in a way that embarrassed or denigrated them. (So, no, my kids’ whole childhoods are not here, and there is not a juicy academic roman á clef to be dug out of the posts.)

I have met some amazing people through the blog, some have become incredible friends and colleagues outside the confines of the interwebs, some who I only know as a screen name on a comment. What is a writer if there are no readers? 

I have enjoyed having this space to think aloud, to wrestle with ideas that had no other place to go. I hope to continue to enjoy it for years to come (and yes, I back up regularly!). Thank you for reading!

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The interface keeps suggesting I “correct” blog to blob. 

I have eaten of the tree of knowledge

A couple of years ago I went around the corner from my back yard to find a substantial snake coming the opposite way. The snake quickly headed under the forsythia and I decided to go around the other way. I hadn’t seen any snakes in the yard since, though I’d seen snake skins on the sidewalk, and earlier this week a large snake on the side of the road nearby. So I knew they were here. Somewhere.

Today I was doing a bit of yard clean-up. I tidied up my pile of kindling, ready for the first cool night and a fire. I thought I’d deal with a raised bed under the apple tree, and the old tarp that was covering it, weighted down by some bluestone pavers.I stacked the pavers, pulled up the tarp and there was a tiny snake, not even a foot long and no thicker than my little finger, wrapped into the top of an upturned pot. Whoops! 

No picture, alas, by the time I went in and got my phone, it had decamped. Also, alas, my snake identification skills are non-existent. The picture with the post is from an encounter in the Maryland mountains some years back, and this one I could identify. I am certain that the little one I disturbed was not venomous.

I have eaten of the tree of knowledge (even if the apples are long gone), the knowledge of good and evil. Or at least the knowledge of snake habits, and decided that perhaps today was not the day to turn that pot over, particularly with my naked hands.

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; They will strike at your head, while you strike at their heel.” Genesis 3:15

A Tale of Two Offices

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..." A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

The office was full, the office was empty. I have everything packed, I have nothing unpacked. I once had two offices, now — incredibly — they have collapsed into a single reality. Things are still jostling for space, the beakers of bright colored markers and sharp pencils patiently wait for me to decide whether they get tucked into a drawer or live on a desk. I sometimes despair of taming the chaos. 

Everything remains before me, even as nothingness blooms on my calendar. I have new projects hatching into those empty spaces: I'm learning to code in Python — my 7th coding language, a retreat to prepare and give, some exploratory noodling around for a new book. Older projects are simmering: two books in various stages of completion, a couple of talks on tea coming up. 

And there are tendrils of grief. I watched the Bryn Mawr back-to-school reel on Instagram and realized how deeply I miss the brightness of my classes, their energy, their curiosity that drove my own. I miss having that other space on campus to call home, where I hung my keys in the little cubby by the door and like Mr. Rogers donning his sweater, draped Dr. Francl across my shoulders. 

I ran into a former student this morning at the pharmacy waiting to get my flu shot (and my Covid vaccine and my shingles vaccine...I got my tetanus shot a couple of weeks ago thanks to the epic altar crash, I am awash in immunity). She came over, offered me her coupon reward for getting her vaccines and then vanished before I had a chance to catch my breath and ask her how she was and what she was doing. I miss the students.

"(Be)comings all involve goings. I keep musing about how Christ holds all these things in tension: birth/death; emptiness/fullness; light and darkness; dance and stillness….and perhaps that’s what it means to be fully human, to live in death and life, light and darkness?" 

I am going, so I must perforce be becoming? But what and how and when? Where I know — my study!

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Images: My office shortly before I packed it up, and right before I closed the door on it. Last photo is of my space as a first year graduate student (a corner of a windowless office on the 3rd floor of what is now Rowland Hall at UCIrvine.) Until very recently the black and red organic chemistry textbook on my desk was still on my shelf.

The quote is me, which someone else captured and tagged as wise. 

Rearranging deck chairs

A futile or pointless task is sometime described as “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” My study at home has been in chaos for months now. Between finishing off the manuscripts for two books and packing up my office at the college, I have just let entropy have its way. But I have been doggedly working my way through the stuff that came home: boxes in the dining room, bags in the entryway, bin and boxes and bags in the living room. All that stuff needing to find a spot to live (aside from the floor) or be gone…

Last weekend I finally emptied the last box in the dining room and have only a bin left in the living room. The rest has been shelved or stashed or sent off. Or moved to my study floor where no one but me sees it. Except on Monday evening I agreed to record an interview for an evening news show Tuesday afternoon, inviting who knows how many people to see my working space.  Something had to be done and fast.

Since I no longer have my college office as a back-up, Tuesday morning had me taking the semi-organized piles and really sorting them. More stuff went into the recycling. And hey, the Lent book and its Spanish translation have been proofed, so all those books can get re-shelved. Same for the stuff I used to prepare to preach this week. There were still a lot of piles, which I then lined up like those deck chairs in front of the shelves where they did not show on camera (I checked!). I did the interview (you can see it here - about the Nancy Grace Roman telescope that launched this week), whew. 

What surprised me was how much less cluttered it feels with those deck chairs re-arranged. I am not tripping over them when I try to get stuff from the shelves. Each pile has a focus, which I can now tackle one at a time. Sometimes just getting the deck chairs lined up makes a difference, if nothing else I have a clearer evacuation route from my study!

An examen for the present moment

My parish has been running a reading and discussion group called “Theology Untapped.” We meet monthly and over the summer we have been working our way through Pope Leo’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The encyclical is long (45,000 words!) and the conversations could only begin to explore the theologically rich and pastorally challenging landscape that the pope walks us through. The conversations provoked some passionate, almost heated, conversations. I had some thoughts (which were shared in the parish bulletin this weekend)…

While it is tempting to call this the encyclical about artificial intelligence (AI), Magnifica Humanitas’ principal focus is the inviolable dignity of each and every human person as a cherished daughter or son of God. AI may be the current challenge to our humanity, but there have been others in our history —  slavery —  and there will undoubtedly be more in our future. How do we respond to current technological developments, including AI, in the light of faith and two thousand years of Catholic social teaching? What serves our sisters and brothers, particularly those unseen and those living at the margins, and what strips them of their humanity, turning them into living, breathing widgets, where productivity becomes the principal measure of a person’s worth. That’s the question Pope Leo is asking in Magnifica Humanitas, and it is the question that’s driven some intense conversations among those coming to Theology Untapped.

How are we to respond, as individuals and as a parish community? As valuable as the discussions have been, we kept returning to the need for more than just words in response to the present moment. Yet it can seem daunting, what can one or two of us do to change the course of the world? Yet, as the pastor reminded us, the work of twelve fishermen arguably changed the world. Like the loaves and the fishes, what we bring to the table can seem like very little, but God can multiply our efforts. 

Pope Leo does not let us off the hook either. [sorry, I could not resist the pun!] Near the end of the encyclical he writes: “At this point, however, a subtle temptation may emerge, namely the thought that the problems are too big and we are too small, and that our choices, therefore, cannot make a difference. This is a polite form of resignation…We all have our own areas for action, and it is precisely there — and nowhere else — that we must choose whether to fuel the mentality of force (even if only through indifference, cynicism, lies or hatred), or to preserve the mindset of peace (with truth, moderation, closeness and care).” (Magnifica Humanitas 212)

Pope Leo suggests five ways we might navigate the present challenges: “the need to disarm words, building peace through justice, adopting the perspective of victims, cultivating a healthy realism and reviving dialogue and multilateralism.”

One of those attending the last meeting said he was so moved by Pope Leo’s challenge that he was committing to reading that one paragraph of Magnifica Humanitas (212) every day. I was inspired to do similarly, making of Pope Leo’s path an examen: How have I wielded my words? How have I worked for justice and so for peace? Have I had eyes for the poor, have I sought out such encounters? Am I listening closely to all the world and not hiding within my own bubble? What might I do going forward — tomorrow — to walk more closely with Christ on these paths?

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Want to try a bit of an Ignatian exercise? Begin by reading Jesus’ challenge in Matthew’s Gospel (Matt 25:34-40). Imagine yourself in the crowd, what do you hear? Now skip to the end of Magnifica Humanitas and read the section titled “We can all do our part” (paragraphs 212-228). Imagine sitting down with Christ and having a conversation about the five paths and your next steps.