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One of the great joys I have had in keeping this blob, obstensibly only a place for me to keep notes, is the wonderful folks who have responded and entered into a discussion with me. I'll admit that I most take interest in the Christians of various stripes that have contacted me. One of them is Russell Mann. He and I have been having a elongated discussion, and he has recently continued it over at his site, commenting on my recent talk about grace in an entry called "Grace Like Rain Falls Down On Me". As usual, he asks some very great questions that have led me to ponder. Take a gander and you'll find yourself pondering, too.
Mann has obviously been having an experience of grace of his own, one that like mine has ripped apart the structure of his faith. Which isn't a bad thing: "Having started in grace, will you now continue in works?" He wonders if he has taken grace too far. Which is the problem of grace: you can't take it too far because its already there. He raises the questions that always come up about preaching grace, the question of "Won't it lead to licentiousness?"
[ Continue reading "Dangerous Grace" ]PBS.org has the full text of its interesting interview with Tony Campol, the token liberal evangelical, whom they talked to as a part of Relgion & Ethics Newsweekly. Campolo discusses many things about current US policies and evangelical beliefs. Most interesting to me was his comments to Bill Clinton about Richard Nixon:
I once said to President Clinton, "What I really would love for this country to have is a truly liberal president, like Richard Nixon." He gulped. I said, "Who was it that invented affirmative action? Richard Nixon. Who was it that first proposed universal health care? Richard Nixon. Who was it that created OSHA? Richard Nixon. Who entered into public policy and international policy with the People's Republic of China? Richard Nixon. Who proposed the Model Cities programs for the poor? Richard Nixon." Sometimes we get so caught up with our political allegiances that we do not really listen to what candidates are doing. I contend that, in spite of all that might be said about Watergate, Richard Nixon was good for the poor people of America.
My brother, a former Republican campaign manager and lobbyist for conservative causes, used to refer to Nixon as "the American Socialist" because of all the governmental programs that came into existence during his abbreviated two term presidency. Of course, he also used to call George Bush, Jr. a "liberal in conservative's clothing" because of the problems he had with the Texas Governor's administration in inacting conservative regulations. Or not enacting, as the case may be.
Campolo is always an interesting fellow, even if he tends to err wildly in his passion. The other full interviews are also available.
In Charles Williams's novel, Descent Into Hell, a woman asks the playwright Stanhope, "Don't you think that trees are terribly good?" "A terrible good?" he asks. He goes on to frighten the poor woman with his musing about how terror-filled (terrible) an experience of good can be. Not quite what the woman wanted to say, of course, but the thought of good being terrible stuck with me. Recently, I've been turning it over in my mind. Ruminating on it, this Terrible Grace.
I would not be a fan of grace, I think. The grace of God disturbs me, bothers me, disrupts me. I do not like having to admit it into my life. Its undeservedness disrupts my living. I have been thinking lately of whether I know God. Certainly, I know a great deal about him: I can even talk somewhat to competing theologies, discussions about God that hold what seem to be opposing points of view. (And perhaps that is simply all they are: views of God from differing vantage points.) I can talk about different orthodoxies and various terminologies. But do I know God?
L and I got back safely from the Festival of Faith and Writing that Calvin College held this last weekend. L had read something by about 4/5 of the authors speaking there. I'll confess that I was excited because Quentin Schultze would chair a session. He wrote Televangelsim and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion, which for my money stands as the best book on the televangelism subculture anywhere. If you were going to start studying Jerry Falwell today, I'd steer you first to his book, because it provides the best historical analysis of the medium. (No, I am not forgetting Marsden's book or The Fundamentalists, or D'Souza's excellent work; I simply think that Quen's book is best.) He tends to make analogies to earlier issues in the church. Earlier as in from the third century. Incredibly interesting reading and he understands the good and bad and indifferent of televangelsim better than anyone else. Most people have one side of the issue or the other: Schultze understands the myriad of sides and untangles them nicely.
[ Continue reading "Calvin College's Festival of Faith & Writing" ]
I'm writing this to the swinging sounds of various western singers, including the Texas Playboys and Willie. I'll be at the Conference on Faith and Writing at Calvin College until Sunday, enjoying being with two thousand middle-aged women who will talk endlessly about their "novel" and two hundred serious writers, who make the whole thing worthwhile. My buddy is going up to spend the night with his wife, whose a conference attendee, so I'll be playing hookey a bit. There's some good breweries in Grand Rapids (thank God for Reformed Christians!) so we'll be doing some serious White Horse Inn-ing. He's a missionary (maybe "professional church worker") in Romania and has consequently developed a chain-smoking habit that is even worse than when he lived over here. He hates western music, so maybe I'll have to switch to hillbilly. Steve Earle's got some good stuff. Plus, my favourite artist &#em; Dawn Wheat &#em; will be at the conference, as will L's "cousin", who's doing an interview of one of the writers. She's a big hoo-to-doo at Calvin, even though she teaches at a Mennonite college. She and her husband. And they're both Episcopalians. Not the ones who had the home exorcism — you had to be there for that ancient rite; even I thought it mixed "cool" with "creepy" in ways I wanted to later capture in a film script.
Anyway, upshot of all of this is that I'll not be writing anything at all for the next few days. And Sunday is Church Day, folks.
The pursuit of holiness must be anchored in the grace of God; otherwise it is doomed to failure. — Jerry Bridges
Our problem isn't that we have cheap grace, it's that we haven't made it cheap enough. — Steve Brown
It's odd that although I long ago made "Grace" a topic in my blog, I have rarely written anything in it. Grace, it seems, is far from my life. Yet it is not. It once was. I once lived far from grace, under a law of death that drove me, drove me, drove me. So, for now, let me talk about the one thing that matters.
When I was in high school, probably a freshman, I attended my church's Wednesday night youth bible study, led by a 20-something single guy that we all digged, not least of all because he once played "Smoke on the Water" after choir practice. There were only a few of us there, Wednesday not being a big hit with anyone in town. Only the hardcore youth groupers showed up, which could mean either really interesting conversations or very stifled ones, depending on which of the faithful showed up. This night, he asked us to provide some definitions to some basic terms of Christianity. We all got "faith" down: since our childhood faith had been taught as that which was necessary to win God's favour. But then he asked "What does 'grace' mean?" and that stumped us. We flailed about a bit, wondering what it meant but could not come up with a suitable answer.
[ Continue reading "The Only Thing That Matters" ]
I finally got my Chris Argyris books today. Thank goodness for the Internet's fine used bookstores, but just these two set me back a C-note. New would have set me back double, so I don't have tears in my ears from lying on my bed crying on my pillow over all the money I spent. I should be, of course, since I am currently in the hole, not counting the assets of the car and house, more than a few grand. The house pretty much knocks me into deep debt, and heaven knows I'll not see a penny more than I paid for it, plus all the cash I have had to pour into it since we took possession. Just a cheap old home. Good news is that my mortgage is about 1/3 of our rent in Chicago.
Anyway, the books came and I started thumbing through them. I've got a hankering for some Action Science learning and Argyris makes up a good part fo the pantheon of Organizational Science right now. I reckon I could have gone without spending such big money (one book, listing for US$99, weighs in at 189 pages, paperback) but his methods and theories can give me the boost I need in this new contract with Big Insurance Group (BIG). Plus, it fits in with all the rest of the reading that I've done over the past three years. I think that I am putting together a unified theory. Although lacking any real creativity, I have a strong synthetic aesthetic.
Man, just writing those two words together felt good.
[ Continue reading "More Pointless Blather" ]Seligman, in Learned Optimism, includes a short instrument to measure general tendencies (or, at least, tendencies on that day) towards pessimism or optimism on various lines. The result are interesting but not, of course, determinant.
I'd have said, before using the instrument, that I had overcome most of my pessimism. The black thoughts that have plagued me for so long have more or less lifted. I'm excited about what God is doing and where he has invited me into his service. We are creating this great community and I finally have a consulting gig doing something I can't wait to get to.
The results were more interesting. I record them here for my own use later.
[ Continue reading "Pessimism vs. Optimism" ]There's a neat little paper from the Congressional Research Service ("RS20172: Excise Taxes on Alcohol, Tobacco, and Gasoline: History and Inflation-Adjusted Rates") that shows what the taxes on alcoholic drinks should be, if we had kept the 1951 rate adjusted for inflation. For example, beer was originally taxed in 1951 at US$9.00/barrel and was taxed at US$18.00/barrel in 1999 (federal taxes only). If the US Congress had written an inflation-adjusted tax, it should have been US$55.88/barrel in 1999.
I've attached the full table below. It's interesting reading. The reason this is important is that if we reduce alcohol consumption, we can reduce a lot of health costs associated with alcoholism. However, we should be aware of unintended consequences: if we make alcohol out of the reach of the poor, will they simply turn to other, now cheaper narcotics?
It's an interesting question.
[ Continue reading "Inflation Adjusted Excise Taxes on Alcohol" ]More on Seligman's What You Can Change & What You Can't:
Depressives are incredibly realistic. I mean incredibly realistic. In turns out that a realistic understanding of one's skills and chances codes incredibly well with either having depression or future depression. HBR had an article on this last year by Dan Lovallo & Daniel Kahneman ("Delusions of Success: How Optimism Undermines Executives' Decisions", July 2003). Lovallo and Kahneman showed how the optimism that makes executives successful also makes them prone to keeping with projects that should be killed. They actually recommend having a professional naysayer on staff to provide the "no" point of view.
Of course, the ancients had this all the time. Medieval rulers had jesters who gave unfiltered commentary on the ruler's actions. Ancient Israel and Judah had their prophets. Jeremiah had to be a depressive.
Perhaps our view of depression is more wrong than it is right. Cooperrider talked about the research into positive emotions. It turns out that if you want to undo the effects of negative emotions, don't rehash them over and over. Instead, fill your mind and heart with experiences of positive emotions. You don't have to be 100% positive, just not balanced in positive/negative. Realism, with a good analysis of positive and negative scenarios, fall apart. Successful cases have twice as many positive scenarios as negative. Pollyannas were as bad as the realists.
Seligman, whose book I've been reading for the last 24 hours, has some strong things to say about how our childhood affects our adult lives: it doesn't. Really. That's what he says. Which totally contradicts current wisdom.
He argues that genetics matter more than what happens to you. Although in an earlier chapter, he says rather conclusively that parents arguing in front of their child has detrimental affects. In fact, any unresolved adult argument seems to set kids on edge. It actually seems to make good sense to hold your arguments with your spouse "not in front of the children". He even argues that children do not know that their parents are at odds: they normally assume that everything is going great with their caretakers.
I went to the library here in town, which has a great selection of business books, to start some reading I needed to do on Chris Argyris's action science. A reviewer on Amazon suggested a book by Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism, as the second book in a learning series. When I looked online before I left the house, the local public library had a copy, saving me a discouraging trip to the local college which has a great theology section (especially Lutheran theologians) but an abysmal business collection. While getting the call number for it, I noticed that Seligman had another book, What You Can Change & What You Can't. Intrigued, I decided to see what that was about. As a change consultant, knowing what I can change and what won't ever change can save a lot of time.
I picked it up at 4 PM (16:00), had to sit with my lovely wife at dinner and go to our friends' steel drum concert and I'm still more than halfway through. It's a fascinating read.
Seligman sets out to present a "fair and balanced" look at the self-improvement industry. The Kogod Professor and Director of Clinical Training in Psychology at Penn., Seligman has worked in changing people for 30 years and he wants to apply the best solution for the particular problem. He is not averse to pharmacological solutions where they work, as in the case of lithium for manic-depressives, but points out where the research shows that they have lower success rates than other methods.
What he wants to do is to provide the reader with information about what can actually be changed. Our culture of self-improvement is partly wrong, he says. There are some things that are set in us biologically. Working against them is very difficult. Other things are not difficult and don't even require psychotherapy. His discussion of phobias surprised me. I had no idea we humans are predisposed to become afraid of certain triggers, things that we as a species would need to learn to be afraid of.
Most interesting is how he lays bare the intellectual assumptions that undergird the various camps in the psychological arena. He not only provides the background on their philosophies but also clearly shows what the current (as of 1993, of course) evidence showed about each theory. The summary of research, which comes from a variety of fields, is impressive and useful.
The chapter on depression is worth the price of the book. He has particular views about depression and its causes that are, simply put, disturbing. Our current epidemic of depression (people who are twenty today are 50x more likely to have had an episode of depression in their short lives than people who
ninety over that much longer life) is well documented and any light that can be shed on it is worth getting.
I never could just read what I was supposed to. Always going far afield. But this has been so enjoyable I'm going to send a copy (once I get my contract going) to my "doctors and pharmacists are simply money-grubbing simpletons" brother, the one who reads FDA reports because the doctors poisoned his wife. (I should tell you his very well argued attack on the thyroid treatments one day.) Great read.
I have been plowing through those books on complexity theory and wondering why the going is so rough. I really don't care about the topic too much. And the writers are not very good at writing clearly. Having written technical material for a living (thank you, Gevaert!) I have little use for people who can't do the job right. Seligman's book is clear, concise and interesting.
Who knows what you will find at your local library?
Just a brief note about the blog:
A pal of mine had some time and went through and put his two cents in across the blog. Terrific! I'm going to put up a "recent comments" list over in the sidebar now that I've been monkeying around with the MT codes. And the anti-spam changes seem to have worked: The Power Struggle has freed itself, temporarily, from the forces of spam.
My pal has some strong disagreements about some of the stuff I've written, but I think that he and I really do agree more than we let on: our disagreements are important but we agree on the fundamentals of Christ, Christ crucified, Christ risen, Christ ascendant, Christ returning. Plus he made some great points about leading (he's got a tad more experience in doing that than most of us) and post-modernism that I'm going to explore soon. I do so love having conversations with people with strong opinions and clear thoughts, folks who have spent time considering something or have the experience of putting a theory to the test.
Great stuff. Good to hear his thoughts. Maybe he and I should do a radio show where we violently disagree about a variety of topics, and violently agree about others. Now that would be good talk radio! We wouldn't even need callers!
Hmmmm...
Tonight, as I started some research for an article I want to write, Trillian (my chat aggregator) pinged. I had been feeling guilty the last couple of days because I have not been online chat-wise for, well, months, and I've lost touch with some of my younger friends, so I decided today to go ahead and run it. Having someone that I didn't recognize ping me was disturbing. I would have figured it for a spammer, and almost didn't reply, but he used my real name.
It was a friend of a friend who has been a true minister of God's grace to me in the past. He apologized for not getting back to me about some question. Puzzled, I replied that I don't think that I had asked such a question. We started bantering over the little chat window anyway.
During the conversation, I said something that I can no longer help saying. I said the truth. The glorious, big, amazing, "you will never believe this" truth. The truth that forces me to stare into my deepest desires, into the things I fear the most, into the very eyes of my Father in heaven. And then I said something on God's behalf. Oh, man. What have I done?
I have done what is true. God wants me to know that He is God, that He cares for me, that I am not the great I AM but that by the his grace I am what I am.
Without saying specifics, I have said that God will surprise him by meeting certain dire needs in very surprising, "God alone did this" ways.
So, I am asking for some help because I need support as I pray for these things. Many of you are practiced in this week of fasting and praying. I am not. So I'm going to be asking for help that God will show my friend, my world, and -- let's face it -- me that He is God and beyond our wildest imaginings. I've so successfully avoided who I am that I don't even know what I should be asking for. I'm asking for something that I don't know what it is. I want to see God trounce my mighty intellect. I want to see him be truly God.
Who would've thought that this would be so momentous a day for me, that God would call a friend of a friend to deliver to me his words of grace again in an invitation to belief and faith, prayer and fasting, to that which only He can do? I am not worthy of being invited to work with God. And yet, there it is: He is asking me to join him in his work, to send his love through this clumsy channel when he could do it so much better by himself.
I am humbled to tears. In its most crazed passion, my hatred for God has never even slowed his torrent of love for me. I am overwhelmed. I am consumed. I am conquered and paraded. Who is he but the One, Only Living and True God?
I'll admit that I've always considered Easter as "amateur hour" at church. I grew up Baptist and Easter was always the one day where everyone who never went to church would show up. I prefer it as the one day that everyone who is a part of the community celebrates the key event in its faith. So, what with the massive crowds and the hordes of people who used to come but won't bother any more and the big show -- well, I just stayed home. One church I went to had a big presentation with a very realistic crucifixion scene. You had to have tickets to get in. I just stayed home. Mostly upset that someone invaded my space, I suppose. Resentful of all the people who wouldn't stick around being catered to. Like the older son of the parable about the kid who took his inheritance and ran off to live la vida loca.
L told me that M, our erstwhile Maid of Honour and currently Mom to our godsons and a an all-around good egg, has asked why we've not ever had more people over than these dozen for Easter. M reads this stuff (hi, M!) while L does not. We have assiduously not read what the other writes; we took a hiatus briefly during our recent forrays into new forms and it didn't work out well. We do best when we simply hear about what the other writes from the trade press. Or from M.
I suppose that I should clear this up: it's simply the largest number that we've had over for a formal luncheon or dinner. We've had the odd mob for Bar-B-Q (Texas spelling) and potluck, including some sixty or so for our "We're Leaving Town!" fête. But I've never been this successful with having people from a congregation over. It was like being in college again. So, M, there's the answer.
Of course, all of this is shadowed by the news of a death: JMMJ's wife got news that her father died. I worry about my friends now. I know that they make the trip (probably already have) to north Texas. I don't have anything to say about it. So let's take care of an issue that always seems to come up when someone dies.
I've finally gotten the new look down. Colophon:
No big deal but all this took me about eight hours. I never remember web stuff for very long. I started out trying to use Fireworks menus, but as they are funky javascript madness, they didn't work well and failed entirely on Mozilla. As an obstensibly standards-oriented guy, I really have to have this site look good on Mozilla. Besides, I use Firefox as my primary browser. I love Firefox as much as I used to love Opera. Sorry, old Norwegian friends: Firefox eats your lunch and steals your milk money. Of course, it doesn't do as much as Opera does. But I don't want an integrated mail/news client. Although I always used Opera as my news reader... Mozilla's Thunderbird looks great and I've been testing it out. I use Eudora for email because not having Outlook installed makes my email loads safer. Plus, let's face it: it's a habit after so many years and who really emails me anyway? My friends all pick up the phone. Even JMMJ. He could IM me, but no, he's on the mobile, the GSM, the cell, the handy. I've had Trillian up for weeks at a time with nothing on it. I'm so very lame.
I'd do the menus as dynamic gifs in Crud, but it takes too darn long. Plus there's the server load to think about. I could configure an extension in perl for MT that would simply create a new gif whenever an appropriate update would happen. That'd mean only an inconsequential CPU once a day or so. I could name the the GIFs sequentially on the Last 5 list (e.g., 1.gif, 2.gif, 3.gif) and rename them down one (so 1.gif becomes 2.gif, 2.gif becomes 3.gif, down the line) and make the new entry 1.gif. Hmmm. Inelegant, like most of my solutions but I've always been the guy with the MacGuyver solution. If I were JMMJ, I'd already have a solution written, but I'm not and I'll probably never get around to doing this. So someone else should do it.
You know, there were lots of distressed typewriter typefaces coming out in the mid 1990s and I always thought that Crud looked best onscreen. I even thought that back when I had the Agfa catalog at my fingertips. I know it lacks some of the finer details that I would want in print but somehow it comes off better than any of the more expensive houses' faces.
To get the full post-modern political experience, I started my day listening to Alex Jones talk about the the evils of the neo-conservatives, and how he, as a true conservative, abhors the current Iraqi civilian casualites. (His site has some terrible pictures from Aljazeera television of dead children, reportedly from US bombings.) His take is that the US armed forces are playing "bad cop" so that when the Internationalist UN troops come in as "good cops" they'll be accepted.
I followed that by listening to Air American Radio, the new liberal answer to conservative talk radio, which broadcasts in Chicago on AM950. I started off with Al Franken (ex SNL commentator and author of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), who has a new talk radio show. They, of course, lambasted Condoleezza Rice for her testimony before the 9/11 Commission and the rest of the Bush White House for casting aside almost every issue that the Clinton Administration followed.
What I really liked was that you could pretty much produce a coherent worldview by combining these two sources. Both were incredibly critical of Bush Jr. and his staff. For different reasons, of course. I doubt that Air America Radio would agree with Alex Jones that Bush is an Internationalist / Socialist / puppet. Still, it was a very funny ride into Chicago from both shows. Air America's later show, The Majority Report, hosted by Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder, was funny but because it was so bad. The only entertaining part of it was Mike Papantonio coming on and outshining the much more famous hosts.
Beat listening to Viacom radio again.
Okay, so when I started changing things to prevent spamming my comments, i started changing other things. Should have done it outside production, but this just isn't worth wasting all that time.
So it looks garish for awhile.
Sorry.
I did get Fireworks to start talking to Mozilla, though.
McCall, in The Lessons of Experience (1988), cites the following as the Top 5 job assignments to produce learning:
These five worked because they taught managers confidence, toughness and independece. Siebert and Daudelin, in Role of Reflection in Managerial Learning, note that "It is what you have to face on the assignment that produces learning, not the assignment per se."
A resulting problem is that in order to maximize learning and thereby maximize future innovation (learners are more likely to accept innovations), a company must be willing to take someone who is performing well in a job and put them into a position where they may fail. Risk is inherent to all of these jobs.
Of course, there are several studies (including Drucker's Innovation) that illustrate that successful entrepreneurs, whether internal or external, do not run towards risk. In fact, their behaviours reduce risk because they reduce the amount of noise in the channel.
Still, many companies find it impossible to put off current profits for future ones. Perhaps this is a problem of not having people with long enough Time Spans of Discretion (TSD) in the right roles.
I'm shutting down comments until I get them back under my control. I don't have any problem with anyone's legit comments (d0g0wa5 comes to mind, as he always does) but the penis enlargement adverts have gotten out of hand today.
Jack Vinson, the Knowledge Management guy from Chicago who has an excellent weblog of the latest and greatest in KM and even development management, has recommended Jay Allen's comment spam killer app for Movable Type, MT-Blacklist. If this works, Jay's gonna earn some money from me. While I love Open Source and the Free Software movement (I've worked on one of the now failed SSO projects), I still think that a few bucks from me is better than sending him a basket of fruit. I got into the habit of giving gifts as thank-yous while abroad and can't get out of it.
(Jack has one of the best set of article summaries I've ever seen. I highly recommend getting his feed.)
I'll also be taking a few other precautions that Elise Bauer's very useful entry on MT spam in her also very useful mini-site on Learning Movable Type. Kudos to her for some very useful information. You'd think that a guy who is professionally paranoid would have already done all of that, but "the cobbler's children go shoeless" and all.
Look, if none of this works, I'm going to move to plone like I had originally planned.
I just got the news (I'm chronically late with comics lately) that Julius Schwartz, the man behind the revival of superhero comics and the start of comic books' Silver Age, died in February. He was 88 and just shy of celebrating his 60th anniversary with DC Comics, publishers of Superman and Batman.
I gotta get back in the loop. Being out in NW Indiana, well, the only person in the industry out here is Pam Bliss, a very independent publisher of some great stuff. But not my normal industry insiders from Chicagoland.
The mom of the family we know over the pond sent us an email this week letting us know that the oldest girl would be baptized at their church on Sunday. I've spent more than my fair share of time talking with her about Big Issues (mostly boys, to be honest; as a guy, I can actually say that I know something about us). Most of the talks occurred while I wasted away my days at INFOSEC, the job where they wanted to pay me a week's pay to do two hours work. It wouldn't have been so bad had I been able to do something else but, no, I had to obstensibly look like I had work to do. All part of the ruse that they had a reason for hiring me. Yeah, I know that I'm going to be working with them again, it's just a pass-through consulting gig that they can't comprehend. If they could, they would have put one of their senior guys on it. I can't wait until someone finds out what they have me doing is going to change the way that their client does all development work.
Anyway, for a thirty-something dude who stopped using email for personal messages of any import back in 1997, holding these big talk conversations via chat has been pretty interesting. I normally use an aggregator like Trillian Pro for my chats: she used MSN, my old boss and sometimes partner hosts Jabber and my brother uses YIM. I know: how shameful not to have an IRC using pal, but I got chat out of my system back in Swiss Investment Bank, whose MIS department used chat for almost all conversations. Most notably during that dreadful day in September when we all abandoned the offices (even Chicago and London) and I became global support while the Stamford guys tried to find their loved ones among the surviving.
[ Continue reading "Baptism, church membership and the stories we tell each other" ]A friend of mine, the guy I first best manned for oh so many years ago (it was 14, he reminded me) called me on Thursday. Finally. I put his full name in my blog in the hopes that he would Google himself, read it, and give me a buzz. I never use anyone's real name here. I don't even use J's name. I'm not as paranoid as Gordon but I don't have any reason to be. Probably. Still, the hook worked. Several months later.
We chatted about the usual that old friends who haven't talked with each other talk about, business and such. We got around to talking about family, right before my signal died, and he talked about a current spat of marital difficulties. I admitted that about two years ago I had gotten to the point where, one day after an incredibly bruising verbal argument, I'd had enough and I looked up the State's law on divorce. I chose to stick with my marriage ? much to my current pleasure ? and I admitted that in part it was just plain laziness: divorce was going to be too much work, let alone trying to find a new mate, with whom I would probably get to this same point anyway so why not just stick it out some more and see if we can do something different.
I'm sitting in the South Bend Chocolate Café watching the noon soon warm the still coolish town center. We have a fairly nice county square, traditional American midwestern style with a large courthouse in the center block, surrounded by what are now mostly protected "historical" buildings. Most of them have been upgraded recently with better electrical and networking connections to support the county's attorney population. I know the county prosecutor ? maybe I'll see him come through. It's about lunchtime.
A bride stood outside the courthouse doors as I walked by. I've always wondered about what a wedding in the courthouse would be like. I've never attended one, and my own was in the Chapel where L and I attended university. Our alma mater has a fairly active chapel community. The school used to be Presbyterian and still has a presbyterian chaplain. Or at least did when we went. He was the only minister that we could agree on. I certainly didn't want to get married in the Oberlin chapel or even L's church there. She didn't want to get married in her parents' church, which she had hated since grade 8. So down to the chapel we went.