On the other hand, one acceptance letter is sufficient for my purposes provided that the powers that be make the right decisions on funding. I'm still waiting to hear back on funding from the school that accepted me.
I'm presently writing a bit inspired by Yo-Yo Ma's commentary for This I Believe. I'm not certain that I'm taking it in the direction he intended, using him as an epitome of the medieval Islamic understanding of a philosopher-king. Should be up on doxos on Sunday evening or Monday morning. What makes this different than other pieces inspired by events in the news or commentaries, is that I'm not inspired by being ((spoiled torqued)) off by the utter idiocy of what I heard. Rather, I was very appreciative of Ma's point of view. It's a nice commentary and well worth listening to.
If you didn't follow the link in bo's celliary to the Salon interview with Chris Hedges, author of `I Don't Believe in Atheists', you should if for no other reason than to see these to quotes in their full glory.
On having sympathy for jihadists:
I spent so long in war zones that I think we don't know what we would do under repression and abuse -- you know, if somebody killed my father. That's the brilliance of the great writers on the Holocaust, like Primo Levi and [Bruno] Bettelheim. They understood the humanity of their own killers. That line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin. We all carry within us the capacity for abuse, and I think that's the most disturbing lesson you walk away with when you cover wars. We're all capable of evil, under the right circumstances, and very few of us are immune.
On the intellectual approach of Christopher Hitchens:
That kind of stuff is just ... it's the epistemology of television.
I think it clear that the `epistemology of television' needs to have a full blown treatment, even if not in the fashion that Hedges uses the phrase.
At work I dodged a major bullet. Or rather, I triumphed over software that is far more difficult to install than it ought to be. The software is on a laptop to which several Pocket PC devices will be connecting. It's set to go out to a trade show on Monday morning. Had I not finally overcome yesterday, I'd working on that all weekend instead of sitting around in my boxers writing things like this diary entry and pontificating on Yo-Yo Ma and Abu Nasr al-Farabi.
I also scheduled a closing to officially sell the last house I own that I don't live in, the Headache House. This is the first house my wife and I bought the year after our daughter was born. Little did we know that Dayton, Ohio was about to enter into a death spiral. When we moved down to Cincinnati, we couldn't afford to fix the things that were required to be fixed in order to sell it for what we owed the bank. Ten years later, and tens of thousands of dollars sunk into it, we're selling it on paper for about 2k less than we bought it for. But we're also owner financing. After over five years of alternating between renting it out and trying to sell it, we've finally accepted that no one who qualifies for a traditional mortgage is going to have any interest in buying it. So we've offered a private mortgage to the present renters who have been paying on time every month for about 6 months. If all turns out well, in ten years, they'll own the house completely unencumbered. But at the very least, my wife and I will no longer be on the hook for property taxes and utilities nor will we have any liability if it goes vacant and turns into a squat.
Despite this being the first week of Lent and despite me holding to the fast (no meat, no fish, no dairy, no wine) and being hungry all the time, my weight is the same as last week. The odd thing is that my waist is smaller. I can comfortably wear my belt tightened one more notch than I could last week. I'd say that maybe I lost fat and gained muscle, but I didn't exercise at all this week. I was so sore from shoveling snow on the weekend that I skipped my morning exercise routine for the first half of the week and by the last half I was just plain too lazy.
Being the first week of Lent, my evenings were full of the Church services. Monday through Thursday were parts 1 through 4 of the Repentance Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete. I missed only Thursday, needing to get my last Latin homework assignment completed before Friday morning. It's a beautifully solemn service that highlights the many wrongs committed by various figures in the Old and New Testaments followed and the subsequent repentance of those figures. No matter how grievous the sin, there is always the possibility of repentance. Friday was a the Lenten vesperal liturgy of Saint Gregory the Great which is also very solemn and heartbreakingly beautiful.
And now on to seize the day.
| < Attention London infidels... | BBC White season: 'Rivers of Blood' > |
