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June 08, 2005
Wanderings Here and There
Bad bloggers don't go to hell.
That's what I keep telling myself. School's done for the year. I'm still jobless in Moscow. The job market is scuzzy. So I'm a bum, and worse - a bum who can't grow enough facial hair to qualify as a bum. If I could I would celebrate by doing something manly, like eating unsalted beef jerky or scratching my underarm or drinking milk straight out of the carton.
But, yeah, I'm unemployed. The green stuff is naturally important, but it's just as bad not having anything to do during the day. One job I know I could get is making cold calls for a market research company which solicits feedback over the phone.
---INTERLUDE---
Anticipated typical conversation:
Me: Good afternoon. I am calling on behalf of the ____ Corporation to get your valued opinion on the recently marketed product of non-disposable nose tissues.
Not Me: They make those now?
Me: Yes, ma'am. ____ Corporation believes there is a hitherto unexploited market niche for those who prefer to recycle their kleenex. Would you, by any chance, be interested in sampling just this sort of product? A sample of 20 tissues could be mailed to you priority mail.
Not Me: I prefer to throw my kleenex away.
Me: Ah, so should I put down your response as "Ambivalent, but hopeful" or "Not exactly enthusiastic, but would benefit from receiving a bi-weekly ad flyer"?
Definitely Not Me: More like, "Go shove it."
---END INTERVAL---
So, yeah. I'm not thrilled. I worked on the phones before, but on the receiving end. At least I had the Hewitt-provided free lunches of plastic coldcuts and decades-old Ruffles.
So I took a covert foray into this forbidding LAND OF BERNETT RESEARCH over in Eastside Marketplace and snuck (or is it sneaked?) a peak at the office. Imagine a workspace the size of your coach-class seat on Northwest Airlines, only without the overhead storage. I remarked to my years-old friend and new flatmate, Isaiah, that I imagined the inhabitants of the sixth circle of Hell had a more comfortable time of it. He, naturally, rolled his eyes and said it he didn't know what the heck I was talking about. But the idea of phone work drives me to distraction and other nasty feelings.
While waiting for a job, I discovered just how naturally I turn into a (perhaps more introspective) version of a Bill Murray character from the 1980s. Sleep all day, play Xbox (not Atari anymore), watch old TV shows, and eat lots of frozen meals (I would've added internet, but I didn't have access till yesterday). After 72 hours of this I made the very difficult effort to shake off the moss and venture outside the house. I ended up spending almost all last week at Bucer's coffeehouse. This allowed me hours of reading, gallons of caffeine, and one page of Zach Greenfield's haiku. I'm not sure any of these activities are good for my blood pressure (but that's another story). I tried - and, shame-making to say, failed - to read a book a day.
---LITERARY INTERJECTION---
One of the books I read was Godric, by Frederick Buechner. This blindingly amazing work was recommended to me by my friend and old high-school tutor (who is finally getting married this August, hallelujah) years and years ago. It's been on my bookshelf for almost as many years. I hate, hate myself for not reading it sooner. I've seldom had so thorough an immersion into a historical-fictional world. Buechner - who I've heard somehow made it as a Presbyterian minister in spite of his artistic inclinations - speaks with the tongue of a medieval. Or - having never actually spoken with a medieval, I think that must be what a medieval monk would talk like. I alternated between crying and laughing so quickly I nearly got an eye infection (it must've been those non-disposable tissues).
You should sample something of the style:
I started out as rough a peasant's brat and full of cockadoodledoo as any. I worked uncleaness with the best of them or worse. I tumbled all the maids would suffer me and some that scratched and tore like weasels in a net. I planted horns on many a goodman's brow and jollied his lads with tales about it afterward. I took up peddling as my trade. I cozened and tricked the way a baker yeasts his loaves till they are less of bread than air. I passed off old for new. I thieved and pirated. I went to sea. Such things as happened then are better left unsaid....
There's much you're better not to know, but know you this. Know Godric's no true hermit but a gadabout within his mind, a lecher in his dreams. Self-seeking he is and peacock proud. A hypocrite. A ravener of alms and dainty too. A slothful greedy bear. Not worthy to be called a servant of the Lord when he treats such servants as he has himself like dung, like Reginald. All this and worse than this go say of Godric in your book.
Even among all the monkish ribaldry, I've seldom had a more convicting read. It's strange, since much of the book would appear to be a modern cousin to some of Chaucer's less pious tales. But each of the individuals in the story responds to sin in a different way. Every son of man, Godric knows, has some shameful sins which he wants both to hide and to reveal for the world to see. This is the conscience-stricken man as sinner - revolted by his sin, ashamed, yet hoping there is some merit in revealing a mud-slewn unrighteous heart to those who would dare think the holy saint holy. How do we answer our sin? What disciplines or sacrifices are good and purifying?
Elric, the anchorite whom Godric saves from imaginary imps, prays,
O Lord, I am a sinner sure. I rate no less. Yet night and day I've served thee all these years as best I could. I've sought to quell me wayward flesh with chains and food scarcely good enough to fill a gnat. All earthly loves I have foregone for love of thee. Canst thou not find it of thy grace to damn some other sinner worse than I instead?
So the mind-riven hermit might find his peace: if his good works are as filthy rags, he can give up even his daily comforts as if in their loss Christ would gain. But Elric is a pitiable character in Buechner. Stronger individuals confront their sins otherwise. Burcwen commits a silent infidelity, and sentences herself to a quiet service in the cloister. Roger Mouse drowns the loud sins of seafaring and thievery in the roar of laughter. Young Godric whispers penitential psalms on the steps of St. Peter's to free his father from purgatory and his own self from the sin of being an ungrateful son.
So this is what an unholy holy man lives with. A hermit with the wandering feet of a gadabout. A saint who thinks on a woman like the elders did of Susanna. A monk who tames snakes, but cannot tame his own desires. An old grey man with overfolded flesh who cannot speak a kind word, but speaks with God as if gasping for breath.
What's prayer? It's shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who's to say? It's reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish in the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell Him sins that He already knows full well. You seek to change His changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast.
---END LITERARY INTERJECTION---
I also took up Lewis' Till We Have Faces. This was a recommendation of my sister's. And another recommendation of my sister's. And at least twenty-three more from her as well. Yes, she wanted me to read it and heaped much abuse on my beardless head until I did. I forgive her, though. It was excellent.
Oh, and Woody Allen is the funniest, most consistent pagan I know. Asher, a favorite NSA Jew, lent me one of Allen's early collections of essays and I had a series of giggle fits. This is very embarrassing in public places for a guy. Allen's play, "God," is amazingly honest. I'm a Calvinist of the old sort who doesn't mind saying that the world is God's stage, and we each are following His script, some knowingly, some not. But, heck, to hear a NY Jewish agnostic acknowledge that Calvinism is the only real alternative to atheistic chaos is rather refreshing. Of course, Allen isn't a closet Reformed Presbyterian, and he tends to equate God with determinism ... but it's still an interesting read.
After finishing Allen yesterday I picked up Coldplay's new album, X&Y. I've been a fan for a while. As such, I feel I have the right to tell Chris Martin to stop wearing the tight underwear. Does he have to try to be one of the castrati? Too much falsetto to be called manly. Other than that, I felt the new album is enjoyable, if a little repetitive.
For now, in the words of my toddler sister, Emily: Love you, clicky.
Posted by Davey at June 8, 2005 01:58 PM
Comments
The moral of this post: Always take your sister's advice before the 25th time. Especially when the advice pertains to literary greatness such as Till We Have Faces. Now you need to get cracking on Crime and Punishment.
I need to see your beardless self in the midst of a giggle fit. Oh, and, not to nitpick or anything, but our sister doesn't toddle any more.
Love ya, amateur bum-ish brother. I'd skip the underarm scratching if I were you. Some sacred levels of bum-hood should never be breached.
~KJ~
Posted by: Kara at June 8, 2005 05:25 PM