Entries in Life

Plus five excuses not to and why they might not matter as much as you think.

1. High Gas Prices. This one is a gimme. And don't forget, gas prices are expected to double. Gas at $3.70 is getting people closer into the city to stop using their cars for their commute. When it reaches $7 or $8, people farther out will see a bike as an attractive way to cut costs.
2. Exercise. It is unfortunate, but as our lives become more automated -- more time shuffling paper and toggling bits -- we become lazier and more sedentary. Humans aren't designed to sit on their butts all day. They should be out hunting something or working in a field. For those of us who are stuck behind a desk, riding a bike to the desk gives you some exercise every day. The further you live from work, the more exercise you get!
3. Endorphins and a Sense of Accomplishment. Exercise produces endorphins and endorphins make you feel good. I've been riding like a madman the past few days and I've rarely felt better. It doesn't hurt that I'm averaging 35 or so miles a day. Looking back, despite whatever else is going on in my life (and, really, my life ain't that bad), I feel like I've really accomplished something most people don't even try.
   
4. Discovering Your Neighborhood. It is amazing the things you notice when you slow down. And lets admit it, for most people cycling is going to be slower than driving to work. But it comes with the benefit of finding new and interesting things along the way. Things that you miss completely when you're going 45+mph. Even if it is only the silly sayings on the bumper of a parked car.
5. Sleep. When you start exercising more, you sleep better. More and better sleep is always helpful. If you have insomnia and you aren't biking to work, now is the time to start!

Now I can already hear objections, so I think I'll start with some and my responses.

1. It's Too Far! How far is too far? I admit I would be hard pressed to make a 20 mile one-way commute every day. But I'm beginning to see that it is possible. If you live in the Northeast US, and you work a sizable distance from where you live, you can probably make part of the trip on a train. But consider how much time you spend behind the wheel. An ABC news poll said "For car commuters, it's an average of 100 minutes". 100 minutes! This morning, I rode to my church (12 miles). Driving usually takes 25 minutes -- when everything is going smoothly. Biking took about 40 minutes.
2. I hate riding in traffic. It can be scary the first few times. But once you get out there and ride, you will probably see that most motorists respect you and give you a wide berth. I'm usually to the right of the white line, but drivers here still give me half a lane or more when they pass me. Now, I have run into some nasty drivers, but in all my years of riding, I can think of only two or three incidents where there was any real danger from the driver. Most people are decent and will make room for you and your bike.
3. High Gas Prices? I'm Rich! Even if you are rich, most of us could stand to get more exercise.
4. But I already go to the Gym! And let me guess... you drive there, right? How far is it? Why not bike to the gym? Or save your gym fees and bike some more. Just keep in mind that if you're getting a good upper-body workout, that ain't gonna happen on a bike.
5. I'll end up Sweaty at Work. Yes, you might. And it probably won't matter. Or you might find a way to make it work. Just keep in mind that plenty of people bike to work and they aren't all pariahs.

In the past 48 hours, I've put 75 miles on my bike. I'm hoping for another 30 tomorrow.

If I keep this up, I can do 200 a week, easily.

I told dvfmama that it took me 30 years to ride a bike and one of the kids asked what that meant.

"Oh, he just means it took him that long to ride using common sense."

Hrm... Not sure I would put it that way... But I've been told plenty of times I have no common sense, so maybe there is something to that.

In any case, today, for the first time in a while, I wiped out. I took my bike over a guardrail.

That sounds more dangerous than it was.

I was fiddling with my water bottle and going around a curve. I try to stay as far from the center of the road as possible -- usually I'm to the right of the white line. On this particular stretch, the road travels through a bit of woods on the side of a hill and, yep, there is a guardrail.

So, with my water bottle fiddling and riding close to the guardrail, I brushed up against it and, after a bit of a struggle to maintain control, went over the guardrail. With my feet in the clips, the bike came with me.

And, of course, the water bottle rolled into the road where oncoming traffic hit it and gave it a nice leak.

Hrm... If I'm going to continue posting these OW-related pieces, I should really start up the News blog.

In any case, I just confirmed that Login is working again. Let me know ASAP if you find something else broken.

And, as I said, in response to tastygreenmint's comment on the last status update: I've changed all accounts so that they are validated again.

I'm really kind of surprised to have anyone outside my friends and family asking me about the OpenWeblog site. It would be really helpful if you could let me know what you use OW for that LJ doesn't provide.

There seems to be a number of stories about bike sales going up. Apparently this AP story from Maryland spurred a local story that has accounts from local bicycle shops about increased (or not) sales. Though reports from shop owners are conflicting, it looks like people in the city (represented by Cycle Circle -- the guy who sold me my bike -- and Bike Line), most of whom naturally have a shorter commute, are starting to pick up bikes. People out in my area (the article mentions two stores in the neighboring town of Ephrata) aren't quite as ready to start bike commuting.

I mentioned that my daughter's godfather was looking at folding bikes. This week he told he got one and is putting 40 miles a week on it at each end of the train commute.

I expect this sort of trend to continue as gas prices edge their way up over the next few years.

(In other news, I put 45 miles on my bike yesterday with travel from here to there and back again. If I found a way to do that every day, I could hit 200 miles a week easy.)

At some point, I need to turn this into a real web service or something.  For now, just know that, if you couldn't log in, I'm aware of the problem and working on a fix.  As a work-around, you can comment on this entry and, when filling in your username and password, tell it to log you in.

You cannot be too gentle, too kind.

Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other.

Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives.

All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other…

Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace.

Keep silent, refrain from judgment. This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult, and outrage and will shield your glowing hearts against all evil.

— St. Seraphim of Sarov

(Via)

I've spent the past month or so really thinking about this.  I'm not sure I'm man enough to "keep silent" -- it seems close to impossible for me to keep my mouth shut at times, even when it would be in my best interest to "refrain from judgment".

It is almost as if St Seraphim wrote this as s gentle rebuke specifically for me.

I wish.

No, for the third time in the 15 or so years since I registered with the National Marrow Donor Program, I have been picked as a potential match.

This time, I'm told, there is a six-year-old girl with Acute Leukemia and I am her best chance of being a match.  I'm still only one of twelve possible choices, and after a bit of blood work it is up to her doctor.  Who may take months to make a decision.

Still, I'm excited.

Hopefully my recent trip to Rwanda won't count against me.

Four years ago, during the last presidential election, I was working like a busy bee on the Clark Campaign in Little Rock, AR.  It was there that I met dcm -- a relationship that took me around the world to Rwanda this year.  He gave me a bike sticker: Fight Terror! Ride a Bike!

Four years later, gas prices have doubled or so and, at almost $4/gallon, we're beginning to think of new ways to avoid using oil.

Last year, before gas prices became really uncomfortable, I bought an old beater of a VW Jetta from Eric.  Still, gas mileage on it is almost twice as good as that of our minivan.  (And I'm sure if I ever get the hang of shifting properly, it'll be even better.)  It has become our go-to car when we don't need to take everyone with us.

And, still, there are times when we can avoid using any gas at all.  Today, for instance, I had my semi-annual dentist appointment to get my teeth clean.  The dentist is eight miles away.  What to do ... what to do ...

Ride a bike, of course!

This past weekend, I upgraded to a road-bike.  The inexpensive Redline Conquest.  With some slick tires to replace the knobby ones it comes with (because I'm not into cyclocross) and clips to replace the clipless pedals (I may be a bike dork, but I ain't changing my shoes to ride a bike), I felt like I was flying down the road compared with the effort-to-speed ratio on my older city bike.

So, I biked to the dentist.  Sixteen miles round-trip.  About half a gallon of gas.  Almost two bucks saved.

I'll make this bike pay for itself yet.

if I didn't use oil to heat my home, I'd wish oil prices went up faster so I could ammortize the bike that much quicker.

(My daughter's God father is starting to take the train to Harrisburg and looking at folding bikes.  At $140 for a month of rides on the train vs a 45 minute commute and four gallons of gas, the car really does begin to look less attractive.)

Χριστός Ανέστη! Αληθώς Ανέστη!

Христос Воскресе, радост донесе!

Christ is Risen!  Truly He is Risen!

Yesterday was Pascha, Orthodox Easter.  After 40 days of fasting and living like vegetarians, we came home from Church Sunday morning — and by "morning" I mean it was 1 AM when we got home — and had a nice roast lamb.  Then the kids popped in a Mary Poppins video (after The Hogfather, the movie I wanted to see, scared them too much) and I promptly fell asleep.

Check out this fun Pascha song from Serbia. "Christ is risen, and brings the joy!"  (Father Stephen has the translation.)

I've let myself get flabby. It's time for a personal programming project. Something with Javascript, graphs, and some digging through piles of statistics.

Maybe even something that doesn't rely on Perl/PHP/MySQL. Now <em>that</em> would be a change!

Wow! If you read my posts on Orthodoxy, you know I often point to Father Stephen's weblog.

Since his post three days ago — a little ontology lesson on why Hell isn't real — he's gotten 115 comments (five more now that I hit reload on the page).

He does have a sizable readership (in the thousands), but nothing else has generated this much discussion.

I suppose this comment in his first reply is about as clear as you can make it:

Literalism is the bane of Scriptural understanding. Not that there aren’t plenty of “literal” things described. But many times we have to push beyond the literal to arrive at the truth.

So, I didn't get to visit the gorillas, but the reporter for this story saw them. What caught my eye, though, was this description of the Gorilla's Nest Lodge where we stayed:

That evening, as the sun was setting over the valley, the gardens of the Gorilla Nest Lodge resounded with drums and chants.

In the magic of an African sunset, the garden exploded with sound and movement as a troupe of dancers rushed on to the lawn.

There were lithe young men in long wigs resembling lions' manes, exuberant young women and beaming little girls in white Communion-style dresses.

As they performed traditional Rwandan dances, they tossed their heads, gyrated, twisted and jumped with ecstatic abandon, to the accompaniment of a hypnotic chant that echoed long after they had gone.

I should point out, If you're interested in the stuff I write about here — Orthodoxy, Rwanda, Emacs, Linux, etc. — I've got a few link over on GotNoBlog.com.

Why there and not del.icio.us?

Because I want to do something useful with the domain besides let it be turned it into yet another empty site of spam. And this use (link and comment) it is similar to what I first saw the name GotNoBlog suggested.

So, I didn't get to visit the gorillas, but the reporter for this story saw them. What caught my eye, though, was this description of the Gorilla's Nest Lodge where we stayed:

That evening, as the sun was setting over the valley, the gardens of the Gorilla Nest Lodge resounded with drums and chants.

In the magic of an African sunset, the garden exploded with sound and movement as a troupe of dancers rushed on to the lawn.

There were lithe young men in long wigs resembling lions' manes, exuberant young women and beaming little girls in white Communion-style dresses.

As they performed traditional Rwandan dances, they tossed their heads, gyrated, twisted and jumped with ecstatic abandon, to the accompaniment of a hypnotic chant that echoed long after they had gone.

I should point out, If you're interested in the stuff I write about here — Orthodoxy, Rwanda, Emacs, Linux, etc. — I've got a few link over on GotNoBlog.com.

Why there and not del.icio.us?

Because I want to do something useful with the domain besides let it be turned it into yet another empty site of spam. And it is similar to what I first saw the name GotNoBlog.

I've neglected you for a long time. Google Reader says there are over 200 things I haven't read. I haven't been twittering like I should. And my Facebook profile is left woefully out of date.

But at least I've been getting eight hours of sleep.

As many Rwandans say, forgiving is an effort that one makes in order to make life livable, especially since victims and the ex-prisoners have to live together as neighbors again. (— from Reconciliation still a major challenge

Rwanda has too many guilty people for “classic justice” — it just “didn’t meet expectations”.

Classic justice is having trouble dealing with the hundreds of thousands of genociders that will show up in court. The guilty and the victims are everywhere.

So Rwanda has implemented public confession, after a fashion, in the form of its Gacaca courts. Confess, and your sentence will be reduced.

Still, as the quote above hints, it isn't always easy. Victims and perpetrators have to live next door and they can be a danger to each other.

Describing the experiences of living in the same communities, some survivors said that despite having forgiven and reconciled, they found it hard to look each other in the eye.

Tonight, after confession, my priest told me "Confession is easy, relationships are hard". I immediately thought of this article. Confession, giving voice to your sin, seems so easy, but we have to do it so often. Screw up, confess. Screw up, confess. Repeat ad infinitum, it seems.

Because confession is so easy and does not, in and of itself, mean change, it is nothing compared with going back and reconciling with the one you wronged.

When I've hurt my wife, she isn't satisfied that I've gone to confession. She wants real change.

When the man who killed your family confesses to his crime and has his sentence reduced or forgiven completely, you aren't going to be satisfied when he moves in beside you. You want real change. (And probably, if we're honest, some "classic", retributive justice.)

Confession is easy. Reconciliation is hard.

Ok, I don't follow the news-cycle much, but evidently people were yammering about Obama being an elitist. I gotta hand it to Jon Stewart, though. This is some good editorializing:

I know `elite' is a bad word in politics, and you want to go bowling and throw back a few beers, but the job you're applying for? If you get it and it goes well? They might carve your head into a mountain. If you don't actually think you're better than us, then what the **** are you doing?!?

Any mention of Rwanda seems to evoke the Genocide there fourteen years ago. Since then, we've had at least a couple more (Darfur, Kosovo), but before Rwanda, there was Cambodia. Dith Pran, the Journalist from The Killing Fields said on his deathbed: One time is too many.

Genocide pops up in the strangest places. Reading this travel account of a couple of Jewish backpackers in Germany is telling. It starts out easy enough.

There was a great divide between my generation and the ones that had lived through the Holocaust. It was their identity. To me, it was a history lesson.

But ends with this haunting image:

Near the exit was a beautiful bronze sculpture that read, "Never again." Beyond the sculpture sat fifteen orange tents. There were fifty Rwandan refugees sitting in the dirt and cooking lunch. There was a cardboard sign in front of them with the words: "You said never again."

Is Dith Pran's dream impossible? Will we always have genocide?

I don't know. I'm pessimistic enough to think that people will always suffer from irrational hatred.

I suspect that the institutional intolerance that Rwanda is currently using is not the right way to get fix the problem in the long term. Now-a-days, Rwanda sacks officials for believing the wrong thing. It may work for now, but as long as people continue to believe the "genocide ideology", it won't matter if they lose their jobs, the beliefs persist and people will continue to elect people who think the wrong thing.

Here we are, sixty years after the end of WWII, and Germany still hasn't managed to cleanse itself of racists.

I suspect it takes something more subtle. And it takes more time.

There is one comment on that last link, though, that gives a note of caution: “He who says he knows the way, does not know the way.” -- Lao-Tze

Today is the day for shell history stats:

mah@spawn:~$ history|awk '!/=/ {a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
107 ssh
55 sudo
27 bzr
18 ls
18 host
17 xrandr
17 ping
16 cd
9 ledger
9 ifconfig

(Modified slightly to skip some ledger lines from when I was doing taxes.)

You won't see most of what I do because it's all in Emacs.

I started writing about why I wasn't a creationist, but, the more I thought about this, the more I thought of giving a more encompassing apophatic description of myself.  I could just call myself an Orthodox Christian, but so many times we have pre-conceived notions for what words mean that a simple label isn't going to tell you anything about who I am.

(I've run into the same problem with my friends that I met in my political activities.  I'm a registered Democrat, but I'm not at all in favor of defending Roe v. Wade.  At some point, I'll have to address my political views in an apophatic manner .  But this should give you a good idea.)

My faith in a literal six-day creation first began to waver in high school.

At the time, some people around me were convinced that you had to believe the Genesis account was literally true.  Otherwise, the thinking went, how could you believe anything in the Bible?  Something didn't seem right with that.  I can choose to believe whatever I like.  Believing in something doesn't make it so.  There's nothing in the text to indicate that Genesis is meant to be a factual, historical account of creation.

The only reason I could find that people thought Genesis account was factually accurate was their standards for understanding scriptural truth.  Father Stephen explains this much better than I ever could when he talks about Scripture as an Icon, so for a fuller explanation, read him, but in a world obsessed with facts and figures, Christians immersed in rationalism look to scripture to provide some straight-forward plain talk.

When the "plain meaning" of scripture doesn't coincide with our observations of the world (what we commonly refer to as science), Christians of this sort have a choice: ignore what their senses tell them about the world, or start to pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe.

I have a hard time ignoring my senses.  Complicated attempts to explain away observations are, well, too complicated to be believed (Occam's Razor).

Fundamentalism, conservative evangelicalism, and any other sort of Biblical literalism is out the door.

Where could I go?  One place I didn't feel comfortable with was that strain of Protestantism commonly known as "Liberal Christianity".  If we consider Protestants as a straight line with biblical literalists on the right and liberal Christians on the left, then, on the far left, there isn't even any need to believe the Nicene Creed.  These would be  the sort who think the Jefferson Bible isn't that bad.  It was just another man's interpretation of the sacred text.

Perhaps I'm just too much of a traditionalist, but I couldn't do that.  My faith includes a belief in the resurrection.  Over time, I've come to understand the resurrection not as a "Get Out of Hell Free" card, but as an act of Love by which God empowers us to be fully human.  I can't ignore my faith.  And I don't think scripture is just a matter of interpreting text.  Christianity is about relation with God, not figuring out what I think Scripture means.

My personal history comes into play here.  I have a lot of trouble with condemning all Catholics -- something some fundamentalists seem fine with -- so I ended up associating with quite a few in New Orleans (a very Catholic city), dating a couple, and, finally, marrying one.

That obviously influenced my path.  I dabbled with Catholicism, but ended up being too Protestant.  And now I'm too Orthodox.  I simply don't think any one person (even a Bishop, or Pope) can be considered the final word on what God has to say.

So I'm not Catholic.

Around the time I became Orthodox, the "Emergent Church" began to grow.

I've said before that I think people interested in the Emergent Church would find a lot of what they're looking for in the Orthodox Church.

Take, for example, this post on War or Jim's post on Biblical Narrative.  Both could benefit from the traditional Orthodox understanding of the Old Testament that focuses on the types of the Old Testament without attempting to justify the atrocities there.

But they'd have to give up something: their individual pursuit of Truth.  I've been thinking about this since my friend Jim (who I hope can forgive me for pulling this quote out of context) wrote earlier this week "Maybe I don’t go so far - as Matthew seemed to have no problem with doing - as to use the word fulfillment".  Orthodoxy, by contrast, is entirely about fulfillment and completely embraces the Gospel.  The resurrection is the beginning and end of everything.

I guess, in the end, you could say I am not a biblical interpreter.  I long ago grew tired of debates about the scripture's meaning and worrying about what I thought about the Bible.  These days, I struggle enough with simply trying to fast, pray, and love my neighbor.  These simple actions, commended to us by Christ Himself, are more than I can manage without worrying about what Just War or Evolution vs Creation.

I didn't know I had such influence.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about fasting in such a way that it piqued Lon's interest and he decided to try a fast from meat -- something most people call "being vegetarian".  I suppose the difference here is that neither he nor I are planning on giving up meat permanently.

He's got some good observations, check them out.  Even a completely secular fast can be helpful.