Stuff and Nonsense

I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with stuff.

On the one hand, I like stuff. I am both a pack rat and an archivist, and I am rarely happier than I am when surrounded by my stuff, organizing it, looking through it, or just exploring it. Most of my stuff is books, admittedly, and these lend themselves to those kinds of activities. It is much the same story with photographs, memorabilia, letters, and the vast array of otherwise valueless objects that I keep on hand because they tell me stories or provide me comfort. Whether this congruency between my stuff and what I wish to do with it is a cause or an effect or whether this distinction is relevant at all is just one of those questions I choose to ignore.

On the other hand, stuff doesn’t have all that much of a hold on my mind. I lose things, which is often just the prelude stage of making exciting re-discoveries. I give things away, sometimes as loans and sometimes as gifts, and so often the difference between those two things is just whether I notice when they don’t come back.

As a historian, I am trained to value stuff for the stories it tells, for the comfort it brings, and for the material security it provides in a world that for so long was defined by scarcity and want and remains so even today for so many.

As a former firefighter I was trained to ignore stuff and focus on the people. Property can be replaced. People can’t. Let the property burn until you get the people out, let it continue to burn if you can’t guarantee that your own people can get out, and sleep the sleep of the virtuous for doing so.

So it’s a conflict, sometimes.

There is a lot of value judgment placed on stuff and one’s attitude toward it these days.

Some folks think stuff is all there is – he who dies with the most toys wins, and all that. Acquisition is virtue, and woe betide anyone who presumes to place any burdens, intellectual, financial or otherwise, upon one’s stuff.

Others think it is an encumbrance and an obstacle, and the goal should be to transcend stuff and our attachment to it and become a figure of pure emotion, or some ascetic Ghandian saint.

But I can’t quite manage either of those extremes. I like stuff and would rather not live without it. But I can’t really find it in my heart to like it more than anything else.

Just another one of those quandaries that define my everyday world, I suppose.

People Find Me

Sometimes I wonder about people.

Well, I wonder about people all the time, really. I wonder what they’re doing. I wonder how they get through the day. I wonder whatever happened to them, what might happen, and how I can find out. But mostly I wonder what goes through their heads.

This is why I majored in psychology as an undergrad. It’s also why I became a historian. It’s all people, and trying to figure out what they were thinking. People are just the most ridiculous things in the universe, and they’re heartbreaking that way.

One of the sneakier things that Blogger gives to those of us who use its services is a tab in the control page labeled “Stats.” You can find out how many people have visited recently. You can see what they looked at if it made the top ten things. And you can see what search strings people use to get to your blog.

Today’s winning search string? “Skinny bald cat wearing a chain.”

Okay.

There are many levels upon which one might take that, all of them filled with regret and awkwardness. I’ve thought about them a bit since this morning, and I have come to the conclusion that there isn’t anything I could ask about that search string that would make me feel better about the world and my fellow human beings in it for knowing the answer.

The thing that sort of gets me about it more than anything else is the specificity of it.

Whoever was looking for that was looking for something remarkably narrowly defined. I suppose you could quibble about the definition of “cat” – is it a feline? A Beatnik? A jazz musician? And you could ask yourself what kind of chain as well: gold, silk, anchor, whatever. But there’s not much play in “skinny” or “bald” and when you put it all together it’s fairly clear to me that the whole phrase refers to a very concrete image, whatever that might be.

It’s a mystery.

How To Take An Exam: A Primer

It’s exam time down at Home Campus, and there is always room to learn more. Not particularly about the subject matter – those neurons died last summer during the Great Tequila Rampage of 2011, may they rest in peace, and you are just going to have to get by as best you can as far as History 101 or Chem 145 or Math 091 is concerned.

But there are other neurons still unblown that haven’t been marked out for specific purposes, neurons that can be put to use learning new skills.

Skills such as How To Take An Exam. Because you’re going to need to know that sort of thing, no matter what class you find yourself in.

So, you’re welcome.

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1. Use the study guide.

You know that sheet of paper your instructor handed you a week ahead of time? The one that has 90% of the exam already on it? You might want to consider taking that seriously.

For one thing, your instructor is probably aware that the material covered in class can be overwhelming in its volume, speed and complexity, and this is a good way to cut it down to something manageable.

For another thing, a properly constructed study guide will also act as a review sheet, forcing you to put together the material in ways that reinforce the classes and assignments, turn it into a story and help to fix it into your head. Who knows? You might even remember it after the class is over.

And finally, the fact that you’ve got this a week in advance means that your professor is not likely to be forgiving when you go completely pear shaped on several of the answers. You had a week to look this stuff up. Get it right.

2. Show up on time.

There is a set amount of time allotted to an exam. You may spend however much of it you like in the hallways chugging the last of your Mountain Dew and texting your buddies about whatever stunt you pulled last night and how it affected your car, your relationship or your waistline, but that doesn’t mean the total amount of time allotted to the exam changes any. It’s a Zero-Sum Game that way at the college level. Plan accordingly.

3. Read the freaking directions.

Part of what we are trying to teach you here at the University is life skills. And one of the greatest life skills you can learn is the ability to find out what exactly is being asked of you in any given situation. In most places, you’re on your own with that. Fortunately for you, in the University setting, we will tell you – all you have to do is pay attention.

If you can manage that, you will be ahead of at least a third of your peers.

4. Read the entire test.

Get the lay of the land before you go charging into battle. Sun Tzu probably said that. I’ll bet Douglas MacArthur did too. So did Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, at least to their subordinates and probably to their dogs. And you know why all these renowned military minds said that? Because it’s obvious, that’s why.

Figure out what you have to do before you go galloping off. It’s a whole lot easier to plan when not moving at top speed.

5. Go for the low-hanging fruit first.

Never voluntarily give up points. Do the quick and easy things before getting bogged down with the difficult or complex things, otherwise you will end up rushing.

This means if you get stuck on something, leave it and come back.

This also means skip the essays and head straight for the multiple choice questions. Questions where the answer is provided for you are always easier than questions where you have to think up the answer on your own. You’ll probably zip through them in no time. Don’t run out of time. Do these first and go back to the hard stuff afterward.

6. Leave nothing blank.

Leaving things blank says, “I’m not only too lazy to study, I’m also too lazy to guess.” This is not a good message to be sending.

There are very few exams that have a penalty for guessing. And most professors will try to work with you on an answer, so if you’re at all in the ballpark with something you might get a point or two just for trying. There’s nothing we can do for you if you don’t give us something to work with.

7. Don’t be so damned stupid.

You know that question that asked you to provide a date for an event? The event that had the date already there, right in the name? There really isn’t any excuse to put a different date down for that answer, is there?

Didn’t think so.

When you write something down, take a moment and just read it over. If you find yourself with an irresistible urge to face-palm, you may wish to change your answer.


8. Don’t bullshit me either.

Most professors have been doing this a long time. After a while, we can’t help but develop acutely sensitive bullshit detectors. You aren’t going to win that battle.

And if you do win that battle, you probably put in more work than if you had just done the actual work in the first place.

Put down what you know, extrapolate as best you can, but when you start making things up just to fill space you can pretty well stop and move on to the next topic. It will save everyone time in the end.

9. Write legibly.

Anything I can’t make out is by definition wrong. I am the sole and final judge of what I can or cannot make out.

If you really knew the answer, you’d make sure I could read it.

10. If you can’t be accurate, at least be entertaining.

Sometimes you can pick up a point or two just by making me laugh. After looking at the same answer thirty or forty times, an honest bit of nonsense can be refreshing.

Go Long and Cut Right: An Easter Story

I was in junior high when the minister at my church resigned.

It takes a while for a parish to get a new minister, and thus we went through a series of temps until I was well into high school. They were good guys, I guess – some people liked them, some didn’t, and that’s about all you can say in any case.

The first guy was a tall man with a deep voice who could never quite estimate how much communion wine to consecrate and generally preferred to err on the side of caution. This meant that he never ran out during communion. It also meant trouble for whomever else was up there with him and was above the legal drinking age, such as my dad on one memorable Sunday when there was an entire extra chalice of consecrated communion wine left over.

Two things you have to know about this situation, for those of you who did not grow up in the church:

First, anything consecrated has to be consumed then and there. You can’t put it back for later.

And second, communion wine at the time – at least our communion wine – was essentially alcoholic syrup. It was thick, treacly sweet, and would have made a great topping for a dark chocolate ice cream sundae, but to have to drink a whole glass of the stuff in less than three minutes was going above and beyond the call.

My dad earned many church-related points that day.

My personal favorite temp minister was the next guy, though. He was much shorter, something that probably bothered him more than he let on as he was constantly bobbing up onto his tiptoes when he spoke. He was a hospice minister by trade, used to working in hospitals and eager to get back to what he clearly regarded as his calling, and thus had no particular interest in putting down roots with us. This meant that he didn’t really worry about who he offended or who he didn’t – he just rearranged things to his liking and that was that. Also, he had a flair for the dramatic. The man was a Broadway director at heart, and he saw us as his big opportunity to get some of that out of his system.

The kids loved him. But there weren’t that many of us, in a church where my parents were considered young, and his departure was not mourned by most of the congregation. He served his time with us and moved back into his chosen field, and sometimes I wonder whatever became of him – every once in a while his name would pop up in the newspaper, so I know he was doing well.

This is one of the stories that keep him in my mind even now, thirty years later.

It was Easter Sunday, one of the two days of the year where you could be guaranteed a crowd in that church. And the thing about Easter crowds is that they are, like Christmas crowds, traditionalists. They want the comfort of routine. They want to do the same things they did last year. They were in the wrong place.

I was serving as an acolyte that day, which in that church at that time meant that I led the choir up the main aisle at the beginning of the service and then sat up front by the altar, off to the right from the congregation’s point of view. There were two chairs there, and the minister generally sat in the other one when not actively conducting the service. When the choir rose to sing, we were pretty well concealed from the congregation’s view.

He saw that as an opportunity.

About a third of the way through the service there was a two-verse hymn, at the end of which it was my job to get up, walk to the center aisle, bow to the cross, go up to the altar and get the book containing that week’s readings, go back to my chair and then follow the minister back out to the center, where I would hold it for him to read from. This in itself was an innovation, and not one most people were fully comfortable with, but we’d been doing it for some weeks by then and the grumbling had died down.

About halfway through the first verse, he leaned over to me and said, “You know that routine where you go up and get the book?”

“Yeah?”

“I have a plan.”

I was not all that surprised by this, it must be said. Every Sunday, just before the service started, we generally got together for a couple of minutes to have him lay out the latest wrinkle he wanted to try that day. The whole book routine started out that way, in fact. But this was cutting it close. When he said he had a plan, in my head I was thinking, “The church is full of people, people who have likely never seen you before. They come twice a year. It’s the biggest holiday in the church calendar. We’re a verse and a half from “go” time. And you have a plan?”

But out loud, all I said was, “Oh.”

“Yes. Instead of getting the book and then circling back to me, why don’t you …”

He paused, his voice trailing away. By this point the choir had launched into the second verse.

“Wait,” he said. “I have a better plan.”

In my head: “What? Is this flag football to you? Are you just drawing up plays on the back of the program?”

Out loud: “Okay, hit me with it.”

We ended up halfway down the aisle with him holding the book on his own while I stood there and tried to look like I knew this had been coming.

And aside from the people I told afterward, nobody ever knew how ad-libbed that was.

Most of that congregation might have been glad to see the back of him, but I missed him when he left. The place got awfully predictable after that.

Thoughts for Good Friday

One day in the not too distant future, geologically speaking, I will stand before my Maker and I will be asked where I have been all those years. And all I will be able to say in response will be something along the lines of, “I was right there, hiding from Your followers.”

There was a time when I went to church quite often. Granted, it was a while ago, but I served my time as an acolyte in my church growing up, sang in the choir and rarely missed a Sunday during the school year (God loves Episcopalians so much that He gives us summers off). I took my turn as a lay reader like everyone else in that small congregation – my first experience with the public speaking that now earns me my living – and I survived more than a decade of well-intentioned Sunday School. There are stories from that time that I still treasure, and someday perhaps I’ll write them down here.

Every Christmas in high school and college my brother and I would church-hop, going to various Christmas Eve services just to see what they were like. We’d start at our own church – a plaster and wood chapel full of air and light, built in the 1950s – for the early service, and end up somewhere else for the late one. My favorite was a place called St. Asaph’s, which was built to look like something out of 1300, all grey stone, dark wood and claustrophobia.

Somewhere in there I acquired a fairly solid faith, defined by the sort of latitudinarian low-church Episcopal theology that I grew up within and modified by any number of other influences along the way. If I had to place myself on a spectrum, I suppose I’d be an early eighteenth-century Newtonian Deist of the sort that fit comfortably within the Church of England when Anne was queen and which descended nearly unchanged into most of the American Founders.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any of that, though. I still have my faith, but I don’t remember the last time I set foot in a church that didn’t involve a bride or a coffin. I find this rather disheartening, but I also find that I have very little incentive to do anything about it.

It seems to me that the term “Christian” has been taken over by the most narrow-minded, anti-intellectual, bigoted, reactionary and insane fringe elements of that broad movement, and that those elements have done a masterful PR job of convincing everyone that they and only they deserve the title. If you don’t believe in the literal truth of every contradictory word in that complex, sprawling document known as the Bible; if you don’t support the most stringent condemnations of unorthodoxy at the expense of compassion and grace; if you aren’t exactly like that fringe element in every particular, then you don’t count.

I don’t see this as Christianity. But then, as noted, I don’t count.

I still consider myself a Christian. And I am aware that those fringe elements are not all or even most of the Church, just the loudest, most smugly self-satisfied and most aggressive part of it. I know people who are active church members and even ministers who find these self-declared “Christians” as offensive as I do. But it gets tiresome having to defend – even to myself – the idea that I should share a space with people I regard as actively evil, and I have no energy to give to that task these days.

The Pharisees have taken over the Church, and I have left to give them room.

I will not be tarred by the same brush of insanity that drives the modern right-wing extremes of American politics and society, the one that has declared itself the One True And Only Representative not only of Christianity but of America as well. I will not accept or associate with people who, in the name of my religion, cheer for the death of the uninsured; treat women like cattle (or worse, because cattle have market value, after all); call for wars of aggression in the name of the Prince of Peace; gut the Constitution and seek to render unto the Lord what is rightfully Caesar’s; applaud the suffering of anyone who doesn’t look, act, think or speak precisely in the manner which these insufferable louts approve; and generally act with a sense of monstrous entitlement that would be deemed excessive in a toddler.

I didn’t put up with anything like that from my kids when they were toddlers, and I see no reason why I should put up with it from people who claim to be adults.

Nor do I see that as the message of the Church or its founder.

To be honest, I doubt the Pharisees want me around either. As noted, I am not of their ilk, and they are not really fond of people not of their ilk. More importantly, I have little patience for nonsense and no particular need any more to tolerate it. As I have gotten older and obtained wisdom in the ways of the world, my willingness to suffer fools gladly – or at all – has declined apace. No doubt I would start to answer their complaints about me honestly, and there is just no way that could possibly end well.

Here in these Evangelical States of America I simply do not feel comfortable hearing the adjective “Christian” applied to anything anymore – not thoughts, not actions, not places, not music, not education, not politics, not books, and not even the Church itself. All too often the word is used as a synonym for close-minded bigotry and as a way to define who is In versus who is Out.

And I’m Out.

I still have my faith. I haven’t changed. But I’m not going to go where those followers lead.

I will just have to hope that an omniscient and omnipresent God already understands.

Remaindered

Every so often the Edward R. Hamilton people brighten my day by dropping off their latest catalogue of remainders, publishers’ overstocks, and assorted other “book porn” for me to salivate over. I take out my pen and make little marks next to all the books I’d buy if time, money and space were infinite, and even if I never buy a single one I still consider it an evening well spent.

This does have its odd side, though.

No, really, it does. Hard as that may be for you to believe, but it does.

Well, I suppose pretty much all of it is odd when I think about it. I could be using that time to drink at bars or watch large men fight over a small ball or surf the web for new and ever more inappropriate images to increase the virus load on my computer – you know, manly stuff like that. But no. I am what I am, and my downtime is spent on books.

But not all books.

Because one of the things that catalogues like ERH prove even more than the fact that I need a real hobby is that there are many, many people on this planet who will write about just about anything. And more than that? That someone will publish those books.

The Magnificent Millard Fillmore?

Seriously?

I can understand someone writing this book. People have all sorts of odd little fascinations, and with the advent of word processing software a lot of the physical barriers to writing have fallen away. People natter on about everything. That’s what the internet is all about. But publishing costs money. Publishing represents an investment of time, labor and financial resources that need to be recovered.

In short, someone in a publishing house somewhere looked at that proposal and said, “Yes! That’s what the book market needs – a new full-length biography of our thirteenth president! A forgotten man, that president! I’ll bet we could make a killing on that!”

Well, yes, he was forgotten. Even in his own time, I’ll bet that nobody ever once called him “Magnificent,” not even his mother.

And to judge from the ERH catalogue price – which is just barely enough to cover the storage fees to have these volumes taking up room in a warehouse – he remains forgotten even to this day.

Someone should write a book about that.

Off to the Polls, Once Again

So today I went and cast my ballot in yet another election here in Wisconsin.

We’re getting pretty well practiced in this sort of thing, here at Ground Zero in the Teabagger War on America. We had one round a few weeks ago where I was forced to show proof of having paid my poll tax in order to vote (darn that pesky Constitution with its 24th Amendment – we’ll have none of that here in Fitzwalkerstan). Thanks to several different judges that particular barrier to suffrage wasn’t in effect for today’s election, but it might be next month when we get to vote for the recall primaries or in June when the actual recall elections are held.

Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) has bitterly condemned the various judges for interfering with his grab for absolute power by invalidating the 2011 Voter Suppression Act, by the way, and has vowed to appeal their decisions to the far more friendly confines of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a body whose naked partisanship, inept electoral corruption, and general inability to function has made it the laughingstock of legal communities across the world. North Korean apparatchiks think the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is too controlled by one party.

We’re getting pretty well practiced in that sort of thing too.

Today’s elections were fairly tame. Here in Our Little Town we had to choose school board candidates, City Council members, and a county judge. I could also vote in the presidential primary if I wanted to, but that seemed foolish. None of the Republican candidates would be worth urinating on even if they were on fire, and thanks to a modern miracle of Not Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory there isn’t anyone challenging the current occupant of the White House from within his own party.

Next month is when the fireworks start.

The Teabaggers have already announced that they will be subverting the democratic process by running false candidates in the Democratic recall primaries – apparently if you announce this ahead of time the laws forbidding it don’t apply. Learn something new every day!

This is a good thing for the Teabaggers, since there are several such laws that might otherwise impede their cynical attempts to undermine the rule of law and Constitutional practice here, such as:

Wisconsin Statute 12.05: “No person may knowingly make or publish, or cause to be made or publish, a false representation pertaining to a candidate or referendum which is intended or tends to affect voting at an election.”

Or:

Wisconsin Statute 12.13(3)(a) “No person may falsify any information in respect to … a certificate of nomination, nomination paper, [or] declaration of candidacy …; or file or receive for filing a certificate of nomination, nomination paper, declaration of candidacy or any such petition, knowing any part is falsely made.”

And so on.

But since the Teabaggers currently control all three branches of Wisconsin’s government, they are immune from prosecution and above the law. And anyone who says otherwise is clearly a Kenyan Terrorist Marxist Mooooslim Radical Who Hates America. Or an educated citizen. Teabaggers don’t seem to make any particular distinction between those two alternatives.

I always vote. And I generally take my daughters with me when I do, because they need to see it happening. They need to understand that in this country power flows uphill, not down. That American sovereignty resides in its citizens, not its tin-hat petty dictators and their minions, lackeys and cronies in the legislature, nor its corporations, PACs and false-front “Institutes” for policymaking.

Someday historians will look back on this period with the same sort of astonished distaste with which we now look back upon the first Gilded Age.

I’m just getting an early start, is all.