1) I used to blog regularly, and I miss it. The book of faces has inertia going for it; and I'm not yet pulling the plug there, but I want to try this again, in long form. So welcome! Pull up a chair!

2) In 2012 I started a blog about being Quaker. It's named after work by one of my favourite Quaker poets, and also after one of my favourite Quaker Science Fiction novels. I might also post there, occasionally. We'll see.

3) I became a dual American / Canadian citizen as of June 22, 2007. My partner dan and I moved here from the US in August 2001, so he could take the position of professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

4) When we moved here, I was a self-employed web application developer, for a much-younger Web. My business-partner and I made our first $2,000 out of a meeting at Comdex in 1996. I look back on those days fondly but definitely don't miss them! I worked for various companies doing Web 1.0 stuff; but I really hated chasing down clients for payment. I started working at the University of Waterloo in November 2004, in a job that was roughly 75% my dream job. Since then I've changed bosses six eight times, but still work for the same unit, Computer Science. My job is currently 100% my dream job. The me-of-half-my-lifetime-ago would be astounded. I expect I will stay at the University until I retire.

5) In July 2002, we adopted the cutest puppy in the world. At the time Rover was six weeks old. It was a few weeks later that we discovered that a certain number of people are offended that we named a girl dog Rover. I was really perplexed. I'm told that her cousin Sonia the Samoyed wanted to know if she's a squeak-toy or a snack. She really was the best dog. She lived to a ripe old 16 years, and we miss her all the time.

In August 2021, we adopted the director of the River Institute who is an absolute delight. And very photogenic. River is learning new things every day; even if it is "what is the best way to arrange my blankets for napping?"

I've started quaking about being a writer.
...No, wait. Reverse that.

http://after-the-dazzle-of-day.blogspot.ca/

I just learned the Yiddish word beschert- "meant to be for some purpose."

It's used for happy occasions like finding the love of one's life, or chance encounters that change your life; and also for twists of fate.

It seems a useful concept in the way the article spelled it out. I was describing it to somebody recently but I got the definition incomplete in way that seems instructive to me. I said it was "meant to be," which the author somehow gave different nuance than "preordained or destined" but I couldn't remember how he made that argument.

The closing paragraph from the article by Rabbi Staub (in Friends Journal) made it clear for me again: "Meant to be for some purpose"— "the meaning isn't in the event itself, but in what we do when the event occurs. There are always opportunities— invitations— to react one way or another.

The meaning that I attribute to any circumstance, when I am able to do so at all, is not in the event itself, but how I respond when it ricochets out of my control."

I like that.

The shorter form "Meant to be" sounds like the heights of hubris; close to claiming to understand a Divine plan for the universe. It also sounds like predestination, which I find fatalistic and not useful.

In contrast, if I say it was "meant to be for some purpose" I am first not claiming to know what that purpose is; though I may spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. I am opening myself to additional clarification, changing it from something the Divine has done, into something the Divine might be asking me to do in response.

Online dictionaries say "beschert is beschert" is the analog to que sera sera— especially the connotations of finding one's soulmate. One's beschert is the one God intended for you to fall in love with.

Thing is, you also have some say in the matter; you can NOT fall in love and not spend your life with them, or maybe it takes some time for things to fall into place.

...Yiddish being Yiddish, there's a fair bit of contradiction built into the word, and perhaps most people just use it to mean "predestined" without the personal implications of responsibility. And maybe that argument is beschert!

Friday evening, I popped down to Toronto for a cabaret/theatre/concert production of Spin by Evalyn Perry. I wasn't sure what to expect; I knew it involved spoken word, singing, and music played upon a bicycle. I was nudged into going by my friend John, who came all the way from Minneapolis for this show. I know Evalyn from Quaker circles; last summer, she was one of the evening plenary presenters at the 1,000-person FGC Gathering. She does a political/musical show that's bitingly clever and often requires more than one listen to pick up all the threads...

In retrospect, I wish this production was extended for another week, so I could nudged more people into going- this afternoon was the last performance (a matinee added at the last minute because it was selling out).

The themes were, broadly, the story of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to bicycle around the world at the very end of the 19th century; the joined history of bicycling and feminism; Evalyn's personal story of being a cyclist and artist; and notes on the City of Toronto's mixed appreciation for bicycles.

I *had* thought that the music-played-upon-a-physical-bicycle would be less effective than it was. Her co-performer, Brad Hart, used drum sticks, his hands, and parts of the bicycle, which was wired for amplification, and attached to a looping device. I spent maybe 5 minutes distractedly studying how it worked- they even tuned different spokes to different pitches- but then I could just let go and listen to the music he was making with Evalyn (and Anna Friz, who did on-stage mixing and singing).

Evalyn produced a CD of the songs in the concert; this morning I drove to Guelph, and I appreciated the irony of driving while listening to a CD all about bicycling.

The Globe and Mail gave it 3 out of 4 stars. And she has a cover article in the weekly Xtra paper, which is a good recap of the show, actually.

So- Thanks Evalyn! And thanks, John, for nudging me to come!

I just got a package in the mail, from Cat and Girl. I am now the owner of the original sketch/ink artwork for Birds of America and this makes me really happy.

Meet the Robinsons is a really charming science-fiction movie, sort of a cross between "Up," "Back to the Future," and "The Addams Family." I now have the DVD, and it stands up to a 2nd viewing, which I wasn't sure of since I first saw it on a tiny airplane seat-back screen with crappy headphones. But yeah. Recommended.

I'm busy, and that feels good, and not like burnout.

Yesterday I co-led a visioning session in the Quaker Meeting, and we accomplished a lot in 90 minutes. The theme was the needs of each of us and all of us together; what should we focus our attentions on in the Meeting. The conversation included a number of areas we've needed to talk about more, if we're going to be a strong community. I see this as a very good step. It was draining but also energizing. Ya know?

Today at work, I had three items on my plate I really wanted to get done, and I did. And then I went to the gym, which was a much better use of that 45 minutes than staying at work.

And then dan and I went home for dinner, and dan dropped me off on his way to chorus rehearsal, and I did an evening of Quaker work with 6 people I like a lot. 90 minutes later, I was very much ready to come home again, but not feeling burned out or stressed. Even though I have 9 new things on my to-do list.

This morning I took my usual route to Quaker Meeting, the rail-to-trail from my house to downtown. It was looking like kids were playing with some heavy machinery on it- there are gashes in the pavement, sometimes the width of the trail, all perhaps an inch deep and wide. They were wavy, occasionally straight, sometimes parallel. Many going dozens of feet down the path. By the time I'd run over the 20th one I was fairly miffed. Who did they think they were, ruining the path?...

They certainly didn't get tired of doing it, since the gouges ran at random intervals all the way to the park. Augh!

...And then I realized who they thought they were. (Did you figure it out already?)

City pavement repairers. Who stopped part-way through repairing cracks. Cracks which I surmise require widening before they can be filled. I guess I'll find out in a few weeks, since I'll be gone the next two weekends.

--

I just received my birthday present from melted_snowball. It is a beautiful stained-glass panel, mostly in shades of white and clear, with a tree-branch motif. The artist came to install it yesterday. While we were admiring it, I realized... it has holes! There are three-dimensional aspects, which include some pointy bits of glass, and some shapes that are the absence of glass. I like it a lot. :)

--

So I was thinking about these both: holes that had to be made worse before they could be fixed, and holes that make something beautiful ("that's how the light gets in", thank you Mr. Cohen) and about a phrase I've been wrestling with, "standing in the tragic gap." I first heard the phrase in a book by Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. He is talking about living a nonviolent life, a life of integrity, when he defines the term:

a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has been and never will be closed. If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility.

I harbor no illusions about how hard it is to live that way. Though I aspire to be one of those life-giving people who keeps a grip on both reality and hope, I often find that tension too hard to hold--so I let go of one pole and collapse into the other. Sometimes I resign myself to things as they are, sinking into a life of cynical disengagement. Sometimes I embrace a dreamy idealism, living a life of cheerful irresponsibility that floats above the fray. [1]

He talks about how examples of standing in this gap can be seen in the lives famous peacemakers like Gandhi and MLK Jr. And also in the everyday, the lives of any parent of a teenager; the parent sees their hopes for the child, as well as what is happening in the child's life. And if the parent fails to stand in the tragic gap, they can cling to an idealistic fantasy or fall to cynicism.

He continues:

Deep within me there is an instinct even more primitive than "fight or flight," and I do not think it is mine alone. As a species, we are profoundly impatient with tensions of any sort, and we want to resolve every one of them as quickly as we can. [...] Ultimately, what drives us to resolve tension as quickly as we can is the fear that if we hold it too long, it will break our hearts. [...]

The heart can be broken into a thousand shards, sharp-edged fragments that sometimes become shrapnel aimed at the source of our pain. Every day, untold numbers of people try without success to “pick up the pieces,” some of them taking grim satisfaction in the way the heart’s explosion has injured their enemies. Here the broken heart is an unresolved wound that we carry with us for a long time, sometimes tucking it away and feeding it as a hidden wound, sometimes trying to “resolve it” by inflicting the same wound on others.

But there is another way to visualize what a broken heart might mean. Imagine that small, clenched fist of a heart “broken open” into largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold one’s own and the world’s pain and joy. This, too, happens every day. We know that heartbreak can become a source of compassion and grace because we have seen it happen with our own eyes as people enlarge their capacity for empathy and their ability to attend to the suffering of others. [2]

That sounds incredibly terrifying. And none of his examples are ones I can relate to. Being like Gandhi?

OK, some readers of this are parents, and some are (or have been) parents of teenagers, so maybe you've got a handle on this...

But while I was sitting in Quaker Meeting this morning, I had the realization that I have certainly been there. I started coming out, half my lifetime ago. Anyone who's done so will recognize the risk of a broken heart there. The closer the person to us, the greater the risk when coming out to them. While it was half my lifetime ago, I remember how terrifying it was. And yet how necessary. And coming out never ends- though, I am so thankful that at this point in my life, I have little risk to coming out to anyone at all, which is partly by my choices and partly circumstance. I know this is not the case for some reading this- either people in their lives who will not accept what they are told; or living in a much more conservative environment. I'm so grateful.

And I know that I have privilege that many do not- I can duck out of standing in the gap in a number of arenas. I'm relatively wealthy, I'm male, I am not visibly gender-variant, I'm not a visible minority.

I'm not sure where this goes. I am still working on it, just having made one connection. I wonder what you think?

Two Parker Palmer links:

[1] Hidden Wholeness on Google Books

[2] An essay by Palmer on living in the Tragic Gap

What with current weather (mid 80s) and the wonderful lilac smell in the air, Ithaca is reminding me of Key West. All it needs is fewer Volvos and more chickens. Any chickens, come to think of it.

I saw the brand new Quaker meeting house-to-be. It's an abandoned restaurant in the middle of a downtown residential neighborhood. It looks great from the outside. It will need many hundreds of thousand dollars of work inside. The Meeting had a work party as soon as they got possession. 50 adults and 20 kids. The general contractor says they did approximately five thousand dollars of cleanout work. In a day.

Ithaca's traffic is just as much a mess as ever. Wegmans is just as awesome a food store as ever.

There was a May Day concert on the Commons, with pretty good music, but which looked almost unmoored enough to become a protest march led by the socialists, judging by the signs against the racist immigration stupidity in Arizona and a few other worthy causes around the country. (which as always, have zero connection to things that a local protest could expect to affect). Am I cynical? Maybe a bit. I lived here eight years.

The conversation in the coffee shop at the old used bookstore today was about how in the old days, we didn't call them glass shops, they were head shops. And did the town need quite so many, after all? I did not weigh in.

Spent a lot of time catching up with my hosts. We went to Viva Taqueria for lunch (super basic burrito with black beans and mole sauce), which gave us the strength to start an evening Settlers of Catan game, and nearly finish before we were hungry for dinner. Plus I was teaching them the game at the same time.

This won't mean anything to anyone but melted_snowball , but I walked right by Unemployed Community Activist Fay Gaugacis at Wegmans.

Tomorrow: Quaker meeting, followed by goodbyes as I head home with Rover, while one of my hosts heads north... To my parents' house. Yeah. Weird. :) But very much good weird.

... On the drive down I listened to the TAL episode about Michael Poyzner, who made fairly exaggerated reporting errors writing a book which became the basis for his California governor's election platform. About the grim urban schools. Which were possibly much less exciting in real life than his story. With an eye to that, I consider and conclude that everything I wrote here was at least as exciting before the retelling.

I've been listening to Lady Gaga / Bad Romance on loop for the last few hours. It's a catchy song. Video's sort of weird. OK, really weird. [1]

This morning I dropped off melted_snowball at Toronto City Airport, for his flight to Chicago. He's gone for a month- but I'll see him in three weeks on a visit. I'm... not sure how this will go, keeping myself on a sane eating/sleeping schedule; at least the dog will remind me to go to bed on time.

Since I was in downtown Toronto on a Sunday morning, I went to Quaker Meeting. I can't claim to be a stranger there, despite only having visited for a wedding once many years back- I was surprised to discover I knew half a dozen people. I was introduced to a friend's house-guest, visiting from Holland, who was surprised I had visited his hometown in the north of the country. (him: "But nobody visits Groningen!" me: "Ah, but we did." him: *shrug* "...OK." [2] I also met Steven, whose partner is a Master's student the department where I work. (They moved to Canada for his school, and they're from Rochester NY. It's a crazy small world.)

And then I excused myself for the second part of my plans, to see the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Royal Ontario Museum. Even though it was just three blocks away, I wasn't sure how I would get to the ROM, given that until I got there I had overlooked the Santa Claus Parade between me and the museum. (The Dutch guy said, "How long is the parade? Maybe you can just wait." I told him it's over two hours. Deadpan: "Two hours? It's just one guy!")

So I dashed across Bloor Street, narrowly missing being trampled by Elves. [4]

And can I just say, November 15 is too early for a Christmas parade. (December 15 might be too early for a Christmas parade, if you were asking me- but nobody did.)

Right. No trampling, though the clowns were scary, and there were too many people in general, but at least the crowds outside the ROM meant the museum was comparatively empty for a Sunday afternoon.

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit was neat (if pricey- $28 for my ticket). The ten fragments of the scroll were text from various books of the Bible, apocrypha, and non-Biblical texts, from 2000-2500 years ago. The fragments are quite fragmented- on the one hand it's amazing that paper scrolls have lasted this long; on the other, you were often looking down at a smudge on a dark frame and only really seeing the text in a reproduction. The light was quite low, in order to preserve the fragments. There was a fascinating video of how badly the fragments had been treated over the last 60 years. Early after discovery, they were taped together, which just makes my jaw drop. They were pieced together in a brightly lit room, people ate while handling them, and so on.

The uncertainty behind how the scrolls got stashed in the caves where they were found is also neat. One theory was the nearby hilltop town was a religious community of Essenes. Another justifiable theory was that the town was a commercial center occupied by stone-masons and potters- which doesn't explain the cache of 600 scrolls hidden in jars in the caves under the town. The exhibit did an OK job putting out the evidence, showing videos of archaeologists arguing about it, and leaving the mystery for the visitor to consider.

I mostly liked the rooms of context they provided before the actual scroll-bits- how the civilizations in the area had been living for the prior hundreds of years, and how they lived in the subsequent centuries.

I was having a bit of a grin at the context, as well, because I'm in the middle of reading Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Right. Fiction, history. Fiction, history. But "Lamb" mentions many of the same pieces of daily life. Such as the Mikvah ritual baths, which involved a joke I won't try to explain but involves the frustrations of being a teenager and needing to take lots of ritual baths.

The ROM certainly could have done better with sound-insulation. The space is tall and echo-y, and a few videos have loud sound, meaning that visitors will be talking fairly loudly throughout the exhibit, making it a bit hard to concentrate.

And the gift shop had some truly special items, like Aveta (sp? can't be bothered to google) brand Dead Sea Mud in 4 different varieties. Also some odd book choices, including "God's Little Princess Devotional Bible" and "God's Mighty Warrior Devotional Bible." [5]

I also saw some modern art on the theme of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which partly worked for me- it had text sliding off glass plates onto the floor, written in rainbow glitter; the text might as well have been "Lorum Ipsum" for its lack of meaning, though the visual effect was interesting.

The ROM also had an exhibit on the 10 Commandments, but I wasn't particularly impressed- the historical info didn't seem well explained and the modern art part of that exhibit wasn't very interesting.

Oh- and food- I went to both restaurants, just for kicks. The 5th floor was too pricey for me, with $5 coffees , $9 fries, and $50 lunches. But the basement restaurant was surprisingly good- I got poutine, made with "hand-cut fries", with real cheese curd, and with chicken gravy. In the past I have mostly avoided poutine for two reasons: fake cheese curd, and beef gravy. This poutine was awesome. Oh, and their meats are from Cumbrae farms, so they're local and free-range and very tasty. $5 for a lunch-size portion. The other dishes there looked quite good as well, and they had tasty looking deserts too.

And that was my day, more or less.

[1] this version has a cute guy in it though. Not that Lady Gaga isn't attractive too- but flaming breasts don't really do much for me.

[2] in case it's interesting to anybody else, the reason I went to northern Holland was to visit Barbara Katz Rothman (who has come up in various friends' discussions on inter-racial adoptions and childcare)- her son was a friend in college. [3]

[3] which is why I know the Dutch proverb De een zijn dood is een ander zijn brood,
One man's death is another man's bread, a grim saying, but what the guy I met on the train to Groningen wanted to share with us.

[4] at the beginning of the day, while dan was driving us downtown, I saw a partially lit sign, and I joked on facebook about renting "Elf Storage." Which was all fine, and I joked with araleith insaint [oops!] about stashing my elves there, but I think the elves were unimpressed with the joke.

[5] Don't follow this link to God's Little Princess Devotional Bible unless you are less annoyed by gender-typing nonsense than I am. *shudder*

My bike odometer just rolled past 215 miles, which means it's gone a total of 6,215 since I put the odometer on the bike nearly exactly 9 years ago. As melted_snowball pointed out, that's 10,000 kilometers, so I'm going to reset to kilometers.

I wonder where the next 10k will take us.

Tomorrow, I'm off to IAD (Dulles) and ROA (Roanoke) thence to Virginia Tech for Friends Gathering. This year, as last year, I'm not taking a workshop, as I'm helping out the community instead. The week promises to be very full, very warm (Virginia! Summer! Oy.) and hopefully with surprises of the good kind.

So I'm preparing for my portion of a presentation on Quakers and Equality tomorrow. I did a text search on my computer for something, and it found me this quote.

Bill Hicks:
""I asked this guy, I said, 'Come on man, Dinosaur fossils. What's the deal?' 'Dinosaur fossils? God put those there to test our faith.' 'I think God put you here to test my faith, dude. You believe that?' 'Uh huh.' Does that trouble anyone here? The idea that God might be fuckin' with our heads? Anyone have trouble sleeping restfully with that thought in their heads? God's running around, burrying fossils: 'Hu hu ho. We will see who believes in me now, ha HA. Im a prankster god. I am killing me. Ho ho ho ho.' You know, you die, you go to St. Peter, 'Did you you believe in dinosaurs?" "Well, you know, there was fossils everywhere.' [Bill makes sound effects with his mic] KOOM Aaaahhhh. 'What are you, an idiot? God was FUCKING with you! Giant flying lizards, you moron! That's one of God's easiest jokes!' 'It seemed so plausibleeeee! Ahhhhhhhh!' Bound for the lake of fire. . . .

While I appreciate your quiant traditions, supersitions, and, you know, I on the other hand am an evolved being who deals soley with the source of light which exists in all of us, in our own minds, no middle man required. [laughs] But anyway, I appreciate your little games and shit, you putting on the tie and going to church, a de da de da. But you know there's a LIVING GOD WHO WILL TALK DIRECTLY FUCKING TO YOU-- sorry --not through the pages of the Bible that FORGOT TO MENTION DINOSAURS!" - Revelations (1990's comedy routine)

Maybe I should just play that.