The gym rats

Mary cancels her old gym membership, and the entire household (minus Bianca) signs up at Planet Fitness.

“There should be a sitcom episode about this.”

“Yes: ‘The Gang Joins the Gym.’”

“There already is one. It’s called ‘Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack.’”

We tour the building. Very nice. There’s purple everywhere, and a lot of fat people.

There aren’t a lot of weights; this is to keep out the bodybuilders and the fitness nazis. A “lunk” alarm goes off whenever you grunt too much or you brag about your workout or about shedding your toxins. If you set off the “lunk” alarm very often, you lose your membership. The gym is trying to be a safe place for “regular people.”

Slogans:

NO GYMTIMIDATION

NO LUNKS

JUDGEMENT FREE ZONE

At first we wonder how we’ll manage without judging people, but soon we’re putting the ideal to good use.

At Wendy’s:

“Are you really going to eat all of that?”

“Hey, I can take it over to Planet Fitness and eat it there. It’s a Judgement Free Zone.”

The other day I was on a treadmill, running next to a very slow man. I did not judge him.

It’s kind of lovely, actually, what capitalism is achieving here. No judgment + just $10/month + free pizza + lots of purple → lots of people exercising who ordinarily wouldn’t.

Principles of composition

Now that Christmas and Carlos Muñoz Day are over, I’m getting ready for my next semester of Principles of Composition (W130). I’m revising course policies … perusing new readings …

… and writing a sample essay.

(I want to suffer what my students suffer.)

IUSB’s English faculty have determined that in each W130 essay, the introductory paragraph must list all of the sources, and each body paragraph must explain how passages from at least two different sources are related to one another. Consequently, these essays are like nothing else I’ve read. They’re their own kind of artform.

Like the sonnet.

Later, I might post my own W130 essay — my opus.

But I’m not 100% sure whether I’ll teach the course again, because the contracts still haven’t been issued, and when you’re adjuncting it’s better not to count your chickens.

The mall rats

Day Two of the winter holiday. Mary exercises at her gym; Martin cleans; Stephen cooks; I read.

Later, it might be interesting to watch some TV.

Stephen asks me to go with him to the mall. He’s itching to leave the house. Well, the mall does have a bookstore, and I do want to buy Dance Dance Dance — the sequel to the Murakami novel that I’ve just finished reading — and The Luminaries, the most recent Man Booker winner.

We’re all set to ride the bus when Mary comes downstairs: “All right, I’ll drive you to the mall.”

Then she sees Bianca sleeping on a chair.

“Hello, my little furry friend. You’re so cute. Who is it who loves you? Who is it who takes you to the vet?

“I love you, Bianca. Will you cuddle with me? Do you enjoy being cuddled with? Do you like it when I hold you? Will you miss me when I go away to the mall?”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Mary drives us to the mall.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

At Barnes & Noble I run into an IUSB student who got an F in my course. Friendly as always, he shakes my hand. I glare. I’m not very gracious in these situations.

Mary buys me The Luminaries, which turns out to be an 830-page (zodiacal!) mystery set in 19th-century New Zealand. Its prose style reminds me of Kate Beckinsale’s in the movie Cold Comfort Farm (“The golden orb had almost disappeared behind the interlacing fingers of the hawthorn”) … which is a good thing, in my opinion.

The Luminaries is Eleanor Catton’s second novel. Aged twenty-eight, four years my junior, Catton is the youngest recipient of the Man Booker Prize. Jeez Louise, I feel unaccomplished.

What we’ve been watching

Our household has gained a new member: Stephen, who’s just finished his undergraduate career. And I’ve just finished being a teacher at Bethel, and my IUSB semester has ended, too. Today was the first day of my winter break. The household spent the afternoon in front of the TV. First the men (and Bianca) watched soccer, and then Mary watched a DVD of Beverly Hills, 90210. The men also watched this.

Earlier this week Mary put on Blackfish, about the imprisonment and abuse of killer whales — one of the saddest movies I’ve ever seen. Afterward we felt badly, and so we were extra nice to Bianca.

10 books

This has been going around on Facebook:

“Rules: In your status, list 10 books that have affected you in some way. Don’t spend more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. Then, tag 10 people, …” (blah, blah, and the blah).

Here are my ten books in the order in which I first read them:

E.B. White, Stuart Little • Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare • Roland Bainton, The Church of Our Fathers • Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table • Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust • Roger Ebert, The Great Movies II • Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings • J.M. Coetzee, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II • John Rawls, Political Liberalism • Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Each book influenced how I write, or how I live, or both; or else it interested me in a bunny trail of other books.

The beach

Mary & Martin reminisce about their honeymoon at a beach in Mexico.

I shouldn’t like to go there, I tell them. I’d get headaches from the sun.

M&M reply that their resort had large, thatched umbrellas. A person could sit under one of them and read all day long.

Even so, I object, the brightness would chafe at the corners of my eyes.

Don’t you enjoy the beach, John-Paul?

No, not really. I got plenty of it in Esmeraldas when I was a child.

(But then I qualify myself:)

I liked the Esmeraldas beach well enough. We’d go there in the afternoons, when the light was low. And it was a different sort of beach: It had garbage. It had sewage. It had stray dogs. The bathers were naked or in their underwear.

And there were jellyfish, says Mary.

And muggers, I say. A person had to be careful. And every ten minutes or so he’d have to leave the ocean and walk back fifty yards to where he’d gone in, or else the current would carry him out into the deep.

There were little dunes with vines on them, and broken glass.

There was a long jetty with a lighthouse at the end of it. We’d walk to the lighthouse sometimes, looking out for muggers because that place was so isolated.

You realize (says Martin), for most people, those things would diminish the value of a beach.

I do realize it. It was an interesting beach.

Sometimes I’m astonished, says Mary, at how boring so many others’ upbringings seem to have been.

(Poor Martin! He feels excluded.)

It wasn’t a pretty beach (have I conveyed this?); it didn’t attract many tourists; but during Carnival, at sunset, thousands of sand-covered bathers would walk past our house. The path up from the beach was lined with discotheques blaring salsa and merengue. I liked to peer in over the chest-high walls of the discotheques in order to watch the people dance. Then, at night, half a mile away, cozy in my bed, I’d go to sleep listening to the music.

Whom we like

Susan Wolf, in “Moral Saints”:

When one does finally turn one’s eyes toward lives that are dominated by explicitly moral commitments … one finds oneself relieved at the discovery of idiosyncrasies or eccentricities not quite in line with the picture of moral perfection. One prefers the blunt, tactless Betsy Trotwood to the unfailingly kind and patient Agnes Copperfield; one prefers the mischievousness and sense of irony in Chesterton’s Father Brown to the innocence and undiscriminating love of Saint Francis.

It seems that, as we look in our ideals for people who achieve nonmoral varieties of personal excellence in conjunction with or colored by some version of high moral tone, we look in our paragons of moral excellence for people whose moral achievements occur in conjunction with or colored by some interests or traits that have low moral tone. In other words, there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.

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Anne Lamott, in bird by bird:

I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing, and without hesitation he said, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. …” I think he’s right. If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn’t really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time. I could watch John Cleese or Anthony Hopkins do dishes for about an hour without needing much else to happen. Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention … When you have a friend like this, she can say, “Hey, I’ve got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma — wanna come along?” and you honestly can’t think of anything in the world you’d rather do. By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, and in all honesty you’d rather stay home and watch the aspic set.

Now, a person’s faults are largely what make him or her likable. I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I. Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, self-delusion, darkness, jealousy, groveling, greediness, addictiveness. They shouldn’t be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting. I like for them to have a nice sick sense of humor and to be concerned with important things, by which I mean that they are interested in political and psychological and spiritual matters. I want them to want to know who we are and what life is all about. I like them to be mentally ill in the same sorts of ways that I am; for instance, I have a friend who said one day, “I could resent the ocean if I tried,” and I realized that I love that in a guy. I like for them to have hope — if a friend or a narrator reveals himself or herself to be hopeless too early on, I lose interest. It depresses me. It makes me overeat. I don’t mind if a person has no hope if he or she is sufficiently funny about the whole thing, but then, this being able to be funny definitely speaks of a kind of hope, of buoyancy. Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning. Although as my friend Jane points out, if you or I had been there speaking really bad French, they would have turned us in in a hot second — bank on it. In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

Sometimes people turn out to be not all that funny or articulate, but they can still be great friends or narrators if they possess a certain clarity of vision — especially if they have survived or are in the process of surviving a great deal. This is inherently interesting material, since this is the task before all of us.

Betrayal

I must be aging: this year it feels more tiresome to walk miles and miles to and from work, every day, in the bitter cold. … More tiresome and more tiring. During spare half-hours at IUSB I wander the hallways, searching for armchairs in which to sleep.

Today the Saudi students have taken the best armchairs. I go away. … I return. The Saudis have not stopped sitting. I wander remoter hallways.

Through sheer winsomeness I’ve coaxed my IUSB students to read their textbooks on time. (Earlier in the semester, hardly any of them would do this.) But at Bethel my students have regressed: a few weeks ago, when I assigned Descartes, they stopped bothering to read at all. So now I must coerce them with quizzes. Oh how they complain. I’m tempted to remind them of the Parable of the Two Sons.

It’s a feeling I must come to terms with as I walk those miles in the cold.

I feel betrayed, I say to my friend, the college administrator, at McDonald’s.

Betrayed! he laughs. They’re undergraduates. What did you expect.

Vegetarians off of the wagon, we comfort ourselves with double cheeseburgers.

A soccer storm

Now that their qualifiers have ended, the South Americans are reacquainting themselves to the rest of the world.

In Brussels: Belgium 0, Colombia 2

In London: England 0, Chile 2

In Amman: Jordan 0, Uruguay 5

In Miami: Honduras 0, Brazil 5

In New Jersey: Argentina 0, Ecuador 0 (appropriate)

It should be a good World Cup.

Despite the stormy forecast, Stephen and I took to the field. Wind and water made long passing difficult. But we kept playing until Meridith yelled at us to quit because of the lightning.

On our way home, the rain was so thick that we couldn’t see, and when we arrived, the power was out. We sat around in candlelight. In adjacent counties, there were tornadoes.

But the storm passed quickly enough, and today, unfortunately, I have to go to school.

A cat video & a movie review

Friends, I present to you Bianca. :)

Romaniacs, pt. 533: The coffee drinker

Rainy weather, and so I’ve decided to read A Wrinkle in Time. “It was a dark and stormy night.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Last night, after I wrote those lines, I promptly fell asleep. I’ve been falling asleep very early. The previous night, at around 9:30, I was on the living room floor playing with the cat, and I fell asleep.

At least I knew which day it was.

Cristian: “How nice to see you, John-Paul. Are we supposed to go out for coffee today?”

JP: “No, Cristian.”

Cristian: “When did we recently go out for coffee? Was it last week?”

JP: “It was yesterday, Cristian.”

Edoarda, Stephen’s gf, remarks that during her four years at Bethel she has watched Cristian become more presidential, i.e. more gray. I point out that this is due to his age, not to his lifestyle.

Even so.

Cristian pushes himself through life by drinking loads of coffee; maybe that’s why his emails tend to arrive at 3:00 in the morning. I couldn’t live that way. After my third or fourth cup I’d be a jittery wreck. On the other hand, I fall asleep whenever I try to grade papers.

As we share a French press, Cristian tells me of the habits of a certain well-loved metaphysician who didn’t have a lot of grading to do. “He used to read detective novels all morning, and then he would cheerfully write for a couple of hours; then his workday was over.” A hint of bitterness. “With such a routine, who wouldn’t be creative!”

Indeed. And with such a routine, the guy’s prose had better be damned good. None of this unnecessary formalism in his popular writings; no tiresome avuncularity. He owes it to those of us who have trouble staying awake, who are too tired to read what we truly enjoy.

R.I.P. “Chucho,” pt. 2

In Chile’s Estadio Nacional, the Ecuadorians celebrate their qualification. Jeff Montero and Toño Valencia wear undershirts commemorating the “Chucho” Benítez. On Valencia’s undershirt, the “Chucho” has wings.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Yesterday, for the first time in two months, I went running. Five miles. Easy peasy.

One more qualifier

We’ll play in Chile tonight at 7:30 U.S. Eastern Time. Watch us here.

If we draw or win, we’ll qualify for the World Cup.

If we lose, we’ll await the result of Uruguay’s match against Argentina. Uruguay must win in order to equal our point total. The next tie-breaker is goal differential. Right now we lead Uruguay by six goals.

Should Uruguay overtake us, we’ll have a home-and-away play-in series against Jordan, the fifth-placed Asian team. But that seems unlikely. It looks pretty rosy for Ecuador, gracias a Dios.

Pray for us to win or to draw.

The game against Uruguay

We won, gracias a Dios.

Announcement

What: World Cup qualifier, Ecuador vs. Uruguay.

Where: Quito.

When: This afternoon at 5:00, U.S. Eastern Time.

Watch it here.

It always comes down to this game. In 2009, the Uruguayans got the better of us. They ended up qualifying for the next year’s World Cup. We did not qualify.

On this occasion, the loser probably will be able to settle for a play-in series against Jordan, the fifth-placed Asian team. So this game isn’t as crucial as it usually is.

Even so: pray for Ecuador to win!

Some Catholic (and some non-Catholic) writers

It used to be, whenever I’d learn of a book I didn’t own, I’d have to go to Amazon right away to buy it. But now I’m a faculty member at two different colleges. I have borrowing privileges all out of proportion to what I do for anybody.

So if J.H. posts a link to the effect that Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography was the best autobiography that Mark Noll claimed ever to have read, I can say, “Oh, it’s in the stacks at Bethel,” and a few minutes later I’ll have walked to the campus and secured the book for the next six months.

It turns out that Muggeridge is the insufferable sort of writer whose every sentence is a gemstone. But whatever. I have the book. It feels good in my hand, and the font is nice. The cover has a blurb from someone cranky and pompous:

And the title reminds me of:

He had published eight books … concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.

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Or if Madame mentions Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and I’m at IUSB, I can go to that library and soon the book is in my hand distracting me from the papers I should grade. Anne Lamott repeats her cleverest bits over and over, as Muriel Spark used to do. Anne Lamott must have learned from Muriel Spark, because she pays a sort of tribute to her:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

That person must be Muriel Spark because, a few lines later, Lamott says:

Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

And soon I’m looking for evidence that Lamott herself is of the Roman church, but no, either she isn’t or I’m a bad researcher. And anyway she’s different from those other writers because she’s more explicitly self-effacing.

Now, you might wonder why my tone is so grouchy, why I’m so critical of these undeniably fine writers. Well, (1) I’m a grouchy guy; and (2) they were grouchy first, and when I was at a tender age I figured out, by reading such people, that eloquence could atone for being a grouch. Up to a point.

Philosophy/television/tuna

Right now the most entertaining thing in my life is my philosophy class. I don’t expect Bethel to hire me again, so I teach however I want to. I’m always going on about which arguer bears the burden of proof. Not very riveting. … Well, too bad. I want my students to learn conscientiousness. I mean, I want them to acquire the habit of obsessing over who has the burden of proof.

(If they end up thinking in this way, I’ll have taught them something valuable: something which should serve them well during their marriages.)

(Dunno if I’ll ever write about my teaching at IUSB.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

After a long day of teaching, I walk over to Mary’s & Martin’s house and we all lie on couches in the living room. (M&M are high school teachers: always tired.) Eventually we all try to grade papers. Martin goes away to the dining room. Mary and I remain in the living room and try to grade while watching Blue Planet (David Attenborough’s TV show about predation in the seas). Orcas hunt down a gray whale calf. They separate it from its mother and then push it under water to drown it. Mary is horrified. It seems to me, though, that the plankton get the rawest deal.

Later, Mary complains that the dolphins are skanky with one another. This is how I can tell that Blue Planet is her kind of show.

The episode causes Mary to desire tuna. She gets off the couch and puts some into a bowl. Bianca, the cat, wakes up, sniffs the air, and walks over to Mary (oh yeah, I forgot to mention that M&M have a cat). Soon I also am craving tuna. I warm up some leftover tuna casserole. Bianca walks over to me, doe-eyed (but in the manner of a cat). No dice, babe.

Hipsters

What I miss from Xanga are the xangazons: the thumbnail pictures of movies, books, and music. Like this one:

[not a thumbnail picture]

Currently:

the bird and the bee

The Bird and the Bee

“Fucking Boyfriend”

Or like this one:

Currently:

Interpreting the Masters, Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates

The Bird and the Bee

“Private Eyes”

Before you pounce:

Listening to hipster music doesn’t make me a hipster. I enjoy reading certain Japanese novels, but that doesn’t make me Japanese (not even in spirit). An outsider can wallow in foreign ditches.

One time, Sabby and I went to Chicago and the female Sabby pointed at some youths and was like, look at those hipsters, hee hee, and we giggled at them. And then she said, John-Paul, you’re a natural hipster. And I was like, that’s impossible; being a hipster requires too much artifice; naturalness precludes it. (That is, hipsters can’t be genuinely cool.)

And she was like, well, I have in mind your sweaters. I said, you mean the sweaters that I bought at Old Navy, that super-hip store. Hee hee, she giggled, no, I mean your hideous, old, second-hand sweaters, the ones hipsters would like. Oh, I said, you mean the sweaters I’ve been using regularly since the 1990s (it isn’t my fault that it took so long for fashion to catch up). Hee hee, she giggled (all red in the face).

If somebody wants to make an entire album of Hall and Oates tributes, I can enjoy those songs. It’s difficult even for hipsters to ruin that music, despite its having been recalled into fashionableness.

The “Boyfriend” song just sounds pretty.

I return to Bethel

Finally, my Xanga has been shut down.

I moved into Mary’s & Martin’s new house. My helpers were M&M, my uncle, my brother Stephen, and Sabby — heroes.

Right now, M&M’s basement contains approx. 30 boxes of my books. Their garden contains my treadmill, abandoned to the recyclers. So long, Timothy. …

I teach just one section at Bethel but often walk across campus to get to IUSB. What an innocent place, Bethel. There isn’t much feeling of urgency …

… except in the class that I teach. There the students sit up straight, eyes wide open.

Through the grapevine I hear:

The readings are difficult;

When he lectures he uses big words.

(And I thought I was so colloquial!)

Our first textbook is Hume’s Dialogues, which many of the students have been supplementing with SparkNotes (not what I recommended, but OK). The class discussions are satisfactory. The students make good points. I wonder which points are from SparkNotes.

Yet somewhere a screw has come loose. In previous years I would quickly learn all the students’ names; this semester, so far, I haven’t bothered to. I know the names of the most frequent talkers. That’s all.

Maybe the reason is that I have so many students (one section at Bethel, two at IU). Even a few students’ faces seem unfamiliar. I never used to have this problem.

Or maybe, during the last year, something happened that is now preventing me from caring like I used to.

A new season

No tutoring this last week, but plenty of busyness: (1) attending meetings and turning in paperwork; (2) reading textbooks (and a few secondary sources); (3) writing essay prompts and syllabi.

(2) and (3) have been pretty exciting. I chose each textbook because of its fonts. And I’m writing my IUSB course documents in Plantin and my Bethel documents in Photina.

Next week — Monday! — I’ll begin teaching. And during the nights I’ll be packing up my books to move out of my apartment. This has been a convenient but pricey place in which to live.

Where will I end up? I don’t know. Mary & Martin have offered to host me until I find somewhere better.

They just bought a house near Bethel. Their yard has a hot tub in it, with a large fence for privacy. Between the fence and the sidewalk, flowers grow out of a narrow strip of dirt. I told Mary & Martin to clear out the flowers and to plant tomatoes for public use: “Mishawaka Unity Garden.”

Along the eastern boundary of the yard is a noisy road. The western boundary nearly touches a power station.

Others might recoil, but I find the scenery quite charming. Industrialism, traffic: I am able to glean comfort from such things. I will miss the river, though. And it will be sad not to be able to walk so easily to my church.

August fragments

And suddenly I’m a lot busier because I’ve been hired to teach one more course, Introduction to Philosophy. This will be at Bethel College, my alma mater.

Soon I’ll have taught in the Ivy League, at a state college, and at a Christian liberal arts college. How’s that for job experience?

Once again, I’m starting to appear halfway respectable. I can see it in people’s faces. I regarded my tutoring job pretty seriously, but I guess for most people it wasn’t so impressive.

(I expect to keep on tutoring for a few hours each week.)

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And now I wish to complain of my injuries. Last weekend, playing soccer, I suffered a full-body collision with someone who probably has health insurance. (I don’t.) For a couple of days I was sore all over and couldn’t bend one of my knees. This has improved.

Then yesterday I was in the church nursery, and the children were merciless. They assaulted me with medicine balls.

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Today Ecuador lost to Spain, but my laptop wasn’t working, so I didn’t get to watch it. The game was held in Guayaquil: the Spaniards were too afraid to play in Quito. That’s our moral victory, I suppose.

Some advice concerning children

Xanga still hasn’t expelled me. Come on, Xanga! I’m weary of the suspense.

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Some good news: the English Department at IU South Bend is hiring me to teach first-year composition. Unexpectedly, I’m even being offered two class sections. So after a year outside of the classroom I’ll be teaching more students than ever, and in a new discipline.

This job should make me a lot better at teaching writing. At Cornell I taught writing-intensive philosophy courses, but this course at IU is pretty much only about writing.

I’m excited.

Credit goes to my buddy Andrew for encouraging me to apply and for agreeing to be my faculty mentor.

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One more thing: it’s been fourteen days since I was last in the church nursery, watching the little kids during their mothers’ weekly prayer meeting. I miss those kids. It took about a month for them to decide that they could have fun with me, but as soon as they did, it was a hoot. The breakthrough came when I pretended to throw up. Everybody, if you want children to like you, just pretend to throw up.

I expect to use this tactic in my courses at IU.

R.I.P. “Chucho”

Ecuador is sad today because Christian Benítez has died, apparently of a heart attack brought on by appendicitis.

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This could be my last entry posted onto Xanga. Please keep on reading and commenting at JUANPUEBLO 2 (Blogger).

I’ll miss Xanga — I’ve been writing on there for nearly ten years.

Home improvement

Today at IU I tutored someone who said, “I don’t think you should be getting paid to do this.”

Um.

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Wanna be my housemate/flatmate/roommate? Or know of anyone else who might want to be? My lease expires at the end of August. I’d like to stay around Keller Park, but that’s negotiable.

Funny, I care more about living near to my church than about living near to my job. (Yes, I’m very pious, but the main reason is that on Sundays the buses don’t travel.)

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More orbiting around those twin suns, Sabby. Their magnetism is irresistible. Last week I was with the male Sabby, the architect, and he was like, “I found some cool stone artifacts in the river. Let’s go haul them out.” And so we did that. I can’t remember what every cool stone artifact was, but one was a part of a century-old balustrade (I think the male Sabby said). We brought them to Sabby’s house and the male Sabby put them away. I’m not sure what he’s going to do with them. (His wife, the botanist, is like him: she’s always collecting leaves and flowers and things, which is a little strange and endearing.)

Then I saw their very old reel mower and felt a sudden compulsion to mow their lawn. And so I did that.

Then this week I was in Sabby’s kitchen, which they’re remodeling, and I had a sudden longing to help them to strip the floor. And so the next day I did that. I helped to tear out a thin layer of sticky stuff and a thin layer of wood and I pounded the exposed staples deep into the bottommost wood layer (see, I don’t know any of the technical terms). It was very extraordinary of me and I’m a little surprised. The female Sabby got me to help her to cook, an activity which wasn’t so extraordinary for me but which felt less effortful than usual.

Walter Ayoví

I’ve been trying to find out what some other philosophers think of the case of Mr. Edward Snowden (future refugee in Ecuador?). One philosopher I consulted was Robert Paul Wolff, more politically outspoken than most. Alas, he had little to offer beyond a few snarky comments about the NSA. But he did say quite a lot about how well he liked his own writing. Which was fine. In this merciless discipline, some light self-appreciation is refreshing.

The concluding paragraph really hits it:

Far and away the greatest contemporary cellist is Yo Yo Ma. He has so completely mastered the ferociously difficult technique of the cello that when he plays, he looks as though he is not so much producing the music as listening to it. There is something about the way he holds the cello, leaning back away from it as though it were playing itself, that communicates that he need no longer even think about the fingerings and bowings that absorb the attention of lesser cellists. The great Russian cellist Rostropovich used to play in much the same manner. God knows, I do not think of myself as a satirist in the same world as Jonathan Swift, say, but there are times when I feel like Fast Eddy Felsen, moving around the pool table with an animal grace, secure in the knowledge that he cannot miss.

Whom I kept thinking of was Walter Ayoví. Walter Ayoví.

I wondered if there were any good YouTube videos of Walter Ayoví “moving around … with an animal grace, secure in the knowledge that he [could not] miss.” Probably not, I thought. How many other people are there who sit around thinking of the animal grace of Walter Ayoví.

And then I found this video commentary by some Mexican dude. Here was someone who understood. Thank heaven for small mercies.

Listen to the commentator say: Siempre desmarcado.

If you don’t know Spanish, I feel sorry for you.

The groomsman

And so Kenny & Lara were married. The previous night, the groom and his men slept in a fancy rented house; it made me happy because for the second time this year I was able to sleep in a bed. Around 2:00am I was awakened when the other groomsmen brought in Kenny and put him into bed with me. (But why did Kenny need to be helped into the bed?) … Anyway, for one last time, I was his roommate.

The thing about being a groomsman is, there’s a lot of waiting around. I read some Murakami (1Q84). The thing about being a single groomsman, I discovered, is that people subtly (or not subtly) put pressure on you to hit on the bridesmaids. So it must’ve been disappointing when I didn’t do that. Forgive me, bridesmaids.

Another who felt this pressure was one of the ushers, recently returned from Afghanistan. Near the end I found him outside, drinking beers. He poured out his heart to me: “I’m twenty-six years old and I can’t talk to a woman.” I felt sorry for him.

In a way, he was the hero of the wedding: earlier he’d been escorting guests, walking with them from the parking lot, holding an umbrella over them while he was getting soaked by the rain.

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The best dancers were Kenny’s little sisters & brothers, including the children. I mean that.

I posed for many silly photos. I expect to be embarrassed when they’re leaked out.

I caught Lara’s garter.

June fragments

This is what’s been happening in June:

My mom has been visiting from Ecuador. A couple of hours ago she boarded a train to go to Kansas City. Who knows whether she’ll arrive there; she called to say that the train was moving at 15 m.p.h. and she was worried about missing her connection in Chicago.

Ooh, she just texted to say that she’s in LaPorte (one county away from South Bend). Go, Mom, go!

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At the church, it’s Kids’ Week. I’ve volunteered to help lead the second-graders. I try not to breathe on them. I’ve been sick.

On Monday I especially enjoyed the fierce game of noodle ball (similar to field hockey; the sticks are polyethylene foam noodles — you know, what you’d play with in a swimming pool). And I enjoyed making and eating the snack. The kids also enjoyed those things.

On Tuesday I didn’t participate because I was coughing a lot. Today I’m trying to be well enough to participate. I bought a cough suppressant.

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Other weeks, I’ve been in the church nursery watching the babies and toddlers so that their mothers can attend a prayer meeting.

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On Sunday afternoons I’ve been playing soccer at Clay Township Park. The fields there are terrible — sloped; potholed; with long grass. Still, I’ve made a few golazos.

I bought a lovely soccer ball, but it got kicked out of bounds and then a car ran over it. The car was going in the wrong direction on a one-way street.

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This coming Sunday, I’ll be a groomsman in the wedding of Kenny & Lara.

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And then there’s work, of course, but I don’t have anything to say about that.

Copa Confederaciones

Pre-match:

Respetamos a Tahití como a cualquiera.
[Andrés Iniesta]

Germany, Peru, Argentina

Katrina, my old friend, kindly writes:

When are you gonna post something about [the] Ecuador vs. Peru game? Will you post anything about [the] Ecuador vs. Argentina game? I always look to YOUR blog for informed commentary =)

This hurts to think about. Even so:

What afflicts us is temperamental immoderation: extreme cockiness, extreme pessimism. We really do think we can outplay anyone. And yet we can’t help but throw our games away.

For Ecuadorians this is old news:

We’re ranked 10th in the world, the highest we’ve ever been. We deserve it. Licking our chops, we schedule a “test” match in Florida against Germany, No. 2 in the world.

On the eve of this match we broadcast one of our team showers (PG-13). Very cocky.

During the match, on the first play, Gabriel Achilier tries to dribble around Lukas Podolski — very cocky! — and gets his pocket picked: nine seconds in, we’re down 0 to 1. Soon, it’s 0 to 4, thanks to more errors by Achilier and other demoralized defenders.

Around minute 30, we wake up and decide to pin the Germans in their own box; we do this for the rest of the game. It’s clear that Joachim Löw, the German coach, is suffering. Still, the German players are good, and so we manage just two goals against them. What we gain from this “test” is the feeling that even though we can dominate anyone, we’re still prone to losing through sheer carelessness.

This feeling persists into the Peru qualifier. In Lima, we’re a bundle of nerves. Once again we concede an early goal. Then the Peruvians pack their own box for the rest of the game. From watching the Germans, they’ve learned to try to score quickly and then concentrate on defending.

And so ends our unbeaten streak against Peru in tournaments. Our previous defeat was in 1977.

Next, in Quito, it’s Argentina, No. 3 in the world. By this time we’re nervous as hell. Right away we give up a silly penalty, and it’s 0 to 1. Another hill to climb.

We assault them with everything. The Argentinians are punch-drunk. At minute 16, it’s 1 to 1.

Not only are the Argentinians desperate, we’re dribbling past them at will. And this is when we regain our cockiness. Our play is downright disrespectful. Never have we been so dominant against anyone so good. Again and again, the Argentinians can do nothing but kick the ball out of bounds. We earn twenty-two corner kicks. TWENTY-TWO. Oh, it’s breathtaking … but it’s ineffective. The game ends, a stalemate.

This is our soccer team; this is our nation; this is John-Paul. Humility, that delicate balance, is so difficult to achieve.

Portage

On the 3A and the 3B, the Portage Avenue routes, the bus makes many stops. Some are planned; others occur when necessary, e.g. when there’s too much swearing. “Profanity is not acceptable,” says the driver into his microphone.

Grizzled men protest their innocence.

“My bad,” says an old lady. “I said fuck.”

The bus starts up again; the bantering is resumed; the bus stops. “If you continue using that language,” says the driver, “I’ll throw you off the bus.” The crowd giggles. Camaraderie.

Two men sit down next to me. “Relax,” says one. “It’s OK to be seated next to a black man.” (On the bus I’m not unused to this sort of challenge.) I glare. They laugh. “Just messin’,” they say. We fist-bump.

“I don’t care if you make fun of me,” I tell them. They pretend not to hear.

“What are you reading?” they ask. I show them An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel, who’s twice won the Man Booker.

Solemnly, they nod. Respect.

Some drivers are less patient than others, and so I always make sure to thank them; this has put me into their good graces. Still, it’s not surprising that the driver who’s kindest to me is another puny white guy. When I disembark, I thank him, and he warmly says: “Take care.”

As I step out onto the pavement, I have a vision: a banquet hall (a warehouse) with many tables at which are seated the passengers and drivers. I hear my name called out: I’m summoned to the podium. I’ve been chosen as the MVP. The MVP of riding the bus.

The end? pt. 2

If Xanga is shut down, or if I must pay to keep on using it, I’ll switch over to Blogger. I’ve created this site:

JUANPUEBLO 2

(How’s the layout? I’m trying to maintain some semblance to the old blog.)

Until further notice, please continue commenting on Xanga. Gradually I’ll upload a lot of my old entries to Blogger. Not that they do me any great credit; still, I think they’re worth preserving so that interested people can have a record of how, for better or worse, one life is being changed.

The end?

The end of Xanga? That would make me sad.

Stay tuned.

Jonah

Now this is the best weather. Neither too bright nor too gloomy; neither too dry nor too wet. Lower 70s °F. Lightly breezy. Mostly (i.e., not completely) cloudy. Sporadically rainy, with t-storms at night. Much birdsong. Much comfort.

Remain this way!

Be like Quito!

Rats.

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The last few weekends, I’ve been invited by my pastor’s family to watch their daughters play soccer. They’re little; the style of play is clusterball. Even so, I can’t keep myself from analyzing the game, out loud.

“Will your children play in the youth leagues?” smiles my pastor’s wife, heroically optimistic. She’s my second-favorite person in the church.

“No, they won’t,” I say. “I wouldn’t want them growing up desiring to play for the U.S.”

She’s amused, because I mean it: I’m a man of principle.

The next weekend, I get a sunburn.

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In church, the sermon is about Jonah. I love that book. Jonah’s such a sulker.

Why doesn’t Jonah want to go to Nineveh? says my pastor. Is it because he’s afraid? No. Jonah’s not afraid.

I think: Jonah’s like, throw me overboard. He’s kind of a badass, in a grumpy (i.e., totally depressive) way.

Jonah doesn’t want God to show mercy, says my pastor. The book is about mercy. Redemption.

I know, I know.

Later, his wife speaks with me again. I tell her how much I love that book. “Remember, John-Paul, mercy,” she says. “Mercy.”

On cultivating one’s own garden

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.
[Luke 12:27]

They know me? They like me?
[Dr. Seuss’s Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?]

The best compliment I ever got was from the Romaniacs’ mother, the Dragon. Or rather it was from the Dragon’s husband, the Romaniacs’ father/chauffeur; but it was about the Dragon. What you need to understand is, I pretty much worship the Dragon. She’s beautiful and good and fierce, and she has no time for me.

One day I was at Popeyes with the chauffeur, and he said, “___ [the Dragon] really likes you.”

That was the compliment.

It wasn’t surprising, because I’d been noticing a softening in the Dragon’s (distant) face. Still, it was good to hear. The Dragon is not effusive. And she has no time for me.

After a few moments, I pulled myself together and said, “How long did it take for her to like me?” “Oh,” my friend said, “about four years.”

Four years.

Two things, I knew at once. First, what an achievement it’d been, getting liked (for who I was!) by the Dragon; all my demonstrations of intense, guileless integrity had finally started paying off. The second thing I knew was that for the rest of my life, with person after person, I’d have a tough row to hoe.

It’s so crucial to be liked, to have some appreciation given you; otherwise, like a shaded flower, you’ll wither and die. But for it to be meaningful, the appreciation can’t be grounded in falsehood. Your integrity must be complete. And that’s what makes the hoeing so very tough.

I write in order to be liked. Like Pontoffel Pock, I seek appreciation — affection — all over the world. These days I’ve been getting page views from Russia, from the Philippines, from Luxembourg. … They can’t all possibly be from real readers; I don’t know what robots they’re from. I don’t understand how the Internet works.

But sometimes I’ll get page views from Montana, from British Columbia, Romania, Ecuador. I can guess who those readers are. Those page views make me happy. And I get hundreds of views from Indiana, which warms my heart, even though I don’t track the different readers.

All this effort to be liked. And yet there’s One who sees perfectly through my guilelessness, who likes what He sees: despite my efforts, not because of them.

A plea for candor

Lovely weather; more time out of doors. I’m getting a farmer’s tan. So is Kenny.

K: “Lara says that a farmer’s tan is the most disgusting feature of the human body.”

JP (rolling eyes, rolling up sleeves): “Then I’m going to accentuate my farmer’s tan.”

We devise a scheme for improving our farmer’s tans: using a tanning bed to darken just our forearms and faces.

Then Lara comes into the apartment and tells Kenny how to dress. (Today they’ll be posing for “engagement” photos.) Goodbye, Kenny.

Not that I’d mind if a pretty young woman, say, Jennifer Lawrence from Silver Linings Playbook, came into my life and told me what to do. And I’d probably do most of it … though first I’d have fun arguing about it.

What I think people enjoy about the movie (what I enjoy about it) is that neither of the leads has a filter. They both specialize in saying uncomfortable truths. Oh, their honesty isn’t perfect: they strategically withhold stuff, and they tell lies. But their candor is exceptional. They don’t shy away from difficult subjects: they chase after them. They ask and say things that most viewers wish they themselves were brave enough to ask and to say. And they accept this about each other. And that is so, so rare. That’s what makes the movie a fairly tale.

People, this doesn’t have to be a fairy tale.

Be candid. Be accepting of candor.

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Lately I’ve been so worn out, I haven’t been able to take advice. … Criticism, I can bear. Advice, if it isn’t faultless (and usually it’s awful) leaves me anxious and annoyed. It keeps me awake at night. It drains me.

So don’t be all that candid. Or don’t be candid in a way that presupposes that you’ve figured everything out. Because you haven’t.

Thinskinnedness

Apologies! Nearly a week has passed and I just realized that I forgot to link to LM’s interview in Boston Review. The link has been inserted! And for good measure, here it is again!

So transfixed I was, I tracked down LM’s article “The Kindest Cut,” about kidney donors. (Here’s the online version … this reprint may be cheaper.) No, I’m not about to give up a kidney; right now I couldn’t. Just reading the article was harrowing enough for me.

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My semester has ended, and as usual I’m sentimental about it. (The last student I tutored was writing her final college paper.) I’ll have a short break, and then it’ll be back to the office for Summer Sessions I and II.

South Bend rejoices for springtime. It never seems trite to marvel at the green shoots, at the flowers, the birds, the increase of rain, the river’s rising. How easy to forget the winter! And yet this is the time for planning ahead, for calculating how to cope. God, this year remind me to make allowances for the coming leanness. Remind me that to harvest, I must now plant (though the sower and the reaper are not always the same). Forgive me how foolishly I’ve been living.

Some years ago a friend was beaming at another’s child, and I said to her [Quote:] You need to get your own damn baby. Well, now she has one, and it’s my turn to do the beaming. How can a creature resembling, alternately, a roasted chicken and Jabba the Hutt still be piercingly adorable? Such is the power of this child. And my adoration is reciprocated. :)

But yesterday I mimicked, a little too harshly, the child’s cooing, and made her cry. It shouldn’t still bother me. But it does.

Larissa MacFarquhar

I made a Twitter account. I don’t care if anyone follows me. I don’t intend to follow anyone except for Kelly Oxford. I just wanna practice saying things in 140 characters or less.

For example: “When the moon is full, the tide is high.”

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From Boston Review, an interview with Larissa MacFarquhar, who writes about people who give to the needy as much as they’re able. They give effort … money … kidneys … etc.

[Boston Review:] How did you become interested in extreme cases of moral virtue?

[LM:] I’ve been interested in them for a long time, but one of the things I read that got me thinking in a more systematic way was the philosopher Susan Wolf’s essay “Moral Saints” [PDF]. She argues that our conceptions of perfect moral virtue (what she calls saintliness) and of a well-lived life are irreconcilable, so one of them has to go. She is basically anti-saint — she concludes that it’s our view of morality that has to go. I tend towards the other conclusion, but her essay was very useful in framing the question. It seemed to me, though, that you couldn’t think about the problem only in the abstract. If you want to consider the cost of making certain ethical decisions, you have to see how they play out in actual lives. So that’s why I decided to write about people who have a very demanding sense of moral duty and live their lives accordingly.

LM is trying to write about real-life “moral saints” who aren’t “kooks.” This fascinates me, because most moral saints I can think of are, in fact, a little kooky. But even if LM’s subjects were, too, I’m not sure how damning that’d be.

I think that if you’re doing something that’s hard to do and good to do, and that makes you feel proud, I just don’t see why that’s so terrible. One kidney donor told me that his donation made him feel better about himself — that it was one really good thing he’d done in his life, which he had otherwise made a pretty complete mess of. Some psychologists think you shouldn’t donate in order to feel better about yourself, but it strikes me as an excellent reason!

Feeling proud isn’t the same as feeling less awful about yourself. But whichever motive the guy had, I think LM is right to view it with some admiration, and with compassion.

Hope

“Dracula’s Lament.”

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Last week’s sermon was about hope. All it amounted to was: We need to keep on hoping!

I was like: But how?

Here are a few suggestions.

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When he became a father, one of my friends wrote:

It’s amazing how much babies live in the moment. If she’s hungry or her diaper is dirty then her world is ending. She has no perspective that says this will probably be fixed in a little while so I’ll just hang on. I suppose that would be a frightening way to live. If I was hungry and couldn’t conceive of a future where I wasn’t I’d probably cry too.

I don’t remember how I felt when I was a baby. But yes, when I was a young child, I often had the feeling that my friend attributes to his daughter. I wasn’t carefree.

Adults can despair for a similar reason. They, too, can become unable to conceive of a future in which their needs are met. For adults, though, this is because of too much experience.

Failing to have one’s needs met, year after year, makes it more difficult to imagine how they can be met. Experiencing disappointment, again and again, makes it exhausting or painful to continue thinking of possibilities for meeting those needs.

For humans, this is an impediment to hoping, because what we can hope for depends on what seems possible to us.

(Notice that the same point applies to the world’s needs. Your own needs are mere tributaries. Even if you learn to navigate the tributaries – and the rivers they pour into – you must eventually confront the ocean.)

So for adults deterred by hurt, being hopeful often requires having the courage to allow wounds to be reopened. (Here a theological virtue depends upon a cardinal one.) And for adults worn down by disappointment, being hopeful often requires endurance in the midst of exhaustion.

It’s natural to lack courage. It’s natural to lack endurance. If you lack those things, don’t be too hard on yourself. By all means, enjoy some shelter and rest. But don’t stop at that:

(a) Keep in mind that, from the eternal perspective, we are babies. Our experience is not conclusive. There truly are blessings of which we can’t conceive. As far as you’re able (and if this is even coherent), don’t just hope for what’s imaginable to you.

(b) Ask God for courage and endurance to keep trying to imagine what’s imaginable, so that needs can be met even in this life.

(c) Train yourself in courage and in endurance. Training won’t be enough. But it will help, as long as it isn’t taken as a replacement for (a) and (b).

(d) Soothe others’ wounds, bear others’ burdens, protect them from the full destructiveness of exhaustion and hurt. And sometimes, or maybe just once, you will be in a position to give a person what he or she desperately needs. Then that person will be saved from despair. That person will be lucky (or blessed).

It won’t suffice, spiritually, for that person. But it’ll help, as long as it isn’t taken as a replacement for (a) and (b).

All too often, we’re tempted to think that cultivating hopefulness is primarily a matter of willing ourselves to believe that things will turn out all right. But we can do more than this. We can cultivate hopefulness by removing hindrances to the imagination. We can do this for ourselves by becoming braver, stronger. And we can do it for others by helping to ease their weariness and pain.