Closing credits

What happened in 2023? It’s a blur. I get through a day at a time. I barely look ahead or behind.

Mostly, I chase after children who live only in the moment. They are rather wicked. (As I compose this, one of them is removing his diaper and peeing on the floor.) My wife kindly looks after them a few hours every third evening so I can record my thoughts on this blog; a week later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve written.

I steal moments to do a little reading. A book or two later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve read.

Someone at a party asked which books I liked best this year. I said Shakespeare, Harry Potter, and Narnia; I had trouble remembering anything not in a series. I had to check my list of “completed” books after I got home.

My life is turning into a series of disconnected events. I’m becoming the hero of Borges’s “Funes, the Memorious,” only without the memories.

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Before I forget, I wish to complain that the previously serviceable app Grammarly has quietly gotten much too big for its britches. Yesterday, I was typing in a document, and Grammarly sneakily auto-corrected “resistible” to “irresistible,” which is THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I MEANT. This illustrates a larger point, that 2023 was the year when a lot of ordinary people started noticing (or reading online) that AI had “jumped the shark.”

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“You need to go to therapy, Sweetie,” says Karin. “This is the bleakest entry ever. ‘I remember nothing, and the robots are coming.’”

She is too young to understand.

Now that I think about it, it would be amusing to pay a stranger to listen to me read my blog entries out loud.

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Allegedly I groan a lot, even when I’m sitting still.

Do I groan, or purr? Jasper snuggles next to me as I type this, and our noises sound alike.

Jasper is middle-aged now; Ziva is almost middle-aged. They’ve both mellowed out. They hardly fight each other anymore.

I look forward to my sons’ attainment of this happiness.

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Every year, I read the book of Zechariah; and afterward, I am sorry to say, I forget about it until the next year.

It ends like this.

[14:16 ff. (NIV):] Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. If any of the peoples of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, they will have no rain. If the Egyptian people do not go up and take part, they will have no rain. The LORD will bring on them the plague he inflicts on the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles.

On that day HOLY TO THE LORD will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, and the cooking pots in the LORD’s house will be like the sacred bowls in front of the altar. Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the LORD Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them. And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the LORD Almighty.

So when you worry about war in Israel, or anywhere, think about that.

Some ex-residences

Forgive me for raking up old history, some of which I’ve surely blogged about before, but I have little else to discuss tonight. I must be getting on in years because I’m keen to list buildings I’ve lived in that have been torn down.

(1, 2) Mission houses, Las Palmas, Esmeraldas, Ecuador.

My boyhood home was the eastern house. As a baby, I briefly lived in the western house.

(3) Cottage on the property of Lakeview Church, Zion, Illinois.

My family lived in Zion from 1990 to 1991 (my third-grade year).

(4) Missionary Church Dorm, Quito, Ecuador.

My home during boarding-school years.

If I were asked to choose one former residence to live in forever, this would be it. My own Hogwarts.

It was torn down a few weeks ago.

(5) The Music Machine, River Park, South Bend, Indiana.

I lived in the tiny apartment above the office of the Music Machine, a DJ-ing business. I moved in when I married Karin. Less than a year later, the city forced us out and built a fire station on the land.

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I used Google Maps to try to find the house in Seattle’s U-District in which I rented a room for four months, in 2004 and 2005.

Ultimately, I can’t be sure of the address. It was a grungy building surrounded by gaudy fraternity houses. I leeched wireless Internet from one of those fraternities; the network was called “Sex Gods.” So, if I’m ever back in that neighborhood, I’ll know how to pinpoint my old location.

I did find this lovely 2013 article in the University of Washington’s student newspaper about my landlady, who rented to ex-cons, sex offenders, and others who needed a break. I was in neither of the first two categories, but she rented to me after she called my friends and they confirmed that I didn’t drink alcohol. (And it was good that she rented to me, because it was about the only room in Seattle I could have afforded.)

I lent her my mom’s parents’ missionary memoirs, and she read them.

That year and the next, when I moved back and forth across the continent, alone, to pursue fruitless but necessary studies, the Lord put me in touch with some remarkable people.

I finish reading Harry Potter

Well, this afternoon, I became, at the age of forty-one – almost forty-two – the latest person to have read all of the Harry Potter series, excluding Fantastic Beasts, Beedle the Bard, Quidditch through the Ages, The Cursed Child, and whatever other appendices, spinoffs, and fanfictions there may be. That is, I read nos. 1–7, Sorcerer’s Stone through Deathly Hallows.

The series took hold of me as I read, and by the end I knew it was a profound thing.

My advice to serious readers disinclined to invest in Harry Potter, who’d dismiss it out of hand:

Just slog through book 1. It isn’t a great book. But it’s short, and it does some necessary scene-setting. If it seems lightweight, that’s because it’s supposed to be. The series is clever that way. At first, the characters concern themselves mostly with ephemera, with froth. This changes. Gradually, inevitably, things get weightier, starker, huger, until whatever trivia came before drops out of view.

Meanwhile, enjoy the satire. There’s a lot of it, and it gets cleverer and more pungent. Enjoy the gentle mockery of ordinary human foolishness. Enjoy it in good conscience. Ultimately, the series is on the side of these sinners, it’s about saving sinners, it doesn’t shirk from paying redemptive costs.

That’s a good rule of thumb for finding profundity in popular art (not that all art must be profound). If a work is to have depth, it’ll soon acknowledge discord: perhaps, evil. If so, as a popular work, it might handle its topic lightly. It might satirize. Ride this wave first. It might take you farther than you expected, to more sobering shores, especially if the piece is long: a book exceeding, oh, five hundred pages; a movie exceeding, oh, two hours; a daily comic strip or radio show or blog lasting, oh, two decades. Lo and behold, the thing might not just offer criticisms; it might offer a positive vision, a hopeful possibility worth considering. It might not only diagnose sin, not only prescribe a personalized cure, but gesture toward or detail a renovated world in which temptation and envy and fear need not have purchase, need not sting at all.

A few small victories and defeats

We bought a new digital scale. As soon as we’d removed it from the package, inserted the batteries, and weighed ourselves on it once, Samuel threw it down the stairs, and it broke.

Mercifully, Karin was able to fix it. Today I am several lbs. lighter.

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This morning the toilet overflowed, due, in no small part, to Samuel’s supremely inefficient use of it. (It was my fault, too; in the chaos of aiding Samuel, I flushed too many times.) While I was wiping down the bathroom floor, Daniel sneaked off with the shaving cream and slathered it upon himself.

I grabbed the shaving cream can, put it on the kitchen counter, and tossed Daniel into the shower.

When I’d finished cleaning and dressing Daniel, I returned to the kitchen. There was Samuel, covering that room – and himself – with the shaving cream.

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I was holding Daniel on my lap, and Ziva climbed into the armchair with us – quite a nice thing to do, given that the children often terrorize the kitties. Daniel responded by speaking two new words: “Ziva” (Zee-ah) and “cat.”

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I took Samuel and Daniel to the library for a couple of hours. They mostly played with the toys. (They have toys at home, but the library’s are different.) I pulled Harry Potter off the shelf and read bits of it while keeping an eye on the boys.

As we were leaving, Samuel discovered that one of the library’s touchscreens has a language setting. He touched a couple of icons and changed the language to Swedish.

The rest of the day, he’s been talking about “the libraries in Sweden.”

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Argentina and Ecuador will play in Buenos Aires tomorrow night: our first World Cup qualifier.

Poor, unfortuble souls

Modifying a song from The Little Mermaid, Samuel has coined the word “unfortuble,” as in:

“Poor, unfortuble souls.”

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Daniel has taken to postponing his afternoon nap as long as possible. Not that he doesn’t still need to nap.

The wilder he gets, the closer he is to sleeping. Lately, his escalation has manifested itself as repeated summersaulting, headfirst, off the couch.

Yesterday, after a particularly violent landing, he lay on the floor, smiling, and gently floated off to dreamland. I was reminded of Frank Reynolds and Charlie Kelly in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, who put themselves to bed every night by scarfing down catfood until they feel so awful, they have to go to sleep.

(Daniel likes to scarf down catfood, too.)

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In a moment of frustration, I called Samuel a monster. He thought it was a great joke.

Later I was singing “My Son Calls Another Man ‘Daddy’,” by Hank Williams, while a child (Daniel, I think) tried mightily to push me away from the kitchen counter even as I was fixing him a sandwich.

“Your father is singing that as a threat,” Karin told the child.

I wasn’t, but I liked that reinterpretation of the song.

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Six Harry Potter books down, one to go. Book 6, utterly devastating, is my favorite so far.

In our household, we employ a useful phrase, “The Shocking Truth,” to refer to the last entry in a narrative series. As in: “Be quiet, children, your father & I are trying to watch The Shocking Truth of WPC 56, series 1.” I was tempted to read the last Harry Potter book as soon as I finished book 6, but then I calmed down, decided to stick to the schedule, and resigned myself to waiting until next month to read The Shocking Truth.

August’s poem

Samuel crawled into bed with Karin & me this morning. “I’m sick,” he told us.

He is, a little.

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Some child has squirreled away the thermos from which I drink my morning coffee.

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This month’s poem, by the Pet Shop Boys, is “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

What a performance tonight

Should I react or turn off the light?

Looks like you’re picking a fight

in a blurring of wrong and right

But how your mood changes

You’re a devil, now an angel

Suddenly subtle and solemn and silent as a monk

You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

It’s better than nothing, I suppose

some doors have opened, others closed

but I couldn’t see you exposed

to the horrors behind some of those

Somebody said: Listen

don’t you know what you’re missing?

You should be kissing him

instead of dissing him like a punk

But you only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

All of my friends keep asking me

Why, oh, why

do you not say goodbye?

If you don’t even try

you’ll be sunk

’cause you only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

What’s the meaning

when you speak with so much feeling?

Is it over when you’re sober?

Is it junk?

You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

This song is for Hermione and Ron.

Another mouse

We aren’t very sick anymore. I have to blow my nose a lot, but that’s the extent of it.

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Last night, we saw a mouse in our basement. Get it, Jasper!, we said.

A little later, we saw our champion mouser trotting along, his mouth full, a bit of brown fuzz dangling out of it. Karin followed after Jasper with an empty potato-salad container. He tried to escape into one of his hidey-holes to play with his prize, but Karin caught him and he grudgingly released the limp thing.

It was a plastic toy. The bit of fuzz was a dust bunny. We didn’t see the mouse again.

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This, at last, is shaping up to be the August when I read all of Light in August.

Some more August reading:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The Merchant of Venice.

Operation Mincemeat, by Ben Macintyre.

Storm, by George R. Stewart.

Something crime-ey as soon as I wind up The Dain Curse.

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Ana & David and their children, Ada and George, will be in town from Saturday to Saturday.

I report on a matter of personal taste

Samuel stayed over at his (maternal) grandpa’s house last night. Karin & I took Daniel out on the town. Or, rather, to some cornfields – specifically, to Prairie Camp, the denomination’s local church camp. It was the first time I’d attended a service there. Readers will recall that earlier in our marriage, Karin & I made a few trips to Brown City Camp – in the “thumb” of Michigan – a larger, slightly more rustic version of Prairie Camp. And of course, I’d grown up visiting the campamento in Same, near Esmeraldas.

Anyway, at Prairie Camp, we left Daniel in the nursery, and then it dawned on me that this would be the first time in years that I’d be around Youth Group Christianity. (My own church doesn’t have more than one or two teens.) The high schoolers occupied the first few rows of the packed tabernacle. They waved their arms. The music was very loud; apart from that, it was pleasantly non-bombastic. A youth pastor preached the sermon. He told a story of a youth group game gone wrong. The game resulted in high schoolers trampling hundreds of marshmallows into a church’s carpet. The youth pastor had to clean the church by himself until five in the morning. This was a prelude to his message about the Parable of the Prodigal Son. (The prodigal son makes a mess of his life.) It was a good sermon.

Nothing about Prairie Camp was very objectionable, except, perhaps, the spiritual arm-twisting at fundraising time.

But man oh man, am I glad not to have to go to youth group meetings anymore.

But this is why it’s good to have institutions like Prairie Camp, where the old and the young mingle, because otherwise I doubt the different Christian groups would mingle at all.

More groups oughta mingle. Not just old and young white Hoosier Low Protestants, but other groups, too. There oughta be a camp where all the Christians meet together.

It would be a logistical nightmare, of course. Feeding would either have to be subsidized by some Christians or else managed on a “loaves and fishes” basis.

I leave mass transit (to the cornfield) and lodging (in the cornfield) as exercises for the reader. …

P.S. J.K. Rowling addresses these two problems in Harry Potter, book 4, in her discussion of the Quidditch World Cup. Spectators camp out in tents. That seems workable. Transit is trickier. It involves something called a “portkey.” That seems a little too mystical for traveling to church camp.

Parenting, round 2; “Bluebeard”

Daniel hasn’t been a great one for sitting still and being read to, but yesterday he badgered me into reading Dr. Seuss’s ABC five times in one hour. Like Samuel before him, he laughed and laughed at the page with the Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz.

The rest of the morning, he followed me from one piece of furniture to the next, around and around the house, committing violence against me (and against the house). That, too, reminded me of how Samuel used to behave at that age.

I had to lock Samuel away from Daniel, in the basement, for his own safety.

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Today I am watching Daniel walk down the stairs feet first (which Samuel only started doing a few weeks ago). He isn’t quite tall enough. Wherever a step doesn’t provide him a bannister to hold onto, he slides down on his bottom.

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Are you the right man for me?

Are you safe, are you my friend?

Or are you toxic for me?

Will you betray my confidence?

This is from the Cocteau Twins’ “Bluebeard” …

I post this song as a tribute to Cho Chang.

I continue to read Harry Potter

I keep chipping away, one book each month, 25–50 pp. most days. I’m now reading book 5 of 7 (The Order of the Phoenix). What I like best is the satire of ambition. Children really could profit from this. Look, kid, don’t do like Guilderoy Lockhart. Don’t do like Lucius Malfoy. Or Cornelius Fudge. Or Percy Weasley. And so on. Voldemort isn’t even cool. Look what a pompous windbag he is at the end of book 4. Too many people reach adulthood not having absorbed these simple lessons.

Also, the books are so obviously Christian in spirit, it’s a mystery to me how anyone who’s read them could think the wizards – the good ones, anyway – were batting for Team Satan.

Although I have no desire to get caught up in the spinoffs, fan theories, fan fiction, etc., I did buy two “Harry Potter and philosophy” anthologies to read after I’ve finished the series. Let’s see if the philosophers get Harry Potter right or if they muck it up. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the chapters on metaphysics. How is it possible to apparate (levitate, time-travel, etc.)? How could someone be a man and a dog? How do potions work? So far, there isn’t much to go on in the texts. The really pressing question, for me, is what the Sorting Hat’s basis is for grouping people into these four character-trait clusters – whether these clusters are bogus like those of the Zodiac or whether they really exist (I suppose they could be stipulated to exist just in the world of the story, but that wouldn’t be very interesting); also, why people who belong to supposedly different trait clusters must inhabit different parts of the castle and ceaselessly compete against one another. The best justification I can come up with is based on the utility of some sort of Millian “experiment in living”; but the danger, here, is that the Slytherins will absorb or destroy the other groups no matter what. Anyway, it’s no surprise that so much has been written about the politics of Harry Potter. (The Wikipedia article I’ve just linked to doesn’t even mention the hilarious number of articles about Harry Potter in the National Review, whose writers seem obsessed with the topic.)

Fantasy reading

I’m reading a kind of fantasy novel, or at least a fantastical novel: How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup, an underdog tale by J.L. Carr (who also wrote A Month in the Country). Today, in real life, the FA Cup final was disputed between two quintessential non-underdogs: Manchester City and Manchester United. The Citizens won. They scored the first goal after just fifteen seconds.

I’m also reading “fantasy proper”: Harry Potter, no. 4. I kept my promise to Karin, which was to read the first two novels, and then I decided to finish the series. If I’d known that they’re mystery novels, I would have read them sooner.

We’re also viewing the movies. Tonight we finished Chamber of Secrets (or, as I like to call it, Chamber of Toilets). It took three days to watch because we kept having to pause it, what with all the noise of Samuel’s crying out how he loves Harry, Hagrid, etc., and his loudly murmuring magical gibberish.

He’s going through a curious phase. He wants the living room curtains to stay closed. If I bring the street into view, he goes to his room and lies on his bed, in the dark. He might be onto something. Today we got junk mail with a photo of our house printed on the envelope.

He’s particularly afraid of the ice-cream truck. He might be onto something there, too.

P.S. As a family, we’re reading The Princess and the Goblin.

This is not a genre in which I especially like to read, but somehow I’ve already created a fantasy reading schedule for the next two years.

Anglophilia, pt. 55 BC

No one ever thought that 1066 and All That was All That, but that book turns out to have been a Good Thing after all. But to understand this, it helps to imagine the book read aloud by Internet wonder Philomena Cunk. This week, the Internet discovered that Cunk has been on the BBC for many years. She has become famous for wondering: “What is clocks?”

She ponders history as well as the “centuries of millenia” of architecture (“buildings”), as well as time. Not only is she an historian, she is a philosopher, or perhaps an idiot. Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wondering. Cunk, in her questioning of “experts,” makes us wonder who it is who would waste time on wondering. And yet, we cannot spend enough time inquiring along with Philomena Cunk.

(Has she ever interviewed Timothy Williamson? He would be almost ripe for it.)

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I checked out Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman for Karin. Rickman is her idol. Karin worries that the diaries will spoil Rickman for her.

She needn’t.

He is – was (R.I.P.) – a good diarist and a decent guy. He clearly was fond of the Harry Potter kids.

I promised Karin I’d read Harry Potter 1 and 2 by May 1 so that we could watch those movies together. She’s reading Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? so that we can watch the Britbox series of that book.

The joy of getting, pt. 2

Karin & I went to four Christmas gatherings. All were relatively painless, and some were quite nice.

As mentioned a few entries ago, I participated in the gift exchange held by Karin’s mother’s family. I’d been assigned to buy gifts for Brianna. She’d asked for clothes and toys with decorations of Hufflepuff – her Harry Potter “house” – and of Bob’s Burgers, the TV show. My selections were very well-received: especially, the Bob’s Burgers-themed Clue game, which we all played after we finished eating the Christmas meal. (Brianna was the murderer, of course.)

Brianna also had drawn my name for the exchange. She used her $50 budget to order three books for me, all of them new, though I’d submitted a much longer wish list of used books. Two of the new books arrived in time for Christmas; one is still in the mail.

The three books are:

• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (not yet arrived);
• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro; and
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Due to my puny haul, and out of pity, Karin bought me the last two of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s police procedurals (used).

At the gathering of Karin’s dad’s family, I was given a book called A Journal for Jordan, the heartrending true story of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq and the woman and child he left behind. This, apparently, is a “joke” gift that has been passed around between all the family members.

I also was given a t-shirt depicting Schrödinger’s cat:

The cat is a recurring topic of discussion in the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which Karin’s dad’s family enjoys. I don’t watch that sitcom – it’s about nerds – but I do like cats and metaphysics (which is not the same discipline as physics). I talked to Karin’s dad’s family about this horrifying philosophical paper to show that I appreciated their gift.

A weekend diary

Friday evening

IU South Bend’s new school term is due to begin next week. I’ll welcome this change. I’ve gotten tired of staying at home.

Today I was in job training at IU for nearly seven hours, and it felt downright refreshing (though I’d dreaded it).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Saturday morning

The high temperature today is 15°F. That is, 15 on the plus-side. It no longer feels unbearable to leave the house.

Saturday afternoon

Having left the house for two minutes, I retract what I previously wrote. The temperature is lousy. Also, I’m perturbed by how very long and sharp the icicles are that dangle, like Swords of Damocles, from the awnings of our housing complex.

Karin has come home from her job (she works half of each Saturday) and gone straight to bed, sick.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Saturday evening

Karin slept all afternoon. Then she felt slightly better. We performed some errands and now Karin is doing the bookkeeping for our church (she’s the treasurer). I’m watching an NFL playoff game.

The kitties are little sweeties. Jasper lets me pick him up and carry him around the house. He sits on my lap while I watch the game.

Are you very manly? I ask Jasper.

Chirp, chirp, he says.

Earlier this afternoon, Ziva lay in bed with me. She insisted that I hold up my left forearm, and then she burrowed herself into its crook.

The kitties have found my stash of groomsman neckties. They drag them around the house.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Sunday, early hours

I’m reading Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer. Karin continues to work on the bookkeeping. For background noise, she plays a TV show called Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., whose characters are from the “universe” of the Marvel comics.

Which universe is that? I ask. Ironman’s universe?

Yes, says Karin.

And ScarJo’s?

Sure.

And Harry Potter’s?

No, says Karin. You pip.

Harry Potter

Our apartment is now overpopulated with cardboard boxes, for which Ziva and Jasper are extremely grateful. Karin brings home boxes; Karin’s mom brings boxes; Karin’s dad brings boxes. Collapsed, the boxes take up most of our space. Filled, they would cause the apartment to be unlivable.

It’s some relief that our landlord is allowing us to store the filled boxes elsewhere on his property.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Evenings, when not filling the boxes, Karin has been playing a lot of Harry Potter for the PS One. I hear the TV exclaim:

“Concentrate, Potter!” (Madam Hooch teaching Harry to fly on his broomstick).

“Flippendo!”

“Wingardium Leviosa!”

And now, whenever I do chores in the apartment, I catch myself muttering: “It’s LeviOsa, not LeviosA.”

Not because it’s in the game, but because it’s the only line I can remember from the movie.

I’m thinking of buying this shirt:

Mary plays a lot of Zelda. I think she would like this Harry Potter game, too.

I suppose that one day I should read the series. How soon? As soon as I finish reading the complete works of Lois Duncan. I’m about to finish Stranger with My Face (downright terrifying).

A promising return

This afternoon, in contrariety to my recent tendencies, I played pick-up soccer. (I hadn’t expected to play again until next year, due to my fatness.) It didn’t go very badly. I lasted a little longer than an hour. I ran exactly two sprints. The first sprint, I fell on my face with no one near to me. The second sprint, my timing was perfect, and I provoked a defender into conceding a throw-in (though if he’d just left the ball alone, I would’ve been too tired to do anything with it). My throw-in led to a corner-kick. My corner-kick was … uninspired.

Nominally I was a defender, but in reality I just walked up and down the sideline and received and gave passes. I didn’t chase down any through-balls. I didn’t try to clog any dribbling or passing lanes. I didn’t shove anyone off of the ball. I avoided pretty much all contact. Defensively, I was a non-factor.

Offensively, my teammates granted me lots of touches, because I was always in the empty spaces. All five of my shots were on target. I gave passes that should have been converted into goals (one particularly brilliant one was so converted). Toward the end I played center-forward. I ghosted into empty space in front of the goal, received a pass, turned with lots of time, and shot low and away from the goalie’s body for an easy-peasy score. On the sideline, Karin didn’t see the goal because she was reading Harry Potter. I yelled across the field – “Sweeeeeettttiiieee” – and the other people told her about the goal, and so she looked up from her book. Then I quickly made another goal (a mirror-image of the first one) so that she could see it. Shortly thereafter I bowed out.

Gracias a Dios, my performance was in line with what I had prayed for and expected.

July fragments

Martin & Mary were in Ecuador for three weeks. I took care of Bianca. She ate one of the houseplants.

On Friday, M&M came back. They brought a hammock (too small) and a new, woven tablecloth. Bianca likes the tablecloth very much.

Mary has been watching some new DVDs, e.g., Harry Potter and the Bucket of Bla. Martin has been growing his hair out.

During the three weeks M&M were gone, I followed a kind of caveman diet, eating mostly sweet potatoes. (I don’t know how many lbs. I’ve lost. I’m not supposed to weigh myself yet.) Every day, I would eat sweet potatoes and watch Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and then I’d read and write a lot about political philosophy. And I’d watch the Copa América, which you already knew.

This last Sunday, I played soccer and gave seven assists. I scored one goal, but it was invalidated. I also wrecked one of my ankles, and so now, when I walk down the stairs, I have to lean against the wall.

The “best man” speech

More or less what I said last weekend:

My brother David is a remarkable young man. … He and I are very close — he’s the first child and I’m the second child — no, wait, I’m first and he’s second. … Well, we constantly compete against one another. We compulsively compete. But since this is David’s wedding-day, I’ve decided to treat him nicely. I’m going to mention a few things that he does better than I do.

First of all, David plays soccer better than I do. Some days ago, we had his bachelor party, and of course we played soccer; and even though no one showed David any favoritism, he still managed to score the most goals. David is a very aggressive soccer player. Actually, he’s aggressive at many things. He’s aggressive at driving … he’s aggressive in conversation … he’s aggressive at eating. Once, when he was very little — five or six years old — he ate fifteen pancakes in one breakfast. And not so long ago, he and a couple of the groomsmen each ate four Big Macs. (I wasn’t one of those groomsmen.) But even though he’s so aggressive, David has a gentle, patient side. He’s very good with animals (many of you know how much he loves Toby, the dog he’s going to live with). And he’s very good with small children … even better than I am. 

Another thing that David and I compete over, though we don’t say so, is reading books. Perhaps we tacitly agree that when it comes to reading books, neither of us is the winner. But in one respect David certainly comes out ahead, which is that he reads more books than I do. He’s read all of Harry Potter; I haven’t done that. And he’s read all of Twilight; I haven’t done that. Already this year he’s read twenty-five books. Just in the month of July, he read seven different books from beginning to end. And they were difficult books — philosophy books. And this was while David was busy watching the World Cup and preparing for his wedding.

OK, I should say something about the wedding (I’ve finished talking about competition). In his sermon, my dad said that when you choose whom you marry, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen. And I think that that’s right. But it still seems that some ways of choosing a husband or a wife are better, or wiser, than others. For example, it’s good to choose someone whom you can consistently put up with. Now, Ana and David are very unlike one another. But they’ve known each other for many years and in many different situations. They have as good an idea of what they’re getting into as anyone could have. What I’m saying is, I think they’ve made the best sort of choice; I think they’ve chosen wisely.

That’s all.