I quit facebook back in April 2012, and at the time I thought the break would be temporary. I was fairly certain that my need to keep up with lapsed friends, random acquaintances, and middle school crushes would, eventually, lure me back. It has not. I don't miss it at all. Turns out, falling out of touch with people is often a natural consequence of time and distance, and it's really ok to start forgetting the names of people you knew in high school.

At the time I quit facebook, you couldn't actually delete your account, you could only "suspend" it. This basically made you invisible; your profile would remain forever in hibernation somewhere in the ether of the internet. Last week I learned that this changed, and you can now delete your profile forever. So I can now confirm: my Face has been deleted from the Book.

Mostly everyone I know is on facebook, except for Josh and my parents. (Or it seems like everyone is on it; I have no way of checking.) What strikes me is that, whenever I mention I'm not on facebook, the response is always some version of "Oh, I wish I could quit!" I never suggest that people should quit, but they seem compelled to tell me they want to. Then they invariably explain why they can't: they use it to stay in touch with family/friends/former nemeses, they enjoying being voyeurs and don't post anything personal, the connections are more valuable than the timesuck, etc, etc. All fine reasons, I can't quibble with them.

The strong implication, however, is that I have done something noble and good by (mostly) exiting the social media landscape. (I say mostly because you can find me on instagram and linkedin, though to say I fly under the radar there would be an understatement. And of course I write this blog, which has 4 readers. (Hello, friends!)) I know that not being on social media is good for me personally, but it's hardly a noble sacrifice. If you're worried about facebook rotting your soul, here's a pro tip: it's optional. Just click "cancel." And similarly, I don't get all the hand-wringing over social media in the wake of the election—misinformation and uncivil discourse aren't exactly new. This is not to minimize our current societal problems, which I think are great; I'm just pretty sure that something as superficial as facebook is not the cause of them.

The best metaphor I have for social media is that it's like sitting at a cafe and overhearing the totally mundane conversation of the couple sitting next to you. Some people love to eavesdrop, and others will immediately put on their noise-canceling headphones. Some people love to be overheard, and others want privacy. I'm in the latter category on both counts. At my most basic level, I don't care that much about what the hive mind is thinking, and I certainly don't want the hive mind to be thinking about me. I also don't have much of an interest in what most people are up to in their daily lives. I don't care about my second-cousin's political opinions, or the new house the dude I sat next to in calculus just bought, or that pie my middle school acquaintance baked for Thanksgiving. I do care about my family and friends and coworkers, though, and I like to know what they're up to. I also enjoy receiving pictures of their babies/pies/pets/new houses.

And I care what you're up to, Dear Reader. Write me a letter! Give me a call! I'm pretty sure you all have my number.

From a New York Times article, referring to the 2016 presidential candidates:

"Perhaps the biggest drags on voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the candidates themselves. To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver."

This is testament to the fact that you can't write anything without irking someone: broccoli and liver are two of my very favorite foods. Choosing between them would only be hard because I like them both so much; not a problem for anyone this election. They are also both very high in iron, so if you are anemic I encourage you to write an impassioned letter to the editor about their lack of sensitivity to anemia issues. Every voice matters, right? 

the &*^%$ side of history

There are a lot of trite and meaningless phrases in the world, but "the right side of history" is by far my least favorite. I detest it. Probably because the whole point of my dissertation was that it's a lazy, useless idea. And probably more so because no one ever read my dissertation (not hyperbole) so no one understands why I care so much. Or why I get so frustrated when they try to argue with me about it and I inevitably descend into rant-mode.

(As an aside: I don't understand why some people ask me about a point of political theory, listen inattentively to my answer, and then immediately disagree with me. A general rule of thumb: if someone has a PhD in a particular esoteric subfield, please assume that they know a bit more about it than you do. And yes, this applies equally to quantum physics and political theory. Really.)

Why am I blabbering on about this now? Because the detestable phrase seems to be everywhere this week. I understand why; many people just got slapped in the face by the present and they are trying desperately to assure themselves that history (whatever that is!) is still gonna come out right (whatever that means!) in the end (whenever that is!). Sorry, folks, but there are no assurances that tomorrow is even going to happen, much less happen the way you think it should. You can run all the regression analyses that you want: the future (or providence or kismet or whatever you want to call it) does not issue advance warnings or moral directives. I mean, it's possible that you will find a burning bush tomorrow, but until that happens you're down here swimming in uncertainty with the rest of us. 

Here's what I do know: First, history does not have sides. Second, history itself is not a moral force. Third, I'm not certain about either of these premises, but because we are living in history we cannot, unless we transcend time itself, comprehend the entire narrative arc of human existence as being right or wrong. If history does have sides, not one of us mere humans is capable of comprehending them. And if you are outraged at these blanket assertions, I invite you to read my dissertation. It has citations and everything. 

Better yet, read Augustine. I totally stole the argument from him. 

When I was awake at 2am this morning, I was thinking about this passage from the opening of The Federalist:

"It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may, with propriety, be regarded as the period when that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act, may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind."

I have always thought this was a beautiful, uplifting passage about the capacity of men to determine their political destiny based on informed reason and reflection. But earlier this morning I was thinking about it in a...somewhat different light. It reads more like a warning than an affirmation. 

Also: one of the best parts of writing a blog is that you get to revisit what your past self was up to in, say, November 2008. Quite a different time, and yet I don't disagree with anything I wrote then. Here's to 2020, I guess?  

gchat, circa 2008.

Date: June 18, 2008

Players: Me and a friend, who shall here remain anonymous should she object to me printing this heretofore private conversation.
Context: This is a very small excerpt from a very long gchat conversation. My friend and I were both about a year into our first post-college jobs, and thinking about applying to graduate school. We were discussing our future plans. I was reading Camus and Nietzsche at the time. (I have no idea what my friend was reading.)
Disclaimer: I found this chat while searching for something else in my gmail, and it amused me. I fixed some typos so as to appear smarter than I actually was at the time.

me: …weren't you going to enlighten me about the void?

friend: ah yes…ok, so the void

me:  i am interested in the void

  considering i am living in it

friend: no

  you are employed

  and have a home

  the void is the uncertainty

 

me: no, no, i am in the void

  there is uncertainty

  it is not like school

  where the end is clear, and the parameters set

  i could quit my job and wander through asia

  no one would stop me

  void

friend: no, that's not the real void

me: as long as there are no rules, there is void

friend: that's some other void

me: no, void is when you have to make up the plan as you go along

   unlike the transition from high school to college

friend: that's like the void of generally having a lot of time before death

 me: yes! VOID

She knows there’s no success like failure / And that failure’s no success at all

If you had come to me yesterday with a wager that Bob Dylan would win a Nobel prize, I would have bet good money against it. And I think Bob would have done the same. Once he's over the surprise, though, I bet he'll start planning a cryptic and cutting speech full of biblical allusions, designed specifically to make everyone in the audience feel awkward and confused. It's gonna be so great.

I think everyone who loves Dylan has a story about how they started listening to him. Here's mine: when I was about 15, back in the age of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, I went over to the CD Exchange in Tenleytown (RIP) and bought The Essential Bob Dylan, a two-volume greatest hits collection. I would have been better off buying Bringing it All Back Home or The Times They are A-Changin', but at the time I didn't know anything about Dylan, except that my mother hated his singing voice and that he was almost never played on the radio, not even the oldies station.

As a teenager it was my job to clear and wash the dishes after dinner, and I would sometimes put music on while I was doing it. One night, I put on my newly acquired Dylan album. As I remember it, I got about halfway through the first CD when my father came into the kitchen and started singing along. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was on. If you know that song, then you know it's really, really hard to sing along to (it has a lot of lyrics and no chorus). But Dad sang along, taking particular relish in the beginning of the fourth verse:

Get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift

After we listened a few more songs, he asked me if "With God on Our Side" was on the album. It wasn't, but thanks to Napster (RIP) I quickly found it. I played it for him later, and he sang along to that one too. I'd never heard anything like it. It wasn't a song! It was just words spoken with the occasional guitar strum and some harmonica. It's seven minutes long! And, even more astonishingly, it had a point. That song is basically an essay. It's not my favorite Dylan song, not by a long shot, but it was quite an introduction.

I remember asking my father whether a song like this could even be considered music. I don't remember what he told me, but I think the Nobel committee just answered my question. 

Hannah Coulter

After trying for almost two years to find a book club that I could talk or otherwise finagle my way into, I've found myself in two different ones, both of which are meeting next week. For one, we are reading Medea, by Euripides, which apparently everyone read in high school except me. In the other, we are reading Hannah Coulter, by Wendell Berry. And despite both featuring women as title characters, two more different stories do not exist.  I was reading them simultaneously for a day or so and it was a very strange place to be, mind-wise. So I gave up and just focused on Hannah this weekend. Medea and her badass revenge may be the subject of a later post.

(I have accepted that this blog is really only about books. My apologies. If you need an excuse to stop reading, you now have one!)

So. Hannah Coulter. I've only ever read Berry's essays in The Art of the Commonplace, which I found thought-provoking but not particularly persuasive. I'm just too much of a feminist urbanite to buy into most of what he's selling. He is a beautiful writer, though, so I was happy to sign up to read one of his novels. I was unprepared, though, for this novel to make me cry, like, twelve times. (It's only 190 pages long, so that's tears about every 16 pages.) It's a simple story about the life of a woman on a farm in Kentucky, but it made me cry more than novels I've read about war. It's possible that my reaction is more a comment on me than the book, but...I would like to think it's the book.

Basically, if I can distill it down, the novel is about time, place, and membership. In the theological sense. It reminded me of Gilead, though, in that it would have been fairly easy to miss the theology. Fiction is a good medium for this kind of work, I think, because what would otherwise be academic to me (like reading John Calvin) ends up being a good story that makes me cry. I don't want to move to Kentucky and become a farmer, but I did end up loving Hannah as a character and admiring the way she lives in the world and thinks about time. I wonder if it's ever possible to separate the goodness of Berry's characters from their rural Kentucky setting? Probably not. It seems like he believes urban life, at its essence, creates character defects. If so, then there is no hope for me.

What I kept thinking about while I was reading Hannah Coulter was, weirdly, Pascal. The way Berry writes about time and expectation and memory reminded me so much of this passage from the Pensees: 

Examine your thoughts and you will find them wholly occupied with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do so, it is only to shed light on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; only the future is our end. So we never live, but hope to live, and, as we are always planning to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

Hannah spends her whole life trying not to dwell too much in the past or future. She tries her best to live, rather than always hoping to live. It's an admirable pursuit.