Songs of a Soupman

Paraguay, December 2011

2011-12-20T10:50:00.003+01:00

I'm currently in Paraguay again. People sometimes get confused as to my relationship to this country, and that is quite understandable. I didn't grow up here -- I grew up in Ecuador, another small South American country. But my mother was born and raised here in Paraguay, which also confuses many people, who assume that she should look like she has Spanish and Native South American blood. Then I explain that no, my mother is from a Mennonite enclave, and people say "you mean like Amish?" Now it starts to get subtle, because the Amish are indeed a sub-group of the Mennonites, and my mother did grow up with ox-carts and horse-drawn plows and without electricity. But this was not because her community was anti-technology (in fact, they're among the most technologically progressive people in the country) but because in the time of her childhood, the Paraguayan Mennonite settlements were in pioneer mode and the nation's capital was a three-week trip away by ox-cart, train and riverboat.

My relationship to Paraguay is that this is where my mother was born and grew up; this is where my father began his missionary career (he is German) and where my parents met and married; this is where my sister was born before my parents started off to other lands; this is where most of my relatives on my mother's side of the family live (and there are a lot of them); this is where my sister has been living with her family for over a decade; this is one country that I've visited every few years for my whole life.

Once again, there would be a lot to talk about. I'm visiting relatives, which is always interesting. Even my immediate family is in "reunion mode" -- my siblings and parents are all in the same place for the first time in over 7 years. I'm seeing more snapshots of life in South America, and how things change.

This is the challenge of the sporadic blogger: where to start? There are a dozen entries I could write, and part of me is planning on writing them over the next few weeks, but part of me does not want to spend this valuable time on blog updates. But here, in brief, are some possibilities:

-Paraguay is looking less and less like a "poor country" every time I visit. The exchange rate of the currency and the average standard of living indicate that there might be steady economic improvement. And the way my Euros don't get me nearly as far as they did last time makes me feel the much ballyhooed "Euro crisis" more than when I'm actually in Europe.

-Nevertheless, Paraguay still very much exhudes the "Latin American Banana Republic" atmosphere. This is hardly surprising, since the first real (free) elections in this country took place only about two decades ago. (If you want to know what I mean by "Latin American Banana Republic", the best example I know is the fictitious nation of "San Teodoros" in the comic book "Tintin and the Picaros": a corrupt, possibly military oligarchy, constant revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity, rumours of foreign money backing certain ideological movements and making the whole country seem like a pawn in the game of the world powers, a large poor class for whom no government change "up there" makes any difference to their daily lives, etc.)

-The relationship between the Mennonite settlers, the average Paraguayan, the indigenous Paraguayans of various tribes, and the more recent Brazilian migrant workers, is intriguing and fascinating. It strikes you the moment you set foot in the Mennonite "colonies". It is no doubt enriching as well, but frequently it seems to be only filled with challenges. Among the people I talk to, no conversation goes more than half an hour before that subject is broached.

-I am very blessed with the family I have. This year the descendants of my (now deceased) grandparents crossed the 150 members mark -- my maternal uncles, aunts, cousins, cousins' spouses and children -- and in spite of being such a large family, there is a lot of love and respect for one another. It is also a very diverse family.

-Many Mennonite settlements intentionally try to keep themselves cut off from the "outside world"; not so here. They have been isolated in the past due to their geographically remote location, but they have always made an effort to be part of the world at large. Now there are even Mennonites in the Paraguayan government, which is a contentious issue since the Mennonite movement began as a rejection of the church-state, and therefore political involvement by a Mennonite was a contradiction in terms.

-the mosquitoes here must be a different species than the ones I'm used to in Europe. They swarm and they bite and they suck my blood, but they don't leave those little itchy welts behind. On the other hand, they do possibly carry dengue or malaria.

-Mennonites -- particularly this group here -- are a musical people. I notice this every time, since I've tried to put together a coherent music programme in some other churches and communities in which I've been. Here, in an agrarian community far removed from any "cultural centre", the congregational singing in a Sunday morning church service is in four-part harmony, without any real effort. For comparison: my church in Amsterdam consists mostly of highly educated people in a world metropolis and centre for the arts, and there I'm happy if I can find even three or four people who can sing harmony parts.

-The history of our Mennonite ancestors here is filled with tragedy. Every family (including, of course, my grandfather's and my grandmother's) lost members to the Stalinist regime in Russia, to the cold of Siberia, to the perils and privations of fleeing Communism, and to the difficulties of settling in Paraguay (heat, dehydration, bad harvests, malnutrition, tropical diseases, etc.). By now, the Mennonite settlements in Paraguay are very well-off, but I think that even the culture of the current young generation is still very much affected by their great-grandparents' generation's battles for naked survival.

-Advent and Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere feels very different. It's summer here, and Paraguay gets really hot in the summer.

-speaking of heat: in my lifetime, air conditioning in Paraguay has gone from "what's THAT?" to "oh, you mean like that cooling thing that rich people have?" to "...and this is where the air conditioner will be installed" to "can you imagine, last night the air conditioner conked out and I had to try to sleep in that crazy heat...!?"

Actually, not all of these bullet points would make for interesting blog entries. But maybe you get some snapshots of how I'm living this year's Christmas vacation. Also, I've blogged considerably about my impressions of Paraguay when I was here two years ago:

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html

Sinterklaas and racism

2011-11-16T04:45:00.003+01:00

It's sort of funny to be in the Netherlands in late November / early December. Sinterklaas is huge here. The Dutch version of St. Nicholas comes on a boat from Spain sometime in November, and travels around (you can even follow on television) for a few weeks before St. Nicholas Day (December 6), when he leaves presents and returns to Spain.

Here's a humorous American take, mashed up with video footage of the event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDK0nZHmSSI

(I don't know who the narrator is -- can anyone help me with that?)

Anyway, this year I finally went, and saw him riding down Amsterdam's Damrak Street on his trusty white horse, surrounded by a legion of "Zwarte Pieten".

The "Zwarte Pieten" are the plural form of "Zwarte Piet", or "Black Pete", Sinterklaas' helper. This part is generally somewhat offensive for non-Dutch people, so I thought I'd blog about it and explore the issue a bit.

The American version of St. Nicholas is Santa Claus, who has elves as his helpers. Since elves are fictional, you don't have to worry about antagonizing a demographic. But Zwarte Piet is seen as racist because he's black. So I'm wondering how that's racist. To me, racism is one of the following:

-offensive words relating to race ("racial slurs")
-discriminating treatment based on race (like violence against someone because of their race, or preferential treatment because of race).
-stereotyped or generalizing comments or attitudes towards members of a race.
-putting the attributes of a race into a negative light.
-being insensitive about issues that are painful for members of a race (the Holocaust, slavery, etc.)

So let's get this out of the way: the history of Zwarte Piet is indeed questionable. Wikipedia places his origins as being the devil, whom St. Nicholas overcame and shackled into servitude to do his dirty work for him. But I've heard other "origin stories" for Zwarte Piet, including that he was one of the Moorish boys who was being sold as a slave, then bought and set free by St. Nicholas, whom he stayed with as a servant out of gratitude.

But interestingly, the gut reaction for many foreigners on seeing the Dutch Sinterklaas proceedings is "this is racist", even when they are given no background story about Zwarte Piet. All it takes is seeing white people painted as black people running around in the streets distributing candy, telling jokes, singing songs and doing cartwheels and whatnot.

The one element that makes immediate sense to me is that in the framework of this story the Zwarte Pieten might indeed be slaves, and that they seem to feel quite jolly about being slaves. This qualifies as racist in the "being irreverent about a sensitive issue" sense. If people take issue with it because of that, then I do understand.

One African woman I talked to found it offensive because Zwarte Pieten are basically clowns and jesters. They are not "serious" people like accountants, CEOs, or law enforcement officers, and she felt that her whole race was being portrayed as people who are good for a fun time, but not to be taken seriously. I'm not sure anyone who watches the Sinterklaas proceedings is going to take Africans less seriously as a result of having seen the Zwarte Pieten's shenanigans, but when determining whether it's racist or not the answer doesn't lie in my opinion (as the majority) but in the feelings of those who feel offended and slighted in their ethnic identity.

On the other hand, I find it a bit difficult to relate to seeing the procession as "here's a white man with all his black slaves". The Zwarte Pieten are running around distributing candy, rappelling off of walls and just generally having a good time, they're not being forced to row a boat or pick cotton or do any other "slave" sort of activity.

But it also seems that some people consider it racist simply on the grounds that the Zwarte Pieten are white actors with black facepaint. This seems a general attitude: white actors with black facepaint = racist. I don't fully understand this. How is it racist for an actor to impersonate someone of another race? Acting involves playing someone you're not. Gary Sinise played a double amputee in "Forrest Gump". Greg Kinnear played a gay man in "As Good As It Gets". Cate Blanchett played a man in "I'm Not There". Does the fact that one demographic is played by a member of another demographic strike anyone as discriminatory? Is it discriminatory against gays to have a straight man play a gay man in a movie? Yet somehow it seems that when it comes to someone playing someone of a different RACIAL demographic it's an inherent problem. The go-to example is Mickey Rooney's turn as a Chinese landlord in "Breakfast at Tiffany's". Sure it induces cringes, but is that because he's a white man playing a Chinese man, or is it because he plays him as such a broad stereotype? Would it be equally offensive if he had played a more sympathetic, nuanced Chinese landlord? Would it be equally offensive if a Chinese actor were playing a broad stereotype of a Chinese landlord?

I often wonder about the defined boundaries of what constitutes racism. It's not always very clear. In John Grisham's "A Time To Kill", a jury was brought to sympathize with an abused black girl by imagining that she was white. But is it really this simple? Sometimes, no doubt, it is. If Sinterklaas had a bunch of white helpers, no one would have any colonial guilt, or colonial grudges, or any objections to the fact that his helpers are portrayed as silly jesters. If anything, there might be some objections about a fourth-century Turkish bishop having an all-white entourage.

It seems that, for one thing, a lot of it has less to do with a statement or attitude in an of itself, and more to do with the majority/minority context. For example, why can Chris Rock use the term "Cracker", but no white comedian could get away with using the N-word? Why does the sentence "White men can't dance" just sort of sound funny, but "Black men can't write" sound extremely offensive? I'm not sure that one insult is inherently worse than the other, but we can't just evaluate statements like that outside of our cultural and historical context, in which they do mean completely different things because of which racial group has had the upper hand and which racial group has had to suffer as a result.

Most of it, I suspect, works on a cultural and emotional level. Maybe that's part of the problem: for the person experiencing racism, it is a highly emotional experience. If you try a rational analysis of an emotional experience, you will usually find only baffling contradictions, which makes it hard to understand racism from a standpoint of pure rational analysis, rather than sympathy and empathy.

So, your turn. Is it racist for white actors to wear black facepaint and play Zwarte Piet for Sinterklaas?

Putting Roots Down

2011-10-26T00:58:00.002+02:00

Next week I'll be taking a step that is pretty much the closest thing I've come in my life to "putting my roots down". What I'll be doing is becoming a "tochtgenoot" (loosely translated: "journey companion") of my community. This is only a one-year commitment, so that in itself is not a very daring step. But it does mean that I'm seriously considering joining Spe Gaudentes, the semi-monastic core community which consists of people who consider it their lifelong calling and take something like a "vow of stability".

Could I see myself spending the rest of my life in this community? This question brings about more thoughts than I could discuss in a blog entry of polite proportions. But let's just start writing and see what happens.

We'll start with this: I'm an uprooted person. Unlike some uprooted people I know, I haven't moved around all that much. Although I was born in Germany, I lived in Brazil til I was 7, then in Ecuador til I was 19. Sure our family took some extended "furloughs" (in Germany and/or Paraguay) that were longer than an average vacation, but that doesn't really count as "having moved around a lot". If anything, it amounts to "having traveled much".

So my uprootedness doesn't come from moving around so much during my formative years, but from growing up between cultures. Sure I spent the bulk of my childhood, adolescence and teenage years in Quito, but I feel no "roots" in that city; at most I have fond memories and plenty of nostalgia, but not a feeling that I BELONG there. At home we were a sort of German family (though my mother is Paraguayan Mennonite), and I went to an American school and spent a great deal of time on and around a "mission compound".

The one place I've ever WANTED to put my roots down was Vancouver. After my student visa for Canada expired in the late '90s, I was willing to try to immigrate. But then I saw the cost: I needed a job in my field of study, with an employer who would "sponsor" me, and I needed to pay tens of thousands to Immigration Canada. Then I would have to wait a good five to ten years for the application to process, and in that time I would not be allowed to change jobs, lose my job, or leave the country for any reason. If my employer decided, after four years, that he was tired of sponsoring me, then I'd be back to square one. If there was a death in the family and I'd fly out of the country to attend a funeral, all my visa application would have to start over from scratch.

You may say I'm lacking in commitment for not having tried that, but it just seemed like too high a price. I figured, I'm a European citizen, I have a whole continent where I can live and work without jumping through such ridiculous hoops. So I lived a few years in Germany. When people ask me why I left, the short answer is "because I couldn't put my roots down". There was no real reason to leave; but there was also no real reason to stay.

I came to Amsterdam for a three-month stint in 2004 and have been here ever since. Again, there's not much reason to stay. But there's no really pressing reason to leave either.

But why join a community? Why put my roots down at all? And, why join THIS community? Why put my roots down in AMSTERDAM, of all places?

The thing is, for an uprooted person, any place seems like a sort of random choice. Amsterdam might not be a very logical place to put roots down, but it's not like there are more logical places out there. I've now lived here for seven years, I know the city quite well, and I have some very good friends here. I feel that any place I move from here, I'd be seven years behind the curve.

I lived a summer in England once, and spent a few weeks in northern Italy. In both places, I made faster inroads towards making a life for myself there than I did during my years of living in Germany. I often wonder what would have happened had I stayed in either of those countries. But again, the choice feels just as random as Amsterdam.

So one question in the equation is: "why Amsterdam?" And the answer is really no better than "why not Amsterdam?" For an uprooted person, that's really all you ever have. There may be very little that holds you to a place, but there's equally little to hold you to any other place. My reasons for Amsterdam might not be very strong; my reasons for moving anywhere else are even weaker.

But then there are trickier questions: why put roots down at all? And why join a Christian community? And why join THIS community?

I have frequently been accused of over-analyzing things, but I think most of my decisions are taken intuitively rather than analytically. This is actually one of the things that has caused the most frustration and tension with people who are close to me. I make decisions that I can't fully explain, even to myself, and that of course is not easy for someone else to have to observe.

I'm not sure what the advantage is of putting roots down somewhere. Maybe there is none. I wouldn't know, because I've never really had roots. Maybe I blame my problems on my own uprootedness, and hope that things will get better once I have a place where I "belong". Or maybe I just see it as a simplifying (and, to be honest, liberating) step if the question "will I still be living here next year" ceases to be relevant.

I do know the advantages of joining a community. To be honest, I wouldn't have it any differently. The world is too complicated for me to face by myself. I do need other people. Sure, a "normal" network of friends would be "enough", but my lifestyle has made it difficult to keep friends in my life for extended periods of time. I find that the people I trust most are still the people I grew up with, no matter how much we've grown apart over the years. But they're all far away. Here in Amsterdam (and in fact in the entire Netherlands) I don't have any "old" friends. There isn't even anyone here that I even knew 8 years ago. And as I get older, I can no longer make friends with the same ease that I used to have. Without community of some sort, you end up a helpless old lonely person, and since I'm not thinking of starting a family, I'd need either a solid group of friends or an "official" structured community of some kind.

I've actually said, even when I was young, that I'd become a monk someday. It was sort of a running joke with my classmates. But I didn't really know what that would entail. I thought of either a hermit living out in the woods, or a "Friar Tuck" who travels around with some group of merry men but is, you know, more independent than they are, because he doesn't have any belongings and no need for any romantic attachments. I only learned later that the essence of monasticism is the community. Of the three vows (celibacy, poverty and stability, as they are popularly known) only the "stability" one was a real problem for me. That would involve putting roots down and all that. And strangely, that's the one vow that I would have to take in joining Spe Gaudentes.

So why Spe Gaudentes? Again, it feels like it's just a random place where I've ended up due to some arbitrary developments and decisions in my life. How have I gotten to the point where I think that this might be my surrogate family until the end of my days?

That question will have to wait for another entry. The short answer is: I have no idea why this should be "my" community, which is the whole point behind doing this year as a "Tochtgenoot". I'm hoping that I can get to know it all a bit better, and that by this time next year I'll have a clearer image.

My Oma Klaue, 1912-2011.

2011-09-28T01:46:00.004+02:00

Yesterday we buried my last grandparent, my Oma Klaue. It would have been her 99th birthday.

I wrote a blog entry about her a few years ago. It still pretty much summarizes any eulogizing I could do at this point:

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2007/09/heritage-days-oma-klaue.html

A month ago we buried her older sister, my Great-Aunt Gertrud, who died at the age of 104. I also wrote about her a few years ago:

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2008/01/heritage-days-great-aunt-gertrud.html

I would like to be able to offer more of a retrospect on their lives, but I don't think I am able to. I don't know much more about their biographies than what I wrote in those entries.

I sort of grew up without grandparents. I mean, three of my four grandparents were alive throughout my childhood and into adulthood, but I never found them to be "present" in any large degree. I can't blame it on them; it was simply that we were geographically removed, and even though we visited every few years and corresponded regularly via letter-writing, it never really developed into a deep relationship. Oma Klaue was always very generous and giving, but our worlds didn't overlap much. As an adult, I lived in her vicinity for a few years and during that time I visited her regularly, but even then it always felt more like a polite conversation with a hospitable neighbor than a deep participation with the life of a close family member.

And now that she's gone, I'm not even experiencing a strong sense of loss. Her passing is not unexpected (again, she was in her late nineties) and her mind had already been spending the last months drifting away from this world. Lately she would forget who we were, and the conversations we would have would be set on a "repeat" loop every couple of minutes, because she had already forgotten what we had talked about five minutes before.

What I am experiencing is a vague feeling of missed opportunity -- that this person who walked the earth for practically a century must have been such a treasure-house of stories and wisdom, and that I never really found access to that. But to be honest, I think she herself didn't have access to much of it either. Even before her mind started going, she didn't talk much about her past and seemed to have forgotten a lot of it.

All the same, there are people who knew her much better than I, her grandson, did. What we all know is that she was generous and that she was a good listener. Many of the more "difficult" people in her environment found her to be a safe person to be around. There was D., an epileptic who talked endlessly and was a strain to most social events; Mrs. R., a disturbed elderly woman who carried a rag doll wherever she went; Mrs. W., one of those demanding old women who abuse everyone until they eventually die estranged and unmourned. All these people regularly visited my grandmother for decades, and she would make coffee for them and listen to them for hours. Outside observers would occasionally comment on the incongruity of my grandmother (who was a woman of "good breeding and manners") spending so much time with the neighborhood "low-lifes", but I think she never perceived it like that.

This affinity to the socially awkward is one thing we all know ABOUT her, but I sort of wish I had gotten to know HER better. I know there are people who knew her better than I did, but I sometimes wonder how well even they knew her. I caught glimpses of what interested her, of what frightened her, of what doubts and convictions she had, of what sort of personality she was and how she made you feel. But just like I couldn't talk to her much about the things that fascinated me (music, for instance), I feel that I she couldn't really talk to me about many of the things that occupied her mind and her life. I'm sure that I would have gotten to know her much better had I not grown up an ocean away, but I'm not sure how well I would have gotten to know her.

Another thing I'm experiencing -- and this is a little less expected -- is a sort of feeling of uprootedness.

Obviously, that's one I should long be accustomed to by now. Growing up between different cultures, in a series of highly transitory contexts, estranged from my fatherland and a foreigner everywhere else, "uprootedness" has been pretty much the one constant in my life. But in spite of everything, my "short answer" to the "where are you from?" question has always been, "I'm German." I've never been a very good German -- I have a feeble grasp of the geography, history, political structure, or pop culture of Germany, and I haven't lived there long enough to have set very deep roots -- but good German or bad German, I've always felt German. German is the language I pray in. Germany is the country I support in the World Cup. German is what my passport says I am. Germany is the country that I can still go to and know that they won't kick me out or let me starve in the streets, like practically any other country would have a right to do to me if it came to that. All these things have always made Germany my "home".

But what I realized yesterday, as we carried my grandmother's ashes through the cemetery through which, in recent years, I often wheeled her in her wheelchair, is that she was also one of the reasons I am German. With her death I've just lost another link to my past, to my identity, and to my heritage. For decades, she was our only family member actually living in the "fatherland". She sent us books and cassette tapes (and later CDs) of German stories and songs, and thus kept much of our cultural heritage alive. She was the reason why German politics should matter to us at all (since she was the only one in our family who would be affected by the decisions made in the German government), and why German history should be relevant to us (since it was an integral part of her life experience). She was one of the few reasons we even bothered to visit Germany, and why some of us stayed there to live for a few years.

With my Oma's passing, Germany is suddenly starting to feel a bit like that part of town you used to visit regularly when you still had a good friend living there, but which you haven't visited since your friend moved away. After the funeral ceremony we had a meal with friends and family, and we had it in the nursing home where she spent the last decade of her life, and I was overcome with the melancholic thought that I'll never really have a reason to enter that building again. And then I realized how much of my reason for entering the COUNTRY wasn't there any more.

Of course, my Oma was not by any means the ONLY reason I would have to visit Germany. My parents live there as well (and have been living there for the last decade), and I do have friends and relatives scattered through that country. But my parents and relatives are almost as uprooted and nomadic as I am, and my friends there don't go back that many years. It's now that my Oma is gone that I realize she's been a lifelong presence reminding me of where I came from.

2011-09-01T00:25:00.001+02:00

Once again, it's early September, and I sort of do a "blog anniversary" entry. September first was the day I moved to Amsterdam (2004), the day I started at the Shelter youth hostels (also 2004), the day I joined Oudezijds 100 (2007) and the day I moved into my current apartment (2008).

I don't really have anything new to say. I've written (and will probably continue to write) about living in community, about living in Amsterdam, about working for the Shelter, about living in Amsterdam's red light district, about how I'm not as far in all of these things as I'd like to be, and all those other tired themes. Here are some entries from this date in years past:

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2005/09/one-year-in-amsterdam.html

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2006/09/two-years-in-amsterdam.html

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2009/09/early-september-means-anniversaries.html

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html

silent train cars

2011-08-24T01:05:00.005+02:00

As you may know, I have this special relationship with silence. Or at least with the IDEA of silence. Or with sound that I have control over.

Whatever.

Anyway, one of the coolest, and cruelest, things about Dutch trains is that they have a "Silent" train car. The idea is that this is where people travel who want to travel in silence. There are notes to that effect on the walls and windows of the train car. It is an absolutely fabulous idea.

It is also a cruel illusion. Of course you won't have everyone in a train car sitting there in silence, no matter what sort of admonishing notes you put on walls and windows. There's always that kid asking the dad questions about everything under the sun. There's always that pair of college friends talking about this and that. There's always the idiot on a mobile phone. What there ISN't is silence, even when 99% of the passengers aren't making a sound. Silence is one of those things that can always be vetoed by the one person who doesn't want it.

The funny thing is, I'd LOVE to travel in a completely silent train car, but I think I'd rather sit in a "normal" train car with lots of noise around me than in a so-called "silent" train car in which people should be silent, but aren't. Even if it's still quieter in the "silent" train car than in the normal one, the fact that it SHOULD be completely silent amplifies every little noise for me so that I end up feeling more angry and distracted than I do when surrounded by noise that, as far as decibels, is louder.

(you may notice, as I just did, that this entry is almost a complete repetition of something I said in a previous blog entry. Sometimes I know I've been wanting to write about something for a while, and I forget whether I've actually written about it or not.)

Is there anything like that for you? Any idea that would be fabulous if it worked well, but that works just imperfectly enough to aggravate the problem for you?

Women's World Cup and the enduring gender question

2011-07-03T23:32:00.004+02:00

These days I'm following the women's soccer world cup for the first time.

Obviously, one is constantly tempted to compare the game to the men's variety, which brings a few surprises and a few expected results. For example, nobody is surprised that women's soccer is a little slower and less powerful than men's soccer. And most people are probably not too shocked to hear that women's soccer statistically includes fewer fouls, cards, injuries and feigned injuries. This would mean that women's soccer is likely to be a little more pleasant, though less exciting, to watch.

But for me, being a newcomer to women's soccer, there are a few surprises. For one thing, it seems that there are many young, young players (starting with 16-year-olds, which is almost unheard of in men's soccer). The important countries are different (and this is one area where the USA aren't the outsiders in soccer, having won two of the five women's world cups so far and being the only country to have made semifinals every time).

But what really surprised me is that it seems that there are far more errors, particularly at critical moments like when it's a striker with only a goalkeeper to beat. The easiest and most obvious explanation is that these are the moments of greatest pressure, and these women aren't as accustomed to this kind of pressure as their male counterparts. The World Cup games are taking place in sold-out stadiums, which is nothing new for world-class soccer playing men but is something that female soccer players aren't used to (some of these ladies play for clubs whose games are attended by only a few dozen fans on average).

But I wonder if there is another reason. It's obviously dangerous to talk about the differences between men and women, particularly if you're going to say something about men being better at something. But I often hear that women are better at multitasking. Sometimes this claim comes in connection with "but men are better at focusing on a single task", while sometimes it's just left at "women can multitask, men can't." If it is true that men are better at focusing on a single task, this may be one area where men are at an advantage. If you're a striker in a one-on-one against the opposing goalkeeper, a single-track mind set on getting the ball in the net might be more useful than the ability to multitask.

For the record, I don't think this is likely to account for most of what we see. I don't know whether women are really better at multitasking or that men are better at focusing. My personal observation doesn't confirm this. I think that it's more likely that these women have less experience in high-pressure contexts and therefore choke more frequently when the stakes are high (it is even possible that they don't choke more frequently, and that it's just my imagination).

But it makes me wonder how many of the differences one sees here can be attributed to gender at all, and how many are just the nature of the sport. Maybe the male soccer stars foul and dive more, not because they're men, but because they're superstars. Maybe women would act the same way if the stakes were as high. The foul statistics in women's soccer are rising just as the popularity of women's soccer is rising as well, and stars like Marta are already showing the sneaky tactics like diving and feigning injury that we've all grown to hate in men's soccer.

Would women be playing more like men if the context in which they were playing were more like the context in which men play? In its broader application this is a very current question, and a very controversial one as well. To what extent do women and men behave differently, and how much of that is because they are different vs. because their conditioning is different?

another idea for a video clip...

2011-06-09T23:38:00.003+02:00

There are certain moments you wish you had a video recording of.

For example, I always think of my friend Bryan, who's a lanky 6'8'', as he was chasing a rabbit around the lawn of our university campus.

Or my colleague Ian, who wanted to get from the café to the kitchen of our hostel without that tedious detour through the door, and jumped over the counter only to crash into the deep fryer (which was, fortunately, not on).

Or the time when I was talking on my cell phone while riding my bike and I wiped out and hit the pavement, but continued my conversation as if nothing had happened. I was too proud and tough to tell the guy on the other side "sorry, I just had a bike accident, let's talk later", but I can't reconstruct how my fall went, and even aside from that personal curiosity I'm sure that video footage of that spill would have great slapstick value.

Yesterday I saw something else that would have made a great video: a guy coming out of one of Amsterdam's coffeeshops, high as a kite, and quite sick. He spent about three hours in the bathroom across from our reception desk. I could see him through the glass door, on his knees over the sink, not moving at all except for the occasional vomiting convulsion.

I think it's quite rare for marijuana to make you really sick (or else it wouldn't be so popular), but I've seen it happen several times. Often it's because it was ingested as "space cake", the sort of brownie with that extra ingredient which throws your metabolism off balance more than if you smoke it. The worst part is that Amsterdam's ambulances and medics don't bother helping you out if this is your predicament. They just explain coolly that there's nothing they can do either, all we can do is wait it out and drink some sugary water.

I'm thinking what a great film this would be: 3 hours of someone slumped motionless over a bathroom sink. Every once in a while you see him throw up just a little bit, but for the most part he's just immobilized, literally too sick to move. Of course you could just take a picture and write "watch out for the space cake", but because the picture captures only a moment, it loses the zen quality and arthouse movie sensibility of a video showing the full three hours that someone spends in that wretched position "waiting it out".

May 21st

2011-05-19T03:00:00.003+02:00

Last year when I was traveling through the USA I saw one of those big billboards announcing that the rapture is taking place on May 21st, and pointing to the website

www.wecanknow.com

There have been plenty of times throughout history when someone somewhere attempted to place an exact date on the rapture, or Christ's return, or the end of the world, or whatever. But this one is probably the most high-profile of them all. The rest of the world hasn't taken much notice, but it has sunk into the American public consciousness to the extent that even newspaper comics can reference them without having to resort to explaining back story.

I've been interested in what sort of math made Harold Camping come up with May 21, 2011, but the website itself doesn't really give a succinct summary. It does provide a few links to e-books like this one , so now I've tried to read it, because I'm curious about this and I think it's safe to assume they won't be leaving the website up after this Saturday. (I'm sort of looking forward to what we WILL find on that website after May 21st...)

I tried to skip ahead to the good bits of the book, but turns into so much numerological acrobatics from the most spurious assumptions that I can't follow how this kind of thing can convince anyone, let alone unleash a major movement. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this, major movements have started around even sketchier ideas.

I just found it funny that, according to Camping, we are now in the last days of the great tribulation, which began in 1988 and then shifted gears in 1994. So upon reading this I tried to remember any major events in 1988 or 1994 that would have, you know, signified a great tribulation. I can't think of anything global, but in my personal life, 1988-1994 are the dates that coincide with my teenage years. I had just turned 13 a few days before 1988 began, and I turned 20 at the very end of 1994.

So yeah. Teenage years. High school. An apt metaphor for the great tribulation if there ever was one.

life in abundance

2011-05-15T23:41:00.003+02:00

Today's sermon in my church was about Jesus saying that he came so that "they might have life, and have it in abundance."

First, let me get this out of the way: "life in abundance" is a scary phrase for me. If I can hardly handle life to the half-full, or life to the ten percent, how on earth would "life in abundance" be a promise that could get me all excited? Nobody wants MORE of something they can hardly handle even a little bit of.

But it also made me ask, "yes, but do I know ANYONE who has life in abundance?"

Sure, many people seem to have it all together, but generally that's just until you get to know them. I can't think of anyone of whom I would say, "now there's someone who has life in abundance."

There are several possible explanations:

1. Jesus didn't mean this life, he meant the next life.
2. There are people who have "life in abundance", they're just not in my social circle.
3. I'm so lost that I don't even know "life in abundance" when I see it, and there's people all around me who have it but I'm either blind to it or seeing it but not cognizant of what it is I'm looking at.
4. Jesus might have come to give people life in abundance, but he pretty much failed at the task.
5. The whole thing is bunk.

Did I miss any?

On a somewhat related note, I've always said that human dissatisfaction stems from having desires that are not being met. I'm not saying that having all your desires met equals satisfaction (it could well be a lose-lose situation), but no one has ever shown me any dissatisfaction that couldn't be boiled down to "I want Reality A, but I get Reality B".

I'd go so far as to say that even the greatest human suffering can be seen as a degree of dissatisfaction. Of course that is a very disrespectful and understated way to define it, because it makes it look as if it's just a difference of degree between deepest human misery -- death camps and all that -- and the spoiled child's "I wanted vanilla, not strawberry".

I don't want to make light of human suffering. But I can't think of it in a way that makes it NOT a matter of degree. That's not necessarily disrespect. To say that you saw a big spider and to say that Jupiter is a big planet is also to use the word "big" about two things that are not remotely the same size.

So if unfulfilled desires cause dissatisfaction, then what is the road to satisfaction? I see three options:

1. get rid of your desires. No more desires, no more unfulfilled desires, no more dissatisfaction.
2. fulfill your desires. No more unfulfilled desires.
3. Learn to desire only the things you already have. Again, no more unfulfilled desires.

All seem to be impossible to me, although I'll accept the possibility that there may have been monks and saints who achieved number 3 (which is just the somewhat easier variant of number 1).

The way I see it we're stuck with dissatisfaction, and the only thing we have a semblance of control over is to what degree we accept it, and to what degree we try to drown it out.

I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't mean "life in abundance" as meaning the same thing as "life without dissatisfaction". What he DID mean is something of a mystery to me.

Everything I Needed To Know About Life I Learned From "The Princess Bride"

2011-05-14T11:09:00.002+02:00

-"Get used to disappointment."
-"Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
-"You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles."
-"Lies do not become us."
-If you are only waiting around to kill me, that does put a damper on our relationship.
-"People in masks cannot be trusted. "
-"If you haven't got your health, then you haven't got anything."
-"We'll never succeed. We may as well die here. "
-"True love is the greatest thing in the world -- except for a nice MLT: mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe..."
-"There's not a lot of money in revenge. "
-"There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead."
-"The chocolate coating makes it go down easier."
-"Murdered by pirates is good... "
-"Not one couple in a century has that chance [to be truly happy], no matter what the story books say."
-"Never get involved in a land war in Asia."

weird conversation

2011-05-11T01:52:00.002+02:00

I'm in the middle of a somewhat weird night shift. I had a former guest come in, a woman who, by all signs, might be having a schizophrenic episode or might be trippin' out on some weird chemicals. At any rate, she said a bunch of crazy things which I'd like to write down to show you how crazy they are, but I can't remember even half of them.

This always happens to me. I've had conversations like this before, both with mentally ill people and with people on drugs and with people who were mentally ill AND on drugs. Afterwards I can usually only remember the feeling I had during the conversation, at witnessing something so off-the-wall that it's funny and tragic and spooky, but I can't remember any of the actual content because it's so random and disjointed that it doesn't connect to anything meaningful in my mind that can be recalled. I always laugh at those movies where someone receives a panicked phone call with some intricate information, or nonsense gibberish, or a sentence in a foreign language, and can later recall the exact content of that conversation and follow the lead to solve a mystery or whatever. If it's Jason Bourne or Rainman I'll buy it, but an average schmoe? Conversations like that leave us so lost that we can't even remember five seconds later what was just said, let alone spend an entire movie tracking down the clues that we somehow still recall from such a context.

But man, this conversation was like a weird dream (which I usually can't fully remember either). She was talking about people and their doubles. She told me that she had just seen someone who looked just like me. Then she saw a random guest walk by and told him with fascination and surprise that she had just seen someone who looked exactly like him. Then she asked me how L---- was doing, but clarified that she doesn't mean the L----- who looks exactly like the L----- that we know, but with a somewhat smaller mouth. Then she told me that she had been in some warehouse that used to be a monastery, and there was a poster there of Bruce Lee and his double, and that something like that could sell for a lot of money.

But I can't remember all the rest of the conversation. She switched languages on me constantly, going from Spanish to Dutch to English. She asked me if I know who stole her Bible. She wanted to know if it would be possible to hide someone's will inside a watch, along with a child's footprint.

Yes. Whoa.

The part that really made my hair stand on end was when she asked me, "what do you think of someone raising a child in a room that is completely red? Red walls, red carpet, red sheets, red ceiling? And if it's not even their own child, if it's a child that they abducted?"

Don't do drugs, kids.

Polarization

2011-05-05T00:15:00.001+02:00

A while ago I wrote a blog post about the health care system in the USA. On my blogspot it didn't get much notice, but on the facebook feed it unleashed a discussion. This discussion went largely along predictable lines, though it did remain surprisingly civil (given the topic and the participants) and I did learn one or two new things from it.

I've been meaning to re-visit the topic for a while and have been reluctant to do so. Part of the reason is that I'm not American, and I know how annoying it is for an outsider to tell you what's wrong with your system.

But I've long been thinking (and the health care issue is as good an example as any) that America, though a worldwide pioneer and role model of democracy, has long been operating under a serious handicap: a two-party system. When I talk politics with Americans, I find that the ideas are much less nuanced and the positions much more entrenched than when I talk politics with anyone else. And I think that it's because, for as long as we can remember, America has had a "whose side are you on" approach to politics. If you're pro-life, many people assume that you also oppose gay rights, that you believe that going to war is good for your economy and socialized health is bad for the economy, that you have loaded guns hanging on your walls at home, etc., etc. What do these issues have to do with each other? From an outsider's perspective, practically nothing. For an American, they have everything to do with each other, simply because of the way they're associated with "right wing" or "left wing" thinking. The circumstances under which these issues have landed on one or the other side of the partisan divide are sometimes quite accidental.

As I was thinking about this, I read this:

http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_twobucket_mind/

I already linked to Scott Adams' blog on my last health care rant, and I'm doing it again now. He usually explains things better than I could. What I find interesting in this entry is that he asks the question of whether our brains naturally polarize ideas, or whether that's an American thing, where you're trained to think that there are two sides to an issue, but not a third possibility. I think both are true: our brains naturally start their categorizing by making two broad fields, but we can continue thinking up categories if we try. But if we live in a polarizing context, it limits our ability to create or imagine further categories.

You can see this everywhere in America. Someone like Rush Limbaugh makes his money by disagreeing with whatever the Democrats do. If Obama defended a certain course of action for a certain situation, Limbaugh would oppose it on principle. Even if Obama's decision were to be atypical -- even if he were to go with "Republican" values -- Limbaugh would make fun of it because it's Obama's idea. This is what polarization does. You know who you disagree with, and then you rationalize your disagreement by showing that you're only holding on to the values you've been defending all along. The easiest example is to consider who would be saying what if it were the Democrats who were making it difficult for 9/11 first responders to get their health care.

This happens, everywhere, not just America. Actual arguments about a matter, good or bad, are often something we construct AFTER forming an opinion about it, and the opinion itself is mostly a manifestation of a sense of identity, of where we see ourselves on the political spectrum. But I wonder how America's politics would work if they weren't so polarized.

(And yes, I've been saying that the USA is a two-party system even though you have the Green Party and the Tea Party. To me, these don't really qualify as "third point of view", they're just the more radical and less populous further reaches of the existing political divide. )

Street Music

2011-05-02T23:39:00.004+02:00

Since I only work part-time, I obviously think a lot about picking up another job. But my weird hours are a challenge, especially since I also want to get more involved with my community and a couple of other things.

One of the most obvious choices would be if I started working as a street musician. I've busked a few times before, in Canada and Germany mostly. Sometimes it was fun, and sometimes I made a few bucks, but often it was not fun and not lucrative either. The most fun and lucrative street music sessions were when I was making music with one or two friends and we knew the music and were having fun with it.

To tell you the truth, my dream in my early twenties was to be a modern-day troubador. But the troubador vocation is pretty much dead (in the West at least). Yes, you could argue that today's touring rock stars are the the carriers of the troubador tradition, but there are big differences. Like, there's an entire entourage involved with the bookings, the transportation and the PR and all that. It's no longer like you can just stand somewhere in town square and start singing, and draw a crowd that will pay you enough for a decent living. Medieval crowds didn't have much entertainment, this might have been the highlight of their week. Crowds today have internet and TV and wii and all that.

I sometimes look at the street performers here in Amsterdam and I think, "isn't this just panhandling?" Sure there's some amazing artists, guys who juggle burning sticks or accordion players who can play Bach Toccatas, but for the most part, it's really pretty pathetic. There's a guy in a gorilla suit. That's it, no further twist to the story. Just a guy standing around in a gorilla suit with a box in front of him for you to throw money in because he's, uh, wearing... a ... gorilla suit...

And then there's all those Eastern European women with a broken accordion playing THE SAME MELODY FOR HOURS ON END. And they're ALL playing that same melody. And they play it with one finger. There's no accordion skill here, there's no music to brighten the day, it's just a simple ditty (I don't even know what it's called) that is most likely the only thing they can play on their instrument.

OK, so this is one step up from panhandling. Some Eastern European woman acquired an accordion and learned to play a tune on it, and plays it for hours on end, and at least doesn't end up destitute, or prostituting herself, or panhandling WITHOUT an accordion. Fair enough. But it's not the same thing as, you know, a STREET MUSICIAN. A street musician is someone who adds music to your day, someone who provides you with a free open-air concert if you feel inclined to stop and listen, and you can return the favor by giving him a coin or two. I see street musicians every so often, and if I'm not in a hurry I'll stop and enjoy the music, and I'll gladly give them a bit of money.

But my problem is that I'd be simply another guy with a guitar singing Bob Dylan songs. Who wants to give money to a guy with a guitar singing Bob Dylan songs? This isn't enough to make a passerby turn off their iPod to take a listen.

Once I teamed up with an attractive girl who played the fiddle, and we just raked in the cash. Once I teamed up with two saxophone players during the Christmas shopping rush and we played carols at passersby, and made $60 in about two hours. But when it was just me and the guitar, I felt indifference and even a bit of hostility from the people passing by.

So I'd need something a little more than a guitar and a repertoire of Dylan classics. I'd either need a more exotic instrument, or more insteresting music (not that Dylan isn't interesting, but who wants to listen to me singing Dylan when they can just YouTube the man himself?) or one or two bandmates to help with making the music more interesting, or all three.

But that is only Part I of the problem. Part II is context, in this case the difficulty of performing for people who don't want to be performed for.

One of the most revealing experiments in street musicianship was when world-class violinist Joshua Bell spent an hour playing in a D. C. subway station. He played the same pieces (on a Stradivarius) that you would normally have to slap down a good $100 to hear him perform in one of the world's great concert halls. There was a Washington Post article going into this experiment in detail, about how indifferent most people were to this world-class performance they were being given for free, and concluding that context is a huge part of art appreciation.

Sure, sometimes good street musicians brighten up my day, but sometimes they're also a bit of an annoyance. Sometimes I prefer the tune in my headphones, or sometimes I'm trying to listen to something else. It can be awkward to walk past them if you know you're not going to give them anything. Do you acknowledge their presence, or do you just ignore them? Unlike most people, I've been on both sides of this equation, and I still don't know. The line between a street musician being an unexpected enrichment or an unexpected annoyance is very fine, and it's not even necessarily connected to how good the music is.

Why does this matter to me? Maybe I'm too self-conscious about imposing myself on others. Larry Norman once said (and these words have haunted me like few others) that if you're called to make music, you'll make music, and you won't care if anyone listens. After a few years of thinking about that sentence and how I feel about music, I concluded that I'm not really called to make music, because I DO care if anyone listens.

No doubt being a street musician could be fun at times and, like any job, would also be annoying at times. I still think about doing it in my spare time, once I find something I really want to go on the streets with, and hopefully one or two willing partners in this endeavour.

Good Friday...

2011-04-22T23:20:00.000+02:00

In my time zone, Good Friday is now practically over. And as I look at the history of my blog, I realize that I haven't yet written a Good Friday entry after almost seven years of blogging.

There are good reasons for this, of course. Good Friday is a crazy difficult topic to say something meaningful about, and as I grow older I feel an ever stronger sense that I cheapen many of these things by talking about them. Still, tonight I'll try it.

The death and resurrection of Jesus is central to Christianity, as being the events that made us "right" with God, but it is not easy to say how exactly this works. Growing up, I was told that even though God loves me, He's too holy to hang out with me, and that I deserve to suffer forever because of my sin, but that Jesus took the suffering and death on himself instead so that I could be counted as clean. SOMEONE has to die for my sins, and it used to be sheep and goats, but since Jesus was perfect, he was able to make the sacrifice once and for all.

I have come to view this explanation as extremely problematic. For one thing, it makes God look like either an ice-cold bureaucrat or a blind-angry avenger, someone whose main concern is that SOMEONE dies for my sins, whether it's me or a goat or Jesus or whoever. This is not what we generally think of as "justice" -- a society run by the principle of "for every crime, someone's gonna die, but we're not so particular about whether or not it's the guilty party" wouldn't strike us as having grasped the concept.

That's just the beginning of the problems. There's also the "too holy to hang out with you" idea -- generally, the more holy someone is, the greater their capacity of associating with scum while not being defiled. There's the problem of the "necessity" of bloodshed for the forgiveness of sins while the Old Testament is filled with examples of God forgiving sins even where no animal sacrifice was made.

The biggest problem for me, though, was a constant feeling of guilt. I figured that, to properly understand what Christ has done for me, I need to reflect incessantly on how it was my sin that caused his suffering, and wallow in the guilt and shame of being the one responsible for such a horrible atrocity.

These reflections led to rebellion and a negative view of life that I still haven't recovered from. Being born in sin, I of course can't help it that I mess up, so to tell me that a condition I can't help is causing someone else infinite pain is like telling your disabled child how much you suffer from having a disabled child. My constant (though usually fearfully suppressed) complaint to God was, "no, it's not MY fault you had to go through this. It's YOUR fault. YOU created humanity, knowing what we'd put you through. I'm not trying to torture you, I'm just trying to get through life somehow with minimum damage to everyone involved."

The irony that took me decades to catch was that Jesus' death and resurrection was precisely in order to FREE me from guilt; if I continue feeling guilty for it, I haven't grasped it at all.

I obviously haven't fully grasped it anyway. But many images are helpful, including, yes, the idea of someone dying in my place. This makes a bit more sense if I focus on the love involved in that kind of sacrifice instead of focusing on the messed up system one would have to create for that to be necessary.

There's also the image of a debt being paid.

And there's the image that C. S. Lewis uses in "Mere Christianity" about how we need someone to "walk us through" all our actions, someone to guide our hand like an adult's hand might hold a child's hand while teaching it to form letters, and that we need this kind of guidance for all our actions including penitence, suffering and dying.

There's the "Gospel Train" image, of Jesus going all the way to hell to enable everyone to hitch a ride to heaven with him. He's not just throwing a rope to someone who's drowning; he's jumping in himself, and going to the deepest depths so that no matter how far we've strayed, we do not need to find our way back, it is he who follows us there and offers to walk or carry us back.

But whatever the mysteries around Good Friday, the idea is one of INVOLVEMENT, of God removing the distance and coming close. This is also true of the Incarnation and of Christmas and all, but Good Friday represents God's involvement in our SUFFERING.

It is one thing for a God to send Commandments from Heaven; it's another thing for Him to become human and live by them himself. God suffers for his world like every artist suffers in putting himself into a work of art. He is involved because He makes Himself vulnerable to everyone who is angry at Him -- everyone whose anger could only be expressed as helpless rage but can now be vented against an actual flesh and blood person who won't even strike back when beaten.

And, perhaps most powerfully, God's involvement is a form of solidarity with all the suffering and the poor and oppressed. It's easy to accuse the king on his lofty throne of not caring. It's hard to continue holding that accusation when the king voluntarily becomes the beggar in the ditch next to you.

This year, Good Friday is bringing one point home to me: the idea that life is worthwhile. Nietzsche said, "he who has a why to live can bear with almost any how." Conversely, I say that "he who doesn't have a why to live can hardly bear with any how." I hear of people in torture and prison camps still holding on to a reason to live. My own reason to live is so fickle and fleeting that a single sleepless night or an argument with a friend or a toothache or some other trivial thing like that makes me angry that I was even born. Jesus choosing the way of the cross, "for the joy that was set before him" (Hebrews 12:2), encourages me to believe that whatever price I pay is worth paying.

I don't have that kind of faith, of course. I can't see the product I'm purchasing, I can only see the price I'm paying. And my imagination isn't good enough to imagine a product that's worth that kind of price.

But that's why I need Jesus. I need him to be the faith that I need, the faith that says to God "not my will, but yours be done." And even though I still can't see what he paid such a high price for, the fact that he paid it can, on a good day, convince me that whatever it is we get in return is actually worth the price. And on a bad day, I'm still in Jesus' hands.

There are times when I "get" it, but they are precious few. Most of my life is spent in a state of anger. But this is why the cross and resurrection are the only hope I have in all this: no matter how deep I sink, Jesus has already been there and can give me a lift -- in fact, that he might just be waiting for me in the deepest place, the place that my survival instinct is still kicking and struggling to keep me away from in some way. Good Friday represents the deepest place.

A blessed Easter Weekend.

Midlife Crisis

2011-04-13T02:06:00.000+02:00

I looked up "Midlife Crisis" in wikipedia, where I am told that it is actually not that common, but has been popularized by society. Apparently, when a man around forty gets in a funk, he may call it a "midlife crisis" with the same carelessness that you call someone "obsessive-compulsive" for wanting you to close the door behind you when you enter a room.

Most of us reach a point in which we just don't want the boat rocked all that much any more. I'm not sure if it's fair to call that a "midlife crisis" because it seems a natural byproduct of aging. I think it took me longer than most people to find something like what one could call a "foothold" in life, and what I have of it I'm reluctant to sacrifice. I still have dreams, of course, but I've been growing increasingly wary of them. Fantasies can be good, they can be the sign of a healthy mind, but if you get emotionally attached to a fantasy it may be the sign of an unhealthy psyche. Sure we consider it inspiring to say "follow your dreams", but we conveniently forget that there are words for people who follow their dreams, and it's not just words like "visionary" but also words like "delusional".

What has stalled me, tripped me up and paralyzed me has (as far as I can tell) always been this:

The price you pay.

The easiest example (and there are very many) has to do with classical music. Growing up, I sometimes enjoyed but usually hated practicing piano. What kept me going was the thought of mastering a piece, was my love for music, but mostly -- I'll be honest here -- it was my love of the limelight. I couldn't beat most of my classmates at many things, but I could get attention for being better at piano than most of them. It was like I could exist, and like my existence would be justified, if I was better than others at something, and this was one area where I had a head start.

(Obviously, I loved classical music, too. Listening to Claudio Arrau playing Chopin's first piano concerto moved something in me that made me want to learn to play like that, and it wasn't just my exhibitionist instinct. )

But the real test is: do I want this enough to pay the price for it? And the price included not only the hours of practice, but all the blood, sweat and tears that accompany the emotional investment you put into a dream. And the more I learned about this price, the higher the price seemed to me, until it just seemed unbearably, overwhelmingly costly, and I ceased investing in it.

That's only one example. There are thousands. "Should I do the dishes now, or can it wait another day?" "Should I move to Spain?" "Should I eat in or out tonight?" "Should I open my mouth and give my opinion on the matter currently being discussed around me?" "Should I plan something for this weekend, or just sit back and let it happen?" "Should I try to formulate these thoughts, or just keep them to myself?" "Should I use this afternoon to take a bike ride through the park, or to get my bank papers organized?" There's always a cost, and the cost-benefit ratio is constantly determining my actions. I think most of us are like this, only that we have differing ideas of what constitutes "cost" and what constitutes "benefit."

The older I get, the more rare it is for me to encounter things that I'm really prepared to pay a high price for. Practically everything I do these days is something I do simply because the cost isn't that high. The one thing I still invest anything at all in is travel, but that's because even though a trip across the ocean may come at a high cost, the cost of sitting in one place for too long feels even higher to me.

My version of "midlife crisis" is more or less the "miles to go before I sleep" feeling. If I reach the average life expectancy, I still have another four decades ahead of me. But I've run out of things I want to do with four decades. I've been breathing air for three and a half decades, and, to tell you the truth, it's getting tedious. It depresses me to think that I'm not even halfway done yet. I feel like I've eaten my fill but am still staring at half a plate in front of me. I have no appetite for it. I feel full and slightly bloated, and even a little nauseous at the thought of having to work through all that food still. And you can tell me that I shouldn't waste food because children are starving in Africa, or that I shouldn't offend my host by not finishing the meal, and that might make me dutifully finish my plate, but it won't help me to ENJOY it.

I feel like someone who, sweating and breathless, reaches the top of a ridge, only to realize that he's still less than halfway to his destination. The walk may have been fun and exciting at first, but for a long time now it's been only about energy conservation, and now there's nothing for it but to steel oneself for huffing and puffing the remainder of the way, trying to find ways to distract oneself from the various aches and pains, the thirst and sweat, mosquitoes and sunburns, etc.

I'm not saying that I'm SUFFERING. I'm just feeling what everybody feels when a good party has gone on for too long and one is just tired and no longer in the mood to party. I feel what every hiker feels at some point on a challenging hike, where he thinks, "I'd be happy if this hike were only half as long." He gets into a mode where he can only focus on the trail in front of him, trudging along in a semi-hypnotic state, because there's not enough energy left to look around or take breaks or detours or photos or whatever.

This does not conform to the classic version of a midlife crisis. In fact, this seems to be the opposite of a midlife crisis, because the "classic" midlife crisis involves lamenting the fact that there's not much time left, rather than feeling that the time left is more than one can handle.

Does anyone else experience middle adulthood like this, or is it just me?

Linguistic nuances, Part III

2011-04-11T03:41:00.001+02:00

The English sentence "I missed you" can mean a lot of things. Take these three meanings:

1. you've been gone. I've been sad.
2. we were gonna meet at Starbucks. I came too late, and you were already gone.
3. I threw an object at you and it hit the wall next to you instead.

If your neurons are hard-wired in English, you may not immediately differentiate between these meanings. But in German that's easier, because there are three different words for the English verb "to miss". You would say:

1. Ich habe dich vermisst. (I missed you)
2. Ich habe dich verpasst. (I missed you)
3. Ich habe dich verfehlt. (I missed you)

Likewise, in Spanish there is a similar differentiation:

1. Te extrañé (or "te heché de menos", depending on region) (I missed you)
2. ... (I missed you). (I don't think there's a direct Spanish equivalent to this one. You could use a different sentence, like "nos perdimos" [we lost each other], but maybe a Spanish speaker wants to correct me on this?)
3. Te fallé (I missed you)

My latest experience of Dutchness was when I suddenly realized that I only know one of these in Dutch, and am not sure whether Dutch is like English in that that same word applies to the other two situations as well, or whether Dutch is like German and would have another word for each situation. I can understand it well enough when someone else says it, but if I say it, I feel like I'm committing an awkward transliteration. To me, one sign of someone who has learned to "think" in a language is that these questions don't even arise.

Linguistic nuances, Part II

2011-04-01T06:50:00.004+02:00

You may have noticed that many Germans, when speaking English, use the word "when" instead of "if". That's because in German there is one word that usually does the job of both: the word "wenn". Context and sentence structure / verb tense usually tells you which conditional it's meant to be.

But what confuses me is how many Dutch people I hear saying things like, "When you have children, please drop them off at the crèche." They obviously mean "IF you have children...". A natural enough mistake for a German speaker to make, but a Dutch speaker? In Dutch you have "als" ("if") and "wanneer" ("when").

Or that's what I, as an outsider, observe. But it must be more complex. A confusion like that can't arise if these words really were one-to-one translations, so there must be cases in which "wanneer" would translate as "if". These are exactly the sorts of things that you would know if you spoke a language fluently.

Got that? Let's try something:

English: "WHEN you come home"
German: "WENN Du nach Hause kommst"
Dutch: "WANNEER je naar huis komt"

English: "IF you come home"
German: "WENN Du nach Hause kommst"
Dutch: "ALS je naar huis komt."

[just for confusion, let me throw this one in as well, because it's an example of ENGLISH using the same word to mean something different entirely:

English: "WHEN we were young"
German: "ALS wir jung waren"
Dutch: "TOEN wij jong waren"
]

Now to make it interesting: the German language does have resources to convey the shades of difference. You can say "FALLS Du nach Hause kommst", which really means "if you come home". So why do Germans use "WENN" so much when the language has a perfectly good conditional that conveys uncertainty? I don't know why. We just do. And one of the meanings of "fluency" is that you have an instinct for these things even when (if, hehehe...) you can't explain them.

One thing you have to do all the time in translation work is change a sentence to another sentence that means practically the same thing. In many situations there is not much difference between "when you come home" and "if you come home", but if (when?) I'm dealing with a situation in which it's definitely "when" and not "if", I could just change the sentence to "once you're home", which means practically the same thing as "when you come home" and can be translated clearly enough into German.

I navigate these waters with little effort since I'm fluent in both, but these are exactly the sorts of little things you see non-native speakers tripped up by: they know how to use the words, but not to the degree of conveying the exact shade of meaning they intend. And even if you're fluent in two languages, it still doesn't necessarily make you a good translator.

In Dutch, though I have a solid grasp of the language, I lack the fine tuning of these nuances to understand why someone will occasionally say "wanneer" where I would have thought "als" was the correct word. There isn't a one-to-one correlation to the English words "when" and "if", and my mind has not yet created categories for conditionals to be divided by other criteria.

Linguistic nuances, Part I

2011-03-31T04:39:00.002+02:00

It is true that I don't very well know how to answer the question, "so how good is your Dutch?" Mostly I talk about how my Dutch SHOULD be better than it is, after almost seven years. All my other languages were better after this amount of time. Even when I say that my Dutch is "serviceable, but not fluent" it means different things to different people, depending on what your standards are for "serviceable" and "fluent".

I once talked to someone about how long it takes to "think" in a language, and she said that she was able to think in Spanish after a few months in Colombia. I'm not sure if she's linguistically much more gifted than I am, or if we have different ideas of what it means to "think" in a language. I don't just mean "carry internal dialogue in a language", I mean "realizing that your subconscious thought patterns, when analyzed, conform to the linguistic structure of said language." Some people say that dreaming in a language is a sign of fluency, but I don't buy that. I know many people who dream in a language they've only started learning, simply because their mind is occupied with it.

I can't call my Dutch "fluent" because there are too many nuances that remain hidden to me. I wrote a Dutch eMail the other day and, wanting to be sure, had it proof-read by a friend. The friend told me that (just as I suspected) the grammar and content was fine, but the TONE was more aggressive than I probably intended. "Fluent", in my book, is someone who can use the words and grammar not only to convey a message, but to convey it well, with the intended emotional tone. Many people who say offensive things aren't really itching for a fight, they're just not particularly articulate. A non-native English speaker may use words like "slim", "skinny", "thin", "narrow" and "slender" interchangeably; a fluent English speaker knows how the shades of difference between these words can determine the tone of a conversation. Also, a fluent English speaker knows that you can talk about a narrow creek or a slender bridge, but when someone mentions a skinny creek or a slim bridge, it calls their fluency into question even though very few people really know the grammatical rules governing these adjectives and nouns. It just FEELS odd to think of a creek being "skinny". On the other hand, intentionally creating that oddness for effect can also be the mark of a great word-smith.

Or am I confusing "fluency" with "eloquence" here? Some native speakers have trouble with nuances as well, but even though you could say they're not eloquent, can you accuse them of not being fluent? There is a line of division there somewhere, and it's somewhat hazy.

2011-03-30T00:20:00.001+02:00

My prayer for those who have doubts is that they may find faith.

My prayer for those who have no doubts is that they may find doubt.

Health Care Rant

2011-03-09T10:10:00.002+01:00

I've had quite a few conversations with Americans about health care. At first I was really curious why so many of them are afraid of socialized health care, especially since very few of them are happy with how their health care has been.

Now I think I understand a little bit -- like, I understand why they would think that way, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to me. What I DO understand is that many people are nervous about Obama's health care reforms -- sweeping reforms in a time of crisis can be unsettling -- but I think the old system in America has been weighed and found wanting for too long.

From what I can tell, the difference between the health care I have and the health care most of my American friends have consists primarily of these points:

1. I pay less for insurance.
2. I get more coverage from my insurance.
3. I don't have to worry about dragging my insurance to court to force them to keep up their end of the contract after every medical intervention.
4. I don't have to worry about living in poverty for the rest of my life if I should have a heart attack or MS or something.

Sounds like I got the better deal, right? But in my conversations I've noticed that there are, from an American right-wing point of view, two problems with this:

1. I HAVE to be insured.
2. if health care is socialized, that means that the government is more involved than in a privatized system. Since the government is seen as a bunch of inept, greedy pencil-pushers, a system would work better the less influence the government has, right?

First I'll say that much of the arguing, sadly, has to do with assumptions. Practically every person I talk to who opposes socialized health care is American, and has never seen socialized health care in action. They are certain that socialized health care means long waiting lists, non-qualified doctors, sub-par health equipment, a prohibitively high amount of government control in which your doctors and insurance companies are chosen for you, and a system in which the hard-working honest person has to pay for a bunch of lazy parasites who are along for the ride. And like that person who has no children of his own but never stops giving you child-rearing advice, they think they can tell me what socialized health care is, even though I've lived with it all my life. And no amount of me talking about my observations has a chance of budging their assumptions. Once you're stuck in confirmation bias (and America's partisan divide is a great polarizing force for that kind of thing) you're not going to be able to hear any arguments that challenge your assumptions.

But there's one assumption that I can relate to: the idea that the "free market" is more efficient than something government-run. This is often true, and is a huge argument in favor of privatizing ANYthing, and I'm generally in favor of the free market economy as well.

But here are some things I observe:

-for one thing (and perhaps most importantly), even in "socialized" countries, most of it is still privatized. Here in the Netherlands I may be required to have insurance, but I also have my choice of insurance companies. They are all cheaper than what you get in America, and they offer more coverage. They even target different demographics (the one I have doesn't subsidize abortions or cosmetic plastic surgery). This is free market economy at its best, so why do we not find it in America? Even G.W. Bush said that he "abandoned the free market principles in order to save free market system" -- which is to say that "free market principles" are not always easy to define as they relate to a government's role.

-I can understand the American Right's distrust of big government, but what I fail to understand is their trust of big business. Private companies can make just as big a mess as a government can. CEOs can be just as selfish and corrupt as any politician. Privately owned banks, energy and oil businesses have a huge share of the blame for the current economic crisis. Being scared of a health care system run by a government is no more logical than being scared of a health care system run by pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

-the average American, with his "private" health care, isn't healthier than the average Dutch person with his "socialized" health care. Even just walking down the street and counting the overweight people can make you suspicious of private health care.

-my American friends with chronic health conditions have a miserable life compared to my European friends with chronic health conditions. What they have in common are chronic health conditions, and that's already miserable enough. And no, they're not lazy.

-many Americans I talk to like to blame the health care situation on illegal immigrants, who get the treatment in the hospitals and then run off without paying. Sure illegal immigrants are an issue that must be addressed. But what I seem to be unable to get people to see is that your all-American hard-working family man who isn't insured can be just as big a drain on the system. All he has to do is contract leukemia, or fall off the roof and end up paralyzed, or have kidney failure and require dialysis for the rest of his life. He's probably not sitting on a fortune, so once his bank account has been emptied, the treatments will continue, running up a huge bill that is paid by...

you. Dear tax payer.

So, yeah, what's wrong with mandatory insurance? I understand that, with the insurance policies in the U. S. being what they are, it's a bigger drain on the individual's pocket than having to pay for all those uninsured people getting their treatment. But if everyone were to be contributing into the system, wouldn't policies become more affordable? And is it so much more "socialized" than the existing laws to have cars and homes insured?

PART II

But the issue is much bigger than health care. There are entire philosophical questions such as: what is the role of a government? HOW do you help the needy without creating parasitism and a cycle of enabling?

These are difficult questions I don't have the answer to, and I'm suspicious of anyone who does claim to have the answer. I do see that America, from its beginnings, was started on much more bravado, individualism, expansionism, etc. than European societies, and that you'd expect that can-do mindset to still be present in a country which had been catapaulted to "sole world power" status by sticking to those values. But I also see that America could be too stubborn in holding on to what originally made it great, and it may be headed for a fall if it lacks the flexibility to see that changing circumstances might mean re-assessing values. It's only fair capitalism to say that your business plan might need altering if India and China are overtaking you.

I hear many people talking about how if you'd take all the services away from the poor, they would immediately get jobs and start contributing to society. No doubt that's true for many individual cases, but if you think this is the SOLUTION, you probably don't know any homeless people personally. Here's what's more likely to happen: crime, mental illness, drugs, disease, despair, suicide. The problem, in most cases, isn't that the people are lazy, it's that they've lost their way and lost their hope. It's a long and difficult process to get them back into "normal" society with jobs and homes and such.

I talk to people who see that MedicAid is being abused by some people, and conclude that if you give the poor MORE aid, they'll abuse it more. Abuse is obviously always a problem, and any health care system (whether private or socialized) has to find ways to minimize it. But the idea that a health care system is easier to abuse because it's "socialized" is another American misconception; many "socialized" systems have a more effective parasite filter than the US system does, while providing better services to those who really need it.

Final observations:

-I hear people talking about how much could change if government services were taken over by private charities. And I do believe that private charities are good, and necessary. But if all government services are taken away, the private charities have to become bigger and more complex until they are themselves a sort of government system, which isn't good for anyone either.

-I heard one woman in a church accuse the government of "throwing money at a problem" (say, health care or homelessness). The church she went to was very generous in giving to charities, but the individual members of the church weren't personally involved, which struck me as, well, "throwing money at a problem." If the majority of the members of this church were to spend, say, an hour a week with a homeless person, they would help much more, even if the financial spending decreased.

-The logical solution for people who want smaller government would be something along the lines of what Scott Adams suggests: a system in which you can be exempt from Social Security tax in exchange for taking care of an elderly person in your home. I would support this idea. But how many people would go for it? Interestingly, the ones I have a hard time imagining doing this are also the ones I hear complaining most about government services.

-In America, a business is generally open to customer abuse because "the customer is always right". I can, for example, buy something, use it, and return it for a full refund simply by claiming that it wasn't what I'd been looking for. Unscrupulous customers can take advantage of this, but the idea is that this is the price you pay, and the price worth paying, for good customer service. This focus on the happy customer has made the American business model rule the world for a long time, so why can't it transfer to American health care?

These are some thoughts that swirl around in my head.

Noise and silence

2011-03-02T01:06:00.003+01:00

Here's a topic I think I've blogged about before. But what the heck.

During my university days I once started writing a short story called "The Forbidden Silence", about a man who is extra-sensitive to noise and seeks out a life in which auditory impulses are minimized. But since silence is something that most of humanity seeks to avoid as much as possible, his attempts are constantly thwarted and he ends up (I never finished the story) either killing himself or going insane, or both.

The story was inspired, of course, by my own search for a silent place to study during my university days. The dorms were filled with dorm-guy activities which include loud music, horsing around, banging on people's walls and doors, etc. The lounges were filled with chatter, and the library (which is supposed to be a haven of silence) had this constant sound of air conditioning.

I think most people are able to tune out noise better than I am. I notice this when I talk about being distracted by the air conditioner and realize that the other person (or people) don't even hear the air conditioner. I notice it when I sit at a table in a loud café or bar, and can only make out about 15% of the conversation over the din, even though everyone else seems to have no problem following what is being said. I have some characteristics of the "Highly Sensitive Person" (though I'm not sure if many people would call me "shy" or "introverted").

As a child I ate very little, which obviously made my mother worry, and when she went to the doctor he advised that she feed me at a different time from the rest of the family, in a quiet place, facing a grey wall. And what do you know, once all the sensory impulses of my environment were removed, it turned out that I did have an appetite after all. The noisy chaos around the dinner table just stressed me out so much that I wasn't able to eat at mealtimes.

But one thing that really bothers me is noisy people. The other day I was on a train on a Saturday night, and spent much of the ride in a state of anger at the handful of drunk guys who were talking a few dozen decibels louder than was necessary for conversation. Everyone else in the train car was annoyed at them too, but one thing that goes hand in hand with being annoyed at loudness is the reluctance to "hush" someone, because we all know that boisterous and loud people (especially when they're drunk) become angry when someone tells them to be quiet. The difficulty is not solved, it is escalated. Even the train conductor, though he told them to calm down, took no further measures when they immediately (as such people are wont to do) resumed their noisy conversation.

Even at tolerable levels, sound annoys me, especially in contexts in which there is supposed to be silence. Dutch trains, for example, have one train car in which there are signs saying "silence". This is for passengers who want to travel in peace, sleep, read, concentrate, or whatever, rather than have conversations. But of course no one takes note of this. Or rather, there is never a unanimous acceptance of it, which in practice is pretty much the same thing. Even if 99% of the passengers keep silent, the 1% who would like to have a noisy cell phone conversation can veto the silence of the other 99%. Even if it's not the level of noise of a bunch of drunken guys, the fact that I'm in a SILENT train car makes me annoyed even at someone rustling around a bag of chips.

Obviously you can just tell me that I'm being too sensitive, that I need to chill out a bit and be less uptight, etc. This is always what you can tell someone who operates under the irrational assumption that a sign saying "SILENCE" should denote, you know, an absence of noise.

I do believe that people find silence to be alarming and threatening, and that many of us will actively (though perhaps unconsciously) sabotage it. This became clearest to me when I was at Taizé a few years ago. There were thousands of young people there for Holy Week, and when we entered the monastery's sanctuary for the prayer times, there were helpers holding up signs saying "SILENCE". But it didn't really result in silence. There were even helpers going around trying to calm down the people who just persisted in their conversations even though we were trying to have a time of silence, but their success was limited as well. Once the prayers and songs started, conversation would generally cease, and during the time of silent prayer (which, at Taizé, can last up to 10 minutes) you wouldn't really hear people talking either. BUT you would hear one uninterrupted concert of people coughing. Since you didn't really hear people coughing during the rest of the day's activities, I believe that this cough is more a nervous, psychological cough, the unconscious need for an individual to assert his or her independence from the contextual pressure to be silent. You experience it in concert halls all the time, during the pianissimo clarinet solo in a Tchaikovsky symphony for example. There's that itch in the back of your throat which is basically your self-consciousness.

In my job as a hostel nightman I also experience it all the time: if people are talking loudly and you tell them to be quiet, their reaction is practically never, "oh, maybe people are trying to meditate / sleep / concentrate, and I guess I don't have to be making so much noise." It's almost always a reaction like "Sheesh, what's with all these uptight people trying to tell us we can't have a normal conversation?" (because "normal" is what they consider it.) In the unlikely event that someone actually lowers their decibels when I remind them that there are people sleeping, it is usually with an air of condescension, like, "OK, you're obviously some OCD guy on a power trip, but since I'm a reasonable person I'll humor you rather than make a scene."

Part of my lifelong fascination with the monastic life has to do with my yearning to have a life unpolluted by loud noises. But I also think that the constant frustration of that hope, the constant interruption of silence you have even in a monastery, could drive me insane.

But here's the embarrassing contradiction: I'm not so good with silence myself. If I've been sitting for more than 5 minutes doing something that doesn't require my full concentration, I find myself putting some music into the stereo. If I'm cycling or sitting in a train, I usually take out my mp3 player.

Part of this has to do with my personal compulsion with music and the losing battle of trying to remain musically literate when there are only limited hours to your day, but -- how can I deny it? -- part of it is probably that I have a discomfort with silence myself.

On being a single man who doesn't understand relationships

2011-02-14T01:09:00.004+01:00

Well, I'll use this Valentine's Day to blog about something I haven't blogged about yet: being a bachelor.

To be clear: I'm not talking about "bachelor" in the "always dating but never committing" sense. I'm talking about the "monk or marriage" bachelor.

I've once prompted some surprised reactions when I said that I have never been in love. But it may just be a matter of how we define words. I've had my share of crushes, some of them quite intense, so if you want to call that "being in love" then feel free. But I always thought that being "in love" also involves a "this is for the long haul" feeling. I mean, from the most vacuous pop song / romantic comedy all the way to, you know, SHAKESPEARE, isn't the consensus that true love means that you have some sort of "for the rest of your life" feeling about it? I've never felt that way about someone. I may strike you as a cynic, but I still subscribe to the romantic philosophy expressed in that jazz song "When I fall in love it will be forever, or I'll never fall in love... when I give my heart it will be completely or I'll never give my heart."

So, "monk or marriage".

I don't talk a whole lot about it any more. I'm not an unhappy single man. It's hard to say that I'm a HAPPY single man, but that's just because I'm not a particularly happy man. It doesn't have much to do with being single, and I can honestly not really imagine how being married would make me any happier. I can imagine plenty of ways it would complicate my life, and burden both me and my wife, but I can't really imagine it being, you know, WORTH it. (So, yes, if I strike you as a cynic, this might be why.)

And that's the reason I don't talk about it much. Saying this sort of thing is an easy way to make people get defensive and/or argumentative. But even where people speak with support (and sometimes even admiration) about it, I feel apologetic and uncomfortable. It's so NORMAL to want a life partner, isn't it? What is wrong with me that I don't want it?

So I do have problems of a single person, but not the typical ones. Not the "why doesn't anyone wanna date me" problems, not the "will I ever find someone" problem, not the "how can I tell whether this is the right one" problem. Just a general feeling of, man, I'm some weirdo who doesn't want what everyone else wants. Even on Valentine's Day I can't have the NORMAL Single Person's Valentine's Day Blues, I have to have my OWN version of the Single Person's Valentine's Day Blues. (Although, to be honest, Valentine's Day flies by largely unnoticed. The interesting thing is that mostly I remember Valentine's Day as "The Day When A Single Man Can Forget What Day Today Is And There Will Be No Further Consequences".)

The purely practical and pragmatic considerations of daily living also create a sort of loneliness. The sort of social life I had, say, in university, is difficult to replicate when it seems that most of the people my age are married and have families, and most singles I know are either women, or they're about a decade younger than me, or they're women who are a decade younger than me.

On the other hand, though, it's not really all like that. My marital status does not really make me such an anomaly. I do know bachelors in their twenties and thirties and beyond, and many of them seem perfectly content to postpone "relationship seeking" into an indefinite future. I'm not a historian, but I'm willing to bet that there has never been a time in the history of our culture when it's been this easy to be single.

But just like technology has greatly complicated our lives by simplifying them, the changing social mores have also made our lives simultaneously simpler and more complex. It may be comparatively simple to be a single man nowadays, but there's plenty of complications as well. There's not a clear sense of PROTOCOL, if you know what I mean. The last decade has seen the rise of something called "cell phone etiquette", which plenty of people ignore by leaving their phone on in church or talking loudly into their cell phone while on the train. What I wonder is if there's something like "bachelor etiquette" which I'm constantly mangling because I'm not aware of it. I guess in a broader sense it has to do with the identity crisis in masculinity in general (like the question of whether chivalry amounts to treating women like the "weaker vessel", and whether that is honoring or demeaning to them).

In my case, many of the complications have to do with two things: 1. the fact that I don't understand relationships, and 2. the fact that most of my friends are women.

(My women friends are in itself a facet of my life I don't fully understand, but that would go beyond the scope of this blog entry.)

My point is that the simple things I do with friends several times a week, like going for coffee or dinner together, paying a visit to help with some task or other, practicing music, watching a movie, going on a walk or a swim or a drive -- things that are simple enough with a guy friend -- sometimes start developing a subtext of mind games with women friends. I largely ignore this subtext, but sometimes I wonder how it comes across, especially from a man my age.

In previous cultures it was probably impossible for an unmarried man to do many of these things with a woman, but on the other hand I think there times when, say, "chivalry" demanded that men do certain things that you can't really get away with doing nowadays. For example, it seems to me that for a time it was expected that a man "escort" a woman if she needs to go somewhere, not just walking next to her but taking her arm, even if she's married to someone else. Nowadays, if you see a man and woman arm in arm, it's pretty safe to assume that they're a couple, which makes me wonder how to respond when, for example, a woman friend takes hold of my arm while we're walking together. Or how many couples would take it nonchalantly if one of them were to traipse down the street at the arm of a mutual acquaintance.

The crazy thing is that I'm substantially more self-conscious about this than most people I meet. I think this has to do with Point 1 above, that relationships are a whole world I don't understand. It's like being in a foreign country. When we move about in worlds that we don't understand we're constantly afraid of doing something grievously wrong. I'm happy enough to leave gender out of it completely and treat my women friends like, you know, friends. But I don't understand the dynamics of relationships.

Take, for example, the frequent occasions on which (let's say I'm traveling and) I meet up with a woman friend who has gotten married since last time I hung out with her. I assume that this time around I'll do something with her and her husband, but to my surprise we often have a conversation like,

"Oh Marco, we should totally hang out. Do you wanna go for breakfast tomorrow?"
"Sounds good. Will your husband be there?"
"Oh no, he'll be at work."
"Well should we do something later then, so that he can be there too?"
"No, he'll be wanting to watch the game when he gets home."
"But is he cool with you just going for breakfast with me?"
"Of course! What, do you think he's some kind of tyrant or something?"

And that's where I betray my complete ignorance of how relationships work. It obviously makes sense that most men would have no problem with his wife meeting an old friend for breakfast, but it's still not something I want to automatically ASSUME is the case. I know plenty of relationships (and cultures) in which this would be a red flag.

Once I went for coffee with a woman friend, and she first called her fiancé to let him know that she was having coffee with me. His response was almost a sort of annoyance that she'd bother him with something so minor, sort of a "are you gonna call me EVERY TIME you meet a friend for coffee? Are you also gonna call me every time you're thinking of getting a haircut or eating a cinnamon roll? What, do you want me to micromanage your life?" The way I grew up, it was sort of a big deal if an engaged woman were to just go for coffee with some other man, especially if her fiancé didn't know about it. But for some people, it qualifies as something so minor that you seem really uptight for bringing it up.

This "I'm going for breakfast with someone else's wife" thing happens to me a lot. It's obviously a good solution because I can hang out with my friend, the husband has enough trust to not let it interrupt his plans for the day, and everybody is happy. It has become acceptable in society, where it might have been impossible in past societies. But I can't help thinking that I'm a sort of anomaly even in this context. How many single men do you know who are regularly in the "breakfast with someone else's wife" situation? At my age? I mean, maybe it is a common thing, and I just ASSUME it isn't because I don't talk much about it.

It's not really easier with single friends. There, too, I sometimes wonder if there's some subtext I'm not getting, something I'm reading into it or failing to read at all. Generally, like I say, I just ignore it, because everyone else seems to ignore it as well and you can ruin your mental health obsessing over what unspoken cues you're not getting.

I guess the question is "when does it mean something?" And that's a question that an outsider like me can't answer. It's always puzzling to me when people around me "hook up" and it comes as no surprise to anyone except me. Everyone else already saw the way they interacted with each other and knew that something was up, and even though I also saw them interact, I had no idea anything was up. Sure I'll buy that a guy and a girl can go on a backpacking trip without it "meaning" anything, and can have a cafeteria conversation that "means" something. I just don't know how these things can be so apparent to outsiders. Like someone in a country in which he doesn't speak the language, I move among relationships and I hear what's being said but I don't understand any of it. This is perhaps not, directly, a problem with being single. It's just a problem of not understanding what a relationship is.

So anyway, this shapeless meditation is my Valentine's Day contribution for this year. Happy Single's Awareness Day from a guy who doesn't understand relationships.

waking up

2011-02-06T23:25:00.004+01:00

I consider "waking up" to be pretty much the most unpleasant thing I do on any given day. This means, of course, that I live a pampered life. But still, my day always STARTS with the unpleasant bit, which is curious.

Sure, there are good ways of waking up, like drifting into consciousness out of a beautiful dream, or into the awareness that today is when that thing you've been looking forward to all week is gonna happen, or even waking up to the relief that that terrible thing was a nightmare and you're actually safe in your room. But even those events aren't all that. You sort of wish you could spend some more time in that beautiful dream, while the nightmare follows you around even though you're glad to be out of it.

But those pleasant awakenings are rare for me. Usually my day starts with a feeling of vague disappointment and annoyance, like that "what, again?" feeling you have when that stupid malfunctioning kitchen appliance acts up for the thousandth time. Sometimes it's even anger, like when it's my alarm clock that wakes me up. Often my waking up experience is like that of Arthur Dent in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"Arthur's consciousness approached his body as from a great distance, and reluctantly. It had had some bad times in there. Slowly, nervously, it entered and settled down into its accustomed position."

I realize how whiny it is to complain that WAKING UP is an unpleasant experience. I mean, EVERYBODY has to do it, an average of once or twice for every day that they live. And I'm one of the minority whose days get BETTER after waking up, while for many people waking up is only the beginning of a long row of rotten hours.

So yes. It's not a HORRIBLE experience, for sure, but it's still interesting that it's something we all have to do frequently, and that what we consider "the beginning of our day" is the first negative experience we have of it. (Although here I'm probably going too far, because many people may consider waking up to be a positive experience.) Why do we say, "the first thing I did today was turn on the radio" even on days when it would be more accurate to say "the first thing I did today was brush my teeth around midnight and then lie down for seven and a half hours of sleep"?

My point is that when my day begins, my personal "pleasure account" is already in the red because my day began with the unpleasant event called "waking up". I often try to counterbalance by subjecting myself to a positive experience (like listening to Satie for half an hour), but too often one has to hit the ground running, and one is running on a negative pleasure value until a chance arises to counterbalance it.

No wonder there's so much violence in the world.

Church Bells

2011-01-28T00:36:00.002+01:00

I live a stone's throw away from Amsterdam's "Oude Kerk" (Old Church), and one of the things I enjoy are the church bells. Not only do they play a fragment of a hymn every fifteen minutes, sometimes they do entire half-hour pieces, like an open-air concert in which the performer is invisible but certainly audible. And on Sundays, I can hear by the tolling of the bell when Evening Prayers are about to begin, or when the Oude Kerk congregation has arrived at the point of the service in which they recite the Lord's Prayer.

I remember with distinct nostalgia the evening bells in the Black Forest town where we spent half a year once when I was 9 years old. I remember the joyous pealing of a village church bell on New Year's Eve somewhere in north-central Germany, and at a wedding in a village along the Rhine. I remember my pilgrimage through Spain in 2007, when I'd pass through a village and hear the church bells call for prayer, and think, "I can still make it to the church in time for the service." I remember at Taizé how on Good Friday at 3 PM the thousands of young people from all over Europe joined the monks in keeping silence for a few minutes as the large bell tolled solemnly.

Church bells are something I miss when I'm not in Europe. The future of European church bells is uncertain, because since many of our countries are rapidly becoming more Muslim than Christian, it makes sense for a democratic system to yield to the majority and either 1. allow adhans in addition to church bells, 2. allow adhans as representing the majority religion, and forbid church bells, or 3. allow neither, as either would show favoritism for a religion to impose an element of its worship onto a public that doesn't necessarily want it.

Different countries in Europe are facing this challenge. So far, the weightiest arguments in favor of church bells and against adhans have to do with either the opinion of a majority public which generally doesn't mind bells but doesn't like adhans, or the argument that Western Europe's historical heritage is worth preserving.

All this is basically just an introduction to quote a passage from a book I'm currently reading, "The Waning of the Middle Ages" by J. Huizinga:

"One sound rose ceaselessly above the noises of busy life and lifted all things unto a sphere of order and serenity: the sound of bells. The bells were in daily life like good spirits, which by their familiar voices, now called upon the citizens to mourn and now to rejoice, now warned them of danger, now exhorted them to piety. They were known by their names: big Jacqueline, or the bell Roland. Every one knew the difference in meaning of the various ways of ringing. However continuous the ringing of the bells, people would seem not to have become blunted to the effect of their sound.

"Throughout the famous judicial duel between two citizens of Valenciennes, in 1455, the big bell, 'which is hideous to hear', says Chastellain, never stopped ringing. What intoxication the pealing of the bells of all the churches, and of all the monasteries of Paris, must have produed, sounding from morning till evening, and even during the night, when a peace was concluded or a pope elected."

holding on to what's hard to replace.

2011-01-17T05:57:00.000+01:00

The wealth of options that lies open to most of us today has turned life into a never-ending series of decisions. I thought that the difficulty of having to make decisions would end once you have a job and a home that you like, but it turns out that (in my mind anyway) it is hard to shake the thought that there might be a job, a home, a church, a social life, a hobby, etc. that is even better suited to my needs than what I currently have.

Those of us who have a packrat instinct have a hard time throwing things away, but (for me anyway) the issue is not "how much did it cost?" or even "how much do I need/use this?" The real question for me is, "how hard will it be to replace?"

I have two lamps I really like. But they're also big, awkward things that take up valuable desk space in my room. And I don't need two big lamps when I got enough lighting from my small IKEA lamps. AND I found the freakin' things on the street in someone's garbage, so it's not like I invested money into them. But I still hesitate to throw out these pieces of someone else's garbage, because I know that I can't just go out and replace them if I change my mind.

I used to have a cheap old guitar. It sounded pretty nasty, but its nasty sound also had attitude. It was a great "campfire and street corner guitar", as I called it, and I took it on many trips that you wouldn't take a good musical instrument on.

This guitar hadn't cost me much -- 10 Pound in a Salvation Army Thrift Store in Bournemouth -- and when I did get rid of it, I got about the same price back for it. So, in the end, it wasn't a loss. BUT my current "campfire and street corner guitar", with its dull sound and warped neck, isn't nearly as fun as that one was. There are £10-guitars everywhere, but most of them just sort of sound like out-of-tune, mouldy instruments. Getting rid of that guitar wasn't a loss of £10, but it was a loss of something that proved difficult to replace.

But it's not just my possessions that I hoard if they are difficult to replace; it's also my life situations. Consider my job and my apartment. They are the best I've ever had, in most respects. I hold on to that. If I were offered another job or another home, I'd be skeptical that it would be better for me, and reluctant to let go of a good thing.

Some people say "don't let the good rob you of the best." I say "if you're always searching for the best, you'll be unable to enjoy the good."

Major investments (for my income bracket) that I might make in 2011:

2011-01-04T00:45:00.003+01:00

-a kayak.
-a Celtic harp.
-some sound equipment, maybe just a bass amp or maybe a full sound system.
-a trip to, say, South Africa or Israel or someplace like that.
-a weekend skiing.

My budget isn't enough for all of these. Probably not for more than one. So I have to prioritize.

What are YOU thinking of spending money on this year?

personal memories of new technology...

2011-01-03T05:28:00.003+01:00

I remember our first CD player. It was 1987, and not many of my friends had CD players yet. My dad had brought it back from his trip to Germany, along with about a dozen CDs that I went on to listen to throughout my teens. They had a great influence on my musical development. I think they've all disappeared in our many moves since then, which is a pity. There was one in which Claudio Arrau played Chopin's first piano concerto.

I remember when I first started using eMail. It was 1993. I don't know how many eMail addresses I've gone through since then, but it's been more than a dozen.

I don't remember when I first used the internet for something other than eMail. I don't remember the first time I googled something, or used the term "google" as a verb. I don't remember when I started looking up videos on YouTube.

I remember when cell phones were still something that only obscenely rich people had. I don't remember when it became an everyman's necessity. Was it a smooth transition, or an abrupt one?

I remember floppy disks, DATs and cassette tapes. I've worked with reel-to-reel tapes in recording studios. I remember when I first heard the terms "mp3" and "wav" to denote digital formats. I don't remember when I first got a portable mp3 player. I do remember having a discman that played mp3-encoded CD-ROMs.

I remember the first time I saw a satellite navigation system. I was hitch hiking in 1999 and got picked up by a rich businessman in a beautiful car and he asked me where I was going, programmed the address into some device on his dashboard, and left me open-mouthed as I listened to some voice give instructions like someone knew exactly where we were and where we were going.

I remember taking pictures that I wouldn't see until the film was developed. I don't remember when digital cameras first made an appearance, nor when they supplanted the old-school ones. I still have my first digital camera -- it's only about four years old, but it's damaged.

I could, of course, go on and on. Much has changed in my lifetime, and not always in the ways we anticipated it would. Much of the "next big thing" technology never caught on, while something unexpected became essential.

And of course if you're older than me you're reading this and saying, "that's nothing, *I* remember when..."

Someone more ambitious than me might write something about how all this is not only changing our lives, but making entire lifestyles become extinct every decade or so. How, for example, mobile phones have revolutionized the world by changing the little big things like the way we make appointments, the way our conversation etiquette has been challenged, the way African villagers communicate with each other.

I'm not sure if I have a point to this entry beyond the "hey, things have changed" clichee, but it's my retrospective nature to at least think of these things every so often. Last week was my 36th birthday. Then I visited my 98-year-old-grandmother. Then I celebrated New Year's Eve coming into 2011. And there is always a moment's reflection of what's changed as time goes by, and for our generations the change we register is not easily separated from the technological change we observe. I get a little nostalgic at the thought that my nieces and nephews might never know what it was like to have to rewind rented videos and to not have "subtitle" options on them. Vinyl records have made comebacks, thank God, but many things won't.

I've observed before that getting used to new technology isn't nearly as difficult as learning a new set of values that may be relevant in a new context. There are enough commentaries being written about how our social interactions are changing (or "suffering") from the networking technology around us. We observe it in little snippets, like how annoying it is when there's someone on the train talking on a cell phone, or when the person across the table from you is multitasking your conversation with a text message to someone else, or when you enter a public building and the receptionist doesn't even look at you because she's chatting on facebook. I sometimes wonder if I find these things distracting simply because they came about relatively recently. Maybe the younger generation doesn't even notice, because they've never known it to be different?

Of the technological changes that came about during your lifetime, do you have a clear picture of when they first started affecting you?

On being the idiot who doesn't speak the language

2010-12-07T06:55:00.004+01:00

Last night when my shift began, a Japanese guest had just checked into the hostel. He spoke practically no English, but we were able to get through transactions like getting him a cup of coffee and some internet time.

An hour later he was very angry, apparently because his internet time had run out and he still had unsaved work somewhere online. I grasped this right away, in spite of the language barrier, but there was nothing I could do about it, and any explanation or possible solution I was offering him was beyond his linguistic skill to comprehend. He was angry, which I can understand, and he was angry at me, which I couldn't help, and he wasn't understanding me, which I couldn't help either. I got into the annoying "talking slower and louder" mode while he got into the "increasingly irritated Japanese phrases" mode, until it was almost a shouting match, which was pretty ridiculous when you consider the circumstances and just how much each of us understood of what the other person was shouting about.

He went on to spend the entire night on the sofa in our cafe, even though he had paid for a hostel bed. I asked him why he didn't go to his room, and he made some noncommittal sounds and gestures. I couldn't tell if he didn't understand my question or if I didn't understand his answer. I managed to kick him out of the cafe before morning manager arrived, by saying something like, "Boss!" and trying to convey through facial expressions and body language that he'd be in big trouble if the boss caught him in our cafe. (He wouldn't actually be in big trouble. But we do like our cafe empty for our morning staff meeting.)

This guy is the reason I don't enjoy traveling in countries where I don't speak the language. I'm a complete wimp when it comes to language barriers. There are few occasions in which I feel so exposed, lonely and helpless as when I'm in a foreign country and I don't understand what people are saying to me, and can't get them to understand what I am saying to them. The trips that I have taken (to, for example, Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Italy, France or Sweden) have generally had me hanging out in close proximity to someone who could hold my hand and translate.

A few weeks ago, I saw a steak house in Philadelphia that had a sign saying something like, "This is America. Please order in English". This seemed so pompous that it cracked me up. I wanted to add another sign saying something like, "English? What, are we in England? This is America. Please order in Navajo."

But the truth is, we do get a sense of something resembling righteous indignation when a foreigner shows up and tries to communicate with us in a language that we don't understand. It inconveniences us, and we feel that we, as the locals, shouldn't be inconvenienced by a language barrier imposed by some visitor from another country.

But when I'm in another country, it's ME who's inconveniencing everyone by being the idiot who doesn't speak the local language.

Now comes the real contradiction: even though my Dutch is solid, it's still got its holes. AND it took me a good deal longer to learn than was necessary. And the reason for that, paradoxically, is because I hate inconveniencing people by being the idiot who doesn't speak the local language. You see, the only way I'll LEARN the local language is by going out and making a fool of myself, which is something I'll avoid doing as much as possible if I don't like being the stupid foreigner.

Like so many things in life, my attempts to avoid a problem result in prolonging the problem instead.

On battling chaos

2010-11-29T06:59:00.000+01:00

So I've been back in Amsterdam for over a week now. This recent trip has been a time for me to make early New Year's resolutions. One of them was to blog more frequently again, so here I am.

I made several such (informal) resolutions while I was traveling, resolutions for how my life would change once I was back home. I would spend more time with friends, including those who live a little further away. I would write more, make more music, watch more classic films, learn to cook a few more meals, and just in general, uh, spend more time doing stuff.

This compulsion comes because, for the most part, my many conversations with the many people I met up with in North America made me feel a vague sense of shame when I described my daily life. I work only a part-time job, and even that one consists mostly of spending the night sitting at a reception desk with a computer and few actual tasks. So you'd think I could get all my blogging, facebooking and eMailing taken care of at work, and have the rest of the day to do other things. And then you'd think that I'd do all sorts of stuff with the many free days that I get. But when I see my friends with their children, their long work hours and long commutes and dozens of extra activities in their church or community or school or whatever, I really feel that I can't justify all these stretches of empty time that I can't account for. This is probably just an irrational feeling of guilt that springs from my Protestant upbringing, but it's still something of a curiosity.

I looked at this once before in my series on "Where Does My Time Go?", but I'm still not sure where my time goes. I try to think of all the things I like doing -- cycling, listening to music, watching movies, sleeping, etc. -- but it doesn't seem like I spend all that much time doing these things. Of course, I also enjoy wasting time, so at least there's one pleasure I'm giving myself to.

Also, I'm spending endless hours these days trying to edit all the video footage I've taken in the last few years (including the trip I've just finished). And I spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff like this blog entry.

Now that I'm back in Amsterdam I'm trying to have a look at it, and it seems like most of my time is spent putting up with chaos. There's chaos in my room, in my computer drives, in my calendar, etc.

I'll give an example:

For a while I tried to keep some record of my financial spending, of my travels, of my contacts, etc. I hate to say this, but the point that caused most of these projects to either fail or to just barely crawl incompletely along has to do with computers and formatting. For a while I saved every receipt for every purchase I had made, and then entered it into a spreadsheet. This is tedious work, but hey, others do it as well, and I have more spare time than most "others" do. But the problem was the deceptive simplicity of it. You think you enter three things: 1. Date of purchase, 2. item purchased, and 3. amount of money spent on purchase.

Right?

Turns out that my spreadsheet gave me a really hard time whenever I wanted to enter Items 1 and 3, and my brain gave me a hard time with Item 2. The spreadsheet had this compulsion to "Auto-format", which wouldn't even be so bad if it kept to one format and didn't make me jump through the same set of hoops with EVERY SINGLE PURCHASE in order to get the date and monetary entry into something I would recognize.

I hate auto-format. I KNOW that 1.50 = 1.5, but what if I want it to say 1.50? I know there are ways to find a format one likes, or ways to knock out the autoformat function, but the darn computer keeps finding ways to sneak it back in at every turn. Maybe I need to BUY some software rather than going with OpenOffice, but I don't think that will help. I think it has to do either with my general ineptitude with computers, or with the general ineptitude of computers.

But it was, as I said, my brain that gave me the trouble with the other part of this proposed list. When I got to "item of purchase", I never knew how specific to be. If I come back with a bag of groceries, should I just lump it all under "groceries", or should I enter individually how much I spent on cheese, and on eggs, and on pears, and so forth?

After all, the whole idea here was to keep track of my spending. This is useful if at the end of the year I can say something like, "man, I sure spend a lot of money on cheese. Maybe I can cut back on that." But if I just see "so that's how much groceries cost me", then there's not much of a plan for improved spending. Not for someone whose brain functions (or malfunctions) like mine.

My problem is that my brain is not good at thinking in categories. Cleaning my room is a constant losing battle because there are so many things (mostly papers) that don't really belong anywhere. I either have to designate a place for them, or I have to compromise by putting them into places with other "miscellaneous" items, which means, for all intents and purposes, that my room is still in a state of chaos. I can have a shelf for "musical instruments", but then I wonder if that includes my harmonica holder, and then I can decide between the chaos of having my harmonica holder lying around, the chaos of having my harmonica holder on a shelf that's ACTUALLY for "musical instruments", or the chaos of requiring a separate shelf for harmonica holders because they don't really go anywhere else.

Being unable to think in categories may have some advantages. It may, for example, make you less likely to be prejudiced. But it also makes your brain do a lot of extra work every time you have to organize anything.

This entry is a rambling and incomplete way of saying this: my mind tends toward chaos, and chaos takes up much of my time. I find that I never really learned to order chaos, and have been dealing with it in more avoidance-based ways in the past. I sometimes wonder why my busy University days are times I still remember as very pleasant and not all that busy. Probably just selective memory, the way we process our past. But maybe, maybe I felt less stressed by a full schedule because it allowed me to cruise from event to event without having to face the chaos in my life.

North America Trip

2010-11-21T22:36:00.000+01:00

I've just spent a vacation of almost 5 weeks in North America, traveling from Philadelphia to Vancouver and visiting friends. I may have some more intelligent things to say about this in the future, but for now, some random notes:

-had a Philly cheese steak in Philadelphia, which wasn't on my bucket list, but has now been added to my bucket list so I could cross it off again.
-saw the monuments in Washington, DC for the first time.
-visited some friends, some of whom I have known for 28 years, some of whom I haven't seen in almost 20.
-spent way too much time sitting in buses, especially considering how little time I got to spend with some of the people I went to visit. Greyhound is a good way to get to know a different America, but I've done it before, too often, and would welcome an actual road trip.
-I consider a road trip to be something you do with a vehicle under your command, with at least one friend but preferably two or three. Preferably (though not an absolute requirement) a road trip would involve traveling for more than a weekend, covering more than a thousand kilometers, going off the freeway for a while, and making at least one random detour.
-Did several road trips of sorts, though they were more like day trips. The true road trip was driving with two friends from Minneapolis to eastern Montana, with a detour to see North Dakota's KVLY Tower, which was the world's tallest man-made structure for many years but hardly anyone knew about it.
http://en.structurae.de/structures/data/index.cfm?ID=s0000675
-Meeting up with old friends is good. It's interesting to see how we have changed and how we've stayed the same. It's also interesting to find out that the people I trusted when I was a teenager are people I still trust, even the ones who I haven't interacted with much in the meantime.
-Nevertheless, sometimes good friendships end up dissolving completely or falling into a state of tension.
-It is always interesting what registers in your mind when you re-visit a place. I make regular trips to North America, but things like the free coffee refills get me every time.
-My relationship to the USA is strange. I've never lived there, but I know its history and geography better than that of any of the countries I've lived in (and better than many Americans). I grew up among Americans and find now that there is a lot of love and indebtedness that I feel towards that country and culture, but also sadness at a lot of what I see there and my inability to articulate it.
-An outsider can always criticize and judge the things that are different in a culture. An "insider" who points out the faults of his culture can have a more prophetic feeling about it. But I don't even know what culture I'm an insider of.
-Many people I grew up with on the missionary field suffer from one form or another of "missionary damage".
-As I met up with old friends, and asked them about themselves and about all our mutual acquaintances, I had a strong feeling that the state of humanity can be summarized with the words "everybody hurts".
-It can be pretty awkward when you're sitting at a table with a group of people whom you know, but who don't know each other. But it can also be really fun.
-One month isn't nearly enough time to visit all the people and places I'd like to. Even the ones I did see went by too fast.
-North Dakota is strange. Who lives there, and what do they do? Traveling through that state, you don't get many indications.
-On the weekend that hunting season begins, you may have a hard time finding accomodation in Montana.
-If you're driving a real British/Japanese car, one that has the steering wheel on the right side, you can have a lot of fun messing with people's minds on American freeways.
-Americans don't get much vacation.
-Danielson Famile was a quirky, fascinating band.
-quads are fun.
-Montana is beautiful in a "Western frontier movie" kind of way, but not nearly as mountainous as I had expected.
-Dyphenhydramine Hydrochloride can make a long flight or bus ride much less tedious.

Six blades

2010-10-04T15:23:00.004+02:00

Even if you hardly know me, I don't think you'd be surprised to hear that I don't like shaving. However, every so often I'll buy some razors anyway, just because there are a few square inches of face that I do shave, grudgingly, on a semi-regular basis.

We've all observed the trend of razors multiplying. For millenia, a single razor blade was enough to shave any man. Then they got to double blades. And triple. And quadruple.

That already seemed silly enough. At this point it just looked like a gimmick that had nothing to do with shaving and everything to do with one-upmanship.

I always liked the single-blade razor. I tried the others, and they just weren't as effective. That space between the blades served as a trap for stubble to get stuck in. Multiple razors don't so much cut as abrade. But that doesn't stop the stores from stocking up on triple and quadruple razors, while the traditional single-blade razor is increasingly elusive, which is bad news for the many people who regularly tell me that I could shave more often.

A few months ago I saw the five-blade razor.

And today, I'm looking in several stores to find a "regular", simple razor between all of the show-off bling of multiple razors, and I find... a razor with six blades.

No doubt they've been around for a while -- if there's a new trend in shaving, you can bet that I'll be one of the last to hear about it -- but to me it seems like the end is near. If the human race survives and new civilizations arise in the future, their textbooks might read something about today's civilization and its decline and fall, which became inevitable from the point at which six-bladed razors hit the supermarket shelves.

Seriously, does ANYONE find it easier to shave with the equivalent of a shark's lower jaw than with a good ol' 1970s Gillette? What's WRONG with this world??

Three years in the red light district...

2010-09-08T01:01:00.000+02:00

In my previous entry I tried to say something intelligent about having lived in Amsterdam for six years. Now I also want to say something about the last three years, the time I've been living in the red light district.

This neighborhood gets me down. And the worst thing is not the prostitutes or drug dealers. The worst thing is the tourists. Isn't it sad enough that humans have strange and dark needs and desires, that they can so easily fall victim to all-consuming addictions and that these are so universal that every major city has prostitution and drug dealing... must we make a TOURIST ATTRACTION out of it? What went wrong?

On a practical level, living in the red light district gets me down for other reasons. I envy my friends who live literally a one-minute walk away from two or three different kebab places, a mini-market, a cafe, a hairdresser, and some random household-items-shops. Me, the first five minutes I walk in any direction all I see are sex shops, inner-city rescue missions (which are plentiful in this neighborhood, though most Amsterdam tourist guides don't make much mention thereof), and women standing in windows in their underwear while they're being ogled or just casually looked at by passersby. Sure, after five minutes of walking I get to Amsterdam's major shopping street, or to a supermarket, or to any number of cafés, or to the train station, or to the random little nooks and crannies of Amsterdam's Chinatown. But it's those first 100 steps from my house that just sort of put me in a dark mood.

And here's something interesting: in the red light district, I live practically in the CENTER of Amsterdam, but I feel isolated from the city. While the rest of the city winds down after a busy day, the red light district starts waking up, all the garish lights blazing and the British bachelor party crews beginning their long process of getting drunk and disorderly while couples from China or Spain stand in the queue waiting for the sex show to begin and backpackers are being eyed and approached by street hustlers. After about 10 PM the streets are so full of pedestrians that you can't drive a car or even ride a bike through them, you can only walk with the flow. This starts slowing down in the wee hours of the morning, and by the time the rest of the city is beginning the hustle and bustle of a new day, the streets here are asleep.

I don't really mind that it's dead here during the daytime. In fact, since I work night shifts, I PREFER living in a neighborhood that seems to have the same circadian rhythm that I do. But it does mean that you're living in a place that feels like it's not really Amsterdam, even though it's right in the center of Amsterdam.

This neighborhood is isolated from the rest of the city in other ways. Demographically it might as well be situated in another country. Part of that is due to the huge flow of tourism in this neighborhood. It's depressing.

But it's not just the red light district, it's the whole of downtown Amsterdam that is overrun with tourists. You could say that there is a sort of "buffer zone" surrounding the red light district. This buffer zone is still too touristy to be a "normal" Amsterdammer's Amsterdam, but it certainly overlaps with all the regular activities of the city. Here you feel the ambivalent relationship of the city as a whole to its red light district. There are many touristy shops that carry what tourists want: souvenirs and knick-knacks and all that. T-shirts and mugs and umbrellas or whatever with something "typical" of Amsterdam to remember Amsterdam by. But this "typical" almost always has to do with what a hedonistic city Amsterdam is. The overarching message you get from the tourist shops in downtown Amsterdam is, "tee hee hee, aren't we naughty? You get to do EVERYTHING here, and the best part is, we can still call it being 'tolerant' or 'enlightened'."

But by now, it seems to me that the most typical thing for downtown Amsterdam is actually not being enlightened or tolerant or naughty, but TALKING about how enlightened and tolerant one is, while insinuating with a wink that by "tolerant" we mostly mean "we encourage what the rest of the prude, uptight world would call debauchery". (Of course Amsterdam prides itself for its tolerance in other areas, like social and religious boundaries. But the Amsterdam that presents itself to tourists mostly shows off about its relaxed stance on drugs and sex.)

But even that is mostly a façade. An average Amsterdammer is no more hedonistic than an average New Yorker or Parisian, and he generally avoids the red light district altogether. But you wouldn't know it if you're a tourist. The tourist is given the impression of how proud Amsterdam is of its unique red light district.

And this is where I live.

six years...

2010-09-06T21:28:00.000+02:00

It's early September again, which, for the last six years, has been a time of anniversaries.

Last week it was six years since I moved to Amsterdam, and started work at the Shelter Jordan.

Three years ago last week I moved into the red light district and joined the OZ100 community.

Two years ago last week I moved into my own little apartment within the community.

As is my habit (compulsion), I use these times to reflect on what that means. I have now lived in Amsterdam longer than in any other city besides Quito, where I lived for twelve years. But when I look at my time in Quito now, it seems like there was a lot I left undone for having grown up there. There are many neighborhoods that I never visited, many local customs I remain ignorant of, many opportunities that I can only retrospectively see having missed. For one thing, I can't forgive myself for the circumstance that in my twelve years of living in Ecuador I never ate guinea pig.

You've heard me talk a lot about my integration into Amsterdam, so I won't say much more about it. I'm beginning to wonder what we mean by "integration" anyway, and how many of Amsterdam's residents could be said to be "integrated", and whether I ever in my life was "integrated" into any of the cultures I've lived in.

But here's what I'll say this time about living in Amsterdam for six years: I've visited most of the major museums, I know a handful of cafés, I can take you to a burrito place or a Greek restaurant, I could point you to a few quaint galleries or music stores, I could help you if you were looking for a ballet or a play or an arthouse film or a club. But I don't really go to any of these places myself, except on rare occasions. Someone asked me what my favorite hang-out place in Amsterdam was, and I drew a blank. I don't really hang out anywhere.

We find a rhythm and we settle into it. And then it doesn't matter if you've been in a place for three years, six years, twelve years or thirty years. If there was never a reason to go to the next town, or to the Chinese market down the street, or to that neighborhood where all the Moroccans live, then these will remain blank spots in your geographical knowledge, just like the Dutch word for "wheelbarrow" may remain a blank spot in your linguistic knowledge because you could go twenty years without having the topic come up in conversation.

There is a lot I like about living in Amsterdam. I like that it is cosmopolitan and diverse. I like that it is very bicycle-friendly in its layout. I like that it is compact, with all the neighborhoods close to each other so that any place you might want to go, including out of town, is an easy bike ride away. I like the way you have over 400 years of architecture represented (I've never been a fan of these boring urban and suburban streets where the houses are all identical). I like the fact that, it being a major city, you can find everything that you're looking for (be it an Eritrean restaurant or an obscure arthouse film or information about some rare disease). These are all things I would miss if I were living somewhere else. But I find that, even though I live surrounded by these "things I'd miss", I don't make a whole lot of use of them. Maybe by "integrated" we mean "able to take for granted the things one will miss when one has moved away"?

Old recitals

2010-08-25T12:47:00.004+02:00

One of the projects in my life right now is taking a box of audio cassette tapes and playing them into a computer to have them as digital sound files. Tapes take up space, and lose quality over time (not that they have that much to begin with), and will soon represent a major hassle to get played at all, as it will become trickier to find tape players in stores.

At the moment I'm copying one of my university-era piano recitals, and it's an interesting experience. The recordings weren't very good to begin with, the cassette recorder and microphone having been of a low quality, and the more than 12 years since then not having been friendly to the tapes. There's some flange and distortion effects which would be pretty cool if you weren't trying to listen to what the recital actually sounded like.

The first part of the evening consisted of me playing Bach, Haydn and Schubert, familiar pieces that have been in my repertoire for a long time and which I render with all the inaccuracies and awkward phrasings that I remember my recital footage being filled with -- sounding like what a university-age music student is allowed to sound like after two weeks of working on a piece, but not at an on-stage performance to end a semester. This lack of competence and discernible improvement in my playing was part of what eventually led me to quit classical music.

But the second half of the programme comes as a complete surprise to me. I remember playing Debussy's "Pagodes" on numerous occasions, but here it suddenly sounds a lot more mature and accurate than the Schuberts and Haydns preceding it. But then comes the real surprise: five consecutive pieces I don't recall at all. Not only do I not recall PLAYING them, I have barely a recollection of even HEARING them. They sound like Bartok, maybe Prokofiev, and one might have even been MacDowell from the sound of it.

And they sound pretty good. I would not confuse it with GREAT playing, but it's not something an undergraduate music major needs to be ashamed of. This confuses me. Since I obviously put so much work into those (fairly difficult) pieces to get them into adequate shape, shouldn't I remember what the heck I was working on at the time?

It's a similar feeling to when I look at my old high school notebooks and see that I was able to do calculus back then. I can no longer follow the equations that my younger self's handwriting is deftly handling on those pages. I guess most of my brain's content just drops right back out again after a while. This might also explain all those people sending me facebook friend requests and me thinking, "who ARE you??"

As a cheer-up bonus, the tape even documents something else I had forgotten: that I did TWO encores that night.

I'm usually not sorry that I quit playing classical music. The amount of work and blood that went into it wasn't worth the meager rewards it gave me. I was just as depressed when I could play a Chopin fantasy as I am now that I can only fantasize about playing Chopin. But right now, for the first time as far as I can remember, I'm listening to my piano playing days and thinking, "I wasn't that bad."

Maybe I'm just getting old. The older you get, the better you believe yourself to have been in your prime.

Cruise of the Norwegian coast

2010-08-19T02:00:00.000+02:00

This past week my dad and I went on a cruise of the Norwegian coast. It was an interesting experience.

My father mentioned decades ago that he would like to see the Norwegian fjords someday. We finally got together to get him a trip for two for his birthday. My mother couldn't join for health reasons, so it ended up being my dad and I on a cruise together.

Usually the famous Hurtigrutten are the default ways of exploring the fjords. They started as post and supply ships, then became a tourist thing which is now, in some cases, more expensive than luxury cruises to the fjords. For us it ended up that the luxury cruiser was the cheapest option we found, partly because said cruiser departed from Kiel, which is less than 4 hours' drive from my parents' home in Bad Salzuflen, and thus doesn't involve some extra costs for ferries or airplanes that would take us to a Norwegian port where we could board a hurtigrut. But also, luxury cruises offer some of their cabins at affordable rates because they can make the money back by charging exorbitant amounts from their more well-to-do customers.

It was, as I say, an interesting experience. We're both not accustomed to being surrounded by the sorts of people that go on a cruise like this. The ship was huge, with over 3,000 guests and more than 1,000 crew and staff members. On board there were bars, fancy restaurants that served 6-course dinners every evening, all-day buffets, swimming pools, jacuzzis, a water slide, a tennis court, a casino, a theater, a reading room, a few shops, about 15 elevators, and all that opulence. We didn't make use of most of these things, although we did eat a lot at the restaurants and buffets. The bars featured live music which was somewhat disappointing, consisting mostly of lounge lizards singing and playing drum-machine-backed muzak versions of pop and jazz standards.

I spent most of my time on deck, looking out over the sea and the coastline.

I had packed badly, not only leaving everything vaguely dressy-looking at home (I was consistently underdressed at the dinners), but also figuring that it was summer and ignoring the cold winds that the North Sea would be subjecting me to. So I spent most of my time outdoors wearing all the thin layers I had brought and often wrapped in one of the boat's complementary blankets.

But the landscape didn't disappoint. After spending the first day at sea, we went into the Geiranger Fjord. This, being north of the 62nd parallel, is the furthest North I've ever been.

The third day we visited Bergen,

and the fourth day was Stavanger, with an excursion into the Lyse Fjord.

On the fifth day we stopped in Arhus, Denmark.

I have been drawn to the fjords for many years now. I have made at least one major life decision based on the assumption that God is waiting for me somewhere on the Norwegian coast, just like He was waiting for me in Patagonia back in 2000. This trip was not THE trip I am to make to the Norwegian coast, but it was a good confirmation that the Norwegian coast should indeed figure in my future. Next time I'll have a bike, or a kayak, or a good pair of hiking boots, or maybe even a sailboat. And a sailing license.

2010-08-04T20:35:00.003+02:00

I frequently act as if I live,
not in the actual world I live in,
but in the world I would like to live in.

For example, I usually trust people.
Not because people are trustworthy,
but because, you know, wouldn't it be great to live
in a world in which people are trustworthy?

Likewise, when I am disappointed
I try to act like it doesn't matter.
Of course it matters.
But man, if I could change one thing about the world,
I'd turn it into a world in which it doesn't matter.

World Cup: like and dislike

2010-07-14T12:45:00.002+02:00

Like: teams vs. superstars. The big stars that were predicted to provide dazzling spectacles didn't really make their presence known, and the hard-working teams provided the results.

Dislike: all those stars not showing up. As cool as it was to see teamwork triumph over individualism, it would have been great to have some world-class solo efforts.

Like: Africa. First cup on their continent, and they provided a joyful atmosphere with more dancing than usual. And South Africa rose to the occasion by conquering the logistical nightmare of hosting the world's greatest sporting event, complete with security and transportation and other aspects that the world had been in doubt about. Too bad about the weather and turf conditions, and the controversial jabulani ball.

Dislike: vuvuzelas. I nominate "vuvuzela" as the word of the year, since a few months ago most of us didn't even know what they were, and now they're so ubiquitous that they've even become a whimsical function on YouTube videos. The thought that their popularity might spread beyond Africa and that future World Cups will also make you feel like you're watching the game from the inside of a bee hive is depressing.

Like: Diego Forlán. A solid player who stood out in a World Cup largely void of superstars, Forlán brought Uruguay back to its forgotten glory as one of the greats. Even in Uruguay's first game I predicted that he would be one of the great figures of the cup, and now I regret not having made the prediction more public, so that I could point at it and say, "I told you so."

Dislike: Argentina's idolatrous relationship to that other Diego, the Maradona.

Like: Spain's victory. As much as you've heard me whine about their midfield possession game, they have finally 1. beaten their curse as the brilliant underachievers, 2. apparently united over the regional divisions that afflict their country, 3. shown us that a European team can win outside of Europe, and 4. shown us that the fairest and most sportsmanlike team CAN win the trophy. (Also, Spain defeated Germany and thereby spared us a Netherlands-Germany final, which would have gone into history books as the trigger event for World War III.)

Dislike: the amount of ugliness we've had to put up with, mostly from other teams. I think I read somewhere that this World Cup has had the highest number of fouls and cards in history.

Like: The final minutes of high-stakes games. Arguably the most exciting were the last group-stage games, where there would be no extra time and a win (or in some cases at least tie) would HAVE to be reached. See Italy vs. Slovakia, Nigeria vs. South Korea or USA vs. Algeria for examples. Also in the knockout stages, the closing minutes of some matches (like anything Uruguay or Ghana were involved in) were white-knuckle suspense.

Dislike: the opening group stage matches, with all that careful defensive playing, the lack of game flow, lack of goals and the abundance of high-cost blunders.

Like: Paraguay. My mother's homeland has been the scrappy underdog for the fourth consecutive time, and once again they put up arguably the best fight against the champion (what would have happened had Valdez' "offside" goal counted? Or had Cardozo's penalty gone in?). The other time they did this was in 1998, when they lost by golden goal to eventual champion France in the last minutes of extra time.

Dislike: the refereeing. I'm not blaming the referees, because they have a very rough job and already receive enough hatred from enough people who have the unfair advantage of camera technology. I haven't done enough research to know how much truth there is to the claim that FIFA hired second-rate referees for political reasons. But whatever the case may be, I get the feeling that FIFA could make things just a bit easier for the refs.

Like: FIFA's newfound willingness to re-evaluate their stance on technological aids for referees.

What I would have liked to see more of:

-Denmark, Australia and Nigeria. No doubt there were a lot of teams who were performing below their potential, but these three in particular gave me the constant feeling that they were having a string of bad days, and could provide some brilliant soccer if I had caught them on a good day, or even an average day.

-African teams scoring. Because their celebratory dances are so much fun.

-Klose scoring. He could have secured a record for himself had he scored one or two more goals. But considering that he hardly ever played a full World Cup game (he's the guy that was usually taken out for the last ten minutes of play), and that he missed almost three full games this World Cup due to cards and injury, 14 World Cup goals in one career is pretty good.

-Managers like Löw, who took the risk with young talent and new ideas vs. established players and tested methods.

-Underdogs. Even though some of the "usual suspects" were eliminated early on, it didn't really feel like we were watching many truly unexpected teams making a dash for glory. Even Uruguay feels more like a has-been making good than like an underdog beating the odds, and while it was refreshing to see Spain in the final for the first time ever and the Netherlands in the final for the first time in 32 years, nobody in the final stages felt like a true outsider making a big entry.

World Cup: winners and losers

2010-07-12T14:35:00.003+02:00

Last night was crazy, the whole country was wearing orange and gathering in front of large screens. I was excited about the possibility of being, for the first time in my life, in the capital city of a first-time World Champion on the evening of their big win.

Alas, that priviledge was reserved for everybody in Madrid, not Amsterdam.

So I got my first experience of being in the capital city of a country on the night of the big loss in a World Cup final. It was fairly quiet as millions of disappointed Dutch people went to bed without much further ado. Today you can feel the grief everywhere.

Losing in a World Cup game is a very real loss. A whole nation needs some time to grieve. Some of my friends -- particularly my American friends who have been here in Amsterdam over the past month -- are finding this out for the first time. It's a mystery. See my last entry: why should I be so emotionally attached to a dozen guys kicking a ball around in the name of my country? I don't know why. It's not rational. But that doesn't mean it's not real.

Even people who don't care about soccer -- who don't even know exactly what constitutes an "offsides" or "tactical foul" -- are grumbling about the referee in last night's game. This, too, is an emotional response. If the match is between two countries you have no relationship with, you hardly notice this, or you notice it mostly as a point of technical interest.

I was called a sore loser for commenting on Spain's game being "boring". Let me complete that by mentioning that I also believe that Spain's game is extremely disciplined, accurate, and sportsmanlike. They are amazing players who form an amazing team. But if they get the ball, they will pass and pass and pass, ticking away the minutes in the forward midfield without showing much enthusiasm for the prospect of, you know, scoring goals and stuff. It's beautiful in its own way, and certainly of extremely high quality, but not EXCITING. It's sort of telling that this was the lowest-scoring World Cup in history, and that Spain is now the lowest-scoring World Cup champion in history. Call me a sore loser for saying that if you want.

The complaints about the refereeing that I hear everywhere today also sound like "sore loser" complaints, but I say that this is part of the grieving process, so let them get it out.

What's harder to understand is poor sportsmanship with winners. How come within minutes of the game being over, I was already seeing Spanish friends posting words like "Cry Holland cry" on the facebook pages of my Dutch friends? Come on, celebrate your victory by all means, but normally, if someone is undergoing a great disappointment, it is considered very rude and insensitive to say something like, "aw, baby gonna cry now?"

I find it so much, and it bothers me. I guess the thinking is that, since it's just a game, a bit of teasing is appropriate and deserved. But the emotional response we have to the World Cup is not what normally falls under "just a game" category. You can see it everywhere on the streets of Amsterdam today: people look like they've just found out that someone has taken off with all their retirement money.

I'm happy for Spain -- the chronic underachievers of world football have finally overcome whatever psychological barrier was preventing them from playing at full potential, and have gone on to win the big championship, and I say it's a deserved win. It nearly didn't happen -- they started out this World Cup by losing to SWITZERLAND, for crying out loud, and we were all saying, "there goes Spain again. Highest in quality, lowest in performance under pressure". So I'm happy that they recovered from that and played up to their potential. But also, Spain knocked out the THREE teams I was cheering for in this World Cup: Paraguay, Germany and the Netherlands. So I'm unfortunately associating them with being the cause for three recent disappointments. Another irrational emotional response.

I also wonder what will change after this win. For example, will the Netherlands stop seeing Germany as the bad guy? Some people are saying that the rivalry is mostly a joke by now anyway, especially since German clubs are strongly indebted to Dutch players and coaches, but I'm not so sure. I think that, had this been a Netherlands-Germany final, the emotions would have run much, much higher. But now that these two neighboring Germanic countries have both suffered the same fate at the hands of their Hispanic rivals, perhaps we can become friends by crying on each other's shoulder?

One of the things I heard most often during this World Cup -- so often it became a sort of catchphrase -- was that the Netherlands was no longer playing "pretty football" because they wanted RESULTS. The Dutch team played with more energy and determination (we could say aggression) than probably any other side, and in some of their games (like the match against Brazil) this served them well. On the other hand, they also amassed more fouls and yellow cards than any other team, and sort of ruined the final with their excessively physical playing. I was interested in how the final would pan out, since Spain was showing a very controlled game while the Netherlands had been playing with energy and creativity, and it would be interesting to see the two styles meet. And the Dutch side possibly had the best idea for the match, returning the Spanish pressure and going with one-man counterattacks rather than full-team forward movement. But like Germany and Paraguay, Holland was unable to keep possession long enough to create many meaningful plays. Like with Paraguay and Germany, one had the feeling that if Holland had managed to convert a single goal chance against Spain, that would have been it.

But I wonder what playing styles we will see in the future. Will more countries try to emulate Spain's style? My hunch is that very few have the sort of midfield quality needed to make it work. Will the focus become on how to BEAT Spain's style? If that happens, I hope nobody gives up on the "attacking" model that made Germany and Argentina so fun to watch in this World Cup. If future tournaments end up being game after game of the sort of thing we saw last night, even someone like me might lose interest in the World Cup.

World Cup: emotion

2010-07-09T14:56:00.003+02:00

During the Brazil-Netherlands game, a Dutch commentator said something about how for the Netherlands, a loss in the World Cup means that you're a little bummed out for an evening, but life goes back to normal the next day; for a Brazilian, on the other hand, a loss means you're likely to throw your TV set out the window, and maybe throw yourself out after it.

There's a bit of truth to this, but I wonder if it's a question of stimulus or response; in other words, does the Dutchman react differently because he FEELS something different at having lost, or does he feel the same thing but RESPONDS differently to what he feels? Maybe the difference lies simply in the fact that losing a World Cup game is not that big a deal to some countries. In a country like the USA, for example, a World Cup loss still barely even registers in the average person's awareness (in spite of the growing soccer culture). But what if the Dutch guy feels just the same intense shock and disappointment at a World Cup loss that the Brazilian fan feels, only he responds differently to that emotion?

Many of us Germans are plenty bummed out about our loss to Spain, and were also bummed out after our loss to Italy 4 years ago. I'm not sure how the average German takes it, nor am I sure how the average Brazilian is taking their loss, and whether or not there is a great difference.

Emotions confuse me. To say that I'm suspicious of emotions is an understatement; I have a downright hatred for my emotions, hating also the hatred I feel towards my emotions. My emotions consist mostly of various shades of fear and anger and a couple of perversions of desire (such as lust, greed and envy). They never seem to be POSITIVE (I'm not sure I could tell you from experience what it's like to have a positive emotion), and they're often not appropriate to the situation. I won't even tell you how many times I'm in a situation in which I should feel happy, but I feel angry, or in which I should feel sympathy, but I feel impatience, or whatever. My emotions don't make sense, and they refuse to do what they should be doing.

So the World Cup, being the emotional time that it is, really confuses me as well. Why do I get so riled up about a bunch of guys kicking a ball around? Even my uncommon activity on this blog is a sign that something's got me excited. I take some comfort in the fact that I'm not alone (people all over the world go crazy about this event), but it still mystifies me. Why should I care what happens on a soccer field halfway across the world?

After Germany had beaten Argentina, I was browsing the 'net and I found a lot of posts by Argentines who were calling the game fixed, blaming the referee, saying that in spite of this 4-0 result Argentina was still the greatest, and other such stuff that you can laugh at if you're the winner. One of them was saying that the rest of the world is simply jealous because being Argentine is the greatest thing in the world, but is a priviledge reserved only for Argentines.

Part of me envies someone who can talk that way. Sure it's delusional and somewhat quaint for some guy in Argentina to say that the rest of the world wishes they were him, but maybe this arrogance makes him a happier person than I'll ever be. In Latin American culture that kind of talk is accepted and almost expected. In Germany we're a little more sensitive to the whole issue of someone saying out loud anything about one nationality (or -- gulp -- race) being superior to another.

After Spain beat Germany I said something about the boring Spanish football, and a friend (a German friend) called me a sore loser. She was probably right, I was just taking some consolation out of grumbling that even though the other side was better and stronger, they weren't attractive. Part of it was that I was so excited about this faster, more attacking style that Germany has been playing lately, and got all depressed because they were beaten by a team that reminded me of the boring German teams circa 1990, who won championships and played with beautiful precision and dominating possession but who rarely did anything EXCITING.

But yeah, part of it was just that I was bummed out about Germany having lost, and was probably being a sore loser. These are my emotions. They make no sense, and I wish I didn't have them. I wish I could take Germany's defeat with stoic detachment, because it's senseless and embarrassing to be hurt by the fact that eleven guys who happen to be my countrymen were outplayed by eleven awesome footballers from Spain.

Let me say that again, because I know you want to say this to me as well: it's senseless and embarrassing to be hurt by the fact that eleven guys who happen to be my countrymen were outplayed by eleven awesome footballers from Spain.

This is why I hate my emotions. They do senseless and embarrassing things.

Part of me wishes that, since I can't take it with stoic detachment, I could at least respond like the aforementioned Argentines and tell the world that Germany is the best, and that you saps just don't know it, and all that nonsense. But this is not a very large part of me. I don't believe that Germany is the best, and I think that (like all of my other emotions) this response would do no one any good.

So is the Brazilian fan who throws his TV and himself out the window after Brazil loses more emotional than the Dutch or German fan who makes a few sarcastic comments and then gets on with his life? I'm not sure. As a people, maybe the Dutch and the Germans really do care less, really have a lot of other things to live for than the World Cup. But for the individual fan, I think the emotions are probably the same, it's just a question of how these emotions are expressed and what role they are given in your life.

World Cup: sour grapes

2010-07-08T01:17:00.004+02:00

As I've hinted before, possibly the ugliest thing about the World Cup is the taunting and mockery.

Germany lost to Spain tonight, which, for a German like me, is already something of a bummer. But the Dutch can always make things worse for a German. They have this song, "Schade Deutschland, alles ist vorbei" ("Too bad Germany, it's all over"), and I haven't known them to skip an opportunity to sing it. Usually it's been sort of pathetic, because they'll sing it when Germany loses and the Netherlands is already long gone from the tournament.

But the "Schadenfreude" element is very strong in almost every soccer context. I saw one guy interviewing fans in South Africa, and even those who didn't have a clear favorite to cheer on had someone that they hated and wanted to see out.

I'm no different myself. I was glad that Italy didn't get past group stages this time. Part of it has to do with the fact that Italy beat Germany last time around. Part of it is that I don't like the Italian playing style and so it's an aesthetic thing. But part of it is also that Italy has won the World Cup four times, while Germany has only three wins.

The championship history itself is a sort of contest. It's not only who will win, but who will get the MOST wins. That's part of why I no longer really support Brazil (at five wins, they're ahead of everyone, and it's getting boring to see them win). It's why I'm glad that we have a Netherlands-Spain final (both countries have produced strong teams for decades, and both have been denied a single World Cup win).

So there's a lot of "opposing" going on. Most likely it happens to everyone out there, but as a German I'm obviously most sensitive to the "Germany-hating". One of my friends who lives in Germany has been opposing the German team at every game, always cheering on the opponent. His rationale? He can't relate to Germany these days, with their immigration policy which is also reflected in their team (which features a number of foreign-born Germans or German-born first-generation immigrants). The real irony of this is that my friend himself lives in Germany though he is not really German, and that the countries he cheers on are countries he identifies with even less, having for the most part not even set foot there.

At the cafe where I watched tonight's game there as an Argentine who was desperately cheering on Spain simply because he wanted Germany to lose. His explanation was, "I'm Argentine. I was born hating Germany."

There's a lot of truth to that. The Dutch also seem to be "born hating Germany". Most Germans see Argentina and the Netherlands just as one more country to play against and hopefully beat, but I don't perceive it as being very personal beyond that. The Dutch, on the other hand, STILL consider Germany their arch-enemy because of Germany's win in 1974. Even to mention "1974" to a Dutchman is touching a sensitive spot. I sometimes wonder when they'll get over it. I mean, it's not like the Dutch don't have likely candidates for arch-rivals: When Argentina beat Holland in the 1978 World Cup, they played a lot less fairly than Germany did in 1974.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gm-b-DkwL8&feature=related

Brazil got narrow wins against the Netherlands twice in recent World Cups (and went on into the finals both times).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9Z5wLJ7BUE

The 2006 Portugal win against the Netherlands has gone down as one of the most violent games in World Cup history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSOW0CRcmKU

So with all this more recent ugly history against other countries, why does Holland hate Germany so much? I guess it may have something to do with the fact that none of these other countries ever invaded and occupied the Netherlands. But come on. 1974? Is there a single player on either team who was already born when that happened?

This World Cup I've heard a lot about how playing styles have changed. How Brazil is supposedly more pragmatic, and Germany more creative, and all that. The Dutch consider their team to be playing a lot less beautifully, but they were generally OK with that because their beautiful game of the past didn't get them any major championship wins. I'm afraid there might be some truth to that. Many a tournament has been won by the team that was least fun to watch. Jut think of Italy.

Spain's playing tonight reminded me of how Germany used to play. Controlled possession playing, passing the ball around but not really taking any risks, and consequently not really looking exciting. They generally played in the German half, but never really got far into the German "danger zone". They've been playing like this all tournament, it's been boring to watch and the wins have generally been narrow, but they've been winning. The strange thing is that the one team to have beaten them in this World Cup has been Switzerland, which is arguably also the one team to have played even more defensive, boring, possession-driven soccer than the Spanish have been playing.

Germany's young team surprised many people by its refreshingly creative and attacking style in this tournament, but tonight they might have done better to stick with how they used to play. It would have been a mind-numbingly boring game (like so many we've seen from Germany in bygone eras) but they might have won. As it was, their hurry to get forward usually resulted in them losing possession. Even high balls into the Spanish goal area were usually headed out by some Spanish defender, although the German players have the height advantage. I wonder if it had something to do with the absence of Mueller, the young forward who has played such a surprising role for Germany in this World Cup. When Klose was gone for a game and a half, Germany weren't themselves either. Maybe a team like that becomes fine-tuned to a certain constellation and is somewhat out of sorts when a key man is missing.

Or maybe Spain just played the better game.

World Cup: bad luck and teamwork

2010-07-06T04:22:00.003+02:00

In a few hours the World Cup will go into semifinals. I've used the last two break days to look at highlights of the tournament so far. At 60 matches played, even watching just the highlights can take two full night shifts.

So I've been trying to come up with some wisdom from reviewing all the games. I think there are a few things to observe.

For one thing, it seems like there are a lot of unlucky teams. The World Cup, as I said before, is heartbreak. Oh man. All the teams except the champions end up losing sooner or later, and as the stakes get higher, the heartbreak increases. Many are beaten fair and square, but much of the time it seems like it could just be a case of bad luck.

There are several forms of bad luck: There's "normal" type of bad luck like missing a penalty or having the ball bounce back off the post -- something unfortunate and unlikely that could happen to anyone but happens to you. Or that happens to everyone, but demands a particularly high price from you (Mexico's defensive blunder in the game against Argentina) or happens to you with uncanny frequency (like, for example, ONLY EVERY SINGLE AFRICAN NATION IN THE TOURNAMENT as they missed chance after chance to score against their opponents).

Then there's the type of bad luck that is completely beyond your control, like the "referee made a bad call" bad luck (just ask Mexico) and the "injured key player" bad luck (ask Ivory Coast). There's also the "parallel group stage game came with a most unfavorable result for us" bad luck, where you can win a game and still lose a qualifier on goal difference. Ivory Coast was trapped in this situation after Portugal (who had an otherwise scoreless tournament) hammered home a 7-0 game against North Korea, and Ivory Coast had to either repeat that feat or hope that Brazil would pound Portugal into the ground, which an already qualified Brazil had no incentive for doing. (See also: South Africa, Slovenia, Australia, etc...)

There's also the North Korea variety of bad luck, which is about the worst luck of all in the World Cup. It consists in great part of having to live in North Korea.

There's the "underachiever" variety of bad luck, in which the team is clearly capable of playing much better than they do, and it's hard to say why they're not doing it (like Italy, who sleepwalked through more than 200 minutes of World Cup time before they realized that they have to start playing soccer sooner or later if they want to stay in the tournament). And there's the "lost a penalty shootout" variety of bad luck, which is a matter of luck combined with nerves.

A few other things that caught my attention:

-once you're playing with a man down, you probably won't win the game (unless you're already in the lead and it's almost over). I don't think there was a single game in which the winning team had been playing with 10 men for any length of time. Since Australia played with a man down for most of the first two games, it made me wonder how Australia could have done with 11 men playing every game. Australia consistently strikes me as an "unlucky" World Cup team. As does Paraguay.

-this wasn't really a "come from behind" tournament. Only three times did we see a team start out losing the game and end up winning it: Greece against Nigeria (no doubt also thanks to that red card), Uruguay against Ghana (and that only after a penalty shootout) and the Netherlands against Brazil.

-the early group stages are sort of boring and frustrating to watch, since the teams are generally playing very careful soccer. But the late group stages, when somebody HAS to win without going into overtime, can be even more exciting than the knockout matches.

-As impressive as "solo efforts" are when they work, the fact is that they usually don't work. Most of the goals scored were the results of accurate passing and teamwork. Usually when a player tried a solo action, either in the form of a long-range shot or of a run past a handful of defenders, it did not end in a goal (although there were some glorious exceptions).

Part of the reason I've grown to love the German team in this tournament is because they seem to have the strongest grasp on this concept. Their accurate passes are a pleasure to watch, keeping the game fast (the ball moves faster than a player) and graceful (they frequently use only one touch to move the ball to the next station). And even when one of them is right in front of the goal and you expect him to take the shot, he might just make one more pass and let someone else finish. This takes a lot of trust: if I have an open goal before me, I might miss but I might also make it; if I make the pass, then I might make a bad pass OR I might make a good pass but my teammate might make a bad shot. The instinct is often to take the shot myself and reduce the risk. But the amount of trust you need to have in the team might just be the quality that ends up winning the title.

The other attribute of a team that understands teamwork is that they have everyone helping out. In the Germany-Argentina game, Argentina's team was frequently in a defensive position, and all three of their forwards were standing around at center field waiting for the defenders to win the ball and give it to them. Germany's strikers would go all the way back to help with the defense. And Germany won 4-0.

Germany's team consists in great part of young players who were completely unknown until recently. Even the better-known "old hands" on the German team aren't superstars; there's no Messi, no Ronaldo, no Rooney on the German team. And I think that they can go all the way.

World Cup: culture, sports and sportsmanship

2010-07-02T23:56:00.003+02:00

As I write this, Uruguay and the Netherlands have gotten through to semifinals, knocking out (respectively) Ghana and Brazil.

It's always a little sad to see Brazil go, but for me, I get a little tired of seeing Brazil win so I welcome the variety of letting someone else through. Also, I was too busy cheering for the Netherlands.

It's also sad to see Ghana go, as they were the last remaining hope for an African country to finally win a World Cup, especially now that the Cup is happening on African soil. Asia's last stand was knocked out when Paraguay beat Japan in a penalty shootout.

Tomorrow Germany takes on Argentina, and Paraguay takes on Spain. It's back to South American and European countries fighting for the Cup.

I've been thinking again about why do we always see the same countries coming out? Sure there are surprises, but there are rarely major upsets. Switzerland may win a game against Spain, but if they wanted to prove that that wasn't just a fluke they might have proceeded to beat Honduras. Also, why do some countries do well over decades and decades, even though they have a different pool of players every couple of years?

It's like that old wisdom: if you think poker is just about luck, how come you always see the same faces at the finals of the big poker competitions? It's because luck is only a part of the equation.

Obviously, no one mistakes soccer for the lottery; it is quite clear that there is a great variety of skills involved. Not only physical skill but psychological strength, determination, teamwork, love for the game, etc. (although it's hard to deny that luck plays a part as well). But how do these skills come to be associated with certain countries? You'd think that the best countries are those with 1. the highest population to choose from, and 2. the strongest soccer culture to nurture the talent. And by that theory, it is quite normal that Brazil should do well, but the success of the Netherlands is more difficult to explain.

Many countries have a playing style that seems to go with their culture. German culture values precision, reliability and punctuality, and it shows in their game. Many African cultures value temporary inspiration over long-term discipline, and it shows in their game too. Italian and Spanish soccer, on the other hand, does not really seem to reflect our stereotypes of their culture. My question is: is every culture equally suitable to produce great soccer, even if they will play different styles? Is the problem with the African teams that their African value system stands in the way of great soccer, or is it the opposite, that they, like the Jamaicans in "Cool Runnings", try too hard to be European?

I'm told that the styles are changing, that Germany is playing like Holland used to play, and that Brazil isn't playing Brazilian style any more, but I can't say that I'm noticing that to any great extent. What I DID notice about Brazil is that the standards of sportsmanship seem to have slipped. Luis Fabiano committed two handballs on the way to his goal against Ivory Coast; Maicon has been taking dives and being manipulative with referees; but the real clincher, the move that made me lose sympathy for Brazil's loss today, was when Felipe Melo kicked an injured Arjen Robben while he was down. A red card followed, and at one man down, even Brazil could not get back in the controls of a losing game.

One of the biggest surprises (or disappointments?) to me was to find out that there are people out there who ADMIRE bad sportsmanship. They admire the guy who can take a fall and fool the referee into thinking that he was fouled. They admire the guy who can injure an opponent while the referee isn't looking. They admire Maradona for getting away with the infamous "hand of God" goal in 1986.

This could be a cultural thing. A culture which honors bluffing and conning your way to success will obviously play a different type of soccer than a culture which honors integrity and fair play.

The embarassing thing at this World Cup has been that North Korea, of all countries, has shown us a new level and standard of integrity. There was no diving, no feigned injuries, no manipulating of the referee's point of view going on in their games. They also lost every game they played. And their country remains a whirlpool of (attempted) deception.

The Uruguay-Ghana game ended with "cheesy inspirational film" material. In the last seconds of extra time, Ghana was capitalizing on the greatest goal opportunity they had had in two hours of playing when Uruguayan striker Suarez made a save with his hand. The consequence: a sending-off and a penalty. This is a high price, but it also means that there is still a slim chance for Uruguay to win, whereas there wouldn't have been a chance at all had he let the ball go in.

And sure enough, Asamoah Gyan missed the penalty for Ghana, which means that the game was still tied after extra time and had to go into penalty shootouts. Uruguay won (oh yeah, did I mention that "strength of nerves" is also a quality that will in soccer games?). It's a weird win, and Uruguay is not winning any popularity contests (they were already responsible for knocking host nation South Africa from the tournament), but to me, it's a "fair" win. No one got away unpunished, a risk was taken and a high price was paid, and the risk still paid off.

Suarez' action was a reflex more than a decision; and our reflexes betray a lot about who we really are. What I wonder is whether any player would have had the same reflex in that same situation, or whether it would depend on the player's cultural background. I find the World Cup to be an interesting context for people-watching.

World Cup: Patriotism

2010-06-28T23:01:00.003+02:00

One of the obvious effects of the World Cup is that it stirs up patriotism in people. Or at least favoritism. This can have such ridiculous symptoms as violent confrontations and even deaths. Every once in a while you hear something like that story of the Japanese student in Russia who was beaten to death after Japan beat Russia in the World Cup.

I'm obviously biased as well. You can see from my previous entries that I'm not too much of a fan of Italy and Argentina, and I'm not even sure if my reasons for that are any good. I say that Argentina has been "lucky" in the World Cup just because their two wins are controversial, but how about all the times they were unlucky? How come I pretend that GERMANY isn't a lucky country, winning all those penalty shootouts and all? It's because I'm biased.

One of my friends who's an Argentina fan (or at least a Germany opposer) saw the latest performances of Argentina and Germany through completely different eyes than I did. If he and I were to tell you what we saw, you wouldn't know we're talking about the same games. Obviously, our loyalties affect how we view reality. If two players go for the ball and one goes down holding his face, your reaction will be very different if that guy is from the team you support than if he's from the other team. He may of course be injured, or he may be playing it up. But your first theory has less to do with what you see on the screen, and more with what you WANT to see. You want to believe in the best for the people you most identify with, which is generally a good trait but can also lead to a certain blindness (if your son is a bully, other children are suffering because you don't want to believe something negative about your own child).

Having lived both in Germany and South America, I can say that in general Germans are much less patriotic. We're more likely to suspect "our guys" of fishy play, or to be happy for our opponents if they win. I remember a World Cup game I watched in Germany, where Germany was playing Bolivia, and many of the Germans watching the game were cheering for Bolivia, even waving a Bolivian flag. In Bolivia you would have been putting your life in danger running around with a German flag during that game.

Note: "more likely" doesn't mean that there's all that many Germans opposing their own country; but it does happen, whereas in South America it's pretty much unthinkable.

I don't think patriotism is bad, as long as we don't pretend that our preferences and biases are more than a mostly irrational tribe instinct or personal taste; but what bothers me is how much aggression there is. Everyone can support a country, or a dozen countries, and everyone can choose which countries to support, and it's all cool. But so much of the time it's not "GO ARGENTINA!" it's "DIE, GERMANY!" It's not about supporting someone, it's about OPPOSING someone. I love it when fans bring cheers and songs to their team; but much of the stadium noise (if it isn't drowned out by vuvuzelas) consists of crowds ridiculing the opponent.

The Dutch still riff on their arch-rivalry with Germany at every major soccer tournament. The punchline to most of their advertising during this time has something to do with the Netherlands playing against Germany. It's mostly pretty good-natured, but it also betrays that there is not just a feeling of wanting the Netherlands to win, but of wanting to see Germany humiliated. Sometimes I wonder if it is, in some weird psychological or spiritual way, this anger that's preventing the Netherlands from defeating Germany until they learn to let go of it.

Too much patriotism can totally ruin the World Cup experience, but a complete lack of bias can also ruin it because it usually betrays a complete lack of interest. I've watched a few games at the cafe of the Shelter Jordan, but this year the team there consists mostly of people who couldn't care less about the World Cup, which makes it a little depressing. I might just as well sit at home alone watching the games by myself. Today I watched the Netherlands game in a bar full of people who were, to some degree, into it. But the guy who was most "into it" was so loud and vulgar that it was no fun either. He did his share of cheering, but also his share of cursing at the referee, mocking injured players, etc.

If the final does end up being Germany against the Netherlands, I'll have to lock myself up somewhere with my German friends to avoid the wrath of our host nation should Germany win. The celebrations will have to be discreet too.

World Cup: karma, national identity, heartbreak, justice, etc...

2010-06-27T22:35:00.003+02:00

The more you get into the World Cup, the more fascinating it becomes when you see, or think you see, patterns.

As I write this, Argentina has just defeated Mexico 3-1.

Four years ago, Mexico and Argentina also faced each other at this point in the tournament. Mexico started out surprisingly taking the lead, but it soon became clear that Argentina was the stronger team and that it was only a matter of time before they would take the game, which they did.

None of that happened tonight. Argentina played maybe 15 minutes of creative soccer, the rest of the game was spent keeping Mexico at bay. Mexico looked by far the stronger team, but they had an unlucky 8 minutes in which, due to a refereeing error and a mind-boggling defensive blunder, they surrendered two goals to Argentina. Sure, Argentina's Tevez made a beautiful long-range drive into the Mexican goal in the second half as well, but those eight minutes in the first half did Mexico in.

Luck is an infuriatingly big factor in soccer. And I always feel that, in the World Cup, there are lucky teams and unlucky teams. Mexico is an unlucky team: always there, and never gets far. England is another example of an unlucky team. Every World Cup I've seen them in, they've gotten knocked out not because they were outmatched, but because they were unlucky. Often they lost on penalty shootouts, or (as in 1986) because of bad refereeing. For the last 12 years, their losses have generally been in some way related to David Beckham getting injured or sent off or something.

Today they lost to Germany. They scored a goal that went unseen by the referee and therefore went uncounted. Sure, that goal may not have made the difference since Germany got them 4-1, but the English went into the half-time break trailing at 2-1, which is a very different feeling than going in on a 2-2 draw. I'm glad that Germany won, but I would have been happy for England to not always be the unlucky one as well.

But there's another side to this. England's discounted goal today was suspiciously similar to England's winning goal against Germany in 1966 (the one time England did get lucky). You can see it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeXWEVXhdUo

That one probably didn't go over the line (the debate on this is still furious because the footage is not conclusive), but was counted. Today's went over the line but wasn't counted. Some claim that justice was served.

In 1986 England got unlucky against Argentina when Maradona managed to knock a ball into the goal with his hand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eZhBCqh8l8&feature=related

I was hoping that in today's game a Mexican player would make the winning goal against Argentina with his hand, and that the referee would let the goal stand. It would be interesting to do an interview with Maradona after that event (he's now the Argentine coach and has been criticizing the refereeing at the current World Cup).

Argentina has been a "lucky" country in the World Cups. Sure they've produced great players and good teams over the years so it's not just blind chance that they've frequently done well, but their two World Cup wins are shrouded in controversy (1986 featured Maradona's "hand of God" goal and the 1978 championship included psychological power games against the Netherlands and a suspicious 6-0 win against Peru that has never yet shaken the aura of having been rigged).

The World Cup is a heartbreak. You see grown men sobbing like children after playing a losing game (I still remember Rio Ferdinand after England lost to Portugal in 2006). But the real heartbreak is not that there are winners and there are losers, but that justice doesn't seem to be served so much of the time. We want to believe in sportsmanship, so how do we deal with Portugal winning game after game with their dirty playing in 2006? We want to believe in a "may the best team win" motto, but what about all those lucky wins? We want to believe in the beauty of soccer, but how can that stand against the fact that the teams who play the most beautiful soccer (such as Spain or the Netherlands) generally don't advance very far? (Much theorizing goes on about this "Spain phenomenon".)

Meanwhile, Italy is known for anything but beautiful play. But they have won the World Cup four times, and have generally gotten far.

I'm thinking the popularity of Brazilian soccer may lie in the fact that it combines beauty and success. The Brazilians can generally be counted on to play with high standards of excellence AND sportsmanship, and to win game after game. They can restore our hope that there is something like justice in the world.

I may be a bit biased when I look at Germany. I was surprised to find that many people don't consider German soccer to be beautiful. I think today's game was a good example of how Germany plays. Here's a review in low quality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-_p9FbSjpQ

Notice the accurate passing? Especially that play that starts around the 30th second. I always loved that about Germany. Sure, many times their game gets boring, when passing is all they do ("German minimalist football" we sometimes call it), but I was surprised to hear that some people consider German soccer to be clumsy. Boring, maybe, but clumsy? Come on.

I didn't much mind when Spain beat Germany in 2008's European Cup. Spain was simply the better team, and I was happy that they finally got success to match their potential. But I minded very much when Italy beat Germany in 2006, because I did not feel that Italy had played the better game.

I wouldn't have minded so much if England had beat Germany today. But I will mind very much if Argentina beats Germany. With both teams, anything can happen. Argentina has had a rough time with the qualifying matches, then sailed through group stages and the first knockout game with flying colours. Germany has a young team with lots of untested talent but not much maturity or emotional stability. This in itself is actually quite un-German, which makes them even more of a wild card (along with the hit-and-miss pattern of their group games).

The World Cup is interesting. You start wondering if the patterns you see will continue. Like, will England ever win a penalty shootout? Will Germany ever win a match against Italy? Will the Netherlands always start strong and then choke, while Italy will start slow and pick up steam? (This time, they started REALLY slow, and by the time they were picking up steam they were out of the tournament already.)

But more interestingly, people look for patterns of justice and retribution. I've heard Argentines claim that the 1986 win against England was the retribution for the Falklands Islands war. I've already heard it implied that England's discounted goal today was simply the karma for the 1966 "goal" in Wembley. I've heard people say that Brazil's 2002 victory over Germany the punishment for Germany's idolizing of goalkeeper Oliver Kahn. I myself wonder if Germany's loss in the final of 1982 was their punishment for that scandalous display of poor sportsmanship in their previous group game against Austria.

And at every World Cup there is some sort of religious war going on as well. Predominantly Muslim countries haven't really done well enough to be taken seriously in this arena, but many players from other countries are at least superstitious enough to make the sign of the cross a few times. Others will do animistic rituals to ensure a win. Many will see the outcome of the game to be a "test of spirits". When Italy's Roberto Baggio (Buddhist) missed a penalty and thereby lost the game against Brazil's Claudio Taffarel (Christian) in 1994, people were saying that this was a sign as to whose god was more powerful.

Will Maradona's "hand of God" ever be adequately punished? Or did that happen in 1990, when Germany beat Argentina in what must have been the most boring World Cup final ever, with Germany just passing the ball around while both teams get increasingly dirty and neither makes any decisive play, and Argentina eventually playing with 9 men against 11 and Germany getting a contested penalty kick to win the game and the Cup?

Man, I hope that never happens again. But I do hope Germany beats Argentina this Saturday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZAxT5Uc7Bs&feature=related

Random World Cup notes...

2010-06-22T01:08:00.003+02:00

There was one Geman newspaper headline which read something like, "Why are they all playing so badly?" This World Cup has started off quite weak, with disappointments from some of the big teams (Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany), lots of boring games, and many goals that resulted not from brilliant offensive playing but from defensive blunders such as own goals or clumsy goalkeeping. Most African teams are already on their way out, which is a disappointment for a cup that is finally being held on their continent. And even at this stage there have already been some serious questions about refereeing methods.

I remember how a few new rules were introduced about two decades ago to make soccer a faster-moving, higher-scoring game. Most significantly, a rule was added that forbade the goalkeeper from using his hands to pick up a pass from a teammate, an infraction of which could result in the awkward possibility of an indirect free kick from within the box.

I wonder if it's time to revamp some of the rules again. For example, as group stages now stand, a team gets one point for a draw, three for a win, and zero for a loss. One friend suggested giving zero points for a 0-0 draw as well, which would give teams the incentive to at least score, instead of going all defensive. I'd go so far as to say that it would be pretty good sport to completely knock out any team that makes it through a group game without scoring a goal. It would immediately thin the ranks, and get rid of all those boring games we usually see at the beginning of the tournament. If you know that stay in even after a 4-1 loss, but go home after a 0-0 draw, you're going to play a more entertaining game.

Also, something should probably be done about the group games in which both sides only need a tie game to qualify. That's the most boring soccer ever, and is unfair to the other teams in the group.

But mostly, it seems to me that the refereeing could use some reform, as it is one man (and his three assistants) having to keep an eye on 22 players on a huge field. The technology with which the games are broadcast to the world improves with every new Cup, which means that all of us can see ultra-close-up, ultra-slow-motion shots of sweat-drops spraying from a player's head as he makes ball contact. It also means that the whole world has a better view of what's happening on the field than the referee does. Referees actually get it right the vast majority of the time, but now we can all see that there was no reason for the USA's third goal against Slovenia to be discounted, or for Kaká to get a second yellow card in Brazil's game against Ivory Coast. The referee is still given a great deal of power, which I think is correct (if every one of his decisions were up for appeal, it would be true chaos), but it hardly seems fair to burden him with the responsibility of making such life-and-death decisions based on his angle of things when the whole world is given an even better angle to look from. Other sports have referees with access to instant replay, why not soccer?

But it is not only a question of his on-field perspective vs. that of a thousand high-definition cameras. It is also they way the referees are often charged by the FIFA to adjudicate more harshly than they normally would. This means that they have to learn a new style almost on the spot, and that consistency will be likely to be sacrificed.

Which brings me to Miroslav Klose. The German player has had a mediocre season with Bayern München, but I still think he's a world-class striker, and even though coach Joachim Löw got flack for choosing him over someone like Kuranyi, I think that Klose has always played well for the national team. He's one of the highest scorers in World Cup history, scoring five goals in 2002 and five more in 2006. If he were to repeat the stunt this year, he would join Ronaldo for most World Cup goals ever. And sure enough, in the opening game against Australia, he knocked one in.

Then came the game against Serbia. Germany was playing with a level of frustration that was confusing for most of us to watch, since they were neither in an uncomfortable group position nor outmatched by their opponents. There was a lot of fouling going on, which the referee met with yellow cards, two of which went to Klose. He got sent off and misses the next game too. It is unlikely that he will become a record scorer now.

I'm not really against that decision. He had committed two dumb fouls. But it is frustrating to watch other referees in other games allowing players to get away with that sort of thing. Consistency would be nice.

And then, of course, there's the whole issue of players taking a dive and feigning injury. This is the bane of soccer, it is the part of the game that gives its detractors (mostly Americans who are into American sports) the most ammunition. A player taking a dive sometimes fools the referees. Occasionally the player is sanctioned after the game by the FIFA after reviewing the game footage, but not really often enough for it to be a very strong deterrent. It is always embarassing to watch. Maybe we need to invent a special punishment for them, like having to bend over and let the opposing team take shots at their behind, or having to write "acting is a respectable career, but when I'm on the field I'll stick to playing ball" one hundred times on some public chalkboard before being allowed to play their next game. Something like that.

The Church of England's Prayer for the World Cup

2010-06-11T09:52:00.000+02:00

Lord God, the source of all life and joy, recreation and skill,
we pray for all involved in the World Cup,
and especially for those who represent our nation
for good health for the players,
for high standards of sportsmanship and fairness,
and for the safety and well-being of all who will watch,
that in our shared enjoyment of the game,
we may rejoice in the one who came to bring life in all its fullness,
Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

World Cup Fever

2010-06-07T01:02:00.004+02:00

So now the 4-year wait is almost over: the World Cup kicks off this Friday.

Unfortunately, as I look at my calendar I realize that I will miss many games. I have to work, attend weddings, etc.

I sometimes run into people who don't share my excitement for soccer (I'm not calling it "football" because I have American readers, OK?). Some people will say, with a sort of aloofness and almost anger, something along the lines of, "what's so exciting about 22 men chasing after a ball?"

That's a valid question, of course. I'm not sure it can be explained, but it can be experienced if you open yourself up to it instead of being too concerned with going against the grain.

But there is more behind the question. To talk of 22 men chasing after a ball is a reductionist view of soccer, one that does make it sound silly. But the fact is, when asked to name something that IS worth getting excited about, and is less silly than 22 men chasing after a ball, people will often draw a blank. They might get lofty and talk about "ending world hunger" or whatever, which I admit would be a more worthwhile goal than "watching 22 men chasing after a ball". But it's a false dilemma. None of us is likely to ever be put in a situation where someone says, "you can either watch a soccer game, or end world hunger. You cannot do both. Choose wisely." Soccer has done great things for the world, possibly more than anyone's attempts to end world hunger.

I'm sort of thankful that I'm with the majority on this one. I'm not some isolated freak who loves the World Cup; it's the world's most popular event.

People often ask me whom I support, and I admit I still go with Germany. This year's team is missing captain Michael Ballack, which is unfortunate, but on the other hand he sometimes got on my nerves because he hasn't always the best model of sportsmanlike behavior. There's a lot of young talent on the team. Keep your eye on Marin, he's very fun to watch (although he's probably being kept as the secret wild card to be traded in when all other players are tired, so we're unlikely to see him play a full 90 minutes).

I'd also be happy for the Netherlands if they won. They have an awesome team, and they've historically had great teams and bad luck. England is in a similar position. I'd be happy for Paraguay (my mother is Paraguayan) or for any underdog team (like, if an African country finally won), including the USA (World Cup soccer is one of the few areas in which they are underdogs, and the USA is one of the few countries where the average person on the street can't name one or two of their national soccer players).

I love Brazilian soccer, but I've grown tired of seeing them win. I'm not a big fan of Italy or Argentina, for some reason.

But the thing with the World Cup is, so much is at stake and is determined by so little. You can look at almost any tournament, and see that the winning team wouldn't have gotten the trophy if it had not been for some silly circumstance like a bad call by a referee, or an injured player on an opposing team, or a freak lapse of concentration on the part of someone or other, or a penalty shootout. The likelihood for heartbreak is great; the likelihood for celebration is slim.

Could it be that soccer is so popular because it's a great analogy of life in general? You chase an elusive object to the point of exhaustion, trying to outplay your opponents while staying within the rules, depending on your teammates to make your efforts count, and in the end there's a high chance of heartbreak and a slim chance of victory.

Confession

2010-06-01T21:27:00.004+02:00

Over five months ago I was struggling to come up with a meaningful summary of this past decade. My mind still keeps returning to that subject. What's changed between 2000 and 2010?

The question itself is tricky, and writing coherent blog entries about it is even trickier. But individual things keep coming up.

For example, the role of confession. I still don't really understand it, but I think quite differently about it now than I did ten years ago.

I used to think "confession" was pretty much the same thing as "apology". If I snap at you or gossip about you, or even accidentally step on your toe, our relationship enters a state of tension, and if I don't apologize for what I have done, the relationship will have a rough time of it. I used to think that confession was when I apologize for all the big and little sins I've committed, intentionally or unintentionally, in order for God to forgive me and for us to be able to continue our relationship in a more tension-free state.

Certainly confession has that element about it. But it is something more, and also something different. For one thing, whatever may be true about the emotions of God, I do not think He suffers from a feeling of hurt pride like we do when someone sins against us. One of the reasons an apology helps to restore a tense relationship between humans is that the innocent party is given a feeling of vindication, which I doubt is something God needs in order to be able to carry on loving us. Also, apologies are usually in order when we have disappointed someone, but disappointment is a result of having expected better. A God who "knows that we are but dust" could hardly experience disappointment if we act in a way that is in keeping with being the corrupted humans He knows we are.

Confession isn't just "saying sorry". In fact, it may even be something altogether different, something that hardly has an "apologetic" tone to it at all. It may be compared to something as sober as "reporting irregularities". I'll make a cheesy analogy and say that if God is a master programmer, sin is a virus in the program. Since God knows that the program has a virus, He doesn't expect it to work perfectly (what a revelation this obvious fact was to me!) But He is intent on debugging it, on destroying the virus and fixing the damage it did. He is also intent on doing this with my collaboration, or at least with me looking on.

When I confess that I gossiped, harbored resentment, lusted, bent the truth, etc., I'm not *apologizing* in the normal sense of the word. The problem is not that I have gossiped or lusted, but that I am a person who gossips and lusts. The problem is not what I have DONE, but what I AM. When I confess my sins, I'm saying, basically, "This program is not running the way it should."

God is not shocked or disappointed -- He knows that I am capable of doing far worse things than I myself imagine. But as it becomes evident to me, I get a clearer view of two things: 1. how tough and destructive the virus is, and 2. how amazing the debugged program will be once it's finished.

At this moment, the virus has even damaged my sensors which can perceive these things with any degree of clarity. But it is all, like everything in the world, to the glory of God. I'm not gonna be able to fix it. I used to think that God expected me to try harder, and that trying harder was going to get me somewhere. If trying harder were any good, I could compliment myself on my progress. But that isn't the case, and the progress is God's. All I can do is keep giving status reports: "this program is not running the way it should."

And then watch the Master at work.

Of course, anyone who has tried regular confession at all will notice how repetitive it gets. It feels like we make zero progress, like we keep having to confess to the same sins over and over without seeing any improvement -- in fact, that our failings grow more serious and more numerous over time. Most of the time it sure doesn't feel like we're watching a master at work. But that's because one of the things we need to learn is patience, and patience can only be learned by enduring a long wait for something we really want. Another reason it often seems to make no progress is because we've simply not had enough time for pattern recognition. In a sort of crazy reversal of the "apology" model, I can actually be THANKFUL for the times I have sinned this past week, because my sins give me further clues as to what is inside me, and what the damage is. Psychologists know that some of our wacky behavior can stem from the most unexpected cause, and that sometimes we need to see the wacky behavior in action -- maybe even PROVOKE it -- in order to find its cause; simply subduing it is not a permanent solution. If God wants me to see Him at work in getting me fixed up, then He also puts me in situations I can't deal with and takes the time to let me say "this program is not running the way it should" enough times for me to see WHEN and WHERE the errors and glitches arise, and eventually join Him in tracking them down to their CAUSE, which may be a very counter-intuitive one.

Ten years ago, this view of Confession would have offended me.

The inability to inspire

2010-05-24T01:37:00.003+02:00

Houses in Old Amsterdam are generally narrow and tall, have large windows and are pressed against each other with no space in between.

All this can pretty much be explained by a single circumstance: there was a tax on how many meters of canalfront you had. So you want your house narrow (less taxes), and you compensate by making it tall and building it out towards the back. Since your house is narrow, your stairway is narrow, so you can't move furniture up the stairs -- that problem is solved by moving it in and out through windows via a pulley system, which means your windows are big.

Of course, not EVERYTHING about an Amsterdam house can be explained by that one law, but it is interesting that many apparent differences we observe are really just results of one difference.

I often wonder how much of our character as individuals is really just one attribute. During my pilgrimage through Spain I realized, tracing my various thoughts to their roots, that they are analogous to one big water-plant: on the surface you see different leaves floating about, but under the surface you see they're all just one plant -- one root down there that isn't seen, but that is responsible for all the leaves that are seen.

When you ask people to describe themselves, they'll often list universal platitudes like "I'm a perfectionist" or "I sometimes need to be alone". This is nothing unique. What makes people unique is WHAT they're perfectionists about or WHEN they need to be alone. Sometimes having a piece of information like that goes a very long way towards knowing and understanding somebody. Most of us do not have that piece of information about ourselves.

What is my most defining characteristic? I've thought about this for a long time, and I've come against an unlikely answer:

I am unable to inspire people -- any attempt of mine to change someone else's mind about something feels to me like a violent act -- and yet I wish I knew how to inspire.

Seriously, I know this sounds like a pathetic central attribute for someone's personality, but I can't think of anything else that would explain so much: from the insignificant little frustrations of my day-to-day existence, to my constant geographic restlessness, to my inability to comprehend love triangles, the American Civil War or the (attempted) Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to my poor sense of rhythm, to the way my speaking conversation is never succinct and does not allow for long silences, to my opting out of obvious career choices like music or education, to my fear of confrontation, to the way I'll invite people in the most general and impersonal terms even when (or especially when) it is very important to me to have them there. It may even influence my driving style, my love for punctuality and my cranky worldview, though that would be a stretch. Except that maybe my cranky worldview is responsible for the fact that I am unable to inspire people, which would leave some explaining to do but seems like a likely spiral (if my worldview is pessimistic, I can't inspire others; and if I fail in my attempts to inspire others, I grow more and more pessimistic).

Some explanations:

-"The ability to inspire" is what I understand to be the way you can draw people into following your idea while building them up as people. Let's say you want to go for a picnic and you call up all your friends, but none are particularly excited about the idea. You can either 1. go alone, 2. make other plans, or 3. convince them that they actually DO want to go on a picnic. This can be done by 1. inspiring or 2. manipulating / bullying. Inspiring them builds them up, while bullying them involves some destruction. My problem is that I can't really tell the difference between these approaches, except that you feel different after having been inspired to do something than you do after having been bullied into doing something. But that's a difference I can only tell afterwards. And I have no idea how to say "I know you don't want to, but let's have a picnic" in a way that is not bullying or manipulative or (depending on the circumstance) authoritarian.

-A love triangle would be, for example, if I love a woman but another guy loves her too, and I have to win her affections against him. I can't relate to the instinct that would pursue her, because I can't imagine how any attempt of mine to convince her that I'm better than the other guy is anything other than a manipulation of her mind, which (if I really loved her) I wouldn't be doing.

-The American Civil War (as I understand it) started because the Southern states seceded, and the North told them they couldn't. I can't relate to the instinct that says: "We can't have this, we'll force them to stay with us." My way is always: "They don't wanna be part of our Union? Well let 'em do their own thing then, why would we want people in our country who don't want to be part of our country?" This is not the way of an inspirer. An inspirer is so convinced of the goodness of the thing that others are leaving, that he will keep them on board, by force if need be. And sometimes they do thank you for it afterwards.

-Regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and many many other examples of invasions: what must be going on in a leader's mind to want to subject another country to his country's rule against their will? I mean, that's just trouble. The only scenario in which I understand it is if it is a pre-emptive strike against a possible war.

-My sense of rhythm: from early on, I've had problems keeping my rhythm constant when making music. It usually speeds up. I often already start the darn piece too fast. I think this is because there's a voice in me saying, "you're boring them. Get this over with quickly." An inspirer does not feel this way. An inspirer is convinced of the beauty and worthiness of what he is doing and of other people's awe of it, or their need to be brought into a state of awe about it.

I could go on and explain how a lot of the other elements in my life and my personality are manifestations of my inability to inspire others, but you get the idea. I feel like I'd be unable to say the sorts of things an inspirer says: in my mouth, they would sound either apologetic or manipulative.

What is YOUR "taxation of canalfront law"? (Meaning: what hidden piece of information is there that could account for a great deal of what everyone sees and knows about you?)

That special gene...

2010-05-13T01:51:00.004+02:00

We all know that a genetic defect can stop us from enjoying certain aspects of life. For example, many types of color blindness are genetic. Also, some people have genes that enable them to taste flavors that other people can't taste (and this is usually not an advantage: some things taste very bitter to those who have that special gene, while they taste just fine to the rest of us).

I sometimes wonder if I'm lacking certain genes that most people around me have. I mean, we all wonder (especially in our teens) why we seem to be different from everyone else. Eventually we (hopefully) come to accept that people are just different, at least on the outside. But I wonder if the human genome project will discover the genes that are responsible for these differences.

For example, that whole style of music that is commonly called "worship music" in Evangelical circles just leaves me either completely unmoved or somewhat annoyed. Other people (reportedly) are greatly moved by it. Maybe I just lack the gene. I've heard other worship music non-enthusiasts blast the whole style of music for being theologically inaccurate and artistically deficient, but I'm not sure that this is always what bothers me. I think I just lack a gene. I'm sure Chris Tomlin is an OK guy, and he's a blessing to people and all that, but I can't even make through to the end of most of his songs. For example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PTvr755V8s

Meanwhile, I can totally enjoy Bruce Cockburn's "Lord of the Starfields", which is thematically similar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=RFkM_R3CZvI&feature=related

I think most people would agree that Cockburn's song is artistically superior, but what do people find in Tomlin's music that they get so excited about, and what is it about his songs that annoys me? I think I lack the gene.

I also lack the gene to appreciate most of what comes in Top 40 radio. And I don't know what people get out of going to the disco / club. Loud music, strobe lights, crowds in various states of drunkenness... these are things I generally try to AVOID, not something I'd seek out, and pay money for, in order to make my weekend complete. Maybe I lack the disco gene. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the gene you need to appreciate clubs is the same gene that's also responsible for appreciating "worship music" and "Top 40 radio". Some of us just don't have it, folks.

No one would be surprised if a "soccer enthusiasm gene" were detected and found to be present primarily among men (like genetic color blindness), or if a "romantic comedy appreciation gene" were discovered to primarily affect women.

Something else I seem to lack a gene for: Television. There are two shows I watched religiously for a period of time (The X-Files and The Simpsons) and about half a dozen shows I watched on and off, with varying levels of interest. But I was never a very good TV watcher, and in recent years I just can't get into TV at all any more, unless they're showing a soccer match or a movie (and then it obviously depends on what movie it is).

I'm not sure I can even explain WHY I don't like television. It just seems like too much hassle, which is weird because watching TV is generally thought of as a passive, brain-dead activity. Not for me. Most shows stress me out, and a lot of times it's because the characters I'm supposed to sympathize with are making it hard for me to sympathize with them. Many sitcoms are just about awkward situations or about lies/misunderstandings that grow bigger and "funnier" as the episode progresses. Most characters are inconsistent and mug too much ("Friends" anyone?). Reality shows usually draw viewers by making the participants suffer. Crime shows, law shows, talk shows... most of it doesn't seem worth the time for me. And over the last decade there's been a disturbing rise in series (like LOST or "Heroes") that make you believe that they have some long, epic, over-arching story that they're feeding you bit by bit, but in reality they have no idea where it's going or how to convey believability; all they really know how to do is end each episode on a note of tension that has you looking forward to next week's episode. I was drawn into these shows for a while, but when I saw what they were doing vs. what they were pretending to be doing, I lost interest. I even TRIED to hang on to my original fascination with LOST, but I just felt that my goodwill was betrayed too many times. Even just the outrageous plot devices I was being asked to swallow made me harbor some resentment against them.

Maybe I just lack the television gene. Another gene that I seem to lack (but this would require a separate blog entry) is the "wanting to get married" gene. Most single people I know are looking or waiting for a partner, and I seem to be one of the few mutants born without the "partner search" gene -- if anything, I seem to have a "careful avoidance of potential life partnerships" thing going on.

How about you? Is there a gene that YOU lack, something the whole rest of the world seems to enjoy but you can't tell what it's all supposed to be about?

The first 5 years

2010-05-10T03:50:00.004+02:00

I was talking to a friend last week and remarked that I seem to have, in some ways, a closer bond with people I grew up with -- even though we've drifted very far apart in the meantime -- than with people I see regularly but haven't gotten to know until my adult years.

Her theory was that losing touch with people we grew up with doesn't make that much of a difference, since people don't change much anyway, and we get to know them better if we've gone through the awkward years together. After that, even two decades of disappearing from each others' lives won't really erase what we've learned about the other.

This is an interesting theory. I'd say people do change a lot, but only in a way. Many things about us don't change at all. We wondered whether one could look at a 5-year-old and predict what sort of a 40-year-old he or she would become. It's a somewhat scary thought that perhaps our most defining characteristics were already fully formed at the time that our early childhood memories begin.

My first five years, if my memory and the reports of my parents are any indication, were marked by two things: sleeplessness and anger.

Now, at 35, my life is also marked by two things: an obsession with sleep and an all-pervasive anger. The main difference is that at age 5 I threw tantrums, whereas now I generally limit my public displays of anger to cynical and sarcastic remarks.

What dominated the first five years of your life? What currently dominates your life?

spring cleaning

2010-04-26T03:19:00.003+02:00

Last week was, supposedly, my week to do "spring cleaning".

I didn't get very far. My room looks worse than ever.

I discovered quite late in life that I can actually make my room LOOK clean with very little time and effort. It's just a matter of having enough "blind spots" to make everything disappear into. I'm generally careful with this approach because I believe (justifiably) that once I've made a bunch of random items disappear into a few closets and drawers, they will NEVER be sorted out and really put in order.

So my room is usually messy, although in an emergency I can make it look acceptable.

And my messy room wears me out. It keeps me from relaxing. It drives me into walking the streets at night.

I think some people can think in categories much better than others. I always find myself trying to organize my stuff based on categories, but I rarely get further than "let's see, there's screwdrivers, and there's everything that isn't a screwdriver." And I always end up holding a bunch of things in my hand that don't really belong into any category (does a Swiss army knife count as a screwdriver or not?), and when the attempts to sort them out in a rational way have failed, I plunk them down, either out of sight (where they will be forgotten and not found when I need them) or in plain view (where they will stare me down accusingly).

So some of my things end up lying around perpetually because there's never a "real" place for them. I also never seem to have enough drawers, shelves, boxes and closets for all my things. And even when I do, say, acquire a new shelf, it is not a long-term solution. It's like getting an extension for a paper you've been procrastinating on for a few months: you get an extra two weeks, but in the end, you do the paper the night before it's due anyway. Same with shelves: you have more space, but you just end up collecting more stuff until the new shelf is full as well.

My room is particularly messy during spring cleaning. We all know that things get messier before they get more organized.

I take all the books out of a shelf in order to dust it. The books don't make it back right away. Anyone seeing the room sees a bunch of books lying on chairs, the table, the floor... what they don't see is that there shelf is no longer dusty.

And getting it all back in order takes longer than my optimistic predictions would have admitted.

This is a spiritual experience for me. I won't bore you with all the tedious and obvious parallels. I'll just say that many people are surprised when, after letting God into their life, they find (after the initial honeymoon) that they're becoming WORSE rather than better, that their vices rage like never before and their virtues perform a disappearing act. But that's because we humans have a much higher tolerance for imperfection than God does; we can easily live with some dust on that shelf if it means that we don't have to have books lying around on our chairs and floor. A life given to God is turned upside down; what was "good works" becomes "filthy rags". And vice versa.

Stats about my church. Because I know you're interested.

2010-04-19T01:16:00.004+02:00

Today we had the annual meeting of our church, Christ Church Amsterdam. What was interesting this time was that we got some stats about who exactly is in our church. It wasn't fully scientific (more like a voluntary survey than a census). For our congregation (City Centre) there were 77 households, for a total of about 130 people, who participated. I found some things interesting:

-Our congregation has a fairly even distribution of different age groups, from newborns right up to age 65, after which it drops sharply. Maybe Amsterdam is not a popular place to retire? One reason I started going to Christ Church was that it represented a wider demographic than the church I'd been attending before (which was comprised mostly of people between 20 and 35). And it does have a wider demographic. But it doesn't have all that many retired people.

-25 nationalities are represented, from every (inhabited) continent except, for some reason, South America. The Dutch make up 45% of the congregation, by far the best-represented single nationality (the closest runner-up are the English with 15%). This always strikes me as a little funny, all these Dutch people in an Anglican church in Holland.

-not many people (6%) came from "unchurched" to our church. Most came from some other church, 29% have "always" been Anglican/Episcopalian.

-60% live less than 5 Kilometers from church, which I guess is normal for an inner city church. Only 14% come by car, 40% by bike, the remaining 46% on foot or by public transport.

-It's a bit of a transient church. Only 32% have been coming for over a decade. 25% joined the church less than a year ago. 33% expect to have moved away from the Netherlands within the next five years.

-No gender breakdown was included, but I suspect the women slightly outnumber the men.

So there it is. Our "average" church member is an adult of working age, long-time familiarity with Christianity, Caucasian European (though we are a colorful bunch), not a permanent resident of Amsterdam but currently lives in or near the city core, and if she has a car she doesn't use it to get to church.

I could have told you some of these things, but it's good to have vaguely scientific-looking statistics backing up a general impression.

The Invention of Lying

2010-04-13T00:20:00.004+02:00

The film "The Invention of Lying" takes place in a world like ours except that nobody is able to lie, or even to imagine what it's like to say something that isn't true. It would obviously take forever to analyze to what extent life would be different under such circumstances, but they come up with a few clever examples, from advertising ("Coke. It's very famous.") to entertainment (all movies and TV shows are filmed lectures about historical events) to the euphemisms we employ on a daily basis ("Nursing home" becomes "A Sad Place For Hopeless Old People").

Ricky Gervais plays the only man in this world to develop the ability to lie. This gives the movie a further chance to explore such a world, by showing how people who have never encountered fabrication will react with absolute credulity to the most obvious and outrageous lies. He becomes a millionnaire almost overnight due to his ability to manipulate this system.

When Gervais tries to comfort his dying mother by describing a beautiful afterlife in which everybody gets their own mansion, it gives the film the opportunity to explore questions pertaining to religion: are we better off with a ficticious hope than with no hope at all? Does a belief in eternity make better people of us? Can faith even be conveyed in a context of literal truth? (Gervais tells people about a "Man in the sky" which evokes questions like "What race is he?" and "in what layer of the atmosphere does he live?")

All of this sets a very high bar for a movie, but ultimately it fails to meet it. For one thing, there are too many nuances around "absolute truth telling". Much of the dialogue confuses "unable to lie" with "unable to keep my thoughts to myself", as if truthfulness is the same thing as saying out loud whatever happens to be going through your head. Also, while the film takes awkward steps to show that even people who don't lie may be mistaken, it then backpedals into a world where you will be believed even if what you say may be based on an erroneous observation. It does not address whether a race of truth-tellers could still have delusional people in it, and whether they would serve as an example of someone who says something you don't need to believe. Also, the society moves a little too fast from "Atheism" to "organized religion". Lastly, it doesn't help that the central love interest (Jennifer Garner) is really quite selfish, Gervais' praises to her personality notwithstanding.

In spite of this, I like the film's ambition, and I wish that more movies had that kind of daring creativity. Above all, I like the questions it poses, and what we can learn about ourselves and our cultures as we try to answer them. How do we respond to a world where people actually say things like "Yes, that dress makes you look fat" or "I'm doing terrible, thanks for asking"? Maybe it's because I'm German, but I would really enjoy being allowed to say such things. In our world, one of the problems with telling the truth is that it gets us into complications. If someone asks how you're doing, you say "fine" because if you said "Well, I'm working up the courage to kill myself" that would make for something much longer and more awkward than a simple greeting. But what if we could give, and receive, honest answers without starting a quarrel, confrontation and/or therapy session right away? What if we could learn to take the truthful answer in stride just as much as the "expected" one? I'd love that.

Meanwhile, others respond to the film differently, talking about what a grey world it would be if our faculty for creativity and fabrication did not exist, or had no outlet -- a world without "fiction" shelves in the library. But to me, fiction literature is not the same as "fabrication" (no one calls Jesus a liar for having talked in parables).

One more: the view that religion is there mostly to "give people hope" -- in other words, that it's better to be tricked into believing something that's not true but that makes your life more meaningful than to live in full knowledge of the harsh reality. I encounter that again and again, and it makes no sense to me. I say (and I'm a "religious" man myself) that our search for truth is more worthwhile than our search for a comforting fiction.

How about you? How do you feel about a world without lies? In what contexts do you think the truth should be hidden?

Impressions of Poverty in Paraguay, Part IV: collision of cultures

2010-03-30T05:31:00.000+02:00

In my previous post I noted how the customs that keep a culture alive may actually be harmful for it if it is supplanted into a different environment. And this is what happens when cultures collide.

Cultures collide all the time. It can't be avoided. I don't even think that it SHOULD be avoided, at least not at any cost.

I can understand, though, the idea that we should try to "preserve" cultures, the feeling of loss and tragedy when a whole lifestyle goes extinct. On the other hand, not much can really be done. Even the passage of time does it: our grandparents lived a lifestyle that we can barely relate to, and our own current lifestyle will go out of existence within our lifetime. Even the idea of "nature people" having lived that way for centuries is probably inaccurate -- there are evidences that the "primitive" tribes we observe are not the remnants of stone-age people, but the disintegrated remains from previous civilizations.

Cultures change. But cultures change with particular violence when they collide with other cultures. And when this happens, there are always surprises. I think you'd need to be a prophet in order to predict HOW the different values will collide. The elements of the cultures will combine in unexpected ways.

I mentioned last time that a hunter-gatherer may become technology savvy long before he is able to make a paycheck last until the end of the week. This strikes many of us as surprising -- would we have guessed that it can take generations to go from "opportunist" to "planner", while it only takes a few months to go from "smoke signals" to "cell phone"? We can't always predict how deeply entrenched a certain habit is.

If we allow some reflection, this observation might do something else to us: it may sow a seed of doubt in our minds as to how many things we do, as part of our culture, that are a memory of a time when they had practical value. For example, take the capitalist idea of "consuming" in order to keep the economy going. Perhaps there was a time when expansionism made sense -- when a constant economic growth was not only possible, but was the best thing that could happen for society. Some patterns of poverty were broken out of, and new technology was developed which eventually let people live longer lives with more possibilities. But this was before there was a serious threat of running out of resources. But now? Many resources are at their limit, in fact many have been destroyed beyond the limit (think of the species going extinct EVERY DAY). And yet, economic growth is still being fed to us as a necessity, as if we're stuck on a way of doing things long after the context in which they made any sense has disappeared.

(Parenthesis: I talk to people all the time who don't see the problem with economic growth, because they still believe that we are miles away from reaching the limit. They do have a few arguments in their favor -- especially that a lot of resource depletion is happening independently of economic need -- but what I can't understand is how so many of them fail to see that we WILL reach the limits sometime, and might as well start thinking creatively, while there's still time, about how to survive without overconsuming.)

So now, imagine the consumerism that currently drives the global economy colliding with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. You may predict something along the lines of, "if you can get people to want something more than just survival, they'll work harder (production) in order to be able to buy it (consumption), and thus the economy will start rolling." You may think the challenge will be to get these happy people to desire a more complex life with more "stuff."

But in general, greed gets fired up easily in a human being. You can make a content "savage" start coveting something because it's nice, or useful, or unique, or impressive, or entertaining. But for capitalism to work, this desire has to be turned into an ethic of work and ambition. The ambition part often doesn't work, though -- anyone can be taught to covet shiny objects, but that doesn't mean you can tempt them to want all the hassles that come with being in charge of some large company or whatever.

And the work ethic is a problem too. A hunter-gatherer, for example, has never observed a causal link between working harder and having more. Sure you do some work to survive, but to have "something others don't have" (such as the bottle in "The Gods Must Be Crazy") has never been achieved by working HARDER.

So what I have observed in Paraguay was that the Latin American culture has been strongly encouraged by their northern neighbors to want to have more and spend more. But both of the major cultural components of Paraguayan culture -- the Spanish conquistadores and the Indigenous tribes -- had been opportunists. Europe and America has been built up in very great part by a millenium-old work ethic that is foreign to the thought process of an opportunist culture. The average Paraguayan sees someone get rich, and his immediate thought process goes towards the question "how did that guy rip us off to get what he has now?" His mind makes no connection between such things as hard work and honesty on the one hand, and wealth on the other. And it becomes a self-propelling cycle: people get rich by opportunism, the rich determine how the system works, the system works in such a way as to reward the opportunists, and many of the most honest, hard-working laborers end up staying poor. No wonder, then, that the causal link between "hard work" and "prosperity" is still not seen. No wonder that Paraguay scores high in corruption statistics: everything you see says "work won't get you there, but dishonesty will".

This is, of course, grossly oversimplified. I also know I'm sort of making the same point as last time: that there are patterns that engrave themselves in your mind and continue directing your actions even after the situation in which those patterns would have been relevant or beneficial has changed. But my point this time around has to do not just with the change in a culture, but the collision between cultures.

This is very difficult to talk about without sounding racist, or at least politically incorrect. For example, if I talk about "western civilization" colliding with "indigenous hunter-gatherer lifestyles" the difficulty already begins with me having to put quotes around the terms for fear of them being inaccurate or offensive. The difficulty immediately continues because I have a bias of my own, and I will judge a culture based on my set of values. That doesn't always mean I'll consider my own culture GOOD (many Germans find the relaxed pace of life in the tropics refreshing), but it does mean that I have no way of judging how objective my standpoint is.

Ortega y Gasset believed that many cultures' norms of "politeness" were determined by the population density of the society, pointing out the amount of ceremony with which people interact in the Far East, and how they consider us barbarians because we (naturally) act like we have a lot more elbow room. I'm not sure if he's right, but certainly it would first require a definition of "politeness". East Asian cultures certainly consider us impolite with our disregard for helping the "other" to "save face", but we Westerners are occasionally astounded by the nonchalance with which these cultures overstep our rules of decorum (as how they deal with, for example, bodily functions). It isn't that one culture is polite and the other is impolite, it's that the two have different standards of what constitutes "politeness". Most of us have learned to talk that way -- "just because others do it differently doesn't mean their way is wrong" -- but in the actual interaction with another culture we will find constant differences that stress us out because what we FEEL is that our way is actually the one that makes sense.

The difficulty is compounded by how easy it is to go to either a complete egalitarianist view of cultural differences ("all cultures are good as is") or an extreme "good-bad" dichotomy ("there is a good culture and an evil one"). Movies like "The Gods Must Be Crazy" and "Avatar" fall into the latter category by idealizing earth cultures (which, rest assured, do not and never did exist in such an ideal state), while questioning "progress". Meanwhile the mainstream of today's culture still values (and sometimes idealizes) "civilization" (which, I'm sorry to say, will never bring about a millenial reign of peace either).

But is it better when we say "EVERY culture is good"? Certainly if what we mean is that "no culture should change", we encounter similar problems. No matter WHICH standard you use (even the one held by the culture itself) you will always find that there are things that "don't work out like they should". You will find that one of the reasons that cultures change is because, deep down, they are all collectively aware that they NEED to change.

Most of the nomadic indigenous tribes in western Paraguay lived violent lives. Infanticide and euthanasia were practiced routinely as a way to keep the group small and mobile enough to survive, but murder was also "part of the culture". Some tribal religions did not believe in a "natural" death: if your brother got sick and died, it was because someone else had put a curse on him; your duty was to find this someone and kill him or her. Even having a bad dream about somebody was a reasonable cause to murder said person. Then it was the duty of his/her next of kin to hunt you down and kill you and avenge the bloodshed.

One tribe, the Ayoreos, were the more "enlightened" ones, in the 19th-century European use of that word. They were complete materialists, believing in no gods, spirits, afterlife, curses, etc. And they were the most violent ones, wiping out other tribes who were in their way and practicing an efficient social darwinism in which not only the unwanted babies and the infirm elderly, not only personal enemies or unfaithful spouses, but even "social problem people" like widows or orphans were simply put to death so the tribe wouldn't have to deal with the inconvenience.

It gets very tricky to look at this and say, "well who am I to bring my personal ethical views to this culture? I'm not gonna preach at them to change their ways, they're happy as is." Even if you really believe that they are happy as is, you can only afford to hold that view as long as the culture is completely isolated and you can watch them with the detachment of a scientist. Once you interact, however, once your cultures start merging, you will have to start wondering if it is only your own ethnocentrism which says, "I don't want to live in an environment in which killing one another is the go-to way of dealing with inconveniences." And your resistance to that element of their culture will be one of the forces that determines how the new culture that arises out of the mix of these two will look.

But this is difficult to say without being ethnocentric. When I see how the collisions of different cultures have caused a mess in so many places of the world, I get these utopian ideas of what kind of elements should be taken from which culture in order to produce the "perfect mix". But these ideas spring out of my own set of values, and also out of my own lack of imagination. When I see what the corrupt society is doing to a country like Paraguay, I can blame western consumerism or I can blame a non-integrated remnant of opportunist culture for it. But either way, I'm bringing my own ideas into the equation, based on what I have seen or studied, rather than allowing for the possibility that civilized life could work and look quite different than anything I have yet experienced or imagined -- it's not that the "natives" need to adapt to the "west"'s way of doing things, or that the "west" needs to adapt. It is that something new arises out of the combination. I benefit more from observing what does in fact happen than from theorizing about what SHOULD happen.

Impressions of Poverty in Paraguay, Part III: hunting and gathering

2010-03-16T01:42:00.003+01:00

Even though Che Guevara liked to see Latin Americans as one solidary entity, there are obviously differences in culture and ethnic heritage from one country to the next. For one thing, the indigenous people of, say, the Andes were and are a very different culture from the ones in, for example, the Amazon basin. Then the many waves of outsiders, from Spanish conquistadores to African slaves to migrants from Europe and Asia, did not spread uniformly or with similar purposes. And, of course, the politics have had their regional differences for centuries. Thus even though there is definitely such a thing as "Latin American culture", the mix is different from one country to the next.

To get a view of Paraguayan culture, one should at least take a look at how it was merged from 1. the indigenous groups, and 2. the Spanish conquistadores.

I don't know if I'm gonna get much into the conquistadores. But I will say this: in western Paraguay anyway, the indigenous groups were (in some cases until very recently) hunter-gatherers. When you're a hunter-gatherer, you need a completely different set of instincts and priorities than when you're part of a "higher" civilization.

For example, the instinct to "hoard" is mostly absent. If you spear a wild boar today, you eat it now and you don't save it for next week. This makes complete sense, and no indigenous tribe would have survived very long if they had tried it differently.

The difficulty comes when conditions change. When hunter-gatherers join 21st-century society, suddenly the values that were essential for their survival in the wild become hindrances. We think that "primitive" people are blown away by technology or whatnot, but usually that's not the case. An Ayoreo Indian from the Gran Chaco can become cell-phone-savvy just as fast as any of us (if you make allowances for literacy, etc.). What he finds way more challenging, even many generations after having moved out of the jungle, is making a paycheck last until the end of the week. His immediate reaction to this problem, and the reaction of many outsiders, may be something along the lines of "make the paycheck bigger." But where the hoarding instinct is absent, even a big paycheck will still disappear long before the next one arrives.

True story: one of the farm hands on my uncle's dairy farm got his weekly paycheck and went and bought the most expensive cell phone it could get him. By the weekend, he realized that he needed to buy school supplies for his children and a bus ticket for his wife to visit her mother in the next city. But he had no money left. So he sold his new cell phone at a fraction of the original price in order to pay for these things. The next week he got another paycheck and went and bought another new, expensive cell phone.

There is a definite survival art present in this sort of approach to life, but it is no wonder that it never leads to wealth. And many of the behavior patterns I observed during my visit in Paraguay were exactly this sort of thing: an instinct that is useful or even crucial for survival in the wilderness becomes an instinct that leads to poverty in 21st-century society.

Another example: One of my favorite movies, "The Gods Must Be Crazy", shows what happens if something unique and irreplaceable falls into the hands of a hunter-gatherer society. It simply isn't equipped to deal with that. Here are the relevant bits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2IxsfUpBck
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN3EecB9fGM

Could it be accidental that this movie features a Coke bottle as the catalyst for strife in the Bushman community? Coca Cola is an apt archetype for the values of western economy, and the appearance of a single bottle shows on a small scale what happens worldwide as cultures are confronted with the realities of our global economy.

But the point I'm making here is that nature people live simple lives with simple tools. Because of this, you'd think that they'd have a hard time understanding modern technology, but the interesting thing is that understanding it isn't nearly so difficult as finding an appropriate ATTITUDE toward it (even we who grew up with it are far from certain that we have the answers to that one). We may be surprised at the speed with which a native can learn how to ride and fix a motorcycle, and we may say that he's making good progress. But then we see that he never cleans the machine, never gives it an oil change, and just generally abuses it even though he has the know-how to keep it in good shape. He'll have run it to the ground and will be spending a great deal of money on another one long before this one would have needed to expire if taken care of. In the end, a lot of poverty in developing countries is caused by things not lasting as long as they could. This, again, shows a hunter-gatherer instinct which is actually useful in the wild: there, you need to be an opportunist rather than a long-term planner to survive. Even the reflection that "I might still be wanting to use this thing three years from now" is an example of the sort of long-term planning that a hunter-gatherer never has to do and therefore may not develop the capacity of doing.

So could the patterns of poverty that I observed during my vacation in Paraguay be simply the results of a cultural transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyle to full-fledged "civilization"? I'm pretty sure that's not all there is to it, but I think it could explain a lot. The part that used to be mysterious to me, the part that is mysterious to many people and in fact causes much tension between races in many parts of the world, is the question of whether such a transition can still be said to be "in progress" so many generations after a culture has been supplanted.

But I believe that even this can be accounted for. There are cultural aspects that we adapt to quickly, but then there are those that run very deeply in our veins, that even we cannot identify or anticipate. These remain with us for generations. In your own country you can observe the differences in culture between people with different ethnic backgrounds, even if they have been living side by side for over a hundred years.

Some of my relatives who work with Paraguayan indigenous groups are frustrated by the lack of progress that they show; how, generations after leaving the hunter-gatherer lifestyle behind, they still throw so much money out the window by blowing the paycheck on a fancy cell phone on Day 1 and then selling the newly acquired cell phone at a huge loss on Day 3, and then still blame their predicament on "those darn rich Europeans". But the fact is, some cultural transitions do take many generations. Our own hunter-gatherer roots took millenia to break out of.

If you ignore this, you just might become racist. I would say that impatience is actually one of the primary causes of racism that I have observed. In North America, for example, I hear people talking about the First Nations people, or about African Americans, in "MOVE ON" terminology: "sure the White Man was mean to your ancestors, but come on, that's very very long ago, long before you and I were born, you no longer have any excuse to spend your whole life sulking in your ghetto or your reservation, doing drugs and getting involved in crime." We want everything to be OK after an allotted time has passed. But the problem is that we don't get to determine how much time is needed for healing to happen. We need to be patient. We are bearing more of our forefathers' burdens than we realize, and need to allow for other cultures to do the same.

Impressions of Poverty in Paraguay, Part II: oppression from beneath?

2010-03-10T03:36:00.007+01:00

I mentioned last time that my visit to Paraguay struck me with the idea of oppression by the poor. It is risky to add to the already considerable burden of a poor population the accusation that they are also oppressors, so I´ll start by saying this: we must not condemn this too harshly, because the way of life makes perfect sense when you consider how the culture was formed. I´ll explain that part in a later post (I have a bad habit of blogging about topics I can't possibly cover in one or two entries).

Concepts like "equilibrium of poverty" and "accomodation of poverty" refer to the observation that mass poverty is very difficult to break out of because it is self-perpetuating. One example is that when a family in a poor rural community in some third-world country starts doing better, the family generally grows in number because better nutrition makes for higher fertility and a better chance of survival. However, a family with more members now also NEEDS more money, so the net gain does not increase substantially.

There is another way in which these concepts work out, and that can be easily observed in Latin American culture: If someone rises a little bit above his peers, it is THEY who will keep him down. In other words, the poor communities are often kept poor through the internal pressure of the poor community rather than the external pressure of rich oppressors or whatnot.

Someone who´s used to the individualistic "get ahead" lifestyle of a capitalist society is frequently baffled by the lack of initiative he will find here. He tries to motivate a native worker by offering him higher pay, and is then disappointed that the worker will be LESS motivated (show up late, leave early, and generally work less). This is partly due to the belief that the more money you make, the less work you have to do (money and leisure are portrayed as going hand in hand in our success stories), but also has to do with the (for some people unfathomable) fact that the guy doesn´t WANT more money, or at least not at the cost of working more for it. This is not some idealized utopian Na´vi society thing either: it is the very practical consideration that once he´s the richest guy in town, his friends and relations will be lining up around the block to share in his wealth. Not only would he lose the money he´s making, but he´d also lose his relationship with the people because he´d become their local money machine. He starts resenting them because they profit from his labor, and they start resenting him because they assume that now that he makes more he considers himself more important than them.

This pressure towards conformity is very great. It is hard for an outsider to imagine it. The capitalist idea that "he who works more should have more" is foreign to a culture that is only a few generations away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Their thinking is, "why should the other guy have more? He should give some to me!"

This attitude translates to all levels of society. Obviously, where justice can be bought, the ones who get the really raw deal are those who have no money to buy it with, which means that the poor do get oppressed. But in general what is easiest to observe is how every social layer tries to get something from the one that is ABOVE it -- from the poor guy stealing his neighbor´s TV because, you know, "why should HE have television?" to the government official putting foreign aid money in his own pocket because "those rich countries have cash to spare.¨ And, human nature being what it is, everyone draws the conclusion that "those who have more than me owe me something" and therefore blame their poverty on "those oppressive rich people" who refuse to share the wealth. But it's rare to find someone who transfers the principle to say "those who have less than me should get something from me." Usually the only reason this is done is because of the social pressure from beneath, and not out of some concept of fair play.

This principle is so well accepted that it is consistently applied in all levels of law enforcement. For example, a housekeeper was found to be stealing things from her employers. When they discovered this, they reported her to the police. The police almost laughed. The attitude was, "what do you want us to do? You´re rich. You can afford to lose a few things. She´s poor, so she steals. If you don´t like that, you can fire her, but what do you want from US?"

Or say you´re driving a car with a broken headlight, and get pulled over by police. If you look well-dressed and, uh, Caucasian, they will charge you a large amount, possibly even threaten to jail you. Often this is done in hopes of receiving a bribe, but often just in the general line of duty. If you are well-to-do, you will pay the sum, or hire a lawyer, and certainly get that light repaired, and all these things keep the cash flow going. But if you are poor, they may well let you go. The thinking is, ¨this is a poor man, he already has so little, there´s nothing to get here, and we come across as heartless if we give him one more punishment.¨

In a way, this ¨Robin Hood¨ principle is somewhat humanitarian: the poor are spared complete destitution within a system that is otherwise not designed to help them. But in the end it keeps a society locked in patterns of poverty, fatalism, opportunism and corruption. When Justice is not truly blind, it doesn´t matter whom she favors, the whole society suffers, and when a society suffers, the poor generally suffer the most. When a government official pockets foreign aid money, he´s not sharing in the blessings of some rich European country, he´s robbing the poor in his own country for whom the money was intended. A poor man driving a car with a broken light is just as much a hazard to his life and the lives of others as a rich man driving a car with a broken light, but if he is allowed to get away with it he continues to be a hazard. A poor maid stealing from her rich employers not only strengthens existing stereotypes the rich may have about the poor, she may someday also steal from the policemen who, like her, refused to see it as criminal behavior. And rest assured that if you steal from a cop, he will suddenly judge you by different standards.

When dishonesty is so integrated in a society, you get punished for being honest. The cops are paid a low salary because it is practically expected of them to pad it with bribes. If you're a man of principles and refuse to bribe, you are put through a great hassle. Expensive purchases that are sold in instalments are generally hugely overpriced because no one seriously expects the buyer to pay instalments for ten months (even if that's in the contract), so the salesman makes sure that he gets the money back by the third instalment. If you're honest enough to try to pay off all instalments, you get seriously ripped off.

Someone wrote me after my last post that poverty makes people do desperate things, but here I'm not talking about people on the brink of starvation who are stealing a piece of bread. Paraguay's poverty is very moderate: you do see many nice cars and no one dies of starvation, so no one's SURVIVAL is really at stake. There is a mentality question, a cultural aspect, that needs to be understood here. As an outsider with my own culture and values I have a hard time seeing this objectively and considering it as an intriguingly different though equally valid form of fairness. I'm bigoted enough to reject a system if it depends on "weighted scales" to function properly. But I need to remember that I am observing a culture that is having to make even more rapid transitions than the rest of us (and we're all having to make rapid transitions these days, and we all have large areas of dishonesty in our own blind spots). These people are covering in 100 years the distance that it took us a few millenia to cover. This clash of cultures can be enriching, but it can also mix elements of the two -- even positive elements -- in very destructive ways. I'd explain, but this entry is long enough for now, so I'll leave it for next time.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Impressions of Poverty in Paraguay, Part I (general difficulties)

2010-03-08T20:12:00.005+01:00

I did promise to write some thoughts on what struck me about the economic climate this time as I visited Paraguay after 10 years of being gone from Latin America.

I do want to write about my thoughts, but I also want to warn you that they are just thoughts of a guy who is not an expert in any relevant field (such as economics or sociology), who does not approach the subject from an unbiased standpoint (although I would claim that few people do, and that at least I know I´m biased), and whose exposure this time around is limited to a month-long visit and various conversations, mostly with people I´m related to (again, that reinforces the aforementioned bias).

Another difficulty: It strikes me that here I´m dealing with cultural poverty, and when you talk about a culture, you´re invariably on a sensitive subject matter where it´s easy to get things wrong, and to hurt people even when you observe correctly. First of all, can you make generalizations such as ¨Japanese culture has a high standard of politeness"? "Japanese culture" isn´t a monolithic entity, and "politeness" isn´t a concept that all would define equally. It gets more tricky when it´s not so evident what the culture values, and you have to say things like ¨it SEEMS like Germans value punctuality a lot¨, and then of course when the observations you make aren´t positive, such as ¨in South African culture there doesn´t seem to be a high value placed on keeping your appointments¨. You can get around it by saying something like ¨Africans appear to value their relationships more than their dayplanners¨, which has the advantage of portraying relative priorities (instead of vague values) and sounding positive rather than condemnatory. Unfortunately it is still misleading, because in some other cultures your commitment to your friends is expressed precisely by your commitment to your dayplanner, and not by your disregard of it.

So when I say "Paraguay is a corrupt society", I may be making a statement that can be statistically verified, but immediately sets a judgmental tone. Also, HOW is Paraguay ¨corrupt¨? What standards do the "corruption surveys" go by, and who determines these standards?

I frequently experience people coming to South America from Europe or North America and immediately coming to conclusions about the nature of poverty. There are generally two theories: 1. if some people are poor, it´s because they don´t work as hard as those who are wealthier, and 2. if some people are poor, it´s because the wealthy are exploiting them. Then there´s other simple fixes, like "these people need to be educated" or "they just have no ambition" or whatever.

But the longer you actually stay, the more you have to admit that you keep seeing exceptions to these theories. There are people who work from morning til night and don´t get richer. There are wealthy people who give a lot of thought, energy and resources into helping the poor population, and all their labor seems thwarted by none other than the poor they are trying to help. It is not easy to level the blame consistently at somebody.

And what you´ll always find, if you´re looking, is the completely unexpected: this time, for example, I was baffled at how much you can see exploitation that is being done BY the poor.

Now I won´t deny that the world´s trade agreements and particularly the all-pervasive free-market dependence on consumerism have created a structure in which the poor are exploited by the rich.

Of all the explanations of poverty I have heard, the one that has the most resonance with my own observations in a culture like Latin America´s is the principle of an "equilibrium of poverty" or "accomodation of poverty" which I first found in the work of John Kenneth Galbraith. He says:

"The accommodation of poverty is the debilitating influence of poverty which destroys initiative, destroys energy, destroys the search for something better and, therefore, becomes self-perpetuating. No one knows exactly how important that is, but from my own observations, my own sense of the situation, it is something which one must accept."

(you can read the whole interview here.)

It´ll take me a few entries to talk about how you can observe this in practice.

2010-03-02T09:28:00.001+01:00

Almost three weeks ago I ended my blog entry with a promise to send another entry soon and share my thoughts about poverty in Latin America.

Well, weeks have gone by, and what thoughts I have on the topic do not really amount to a blog entry you'd like to read. Also, my internet access has been sporadic, and I've had plenty to do. And there would be plenty of other things to update about.

Mostly I've been visiting relatives in a Mennonite colony in the western part of Paraguay. My mother is the daughter of some of the original Mennonite settlers in Paraguay. She's one of ten children, most of whom got married and had kids (my 29 cousins). Now most of my cousins are also married with children. All in all, on the Neufeld's side of the family there's almost 150 of us, and most of these cousins, uncles, aunts, counsins-by-marriage and children-of-cousins live here in Paraguay. I don't see them much, so there's much catching up to do.

It is very interesting to visit family, particularly when the family is as large and (we think) distinctive as ours. The most unlikely moments are met with a "That's so typical of Neufeld's" comment when I'm with extended family. I'm not sure how much is really a family trait and how much is just generally or coincidentally attributed to our blood. But the kinship on some level is undeniable, and it is good to be surrounded by kin, especially since here it comes in such quantity and in so much variety.

Practically all my relatives here own land and cattle, but none are really "ranchers" any more (here, cattle are a form of financial security, sort of like other types of "stock"). They work as teachers, administrators, veterinarians, nurses, physiotherapists, and so forth, and many are involved in ministry work (pastoral, missionary, etc.).

What strikes me as I hang out with them (I've drunk more terere and eaten more steaks in this past week than cumulatively in the last several years) is how much knowledge they have about things that I have no idea about. As they talk about their weekly routine I hear about repairing a tractor, putting together a semester syllabus, vaccinating a cow, negotiating with government officials about economic laws, visiting social projects for various indigenous groups, irrigating a new plot of land, reforming the colony's co-operative system, and many other things I can't really join in the conversation with. I feel like such a city slicker, but I also feel that "my" world is a lot simpler -- that I need a lot less brainpower to function in Amsterdam than they need to function out here.

It is a good time here.

Paraguay after 10 years.

2010-02-12T17:22:00.007+01:00

I´m in Paraguay, for the first time in 10 years. During my childhood and youth I´d visit this country sporadically (I have many relatives here) but this has been my longest absence so far. In fact, I haven´t been on this CONTINENT for ten years.

And sure enough, I got sick right away. I assume it´s the water, or maybe that plus the pretty significant climate change plus the disrupted sleep patterns from the flight and whatnot. But I´m better now.

One of the strange things when you see someone or something after a long time is not what you´ve forgotten, not what´s changed, but what you remember but weren´t consciously remembering coming in.

Like, it´s not that I´ve FORGOTTEN what it´s like. And it´s not that it´s changed much. It´s just that I´m remembering that I know these things.

The first thing you usually notice about a new place is how people drive. And sure enough, even though Amsterdam is already liberal with traffic laws, the chaos here is on a completely different level.

Also, the heat is paralyzing. The general amount of dirt, noise, pollution and poor maintenance is great. I knew these things, I was prepared for them, and yet they strike me again now that they constitute the reality around me. Like, it´s one thing to pack all my shorts and T-shirts in Amsterdam preparing for 40+ C weather, but the heat has a different reality when I´m trying to sleep and the air conditioning is broken.

The beauty. The sheer volume of tropical vegetation (coming in for a landing over Asunción, the city beneath you looks a bit like a park or like a green suburb). The quaint architectural ideas.

The rhythm of life. The types of people you see and the sorts of things you see them doing. Everyone seems to have a lot of time on their hands, no one is in too much of a hurry, and everyone seems to be suffering a bit from the heat. You don´t see the dissatisfied racing around that passes for "goal-oriented ambition" in some of our more developed countries. Here things generally "happen" in the evenings and early mornings, the bulk of the day is used for trying to find what shelter from the heat you can. Of course most offices, banks, shopping centers, etc. have air conditioning, so you can work more "normally". I actually find this to be a bit of a pity, because it seems unnatural for this environment.

The little things, like how you socialize under a tree with a horn full of yerba mate, and how when you put your plate down you´ll have ants all over it in a few minutes.

And of course the poverty. There´s not a whole lot of ABJECT poverty, no starvation, but still, I feel very priviledged for the options I have in life. And indirectly you can feel the corruption, the crime rate, the view towards foreigners.

That´s another blog entry, coming soon.

Answer: The Big Lebowski

2010-01-21T06:43:00.001+01:00

Question: if you had to watch one movie every evening for a whole summer, which one would it be?

(runner-up: The Gods Must be Crazy)

ONE ARTIST: Leonard Cohen

2010-01-20T00:12:00.002+01:00

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 10 people or more (if you have time and want to do this) and include me. Try not to repeat a song title. Enjoy!

Pick Your Artist: LEONARD COHEN
Are you male or female: I'M YOUR MAN
Describe yourself: YOU KNOW WHO I AM
How do you feel about yourself: BIRD ON A WIRE
Describe where you currently live: BY THE RIVERS DARK
If you could go anywhere you wanted to go: HERE IT IS
Your favorite form of transportation: TACOMA TRAILER
Your best friend is: DEMOCRACY
Your favorite color is: EVERYBODY KNOWS
Favorite time of day: CLOSING TIME
If your life were a TV show, what would it be called: STORIES OF THE STREET
What is life to you: WAITING FOR THE MIRACLE
What's the most valuable thing you own: FAMOUS BLUE RAINCOAT
Something you would really like to do someday: SING ANOTHER SONG, BOYS
What is the best advice you have to give: TAKE THIS WALTZ
If you could change your name, what would it be: "AVALANCHE"
Thought for the Day: IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED?
How I would like to die: JAZZ POLICE
My soul's present condition: THERE IS A WAR
My motto: ONE OF US CANNOT BE WRONG

A dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God

2010-01-18T05:24:00.004+01:00

Hebrews 10 contains a dire warning against walking away from God which ends with the words:

"It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. "

Have you ever seen a cat play a mouse to death? If the cat isn't very hungry, it is not in any hurry to kill the mouse; it just wants to have some fun with it. So it pins it down and stands over it, apparently losing all interest in it as long as the mouse doesn't move. When the mouse does move, the cat's attention is immediately riveted back to it and it catches it, roughs it up a bit, and stands over it again waiting for it to move.

This has got to be terrible for the mouse, once it clues in to the pattern: you either lie motionless in horrifying proximity to the predator, and get left alone, or you make a dash for it and almost certainly get caught, pummeled around for a while, and eventually killed.

This is how many people picture our relationship with God, how I pictured it frequently and, I'll be honest with you, how I often still picture it. As long as we're walking close to God, we're "under His radar", as it were, and His focus stays away from us until He sees us trying to get away. It is a bit of a paradox that by walking away we risk falling into His hands, and by staying close we don't. It reminds me of the old saying to "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

But how is this going to help my walk with God? Sure it'll make me terrified of drifting too far, but only because it will make me generally terrified. Being generally terrified might be a good condition for unquestioning obedience, but this gets tricky if the command you're trying to obey is to love God, because being generally terrified is usually not the best condition in which to learn about love. I have trouble enough following the Greatest Commandment; as far as I can tell, I haven't even learned to love God with PART of my heart, mind, soul and strength, let alone with ALL of it. And now you tell me how terrible it is to fall into His hands, sure that might make me respect Him more and take care not to overstep His boundaries, but will that make me LOVE Him? In psychology, a love of that nature might be called "Stockholm Syndrome".

A few years ago that verse from Hebrews 10 took on a new meaning for me. It wasn't so much that it would be a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God who's out to punish me, but that I had ALREADY put my life in God's hands, and could expect the experience to be terrible.

And in many ways it has been. I'm in the hands of God, and He's making a Saint out of me, and let me tell you, that's a HUGE distance from what I am now, which means it's gonna be a lot of painful work. It's not a fun process. It's no accident that the Bible keeps talking about death, and crucifixion, and all these other nasty things, in connection with our salvation.

People always tell me about Job, and how he lost everything and still didn't curse God. But I've come to realize something: I'm not Job. God showed off before Satan with Job, saying that there was no one else like him in the world. I do not have that kind of righteousness. I complain before God over trifles like being unable to sleep. I realize that I should try to be like Job, but I'm not. And maybe I can eventually aspire to that kind of faith, but for now I might need a role model who's actually realistic.

But that's not where the real pain is. The real pain is in the knowledge of how much still has to change in me, how painful that change will be (it will, and this is no exaggeration, involve DEATH over and over again), and that God is so very relentless in His demand to make me perfect. I've long ago realized that God is not making this demand on me; He's making it on Himself. As far as I can tell, I now have (I'll just go ahead and offend some theological views here) extremely little influence on all this, just like clay doesn't have much of a say in what the potter makes of it. Except that, in our case, the clay is sentient and has to put up with all the pain involved in the process of becoming beautiful.

I realize it's poor exegesis to interpret Hebrews 10 this way, but that is currently the best way I can understand it.

During my 2007 pilgrimage through Spain, walking became a total pain in the muscles, joints, feet, back, etc.. There were days when I winced and cursed with every step I took. But as the two Swedish pilgrims that I joined up with for the last few days always said, "No pain, no glory."

Possibly my main impediment is that I'd really settle for that kind of life. A life of no pain and no glory. It sounds beautiful to me, almost as beautiful as falling asleep forever, but I know somehow that this is a bad thing, and that God won't have any of it. But He's not gonna just extract that like you tear out a hair or even a tooth. He's gotta put me through a whole process of dying, He's gotta kill the guy who wants no pain and no glory, and resurrect me as someone who is, in a way, thirsty for both, or at any rate thirsty enough for glory that he'll take any amount of pain that it may cost. If I had the necessary faith, I'd be genuinely convinced that what God has for me will be worth all that, but even for that little bit of faith I am fully reliant on God, who first has to extract my doubts and fears (you guessed it, more death processes).

But there may be the small beginnings of a seed already. I do have fond memories of the pilgrimage, even though I know that there were days of screaming pain. But here's a naughty little secret that often makes it bearable for me: the positive memories outweigh the negative ones even though I didn't shoulder the pain as heroically as Job did. And even Job wasn't able to be like Job all the way through. It's not all about being a hero. It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, and we might as well admit that instead of being all macho posturing about how blessed we are. I might someday be embarrassed about having been so sensitive to the pain and having complained so much about it; but the fact that I'm currently not bearing it very well is not going to stop God from ultimately making me perfect anyway.

Though not in this life, of course.

Rehabilitating inspirational stories: the deer and the obstacle

2010-01-12T20:11:00.003+01:00

I once mentioned the story of the elephant and the sapling to a friend, and he immediately said something like,

"Of course. That's a standard story you hear from every motivational speaker. That and the story about how deer won't jump over something unless they can see what's on the other side of it."

To be fair, I don't know the full story of the deer and jumping over obstacles. I'm just assuming that the story is something like "don't be a deer. A deer won't jump over a fallen tree unless it can see what's on the other side. And so many people are just like that deer, they're trapped in their little world because they're afraid to jump into the unknown." I mean, that would be what our stereotypical "motivational speaker" would be saying, right?

But this leaves out an important detail: why should a deer jump over an obstacle if it can't see the other side? Sure, if it's being chased by wolves, there might be a good reason. But otherwise? Part of the reason that deer haven't gone extinct is because large fallen trees in the middle of the woods don't make them go, "hey, who knows what's on the other side? I guess the only way to find out is to just jump right over." Because on the other side there is probably just more of the same of what is on this side. But this is just the most harmless, and most likely, scenario. There could also be:

-a rattlesnake
-a deep hole or precipice
-sharp rocks
-briars
-quicksand
-etc.

There used to be a "cardinal virtue" called "prudence". Prudence is, as far as I can tell, not considered very sexy. It is usually associated with drab, unspontaneous people who live dull lives because they don't want to take any risks. The irony is that I can't really tell what society values more: on the one hand most people in our culture have boring cubicle lives with two-week annual vacations and dozens of insurance policies and other predictable aspects; on the other hand, no one seems to WANT to live like that. Everyone's always TALKING about living dangerously. Practically every romantic comedy centers around the conflict between the "safe" option and the "risky" option, and the latter is usually presented as the more fulfilling, certainly the more romantic, of the two. What shall we judge our culture's values by: how safe we live, or how reckless we talk?

I say, if you can't see to the other side of an obstacle, don't jump unless you're being chased by wolves. Sure you'll find some millionaire entrepreneur who will tell you that at one point he gambled everything on one card, and won. But there's a reason it's called a gamble. Most gamblers lose. Our inner city homeless shelters are filled with people who gambled everything on one card. Any motivational speaker who is trying to turn you into a gambler is trying to make you ignore both the odds and the cost.

But I'm all about trying new things. And I'm here to encourage you to take another kind of gamble: it's the "nothing to lose except your pride" gamble. Put your pride on the line, what do you need it for anyway? People who say "at least I've got my pride" are usually people with boring, lonely, monotonous lives.

You won't believe how many people have a dream job that they never send an application to, a dream girl they don't ask out, or generally a dream they never take any steps to pursue. They want to be famous poets but never send any of their writing to a literary magazine. They want to be rock stars but won't sit down to record a demo. Or they have their demo but they won't send it to venues, radio stations and labels.

All these things feel like a big risk, like jumping over an obstacle you can't see across, but it isn't. It's really a "what can you lose?" situation. Because unless you're QUITTING your job on the off-chance of landing your dream job, you're not gambling anything REALLY. What you ARE doing, and the reason why it feels like a gamble, is you're making yourself vulnerable to the pain of rejection, disappointment and humiliation. That's a risk, of course, but it's not quite the same thing as jumping into the unknown.

fire, purification, destruction, growth, improvement, etc...

2010-01-11T15:40:00.004+01:00

The other night I had a discussion with two people about what John the Baptist might have meant when he predicted that Jesus would baptise people with "the Holy Spirit and with fire." One of my companions said that "fire" means "passion".

Now I generally consider "passion" to be a bit of a yuppie word, sort of a more dramatic way of saying that you have strong feelings about something. In the Bible and in the Church Fathers "passion" is usually used in a negative sense, as in "the passions of the flesh". The positive equivalent is "zeal", and has a less positive connotation today (fundamentalism and all...). So we can call it a linguistic alteration, that what got translated as "zeal" is what we today call "passion", and we can shake hands and say we're agreed.

But even as "zeal" or "passion", the image of fire is not so often used in the Bible. The one instance I can think of offhand is a verse in Jeremiah 20 where "fire" seems to be the torment you feel when you have a calling and are suppressing or avoiding it. I wouldn't know, but I suspect that this might be what people mean when they talk of having a "passion" for something.

Sometimes the Bible mentions fire in the context of light and warmth, more often to refer to the torment of extreme heat, but probably most frequently fire is used as an image of purification and destruction. Certainly in Matthew 3 (where we first encounter the words "baptism with fire") the word "fire" occurs several times, always in the context of destroying something impure (the chaff, the fruitless trees, etc.).

I tend to think of Jesus' "baptising with the Holy Spirit and with fire" as being the double process of planting a spiritual tree in me which bears spiritual fruit (baptism by the Holy Spirit) and of purging me from my impurities (baptism by fire).

A refiner's fire first makes the impurities visible (as a precious metal melts, the dross floats to the surface), and perhaps also destroys the impurities (again, the image of chaff being burned away).

Now, as I look on my life, I have to say that there is little evidence of this. If I compare myself with who I was in the past, I neither see much spiritual fruit having grown, nor do I see much of my "fleshly nature" being destroyed. As I was thinking of ways I might have improved over the years, only two things came to mind:

1. when I was around 12 years old, I told many lies. Sometimes they were fanciful stories I made up but "forgot" to mention that I was making them up, and sometimes they were lies to get me out of uncomfortable situations. Nowadays I can generally be counted on to tell the truth.
2. I think I have grown a little wiser, and a little less judgmental, as I have grown older.

But even this "progress" is relative. Maybe I don't lie any more because I've found more socially acceptable ways of entertaining people or worming out of uncomfortable situations. And maybe what I think of as "growing wiser and less judgmental" is simply what we call "pattern recognition". If you've lost a few fingers in rat traps, you know to stay away from them and to warn others to stay away from them (which is often construed as wisdom), and you are perhaps not so harsh with other people who have also lost a finger or two in a rat trap.

On the other hand, I have increased greatly in sins like anger, lust, despair, sloth, malice and hatred. I have made no visible progress against selfishness or ambition. And I have not come any closer to being more patient, loving, joyful, or self-controlled. In other words, the things that (according to Galatians 5) the Spirit is supposed to produce in me, aren't being produced, while the things that the fleshly nature produces are going full steam ahead.

What conclusions can we draw from this? I see three possibilities:

1. I'm not really living by the Spirit. I'm moving further away from God.
2. God's refining fire is bringing out the impurities and making them visible. This raises a question that experts still don't agree on: how do we know when the "change" we experience is simply a "revealing" of what was REALLY under the surface?
3. I'm in a skewed perspective. My own standards might be shifting all the time and I can't tell because of my vantage point. I may have had the same amount of hatred in me 20 years ago as I do now, I just wasn't calling it that.

We all know that it's easy to think of ourselves as "a patient person" as long as there's no infuriating, time-wasting attention-eater talking our ear off when we have other things that we need to be doing. When we do have that person around us and get impatient with him, it is perhaps the moment that we learn that we were never really PATIENT; we were just never in the presence of circumstances that showed us the limits of our patience. Or (to use an example I've often used) when we're learning to sail, we may think highly of our sailing skills because we're in a harbor with smooth waters and mild winds. When we are actually out at sea during a storm, wetting ourselves with fear, we find out that we are not really that skilled, we were just always in easy conditions. But without such experiences, we can never really become good sailors, either.

But obviously, feeling suddenly challenged with something can also mean that you're getting WORSE at it? What if you're impatient with someone who you never used to be impatient with? What if you're almost sinking your boat in weather that you used to cruise through with a smile and a song?

How can you tell the difference?

Packing

2010-01-07T01:18:00.001+01:00

A friend of mine is doing a project on people's packing habits, so I took part in her survey. If you feel inspired to put your own answers to these questions, feel free. If you also want to send them to me, I could forward them to her for her project.

-would you say you usually travel lightly, or do you usually bring lots of luggage with you?

More on the lighter side, always depending on who I compare myself to. For example, the only time I ever pack shoes is if there's gonna be a wedding or something like that. But I don't think I could ever go as far as my "travel light" friends who have only one or two shirts for three months of backpacking.

- do you consider yourself a skilled and/or experienced packer?

Experienced yes, skilled not particularly.

- how long before you leave do you usually start packing?

Start? 3-4 days. Really get moving with the packing process? one or two hours.

- how long does it usually take you to pack?

Yeah, see above answer. You could say 4 days, or you could say two hours, depending on whether you consider it "time taken to pack" if I haul out the suitcase and already throw a few T-shirts into it a few days before the trip.

- do you make a checklist when you pack your luggage?

Sometimes. Usually on the night before the trip, when I can't sleep because I know there will be some last-minute things I'll have to pack in the morning and I don't want to forget them.

- what do you usually pack first?

I think the basic clothes: socks, underwear, T-shirts, and pants (longer trip. 1 week or less I frequently just wear the same pants every day). ("Pants" being the American word, what the Brits call "trousers" and the Dutch call "broek". Not the British "pants" as in "onderbroek", I usually pack at least as many of those as there are days in my trip, unless I know I'll be doing laundry sometime during the trip.)

- top-5 (or random listing of 5, or more than 5) absolutely necessary items to take with you?

Apart from the obvious ones like clothes, travel document, toiletry bag, etc., I can't sleep well unless I have certain aids like ear plugs, some kind of blindfold (a shirt will do), an alarm clock (otherwise I obsess about will I wake up in time?), in some circumstances even some sleeping medication (necessary sometimes, but be careful how you use it) and a water bottle for when I'm thirsty in the middle of the night. No matter what kind of trip I'm making, if I forget one of these things I'll be angry when I'm unsuccessfully trying to sleep.

Also important: a list (preferably two copies in different locations) with information that I will need on this trip. Phone numbers and addresses of people I plan to visit, or that I might have to contact in an emergency. And, of course, currency. I've had bad experiences with having plenty of money, but in the wrong currency. And at airports they gouge you with their exchange rates.

- what do you always, always have with you in your carry on luggage when you fly / in your backpack when you run around for the day in a city?

camera, toiletry bag (incl. sleeping aids mentioned above), document, money... Actually, money and document I carry on my person, as in, pockets or money belt.

- what item(s) do you most often forget to take with you?

hmmm,.. probably water.

- what items do you usually bring with you but most of the time turn out to be useless / not necessary to bring?

This is sort of tricky: I usually bring a book and a journal, but most of the time I don't end up reading or writing much on a trip. HOWEVER sometimes I do read or write, and am thankful for having brought the book or journal. Same thing with my trenchcoat. The trenchcoat can be a blessing, because it doubles as a blanket if you need to, like, sleep on a bench or something, and you can put LOTS of stuff into its various large pockets (sometimes the it saves you from having to pack a suitcase at all, because it significantly increases the volume of your "carry-on" without having to fit the dimensions of standard carry-on luggage). Also, sometimes when you travel you feel vulnerable, and people are less likely to mess with you if you're wearing a trenchcoat. BUT it's also a big heavy beast to wear or carry around if, for example, the weather is hot. So sometimes my trenchcoat has been a good thing to have, and sometimes it's been an unnecessary burden.

- do you have a certain habit or system of arranging items in a certain way in your backpack and/or suitcase?

not really. I do have a camera bag in which I keep a camera, notebook, mp3 player, agenda, pens, etc. (a bit like what a woman has in her purse), and I often put that into the carry-on, at the very top so that I can access these things first.

- any brilliant advice on packing luggage in general?

Do pack your carry-on as if you were spending the night somewhere without the rest of your luggage, because that might well happen.

-(extra question, for the die-hards: would there be something (anything, from an object to a service) that would make traveling and/or packing easier / more fun for you?)

(This answer could also serve for the previous question) My dad has a small (again, purse-sized) bag in which he has all the necessities if he should need to spend the night somewhere. This is not just a toothbrush, but also spare socks and underwear, an alarm clock, a flashlight, etc. No sleeping bag, just a small bag with everything else. He keeps this bag somewhere in his closet and never messes with it unless he suddenly has to pack for something unplanned. He then throws this bag into his suitcase or backpack and knows that, whatever he forgets to pack, at least he has his necessities for one functional night somewhere. I need to make me a bag like that. It's not like someone has to invent something new or create a new service, because it's just up to me to put the thing together myself.

Tarnishing the New Year (recursive forgiveness)

2010-01-04T00:52:00.004+01:00

This year in particular, I've had a feeling of a new beginning with a clean slate. 2010 lies ahead of me like a new journal I haven't written in yet.

A new journal used to fill me with a feeling of potential. In my mind, it would someday be filled with beautiful poems and poignant short stories and witty aphorisms. Nowadays I'd just as soon leave it blank than soil it with ink stains conveying my oh-so-precious thoughts.

The new year feels a bit like that, with one important difference: I could, with some self-discipline, actually leave a journal blank. I can't leave this year blank. It's gonna roll over me, or I'm gonna roll over it, or whatever, and unless this is my year to get off this ball of dirt I'm gonna make a mess of this pristine new slate I'm looking at. It's like 2010 is a long white hallway that I have to walk through, and you've just dipped me in mud. And at the end I'll be sorry for having walked through it, because it looked so good before I dragged in all that dirt. But I have no choice.

Christianity teaches that God forgives, although Matthew 6 contains a horrific qualifier when Jesus implies that God only forgives us if we forgive others first. (I've heard a lot of interpretations on this, but it remains a mystery to me, and a hopeless trap if the sin I need deliverance from happens to be my inability to forgive someone.)

All in all, I think I don't believe very strongly in forgiveness. Or justification. Because if I believed in these things, I'd believe that God can keep, or make, that hallway clean no matter how muddy I am and how much I roll around on the floor and throw myself against the walls -- that He could keep it clean even if I brought a dozen gutter dogs to run down that hall with me. Christianity teaches that Jesus makes me clean, and not my own works (and with "my own works" I include "my own success at keeping from falling").

But man, maybe I just don't have that kind of faith. I've made a mess of myself so far, and make it worse with every coming year. I see no evidence that anything about me is getting better, and plenty of evidence that it's getting worse, and I wonder if "faith" means that I go on stubbornly believing things if the evidence is against them. Faith means accepting that I AM forgiven even though I don't FEEL forgiven, but usually I can't do that. (This proves again that I need to look to God to supply me with faith, because if it were my capacity for faith that could save me, I'd be a lost man.)

All this probably proves that I'm still a pharisee, defining my righteousness by how much I succeed at living up to some standard of conduct, rather than believing that Jesus lived up to it for me and trusting that this righteousness remains untarnished no matter how badly I mess up.

The closest I can get to understanding forgiveness at this point is to reflect that at least I'll keep getting a new hallway to drag mud into, rather than dragging layer after layer into the same hallway. Whatever happens in 2010, in a year's time I can say "good riddance" because I'll have 2011 before me like a pristine white page, and sure I'll mess that up again but I can keep tearing pages out after wrecking them, and I can keep starting on a blank page, and enjoying the blank page for that one moment before I start messing it up. Maybe the real artwork God makes with our lives has nothing to do with the things we scrawl into our journal; maybe He recycles the pages that we've thrown away and uses them for a beautiful papier-maché sculpture or something. Maybe that's why He keeps talking as if we'll receive more if we throw away more.

Rehabilitating inspirational stories: the Elephant and the sapling

2010-01-03T00:47:00.003+01:00

There are some stories you hear over and over again, and there's supposed to be some inspirational moral to them, but in the end they are little more than an attempt to keep you going. "Inspiration" is often a euphemism for "incentive to keep you pumping your energy into the rat race", analogous to some fodder or a sharp stick that will keep the ox working the mill.

I think someone needs to put these anecdotes into question, and who better than a jaded cynic like myself? I've already shared on this blog how an inspirational story told at my graduation left out the all-important question that would have made you draw the opposite conclusions from what the speaker intended:

http://marcoklaue.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-happened-to-prairie-chicken.html

Today I'll tackle that favorite of inspirational speakers everywhere: The Story Of The Elephant Tied To The Sapling.

You see, apparently (though I am too lazy to find a way of verifying this) elephant domesticators tether baby elephants to sapling trees, and because the elephant eventually accepts that the rope and the tree stop him from moving around, he won't try to break free even when he's an adult with four times the strength needed to break the rope or uproot the sapling.

Moral of the story: even if you've tried something a bunch of times and it didn't work, you should keep trying because maybe it will work someday.

My objection to this inspirational story: the elephant is not really bound by a tree and a rope, but by the intelligence of a human who has outwitted him. If the elephant were to spend his life trying to break free, his human captors would simply keep tying him with stronger ropes to bigger trees. The reason the system with the sapling works is because the elephant behaves in a certain way; if he were to behave differently, humans would find another system that works.

Moral of the story: if you're trapped, don't think that you can get out of the trap by trying again what you've unsuccessfully tried before, because even if your strength has increased, the conditions of your captivity can easily change to accommodate your difference in strength as well.

Someone once tried to impress on my mind how pathetic it looks for a full-grown elephant to be tethered to a puny little pole. But I'm considering how pathetic it would look to have an elephant that keeps trying to pull free, being tied with bigger ropes to bigger trees and still spending all his years pulling away at it and chafing his neck raw. I'm also considering what the heck he's gonna do if he ever breaks free, anyway. ? If we was captured as a little calf, will he even make it in the jungle, or enjoy it? Can he find it without leaving a wake of destruction? Isn't the most likely scenario that he'll be re-captured and tied to a big fat tree?

The big question is: which elephant is happiest? The one who has accepted that he's tied to a darn ol' tree, the one who keeps unsuccessfully trying to break free, or the one who successfully breaks free? (OK, so there's another question: how improbable can the "breaking free" option be and still make the "trying to break free" option worth pursuing?)

How you answer these questions will reveal a lot about what sort of promises you can be manipulated with.

What if...

2010-01-01T21:59:00.003+01:00

What if intelligent lifeforms from, say, another planet were given information about humanity in the form of a collection of every movie to have come out of Hollywood? And I mean what if that were their ONLY source of information? What would they believe about us?

The '00s: year by year.

2009-12-31T10:00:00.000+01:00

Here's another attempt to summarize the past decade: were there things that marked every individual year? The things I put in capitals are either definite highlights that are memorable enough to cast the rest of the year in a shadow, or they are conditions that shaped most aspects of my life during that year (such is particularly the case when they pertain to where I lived).

2000 - Various locations. THE YEAR OF PATAGONIA (new spaces for the soul), of England (actual "normal" work for once), of back to North America (new musical project in the oven)...

2001 - Canada. Back to school (part time for a visa requirement alibi), continued attempts at a chance to immigrate, joining a Street Evangelism team in Vancouver (which involved giving hot chocolate to homeless people, not standing on a soapbox to preach), doing a summer stint as a youth pastor in a Manitoba mining town (a challenge so far beyond my abilities that it's downright hilarious), moving in with Desmond and the guys in Coquitlam, getting more serious about working with a homeless mission in Vancouver.

2002 - Various locations. THE YEAR OF "THIRST" (finally finishing the musical project begun back in 2000), of continuing work in downtown Vancouver, of continuing part-time university courses, of my first hitch hike all the way across Canada, of a last-minute flight to Germany, of renewed attempts at setting foot in Europe and setting foot in a sort of music setting, of getting back into radio work and back into missions work.

2003 - Various locations. Trying to get established in a German missionary organization, returning to North America for my brother's wedding and my 10-year high school reunion, returning to Germany and sort of working at my local church and sort of working in radio.

2004. Germany and Netherlands. THE YEAR OF THE PSYCHO WOMAN ("borderline syndrome"), THE YEAR OF MY "CONVERSION EXPERIENCE" (the conversion itself was decades earlier; the "experience" took that long), the year of my move to Amsterdam, of my beginnings at the Shelter.

2005. Netherlands. THE YEAR OF THE SHELTER (living in the staff house).

2006. Netherlands. Working a "normal" job (cleaning hotels), renting a room in East Amsterdam.

2007. Netherlands, mostly. THE YEAR OF THE CAMINO DE SANTIAGO, also of visiting Grenoble and Taize, my first time in Spain, of my first visit to Portugal and Ukraine, of a paid position as a nightman at the Shelter, of a summer living in an awesome apartment on the Tweede Schinkelstraat, of a trip to Philadelphia for my childhood friend Rob Reich's wedding, of reuniting with some of the guys, of moving into the Oudezijds 100 community.

2008 Netherlands. THE YEAR OF LIVING IN THE VADERHUIS (the main building of the OZ100 community). Other than that, continuation of the nightman job and generally of the life I had had.

2009 Netherlands. THE FIRST FULL YEAR OF LIVING IN A SELF-CONTAINED APARTMENT OF MY OWN, EVER. Of course it only just doesn't count because my bathroom and shower are shared. In all other respects, possibly the least eventful year of all. I made two trips to England to hang out in an Anglican monastery in Yorkshire, but while these were rewarding times, they brought me no closer to an understanding of my vocation (which is what the point of these trips originally was). A definite highlight was the Amsterdam-Frankfurt-Amsterdam bike trip, particularly the stretch between Boppard and Wiesbaden, along the Rhine.

See you in 2010.

...and another decade is ending...

2009-12-29T23:39:00.001+01:00

In my time zone, it's the last half hour of my birthday. Since it also coincides with being pretty much the end of the year, I usually do some kind of retrospective at this point. But since in this case we're reaching the end of a DECADE (the '00s), I've been looking at what the last ten years have been for me. I obviously can't summarize it into a blog entry, so I asked myself what has been the greatest change during this decade. Who was I ten years ago vs. who am I now? And even though it takes an entire decade for such a development to take place, can I point out one or two events that have brought this change?

In many ways, I am something of the opposite of who I was ten years ago. To name just one (characteristic) example, I now celebrate wasting time while I used to scorn it. I celebrate all kinds of waste, in fact. Perhaps most central to my change in perspective has been understanding that God is wasteful in His way, and we (who are in His image) are not fully ourselves until we embrace that and start being wasteful (in similar ways) ourselves. I have found it particularly liberating to throw away so much of my "righteousness" which used to feel so important to me but which, in the sentiment of the Apostle Paul, I can now regard as (you guessed it) waste.

Ten years ago I was heading to Ecuador after a bleak year in Germany. I've talked a little bit about it in my 10-year retrospective on my ArtIFact album. My year in Germany (1998 - 1999) was characterized by a great deal of frustration. I had dreams for my life and I felt that they were rapidly slipping away from me, that I'd have to either become emotionally detached from them or throw myself with everything I had into making them come true.

The problem was, "everything I had" was not enough, and I usually knew it. The other problem was that I couldn't stick to one approach: I'd alternate furiously between trying to reconcile myself to my underachieving existence and trying to reach the stars with my megalomania.

But this was the decade in which I learned to embrace wasting things. Somewhere along the line I submitted myself to living an anonymous, underachieving, boring life. Maybe this is called "growing up" or maybe it's called "giving up" or maybe it depends on circumstances. In my case, it has certainly made me a less angry, less frustrated and more peaceful person. (The problem is, this is not much of a testimonial because I'm still angry, frustrated and tense).

In his book "Life on the Mississippi", Mark Twain tells about his experiences as a cub pilot on a riverboat. One bit that stuck with me was how he describes the first time the captain left him alone on the bridge. You can read the whole chapter here, but I'll just summarize: things went well at first, then he sees a reef and tries to steer clear of it, almost landing the steamboat on the riverbank. The captain comes and saves the boat, then asks what he was doing steering for the bank. Mark Twain mentions the reef and points at it, and the captain gives him the order to run the boat over it. And here is a significant line:

I was just as anxious to kill the boat, now, as I had been to save her before. I impressed my orders upon my memory, to be used at the inquest, and made a straight break for the reef. As it disappeared under our bows I held my breath; but we slid over it like oil.

The captain explains that this wasn't a bluff reef but a wind reef, a trick on the water surface that made it look like there was a reef beneath it. The other significant part is that when Mark Twain asks him how one can tell the difference, he replies,

'I can't tell you. It is an instinct. By and by you will just naturally KNOW one from the other, but you never will be able to explain why or how you know them apart'

At the center of this past decade was a spiritual experience that I can't really describe, but it had something of this anecdote in it. It was like I'd been avoiding something all my life because it looked dangerous, but when I steered right into it (a decision that was preceded by a sudden go-for-broke excitement, like in Mark Twain's story) it turned out to be nothing at all. And it actually (unlike Mark Twain's story) opened a whole new world -- a whole new way of being -- to me. Forgive the mystical language, I'm doing the best I can.

Of course there's still the challenge of differentiating "wind reefs" from "bluff reefs", which is what I've been thinking of ever since the excitement wore off. In many ways, I've only reversed my obsessions: where I used to be obsessed with remembering, I now want to forget. Where I used to be obsessed with action, I am now almost equally obsessed with inaction. I'm as anxious to "kill" the boat now as I had been to "save" her before. But she's sliding over it like oil. And the Captain is still in control.

Well, that's the short and somewhat ambiguous version of what's changed in this decade. It doesn't nearly do justice to all that has happened in ten years, but it's the best I can do for a blog entry of polite proportions.

10-Year-Old ArtIFact, Part 17: conclusions

2009-12-21T23:50:00.000+01:00

Starting back in February, I've been posting occasional notes reminiscing about my first album, "ArtIFact", because it's 10 years since I released it. I've been trying to finally finish this blasted series before the year is over, and now I'm stuck having to make some concluding remarks. I've written three drafts already, and I keep running into the problem of how to explain the aftermath. What I basically want to say is this:

1. ArtIFact was, as I was aware of the time, a beginning. My first songwriting efforts, my first studio album, etc. What I didn't know was, WHAT was it the beginning of? Possibly a singer-songwriter career? I was aware of my considerable musical limitations, but I dared to dream and thought that maybe there was some unmined potential as well. I had already abandoned the dream of being a classical musician, but I was going to give the singer-songwriter dream a chance. I wasn't looking for superstardom, just for an appreciative local scene somewhere.

2. Looking at it ten years later, the sad reality is that ArtIFact was, yes, a beginning, but it was the beginning of the end.

3. The reason it was the beginning of the end has very little to do with my musical limitations.

I know how this sounds. It sounds like a million other guys who feel cheated because they've failed to attract the world's (or anyone's) attention, and it doesn't occur to them that maybe the world takes no notice of their art because, quite simply, their art sucks.

I'm not going to say that I'm some misunderstood artist. I know better than anyone what a pathetic effort ArtIFact was. But at the time I was recording it, and for the three or four years following, I was not fully aware of what the real challenge was going to be if I were to get into a musical scene. Sure there was the challenge of working up some chops as a musician. But looking back on it now, I think that even if I had been a good musician, I wouldn't have had a chance. I have other limitations in areas that, for a musical career, are just as important as musicianship. If you have the wrong amount of ambition (either too much or too little), or if you're difficult to work with, or if you're incapable of inspiring others, or if you don't enjoy touring or performing, or if you're unreliable or impunctual, or if you're no good at networking, or if you're weak-willed, or... any number of other things that have nothing to do with how good you are as a musician can wreck a musical career.

If you don't believe me, look at all those "American Idol" finalists. There's no denying that they are good singers, to have passed muster under the likes of Simon Cowell. Their musicality is not the issue. And they were elected by a whole nation, so their popularity isn't a problem either. They got lucrative recording deals, so money AND a huge marketing infrastructure was at their disposal. These are DAZZLING conditions. So how come these people are generally not the ones furthest ahead in the race for a music career? There must be something else involved. And even if we were to agree that musicality alone can guarantee success, the fact is that musicality is linked to all sorts of other attributes, such as determination or discipline.

When I was recording "ArtIFact", I sometimes got this giddy feeling like I was beginning on the path towards my calling. The ten years in between have pretty much convinced me that I was wrong.

10-Year-Old ArtIFact, Part 16: Mr. Senator (Track 13)

2009-12-14T22:29:00.003+01:00

I was standing on a street corner in Seattle once when a grizzled man in a wheelchair approached me and asked if I could spare some change for a Vietnam veteran.
I wondered whether he was really a 'Nam vet or if this was only his sympathy story. If he lost his leg in the war, he'd have gotten a medal and would be considered a war hero, right? It made me wonder what sort of benefits a war hero gets. It seemed just plausible that the American government might actually send people into some war halfway across the world, and then leave them, when they return with fewer limbs then they set out with, to eke out a living on the streets of the inner city. But for all I knew, he might be getting a handsome government pension but uses it up for a drug habit. This would raise the question of whether his drug habit is a result of war trauma, and whether the government tries to solve that by throwing money at it, or by ignoring it, or by actually providing help that some people refuse.

I have not heard many stories of Vietnam veterans who feel that the government has provided the services to help them return to the normal life that the war had taken away from them in the first place. But maybe that's because the content vets don't direct movies like Platoon and don't write songs like "Drive On". But I suspected that a lot of needy people get shabby treatment from the legislators who they helped elect, and I wrote the lyrics to "Mr. Senator". I sent those to Rob, who filed around on them and set them to music. Then I filed around on his product and it turned out like this in the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A-CGa8gvp4

I'm still not sure if it works. It sounds almost like a period piece, like an updated cover of a Woody Guthrie song or something like that, something you don't really take seriously any more. That's why it seemed like an album closer -- a sort of afterthought.

10-Year-Old ArtIFact, Part 15: My Love is Waiting (Track 12)

2009-12-09T07:10:00.003+01:00

I'm almost finished talking about that album that I recorded ten years ago.

I realize now that the CD gets more and more "Marco solo" towards the end: more songs that I wrote by myself rather than co-writing with Rob, and more songs in which I don't have the band playing along.

The song "My Love is Waiting" has only my voice and guitar, and Dr. D's violin. I wrote words and music to it, and actually had pretensions of making it an art song. But then I decided to sing it myself for the recordings. The idea that my voice could carry a song like that was about as misguided as everything else about the album.

I consider "My Love is Waiting" to be one of my better songs. I do think it could work as chamber music -- as an art song -- if it were sung by someone who could pull that off. The theme -- someone trying to come to terms with an existence that feels lonely and futile -- is something I came back to in almost every song I've written since then, but I think this was one of my most poetic renditions of the subject matter. I also like how the music changes meter and tonality several times but doesn't (I think) seem to stumble over these shifts. Pity about my voice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAy0FHSduGM

10-Year-Old ArtIFact, Part 14: Pascal's Wager (Track 11)

2009-12-02T22:07:00.000+01:00

In between what I consider to be two of my best-written songs ("Martyr of the Moon" and "My Love is Waiting") is Track 11, "Pascal's Wager", probably the worst song that I've ever written and didn't throw away or keep to myself. (People ask me why I don't write more "Christian" songs? Answer: because they usually turn out like this one.)

This song is insufferably pretentious. I can't even listen to it any more. The title, the opening Latin phrase (which contains a grammatical error), the name-dropping of philosophers and scientific principles, the smug "I'm on the safe side" attitude -- it all comes across like someone making an argument based on things he remembers from an apologetics class he took at a Christian high school, which is pretty much what I was using as source material for the song. The only redeemable line in the song ("Was Jesus a Jedi?") actually came as a last-minute thought during the recording process.

Pascal's Wager is actually a groundbreaking philosophical suggestion (read about it at Wikipedia), but for most who reference it (either to invoke it or to debunk it) it is usually interpreted as a "better safe than sorry" attitude of living as if God exists because if you're wrong you'll regret it for eternity. Me, I treated it the same way in this song, maybe because I couldn't be bothered with the difficult bits of what Pascal actually said. Neither did I do much research into the other things that I reference in the song. I had heard someone say that Stephen Hawking believes that our universe is eternal; I had listened to a physicist explain (as I understood it) that chaos led to the Big Bang because chaos is an unstable condition that will erupt into matter; I had read somewhere that Descartes postulated the existence of God based on a finite mind's inability to invent the infinite. I didn't bother checking out if I quoted these sources correctly. The song just lists points of (straw man?) contention between the Christian and the skeptic and says, essentially, "boy, will you ever be in bad shape if it turns out that I'm right".

Having said all that, I like the IDEA of the song. I like the idea of someone referencing philosophical debates to a laid-back beatnik jazz groove. A song like that is even allowed to sound a little pretentious. But I think it also needs one or two more redeeming qualities, like more wit or absurdity or something. I might rewrite the whole song someday and build it around the "Was Jesus a Jedi" line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsX2Mb0Hstw

10-Year-Old ArtIFact, Part 13: Martyr of the Moon (Track 10)

2009-11-24T07:12:00.004+01:00

I was driving around with a friend in the small hours of the night when a Type O Negative song came on the radio. My friend turned up the volume and said something about how it was appropriate to play that music at this hour, since it's "a good howling-at-the-moon song".

If I remember correctly, I retained that feel and wrote "Martyr of the Moon" in about an hour's time. It was going to be a low-voice "howling at the moon" song, a song about darkness and insanity, only instead of gothic metal I'd go more towards a "primitive music" feel (I've always loved South American indigenous music). The images for the text actually came quite quickly. I borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe, C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, a Debussy song I vaguely remembered, and other obvious sources.

The resulting song is one of my personal favorites. What we got recorded, though, is a different story. Some of the tracks are from a weekend recording session that I had made with Bryan Ward a few years earlier, when I had just written the song and was teaching it to him in the car on the way there.

For the ArtIFact sessions, Dan and Rob added instruments and Dan gave the rhythm some much-needed tightening. In the end, it's a fun, uneven jaunt into weird dreams territory, but all in all, it doesn't sound to me like the song that it could have been. Like much of the album, we didn't give ourselves nearly a chance to actually learn the songs before recording them, and on this one it's particularly obvious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8abpc2kJIY

10-Year-Old ArtIFact, Part 12: White Like Me (Track 9)

2009-11-11T06:35:00.002+01:00

Although I had grown up going to an American school and all that, I didn't actually set foot in North America until I was 19. And I immediately got to know a side of America that most Americans never get to know: Greyhound travel.

I took the Greyhound many times since then, and one thing it's never been is boring. You always feel surrounded by, uh... interesting people. In general, they are people for whom the American Dream has been a betrayal. The people living the American Dream have houses with lawns and two cars per family and all that. They don't take the Greyhound.

Usually I felt very white sitting in a Greyhound bus. And that gave me a vague feeling that there must still be racism at work in a country in which the Black minority is so over-represented in the cheap transportation sector.

I felt apologetic for being white, but at the same time I felt almost discriminated against, as if no one wanted to talk to me. And seriously, why should they? A stranger in a bus? But at the time it felt like no one wanted to talk to me because I was white, and for once a minority.

It's an irrational feeling, so I can't really explain it. But I did try to put it in a song, and I consider this one of the most solid tracks on ArtIFact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcpp9pSIovM

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part XIV: Compassion vs. Problem Solving

2009-11-05T22:21:00.003+01:00

[Like I mentioned earlier, this series on phariseeism began as a series of thoughts I mulled over during my bike trip this summer. I was originally planning on building a logically progressing profile of the problem of Christian "religiosity", but I'm finding that I'll have to settle for jotting down a bunch of snapshots instead.]

One of the things Jesus repeatedly accuses the Pharisees of is their inability to understand compassion. This is also an attribute of the "pharisee" I'm talking about in this series.

Now the Christian pharisee obviously knows that compassion is one of the virtues he's supposed to strive for, and, in his own way, he does have something like compassion. (Just like, "in his own way", the pharisee has his own versions of all spiritual virtues.)

If you share a problem or a struggle with him, he at least would like to see this problem solved. He's not indifferent to it. In fact, one of the things you're not likely to hear a pharisee say is, "your sins and struggles are none of my business."

But the pharisee's solution is usually an oversimplified one, more or less like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYLMTvxOaeE

There is no real compassion. Sure the pharisee wants to see the problem solved, but that's because the problem itself is an annoyance to him. It is one of the many things that are wrong with the world and that produce a discomfort and anger in him (see previous entry).

But compassion is not the same thing as "trying to get the problem out of the way as fast as possible." Compassion means suffering along with someone: "com" = with, and "passion" = suffering. Similar meaning, similar combination of roots, as the word "sympathy".

Once again, the difference between Jesus and the Pharisees is that Jesus becomes like us. He accuses the Pharisees of putting heavy burdens on people and not lifting a finger to help them. But Jesus, though he tells us to take up our cross, goes before us carrying his. He does put a yoke upon us, but his yoke is light, and he yokes himself alongside us so that we can learn from him and work with him, and so that he works with us and suffers alongside us.

The pharisee offers problem-solving advice, but it's generally misguided advice because he doesn't bother trying to relate to the problem, to really suffer under the difficulty, first. In fact, one of the most aggravating attributes of a pharisee is that the less he can relate to your problem, the more confident he is in his "solution" and the more frustrated and disappointed he is with you for persisting with not winning your struggle in spite of his "help".

As a recovering pharisee, I'll tell you a little secret: the pharisee doesn't really WANT to feel compassion, he doesn't really WANT to understand your problem. Real problems and real struggles are messy things, things that would challenge his simple view of the world. If you tell him that you sometimes doubt that God is good, or that you can't control your overeating or your alcohol consumption, or that you gossip about things you know you should keep secret, or that you still can't forgive someone for something they've done to you long ago, or that you have irrational fears, his go-to answer is "stop it!"

The pharisee believes that whatever you're struggling with is your own fault for not trying hard enough to put an end to it, and he doesn't really want to open his mind to the possibility that he may be wrong. But maybe there is in fact nothing you can do about your sin except to wait on the Lord and to trust His forgiveness in the meantime. (Why else would we need Jesus?) This is the condition you have to live in, and the pharisee does not want to share in this suffering (have "com""passion", "with""suffering"). Our most stubborn sins become deeply entrenched in us precisely because of our constant attempts to beat them away through our willpower. Relinquishing our attempts and trusting in God is a very hard step, and it becomes harder when you have someone with spiritual-sounding arguments about why your willpower is the way to go.

Here is the tragedy: the pharisee, in trying to "solve" your problem, increases the burden. You, struggling under the greater burden, find your problems worsened. This in turn frustrates the pharisee, to whom you just look like an example of someone obstinately refusing what's best for them. He'll increase the intensity of his problem-solving technique, which will cause your burden to grow heavier, etc.

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part XIII: Anger

2009-11-03T12:33:00.001+01:00

I'm generally skeptical of "personality tests". This is because most personality tests I've encountered seem to be cold reads which combine flattery (usually telling you how unique or intelligent you are) with vague, universal platitudes (stuff like "even though you like having things organized, there are pockets of chaos in your life"). A lot of times personality tests sound just like horoscopes to me.

But when I read Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert's book about the Enneagram, it struck me as something legit. Maybe that's because the nine personality types in the enneagram sound (in this book) very much like people you've actually met, with real foibles and aggravating idiosynchracies. Above all, I find both the psychological and spiritual explanations enlightening, accounting for both our individual uniqueness and our need for redemption.

But looking at results for internet searches about the Enneagram personality types, I'm finding the same sort of shallow cold read material that I find for other personality tests, which makes me suspect that maybe there are many personality tests out there that I'd find legit if I got an actual explanation, rather than these online tests.

At any rate, I found it interesting that Rohr and Ebert consider the Ennea Type ONE to be something of a "born pharisee". Type ONE is sort of an obsessive perfectionist, especially in moral matters. Hard on self and others. Punctual. Frequently derisive of just regular fun stuff. A strong believer in willpower and rationality, and often suspicious of emotion.

Type ONE has a vision of how the world should be, and is constantly disappointed in the reality he finds. His friends, his community, his job, his political party, his family, his car, his house -- everything around him is something that he had high expectations of when he was coming in, but that turned out to be different than he expected. Type ONE is naturally drawn to religion, because at least God can be counted on to be perfect (although he finds, if he ever admits it to himself, that even God is infuriatingly messy in His mysterious ways).

Obviously many Type ONEs become cynical from the constant disappointment. Others adjust their expectations to be more realistic, but they can often only do this in a form of "resignation". Many will simply block away a part of themselves (such as the messier emotions) and actually be fully unaware of this part of themselves for long periods of time. Still others retain an upbeat can-do attitude, not allowing any amount of past disappointments to shake their belief that they can still find the sort of perfection that would truly satisfy them.

But what lies at the heart of all of this is something that you may perhaps find surprising: it is anger.

As this series lumbers on I'm going to say some more about anger, because I think that's a root sin of a pharisee. But for today I'll just finish by saying that I, for one, was very surprised to find the ways that anger expresses itself. I had expected an "angry person" to be the guy who has a hot temper, not the guy who remains perpetually sunny and hopeful.

10-Year-Old ArtIFact, Part 11: I Need Your Grace (Track 8)

2009-10-26T02:55:00.002+01:00

I once had a beautiful South American protest song in my head, and wrote lyrics to it, in English, about my dependence on the grace of God.

I figured I wouldn't be able to use the melody that had been going through my mind, so I sent the lyrics to Rob, who set them to music. I thought his music was a little too agressive for what I was thinking of, though, so I wrote another set of lyrics to his melody (this song then became "Among the Dead") and asked him if he could come up with a new tune for this.

The end result was a sober enough song, but neither of us are particularly happy with how it turned out on the recording. I had wanted at least one song that features some Andean instruments, and we have a toyo and a charango in this, but the effect is not the one I had been going for. Our limited studio didn't really give us enough channels to work with, so we ended up making compromises. In addition, the interplay between the Andean instruments and the saxophone, guitar and hand percussion sounded better in theory than in practice. The odd-time groove which alternates 4/4 and 7/8 time might also sound more jarring than interesting.

As far as the text goes, it is interesting to me that if I were to write a song about God's grace now, ten years later, I don't think I'd even take the challenge. It seems to me that my comprehension of Grace has changed greatly. Back then I probably thought of it primarily as the mop and bucket with which God cleans up my mess, rather than a driving power that moves me forward and upward.

Anyway, here it is, if you want to hear it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ecsYW4dL70

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part XII: Indebtedness

2009-10-20T21:50:00.003+02:00

Last week I wrote a piece about the difficulties I have in generating genuine gratitude. One of my handful of regular readers pointed me to wikipedia's take on the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude

Mostly it's a long list of advantages you can enjoy if you're a grateful person. For me, reading through this was a sort of depressing experience, even though I'm sure that it was sent to me in the hopes that it would be an inspiring one. It felt a bit like being in a wheelchair and someone telling you how much fun he's having running around. "See how awesome it is to be a grateful person? Only you, of course, are incapable of it."

This illustrates what I mentioned in my last entry: just because you give someone a list of all the advantages of a certain course of action doesn't mean that you enable them to pursue it. Most smokers know the health risks of smoking, but that knowledge doesn't empower them to break free. In fact, sometimes it's that knowledge that keeps them bound (knowing that they're poisoning themselves stresses them out, and their go-to method of dealing with stress is to have a smoke).

But I got some useful stuff out of the article as well. For one thing, it ends by saying that there are exercises to enhance gratitude, which I find interesting. I'm still not sure how much it will help me, because you can't enhance something that's not there, so I still need to find out how to generate a little bit of gratitude before I can go expanding that into a whole lot of it. It sort of reminds me of Jesus' words that "to him who has, more will be given, but from him who doesn't have, the little he has will be taken away."

But my thought for today has to do with the first real point of the article: the differentiation between "gratitude" and "indebtedness".

Indeed, this comes at a good time in my series on phariseeism, because I think that what lay at the root of my phariseeism was a deep sense of "indebtedness". In spite of all the talk I heard about "salvation by grace alone" or "faith, not works", and all that, I still understood the gospel to be very much a reciprocal transaction. Jesus gives his life, so I give mine. I OWE him. And I can NEVER pay it back all the way. So anytime he asks me to do something that I don't want to do, he can say, "Oh, come on. After all I've done for you..." and since laying down his life is an impossible act to repay, I'll be indebted all my life. I felt that the Christian life consisted of submitting to a sort of divine manipulation.

Wikipedia makes this differentiation:

"Gratitude is not the same as indebtedness. While both emotions occur following help, indebtedness occurs when a person perceives that they are under an obligation to make some repayment of compensation for the aid. The emotions lead to different actions; indebtedness motivates the recipient of the aid to avoid the person who has helped them, whereas gratitude motivates the recipient to seek out their benefactor and to improve their relationship with them."

For much of my life I had things turned around. I assumed that by Jesus "paying my debt" it was like the debt had only been transferred. I no longer had to pay a debt to that nasty Satan guy, but I thought that I was now expected to pay back as much as I could to that kind Jesus guy.

This, in fact, can make it even more difficult. If you owe money to a complete douchebag, you get a sort of perverse pleasure out of not repaying him, even if he makes your life miserable in return. But if you owe money to the most kindhearted person in the world, you feel terrible every time you see him. You start avoiding him because you know that you have no excuse or explanation for why you don't have this month's installments with you. This is not the path to a good friendship.

The pharisee has a keen sense of justice, and that justice is karmic and has little room for grace. That means that even if he has been given something as a "free gift", he will consider it his duty to repay as much of it as he is able.

I still hear many Christians talking as if it is our duty as Christians to "repay" Jesus. I don't know where other people get with this, but in my case, it lead me to despair and anger. And to an inability to comprehend genuine gratitude.

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part XI: The psychology of imperatives, willpower, reason and sin

2009-10-16T23:07:00.003+02:00

One of the great steps for me in my spiritual walk was the recognition of the limitation -- indeed the OBSTACLE -- presented to me by my willpower. My thinking went more or less along the lines that Jesus saved me, and that in return I have to try very hard to be good. If I don't do what's good it's because either I don't know what's good, or I'm not trying hard enough.

There are a few problems with this, and I'll get to them eventually. The one I'm interested in addressing here is the idea that we indeed are such simple organisms as to be able to recognise what is good, put our minds to it and "just do it."

I was totally clueless on the psychology and spirituality of our actions. For example, I would probably have gone so far as to believe that if someone has a weight problem, this can be solved by sitting them down, explaining the health advantages of a fit body vs. an overweight one, and then telling them to eat less and exercise more. And if their weight problem persisted, it was (in my mind) because they were undisciplined gluttons.

In a small number of cases, the "explain the advantages of a fit body" method might actually work. But those are exceptions; for the most part, a person who is overweight is already obsessing enough about their body weight, and how to bring it down, and is already trying to work up the discipline for diets and exercise programs, and is generally depressed about it even without having to listen to simplistic answers from people who do not share this struggle.

But that is the way of the pharisee. The pharisee sees the most direct, simplistic manifestation of a behavior problem, and ignores the psychological and spiritual forces that lie at the root of the problem. He believes (I believed this for years, and it sounds heretical to me now) that with a good shot of self-discipline you can solve it all.

And the thing is, it seems to us (especially when we are young) that we CAN control a lot of our behavior through our willpower. But much of this is an illusion we have manufactured because we have not seen the Grace that has been at work.

I know rich people who come from poor backgrounds who have no sympathy for poor people. Their thinking is, "I used to be like that, and look at me now. If any of them wanted, they could work their way to the top like I did."

Because, you know, it is easy to think that if you got rich it is because you "worked your way to the top." It's easy to forget how much of this "working your way to the top" was a fortunate combination of events and circumstances that were completely beyond your control. If someone points this out to you, you can make a long-winded argument to defend the thesis that it WAS your hard work and not the circumstances.

It is the same with a pharisee. You don't want to confess your sins to a pharisee because he has no sympathy. If he also has struggles, he won't let you know, and the areas he doesn't struggle in he considers to be areas he's conquered through spiritual discipline, rather than areas in which God's grace has spared him. He thinks you can "work your way" out of sin just like he thinks he's "worked his way" out of it, and he has no patience with you if you question the value of self-discipline in solving sin problems.

This I think is part of what Jesus meant when he called the Pharisees "blind guides."

The Pharisee Chronicles, Part X: The Older Brother

2009-10-14T01:24:00.003+02:00

One of the best-known "pharisees" in the Bible wasn't really a Pharisee at all: he's the older brother in the famous Parable of the Prodigal Son.

So the younger brother demands his full inheritance from the father, squanders it, loses everything, is reduced to herding pigs, then returns to his senses and realizes that he could have a much better life being a servant of his father's. He returns home offering himself to be a laborer, but his father receives him back as a son, and throws a big party.

A well-known heart-warming story of grace and forgiveness and unconditional love. But things look a little different from the perspective of the older brother. Some people think that Jesus added him as a symbol of the institutional religion of the day, but I don't think so. I think he included him in the story because mercy and grace are all well and good if we are the recipients of it, but look a little different when someone else receives it, undeserved, at our expense.

Jesus certainly showed the sibling dynamic in a way that many can identify with. You can talk to many pairs of brothers and you will find that the older one is frustrated by the fact that the younger one seems to "get away with everything," while the younger one often feels judged and disapproved of by his big brother.

A pharisee has a strong sense of justice, and a strong sense of justice requires a sort of karmic worldview: people will eventually get what's coming to them, their good deeds being rewarded and their bad deeds being punished. So a pharisee is offended to see karma thwarted, when a person has done bad but still gets a party thrown for them, and when a person has done good but gets no special rewards.

I always claimed that I was NOT like the older brother, since I was happy to see anyone forsake their evil ways and come to Jesus. I wasn't angry because God forgave them and promised them a bright future they didn't "deserve". I was happy for them.

But I was missing something important in the parable: the younger son in the story gets something that the older son doesn't get, even though he's always wanted it. Sure we can be happy for others to enjoy a glorious afterlife that we know we're getting as well. But can we be happy for those who have taken the low road and then, after making a show of asking for forgiveness, receive something we've always wanted and have never gotten, in all our years of efforts?

The older son thinks that all his years of faithfully working for his father entitle him to something that he hasn't gotten: his father never even gave him a goat for a little party, but his brother gets the fattened calf.

As a high schooler I watched with a great sense of superiority as my peers partied through their teens. I was the "no booze, no drugs, no parties, no women" guy, and proudly convinced that God would one day reward my discipline. But what I failed to realize then was that I was living with a deep suspicion of anything that is fun. I'm not saying that I should have partied it up; but with my strong conviction that a life of ascetic sacrifice would entitle me to a better position with the Almighty I cut myself off from something I have never fully recovered, and that is essential to every Christian: the ability to party. The younger brother had the ability to party, and this ability brought him ruin at the beginning of the story, but also helped him to restoration. (All our strengths ultimately work against us until they have undergone a death process, and our weaknesses become our crowns once they have been resurrected.) The older brother lacked this ability, which means that he didn't get into as deep trouble, but also found it harder to accept his Father's love.

The thing that truly offends a pharisee is that it is all grace. This means that all our labor is in vain, which is a more depressing thought to many of us than the idea that grace will give us much more than our labor could earn us.

The father tells the older brother "all I have is yours." It was not the years of work and being the "good boy" that entitle the older brother to a festive meal. He could have just asked for it, and received it out of the love of his Father, rather than out of the merits of his efforts. The great irony of this parable is that both sons, in their way, demand to be treated like hired laborers, and only the one who thinks he's been a pretty good hired laborer objects to being treated like a son instead.

A Christian pharisee will often claim to believe that "it is all grace", but when it comes down to it, when you watch what makes him tick, what makes him angry, what makes him indignant and what makes him happy, you realize that he doesn't really believe that it's ALL grace. He believes that putting in an extra effort entitles you to more grace. At this point grace ceases to be grace, and becomes another karmic transaction. And the Christian loses something that is essential to his spiritual life: the ability to leave his past behind and just party for once. The younger brother could leave his recklessly mis-spent past behind him and join the party, but the older brother had a much harder time leaving his hard-working past behind him. It's like your bank's archives going up in flames: if you were bankrupt and deeply indebted, you love this new start, but if you were doing great and had payments due you from all sides, you curse your luck.

This is why Jesus said "blessed are the poor in spirit". Unless you are bankrupt, you do not consider a "start over" based on grace alone to be a better position than before.

One last lesson I learn from this story: the two ARE brothers. The differences in their personality do not change the fact that they are sons of the same father, and that the father loves them equally and wants both to share in his wealth and his love. Both have a growing process to undergo, and the Father waits patiently for them to work through it, loving them all the way through the process.