Interests:Geo-toiletology; Stationary connoisseur Expertise:Peer Pressuring, Dispensing Sagely Wisdom and Centure, Spellingg Occupation:I hate it, don't garrison me Industry:A good thing if moderated
Pretty typical for a story I post on the ol' blog - we almost missed our flight. Just like the train in London, and in Rome, it was a pretty dire situation - it turns out you have to get some special Visa check done on your passport if your not an EU citizen, which we discovered while trying to board the plane - and the visa check happened to be before secuirity, not after - so with 15 minutes before our plane left we ran back throug security to the visa-check desk, back through secuirty again, and then back to the gate. But we made it - miraculously (i think time may have frozen, its the only explanation I can think of). Anyway, so we're in Dublin - I'm presenting a paper at a conference mainly abour Charles Taylor's new book, A Secular Age. Like, I suspect, most academic conferences - its not all that interesting. The papers are mediocre - first theres a secularist that thinks Taylor is too Christian, then theres a Catholic theologian that thinks hes not christian enough - and the food is sub-par. Its somewhat Ironic that, coming to Dublin to for an academic thing, by far the most enlightening, educational, and profound experience I had was at the Guiness Storehouse - its a big exhibition of Guiness branding essential, but its like Willy Wonka kind of, and makes you love beer, especially Guiness. I never buy souvenirs really, but we decided to get a bottle opener that looks like a guiness bottle cap made of pewter; best decision ever. I've been ecstatic about this bottle opener ever since we bought it and I think this is why: it is so paradigmatically unique, the summation of the experience of beer and my visit to Dublin. You think of an average souvenir and what is it? Answer: usually pretty dumb, a sweater, a key-chain, maybe a necklace or a postcard, always with the name of the place, or some symbol its associated with. But its dumb because the symbol has nothing to do with the item itself: a t-shirt that says "Paris" on it with a picture of the iffel tower exibits no real relationship between the t-shirt itself as a t-shirt and Paris. Paris isn't known for its t-shirts, so the thing itself, the t-shirt becomes an empty place-holder for the symbol of Paris. The guiness bottle-opener though, its different. Dublin is known for Guiness, Guiness is a beer that has acheived a brand of legendary proportions. Thus the guiness bottle opener is the summit of all possible bottle-opener experiences, its the best and most appropriate one could get. The only improvement one could make, is if it were a guiness bottle-opener from the guiness storehouse in Dublin itself, and it served the double role of commemorating a personal experience in Dublin simultaneously. Thus this bottle-opener is the best possible bottle-opener I will ever have, forever. Not only that but it won't wear out, so it will be there in its perfect overlapping position of personal and universal experience forever. Its almost like a symbolic testament to the cross of Christ, in fact it is - its the theology of souveniring. It should never be replaced, its the best I could ever get (excluding strange anomalous cases). So, I've often thought I'd like to collect something, but I've never thought of anything that interests me: but I think this finally might. I want to be a souvenir connaisseur, finding these incidences where personal experiences meet categorical utility in perfect coincidence. We'll see how it goes. Still, in that this bottle opener is so much the same as the Cross for the Christian, its funny that I've had such a more spiritual-educational experience in the beer store than in the university this week.
I’m not a homosexual, and I react very poorly to the insinuation that I am one; the irony of this situation really hit me just recently. After all what does it mean to be homosexual? Basically – it means your all male, even the female has been subverted completely into a male category. Hence the common association of homosexuality with the effeminate, because the female category is male, its not off limits for learning behavior patterns. Your whole world is male, when your gay; at least so it seems to me. And therein lies the irony: my whole world is male. I live in an all-male world, surrounded by only male figures, doing things only according to all-male motives. In my values, in my entertainment, my work and even my religion – it’s all male. It’s a world completely hostile to the notion of homosexuality, but I can’t help feeling a little self-deluded in that hostility now.
When I say the world is all male – I mean its all defined by male-ness, there’s no female perspective there. Even women – sure I’ve met women, enjoyed friendship with women, even married a woman – but they are place-holders in a male-ordered world. I construct their identity as male objects. Don’t get me wrong though. I’m not a pervert. I don’t watch porn, make offensive comments to women, or daydream about celebrities in their underpants. But still, somehow adopting the right behavior doesn’t help my understanding of the female – as in the female in itself.
Realistically I think it’s just sort of unavoidable – looking at the world in such a totally male way is the only behavior I’ve learned, the only values I’ve been exposed to. When I was young, I had two unadulterated values, completely unmitigated and unobstructed by any other ideas: candy and violence. I pursued these interests relentlessly. If I wasn’t finding a way to consume sugar, I was pretending to be fighting villains, watching movies about fighting villains, or playing games – the object of which was to defeat the villains. I hated villains. Being raised in a Christian home, sex, drugs and rock and roll were all off limits for potential sources of role-models; this left only violence. And where were women? The damsel to be rescued, or the sexy, seductive enemy whose only weapon was in her feminine wiles. Sure it wasn’t porn, and rarely nudity, in my action films – but it gave me a category, a category I couldn’t avoid: women were meant to support the male ego.
Of course all my values weren’t defined by movies and video games. But sadly, my Christian heritage did little to fill out my picture of the female. Raised in the extreme fundamentalist conservative sect of Christianity – I was clearly taught that objectifying women is wrong. The sex trade, pornography, the role of women in a non-democratic society; these things degraded women and were clearly despicable. That’s about as far as we got though. The reality was, for us fundamentalist hyper-conservatives, its all male; Christianity is all male. Men rule the home, the church and all social institutions, by divine appointment. All the biblical heroes? Male; all the church heroes? Male; all our theologizing and church structure? Thoroughly male. The concept of female ministers? Utterly apostate! They can’t be given authority over a man! It’s unbiblical! For the child being raised in such a church, all this amounts to the inevitable feeling that – while God must love us all equally – surely he respects us men more than women. He knows men can get the job done better; we can be trusted with authority. Women aren’t objectified, but they remain idle objects on the periphery of the ecclesiastical landscape.
Of course, there is a fundamentalist justification for these views – and, as always, it comes in the form of the minutia of biblical interpretation. “Help meet”: there you have it. Genesis 2:20 reads literally in translation that God created woman as, “a help meet for [man].” But what does this mean? Well, for us fundies it meant God created woman equal in theory, but practically subordinate to man. It is woman’s natural and God intended role to be submit to man and serve, er… help him. The fundamentalist reading then likes to focus on the help side of that nefarious little term. “Help meet”: woman is there to help, gains her identity from helping. But I really like to focus on the meet side of things – and I really think of it more as a “help MEAT.” Woman is help-meat. Sure we’re not pornaholics, we condemn the sex trade and even avoid lusting after the women around us, by and large. Then again, just because you’re a vegetarian doesn’t mean your still not going to look at a cow as a bunch of steaks and ground beef that’s meant for eating, and little else. In a sense then, my religious upbringing set me up for disaster: I was taught to be a vegetarian until marriage, then I could feast on help-meat to my hearts content. De jure, de facto; In principle, in practice. In principle women are equal, but in practice she’s still my help-meat.
The perfect storm: the simultaneous occurrence of a combination of weather events which independently are not problematic, but the sum of which are violently unpredictable. Such were the forces at work when I married. It just so happened that I was raised in a male-centered world – no sisters, fundamentalist up-bringing, totally male pop-culture. It also just so happened, that my wife had lived in an female-centered world – no brothers, scarcely a male friend in her childhood, and all values and culture thoroughly female to the core. It proved to be frustration at every turn, though surprisingly manageable. We didn’t fight constantly, and we felt very in love, but that’s not to say it wasn’t a confused mess. I couldn’t perceive her femaleness – her female as female, it made (or more realistically: makes) no sense to me. Now I’ve never conceived of myself as a male chauvinist, but I was absolutely baffled when I found out my wife’s identity was constituted by something other than being help-meat. I was unprepared – the war against objectifying women in my life was meant to be over at marriage – but here I found it had just begun. The reality was, however, that I simply couldn’t perceive her as female – I only had a male world to place her into. And so the long process begins: opening up to the female, allowing it a voice of its own; a task with no precedent in my world – not from church, school, home or work.
My mother died in December last year – I was twenty-three and married for three months. This notion that perhaps the female was something more than I had thought was just impinging upon my male-centered world. She died somewhat unexpectedly – I mean, she had bad health for years, but all at once she was dead, and I was back home, standing in the waiting room before the funeral. I hadn’t had much of a chance to process it – but now, as I sipped at some distilled funeral home water and the aisles filled up in the chapel, it suddenly hit me. Much like a monsoon tide comes upon a tiny Hawaiian island, my little male-centered world was overwhelmed with the gravity of that which was unknown to me all at once. This was woman. Not just the woman that looked after me, or gave birth to me – this was woman itself, woman the category. It was all I’d known of woman, my only determination of what woman was – and now it was gone. Before I’d ever peered through my gossamer-like false woman-construct to perceive woman in its own identity, she was gone.
So I was in Rome last week. It was a great time. I saw sights, I ate pizza both good and bad, I got away with not paying for the 2 extra people in our hotel room, I made it on the plane even though we booked the tickets saying we had EU passports. There was only one thing I didn't do: miss the train leaving Rome. 2008 ended with with me missing the train in London - on the way back from my mothers funeral - after having bought outrageous same day tickets - because the ones we booked on the computer didn't work - the computer that my brother stepped on and broke making me loss all my grad school work. All this was following three turbulent months moving to England in which everything almost didn't work out constantly. So I missed that train in London, I fought with the coachman, I begged and pleaded - but I missed it. It was a very very low point. The lowest perhaps. Then there was Rome, there was 2009, there was victory. Our train left Rome at 10:09, and our hotel was about a 15-20 minute walk away. We woke up early - Sara set her alarm - and we figured we'd stroll down to the station real early to make sure we book the right tickets. So we were down at the station at 8:45. It was so early, we figured we might as well leave Emily (Sara's sister) and all of our luggage at the hotel; so much time, why not come back later? Well, it turned out, that what we thought was 8:45 turned out to be 9:45 when we saw a clock at the station. Sara's clock was an hour behind. So we had 20 minutes. I ran back to the hotel. I told emily we only had 10 minutes. I grabbed my bag. I grabbed Sara's bag, Leah's bag, Cora's bag, the extra bags we'd accumulated, and the bag of food - it was too many bags. I ran. I didn't look crossing the street. A car almost hit me. Emily said she couldn't run - I said she had to. She said she could - so she started speed walking, but by then I was moving so slow with all the luggage she pretty much kept up to me. I can finally appreciate a little why marines hate running with their "gear" so much. When I got the trainstation and gave everyone their bags, I suddenly felt like I had super-human speed. Still, it left us with 3 minutes to catch the train and we had no idea where the platform was. So we ran to the platform. We got confused and turned the opposite direction and ran away from the platform by accident. We asked an italian man where the platform was. He spoke italian. He pointed a direction and we ran. I found the train: 2 minutes to spare, but all the girls were way behind. I ran back and told them to run - Sara said "Tyler" like it was my fault we had to run if we were going to make the train. The train could leave at any moment - any moment, but we all made it on, with less than a minute to spare.
So thats it - its victory. I succedded where I once had failed, and now nothing can hold me back.
As anyone who reads this will know, at the end of last September I got married and moved to Nottingham, England to start an MA program. It was big changes - as big as they come - and all at once. I recall thinking 3 months ago (as I think we all do when faced with momentous changes), something like: I wonder what all these changes will bring? Will life seemlessly support me and put things into place, or will my life descend into disastrous chaos? It was with a great deal of excitement (and not a little trepidation) that I looked forward to what the future might bring...
I guess I can only describe where things went from there as "a string of bad luck." Life hasn't been bad necessarily, being married to Sara is great, the grad program is awesome, and I love what I'm studying. But then again, I've had just about the worst luck running, which hasn't ruined life, but its definitely made it more stressful then I ever could have imagined before. It all started I think, on the plane ride over to England. Me and Sara weren't sitting together, and we couldn't find anyone in the whole plane to switch with us. Sure its a small thing, and at the time it wasn't a huge deal - but in hind sight it captures it all. We still came to England, it was just really less comfortable. When we got here, it turns out the house I had arranged was full of mold and it was gross, so we moved into a slightly overpriced, dingy and cramped hotel. We figured out life over the next 2 weeks, found a place and tried to start arranging our bills etc. which proved next to impossible thanks to the British way of doing things. Oh, you might not know what the British way is, to put it simply: the British way of managing information is whatever way takes the longest time, is the least reliable, and can most make it seem like no one has an effing clue whatsoever. Still, thats not necessarily bad luck. This is bad luck: I bought a nice bike, to save money instead of taking the bus...stolen within 3 days. The hard drive on my old computer crashed, but it wasn't a huge deal because we still had the new one we just bought for school. Then my mom went in the hospital. She was in for the next 3 weeks, then she died (could you really call that bad luck, probably not - I'd hate to reduce her death to an appropriation of bad luck in my life). Regardless, its a bad event that fits in the string "mother died". We decided to go home, obviously, and thanks to that same british way of managing information, we ended up taking a 2am bus because it surrepiticiously ended up beign the only one available, getting us to London for 6am, and leaving a good, unnecessary 8 hours before our flight to resent the National Express Bus' website.Still, we made it home for the funeral and it was pretty crazy busy. The second day home I became violently ill and dry heaved for the day and a half before the funeral with a temp. of 103. I was fortunate in that I had a good relationship to my mom and there are few regrets I have with her gone. Still, the whole thing was draining, and as Sara and I prepared to return to England, we were excited to get back to normal. Then, 2 days before we left, my brother stepped on our computer (the new one). It broke the hard drive: we lost everything. The other computer having crashed not too long ago, we didn't have much backed up, oh and I had just lost my USB drive 2 weeks before, just to make sure we lost as much as possible. I'd bought a new one - of course it occured to me that it wasn't safe to leave everything in one place not backed up. But my brother happened to step on the computer litterally 2 hours before I had the new USB drive to back it all up. That was unfortunate. But still we were happy to go home, that is, we were relieved until we arrived at the train station. It turns out, due to credit card fraud in the past - you need to have the actual card that you used to book the tickets with you to claim your tickets at the trainstation. That wouldn't have been a problem, except that inexplicably, none of our cards were working on the train website and we ended up using my brothers. So our tickets were useless. We bought same-day tickets (or you could probably call them "apendage" tickets if you want, because they literally cost an arm or a leg). It sucked, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I mean, we could have missed the train that we just paid for with our arms and legs, that would be worse. So we did that. Yep, missed the train that we just bought tickets for - apparently there was another train station next door no one told us about, and our train was leaving out of that station. I ran for the train, wth 2 minutes to catch it, and I actually made it. I was so relieved - there was the train, I had made it with roughly 15 seconds to spare. Sara, however, did not. I pleaded with the coachman to wait just one extra minute so Sara could make it - but he was rigidly puncutal about the departure time. Still, I didn't make it easy for him. I shoved my arm in the door and kept saying "Just one more minute please." "Get your arm out of this door!" he shouted back at me. "Just one more minute!" "This is a twelve thirty-five train, and it leaves at twelve thirty-five." he said, and he then started slamming the door on my arm.
It was as I grappled with the coachman that I began thinking about the whole thing theologically. What was God trying to tell me in all this? As life conspired against me, arranging that one small thing would lead to another until I had lost all my school work, Sara lost all her photos, we were going broke buying train tickets, and I was now fighting to get on the train, what could it mean? As a Christian, I have two intperpretations: either I'm not in God's will, or so much in it that Satan is conspiring against me. It's hard to say, because it seems to be a matter of perspective. On the one hand, life is moving against me - shouldn't that mean that God is against me? On the other hand, I could see things in a way, that it would appear like things are just going wrong, but then God is actually providing for me as things go wrong. Sure I had a few stings of bad luck that all culminated together to make very bad situations, but then it all could have gone worse. Sure my bike was stolen, but Sara's could have been stolen too. We had to stay in an overpriced hotel, but then again after 4 days another couple let us stay with them for the next week while we figured things out. I could have stayed sick for the funeral, but I got better just in time. My brother could have broken the whole computer. My mom could have not had life insurance (in which case the funeral would have been impossible) or we could have had flight complications. Then the train - sure it sucked, and missing this second train made me so depressed and hopeless, but as it happened, the tickets we were sold could be used on any train that day before 3, and there was another train in an hour, so we were provided for again. Its a strange situation where it seems like everything is going as bad as it possibly can but letting them still work out. It seems like right from the start with England - when I applied for a Visa, had to call it back, then had to fly to Edmonton from Californiia for a security interview, then had to apply 2 weeks before leaving, getting it back 1 week before, and having to apply for sara's - getting her's back 1 day before we left - it seems like things have always gone as bad as they can without actually stopping us. So what do I read into that? Is God trying to let me know I'm not doing the right thing? Or is he just making sure the whole thing is as bad as it could be because he wants to see if I'll still do it? There's no way to know really, you just have to do crap, and hope for the best. One thing is for sure though: now, at the end of 2008, way short on tuition money with no plan for how to make it up, I actually feel like I have more faith in God now after everything thats happened. I guess it's hard to explain why some things support your faith and others don't. But as I study philosophy and all my beleifs start to empty of all their meaning, I get lost in how surreal everything becomes, how vacuous everything we think is full of meaning can be, maybe its encouraging to know that God is going to make sure my faith will never leave me because he will always make me face him in the practical things in life.
This blog is obviously ridiculous, far to long and rambling, I stopped putting serious effort in the style, but I guess it doesn't matter.
Late one autumn night, a platoon in dire straits. A rescue mission gone wrong, the dead and dying strewn about. Overcome; exhausted; defeated: it seemed hopeless. All was lost, and then: Sergent Graber was there.
Sergent Graber was there, I saw him in the night A fierce grimace in his stare he burst in with all his might!
With power and fervor he brought hope, with Sargent Graber we could cope. Deliverance and salvation now in sight; a night dark and grim - now filled with light! "Go home boys," he cried, "I'll see this night through!" Saying this, he had not lied: Without him we were goners - that we all knew. Now we were saved by a hair, because Sergent Graber was there!
*This poem is a chronicle of one of Sergent Graber's many heroic deeds.
