Soccer in the Hospital

Kristin has a new post up about soccer in the port. The soccer-aiding-chaplaincy factor is definitely present in the hospital as well. I met one cancer patient yesterday who is almost always asleep when I swing by. They were saving her a seat for the U.S.-Algeria match, though. She told me she's more of a tennis fan (speaking of which, holy smokes) but that she'd really gotten into the World Cup. Nice to be able to high-five a serious leukemia patient, even if it is over a last-second goal rather than a more important piece of good news.

Come to think of it, the World Cup was probably on in 85-90% of the patient rooms I was in today during match hours. I guess there's not much else of value on TV during the day, but still...I think Kristin's right about the U.S. continuing to catch soccer fever.

Newbie Soccer Thoughts

I am a systems person; I enjoy watching new systems in action and trying to figure out what makes them tick. I'm also, as one of my CPE supervisors pointed out to me this week, an associative person; I like making connections between seemingly disparate things (both a blessing and a curse in the CPE context, let me tell you).

As such, I've had a field day--or would it be a pitch day?--watching World Cup games this weekend with my my über-enthusiastic, half-German girlfriend. I've been dipping my toes into soccer's waters off and on since the last Cup, but it's starting to get a bit more serious. Among the questions I've been pondering are the following: why don't more Americans like soccer, and am I allowed to support* Germany in the plausible event that Germany and the U.S. meet in the Round of 16 (apparently it would happen if Germany wins its group and the U.S. takes second in its, or vice versa)?

Regarding the former, my working hypothesis is built on the lens of looking at the two most dominant presences on the American sports landscape: football** (it dominates our current sports culture; we can't get enough of it) and baseball (it dominated our past sports culture; we're slowly abandoning it). I'm coming to the conclusion that soccer is more like baseball than football. It's subtler. It requires the fan to have a greater appreciation of small details and a more patient orientation toward brief, intense action rather than the throb of regular scoring. And, just like in the game where the best players only succeed about a third of the time, soccer doesn't always reward brute effort. Kristin caught this telling gem in the Times this morning: "It was a characteristic American effort, full of resolve[***] instead of beauty."

This comment actually sort of leads me to my second question. Many people rightly sing the praises of international soccer's coolest attribute: that the teams' styles often mirror their national personalities. And a major reason I want to support Germany in this tournament is that they play, well, like Germans: organized, patient, attentive to detail. Somewhere around the tenth minute today, I said, "They look like they're spending more of their energy thinking than playing." Like a Bo Ryan basketball team, they're patient, plotting, and sometimes plodding. They're like my parent's Volkswagon Cabrio, which was a humorous and kinda futile attempt at a midlife-crisis car. They're not a sexy pick. They're a sensible one. Sounds like my kinda team.

My problem is this: I'm not so sure we get to pick our loyalties. I grew up a Pirates fan because I lived in the town in Florida where they Spring Trained (this was before the Marlins). And then, when I moved to Milwaukee, I became a Brewers fan. "Root, root, root for the home team" is not easily dismissed in my sports worldview. I think Americans who have spent substantial time in countries that actually care about soccer are well within their rights to transfer their allegiances abroad. But that's not me. Am I stuck with Team USA until they're out?

What do you think about sports allegiances? Do we get to be primarily aligned with the team that makes us say, "I like they way they play"? Or is there something bigger at stake?

* Pitch instead of field and support instead of root for are among the charming vocabulary upgrades you get when you watch soccer (others: match instead of the more pedestrian game and side instead of team, which is fun even though the connotations are troubling). But see below for a major vocabulary pet peeve.

** If you are an American living in America and have not spent significant time in a foreign country (that's context information your hearers usually have), please don't call soccer football. Don't get me wrong, I think it's kind of obnoxious and typically American that we call our much more provincial game by the same name that everybody else (more accurately) uses for the world's most popular sport. But you only confuse things when, as an American having a conversation in America, you use the non-American convention. Not only is it confusing, it's kinda obnoxious. It's like insisting on calling the theater the theatre, spelling gray with an e, or putting periods and commas outside of quotation marks: nice idea, classier perhaps, but you're in the wrong country. I want to be British too--that doesn't give me license to punctuate or spell as if I were.

*** Even I can see that this is why an America-Germany matchup will just be a train wreck. The Americans will be stubbornly flying all over the pitch wearing themselves out while the Germans very patiently pass the hell out of the ball and dissect their opponents' feeble defense (especially if Howard is out).

Brief Review of Brief Interviews

I've written a fair bit on this blog about one of my top two or three favorite authors, David Foster Wallace. I'm hoping to use this summer's respite from required reading to finally finish slogging through his rather daunting catalogue. Of the three books that remained for me, I decided to start with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I think the requisite "acclaim for" pages in the softcover version nail it pretty well, especially the blurb from Time's R. Z. Sheppard:

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is meant to interrogate the reader, to elicit fresh responses to horrors that have lost their edge in the age of information overload . . . It displays a range of intellect and talent that is unseemly for any one writer to have, let alone show off.

My only quibble with Sheppard's assessment is his implication that Wallace is showing off. I mean, maybe. But I think the truth is probably more innocent and more tragic. I think he's simply trying as hard as his prodigious talents will allow him. I think more than just about anywhere else in the Wallace canon (at least the 85% or so that I've encountered), Brief Interviews is where Wallace fesses up to what seems to account for some or perhaps most of why he writes. Things come to a head in Pop Quiz 9 of "Octet," which begins, "You* are, unfortunately, a fiction writer" (145).

Ironically, there's no fiction to be found in PQ9, because it's where Wallace lays out, in agonizingly self-conscious detail, what he's up in "Octet" and--as Sheppard points out--in pretty much the entire book. The piece isn't working as he intended, he comes out and tells us, and so urgent is his desire to quote-unquote bare his soul** regarding the apparently undefinable thematic backbone of the Pop Quizzes that he decides to "address the reader directly and ask her straight out whether she's feeling anything like what you feel" (154).

I frequently get the impression that Wallace haters think all his formal acrobatics are just some tiring attempt to be cute. I think they couldn't be more wrong. As I said, I think he's concentrating really, really hard. And, to borrow from Dave Marsh's characterization of Aretha Franklin in "Respect": "[Wallace] when [he's] concentrating is as good as it gets" (Heart of Rock and Soul, 10). Here's his description of his own desperation in resorting to this fourth-wall-breaking ploy, "which in the late 1990s, when even Wes Craven is cashing in on metafictional self-reference, might come off lame and tired and facile, and also runs the risk of compromising the queer urgency about whatever it is you feel you want the pieces to interrogate in whoever's reading them" (146, emphasis his):

The trick to this solution is that you'd have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked -- more like unarmed. Defenseless. 'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' -- this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to 'Do you like me? Please like me,' which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene. In fact one of the very last few interpersonal taboos we have is this kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else [Ten years later we have an abbreviation for the self-revelation that rhetorically must accompany such prying: TMI. ~KMO]. It looks pathetic and desperate. That's how it'll look to the reader. And it will have to. There's no way around it. If you step out and ask her what and whether she's feeling, there can't be anything coy or performative or sham-honest-so-she'll-like-you about it. That'd kill it outright. Do you see? Anything less than completely naked helpless pathetic sincerity and you're right back in the pernicious conundrum. You'll have to come to her 100% hat in hand. (154)

This is the sentiment at the heart of all the material I've found most compelling and heartbreaking--but also the most deeply reassuring--about Wallace's work. For more of what I mean, see the painfully self-conscious Dean or President or Provost or whoever in Infinite Jest (my copy is currently missing or I'd name him for you). Or see that scene in IJ where he's talking about all the things you learn in AA or the halfway house and there's like four or five pages of semicoloned subclauses that just make me want to weep because they so thoroughly finger the jagged grain of each of our darkest secrets and most relentless insecurities. Or see, for the closest thing to PQ9's direct and explicit desperation, the "intertextual quotation[s]" that contain "the really urgent stuff" as part of the "multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit" in "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" (Consider the Lobster, 271).

The reason Sheppard's show off misses the mark is that Wallace's decision is ultimately a move of deep humility:

[I]t's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they're reading is when they sit down to try to escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning. Rather it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do . . . more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the whole campaign from ack at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.*** (159-160)

In the end, Wallace knows all he can do is ask us to think about it: "So decide" he concludes (160). I will be forever puzzled by the people who decide he's simply putting up a front.

------------------------

* In all of these pop quizzes, we're asked to make an ethical judgement or some other decision about one or more of the characters or situations in a short sketch. The sketch of PQ9 is of a writer writing an octet of quizzes (this "Octet" of quizzes, as it were), and so the implicit quiz question is something like "What would you do in my situation?" Thus, it's important to be clear about the pronoun antecedents in these quotations: "you"--the reader of the Pop Quiz--are Wallace himself.

** See B.I. #20 and much of PQ9 on how we all get reduced to such banalities when we really drill down deep into the big-insights-into-the-human-condition layers of personal experience and attempted expression.

*** I wonder if being a good priest/pastor/preacher is perhaps analogous to learning--to use Wallace's terms as he's developed them here--when to be a reader and when to be a Writer, or more appropriately just a writer. I think the great emphasis on cultivating self-knowledge as part of priestly formation is so we can learn to see and get some kind of handle on which of these two impulses is most strongly informing whatever bit of priestly advice bubbles up for us in a particular situation. I.e., "In recommending X, am I actually just responding to the way this situation pokes at my own insecurities, or do I have the kind of critical distance that surely almost all of us need in order to be truly open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit?" Of course, theologically and rhetorically, the ability and desire to relate to fellow human beings as Wallace's reader rather than his Writer is also really important. Most of us know a seemingly 100% Writer-priest or -pastor, and there's a good chance he or she is not very effective.

Kyle's Blogging Tips (80% of which are too specific to be useful)

I am probably the worst kind of blogger (OK, maybe not the worst kind: see Exhibits A, B, and C). I know a lot about blogs (I used to evaluate them for Newstex) and about blogging best practices (having edited many words on the subject), but I don't put that knowledge to very good use. For better and worse, I primarily write posts that explore rather vague and abstract notions of complementarity and wholeness, because these are ideas that seem central to my life/work/ministry/interests (it's hard to resist the forward slash when your life/work/ministry/interests have something vaguely and abstractly to do with complementarity and wholeness).

Thus, CSC has a theme but no focused topic, except maybe the worst topic any writer can have: him- or herself (e.g., the experiment with video blogging to keep in touch during my first year of seminary, regarding which experiment: thanks for all the good feedback this year, friends). Prompted by a couple of recent incidents (a retweet by David Meerman Scott of my post about BEA and then a very minor burst of secondary exposure on Twitter because David also mentioned in another tweet that I was the one who filmed this video), I took a look at the CSC stats today to try to glean what (silly) tips I might have for bloggers (silly because, for the reasons outlined above [and more], this blog is no example to follow). Here goes:

1. Name your blog after a snobby Latin expression. Almost all of my traffic from Google comes from people searching for the phrase "Contraria Sunt Complementa," presumably trying to figure out what it means. Sorry, y'all, I'm afraid you'll find only very opaque, inductive help here (I guess with the exception of my first post, which actually does do a decent definitional job and is--probably not coincidentally--my most popular post).
2. Know some important bloggers. I know two, sorta: David Meerman Scott--whom I rather shamelessly mention here from time to time and who as I said has been very kind with comments, retweets, etc.--and Freakonomics co-author Steven J. Dubner. OK, I don't actually know Steven J. Dubner, but I know (and currently live with) his pirate-obsessed research assistant, Ryan Hagen. And Ryan once saw my post about the Wikipedia article for "real life," which in turn prompted a post about what fantasy is for. The h/t traffic from that post has made freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com my fourth-largest all-time referrer, although I now believe that stat to be skewed because of a rather hideous record-keeping blunder on my part (see No. 4 below).
3. Have lots of time off and/or periods of isolation and a desperate need for concrete goals during same. As the last two weeks have reminded me, I am--like Sports Night's Dana Whitaker--terrible at having "unstructured time on my hands." Blogging has typical been for me a great way to manufacture some structure. I first got into blogging during a summer when I lived with my aunt and uncle in Cold Spring, NY, worked a pretty mindless job as a totally unqualified assistant to a medical equipment company field engineer, and had pretty much no friends and nothing to do. I started this blog during a Christmas break from grad school, by which time most of the high school friends I still kept in touch with had stopped coming home for more than a couple of days at the holidays, and anyway my parents now live pretty far from "home," or at least where home used to be. Point being: I do my most productive blogging during long school breaks. I recommend getting some of those.
   
4. Keep your counter's URL information up to date. This one is only silly because it's sad, though it's also only a problem if you care about your visit stats. When I bought my own domain name about a year and a half ago, I went ahead and moved http://contrariasuntcomplementa.blogspot.com over to http://blog.kyleoliver.net. However, I failed to enter this piece of information into my profile over at Blog Counter. Thus, I have like sixteen months' worth of statistics wherein the only recorded visits are via an outdated URL. I only discovered this blunder when I checked to see how many people had visited the site after David's recent retweet of my post, only to discover that only one person had. David currently has 40,558 followers on Twitter, so that number seemed pretty unlikely. (If only tinyurl.com, which I use for all my tweeted links, offered statistics the way tiny.cc does. Perhaps I should switch my allegiance.)
5. Write about your adventures wrangling household bats. What can I say? My most popular post not about physics (or about BookExpo America, but see Nos. 2 and 4 above) is about my adventures trying to usher bats out of St. Francis House while working as the House Fellow there. I guess it was funny.

So there you have it, my probably-not-at-all-helpful blogging tips. By the way, in other news of blog traffic suddenly and rapidly expanded, the secret is now out (thanks to the enthusiastic and tech-savvy clergy and parishioners of New York's St. Luke in the Fields [the former parish of my favorite VTS professor, incidentally]) that my smart, observant, and unusual-adventure-having girlfriend, Kristin Saylor, blogs about life as a port chaplain, St. Luke's parishioner, Wisconsin transplant, and amateur urban anthropologist at Wisconsin meets NYC. Since the cat's out of the bag, I can now offer a whole-hearted recommendation. It's a highly entertaining read, and she's got lots of interesting insight on the challenges of port ministry.

(P.S.: Apologies to any cat bloggers, cat lovers, or cat blog lovers reading this. You all can and should continue to blog or read about whatever you want.)

A Lesson and Some Highlights from BookExpo America

My friend David Meerman Scott was at the Wiley booth today at BookExpo America, signing copies of his new book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now. Since I now live in New York but haven't started working yet, I was able to attend. (David scored me a free pass. I was a John Wiley & Sons "Exhibitor Author," which made for a couple of initially awkward clarifications at other publishers' booths, since no conversation began without a subtle name-tag check.)

One thing I learned today: You really can come to know somebody pretty well without ever meeting him or her. I've been doing early-manuscript editorial work for David since the first edition ("1E," if I'm successfully extrapolating from an abbreviation I heard thrown around today to describe later editions) of his popular but "underrated" The New Rules of Marketing & PR. That's four years of reading "every word of every book that [he's] written for Wiley," he noted today. But because we got introduced via email by a mutual colleague (EContent's Michelle Manafy, who I've also worked for but never met), and because until now I've never lived in a city that's especially well trafficked by business speaker-authors, we've never had the chance to meet. And yet, after reading and deeply engaging with so much of his prose, it really did feel like I already knew him. I was highly encouraged by this realization, since I don't expect the trend of increasing numbers of "e-colleagues" to ever reverse itself.

Anyway, David, if you're reading this (and if you doubt that he is, I can only assume you've never read any of his books), thanks for getting me in to a really fun event. It was great to finally meet you.

What kind of loot did I come away with? Well, the highlight might be an autographed copy of Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters's Android Karenina, from the publisher who brought us Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as well as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. I confess that I've heard about but never (yet!) read one of these remixes, but I was pumped nevertheless. I also procured a signed copy of Colette Brooks's Lost in Wonder: Imagining Science and Other Mysteries, the 2010 Frommer's guide for D.C., an unsigned copy of Richard Miller's Fighting Words: Persuasive Strategies for War and Politics, a half-dozen less promising titles (some signed, some not), and--of course--a galley of David's new book.

All in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon! That's it for now. Stay tuned for thoughts on why I love Minneapolis-St. Paul, even though the Brewers always more-or-less collapse when I go there.

My Favorite Preacher Unexpectedly Reminds Me Why I Miss Him

[First, a guarantee: I will post something about my life and not about church very soon. Probably when I get back from the Brewers-Twins series this weekend!]

I remember reading at the beginning of the school year some article in which the author claimed, "Good preaching changes lives." I know that statement is true when it comes to my life, and no one has changed it in that way more than Alan Jones, whom I'm profoundly lucky to have been introduced to during my discernment year.

I listened in Central Park today to an old sermon of his, one I'd never heard before. The text, I presume, is from Jeremiah 18 (the potter's house), but from the sound of his voice you've got to assume he was riled up enough about some personal or news-reported incident that it wouldn't have really mattered what the text was. His subject is authority, in particular the challenge of interpreting scripture and the peril of bringing it to bear on our lives without proper care, perspective, and--most of all--humility.

The sermon got me thinking back to one of the last late-night patio theology sessions that I was a part of before I headed north (yes, this is what seminarians do in their free time, which I'd despair of if I didn't have a record of how I spent my free time as an engineer). I said a lot that night about why I think the Anglican ethos gives us answers to how to be a functioning church without resorting to sola scriptura disengagement from the world's present realities or to a reliance on theological witch hunts to defend orthodoxy. Unsurprisingly, Jones sums up what I was trying to get at rather gracefully:

We are not without resources. We're not floundering around. We look to the cross; we share in this Eucharist; and surely we see a trajectory in scripture and history, the trajectory of inclusion and justice. That's our pilgrimage together.

Anyway, I highly recommend this gem from the "master of the serpentine sermon" (thanks, Gary). It has greatly lifted this exhausted liberal-centrist seminarian's spirits. I can't find a direct link anymore, but you want the 9/10/07 sermon that seems to be available here.

In other news, I watched the VTS commencement ceremony today. Brian McLaren, who I've never read but had assumed I would dislike, gave a great address (full disclosure, though: I missed the last few minutes to take a phone call and haven't had a chance to catch up yet). You can check it out here.

Spring Update

Well, that's a wrap for the first year of seminary. Man, did it go fast. If you want the short version, it was a challenging but formative and faith-deepening experience. On the whole, very positive, very blessed. Click below for some more details and information about my new gig in New York for the summer.

250 Words About My Favorite Bible Verse

When the LORD restored the fortunate of Zion *
then were we like those who dream.
(Psalm 126:1, BCP Psalter)

Our hope as Christians is for restoration with God, our neighbors, and ourselves, through Christ. I can think of no better way to describe the joy of that restoration than to note that, when we experience it, we are "as dreamers." As a trained and duly pragmatic engineer, I need this verse's insistence that we should not be content with a small-potatoes promise; God's abundance extends beyond all that our most wild and reckless dreams can come up with. At the same time, I find it possible to trust this verse so deeply because of what we learn from it in the wider context of the psalm. We live and minister in a kingdom that is already here and has not yet fully arrived, and so it should resonant deeply when the psalmist goes on to call for God's re-restoration of Zion. When the verb tense changes in verse 5 (thank you, Dr. Ferlo), reminding us that our earthly fortunes will always be like the rhythmic waxing and waning of “the watercourses of the Negev,” the imagery from verse 1 makes even more sense. The LORD is also with us in our deprivation, and in those decidedly darker dreams it produces. For me, the sustaining witness of this verse is that in most moments of our lives, all our joy and thanksgiving (“O LORD, we are restored!”) intermingles with all our hope and even regret (“O LORD, restore us!”), and God declares the whole lot good.

Ice-chaton 2010

Yes, my friends, it's true. I have seen, in the past couple of days, more snow fall at one time here, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, in balmy Alexandria, VA, than I did in 17 years in Wisconsin. 28.8" in about 31 hours. Pretty impressive. Here are some pictures.





Album link

On the Marq, Finally

A while back, I lamented all the difficulties involved in establishing a paperless seminary workflow. Lots of people chime in, but in the end we didn't locate an ideal way to do the main task: mark up PDFs (with highlighting, marginalia, etc.). During that process (though not on the comments--perhaps via Twitter?), someone told me about Marqed.com, and online service that provides tools for doing most of the things we had discussed. To my great frustration, however, it was really buggy (perhaps just on my system--Firefox 3.0.17 on Ubuntu 9.04).

However, highlighting at least seems finally to be working well enough to make this a legit go-to tool for now. You get ten PDF uploads per month with the free version, or you can upgrade to unlimited. (The paid account allows you to upload MS Office documents as well, though don't ask me why you'd want to involve a Web tool to edit a document that can already be marked up natively. Maybe for read-only files?) Of course, I'm not wild about being dependent an Internet connection in order to view my files, but all our classrooms here at VTS have Wi-Fi, so I guess I can deal with this for now. Anyway, I feel like I can finally recommend it. Check it out at www.marqed.com.



In other news, we got some beautiful snow last night here in Northern Virginia. I posted a few quick pictures to Facebook here.

Football Photos, Thomist Thoughts

You could probably do worse for an update on what I've been doing at seminary the last couple weeks than to check out two digital snapshots.

The first is actually a collection of snapshots. The VTS Fighting Friars went 1-2 at the Luther Bowl in Gettysburg a few weeks back, ending our season 2-2. But we went 2-0 "in conference," after adding a win against our fellow Anglicans at Trinity School for Ministry (aka the Pittsburg Kneelers), who were by far the best sporstmen (and sportswomen) and the cleanest team we played on a day of startlingly hard hits for a flag football tournament. Anyway, you can check out the pictures here, including this highly embarrassing one of me running with the ball after our goal-line zone won us an interception:



The other tidbit is a response to one of the several comments I got on my Twitter post about enjoying Thomas Aquinas. A friend wanted to know what I'd liked about him, and this is what I wrote:

I guess what I appreciated about the excerpt of Aquinas that we read was the motivation and methodology. I like this notion of saying, in effect:

"There's some unity to this huge mass of literature the Christian tradition has accumulated. Of course, there is some genuine disagreement, but more often than not the much of the conflict either evaporates completely or at least diminishes if you look at it closely. If we borrow a little Aristotle and go through the careful (if at times a bit tedious) exercise of very clearly defining and categorizing this vast repository of theology, we realize that the story is a lot more harmonious than we might have guessed."

I just really admire the care and precision that goes into the whole thing. Plus, the implicit and rather bold claim that logic and analysis can be deployed meaningfully to help us navigate among this collection of hundreds of isolated claims, plucked (almost at random, it sometimes seems) out of the Scriptures and patristic literature, is just endlessly fascinating when you watch it being deployed. The effort feels very rigorous and worthwhile even if the underlying epistemology seems a little naive by modern standards. [Response from my church history professor to my follow-up question about this final issue: "It's what scholastics do."]

Hope you're all having a lovely weekend and that the weather wherever you are is better than on this dreary day in Northern Virginia.

Travel Day: Harlem to VTS, Via Media

Navigate past vesting choir members to leave apartment at St. Mary's, Harlem, (126th between Amsterdam and Broadway) at 10 a.m. Take southbound C train to 34th. Walk to Madison Square Garden to get in line for Megabus. [Romantic interlude.] Take Megabus to 30th Street Station, Philadelphia. Take R3 SEPTA train to Media, PA. Walk to Christ Church to attend installation of Adam Kradel as new rector. Change out of suit at Christ Church rectory and walk back to Media station. Take R3 back to 30th Street Station. Take Amtrack 165 Regional to Union Station, Washington, D.C. Trains are shutting down for the night, so take final Red Line train from Union Station to Metro Center, transfer to the Orange Line and ride to Roslyn, then transfer to Blue Line and ride to King Street. Take taxi from King Street Station to VTS and arrive at 12:45 a.m.

Fall Break Update

Sorry for my month-long absence; it's been a wild month or so here at VTS. I hope to make up for it by putting off my final Hebrew studying to tell you a bit about first quarter and share a few photos. Enjoy!















The weather was a lot like it was at Crazylegs 2009 in Madison.










Lined up for a blitz, I think. See the rest of the really excellent pictures (by my friend Cayce Ramey) here.













Second-quarter books! (With Kermit, for scale. Special thanks to Trinity Church for helping me pay for them!)












There are some beautiful fall colors just out the back door of Price Hall (yes, this Price, who apparently wrote one of my favorite prayers in the '79 BCP).










Kristie and me by the WWII memorial on a beautiful afternoon over Columbus Day weekend.

The Ongoing Pursuit of a Paperless Seminary Reading Workflow

In seminary, we read a lot. Like, probably more than we do anything else--including playing intramural sports (a surprising but deeply rewarding time sink), praying (though we've received tremendous support in this respect), sleeping (at least it feels that way), and complaining (a necessary thing sometimes, let me tell you).

And--as any humanities major knows but us engineering students are always too busy with problem sets to notice--retaining even a small fraction of that reading is a matter of no small challenge or importance. The old middle school "reading notes" model is an almost laughable prospect due to the shear number of pages we're talking about here. The highlighter, I've been told, is my friend. I have come to agree whole-heartedly.

However, because this school thankfully realizes that part of being good stewards of God's creation is to learn to use less paper (and because--let's be honest--who reads paper copies of anything these days, except maybe for actual books?), I find myself with a quandry: how do you highlight PDFs?

You may know that this is a maddeningly difficult question to answer. Trying to do so may be the one thing I'm spending more time on than the actual reading. The problem, as I see it, is that it's impossible to justify spending the money on programs like Adobe Acrobat or Foxit Editor when all you want to do is highlight some text in any damn document you please. I'm not an expert in digital copyright or fair use, but I really don't think this is too much to ask.

In a move we're apparently supposed to interpret as magnanimous, Adobe now allows Reader users (people like me who aren't willing to pay for Acrobat) to do some basic markup on files with "document rights...enabled." The problem--and surely the people at Adobe know this--is that I have never, ever, been given a PDF course reading with document rights enabled. Again, some of this may be a matter of legitimate intellectual property concern. But if these files are being used for educational use (and clearly that's why my professors are allowed to distribute them as PDFs via course management software in the first place), it seems like merely applying a "highlight filter" to a local copy of the document ought to be fair game. Am I off base here?

Anyway, enough complaining...let me tell you what I've converged to and then put out a plea for anyone who finds this post and has a better solution to please help me out. After playing quite a bit with PDFedit and finding it summarily difficult to use (or maybe the Ubuntu distribution is just buggy?), I've settled on the more user friendly but still unsatistfactory flpsed. Basically, this program lets you do text annotation. As you can see in the screenshot below, the text manages to remain persistent even if you view the re-converted PDF in a program like Evince, which is handy. But this workflow still requires a lot of typing, when all I really want to be able to do is highlight. I'm encouraged by early experiments with Scribus, but I'm still fighting the learning curve.

Am I overlooking a simpler free (or cheap) solution? It wouldn't be the first time. If so, please enlighten me. Is anyone else as perplexed as I am about this stunning lack of obviously useful functionality?

DC Must-Sees?

Hey everybody, this instalment of the video blog includes a request for tourist destinations for me to take the folks this weekend. Please chime in in the comments if you have favorite places. Thanks!