Nate Knows Nada

Ryan blogged about caffeine in academia, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I drink a cup of tea in the morning, followed by a couple of cups of
morning coffee (usually a 16 oz. Starbucks, as it’s on the way to work,
sometimes full-caf, sometimes half-caf).  Then there’s probably a
coffee aftert lunch sometime, sometimes leaded and sometimes not (but
since it’s from Peet’s, it’s damn strong).  Then, if I’m out in
the evening, another coffee beverage, like an espresso or small strong
coffee.

Just in case you wanted to know….

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Yesterday, the Times ran an article on the low-carb food revolution
sweeping the food industry.  I don’t count my carbs, and the
article gave me further reason to avoid doing so.  Here’s the
quote that shocked me the most:

“None of this was really available,” Ms. Lipson said. “The amount of
stuff that’s available now, it’s amazing,” she said, poring over
pancake mixes, pasta and chocolate bars. Asking for “something like
rice,” she was directed to a row of canned low-carb mashed potatoes in
a variety of flavors. “Garlic parmesan?” she asked her husband. “You
like garlic parmesan?”

The price: $6.99 for seven ounces.

No one is claiming that eating low-carb is cheap. Robert Hall, 30, was
buying nacho cheese and cool ranch twists by CarbFit, some baked
cheese, low-carb soft tacos made by a company called Adios Carbs, and,
for his girlfriend, low-carb brownies. He left with $122.18 in low-carb
food. “I spent 300 bucks last time,” he said. “This was just a
supplemental visit.”

So, it’s massively expensive to eat this way.  Which makes me
more likely to want to follow the general model of portion control if I
wanted to lose weight.  Or — and I will if today’s beautiful
weather holds — spend more time on my bicycle.

But there’s a social justice concern here, too.  Following a
low-carb diet leads to bad use of the earth’s resources.  Since
most Americans bulk up on their protein with meat, this means that we
require more meat.  Meat — ususally from poultry or cattle —
requires lots of resources to produce, in terms of feed, waste products
generated (effluent and methane), and slaughter anddistribution
facilities.  (I think the general ratio is about 7-10 units of
feed to produce a unit of cow and about 3.5-5 units of feed for
chicken.)  It requires many more agricultural and economic
resources to sustain a massive scale diet shift like the one that we
are seeing right now.  Meat has a greater impact on the
environment that vegetable and grain matter, and the shift from plant
production to meat production also has a disproportionate effect upon
the world’s poor, who can’t afford the indulgence of meat.  Only a
wealthy country can even consider such a diet.

For a few months now, I’ve been thinking about posting a fairly
personal essay here, one that freely gives up some of the details of my
life, an essay that talk about my coming out and coming in as a gay and
spiritual person.  I rarely talk about the details of my inner
life in such detail here, keeping a fairly firm wall around parts of my
personal life in this forum.

Also, since the Times put up a story this morning on why some gay people are seeking marriages in the church, even if the state doesn’t recognize their unions, it seemed appropriate to put this up for now.  Best quote there:

It is a perennial complaint among members of the clergy that many
straight couples regard the chapel as little more than a stage set for
a picture-perfect wedding. In contrast, many of the gay couples who are
heading for the altar are regular worshipers who say in interviews that
religion is central to their lives.

Anyway, at the risk of getting hate comments, I am posting my story here. 
And I might note that while this described where I was in January 2000,
it’s not necessarily the same story I would tell now.  But much of
it is.

I was talking with a friend last night, right as i was about to go to
bed, and he’s trying to figure out what to do with the person he’s
dating.  He’s not into the person in a permanent way; he likes
hanging out and spending time with the person but doesn’t see the
relationship moving into a permanent place.  So he’s doing this
dating for now, but he seems to feel a little out of sorts for being in
something he’s not committed to for the long term.

I guess I don’t see anything wrong with placeholder relationships, as
long as both people are generally aware that that’s what is going
on.  Who decided that all of our relationships in life have to be
open-ended?  We don’t keep friends, family, or lover forever, and
it seems unreasonable to think that every person we date has to be
decided upon quickly as relationship potential or not.  I’ve dated
guys that I wasn’t planning on settling in with, but I enjoyed getting
to know them.  They added to my life, taught me a bit about
romance and friendship, and they certainly have had an effect on my
life.  I just knew from near the beginning that these were not the
guys I wanted to be with in the long term (‘though I’m pretty sure that
my current BF is that person)….  And I’d like to think they
learned half as much from me as I learned from them.

Any thoughts out there?

As a kid, I had a fair amount of acne.  Not disfiguring or
scarring, but still quite a lot….  As an adult, I tend not to
break out anymore, but I do get these cysts (which my doctor has
assured me are perfectly innocuous) that occasionally become inflamed
and really hurt for a couple of days.

The one on the back of my neck has been doing that yesterday and
today.  It really hurts, and I’m getting annoyed by tnot being
able to turn my neck and all.  I’d go to the doctor, but by the
time I get in a couple of days from now, the thing will have gone
down….

Right, like you all wanted to hear about my medical issue of the day….

It’s one of those days where I don’t feel like doing the tasks right
before me, but I think I can get them done.  I have my independent
study student coming in a bit under two hours, and I need to read her
assigned book so that we can talk about it over lunch.  The West Wing paper is coming along VERY slowly.

I had a fantastic coffee with my friend Brad last night, after having attended a Latin Sarum-rite mass in Emmanuel Church’s Historical Liturgies
series.  I’ve never been to a full Latin Mass before, and, per the
bishop’s authorization, this was not a recreation but an actual
Eucharist, and so we had some of the feeling that a fifteenth century
English person might have upon going to Mass.  Which will make
next month’s introduction of the English Reformation liturgy all the
more dramatic.  Then Brad and I had a good two hours discussing
religion, friends who are dating, our childhoods, work, and whatever
else might come up.

I feel a need to mention that a professor in my old department at UC
Berkeley has recently been diagnosed with inoperable brain
cancer.  Lots of people here and there have been praying for
her.  She’s jewish, but I know of Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist
prayers that have been said for her.  BF’s priest-boss even
offered Mass for her, her family, and my friends who work with her last
week.  One of the first things I thought of when I heard the news
was the line from the New Testament, “The prayer of a righteous person
is powerful and effective.”  I don’t know any righteous people,
but as a good social scientist, I figure that if we get enough people
praying, we’re bound by random selection to hit at least one righteous
person….  *wry, somewhat sad grin*

BF and I leave for a weekend in New York tonight, to stay with my friend Kjrste, the opera singer, and her husband, Rob.

Right.  Back to work.

So in reading a post from Vernica yesterday regarding AKMA‘s presentation at BloggerCon, I had a suspiscion of mine confirmed.

When I was home in the Bay Area a couple of weeks ago for the wedding,
I had dinner with a friend, and he asked me why it is I write this
blog.  “What’s the attraction?” he wanted to know.  I can’t
explain all of it, but I was able to finally stumble into the idea that
blogging is in part a form of prayer.

Writing has been a form of prayer for hundreds of years, in all the
spiritual traditions, in the work of the Kabbalahists to Teresa of
Avila and Julian of Norwich to Thomas Merton to the Sufi mystics to
Pascal’s Pensees.  If
I’m learning anything about prayer in my own life, it’s that it’s not
just in the form of sitting down, bowing the head, and trying to
replicate the prayer experience of my Sunday School past.  It’s
about talking to God in whatever way that’s possible for us.  The
limit is on our end, not the Holy One’s (blessed be He or She). 
In other words, God does not need us to pray in a particular way —
it’s we who need to pray in a particular way, due to our limitedness.

So when I write, I pray.  And sometimes when I pray, I
write.  And sometimes I mull over things in the shower and
suddenly realize that I am praying, as happened this morning.  For
example, I got a yucky e-mail from my dad last night, and I can tell
that all that’s going on in his life is rocking his world right now,
from my gayness to the fact that my grandfather appears to be
emotionally abusing my grandmother to the fact that my mom had major
surgery a couple of weeks ago to his idea that I won’t communicate with
him and my mom (what appears to have happened is that he hasn’t checked
his home e-mail account to see my response, and so he thinks that I am
in the process of cutting them off).  As he concluded, “I used to
think I had, on some level, a charmed life. If things were not
brilliant, they at least seemed to go smoothly, no real problems of any
kind. Now when I see how things are in my family, I feel like we are
all characters in discarded draft of a play by Tennessee Williams. When
I hear people occasionally talk of the second coming and the end of our
problem-filled lives on this earth, it seems a more welcome prospect
than I have ever found it before.”

So, as I stood in the shower, I was thinking about the situation and
how I had responded (I wrote back a couple of hours after I got the
e-mail), and I found myself hoping for compassion to deal with the
situation.  And then I found myself feeling thankful that I can be
around for my friend Edward, who’s dealing with the closet and love and
life and work, all of which are quite full.  And then I realized
that thinking through these occurences, reflecting on them, and perhaps
seeing the transcendent in them was praying.

Moreso, since I wasn’t in any sort of “prayer mode,” my mind was free
to listen, to “wander”, to do what and go where it needed to.

And I felt at peace with all of that, with yesterday.  And writing it out has furthered that.

Is it a bit scary to pray here, where others can read what’s going
on?  Yeah, but here’s the thing.  I believe that God is found
in each of us (panentheism), that each face is the face of God, and in my particular
religion, the face of Christ.  Bits of the God-spark live in each
of us.  By sometimes praying while writing and letting other people
read it, I’m not praying to any of you out there.  But we all may
be the agents of change for each other, working out our lives with and
for one another, helping to create the kingdom of God here on earth, in
our lives.

Or I could just be babbling on….  *grin*

These lines — from the autobiography — might well have been the man’s
thoughts very early this morning.

“It’s about time for me to go to work, or if you like, to go play. That’s
what we music gypsies call it, after all. I’ll put on my black shirt,
buckle up my black belt on my black pants, tie my black shoes, pick up my
black guitar, and go put on a show for the people in this town.”

Johnny Cash died today.  I’m shocked. I might even tear up a bit.  Wow.  He’s such a huge part of my life, in many ways.

I may not post anything else today.