Unexpected Pleasures and Small Stuff

Unexpected pleasures are a beautiful thing. For instance, The Buick Verano's Unexpected Pleasures commercial that lives up to the concept. It makes me smile each time I watch it, which is fitting. I think my job counts as this too: the people are fun, and I get payed to workout! It's like a cool, old lady from my church who I waited on today said, "This would be a fun place to work! I'd work here." I agreed with her. It's one of those jobs such as barista or book store clerk that's kind of day dreamy.

And so is small stuff. This British lady's post was an excellent reminder of Ann Voskamp's book, One Thousand Gifts. It's not a life changing book, but it's good.

My small stuff this week is the Hunger Games soundtrack-- I'm totally digging on it. And, I've worked ten days straight (8 days of work and 2 days of 6+ hours of interviewing), and I get a day off. When it rains, it pours. It's nice to work and have the hope that interviews bring, but I'm glad to have a day that's low key. I heard from some friends and professors because of applying to jobs that care about my intelligence... it's on the refreshing side. My last teaching job didn't check with my professors.

too much of a good thing?

"learning curve"

The knitting class lived up to my expectations. I was the "special student". I had a 2:1 teacher-student ratio. But by the end of the intense tutorial that lasted thirty minutes longer than everybody else's, I had an idea what I was supposed to do. It was helpful to hear two people explain it. I have to say the pharmacist- former chemistry teacher's really anal directions were the most helpful. She would narrate what I was doing and correct me as I go. She gave me pointers about the yarn always being to the right and paying attention to the tension of the string. The other girl helped me break it into steps. She also told me I was going to be a natural. I think I'll like knitting; it'll be a good past time for when there's too much background commotion to read. And, i may become good enough to knit Christmas and fall and winter birthday presents.

a close up of my knitting genius

*****
The job took. They like me, and I like them. It's a physical job: I come home dirty, sweaty and tired. But, I get to chat while I sweat. I really enjoy the ladies with whom I work. They're very protective of me. A customer was snippy with me, an she jumped on him: "There's no need to be rude to us." I love the "us". Everybody works hard. I'm still in the honeymoon phase, but I feel I have a lot to learn from these women. They seem to be pretty good at being content and putting others first.

*****
The first interview of the week went fairly well today. There were a lot of people. I didn't have the best 5-minute lesson, but it was good. I didn't have cute visual aids that worked with the impact of roads on the success of the Roman empire. But, I did have the shock factor. There was this one guy who was a punk to the girl who taught about Christopher Columbus. Yeah, the political and technological history of the Roman Empire exceeded his pay grade. Good luck: I was in line to go first with my lesson, but a fellow Heel volunteered which put me going 7th. I did some good brainstorming while watching the other people teach their lessons. Bad luck: I got the last interview slot and had a lot of down time between the first part of my day and the last part. I got really hungry.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

This is the first book in a great YA dystopian trilogy. The movie opens Friday! I taught this book to 7th graders last year who loved it. The author wrote for TV, so she has a knack for suspenseful endings to chapters. I know adults who've stayed up until 3am or fallen asleep on the sofa on "school nights" because of the suspense of this book.

Why I like this book:

Universal Themes
Good v. evil. Do good and evil exist-- or are they just cultural concepts?
Big v. little. Was Nietzsche right?
Friendship. What does friendship entail? Is there more to it than sharing secrets?
Family. A parent dies, and a child has to take charge. Roles shift. What are the givens and necessities in familial bonds?
Courage. What is courage? Where does courage live and thrive? What brings courage out in a person?
Survival. What gives humans the will to fight against seemingly insurmountable odds?
Love. What does love look like, feel like, act like? What does love mean? Who and what's worth loving?
Hope.
Liberty.
Role of government.

Kick-Ass Female Protagonist
Thank you, God, for giving teenager a girl worth emulating! Move over, Bella and Twilight. Bella is such spineless, whiney, soul-less, pointless protagonist. My heart sank every time I saw a 12 or 13 yo girl toting around one of the Twilight books.

Relevance
Reality television? Video games? Politics? Does any of this stuff impact our daily lives? Do we need to question this stuff's role in our lives?

Craftmanship
Poignant use of symbolism. Say, the dandelion. Bread.

Readability
It's a quick, fun read.

Movie tie-ins. It was shot in North Carolina. The Capitol scenes were shot in uptown Charlotte. A lot of the wilderness scenes were shot in Shelby.

I think there are going to be a lot of connections between this movie and Winter's Bone. Watch it and see for yourself.

May the odds ever be in your favor!

job update

I go in tomorrow at 10am to a local nursery to try out the job. We shall see-- I'll be on the seedy side. It could be fun, and there's definitely a lot to learn. This will be unskilled labor that I have interest in.

I have an all day interview on Sunday. Yes, Sunday, which I thought was on Saturday until a few hours ago. Oops. And, I have an all day interview on Thursday. I have to prepare two lessons. One is on figurative language, which I'm going to use comic strips. And, the other is on Roman technology. Both are going to be awesome, but guess which one is my favorite?

In related news, I'm still studying for personal training certification-- a chapter a day. And, I start my knitting class tonight at 6:15pm at my church. I have selected my turquoise blue worsted weight yarn and size 9 circular needles. Bring it, grannies. They give lessons so that you can bring your skillz to the "Knit One, Pray One" ministry that sews prayer shawls.

Diane Ackerman's An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

This book is excellent! I like most books I review, but this one is definitely a starred review. It's the kind of book that takes root in your mind and finagles its way into your daydreams and conversations with unsuspecting friends. I was emailing a friend I hadn't seen in years about something, and somehow a paragraph about mammals' sleep patterns appeared. He was cool and worked some weird facts into his reply.

Diane Ackerman blends science, art and everything into this book in a beautiful and playful manner. She reminds you what a fun adventure thought is. Based on reading this book, I'd recommend anything by this author. She reminds me of my favorite professors-- I didn't care what they were teaching because their teaching was enough. I hated Greek, but Prof. Wooten made Lysius' court cases come alive and seem completely relevant and fascinating. She's a curious teacher-- what's not to like?

The book is well crafted from the macro level of organization to the micro of sentences. It's witty and wise. Even the Table of Contents is delightful:

MIRACLE WATERS
(Evolution)
Chapter 1. The Enchanted Loom
Imagining the brain.
Chapter 2. This Island Earth
Evolution; the world's tiniest reptile; our brain and other animals.
Chapter 3. Why We Ask "Why?"
What happens in the right brain vs. the left brain; why we're driven to tell stories.
Chapter 4. The Fibs of Being
Consciousness; some definitions and theories.
Chapter 5. Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines
The unconscious; how it collaborates with the unconscious mind.

SWEET DREAMS OF REASON (The Physical Brain) Chapters 6-12
PAVILIONS OF DESIRE (Memory)13-19
NEVER A DULL TORMENT (The Self, and Other Fictions) 20-24
THE WORLD IS BREAKING SOMEONE ELSE'S HEART (Emotions) 25-26
THE COLOR OF SAYING (Language) 27-30
THE WILDERNESS WITHIN (The World We Share) 31-34

Aren't those fascinating, enticing titles? My job already finished because you're already dying to read it.

The book is worth owning solely for Chapter 30: Shakespeare on the Brain. The chapter's epigraph: "[He understood]... the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live." - C.S. Lewis

There's a plethora of worthwhile quotations: for instance: "... the spirit of inhabitable awe... Edward Hirsch, The Demon and the Angel

The book's epigraph:
my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and
taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and
chipping with sharp fatal tools
in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of
chrome and execute strides of cobalt
nevertheless i
feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am
becoming something a little different, in fact
myself
Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet
bellowings. e.e. cummings, Portraits, VII

Another Chapter's epigraph:
“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

She even weaves alchemical symbols into the book. This book is engaging, beautiful and fun. It lives up to its title. You will be altered by reading it. What more can you ask from a good book?

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I have a thing for modern Catholic writers: Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Graham Greene. I'll even put Kathleen Norris in the group-- she's an oblate with a Benedictine order. I find their writing true, characters real, and ideas necessary. It's kind of a serious thing that proves CSL's statement: "We read in order to know we're not alone." I'm never alone when reading these people. They are my clan.

Graham Greene makes the most despicable characters spicable. Well, he makes them tolerable if not endearing. His whiskey priest in the Power and the Glory is genius: my post on the Power and the Glory. He has the uncanny ability to make the reader realize that she has a lot in common with this terrible, easily judged character. He blurs the lines between good and evil by calling into question social norms. His "bad guys" are reminescent of the publican praying outside the synagogue. They have the humility to forgo on pretense.

In The Quiet American, Fowler is a small, desperate, weak man, and Pyle is ambitious, naive, and dangerous. With a lesser author, liking both these characters wouldn't be possible. His characters are very believable and he conquers really big ideas... like proxy war and colonialism, and religion. And, his style is highly readable yet artful.

Here's Fowler on war and politics:
"Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and democracy when he gets inside his hut at night?" (119)

"Isms and ocracies. Give me facts. A rubber planter beats his labourer-- all right, I'm against him. He hasn't been instructed to do it by the Minister of the Colonies. In France, I expect he'd beat his wife. I've seen a priest, so poor he hasn't a change of trousers, working fifteen hours a day from hut to hut in a cholera epidemic, eating nothing but rice and salt fish, saying his Mass with an old cup-- a wooden platter. I don't believe in God and yet I'm for that priest. Why don't you call that colonialism?"

".... We haven't a liberal party any more-- liberalism's infected all the other parties. We are all either liberal conservatives or liberal socialists; we all have a good conscience. I'd rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it. Look at the history of Burma. (120-1)

Fowler on religion:

" If this cathedral had existed for five centuries instead of two decades, would it have gathered a kind of convincingness with the scratches of feet and the erosion of the weather? Would somebody who was convincible like my wife find here a faith she couldn't find in human beings? And if I had really wanted faith would I have found it in her Norman church? But I had never desired faith. The job of a reporter is to expose and record.... I had no visions or miracles in my repertoire of memory." (110)

"Repertoire of memory": what a brilliant, weighted phrase. The human mind does pick and choose which memories to play.

"It's strange what fear does to a man." (says the priest.)
"It would never do that to me. If I believed in any God at all, I should still hate the idea of confession. Kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing myself to another man. You must excuse me, Father, but to me it seems morbid-- even unmanly."
"Oh," he said lightly, "I expect you are a good man. I don't suppose you've ever had much to regret." (57)

Oh, the gentle knowing wisdom of the priest.


There's the "love" triangle between Pyle, Fowler, and Fowler's Vietnamese lover, which, of course, mirrors the politics and war. The American's the idealistic ass. Greene is British after all.

This book demonstrates the power of art to raise necessary questions in a fairly inoffensive manner. I think this book is extremely timely considering the American presence in Afghanistan-- are we really helping the Afghanis? Are isms and ocracies a legitimate reason to kill a human being?

This book has made me realize how grateful I am to regain my capacity to read and engage with good books. It was really hard when I didn't have the attention to do it. Three cheers for good books!

strength training vs. cardio

If you're like I am, the only way you enjoy strength training is in a group setting with loud music... or a coach and some competition. I'd like to see a gender breakdown of preferences towards different types of workouts. I'd think women would own yoga and aerobic classes and guys weight lifting. I'm not sure about cardio, but I think women would have the edge.

I became a believer in weight lifting in college. It was amazing to watch my splits go down as I got stronger. And, I didn't get bigger, which is a lot of women's fear about lifting. Well, I liked my shoulders getting bigger-- I thought it made my hips and thighs look smaller. I always remember sitting with my novice coach on a spring day, watching a class change. She simply said, "Muscle is beautiful." One of my teammates asked, "Are you talking about the guys or girls?" My coach responded, "It doesn't matter."

That logic really stuck with me. I tried to get my students on the band wagon-- the healthy girls wanted to lose weight so they could look like magazine chicks.

I hate abs and arms workouts. They are miserable pain. However, they make me faster and less flabby. Classes are the best way, but a close second is mixing strength and cardio. For instance, burpees. Burpee article that you can read (and source of picture). But, I leave out the push up because I'm a wimp. I always do burpees in sets of ten in a considerably less sexy outfit (although that outfit would be incredibly less sexy if I were wearing it).

In high school, my Cross Country coach had us do frog jump/mountain climber combos. The one difference with the frog jump-- we jumped up not forward, so we remained stationary. We'd do the combo:
15 frog jumps/1 mountain climber
14 frog jumps/ 2 mountain climbers
etc. until
1 frog jump/15 mountain climbers.

We'd do these kind of workouts after an easy to medium run. To state the obvious: these kind of workouts are more fun outside with a friend.

Also, the other key take away from this blog article. Youtube is a brilliant, free resource for working out. Granted, there's a lot of crap, but you can find ideas that will spark your interest.

The Innocence and Wisdom of Father Brown by GK Chesterton

I discovered Chesterton in seminary, which isn't really a shock. He's such a fantastic thinker and so quick-witted and joyful. I'd put his wit up with Oscar Wilde, but it has a very different flavor. I'd have loved to watch him debate. However, I actually read my first Father Brown mystery, "The Blue Cross", this year in an anthology. I'm a big fan of murder mysteries because they are the most moral fiction we have.

In seminary, I came up with a theory that the chubbier a theologian was the jollier his theology. Take John Newton. He was rotund at the height of his writing on grace. Take the Desert Fathers; they thought laughter was bad for the soul. But, I think my theory explains the difference between Martin Luther and John Calvin... and their followers.

Father Brown's character is a lovable little mole of a man. He's nothing to look at and terribly odd, but he's terribly keen and wise. He understands human nature at a fundamental level. The plots are not always brilliant, but there's always a haunting idea embedded in the story. And, Chesterton's writing is phenomenal.

Father Brown on crime as a work of art:

"A crime," he said slowly, "is like any other work of art. Don't look surprised; crimes are by no mean the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop. But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable mark-- I mean, that the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated...." He then goes on to prove his theory with Hamlet; he makes numerous literary allusions which are fun and accurate. (from The Queer Feet, p.57)

On politicians:

"Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I've known started like to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime." (The Flying Stars, p. 73).

On conversation:

"Have you ever noticed this-- that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean-- or what they think you mean...." (The Invisible Man, p. 89)

On Sleep:

"Sleep!" cried Father Brown. "Sleep. We have come to the end of the ways. Do you know what sleep is? Do you know that every man that sleeps believes in God? It is a sacrament, if only a natural one. Something has fallen on us that falls very seldom on men; perhaps the worst thing that can fall on them."

Craven's parted lips came together to say, "What do you mean?"

The priest had turned his face to the castle as he answered:
"We have found the truth; and the truth makes no sense."
... when they reached the castle again he threw himself upon sleep with the simplicity of a dog." (The Honour of Israel Gow, p. 102)

On miracles and the modern mind:

""The modern mind always mixes up two different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its difficulty about miracles. A miracle is startling; but it is simple. It is simple because it is a miracle. It is power coming directly from God (or the devil) instead of indirectly through nature or human wills...." (The wrong shape, p.121)

On humility:

"....Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."
....
"I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart...." (The Hammer of God, pp. 158-9)

Example of his poetic language (and literary illusion):

The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver. In a sky dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice. All that quickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless, black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold.... (The Sign of the Broken Sword, p.176)


My recommendation: buy this book at a used bookstore to pick up when you want to smile and think for a bit.