Gazing at Infinity

Like so many people, I suffered from the affliction of myopia in my youth. I refused to wear my glasses and walked around blind until my parents relented and let me get contact lenses in junior high. A few years ago I gave myself a very special birthday present: LASIK surgery. And to say it changed my outlook on life is an understatement.

Immediately after the surgery, and for about two weeks thereafter, I did not enjoy reading. It was the first time I remember having suffered this affliction since having learned to read, and it led to me spending a lot of time gazing at infinity. At that time I worked in a windowless basement, so every chance I got, I would find a window and gaze out of it. This got me to thinking about how man was made to gaze at infinity. While I have long since gone back to my love of reading, I find that many of my happiest memories were those times when I spent hours gazing at infinity, like when T and I just sat on Deck 10 of the cruise ship and watched the horizon, or when we drove along the northern edge of the state of New York. The jobs I have been most content at were ones where I had a window. (A BIG part of the reason I took my current job!!) And I tend to believe I am not alone in this, that we all grow depressed if the furthest we can see in front of us for hours and months and years on end is our cubicle wall ten feet away. No wonder so many people are gloomy! I have never heard anyone say that the problem is a lack of ability to gaze at infinity, but studying this problem would certainly make a wonderful grant proposal!

I will be looking into infinity quite a bit more in the future, since I have been - don't laugh - asked to participate in a triathlon. (OK, go ahead and laugh - I did!) This is by no means the Iron Man or anything of that caliber, and the several hundred yards of swimming and ten miles of biking don't frighten me at all, but those three miles of running sure do! I'm not sure if I could run that far if something were chasing me! But I have six months to work up to it, and those six months should involve lots of gazing far into the distance while attempting to run at least a few feet before calling it quits. At least, as soon as the temperature gets into the positive numbers Fahrenheit...

Famous Hat

Visual Acuity Quiz

Here is the first Famous Hat Visual Acuity Quiz: What is the object pictured below?

a. mouse neural cell

b. a piece of modern art

c. pure evil

What your answers reveal about you:

a. You may think you are a scientific nerd, but you are fooling only yourself. What kind of cell has a giant red organelle in the center? You spend a lot of time trying to impress others by reading People magazine hidden inside A Brief History of Time.

b. You are either very creative or, more likely, extremely pretentious. I could easily sell you a pile of dirt with a shovel stuck into it for a cool 35K, as long as I called it The Tribulations of Mankind. On second thought, you are a WONDERFUL individual. You should stop by sometime and see the vast art collection I keep in my basement storage unit.

c. You are obviously a person of great intelligence and good taste. Why would anyone eat something in the nightshade family, which also includes the deadly belladonna? It's fine to cook these with oregano, or dice them up and mix them with cilantro and hot peppers, but how incredibly vile to simply slice one up and stick it on a sandwich, where its slimy little seeds will stick to the lettuce and impart its hideous flavor long after the offending piece of vegetal matter has been safely removed. And if you are one of those wackadoos who eat these things like apples, there's simply no hope for you.

Just another culinary service message from Famous Hat

Smackdown: Ancient Cacaphony vs. Modern Worship Space!

How Catholic a church is tends to be inversely proportional to its name; for example, my parish is not really called Our Lady of Perpetual Sobriety but instead has a name so generic that people are always thinking it's a Lutheran church. However, upon entering it you would see a tabernacle in the middle of the reredos, numerous candles burning for the souls of the departed, lots of statues of Mary and other saints, people praying the rosary, and sometimes even the old Tridentine Mass. Downstairs there is a Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration chapel, or PEA. (They are always looking for someone to PEA in the 3:00 am time slot, if you aren't busy. I personally am sleeping at that time and cannot take a PEA in the middle of the night.)

On the other hand, in my town there is a church with one of those names like Our Holy Mother, Queen of Penitents, or QOP for short. (Pronounced "kwopp.") It is a typical ugly suburban parish that has - I'm not making this up - a blueprint in the "gathering area" with each area labeled. So instead of a narthex, a nave, a sanctuary, etc., it has a gathering space and a worship space. The tabernacle is relegated to a little chapel off the gathering space. Yes, Jesus has been sent to his room! The music is hideous and the theology is generic feel-good nonsense. I once taught Catechism at QOP, where I took no prisoners (see my post on Catechism Captive), and more than once I thought, "Why would anybody be this religion, the way they teach it here?" Jesus was just some nice guy who wandered around healing people. Eventually I gave up on the textbook and just taught the basics: you know, the Trinity, Original Sin, the Passion and Resurrection, little things like that. I have used this parish as a benchmark to measure all other bad parishes against, so we will discuss the level of Qopitude in a given parish. Our Lady of Perpetual Sobriety has almost no Qopitude, though there are certainly those trying to change that!

Because of its odd setup (being round, having carpeted pews, etc.), QOP has lousy acoustics, as opposed to the wonderful acoustics at OLPS. Once I sang there with the Lutherans in a joint Catholic/Lutheran service, and we could barely hear each other so it was difficult to stick together. (Because QOP has no choir loft, we were sitting in the pews on one end of the arena-shaped worship space.) Years ago, an acquaintance of mine died at a tragically young age, and they brought in a bagpiper for his funeral at OLPS. We wondered how that would work out, since the acoustics there are so good, and bagpipes are built to be heard five miles away, but it turned out to be wonderful, and very moving. So that got me thinking... if you had bagpipes in QOP, would you be able to hear them, or would the building's squishy acoustics manage to suck five miles' worth of sound away to a barely audible whisper? Maybe you'd have to mic the bagpipes! I've always wondered who would take this smackdown, but so far as I know, it has never occurred.

Famous Hat

The Cat Is the Hat

Last night for Epiphany we did exactly nothing at Our Lady of Perpetual Sobriety because "Epiphany" was moved to last Sunday, so I was forced to celebrate with the Lutherans. As they always do, the Lutherans marked the occasion with a potluck and then singing. Being ultra-polite (or as they say, "Minnesota nice" although this is not Minnesota), nobody would eat the last bite of anything at the potluck so we all had one scoop of food left in our serving dishes. That made cleaning up quite interesting!

Then I went home and played with my menagerie. For footage of Aimee and Allie, watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s_UQxbMOyw

(That is Hardingfele, not me, making the un-PC crack about them!)

I know a woman who was once in the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and she said it was like living in a Dr. Seuss book. The people in Lesotho (which is pronounced "Lesootoo") are called the Besotho (pronounced "Besootoo") and speak Sesotho (pronounced - how else? - "Sesootoo"). Then there are the giant aloe vera trees everywhere, which she says look like the bizarre vegetation in Dr. Seuss's tomes. To top it all off (so to speak), her cat disappeared one day, and not long after that she saw a man wearing a hat that looked oddly familiar. At that she decided she should write a Seussian book of her adventures in Lesotho, and of course the title would be The Cat Is the Hat. So far as I know, however, she has not done so, thus depriving the world of this moving story until this very moment.

In case you were wondering what a cat as a hat looked like, here is a picture of my office mate's kitten sleeping on her husband's head. (It's my officemate's husband, not the kitten's.)


Famous Hat

I'm Growing ePlushtrated!

Hardingfele sent me the Unitarian Jihad's Manifesto:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/04/08/DDG27BCFLG1.DTL

This is some scary stuff. Maybe it's time to stop telling all those Unitarian jokes, like what do you get if you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who knocks on your door but they aren't sure why. Or this one: what do you get if you cross a Unitarian with a Ku Klux Klansman? Someone who burns a question mark on your front lawn! Yes, the Unitarians mean business and so the time to mock them may soon be at an end.

Yesterday Hardingfele bought me another ePlush animal for my birthday, this one a little black puppy. She is very cute, but Hardingfele refused to let me name her Aethelflad after the Anglo-Saxon queen, so I had to think of another name for her. Rock Star Tailor had many suggestions, as she always does (she suggested "Gallipoo" for Bellamy), and Hardingfele liked Onyx when I tossed it out, but I wanted to call her Josquin after my hero, Josquin de Prez. Not only could he compose incredible sacred music, he also often wrote the lyrics and incorporated acrostics into them, so that the first letter of each line would spell something out. (In at least one case, a naughty expression!) His secular pieces are as hilarious as his sacred pieces are transcendent. Some are suggestive, and one is a shout-out to all his drinking buddies followed by his assurance that he can outdrink them all. Also, he was renowned for being able to sing a very low F. One of his pieces is a clever canon written in a circle, with a poem in Latin giving the oblique instructions in how to sing it, and then it's just gorgeous. Why are people not so smart and well-rounded today? Two letters: TV.

So I decided to name my ePlush puppy Josquin d'Onyx, but wouldn't you know that ePlush does not let you use an apostrophe in your animal's name? (Would that real human names were so strict! Then children would not be saddled with atrocities like Z'Xayla and X'Zavier, actual names I have seen at BigBadBabyNames.com, not a website for the weak of heart.) Apparently a hyphen is allowed, which seems sort of random, so I could have named my puppy Josquin-Onyx or even just mushed the two names together into something worthy of Big Bad Baby Names: Josquonyx. But I ended up naming her the rather awkward Josquin de Onyx. So now she joins Sylvia the Pseudo-Hedgehog and Bellamy the Horse online, and many other stuffies in my house offline. (No TV, either. Maybe I'll be the next Josquin de Prez! Or at least the next Tolkein, since he and I share a birthday.) I suppose Josquin de Onyx isn't so bad, maybe just a little pretentious. I know of ePlush animals named Little Moo (guess what species she is), Popsicle, and potentially a tiger named Oskeer. (If I am even spelling that correctly. Hardingfele will probably let me know.)

So here's a little poem for my new puppy:

Just a puppy
Onyx black, it's
Soft and cuddly
Quite a racket!
Unless you are
In thrall to cute
New animals,
Don't chase this loot!
One's not enough;
Next thing you do,
You'll have your own
X-tra soft little zoo!

Famous Hat

Gamelon and On

How does this trucking company know me so well? Although shouldn't that be "Putzmistress"?

Here is what T gave me for my birthday. It's a necklace. Isn't it lovely? It's Capricorn the Mergoat, or as I said in a previous post, the same thing as a Chi'wara. That's how I prefer to think of myself: Capricorn the Chi'wara!

Last night on the community radio station (the one where all women are represented unless they are prolife), I heard the weirdest thing: a solo violin playing with a gamelon. Talk about opposites! A solo violinist shows off his skill, while a gamelon is a bunch of people playing together in unison. To add to their insignificance, there are usually dancers during a gamelon concert, but I watch the gamelon players. As if the music weren't hypnotic enough, they move together in a mesmerizing synchronicity as they play. The gamelon is way cool, but is it an instrument or an orchestra? Perhaps the closest Western analogy is a handbell concert, where the individual members must work together as a system.

Stephen Jay Gould once wrote a fantastic essay on the question of when a system becomes an individual, using the Portuguese Man O' War as an example. Some consider it a colony of individual animals, but each animal has a function, such as protection, flotation, digestion, or reproduction, so in a sense they act like organs. Like a single gamelon player or a single handbell player, they could not function alone. That got me thinking: at what point does a society cease to be a collection of individuals and start to become a single system in which no individual member can exist alone? One bacteria cell exists on its own, like a person who grows her own food; but I only take care of one function in society, just like my cells only perform one function. I don't know how to produce my own food, although at this point I still could learn how. In a few centuries, will we become so differentiated that society will be a giant Portuguese Man O' War?

Famous Hat

Zorionak Niretako!

Today I, Famous Hat, am celebrating the anniversary of my 29th birthday! As often happens on one's birthday, I was feeling slightly reflective and thought about my great-aunt Josephine. I never knew her, since my grandfather was the second-youngest of thirteen children while she was the second-oldest, and he did not marry young, so she was long dead by the time I came along. Grandpa always told me that I was "beautiful" and "the spittin' image" of his sister Josephine, so I was saying to T and Richard Bonomo over lunch that I imagined she was already a young woman by the time my grandfather was old enough to remember her, so she probably just dropped in now and then and brought him presents. T said maybe she was a flapper, so that really sent my imagination flying.

The place: Broad Channel, a small island in Jamaica Bay, Queens, New York. The time: The Roaring 20's. Josie, a young girl with a stylish blonde bob and a hat with elaborate feathers, is heading to the streets of Harlem, on her way to see Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club. As a small girl she was very poor, since her parents had just come over from Ireland, but Prohibition has been good to them. Her uncle Marty Ganigan has a cousin in Canada who meets him in Jamaica Bay with a boatload of booze, which he then sells in the city. Her father works at Tammany Hall for the city's Democratic machine. (Daley, eat your heart out!) So Josephine Mary O'Hat is now solidly middle-class, and after she goes out to the speakeasies with her girlfriends on Saturday night, she will meet her family for Mass and bring a small present to her baby brother Alfie, who is her particular favorite. After all, with her job she can afford to give him little trinkets.

How much of this is truth? Does it matter? As my grandfather would say, a good story is better than a true one. God rest his soul, he would have been 106 or so in a few days. We were very similar, being two Capricorns, but apparently I looked just like Josephine, so she must have been breathtakingly gorgeous.

Yesterday T and I made a pilgrimage to "Svedish Söperstår," the Swedish home furnishings store. Everything there was very cute and had little Swedish names, like you could buy a stuffed soccer ball named Sparka, a set of drawers called Andy, or his smaller brother Erik. My favorite thing about Svedish Söperstår is that, as you go down the escalator, your shopping cart can travel alongside you on the shopping cart escalator. There is even a cafe where you can get Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce, natch. Then we went to a Medieval-themed restaurant, let's call it the Middle Rages, on a whim when we saw the giant cement castle from the highway. I said I had always been curious about the Middle Rages, and T admitted she had too, so we entered the heavy wooden doors. The guy behind us in line said you were supposed to buy tickets online ahead of time, but when we got up to the front, not only did they sell us tickets, they even let me in free for my birthday! (Technically it was my birthday eve, but I pointed out that in the Middle Ages they were very into Eves, like Christmas Eve and Easter Eve.) I had brought in a couple sprigs of "lucky bamboo" (which is technically a dracaena) from Svedish Söperstår, and one of the characters from the Middle Rages said in an extravagant British accent (to sound as if he were from Medieval Spain, since that's how they talked back then), "She has brought her own plants." I said they were for my birthday, and he said, "Oh, that explains everything!" and every time he saw me, he made some comment about my birthday bamboo.

We actually upgraded to the Royal Treatment at the Middle Rages for a nominal fee, so we got front row seats to watch the "knights" fight with each other. Sparks literally flew during the swordplay, and lances shattered during the jousting. The horses were beautiful Andalucians, and one of them did a very cool dance in which he pranced, went sideways and backwards, and did fancy jumps, all to music. There was also a falconer who got his falcon to do tricks. T and I were put in the Medieval kingdom of Navarre, which seemed appropriate since I can speak (about five words of) Basque. There were no utensils, so we had to drink our soup out of bowls and tear our fowl apart with our bare hands. The authentic Medieval laser light show, rock music, and fog machine were nice touches. Dessert was "pastries of the castle," which were apple pies which looked suspiciously like those peddled by a well-known fast food restaurant. Meanwhile, vendors wandered the crowds selling Medieval light-up sticks. I asked our serving wench if she were a monkey wench or a crescent wench, but she just blinked at me and replied that she was a regular wench. She did, however, bring a cup of water for me to put the bamboo into. (In New Orleans I remember fondly walking into Jean Lafitte's with Nola the Papyrus, setting her on the counter, and saying, "I'll have a Hurricane and the plant will have a water," and the waitress complied cheerfully. Waitresses are, in my experience, very kind to plants. They are not disruptive, but I doubt if they are generous tippers.) We got commemorative paper crowns and "cheering banners" (Navarre is #1!), and I rescued a couple of commemorative plastic goblets shaped like horses which the people next to us had abandoned. When I saw the guy from in line and he said, "Good for you! You got in!" I told him that it was free for my birthday, and his jaw about hit the floor. I would highly recommend the Middle Rages for your next birthday if you are jonesin' for a truly authentic commercial Medieval experience. Just tell 'em Birthday Bamboo Lady sent you. (I did not go for the Knighting, a common birthday treat for an additional fee which gets you a commemorative photo of yourself being knighted by the King and a shout-out during the feast.)

Here is a little movie of Gertie and Eva, two girl robots who moonlight (or should I say sunlight since these are their day jobs?) as a bottle opener and a can opener, singing me happy birthday in both English and Basque. (The subject of this post should translate as "Happy birthday to me" in Basque if I am remembering correctly from my time in the Basque country back when I was twenty, nine years ago, give or take eight years.)

Famous Hat