So in lieu of actual content, I bring you statistics. I was poking about in the ol' sitemeter, and found some interesting things about the readers of this blog.

First we have a world map of BigU readers. You'll note that South America is disproportionately represented, along with Africa, Australia, eastern Asia, and Antarctica. Nobody from Russia, either, although the hits I have gotten from there in the past have been spammers.

Next we have operating systems. Nice to know I'm not the only person running linux out there. I'm willing to bet the unknown person is running BSD and afraid to pipe up. ;)

Finally we have browsers. Interestingly enough Firefox has a bigger browser share on my blog than IE. Couple people kickin' it oldschool and using netscape. Gotta admire that.

Since people have asked, I'm officially endorsing George Clinton, because you can never have too much funk.

Pardon me a moment while I channel my inner Tyler Durden...

"You're not your parish. You're not how much money you put in the collection basket. You're not the language you pray in. You're not the contents of your rosary pouch. You're not your frigging mantilla. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

OK. I feel better. You know I have to wonder if some of the scandal and shock some have towards the world isn't more about them than the world, itself. Case in point: how some like to go on and on about how horrible the world is and how death is behind every stone, namely those who like to go on about the "culture of death."

I think they're being disingenuous. For one, if God created the world, it's good. They hedge towards Jansenism and Albigensianism more than I'm comfortable. For them, it's almost as if nobody is worthy of grace or redemption. And, most importantly, when they hear of some horrible thing, they shy away from it, as if their knowing about it will corrupt them. Frankly, it makes me wonder where they are, as thinking and praying Catholics and Christians, if they don't know about how horrible some things can be in the real world.

With them, I'm reminded of the quote from Tony Campolo: "I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night."

I think that we're losing our Catholic identity not because of "On Eagle's Wings" or what language we use but because people simply don't care. On the one hand, I understand their fatigue. I certainly experience it every time I walk down the Ave and get asked for spare change every half-block or so. But on the other hand, if life is sacred, then all life is sacred, not just the life that's non-threatening, cute, or doesn't force you into some uncomfortable consideration of your own life. Nothing disgusts me more than hearing so-called "pro-life" people twist reasoning into approving of torture, the death penalty, or unjust wars.

OK. I feel better now.

This is from a friend on LJ, and I thought it was too good not to share. Orff on banjos.

Update to the last post: Cobalt DS lite obtained (I was the first person in line), and I've even knitted a cozy for it.

For the knitters, the Turkish cast on is the coolest thing ever, especially when coupled with the magic loop technique. I have no idea what makes the cast on Turkish, but it's awesome and eliminates the need to do a provisional caston.

An update about a recent poll...

You may wonder why I'm up this early on a Sunday morning, when I'm not serving. Good question! That would be because the cobalt Nintendo DS lite is released this morning, and I'm trying to be one of the first people in line when my local Gamestop opens. (The cobalt/black one is unique to North America, I believe. Only fair, since Japan and Asia get nifty colors. Europe's kind of screwed in that regard, though. If Nintendo's reading this, can't they hook them up? I think they only have black and white.)

So, yeah. While I love the ice blue DS lite, I can't really justify spending the extra money to import one. With the difference between the Christmas/birthday money I received and the price of the ice blue DS, I got myself an R4 Revolution card. This nifty little device with a micro SD card allows you to run all sorts of homebrew applications for the Nintendo DS. So far (on the same micro SD card), I have DSOrganize (how did I live without this?), drugwars, and A Touch of War. The DSOrganize is pretty nifty, and the browser is super-fast. (Mostly text-based, but also loads some images.)

They have a nethack port for the DS, but I haven't gotten it working yet, and I was going to try to compile it from source, but I need to recompile gcc for ARM support. (And I'm feeling too lazy to do that. I think there's something in the Catechism about not bootstrapping your compiler on a Sunday during Lent.)

My Oblate Story, Part 3

So I arrived in Seattle. When I left LA it was 85. When I arrived in Seattle, it was 65. I think that's a good enough metaphor for my first few years here. Take a psychotic landlord (who liked to scream and verbally abuse tenants), the normal self-doubt and hypercriticality that comes with graduate study, financial instability, and a good dose of homesickness, and you've got yourself a mess. Or the proverbial dark night.

While I learned what community was at CalArts, I think I was supposed to learn what it is to be alone here. While there are people I care about out here, I don't have the communion I did at CalArts, either. It's nobody's fault or failing, it's just life.

So another thing happened when I moved out here. I started going to a Dominican parish. Now I hadn't had much exposure to the mendicant orders, aside from a Franciscan priest I once knew. (Hell of a guy.) I'm extremely attracted to the Benedictine notion of stability, but it's not something I've had a lot of. (New academics generally don't get that luxury until tenure.) I guess the biggest thing I learned from the Dominicans is how to "Keep in touch / and be at home / everywhere." (As Timothy Leary wrote.) I also absorbed the notion of study as being a kind of prayer from them.

The other thing that dawned on me is that maybe I'm being called, as it were, to more solitude. I can easily survive when I have community. But there comes a time when the community is a crutch, and its absence is another kind of formation. I think this dawned on me when I started my dissertation, and I started getting very little feedback about what I was doing. (My chair is pretty "hands off," which I appreciate.) There are days when I pine for the community I had at CalArts, but I know it's also a metaphysical dead-end.

So I discovered the Camaldolese Benedictines. There's a community of them in California, and I'm trying to get down there. (I've been told by a friend who lives in the Bay area that they're on a BART stop.) And they do have oblates. I haven't contacted them yet--there's no hurry, I have the rest of my life to figure it out--but that's where I am at the moment. Their blend of cenobitic and communal life seems to be what I've been looking for.