Losing Things in Bulk

The holiday's leave plenty of time for losing things, running expensive errands, snacking, long showers, and reflecting on current employment (because NOT working leaves time to think about it). So naturally, a few more top-five lists emerge:

My Top-five Most Annoying Things to Lose:
(Based on degree of annoyance and frequency of misplacement, these are the things that wreck all concentration until I find them)

1. Fingernail clippers
2. Fountain pen
3. Driver's license
4. Phone charger
5. my lists!

Top-five Coolest Things to Buy at Costco:
1. Post-it notes--a pile of 24 for 10 bucks!
2. Wine--Banfi Chianti Classico Riserva for 12 bucks!
3. Peanut M&Ms--who wouldn't want five pounds of these??
4. Cheese--Gruyère, Gouda, and a Dublin cheddar!
5. Dog bones--even George Herbert understands the significance of buying in bulk.


Top-five Favorite Cheeses:
1. Sharp English Cheddar (aged)
2. Muenster
3. Fresh Buffalo Mozzarella
4. Feta
5. Brie (with no rind)

Top-five Favorite Shampoos
1. Paul Mitchell's Tea Tree Shampoo
2. Bumble and Bumble's Gentle Shampoo
3. Redkin's BlondGlam
4. Aveda's Rosemary Mint Shampoo
5. Bumble and Bumble's Creme de Coco Shampoo

Top-five Dream Jobs
1. Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (with a season ending at The Proms)
2. Accessories/Cosmetics product selection for Nordstrom's
3. Editor of my own magazine (The New Yorker meets InStyle meets The National Review meets Paste meets CondéNast)
4. Ambassador to Britain under Tony Blair
5. U.S. Senator (Foreign Affairs Committee, Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee)

extraordinary days

Over a month ago, I posted a lament that I couldn't find something important to me online.

Yesterday, I was wandering around online, and I came across this. It is only part of what I was looking for, but it is sufficiently representitive of the thing I thought I had lost.


I forgot how much I had contributed to this site, acknowledging that it is amateur and archaic. My photos (or I!) appear in the following sections:


Birmingham>Manor House, Out and About in Birmingham, Working in Birmingham, University of Birmingham.


Chances are, if there are blue skies, I took the photo. Also, a handful of photos at the bottom of here are mine, too. I am quite proud of that nighttime Tower Bridge photo, and the shoe one.


***
I got a gift for Christmas that has me pouring over photos. Doing this, combined with having found the website, has me wondering what to do with a set of experiences untouchable by any other set from before or since. This life seems so irreconcileable to the one I have now; in fact, these extraordinary days are actually aggravating because they give me something against which everyday life is compared--if not everyday life, at least my current geography. I am so annoyed by the contrast.


For which days are we supposed to live? Those days, the extraordinary ones? Or the doldrum days like these ones between Christmas and New Year's?

It is easy to love the extraordinary days--the kind one spends galavanting around Europe (and then spending years paying off). And to be honest, it is unlikely I need any more of those, exactly.

All this just makes me wonder what it will take before I feel satisfied, before I am no longer aggravated by what I don't have any more or what I am not. I know I have a job I love, a cool apartment, and a great dog--why isn't this enough?

So what we have here is a set of life lessons:

1. Holiday breaks highlight twentysomething ennui. Combing through favorite pretty photos is no remedy for this.
2. Drinking more (liquor or coffee--its a tossup) is.
3. And my longtime favorite: Today is not forever.

Smashing the World

“The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself…We are mistaken when we compare war to “normal life. Even those periods we think most tranquil…turn out, on closer inspection to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies…” –C.S. Lewis (Weight of Glory)

“One of the most dangerous errors is [believing] that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.” C.S. Lewis (Rehabilitations)


The Washington Post, this past few weeks, has had several articles discussing the fight over the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. I am deeply bothered by this whole situation, and I have been for some time. There has already been the congressional vote over the issue of the detainee’s treatment; now, it’s under judicial scrutiny, where the latest battle is over a destroyed set of tapes that allegedly recorded a significant interrogation. It is true that the issue of the Guantánamo Bay Detention center poses a serious political and ethical dilemma, but this governmental action is bringing us no closer to solving it. I question the legitimacy of a bill whose passage is so clearly marked by party lines, like this last one.

The more we talk about Guantánamo in terms of presidencies, bills, and hearings the smaller we make it. Few meaningful things actually fit in the tiny context of partisan politics. One problem with the Guantánamo situation is that it is being shoved into the role of a banner issue—one must be for or against it. But it doesn’t fit a context this small, and it is not the only issue that doesn’t. I feel the same way about abortion.

It seems to me the issue of Guantánamo shouldn’t be part of the referendum debate on the current administration, but part of one of the greater debates in human history: between civilization and. anarchy, or between war and pacifism. It is a great historical paradox that war—in all of its brutality and savagery—must be waged to protect civilization. War and civilization are intuitive opposites, except in the case of preservation. Lewis reminds us that shreds of civilization are hard won and not the normal state of humanity. The prisons in Guantánamo are an ugly reality of war—war on those who threaten our young notion of civilization.

We are fortunate that, in the last 100 years, our attempts to mitigate the hideous effects of war with conventions and treaties has been relatively effective. I don’t disagree that these conventions are a good thing—in fact, they still fight for civilization in the face of its opposition on the battlefield. But our biggest problem with Guantánamo and its detainees is that they may exist outside the battlefield defined by our rules and conventions. It may exist, as a friend helpfully identifies, in a space outside “democracy” and “rights” and even the law.

Of course I would prefer that we could keep war within the confines of our civilized political conventions; Of course I am appalled by the legal and physical conditions of Guantánamo , just as I would be appalled by these conditions in any other element of war. One argument (all superficial partisanship aside) is that a place such as Guantánamo seems absurd because it tramples democratic virtues. But maybe the absurdity is trying to apply civilized, democratic conventions to War in the first place. War and civilization are opposites. It is no wonder that the issue of Guantánamo is so problematic: the government is attempting to drag an element of war into an element of civilization, the United States Congress (where civilization is a broader term than that which evaluates the individual behavior of our representatives) The degree of political infighting does not reveal the magnitude of this issue’s significance, but the absurdity of pursuing a political solution.

A friend pointed out, “the decision to use methods of torture is not going to be definable by law… [W]e need to face the fact that there are some issues that cannot be solved for all cases in advance, and that this is one of them. The decision to torture someone is a moral decision, one about which one must have absolute certainty, and the Congress will not be able to define all of these cases via legislation.” The issue of Guantánamo is not threatening because it represents the work of an evil executive or military with too much power; it is threatening because it exposes the weaknesses and flaws modern liberalism and its political manifestations bear. Every age seeks to hold their own laws and systems as absolute, and the issue of Guantánamo , among others, exposes that principle for the historical hubris it is. Our notions of Civilization are actually young and fragile and perhaps sometimes flawed.

We don’t defend our system because it is perfect and everything about it is defensible. We defend it because this civilization is ours—a civilization, that Lewis defines as, “the realization of the human idea…the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, and conversation are the end, and the propagation of the species is merely the means…” (Rehabilitations) All patriotic pomp and circumstance aside, the 9/11 attacks put us directly at war with people who seek to destroy our political, economic, and moral system based on the freedom of choice. Their preferred system (if there is one) is one of totalitarian control by a few corrupt elite (using the government of Iran, as an example). We are free to be critical of this system—to in fact, deem it inferior—because we love our own.

Just because two systems both lay claim to the label of “civilized” does not make them equivalents. History reveals the tactics used by a Civilization to defend itself do not have to be civilized to be in defense of it. It is the brutality of war that masks a key difference between the two. While the elements of war are horrifying, we can make the distinction in the case of combative defense based on purpose: the purpose of preservation is inherently noble and civilized, while the purpose of destruction is not.

We may in 100 years, or even 10 years, come to regret our behavior in Guantánamo . But we would certainly regret not doing everything in our power to preserve our civilizations’ freedoms. As Chesterton points out, those who love the world would be “ready to smash the whole world for the sake of itself.”

The Flag of the World

There are those moments when you read something so catching that you wish everyone you know was also reading the same thing at that very moment. It is likely that no one else is reading that very thing because they care about it a great deal less than you, but blog-posting is sort of a half-way point between making people read your book and keeping it to yourself.

This morning, I came across some great Chesterton:

"For our titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as compromise [between good and evil], but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it... No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on in this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its collossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its collossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fantical an optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails and the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole world for the sake of itself."

and...

"An imbecile habit has arisen in the modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in once age but cannot be held in another...You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. [But] what a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, no upon the clock or the century...It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore, in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our Question. "

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy "The Flag of the World"

If it were not end-of-term and exam week, I would be posting a pondering response to the passage instead of just the passage, but my to-do list has a hold on my intellectual will and creative liberty. I'm looking forward to the upcoming holiday, where, though riddled with boredom, will have plenty of time for "real" blog entries.

Christmas List

I checked the refrigerator today when I got home for "tree-festooning," and all of my siblings had their Christmas lists posted. The problem with posting things on the fridge is that you can't add hyperlinks; one may look at a written list, but there is no compulsion to click on it. So I posted mine in the family pile, but here is where you can add specifics and pictures.

So, without further adieu, the interactive Christmas List:

• long sleeve JCrew tshirts. (XL, holiday red, black, and sapphire)


• a weekly London Engagement Calendar


• bookends


• a pretty inkwell


• The Blair Decade, PBS video


• Moleskine City Books, Boston and Dublin


• Moleskin large plain notebook


• Magnetic Poetry (I have never owned a set and always wanted one.)


• Levenger Ink in cobalt blue and emerald


• Style 101, from InStyle


• Elements of Style by Strunk & White (mine has dissappeared)


• This is Not a Book, by Michael Picard


• England, England, by Julian Barnes


• Joshua Tree, U2


• Under the Table and Dreaming, Dave Matthews


• Crash, Dave Matthews


• Stars: The Best of the Cranberries, 1992-2002


• Stella by Stella McCartney


• Weekly Subscription to The Washington Times


• A Subscription to Paste magazine.


• Anything from my Amazon Wishlist


• Anything from my Sephora Wishlist

I seem to have posted a series of shallow, materialistic lists. I will make a real post later.