william sloan coffin and a pluralistic vision of love

The librarian reads my blog and now she knows that I have been enlisting others in my swap-food-for-tech-advice scheme. Hi Andrea! I had another good day fixing computers and wrassling with technology generally over in New Hampshire. Twelve hours at three times my regular rate, I’m going to go out and buy myself some shoes! I’m not sure when the last time was I bought new shoes, probably before my last library job started.

I’m a little mopey today. One of my favorite local activists William Sloan Coffin died this week. He had always been a model for me of how to believe in something fiercely and strongly and have that belief inspire and motivate, not threaten. And yet, he’s been outspoken about the craven emptiness of war — this one and the one in Vietnam — and what he feels is the general ill will coming towards the American people from their own government, to say nothing about the rest of the world. In an American gone mad with zealot Christian fundamentalists, his steady faith and willingness to challenge the beliefs of others within his faith while still being an outspoken yet caring advocate for social justice and the power of faith always impressed the hell out of me and left me wanting to do better at all the things that I do. Here is an excerpt from a PBS interview with him two years ago

Q: How about your own death? Do you think about that?

A: Not very much. I’d just as soon live a little bit longer. But when you’re 80 you can’t complain. To quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inaugural address, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Fear of death is what is insidious, and once the fear is behind you, then it is only the physical death which is ahead of you. If we didn’t die we’d be immortal, like the Greek gods, and perhaps up to their same dumb tricks. It’s a very good thing we die. In fact, it’s death which brings us to life. But we need to be scared to life, not scared to death. I await death with no protest. “Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light”: I’m sorry, Dylan Thomas, but that’s not always the case. You can go gentle into that good night. Stop complaining. Remember that, as old Hamlet said, “The readiness is all.” Basically, when I said I don’t think much about death, I was really thinking, I don’t think much about what comes next because I believe our lives run from God, in God, to God again. And that’s enough. We might want to know more, but we don’t need to know more, and demanding that I know more about the afterlife somehow demeans my faith. I think, one world at a time. The second world will be in God’s hands, whereas we were lucky enough to live in this world.

prosocial

This has been a week without a weekend, but with a lot of meals. Not that we didn’t enjoy the company on Saturday, but the day after the dinner party we were fixing sinks and heading over to a student’s house for DSL and dinner. I had made the offhanded remark that I’d install her DSL if she made dinner, and Sunday happened to be the perfect day. So, we made a big meal one night, and ate a big meal the next night, at someone else’s house.

Then, on Monday a librarian bought me lunch as part of my helping her with her library computers, and today my boss bought me lunch because she knows how little I get paid and I think she likes to have someone to have lunch with. Tonight the free meal was the open house at the Randolph Technical Career Center. It was sort of neat to have a ready-made name tag because hey, I work there. Greg met me there and we wandered from classroom to classroom seeing all the kids’ projects and sampling the snacks in every room. The Culinary Arts kids can really cook up a storm, and I was there to help the guidance counselor get the newsletter on the website just in the nick of time before everything got going. I can remember going to this same event last year before I was really working at the school and thinking that it seemed like a ncie place to work and my opinion on that hasn’t changed.

dinner party

I got a little nervous at some point when I realized that we had invited twelve people for dinner and we had eight, maybe nine chairs. I’ve had it with being indoors and looking at the outside and wondering when we could be sociable again, so we invited people over for some grilling. And then it snowed for a day or so. So, it was cold, and we cooked the two chickens inside but it all went well. We missed Stan and Hannah who stayed in Montpelier and Jill and Wayne who may have gotten the date off, but we did wind up with just enough chairs, just a little too much food and the right number of slices of pie.

Since everyone didn’t really know everyone else, here are some URLs casey, sonny rachel and finn, meredith, adam, rick, sarah and of course greg and me.

After everyone left, we ran the dishwasher. I went upstairs while Greg did the final clean-up. I came down 30 minutes later to find him mopping the floor as water poured from underneath the sink. Not a fun job for a tipsy guy. As it turns out, the pipe in the U-joint had chosen that minute to break in two and we ran the dishwasher through the rest of its cycle hauling the water from under the sink in pans to the bathroom sink. After an early trip to the hardware store, we got replacement pipes and all is well with the world again. Thanks to everyone who showed up or almost showed up. We’ll do it again real soon.

I love big blogger

I’ve changed some things around here, though the changes are minimal. I’m using Blogger to add and update entries. This means it’s easier for me to update this site from anyplace. It also means I can have comments and an RSS feed that updates itself and doesn’t require painstaking re-coding and re-uploading by me. You can see a before and after set on Flickr if you’re curious what’s really changed. I’ll add redirects to the RSS feed but if you are still doing this by hand, the new feed is at http://jessamyn.com/journal/atom.xml.

We’ve had a busy week this week, lots of classes, computers and car maintenance. You can read Greg’s story of swapping MP3s for syrup in lieu of more how-it’s-going news from me. If anything is desparately broken, please drop me an email or leave a comment. It may be bumpy until Monday.

test

I made an appointment to get my snow tires taken off the day before it started snowing. However, I am crafty, the appointment is for after it stops snowing. Smart, huh? It’s been a pretty prosaic month so far. A shopping trip to the mall to replace our gross pillows. A new adult ed class for me, email, where I have four students including TWO great-grandmothers. Greg’s been told he’s getting a new bike for graduation and so the house is slowly filling with catalogs and scribbly notes about wheel sizes and phone numbers of bike shops. This weekend we are having friends over for a biggish dinner party and today it’s snowing fit to beat the band. Ola’s away for her annual three week trip to the West Coast so we’re playing house in this big Victorian dollhouse and thinking about the post-law-school, post-Jessamyn’s-job world with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation.

back from boston

Somehow we managed to have a successful trip to the big city and come back here to the Loveliest Place on Earth just in time for the weather to finally get right for sugaring (cold at night, warm in the daytime) which has cheered people up considerably.

My MBTA karma continues unabated. This time I arrived at South Station to find that they had switched over from T tokens to Charlie Cards and I had to exchange the former for the latter to get through the turnstile. There were some surly T employees to assist us with this problem, one of whom bitched me out directly. I spent all my tokens (I have extras at home and bring them with me when I go to Boston, I am a nerd) on passes only to find that no other T stop in the system that I used in my travels (Copley, Prudential, Davis, Downtown Crossing) would accept them. So they have two mutually exclusive systems in place at once and, like all true religions, each one is acting like they are the One True Payment Method. They offer this helpful chart. I was thinking bad thoughts about the T when we went in to go suit shopping with Greg and this is why it took us an hour and a half to get home. Apparently the MBTA has a Customer Bill of Rights [who knew?] so I’m asking for my $1.25 back, even though what I’d really like is that hour of my life back.

For me, it’s so cool not having to drive anyplace that I’ll take almost whatever the T can dish out. We went to Keezers and got Greg a really smart looking suit for less than $60, then we went to Filene’s Basement where we rolled our eyes at bizarre Italian get-ups and found Greg another suit for slightly more money. I only wish we’d been better fed so we could have stayed longer and had more stamina. Now I am done with suit shopping, hopefully forever. Much thanks to my sister for coming along on this little three hour tour. We took her out to dinner for an early birthday celebration and between the four of us got six different kinds of meat from Blue Ribbon BBQ.

This all happened after the three days of library conferencing which I talked more about over on librarian.net. The high point — besides getting to hang out with my friend Andrea and seeing other folks who I don’t see often enough — had to be seeing the senior editor from MAD Magazine talk about censorship, thus giving me an excuse to use swear words and this excellent picture.

spring

Because I’m generally optimistic and okay with my lot in life, I sometimes forget how my life is different now than it was before I moved to Vermont. Sometimes I remember. We went bowling in Barre for Sarah’s birthday, something I don’t think I’ve done since I’ve moved here. Suddenly, I remembered that when I lived in Seattle I used to bowl all the time. I would regularly (weekly?) get together with a bunch of people and drink beer and hang out in hipster bowling land. I did have some sort of muscle memory, I guess, because I did fairly well and got a 153 one game. I also remember, now as I’m typing, the sore muscle memory and the way my middle finger gets all wrenched out of place when I bowl. It was a real pleasure to get together with a group of people someplace that wasn’t someone’s house, or a bar, or a library conference. I had forgotten. Now I remember.

Greg and I went for a walk yesterday and I took some pictures. We’ve had the bizarrest excuse for a winter this year and I don’t know whether to be happy or sad about it.