Sunday at the Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum with Erynn was rather spectacular. It wasn't that either of us found him or even his period or style to be a new top-flight favourite, but simply that Erynn turned out to be a fabulous museum partner: that is, we moved at about the same speed through the exhibit and the conversation was just the right mix of really paying attention to the art and then tying it back to Everything Else. My theory is that you tend to have Fast Museum People who want to zoom through everything, eyeball it, and just get a sense of the whole, and that you have Slow Museum People, who want to look at everything, read the captions, stop and think about it as you go along, and even double back for second looks and comparisons. I knew that I was the latter, and that when I've been with the former that they find Slow Museum People to be excruciating. Erynn turned out to have pretty much the same pace and have as much to say, which makes for good company in something like this.

We headed down to the Museum in the early afternoon as she kept me alternately laughing and cringing with the story of her telling off Persistent Drunk Guy when she was out dancing the night before with friends, which, I suppose, sounded extra horrific to me just because guys generally don't have to deal with that kind of being hit-on. We stashed our coats and such in the locker room and took a few minutes to start merging into the crowd at the exhibition, with me probably being too worried about watching out whether she was going to be Fast Museum Person and get impatient with me. Once that became a non-issue, we found ourselves just getting into the paintings themselves, although I took a minute to enthuse when she mentioned that she would be taking an Art History course next semester. I mentioned both about how much that study had added to my own work, and also speculated that that more specific familiarity with the sweep of art history would give her a different eye behind the camera, empowering her in being attentive to aspects of people that you just cannot see unless you're more sensitive to how other people, elsewhere and elsewhen, have pictured people.

There seemed to be a mix of roughly chronological and thematic organizations to the whole exhibit, and it was some of his youthful stuff that got us first talking a little more intensely, where there was a bit of bawdy or moral themes. Allegory of the Five Senses got us picking up where our conversation had ended last week, on just starting to notice the different concepts of beauty in different cultures or times. Although the comments by the picture noted that this was a common motif for a moral lesson about indulging the senses, this particular painting didn't seem to be engaging in quite so stark or obvious a moralizing task. Similarly, Youth Embracing A Young Woman, with Lievens's young painter friend Rembrandt apparently acting as the male model for the work, also presented us with a similar picture of beauty and here, also, without any overt moral statement in the text. In fact, I thought there was a real tenderness in the Young Woman's hand-holding with the Youth that didn't make the picture necessarily seem one about the temptations of 17th century Dutch clubbing. We were also struck by how un-youthful these "youths" seemed to us, and that got us murmuring back and forth a bit about what might have been considered youth at the time, in contrast to our own time and culture's tendency to try to perpetuate youth, both for something useful like extended educational opportunities, but also for less attractive reasons, like the inevitably-doomed-to-fail cult of youth we have today.

Up until that point, it had been more the technical stuff that had been grabbing our attention: the way he captured like on metal, gems or buttons, or on the brocade of a rich piece of clothing, or perhaps the authentically diaphanous look to a woman's headscarf. We both got taken right back into that sort of thing and away from the question of youth or beauty by a large Still Life With Books that we both found oddly electrifying, with the both of us staring at the same corner and commenting on the same details: the light on the winecup, on the golden paten holding the bread, with its eucharistic themes. This was one of several Lievens paintings in the show that had formerly been attributed to Rembrandt, and it was strangely compelling for such an ordinary subject.

This was the best scan of the painting that I could find online, but most of these copies of the paintings don't do the delicate and precise uses of colour justice at all. In fact, in reading an Amazon review of the show's catalogue, that was one reviewer's complaint about the text: that the quality of the shots left much to be desired. This is particularly unfortunate in a show whose principle task is supposed to be the revival of the reputation of a painter who was unfairly diminished next to that of his friend and collaborator, Rembrandt. So we stood there peering at the detail work on this particular painting for a bit, while I kept an eye out for the attendants, who were awfully skittish about anyone who was getting too close to the paintings.

Another painting that caused us to pause and talk for a time was Samson and Delilah, which was near another Old Testament femme fatale in a painting of Bathsheba Receiving David's Letter, and which brought us back to the cultural concept of beauty. Too look at a 17th Century blonde, Dutch Bathsheba, well-fed and well-off in the vision of that culture was to reimagine the story in a way that I never had. This got us talking a bit, too, about re-conceiving the stories of the Bible in your own ethnic and cultural vision. You sometimes hear people giving paintings like this a lot of flack nowadays, reading back 20th century racism into older art at the sight of a blonde, blue-eyed Jesus, while at the same time glowing with approval should they observe a red-cloaked Masai warrior Jesus. The first is racism, the second, cultural appropriation. I find this more than a bit irritating in that it's simply bad history to export more recent history and to superimpose it upon the past, although I would be the first one to raise an eyebrow at that blonde, blue-eyed Jesus in a piece of art from our post-20th Century context. Now, particularly with contemporary concern to portray Jesus's historical and Jewish context accurately, and in light of Modern racism, such a European cultural appropriation of the Incarnation just simply has too many political hurdles to overcome, and would likely lose whatever honest artistic attempt might be being made into suspicion. So to look at this 17th Century Dutch appropriation and adaptation of an Old Testament story, innocent of at least our later Modern issues, was a bit of a mind-stretching moment. Erynn got to talking here about working on both sides of the camera, both in trying to take advantage of certain particular characteristics in someone, and having capitalized on her own look, which has been taken for virtually everything on the planet. I finally conceded some of the last, not having seen earlier how she could be taken to be Asian, for example, but seeing how, in presentation or context, she really had a distinct ability to look like our whole world. In light of Rembrandt posing for a number of paintings thus far, we got to talking about how a conscientious model can really be a collaborative artist working with a painter or a photographer, although she admitted that that was probably a minority concept among models in our contemporary modeling industry. I hadn't really thought of it in that way before. Knowing my own experiences in the recording studio, and what a creative process making a recording of a song is, and how it's an experience shared with the writer, the band, and the engineers and even the crew, gave me a window into imagining how much of the art we were surrounded by – and all the rest I'd ever seen – might have a creative part of so many other people's stories, beyond whoever's name was on the work.

We stepped into the next room and I was flabbergasted. This section was devoted to portraiture, and I could scarcely believe that these pieces were done by the same man whose work I had been examining up to this point. As we went on, we found in the commentary that this was something that had been noted about Lievens's work, and maybe even been a complaint: that there did not seem to be one particular style that was his. Instead, he adopted a variety of styles, depending upon his intent. The living realism of his portraits took me by surprise.



As we looked at these, Erynn and I talked some of the differences between "raw" photography and the ability to "Photoshop" pictures, debating quietly which of these two that the art of painting was more like, even with the obvious and more Photoshop-like control that a painter exercises over the execution of their image. Nevertheless, despite that control, there was still the need in painting to "capture" the person, to somehow bring together that combination of technique and vision that in some way makes the difference between a great portrait and just an ordinary picture of someone. She was just as much at a loss to try to explain that difference as I was, though I certainly can tell when I've captured something of that sort: more rare, precise and exciting as it is.

The next section of the exhibition had more pictures of a sacred or moral sort, illustrative instead of portraiture. Nothing here much grabbed my attention or imagination. The Lamentation of Christ was more interesting to me in simply layout and execution than really grabbing me for its ability to capture the mood after the crucifixion of Jesus. It nowhere near affected me as much as Michelangelo's Florentine Pietà that I saw with Erik in Florence in 2006, or as much as Michelangelo's St. Peter's Pietà. Somewhat more interesting was Lievens's Christ on the Cross, painted, if I recall correctly, in competition with a similar piece by Rembrandt for a commission. Erynn picked up on something Lievens was doing with the light in this piece that I hadn't noticed, drawing my attention to the light in the upper left of the painting. She speculated on this for a moment before asking me what I thought it might mean. Once she got my attention on it, I thought that it was more likely that this was a fairly standard convention for such a scene – that this was Lievens's attempt at symbolizing the presence of God The Father in the crucifixion: a light "from above" that was mirrored by the light around Jesus's head, as sort of a more naturalistic "halo" in the scene, where this light in both locations indicated the shared divinity of Father and Son. I compared it to that striking shot in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ where, after Jesus's death, the camera suddenly shifts to an angle unprecedented and surprising in the film, that "God's eye" view looking downward upon the scene of the crucifixion, where a first drop of rain falls, tear-like, from that viewpoint onto the scene below.

With this painting, as with many others throughout the exhibition, there was next to the Lievens piece a small print of a similar Rembrandt piece, often done in competition with one another over commissions, or simply just riffing off of one another's ideas. Unlike this Lievens crucifixion scene, where Jesus has already died and been stabbed in the side, Rembrandt's painting shows Jesus still with his eyes open, and his face animated by the pains of the Passion. Erynn put her finger on a commonality running through all these comparisons which I hadn't noticed: the Rembrandt pieces were all more animated. Their emotions and actions were all more overt, which might be a better way of saying what she was noticing than just to call them more "animated." Once they were placed side-by-side, she consistently found the Rembrandts less appealing because of their comparative lack of subtlety. There was a greater sense of "playing to the crowd" in them, of a drama slipping toward melodrama, and I found myself agreeing with her. I made the comparison to the difference between Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's novel itself (which, to my dismay, she had never read). Wherever Tolkien is subtle and builds tension or meaning slowly or delicately, Jackson is content to shout BOO! Some of those adaptation decisions might have to do with the limits and pacing of film compared to that of a novel, but oftentimes it's just a cheapening. I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say that Rembrandt was consciously "pandering to the crowd," but once Erynn made her case, it became harder not to make such comparisons in favour of Lievens as we went along.

A little later we found ourselves sitting for some time in front of the nearly eight-foot high canvas of The Sacrifice of Issac. I think that this was another fairly recent discovery or identification as Lievens's work. I believe it sold in 1996 for just under $22,000, so it is strange to think of an Old Master that I could have conceivably purchased, though I have to wonder how I would arrange my living room around it had I done so. This small copy of the painting is the only online image that I could find that reasonably came close to the colours as we saw them sitting there, and to the crispness of the image. Larger images online were strangely dull, amounting to a horrible distortion of the painting. The first thing that we found ourselves commenting upon or drawn to was simply the colour of Abraham's robe: a rich burgundy that we both found attractive.

I razzed her briefly when she asked for a reminder of the story – "That was in one of the first lessons in my class!" – forgetting, for the moment, that that was true of my Intro course and not of the Theology Through The Centuries course she took with me last spring. Mercifully, however, she didn't pick up on that, either, as I moved on to the story itself, or otherwise I would have been very thoroughly double-razzed in retaliation. But once I refreshed her memory about the story of the so-called sacrifice of Isaac, since it never actually happened, we spun off from the story itself, getting all intertextual. I talked about the symmetry that Christians get from the story, of how Abraham's faith and willingness to even offer on the Mountains of Moriah his only son to the mysterious God who spoke to him would be answered in turn by God's offering of Jesus for humanity on those same mountains centuries later when the city of Jerusalem now occupied them. I also mentioned the seeming barbarousness of the Jewish story, of how that had been highlighted for me when I was an undergraduate, reading a short story included with Goodbye, Columbus in a collection by Phillip Roth, and the impact this vision of Abraham through secularizing Jewish-American eyes had on me, in the way that it brought to the fore the need to read the biblical text with sympathetic, historically-informed eyes, and not to subject it to my own contemporary prejudices. We stared into the painting, finding ourselves taken with the sharp, dynamic character of his face, and the surprising – virtually unprecedented, from what we had seen – splash of colour in this one, with rare blues as part of a rainbow sunset or sunrise on the horizon in the background, wondering if this could be an allusion to the covenant with Noah. Again we looked at a print of a parallel Rembrandt text, and Erynn firmed up her thesis in comparing the two.

We began to speed up a bit toward the end. My Mom and aunts and uncle had warned me the night before that the exhibition was a long one, and it was even longer than I had thought from looking ahead, as there was more rooms to it than I had been able to see from earlier vantage points. As we got toward the end, I asked her what had been the piece that had stood out or grabbed her the most. She got a thoughtful, weighing sort of look on her face and lead me back through the exhibit, musing on The Sacrifice of Isaac and Samson and Delilah briefly, but pretty quickly settling on, and leading me straight to the Still Life With Books. I was surprised, in seeing that her choice was such a technical-seeming one, while we were mostly surrounded by narrative and portraiture, but I certainly sympathized insofar as something in the work had leapt out at me, too. Naturally, she turned the question or challenge right back at me, as I knew she would, though I slightly dreaded it, because I wasn't sure how I was going to answer. As I said, I too had loved something about the Still Life With Books, but I went back deeper into the show, eyeballing some of the portraits, and thinking through a few of the ones we had especially talked about, but I settled on The Penitent Magdalene as my choice, though in way I'm not even sure if I chose correctly. But that one had had us stop for a while, as I was so struck by such a different take on Magdalene. With the long history of how Mary Magdalene had been conflated with other figures in the New Testament, particularly the unnamed penitent woman who anointed Jesus or the woman caught in adultery, Magdalene has gained an importance in the history of Christian art – and presumably in Christian devotion – that is quite distinct from her historical significance. I mentioned this to Erynn when we had originally looked at the painting, for which I could only find this tiny copy online, and spoke of the way she is usually portrayed in art, with something of the flamboyance of one flaunting her beauty, so as to identify the character with this conflated/fictional past. Oftentimes she's stunning (as she is in The Lamentation of Christ, which we saw just a little farther on, presuming that the dazzling blonde woman is supposed to be her), and I first brought up Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in this context, with its full use of this tradition of so treating Mary Magdalene, with Monica Bellucci cast in the role. What so struck me here was to see such a different version of this Magdalene: elderly, weathered, worn and poor – a sort of vision of her as one living a monastic discipline in later life. Here she is, as an image, unaffected and lacking the usual accoutrements of the temptress, utterly human, with a life no visibly different than anyone else's, other than that which we know to be hers by virtue of her story. It was a new vision of her, making me look at the story – both historical and otherwise – with new eyes and imagination, and that, I figured, made it in some ways the work that had hit me the hardest. It might be technically or visually one of the more unremarkable, but it certainly grabbed me as an exercise of the painter's spiritual imagination.

One thing we noticed in the last few rooms, even though we were moving at a faster pace was this portrait, identified as another self-portrait of Lievens, but here showing him in his 40s, less fleshy and youthful than the striking self-portrait that, in my set of portraits above, is the middle one in the bottom row of three, in glowing browns. Here is where Erynn and I made our significant contribution to art history, should anyone ever know of it: comparing this self-portrait to the one above (which we had in the brochures in our hands), we noticed that in this mid-life self-portrait, not only has Lievens lost some of the youthful roundness to his face, but he has also lost the deep brown of his eyes in his 20s, as in this portrait they were now a deep blue. So, the experts may have identified these two paintings as self-portraits by the painter, but Erynn and I spotted this oddity, exchanged a wry glance, and quietly concluded that something in that story has got to give.

We headed out the door as they were shutting the place down, laughing about some story one of us had told the other, and decided as we crossed the footbridge over to Wisconsin Avenue to go ahead and grab dinner. I made a few suggestions, and she opted for Hotel Metro, seeming to be most intrigued by my enthusiastic descriptions of the apple pie and cinnamon ice cream dessert I favour there, though neither of us ended up opting for that. I had never seen the place so quiet as it was, though I was usually there when there was a lot of resting there by the clubbing crowd on late nights and not at a little after 5pm on a Sunday. She grabbed some kind of gumbo they were offering with alligator, apparently, and slipped me a bite of that so that I could add another strange and odd item on my list of things eaten. I settled into a pork tenderloin, and took my time through that, declining dessert while she grabbed their tiramisu.

And so we just had a lot of random dinner conversation, starting with the discovery that she had no idea where we were. I have pretty much concluded that there's two kinds of people: people who get directions and always know where they are, and people who do not. My Mom is the former, and my Dad the latter, and mercifully I inherited my Mom's talent here. Erynn was the other sort, and so I was amazed by the fact that she was completely lost after we had walked all of one block of north of Wisconsin Avenue, which is the straight drag directly from campus to the Art Museum. That got us talking about personality traits, I think, about things like Meiers-Briggs exams in the such, and we discovered when she was talking about how much she had enjoyed some down time when her roommates were out of the apartment that we were both extroverts who needed a lot of time to themselves, and how it had been a bit of a surprise to even discover that that was a category that made sense. I had always thought of myself as an introvert until I first took the MB for a class and had my results explained to me. Her upcoming competition at the Duke Invitational got us talking about a variety of schools and the huge choice of picking just one: I think Duke had been one of the schools that had sent her recruitment letters for undergrad – along with Harvard, Notre Dame and other impressive names – and I talked about how I'd almost gone to Duke for my Master's, and then opted for Notre Dame, and why I wish she could have experienced what makes ND distinct, although I had to say I was happy to have met her at Marquette. It's utterly unpredictable, the chain of consequences, of meetings and friendships and opportunities that come from picking one school instead of another. And it's really almost beside the point to worry about that decision in that all of those particulars are utterly beyond our foresight and calculation. My sibs wouldn't have met their spouses had they not gone to the University of Illinois, either meeting there like Leslie and Jim, or having their lives start on a particular course, like Joe then meeting Daniele. All the kids – their sheer existence and chance for it – are consequent to that. So that sort of conversation is always a bit head-spinning. But that was the kind of thing that made the whole afternoon fun: the combination in conversation of her offering comments that completely made sense for her to say, from what I knew of her, and the completely surprising insights that took me unprepared and made me look at the art, or at a story, differently than I would have on my own. Good times.

There have been a number of good moments with friends over the last several days. Thursday night I headed up to the Oriental Theatre with Barnes to see Watchmen after we finished up a session of the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Christian Mysticism where Fr. Golitzin winged his way through a review of a text I had never heard of before, in a presentation called "The Vision of Dorotheos: An Early Chrisitan Example of Heavenly Journey." That isn't me being critical: he was explicit that he was moving fast and loose on this one, having apparently been volunteered without his knowledge for a talk on the text at SBL by Bogdan, which was really funny to hear. (Of late, Professor Golitzin so frequently publicly gives me crap for not doing a Patristics doctorate that I've become terribly regretful of never having had him for an actual course: everybody speaks highly of the work done in his classes.) I wasn't sure that the text wasn't meant to be fictional in antiquity, it seemed so silly on some levels, like the bad novels of the saints from the 3rd or 4th century. Looking around a bit, I found that Chrysogonus Waddell had actually written an introduction to an edition of the text that Cistercian Publications put out, so that's now on the to-buy/to-read list.

So Watchmen seemed a pretty fabulous adaptation of the text. I'd never seen a direct adaptation before (I've never read or seen the graphic novels and movie adaptations of 300 or Sin City) but this seemed about as good as could be imagined in a single short movie. Barnes and I headed over to Pizza Man after the movie let out, talking about the changes for the movie – which we both thought worked and were sensible – and in one major case, even tightened up the plot considerably. From there the conversation moved on to matters theological, where I augmented a comment from some weeks earlier that he had noted and talked with his wife about, when I had called Thomas Merton somewhat "dated" over dinner at the Lloyds. I certainly didn't mean that to be dismissive. While there are a few areas or moments in which there is that sort of cultural, historical or technological datedness to Merton's work, mostly he's "dated" in the same sense that Augustine is: he is clearly a man fully engaged in his moment in history. This says nothing about his ability to be adapted to another set of circumstances: in fact, I find that much of what he says that is specific to his immediate time has that ability to be extrapolated-from which is necessary to guarantee a writer's long-term usefulness. I think this is particularly so for a spiritual writer like Merton. That got me talking some more about my own recent conversations and thoughts about the topic of "religion and autobiography," which led to some questions on his part for some more detailed explanation of how it was I ended up doing a Systematics doctorate instead of a Patristics one, and I went into some detail explaining the story of that shift, from early comments from Catherine LaCugna and Brian Daley, through my changing perspectives as I taught high school Theology, and then some of the shifts occurring after I actually began at Marquette. Barnes's own influence in being a Patristics scholar trained as a Systematician also featured in the conversation, given the way he has challenged me over these years regarding some of the ways in which Systematic Theology is taught today, as well as giving me a springboard for using historical figures like Augustine as dialogue-partners for contemporary Systematics. I heard more, too, about the development of his own doctoral work and of his historical project with Lewis Ayres, and how it was that he pulled together this particular education of his own. Good stuff.

Battlestar Galactica concluded on Friday with a two-hour final episode, as many of you well know, as did the four years of Friday night dinner and viewing parties we've been having, mostly at the Lloyds's. (I'm sure the gatherings will continue, without the show, although they won't have that same strange flavour of us intensely jabbering away at the breaks and conclusions.) I've never before experienced a television show as such a social phenomenon before, gathering together to watch a 100-hour nail-biter of a movie. I know lots of others around the country have watched it socially as much as (or more than) privately, and I've never seen a show that so demanded to be discussed, argued and debated, both as drama and as a jumping-off point for its themes. It really gave a different sense of what television drama could be (and of the staggering amount that is produced to lesser effect).

Amy's Mom is staying with them for some time now, and I think was bouncing somewhere between amused and bemused so see us all discussing and arguing, both during the breaks and then for a good hour afterwards, trying to judge whether we thought the conclusion worthy of the whole (Dan and I on the positive of that, Mike on the negative). Complicating matters, she had never watched an episode of it before, so, rather like I said above, coming in on the last two hours of a hundred hour movie is certainly less than ideal. So I tried to explain a bit to her about why it was we were so invested in it. I wonder what kind of impression it would make of her daughter's and son-in-law's friends that they come over to fixate on the television and over-excitedly debate a piece of fiction.

There's not much else I can say here that isn't full of spoilers and there are people who may read this who I very much want to enjoy the thing on DVD. I has been great, though, that I could enjoy this thing (which I might dare to call the single greatest piece of television ever, with the possible exception – or tie – of the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited, although that's a very different kind of beastie) all with such a group of friends as this: some of them theologians, all thoughtful and passionate people fully invested in the art of living, and who then would take an epic drama of this sort as a jumping-off point into a few hundred hours of fabulous and real exchange with one another. I realize that, spread over the years though it was, this piece of drama will one day be one of the most significant artistic Events in my life as I look back over it, just because I could share so many hours of it with the same group of friends, as it became an occasion for drawing each of us out – both in talking about it and in leading to lots more talk beyond it once we had exhausted the night's episode. I suppose anything can serve for bringing friends together, even just the simple decision to gather for a regular meal. But I have to give this show kudos for being so frequently exciting and compelling in itself as to rile us up for lots of different sorts of thoughts, conversations and stories.

Last night I enjoyed relaxed talk over a late dessert at Starbucks with Erynn, after having to reschedule for a number of days due to her ever-changing school schedule. She came in kind of glowing over her first place finish at the weekend's meet at the University of Georgia where she qualified for NCAA regionals in the very first meet of the outdoor season. I actually hadn't seen her since she tied the school record in the high jump (5'9.25"/1.76m) the other week, although she was almost dismissive of that when I congratulated her on it. She had an air of being on the hunt: clearly not satisfied with sharing that title, she was stalking the record already – determined to beat that mark and hold the title alone. It was fun to see that quiet determination just instantly burn in her eyes. So I got caught up in talking technique with her for a while, since jumping is such a different kind of training than I did as a distance runner, and since I wasn't sure what it was, exactly, that one did in trying to improve one's heights, once you knew what you were doing. She explained to me that there were kind of two ways or styles of high jumping: those whose jumps were particularly powered by speed and by their approach to the jump, and those whose power came out of their spring itself. She was of this latter sort, she said, and so while she can improve that power through weight work and building muscle mass, for her there was perhaps greater growth to be found in working on the speed and technique of her approach to the jump, and that this was a lot of what she was doing.

Then it was my turn to try to catch her up on some of my news, suddenly recalling that I'd been holding back on the details of my news for a few weeks, until we could sit down face-to-face. Plenty of randomness through and after that: some of her internship/summer possibilities, bad break-ups and awkward first-dating-someone-older stories, high heels, the character of our anger when we get angry, with me talking about getting into fights as a kid and with her description of being "black angry," and that leading to comparisons between African-American and Irish-American styles of verbal abuse as affection; dealing with other people's ethnic perceptions and constructions – a roommate of hers who cannot be "Assyrian/Italian" but is just told that she is "white"; my classroom discoveries about my Irish upbringing and sense of humour, particularly as experienced by German-American students – and I think ending on the breadth of concepts of beauty around the world that are threatened with being overwhelmed by our media culture, at which point we were thrown out of the place because it had closed. Good talk. Not only is it fun to have a newish friend who is a track athlete and who can talk that sort of thing, but it's also cool that she has her art wing to her: so we're going to hit the Jan Lievens exhibition at the Art Museum on Sunday, as she has a rare meet-free weekend and for which I'm totally jazzed.

I had a long conversation with Grace on the phone last night, longer than ever before, with her seeming to be completely comfortable with it. Like her sisters, she has been so utterly shy of talking on the phone for so long that this still hits me like a quasi-miracle. But she chattered away about the "rocks, sand, and shells" that she had been studying in school, although she sounded slightly frustrated when I asked her what kind of rock the golden rock was that she was able to take home from the actual experience: it was as though all of a sudden she realized that there were identification books for rocks like all the ones she had for birds, and that there was now a whole 'nother science she had to set out to master. (But she confessed that she didn't think rocks as interesting as birds.) That got her back on birds and she told me that she had just added the Purple Martin to her collection of species-specific stuffed birds. I wasn't sure if I had ever seen a Purple Martin, so I had her describe it to me, and then I got to talking how I thought perhaps it had been a purple-headed bird, but this was purely a product of my imagination. I told her perhaps I had been thinking of the Common Grackles that had been everywhere when Mommy and I were growing up, with their iridescent blue heads. That sounded like it also frustrated her, because if these were all over the place just a few hours from where she was growing up, why had she never seen a Grackle? I don't know that I've ever seen a child who was just so drunk on pure knowledge acquisition, and I hope that that stays true.

Her new word seemed to be "crazy." Haley is still acting crazy, jumping off of things even though her arm is in a cast. Sophie was annoying, running around the house all day like she was crazy. It was funny to hear her say this with such emphasis: a slightly world-weary eldest child. I had interrupted her while she was writing her very first email, to Daddy, who was away for a few days. She asked me how you spelled "early," confessing that she didn't think her spelling of "erlay" looked right to her. I told her a little bit of what I was up to, as she could understand it, and just asked questions about what she shared, whether about the schoolwork or Haley's cast, and how painful that could be as Haley would thunk into you with it. I also heard about her basketball games. I hadn't known she was involved in the sport at all, especially with how tiny she is. Leslie told me that she's actually a surprisingly ferocious player, especially defensively, charging the boys and others who were practically twice her size and therefore using her size to advantage in that way. Both of them sounded pleased in describing to me the basket that she scored. Leslie said that the baskets were fixed at about eight feet high, and so most of Grace's shots didn't come near the thing, but this one day – boom! – there it was. Grace sounded like she had been coasting on that particular triumph for a few days, and it was fun to hear the pleasure in her voice.

One of the constant struggles of my life is that I have always – since the 5th grade – been a nocturnal person, whose "biological clock" always tells him that going to bed between 3-5am and getting up in the late morning is the right schedule to keep. This was useful as a grade school amateur astronomer or as a college student who enjoyed the classic late night deep conversations of the college sort. It's not so useful a tendency now, when I'm finding that I'm not actually as productive in late hours as I used to be, and who wants to be on a diurnal schedule so that I can hang out with the rest of the world while they're awake.

Enter Erik, who's up tonight driving from Boston to make a 5am airline flight out of Hartford, Connecticut, and who therefore figures he can call me at 2:35am just to "catch up," because I was going to be up anyway.

Except, of course, that I went to bed at midnight, keeping my "diurnal" success rate going for a few days in a row now. After letting the call go to voice mail, since I blearily was figuring from the bedroom that it was probably a drunken student mis-dial, anyway, I then stumbled to the living room once I recognized his voice, picking up the phone just in time for him to hang up. I called back to make sure things were alright, though I wasn't too worried that something was wrong, given the tone of his voice as I'd heard it. And so, a good catching up: old catch-phrases and favourite jokes wove their way into the dialogue, including the venerable "All I wanted was a scoooop!" which had been my imagined self-justification the night he, Mark and I debated driving through the front window of the Baskin-Robbins that had closed earlier than we thought reasonable. He spoke of the grad class he's teaching for high school counselors, family stuff, stories of restoring old friendships, and ending with an account of watching the predictable end of some friends' attempt at an "open marriage," and I shared my own news of the last month. I'm still not ready to give him a final date about my trip to Boston to see him when I turn in this next chapter of the dissertation and go out to Boston College to confer with my dissertation director and my dissertation subject, and he's all anxious about that, with plans to geek out together over some of the American Revolutionary War era sites around the city.

Me, while preferring not to have had my sleep ruined, am far more happy simply to have old friends who are willing to do things as fundamentally dorky as call at 2:35 in the morning to catch up for an hour. Good stuff.

I'm sitting with my back to the window at Gate F7B, with an hour and a half to wait before my plane for Milwaukee leaves. Naturally, I have to pay for wireless access here, so I'm just typing my journal into Word for now and I'll upload it at home. It's ridiculous the amount of consumer frenzy I'm feeling - and still holding at bay, mind you - in my lust to have an iPhone, the internet access of which I'd have already paid and which, therefore, would cloak me in the illusion of somehow saving money for not having to cough up the $7/hour I'm dodging currently. That, and the feeling of technological obsolescence in the iPhone-envy, of that sleek, pocketable internet device, while now my titanium G4 Mac PowerBook seems improbably large, clunky and antiquated.

Another random note: in many years of (granted, intermittent) airline flights, this United flight from Tulsa to Chicago was the first one I've ever been on piloted by a team of women, and I also think the first one for me where the principal pilot was female. As soon as I noticed it, I was also struck by my noticing it: I've not, apparently, been struck by the uniformly male piloting I've had until now.

I've been highly honoured by friends this weekend. Having spent a month's budget - more than I'd intended - at the American Academy of Religion conference last month, both on the extra days of staying at the Palmer House for what turned out to be a five-minute mini-interview, and for spending more on a new suit than I'd hoped to do in my optimism, I'm now well into scraping the bottom of the barrel for this semester's student loan. Enter Kevin and Frannie. They really wanted me to come down and visit them in their new home in Tulsa, but I just couldn't afford it. And then hey! presto! I'm suddenly receiving from them a round-trip airline ticket. I have cool friends, who apparently think I'm pretty cool, too. All weekend, I was humbled by their generosity, which included meals, a ticket to a John Prine concert last night (with Iris Dement opening), and, from Frannie's folks, Bob and Fran, a ticket to this afternoon's matinee of The Nutcracker, which is the first time I had seen it performed since I was an undergraduate.

My flights down to Tulsa, delayed and swapped for a set through Cincinnati instead of Chicago, were unusually fun. The flight to Cincinnati had me sitting next to a young woman named Renée who managed some aspect of a pet supply company and who was just a riot to talk with, with the two of us laughing through everything from 80s clothes we remembered from our youth to hazards of business travel to comparing notes on favourite overseas travel (with particular attention to Santorini, Greece and the west coast of Ireland). Since I was in Cincinnati and just a matter of a few miles from Joe and Daniele's place, I called and checked in with them while I was delayed at my gate. Then, in my flight to Tulsa, I ended up seated in the midst of a pack of young women doctors in their residency in Chicago who were headed to Tulsa for some kind of clinic on scoped surgery of some gynecological sort. I was seated next to a D.O. named Aspen (which named I'd never heard before and liked) from Montana, and so we compared medical/theological professional notes, particularly emphasizing dismal aspects of residency and dissertating stages. Kev picked me up at the Tulsa airport and we rode in the glorious warm air of central Oklahoma with the top of his Jeep Wrangler down, wind blowing through my hair, and into town. My eyes kept catching sights reminding me of my first visit, driving into town from the airport, when I first went down to meet Frannie in May 2004.

That first night had me settled in by around 1230am, with a quick tiptoe tour of the house and a bit of talk until Kev had to take on another hour's work before bed, with having to be up at six. I was settled in the playroom/guestroom, which was slightly detached from the rest of the house, and therefore had a good night's sleep without any of the kids sounds that the parents have to live with.

TO BE CONTINUED

Whew! I just sent out the last batch of the job applications, including one to sunny Scotland. I still am amazed at what an exhausting process that has been: I had it in my head that it would probably take two or three days to put it all together, but starting from scratch, it's been closer to a month of solid work. I've still had to keep my Official Crazy Dissertation Hours to do it all: up, shower, breakfast, library, meal, library 'til closing, move downstairs to 24-hour zone, another hour or two, home, sleep. It's good to be able to give that kind of devotion back to the dissertation, now, while keeping an eye peeled for any late job notices that come up.

I had a good piece of fun Friday when Julie R made it by for a visit during the afternoon, as part of a weekend trip back to Milwaukee from Long Island, where she has started work on a Ph.D. in Psychology, focusing on her taste for research into cognition itself. She was aglow with energy and excitement, reminding me of what starting graduate studies was like: the pure pleasure of being able to sink, unrestrained, into your own field of studies and no longer have your attention spread out in more general studies. So we talked about that, what work she had already begun doing at SUNY Stony Brook, how cute bohemian Jewish grad students can get her involved in university activities, my applications adventures, teaching and student reviews, Chopin's Nocturne No. 8 in D Flat Major, if I recall that name correctly, and Mozart's Requiem. Just good, fun stream-of-consciousness conversation. That was the extent of my recreation this last week, other than a last-minute dinner invitation from Dan and Amy to join them and the kids in checking out Joey Buona's, where we tried out a pair of their family-sized dinner platters. (My Signature Steak: nothing great; the Chicken Marsala: extremely good.) Mostly our conversation ended up being a lot of updating them about the application business, as well as a bit about my trip to Chicagoland. Anna and Owen were not content to leave us to grown-up conversation, though, and so we spent a certain amount of time talking about drawing, choo-choo trains, and tic-tac-toe strategy, too, just to even things out.

I also received photographs from Jules and from Emily that, along with my pics from the other week's visit with my nieces, let me properly illustrate my entries from Julie's departure from Milwaukee back in August, and from my dash down to Chicago to visit Emily at her Jane Austen conference and to see some of my family, too. So that lets those journal entries finally feel complete to me.

And, sadly, I cannot really think of anything else in my life other than a salmon-like desire to return to my dissertation work. I'm listening to Mark's CD Simplicity right now: was there really a time when everyone around me just broke out spontaneously into incredibly cool rock music?

Still digging away in the literature review, and being compelled to re-write tons of material as I dig deeper and learn more, constantly having to revise my earlier impressions and interpretations regarding the development of a Catholic understanding of spiritual gifts or "charisms." The idea of "charismatic" theology is more complicated to talk about today since the rise of the "charismatic" movement in the late 1960s/early 70s, and people's association of the word "charismatic" with the particular characteristics of that movement, like a Pentecostal focus on speaking in tongues, and ecstatic forms of worship. What I'm looking at is much more basic and broad: a notion of charisms, of spiritual gifts that is integrated into all "natural" human gifts and capacities and extends them to supernatural lengths. It's like in physics today when we talk about "uncertainty" and the complex relationships of chaos theory: we cannot easily quantify the extended impact of human action, and, I think, if God is in the mix, this obviously holds true for the actions of the Holy Spirit joining in with our own actions. We cannot separate the supernatural from the natural; we cannot separate the spiritual from the religious.

I had a bit of fun running into a few folks last night, to both of whom I ended up trying to explain a bit of these thoughts. Christine was over at the library as I fetched a book, back from Australia and working on her Doctoral Qualifying Exam questions. I noticed she had Coffey's Theological Studies article on "The Whole Rahner on the Supernatural Existential," and mentioned how impressive I thought that article was. I then found out that she had seen Coffey over her break, back home in Sydney, traveling to see him with her brother and meeting him for the first time. That's when I first realized that he had just retired before she arrived here. She said he seemed really eager and excited to talk the material at length, apologizing for starting to virtually launch into a full lecture. Since he retired at the height of his powers, I can imagine that he'd be really missing the classroom. I can't imagine losing that. So we talked about her DQEs and the set-up she's giving herself and some of the topics she's pursuing, and compared notes with my own experience, which of course was insane and hardly a model anyone should follow, given that four of the five topics I pursued were completely new to me and unrelated to my coursework. So she seemed jazzed and excited for the new year.

A bit later, back at the Ardmore, I ran into my neighbour Kelly on the stairs for the first time since I got back from all my travels, and apparently she was just back from some of hers, too. We got to talking a bit of compare/contrast with what I was doing now, and with her starting to look at post-doc medical-related programs after she finishes up her dental degree this year. Her boyfriend Mark, who I met earlier this summer, is in seminary and thinking of a theological career, and so she's not scared of hearing the subject as so many are. And so I tried to explain the current state of the research in a quick way, which of course was a hopeless task. But the random ebb-and-flow of the conversation was fun, and she disabused me of my conception of her field being a little more "set in stone" simply for being scientific and free of the ideological considerations I'm used to from the humanities or the social sciences. It was cool to hear new examples simply of how emerging technologies like medical modeling and record-keeping are altering even something as focused and concrete as dentistry, and I could see the thrill the creative edge of her field gave her, which made for fun chat as she's somehow both engaging and relaxing to talk with. She's on a quest to find something more hospital or even trauma-oriented to do after graduation rather than a regular practice, which would make her work much more collaborative and a continued learning experience.

The most passage from reading this evening was from Rahner’s The Dynamic Element in the Church, pp. 58-59, speaking in 1958 right to the “spiritual, but not religious” half-truth that people settle for today. He uses the word "charismatic" in the way people today mean "spiritual," and he talks about how that is integrated into, expanded by, and made far more effective by its being brought into the institutional aspects we call "religion":

The Spirit has always held sway anew in the Church, in ever new ways, always unexpectedly and creatively, and bestowed his gifts of new life. He has never abolished official authority and laws, which after all derive from one and the same Spirit, but again and again brings them to fulfillment in ways other than those expected by the “bureaucracy”, the merely human side to office, which exists even in the Church. And he has again and again brought the hierarchy and the whole institutional element to recognize this influence of the Spirit. That is not the least of his repeated miracles. The love of martyrdom was a charisma which existed side by side in the early Church with cowardice, calculation and compromise. Charismata too were the numerous waves of monastic enthusiasm which led to ever new religious communities from Anthony and Pachomius down to the many such later foundations of the nineteenth century, even if many such later foundations appear to have sprung more from shrewd, almost secular, aims and from a need for organization, than from an original impulse of the Spirit.

With regard to such charismatic enthusiasm for the evangelical counsels, which can only be followed through God’s grace, it must be realized that not only the first emergence of such a mentality, which, of course, nearly always forestalls or occurs apart from and indeed, to all appearance, in spite of the institutional elements in the Church, but also the institutionally organized transmission and canalization of such gifts and graces of the Spirit, belong to the charismatic component of the Church. Not only Francis but the Franciscans too are charismatics of they really live in a spirit of joyous poverty. What would Francis mean to the Church if he had not found disciples throughout the centuries? He would not at all be the man of charismatic gifts in the sense we have in mind here, but a religious individualist, an unfortunate crank, and the world, the Church and history would have dropped him and proceeded with their business. But how could he possess disciples, many disciples, who have really written into the actual history of the Church something of the ever-young grace of the Spirit, if these disciples and the soul of the poor man of Assisi had refused on principle to be faithful to this Spirit of theirs under the yoke of ecclesiastical law, of statutes, vows and obligation that derives from the liberty of love? It is precisely here that it is clear that the charismatic element belongs to the Church and to her very ministry as such. She has the courage, the astonishing and impressive courage, and many holders of office may well not realize what they are doing thereby, to regulate the charismatic element in the Church’s life, to formulate “laws” concerning it, and to “organize” this Spirit.

Classic comeback. Kevin's razzing response to me is one of the funniest sentences I've heard in a long time....

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike
To: Kevin
Sent: Fri, 8 Aug 2008 6:04 pm
Subject: It's Not Gonna Happen, Is It?

Well, Kev, I have to say that I'm impressed.

I've been waiting for a few weeks, bag figuratively packed and waiting by the door, for the summons to come out to Wyoming and drive one thing or another down to Tulsa. But it's not gonna happen, is it? Getting married was one thing, having babies another, but actually having a major move without putting me to work? You're really grown up, now, aren't yo u?

:-P
Mike



From: Kevin
Subject: Re: It's Not Gonna Happen, Is It?
Date: August 8, 2008 6:20:24 PM CDT
To: Mike

yes indeed :) not only not calling you to move, but getting professional movers to do the packing, moving, and unpacking for us.,....you have been demoted based on uselessness...

lol

I had a quietly fabulous time with Jules Monday night. The scheduled Event of the evening was to watch Before Sunset together. I had bought that DVD and my copy of Before Sunrise with her back in December of 2006, and sweat through the break in not watching them on my own, to save the experience for her. I had seen them a few years earlier, and then had rented and watched them again in November and absolutely been floored by them in a way I hadn't been before. But for one reason or another, whenever Julie and I hung out, we were doing something else. So I didn't get a chance to watch Before Sunrise with her until a few months ago, and Before Sunset finally happened last night.

When I got over to their place, though, she and Jackie were in the midst of their stare-at-the-accident fascination with The Bachelorette, and so things had to be postponed for an hour while they filled me in on that piece of reality TV nonsense, which has long been their personal cocaine. So that had us laughing and talking bizarre dating dynamics, while Julie caught me up on her news here and there. We took some time there, as she filled me in on some things she wanted to talk with me about, and it proved, in a way, to be an interesting jumping-off point to the film: to move from real couple dynamics to a well-done fictional one in a kind of extreme setting, but then to use the fictional narrative to come back to the real one later in the night. She's been around the Theatre program enough that she's one of my favourite people to watch anything with, and she was technically taken with the film right away, marveling at how tight the narrative was, which was gratifying. I was surprised to have her say that she thought she preferred the second one: I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that after further viewings, but Before Sunrise is such a charmer of a masterpiece that it can leave the more complicated Before Sunset to seem less attractive by comparison, at least at first, I suspect. But I think the realism of that complexity appealed to her, though she felt ambiguous about some of the character flaws revealed in that complexity, like the question of fidelity raised by Jesse and Celine's situation.

So we worked our way through the Chianti and through some talk on the logic of fidelity, of what the human mind or spirit needs in that commitment. We didn't actually tie it into her upcoming research as she starts her Psychology Ph.D. at Stony Brook, but now as I'm typing this up, it strikes me that that might make for an interesting project in light of her focus on cognition itself. Playing the part of a theologian, that made me talk about what seemed to me to be the pure functionality of classic Christian sexual ethics, that they were not taboo-based but based on a pretty common-sense, observational reaction ingrained human psychological drives, although probably articulated in terms of "natural law" theory, but ultimately meaning the same thing. As usual, the conversation seemed to be just getting really going when I had to duck out if I was going to catch the last bus before the city system shut down at 2am.

My social streak continued last night, then, when I got together with Diane for dinner. She jumped at the chance to picnic, since she and Tim don't really get the chance with their conflicting work hours. So we went over to Metro Market and walked around the produce and deli sections, putting together a few salady things for her, and grabbing some bread and fruit and fried chicken for me. We decided to forego wine and to instead grab local soda: her pouncing on a Sprecher's Kola and me, when I inexplicably found no non-diet Sprecher's Root Beer available, grabbing a Point Root Beer instead, which I'd been meaning to try, anyway, and which proved to be well above average in quality.

We left the car parked there, after she showed me how her recent car accident in the nearby intersection went down, and we strolled over to Lake Michigan, grabbing a picnic table over by the Solomon Juneau statue where we had a great view of the sailboats playing in the light of the setting sun. Seeing those, I instantly regretted not having my camera. Amid lots of purely fun talk and laughing, it was really cool to hear something of how she's getting a sense of growing as a writer through her writing job for Discovery World, and how even what would seem to be straightforward factual or scientific writing could give her a chance to engage in unexpected creative exercises, such as her assignment to describe all the species of fish in a particular display as though she was writing wine reviews. Watching the sailboats made me recall the fun of learning to sail and windsurf with Richard Grainger in the Sailing I camp my first year at LOMC, and the thrill of getting away from the kids during our break and racing Sunfish against one another, standing off the gunwale with backs arched out over the water, straining to keep the boats running as fast before the wind as we could without the sails flipping us over. Diane and I both thought that it would be fabulous to go out on Discovery World's schooner, which neither of us had done, and she told a funny story of waiting for a particular appointment on day, and running into a strapping, gorgeous guy who she (brightly) asked if he was the person she was expecting, only to find out, in his rich English accent that, no, he was the chef on board the schooner, leaving her thinking "Of course you are!" and laughing about this vision of all the mancandy staffing the sailing vessel that she never got to go near in her work at the place.

As we finished the last of our food, we strolled down Juneau Park to the older, upper part of the Art Museum, to see if we could get out on the deck overlooking the water, which I had only really noticed for the first time from the picnic table. That was locked down, and we debated whether it was worth climbing the fence and getting caught now, or whether to save that for a different time. We went back around the front, peered in through the window at a model of a PT boat, so then I gave a brief history of PT 109, which I assumed it was, and privately marveled at how my fourth grade war histories were still floating around in my head. We settled onto a spot where we overlooked the Calatrava addition to the Musuem, leaning on the top of a wall, Peanuts-style, and Diane asked about some of what the looming application process looked like, after I had told her about getting a feeler for a systematic theology position from Pittsburg's Duquesne University, which I was kind of theo-geekily delighted to see was actually named Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit, who I happen to find very cool. So, moving eventually to sit at the foot of the Lincoln statue, I tried to make sense of that process, as well as marveling in general the simple fact that it's coming, while we also talked here-and-there of the architecture that we liked as we looked northward across the park at the old Cudahy Building and the new high-rises in the neighbourhood. The older buildings, with their penthouses six or eight stories above the street were the ones that caught my eye more, though we also laughed about the idea of dressing up and posing as through we were thinking of buying one of the new condos, "modestly priced between $649,000 and $2,499,000," just so that we could get in and eyeball them.

Diane led me down Kilbourn a few blocks and then turned down to a cute, quiet place I'd never noticed before on Cass and Wells called Buckley's Kiskeam Inn, we finished up the night sitting out at the sidewalk table with a pomegranate martini for her and a Syrah for me, just talking over our current events, and looking back over the last year at how much had changed over that time. Good times. Tonight, by contrast, I think will be largely devoted to laundry.

I found myself a bit lost in time and space over the past several days. Last week, after typing up the story about the night on the lake with Becky, I had a long phone call with an old friend/girlfriend from my undergraduate days that hit me on so many levels that I found myself musing on one aspect or another of the conversation through the rest of the weekend. Part of it was just the normal catch-up, the what's-been-going-on in the months since we last spoke. But Angie had also been doing a lot of thinking about her past in that time, she said, and she wanted to let me know just how I had figured in her life.

It was kind of staggering to be given credit for long-ago kindnesses that helped lay a foundation for the life she has today with Chad and their girls. I'm an historian, and an Augustinian in so many ways, and I habitually follow Augustine in using my own life story as a ground for a spiritual reflection and insight in the way he demonstrated in The Confessions. If there's anything I love in teaching history, it's the moments where you can show students long chains of cause-and-effect: if 300 Spartans and their companions hadn't defended Thermopylae, no American Constitution twenty-two centuries later – that sort of thing. It was new, though, to hear something like those kind of long consequences drawn out from my own life. We dwell so much on that bad things that happen to us and to others. I know students resonate with the example of hearing a cruel word said about you in the high school hallways when I talk of historical chains of causality. I don't know that we so strongly realize the good things. It's like physical health: we recount episodes of being sick, but we don't keep a tally of days of health – we take those as "normal" or as our due, and all our blessings become hazy in memory. I've pointed that out in story before, echoing Tolkien in another observation: the evils that happen to us make for stories, while the days of goodness, while better to live, don't seem to be something we can easily turn into compelling stories. Would that that were somehow true: this entry might make more sense. Yet somehow these moments that Angie took to try to make me hear her, and to thank me, did in fact make that kind of impact.

She had continued in that kind of reflective mood afterward, writing a long addendum letter that shared some copies of mementos she had dug out that night, and following up on a few points. So that sent me for a further loop as I read it on Saturday, and re-read it Sunday on my way to Chicagoland for the nieces' dual birthday party. Theologically, of course, I suppose that this gets to the heart of what I think is ultimately true about reality: that at its foundation, it really is about Love, about a Triune God whose mode of existence is an interpersonal love, and that this base gives the rest of reality its character, from quantum physics to human psychology. And so here I'm given a chance to see that love continues, aways, to bear fruit, even the love of college friends who dated for a while and who now haven't seen one another in years. I can think of things that didn't go right, that I was young and immature and dorky when we dated (some would say "male"), but that part doesn't really matter anymore. Even the "dating" part isn't really a big deal: it's the strength of the friendship we offered underneath, and can continue to enjoy still today in some fashion. All the rest seems to fade. Angie's husband, Chad, is one of the coolest people ever, and has really welcomed me as a friend, too, as well as supporting Angie and me in continuing to be friends over the years – the foundation of Christianity in the friendship has allowed that kind of generosity, and made the fact that we once dated to be not an issue. But instead, whatever was done right in love, of seeing the beauty and what was to be loved in the other: those seem to be the things that continue to bear fruit in people's lives, that become part of us. Maybe love enables us to become what others see in us.

Last night I took some time to just hang out with Julie, which I hadn't had a chance to do since right before I took off for Wyoming. We ended up not heading out to anyplace but just opening up a bottle of wine and settling in at her kitchen table, away from where Jackie was working, which was actually just the perfect thing for the night: we hadn't just sat and talked over wine in a while, and that's always been fun. The best thing about talking with Jules is that we kind of love talking in the same, wildly-digressing way that's open to everything and not too terribly concerned about getting off track. So over the course of a bottle of a good inexpensive Australian Shiraz called Wyalla Cove, I seem to remember hitting:

• the Wyoming retreat
• the necessary right timing for retreats to be worthwhile
• when friends irritate
• differences between friendships that fade with loss of contact and those that do not
• my new photo display in my apartment and my failure to have yet taken a really good portrait of Julie
• Julie's personal book of quotations (my contribution, from when I was a TA teaching a session of her class: "We can never get to the bottom of another human being.", or something like that)
• my comments on how I have since kept using that point in my own classes, generally to try to "normalize" something of the finite/infinite divide in relating to the Triune God.
• the Brewers and the Cubs (with Jackie joining in briefly on that)
• dating while on a countdown to moving away
• the redistribution of brain functions after dismemberment
• the neurological nature of the "phantom limb" phenomenon
• justice and prioritizing in social services versus a "first come, first served" system
• Sex and the City
• the appeal of Sex and the City for the contemporary American female mind
• Melrose Place
• the acting career of Marcia Cross
• the Nineties in general
• the weight of pop culture in defining an era
• The Dark Knight
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• the "book versus film" argument, both with regard to Memoirs of a Geisha and as such
• the re-reading of books
• differences in how the two of us hear or listen to music

Now I'm curious as to what her list would remember.... So, just good talk, ending with the dual subject of whether I was too wobbly to make it home on the bus (no) and when I would show her Before Sunset.

By contrast the last few days' research on Rahner seems a bit of a blur. I think I'm writing a lot that will not actually be included in the dissertation once it comes time to trim this chapter, but which still has to be written, nevertheless. I can't trim down the material to its essentials until I do the breadth of the work that lets me see what the essential information is among all the possible information on the subject.

My neglected journal lacks summaries of the following fun and interesting adventures. (Part One)

• Cancer surgery – and recovery! Does life get any more exciting than ugly skin thingies on the side of your nose? For over a year I lived with this unsightly hole, and I'm obviously lucky in that this was really so much of nothing that I can just complain of its aesthetic effect. The non-metastazing basal-cell carcinoma on my left nostril was cut out by a friendly Jewish surgeon who regaled me with a tale of the apparently-miraculous giant statue of the Virgin Mary that had come with her house and which she had gone to great lengths to donate to an area monastic community, where it gained its peculiar reputation. This is the kind of thing people tell you when they hear you're a theologian. She also wanted to know if she could get a bigger tax write-off because of its apparent mysterious powers. The plastic surgery went swimmingly, with the details I related in my entry at the time. When I went in a week later, the surgeon and I – who now met face-to-face instead of us both being masked – were both pleased to have him announce that it was quite a successful procedure, and that the slightly more long-shot option we went with looks to have gone as intended, and thus likely to leave me without a mark. Jen and I watched in fascination over these last two weeks as the wound has almost entirely vanished.

• Dan Lloyd and I did attend the Allis Chalmers Distinguished Professor of International Affairs Lecture, "American Foreign Policy after the Bush Doctrine," given by Dr. Francis Fukuyama on Thursday, April 12, at 7 p.m. This space should soon see Dan's summary notes of the talk.

• On the following Saturday, the 15th, I spent the afternoon and evening with friede, meeting her face-to-face for the first time, after being good LiveJournal friends for a few years, now. Her own epic account of the day ( My Copy of Said Epic Account Located Here ) could only be supplemented by a few more observations. I might also note that I, too, would never have noticed George Bellows' The Sawdust Trail without her, but I was also quite taken with a portrait of a girl in the same room, the name of which now escapes me and which isn't on the Milwaukee Art Museum's website. The use of the colours was extraordinary, somehow being both very realistic and human, and yet also utterly unrealistic, like the large patch of blue-green that composed part of her forehead, but which was perfectly the colour of a vein seen under the skin. Emily mentioned that in her own painting, she used colour in such a "wide" way, and that also made me notice and pay attention to the technique in a way that I wouldn't have, otherwise.

I also remember a discussion of politics which she doesn't include, perhaps more on my end, when she asked me about my politics and I made my way from describing myself as "Contrarian," alluding to my annoying habit of drifting to the opposite end of whatever political consensus I hear emerging in a given room. My own strong inclination toward political independence (and that everyone else should be independent – just like me), and my annoyance with anyone who seems to think that any given political party or left/right orientation can be correct on every point while the other pole is miraculously – and conveniently – wrong about everything. This is the worst feature in American politics, to my mind, with the undemocratic demonization of the Other, and the lack of any impulse to work with others, and it's a mindset I try to warn my students away from as soon as I begin talking with them, especially given that so much of the American university and intellectual culture substitutes such orientations in place of actual thought. Thus, I ended up largely describing my politics as ultimately "Augustinian," in that I'm fully aware of human tendencies toward corruption and thus tend to vote not so much for strongly positive reasons, but rather for whoever and whatever I suspect is the least evil of my choices at any given moment. Emily didn't seem to think that this was entirely absurd of me, for which I was grateful....

It was one of those meetings that is an ideal result of a LiveJournal friendship. I say "ideal" because other than the basic surprise of the sound and styles of our speech, we really weren't surprised by one another: we had accurately conveyed ourselves in our writing. I did in fact notice Emily's avoidance of eye contact, even if I didn't mention it. When it came up in her original entry which I copied above, I simply mentioned that I understood the kind of vulnerability that comes with the real speech of eyes: if she was more aware of it than others, I figured that that was more to her credit than not, and that that sort of comfort would come as we got more used to one another, as it did.

• That weekend had also seen the Friday the 13th dissertation defense of my classmate Matthew Lewis Sutton, with his long-developed project, The Gate of Heaven Opens to the Trinity: The Trinitarian Mysticism of Adrienne von Speyr, which had begun back when we took Professor Raymond Gawronski, S.J.'s course on the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar in the spring of 2004, which was one of the highlights of my coursework. I had long heard friends enthuse about Von Balthasar's work, particularly P.J. McCurry during our years at Saint Joe's in South Bend, but I'd never had the opportunity to really dig into his work in that way before. Matthew had been working on this project more-or-less since his research paper for that course, (von Speyr was a mystic with whom von Balthasar collaborated for years) and it was great to see it come to term in front of his board and an interested crowd. In Matthew's words,

In this dissertation, I synthesize what von Speyr says about the Trinity, integrate her many insights into its central themes, and interpret their significance in light of Catholic Trinitarian theology. My central thesis is that according to the Trinitarian mysticism (Mystik) of Adrienne von Speyr, the gate of heaven opens to the Trinity and reveals the original image (Urbild) of the eternal, immanent relations of triune love. The gate of heaven is opened by the Father in the mission (Sendung) of the Son to be the incarnate Word of obedience (Gehorsam) and together they have sent the Holy Spirit to be like a religious rule (Ordensregel) accompanying the obedience of the Son and the disciple. The open heaven reveals that the Trinity is the original source (Ursprung) of the sacraments and prayer, inserting man through the gate of heaven into the inner love of the Trinity.

I came in late because I had to teach until 4pm (he had started at 3) and I had to leave early because I'd told Jen I'd meet her at 4:30, and I hadn't known the defense would go until 5. That was a shame not only in missing more of the content, but also in not being able to with Matthew and his wife Elizabeth well, and not having a chance to pay my respects to Fr. Gawronski, who had since left the Department, to our great loss. Matthew and I had taken almost all the same coursework, so we were both kind of relieved that he got ahead in his writing, with me having been sick earlier and with my teaching responsibilities this year: that way we wouldn't go on the market at the same time and have to compete against one another for jobs!

Curiously, I've no time of late to really journal or to read journals and see what folks are up to, but I've nevertheless had a number of conversations about journaling or blogging. We had a grad student in the Dental School get suspended for something written in his blog; I believe it had to do with things said regarding faculty members and classmates, but I've not followed the story closely. Then there's the suspicion about the faculty member at Chicago being denied tenure due to his blogging, which story my Mom first brought to my attention, since she's still got my back after all these years. Go Mom.

Oh, has anyone else had their LiveJournal account just now forwarding them comments to them that were posted weeks ago? I'm getting stuff from over a month ago emailed to me. I don't know if it's LiveJournal or AOL, or some mutant combination of the two. It was a real opportunity for some déja vu experiences before I figured out what was going on.

Mostly there's lots of end-of-year stuff going on, and if I'm not grading the latest batch of papers (I'll have graded 210 papers from one class this semester, with a low-end estimate of 780 pages of graded material) then I'm now doing some enthusiastic and celebratory free reading to the exclusion of almost all else. Dan Lloyd emailed me the other day, as he's slaving away toward the end of his semester's seminars, expressing his daydream fantasy of what it would be like being done with doctoral exams, and saying that he hoped that all I was doing all day was watching movies and eating ice cream. I thought it a charming image.

Bob Foster is staying with me for the week. His wife Carmen started a residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of Michigan Hospital, and so--being done with coursework himself--his new living situation in Ann Arbor doesn't allow Bob to make it back to Marquette's campus very often. But when he is here, he makes it for a week-long stretch and so we're getting in some social time when the day's work at the library is done. This was the second night in a row that Mike Harris came upstairs from his apartment and ended the day around the dining room table with us, eating Christmas cookies, drinking Sam Adams and talking theology, movies, history, politics and just nonsense. Tonight there was:

carry-over from last night about the worth of Clement of Alexandria's (d. c. 220?) work, particularly the Stromateis.

Dismissive undergraduates of the sort that read a classic text--say, Plato--and then after half an hour are able to tell their class that "This guy is so stupid" and that they've totally seen through him: this kind of undergraduate did not fare well in our conversation. Not at all.

Much more sympathetic was conversation about dealing with the occasional sheer panic of students who are dealing with Theology and Philosophy for the first time, given that they're being immersed into an undergraduate topic for which they have not had the 12 years of reinforcing, refining preparation that they have had for their other subjects. (Our American cultural self-censorship in the name of free thought seems to be less persuasive to undergrads than it used to.)

Various problems of learning history from Hollywood were also lamented, particularly with the low status of women in the early-to-late modern period being projected back upon the surprisingly high social status of women in the medieval period being a noted example.

There was particularly fierce debate about the thesis that Die Hard became the (virtually exclusive) formula that was followed for action movies after its premiere. Harris continued to hold with rabid intensity to the opinion that Kevin Costner has never made and could not ever make a good movie. Bob and I both offered Silverado as immediate rebuttal, and held forth on the entertainment value of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Bull Durham, and Field of Dreams. I didn't really attempt to defend my belief in a sort of glorious or profound awfulness of Waterworld, which always draws me in with that sort of horrified fascination of an accident scene.

The summer's travesty of the Marquette "Gold,"--and how we spent a rumoured $300,000 to stop being the Marquette "Golden Eagles" so that we could become the Marquette "Golden Eagles"--was reviewed for Bob's benefit.

More than anything, though, I'm still glorying in having an apartment where I can really host people. It's been great just to have Bob around to and to be able to talk with him at length, even though I know it will all feel like we barely got a chance to see him when the week is done. But to be able to have people--plural people, which was impossible in my old studio apartment--at my place is still just a raw, satisfying pleasure in itself.

Is anyone this sentimental and geeky? Do you, like I do, so love certain messages you get on your answering machine that you actually save them? That you get a grin listening to them once again every now and then? I actually copied them, after a while, 'cause the saved ones were taking up so much room, onto a tape, and now that had been converted to an mp3 file. See--sentimental and geeky.

I mention it because the first message of that old set--the one I just deleted after pulling out my answering machine here at the new apartment after three years of not using it since I had voice mail at the other place--was from an old friend with whom I'd fallen out of touch. The message, full of what I can only describe as affectionate contempt, went like this (after hearing my absurd greeting):

I don't believe you said that: "Happy happy...." It's now 8:40 in the morning and all of God's children should be up doing God's work and you're in bed. This is The Priest. The Priest is at Moreau Seminary, and he's going to be here until Wednesday morning, but he wants to go to dinner with you, and Erik if he's around....

Well, the other day I finally called The Priest, which I've meant to do for months, as I'd fallen out of contact. Joe O'Donnell, CSC put in 27 years as a Naval Chaplain before retiring at Notre Dame and having to put up with all the inefficiency of his own order. On the flipside, he could now wear Bermuda shorts all the time, and went out and got his ear pierced the day he left the Navy, so he was enjoying some of the change, as well. I met him immediately after that when I got hired along with a fellow grad student for a live-in position at the Holy Cross priests' and brothers' retirement facility, essentially just watching the door every other night. It turned out to be an incredible experience, not least just by living with such a distinct group: Joe was the next-youngest after us, at a mere 62. And the thing was, living there, I began to see being in your sixties as being rather young, at that. The priests and brothers also got the benefit (at least, most of them thought so) of having a steady stream of young people who weren't seminarians beginning to visit the house. Other than the several near-fatal heart incidents caused by the future U.S. Catholic writer and then-undergraduate, the lovely Miss Tara Dix coming to dinner in short shorts, I never got anything but thanks for bringing friends over. (And truth to tell, I think a lot of the guys enjoyed Tara, for all that, as any group of guys rightly would.)

It was good to pick things up with Joe, as I'd let that go far too long. Now he continues to use his military background as a very successful State Police chaplain in the Phoenix area, while living a very active retirement (what else, for priests?) that includes, as he told me gleefully, having his very own police car. He also published a chapter on his experiences as a chaplain in Vietnam in the book The Sword of the Lord : Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century (Critical Problems in History), which came out of a conference some years back at Notre Dame that I attended while teaching at St. Joe's. His story is a noteable one, and I highly encourage people to pick it up, as it might be an interesting and unusual read all-around. (And magdalene1 should secure the film rights.)

+++
Last Monday, on a day that saw great conversations with Mark Lang in the afternoon and Michael McGlinn in the night, I strolled over to the Jesuit Residence to see if I could catch Fr. David Coffey before he left the next day to retire in his native Sydney, Australia. There had been a party the Saturday before at Professor Bob Masson's place, but I ended up not going because I was afraid I'd be entirely too maudlin for my or anyone else's good. This sentimental Irish thing, I tell you, can be inconvenient. Fr. Coffey has been my Advisor, the Professor to whom I was first assigned as a Teaching Assistant, and the hardest intellectual Master I've ever worked with. I came to Marquette to work on ecclesiology, the theology of the Church. My first semester, I studied Theology of Grace with Coffey and my life has never been the same. Part of it is that this, I believe, is really the hardest theology there is. Even trinitarian theology is easy, by comparison, because once you start to "get" the trinitarian logic, the rest of it all begins to follow. With Grace, you're studying how the divine, the Triune God, interacts with us and the world. How does the infinite relate to the finite? What kind of mathematics allow for such a conversion? Going from digital to analog--we're talking about the intersection of two kinds of realities here, and that--on every level: theological, ethical, physics and metaphysics--became my passionate interest that first semester. Would that it was as easy to understand as it was to appreciate. An expert on the work of Karl Rahner, and one of Rahner's grad students, Coffey was my constant challenger, as his learning regarding grace, or Rahner's work that seemed to well up from him without effort required all my concentration to try to pace him. Only in his theology of the resurrection did I think that I got the better of him, by virtue of my historical training, and by a strange flaw of 1967 fashion that marred his.

I did manage to find Fr. Coffey at the Jesuit Residence, and was delighted when instead of wishing me a brief farewell, he exclaimed in delight that I'd stopped by (even unannounced, tacky me) and led me into a lounge where we talked for an hour and a half. While I'm being all sentimental in typing this up, that generosity with his time gave me a lot more freedom in the moment. We talked of theology and faith, of course, of a story in the New Yorker written by a young Jesuit currently in the house, of his ten years in the States and his great satisfaction with the opportunity that had been given him. He also spoke at length about his family with me for the first time, of brothers and sisters he was looking forward to seeing again, and of one large family of nieces and nephews who were alienated from the Church, and the pain that that gave him. It was different for me to imagine secularized family members who might treat the man I knew as "the David Coffey" as their embarrassing oddfellow, being a priest. There's nothing like seeing the ignorant dismiss an intellectual giant, because they know better, without trying, to make me feel like the world is out of order. Australia, he told me, was much more secularized than the U.S., more like a European country in that regard. And, he admitted, there really was a certain contrariness in the Australian spirit, he thought, that came from their common ancestry as criminals. I thought this was joke until I really gave it a moment, and remembered my own discovery of how Irish my U.S. upbringing had been, despite the generations, once I had experience of Irish homes.

When we had our last, wine-soaked session of the Nouvelle Théologie seminar last month, he came to his conclusion, and recognizing the moment of the end of his formal teaching career, used the Anglican phrase: "Here endeth the lesson." Our good-bye came with his thanks for my friendship here, to my great honour, and looking ahead to his continued work and our contact via email, but I was deeply moved at the thought that I might never see him again. Had he been here a few years more, I'd have likely jumped ship from Fr. Fahey to do my dissertation with Coffey in something overly-ambitious. He had surprised me by pulling me into his orbit and re-arranging my theological priorities and, ultimately, sending my life down a line I had not forseen. I guess our most important relationships always are like that: violations for which we will always be grateful.

+++
One last priestly note: I only discovered today in my new issue of America that Fr. M. Basil Pennington died June 3rd from injuries sustained in a car crash a few months ago. I'd heard about the crash from Erik, and that Basil was having a hard time recovering. Along with being one of America's most important contemporary spiritual writers, I was able to follow Basil (who I've never met) from the "inside track" of Erik. Basil had met and recognized the budding spiritual and personal depths in Erik even back in pre-Freek days, and had initiated a long correspondence with Erik. I was thus able to follow some of his spiritual and ecclesiastical adventures "from the inside," such as his clandestine meetings with underground Chinese churches. Even second-hand, that friendship gave me some insights for which I remain indebted to him, and we all feel the Church's loss.

Abbot Basil Pennington, OCSO (1931-2005)
Basil Pennington, OCSO, retired Cistercian abbot and prolific author, died June 3, 2005 as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident on March 29, 2005. Robert Pennington was born July 28, 1931 in New York, and entered St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, MA on June 18, 1951 and was given the name Basil. He took his first vows July 26, 1953 and was ordained a priest December 21, 1957. He studied both theology and canon law in Rome and taught these subjects at Spencer, where he also served for a number of years as vocation director. At his initiative, Cistercian Publications was begun in 1968 to publish translations of the Cistercian Fathers in English and other studies in the areas of monastic life and spirituality; he also organized the First International Cistercian Studies Symposium, held at Spencer in 1970, the first of a series of similar meetings currently hosted each year in conjunction with the annual International Medieval Studies Congress at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. In the 1970s he became interested in the Centering Prayer movement, first taught at Spencer by Fr. William Meninger and Abbot Thomas Keating. Among his most popular books have been Daily We Touch Him and Centering Prayer, both of which focus on this type of prayer. Fr. Pennington’s extensive travels included an extended visit to the Greek Orthodox monastic colony at Mount Athos and periods of time at Cistercian abbeys in the Philippines and on Lantao Island, near Hong Kong. In February 2000 he was named temporary superior at Assumption Abbey in Ava, MO, and in August of that year he was elected Abbot of the Cistercian Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. In May 2002 he resigned as abbot and returned to Spencer, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was buried at St Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer on June 8. Abbot Pennington was a prolific author, with more than forty books and hundreds of articles and reviews to his credit. He was a friend and correspondent of Thomas Merton, and among his many books were Thomas Merton, Brother Monk: The Quest for True Freedom (1987), A Retreat with Thomas Merton (1988) (reprinted as Engaging the World with Merton [2004]), a collection of his articles, Thomas Merton – My Brother: His Journey into Freedom, Compassion and Final Integration (1996), and a collection of articles on Merton which he edited, Toward an Integrated Humanity (1988); his anthology of writings by Merton, I Have Seen What I Was Looking For: Selected Spiritual Writings has been issued posthumously.

Coming back from Jamaica, I was delayed for one hour in Montego Bay due to American Airlines' computers all going down to a computer virus. I still got to Miami with my folks and my Aunt Pat with three hours to spare for our flight to Chicago. That's when the electrical storm hit. I spent 20 sleepless hours in the airport and finally made it back yesterday, just in time to spend the night at my sister's and leave aristotle2002 standing around at my place in Milwaukee wondering where the hell I was.

Fortunately, he spent the night with friends in Madison, and now is safe here were we have been enjoying pub food and drink ("Guinness!" he shouts, "Mention Guinness!") and talking about

• the derivatives market
• PJ McCurry getting married
• paparazzi and their effects on our lives
• nature and grace (the true epicenter of all conversation)
• the Tolkien manuscript collections here at Marquette
• the finer points of being a hard-ass on your first days of ever teaching school
• the absence of Catholic martyr memorials at Oxford despite being the clear majority of martyrs
• what Phillip Kennedy, OP and Fr. David M. Coffey have in common
• rules I was or was not breaking in my melody on "Listen To You"
• the perils of teaching the opposite sex
• Benjamin Evans
• the advantages of crewing the first eight
• school architecture and its direct influence on the soul
• defects in Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (Glamdring's not glowing, Arwen as replacement for Glorfindel and thereby diluter of the boldness of the characterization of Éowyn/Dernhelm)
• praise for Jackson's obsessive attention to visual detail particularly as we noted in the Chamber of Mazarbul
• the proper characterization of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited and the literature in general of Evelyn Waugh
• public hot-zones for wireless internet
• Professor Hugh Page of Notre Dame's thesis that Prince is a prophet

and some other things that are more random and less important for you to know.

I'm now going back to the conversation.

Well, I really started working today on putting together an account of my Victoria trip. I really did. It took me some time to weed through my photos and decide how to illustrate it. Now I'm too tired to type it out. I'm leaving for Jamaica and my brother's wedding Thursday: at this rate, I'm going to completely blow the illusion that I can keep track of my own life on these electronic pages.

Yesterday was Overwhelming Conversation Day. Exactly 73% of the people I know on the planet IMed or called me, and if you weren't one of them then I was worried that you were somehow ill or injured. So I talked breakups in Ohio, childcare in the Home Counties of England, earaches in Iowa, Nature and Grace in the Papal Social Encyclical Tradition in Minnesota (who woulda thunk it?), mystical visions in Massachusetts, and who knows what and where else. I even had time to make the acquaintance of a semi-celebrity storyteller and filmmaker in Chicago. An entirely satisfying day, other than that I didn't get to read word one of my 1930 Charles Williams novel, War In Heaven, even though I was only 40 pages from the conclusion. My favourite paragraph and scene which will forever be emblazoned in my consciousness:

So through the English roads the Graal was borne away in the care of a Duke, an Archdeacon, and a publisher's clerk, pursued by a country householder, the Chief Constable of a county, and a perplexed policeman. And these things also perhaps the angels desired to look into.

I just finished and sent in my abstract/paper proposals for the Epiphanies of Beauty conference at Notre Dame I've been trumpeting to all of you. ( If you are the sort to be interested by two paper proposals and a bizarre plea for the conference presence of a Cincinnati Band of Some Note, then by all means, click here. )

Now I'm going to end the night with one of my new Netflix movies. I've got Bergman's The Seventh Seal, which I've not seen in years and am really eager to return to, but I'm so wiped that I think I'm going to watch Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman in Paycheck. Is that a sin against film?

Oh! Randall Thompson's "Ye Shall Have A Song" just came on the iTunes! Even in the hands of a high school choir, this is a masterpiece: transcendent in its simplicity. The movie can wait a bit....

Edit (5:18am): Well, no movie happened. My brother, curiously unable to sleep for someone getting married in a few days, came online and we just chatted about the wedding, the resort where it's happening (the reception's next door at The Whistling Bird), and the house they've put a bid on. I read 2 BD as "two bids" instead of "two bedrooms" on the realtor's webpage and nearly gave him a stroke when I asked about the other bid the website said had been placed.... No, no reasons for insomnia....

Been having a long, rambling talk via computer with Nathaniel Hannan all [England] night as he packs to go down from Oxford. I'm looking back at an old post of his on his Live Journal to look at the pictures of his view as the sun comes up over the towers. A funny post of ours on that day is included, too. Maybe I'll post some of this, edited, later on....

Update 2:06am

( And later on, here is the conversation, if you're at all interested; and I don't know why you would be. )

Goofy IM from a former student:

Lisa: mr novak!
NovakFreek: Miss D!
Lisa: hey i met someone that made me think of you
NovakFreek: Brad Pitt?
Lisa: close
Lisa: but no
NovakFreek: Um...
NovakFreek: Adrien Brody? I'm getting that nowadays....
Lisa: This RA who I work with
NovakFreek: Ahhh...
NovakFreek: Are you an RA now?
Lisa: no
NovakFreek: You're a secret RA informer?
Lisa: i work at a desk doing mostly paperwork
Lisa: again close..but no
NovakFreek: Oh, one of them!
NovakFreek: What was the reminder?
Lisa: he told me i had poor listening skills
NovakFreek: LOL
NovakFreek: Did I ever say that to you?!
Lisa: yes quite often
NovakFreek: Oh.
Lisa: no the wound has healed
NovakFreek: Well, sorry, if that seemed rude. I'm sure I was just trying to encourage you to enhance your talents.
Lisa: i think it makes me endearing
NovakFreek: Good attitude!
Lisa: he also listened to celtic music and he had your eyes
NovakFreek: He has removable Lego eyes, too?!
Lisa: i thought that was a secret...