strictly missionary.

Visiting my brother-in-law in Recent Subdivision, WA leaves me a little bit adrift. The pre-teen boys are playing Minecraft, of course, and the other adults play games and seem mostly content to stay in, but I have to leave the house or I will go insane. So every day I go to the coffee shop.

Recent Subdivision gets the epithet because unlike most subdivisions, this was not actually designed to mimic Dante's conception of Limbo. It's quite nice if you like your house to be beige, taupe, gray, or slate blue, or a mute pine green, if you're particularly racy. There's a small main street with an adorable library and a mediocre diner and a Verizon store and the coffee shop. There are a couple dozen miles of beautiful Pacific Northwest trails spread throughout generously wide greenways. It's quite walkable, and the roads are thoughtfully laid out to prevent fast traffic, which means it's easy for me to get lost. If it weren't for Google Maps on my iPhone, I might not have returned from that first excursion.

Yesterday I took a different route in the general direction of coffee, and as I approached the mini-downtown and started looking for a way in, there was a call from across the street.

"Good morning, sir!"

I kept walking.

"Sir?"

I turned around and saw two guys, maybe 20 years old, identically dressed in black suits and trenchcoats, name tags and briefcases. I know that uniform!

"Good morning. Mormons?"

"Heh, yes. How are you doing today?"

I thought about ditching them, but that was going to be a pain: evangelists always peacefully and quickly retreat from my doorstep, for some reason, but on the street they won't take the hint any more than schizophrenic homeless people. I sympathize. If they gave up easily, they wouldn't be doing their job. So I let them catch up and decided to let my plans be changed, figuring that I've never actually talked to Mormons about Mormonism, and it could be almost as interesting as reading my novel.

"Well, I'm headed to the coffee shop, but you guys are welcome to tag along and chat. You don't want coffee, obviously, but they have other stuff."

Now, the only active Mormon I've spent much time with is a former co-worker, who is brilliant, curious, widely-read, and grew up outside L.A. My bar may be set wrong. I talked about my co-worker spending his missionary years in Sweden, and how they drew the long straw in not being sent somewhere particularly far off. They asked if I had a faith of my own, and I said "Zen Buddhist."

"You must learn a lot about Buddhism in the Middle East."

No. No, you don't.

I kept returning to them and their experience; unsurprisingly, they've clearly had a bit of practice re-focusing the conversation on how reading the Book of Mormon brings you closer to God.

I did manage to get us a little far afield, because I think they get thrown by the idea of spirituality without a deity, so we chatted for a while about meaning and love and connection. At one point I mentioned theodicy, the question of why God allows evil in the world; most people don't know the word, but I'd expect studied Christians to at least know the concept (or have considered the question).

"Do you guys study basic Christian theology? Augustine, Aquinas, all that?"

"No...not really."

"Augustine...why does that sound familiar?"

"He's one of the foundations of Western civilization."

"Yeah, I think maybe...I studied humanities before my mission, so I think I might have read something by him."

Oooookay then.

I had to get back to the house, which made ending the conversation easy. They were nice kids, but I was pretty surprised at how ignorant they were: the LDS Church tagline (which they repeated) is that the Book of Mormon is a completion of Christianity, but as far as they knew, it is Christianity.

I was super nice, I thought. I did a lot of work to keep the conversation going, because there are a whole lot of awkward questions you can about about Mormonism:

• Why does the story of Joseph Smith's revelation sound like any number of new religions and cults that have appeared in the past 300 years?
• Why would I believe this one over the others? How do you know there weren't other prophets after him?
• This is, prima facie, a little odd.

 And my favorites, if those are too crass:

• Why did God's prophets in North America have to be white?
• Doesn't it seem even a little odd to you that the President of the Church, God's living prophet on earth, just happened to have revelations about polygamy and racial discrimination (really, about the fundamental worth of black people) not long after political circumstances required them?

I learned a lot, though. At one point they said "You can't change someone's mind," and I said "What do you guys do all day?". But they really don't view themselves as being in the business of persuasion, as though this were debate club and Mormonism were like your opinion on cap-and-trade schemes. They speak from a position of Mormonism being self-evident if you just open your heart and do the reading; they are "inviting" people to join the awesomeness.

The only religion I've ever seen that was even close to self-evident was Zen. And I only thought I understood it.

surfacing!

Wednesday night I went to the local YMCA, which we joined a while back. It turns out that compared to an unlit, cold running route full of traffic lights, a treadmill is just fine.

I'm working a fair bit, trying to give work its due after a few months of non-work chaos. That's going well, although our system has been in meltdown for a few weeks. I feel like I should be able to fix it, but I actually can't, and it's hard to let go of that and go write code for the new and improved version, instead of trying to get the current version working. It's a terrible time for our team lead to be quitting: the boss thinks we can hire a replacement before the end of the year, which means I'll consider us lucky to find someone before March (he's often a little optimistic about hiring, and in general, hiring mostly stops during the holidays). My fellow SREs voiced my fears by pointing out that when the team lead leaves, one natural choice for at least an interim team lead would be the other senior engineer, which is...me. I hate meetings and I don't know anything about video, but hey, it could work.

Married life is going well in Week 5, its cold iron grip generously offset with snuggles and head-petting. Ain't nothing boring about it, that's for sure.

Hanukkah is coming! Have some cute Jewish boys singing excellent a cappella:


The best part for me is that the description says, "Feat. Big Bang Theory's Mayim Bialik!", when in fact those of us of a certain age remember that Mayim Bialik starred in her own TV series, Blossom. Like most of us, she's much hotter now at age 35 and not dressed in horrible early-90s clothing. Somewhere in there, she got a Ph.D. in neuroscience, which of course makes her even hotter.

No real rain yet! Someday, though.

not my question

I've been reading this blog Conversion Diary, by Jennifer Fulwiler, and her prior blog The Reluctant Atheist. I find her to be an engaging writer, and I'm fascinated by the process of conversion from whatever (usually nothing) to Catholicism. Hers was an intellectually-driven path, and it seems it's been trod many times, by the likes of Thomas Merton and C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton.

(Attracting, perhaps, a disproportionate number of Englishmen known by their initials.)

I read Merton's book, and I don't understand the hype, because I don't think it's very good or interesting. The depiction of life in the first half of the 20th century is detailed, but as a story of conversion, it's full of vague allusions and maybe some presumption that the reader has already been there before, or something. I didn't learn anything except that Merton circled Catholicism for a while trying to decide if that was his thing, and that's hardly remarkable: I've done that with several religions, as well as a few employers and plenty of girlfriends. So it tells you nothing about conversion except that the Catholic Church and its priests are involved, and really, none of us are that stupid. There's obviously something more to it.

I also read C.S. Lewis's Surprised By Joy, and had a similar experience. Lots of vagueness and allusion, without much substance. Having read a few passages from Mere Christianity, I'm not optimistic about his other works.

The process interests me for a few reasons:

• Ever since I was tiny, I've been fascinated by the ways and directions human beings change, and respond to our thoughts and emotions and circumstances; in particular, the processes we use to change ourselves;
• To those converts, "orthodox" Christianity (which to them is the Roman Catholic Church, full stop) is the most intellectually consistent and reasonable thing in the world, which is a bit different from my experience of it;
• The question of whether God exists isn't important to me, and I want to understand why, and how to better explain that to people.

I started writing this back in November, and let it sit for a lack of direction, but Fulwiler just recently had a column in the National Catholic Register that gives me something to go on.

Some background to synopsize the article: in 2005, Newsweek reported that author Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire etc.) had re-joined the Catholic Church in 1998. The Catholic public voices were understandably pleased that someone famous had publicly gone to the Catholic Church instead of the many alternatives: the publicly notable Catholics listed above all died at least 30 years ago, and the list hasn't refreshed often.

In 2010, following the Church's substantial support for the anti-gay Proposition 8, she suddenly noticed that the modern Catholic Church is quite hostile to gays (outside the priesthood), and somewhat confusingly left the Church, stuck with Christ, and no longer considers herself a Christian.

Got that?

Back to Mrs. Fulwiler. Here's her theory about Anne Rice's un-conversion:

At the time, I got a lot of emails from blog readers asking for my take on this turn of events. I didn't respond because I was embarrassed to say what I really thought:

It was probably spiritual attack.

It's a subject nobody wants to talk about. Even among fellow Catholics, you risk being seen as superstitious or ignorant if you acknowledge that there is a dark force whose sole purpose is to keep people away from the light of Christ. And, to be sure, some hesitation about the subject is warranted: We've all heard stories of people who became overly fixated on the subject of evil, renouncing personal responsibility with "The devil made me do it!" arguments or seeing demons around every corner. So it's good not to place too much emphasis on the forces of evil. But this is a subject where we want to be very, very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I think that modern Catholic culture has done just that.

Uhhh...okay! Let's skip the obvious questions and go with that for a minute...

In my own journey, an understanding of the reality of demonic activity has been critical to my spiritual life. I've been fortunate to have a spiritual director who has helped me learn to recognize when these kind of forces may be at work, and to act accordingly. For example, at one point I walked into one of our meetings to announce that I was quitting a spiritual writing project I'd just started. Agitated and jumpy, I ranted about how I was sick of this and sick of that, I knew everyone would hate it, and, besides, it was all moot since I was going to fail anyway.

"This line of thinking is not from Christ," she said. Christ doesn't accuse. He doesn't fill your heart with resentment of others. He never makes you feel like a failure. She gently pointed out that I needed to wait to make a decision about how to proceed until I was in a place of peace. Sure enough, after going to confession and spending time in prayer, I realized I should continue with the project, and it ended up being beneficial to me as well as others. I suppose that my agitation could have just been that I was in a bad mood or had been drinking too much coffee (though I doubt it, given some of the specific spiritual "symptoms")--but, either way, it was helpful for me to learn to recognize and reject those thought patterns that are not of Christ.

I'm not sure about your (probably non-Buddhist) response to that, but mine is something like "Uhhhhhh what?".

I want to be clear that noticing your thoughts and impulses and treating them with a sense of skeptical perspective is a genuinely fantastic thing to do, and is sort of a sine qua non of Buddhist practice. The teachings give us a dizzying array of tools (of which I honestly use, like, two), but simply "noticing what's happening right now" is really the most elemental. Good for Jennifer!

The thing I can't wrap my head around is the need for our thoughts to have some sort of supernatural basis. There's a perfectly rational, and physical, explanation for it: the same way your ear creates sound signals in your nervous system whether you're trying or not, your mind creates thoughts. Imagine "thoughting" as a verb. It's what minds do. Practice, in one sense, is exercising our ability to treat those thoughts, or react to them, in different ways. But there's no one out there trying to get us. Thoughts come from the mind. Why bring demons into it? (I won't ask how you tell which lines of thought are supernaturally imposed by Christ or Satan and how you tell when it's just, as Scrooge proposed of Marley's ghost, "an undigested bit of beef." I can't imagine how you could convince me of your premise.)

I think that ultimately I just have no patience for unprovable propositions. How does it help? If God exists, what exactly are we going to change? We might change our behavior, change our relationships to other people, change our ways of thinking...

Hmm. We'd be changing ourselves. It would be us, working on us. Why not forget about whether God exists, and just change ourselves anyway?

That's basically what Buddha said. People asked him these sorts of questions all the time, and although they didn't have the does-God-exist question (or its relative, "How does a good and loving God allow the presence of evil?"), there is a short list:

• Is the cosmos eternal, or not eternal?
• Is the cosmos finite, or infinite?
• Does the Buddha/a person continue after death, or not?
• Are the mind and body separate, or the same?

Here's a roughly condensed version of the primary story where this came up: A monk named Malunkyaputta came to the Buddha and said, "Answer these questions, or I will no longer practice with you."

The Buddha said, "Foolish man, did I ever tell you that if you came to practice, that I would answer these questions?". Malunkyaputta said, "Well, no."

And then we get one of Buddhism's most awesome passages:

"It's just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me... until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short... until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored... until I know his home village, town, or city... until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow... until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark... until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated... until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird... until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.' The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.

"In the same way, if anyone were to say, 'I won't live the holy life under the Blessed One as long as he does not declare to me that 'The cosmos is eternal,'... or that 'After death a Buddha neither exists nor does not exist,' the man would die and those things would still remain undeclared by the Buddha."

That's why I'm not really interested if God exists or not. I could wonder and philosophize about it forever, and then I'd be dead anyway.

"Malunkyaputta, it's not the case that when there is the view, 'The cosmos is eternal,' there is the living of the holy life. And it's not the case that when there is the view, 'The cosmos is not eternal,' there is the living of the holy life. When there is the view, 'The cosmos is eternal,' and when there is the view, 'The cosmos is not eternal,' there is still the birth, there is the aging, there is the death, there is the sorrow, lamentation, pain, despair, & distress whose destruction I make known right in the here & now."

No matter what our views on the unanswered questions, we still experience birth, sickness, aging, and death; we still experience "sorrow, lamentation, pain, despair, and distress." How we engage with our experience is entirely, utterly, completely about us. Our metaphysics don't matter. How are we going to respond? How are we going to act?

Buddhism: lost in translation

I've been listening, often repeatedly, to some talks by the teacher/scholar Stephen Batchelor, and I've decided to eventually learn Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts. It's kind of a spoken form of Sanskrit, and in fact the word Pali just means "text," so someone in the early days saw the words "Pali language" and didn't get that it's just "the language of the texts".

Pretty much all of Batchelor's talks are awesome, but I recommend "The Life and Death of Siddartha Gotama" and the ones on "secular Buddhism" to get a sense of what struck me. Essentially, he's looking at the earliest Buddhist texts with the rule of thumb that anything in the canon that could have been said by anyone in 5th-century B.C. India probably isn't a part of what made the Buddha's teaching special even at the time, and has enabled it to continue to the present day.

Why bother with Pali when I'm not interested in learning Japanese or Chinese--Japanese especially being the liturgical language of Soto Zen? (I'll learn some eventually.)

For one thing, I think Pali will be easier. It's Indo-European and written with an accented Roman alphabet. I should say "can be written": Pali, as a spoken language, doesn't have a native alphabet, and everyone has always written it using their own native alphabet, like Brahmi, Sinhalese, Thai, and now Roman. Unlike Chinese and (literary) Japanese, though, it does have an alphabet, which is already a big step in comprehensibility.

The other thing, and the root reason for learning it at all, is that Chinese and Japanese are often additional layers of translation, and learning Pali will let me look behind the curtain of translation a bit and judge for myself what a passage means. Here's an example:

In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the "Discourse on the Noble Quest," the Buddha gives a little backstory of his awakening experience. After his realization, he hangs out for a bit, then thinks

This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise. But this generation delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment. For a generation delighting in attachment, excited by attachment, enjoying attachment, this conditionality & dependent co-arising are hard to see.

From Stephen Batchelor I learn that instead of "delights in attachment," he actually says "people love their place," where "place" is "alaya," as in "Himalaya": "place of the snows". Thanissaro's translation isn't wrong, but it takes the Buddha's metaphor and substitutes the more direct Buddhist terminology that everyone has standardized on in English (which I deeply dislike, and being able to write about that more clearly is another reason to learn Pali). There's a lot of flavor lost there, like how the buddha views home and place, and why they thought of "going forth from home into homelessness" as being such an unusual and good thing. That context matters, if, as Batchelor suggests, we want to identify what parts of the Buddhist canon are timeless and speak to our situation now, and what is just a sort of hangover from ancient India.

The older the English translation, the more rewarding to look closely at the original. The final words of the Buddha, according to Rhys-Davids (late 1800s):

"Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!"

In researching this I found it quoted a fair bit by Christians explaining why every other religion's idea of "salvation" is wrong (in this case, that salvation can be achieved by works). Except that line is actually based on Philippians 2:12 (Revised Standard Version, my emphasis):

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling...

And the word "salvation" doesn't appear in the Pali. Vajira and Story's version:

"Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!"

The Christian apologists quoting the Rhys-Davids translation don't look too hard to see that they're using a translation benighted in 19th-century colonialist projection. (Although they might not notice: most conservative Christians themselves seem quite comfortable benighted in 19th-century colonialist projection.) That's sort of an egregious example, but we're stuck with many longstanding bad translations made by people who didn't understand the material: any time you see the words "Void," "suffering," and "enlightenment," you're looking at a bad translation that barely scratches the surface. (Those are shunyata, dukkha, and either nirvana or bodhi.) The very name "Buddhism" comes from that old Western worldview: Buddhism isn't an "-ism" in the sense of a system of beliefs, but that's all those scholars could imagine. We have to be somewhat cautious about taking the translators' word for it.

It seems well worth the effort to read past that.

heresy, history, and doctrine: a ramble.

Having finished the heresy-centric book Out of the Flames, about Michael Servetus and his book Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity), I decided to ask Google about ["Episcopal Church" heresy], wondering if they bothered any more, and having a vague memory that the Church had run a heresy trial some years back. They did, in 1996, against a bishop who ordained a gay deacon in 1990; the Church eventually punted on the trial, and in any case the deacon is now a priest serving in New Hampshire.

What a thing, though. 1996.

The latest news, though, involves a striking comment from the Presiding Bishop, at the 2009 General Convention, no less. I think I know what she meant, but she said

"The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy - that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It's caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention." [emphasis mine]

This is mind-bogglingly inarticulate, and the conservatives had a field day, because

1. as far as I can tell, they already hate her for being the female head of the modern gay-and-women-ordaining Episcopal Church, who furthermore referred to a feminist-theology "Mother Jesus" in her inaugural sermon, and
2. individual salvation by way of Jesus is kind of...the whole Christian thing.

The Buddhist Thing is the fundamental lack of separation between the seemingly different entities in the world of our lived experience.

The Jewish Thing is about God's relationship with his Chosen People in the world.

The Muslim Thing is submission to and worship of God according to the Qur'an.

The Christian Thing is individual salvation through Jesus Christ. If you're a Christian and you're not doing that, it's worth asking yourself what you are doing. (And tell me, if you're willing: we all work out our religion and spirituality in different ways and I am typically really interested in hearing about it, especially if I get to ask questions.)

I'm inclined to go with her clarification that she intended to talk about how Christianity also intends for people to live and function in community, and that's what the General Convention was part of. I don't know if her bad phrasing reflects her deeper thinking, or if she's just determined to stick her foot in her mouth. But come on, you're the head of a major national church. Surely you can avoid even the appearance of declaring your religion's central tenet to be heresy. I can do that, and I've only been a seriously practicing Buddhist for 4 years.

Conservatives are funny, though. I liked this guy, for his honesty. The Episcopal Church

has resoundingly declared its intention to stay on its revisionist course, and damn the torpedoes. It has now officially given its approval and encouragement to men who have an irresistible urge to have sex with men, and women with women. It is only a very short step away from giving the same approval to men who want to have sex with boys, and women with girls. If man/man sex is good and to be encouraged, what's wrong with man/boy sex? Or man/child sex? Or man/beast sex? Essentially anything goes in the sex department, and the prime responsibility of the church is to make sure that everyone is happy and comfortable with their sexuality.

Right, that's not a classic homophobia argument at all. I'm never sure what kind of failed sexual maturity leads people to draw comparisons of gay sex to pedophilia and bestiality. The typical conservative approach seems to be that WE MUST HAVE RULES, and it doesn't matter if those rules are arbitrary or harmful, we must have them and we must be strict, because otherwise, chaos! Our author continues:

We are merrily slithering down a long slippery slope at the bottom of which we will be greeted by the complete collapse of our Western way of life, just in time to submit to the gathering energy and suicidal passion of the radical Muslim alternative. Like the ancient Romans, we are sitting ducks for a new generation of Barbarians.

The Africans have had the guts to call a spade a spade. They are in the frontline trenches of the great Christian/Muslim divide, while we sit in our comfortable living rooms watching a daily torrent of news stories of men abusing and murdering women and children, and the filth glorifying sex and violence billed as entertainment by Hollywood and the media. We pretend to be horrified by the Muslim mistreatment of women, and soak up a daily dose of American-style abuse of women. Sooner or later we will get what we deserve - probably sooner.

Ah, yes, the decadent-society-in-decline thing. It's a core Christian idea that the world is inherently flawed, that God made it perfect and then humans sinned and screwed it up. Far outside Christianity in space and time, though, complaining about the decline of one's society is so universal that I think it's just an expression of fundamental human discontent. It seems like kind of a downer to see the force of theology behind something that seems to encourage the perception of conflict: between God and humans, between heaven and earth, between Christians and non-Christians. (And between humans and devils, if that's how you roll.)

The author could stand to read The Inheritance of Rome. Rome didn't "fall" as we usually think of it: it faded, and for centuries afterward the victorious Germanic tribes (especially the Franks) viewed themselves as the continuation of the Roman Empire. They didn't think they were its conquerors. They thought they were its descendants and preservers. While we now remember Coffee Talk's repeat of Voltaire's "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire," they didn't call it the Holy Roman Empire to be funny.

The Byzantine Empire also thought it was the continuation of Rome, to which it did have more of a claim than the Franks, since it actually started as the Eastern Roman Empire. They were also fading, but hanging in there, until the Fourth Crusade, not the Muslim empires, sacked Constantinople in 1204, and they never really recovered. Reality is always so much messier than our stories about it.

My ultimate takeaway from all this is how grateful I am that I get to study it academically. I don't really care about doctrinal disputes. Yes, it would be nice if religious leaders would stop advocating the execution of gays and telling people that condoms cause AIDS, but those are cultural issues, and that's ultimately what we're seeing here. To me, it's all angels dancing on the head of a pin: arguments between Buddhists, too. What matters is practicing meditation, practicing listening and speaking skillfully in relationships, practicing practicing practicing. One of the old Buddhist debates, still unresolved to my knowledge, was whether Buddha attained such a state that negative impulses/feelings/desires never even arose in his mind (rare to nonexistent in post-Buddha people), as opposed to having them arise and being able to let go of them immediately (which plenty of people learn to do).

I realize that the participants in doctrinal arguments, especially in a salvationist religion, often feel like there's more at stake than just whether they're right or not: it's the eternal fate of other people's souls. That's why they burned heretics, you see: heretics were worse than murderers because they imperiled other people's souls instead of just their own. It's hard to wrap my head around that kind of severity and urgency, but it still survives in a lot of modern debates even in the West, largely subjugated to the standards of liberal democracy. Abortion in America would be the choice example.

I feel like this history and emotion and doctrine is nothing but a distraction. In the end, who cares exactly how perfect Buddha's mind was or wasn't? My question is: what's my mind like? What happens when things arise for me? When I go looking for the supposed permanent thing that I think is me, what do I really find? Buddha is long, long dead. It's my experience I have to deal with, not his.

Why are humans so concerned that everyone else should think and believe the same thing we do?

the priest at the Pyramid of the Sun

In October 2001,my girlfriend Mona and I crewed on a sailboat down to Mexico. This was The Bad Relationship, and the boat's owner was a selfish, passive-aggressive loon who eventually tried to kick everyone off the boat in the middle of nowhere, so the trip was a mixed bag. I did enjoy Mexico, though, and I came back with a raft of stories, including the time the four of us--me, Mona, the skipper, and his girlfriend--rented an old-school VW Beetle and did a road trip from Puerto Vallarta out to Teotihuacán and back.

Teotihuacán is hard to describe. It's an ancient Mesoamerican worship site, obviously, but it's...enormous. Huge. The Pyramid of the Sun, the largest structure, is 246 feet (75 meters) tall, which is at least 16 stories high. It has a lot of steps and takes a while to climb, and it's made of these tiny stones, 8-20 inches. And there are other buildings comparably sized, and then you realize that it's 2000 years old and we don't actually know who built it, and the mind reels.

Then you have to fend off the obnoxious guys pushing little stone statues to the tourists. Luckily they're either too lazy or not allowed to sell on the pyramids themselves, so if you gain some altitude you escape them.

We arrived there on December 11th, the day before the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's protector. Being godless heathens living on a sailboat, we hadn't noticed, and it took us a bit to figure out why there were all these Catholic pilgrimage tourist groups. This was their last stop before the gigantic festival in Mexico City the next day.

The first thing I noticed was a group of American Catholics standing in a circle, chanting some ritual I'd never heard before. There was the obligatory endless response of "Lord, hear our prayer," but the (non-priest) leader's lines were unfamiliar, and...unusually esoteric, somehow. It felt like it came out of the same dusty book as exorcism, and lived there, largely unused, for similar reasons.

The next thing we encountered was a Mexican guy who was pretty angry that a bunch of Americans had the temerity to come to a foreign culture's ancient religious sites and do some random ritual there. Mexican Catholicism has a strong streak of the original pagan in it, more than in many Latin American countries: this guy was there to do a solemn greeting to the four directions, and the next day he was going to dress up and perform in a giant traditional Indian dance in a plaza in Mexico City. So he was pretty miffed about pilgrims feeling they had the right to do some random thing on top of the pyramid.

There were a couple of priests with the group, and on the way down I caught up with one of them, a doughy heartland American in his mid-30s, from Wisconsin. We had a nice chat: it turns out there was a particularly zealous guy in the tour group, who asked the priests if they could do an obscure Catholic rite for purifying a space. Basically, they were asking God to forgive humanity for all the evil things (which I guess meant human sacrifices) that had happened on that spot. The priest thought it was a little odd, but wouldn't harm anything to humor the guy. Inasfar as you think Religion A coming and purifying Religion B's "defiled" ritual spaces might be a little arrogant, the Mexican guy's anger was right on target.

I saved several gems into my journal from the conversation with the priest, and someday I'll type them up, but it included one of my favorite lines ever, said without a hint of irony:

"Are you Catholic?"
"I was raised Episcopalian."

"Well, that's almost as good."

memory lane: cultural sensitivity

Anna countdown: 4 days.

I'm still cranky, and still recovering my strength: staying home from school today, which turns out to be just as well, since Marcela is giving a test. Status quo.

I've been watching the firestorm of protest about the Muslim community center a couple blocks from Ground Zero in New York City, which is a pretty sickening debate for someone who holds the First Amendment as a principle rather than a hidden instruction from the Framers that schools need to teach creationism. It's an obvious step for the GOP: I've said for years that the party's pillars are racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and they've recently been losing on the latter two. A recent CNN/Time poll (pdf) claims that 49% of Americans think gays "have a constitutional right to get married and have their marriage recognized by law as valid," while 68% oppose the mosque.

(Does anyone else remember when (1) men piercing our ears was a big deal, and (2) you couldn't get your right ear pierced because that meant you were gay, and (3) that was bad?)

Anyway, the relevant story.

At Danger, my team named our software releases after drinks, in alphabetical order: Absinthe, Bellini, Cosmopolitan, Daiquiri, Everclear. (I didn't say they were good drinks, and we did pay the price, since the named drink was the primary beverage at the release party .) We got to K, and the logical name was Kamikaze, a potent and tasty get-drunk-fast choice of college students everywhere.

The suits on the third floor heard about it, and sent a rare dictum downstairs that we had to change the name. Why? Danger's hardware was made by the Japanese company Sharp, and kamikaze in Japanese is not a drink.

No one likes mandates from the suits (because they're almost always wrong), and in Danger's autonomous engineering department, this produced a lot of grumbling. I had the unpopular (and disagreed-with) opinion that it was actually a fine decision. The suits' job was to manage our partner relationships, and Japan, to put it generously, is still processing its World War 2 experience. As Americans, full of indelible arrogance and optimism and living in the world's most powerful nation, it's often hard for us to imagine a long-running, deeply-held sore spot, especially now that no one claims we could have won in Vietnam if only we'd tried harder.

But the sign at the border going from Chile into Argentina says "The Falklands are Argentine!", and Bolivia is still pissed at Chile for leaving Bolivia landlocked after their war 125 years ago.

At any rate, I was sad to not call it "Kamikaze," but it seemed like a fine choice to change it. Unlike Muslims in New York City, we don't actually have a First Amendment right to name our software releases whatever we want.

my friends

I have one (as far as I know) practicing Catholic friend, whose second job is as a parish musician, leading the music for services. His Facebook status:

Crucified: check. Dead: check. Buried: check. Time for late passover with friends, and get ready for the most overtly pagan of catholic feasts of the year tomorrow night.

I love you people.