quotables.

(Stuff I've either said, heard, read, or thought about recently that sticks out.)

• Maze Runner was based on a book? Oh. I thought it was based on Temple Run. - F.

• For almost thirty years now I have listened to the Israelis say to the Palestinians what I first heard the Afrikaners say to the blacks and coloreds. We are good people; if you just behave, we will give you most of what you are asking for. Oppressors do all they can to prevent use of the category of justice; they do all they can to cast the situation in terms of better and worse rather than justice and injustice, in terms of good behavior and bad behavior, in terms of benevolence. Nicholas Wolterstorff (2007-12-26). Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Kindle Locations 218-221). Princeton University Press - A. Kindle Edition. 

• A VIRUS IS a small capsule made of membranes and proteins. The capsule contains one or more strands of DNA or RNA, which are long molecules that contain the software program for making a copy of virus. Some biologists classify viruses as "life forms," because they are not strictly known to be alive. Viruses are ambiguously alive, neither alive nor dead. They carry on their existence in the borderlands between life and non-life. They are dead. They can even form crystals. Virus particles that lie around in blood or mucus may seem dead, but the particles are waiting for something to come along. They have a sticky surface. If a cell comes along and touches the virus and the stickiness of the virus matches the stickiness of the cell, then the virus clings to the cell. The cell feels the virus sticking to it and enfolds the virus and drags it inside. Once the virus enters the cell, it becomes a Trojan horse. It switches on and begins to replicate. Richard Preston, The Hot Zone,

• They were two human primates carrying another primate. 

•  The cross is in all life. It is in the earth; the seed dies that the plant may live. It is in the landscape; the mountain is bare and barren that the vale may be rich and fecund. The valleys stand so thick with corn. Aye, they do! And they do it by the soil washed from the mountain. The cross is in your blood. What are the white corpuscles doing in your blood-stream? Watching for infection! When they find it, they absorb it, but they too, in their turn must be absorbed by the newly created cells which take their place, or the blood would stagnate and the body would die. William E. Sangster, "He Dies. He Must Die" (1960), Classic Sermons on the Cross of Christ 

• Have you ever seen the germs that cause disease magnified for examination? They are most interesting to look at. They have such curious shapes; even beautiful shapes, some of them. It is possible to take an artist's interest in them and half forget the deadly nature they possess. But now go straight from that magnified specimen-glass and see the germ at its deadly work in the hospital ward. Look! This is Lupus at work. You were specially drawn to that magnified bacillus. It seemed so innocent; even pleasing to look upon. Yet that germ is doing this; it is eating that man's living flesh away. On and on it goes and nothing, it seems, can arrest it. You didn't know the deadly character of that bacillus when you first looked at it. It seemed just cute and you could discuss it with academic detachment. But what does it do? It does this! 

•  Supin, dude, you just let me down. In fact, you constantly let me down. In fact, when I die, I'm gonna let you lower me into my grave so that you can let me down one last time. - F.  

•  It was a mistake. But it was the kind of mistake you don't regret making for how you've learned from it. - F. 

A Groomsman's Joy.

“The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete.” – John 3:29

In this grand procession, I am neither groom nor officiant, neither invitee nor relative. I am the groomsman. Rejoicing in their completeness completes my joy. Celebrating their wholeness is making me whole. Blessing their oneness unifies my ...

Here's looking at you two.

when your tide rushes over me
there's only one
way to figure out
will ya let me drown
oh will ya let me drown?

The Power of a Photograph

 Art is limitation. The essence of every picture  is the frame. - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

 A way of certifying experience, taking  photographs is also a way of refusing it—

 by limiting experience to a search for the

 photogenic, by converting experience

 into an image, a souvenir. - Sontag, On  Photography

 I photograph to find out what something will  look like photographed. - Garry Winogrand

HONY (Humans of New York) is this guy who takes great photographs of people. Each person featured on HONY is generally photographed alone. It's shown me how close-up shots of a person effectively alter your perception of him. Look at the man pictured above. I suspect that if I saw him in a crowd, I'd just see a disheveled old man. I'd avoid eye-contact. But now I see him and only him. I'm forced to reconsider him. I see a man with tired and sunken eyes that have seen a lot. And s that a suspicious or amused face? Dunno But I do know I am interested.

I guess you'd think I see him better now that I see him as an individual. True.

But seeing him alone also causes me to glorify him. Now a man wearing a colorful turban is a wise man, a sage full of counsel and exotic experiences. Oh, he doesn't have a shirt on? What a simple-minded man who doesn't care what others think of him! What a great simple life! Look at those gaunt shoulders. Must get lots of exercise. I should ask what he eats to stay in shape. 

In Which I Avoid the Elephant in The Room

• I look forward to this weekend. For months now, I have been heated, poured into different molds, reconstituted, cooled for a time, and then heated and poured out again. I gotta find myself again. Trees and hiking and shit have always helped me do that. Here's to you, nature.
• Each time I walk into a courthouse I am immediately smacked with two impressions: 
• (1) How important this stuff is. I walk into a courthouse and see the woman who is about to be evicted from her apartment, and I know that lawyers like me will decide where she sleeps tomorrow. 
• (2) How self-absorbed lawyers are. We are suit and tie society. We flash our secure ID passes as we enter, avoiding eye-contact with non-lawyers. But we can tell they notice us, and we relish in that.
• The court rooms are dingy, and even the ones with polished mahogany desks have gum stuck underneath. Cases are decided flippantly, clerks play favorites, and judges who have eaten breakfast are kinder to plaintiffs than those who have not. I have taken a look inside the sausage factory, and it is not pretty.

---------------------------------------------------Interlude-------------------------------------------------

                            

• These observations are really just pour-overs from observations about us people in general. You are forever so self-absorbed that you have no idea what you've done to someone, and your fading memory lies to you. And the most tragic thing of all is when the good memories flicker and burn out with no one to think of them anymore, though they are the reason we are where we are now. 
• The unnoticed thing about endings is how they precede beginnings.
• What if life throws you lemons and you have no pitcher to pour the lemonade into? Or what if instead of throwing you lemons, life just throws you lemonade? Everyone loves lemonade until it gets poured on them. 

Carolyn: I need you to do some research for me on the “volunteer exception” to the NY Labor Law.

20 minutes later….

Finney: There is a “volunteer exception” to the NY Labor Law. 

original sin - a theory

Adam's Sin isn't passed biologically. It's passed socially.

Each act of disobedience results in exile, and each exile results in more sinfulness. Adam and Eve were exiled from Eden, and God locked the east entrance to the garden. (Gen. 3:24)

The finger-pointing in the first parents passes down to their kids. One kids murders the other, denies responsibility. He gets exiled to a land "East of Eden" where he restlessly wanders. Notice his parents already were east of Eden. If Eden represents what humanity could have achieved, it is becoming an ever distant dream. (Insight from a pastor's message today: Whenever someone gets exiled, either by divine or self-mandate, it's always to the east: Gen. 13:11, Lot goes east; Gen. 11:2, people move east and build Babel; Jonah 4:5: Jonah, angry at God, camps to the east of Ninevah. Not sure how important this is.)

Sin multiplies with people. Lamech's senseless killings result in further alienation.

There's a generational curse passed down where the conflicts of brothers become conflicts between cousins and then becomes conflicts between families and whole peoples. There's a crescendo of sinfulness that always results in more alienation, more scattering, more restless desperation. That regress is vividly described in the O.T.

If I could shake out the general effects of original sin as it plays out in the dramas of the Old Testament, it's that (1) when people sin, they exile themselves further away from their own paradise, and (2) when people sin, they exile themselves further away from each other. 

C.S. Lewis wrote a story once about how people live in Hell. They can make houses simply by thinking it, which is pretty awesome. But they can't put up with each other. So they keep moving away from each other, enlarging hell and living at its fringes. They keep moving away until each person only has himself to hate. And that is hell. Hell is self.