Quote for Today

"To pretend not to believe anything is just a lie, and to pretend to believe something without thinking it's true is contradictory."

Before and After

I spent most of my Spring Break redecorating my family room downstairs. For some time it has been cluttered with junk and useless furniture that got piled with more junk and it was, in short, not a very pleasant place to be. I didn't manage to get a really good "before" picture, since much was taken care of before I thought about it. So take the following pic, and add for me, mentally if you will, a ping pong table, blue, against the left wall, covered in folded laundry and assorted junk, a desktop computer and monitor (and miscellaneous computer paraphernalia) on the desk in the back corner, four monitors gracing the sofa and chairs, books stacked any which way on the tall shelves, and paper stacked a foot high on the near table. Only then will you get a true idea of what I started with.

Here's another one of the general clutter. Notice the wrapping paper with no home, the CD player that doesn't work, and the boxes of records.

So first of all, I decided to paint. White walls are all well and good for hospitals, but I was tired of the lack of color. I bought a grayish blue paint, which looks very much bluer on the walls than it did in the can, but it's ok. This pic is only after coat one; coat two covered its imperfections nicely. Notice also the new light fixtures in this picture. Verily, I believe they provide twice as much light as the previous ones.

During this whole process, Colleen's room became the stacking site for, well, pretty much

everything. --Don't worry, it's all better now...

We built a shelf specifically for folding laundry upon. Here it is, stained, but not yet varnished. Ahh, through this I suffered. The stain had to be removed from our hands with oil, and the finish smell made us decide to sleep with the windows open and the fans on. This shelf really represents a great deal of work. Mom measured it out originally; Kyle cut the boards; Kevin helped Papa and I glue and clamp it; Mom and I sanded and stained it; Papa and I varnished it. It is cool.

After observing that the old baseboard molding was small and ugly, we decided to replace it, and paint it a darker shade of the wall color. I am a bit sentimentally attached to the stuff. Isn't it lovely?

So, then, here it is, as well done as my time and limited financial resources can make it. The back left corner has been dubbed by the Mother the "library corner." It's a shame I can't just turn the entire room into a library, but it must serve other purposes.

The Craft Table, complete with shelving and convenient corner lamp.

The view towards the Laundry Corner, along with view of sofa area. The exercise equipment, not pictured here, sits to the right, just out of this frame.

Exactly...

...in a devastating sort of way.

"The impossibility of the task made pursuing it that much more tempting."

--Shamelessly borrowed from another blog.

“The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.”

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young skeptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”

There is a thought which stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of skepticism called “Doubts of the Instrument.” In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavors to remove all reality from all his won assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and rule. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defense of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defenses erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all—the authority of man to think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear skepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

--G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"

'Twas on the brain, so to speak.

I Despiseth, Therefore I Rant

So all these people are up in arms about the new VandalMail Live system. I guess it doesn't support IMAP, or POP or something like that. I don't care about those. What do I care about? The fact that I can't transfer my inbox from my old account to my new one; the fact that there are advertisements on the side of my email page; the fact that my email account is trying to act like Facebook and Blogspot and Flickr all at the same time--when I just need to get some email!; the fact that I can't reorganize the stuff on my page the way I like it; the fact that I've spent over an hour on the ITS help website trying to solve some of these problems, and can't!! For instance, my old inbox messages show up in my VandalMail Live Desktop thing, but not in my new email Inbox. Why is that? What is this Desktop thing anyway? Why can't I get rid of all the useless icons cluttering up my email page? It reminds me of all the commercials advertising combination medicines for runny noses, sore throats, headaches, and coughs. It's like VandalMail is trying to 'cure' me of all of these symptoms that I don't have! I just need some water, that's all, not Benadryl, not Ibuprofen--and please save the Viagra for someone else!

Perhaps I am just a sentimental person attached to the cleanliness and orderliness of my old VandalMail page. I am just rejecting change. Maybe I'm stuck in the past; maybe this new thing is going to be better. Hmm. Nope. This is confusing and unnecessary. A school email should be just that--a scholarly sort of thing, not a facebook-wannabe, hotmail-ish, trashy sort of thing that takes hours to set up.

There's my rant. I dislike the sort of change that causes many problems and solves none. As I said, I despiseth it much. Now I'm done.

A Boring Scene

Extra points for whoever can tell me which author I was theoretically imitating...

The road from St. Catherine’s church back to Stanley was bordered by short, scrawny, stunted trees and little else. Due to the fact that both Stanley and the St. Catherine’s congregation were entirely made up of elderly people, a commute on a Sunday afternoon was not only scenically boring, but also very long. There was one point where you could see a fantastic landscape if you happened to drive by at sunset. But usually, it isn’t sunset.
“Calm down, honey,” said the woman in the passenger’s seat of the car. Her voice was soft and feminine; very soothing, like lotion on a sunburn, unless the sunburn is really bad.
“Just shut up and let me drive. I hate it when you try and tell me—Hey! Come on, the speed limit isn’t 25!” He struck the steering wheel with an aged but still strong hand. “I can’t stand driving this road every week when it takes twice as long as it should!”
“Why don’t you just try to enjoy the drive?”
“Enjoy that?” and he gestured at the landscape—some brownish grass and an eternal flatness. “People go on and on about how they love driving and they take road trips just to see the scenery. And they write poems about the flowers and the sky and the sunshine. Well all I can say is that they’ve never been to Stanley.” And he jammed his foot onto the gas pedal.
“Oh be careful! This isn’t a passing lane!”
“Don’t care. I’m not going to stand this another second!” He swerved the car out across the double yellow lines and accelerated past four other vehicles. A smile came to his face for the first time as he rolled down the windows. “Now this is what I’m talking about!” Faster and faster as he exulted in the speed that he’d never grown out of loving.
His wife resigned herself to their excessive speed and, eyes closed, her lips moved in a silent prayer. She didn’t see the black state police car coming towards them until she heard the siren. Then she saw the flashing lights and the policeman bearing down on them.
“You have to pull over.”
“Fine.” He jerked the car over to the shoulder and stopped abruptly. The cop stopped behind them and approached the car.
“Do you know how fast you were going?”
“What do you think?”
“You were making about 85. That’s 35 miles per hour over the posted limit. I’m going to need to see your license and registration.”
“Fine. Nancy, pull the stuff out of the glove box.”
“Frank Merdon?” checked the policeman as he examined the license.
“Yeah, that’s my name.”
“Birthday is—well look at that, it’s today. Happy Birthday to you,” and the policeman smiled as he said it.
“What do you care?” Frank snapped back. He stuck out his chin and crossed his arms.
“I’ll just be a minute,” said the policeman pleasantly as he walked back toward his car. Frank humphed and sunk further into his seat glowering.
Nancy looked over at her husband. She remembered the days when he wasn’t like this. In fact, he had once wanted to be a policeman. His record was perfect, he was athletic and strong and passionate about law enforcement. So, so long ago. She remembered when they were first together—they were so young!—and Frank used to wake up in the middle of the night laughing and he would tell her about his dreams for the future, a future he never had. She wished that for one moment he would remember what it was like to feel that way. To feel a respect for men and a profession like that. The kind of respect that she felt now for the policeman who was so calmly dealing with her husband’s rudeness and who was still making an attempt at friendliness instead of returning anger for anger. A soft sigh escaped her lips. Who could bring back youth when it was gone? What is more crushing to an alive and vigorous man than a long life as a one-eyed garage-door salesman?