Lunch (also: city-living)

For lunch today, I walked to Alberto’s, while listening to music, and had a slice of pizza; I stopped by Second Story Books on the way back to the office. It was perfect.

Walking: I love walking. During high school, I listened to new albums while driving, but the time I spent driving after high school quickly petered off. I once heard talk radio superstar and general heartthrob Ira Glass say that radio was meant to be listened to in the car and that trying to replicate any type of radio experience while not in the car is a futile effort. I don’t feel quite the same way about music, but I do think that the best times to listen to new music are those times when you can insulate yourself from other people’s conversations and from distractions of one’s own creation at home or at work. For me, walking and driving are those perfect times for music. Work is about a 15 minute walk away, and, since I go home for lunch almost every day, I can usually listen to one album per day while walking. I enjoy this. This week, I have stepped outside my apartment and immediately played The xx’s “VCR”  and wanted to sing along out of the pure wondrous awesomeness of the moment.

Alberto’s: I first went to Alberto’s with Beth and Hans during the summer of 2007 and have loved it ever since. They serve a pizza with a cracker-thin crust that remains foldable and chewy, not crispy except on the very edge of the crust, with delicious veggie toppings and a tangy sauce. The best time to go is after midnight and after drinks (and they stay open until 5am on weekends), but lunch is delicious too.

Music: throughout life, I have been frustrated by my distance from shows that I want to see. During high school, I didn’t have the funds to go see shows much, and the trip back into the suburbs from a late night show in DC was difficult, especially on weekends (also: being under 21 prevented me from seeing a fair number of shows; I especially remember being upset at missing a Joanna Newsom show just prior to my 21st birthday). During college and, to a lesser extent, law school, there were just no interesting shows nearby. I went to a few in law school, but Champaign isn’t really a hopping concert scene. DC, on the other hand, is. I’ve always felt that my love of music is somehow incomplete because I haven’t been able to see much live music, but that has been completely changing within the past few months. During the next month or two, I’m seeing Spoon, Joanna Newsom, Of Montreal, Ani Difranco, and Mission of Burma. This is how I have wanted to live life for years, and I finally am.

Second Story Books: after getting pizza, I went to this used bookstore. They usually have long tables outside of the store with $2 books (and Jewel’s book of poetry is almost always on a table), and I love browsing and finding special books. Today I found an old, old copy of Lieutenant Hornblower by C.S. Forester (maybe a first edition?), a book from a series that I loved when I was younger. When I checked out, I stood next to an older man talking about how he had backpacked through Algeria when he was “the age of everyone in here now.”

Perfect: life isn’t perfect now, but sometimes it seems damn close. I have been wonderfully happy during the past few months. I’ve been so happy that it’s almost embarrassing; I keep breaking into a smile while walking and then looking down at the pavement to hide my big, goofy grin. I cannot remember a time I have felt so connected to a place–the food, the music, the people, the walking–and I don’t know how I could ever want to leave.

Growing up religious, part one

For many, many years, I have been uncomfortable with the religion I grew up with. Even as a child, I did not feel at home in the churches I attended and could not completely buy into the emotional religion that everyone around me so obviously seemed to feel. Recently, however, it’s become absolutely clear to me that whatever tenuous connection I had with that religion has (almost) completely fractured.

Part One: Growing Up

I grew up in a community church in rural Illinois. The roadside sign said “Baptist,” but I doubt more than a handful of Baptists attended the church. When you live in a small town, you go where your neighbors go. Most of my earliest church-memories are basically of boredom: doodling in church programs, hiding Hardy Boys paperbacks inside large Bibles, waiting for Children’s Church to start, so I could leave the main service. I also remember, however, being told that I needed to ask Jesus into my heart to save me from going to hell. I remember being told this a lot. A couple times each year, we’d have a church musical, and then the kids would break off into a kids’ class to discuss the musical. These usually led to one-on-one sessions with well-intentioned high-schoolers, who would tell you how important it was to be saved by Jesus. I probably asked to be saved anew dozens of times as a child. I remember asking for it over and over again, because I didn’t know how I could tell if I was saved. Did he hear me last time? Was I still saved even if I hadn’t been reading my Bible? Was I still saved even though the pangs of emotion I’d felt last time had faded? Mostly, this latter question troubled me. After a church musical, I felt so emotionally enthralled by the idea of salvation that I would throw myself into asking for it over and over, but after a few days, this feeling would fade.

When I was 10, Dad got his job in DC, and we started to move back and forth between DC and Illinois. When I started to near junior high age, the differences between the rural church in Illinois and the church we attended in Virginia became quite clear. I could use specifics, but the differences are basically summed up as this: fewer emotional appeals. While the Illinois church depended on fear of hell or end times soothsaying to rope you in, the pastor of the Virginia church just did classical exegesis. He would take a few verses, talk about what they meant, their original context, and their applicability to modern life. There was very little attempt at a direct appeal to emotions; instead, it was the listener’s burden to decide what to do with the lessons. That said, my primary memory of that church was the junior high youth group. At times, due to a kinetic, friendly leader, I loved the youth group, but in hindsight, I wonder at the burden of guilt that was placed on young, growing people. Sometime around then, and certainly continuing into college, Christian youth circles seemed to become obsessed with masturbation: it was a Huge Wrong, everyone should have an Accountability Partner to whom they could confess whenever they sinned against themselves, it led to demeaning your Christian sisters around you, only boys did it, etc. For a developing teenager that wanted to follow the Christian way, this obviously led to paroxysms of guilt over a fairly mundane activity.

This post is growing epic in length, so I’m going to cut it off here and post the rest of it in segments, as I finish them. Part Two: The Heart of Worship. Part Three: College. Part Four: Beyond. I only have a clever name for Part Two, unfortunately.

Matchstick Protests

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves. Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

In law school, a strong correlation exists between one’s identity and what one does. That school emphasizes the importance of vocation, of having “what you do” be something that is intimately tied to the sense of “who you are.” At my undergrad, also, there was a strong sense that one’s job defined who one was as a person. There, this sense was tinged with the religious sense of vocation: that one should search for the job God intends for a person.

Which is why, this past fall, I found it incredibly difficult to deal with a job where I did nothing. For days at a time, I would go into work and sit in a chair and mindlessly browse the Internet, because there was no actual work to do. Law school had taught me that job = self, but now I felt like nothing = job = self. I wanted to quit, I wanted to leave the country, I wanted to start over somewhere else.

In early October, however, I bought a book (that I’ve cribbed a quote from to make the title of this blog, and which I now feel obligated to write about to justify using a semi-wonky title) called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work that helped me break the nothing = job = self conundrum. I’d read one other book by the author, Alain de Botton, and the positive reviews combined with the fact that it was about working made me pick it up. Each chapter focuses on a different occupation (aviation, biscuit manufacture, career counseling, accountancy) and de Botton writes about why we work (to pay bills, buy food, forget troubles) and what we do when working. He writes in a self-deprecating style that makes the book enjoyable, even if the actual subject matter is somewhat dull (one of my favorite chapters starts: “During a time when I was finding it hard to write anything and often spent whole days on my bed wondering about the point of work”). For de Botton, the point of work is as a breaker against the realization of futility. He writes that “[d]eath is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done,” and that investing ourselves into an ultimately meaningless occupation is okay because it keeps us out of “greater trouble.”

I don’t know if I feel quite the same way about work, but I do know that this book broke me out of my nothing = job = self cycle by presenting me with dozens of stories of people trudging along in humdrum jobs just to make it through the day and have something to eat. I realized that work doesn’t have to be who I am, and law-work is emphatically not what I think I am at all. I spent the fall re-discovering what really brings me pleasure: obsessively listening to and reading about music, reading books, playing games with friends, going out for drinks. I also spent a lot of time thinking about the parts of myself that I’ve neglected during the past few years, such as trying to write. Right now, if I had to define myself, it would be with some confluence of those and other interests, not with the sentence “I’m a lawyer” that law school taught me to use (and, actually, that sentence may even be somewhat incorrect because I’m an inactive member of the bar and can’t actually practice law).

This blog is an attempt at that and a place to write about what I enjoy–about who I am–about my matchstick protests. Enjoy =)