Half Birthday Checkup

November 13th is my half birthday -- six months since my actual birthday, the halfway point of this particular year of life -- so I decided it is a good time to check in with my goals and the things I was thinking about last May that I wanted to accomplish during this year.

I'm super into both New Year's Day resolutions AND new birthday year resolutions. I love the symbolic calendar-induced fresh start and I love making plans and lists and figuring out all the things I want to do. Careful readers of this blog/people who know me well understand that I tend to enjoy and excel at planning FAR more than executing, which is admittedly problematic...and which is part of what necessitates this half-year, half birthday check-in. 

I am well aware that there are many of you out there who scoff at New Year's resolutions and the like, with retorts such as "It's just a day on the calendar. You can set goals any day of the year. You can make changes any time."  Well, that's exactly right. So, do you? When you show me your awesome list of "March 8th resolutions" or "random Friday in September resolutions" and all you've done to achieve them, then you can feel accomplished. In the meantime, why make fun of my new calendar year and new birthday year dates? 

Anyway, today we are going to check in by opening up the journal and seeing what sorts of things I wrote last May 12th, 13th, and 14th, i.e., the day before, day of, and day after my birthday. Scary stuff, opening past journals, especially when they contain stream-of-consciousness morning pages, as these do. But, let's see what we find!

On May 12th I said that I wanted to:
- Heal our dying houseplant.  NOPE. FAIL. I re-potted it and everything and it just ended up dying and I felt sad because Brian and I got it a long time ago together and it has moved with us a bunch and now it's dead. 

-Go to five High Points this summer.  NOPE. FAIL. Totally took about sixty-five other road trips though (I'm exaggerating, but not by much) that are the main reason this goal got pushed aside. 

-Do 5Ks in June, July or August, and September, and then a November Turkey Trot. PARTLY ACCOMPLISHED, PARTLY FAILED. Could still do a Turkey Trot 5K and am eyeing the Santa Hustle.
-Go see more live music and shows. HEY! I FOUND ONE! ACCOMPLISHED! That's all I'did all summer, it felt like. And has somewhat continued through the fall. 

Then, on my actual birthday, the 13th, I was apparently way more into musing about the past than looking ahead, with paragraphs about the last birthday I went out to dinner with both of my parents, a digression into if/when/how my journey out of being a churchgoer would have been different if I had gone to Amherst, Oberlin, or Yale, as I wanted to do, and then this gem: "So many regrets. But how can we know what to regret?"  So that was my birthday head space, yikes! 

As for what I thought about doing in the year to come, I wanted to:
-"Read and read and read"  NOPE. I have not been reading much this year AT ALL and it sucks and that's how we all know something is wrong.
-Succeed at my Habitat fundraising. YES! ACCOMPLISHMENT!  Except then I didn't get to go on the October build and will be doing a Habitat trip next spring-ish instead, but I did raise the money for Habitat. Yay, Habitat. 

-Stay on track paying off credit cards. UM. NO. Unless paying health insurance premiums on one's credit cards counts as sound financial strategy? No? Huh. Shame, that. 

I did enjoy my birthday this year, though. We had a private yoga practice in the park, led by one of my favorite Chicago yoga teachers, with me and a couple friends, and then a group joined for dinner at our beloved neighborhood bar and grill spot for a birthday book swap. Maybe that cheered me up a bit for the next day's journaling? Let's see what I had to say on the 14th....

Regarding birthday yoga: "I am so grateful to the ladies who came and I feel so much gratitude to the universe, the sunshine, and the beautiful expanse of blue sky that was over my head - incredible."  Wow! That's a better mood. A little hippie-dippy, even. And, any goals, there, older and wiser Linda? 

-Be a better friend and do better at maintaining friendships.
-Plan a summer barbecue.
-Hang out with people enjoying life and just being. 

-"Every day I want to read read read" cropped up again.
-And then this articulate sentence with my plan for the year: "Write read yoga guitar baseball music." Which may make you think, "Wasn't she doing that anyway? Aren't those things always what she's doing?" Well, yes. Which tells me that over my introspective birthday weekend I didn't think I was living enough of my life. 

Looking at this last list, I'd give myself a solid two and a half accomplished. Actually probably three, but that's one plus one plus half plus half, not one plus one plus one...  (My real friends got that allusion to Clue, right??!?!)  

It would seem that in the next six months of this particular year of my life, in order to meet all my goals, I need to read (read read read read), pay off credit cards, visit more state high points, finish my "Five More 5Ks" plan, and be a better friend. Well. Let me get right to it. 

But I can't resurrect the dead houseplant. I'm sorry. Bringing things back from the dead is decidedly not in my job description. 

"...And the wisdom to know the difference..."

The picture below is of a column I read in this week's editorial pages that I find absolutely incredible. Incredible, as in, not to be believed. Because I cannot in fact believe that someone wrote it and seriously thinks he has written a reasoned argument, which he decidedly has not done. Now, people can and obviously do disagree about whether to pray, ever. That's not what we're here to discuss. I'm here to remind you that the editorial page is a place for all sorts of topical opinions, but the point of writing and getting an opinion piece published is to offer some support for your opinion, some justification for it, some arguments in favor of it. Here Mark Davis has failed mightily.

I took a photo instead of linking to avoid giving him more hits.

First of all, he doesn't even really get the premise right, as he fails to address a major part of the "Thoughts and prayers!" problem. His argument here, which he fails to support, is that those who respond to a gun tragedy with calls for "Thoughts and prayers!" are not "doing nothing."  But his premise is that those of us mocking the predictable unleashing of calls for "Thoughts and prayers!" are mocking the idea of thinking and praying in response to a tragedy.  He criticizes our "open scorn for those expressions of faithful support" but seems to miss his own point -- that it's those empty "expressions" of faithful support that are being scorned - a Twitterverse full of those expressions, Facebook comment threads full of those expressions, a chorus of "Look, I'm praying too! Count me in! Prayers!" that rings so shockingly hollow and counter to anything I was ever taught about how to be a Christian that I can't believe anyone can take themselves seriously in church the next Sunday. "Look at me! I'm praying! Count me in!" It's a little pathetic. Mocking the "Prayers!"-as-a-comment cliche is hardly the same thing as mocking a sincere person's prayer, and not addressing this distinction is a major failure in the premise of Mark Davis' piece here. 

But. There's also the whole failure to support his argument. He claims that the Thinkers and pray-ers! are not "doing nothing" in response to gun violence. So, what are they doing? Well, according to him -- check out that second-to-last paragraph -- they are addressing the issue "through the lens of a fallen, sin-stained world, calling on God to redeem it, and each of us." 

Oh. I see. Your response to very real bullets in a very real harmful situation killing very real people in very real numbers with very real frequency is to cite an imagined being (easy there, believers -- I didn't say "not real," I said "imagined," as in "conceived of") that you can't see or sense with any of your other earthly senses but can only believe in with faith, and that's "doing" something? What? What are you doing? All you've done is state your beliefs (the world is "fallen" and it is "sin-stained") and pass the buck ("calling on God to redeem it"). 

And this guy and his evangelical ilk made fun of Hope and Change as a slogan? Guess their house of worship is a glass one. (By the way, I made fun of "Change!" as a rallying cry in 2008 too. Because it's stupid. Not because I would have edited it to be "God, change us!") 

The other problematic non-support of his argument is a real doozy. He spends most of this editorial lambasting people who want to respond to a gun tragedy by addressing guns (in other words, logical people) and calling us things like the "gun control chorus" and the "preachers of the Gospel of Gun Control."  Oh, the religious imagery! I kind of like the idea of this bizarre-o Church of Gun Restrictions that he invokes. If that existed, I'd pop in for a service, maybe even get a regular pew. Non-violence is one of my things. What can I say, it's just that loving, compassionate, milk-of-human-kindness in me. I hear Jesus and Buddha and some other guys were into it also. 

But anyway, as our fine opinion writer here insults what he calls our "derisive intolerance" (um..?) he actually writes "But equally absurd is the belief that there is something magical Congress can do that will prevent the next Las Vegas or the next Sutherland Springs."  Yes, that's a sentence he wrote, followed a few paragraphs later by his assertion that he, on the other hand, is doing something by offering "Thoughts and prayers!" and, get ready for the money quote, "That has more power to prevent further tragedies than does any new wave of laws." 

You know why you can't reason with someone like this? Because you can't reason with someone like this. Reasoning, as in the process of forming arguments using logic, as in using the power of thinking in orderly, rational ways -- this guy is not signing on for any of that. Nope. Rather, he is going to go out there on record as chiding people who think "there is something MAGICAL Congress can do..." when according to him, duh, obviously, sheesh, the answer is to let God do something. 

I'm sorry -- which one is actually here on Earth with the power to regulate interstate commerce? Which one can pass laws (actual ones, on the books -- we don't need #1 fan Annie to tell us about a higher justice right now)? Which one regulates? Which one is SITTING THERE GETTING PAID TO PROMOTE THE COMMON WELFARE AND PROTECT THE CITIZENS OF ITS NATION?  

And which one is, you know, supernatural? As in, not perceived by our natural senses? Otherworldly? Dare I say it - magical? 

My astonishment that this editorial exists, was written, and was published is matched only by my dismay that I really shouldn't be that astonished at all. 

In the 1993 film Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis, portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, offers a great response to his liberal academic colleagues who question his reliance on prayer. How will prayer accomplish anything, they ask, being the snooty disbelievers that they are -- how can you change God?  C.S. Lewis replies, "Oh, it doesn't change Him. It changes me." 

Well, in that sense, maybe this Mark Davis guy and his fellow Dallas media voices, NRA loyalists, and Trump-lovin' evangelicals could definitely use a few more prayers -- and I hope they can change.