For six or seven years now, I have been dependent on Quarters to maintain my reputation as a wearer of clean clothes. Before that, when I lived in Lincoln, I used to walk to my parents' house, borrow their car, drive back to my apt. to get my laundry, and do my laundry at their house. I'm pathetic.
Chicago is much too far away for that maneuver though, so once I moved there it was curtains--I mean quarters for me. The first year I lived there, my building had wash/dry machines in it, which was convenient although very difficult to find a time when they were not in use. When I moved, I just sort of assumed there would be machines in my new building; but I was so wrong.
From then on, the sight of me airing my dirty laundry down 53rd street on the way to the laundromat became a common sight. Well, not all that common, I did it as infrequently as possible.
In theory, things like buses and laundromats make sense to me--individual ownership of large, expensive machines seems a little odd to me, different in scale but not in concept to us each having our own space shuttle. (Which shouldn't we have, by now? We're well into the 21st century, what's the hold-up? The Jetsons promised me so much more out of the future.)
In practice, of course, owning cars and wash/dryers onself makes life a lot more pleasant, which is why we all work our butts off to have them. But still, it feels churlish to complain about having to go to the laundromat when you think of our ancestors, cleaning one of the two outfits they owned during their lifetimes by whacking them with rocks. (Having washed my dirty dig clothes by hand in the sink last year at Ashkelon has also given me new appreciation for the institution of the Laundromat; as did the hotel laundry service, which charged about $40 for the equivalent of one load of laundry).
There was a laundromat a few blocks away from me called "Launderkoin," which we immediately began calling Das Launderkoin. It was one of several establishments in Hyde Park with Germanlike compound names, like the art shop called "Artwerk." The laundromat I used did not have nearly such a kicky name; it was called "Coin-Operated Laundry."
Most of the time, going to the laundromat wasn't so bad. It was too loud and busy to really study in there, so it gave me an excuse to read non-school-related books. Although you were supposed to stay and attend your laundry, I frequently went grocery-shopping or went to get a bagel and coffee while my clothes swished around. Most people at the laundromat were nice, and helpful when I was stumped by some aspect of the machines, the instructions for which were often obliterated by years of use. I tried to be helpful in turn, by explaining to newcomers the difference between the Wascomat Junior and the Wascomat Senior ($1.25).
But there were the infrequent unpleasant Laundromat experiences that made me reluctant to go there, lest today be the day another Hyde Park Experience manifests itself at Coin-Operated Laundry. These included: screaming children (I don't know what would be more boring to a child than two hours spent sitting in a room that contains absolutely nothing of interest to children), people selling random objects (usually rapidly ejected by the Laundromat Attendant), people askign for money (same as previous), chatty people (old ladies, fine; random men, no thanks), and the memorable occasion a homeless person decided to follow me down the street and hit on me in the laundromat (he was ejected in about 2 seconds by the Laundromat Attendant. Thanks, Laundromat Attendant).
You see, all I want is a quiet life. If I need to do my laundry, I just want to do my laundry. I don't want to meet new people, I don't want to experience new and bizarre situations, I don't want to get any insight into the lives of my fellow community members. I want clean clothes, that's all. Of course, life is not like that. In life, you always get more than just clean clothes: that's my motto. The Laundromat just makes that more obvious.
Now, I once again have laundry facilities in my building. But getting quarters to feed their hungry maws has gotten more tricky (no change machines here). At first, I got rolls of quarters from Customer Services at various stores; then one of them told me they weren't going to do that any more. Then, I got quarters from the bank for a while, but these were full of Canadians, as much as $3 worth out of a $10 roll. They would reluctantly replace these, if I remembered to ask. The last time that happened, my teller called out to another that I wanted the Canadian q's to be replaced with Americans; the other teller said she could do that "if she wanted." Excuse me? She gets to "choose" whether to give me legal currency or useless metal discs in return for legal tender? I'm having flashbacks to a run-in I once had with the Chicago post office, who informed me that it was up to the individual mail carrier's discretion whether to deliver my mail or not.
So, now I have started marking out every change maker I see in town, in case it's needed. I practically cackle with glee whenever I get quarters in change. Maybe that's the real reason that store wouldn't give me quarters any more: all the cackling was scaring off the customers.
What will life be like for me when I have my own washer/dryer? In some ways, less convenient: I won't be able to do 4 loads of laundry at once any more. Yet, I long for the day when quarters are nothing to me but annoyingly heavy money that I always forget to use at the cash register. Won't that be marvelous.
I have a theory. I have a lot of them, actually, and the less I know about a given subject, the more definite my theory on it is. Today’s theory pertains to religion, and it goes like this:
In today’s world, there are no atheists. Everyone believes in a god, and the most common god is oneself. Anyone who decides what is right or wrong for him or herself is his or her own god. This includes agnostics, “atheists,” and those who nominally associate themselves with a religion or set of beliefs, but use their own discretion as to whether to accept individual tenets thereof.
You can’t do without a god altogether, you see, because there is no “right” or “wrong” in nature, nor there any “meaning” in life. Animals don’t do things because they are right or wrong, nor because they seek meaning. Perhaps humans are just very weird kinds of animals, and right, wrong, meaning, and so forth are things we need to survive in our highly bizarre and improbable “adaptation,” but while animal behavior is easy to explain in terms of survival, human behavior isn’t. Neither war nor compassion make any sense in natural terms; people try to make them fit into the evolutionary schema, but these are nothing more than just-so stories. And no matter what the reason we need these things, natural or supernatural, we need something outside of nature (a god) to make them for us.
As a Christian, there is a distinction to be made between being one’s own god, and being a fully-engaged Christian. Our God could dictate every aspect of our lives to us and demand unquestioning acceptance (because he's God), but instead He graciously allows us to involve our intelligence, understanding, and emotion in our faith. Sometimes we don’t understand, and we choose to accept God’s word blindly because we trust that He does understand. Sometimes we only partly understand, but the Christian faith always allows us and indeed requires that we think and feel, in order to be a true faith.
The basis for our faith is the Bible, and it would in fact be difficult to live our lives in accordance with it, without thinking for ourselves. The Bible reiterates certain general principles over and over—love God, love your neighbor—and a there are a few specific guidelines that are made perfectly clear in the Bible, but a vast amount of day–to-day life is never even alluded to. How we apply those principles and guidelines requires us to think for ourselves, guided by prayer. There is thus a lot of disagreement among Christians about various specifics, which the Bible doesn’t explicitly speak to. The only way to tell who is right about these is to determine who is wholeheartedly requesting God’s guidance, who is thinking about the issues most clearly, and who God has given guidance to. And there’s no way for us to tell these things.
Now, you would probably expect me to say that making yourself your own god is a bad thing. You’d probably be right, but let’s look at this a minute: if you feel that all the major Gods of the major religions have the wrong idea(s), and you don’t care to sign over your self-determination to any other person or set of beliefs, then I guess you are your own best bet as god. The next question is: how good a god will you make for yourself?
Maybe you think you would be a pretty good god. Why not try being a god to someone else too—maybe you could do some good for people who just aren’t as together as you are? Well for one thing, people who do that are usually called “cult leaders” by people who just don’t understand. So we’ll take me, for example: I’m not into coercion, so I’ll just tell you what kind of god I make to myself, and you can decide if it’s something you’d like to sign on for.
I’m pretty nice, much of the time, but there are many situations in life that stump me: you’d be on your own there, because I tend to just stare and stammer or possibly hide in the bathroom when I should be making a positive contribution. I’m firmly committed to the concepts of Justice and Mercy; however, how I apply them has varied quite a lot over the years, depending on my age, mood, and what I’ve been reading recently. Also, though Mercy seems like a good idea to me in the abstract, I don’t really forgive. Other people, yes, eventually; myself, no. Furthermore, I dole out equal portions of hell to myself for things I did wrong recently, things I did wrong decades ago, things that happened that weren’t actually my fault, and things I did that weren’t wrong but were merely embarrassing. So you’ll need to be prepared for that if I’m to be your god.
Also, you can say that we are also “gods” in the way we treat others, since we each have some measure of power over those around us. Here’s how that goes with me: I intend to be nice to people, really I do; but things like traffic, small mishaps, and minor annoyances tend to send me into full Divine Wrath mode. I am often meanest to those who most deserve my love and gratitude: i.e., my husband and parents. If you feel you can adequately defend that kind of behavior in your apologetics work, by all means, I’m your god.
Even when my intentions are all to the good, things frequently go awry. Why? I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I am neither omniscient nor omnipotent; things which were de riguer for most of the old-school gods. I know it’s difficult to see how I can work all things for your good when I rarely have the foggiest idea of what is going on; but that’s something you’ll just have to deal with if I’m going to be your god.
What? Not interested? Well, I can hardly blame you—my god failed me a long time ago. Left alone in a vacuum, I prayed, hoping there would be a God out there who could hear me. Fortunately for me there was: a God who never changes, who not only consistently practices but is Justice, Mercy, and Love. He knows more about me than I know about myself, and He shows me to myself not as I am but as He intended me to be, and as I someday will be—and He shows me others that way too. Though I can never fully understand what He is up to, He shows himself worthy of my trust, and helps me understand more than I knew even existed. He’s a good God. I’ve gotten out of the god business, myself, but I can highly recommend Him.
The Thing That Should Not Be (Metallica, Master of Puppets): Last night saw the premier of the new series, Tommy Lee Goes to College. I probably would have remained blissfully unaware of this, like you, had Tommy not chosen to attend the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the scene of a good portion of my formative and post-formative years. So as it happened I heard a good deal about it from my inside sources at UNL. Even so, it was mere chance that I happened to flip through TV to see if anything was on before starting my movie last night. Some dark Fate took this opportunity to smile twistedly down upon me, and I found myself gazing at the image of Tommy Lee, twirling like a little girl playing ballerina in the middle of Memorial Stadium, chanting “UNL! UNL! UNL! UNL!”
Let’s Get Rocked (Def Leppard, Adrenalize): Having graduated from high school in 1991, I’m quite aware of the existence of the band Motley Crue. Though I couldn’t have named one of their songs, once reminded which ones they were I could sing at least a couple of lyrics of any of them that played on the radio back then. Also, they bring back all sorts of flashbacks of Jr. High and High School. For example:
Good times, good times.
18 and Life (Skid Row, Skid Row): So I know who Tommy Lee is. But why do all of these college kids? They had barely been born when Motley Crue was experiencing its heyday. Of course, some humor is found in the fact that some of Tommy’s potential roommates had no Motley Crue CDs and/or had never heard of Motley Crue. But the level of excitement displayed by most of the UNL students leads me to suspect that they were either put up to it by the show’s producers, or that some of the other, er, artifacts of Tommy Lee’s career have been passed on to a new generation. One or the other has to be the explanation for this exchange between Tommy and his mild-mannered roommate, Matt.
Tommy and Matt are doing their laundry in the dorm laundry room. They start the machines and Matt says:MATT: Okay, let’s grab a seat.
They stare their hands for a few seconds.
MATT: So, what’s Pam like?
TOMMY: Oh, she’s great. And really beautiful.
MATT: So, weren’t you jealous, with the Playboy and everything?
TOMMY: No, not really.
MATT: Of course, now everyone’s seen you naked, so…
TOMMY: So, we’re even!
They stare at their hands for a few seconds.
TOMMY (Indicating the washing machine): So how long does this ^&*!@ take?
Ha ha! He doesn’t know how long a washing machine cycle takes.
Paradise City (Guns N’Roses, Appetite for Destruction): I’m pleased that they didn’t try to make the residents of my home town look like total clueless rubes. On the contrary, they make it appear that the campus is mostly populated by brilliant, hot* pre-med students. The show is, rather, premised on the conceit that Tommy is unable to cope with college life, even with his band tryout, at which he didn’t appear to have the first idea how to play the quads. (I happen to know, again from my sources, that he played in the band all season, so he couldn’t have been that bad).
Same Ol’ Situation (Motley Crue, Dr. Feelgood): The show made me laugh a few times, so all in all, it wasn’t the total disaster that I thought it would be. So next Tuesday on NBC at 9/8 central, won’t you please consider joining me in watching Tommy Lee Goes to College? Because…I don’t want to be the only one. And, maybe you'll see my dad somewhere in the background!
*Not my choice of adjective.
Along with several million of my fellow Americans, I got the new Harry Potter book the weekend it came out (I pre-ordered it), and read it the same weekend. I had justified buying it in hardback as good reading material for the plane to Turkey, but clearly I am not in Turkey. Turns out it was equally good reading material for that weekend. No spoilers follow, I promise.
It is not my job to convince people to read the books who don't want to, because they feel the magic described in it is inappropriate, or for any other reason. I do sympathize with this view. It's possible that the books make witchcraft etc. more attractive to readers, even though the magic in the books has virtually nothing to do with the practice of Wicca; but if you look up a Harry Potter on Amazon, you will see all sorts of links to peoples' lists of "real witchcraft" books. But as the books go along, however, there is more and more in them that makes me sit up and take notice as a Christian. Not only do Christian concepts and symbolism play an important role, but the books show an amazingly strong and complex understanding of concepts like loyalty, courage, sacrifice, and most importantly, love.
The concept of love is awfully diluted and distorted in our culture, and seems to be used as a justification for doing what one feels like doing more than anything else. But in the Harry Potter books, the concept of love is only sometimes linked to romantic love. Love is not inspired by an attractive appearance, but is evoked by qualities like kindness, humility, and dedication to do what is right and never give evil a millimeter of one's heart or mind. Love is difficult and demands sacrifices, and the one who loves must guard his or her character as well in order to be able to give that kind of love. Love plays a central role in the books, and it isn't our culture's concept of love as easy, emotion-based, and centered almost exclusively on sexual attraction.
This view of love is much closer to the Christian concept, and I would like to think that for kids who are reading these books, this view of love as well as other important ideas about character and how to discern and do what is right will stand in sharp contrast to what television etc. are shouting at them from all sides.
Something I thought about the magic in Book 6: Magic and witchcraft is not at all central to the stories. It makes an interesting and imaginative background in which the stories can take place, but the basic story could take place in the real world, outer space, or in any other setting. Also, the magic in Harry Potter is not omnipotent. It makes some things easier, and takes the place of electricity, weapons, and so forth; but there are many things it can't do; and it can go wrong, curses can be dodged (pretty easily, apparently), and so forth. For example, for long-distance travel I personally would rather take a car or plane than a broom; in good weather, sure, flying would be fun, but not in January thanks.
But enough about Harry Potter! What else? Well, as I noted, I'm not in Turkey. The excavation was canceled, so I'm home for the rest of the summer, trying to make it look like I've been doing serious work on my dissertation. We are still going to Germany this fall though: our non-refundable plane tickets that we had already purchased before finding out the excavation was canceled would have made it a huge waste of money not to.