The Holidays are here!
It's the most wonderful time of the year...
With Mannheim Steamroller and the Vince Guaraldi Trio blarin' on the radio.
With the smells of potpourri, wood fires, and hot chocolate as it warms your belly.
With the early nightfalls and crisp winds that chap your lips.
Man, I really love this time of year.
Happy SolstiFestiRamaChanuKwanz'Mas!

A movie hasn't made me cry since Haley Joel Osment's performance in A.I. Until tonight.
I saw Rent, y'all. I identified with Angel, and I really wish I had her great attitude.
Bravo to the cast for moments like "Will I?", "Tango: Maureen", "La Vie Boheme", and "Without You".
One of the major forces in the story is the AIDS epidemic. It was a shameful time in American history; the excuses people gave for choosing to ignore the situation still make me very angry. But what's done is done. We live with the consequences of our actions and the actions of others. It's way easier sung than done, but I "must let go to know what's right."

There's only us; there's only this.
Forget regret, or life is yours to miss...
There's only now; there's only here.
Give in to love, or live in fear.
No other path, no other way.
No day but today.

Iron Chef is amazing. The concept of master chefs competing with themed ingredients coming from different cuisine training turns me on. Everyone needs to eat, so cooking is important, right? I cannot think of a better way to celebrate diversity, quick thinking, and the art of cooking than some friendly competition in Kitchen Stadium. Back to you, Fukui-san.

My two best friends in the world are identical twins. I met them the week of September 11th, 2001 at Notre Dame and we bonded almost instantly after that. Right now they are studying at Columbia University in NYC to be dentists.
Here's a philosophical question: The Roman Catholic Church does not officially claim to know the exact time a human body is infused with an eternal spirit. The event is shrouded in mystery. But the RCC says that people should not interfere with the life-giving process, banning all forms of contraception (except the Timing Method, aka Vatican Roulette). Additionally, the Vatican considers abortion to be murder in all cases. Such teachings would lead to the conclusion that body and spirit are fused upon conception, the joining of sperm and egg. Biologically, it is an amazing occasion and a lot of really cool stuff happens. But why is the soul thing tricky?
Wells and Pippen, affectionate nicknames for these dudes, were conceived in only one event. The meeting of a single female gamete with a single male gamete. I know this because hundreds of people (including me) get them confused very often. [Fortunately there are tricks to tell them apart. Wells has a mole between his eyes and Pippen has a scar on his left eyebrow.] The point is, for a very short time these two gentlemen were one organism. By some mystery one became two. Was the fertilized ovum enfused with two souls? Were their spirits granted after the separate lives became apparent? Is a spirit something attached to the stuff of the earth that moves and changes, grows and splits? Was the fertilized egg a non-person phase in the same way that egg and sperm are human life but not human persons?
I don't know the answers to the questions, but they really drive at the heart of the idea of an individual.
Another case of our complex biology is beginning to make its way into the American legal system. It has long been known that chimeras exist: organisms with two very similar but still distinct sets of DNA. Happens in plants all the time. It also rarely happens in animals. Guess what? Human chimeras can have blood types different from the DNA collected for evidence by police, because some very special people have more than one set of human DNA. It has been observed in different animal species that the fusion of fraternal (or sororital) twins can create a chimera. This kind of fusion may be the way human chimeras occur, but to my knowledge it has not been observed in humans. However it has been documented that some individuals have two sets of DNA. Kinda changes the legal definition of an individual in this day, when our courts use DNA evidence to find out whodunnit.
If these human chimeras were once (approx. nine months before their birth) two organisms, do they have two souls? Again, I'm simply not smart enough to know the answer to this question.
What I really want to get at, is can we define individual in a satisfactory way? Scientists agree that once you've seen one electron, you've seen them all. Same goes for protons, they're all interchangeable. Every Carbon atom with 6e, 6p and 8n is like every other C atom with the same set up. The benefit of Quatum theory was that it helped physicists explain why atoms don't fly apart, but the cost was that all of the sudden, my electrons are mingling with yours, and yours with mine. It's very unlikely, but the possibility is still too great to have distinct electron orbits, like the Dalton model. Now we have electron clouds shimmering around nuclear clouds, but every now and then an electron shimmers really close to or really far from its nucleus. We're always mingling with our environment and vice versa. Wells' electrons are partying with Pippen's electrons and so on.
So it breaks down on the tiny scale. So what?
I think there are deep consequences to how i think about individuals, or the inability to define them in classical terms, the messiness of counting. Maybe my thinking runs back to grade-school when i read a cheesy sci-fi. In "My Teacher Flunked the Planet", Bruce Coville writes that humanity, of all the intelligent species in the Galaxy, is special because "there is only one of them." We appear to be different individuals, but it is only the consequence of a defense mechanism for an emerging mind. There is a strong bond or connection that binds us so closely, and we're almost ready, almost mature enough to break down the walls that separate us. In the book the bond is expressed as mental/spiritual. That's part of what I was getting at in my post earlier today about "Inner Light" and "Flame Imperishable".
How different would the world be if we all stopped thinking in terms of us v. them, and began using more fluid ideas?

Gosh, nothing much to report here. I get today and tomorrow off from work, so tonight i might go and watch Harry Potter which i have heard some good reports about. Notre Dame won, Auburn beat Alabama. Crazy people are getting crazier all the time (I might or might not be talking about Joseph Farah and Pat Robertson).
If i could say something thought-provoking or stimulating, it might be this:
Christ is in you. Take that how you like. It is written in the Christian Scriptures a few times. Paul said it outright, and Jesus promised to send his holy spirit, our advocate.
This teaching leads to some interesting conclusions. We all share a lot in common. We are all made of the stuff of the earth, we are all H. sapiens, but we also share some kind of divine spark. In "The Silmarillion" only Eru (the One) can give a special life-giving thing called the "Flame Imperishable". The Quakers talk about the "Inner Light" that guides us. I think these descriptions come pretty close to it.
Look past division and labels and get to the heart of the matter; there's a lot more similarity that difference when it comes to people.

When I woke up Saturday morning, the first thing I saw was a Navy ROTC guy.
Naked.
Quite a surprise, and a pleasant one if you take my meaning. Looking past the grade-A beef (which we should all do), he's also an intelligent and friendly person. He and his roommate, my good friend from Alaska, let me sleep in their room on campus for the Navy game at Notre Dame last weekend.
Navy games are special because the first football game Notre Dame played in the stadium in 1930 was with Navy. Additionally, Notre Dame has won the last 42 (43?) consecutive games in the long-standing rivalry.
The weather was perfect. I saw a bunch of old friends. The Liturgical Choir sang beautifully at the bookstore. Tailgates of course always rule. The Dome and Our Lady shined even brighter than last year.
blah blah blah
It was great to be back, and I miss college. But most of my friends from school are scattered across the world now, doing good work and studying for their professions. So in a way we can't go back.
Before I log off for another obscenely long and unannounced time, I just want to recommend four movies that I haven't seen. Please go and watch:
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Loved the book. The movie should capture a lot of the spirit and clarify some of the crazy England-talk (e.g. "git", "wodger", "Prime Minister").
Rent. The soundtrack rocks on many levels. I haven't seen the play. BUT everyone I know that's seen it, raved about it. Like "Love! Valour! Compassion!", most of the actors from stage play their famous roles on the big screen.
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I recently finished the Chronicles by Lewis and I say, read them!! Oh, already done it you say? Read 'em again. Even though I disagree with his strongly paternalistic view of the world, the lessons he teaches are priceless.
Brokeback Mountain. Director Ang Lee and actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal present the story of two cowboys whose relationship shifts from platonic to physical. "Brokeback Mountain" examines the consequences of it. I don't want to make a controversial post about gay and lesbian relationships yet, but I will say I expect Ang Lee to do a fabulous job.

I got some comments earlier, and I'll get back to you soon.
Correction: The ban on married priests in the RCC is only 790 years old, not 890 years old.

The Roman Catholic Church needs to change its tune on priests right now. Rather than excluding men with homosexual tendencies from the cloth, they need to crack down on paedophiles in the ranks and weed them out. Discouraging gay men from the priesthood would worsen an already bad shortage of Catholic priests in the United States, where a very large minority (proportionately much larger than the general population) of priests anonymously self-identify as gay. Remember this: Gay does not mean paedophile, and paedophile does not mean gay. They aren't mutually exclusive groups, but they do not correlate.
The RCC must also update its policies on married priests and female priests. The perspectives that these groups can offer to congregations is invaluable and needed.
If the Church believes in the full equality of women as believers, then the exclusively male hierarchy must open its doors to the half of humanity that gives us birth and more than half of our DNA. The inequality is staggering; a church that is mostly women has never been ruled by a woman. The RCC has several religious positions for men: acolyte, deacon, monk, priest, (arch)bishop, cardinal, pope. If a Catholic woman wants to serve God's Church she can be a nun or an acolyte. Pope John Paul II hailed Darwin's Theory of Evolution and its subsequent alterations as a great achievement for science. If the Vatican can be open-minded about modern scientific observation and theory, it can embrace women as full partners and co-inheritors of the Church. As one of my friends said, "If you're a Catholic you get seven sacraments. If you're a woman, you get six." Let's demand more sacramental grace for our sistren.
What about married priests? Converts who were already married ministers upon initiation into the RCC have breached the 890-year-old celibacy requirement. Some rites of the Catholic Communion (e.g. the Maronite Catholic Church) already offer marriage to priests, with policies similar to that of the American RCC on married deacons. Allowing more diversity into the priesthood can only strengthen it.

I work at Felix's Fish Camp. Y'all should come out and visit sometime. It's on the Causeway, the Western edge of Spanish Fort.
After work yesterday I was driving home and saw Venus (The Evening Star) and the waxing crescent Moon over Mobile. It was beautiful. You could almost see the ecliptic. That's the imaginary plane circling Earth where you find the Sun, Moon, zodiac, and all the planets.
It's a really special time for watching the night sky. Venus just completed its Greatest Eastern Elongation (3Nov) which means it'll be up for a few hours after the sun sets for the next month or two. And Mars was recently at nearest fly-by (29Oct) slash Opposition, which means it's that big pink spot nearly overhead at midnight. For both events to happen close together like this is quite rare.
I took Astronomy a couple years ago. Great class, easy, and it's fun to impress people with the stuff I learned there. It also helps me appreciate the Universe we live in a lot more. I definitely see God in Nature.
Venus will be setting a little sooner every night now until it crosses the sun, but until December 4th it will be getting brighter. At that time it'll have a -4.5 magnitude brightness, brighter than anything in the sky except the Moon and Sun, and visible even during the day. So keep your eyes on the skies.

Hi. This is going to be a spot where I talk about stuff. My name is Day. I think I have darned original and crazy ideas, which makes me pretty standard I guess. I read Clifford Geertz's "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" a couple times for my BA in Anthropology and fell in love with post-modern complexity. There's a lot of room here for me to talk about who I am and what turns me on or off, but we'll save that for later.
This is a safe space. If you like discussion this is the place for you; please come in with an open mind and heart. And leave your shoes at the door. It's comfy in here. So please sit down on the plump chairs. Have a drink. The coffee and tea are freshly brewed, steaming, and filling the room with that special aroma. The beer and water are kept very cold. The subtlely scented candles are lit. Living flowers bloom by the bay windows.
Enjoy!