You Can't Make Mistakes.

May your spirit find its way, whichever way that might be

My advisor and friend David Ede, Chair of the Department of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University, passed away a week ago today. He was 73 years old and died as the result of an allergic reaction to nuts, something that he had known about and was always prepared for with an epi-pen on hand. I am not sure as to the specifics, really.

I was shocked to learn this when a good friend called me last Sunday to let me know. I was thankful because I might not have known as soon otherwise, being that I just returned to Cairo a few weeks ago. Dr. Ede’s death is an untimely one: for me it seems especially untimely because we were still working on my thesis project. He will unfortunately not be able to see the results.

There was a very nice write-up in the Kalamazoo Gazette yesterday which can be found here. However, as with all such articles and obituaries, I felt that it left something to be desired. So, I will use this forum to express a few of my more fond memories of David.

I hadn’t really realized, having studied under him for almost 4 years, how much I had come to consider Dr. Ede a friend as well as mentor. I, of course, had my gripes with him, but that is par for the course in any grad-student/advisor relationship. Grad school wouldn’t be very interesting if our advisors didn’t occasionally piss us off. However, those gripes were typically assuaged by even the shortest conversation with him. He had a way of setting my mind at ease whenever I was freaking out about my project or anything else. This would typically involve his telling of anecdotes from grad school or living and traveling abroad. One thing that I regret that I will never be able to do now is to help him compile these stories into a memoir of sorts, something that we spoke about briefly this spring after I suggested that he do this. In that same meeting, having not met in months as I was living in Egypt last year, we spent about 15 minutes talking about my thesis and a good three hours talking about our recent travels. He had just returned from a trip to Japan with his wife, Yumi, and his eyes lit up like a kid in a candy store while talking about food, trains, and other little phenomena of which he had taken note.

That is how he was: his attention to detail was remarkable. One of the most valuable things that he taught me as his student was how to compile an exhaustive bibliography. If you were writing a paper for him, he wasn’t happy until you had found every source in existence with even a mere mention of your topic. It is for this reason that I have been able to find as much primary source data as I have to work with for my thesis. He told me once that you could start out compiling sources by excluding some of them from the beginning. You have to wait until the end to decide what is redundant and what is irrelevant to your work.

I think that it was in that same spirit of being thorough that he conducted his own education. Having been initially trained at a Lutheran seminary, he used to say that he didn’t go into the clergy not because he didn’t believe, but because there were so many other things out there to believe in. He didn’t feel like he could choose just one path. This led him to study religion in a comparative/pluralist academic environment, a field of study which he remarked only recently is “still very new, and still theoretically wide-open.”

This was the same thing that he said to me the day that I, having just come back from Egypt for the first time, went to his office to inquire about the MA in Comparative Religion. He was dressed in a such a way that he looked like he might be off to the beach as soon as he left the university with his flip-flops and Acapulco shirt. I left his office that day having been accepted into the department and with a teaching assistantship for his course on Islamic Traditions. He wore sandals, shorts and Acapulco shirts to class too. I remember him once saying, “when you get to a certain age, if you want to wear flip-flops to teach, you just can.”

A number of the students in that class would come to my office hours with endless questions. They thought that the material was a little obtuse, that Ede was a little boring. I, sitting in the same class so that I could help with the undergrads and grade exams, thought that he was giving the most in-depth survey he could given the time-constraints, and that he was as thorough and as knowledgeable as you could get. His answers to students’ questions were not patronizing, pedantic, or overly simplified, they were complete. When they weren’t complete, he would give students the information they needed to find a more complete answer on their own. He was a big fan of teaching students the joys of utilizing the library for research. On one occasion, we took the entire class to the library to show them where the Islamic Studies references were and how to use the Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd Ed, Brill) and the Index Islamicus (Brill), among others.

David was also very thorough in his other interests. One of the most fascinating conversations that I had with him happened as we were listening to some recordings of Qur’anic recitation by Iranian women reciters that I had found for him. I brought them in on a USB stick and he put them on his Mac so we could listen. He commented that it was amazing how much audio you could fit in such a small space these days, and how it all sounded terrible.

It turned out that he was a HUGE audiophile, actually constructing his own multi-track audio systems from parts: ceramic drivers, hand-wrapped coils, hours of soldering and fitting boards into amplifiers. He had constructed a system which in which he had striven to make the playback sound as much like being live as possible. He said that the secret wasn’t this trend toward very low-frequency sub-woofers balanced with tweeters for dispersal, but those combined with lots and lots of mid-range stacks. “Mid-range is where all of the sound really is,” he remarked, “Without it, all you have is booming bass and screechy treble.” We sat and listened to the rest of the recordings and he made some suggestions for my living-room system, which I immediately went home and implemented. Dvorak had never sounded so good, neither had Zeppelin.

I know that Dr. Ede felt bad that in the past year he had been very distracted with having been tapped as the department chair and not as focused on his students’ research projects. He said as much to a colleague/friend of mine who recently graduated from the department when she spoke to him about my project. While it is true that he may have been distracted sometimes, the advice that he did have was always spot-on, and is still applicable. It will be with this in mind that I finish this project, my interest in which would have never come to the surface if not for him. He was always excited that I had found something so original and new to work with and his eyes would light up whenever we talked about it. He never doubted my ability to conduct scholarly work, sometimes—I felt—over-estimating me. Because of this, I worked ever harder to live up to his expectations, and he was never disappointed. At one point he even asked me to collaborate on a translation of Hasan al-Basri’s letter to ‘Abd al-Malik on the problem of free-will, and some other unpublished things that he had been kicking about for years. We just never really got around to doing anything about it. Had we but world enough, and time, I suppose…1

There is a visitation and memorial service being held today in Kalamazoo. Details are listed in the link above.

Dr. Ede, you’ll be sorely missed. I hope your spirit finds its way now the same way you did in life, whatever way that might be. Rest in peace, dear friend.

———

1 “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime” – from “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell, 17th-century English poet.

because it is none of your business.

I just heard retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis indicate—with regard to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy employed by the U.S. Armed forces for discriminating against homosexual service-people—that “when you raise your hand to swear to defend the Constitution, you are giving up some of your rights to free speech.”1

Really?

I don’t remember seeing that in the constitution. Listen to the full discussion on the Diane Rehm Show.

———

1 Diane Rehm Show, 24 July 2008

Itchy and Scratchy

I came down with a rather bad case of poison ivy last week. I was absentmindedly pulling weeds and likely picked it up then since I wasn’t wearing any gloves, which is abnormal.

In any case, I usually don’t have any problem with it. The point of contact is itchy for a few days, I put calamine on it, it goes away. This time is totally different.

I have had it since last week and it has been spreading. I think that this occurs while I am sleeping so I am reduced to sleeping in a burqa to keep myself from making contact with my own skin.

The funniest part about this experience, though, is the advice that I have found for getting rid of it.

I was, against my better judgment, trolling Google last night looking for remedies. I found the usual sort: calamine, steroid shots, vitamins, etc.

Then I found a treasure trove of insanity. There were recommendations that poison ivy victims use everything from hair dryers to cool whip to saran wrap on their poison ivy. They went something like this:

“I had poison ivy a few years ago, and it was so bad and nothing worked so in desperation I mixed together a paste of bleach, oatmeal, furniture polish, and baking soda. Then I spread the mixture on my poison ivy and wrapped it with saran wrap for five hours. Then I removed the saran wrap and used the hair dryer to dry the mixture into something just shy of concrete and then sanded it and the rash off my skin with a belt-sander. I never got poison ivy again.” – Ralph, Oklahoma, 2001

“When we were little, and got poison ivy from playing outside in the woods, my grandma would draw us a really hot bath, as hot as she could get it. Then, she would pour kettles of boiling black tea in it and tell us to get in. It scalded something terrible, but when our skin finally healed from being scalded, the poison ivy was gone too!” – Sally, New Jersey, 1997

“I get poison ivy every summer because my cats play outside and then come in and I pet them and end up with it all over my hands and neck. Every summer! I don’t know, I just love my cats! So, now I take 8000mg of vitamin c and 10000mg of zinc and wash it down with a tea made of poison ivy leaves, cat hair, and acetone. It works like a charm! I have to carry my liver around in a bag from all the vitamins, but I haven’t had poison ivy in 10 years!” – Gertrude, Idaho, 2006

The moral of the story: don’t google your symptoms, or about any sort of home remedy unless you want to be amused. People are crazy! For now, I am sticking with the way that has worked for me in the past, that my grandma recommended to me one time: cover my entire body in a paste made of baking soda, cut a clove of garlic in half, put one half in my mouth and bury the other half in the yard where the poison ivy is, do a little dance, and take a hot shower, then a cold shower, then a hot shower, then a cold shower, then a hot shower and then dry myself off with a hair dryer with a diffuser attachment.

Then I am going to judiciously apply calamine and aveeno, remember to take my vitamins and hope it goes away by the end of the week.

Wear gloves and long sleeves folks.

The 8th Annual

Likely, you already know about the Fruity Rum-Drink Party. If not, check out the site that went live this week: fruityrum.com

Eleven score and twelve years ago brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

After that, some things went terribly wrong. But really, is it the first time that we had tried and failed a little. No. We got through most of the worst bits and things seemed to work out alright.

Today we’re still limping along, economy in shambles, war-torn, demoralized. No matter! Behold our pluck! We still celebrate the advent of this great nation by hurling explosives skyward, searing the flesh of animals, and drinking vast oceans of beer until the urge to lie down and groan with bloated discomfiture takes us. That, after all, is the American way.

Keep hurling Americans. Happy Independence Day.

Okay.

I guess my last post was a little more rancorous in tone than I had thought. I don’t really hate weddings that much. And I failed to mention that once engaged in a wedding, I always find myself enjoying myself. I think that what I dislike the most is the amount of time/energy that goes into fighting with family members/caterers/clergy over the preparations. You can see it often on the faces of brides and families that they are not enjoying themselves and are rather just panicking and freaking out.

That said, I had a great time at the wedding yesterday, unsurprisingly, as I have so often done in the past. It also helped that the bride was the sister of one of my best friends, who was the maid of honor for this particular festival of freakouts. However, she delivered the following toast, which had me on the floor. Sometimes all it takes is a few well chosen words and I melt like butter.

Now that you’ve found happiness and love with each other, there remains one question: how will you make love stay?

Here are some ideas [with some help from Tom Robbins]:

1) Tell love you are going to Hinkle’s Bakery in Otsego to pick up a cheesecake. If love stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2) Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin-yang symbols on 3 sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell them you are someone new. It will stay.

3) Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything will be alright. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.

And with that I’d like us to raise our glasses in a toast to making love stay…

So, after that, I woke up this morning hung over, but smiling. I just need to read this the next time I get a wedding invitation to remind me of why we do these things.

I’m dyin’ here

I have another wedding to go to today and I’m not overly enthused about it.

I am not attending any more weddings this year, possibly ever.

So, if you’re getting married, don’t send me an invitation. I won’t come. It’s not because I don’t like you. It is because I want my life back.

I may or may not send you a card, or postcard, but I will not show up to sit through an hour-and-a-half ceremony or to drink the booze that your parents paid for.

It’s not that I have anything against marriage—though I do believe it to be an arcane and now purposeless social contract which we hang on to in order to make having sex seem legitimate, which shouldn’t be a problem in the first place—it is that I have a problem with the wedding part of the marriage. There are so many ways to go about it that don’t inconvenience your family and friends and yet so many people choose the way of significant inconvenience.

Plus weddings have become boring and tedious.

Why can’t everyone just go to the courthouse and have the quickie elopement that works so well. I know what you are going to say; “But John, it is a way of affirming our commitment and making our marriage stronger by involving our family and loved ones,” or “You have to have a ceremony with your friends or your marriage will not be as good as other marriages.”

Bull. Shit.

My parents, and many others, went to the courthouse, got married in ten minutes, and are still happily married today. I’m sure that you can still convince your friends and family to send you gifts and cash. Maybe some moron will even send you a silver knife and spatula to cut the wedding cake that you will never have. I would recommend using these as gardening implements.

“Lovely silver garden shovel…”

“Oh, why, thank you.”

I know, I know. I sound like a mean, curmudgeonly bastard. Well, that’s because I am a mean, curmudgeonly bastard. Big surprise that I sound like one.

There are so many more interesting and important things that we could do with the money that we spend on weddings. Is it really necessary to go through all that hassle so that you can claim your tax benefits and file jointly? This mean, curmudgeonly bastard certainly doesn’t think so.

Whatever. If you are reading this and have just gotten married or are thinking about getting married and it made you feel bad or pissed you off: good. That is your right. Good on your for exercising it. However, if you agree—or if you don’t, I don’t care—then watch the video below.

This sci-fi is fortified with extra “fi” and low in “sci”

I read this article on Slashdot and started thinking.

Never good.

The idea is that climate changes on Mars happened more recently than we previously thought. Maybe our Sun used to really kick out the jams and Mars was warmer. As the Sun lost some steam over 3 or 4 billion years, Mars cooled, glaciers form, then recede. Canals and trenches, etc are created in the process. Atmosphere changes. Suddenly, nothing more than a frozen little rock floating around the Sun.

In the mean time, the very, very hot Earth next door has also started to cool and settle down. Volcanic activity is down, rainfall is up. It is becoming more habitable.

In the mean time, Venus next door is still rocking and rolling with the greenhouse gases. Hot and smoky: no fun for a vacation.

Let us introduce a race of intelligent beings into the mix. They are hanging out on the homeland, doing their thing. Then there occurs what is called an Extinction Level Event. This may have been caused by a weapon of some kind which the folks decided to test or use against one another some sunny afternoon, or an meteor. Who can say? It kicks up the dust. The planet cools, the Sun is cooling anyway, freezing, glaciers, we’ve heard it all before.

These guys have very little time to get out of Dodge, but they have the technology. They gather together a group, lie to the rest—who are, by all accounts, totally screwed—by telling them that they will come back for them, and blast off.

They head for the nearest safe-looking haven and land on, that’s right, Earth.

Perhaps that is where we are now. We’re the Martians. Our new digs aren’t so new anymore. We’re approaching critical population mass, Earth is warming up.

Do we need to think about calling up Two-Men-and-a-Spaceship and heading for Venus? If so, be sure to make your reservations early.

Don’t worry, I promise I’ll call too

Last night I heard a load of people almost griping about how they had to get up early and go see their mothers today. You have to? Really?

I would like to go see my mom today (Hi, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day, by the way), but it ain’t in the cards. I will see Mom soon, and I just saw her last week—we took our mandatory Mother’s-Day-picture. It used to be that Arnold (brother) and I would all take a picture with our mom and grandmother, but it is getting increasingly difficult to get us all in one place, so we take small group pictures instead now. This year it was just me and mom and Jeff, and then a hilarious second-take with my mom wearing the scarf I bought her in Cairo as a hijaab—which was its original intended purpose, I suppose. It was cute anyway.

Back to my point, if you feel that you have to begrudgingly go and see Mom on Mother’s Day: don’t. Go see her on a different day when you feel happy about seeing her. Send a card or call on Mother’s Day, but don’t make a big deal out of it, just enjoy your time when you can.

See, it’s about quality time, after all. I have very few life-long regrets, but one is that I grieved over my grandmother’s death before she died, and in the process, I forgot that she was still alive. In the two years that she had cancer I saw her very little, and when I did, our interactions were perfunctory—as though they had been rehearsed. It wasn’t until the week before she died—the very last time that I saw her—that I felt like she and I were the same people we used to be I wrote the experience here.

Again, to redirect, I wish not to be a downer, only to remind everyone—myself included, to go see the people you love when you want to, not when you have to. Remember that even if you don’t get along with your family—genetic or chosen—that they are doing the best they can with the resources that they have at their disposal. And, don’t forget to thank them for the things that they did which made you who you are, whether they meant to or not.

So, on that note, I wish to thank my mom for the following things:

1. Reading to me every night when I was a kid, so that now I would enjoy reading and writing more than almost any other activity
2. Teaching me, by example, about patience
3. Becoming a vegetarian when I did and remaining one even to this day, even though I no longer am
4. Teaching me the importance of spelling and proofreading, and for the book about the joy of diagramming a sentence—it is among my favorites.
5. Never, ever asking when I was going to quit going to school and get a job, and for telling me that she thinks of me as a scholar anyway
6. Innumerable other little things that I never once took for granted, even though it may have appeared that way

I love you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.

Nightmare night

Since you last heard from me, I have been lost in the bellies of various airplanes and then was delivered into the hungry maw of homeland security.extra It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun.

Our flight out of Heathrow was delayed, which I somehow knew instinctively. Something always has to go wrong at Heathrow. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be Heathrow. What I wasn’t banking on, though, was “scheduled maintenance” which would delay us for 3 and a half hours.

Now, I would think that if you were going to schedule maintenance on a plane, you would schedule it for a time when said plane wasn’t about to taxi. This is not how it is done, however. Once we all boarded the flight, it was really quite pleasant. There was really no one on the plane: it was mostly empty, which meant that each passenger got at least two seats and loads of leg-room. Sweet. The crew was funny too. They didn’t give a shit since there were so few of us, so it was very laid back. I got some much needed sleep finally.

When we arrived at Dulles, however, it was a different story entirely.

We were first ushered onto the weird Dulles airport shuttle thing. It’s like a really uncomfortable waiting room, with tightly packed seats, except that the whole thing moves and changes levels depending on where it is and where it needs to go. It is a creepy prelude to the nightmare that Homeland Security/Customs and Border Patrol will then inflict.

You can imagine that I was really looking forward to the body cavity searches that I would be receiving, having just lived in North Africa for 8 months. I have to say, they took it easy on me. I think that the guy who questioned me was a rookie though, he didn’t really know what to ask and just seemed kind of nervous.

I did get extra-special service though—not the ultra-special, wait in a room for hours and hours and then be body-cavity searched version though. They just wrote in huge letters all over my form and then sent me off to a special line with all of the Latinos, Arabs, and anyone else who was brown. I was the only white guy. It was nice. Made me feel at home again, like in Cairo.

So I get to the front of the line finally and the guy that got stuck with me was alright. He was a little green, but friendly—and thorough. He aksed me question after question about my program, my teachers, how I met my tutors. My favorite was when he caught a glance of the load of Quranic studies books and asked me if any of my studies were of a religious. He was, of course, hoping that I would slip up and admit to having been drafted into the ranks of some extremist group.

I haven’t, by the way.

I said “Yes, I’m a religionist by training, so I study the religious texts as well.”

Then finally, after having decided that I was not going to be a threat to our great nation. I was allowed through, back onto American soil.

Thankfully it was really late, so my plans were shot, and I decided to just wait for my flight to come up in wee hours—now swiftly approaching.

I tried to find someone to take my bags off me again, but no one was at any of the desks for Northwest Airlines, so I had to schlep around the airport with 60 kg of luggage, desperate for a coffee.

I thought that was bad, until the time came when I could check in for the connecting flight to Detroit and woman decided to charge me for my bags. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. Apparently,even though I had just come 10,000 miles with these heavy bags, now I had to pay $50 to get them another 500 miles home. She said she couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t been charged in the first place as she had never heard of an airline with a 30 kg weight limit before (both Virgin and British Airways have a 30 kg weight limit, FYI). Bastards. It’s just an example of a sinking American carrier scheme to get a few more nickels and dimes.

It’s amazing how I didn’t have any troubles with airline employees until I landed in the United States. Surprise, surprise.

But I’m better now, I just found Vitamin Water in the airport while waiting for the flight. It went well with the rest of my Xanax. I’ll have a nice relaxing nap on the plane.