Return from the Monkeypox

Okay, it’s my second day mostly out of bed, and I’m feeling pretty good. Just tired. When I went to the ER two weeks ago, the nurse asked me if I’d had a pneumonia vaccine. I’m thinking, “there’s a pneumonia vaccine?” and just saying, “No.” Does everybody out there know that there’s a pneumonia vaccine? Well, now you do. You should probably get one next season.

The good thing is, besides racking up a lot of naptime, I’ve had a chance to read ten or fifteen books. My favorite during this time has to be “Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription,” from Bill Buckley’s Notes & Asides in the National Review. I probably would disagree with him at least nine times out of ten, but intelligence and a sharp wit will keep me a fan. (No, I wouldn’t be a fan of Hitler, or even Bush, if either were intelligent and/or intentionally funny. So don’t everybody pile on me.)

Besides, he looks remarkably like my great uncle Bill. He’d be the anti-Bill, but it’s captivating to me.

Not Dead Yet

I’ll be back in a couple of days. Lately I’ve been busy having pleurisy and pneumonia and reading really bad novels with James at my side. I don’t know whether his clinginess is because he’s concerned or just happy to have someone to hang around with. I’m going to pretend it’s the former. While I’m in bed, he assumes the “nurse’s position” in his bed on the bed.

Pilgrimage Day: Chaucer and Cats

Today is, if I remember correctly, the 625th anniversary of the Chaucer pilgrimage. I will observe it by reading the following (from The Manciple's Tale) to James, as I’m sure he will appreciate it:

Lat take a cat, and fostre hym wel with milk
And tendre flessh, and make his couche of silk,
And lat hym seen a mous go by the wal,
Anon he weyveth milk and flessh and al,
And every deyntee that is in that hous,
Swich appetit hath he to ete a mous.

Roughly translated:

Take any cat and give him milk and tuna and a silk beddy-bye basket, and let him see a mouse go by the wall; right away, he’ll ignore all of that and anything else you can think of to give him (laced with catnip, yet), such appetite has he to eat a mouse.

Kindling and Such

I’ve been reading like mad in between bouts of one or another annoying health problem. Nothing deadly, just annoying. I finally managed to get a Kindle, the amazon.com e-reader. I had my doubts at first, which is why I wasn’t one of the ones to get it when it first came out. Since then, I’ve been waiting impatiently in line for them to make new ones. I mean, how long can it take? Suddenly I was seized by a wild and dangerous move: e-bay. I have never used e-bay, but I did find an unopened Kindle posted, and got it, as described. It’s great. It compares to the iPod, which I need to maintain my sanity. Music is that important to me. It also has the advantage of clearing out the house of thousands of books. I’m not going to get rid of all of them, no. Not anything with lots of pictures, not anything that looks simply beautiful on a shelf, and not anything I’d want to annotate (you can make annotations on a Kindle, but it’s a pain). Since Wednesday, I’ve sold ten books and got about $75 in my bank account and lots of books off the shelves (that haven’t sold yet). Those that won’t sell at amazon.com can probably be sold to local used book stores. Of course, not everything in my library is in Kindle format, but enough is to make it usable. Books decorate a room, but after a point, when they’re piled on shelves, on floors, on surfaces, they become somewhat oppressive. Anyway, enough about my new toy.

I have successfully (so far) grown fingernails so that I can use them to play the guitar properly. This near-impossible feat shows how much I want to play the guitar. The fact that I’ve spent more time reading than practicing is another issue. My hands look like they belong on another person. When I was a little girl, Memaw promised me five dollars and a manicure set if I’d just quit biting my nails. (She was a nurse and saw it more as a health hazard than disgusting and unladylike.) Sadly, Memaw is not around to see my new fingernails. I could go without the rewards now; I’d just like to see her happy about it.

This weekend I will be practicing my guitar to death if I am a good girl. That contingency will make for a pretty big if, but I do want to play the thing. It’s just frustrating to start almost anything to realize how much harder it is than it looks!

Recognition and Thanks

Kaye and I have been together for twenty-three years today. It’s never something that’s noted by anyone, though at least my mother has known the date for a good many years now. I feel pretty sure that she’s sent my brother and his wife anniversary cards since September, 1996. It’s not that I want any fuss. In practical terms, I’m somewhat relieved that it goes unnoticed. I’m somewhat reserved, and in this case, Kaye is more so. I’m happy, proud and lucky to have Kaye, and that’s the important thing by far. It’s just maddening somehow that other people don’t recognize us as a couple like any other. I guess that’s because there is no couple to match us.

If there is someone out there pulling the strings, I would like to say thank you.

Arlo on Teaching Methods

From the album Precious Friend, by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. Arlo introduces "Garden Song" with some thoughts on how we learn. I wish I'd had Arlo to fall back on in grad school, because by the time I got there, they figured the "boring method" (i.e., some rote memorization from which you can draw new conclusions, create new ideas) was very much looked down upon. I think there's some middle ground.

This’s a kinda easy song, let’s hold one second, let’s learn this song, ‘cause this is, I mean, I know everybody likes singin’ with Pete, but I learnt this song from Pete, an’ it’d be almost the same thing. So, now I know, I mean, the difference, I know, I’ve been watchin’ Pete now for a few years, and he does somethin’ I can’t do, which is, he sings the songs twice at the same time. That’s what we were talking about before, celery consciousness, an’ Pete can do it. It’s the same –it’s – he sings the song once in front of the song and then once with everybody. That’s hard. So, I’m gonna try it, but first, let’s do it the normal way, which is the way we all learnt stuff in school. Now I know, people wanna forget about that, because you don’t figure you can learn anything that way, but it’s wrong; you’ve been learnin’ new ways to learn stuff an’ it don’t work. Right? So. Go back to the old way. It’s the old, what they call the “borin’ method.”

Teaching Styles

My guitar teacher insists that I am doing better than I think. I don’t know if that’s so I don’t have a nervous breakdown over a transition to a D chord (almost got that without buzzing now). I guess I quit classical guitar mostly because I went to them with a sinking feeling and drove home in tears. I was probably more sensitive to criticism then, not having had nearly as much time to fail at things. The classical guitar teacher (whose name I don’t even remember) was like a drill sergeant. The only nice thing I remember him saying about me is that I could sight-read well. Having been in the band, in high school, I guess I could.

When I taught, I didn’t grasp the concept of “good enough.” I should have. I could have taught my students something about writing instead of putting the bar at English major grad student level, which I think I did. I’d do it differently if I had it to do over again. The thing was, it was hard to find something to praise in those papers! I mean, I got reduced to saying things like, “nice use of semicolon” or something. (They didn’t get punctuation or parts of speech, and we were banned from teaching them. I did anyway, surreptitiously.)

Of course, a guitar lesson that you’re paying for because you want to play the guitar well (or well enough) is hardly the same thing as Freshman Composition. That, you’re taking because you have to if you want to graduate. Not everyone there – and I know this will come as a shock – wants to learn anything; they just want a diploma they can barter into a job offer. That makes me sad. The reason I worked was to pay for a lifestyle in which I could continue to learn things for the sake of learning them.

A cynic might suggest that any private teacher does himself a service when he praises mediocre work by making the student like him through false praise. I’m generally not cynical, sometimes to my detriment. In any case, I don’t think that’s the case with my teacher. I’ve heard about her from a friend and an uncle. I think I’m awfully demanding of students, and moreso of myself. Anyhow, that’s what I’m going to tell myself while I keep practicing at home, where I can cuss at myself freely, and sing along. I sing okay, I think, when nobody can hear me. Kaye doesn’t count as an extra person after twenty-three years. I’m pretty much the same person around her as I am by myself. Not necessarily good, just consistent.

Chaucer's April

To ring in April, no fooling, here is one of my favorite “April” poems. It’s from Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, a collection of poems he wrote to Sylvia Plath after her death and published shortly before his own. It is one of my favorite poems.

Chaucer

‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . .’

At the top of your voice, where you swayed on the top of a stile,

Your arms raised – somewhat for balance, somewhat

To hold the reins of the straining attention

Of your imagined audience – you declaimed Chaucer

To a field of cows. And the Spring sky had done it

With its flying laundry, and the new emerald

Of the thorns, the hawthorn, the blackthorn.

And one of those bumpers of champagne

You snatched unpredictably from pure spirit.

Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester.

It must have sounded lost. But the cows

Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.

You went on and on. Here were reasons

To recite Chaucer. Then came the Wyf of Bath,

Your favourite character in all literature.

You were rapt. And the cows were enthralled.

They shoved and jostled shoulders, making a ring,

To gaze into your face, with occasional snorts

Of exclamation, renewed their astounded attention,

Ears angling to catch every inflection,

Keeping their awed six feet of reverence

Away from you. You just could not believe it.

And you could not stop. What would happen

If you were to stop? Would they attack you,

Scared by the shock of silence, or wanting more – ?

So you had to go on. You went on –

And twenty cows stayed with you hypnotized.

How did you stop? I can’t remember

You stopping. I imagine they reeled away –

Rolling eyes, as if driven from their fodder.

I imagine I shooed them away. But

Your sostenuto rendering of Chaucer

Was already perpetual. What followed

Found my attention too full

And had to go back into oblivion.

– Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

Tom Paxton and Groovitude

Ah ha!  I think I have figured out how I was holding the guitar wrong by looking at pictures of folk guitarists at work.  The bottom of it (as in if you stood it up on the floor with the tuning pegs at the top) needed to be more under my right armpit than it was.  I was still feeling as if I were breaking all the rules by not standing the thing up on my left leg.  And I can change from an A back to a D7 without looking if you’re forgiving.  I’m getting there.  Kaye came in from the kitchen and said, “Oh, it’s you.  I thought you were playing Tom Paxton.”  I think that was meant as a compliment from the ultimate tone-deaf fan (must be my groovitude, I’m thinking), but why Tom Paxton?  Why not, I don’t know, any female singer?  I mean, I mean, I mean . . . 

I have to acknowledge that I do not remotely sound like Tom Paxton.  

In theory, theory and practice are the same . . .

In practice, they aren't, as Yogi Berra noted.

Less than one week into the guitar lessons, and I am frustrated as hell. Oddly enough, the fretting doesn’t hurt my fingers like it did some twenty years ago when I was studying classical guitar with nylon strings rather than steel. Well, as I said before, I suck at this. What is maddening is that I have never sucked at a musical instrument. Practice wasn’t practice so much as playing. They gave me a recorder in the 4^th grade, and I could play all the songs in the book by the next day. I was hooked from then on. In the 7^th grade, I got to join the band, I think because Gran-Gran had played clarinet and sax by ear and surely considered music one of the most important things in life. Anyway, the next band day, I could play most of the book. The teacher gave me an extra book to play around with. I never got good at piano, mainly because we didn’t have one at home for the most part, but I could either play it by ear or practice the hell out of music. I guess I have a knack for sight-reading. But chords I do not really understand. I’m thinking maybe I should go back to the classical guitar along with the acoustic and read up on this music theory for the guitar in a book I bought recently.

Kaye, a good piano student who also plays the clarinet and recorder, assures me that music theory will make practice positively fascinating. Maybe, but I like to know why I’m doing something – what’s the core truth behind it all. Just like any other discipline, perhaps more obviously, a real study of music is making order out of chaos. I noticed that the three fields I studied (Math, Computer Science, Medieval English Lit) all try to do the same thing, which is to make order out of apparent chaos. I call that quest for meaning religion. Talking about religion gets me into all sorts of trouble, though, so don’t mention this comment to anybody.

My whole right side hurts, and the only excuse for it I can come up with is that I’ve been holding my body in an unfamiliar position and there are screws in my neck on that side, making it less flexible than it thinks it ought to be. I figure I can overcome it, but my teacher may be dismayed by my lack of progress.

My frustration is partly at my incompetence, to be sure, but, as I say, I don’t get it. It’s just “put your fingers here and strum. This is called a D chord.” One of everybody’s first questions is “Why?” I got frustrated as a teacher over this phenomenon. I wanted them to take whatever I told them on faith, given that you have to start somewhere, and they wanted me simply to pour my knowledge into their ears. Having been on both sides of the desk, or lectern, I realize that most of the onus (at least on college students and beyond, and, ideally, before) is on the student – the teacher can’t do much beyond provide direction and carrots and sticks.

I know I gave out a disproportionate number of sticks in my stint as a teacher. I’d do things differently now.

Well, I guess I’ll drag out the classical guitar, so I can feel some semblance of competence, and then be happier to practice chords.

Room to Make Big Mistakes

I think I can say with some confidence that I can now play “Frère Jacques” on the guitar, at least the embarrassingly easy version I have. Still, I’m not getting the buzz on the chord that I was originally getting. I’m still struggling to move from A7 to D (the reverse is pretty easy). If I can do that by Wednesday, I will consider the week a success. I believe there’s a G chord in one of the songs I haven’t looked at much yet. You have to start somewhere, and my problem was more knowing where than being willing to practice. The will to practice so far comes from an intense desire to play anything but what I’m playing. That, and the fact that my mother doubts I’ll be at this for more than a couple of months. That’ll do, for a start.

Borrowing from the Dixie Chicks, I now have a room to make big mistakes in.

The Will to Suck at Something and Continue

After one 45-minute guitar lesson, something I’ve long suspected became clear:  I suck at guitar.  Oh, I was prepared for this.  I used to teach something I’m better at, and I constantly told my students not to worry about the early papers, which were weighted much less than the later papers because I expected them to do poorly on the first assignments.  Over and over I said, to get good at something, you have to be willing to suck at it for a while first.  And think about exactly what you’re doing wrong, and what, if anything, you’re doing right.  I guess deep down I didn’t want this to apply to me.

It started out positively sad.  My guitar was out of tune, without looking, I would turn the wrong peg to tune it, and I apparently couldn’t hear.  But I expect I’ll get better at that fairly soon.  What was worse was when my teacher asked me what chords I knew, knowing I’d taken classical guitar lessons about twenty years ago.  I just looked at her miserably and shrugged.  “I just know notes,” I said.  So I’m in the baby section now.

On the other hand, I got better than I thought I could at changing from D to A7 in the lesson itself.  My fingers are sore but proud.  I’m working on, let’s see, “Clementine,” “Down in the Valley,” “On Top of Old Smokey,” “Hush Little Baby,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” and let us not omit “Frère Jacques.”  Actually, those are much better than the stuff I had to play when I first started classical guitar but hadn’t actually worked my way up to actual (if simple) classical pieces.

I’m going to need to quit biting my fingernails, I guess, at least on my right hand.  I’ve quit stronger things, but if they’d had sonograms in 1966, you’d have seen me gumming my fingernails, I’m sure.  It’s a hard habit to stop.

Meanwhile, I think that in addition to actually playing (and singing – yikes) these songs, I’ll be sitting on my guitar stool with my eyes closed just changing chords without looking.  So far it’s just a strum with my right hand, so rhythm is all I have to worry about.  And this nearly imaginary guitar practice shouldn’t bother the neighbors.

Desecration of Peace

When we got up this morning, barely realizing that it was Easter, but for the mention from my mother and Yvonne, a very loud grease-removal truck pulled up at the manhole in front of our house.  Kaye went out to ask if there was an emergency, figuring a city that closes the liquor stores on the non-existent holiday of Easter Monday would not violate the peace of Easter morning for no good reason.  No, they said.  Apparently they de-grease the sewers every Sunday morning.  Then the kids next door were hunting for eggs in the back yard, arguing over which egg was whose.  I guess because I don’t have kids, it’s interesting to me how worked up they can get over what seems like nothing to me.  I mean, their arguments can escalate to the point that you’d have to have wrecked my car or something for me to get that upset, and I have a temper.  All is peaceful now, anyway.  My brother and I had the decency to yell at each other indoors (“Mom, Chris is looking at me!” or “She rode in the front seat last time!”), not that it would matter, since for most of our childhood (all but two years with the two of us), we lived out in the middle of nowhere. 

Would that every argument were so mild.  If all the people intent on blowing other people to smithereens could just agree to play in different sandboxes . . . but I guess which sandbox is whose is the source of much of the trouble.  There are enough sandboxes to go around.

The American concept that we know best and are the natural arbiters of other countries’ internal or international disputes is another embarrassing and disappointing issue altogether.  We have a very big sandbox and ought to appreciate that, and the fact that we don’t have suicide bombers going on here.  I am sad and angry about the events of September 11, 2001, but the destruction we’ve wrought is just that – it hasn’t rebuilt the twin towers or brought back the victims; it’s simply created more.

I just wish people could work out their violence during childhood, in harmless disputes.  If that were so, the screaming kids would be a blessing.

Music Room!

Yesterday was so busy. Between appointments and re-doing the house (to a point), I didn’t have time or energy to type much. We turned our guest room into a music room for me. I have four guitars, a banjo, a sax (Gran-Gran’s), a clarinet, a flute, a couple of recorders of different sizes and a keyboard. That takes care of the instruments, I think. The rest are electronic stuff and a guitar stool and music stand. And Kaye’s desk. She just uses it as a file cabinet, but moving it out of the room would be a lot more difficult than moving the bed out was. I hope having a “music room” will help me focus. There was hardly room in the bedroom to store all the stuff and practice (or open closets). I've got a framed picture of Joan Baez up and am planning a Dylan and Arlo picture so now I’ll have a place that says “practice!” the way my study says “work” and the bedroom says “sleep” (or read or paint, but there are only so many rooms in the house, and Kaye wants some of them, and we need one we can lock James in when the plumber comes or whatever).

I can’t find such a thing as a sax or clarinet mute. That’s disheartening, especially with the sax. I guess I will literally “stick a sock in it.” For now, I’ll just nap. I'm so tired . . . but grateful for the space!

I guess the bedroom can double as the recuperation room. :P

Mysterious Itches

The itch from which I have suffered for months (or, but with interruptions, for years) has recently become unbearable and, for the last few nights, has almost completely kept me from sleeping.

Besides, nothing appears on the outside; immediately under the skin, it is like a poison that wants to come out; an injection of extract of bedbugs.  Can it get more intense?  It doesn’t seem so.  But it can enlarge, spread to the whole body . . .

I think of Job looking for a piece of glass with which to scratch himself, and of Flaubert, whose correspondence, in the last part of his life, speaks of similar itchings.  I tell myself that each of us has his sufferings, and that it would be most unwise to long to change them; but I believe that a real pain would take less of my attention and would after all be more bearable.  And, in the scale of sufferings, a real pain is something nobler, more august; the itch is a mean, unconfessable, ridiculous malady; one can pity someone who is suffering; someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh.   –   André Gide, March 19, 1931

This is weird.  Yesterday I wrote about Flaubert, and today I find out that he and Gide (to say nothing of Job) had the same inexplicable itching – literally, I take it – that I’ve been having lately.  I told Kaye we must have bedbugs or something, but she’s not itching.  Well, it’s not that bad.  And I’m happy to find myself in such company, I think.  I notice that Flaubert had epilepsy, if Wikipedia is trustworthy.  It may as well be, as it’s what people get their information from these days.  Gide seems to have been a married homosexual.  Job may not have existed.  I’m beginning to see what my problem is . . . I guess I'll take an antihistamine.

Is it too prurient that I looked up these guys to see what I'm going to die of?

Please Don't Make Me Go

The Atlantic has a great article out, “Caring for Your Introvert” that explains what it’s like to be shy to all the normal people who don’t know.  I don’t mean just shy.  I mean, have to work my way up to an event (which can be going to the grocery store) and recuperate the rest of the day.  I talk other people’s ears off when I get an attentive ear; I just don’t like conversations about nothing, aka small talk.  If I start talking about something real, it scares people, and if I don’t say anything, they are afraid of me (I’m pretty sure) and see me as the neighborhood Boo Radley (forgetting that he actually saves Scout in the end and was just shy).  I think Bob Dylan is shy, for instance, and probably not as much of a jerk as he’s come across as sometimes.  The guy probably just wants to be left alone.  At least I’m going to assume that’s the situation.

Diddums and driftington have already brought the subject of shyness up, but I’m going to add to it so that the three people who read my blog will see it even if they don’t check out their posts. 

My name is not Snark, and I am an introvert.

I have gotten myself into a nasty spot within my own family, just because I can't stand the idea of being with all of them at once.  It isn't any one person.  It's the zoo aspect of it.  I don't like to go to movies; I wait for the DVD to come out.  I love the Harry Potter series so much that for book 6, I think, I went to the bookstore at midnight to see if I could get the book earlier than 1:30 PM.  I had a real panic attack.  I had a similar reaction at Disney World (my mom took me one year) when they started the parade.  When I went into Home Depot, I almost lost it between the number of screwdrivers available, the vastness of the place, and the number of people who wanted to help me.  

So if there are any normal people out there, just don't assume that the loners are all potential terrorists.  Some of us are just shy.

Guitar Lessons . . . Wish Me Luck

I spoke with my new guitar teacher last night, and am set up for weekly lessons. I’m really enthusiastic about this, mainly because it is something I’ve always wanted to do but somehow never had the time, energy and money for all at once. Now, I don’t really have the money, but I think this qualifies as a need – certainly more than my Starbucks habit does. When I listen to music, it does something to me that apparently isn’t true for everyone – the song becomes an active part of my being. It seems like what I imagine as “being in the zone.” I wonder if that’s partially related to my temporal lobe epilepsy – does it serve as a metronome for my brain as well as give my mind something to focus on? It probably doesn’t matter. That it makes me feel at home in my head is very important.

But I know it’s going to be a long time before I can play anything well. I hope my passion fuels my discipline.

Genius and Perspective

“You can’t read any genuine history – as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede – without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man – on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.” – Thoreau, March 18, 1861

Somewhat later, Oscar Wilde noted that "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

Both Thoreau and Wilde seem to be supporting my earlier claim that observation is as important as creation. (If they aren't, well, what’re they going to do about it?) You can’t be creative without appreciating (in the sense of noticing) your corner of the world, whether it consists of you and a cat in two rooms or you on a concert tour. But you need time and space to appreciate things, and that would seem to make a more hermetic existence richer in detail than that of “normal people,” since you’d have to zoom in on your subject instead of seeing it from far away. The globetrotter would see things from a different vantage point than the near-hermit. The astronauts who gave us pictures of an earthrise gave us a sense of ourselves in a different way, and Michael Collins (the American astronaut, not the Irishman) had a then-unique perspective: when he was orbiting the moon while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were on the lunar surface, half the time he was on the dark side of the moon, making him further removed from the earth than anyone had ever been. Either way, though, we realize that there is another world – either a microcosm or a macrocosm – that should humble us from our egocentric universes. I’m not sure I’m capable of extracting myself from my self-centered universe, but at least reading others’ accounts of their world makes me aware of them. Perhaps genius requires observation. Or is it the other way around?

Flaubert on the Novel

"The story, the plot of a novel is of no interest to me. When I write a novel I aim at rendering a color, a shade. For instance, in my Carthaginian novel, I want to do something purple. The rest, the characters and the plot, is a mere detail. In Madame Bovary, all I wanted to do was to render a grey color, the moldy color of a wood-louse's existence. The story of the novel mattered so little to me that a few days before starting on it I still had in mind a very different Madame Bovary from the one I created: the setting and the overall tone were the same, but she was to have been a chaste and devout old maid. And then I realized that she would have been an impossible character." -- Flaubert, March 17, 1861

I've been trying to get this notion into various people's heads for a while now, and they just give me a blank look. They think a book is supposed to be about something. Not necessarily. And I know that whenever I create something, it inevitably takes on a life of its own. Sometimes it's a keeper; sometimes not. It's always a surprise.

Beware the Ides

Beware the Ides of March. Since it’s March 15th, I wanted to remind anyone who could possibly forget to be extra careful today. Whether you’re standing in line at Starbucks, blogging or working on an assembly line, you don’t want to get stabbed in the toga. It’s seriously dangerous. Well, once it was.

I am amused and annoyed that I have been pegged for a Jesus freak just for standing up for theists and agnostics and admitting that my cultural background was Christian, so that’s what I have in my mind. I keep getting all these “Dear friend in Christ” e-mails. Probably shouldn’t have put my e-mail on the page, but I like to live on the edge. Anyway, anybody out there who’s thinking of addressing me in such a manner, please know that you will be promptly marked as junk mail, and I will never hear from you again. I am not passing out Bibles, becoming a brickyard preacher (at NCSU, we had a lot of them, having a brickyard), financially supporting your Jesus project or anything else. It is not my mission in life.

Discussion is fine, though. Just don’t call me your “friend in Christ.” It gives me hives.