the go-ahead

UPDATE: We've heard from a doctor that Mom might be going home this weekend. This isn't absolutely certain yet; Mom requires a few more checkups. The point, though, is that if you're planning to visit Mom in the hospital (which is what this post is about), you'll either have to do so in the next couple days, or visit her once she's home with us. Just FYI.

---

Dad wants me to give all my readers the official go-ahead re: visiting Mom. Yes, you may go see her. She's in Fairfax Hospital's Tower Building (i.e., the main building when you turn left off Gallows Road at the "gray" entrance; it's the first major building you'll see). Park where you can, then find the "gray" elevators by the main lobby. You'll feel like a heel for doing this, but take the elevator up only one floor to the second floor. Turn left immediately upon exiting the elevator, and look for Room 276. Mom is in Bed 1, the bed closer to the exit. For Fairfax Hospital's phone numbers, check out their website.

There are, however, some issues to address. Please read the following before heading out to see Mom.

1. Mom is MRSA-positive (see previous posts if you're not up to speed on what this means). This isn't as scary as it sounds, but it does mean there's a protocol to be followed.

When entering her room, you'll need to glove up and gown up. A metal cabinet just outside Mom's door normally has gloves on top of it (be careful: the gloves come in several sizes, a fact I discovered when I ripped one while trying to put it on my hand), and gowns inside it, usually in the top drawer.

Once you have prepped yourself and have entered the room, you cannot exit without first removing your gloves and gown. They must be removed just inside the threshold, and thrown away in a large red plastic garbage bag. After doing this, you must wash your hands, which is a standard infection control procedure. Most infections are passed along through a lack of proper hand-washing.

Only after having removed your gloves and gown, and then having washed your hands, may you exit the room.

[NB: If you're an MVPC member and are unsure how to proceed, know that Pastor Kim and Pastor Jeri are veterans of the MRSA protocol and can mime the procedure for you.]

2. Although I need to verify this, I'm pretty sure that Mom cannot receive flowers, even though she's no longer in the ICU. Pollen is a potential allergen for some patients, and living things are all carriers of various "contact" and "airborne" pathogens. I should note, though, that our family is very, very thankful for the flowers that have been sent directly to our house. We don't know yet when Mom will come home, but I'm sure she'll appreciate the display (as do the rest of us). On behalf of Mom, then, I'll say, "Feel free to keep on sending those flowers!"

3. We family members have been told that we may kiss Mom on the forehead. Whether you decide to do this is, of course, your choice. Once gloved and gowned up, you may hold Mom's hands, grasp her feet through the blankets, etc. Mom might be embarrassed to see you at first; even before the operation, she had a sense of dignity, and would rather be seen after a proper session for her hairdo and makeup. Don't worry about Mom's embarrassment (if she even shows it to you). She'll appreciate your visit.

4. If possible, please coordinate amongst yourselves so as not to crowd Mom. Staggered visits will keep her spirits up throughout the day, but once there are more than four people there at the same time, all surrounding her bed, this may become a bit stressful for her. Mom will want to interact fully with everyone, but her verbal output remains fairly basic. She will, of course, remember who you are (long-term memory hasn't been affected), and might even ask after your kids or mutual friends/acquaintances. Beyond that, though, you'll find that you'll be doing most of the talking, which to me seems proper: give her brain as much auditory stimulation as you can. Come with stories. Read something funny. If you feel like praying with her, do so. If you don't, that's fine, too; we're not pushy (and long-time readers of this blog know that I'm not pushy when it comes to this particular topic).

5. Related to the previous point: Mom's visiting hours apparently aren't restricted, so if you pop up at 9PM, that's probably OK, unless she happens to be napping. She may have certain things to do throughout the day as the nurses check on her regularly, so please be prepared to leave the room rather suddenly if the nurse asks you to. Again, remember that you cannot leave without first removing your gloves and gown, and then washing your hands.

Beyond those considerations, you now know as much as I do about proper etiquette. If Mom is struggling to sit more upright, feel free to step in and help her. Your own common sense and compassion will guide you. Those virtues guided you to her door, after all; why would they fail you once you made it inside the room?

And to all of you, I say: thanks so much, in advance, for coming to see Mom. And to those good folks who had wanted to see her before now (but who saw only us guys), thank you as well.


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wise words

In the front of my book, Water from a Skull, I quoted my favorite snippet of the Tao Te Ching:

Try to make this sacred world
into more than what it is,
and you ruin it.

Try to grasp it,
and you lose it.

To me, this verse expresses what religion is all about. First, see things for what they are. Second, don't try to possess, because possession is impossible. Try as you might to hold on to the things you think you possess, and you'll lose them eventually, if for no other reason than because the notion of possession implies the notion of loss, and reality is always moving out from under you.

This desperate grasping, this vain attachment, isn't the proper way to relate to reality. What's more proper is to remember that nothing you have is yours. You can't even control the ebb and flow of your own cells-- how do you expect to control the things around you? No: real wisdom comes first from acknowledging this state of affairs. You're not powerless, you're not helpless, but you do have to understand the basic nature of things if you want to know happiness and share it with others. Far less eloquently than the writer of the above verse, I put it this way in my book:

"Mastery" in calligraphy is like "mastery" in other pursuits, such as surfing: it's less about controlling outside circumstances and more about mastering oneself. The surfer doesn't seek to subdue the wave; his mastery involves an understanding of and harmonization with it. By the same token, the calligrapher can't alter the physics of ink's interaction with paper, but he can alter his own technique to produce the desired effect. As the ink is absorbed into the paper, so the calligrapher is absorbed into the work he creates.

Such activities point us to a way to conduct our own lives: not attempting to control what we can't control, worrying about what we can't change, but working instead to change how we move through the world, and therefore how the world moves through us.

So I string these words together for the first time: my mom has a tumor. But even if she didn't, it would still avail me nothing to try to grasp her, to halt her eventual disappearance. This is because we all disappear; it's in the nature of all phenomena to go places. Even when we're still as statues, we're moving on. Handling what's happening now requires recognizing this basic fact.

None of this implies giving up (sometimes fatalism is another word for laziness), but it does mean that, whatever we do, we don't give in to delusion or false hope: we should see things as they are, and however our love for others expresses itself, that love should never be grasping. That sort of attachment is ultimately selfish, and it goes hand in hand with fear, panic, and a general inability to function as we should. Especially during the coming months, I and the rest of my family will have to proceed with clear minds. This won't be easy, but it's what we have to do.


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tentative prognosis

When I went back in to see Mom and Emo, I was met by a certain Dr. Meister, who suited up alongside me so we could enter Mom's room together. He laid out to us what the docs know at this point, which is essentially what we already knew: the surgeons had taken out as much of the tumor as they could, and the preliminary assessment was that we are looking at an aggressive glioma. Mom will have to undergo radiotherapy for the tumor, along with a new type of chemotherapy in pill form (for those doing online research about all this, be aware that some information might be slightly out of date; some references that I consulted said that chemo is rarely suggested in cases like Mom's).

The prognosis for people with Mom's type of aggressive glioma isn't that great. A person normally has about one to two years of life with regular treatment, according to Dr. Meister. Anecdotally speaking, there are exceptions: Dr. Meister has one patient who has gone four years with no recurrence of his tumor.

We all want to be positive, especially today, especially now, with Mom doing so much better after surgery. But the doctor's news was devastating for my aunt, who's trying her best to be positive in front of Mom, her little sister. Obviously, it's devastating for the rest of us, too: more than ever, it brings each precious moment into focus.

Now is not the time to give up, not when we're at the very beginning of exploring our treatment options. I'll tell you more as new developments arise.

UPDATE: Here's a post by a neurosurgery resident re: Ted Kennedy's brain tumor, which is the same type as Mom's. The resident's blog is interesting; you get some idea of what the healthcare profession looks like from the inside. It's not always pretty, as this post demonstrates.


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Thursday morning update

My aunt (whom I'll call "Emo" from now on, per the Korean title, i-mo, one of many Korean words for "aunt") and I left around 10:20AM to visit Mom. Dad has to stay home, catch up on paperwork, and be ready to pick up my uncle from the airport when he arrives around 2PM. Dad will be at the hospital with Uncle John in the mid-afternoon; Sean is also coming by later today.

Mom seems much better than yesterday. She's eating, she's less nauseous, and her cognitive improvement continues in terms of her aphasia, short-term memory, and ability to feel and express emotion. We're told that she'll likely be moved out of the ICU today, which is good news. And bizarrely enough, because she's MRSA-positive, this likely means she'll have a double room to herself, though there's a chance she might be placed in a room with another MRSA-positive patient.

No word yet on the results of Mom's latest MRI.

David came to the ICU not long after my arrival; the staff bumped me out because only two visitors at a time are allowed there, so I'm off in a nearby waiting room, typing up this entry.

More updates soon.


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lucky

Brief chronology for Wednesday:

1. Pastor Kim visited Mom in the morning. She was asleep.
2. Sean visited Mom later in the morning; he reported she was "groggy."
3. Dad picked up my aunt at the airport around 3PM, then went straight to the hospital. Mom was apparently awake and talking, though not too chatty.
4. I got to the hospital around 4:30PM. Mom was still awake and talking with my aunt. I joked with Mom, too, and she was able to laugh. Dad waited outside the ICU while I was in there. Sean texted me to say he would be there around 7PM; he ended up arriving earlier.
5. By the time Sean saw Mom again, she had gone quiescent again. Dad, Sean, my aunt, and I all went out to dinner in the nearby Koreatown.
6. We came back to the hospital and Mom was seemingly asleep, or maybe just groggy. In pairs, we said our goodbyes to her, to let her rest.

---

I had delayed my visit to see Mom until about 4:30PM or so. It seems I came at the right time: Mom was awake and listening to my aunt, her big sis, chatting her up in Korean. I slipped in some jokes, and Mom laughed. When Sean had seen her earlier in the morning, she had been extremely groggy, as well as nauseous and in pain from a headache (naturally!). When Sean saw her again, sometime after I had seen her, she was once again groggy and barely responsive. I assume this means she's simply fading in and out on a cycle partly determined by the meds floating around in her system.

Dad and I were the last to see her this evening. Mom was prompted to partial wakefulness by a male nurse so that she could take some medication; after drinking and swallowing with some difficulty, she settled back into bed with her eyes closed. Nevertheless, I knew she could hear us. I said, "I'm going now" in Korean, and she nodded weakly, eyes still closed. Dad and I had flanked her bed, each of us with one hand on one of hers. I saw that she had gently gripped Dad's hand. In my case, Mom gripped my gloved forefinger the way a baby instinctively grasps a parent's digits. It was a moment I'll remember for a long time, not so much for how it looked as for how it felt.

My aunt is with us at home now. She's on Texas time, which means she's slightly less tired than we are. Uncle John arrives tomorrow afternoon; it'll be good to see him, too, and given how happy Mom was to see her older sister, I'm sure she'll be just as happy to see her younger brother.


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housekeeping details

For people wanting to visit Mom: at least for the time being, Mom is in the Neuroscience ICU of Fairfax Hospital-- second floor, berth 10. While the intention to visit Mom is appreciated, she remains positive for MRSA (a potentially virulent bacterium often associated with in-hospital infections), requiring a special glove-and-gown protocol. The rules for the ICU also stipulate that there should be only two visitors at a time, so visiting Mom en masse is inadvisable.

Upshot: for now, it might be better to hold off on visiting Mom-- who is currently floating in and out of consciousness as her body processes out the anesthetics-- until she is transferred to the step-down unit (i.e., to non-intensive care).

Those hoping to reach me by email will find my contact information on this blog's sidebar. I have more contact information on Facebook.

Many thanks to Pastor Kim of our church, MVPC, for coming out to visit Mom this morning.

UPDATE, 2:12PM: My brother Sean reports to Dad that Mom is "groggy." Dad and I were home this morning; Dad spent a lot of time making and taking various calls from people, rearranging appointments, running errands, and prepping to pick up my aunt from the airport. I'll be driving up to the hospital separately, as it turns it, but first I need to clean the upstairs floor.

UPDATE, 6:15PM: Mom is awake and very reactive. My aunt is in the ICU with Mom (Dad and I are taking turns, allowing my aunt to stay constantly at Mom's side), and they're talking in Korean. I added my broken Korean to the interchange for a while; Mom even mustered up enough affect to laugh weakly at our joking. Mom's not too chatty, but I noticed right away that her short-term memory had radically improved, and her aphasia seemed almost nonexistent. She doesn't seem to remember the desperate events of Thursday, which is probably for the best.

Sean swung by earlier today and saw Mom when she was asleep; he'll be back at the hospital at 7PM, and will probably be delighted to see how much Mom has improved.


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stable

[NB: See the bottom of this post for more updates.]

As of 5:50PM today (Tuesday, April 21), Mom is still in surgery and has been deemed "stable." Surgery began at 3PM; we're told that it might take 5 or 6 hours. When the surgery is complete, the docs will come and talk with us about their preliminary findings and probable treatment paths.

Mom will remain in recovery for a bit after surgery; she will then be moved to the Neuroscience ICU. For at least 24 hours, she'll be sedated and intubated; a respirator will help scour carbon dioxide from her brain. There's no fixed schedule for her extubation, but we know that she'll be in hospital for at least a few more days after surgery.

So much depends on what the surgeons find inside Mom's head. We were told that there were three possibilities; two of those possibilities involve tumors, and the third is infection: the mass might actually be an abscess. We were told that this third possibility is unlikely, however; if the mass were an infection, Mom would be sicker. The aggressive nature of the growth makes it highly probable that Mom will need further treatment. As we had been told last week, surgery was "just the beginning" of treatment.

Our church's associate pastor, Jeri Fields, was here with us again, along with Mrs. Higdon, a family friend (and fellow congregant) who very kindly brought us lunch. One of Mom's Korean friends, Mrs. Lindow, is a GI nurse who works at Fairfax Hospital, and she has taken the time to visit with us after her shifts, even asking after Mom and updating us on her condition.

Rewind to this morning. Dad and I woke up around 5-ish, prepped and got to the hospital around 6:40AM. I dropped Dad at the main entrance, and he tracked down one of the neurosurgeons, whom we were supposed to meet at 7AM. It's a good thing we got there early, or we'd have missed the surgeon altogether. The conversation didn't reveal anything new; Dad was told that the docs would be back before the pre-op phase to give us the lowdown on what would be happening.

Dad and I waited with Mom, who was surprised to see us in the ward so early. As always, there was a lot of hand-holding and talking and foot-massaging. My brothers David and Sean came by, fighting rush-hour traffic. We sat while Mom had routine tests done; today, she wasn't allowed to eat anything, so she was reduced to drinking a bit of water with her pills. She took care of personal hygiene as best she could, sneaking off to wash herself while I napped at her bedside (I must have slept pretty soundly to have missed all that racket), and later brushing her teeth when all of us were present. We got Mom to sign consent forms and the advance directive (a form that uses polite language to address ghoulish matters, like organ donation in the event of death, acceptance/rejection of heroic measures to save oneself, etc.). A group of docs finally came by to talk about the upcoming surgery. After all that, we were told to sit tight until Mom was taken down to the pre-op room. Pastor Jeri, meanwhile, prayed with us and presented Mom with a prayer shawl that was a gift from the congregation.

When the time came (a bit after noon), we followed Mom down to the pre-op area; she was placed in the "isolation" booth because of her MRSA. As before, we held her hands and hugged her and massaged her feet, talking all the while. Mom's mental state may have been a blessing in disguise; I'm not sure how I'd have felt in her place, acutely aware that I was about to undergo brain surgery.

We met the surgeons who would be working on Mom; they reviewed the game plan with us, outlining the risks, the hoped-for results, and answering what questions we could think of. A capable prep team set Mom up with IV drips, and once again, we had little to do but wait for the signal that it was time for Mom to go.

Soon enough, we were told that Mom had to head on over to surgery-- time for us to say our goodbyes and hope against hope that these surgeons were as good as everyone said they were. We took turns saying goodbye to Mom, none of us knowing whether this would be the final goodbye. I whispered "I love you" in her ear, and stepped back to look deeply into her eyes. She looked at me, a smile of gentle reassurance on her face, and for the first time since last Thursday, I finally allowed myself to cry. I saw that poor Sean was in the same boat.

We left the pre-op area with Pastor Jeri, and made our way to the spacious waiting area. There, we met our aforementioned family friend, Mrs. Higdon, plus two more of Mom's Korean women's society friends-- Mrs. Kopf and Mrs. Rappaport. At that moment, I would have preferred to sit alone, but ultimately, it was something of a relief to have people to talk with. I would have been a blubbering mess otherwise.

Around 5:50PM, after hearing that Mom was stable, we made the command decision to go eat. Mom's two lady friends had already left; Pastor Jeri and Mrs. Higdon remained with us until we got up to go to dinner; Mrs. Lindow also took her leave at that time. As Dad said, we've got quite a support group pulling for Mom.

Mom's elder sister and younger brother are flying over from Texas; my aunt arrives tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon; Dad will pick her up from National Airport. Uncle John will arrive Thursday and stay until Saturday. Tonight, we'll be prepping the house for them, and I'm sure Mom will be happy to see them (thanks, Matthew and Jihae, for your kind expressions of support).


UPDATE: Mom's surgery ended around 8PM. A preliminary diagnosis, based on a quick examination of the mass removed from Mom's brain, is that we're dealing with a possibly malignant glioma-- in this case, a primary (i.e., not metastatic) tumor originating in Mom's brain. The surgeon said that gliomas tend not to have clear boundaries; at this point, the good news is that everything that was visible in the MRI has been removed, but this doesn't mean that absolutely every part of the tumor is gone.

Happily, Mom has already been extubated and is awake and responsive. The docs asked whether she was in pain, and she shook her head no. We're hanging around the hospital, waiting for Mom to be transferred to the Neuroscience ICU. Once she's there, we'll be able to see her and talk with her.

For the moment, then, we can breathe a sigh of relief. Mom needs time to heal before other therapies can be implemented (e.g., chemotherapy, radiation therapy, etc.), and the road to recovery doesn't promise to be easy. For the moment, though, it seems the worst is over.

UPDATE 2: It's 8:37 the following morning. We got to see Mom last night, sometime around 10 or 10:30PM. She spent most of her time lying in bed with her eyes closed. While she was completely uncommunicative, verbally speaking, she did open her eyes twice and stretched her left arm out twice as well. The first time, she appeared to be looking straight at me and reaching toward me, but I'm not sure this is the case, given that the second time she performed the gesture (which I saw after having switched position to the other side of the bed), it looked more as though she were simply stretching her arm. The same arm occasionally made slight movements while it rested on her body; the nurses said this was possibly a sign of discomfort with or agitation at the ambient auditory stimuli.

Mom's breathing was a bit labored and her vital signs were elevated: higher blood pressure and more rapid pulse than usual, but we were assured that she was stable and that "her labs were excellent," whatever that means.

8:45AM: Dad tells me that Mom's morning CAT scan came back "fine," though the nurses with whom Dad spoke a few minutes ago had no details on what "fine" might mean; I assume the docs will provide us with a detailed reading. Mom's also been moved from PACU (post-anesthetic care unit) to the ICU; she's in the same bed she was in when she first arrived at Fairfax Hospital: Number 10.

I'm breathing a bit more easily this morning. Yesterday was a stressful day, and though it ended well, we were all physically and emotionally exhausted. Today, we'll visit Mom in the late morning or early afternoon (they've got docs working on her right now), and Dad will pick up my aunt (Mom's elder sister) from the airport. Tomorrow, we'll collect Uncle John (Mom's younger brother). In the meantime, we'll play things by ear. We've got a week until we get detailed results from the pathology lab, and Mom will use that week to keep on healing. The docs had told us that starting her on some other form of therapy right away (such chemo or radiation) wasn't advisable, given her need to heal first.

Oh, yeah-- Dad thought that I should save the head-shaving for a barber instead of taking the do-it-yourself approach. So I haven't shaved my head yet. I really should; I look like a fat Bruce Lee.

UPDATE 3: Mom's glioma is also called an astrocytoma. The aggressiveness of such tumors is graded on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being most aggressive. We've been told that Mom's tumor is probably in the upper end of the spectrum, the implication being that it's a 3 or a 4. You can read about such tumors and the treatment options for them here. According to that online reference, Mom's operation, which removed all of the mass that was visible in the scans, is called "debulking." The rest of the tumor will be kicked into submission through other therapies (radiotherapy or chemotherapy), but the article notes that high-grade astrocytomas are difficult to treat successfully. In other words, we're not out of the woods yet.


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on the cusp

Mom's operation has been slated-- last I heard-- for 1PM Tuesday afternoon. Mom seemed largely the same on Monday, with the short-term memory issues and the aphasia. Toward the end of our time with her, however, she began to manifest a strange detachment from reality, insisting that she didn't have a tumor and that the doctors had told her so. When we were about to leave, she got out of bed and said, "I'm going with you guys." Luckily, Mom was still pliant enough that we could persuade her to return to bed, but we asked the nurses to watch over her during the night to make sure she didn't try to wander off somewhere.

My understanding is that Mom will be prepped for surgery (which will involve shaving her head; I plan on shaving mine in solidarity, and Dad and my brother David have said they have planned to do the same), and that the operation should be fairly straightforward. The mass will be biopsied, and further treatment will be discussed. Mom is likely to be returned to the ICU, which is where she was first placed when she was transferred from Mount Vernon Hospital to Fairfax Hospital. For at least the first 24 hours after the operation, Mom will probably be both unconscious and intubated. A drainage tube (or tubes) will be in her skull; her steroid regimen will also continue, since the brain will swell in response to the trauma of invasive surgery.

Much depends on what the doctors see when they finally have a good, clear look at the mass. We know nothing at this point. I'm hoping we'll know a lot more within 24 hours.

The neuro team is visiting Mom at 7AM; visiting hours begin at 10AM, but Dad, David, and I will be there to intercept and talk with the team.


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touch

I do a lot of hand-holding now-- more than I've ever done with Mom since, oh, my elementary school days. Mom has little to do aside from lying in her hospital bed and occasionally making the five-yard stroll to the curtained-off bathroom. When life becomes that circumscribed, when a person's world is reduced to just a few activities, every little motion starts to take on significance. Just ask a monk or a prisoner.

We family members watch TV with Mom, or we attempt conversation with her, but conversation never gets that far given Mom's aphasia and short-term memory difficulties. We can do little more than broach a topic, express some very basic, general sentiments about it, and end the discussion with an "Oh, really?" or an "Ah, OK." Each topic gets about thirty seconds' to a minute's treatment. We can create the illusion of conversation if we talk at length and invite Mom simply to nod or answer yes/no questions; as a passive contributor, she's a great conversationalist. Discussions including the notion of "because" are out of the question; the frontal lobe is associated with, among other things, a person's ability to connect cause and effect, and you can't offer a "because" if you're unable to draw causal connections. In other words, if Mom wants to tell us not to do something, she can express a negative imperative, but she can't explain why; the effort is beyond her. It may well be that the reasons are in her head, but the train that leads from her utterance to those reasons has derailed somewhere along the way.

Mom's short-term memory problems and the diminution of her world mean that she likes constant audiovisual stimulation. She might have trouble following the flow of a long newscast or an extended conversation, but it seems to do her good to hear people talking. She's also got a healthy appetite; some of her Korean friends have begun dropping off meals for her, and she attacks the food eagerly, supplementing her drab hospital diet with Korean soups and American-style BBQ ribs. This stimulation, too, is good for her; it embellishes the tactile and gustatory dimensions of her narrowed, simplified world.

Mom's ability to recognize people, even to ask after their welfare, is rooted in her long-term memory, which is largely intact. And that brings us back to hand-holding. It's a very here-and-now gesture, holding hands, and doing it with a friend or relative links the present gesture with memories from the past. When Mom isn't holding someone's hand, she's holding and stroking one of the stuffed animals that sit alongside her in her bed. The simple fact of touch does something for her, and I am-- we are-- all happy to help her on that score. Mom needs this from us... and if I'm honest, I have to admit that we need it from her, too.


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MRI

Mom's in good spirits today; she had an MRI a couple hours ago, and we hope to learn-- sometime before 8PM-- what the docs have seen from this latest scan.

Our church's assistant pastor is currently visiting. She may also be joining us for dinner.


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updates

1. Mom is positive for MRSA, but currently, she's only been colonized, not infected. She probably got the bacterium while in the ICU. We had to spend our day wearing disposable gowns and gloves. The ritual for putting these on and taking them off was rather annoying.

2. One of the docs told us a bit about Mom's tumor, the exact nature of which remains unknown. It was described as "aggressive," but one strange result of this is that the tumor's center is necrotic: the tumor's tissue has built up thickly and quickly enough to block blood flow to its interior. I asked whether there were any ramifications in terms of sepsis, and was told no: to the contrary, this means that the center of the tumor will be very easy to remove.

3. Despite the MRSA, which the docs don't see as a huge problem for the moment, Mom's surgery is still scheduled for Tuesday. I asked why Monday wouldn't do and was told that the neurosurgical team is all booked up Monday. Perhaps because Mom has been classified as not in need of intensive care, the doctors feel it is enough to use steroids to reduce the swelling of the edema to keep Mom stable.

4. Surgery to remove the tumor is being considered "the beginning" of Mom's treatment. Much depends on the nature of the tumor itself.

5. On Friday night, some genius almost double-dosed Mom on blood pressure meds. Luckily, my brother Sean was there to catch the second nurse to come in and try to feed Mom the same meds she'd received ten minutes earlier. I'm normally the type to salute health care professionals, but I have to admit I've seen incompetence on a few occasions, often caused by a simple failure to read the damn charts. In 1997, when Dad was in the hospital after his minivan was hit nearly head-on by a drunk driver, a hospital staffer tried to take Dad's blood pressure... apparently unaware that he had placed the pressure cuff over a massive hematoma on Dad's bicep. That time, I was there to catch the mistake before it happened. Strangely, Dad himself said nothing as the cuff was being fitted over his arm.

6. Visiting hours in the new ward are restricted; we can stay from 10AM to 8PM, which means Mom has 14 hours a day with no visitors. I don't like this arrangement, especially after the blood pressure meds incident. Dad and Sean are now taking notes of everything that happens, procedurally, to Mom.

Many thanks to the people who continue to write in and voice their concern and support.


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operation

Last night, Mom was moved out of the Neuroscience ICU to the floor above, a non-intensive ward. She now has a roommate, separated by a curtain. Visiting hours in this new ward are restricted: 10AM to 8PM. In the ICU, only two and a half hours per day were verboten (7:00-8:30AM, and 7-8PM), as that was when the doctors did patient rounds. The new ward doesn't restrict cell phone use.

Mom was moved to this ward because she had been given steroids that reduced the swelling and resultant pressure of both the tumor and the edema. Her cognitive faculties had noticeably returned yesterday; I was with her for most of the day. She's not 100%; I wouldn't expect her to be.

The neuroscience team has yet to see Mom and evaluate her, but she's had the full-body scan, which was negative for any other masses, thank goodness. Surgery to extract Mom's brain tumor, while not explicitly scheduled at this point, is an almost definite prospect. Mom was informed that the staff would have to "do her hair," as she put it, for surgical purposes. She didn't look too thrilled about that.

Guess what I plan to do as a gesture of solidarity. Life is going to be so much simpler without hair. And, hell, I've spent years looking for an excuse to do this.

UPDATE: The neuro team came to see Mom earlier this morning, before patient visiting hours, and told her that surgery was most likely scheduled for Tuesday. She will remain on the steroid drip until Tuesday and beyond, as brain surgery is essentially another form of trauma to the brain, causing it to swell. As you might imagine, I didn't get this info from Mom, but from the doc who's watching over the ward Mom's currently in.


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update

Many thanks to everyone for all the expressions of support. I don't want to go into back story, but the upshot is this:

Mom has a small mass on one of the frontal lobes of her brain. The mass is what is called a "primary tumor," i.e., it isn't the child of a tumor that originated elsewhere in her body. The docs appear to have caught this early, and its position on or near the surface of the brain makes it "very operable," to use the phrase Dad borrowed from the docs.

Mom initially underwent a CAT scan at Mount Vernon Hospital, which is how the mass was first discovered. A subsequent MRI led the docs to diagnose the mass as a tumor. After several hours, Mom was moved from Mount Vernon Hospital to Fairfax Hospital, a much larger and better-equipped facility. A neurological team has been assembled and prepped; the most likely plan of attack is surgery to extract the mass. As of tonight, Mom has been given steroids to reduce the pressure in her brain; when we three brothers saw her this evening, she was slightly more herself than she had been at 9AM on Thursday.

Tomorrow, Mom is likely to undergo a biopsy procedure; what happens after that will be determined by the biopsy. Surgery to extract the mass is probable.

What this means for readers of Kevin's Walk is that I won't be heading out Saturday. I'm putting the walk on hold indefinitely. After all, what sort of person could possibly leave at a time like this? There's little use blathering on and on about religion if you can't even practice proper virtues with your own family-- things like love, attentiveness, dedication, and just being present and available.

I've decided not to deactivate the blog, though; I still have many promises to keep in terms of dialogue transcription, and that activity will give me something to do over the coming weeks. I need a distraction.

I might post further Mom-related updates to the blog. If I don't, feel free to email or contact me via Facebook. Meanwhile, do me a favor: if your parents are still around, go find them, talk to them, hug them. If they're no longer with you, take some time to think about all they've done for you. Don't let sadness and regret dominate your thinking; be filled instead with gratitude-- nothing but gratitude. And if that gratitude moves you to do something nice for someone you love, all the better.


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Mom in hospital

As you can see by this post's title, all is not well at my house. Mom's been taken to the hospital after displaying some alarming cognitive symptoms. She's being looked over as I write this; hopefully, we'll know more in a few hours.

To be honest, I'm not sure how much information I'm willing to divulge on the blog. Friends are, of course, free to email me. The important thing for Kevin's Walk is that, depending on what we find out today, I may or may not be heading out west. There's even a chance that the walk might be canceled as personal matters take precedence. Life gives you only one mom, after all.

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UPDATE, October 31, 2009: As is obvious to those who have followed this blog since April 16, I've had little trouble writing about our family's journey as we deal with Mom's ever-worsening brain cancer. If you're a newcomer, welcome to this humble chronicle of Mom's life. I'm her eldest son Kevin; I have two younger brothers, David and Sean, who do what they can for Mom during their free time and who are often cited on the blog. My father, also a David but known to the world as "Ned," is retired; he and I stay at home and provide Mom with 24/7 care.

If you're wondering how to read these blog entries in proper chronological order, here's how: scroll to the bottom of this blog post, find the link that says "newer post," and click it. The next blog entry in the series will come up. It's a long slog, trying to catch up on everything that's happened since April 16, but if you're one of Mom's close friends, I trust you'll care enough to want the details.

The story that follows isn't a happy one, and based on what we know about Mom's cancer (it's the same brain cancer that Ted Kennedy had), we know that there's no happy ending in store for us. All we can hope is that Mom will live as long as technology (and our care) makes possible, and that her remaining time with us will be both happy and pain-free.

PS: Impatient folks can read a brief summary of events from April to early November here. This will be updated periodically.


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more mug designs!

New mug designs now available at the Kevin's Walk section of my CafePress shop. One is my "Ten Religious Questions" (see link on sidebar, under my photo); the others are "teaching" mugs, if you will, each explaining a particular religious attitude. I've covered four: exclusivism, inclusivism, convergent pluralism, and divergent pluralism. Each mug shows a little graphic that will, I hope, aid the consumer's understanding of that worldview.

Collect all five!

Here are the designs, unwarped by CafePress graphics rendering software:




























If I have time, I'll be turning these into tee shirt designs as well. I debated over whether to add the Kevin's Walk URL to the "teaching" mugs, and ultimately decided against doing so, because this blog will most likely go inactive or be deleted once the walk is finished. Meanwhile, the information on those mugs will remain fresh. The "10 questions" mug, however, is tied specifically to my personal mission on the walk. I will probably alter or delete that particular design once the walk is over.

I should note a few things: the typology you see on the mugs is not something I invented. The original 3-fold typology of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism comes from religious scholars Alan Race and John Hick. Whether the typology actually works as an analytical tool for sorting religious attitudes is a matter of debate, but from what I've seen of scholarship over the past three decades, the basic template still seems to function. Thinkers like Paul Knitter have riffed off the typology; when you look at Knitter's work, you see he's providing variations on a basic theme.

My division of pluralism into the two large categories of "divergent" and "convergent" comes from the scholarship of Kate McCarthy, specifically from her chapter titled "Reckoning with Religious Difference" from the book Explorations in Global Ethics, a collection of scholarly papers on comparative religious ethics. McCarthy's chapter is one I highly recommend to anyone interested in a quick and dirty overview of the fact-- and problematic-- of religious diversity.

If I thought I'd had the space to do it, I would have provided the above explanation on each mug.


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two views on the "tea parties"

A liberal view over at the Peking Duck:

Back in the motherland, I’ve been watching in amusement and amazement as the “tea party” nonsense titillates the right into paroxysms of ecstasy. All I’ll say is this: The tea parties are code. They have nothing to do with taxes. They are all about anti-Obama rage, racism, fundamentalism and the Limbaugh-Rove-Malkin axis-of-sleazels’ wet dream of imitating the Nuremberg rallies in America. The astroturfed, Fox-news-sponsored orgies of faux outrage are simply a continuation of the 2008 campaign’s insistence that Obama was a socialist Muslim terrorist born in Kenya and out to plunder the US treasury and turn the US of A into a Caliphate.

And as quoted on Instapundit:

“Democrats and other skeptics are desperate to dismiss the tea parties that popped up across the country today. . . . This eagerness to explain away this movement is telling, suggesting the skeptics see these gatherings as a real threat. Certainly the tea parties have an anti-Obama slant, but what we’re seeing is something outside the normal dynamics of Democrat-Republican tension. . . . It isn’t clear yet what the tea party movement is all about, but it can’t be dismissed as something that simply arose from shadowy GOP organizers.”

I'm not a fan of protests in general, no matter who's behind them. The loss of individuality and the reduction of calm, sophisticated debate to a small cluster of frothing, 10-word talking points are too much for me to take. While I concede the value such activities have in raising consciousness about issues, the activities themselves completely turn me off.


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back from 15 miles

Yes, Virginia: I am still capable of 15-milers. No problem, aerobically speaking: as I suspected, there's a good bit of muscle memory involved. I do, however, have a throbbing left knee, which I'm managing with Vico-- uh, no... Naproxyn. (I'm not House, dammit, I'm not!)

My friends in Irrigon tell me they might just pick we up at the Portland airport instead of letting me walk along I-84 during the night and fetching me from the roadside the following day (that's the plan I'd suggested to them). Great people, Chuck and Lori. Whenever I write my book, they're going to be lavished with praise.

I don't think I'll be walking much with the backpack on my back this time around, except perhaps when I'm in a town or city. One of my upcoming purchases-- either here or when I'm out west-- is going to be a super-simple rig to tow my stuff behind me. I'm hoping to get something light enough to strap onto the backpack itself, if need be. We'll see what the sporting goods stores have on offer. I can't afford to get anything too bulky or heavy, but whatever I buy has to be durable, with fairly large, sturdy wheels.

The above might seem like a digression, but my point is that I'll be able to go farther and faster with the pack rolling behind me than with it on my shoulders. My first walk out from Walla Walla takes me back south into Oregon, to the city of Milton-Freewater. The next walk is a doozy, though: about 30 miles to the city of Pendleton. The walk to Emigrant Spring State Park, the following day, looks to be around 25 miles. Considering the distances I plan to cover, having the pack off my back seems like the way to go, at least until I've lost enough weight to think about shouldering the load for longer periods.

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10 miles into a 15-miler this morning

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Kevin becomes House?

While I'm about 200 pounds heavier than Fox's Dr. Gregory House (that's only a slight exaggeration), House and I will have something in common for the remainder of my walk: pill-popping to manage pain in the lower extremities. In my case, the pain is a generalized ache in both knees. I get the pain even during short walks of 6-10 miles, so I assume this is simply part of my reality, now. Rest assured: the pain isn't debilitating, and it's worst at the beginning, when I start moving after having sat still for a while. It's not a big issue; this pain is nothing like the agony my right knee was in last year.

I'm assuming that the ibuprofen and Naproxyn tablets that I used last August were not addictive; I managed to wean myself off them rather easily while in Walla Walla. I'm hoping the same will be true after another 3000 miles of walking; we'll see. I don't want to end up in the painkiller-addicts' wing of whatever clinic hosted Michael Jackson.

And now, Dear Reader, I'm staring down at my gut and ruing the fact that I've regained about 20 of the 40 pounds I had lost last year. I don't blame anyone but myself for this, and I know that honesty doesn't ennoble me, but I also know that a few weeks back on the road will start me losing again. Think positive.

Meantime, I'm impatient to get restarted. A dark corner of my brain has been screaming since last year that I've been home way too long, but you'll recall the circumstances that led me back here: the need for a place to stay while I healed; the fact that winter would have been an issue, given the equipment I had with me; and the lack of funds, which disappeared at an alarming rate thanks to my decision to "stay legal" and not act like a vagrant while in towns and between them. (CouchSurfing.com isn't much help when you're passing through small towns-- a fact I've been rediscovering as I plan stops from Walla Walla to Salt Lake City.)

But this time is going to have to be different. I haven't made that much money, so it's imperative that I conserve what little I have. I'm not even budgeting for food; I'll rely on what charity comes my way. Because I have $500 per month in bills (all scholastic debt-- none of it with credit cards), my parents have agreed to help me for the next several months. For their sake, I need to finish the walk sooner rather than later. The folks are doing this despite having taken heavy hits in the pocketbook thanks to all the renovation since last September. I've promised to pay them back once I'm in Korea and... heh... probably working three jobs to make up for lost time. If I write a book and it ends up making some money, I'm sure that all the initial proceeds will go to my folks.

I'll be in Walla Walla for a few days, interviewing some of the interesting people I met last year (plus a few I've promised to meet), stretching my legs, basking in the high desert climes. I start ambulating in earnest on April 23, striking out for Milton-Freewater, where I hope to have a place to stay (the route to Salt Lake City is here). Unlike the first 600 miles, when I only rarely camped illegally, I see myself imposing a lot more on the largesse of both the federal government and private property owners. I might have to pull a Steve Vaught, camping in someone's woods when needed. That's what you do when you don't have $150,000 and a huge staff to act as your caddy so that you can walk virtually unencumbered.

Despite not having filled in all the blanks for my first 40-60 days of walking, I do have a route plotted out, which is a major difference from last time. I've given up on the "self-planning" idea; it's disappointing to have to let that notion go, but the basic problem has been the insularity (and general unresponsiveness) of many of these religious communities. I've heard excuses from some of them-- they're staffed with only a skeleton crew of volunteers, etc. That's fine, but simple courtesy demands that one respond fairly quickly when addressed directly, and the sad fact is that, on many occasions, this hasn't happened. Just ask my friend Nathan, who sent out a blizzard of mailings on my behalf many months before I even arrived in America. Not a single response after all that effort. Maybe I'm just not famous enough. Heh.

The week is winding down. There's still some shopping and some packing to do, then I'm off to Portland on Saturday. Am looking forward to being back on the road; I feel as if I've been dead weight here in Virginia. I'm deeply thankful to my folks for having hosted me this long and for helping to fund the next several months of the walk, but it's definitely time to move on. I've put my life on hold to do this, but I can't stay on hold forever, not with bills to pay.

If you readers want to help my folks out with this $500 a month burden, go peruse my CafePress shop and buy some items. Every little bit helps.


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it grows within you

[UPDATE: If you've read the comments to this post, you've seen that this is likely a hoax. I'm beginning to incline toward that view myself.]

One of the greatest glories of the human condition is pregnancy. Granted, it doesn't feel all that glorious if you're a woman, what with all the bloat and vomiting and weird dietary urges. But gestation is still a marvel: a little life is growing within you, and the moment of birth is, as every parent I know attests, like stepping into a whole new realm of existence.

Perhaps as a result of our evolutionary wiring, we have a completely different view of anything other than a human being growing inside us. Whether it's a tapeworm, or a cancer, or hookworms, or an invasion of ascaris (picture not for the easily grossed-out, but this was an internet classic years ago, so you've probably seen it), we are wired to view such things as a horrifying violation.

The horror begins early. Many children worry about what might happen after they've eaten watermelon seeds: "Will I start growing a watermelon plant inside me?" Most parents respond with a laugh and a "No, of course not, dear." But this isn't to say that you can't grow plants inside your body, as my brother David demonstrated when he sent me a link that led to the following picture:

What you're looking at is a tiny fir tree extracted from a Russian man's lung. Here's what the article says:

A Russian man who had been feeling chest pain and coughing up blood got some stunning news from his doctors -- his symptoms were caused by a tiny fir tree growing in his lungs, Mosnews.com reports.

Doctors spotted a tumor on an X-ray and had expected to find a cancerous tumor when they conducted a biopsy on Artyom Sidorkin, 28, earlier this month. Instead, they found green needles embedded in the tissue.

"I blinked three times, and thought I was seeing things. Then I called the assistant to have a look," said Vladimir Kamashev, a doctor at the Udmurtian Cancer Center in Izhevsk in central Russia.

A 2-inch fir was removed from Sidorkin's lung.

"... I never felt like I had an alien object inside of me," the patient said. Doctors suggested he inhaled a small seed, and it started growing.

As Alan Grant says in the movie version of "Jurassic Park," "Life will find a way." Now that we all live in a post-"Alien" world, I imagine many of us, upon seeing the above photo, are having the same thoughts about chest-bursting aliens. Luckily for us, fir trees grow slowly. Luckily for Mr. Sidorkin, he lives in the era of modern medicine. Imagine if this had occurred two hundred years ago.


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new CafePress items!

Work with BK has officially ended for me, so I now have no income stream. In my ongoing quest to fund my walk (and possibly make a little more money to address my mountain of scholastic debt), I've created more CafePress items for your perusal. Hit the links to see them up close.

1. The "Kevin signed this" tee shirt. Buy the tees, meet me along the road with a waterproof marker, and I'll sign those puppies as I walk across the country.

2. The Dalma Daesa white tee. My best-selling CafePress item is an ash-gray Dalma Daesa tee shirt; I have no idea why I neglected to put up a normal white shirt, but here's hoping that white will sell as well as (or better than!) gray. (Value tee also available.)

3. A slew of black Kevin's Walk tee shirts with the revised logo. Yes, I finally changed "Kevin's Wank" to "Kevin's Walk." Visit the Kevin's Walk section of the shop to see the whole gamut.

4. "A Pup and a Way!" tees. The pun comes from one of my poems. See the tee shirt section of my CafePress shop for the full gamut of available shirts.

5. The "Tiger and Rabbit Raisins" tee. I'm rather proud of this one, which uses the tiger/rabbit imagery I'd shown off before to portray one moment in the bizarre friendship between Tiger and Rabbit, a friendship rooted in Korean folklore, where many stories begin "A long time ago, when tigers smoked pipes..." Many a shop in Insa-dong, one of the most famous art districts of Seoul, will feature scrollwork images of tigers and rabbits placidly smoking together, puffing away on long pipes. My tee doesn't show any smoking, but it does show Tiger scaring the bejesus out of Rabbit as he roars, "Teach me how to make those awesome chocolate raisins!" I'll leave you to dissect the queasy implications of what Tiger is saying.

There are more designs on the way, so stay tuned. If you see something that interests you, I'm not gonna stop you from buying it.


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my last "24" update from home

Well, my easy prediction came true: ol' Larry Moss is officially dead. But who killed him? Not the person I expected: it was Tony Almeida! So we're now left with the impression that Tony is still one of the bad guys, since he helped the other bad guy spirit the remaining bit of the bioweapon away from the bombed-out portion of the Starkwood compound.

I suppose there's a chance that Almeida's still on our side, that what we saw lacked context and will make sense in subsequent episodes (Agent Moss might have been dirty, for example), but that's not looking likely. Here's my "middle knowledge" prediction: if Tony Almeida is indeed one of the baddies, then he will be dead by the end of the day, probably thanks to Jack Bauer. Tony allowed his co-conspirator to kill two federal agents, so the probability that he's a villain is high, which in turn means that the probability of his death is high.

I figured Moss was going to die this episode when he suddenly started doing the right thing. Up to now, Moss has been portrayed as pretty dense, and thus fairly unlikable. On "24," the route to likability is to do whatever Jack says is best, which is why Jack, not the US president, is the actual leader of the free world. Many characters who have gone against Jack's wishes often end up seeing the light, then dying. Moss is no exception. Once he was on the Bauer bandwagon, his fate was sealed. Think back to Lynn McGill's fate in Season 5.

We also see the return of Kim Bauer, who might be offering her dad some stem cells that will work their magic against the pathogen that's currently killing Jack. I'm assuming that Jack has to survive until the end of the day; if he expires, it'll be in the final hour... unless the writers pull a "To Live and Die in L.A." on us and kill off the main character two-thirds of the way through the plot. Don't see that happening. The show rides entirely on Jack.

Based on the preview for next week's episode, things don't look good on the romantic front for Bauer and Agent Walker. She's going to be grieving over the loss of Agent Moss, so viewers can expect her to be rather snarly. There might be some comic potential in having Jack put the moves on her, though: "Hey, babe. I'm dying from a pathogen that's gonna turn me into a drooling, spastic moron in an hour. What say we head over to my place?"

While watching the episode, Dad and I joked about what a crossover "House"/"24" episode would look like ("House" also shows on Fox; in fact, it comes on right before "24"). I wondered aloud who would be torturing whom. Both shows feature their own forms of political incorrectness; mixing the two-- Bauer's brutality and House's inability to hide what he's thinking-- would be volatile.

But such a crossover episode is about as likely as Jack undergoing sexual reassignment surgery, so I'll stop the fanciful speculation here. Given the recent turn of events, with Tony Almeida seeming once again to be an enemy of the state and Starkwood CEO Jonas Hodges raving that he's only a small cog in a very large machine (typical mid- to late-season revelation on "24"), I'm going to bring back my old prediction that Janis Gold (Janeane Garofalo's character) is a mole. She still fits the profile for moles on "24": fairly mousy, whip-smart, and at the center of things. Given the twists we've experienced thus far, I think this is not a bad prediction. It's not as easy or obvious a prediction as "Tony Almeida's gonna die," but I think there's something to it. We'll see.

ADDENDUM: This is sorta cute.


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sae ong ji ma haiku

poor old man, lost horse
horse returns and kicks his son
son stays home from war


Well... that's the condensed version, anyway. Sae ong ji ma means "poor old man's horse." The Chinese story from which the image comes tells of a poor old man who undergoes many reversals of fortune, but who has the wisdom to know that reversals are just the way of things: no need to rejoice when times are good, because things can go bad. No need to weep when times are bad, because they can improve.

I've mentioned this proverb before (see here). It's a good one to remember in times of economic trouble, and a call for caution and prudence when times are good.


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with thanks to Rico

One of my mentors during my southward walk along Washington's I-5, Rico Simpkins, has just posted an embedded YouTube video about what open-mindedness really means. I enjoyed it and want to pass the word along.


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Happy Easter!

I walked into one of my grad school classes back in 2001 or thereabouts; it was just after Easter. Inside the class were a few classmates who'd arrived earlier than I had, mostly Catholic and ranging in age from late 20s to mid-50s. The other Protestant in the class, a young minister in the American Baptist Church, interrupted the quiet pre-class conversation by saying in a cheerful voice, "He is risen!" Everyone looked at each other, nonplussed; I was, apparently, the only one ready with the response: "He is risen, indeed!"

I know that that ritual exchange, or something close to it, is part of the Catholic liturgy, so I assumed the general lack of response had more to do with the out-of-context nature of my classmate's utterance. It threw people off guard. Anyway, it was an amusing Easter memory.

The Easter event is considered by most Christians to be the focal point on the liturgical calendar: Easter is what Christianity is all about. According to this point of view, Christ's resurrection, which signals his defeat of death and his opening of the way of salvation to all, is essential to Christian belief. If you fail to believe in the historicity of the resurrection, you aren't a Christian.

As my friends know, I'm not a scriptural literalist, nor will anyone ever mistake me for any sort of traditionalist. Politically, I think I'm fairly centrist, but religiously speaking, I recognize that I'm a flaming liberal. I don't take the resurrection to be a literal, historical event. The scriptural accounts of what happened aren't consistent, and what data the scriptures do provide can be interpreted in a variety of contradictory ways.

But this isn't to say that the Easter story doesn't resonate in me. I grew up hearing it, so of course it's a part of my history and psychology, part of who I am. The story of Jesus' self-sacrifice, his death on the cross, presents me with a model that I routinely fail to emulate in my daily life. And the resurrection, historical or not, conveys an ancient message about the nature of endings, which is this: even endings end. Each ending represents a new beginning. And there's hope in that way of thinking.

Whatever your view of Easter may be-- whether Easter represents the risen Christ or a rabbit that has the ability to lay eggs-- may it be a Happy Easter for you. Let the day be a reminder that every moment is a new beginning, and that we should, to borrow a biblical injunction, "rejoice and be glad in it."


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Jesus with the angler fish?

Lee's Holy Saturday post (his blog is excellent, by the way) shows a picture of Jesus standing on what appears to be a rocky ledge, staring down into a hell-realm (or maybe it's just a sea) filled with angry or tortured-looking beings that strongly remind me of angler fish. Interesting image.


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Easter miracle

Yes! You can now huff chocolate!


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and how will you be spending your Easter weekend?

I'll be spending a goodly chunk of my weekend working on five documents I got from BK. I'm in the process of passing the torch on to a friend of mine in Seoul; he'll be taking over my proofing while I walk, but I'm still on the job until next Wednesday, after which I'll definitely have to stop working. It's a bad time to do that to BK, because next week is "crunch week," i.e., the week before the 20th of the month, which is the due date for all articles going into the magazine. But them's the breaks: I'm passing the job along to my friend because (1) he wants the work and I can't expect to continue proofing while stuck out in the middle of nowhere, and (2) I don't want to leave BK totally hanging.


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put it down

What follows is an edited reprint from a post I wrote in 2005.

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Today begins the period known to Catholics as Triduum, the three-day span during which Christ suffered, died, descended into hell, and rose again from the dead.

Good Friday is the day of sadness and shadows, the day when the world loses hope and all seems to be in ruin. Holy Saturday finds us in mourning and loss; it is a day of endurance. Finally, Easter Sunday reminds us that every ending is also a beginning. New life emerges. Hope finds its fulfillment.

Since I and a few people I know are all going through a painful period, each of us for various reasons, I thought it might be good to write about "putting it down."

In Zen Buddhism, the maxim is "don't make anything." Your mind is so often the source of your troubles. You choose to face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune either negatively or positively. Often, at the beginning of a troublesome period in your life, it's difficult to realize how responsible you are for your own choices. It's easier to shift blame to your surroundings. But ultimately, the healthiest route out of the forest of troubles is to start by looking in a mirror. Behold what's actually there; don't needlessly manufacture problems for yourself and others.

I'm not a scriptural literalist, so I don't believe Jesus rose from the dead. But the story of the passion and resurrection nevertheless holds power for me, because it's a story about a man who put everything down, including his own life, for the sake of love. How many of us can claim to be ready and willing to do something like that? Not many, I suspect.

Most of us, like little children, cling desperately to our cherished notions, preconceptions, and delusions, unwilling to countenance truth and change. We face the world with fear, and create clever rationales for our spiritual cowardice. In a crisis period, this instinct intensifies. The ego swells to enormous size-- everything is about getting hurt, everything is about me, me, me. The world doesn't understand my pain, and only I am in pain!

I've felt like that before. I've looked out at a street full of people and wondered why they didn't see my agony, which was plain as day to me. The world kept right on turning, resisting my egocentric interpretation of it.

And there's a lesson in that. Life is change, ceaseless change. All we have is this moment. If we try to keep the past with us, we merely create more suffering for ourselves. If we try to hold on to our anger, or our hurt, or whatever it is we're feeling, we poison ourselves.

It's better simply to put it all down.

People need time to do this. It can't be done immediately. If, for example, you've just experienced a family tragedy, you can't be expected to act like the Taoist writer Chuang-tzu, banging on pots and celebrating your wife's death. No; most of us need time to mourn, grieve, recover. But after that period, we should be ready and willing to move on with our lives, to follow the constant flow of the river, to bang on the pots and celebrate.

You can't see the new life of Easter if you're always looking backward. Easter points simultaneously to the present and to the future, to hope and happiness and fulfillment. Think positively. Embrace goodness where you find it. Actively seek the good, don't wait passively for it.

Whatever your religion (or even if you have no religion), may this Easter find you looking to the horizon with hope and a sense that things can and will be better. May it also find you looking at where you are now, suddenly seeing the good things that have always surrounded you.

Peace.


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good for him

I heard that President Obama hosted a Passover Seder at the White House. Good for him.


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giving each other a look

I recall a moment last September, during that first Spirituali-Tea I attended at Whitman College, when two students gave each other a look while I was talking about the assumption some people make that all religions are basically reaching toward the same absolute reality or the same type of salvation. I had cast doubt on this notion, and the students who had given each other that look explained that they assumed that most people saw religions that way, i.e., as sharing a common essence or goal. Alas (or maybe hooray!), it's untrue that most people possess this conviction: while religious liberalism isn't necessarily a fringe movement, it's certainly not a reflection of where most people in any given religious tradition stand. Religious liberals are decidedly in the minority.

The problem for the religious liberal is here analogous to the problem for the political liberal, I think. The religious liberal wants to assign equal value and legitimacy to different traditions out of a sense of charity, but risks disrespecting those religions by relegating potentially fundamental differences to the realm of "mere detail." Good intentions can thus go awry when such a liberal, without actually having studied other religious traditions, makes a claim like "all religions are talking about God, each in its own way." It's not really a dialogue when you already think you have the answer.

This isn't to say, however, that you should approach dialogue with no convictions whatsoever. To the contrary, it's a good idea to have beliefs, and to be comfortable with the specificity of those beliefs-- to be able to say "No, I think you're wrong" when your interlocutor says something that runs contrary to your worldview. If the dialogue is a healthy one, the interlocutor will maturely accept this opinion without losing his temper.* Disagreement can be fruitful-- fodder for some great discussions-- and agreement is not necessarily the goal of dialogue. It's not even clear that dialogue should have a goal (cf. Raimondo Panikkar's notion of dialogical dialogue).

We should also note that the liberal impulse to make ostensibly conciliatory, pluralistic claims should not be viewed as completely wrong-headed. There is indeed a risk that, in making broad claims about a tradition not one's own, one will offend the Other. But there's also a chance that one's views of the Other's tradition, however well- or ill-informed, might afford the Other a look at his own tradition through another perspective. Reinterpretation by the Other is also part of dialogue, after all.

Anyway, I recall being amused by the students' reaction to the idea that not everyone was as "accepting" as they were. I wonder if they saw that moment as I did. For me, it looked as though they were beginning to realize that the world is a bigger, more varied place than the boundaries of their conceptual bubble had allowed for. That's a good thing, and to me, that's what college-- and life beyond college-- should be all about.

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*Mature acceptance doesn't mean the discussion is over. This isn't about agreeing to disagree (see my above-linked post, plus this and this). Here, I'm talking about the acceptance of the fact that people will believe differently, possibly for reasons as legitimate as one's own.


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all praise be unto Kim Jong-il

Humorist Frank J. of the blog IMAO (which is apparently banned in Korea... I was never able to access it) writes in praise of a leader even greater than Barack Obama.


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Malcolm and dark thoughts

Malcolm links to an interesting exchange over at Dr. Vallicella's blog re: the morality of dark thoughts (you'll recall Jesus' instruction, in his Sermon on the Mount, regarding having lust in one's heart).

On the assumption that who we are is the sum not only of our darkest thoughts, but also of our repression/re-channeling of them (along with the expression of more positive thoughts and behaviors), I've argued, in the case of Mel Gibson's drunken episode, that vino doesn't reveal the veritas, but reveals only an incomplete person. At the time, Dr. Vallicella agreed with me, which makes me wonder how he reconciles his current contention (thoughts can be morally wrong) with that previous position. Thinking charitably, I can imagine a convoluted way to reconcile the two positions, but I'm still left to wonder, then, what our attitude should be toward something like the Mel Gibson incident, especially if unexpressed dark thoughts, as well as those expressed while drunk, are worthy of condemnation.

On the one hand, it's true that a single dark thought, in and of itself, probably won't lead to whatever behavior is indicated by that thought. On the other hand, a habit of thinking along certain dark lines could be argued to exert some sort of causal pressure on behavior, and such habits begin with single thoughts. But even here, bad behavior isn't an inevitable result of dark thinking. If you're interested in the current discussion over the morality of dark thoughts at Dr. Vallicella's place, see here.


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updates

I'm moving my flight date forward one day to the 18th, because tickets are far cheaper for Saturday than for Sunday (go figure). Yes, I'm having to buy my ticket, but it's not a big deal.

In other news: the guy who shot up the Koreans at the Ggot-dongnae Catholic retreat center was himself a 69-year-old Korean resident of the center.


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foodblogging!

Pesto with a twist: fresh basil, a touch of garlic, pine nuts plus pistachios, parmesan plus Gruyère, salt, pepper, lemon juice, olive oil. My brother Sean, back from Prague (which means Maqz is gone), tells me that, technically, "pesto" simply refers to any concoction made with an herb, a type of nut, a cheese, and an oil. So maybe my pesto isn't as twisted as all that.

Below: charoset. I made it the way I said I would; instead of Passover wine, I made a syrup of Korean pomegranate wine, sugar, and honey. Eminently edible.




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nuts

More shooting violence, this time in California. Is it the economy?


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mutant charoset

A slightly early Happy Pesach if you're Jewish (it actually begins at sundown on Wednesday)! I'm planning on going nuts by making a batch of charoset-- not because I'll be attending a Passover Seder, but because a Jewish coworker of mine, back when I worked at APIC from 1998 to 2001, brought some charoset into the office and got me hooked on it.

There are approximately 3.29 trillion different recipes for charoset (a word whose romanized spelling also seems to vary widely). You can see a few here. What I have done-- and plan to do-- probably doesn't qualify as true charoset, if for no other reason than that I won't be purchasing Passover wine, but will instead rely on whatever alcohol is currently sitting around the house, being consumed by no one (my parents and I don't drink, and Mom sips wine only on extremely rare occasions).

Charoset, according to the above-linked site, symbolizes the brick mortar made and used by the Hebrews during their time of slavery under Pharaoh. It generally has a rough, mortar-y look and feel to it, but it tastes fan-damn-tastic, which is why I suspect my Jewish friends and acquaintances are cheating every time they say they're remembering a bitter time in history-- they should stick exclusively to the consumption of bitter herbs and vinegar.

Anyway, I won't even pretend that what I'm going to make qualifies as true charoset. I simply like the general combination of nuts, fruit, honey, and certain spices or seasonings (wine optional). When I say "charoset," what I'm really saying is "inspired by charoset." A charoset tribute, if you will.

So I know you're wondering: how do we make this bad boy?

Very roughly pulse-chop in a food processor (make pebbles, not sand grains):

cashews
almonds
peanuts
walnuts

Mince or rough-chop:

raisins
pitted dates
figs
dried apple

The nuts should be in roughly equal portions. The fruits should also be in roughly equal portions. The amount of fruits and nuts should also be roughly equal.

Take all the above, once prepped, and combine. Add (to taste):

honey
wine
powdered ginger
chili powder


The red pepper was something I learned about from my coworker, who had brought in several kinds of charoset, including a spicy variety. If I'm not mistaken, the idea of adding fire to the charoset is Yemeni, though I suppose there might be other types of spicy charoset. You don't add much red pepper-- you need only enough chili powder to give the mix a slight but palpable kick.

In the past, I've made charoset by boiling the dry fruit for a minute or so, draining it, then blending it almost smooth in a food processor, leaving it up to the nuts to provide any chunkiness. Not this time! This time, I want the whole thing to be as chunky as possible. So I'll pulse-chop the nuts, use a knife on the dried fruits, and reduce any boiling (NB: many charoset recipes call for fresh fruit, with nothing boiled or otherwise heated) to about 45 seconds, just to achieve a slight softening of things like dates, which can be stiff and grouchy. The honey, wine, ginger, and chili powder will still be drizzled or sprinkled to taste.

The mixture won't look pretty, but I'm counting on it tasting very good, especially atop some matzo crackers. If I remember in time, I'll provide a photo of the results of my labor.


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Faccia Luna: review

Dad was thoroughly pleased with yesterday's outing to Faccia Luna in Old Town Alexandria, a restaurant I hadn't visited in years. He thought I should write a review of the place, so here it is.

1. Service

It was a Monday night, right in the middle of the dinner hour, but seating wasn't a problem. We were led to a booth as soon as we stepped in, and our server, a young lady, proved to be very prompt and friendly. (The main gauge of promptitude, for me, is how often the server swoops by to refill an empty glass. Ours was spot-on.)

There was one major hitch, however: the kitchen flubbed my brother David's order, adding extra mushrooms to his pizza instead of the sausage he'd requested. David's miscarried pizza was taken away, and was replaced a few minutes later by the proper dish.

2. Ambience

Dinnertime lighting was tastefully dim, but not too dim. The atmosphere struck me as informal and family-oriented, but the bar was a prominent presence: it's the first thing you see upon entering, and it dominates almost half the seating space. Faccia Luna takes pride in their wine selection, and I got the impression that the bar patrons were more of a wine crowd than a beer crowd. The bartender dropped and shattered a bottle of something near the tail end of our meal, which would qualify as a tragedy if I drank alcohol. Dad stepped over to help a person with cut fingers ("I'm a medic," he said-- and he is); his aid was politely accepted.

I think there was music playing in the background; if there was, it was kept tastefully low. The overall noise level allowed for easy and animated conversation; no shouting was necessary. All in all, it was easy to settle in.

3. Menu

I previously described Faccia Luna as a "fusion Italian eatery." The restaurant is part of a chain that describes its restos as "trattorias." I call the place "fusion" because the menu, while predominantly Italian in focus, has French-American highlights. The menu's text certainly features a lot of bad French spelling-- "chocolate noir," from the dessert menu, comes to mind.

The menu itself ran the gamut from a wide variety of pizzas to pasta dishes to sandwiches and salads-- a fairly typical gamut for Old Town Alexandria. While not exactly cheap, Faccia Luna's prices were reasonable; our meal ran about $25 per person before tip.

4. Bouffe

The appetizers were interestingly different: we decided to order an eggplant dish ("Melanzane alla Parma" on the menu) and a portobello-and-pepper dish (Portobello alla Chevre [sic]). They arrived hot and attractive; the eggplant, covered in a generous layer of mozzarella and sitting on a smooth marinara, disappeared quickly. The mushroom dish also disappeared, but the whole cloves of garlic went to Mom who, being Korean, had no trouble dispatching them. Garlic bread came with both appetizers-- not much of it, but enough to swab some of the sauces on both plates.

We all decided to avoid the Monday Night Special, a sort of bare-bones menu prix fixe, in favor of exploring various dishes. My brother David ordered a personal-sized pizza that looked and smelled delicious (La Capra: goat's cheese, spinach, and chicken, with the addition of sausage); Mom had a salmon dish; Dad ordered a chicken breast-on-herbed penne plate, and I had some plump gnocchi with slices of sausage on top (Gnocchi di Piselli). The gnocchi, which were plump and rib-sticking, featured a tomato-vodka sauce.

Portion sizes were satisfactory without being huge. Mom did her usual thing, giving away chunks of food to the rest of the family, which is how I know that her salmon was cooked to perfection-- buttery-smooth on the inside and seared crispy on the outside, in a perfect contrast of taste and texture. Alas, the fish was served atop a pile of shredded and seasoned onions, but that's just a personal hangup of mine, not the restaurant's fault. Dad's chicken penne earned plenty of praise from Dad (strangely, Dad's and Mom's dishes aren't listed on the online menu, which is why I haven't given you their proper names); I sampled a bit and pronounced it very good, indeed.

We were pleasantly full by the end of the main course, but because we had already had a glimpse of the dessert section of the menu, we were tempted. Dad ordered a cheesecake with raspberry sauce; David ordered the tiramisu (or Tira Mi Su, as it's called on the menu), and I swerved from ordering the Chocolate [sic] Noir to having something not listed on the menu: mousse au chocolat. David, who has been to Faccia Luna before, had recommended the tiramisu to everyone, but I once again gave in to my chocoholism. Mom ordered nothing, content to sample our desserts (sort of the reverse of what she'd done at dinner).

I tried a bit of Dad's cheesecake and thought it was pretty good, though not great. David's tiramisu disappeared before I had a chance to scoop into it; it was served in a ramekin, which is unusual for tiramisu. My mousse rocked. It was thicker than the mousse I'd grown used to in Switzerland, and arguably richer, but delicious nonetheless. Mom pronounced it the best of the three desserts.

5. Rating

Faccia Luna rates "happy ending" on the massage parlor scale. The night wasn't perfect: Dad's dessert could have been fresher, and the kitchen messed up David's order, but the overall experience was very positive. Service was friendly and prompt; the ambience was cheerful and struck a good balance between family dining and something more adult. The aforementioned shattering wine bottle was more entertainment than tragedy, as far as I was concerned, and the food was excellent. If you find yourself in Old Town and have a few bucks to spend on a very good meal, then I highly recommend Faccia Luna.


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Muggle Quidditch!?

Fans of JK Rowling's Harry Potter heptalogy will be familiar with every wizard's favorite sport: Quidditch. It's like a complicated version of soccer, and it's now available in a Muggle version.

I would have thought that, with networked gaming so popular now, someone would have invented a scaled-down MMORPG-style Quidditch video game, so that the game could be played properly. In Rowling's universe, Quidditch is played on flying brooms, making it a decidedly three-dimensional sport. Only in a computer's brain can you simulate the predatory behavior of the Bludgers-- whose job is to unseat random players-- and the behavior of the Golden Snitch, which flits erratically about, eluding capture by each team's Seeker with startling bursts of raw speed.

A sufficiently complex video game would allow players to try different brooms, each with its own performance quirks-- acceleration/braking ability, turn radius, stability, and susceptibility to magical interference (cheating seems to be part of the reality of Quidditch). Players would choose from among thousands of different magic wands; they'd play in hundreds of different venues, and be subject to all manner of weather conditions and random aerial events (e.g., the occasional low-flying aircraft, flock of geese, or child's kite). That would be Quidditch!

Muggle Quidditch seems so pedestrian in comparison.


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42 years and going strong

Mom and Dad celebrate their 42nd anniversary today. They married in 1967, and waited two years before bringing me into the world. "I screeeeeeeaaaamed," said Mom, describing what birthing me was like. She wasn't keen on having another kid right after that experience, so she and Dad waited another seven years before David, the Bicentennial Baby, was born. Three years after that-- Sean.

They went from sitting on the floor in a small northern Virginia apartment, with apple boxes for tables, to settling in suburbia with a nicely renovated home, and three big kids buzzing in and out of their lives-- me and Sean infrequently, David frequently.

I haven't asked the parents what makes their marriage work so well; I'm sure that, if I asked them the secret to a good marriage, they'd say all the usual things: love, trust, patience, and letting the wife win all the arguments.

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad, and many happy returns! I love you!


UPDATE: This evening we went out-- my parents, my brother David, and I-- to Faccia Luna, a fusion Italian eatery in Old Town Alexandria, and enjoyed a fantastic meal. I asked the parents what the secret was to staying together 42 years. Dad's reply: "It's not just 50-50. It's 100-100. And when things go wrong, you take care of each other." Mom heard this and said wryly, "He puts in 100 percent. I'm not sure I do." Heh.


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Elisson on Watchmen and "Watchmen"

Elisson came to Alan Moore's Watchmen late in the game, reading the graphic novel only recently, then going out to see Zack Snyder's "Watchmen" in an empty theater. Elisson's review of the print and filmic experiences makes for a good read; see here. What makes his perspective unique is that, having given himself so little time between acquainting himself with the graphic novel and seeing the movie based on it, he hasn't had time to build up a raft of fanboy expectations.

I still have yet to see the movie. It pains me that I've missed "Doubt" (already on DVD!) and "Gran Torino," and will likely miss "Watchmen" as well before I restart the walk.

Oh, yes: I got paid and now have an official start date: April 19.


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celebrate!

Today, Sunday, is significant for most Christians, because on most Christian calendars today is Palm Sunday.

Today also happens to be National Pillow Fight Day, a fact I would not have known had my mother not been watching the Korean TV news. There, on screen, stood a Korean reporter in downtown New York City, and all around him was a mob of fighters, their pillows deployed and swinging wildly. Interesting. I wonder what Jesus would have said about that.

On a theological note, I startled Mom when I told her that, according to tradition, Jesus descended into hell after dying on the cross. Much depends on how one interprets the relevant scripture (1 Peter 3:18-20 --I looked it up), which might not necessarily refer to hell (many English renderings say "prison"); the significance of Jesus' visit to the place of the damned is also subject to multiple interpretations: according to one school of thought, Jesus was there to suffer, thereby expiating humankind's sin. Another school of thought claims Jesus was there to proclaim victory over hell and the Evil One. Take your pick, or take none at all.

Hell is just an open mouth away.


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one of the boats I missed

I sometimes wish I'd studied criminology, because I'm constantly boggled by what drives a person to grab one or more guns, then slaughter a mess of people. Jiverly Wong's story (told somewhat sensationally here) is a good example; the even more recent family slaughter in Washington-- in which a father killed his five children and then himself-- is another. What makes these people tick? Wong (ethnically Chinese, as it turns out... I never thought "Wong" sounded like a Vietnamese surname) was apparently a coke addict, had trouble learning and speaking English, and was a gun nut. But these factors don't add up to an explanation, do they? Good Lord.


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the center cannot hold:being Christian and Muslim at the same time

I think(?) it was my walk manager Alan Cook who first mentioned the name Ann Redding, an Episcopal priest who entered the Muslim fold while trying to retain her priestly status. At the time, it seemed that she had managed a rare feat, balancing two rival traditions in her personal life, but we now see that the tapestry is unweaving itself.

Get Religion has an interesting article on Redding and the coverage of her defrocking. I note with some surprise that the current trouble seems to be coming mostly from the Christian end: it is certain parties in the Episcopal Church who do not accept what Redding has done.

The common wisdom is that, the more similar two people are, the more likely they'll be in conflict. There are exceptions to this, of course, but I think it holds true as a general rule. The tension between and among the three major Abrahamic traditions is a good example of this. As Islam scholar Bernard Lewis notes in his book Islam and the West, when a Christian or Muslim uses the pejorative "infidel," the interlocutor clearly understands what is meant. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are, despite their major differences, similar in many fundamental ways. Familiarity often breeds contempt, and if not contempt, then at least tension and rivalry, especially between religions with strong missionary components like Christianity and Islam.

Radically different traditions seem to lend themselves more easily to syncretism. Three personal examples come to mind right away: Robert Kennedy (not RFK), his mentor William Johnston, and a Benedictine monk named David Steindl-Rast. Kennedy and Johnston, along with being Catholic priests, are both Zen masters who undertook Zen training and received "inka," a certification of enlightenment that legitimizes their teachings when they speak in an institutional Zen capacity (in Buddhism, the ultimate magisterium is your own experience, so it might not be exactly right to refer to inka as something that grants or signifies "authority" in a conventional sense). Brother David is not, to my knowledge, a Zen roshi like the other two men, but he has undergone extensive Zen training, much of which took place in the context of monastic interreligious dialogue (he co-wrote a book with Robert Aitken, a roshi of the Rinzai-Soto fusion Sanbo Kyodan school, titled The Ground We Share: Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian).

Zen nondualism probably sits very comfortably beside Catholic contemplative spirituality, which may be why these three men have been able to pursue their Zen studies so deeply without risking a raised eyebrow from the Roman magisterium. Zen also seems to go down easily if you're Jewish, as evidenced by the whole, "JuBu" (Jewish-Buddhist) movement, emblematized in such books as Roger Kamenetz's The Jew in the Lotus (a pun on the Buddhist expression "jewel in the lotus"), a story of Jewish-Buddhist dialogue through the eyes of a Jewish journalist who met the current Dalai Lama along with fellow Jews of different traditions to discuss, among other things, what it means to survive as a persecuted people.

What's your opinion on this sort of thing? Could you (assuming you belong to a specific tradition) adopt another tradition's beliefs and practices while keeping your "home" beliefs and practices? Is this even possible, or are people who try such things fooling themselves? Are such meldings doomed to failure? Why or why not? What do you think of Ann Redding? Is she brave? Misguided? Onto something?

Comments welcome.


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ayup

In the end, not even Japan lifted a finger against the North Korean rocket, which has launched. You gotta love appeasement. Shame on all of us for allowing this regime to continue doing what it does to its own people and to the world.

"I urge North Korea to abide fully by the resolutions of the U.N. Security Council," Obama said in Prague, Czech Republic, calling on Pyongyang to refrain from further "provocative" actions.

This is a joke, right? North Korea has already violated at least two UN Security Council resolutions (see here and here). It will continue to make demands and give nothing in return. At the very least, we should contemplate closing off all diplomatic and trade/aid relations with the country. When will we learn that the best way to deal with a spoiled, potentially dangerous child is through firm discipline, quickly, consistently, and judiciously applied? If "Go to your room!" doesn't work, ready the leather belt. The country obviously isn't ready to reason with the world, so speak to it in the language it understands. We've been patient since 1953.

I give North Korea full marks for playing us all for fools. We are fools, and the starving, oppressed North Korean population continues to pay for our foolishness.


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NERF GUNS!

I want numbers 5, 6, and 8. And lots of ammo.


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death on the brain

I think it's fair to say that we are all stunned by the latest massacre to hit our shores, this time courtesy a disgruntled Vietnamese immigrant who had just lost his job. April 4 also marks the 41st anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, an event that still echoes strongly in the American consciousness because of what King preached and represented. In him, the messenger and the message were one.

King was a powerful speaker and an eloquent writer; his "I Have a Dream" speech can still bring tears to one's eyes; it enunciates a dream that resonates not only with the native downtrodden but also with the immigrants who come to America in search of a better existence: for people to be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I'd like to think that racism didn't play a role in whatever set Jiverly Voong (or Wong) off, though even if racism fueled his crime, he remains fully culpable for choosing to do what he did. I hope that we, as a country, will nurture the idea that character, effort, and merit count for more than color, and learn to put color-- race, ethnicity, local culture-- in its rightful place, for the sake of our children and for the Jiverly Voongs among us.

So we've got death on the brain this Saturday. I don't know what your thoughts on the afterlife are, but personally, I'm not counting on there being one, nor do I think there'll be some final judgment. But whether you subscribe to those ideas or not, I think we can all agree that every instant is precious because it's unique, which makes it imperative that we live each moment deeply and fully, because it'll never come again.

There used to be a minister at Geumho Presbyterian Church in downtown Seoul-- a small church that some of my relatives attend. The minister passed away years ago, but I heard many of his sermons in the 90s, probably understanding only a tenth of what he was saying. There was, however, one phrase that was repeated over and over, and I think it's a good phrase no matter where you fall on the spectrum of religious belief/nonbelief: yeollin maeum-euro, gippeun maeum-euro, sarang-haneun maeum euro...

With an open heart...
With a joyful heart...
With a loving heart...

Something to remember as we contemplate death as a nation and a world. As a mantra for how to live, it's hard to beat.


UPDATE: Charles has written a post that offers some potentially related insights about the good that people can accomplish together.


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