rivka

acceberskoorb passed on a link she received from our church's new interim minister, Rev. Lyn Oglesby. It's to a typically brilliant Orcinus essay. I'm going to quote extensively, but I encourage you - and especially the UUs among you - to read the whole thing.

We are an odd group, we Unitarians.

Conventional wisdom says that we're soft in all the places our society values toughness. Our refusal to adhere to any dogma must mean that we're soft in our convictions. Our reflexive open-mindedness is often derided as evidence that we're soft in the head. Our persistent and gentle insistence on liberal values is evidence of hearts too soft to set boundaries. And all of this together leads to a public image of a mushy gathering of feckless intellectuals that somehow lacks cohesion, backbone, focus, or purpose.

You can only believe this if you don't know either the history or the modern reality of Unitarian Universalism. The faith's early founders, Michael Servitus and Francis David, were executed for the radical notion that belief in the Trinity -- which excluded Muslims and Jews -- should not be a requirement for participation in 16th century public life. Four hundred years later, in the same part of the world, other Unitarians died in concentration camps for having the courage of their humanist convictions. Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother from Michigan who was killed by the Klan in the days following the Selma march in 1965, was one of ours, too.

And then there are the thousands of us who lived to fight another day -- surviving not because we were weak and indecisive, but because we were unshakable in our convictions and unwilling to back down out of sheer cussedness. That Unitarian-bred belief in the nobility of the human spirit was the spiritual foundation on which a plurality of America's founders found sure footing as their convictions crystallized into revolution against tyranny. It fueled the passionate oratory of Daniel Webster, the wisdom of Ben Franklin, and the incisively clear writings of Tom Paine. It sent Paul Revere out into the cold of an April evening, and set Thomas Jefferson to the task of writing a Declaration. It recklessly bet the church's entire existence -- and the lives of its leaders, who willingly and knowingly committed a capital act of treason -- in order to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Unitarianism and Universalism lit the spark of progressive change that drove Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Julia Ward Howe to organize for women's rights. It sent Jane Addams, Dorothea Dix, Albert Schweitzer, and Clara Barton forth to bring health and hope to the poor. It gave voice to poets from Whitman to Plath to cummings, novelists from Dickens to Melville to Vonnegut, and musicians from Bartok to Grieg to Seeger. It fueled the boundless imaginations of Bucky Fuller and Rod Serling and Frank Lloyd Wright. It kept Christopher Reeve alive and breathing and working for his causes. I still hear it crackling hot and fresh every time UU-bred Keith Olbermann goes on one of his trademark rants.

These are not fearful people. Nor do any of them seem to be bedeviled by a lack of conviction. "Mushy" or "feckless" are about the last words I'd use to describe any of them. ("Stupid" isn't anywhere on the list, either.) When you sign up to become a UU, this is the legacy you take on, and from then on attempt to live up to. It's not God's job to make the world a better place. It's yours. This has never been work for the faint of heart, mind, or spirit.

I don't have anything on my schedule today, so maybe I'll catch up with my recaps? At any rate: Tuesday was quite the jam-packed day. ( Sometimes those who wander are lost... )

It's actually a good thing I'm posting this morning instead of last night. I went to bed thinking, "Was SUUSI really a good idea?" This morning I remembered: Yeah. It totally is. ( Read more... )

I went to my research assistant's funeral today. ( Read more... )

Here's the very first harvest from our courtyard garden:



Two grape tomatoes and a miniature red bell pepper. Yum.

We have a substantial crop of small green peppers waiting to ripen, and a smaller but still lovely collection of green tomatoes. And one exciting green pendulum hanging from the midget muskmelon vine. It's about the size of my fist right now; I understand that they grow to approximately softball size. I am excited.

In retrospect, I didn't have very strong pregnancy symptoms with my miscarried pregnancy. At the time I certainly felt tired and nauseated, but there's just no comparison to the way the first trimester is beating me down this time around.

It's not totally intolerable, and in fact I actually find the symptoms reassuring. I need all the evidence of pregnancy that I can get. But... it's the difference between having to be careful about what I eat and sometimes being unable to eat; between often feeling tired and often needing a nap to get through the day; between outgrowing my regular bras and outgrowing my maternity bras. (ZOMG I have outgrown my maternity bras and I'm only just entering the ninth week.)

I produced pregnancy hormones last time - enough to make a placenta, even though it had nothing to support. My pregnancy symptoms were real. But they were a shadow of what I'm experiencing now that I'm churning out enough hormones to support an inch-long fetus.

Michael had a meeting this afternoon at the UU church in Towson. I had an errand to do in the approximate vicinity, so Alex and I dropped him off, did my errand, and went back to the Towson church to wait for him. The meeting, unsurprisingly, ran late.

The Towson church has lovely grounds, including a well-maintained "nature trail" that's perhaps a quarter-mile long. Alex and I walked its length and back. There were numbered markers that presumably correlated with some kind of printed guide, but there was plenty to see even without a guide.

This evening, during her bath, I ran my soapy hands down her legs and felt a little bump behind one knee. I tried to wash it off. No luck. It was a small black circular mark.

"Michael!" I called. "Would you bring up Alex's magnifying glass, please?"

Michael took a look while I was drying Alex off. She was pretty wiggly, but he said he thought it was just a scab.

"That's a funny place to have a scab," I said. We laid her down on her stomach on the bed for a closer look. Bringing in a flashlight to aid the magnifier made it clear: she had a tick. And Maryland is a Lyme disease state.

Michael dredged up memories from a Tennessee childhood and recommended putting Vaseline on it so the tick would have to back out to breathe. I was unsure, so I dashed downstairs to ask Dr. Google, who (in the form of the American Academy of Family Physicians) informed me that Vaseline can actually cause the tick to salivate or, um, regurgitate into the victim. Not recommended. So in the end, Michael just pulled the tick straight out with tweezers, and it came away clean. I saved it in a plastic bag just in case. It was even still alive. Alex was fascinated to see it.

A few different sites assure me that ticks need to be attached for 24 hours or more to transmit Lyme disease. Michael checked the rest of her body thoroughly, and he's going to check me before bed.

Presumably, if we'd had the printed guide to the nature trail? One of those rustic numbered markers would've turned out to mean "deer ticks." Had we but known.

Michigan State biologist Richard Lenski has been following an E. Coli population for 20 years, and has produced evidence of a major evolutionary shift in response to environmental conditions.

Some puffed-up "Conservapedia" hacks decided that they were competent to take apart Lenski's conclusions, and wrote to him demanding that he release his raw data for "examination by independent reviewers."

The resulting exchange of letters is pretty entertaining. Here's my favorite bit from the exchange:

It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]

The Conservapedia talk pages are hilarious. My favorite unintentional bit of comedy: the plaintive heading on the talk archive page "Anyone a biologist?" (Answer: sadly, no.)

(Via Pandagon)

Edited to add: Wait, wait, here's another favorite bit from the talk pages: "I asked Zachary Blount to clarify his statements about whether evolution of Cit+ (citrate-eating) E. coli bacteria was a goal of the experiment. He answered by asking me to go on a wild goose chase by reading the whole paper, which has 8 pages of fine print -- this is called "bibliography bluffing." And when people balk at going on these wild goose chases, they are accused of not wanting to learn."

Man. I can't believe that charlatan Blount expected that anyone wishing to argue about the merits of a scientific paper would read all eight pages of the paper itself. Why would you set up such ludicrously rigorous standards? Only if you have something to hide...

Michael is a hero of the revolution.

He took Alex out of the house this morning so that I could sleep in. (Until 9:30!! Wow!!) And they went to the farmer's market and brought home fresh blueberries, so I could make blueberry pancakes for breakfast.

Yay, Michael.

Partway through dinner, Alex announced that she was done. I briefly tried to suggest that her tummy might not be full and she might get hungry later. She assured me that, no, she was full. So, as is our custom, I let her get down from the table to go play.

She made it out of the dining room, through the foyer, and about two steps into the living room before she burst into tears.

And came back. And leaned against my side, sobbing, "DON'T LET ME GO!"

"Don't let you go?" I put my arm around her and rubbed her back. "Do you want me to tell you that you have to stay at the table?"

She sniffed. "Yeah."

"Okay. Alex, I want you to stay at the table with Mama and Papa, even though you're done eating. Climb back into your seat."

She scrambled happily back into the booster seat. And I figured that it was probably time for the "No matter how angry I get..." conversation. (She responded happily, "And I love you even when I'm angry!", so apparently that was a useful framework for her, too.) Because all I could think of was that that strange exchange must have been about needing us to prove that we're going to hold onto her no matter what she does.

---

She definitely chafed at being restricted to the house for the rest of the day. Not at first, but when Michael came home and I went out to water and fertilize the garden without her. And then after dinner, when I decided that just because she didn't get to go to the library shouldn't mean that I missed my trip to the library. She wanted to go, I explained in a gentle but firm and matter-of-fact voice why she couldn't, and she clearly remembered, and made the connection, and was sobered by it.

She told Michael that because she had run away from me, "I can't go outside for the rest of my life." (He corrected her.) And also: "I'm not going to run away from Mama anymore. I'm only going to run with her."

So ultimately I think it all ended well. My discipline was more effective than I feared it would be, and we had a chance to re-connect emotionally and talk about our love for each other. And I brought her home some special treats from the library.