Places I Grew Up: Homeschool Co-Op

For a while we were part of a community of homeschooling families named MACHE for Mountain Area Christian Home Educators that met a nearby church. It looks almost like I remember, except for the fence and fewer trees.

When we had band lessons under Bart, we would come here one day a week and then a place in town on another. We would assemble our instruments in the foyer behind the auditorium, where we would practice, left in the image. I started with the clarinet and Andrew with the flute. We had had some exposure to reading sheet music before, I think, but for me this really solidified reading treble music. (Later, I would take piano under Mary and solidify reading bass.)

I don't know how much I knew about the clarinet when I started. (We used to watch Boston Pops, and in one of our unit studies Mom made a poster of an orchestra with circle stickers to represent the seats and different colors for instrument classes like woodwinds.) I'd probably play every instrument invented if I could. At one point I wanted to learn drums. I think I remember meeting Bart about me playing brass, which was his forte (pun intended!), but we thought my asthma would be a problem. 

Dad had played trumpet in his high school's marching band. He has lots of trumpet albums (Maynard Ferguson, Herb Alpert, etc.), a few recent ones I think from my grandmother Celeste. And some synthesizer ones too, like Isao Tomita. We had a synth (Roland I think) that Andrew and I liked to play, especially later. Mom had played flute and guitar. Andrew and Matthew would later go on to learn guitar from a teacher up in the mountains named Don. I think before that, Matthew and Haley learned trumpet and flute in town from Bart's son.

It's probably for the best that I landed on something quieter than drums or brass. Clarinet also put me in a good position to later play alto sax. Saxophone interludes are still one of my favorite things about 80s music!

One clarinet I used I borrowed from a family who also played in the band. There was tape on the bell and sometimes it would fall off. A little embarrassing to have that kind of attention from the whole class. There are life lessons there, though. I got another one later, still have it. Wonder if it still works. (Wonder if I should get new reeds before I try. 20 year old spit! 😶)

If I remember correctly the same family helped drive us to band when Matthew had heart surgery. The mom had beads that spelled her name on her keychain. Don't remember much of our conversation except that I mispronounced a word -- I learned dressage is more like massage than message. I learn new languages to avoid making that kind of faux pas. (But please don't ask me to say that out loud; haven't learned French yet. 😉) Edit: Reword and add note, because I don't think this did justice to how very kind not just she and her family were but also everyone was during that time. We had a lot of help, and I'm very thankful for all of it. 

Band is what I remember most here, but there were other things as well. We attended a production of Pilgrim's Progress here. Some things we tried a couple of times: a 4-H group, a bell choir. One of our more regular ones was a chess club. I don't win at chess much, so one game when I was ahead I started taking out every opposing piece I could to clinch the win. It was a stalemate. 😬

We took standardized tests here. One time I finished a test early and drew a koala eating tapioca on scratch paper we were given. (It made sense at the time.) The proctor made my day by complimenting me on spelling tapioca correctly. 

When I was young, I made the best painting in my life so far at that building. (Not saying much! 😛 Art's not my strong suit.) It was a mountain scene that reminded me of one my grandmother Judy painted. She showed us that mountain once when visiting her mother, my great-grandmother Lillian (a.k.a. Granny; we call her by the same name Mom does!), in El Paso. 

One time I was making biscuits but I forgot to take them out of the oven when we had a class. Worse, I didn't realize until we were on our way back, when I told Mom. We worried that I burned the house down! Fortunately it was a short drive and we found only very well-cooked (re: charred) biscuits.

Mom taught creative writing and bookmaking. I made a book of poems and a murder mystery based off the comedy "Murder by Death." They're not as good as I remembered. One part in the beginning of Gotta Clue made me chuckle like a book I found after college, John Swartzwelder's "The Time Machine Did It," which I highly recommend. Also, the poems about pets are nice. (One of my chores was to take care of our pets.)

Places I Grew Up: Library

Libraries, books, and reading were big parts of our education. Mom taught us to read with a book called 100 Easy Lessons. Think the incentive for me to finish was a trip to Planet Fun, which Andrew had gotten me pumped over when he told me about a slide where you went so fast you almost flew into a ball pit. (Incidentally, I've always associated Planet Fun with Pizza Planet from Toy Story.) It may have been a book still when I was using it, but we eventually turned it into a 3-ring binder. This was its cover:

Andrew was also a big influence in teaching me to read. For fun, we'd read his Boys' Life magazines and comics like Calvin and Hobbes. Dad too would read the Bible to us while we drew pictures on the den floor. One time I drew an armored knight -- think Dad was reading Ephesians 6 that evening! -- and we fastened his arms and legs together with brads. He'd also read things to us kids before bed like Dr Seuss.

When I was very little, we'd go to the Lomas/Tramway library in town, which had a gorilla made from tires in its courtyard. Later, we would drive past the library in Tijeras on our way home from town to watch its progress as it was being built. (Its Facebook page says it was finished in October 1994.) I think I remember us being there for the Grand Opening, which would make sense given how excited we were about it.

We also watched Cherry Hills Library go up, since it's over by Mom's parents' house. (Its Facebook page says that was 1998.) 

For the longest time, Tuesday was our library day. Especially when we were car schooling we would stop by on our way to or from town. We were very active in the summer reading program. We often took (and take!) books everywhere we went because reading was something to do in downtime: in waiting areas, while our siblings were taking classes, on road trips and vacations. 

We got to where we could read in moving vehicles, even on rough roads! I would entertain -- I hope I was entertaining! 😛 -- other passengers by reading aloud strips I thought were funny from Garfield books I borrowed from the library. Think all the kids borrowed Garfield books. (Coincidentally, Mom's dad Don and Haley share the same birthday as Garfield artist Jim Davis. And the day after is Mom's mom Judy's birthday.)

Even when we were going to the library weekly, we would sometimes each get many books. We used to have a communal blue plastic basket like you might use for laundry filled with the weekly haul. Although we did also keep books in our rooms. Because we'd also be asking for holds on books from other branches, Mom joked we were good for the library's book circulation. 

We all kind of had genres we liked to choose from. 

Dad has always been mystery (detectives like Morse, Poirot, Dalgliesh, etc.) and thrillers like Clancy and Cussler. He and Matthew read Ted Dekker's Odd series, and he and I read John Grisham.

Mom would do whatever our unit study was at the time (Ancient Egypt, Wild West, etc.), productivity books, and things like best-sellers for beach reading. Everyone had genres they liked, but Mom and I are probably the most discursive. I didn't read a lot of sci-fi, but I read some, and I think she's the same way. Think my liking for zany fiction comes from her, because she liked Ramona the Great, Steven Kellogg, and Junie B. Jones.

Andrew liked sci-fi/fantasy like Dune and spooky stuff like Goosebumps, which he would pass on to me and I also liked -- think we may have been limited to one per person per trip to limit nightmares... and also to encourage a little more variety in our reading 😉 -- and Stephen King.

I liked Encyclopedia Brown, zany fiction (like the Bailey School Kids series or Judy Blume's Fudge books), comics, classics (one series had books like Edgar Allen Poe and The House of the Seven Gables in comic book form), and non-fiction. 

Matthew, our Trekkie, was also sci-fi/fantasy, reading Star Trek books by Shatner and Nimoy. I think once or twice he found Dr Who books too. Tom Baker and K-9 were his favorite. He once knit a long Tom Baker scarf and gave it to Dad, and I think he also made a cardboard K-9. He and Haley were big fans of the PBS morning lineup and would check out the Arthur books frequently. Recently he's also been reading classics like 20,000 Leagues and Moby Dick.

Haley went through a stage where she read a lot of Mary Kate and Ashley books. (Think she probably wondered what it would be like to have a sister.) As they grew up, she and Matthew both got into Mangas. One she lent me to read a few years ago was One Piece -- not much into Mangas myself but that was a really fun book!

Just by being there so much, we got to know some of the librarians pretty well. One in particular was Michele, whom I remember being at the children's center desk and who we talked to about summer reading. 

One time while checking out a nonfiction children's book by Asimov (part of his Library of the Universe Series?) I got in a conversation with a librarian about him. I knew little about him or the subject matter. But I'd skimmed the book, and there was a drawing of him on it and I thought he looked smart, so I told her he was a genius. Probably the truest yet most uninformed thing I've ever said! 🙂

When Mom needed to clean house when we were little, a lot of times we would help, but sometimes we would go outside to play. (Sometimes she may have just needed time away from us rapscallions.😉) By legend, Andrew and I would sneak (library?) books out there around our waists under our shirts. Swings and slides and dogs are fun, but books are too!

When LOTR was in theaters, Andrew and I made a board game like Trivial Pursuit about it for an event at the library. Seems like we met a fellow student named Forrest from Karate at that event too. Somewhere I've got a bunch of bookmarks from the library around then of the movie's characters (can edit if I find them). Here's one:

We also found some work through the library. One of Andrew's first jobs was as a page at our local library. And when he went to live with Dad's mom Celeste in Texas, he worked in a library over there too. (Celeste also got us, especially Matthew, into Hank the Cowdog books on tape, which she would borrow from the library and play in her car while traveling.) I volunteered at the library when I was not at school. And when I was at NMT and UNM, it wasn't unusual to find me in the library.

We got hit a little hard by fines when we moved to Virginia. Weren't used to them. Our libraries in NM have a very generous policy about renewals and late books. (One library book that I'd swear we had for years was Stranger with My Face -- we got so many library books they'd sometimes get mixed up with our own, but they'd still have a barcode or big orange sticker showing they were the library's!) The selection of books in VA, though, was top-notch. I found a receipt the other day of books I borrowed, and it was stuff I'd forgotten all about until I rediscovered after school, books by Peter Singer and Dostoevsky for example. 

The library has been in many ways our home away from home. I still visit, not as much as I used to, but I also still have fond memories of libraries and the books and folks that we found inside them.

Places I Grew Up: Karate Dojo

I grew up east of Albuquerque, NM, on the other side of the Sandia mountains, between Tijeras and Edgewood. When I was very young we lived in the city, but about the time my brother Matthew was born we moved up the canyon to about 2000 ft higher elevation than ABQ itself (about 5000 ft), which can make a difference with some recipes. 😄

I was homeschooled up through high school. I'm told that we started with my older brother Andrew, who had some difficulties in early education. Since Mom was a teacher she suggested that she could teach us instead. When Andrew did better and I was doing ok too, we decided to continue. There were times when Mom would say the rest of us never set foot inside a real school.

How we were educated changed over time. Early on we would meet with nearby families and a co-op. Later we would almost "car-school," driving from teacher to teacher. That was a lot of work! So after that we had a phase where we were almost entirely schooled at home, although church was another resource; this thread was always present in our education, but for a time we focused on it primarily. And then we were introduced to public education through community colleges. (When we moved to VA when I was in high school, we had some opportunities that were like co-ops and car-schooling.)

When we were car-schooling in NM, one of the activities for us three boys was karate. If we were out shopping and in our ghis (uniforms), Mom would sometimes observe that we looked like bodyguards around our sister Haley. There was a dojo in Cedar Crest, which was at this plaza when we started as white belts. (We moved locations, so it's another place now.) Seems like we upgraded our fireplace to a pellet stove through a place right next door, but that's no longer there either.

Sessions usually consisted of:

1. Bowing in (if you were late you may have needed to wait a bit for a senior member to recognize you, motivation to be on time)
2. Stretches/warm-ups
3. Techniques: the whole class would line up by rank and go back and forth the exercise space practicing one technique at a time. (For example, forward leaning stance was a lot like lunges.) We would breathe out on completion of each move, and kiai (pronounced key-eye, shout) when we reached the opposite end of the room.
4. Forms: Sequences of techniques that the whole class would perform in columns. We'd start with the forms everyone knew, bowing out when we'd exhausted our knowledge to either learn more forms from the instructor or a student with a higher belt level, or to watch stoically from the sidelines as more senior members performed higher-level forms.
5. Sparring: Usually best in one-on-one fights to 3 points. A point was gloved punches that landed on torso, maybe a penalty for blows that hit the (helmeted) head. Strangely, since I've had an interest in boxing, I wasn't as hyped up to do this as I thought I would be. 
6. Fun time: Usually aerobics like somersaults or punching, kicking, or leapfrogging over a punching bag. Our instructor, Shane, sometimes used a padded stick to indicate sequences of jumps and rolls for us to perform.
7. Recitation: Shane was careful to remind us always through echo-and-response with students enthusiastically shouting "Yes sirs" and "No sirs" that
1. Practice is important, but "perfect practice makes perfect"
2. The skills we were learning were last resort, for self-defense only, and never to harm
8. Bowing out (more senior members last, if I remember correctly)

Shane was a great teacher and role model. He could be funny: Sometimes when stretching we would sit Indian style with the soles of both feet touching, and we would stretch our backs by leaning forward, at which point Shane would ask us to breathe in deeply through our nose... and therefore smell our stinky feet. And he could be serious: There were times when horseplay and messing around were simply not allowed. 

Shane also pushed students out of their comfort zone. He coaxed one young student into learning how to say "yellow" correctly before earning the belt. For my part, I had always been a little on the lazy side with physical activity because of asthma, but he made sure I got my exercise in! But he also made sure we didn't push too hard.Seems like his father also taught karate. Shane had a ponytail and goatee, a look I've tried once or twice. (Edit: Thought he might have also given students mementos from out-of-area competitions, but not sure.)

We shared the building on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings with a Jazzercise group led by a lady named Judy. The leftmost part of the facility was for guests like parents to watch or wait to pick up the students. The gap to the left of the building in the picture had a staircase that I went down very infrequently if at all. One time a student tried sliding down the staircase's banister and got their leg stuck between it and the wall! The senior members had to help ease them out.

When we moved locations to further up the crest, we were in another plaza near a BBQ place called RIBS; Mom, Dad, and Haley (who did ballet/dance lessons instead of martial arts) would sometimes grab a bite there while they waited for us. We may have been a complex or two down from RIBS. (Seems the far left end had an aquarium, where we got betta fish.) The new building had a mirror at one end of the room so we could watch and correct our posture. The waiting area was separated from the exercise area by a windowed wall so parents could talk without breaking the class's focus.

Highest level I remember getting was brown belt. Earning a black belt was strenuous: You had to go through several kyus (represented by black tape wrapped around end of belt) with several levels to get it. Some of the black belts had red tape at the ends. Didn't learn all the ins and outs of the belt system -- some of my certificates have JG for Junior Grade (I think) but I don't know what that means -- I just knew that if you wanted to pass when testing day rolled around you gave 101%! I failed tests when I didn't do that. You had to sweat!

We also trained for competitions. There was sparring, but I don't remember doing it. I remember you walked crisply in front of judges, announced yourself and your form, and then performed it like testing day.

Martial arts has been a good influence with a positive impact on me. At NMT I took classes in Kung Fu with other strong role models. In the future I may look for ways to get involved in it again.

Local Restaurants

 Been meaning to try more local restaurants. But had trouble figuring out where to start. So when I saw a news broadcast on an app especially for ABQ, I knew I had to give it a whirl:

 And tonight I used Selflane to find Gyros Mediterranean. Wish I'd ordered something more adventurous (for me)... like lamb, which I don't know if I've had. But the Turkey Pita was really good! And the salad. I'm very partial to feta! And the patates, like a cross of potato chip and french fry.

Looking forward to doing it all over again soon!

Movember '20

 Lots of good mustaches out there. To name a few:

Bonus (a Daniel playing a Daniel with a mustache!):

They made it look so easy, I thought I could grow one too! But so far mine's more like

I've got a couple more bristles in my cookie duster, but you can see Spike's! Here's mine:

I'd heard about Movember before and took a look at it for the first time this year. Was just going to donate this time and grow a mustache in solidarity -- I joked at the office that I'd never grown a mustache by itself before, and this was the time to experiment because if it didn't look good on me I could always cover it with a mask! -- but I accidentally made an account somehow.

Then today I heard the news about Alex Trebek. When I was younger, probably about 10 or so, we had an old TV in the attic and I asked if I could have it. One of the channels that it picked up best was Channel 13, which played Jeopardy, Fridays at 6pm if I remember correctly. Used to play the computer game a fair bit too:

Haven't really decided what kind of mustache to grow yet. Trimmed it yesterday according to Civil Air Patrol guidelines ("not extend downward beyond the lip line of the upper lip or extend sideways beyond a vertical line drawn upward from both corners of the mouth"), but that looked too short. Guess I could try to grow one like Alex's. (Emphasis definitely on try.)

♪♫ I'm Dreaming of a White... Halloween

 Got some snow early this year

About a week before Halloween too

So I was cleaning because of the weather, and I finally found my copy of Seneca's On the Shortness of Life. I have been looking for it the past few weeks. I went through my bookshelves several times too. And that's where I eventually found it. But I must have missed it because it's a thin book. I've wanted to reread it because a book I'm reading called I, Claudius follows the life of Caesar Augustus (and his successors), and I remembered Seneca talking a bit about Augustus in it. I've only had it for a year or two, but it's a favorite. So I'll try to read it next.

Windy Week

A lot of wind this week. Saw a couple of trees blown over. Here's one of them.

A cold snap rolled in with it. (Thankful I had a packet of hot chocolate to spare! 🥶) Think it might have frozen this katydid. Didn't seem to be responding when I got near for the picture.

Wondering if it's the same one I saw not long ago. (I forget when, but within the last week or two.)

Interestingly, on this day in 2012, I gave another katydid a hard time about not blending in enough. (I don't see many katydids, so I was really surprised when I saw the days lined up!)

Running a Windows 95 Program on Windows 10

Today I got one of my favorite Windows 95 programs to run on Windows 10. Kind of. It's actually a Windows XP VM running on Windows 10. 

After several tries at using compatibility settings, I sat down today to see if I could get there with a virtual machine instead. 

From a How-To Geek's guide I thought my problem was a 64-bit OS trying to run a 16-bit program. So I first downloaded a 32-bit version of Windows 10. But when I got an error that rebooting didn't solve, I tried something else. (I don't know if the ISO I got was meant for VirtualBox.)

An Online Tech Tips page I visited linked to Help Desk Geek's instructions for using an XP VM, which is the solution I used. 

I did have a few other issues to resolve:

• Was using keyboard to navigate forms -- and I would've gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling taskbar popups! 🤓 (Couldn't see what I was selecting!) -- because I had trouble moving my cursor when in XP... until I read this answer about changing my VM pointing device
• Wasn't reading from my CD drive until I went into VirtualBox's Settings -> Storage and made it so an Optical Drive was pointing to my E: drive. (At first I thought it was because XP thought the drive was D:, like in this thread, but that wasn't it.)

And voila! 

The program I'm running is DesignWare's myHouse Classic Edition, for laying out blueprints/floorplans and then rendering them in 3D. Need to read up on the docs because I don't remember how to make a second room! (Although I could also use the occasion to try out some tiny house designs... 🤔)

Looking forward to walking down memory lane as I use XP some more!

My Graduation Story

I feel for the class of 2020 because of COVID-19's effect on graduations. I've been on the fence of whether or not to share my graduation story. Partly since I'm still processing it; partly since it seems trifling and avoidable compared to class of 2020's situation. I see now that I was fortunate to have had a ceremony, even if it wasn't the one I had envisioned. But I also feel some of the things I have learned may come in useful to others.

I graduated December 2014. The ceremony took place at The Pit, UNM's basketball stadium. Although I had read articles in the school paper about renaming it to Wise Pies Arena, I didn't think much of it. Not until recently did I reflect that a name like The Pit is a little dismal for such a momentous day. It's a great venue no matter what it's named, but, due to how events unfolded, "in a pit" is a fitting description of how I felt at my graduation. It felt like many things went wrong on a day I had been looking forward to for a long time.

The barber who gave me a haircut before the ceremony asked me if it was for some occasion. I don't know why but I told him "family photos." When he asked where, (not sure why again) but I lied and blurted out the first photography shop that came to mind. Think he might have called me out on my bluff because he said he knew the owner. I must have changed the subject, because I don't recall what was said after that.

I deferred inviting people to the ceremony until the last minute because I worried about one grade in particular. It was a class I had taken at another school, NMT. When I took the final the first time, I was so distracted I left my textbook under my chair in the classroom! (I had arrived early to review the material.) I had come close to graduating from NMT in 2012, but I transferred to UNM when I didn't make the grade on those last classes. I worried I might have to retake that one class over too.

Because of the short notice, not much family was able to make it. Some had already made plans. Others were working in businesses where they could not take time off so abruptly so close to the holidays. The attendees were my parents and my mom's parents.

I planned transportation to the ceremony in a similar hurried manner. I knew I would have a lot on my mind, so I wanted to ride with someone. Mom had errands to run and Dad wanted to drive with Mom when she got back, so since I needed to be at the venue early, I drove over alone. The drive went well, but I took off my mortarboard beforehand so the tassel wouldn't distract me.

I made it to the event in good time, though crowds were starting to form. Preparations like names and seating instructions were on tables sorted by department overlooking the stadium. I had trouble finding my table in the hubbub, even after asking for directions. Seems like I found my major Mathematics at the School of Fine Arts table. (I was mostly scanning tables for my name. When I couldn't find it, I talked with the lady at my table and she fixed a name tag up for me.)

From there graduates sat on stands encircling the stadium, opposite where the audience would sit. I thought about stopping by a bathroom to adjust my mortarboard in front of a mirror. But after a quick search for one and afraid of missing something important, I decided to go directly to the stands. I saw a group of 3-4 people I knew from my math classes and thought about joining them, but decided against it because I didn't know them very well.

It was also in the stands that I got a text message from someone I'd hoped would be able to make it, apologizing for not being able to. The lady sitting next to me was friendly and seemed to pick up on my disappointment. We chatted about work and our plans for the future (hers was "Wherever the wind may take me"), but we were separated as we went down to the stadium.

The speaker was upbeat and motivational, but every time he mentioned family I thought about my relatives who weren't able to make it.

I had put my mortarboard on absentmindedly in the stands. If I'd been resourceful, I could have used my phone camera as a mirror. Or even easier, I could have asked the lady sitting next to me. As it was, my cap was on crooked when I made the walk. A fellow on the sidelines pulled at my tassel to try to fix it, but I smiled at him goofily, thinking he was horsing around, and he gave up, probably thinking that's the way I'd wanted the hat to be.

When I'd imagined graduating, I pictured pumping my diploma or holding it over my head. The diploma itself came later in the mail, but I don't remember if I had the folder it would go into during the ceremony. 

As far as I know, these sample photos are the only pictures of my graduation. (It was getting late when the ceremony was over, and I left as soon as it finished to stay ahead of the crowds.) I showed them to my mom's mom, but I don't know if she ordered any. I kept the gown and hat with the intention of taking more photos, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

My younger brother felt bad about missing the ceremony and as a present gave me Bruce Lee movies, which we watched together on Netflix while I was finishing up my degree. I don't think I had known that Mom made it to the ceremony until she talked to me about it right after. (If I remember correctly, she was still on errands when Dad drove over.)

When people (at work, especially) would ask if I graduated, I would answer with vagaries like "I think so" or "I'm not sure." I couldn't believe that it was over! It had happened! Seems like the last grade hadn't come in until after the ceremony, and I had hoped that it would be a failing grade, so I could do it all over, now that I knew what to expect. I felt the way Abraham must have felt in Chariots of Fire when he said, "I'm almost afraid to win."

It was upsetting that things didn't go as I had planned or hoped. Some things that helped me come to terms with it:

• Things going wrong can reveal our true priorities to us. A graduation ceremony didn't mean as much to me if there weren't friends or family there to share it with. How am I to get the outcome I want if I don't have the right priorities?
• The ceremony was the means, an inspiration or driver to the end. But I also received a good education, which was the end itself

"I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so people are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them." -- Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 (NIV)

"There is a scene in Arthur Miller's play Incident at Vichy in which an upper-middle-class professional man appears before the Nazi authority that has occupied his town and shows his credentials: his university degrees, his letters of reference from prominent citizens, and so on. The Nazi asks him, 'Is that everything you have?' The man nods. The Nazi throws it all in the wastebasket and tells him: 'Good, now you have nothing.' The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed. Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond." -- Harold S. Kushner in his Foreward to "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl

"For Stilbo, after his country was captured and his children and his wife lost, as he emerged from the general desolation alone and yet happy, spoke as follows to Demetrius, called Sacker of Cities because of the destruction he brought upon them, in answer to the question whether he had lost anything: 'I have all my goods with me!' There is a brave and stout-hearted man for you! The enemy conquered, but Stilbo conquered his conqueror. 'I have lost nothing!' Aye, he forced Demetrius to wonder whether he himself had conquered after all. 'My goods are all with me!' In other words, he deemed nothing that might be taken from him to be a good. We marvel at certain animals because they can pass through fire and suffer no bodily harm; but how much more marvelous is a man who has marched forth unhurt and unscathed through fire and sword and devastation! Do you understand now how much easier it is to conquer a whole tribe than to conquer one man?" Seneca, "Letter IX: On Philosophy and Friendship," Letters from a Stoic

"'Why do you complain to [God] that he answers none of man's words? For God does speak -- now one way, now another -- though man may not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn man from wrongdoing and keep him from pride, to preserve his soul from the pit, his life from perishing by the sword....'" -- Job 33:13-18

 

Problem of Evil

"I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not. I want to find out why evil exists. I want to know whether I have an immortal soul or whether when I die it's the end." 

-- Larry Darrell, "The Razor's Edge" by W. Somerset Maugham

Been thinking about this topic for a while. Here are some of the materials I've been going over:

• Miserable Comforters by Timothy Keller
• My Servant Job by Timothy Keller
• The Book of Job
• Job (The Expositor's Bible Commentary) by Elmer B. Smick
• Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
• World Views and Values: Boethuis, Consolation of Philosophy by Dr. Gregory B. Sadler
• Suffering: If God is good, why is there so much suffering in the world? by Timothy Keller

Though not as strongly related, I feel a few of the Oscar movies I've watched this year (like Amadeus and All the King's Men) explore the problem as well. 

Some things that reminded me of Job in particular:

• "Sorrow" by Bad Religion
• Wild America with Marty Stouffer (especially Job 39)

I am eyeing C. S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain for when I finish Boethius.