Author: JenniferFitz

Conscience Protection Protects Everyone

Rebecca Hamilton reports on the AZ bill allowing businesses to refuse customers based on religious grounds.  I haven’t seen the bill either, so I don’t have an opinion on whether it is a good one. But the idea — that a person should not be required to do something they think is wrong — I like that idea.

Some people would go so far as to say it’s such a good idea it ought to be in our Constitution.

***

The trouble we’re having with these laws is that no one is testing the courts in all the possible directions.  What we need to do is start an onslaught on the printing companies.

  • Find a printing press owned by an ardently pro-choice feminist.  Place an order for bunches of anti-abortion propaganda.
  • Find a printing press owned by an openly gay couple.  Place an order for bunches of pro-traditional-marriage tracts.

When the tables are turned: Shouldn’t the business owner have the right to decline?  I think so.  I think it so profoundly that I’m not sure I could bring myself to place the test-order.  Who would do that?  If you care about someone, would you really put them in that position?

If I did it accidentally, I’d apologize and quietly take my business elsewhere.  What kind of person *wants* to make another person miserable?  Not me.

This decency is killing us. We’re too nice for own good, and we have an empty slate of court cases to prove it. Because the “anti-discrimination” cases are all running in a single direction, today, everyone thinks that “conscience protection” is all about right wing religious extremists wanting to discriminate against innocents.

No.  Just no.  Conscience protection is about everyone being free to refrain from actions that violate their conscience.

***

The one trouble with conscience protection is that it eventually reaches a wall.  As a society we have a fundamental morality, a firm set of non-negotiable beliefs.  Americans believe (rightly) that discrimination based on race is wrong. It’s a non-negotiable.  If you want to have a business that serves the general public, you can’t pick your clients based on race.  That is a fundamental moral law that Americans have (rightly) adopted.

The battle in our courts and in our legistures right now is not, therefore, fundamentally about “freedom of belief”.  If we truly thought that people were free to have any number of opinions about abortion, or contraception, or the nature of marriage, we would not have these cases. The Bill of Rights would suffice, end of story.

What is being fought, now, is a battle over what our national morality will be.  “You must believe that contraception is morally acceptable.”  That’s what’s at stake. “You must believe that marriage is not the sole province of one man and one woman.”  That’s what’s being fought.

This is evil.

 

No-motion, slow-motion, and . . .

. . . I dunno. Fill in your own rhyme.

Rebecca Hamilton writes here about the importance, to your health, of not sitting around.  She mentions the research, and also her personal experience with RA that bears it out.  The clincher in the health news: It’s not about just the “exercise” component of your day, where you are doing something all active-like and you count it as physical fitness.  Think of that “30 Minutes 5 Days a Week”, or whatever the source of your choice has been telling you over the past couple decades.

What also matters is how you spend the many hours of the day when you aren’t “exercising”.  (Hint: Writing as a career is hazardous to your health. So is accounting.  Rearing children, in contrast, offers very many health benefits, and not just for keeping vocal chords warm.)

Now I never doubted this.  In fact I was rather depending on Putting Away Laundry as a health-preserving scheme.  But interestingly, the vexing illness has given me some powerful evidence on the biological difference between Sitting Around and Not Sitting around, but from the other side of the coin.

First let’s review Life as Normal People Know It.  Call it Jen’s Life in January 2014:

  1. Sitting around = feels like no effort.  Big surprise.
  2. Pottering about = feels like no effort.  As it should be.
  3. Going for a pleasant walk = um, pleasant.  No big deal.  Good for you.  As it should be.
  4. Going for a brisk walk = exercise.  Not that intense, but it counts, right?
  5. Throw in some big hills,  some running, or switch it out and do some strength training = Exercise exercise.
  6. Sprint, haul really heavy things around the yard fast, etc. = intense effort.  Enjoyable.

The thing is, if you’re a healthy person, #1-3 feel about the same.  You’d be bored if you *just* sat, but if your brain is engaged in something, you don’t particularly notice that your body is doing something radically different in #1 than it is in #2 or #3.

Ha!  Let me tell you, is it ever.

Here’s my new scale, call it the February 2014 Vexing Illness Scale:

  1. Sitting or laying reclined, body fully supported, such as in a Lazy Boy: No effort.  Can do that awake all day and half the night –> Insomnia inducing, it takes so little effort, even for the vexingly ill person.
  2. Sitting upright but in a pretty good chair: No problem if rested, palpable effort if tired.
  3. Sitting up, unsupported (bench, stool, etc.): No problem if really really rested, no-go if tired.
  4. Pottering about — walking at Wedding Procession Pace: No problem if rested; if tired, induces desperate desire to go lay down and shut eyes ASAP.
  5. Walking normally: Bad idea.  Feels great at first, but the coughing kicks in after a bit, and you pay for it later.  For hours.
  6. Walking briskly: Just no.  Just. No.

Note that #1-5 *all feel about the same* to a normal person.  You probably aren’t aware that your body is working noticeably more if it’s sitting on one of these instead of one one of these.  I am here to tell you: Yes! There is a big difference!

And pottering about the garden, or dusting the nick-knacks?  Adds another level.  Fetching the mail, feeding the cat, sweeping the kitchen, wandering down to the playground . . . your body is doing something radically, radically different than what it does while sitting on the couch watching TV.

 

****

Anyway, in happy news, I figured out that if I’m walking like a normal person, I have to just stop, pretend there’s a wedding director giving me the evil eye, and resume at processional-pace.  So far it works, anyway.

****

Note: Any inference on your part that I actually dust nick-knacks is your own fault. That was a purely hypothetical example.

 

 

The Up-Down Lifestyle

In the past 24 hours I’ve . . .

  1. Learned how to play pick-up sticks.
  2. Lost all my Words with Friends games.  Literally and figuratively literally.  I can’t find the link anymore.  Facebook Fail.
  3. Discovered that I score just as well at Mancala if I randomly pick a handful of stones when it’s my turn, while checking e-mail, as I do if I concentrate and try to win.  Only I enjoy it much more.
  4. Did Mrs. Darwin’s Immediate Book Meme.  Answers posted at the blorg bookshelf.
  5. Figured out that I have no clue how to pace myself.

#5 We’ve always known, haven’t we?  It’s just more dramatic now. I’m thrilled to be off the mandatory complete rest thing, because: Insomnia.  But what seems to me like a very light activity level really isn’t.  Serious intervals-action going on: When I’m up, I’m more up than I’ve been in ten days.  But a couple hours of acting vaguely like a normal person, and I’m completely wiped out. Brain. Body. All of it gone.

I’m sure such a thing as a ‘happy medium’ exists.  I’ve never actually experienced it, but I’ve heard about it.  Okay, strictly speaking I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s mythical.

Time to Order Chocoloate

PSA: My son reminds all you southern-North-American-types that it is time to make your last chocolate order before melting-season is upon us. Don’t let nasty corn-syrup laden, blood-tinged bunnies into your Easter basket.  Invest now, multiply your Lenten penances by not eating the peanut butter chocolate bars until Easter Sunday (goes great with bacon!), and get a minute out of purgatory for every dollar you spend  invest in duct tape for an assist when the flesh is weak.

Seriously.  The Equal Exchange folks put out good stuff.  You can set up an individual or a wholesale account (different pricing, but a higher threshold for free shipping if you order wholesale), and yes your private buying co-op of just you and your friends / family qualifies for the wholesale rate, if you do in fact eat that much chocolate among yourselves.  Feel free to link to other fair-trade suppliers in the combox.

***

Speaking of chocolate, for those who are following the vexing situation, here’s today’s FB update:

Details from yesterday, per Jon — not a lot to add, but some good spin. TEE was looking (in particular) for evidence of shunt in my atrial septum, which it did not find, nor anything else suspicious. Let us pause right now to observe that Dr. W *came in on a vacation day* to do that. Serious point-accumulation there.

–> Afterwards, he said that he sometimes runs into this — patients with definite symptoms but no obvious explanation for them. Sometimes it clears up on its own. (ER Doc pointed out last weekend that sometimes the tests don’t come back positive for a while after the symptoms show, too.)

And since we’ve ruled out everything imminently life-threatening, he proposes we take 10 days to attempt “rehab”, that is, Jen-directed gradual increase in activity level, and see how things go.

If symptoms persist, the next thing to do is refer me out to someone who investigates really nutso inexplicable stuff.

Day 1 Rehab report: Um, yeah.  Anyway.  It’s nice to be allowed to do stuff.  We’re a long, long ways from walking and talking on the phone at the same time, kids.  But I’m allowed to clean my desk, not a moment too soon.  You who are waiting on paper-based correspondence from me, there’s a light at the back of that cave.

Time for a New Novena: What’s Vexing You?

The Nine Annoying Things novena has been very successful, but we need to take it up a notch.  TEE was normal (for me – nothing there that should be causing my problems, I’m told), and we’re waiting to hear back on the labs measuring arterial blood gases.  Follow-up appointment is on the 26th, so that gives you a perfect nine days of vexation between now and then. 

Because this situation is more and more vexing by the moment.

Which means we need to invoke: Mary Untier of Knots.  (Warning: If you click the link, it plays music.  Turn your volume down first.  I just went with the first link I found.  Sorry guys. St. Google could help you find a different link if you aren’t already familiar with this particular devotion.)

Advanced pray-ers, have at with rosaries and chaplets and everything else in your arsenal.  Junior team, here’s how the Nine Vexations work:

  • Identify something vexing. An unsolvable problem.  A thorny situation.  Anything that’s too big for you.
  • Invoke the help of Mary Untier of Knots for your cause, and offer up your vexation for mine.  She’s Mary. She can help more than one person at a time.
  • Repeat nine times.  If your life is vexatious, you might have nine different vexations.  If your life is particularly tranquil, you might just have to pray nine times over for someone else’s vexation.  Any kind of mathematical arrangement is fine, and in any case it isn’t a math quiz.
  • Just like the Nine Annoying Things, you’re allowed to offer up your vexations retroactively.  We don’t do scrupling around this castle.

Thanks everyone!  I haven’t dropped dead and I’m still sane, mostly, so we know your prayers are being heard.

Sinful People Wanted.

It’s the 16th so that means I’ve got Gospel Reflecting Duty at CatholicMom.com.   I submitted this back in January, and frankly this morning as I was reading the Gospel, I found myself wondering, I wonder what I wrote about this?  Nothing I’m thinking of, or that I’ve read around online in various homily-blogs, is what *I* wrote, but I can’t remember what exactly I wrote.

So looked.  Just now.  Hey, I remember that!  Oh yeah!  And I think I did good, too. 

But you can verify.

On Faith: Sticking the Corners

The other day I compared the infernal Circle of Pulmonology to bicycle racing, and intentionally communicated one thing — pulmonologists, take care of your immortal souls!, or something like that — and realized I’d also let slip another: I was not a particularly *good* cyclist.  But I liked it.  And so, as with most things I like, I managed to get myself firmly into the middle of the pack by sheer enthusiasm and willpower.

I was so reliably middle-of-the-pack on the road bike that you could literally count the size of the women’s field for the day’s race, divide by two, and know what place I’d come in.  I placed 6th overall one year in the NC-SC State Championship Road Race because 12 women entered.  I medaled — bronze — for SC, because of the field of 12, six were from SC.  It always, always worked that way. Except one time.

The one time was a criterium in downtown Greenville. In a crit, you go round and round a short circuit for a lot of laps.  A typical ladies’ crit would take about half an hour, max, and because the course is short, in a small field of women at a local race, the pack tends to stay tight.  All of us average riders would just hang on and suck wheel, and the better ladies would pull us long grudgingly because they couldn’t quite breakaway. The race would be won at the sprint.

So this course in Greenville was unusually hilly, and the last corner was nuts, as road cyclists see it.  You descended fast, took a sharp left, and then sprinted back up hill again. The finish line was right at the top as you came out of that corner.  Without the corner, the sprint would have begun at the top of the downhill — pick up as much momentum as possible, to get you back up that last hill and over the line.

But because of that corner, you could only go as fast on the downhill as you were willing to move through that corner.  The course was clean enough — no debris or gravel or anything — but too much speed and you’d wipe out on that last turn.  And if you don’t make the turn, the faster you’re going, the worse the crash is going to be.

So Jon and a friend and I rode the course together before the race.  Big question: How fast can you take that turn?  Pretty fast, as it happens. I mountain biked before I road biked, so my bike handling skills were good.  Rock climbing + rugby + scary exposed gravely mountain biking with nutso turns . . . these things prepare you for a crit. Which is something of a combination of all three, accelerated.

And thus a strategy emerged: Sit in the pack for the race, and see how the other ladies take that corner.  And if they’re slow . . . go wide and get ahead of the pack on that final downhill, scream through that turn, and be back up the hill again.

But you can’t waffle.  Once you go wide, you’re committed.  The only way out is through that corner. Period.

This is what faith is.  Sticking that corner.  You know how it’s supposed to go. Everything up until this point in your life has given you reason to believe it’s going to work.  Maybe it’s a stretch, or maybe you’ve got good solid evidence.  But you won’t really know until it’s done. Until you’ve turned that corner, you haven’t turned that corner.

So we got into the bell lap. I hung in the pack, but worked my way forward a bit.  When we got to the top of the last downhill, I went wide and picked up speed.  No one else followed.  You feel a lot crazy when you do something that *should* be the obvious strategy, and no one else follows.

By the time I reached the bottom of the hill with the sharp left, I was all by myself.  No one was on my wheel.  No one was even close.

The only way out is through that corner. Or else through the crowd + signs + buildings. Nice big crowd down there, because everyone always gathers where the crash is going to be.

What do you do?  You stick that corner.

Do it like you mean it, and find out if you were right.

So that’s what I did.

And I’m not dead or anything, so it worked.

Jesus and the Laundry Fairy

Two weeks ago I was still ostensibly the person responsible for doing laundry, though I’ll allow that a party of alpinists had contacted us about permits for ascending Mt. Foldmore.  But let’s harken back to the days of old, when it sometimes happened that a person could toss his clothes into the laundry hamper, and a few days later find those clothes clean, and folded, and waiting in the drawer or closet for their next use.

There’s was something of cycle to it, though, and often the sock and underwear drawers would get perilously empty.  And then one day, just when things had gotten very grim, a certain SuperHusband would wake up and discover his drawers were restocked, and he would proclaim, “Behold! The Laundry Fairy has come!”

And I would remind him that there is no Laundry Fairy. That was your wife who did that for you, thank you very much.

***

This morning’s Gospel is one of those miraculous feedings of the crowds.  (Mark 8:1-10).  What caught my eye today wasn’t the Jesus part, it was the people part.  Our Lord observes, “They’ve been with me three days now, and have nothing to eat.  If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will collapse on the way, for they have come a great distance.”  The disciples up the stakes: “Where can anyone get enough bread to satisfy them, here in this deserted place?”

Those are the miracle conditions.  You’ve stuck around with the Jesus Person until you’ve run out of food and have no way of getting more.  You didn’t bail even as you approached the point of no return.

You’ve let yourself get desperate.  Empty-handed.  No way to make it on your own.

–> There’s an aid to faith here, by the way, if you can stick through the tempting part, the getting-out-while-you-still-can.  Once your case is hopeless, there’s really not much point in trying to turn elsewhere.  Makes it easier to stick the final corners.

And that’s when the miracle shows up.  Not before.  If there’s something consistent in the Gospels, it’s that desperation.  Joyful, hopeful?  Sometimes, yes.  But unequivocal: Jesus isn’t one more tool in the portfolio. It’s got to come down to Him being the only way.

(And yeah: You’re left as your only hope with Someone who’s idea of goodness involves self-sacrifice and an eternal outside-of-time-frame.  If what you want is a patched-up Old Earth, you’re fresh out of luck.  That’s not what He does.  Not how He does it.)

Of course God sends us thousands of natural helps every day as well.  Our very existence — in this life or the next one — is only by virtue of Him keeping us here.  But either way, whether in the day-to-day miracle of ordinary life, or the big moments of divine intervention on this side of the grave or the other, there’s a consistent theme: No Laundry Fairy.  That was Me, thank you very much.

****

Back to practical stuff: SuperHusband’s taken over the mom-jobs like groceries and meals and laundry, but in a pared-back way that makes it not so overwhelming.  Our friends and family are totally showing up to do all the extras, like getting kids to activities, or whipping out dinner when we’re way late getting home from doctors appointments. I had three different people offer to step in and get the girls their valentine supplies. All that makes the load on Jon much, much lighter.

But something specifically laundry-related that we did was to give me a basket in the bedroom where my clean laundry lives. So no one ever has to put my laundry away in drawers and closets, only to have to pull it back out again. The nice thing about my particular state of decrepitude is that it isn’t fashion-intensive*. A pair of jeans to wear and one to wash.  Ditto on PJ’s.  Underwear, socks, a pile of t-shirts, a jacket.  That’s it.  You can store all that in a single laundry basket, no problem. None of it really needs to be ironed.  Works great.

*In contrast, in normal life on any given day I might have:

  • Work clothes for doing stuff in the yard
  • Normal less-grungy clothes
  • Church clothes
  • Possibly something business-y, or business-casual.
  • Usually not workout clothes, because normal stuff works for that, but maybe yes, depending.

Completely different game.

And as long as we’re playing the gratitude game, you know whom I really appreciate? The people who’ve picked up slack for me on stuff I could do, but they could do instead.  It is remarkable how much fortitude gets consumed on accomplishing very very little.  I’m massively thankful for the slack I’ve been cut in a few places.  Pure luxury.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Ruled out pulmonary embolisms — none of those.  That’s always nice.  Echo looked . . . okay.  As in, nothing there, on the face of it, that ought to be causing anything this dramatic.  TEE on Monday to confirm that.

Summary of conversation with cardiologist:

Dr: “Well, it looks like you’re fine then . . .”

US: “Not Fine!”

Dr.: “Stable, anyway . . .”

US: “Um, no, not exactly . . .”

Dr.: “Well, I don’t see anything that could be causing this . . .”

US: “So there’s nothing else that could be causing these symptoms?”

Dr.:”Well, nothing common.”

US: “Something rare?”

Dr.: “Oh, I’m sure.  Lots of rare things.”

***

So Monday we test his knowledge of rare things.

 

(BTW: I like this guy.  I asked for dogged, and he seemed willing to be that.)

And some Valentines . . .

Sticking to the Sts. Cyril & Methodius theme:

At the blorg, I get into that “What’s the point of religious ed?” debate again.  On Catechesis: Love and Common Sense.

And at AC, I send a Valentine to a lady who needs your prayers, and also my husband in the process. Marriage Only Has Meaning if It’s a Lifelong Commitment.

Many happy returns of the day!