The Time Has Come

Kyle and I started a blog to post updates about our life in New Jersey. You can find it here:

http://kyleandsally.wordpress.com/

There might be pictures, or posts about what we are reading, or if you're lucky, rants about New Jersey culture. Those sorts of things have served me well on this blog. Thanks for reading, if you've read this.

Williams.

I am sitting on the couch in our OKC apartment, drinking apricot beer and watching the Republican National Convention on mute while Kyle works on grad school applications. We just got internet at home this week so I thought maybe I would update this thing some people call a "blog."

The easiest thing to do seems to be just to post about the books I have been reading rather than about the things I have been doing or have been thinking about. Ok. How about we talk about books of 2012.

January:
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky - I, embarrasingly, had read only parts of this. I knew what was coming at the end but not along the way. Dostoevsky/Raskolnikov is agonizingly obsessive and unstable. It is so uncomfortable and stressful to read, but that's what makes it good, right?

February:
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy - First intro to Percy, and he is great. Really funny, poignant, Southern. Loved the book. Wish he had written more novels, but I plan to read the others that are there. We watched a documentary about him that was good too.

April:
The Man Who Was Thursday, GK Chesterton - this was a re-read - listened to the audiobook at work. Zany story of anarchists in London. Exactly who was Thursday? I still think I don't understand the end of it. I need to read more Chesterton.

May:
Persuasion, Jane Austen - another at-work re-read. A lesser-loved Austen classic, but still good. I wouldn't want to refuse an offer of marriage and eight years later still be unmarried and regretting it. I think Austen is good at describing conversations and how they make people feel.
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy - so gruesome! So much blood and scalps and bullets and etc. His writing style is so strange and compelling and distant and beautiful but weird. He doesn't use quotation marks - not sure if that's for every book or just this one. Very wild West, but not in the kitschy way.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard - she spends a year (?) at a cabin, Thoreau-style. Great nature writing, but I'm not sure that that's my thing. She's very, very good, but there is no plot and I have trouble with that.
East of Eden, John Steinbeck - audiobook re-read. Probably one of my favorite books ever. Follows two families through several generations in California. Superb writing. Beautiful story of relationships, sin and grace. I need to read it again. I think I posted about this one a few years ago.
Anne of Green Gables (and Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne's House of Dreams, in June&July), L M Montgomery - these were fun to re-visit, but I also definitely had a different take on the series. Pretty annoyingly moralistic. Really wordy - the books could be a lot shorter. But still very lovable and nostalgic.

June:
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell - I have to say it wasn't everything I thought it would be after seeing the movie. Listened to it at work. She tries to put too many social issues into the book and ends up treating them too lightly. The main character is overly dramatic. Kind of over-written, or something. But the story is good, and the movie is good. This might be the rare occasion where I think the movie is better.
With God in Russia, Walter Ciszek - An American Jesuit priest goes to Russia for missions and ends up in Siberian work camps/exile for 30 years. Crazy story. He was never angry at God, just angry at the Russians for being unreasonable. Ha.
The Brothers K, David James Duncan - Kyle and I read this one out loud. A re-read for me. It is WONDERFUL. Incredibly funny, incredibly sad.. A dysfunctional family of 4 brothers, 2 sisters, a fundamentalist 7th Day Adventist mother, and washed-up minor league pitcher dad. Follows the whole family into the brothers' adulthood. So much pain and hurt and humor and love and baseball. I laughed and cried a lot which is more of an issue when you are reading out loud.

July:
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck - read this out loud with Kyle. Short, depressing, classic Steinbeck piece. Lennie just wanted to pet the rabbits and live off the fat of the land....is that too much to ask?
The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton - a fascinating, dramatic spiritual journey of a great Catholic writer. I don't know. Parts of it were good. But the way he rhapsodizes about the Catholic Church and revisionistically talks about his earlier mistakes got on my nerves. I would recommend it, but not to just anyone.
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri - short stories by a contemporary Indian-American writer. Good stuff. Lots about immigrants and children of immigrants.
My Antonia, Willa Cather - great American book about a Bohemian immigrant family transplanted to the Nebraska plains. Farm life, small town life, immigrant life.

August:
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke - two magicians bring practical magic back to 19th century England. This was way better than I expected - riveting, funny, interesting, surprisingly scary, really well-written and practically believable. Magic is awesome, and fairies are scary.
The Awakening, Kate Chopin - reread from high school. I don't know. I sort of like it and sort of don't. It's not the feminist thing, it's just Edna is just so annoying.
The Good Thief, Hannah Tinti - short novel about a young boy taken from an orphanage by a man pretending to be his brother. They proceed, in a very Dickensian fashion, to live on the street and steal. Kind of a kids' book but really kind of not.
The Narnian, Alan Jacobs - excellent biography of C. S. Lewis. Beautiful and also sad. He very deftly handles that parts of Lewis's life that are hard to understand. But he's also writing about CS Lewis, and he has great stuff about magic and imagination and fairy tales.
Boy, Roald Dahl - Dahl's memories of the first 20 years of his life. Hilarious. Dahl is the best.
Being Consumed, William Cavanaugh - the subtitle is Economics and Christian Desire. I don't know if I've ever heard that kind of Christian thinking on economics. The Eucharist speaks to desire, scarcity, globalization, consumerism, and all those questions that should be troubling us. I need to think about this one a lot more. But it's only 100 pages so you should probably read it.

my personal dictionary

I went through and deleted my "personal dictionary" on my phone today because it kept offering misspelled words before correctly-spelled words in predictive mode. But before deleting all of my words, I looked through them and thought some were funny. I remember why I was texting some of them, but some I have no idea. Here are some of them [consecutive words are not necessarily related]:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, killlllllllllling, height-to-weight, what-are-my-intentions, heartwrenching, fetus-looking, pseudoholiday, pseudosnowstorm, struggleville, aldrichmobile, yourmom@gmail, russification, kerouac-style, roethlisberger, santos/mcgarry, you-should-date, kitten-killer, steam-cleaned, facebooking, tear-jerking, beach-ready,

engagementy, post-bellum, mochadoodle, damonatalie, chesagreeks, putrescence, maggalicious, anti-tolstoy, dostoevskys, mendelssohn, volkhonsky, lever-puller, subjectless, roommateless, iconostasis, non-basement, homeschooled, inglourious, presbytery, bold-faced, boomerang,

chapstick, wormtongue, nocturnes, breakroom, eye-talian, dwebster, garfunkel, anti-party, carnivore, burlesque, bow/salute, gchatting, dasvidanya, flannery's, brewhouse, lathspell, nutcracker, five-inch, worrrrrrrst, frattastic, sickliness, jesusland, magnolias, infersday,

recursday, chickfila, eclipsing, textastic, apotheosis, phonership, talking-to, distemper, stalagmite, arbuckles, unbirthday, moodswing, dumbledore, coldagelli, breakups, kickapoo, babyface,

agricola, whithams, suburbia, brewpack, glittery, coworker, raptured

hanukkah, slavonic, basilica

the latest

Last week I was accepted to the Masters in Counseling program at Covenant Theological Seminary in Saint Louis, Missouri. I'll move to Saint Louis sometime towards the end of the summer. I'll live on campus along with Natalie who is doing the same thing.

In some ways this is really scary. I actually haven't moved in a long time. New things are hard for me. My life will change a lot. It's a three-year degree. It seems like a big commitment.

In other ways this is really awesome. Saint Louis is a beautiful city and Covenant seems like a great place. And I will be studying counseling. That sounds pretty exciting. Here are my thoughts on counseling, from my application essay:

I believe that counseling people and helping them work through their hurt and their past is a way of fulfilling the Creation Mandate and restoring creation. Broken people and relationships and lives are a result of the fall, and by facing that reality and working through it, we are fighting the effects of the fall. All is not as it should be, and by the grace of God, through counseling, the church, and time, brokenness can be healed, relationships can be restored, and wrongs can be righted. That is a beautiful thing. I think that there is hope in the gospel, and I think that God also works through psychology and medicine to accomplish his purpose in his world and his people. This is exciting to me. I like to help people, listen to people, figure them out, learn them. Some people need more help than their friends or pastor can give. While some in the church decry counseling or dismiss therapy, I believe that many people need the help that professional counseling can offer. I want to be a part of that.

Book List 2010 etc

Reading is great. Fiction is better than non-fiction. You should read almost any of these books. Thirty-six books in a year is probably more than usual for me - being home alone unemployed for three months helped.

1. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery - A little boy in a spaceship, prince of his planet. I read this one out loud to my sisters over winter break. I didn't know what to expect but I liked it. I probably missed a lot of the meaning.
2. A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken - A wonderful love story, followed by death and grief. I read this one in one sitting, which I don't often do. On the train from Russia to Kiev in January. This book is heart-wrenchingly beautiful and sad. I cried a lot.
3. Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry - observations and stories of a small-town barber in Kentucky. Wendell Berry intrigues me. I want more.
4. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy - see this post. Tolstoy at his finest. I loved it. I would read it again. I would watch any film adaptation. Life and death, war and peace, love and hate, and so much more. It is epic.
5. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy - not quite as good as W&P, but it is shorter. Anna is an annoying adulteress, but she is troubled so you feel for her. Tolstoy is great.
6. The Art of War, Sun Tzu - ugh.
7. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other Stories, Leo Tolstoy - short stories are a good way to go if you can't read a long novel. Ivan Ilyich slowly dies of an internal illness, and it is painful and fascinating.
8. Peace Like a River, Leif Enger - set in the 1960s Midwest. Ruben's brother murders two boys then escapes from jail. The characters are interesting and the story is beautiful in its own way.
9. Stalking the Vietcong, Stuart Herrington - I had to read this for class. I usually hate the Vietnam War and anything associated with it, but this was pretty compelling. It's basically just a memoir from an intelligence advisor. It's an easy read, so it's worth it if you're interested in that war.
10. The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz - A Polish prisoner escapes from a Soviet gulag and walks to freedom from Siberia to India. Amazing. What probably intrigues me the most is that after arriving in India, he never sees his walking companions again. Ever.
11. Harry Potter, #1-7, J. K. Rowling - well, I wrote about these already. Really good, of course. Not as good as LOTR. I still haven't seen the seventh movie (!) Of course you should read them.
12. Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer - great short book on Christian community. I had never read anything Bonhoeffer. I didn't like every part of it, but I am interested to read more.
13. A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis - Lewis's wife dies and he grieves. The book is his personal journals. Raw. Tragic. Excellent.
14. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien - My thoughts on this book. It's a lot more for kids than LOTR, but it was so great. I cried when Thorin Oakenshield died. Gollum is creepy and pathetic. Bilbo is grumpy and awesome.
15. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien - another post. I can easily say that LOTR is some of the best fiction ever written. These books are long but so worth it. I love the writing. And the characters. And the story. And the maps. And everything.
16. Beer and Circus, Murray Sperber - eh. Drinking and sports. I guess they're ruining America or something. That's probably not what Sperber was saying, but I didn't finish the book. He makes some good points.
17. The Mysterious Benedict Society, Trenton Lee Stewart - great kids book. Four kids save the world from an evil man infiltrating people's minds. I'd like to read the sequels.
18. Ministries of Mercy, Tim Keller - I was reading this for a year and finally finished. Keller is good of course. The church needs more mercy, and more mercy ministry.
19. Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis - The Space Trilogy part 1. This may have convinced me that aliens exist, and I'm not kidding. I read these 8 or 10 years ago, but they are worth a re-read.
20. Perelandra, C.S. Lewis - Space Trilogy 2. Weston is so creepy. A sort of re-writing of the creation story, with a lot of twists.
21. That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis - Space Trilogy 3. The first time I read the series I thought this one was boring. Now I think it's my favorite of the three. It has Merlin!
22. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov - stream-of-consciousness autobiography of the author of Lolita (which I need to read). He has an incredibly beautiful writing style. Nabokov fascinates me because he grew up in Russia then emigrated to Europe and the US. He wrote some in Russian, some in English, tried to translate his own books, couldn't, and so re-wrote them in the other language. His relationship to language is very interesting.
23. Emma, Jane Austen - a re-read. Austen is always great, and I think this is one of her better ones. Emma is so annoying but likable of course.
24. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov - I read this my freshman year, then listened to it on audio at work. Then I got it for Christmas in Russian. The devil comes to Moscow and wreaks havoc. Absurd. Great 20th-century piece of Russian lit.
25. Jesus Land, Julia Scheeres - oh my gosh her family is crazy. A memoir of a journalist's life in a fundamentalist Christian family who adopted two African-American boys. Racism, abuse, fundamentalism, tragedy. I cried for her.
26. Leading with a Limp, Dan Allender - Leaders should lead out of their weakness. It was good overall but I think I'd like his other books better.
27. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton - Wharton writes simply and beautifully. A short New England tragedy. I hate how the book makes me feel.
28. The Great Game, Peter Hopkirk - The British and Russian Empires struggle for control of India, Persia and Central Asia in the 19th century. I know you're supposed to root for Britain but I wanted Russia to win. But seriously, a surprisingly-readable history book. Lots of explorers and spies and deceitful murderous rulers and stuff like that.

God bless America and no place else

From Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, p. 523, referring to 19th-century British and Russian officers who were involved in the struggle for control of India and Central Asia:

Men such as these, of either side, had few doubts about what they were doing. For those were the days of supreme imperial confidence, unashamed patriotism, and an unswerving belief in the superiority of Christian civilization over all the others.

I wonder what it would be like to believe that. It seems like Americans have lost a lot of their patriotism. We don't have that blustering self-confidence or trust in our government that allows us to believe that everything we do is right and moral. Dr Fears asks his class of 350 if they consider it noble and worthwhile to die for your country. Three people raise their hands. And I doubt they are enlisted.

There are few things for which I would give my life. Territorial gain is certainly not one of them. I don't think I'm crazy, but I'm not sure those 19th-century guys were either. I don't know.

a winter's day

Two weeks from today is Christmas. That's fun.

Tomorrow my family leaves their outpost in Russia and makes the long (10-day) trek to Tulsa. There will be lots of planes, trains, and automobiles. Really.

I've taken three days off work which gives me ten straight days off over Christmas and New Years. I'm glad I still get a pseudo-break as a pseudo-college-student. Some things I am looking forward to:

- Seeing my family. I said goodbye and got on the train on January 10. It'll have been ten and a half months by the time I see them in a couple weeks. That's a really long time.

- Sleeping in past six, and then drinking my dad's pakistani chai every morning. It's delicious, it's caffeinated, and it's hand-delivered to me.

- Christmas in Oklahoma. Well, I really love Christmas in Russia, but I'm willing to experience change. Maybe we will have snow. Maybe not. It'll be fun. There are nine of us and everyone gives everyone else a present. If you do the math, that is a lot of presents. We open them one at a time. Then I'll spend the rest of the morning with my mom in the kitchen.

- possibly midnight mass on Christmas Eve.

- New Years in Oklahoma. New Years is a big deal in the former Soviet Union so I love the holiday. I will definitely miss our tradition of going to the natural hot springs pool in the mountains like we did the last two years. And the sparklers and fireworks at midnight. Oklahoma New Years are usually much quieter. But that's okay, and it will be great.

- Going to church with my parents in Tulsa. I love my church in Norman, and like to be there, but it has been three years since I've been to TCF. The people there have known me and my family since I was a baby. They love us well. It will be good to see them all again.

- Seeing Michael & Anna and Thomas, who all moved away but will be in Tulsa over break. And other friends.

- Lots of good Schupack food and Schupack family time. Hearing our standard family Christmas music, baking our traditional Christmas goods. Watching movies, hanging out. Catching up. Taking pictures. Being silly. Getting on each other's nerves.

And then it's back to work on January 4. Yesterday I celebrated four months at my job. Which is funny because I don't really love my job so I was not exactly celebrating. But it's okay.

Life is good, overall. I am thankful.

thanksgiving day quote

Carrie: "When I take Isaac in to live with me [decades from now], is he still going to shriek?"

sullivan county, pa:

"I have been wearing overalls most of the time for the last 20 years of my life, and do not expect to be buried in silk socks, pat leather shoes, silk shirt, tie and elaborate suit. A pair of clean overalls, clean shirt etc is all that I want and expect, and do not buy a lot of flowers to decorate my grave, if you could not buy any flowers for me while I was alive and could appreciate them, do not buy any now when I cannot see and appreciate them."

Upon the Completion of the Television Series "The West Wing," I Write: A Haiku

So apparently

politics is awesome; We

love the president.

Forty-four minutes:

Politics, love, anger, tears.

One more episode.

Work at the White House -

never eat, sleep, or go home.

This is the West Wing.

We waited so long

Seven seasons of drama.

The guy loves the girl.

I'm convinced to change

my voter registration.

...I'm just kidding, Dad.

We started in June

It is finally over.

Natalie is sad.

Ah West Wing, West Wing, take me in. Are you aware the shape I'm in? My hands they shake, my head it spins. Ah West Wing, West Wing, sucked us in.

- The Avett Brothers