Death to Taxes

Someone was on their way to get their taxes done at H&R Block and I said a little sardonically, "Have Fun!" You know, as you might say to someone with performance anxiety on their way to stage right. Well she says, "My job's easy, their doing the hard work." This makes me think. What makes a job hard. A job can be hard because it involves the moving of very heavy objects. A job can be hard if it takes intense concentration on many things at the same time. and apparently, a job can be hard if it's very very complicated. But to me the hardest kind of job is one you don't know how to do.

Of all the vices with which I am cursed,
ignorance is by far the worst.

I just wrote that. Yeah, just now. But my point is this. Call me callous but there's not one person at H&R Block who I have a heart to pity even now, except the intern. I don't mind hard work. If my body is capable of a physical task, I won't complain to have to do it. In my mind and to my eye, orderly complication adds a sense of beauty to any system. And though I don't know the United States Tax System, I'm under the impression that it's ordered to the extreme. I'm not saying at all that tax professionals don't deserve their wages. I'm not going to pay them. I don't make enough. I'd rather suffer through filing my four W2's each from a different state, than give up a fifth of my federal refund. I'm just saying that I'll never pity the tax professional, even in his busy season. For knowledge is his business and knowledge is all he needs. Knowledge is power. Truly said. I pity the ignorant, and self-pity is a sweet sweet sickness.

Good Friday

People who know about me know I like to walk. Maybe you might have to be a hard-core fan of Tim to attach that to him as something wholly and truly Tim, but I like to think that people who know me know that. But I especially like to walk on Good Friday after Tenebrae, the service of darkness. So I walked this evening. Some people walk to take time to think. For me that hardly ever happens. Walking is hardly ever a time to dedicate my mind to a certain topic. More often then not it is a time in which all things fall to the back of my mind and I'm simply a body moving through space, ears listening to the voices of others, eyes considering the environment in which God's placed me. These lulls in mental activity, however, seem to shadow a deeper consideration of concerns and worries and the second I pause and cosider what I had set out to ignore, a leap of understanding occurs, or sometimes I simply find I've more things to figure out then I thought.

So I did that today after Tenebrae. Whenever I went to Good Friday service at home,in Overland Park, I could always just walk the five minutes home or take a detour for a longer ambulation, but this time I took to the streets of Waterloo under a full bright moon. I considered my life, in terms of my current and future stations, as well as reflected on times gone by. It seemed that this was one of those times I came to understand nothing in my walk but only found more and more things to figure out. I was not so much frustrated as I was resigned. Almost completely content to be lost and wandering. So I got back to church, hopped in my car, turned the ignition, killed the radio, and set off back to Camp. Then as I was gliding down Maeystown Road, I looked up over my left shoulder to see the moon once again. I remembered instantly an old Family Circus Cartoon. This one was from the good old days when Family Circus was more than one frame. (That or it was not Family Circus. I must admit I'm not sure.) Anyway, the boy, Tommy, I think, is looking out the window of the car at the moon. And he says, "Daddy, why does the moon follow our car whenever we drive at night." The next frame of the cartoon shows Dad on the phone when they get home, calling Grandpa, "Dad, why does the moon always follow our car when we drive at night?" Family Circus, Dennis the Menace, whatever I found myself mentally screaming, "Why are you following me?" I aced Descriptive Astronomy with Dr. Hermann. I know the moon doesn't really follow you, okay? But what we know doesn't always have a meaningful effect on how we feel. The moon appears to follow us, because of it's steadfast position relative to the shifting objects around us. The moon appears to move because it doesn't move. I'm glad to know that my God will follow me like the moon follows my car. Never leaving, for He never moves. Utterly steadfast.

"Dimensional Analysis" haha, get it? ...nerd...

Oh, man, posting two days in a row, Tim? You are already addicted to blogspot.

Shut up, I do what I want.

I just wanted to put something down as I look out my office window onto the pond at camp. (I should move my desk away from the window soon or I won't get any work done.) It's raining, but not quite storming. The wind however is tremendous. I was just looking out kind of mesmerized by the patterns of the ripples as the wind whips and spirals across the pond, and the wind died down suddenly and the only changes in the surface of the water was the fall of the wind torn rain.

I started thinking, as I watched this two dimensional design shift and morph in front of my eyes, about the things we see that we don't really see. You don't see rain fall. You think you do but you don't. You see the blur of droplets passing too quickly to be considered or admired. Today I got to see, plane-by-plane, the composition of a minute and a half of a quarter-acre (?) of rain. I wish I'd been paying more attention.

I wonder how often what we see in two dimensions are actually representations of three dimensions, with the third being replaced by the fourth. And so, was the image I saw in the pond three-dimensional and not two, time having taken the place of depth?

I've been reading Madeleine L'Engle, which makes me think: If depth is taken away and replaced with time then how would Mrs. Which have made such a silly mistake to take the Murray children to a two dimensional planet. Certainly, using the fifth dimension to tesser would be quite different if you were tessering from four dimensions to three, right? Would it be possible, even consenting a fifth dimension, to tesser from only three dimensions, length, width, and time? If you can't have a second without a first, or a third without a second, how come you can have a fourth without a third? Can you have fifth dimension without a third?

Okay, I give that this has dirfted toward, but not into nonsense. Next time you see something, ask yourself how much of it you really see. What might it look like if you could not just see, but visualize more.




I couldn't stop thinking about it. It took the third dimension of the rain to allow the fourth dimension to take it's place. Just like it takes three dimensions of light moving toward a movie screen to lend the two dimensional image the fourth dimension of time. If a tesseract bypasses space time, I wonder if it would be thought of as somthing similar to my pond bypassing the third dimension to show me the rain.

"The Violinist Analogy"

Okay, so I was reading the other day... go figure. And I came across this contemporary philosopher named Judith Jarvis Thomson. Cool name. So her big work is this paper called 'A Defense of Abortion.' Now I'm all about the sanctity of life, but I read about this paper (never read the actually paper, but I hope too) with the utmost open-mindedness to her argument. I really did. She approaches the subject using thought experiments. If you've no idea what I'm talking about check it out on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion

Check it out, I'll wait. . .

Now this analogy of being hooked up against your will so that you're suddenly sharing your circulatory system with this violinist. It strikes me as wrong. I'm surprised that so many opponents of this argument simply consent that it would be morally permissible to detach yourself. No it's not like you are stabbing Paganini in the face, but since when is it not morally wrong to not do the right thing.

It sounds to me like we're not hearing anymore about Morality, but instead civil responsibility. Theres so much in the criticisms and responses to those criticisms about legality and stuff, but just because somethings not against the law doesn't make it right. I don't think there's a difference between virtue and morality. Courage shouldn't be thought of as something you should have if you can, and compassion shouldn't be something that's good if you feel like it. Courage and Compassion are good Just as Cowardice and Indifference are bad.

Til now I've been writing not as a Christian but as a human being. But now I'm going to write as a Christian for a second. If I understand Wikipedia correctly. Ms. Thomson describes a woman who carries a fetus to full term as a 'Good Samaritan.' I don't care if you see Jesus as Savior or simply an excellent moralist, -- I'd think that if she's quoting him she'd think he's one or the other at least-- but in Jesus' parable, being the good Samaritan is the right thing to do and passing by the Jew, obviously in dire need of care, is wrong. This is interesting. To leave someone for dead is bad, right? Well, does it matter if you've placed the person there or not? Surely, the Levite was leaving the Jew as much as the robbers were. But I digress.

Now in the explanation I read of Thomson's argument, particular attention was paid to the concepts of right to life, and right to do as one pleases with one's body. Thomson seems to find it appalling that those who argue against abortion would hold the fetus' right to life as more important than the pregnant woman's right to use her body as she pleases. Isn't this sort of denial of rights unprecidented in our society? It's not. Our society does not condone suicide. Certainly this example of right to life being greater than right to body, is more clear than the unwanted pregnancy situation. If it's wrong for a person to commit suicide, using their right to do as they please with their body to deny their right to life, then it's wrong to use the right to do as one pleases with one's body to deny another human being their right to life, whether it's a fetus or a violinist or whatever.

This last point is debatable I know. First of all, what does it mean for suicide to be condoned? Well, I don't want to get into the argument about assisted suicide. That brings with it more emotions that I'd like to address right now. What I mean is that if an adolescent attempts to commit suicide their parents put them in protective care, and even before that medical care professionals, by default, fight for life, not for choice. When a prisoner attempt to commit suicide, they are removed of anything on their person with which they might harm themselves. Further, when people make such attempts their rational minds are called into quesiton. That protective care is accompanied by psychiatric evaluation. It seems that we know what is right: that right to life is a priority over right to do as one pleases, even when someone doesn't want their right to life.

My point is that life is more important than what you want. Doing what is right is more important than doing what you want. If what you do is not right, it's wrong. That said we all make choices, and we all make wrong choices. But it matters that we acknowledge right and wrong. Most of the time it's not hard to figure out. It's just hard to act according to what we know to be right.

So what would I do if I woke up back to back with a famous violinist who needed to borrow my kidneys for ninemonths while they were still in my body? I don't know, but I hope I'd do what's right and let him have his right to live. Some people might say that it would be an act of extreme virtue, an outrageously kind gesture to one's fellow man, I'd say it's the right thing to do. Which is ALWAYS beautiful.

I would also say that Paganini better give me nine months of the kickin'est theme music ever. Nonstop, baby!

Tim