Duke, I choose you

I didn’t have a particular reason for applying to it. It was the only school I hadn’t visited, and the basketball team was the only particularly spectacular thing about it. None of my family had gone there, and Washington, D. C. was the farthest south I’d ever been.

Yet the farther I got to my self-imposed deadline of Sunday night, the clearer the choice became. It was like a basketball game that’s close for three quarters and then blows open at the end. Blue and white were everywhere: men wearing undershirts and blue jeans, cars, handicapped signs, books, even the clothes I was wearing. At various moments in the process I considered a coin flip – “heads it’s this one, tails it’s that one.” I pulled out my wallet today and discovered a blue-and-white Meijer gift card I thought I’d lost with a quarter stuck to it, heads up. “Fine! It’s this one!” said I, and I went to that venerable supermarket and bought three CDs.

Duke it is!

Hindsight

Well-known is the phrase “Hindsight is always 20/20.” ‘Tis very wise, and I have a corollary to it: if you spend too much time looking into that rear-view mirror, you’ll probably crash into something. One of my nightmares is that I’ll spend so much time thinking about one mistake that I’ll unwittingly make three more.

Talk about the weather

I seem to get into conversations about the weather all the time. It’s one of the few things that everyone in the world has in common because we’ve all been outside at one time or another. It’s also a very controversial topic. People don’t just tell me what the weather is; they also give me their opinion about it. “Hot” and “cold” are pretty subjective terms; since my definition of “cold” is “below freezing,” I’m find myself in a lot of arguments on people on 40-degree days. Yet it’s rarely just “hot” or “cold” outside; it’s “too hot” or “too cold” or “a lot hotter than yesterday” (spoken with implied approval or disapproval).If God had a phone number, people would probably dial the seven digits to his voice mail all the time just to comment on the climate. Journalists would go nuts. They’d take polls about it every day, or even every few hours, and then call God and say, “Lord, your approval ratings on the weather dropped under 50% for the first time this year because the groundhog saw his shadow. What are you planning to do about this?” or “Lord, are you planning another snow day to increase support among your under-18 constituents?” or “Lord, the people of Kansas feel you discriminated against them by giving them a disproportionate amount of tornadoes this year. What is your response to these allegations?”

God would be a good sport, but one day, He might get tired of it and say, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone – while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”

The journalist would become indignant and reply, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! All right, Man! I’m just trying to do my job.” God would end the interview with peace and forgiveness, but He’d still cringe when he saw the next morning’s headline: “Weather Query Precipitates Stormy Response From Divinity.”

Lightning in a bottle?

The difference between success and failure in the business world can be quite arbitrary. Portable video-phones were a huge flop, but cell-phones with cameras are new and hot and are raking in millions of dollars. These products do essentially the same thing with one big difference: one “feels right” and the other doesn’t. The primary reason is cost, but even so, I don’t think cheap video-phones would work, either. For one, people don’t want to look into the phone the entire time they’re talking to someone because there are so many situations where the phone will just sit on their shoulder. More important is our “telephone psychology.” The people on the two sides of the line can’t see each other, and they really like that. I don’t have to look good for the telephone, and if I’m in the mood for covert operations, I can lie through my teeth about who’s with me, what’s going on, or even who I am. Video-phones take away all these conveniences while picture-phones do not. The inventors of this ill-fated product, in their attempt to improve on the telephone, actually made it worse. I’m sure it never occurred to them, though, because these grievances would seem petty to a scientist. Yet this is a world populated with idiosyncratic people who won’t buy on the cutting edge unless they like it (or until everyone else has one.) Picture-phones work for normal people, and video-phones don’t. That, my friends, is the difference between a good invention and a bad one.

College Admissions Stuff

I’ve decided that Philosophy would be a better choice for a major. I have a contempt for vagueness, shallowness, relativism, and pretention in modern literary criticism, but I just now realized that the people behind these trends live in the universities. I want to go to college to learn how to think, and a strong Philosophy department will give me that. As for being a writer, that has little do with majoring in English. The best ones come out of nowhere. My new major will also give me many, many, many opportunities for stroking my chin and saying “Hmmmmm.” How can I resist that?

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I like the weather patterns this week. It’s like a shower that starts off cold and then slowly, surreptitiously, gets hotter and hotter until you have to turn it down a notch because your skin is scalding.

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As is now well known, I did not get into Princeton. I heard the news while Dad and I were sitting in the chapel at Duke listening to an organ recital. The location was a big help. I felt a light thump in the stomach rather than a dagger in the heart, and I’m very peaceful about the whole thing. I’ll be attending either Duke or Notre Dame. Either will be a great choice. Going to college will feel perfect after a bit of jiggling, like sticking a little plastic rectangle into a rectangle-shaped hole. Please pray for me to pick the right school. As for the Ivy League: they will pay for their east coast bias, but I’m not too worried about it.

Old faces in fictional places

“You can’t make something out of nothing.” Sometimes I try to think of a completely new and original human face, but all I can come up with are the faces of people I’ve seen before or different features mixed together. I have this problem most often when I’m reading books. I should use the character descriptions to create new and original people, but it never seems to happen. Instead, the people I’ve seen float into the characters and fill on the dotted lines that their profiles make. For example, Evan Somers is Holden Caulfield; Jack Wharton is King Richard II; Dan Hugenberg is Helmholz Watson in Brave New World. Once in a while these choices make sense, but more often it’s random. If I talk to someone and then start reading a book, they follow me in. It’s like an acquaintance you make who shows up in your dreams, and when you wake up in the morning, you wonder what they were doing there. (If you’re curious about whether or not you’re a character in my books, feel free to ask.)Indeed, only God can create dust and trees and men where there was once nothing. Man’s brand of creativity is lesser, but it is still quite beautiful; he takes in everything from the world around it and then shapes it into something new and different that has never been seen before. It is not the parts that are original but the whole. It is not the language or the characters or the places or the plot that make a book unique; it’s the mixture of them into a compound that is striking and personal. This expression of one man has meaning for all of them.