pumpkin season

Photo by: Danielle Scott

One of the primary seasonal flavors of October and November is pumpkin.  Not only do pumpkin pies appear, but everything from ice cream to bread to coffee is sold with pumpkin flavoring.

I wouldn't say I don't like pumpkin and the things made from pumpkins.  I actually do.  For example, a properly made pumpkin pie can be quite good.  I would say that I have never had anything with pumpkin flavoring that wouldn't taste better with a more traditional and less seasonal flavoring, though.

For example, I think pumpkin bread is perfectly fine.  I'd actually prefer banana bread or zucchini bread, though.  Note that this comes from someone who does not like bananas or zucchinis.  Pumpkin flavored ice cream is okay, but even in autumn I'd prefer vanilla.  I can definitely enjoy a slice of pumpkin pie, but I like most other types of pie far better with a few very specific exceptions.  Give me apple, cherry, or blueberry over pumpkin any day.

I understand that a big part of the appeal is the same sort of appeal that certain foods have at Christmas time.  It's not necessarily the flavor that is desirable, but rather the atmosphere that it creates.  It's a way for a person to get their mind into the season, and it can be more pleasurable for the person who loves autumn.  Even so, I'm always a little perplexed with the excitement that pumpkin flavored things garners with a lot of people.  Pumpkin just isn't a flavor I can get excited about.

So, I'm interested.  Do your tastes align with mine, or do you get excited about pumpkin season?  If you get excited about pumpkin season is it more about the flavor or about the season itself?

900

Sandro Botticelli's Chart of Hell

This is my 900th post, and I have a tradition of posting something somewhat related to the number on round number posts like this.  The last time I posted on 800 area code phone numbers and the concept of "free."  While the obvious choice would be to post on 900 numbers this time around I am going to take a different, more convoluted, and slightly more serious direction with this post.

About twelve years ago I read a translation of Dante Alighieri's Inferno, which was his depiction of Hell, as well as his Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Heaven or Paradise).  The way this is tenuously related to 900 is that Dante's depiction of Hell was that it was a gigantic hole in the ground, and that there were nine (not nine hundred, but I already said this was tenuous) rings that formed the hole, and the closer to the center rings you got the deeper into the hole you were.  Each ring was devoted to specific types of sinners, and so the less bad sinners were tormented on the outer rings while the serious sinners were tormented worse in the inner rings.

I have had a lot of contemplations about Inferno ever since I read it, but I never took the opportunity fully articulate them until now, so this is my chance.

The first thing a person notices when reading Inferno is that Dante had enemies and he enjoyed imagining them suffer.  He fills his Hell with people he personally knew, or who were opposed in some way to Dante (or his city-state), and details in what way those people will suffer that is related to the way they sinned.  He also fills his Hell with historical figures that most people agreed were deserving of punishment (the worst reserved for Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot).  If Dante had a beef with you there was a pretty good chance you were going to end up somewhere in his literary torture fantasy.

The second thing that sticks out to me is how appealing a depiction, woefully inaccurate or not, of Hell is.  Put bluntly, Purgatorio and Paradiso were boring.  Inferno was interesting if only for the creativity with which Dante imagined people's eternal demise.  On further thought, isn't a perfect reflection of human nature?  The idea of being perfected and moving toward Paradise makes for a boring read, but detail how sinners are justly tortured and I can't put the book down.

The third thing that sticks out to me is how damaging the book is to a real belief in Hell.  I have heard multiple people say the opposite.  Interest in Inferno will make people wonder if there really is a Hell, I've heard.  To me, the stories are so specific yet so limited within a human mindset that it feels (and is) contrived.  Hell is real, but it is not something that we can conceive of more than we can conceive of Heaven.  To force a detailed depiction that makes some physical sense to our feeble minds is to make it sound more like a fairy tale than reality.  I couldn't believe that Hell was real if I were forced to accept even 10% of the depiction that Dante presents.

Finally, this trilogy of books is absolute proof that people did not believe the earth was flat in the years prior to Columbus' initial voyage to the Americas.  Typically, when people correctly note that people in Medieval times did not believe that the earth was flat, they point to the writings of the ancient Greeks which note that a flat earth would not allow for ships to sink into the horizon to disappear, and that they would instead just disappear into a tiny speck at a large distance away.  If the 500 B.C. Greeks knew, the 1492 A.D. Portuguese did as well.  I look to Dante instead, who lived about two hundred years before Columbus' voyages.

The reason that Dante presented Hell as a hole in the ground was that he imagined that Hell would be a void in the earth left when Satan was cast down from God's presence and struck the earth like a massive high-speed asteroid.  Dante further surmised that on the other side of the world would be a huge mountain created by land upended from the creation of the hole that was Hell.  This mountain would be Purgatory, and it would rise up into the heavens and be the gateway into Paradise.

So, in summary, Dante's Hell is a hole in the ground caused by Satan striking the earth with incredible force. Also, Purgatory is a mountain on the other side of the earth, which was created by that same force.  This is not a story conceived by someone who believes in a flat earth.  It is a story conceived by someone without a great deal of knowledge of physics or astronomy, however, so there is that.  I just believe that we need to remember that not every belief from an earlier time period is completely ridiculous.  I may have brought harm to that point by mentioning Dante's description of Purgatory as a mountain leading to Paradise, though.

kids these days

I've heard several people near my age make negative observations about younger generations.  I'm talking about the typical, "Kids these days just don't have to go through what we did," to, "Those lazy Millennials don't know how to hold down a job."  I don't understand when I hear this.  A mere decade or two ago people were saying this about this individual and his or her generation, but now he or she is willing to forget that and do the same to a younger generation?

I may have shared this before, but one incident from my teenage years that has stuck with me was an interaction I had with someone when I was working in a grocery store.  One of the jobs that needed to be done some nights was to vacuum up the carpet in the main entryway, and that night this was one of my responsibilities.  A guy who was probably in his fifties walked by and asked if I ever vacuumed at home.  I acknowledged that I sometimes did, and he responded that he thought I was lying.  He had three or four kids and none of them ever vacuumed at home.  Then he made some comment about kids today being lazy and walked out with a demeanor that indicated he had made the point he intended to make.

Obviously, this guy was not representative of fifty-something-year-old guys.  He was obviously bothered about something else that was happening in his life (or had already happened) and found this an easy situation to—well, I'm still not sure how to properly finish that sentence.  I had more than my share of faults, and it was true that I was not keen on doing chores, but vacuuming is about the easiest of the chores there are to complete.  I couldn't believe that he singled me out on that one specifically.  If you're going to call me lazy call me out for a chore that there's a solid chance that I don't actually do.

I actually didn't take it too personally.  I had a solid reputation around the store as a hard worker so I didn't need this guy's validation.  I did get irritated that he would judge my entire generation so quickly, however.  What bothered me the most was that he did not see that what he said was more an indictment on his ability to parent than it was on my generation.  I personally worked with both hard workers and sluggards in my age range in that store already, so I knew both existed.  Even then I figured that, if this guy's experience with teenagers had been exclusively bad, his problem was probably with the man in the mirror.

If I am ever tempted to make generalizations about people in another generation as I age, either older or younger, I always remember that guy walking out of the grocery store attempting to give a seventeen-year-old kid what-for.  Is what I have to say about kids these days (or maybe about septuagenarians these days) going to sound like that man's words?  If so, is that an opinion worth holding, let alone sharing?

I will sometimes point out something about my kids' childhoods that makes theirs easier than mine.  I will with regularity note that I don't get music/humor/movies that is popular (or was popular) in specific decades.  I will often have a hard time connecting with people from specific generations.  However, I will not make sweeping statements about people of a certain age.  I will not do it now, in twenty years, or in fifty years.  This is something that I am committing to now, and it is a standard that I expect to hold myself to forever.  As such, I will always be a little uncomfortable when I hear others making those statements in my company.

the real facebook temptation

Facebook is a constant siren.  Not just to check everyone's statuses, though that is tempting too.  No, Facebook constantly taunts me to jump into debates that will ultimately be meaningless.

It comes at me from all angles.  I see absurdities in all sorts of bold positions that people take, but my fatal flaw is that I don't usually see the absurdities in my own positions.  "Of course that's a ludicrous position to take," I think as I start whipping out a brilliantly witty remark at my friend's (or worse, a friend of my friend's) expense.  Then, I usually (and thankfully) realize that maybe I shouldn't comment like that.  At first it's usually out of concern for the obvious faux pas, but then it starts impossibly sinking in that maybe I'm also somewhat wrong.  Maybe my comment isn't as bulletproof as I am imagining it to be, impossible as it seems right now.

Many times I have dialed myself back in time to avoid being, if only temporarily, yet one more idiot shouting an opinion on Facebook.^*  While I do not always feel in my gut it is the right decision at the time I always feel that it was a day or two later.  Sometimes with my bolder friends I don't dial myself back as much as I should.  The only times that I don't feel bad about that later are when I was correcting obvious and egregious doctrinal errors from a proclaiming Christian.  That caveat scenario doesn't happen too often.

So, why is that temptation always there?  I know better.  I just don't know better in the moment.

^* I'll always be an idiot shouting an opinion here. 

inevitable failure

One of the main topics in the news lately has been the troubled roll-out of the healthcare.gov website that is the main portal for people in the thirty-six states that did not create portals of their own. Amid all of the grandstanding, excuses, and political showmanship from both the Right and the Left on this I have one question that keeps coming up in my mind. Wasn't this to be expected with a major website roll-out?

I understand as I am reading news reports that most people have not been a part of a major IT roll-out like the healthcare.gov website.  A significant minority of the population has, though, and the news reports are notably silent on the inevitability of these outages which should be obvious to anyone who has taken part in them.  Simply put, large IT projects with immovable release dates, extraordinary load requirements, and multiple complex inputs do not usually roll out successfully on the first try.  Many times I have seen roll-outs pushed back months due to unforeseen circumstances, and with a complex roll-out it is almost guaranteed that something unforeseen will occur.

As I have been reading over the last year about the impending go-live date for the website I was always inwardly thankful that I was not involved with what was obviously going to be a failed release.  The idea that major bugs would be addressed, security and load testing completed, and all of the unforeseeable issues that plague any roll-out by a very public unchangeable date was absurd.

While there will be calls for heads to roll, and many probably will, this whole thing smacks of a misunderstanding of how major websites are rolled out.  Few of the people sacked or called out publicly will have deserved it.  This was a failure in the planning stages of the project, and it will be the implementers who take the heat.  That is typically how the project blame game works.

If there is a lesson to be learned it is that something like this should be slowly phased in, lessons learned, then changes made based on those lessons.  The website target date should have been July so that necessary changes could be made when the roll-out inevitably failed.  Those running the project could have crowd-sourced the testing process and had individual volunteers try to overload and break the system, then used that feedback to know which issues needed addressing.  Also, to reduce load, the thirty-six states portals could have been phased in week-by-week.

That's just me being an armchair IT guy, though.

sports praise

As a full disclosure before I get into this I want to note that there are a handful of famous athletes that I look up to, so I'm a bit of a hypocrite with what I am about to say.  One justification for this is that in most cases I do not admire an individual simply for his athletic ability.

Women are judged by their appearance, and men are judged by what they accomplish.  Neither of these are right, but both will be the way things are for a long while.

I have been astonished by the number of people I have seen lately who have gone out of their way to lavish praise on specific sports players in ways that they might not do the same for a Joe nobody.  This has been especially noticeable with Mariano Rivera retiring, Peyton Manning having a career year, and a lot of people wanting to compare Michael Jordan to LeBron James as of late.  While the players praised play at a level that indeed requires incredible dedication, I have to believe this praise is somewhat absurd.

Are any of these people ever going to hear most of the accolades bestowed upon them?  They'll hear a tiny percentage of it for sure, but is there any real value in arguing about who the best basketball player in recent history is or waxing eloquently over a quarterback who impresses you?  Ultimately, it is pontificating about arbitrary information that does not meaningfully affect anyone in earshot.

I have been thinking about this due to the value statement I opened this post with.  Those sports figures are valued because of what they have accomplished (and may still accomplish) through their physical and mental abilities, as well as their willingness to train, and due to the efforts of countless coaches.  Does that change their value as people, though?  Is Peyton Manning worth more than a gas station attendant because one has accomplished a lot in the sports field and the other works a low-prestige job?  Would I be as excited to have the gas station worker's signature or autograph as Manning's?

I am sure that the allure of celebrity is relevant in every culture, but I believe in the West we especially look up to sports figures because we value individual accomplishment in men.  While you have to have won the genetic lottery to have a chance at being a professional athlete, you also typically have to have a strong work ethic to succeed.  Since everyone knows that great effort is necessary to perform at that level it makes those sorts of celebrities admirable.

The same sort of thing happens with women as well, but in regard to appearance.  As an example, Marylin Monroe gets quoted a fair bit, but few would have originally cared about her were it not for her appearance.

My real point is simply that I wonder if the human tendency to praise celebrities more than everyday people points to a deeper issue that we as humans do not know how to value ourselves or others appropriately.  There are some really valuable people in low places, and athletic ability and looks seems like a lousy measure for determining how valuable they really are.

80/20

I have often heard the 80/20 rule referenced in several different contexts, and mostly where most work is voluntary, but especially in church.  Twenty percent of the congregants do eighty percent of the work I've been told many times.  This may be true, but I think there's more to it.  I think my own personal experiences in college mirror what causes the 80/20 phenomena.


Partly due to a scholarship I had, partly due to a sense that I would need school activities on a resume one day, and partly due to a need I had at the time to feel important, I became overly involved on campus.  I had a work-study job, as many did, but was also involved with student government, residence hall government, leadership in my dorm floor, a weekly weather report for the school newspaper, and a few other things, all while maintaining a serious relationship with Golden.  For a while I did not know how to tell someone, "no," if they wanted me to contribute effort to something.  One specific semester I was in danger of losing my largest school scholarship when my GPA slipped simply because I was at my physical limit of what I could do.  I learned a lot about priorities during those years.

After that experience of being close to burnout for an extended period of time I became more willing turn down activities.  As an ardent introvert, I have struggled with where the line is and so have gone through busy and non-busy stretches.

I see the same behavior at work in church and in other volunteer situations.  It is not that twenty percent of the people are doing eighty percent of the work.  It is that twenty percent of the people are doing the work right now, and a huge portion of the other people are actively removing themselves from activities after having been burned out by being part of the twenty percent at some time in the past.  For whatever reason, volunteer situations cause people to get overworked when they have volunteered, and somehow encourage the view that, "I've put in my time."

Right now I feel on the busier side at church since I teach a class and do a few other things, but I have actively resisted a few different opportunities, and I suspect that I will actively resist others.  I know others who were very involved, got burned out, and completely and utterly removed themselves from teaching and administrative responsibilities as a result.  Maybe if I don't try to do too much I will not feel like I need a sabbatical from all responsibility in short order.

Perhaps organizations that rely on volunteers could learn from this and manage their resources more effectively so that the 80/20 rule doesn't have to continue being a thing.