atoms into suns

There's an article in the LA Times about the town of Monowi, Nebraska, population 1, and its library. (Found on boing boing.)

Presumably this little town is so interesting because it's just so incomprehensible to those writing about it. (I have good evidence that anything between the Arizona line and the Hudson River is inscrutible to most LA residents, but that's another story.) But reading the article gave me all sorts of warm little feelings of home.

I grew up in a town of 1500 or so in North Dakota -- a metropolis, really -- but there are little towns not much bigger than Monowi all over ND. Just up the road is a little town that consists of a few houses, a grain elevator, store, and bar. My great uncle and aunt owned the store and bar, which are right next to each other. Just outside were gas pumps that haven't been used in decades. In addition to being the store proprietor and bartender, my great uncle was the constable, postmaster, and probably a zillion other things, too. The store is smaller than most modern convenience stores. The post office is a roughly 3x3 foot room in the corner of the store, complete with Wanted posters on the wall. I remember staring at all those posters as a kid, wondering what Interstate Flight was and checking out the fingerprints.

Living in a small town, you get used to the idea of extended family. Only a couple generations ago it was common to have 10 kids in a family, which makes for lots of cousins down the line. Seemed like each time I met someone new my mom would explain to me how we were related. "Your great-grandpa's brother Billy had a son named Jack, who married Helen, and they had six kids. Two of them died of scarlet fever when they were pretty little, and then Helen died and Jack married Martha and they had five more kids. Jack and Helen's included Frank, who married Frances, and they had..." You get the picture. Before I got married I asked my mom several times -- partly in jest, partly seriously -- if she was absolutely sure Bill and I weren't related somehow. (No, we're not.)

Whenever we'd get everyone together for a family reunion or wedding or somesuch, we'd often all naturally congregate in the bar. Everyone could have their drinks and socialize, there was plenty of room for everyone, you could stay as long as you wanted, and the kids could be right there, playing with all their cousins.

Between the two towns were my grandparents' farm and the farms of all those great-uncles and great-great-uncles -- another part of the family history to remember. Each time we'd drive down a gravel road we'd get the story of which of our ancestors used to live there, who lived there now, and more bits of family history. Not far from the farm was the one-room schoolhouse my dad went to and the church where a lot of family events took place. I think we spent as much time in the basement of that church as we did in our own. We had lots of great times racing around between gravestones and church pews with cousins, too.

The article's description of the library itself, though, reminds me of my grade school library.

The radio station bit was spot on, too. There were only a few radio stations around, none of them geared toward the high-schooler demographic. We listened to KFYR a lot. I got a wakeup call -- broadcast to five states and two Canadian provinces -- from the KFYR morning guys on my birthday during my freshman year of college. (That was before the station was bought by Clear Channel and turned into a right-wing talk-radio unbearable spewfest.)

I'm not really that old, but reminiscing like this makes me feel like I belong more to my grandparents' generation than my own. My peers in other parts of the country went to high schools like those in John Hughes movies. I went to a grade school with probably just over 100 students in the whole place and played kick the bucket and cowboys and Indians with neighborhood kids. In another bar in another tiny town, I remember watching Zorro on TV while my parents socialized. What time warp was I living in?

When I was taking a programming class in high school, I'd always save that homework for last. The downside of that was that I'd always wake up trying to figure out how to program my alarm clock -- in Turbo Pascal -- to stop ringing.

There's no keyboard! Maybe these buttons will let me type, if only I can figure out how. And there's no screen, so I won't be able to see what I'm typing. Confusion! Distress!

Eventually I'd type with the snooze bar, and then the whole thing would start over nine minutes later. Every morning.

This reminds me a lot of that. The idea of little binary-random-number-generating boxes predicting global catastrophes addles my brain in the same way. It's like Beautiful Mind meets Reverend Maynard when he discovers that the carrots have a consciousness. (Confused? Exactly.)

I'm making far less sense even than usual. I'm going to bed before the walls start talking.

(There's a lively discussion and much talk about debunking -- or not -- on Slashdot.)

I was wandering around the Internet today and ran across a link for GodBlogCon. Cool idea, I thought. It'd be nifty to get a bunch of bloggers together to talk about their faith and how they present it, how the development of ideas is different in blogs than it is in other formats, and how blogging has helped their personal faith evolve.

Unfortunately, turns out GodBlogCon is reserved for Christians only. "And so the Convention will not include individuals from other religions or Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, and other cultic aberration groups." (from the SIXTH section)

"Cultic aberration groups"? Suppose they meant that in the original senses of those words, or in the way it comes off?

They're welcome to have a con and invite whomever they'd like, of course, but the name GodBlogCon and the language they use to disinvite others is what's grating on me. I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, since they do say right after that that "It is not [their] intention to offend anyone," but it sorta reminds me of the guy who tried to tell me once how Muslims worship that false god Allah, while Christians worship God. (Whereas Arabic-speaking Christians worship, uh, well...)

Yay Red Sox

Why couldn't you have been good when I lived in Boston? I suppose I should be thankful for the fact that you won every game I went to see, except when you played the Twins, but since I'm from North Dakota, where everyone cheers for the Twins, that's okay. You taught me that seeing a baseball game live is far cooler than watching one on TV and that Fenway Park is the best place on the planet to watch a baseball game. And I never paid more than $14 to do it (nine years ago). Now, if you could explain to me why anyone would pay $14,000 for one baseball game, I'd appreciate it.

Politics

It's probably a good thing that I took a break from posting in the month before the election. I found myself getting very caught up in politics. This is a) something I've never done before -- I normally avoid politics because I find it pointless, obnoxious, and frustrating; b) maddening due to its inherent divisiveness; and c) specifically forbidden in the Baha'i Faith. The overriding theme in the Baha'i Faith is unity -- the recognition that God created us all equal -- and politics as practiced today is divisive and contentious and therefore against the teachings of the Faith. This doesn't mean we're supposed to ignore politics. We're expected to vote for the best candidate for the office, regardless of party.

I found it rather stunning just how divisive it got; even our food choices were politicized. (You want Heinz ketchup on those freedom fries?) I'm glad it's all over, and even more glad that there weren't challenges that would cause the result to be dragged out even longer than last time.

GIMP

See that picture in the previous post? I cropped that all by myself, using The GIMP. I'm quite proud of myself, since my previous attempts at using gimp have resulted in stupendously horrendous results. And lest you think I'm simply technically incompetent, I present my proudest geekly achievement: Learning LaTeX and vi simultaneously in roughly a 24-hour period in order to post Polymer Physics problem set solutions online. Gimp just hates me.

Where'd Everybody Go?

In the space of a few weeks, several of the blogs on my sidebar have shut down or disappeared.

John Wiegley has quit blogging since a high school student plagiarized one of his entries, which led to him being accused of plagiarizing her paper. I'm too annoyed to even comment.

Sina Mossayeb's blog has disappeared.

HijabMan is still around, but has put out the (mostly-)blank white facade while undergoing a major renovation.

And most surprising and troubling of all, Laura has put up a "Closed" sign. I really hope this is only temporary, since her blog has become one of my favorites (and I'm not just saying that because she linked to the big news in my last post). Some of her posts in the past month or two have really gotten me thinking, even keeping me up at night. She has a way of writing simple posts that act as Pop Rocks in my brain, causing flashes here and there, leading to little epiphanies... and big ones. If you're really done, Laura, I figure you have a really good reason, but know that you'll be missed. I hope you come back soon.

The Boulder Daily Camera had an excellent article in today's Faith section about the Baha'i community here. They sent a reporter and photographer to our devotional meeting last Sunday, and afterwards they interviewed Mr. Majidi, a member of the community who fled Iran under death sentence.

Mr. Majidi's story isn't all that uncommon. A large number of Iranian Baha'is have fled Iran (and other countries) to escape persecution. Often they've come to the US when they were well into adulthood or even old age. Many hardly speak any English, or if they do, they're often not entirely fluent and have thick accents that make them reluctant to talk to native speakers.

Mr. and Mrs. Majidi speak no English. Even though I see them regularly, all I can offer them is a kind look, an Allah'u'Abha, and an attempt to understand a little bit of who they are and why they're here, so far from Iran. Occasionally, if one of their family members is nearby to interpret, we can have a short, awkward conversation. I can't imagine how isolated they must feel.

And yet they come. They come to Feast, they come to devotions, they come to other gatherings. Mr. Majidi chants prayers with a hoarse and tired voice, in words that I don't understand. That's okay; I understand the beauty of them. Besides, it must be nice for him and his wife to understand the words of the prayers themselves now and then.

Of course, they're not the only Baha'is in the US with stories of escaping Iran because of their Faith.

I used to live in the Phoenix area, which has a large Iranian-American population. One woman I knew well came to the US in 1980 or 1981 (a year or two after the revolution) with her husband and one-year-old son. They'd intended to stay there even after the revolution but changed their minds after hearing about another one-year-old boy being decapitated -- simply because he was a Baha'i.

Baby martyrs. I can't imagine.

This same woman told me stories now and again of her life in Iran even before the revolution, in the relatively carefree times of the Shah's rule. In one story from when she was a girl, a number of Baha'is were gathered in someone's house when they smelled something burning. After a minute or two, they realized their front door was on fire; someone had tried to burn down the house -- or maybe it was just a warning.

Hearing these stories through broken English makes the effect even more surreal and jarring. After a couple of sentences that don't quite make sense to my ears I'll finally grasp that -- Oh! They're burning the house down!

While living in Arizona I also met a recent arrival. Shervin and his family had come to the US, knowing no English and having no family here, so he could get an education. Baha'is aren't even allowed to attend universities in Iran. Many are denied jobs.

A friend and I have talked about collecting the stories of these souls, first as sort of an audio history, then maybe as a book. The task is pretty daunting; there are tens of thousands (or more) of Baha'is who have fled Iran, and each of these people have stories that could fill an entire book on their own.