Blue Cord

Back in February, I wrote a post on pet peeves. It turned out to be a rather popular post with a good number of comments. In the intervening months, more things have gotten stuck in my craw, so I thought I would share another group of things that frost my shorts.

• Bumper stickers. I am not sure why people cover their cars with these things. Those that are supposed to be funny rarely are. Those that are supposed to make you think are cliche. And those that advertise the person’s identity or association with a particular group baffle me, because I am not sure why they think I would want to know the group to which they belong. As for political bumper stickers, I have never known anyone to decide whom to vote for based on someone else’s car.
• People who think that proper punctuation, grammar, and formatting don’t need to be used when writing e-mail.
• Restaurants that sell medium, large, and extra-large drinks. I’m not opposed to those sizes, but if you only have three drinks, they should be small, medium, and large.
• While I am on the subject of drink sizes, Starbucks needs to get rid of the large, grande, and venti. The large is the small. Grande is French and Spanish for large, so it should be the same size as the large. Venti is Italian for twenty, even though the size it represents is twenty-four ounces. Therefore, the sizes are inaccurate, confusing, and misleading respectively, and taken as a whole they are pretentious.
• A Boston accent. Before moving here I always thought that it was an interesting accent. In large quantities, however, it really grates on my nerves. And then they make fun of my Southern accent . . .
• “It’s what I like to call X” This phrase drives me nuts. Or more specifically, the way it is used most of the time drives me nuts. Often, people use it to refer to an object by a name which everyone uses. For example, I heard someone on the radio the other day refer to a portable USB drive by saying, “It’s what I like to call a ‘geek stick’.” Yeah, well, so do a lot of people. Saying “It’s what I like to call X” implies that you are the one that came up with that term. If you did, feel free to use that phrase. But if you got the term from someone else, don’t. And don’t use it to make up new terms for items for which we already have good names. The new name is not as clever as you think it is.
• The Texas Rangers.
• People who try to “think outside the box” before learning how to think conventionally first. The reason things are conventionally done a particular way is that it works. Whether it is business, theology, creative writing, or music, you can break the rules only after you learn the rules and why they apply most of the time.
• This brings me to my final pet peeve, the idea that rules were made to be broken. Rules are made to be followed. There may occasionally be reasons to break the rules, but they are by definition the exception and not the . . . um . . . rule.

I could go on, but my new apartment doesn’t allow pets, so I better stop.

As I rode up the elevator in my new apartment this evening, the only other passenger noted my Baltimore Orioles cap.  The man - who was wearing a Boston Red Sox t-shirt - informed me that I was in the wrong neighborhood to be wearing such a hat.  I admitted that it hadn’t been easy being an Orioles fan anywhere for the last decade.

That point was emphasized when I got to my apartment.  Upon signing on to my computer, I saw that Baltimore had lost their game to the Texas Rangers.  That is not that surprising, even though the Rangers are in last place in their division.

What was surprising, however, was the score . . . Rangers 30, Orioles 3.  That’s not a baseball score; it’s a football score.

In case you are wondering, major league teams have only scored thirty runs nine times in the history of baseball.  The last time it was done was in 1897 when Chicago beat Louisville 36-7, a game in which Chicago set the record for most runs scored.  This is the first time that thirty runs have been scored in an American League game.  The AL didn’t come into existence as a major league until 1901.

Some days its hard to be a fan.

Last week, Barry Bonds hit his 756th* career home run, passing Hank Aaron as the all time leader. The asterisk, of course, represents the fact that this record is somewhat tainted, due to Bonds’s use of performance enhancing drugs.

I don’t particularly like Bonds. He is a very arrogant player. This is especially evident when he hits a home run. He - like many others - stands at the plate, nonchalantly admiring his work as if to say, “Of course I hit a home run. What did you expect?”, before beginning to trot down to first base. This does not mean I don’t respect him as a player, though. No matter how many drugs you take, you still have to manage to put the bat on the ball. In this regard, Bonds is like Ty Cobb. Cobb was one of the meanest SOBs to ever play the game, but he was still a great player.

Bonds’s milestone got me thinking about performance enhancing drugs, especially because I spent ten years taking such drugs. I never took anything like steroids or human growth hormones, but I never needed to. I am not an athlete. But I did take antidepressants, and these certainly enhanced my performance as a scholar.

One of the primary symptoms that finally got me to go to a psychologist was the loss of short term memory, something that is often associated with depression. While I was a student, I would be translating some Hebrew or hieroglyphics the night before a class. I would look at the word I needed to translate and then turn to my lexicon. By the time I had turned two or three pages in the lexicon, the letters of the word had rearranged themselves in my head and I no longer had any idea what word I was trying to find. It would take several attempts before I retained the word long enough to find the definition.

For a philologist, such a problem is fairly severe, but it would create difficulty for any scholar. When things are not retained in short-term memory, they never get transferred to long-term memory and therefore do not become a part of our working knowledge. Since knowledge is our stock in trade as scholars, depression makes scholarship difficult.

Once I was prescribed antidepressants, however, the problem went away. This means I am able to do my job better because of antidepressants. That would seem to me to be the very definition of performance enhancing drugs.

It could be argued, of course, that the drugs Bonds took were banned by baseball, while scholarship has never banned antidepressants. (And given the number of scholars I know who take them, this is probably a good thing.) But this points to the fact that rules in baseball and scholarship must be based on something. If merely making you perform better makes a drug illegal, then surely antidepressants would be banned.

Another difference between steroids and antidepressants is that steroids are supposed to make you perform at levels above that of a normal human, while antidepressants simply make your body functional normally. The unstated assumption in this, however, is that we know how a body functions normally, that there is some sort of baseline human against which we can measure ourselves. Such a human is supposedly perfectly healthy, with no physical or psychological problems.

I have never met such a person. This is not surprising, since this person exists only as an abstraction. Everyone has problems of some sort. Theologically we call this our fallen nature. One thing that the Calvinists have right is that sin corrupts everything. It does not remove all goodness, but it does infect every aspect of our being, including our bodies and our minds.

And so, I freely admit that any success I have had as a scholar is due in part to performance enhancing drugs. Antidepressants may not have given me the ability to function as a Hall-of-Fame scholar, but they have allowed me to play the game. Without them, I would never have even made it into the minor leagues.

This month’s RBL includes a review of Listening to the Artifacts: Music Culture in Ancient Palestine.  There is some confusion about the title of the book, which is called Do You Hear What I Hear? in the book description.  The book is the published form of the author’s dissertation.

The book examines music culture in ancient Palestine, primarily in Iron Age Israel.  It examines both artifactual and textual evidence in an attempt to understand how music was produce and performed.  It focuses on the technical aspects of how the instruments produce music and more importantly on the context of performance and the role of musicians.  The reviewer says that the book is accessible and useful not only to biblical scholars and musicologists but to people who produce music in churches and synagogues as well.

Sounds like a great Christmas present for my brother.

As of this week I have regained access to two very important resources.

The first of these is the Internet.  As I mentioned before, I had to wait for my Internet access to be set up in my new apartment.  The technician came by and installed cable and Internet today.  The cable stopped working about two hours after he left, but I can live with that. Digital cable is not as impressive when you are watching it on a 12 inch incredibly low definition TV that you bought ten years ago.  The Internet is still working, however, so over the next few days I will be getting in touch with those of you who have offered to write essays for the blogging book.

The second - and ultimately more satisfying - resource is my library.  For the past three years, I have had only a small number of my books with me.  While I was in Lithuania, 90% of my books were in storage.  They, along with furniture and dozens of boxes, were delivered to my new apartment last Saturday. I am so happy to have them back that I am almost giddy. I am now in a position to explore ideas without having to wait until I get to a library to do so.  Having these books here almost makes this place seem like home.