rain

Today it was misting and I had the track to myself--the ROTCers were inside the football practice facility. My knee stiffens up a bit, but twinges only the first few steps going down stairs.

Yesterday I swam 800 yards in just under 30 minutes, which will be fine for the triathlon. I went right when the pool opened at 1 and there was only one other person there. Saturday I had a lovely bike ride of something over 30 miles following a route called "Almost every hill in two counties." It wasn't--I could think of another hill I could easily have added. And a key road was closed so I had to ride 3 miles on a four lane road. But it still felt good.

evil

We must remember that God uses people we'd just as soon he didn't use -- that's not our call -- and that God specializes in bringing life out of death, can bring good out of evil situations. God's ability to do that doesn't make bad things good. But it does make history move forward.

Barbara Crafton

early mornings

My son has to be at school half an hour away tomorrow morning at 6 am. At least it isn't on Saturday like my daughter last week. I prefer having early mornings to myself. I wasn't too happy Wednesday to get to the track at about 5:45 am and find 50 or more ROTC students doing pushups.

knee worries

After two days of rain we have a beautiful warm day today. I went for a hard hour's bike ride this morning, and was very happy that my knee didn't hurt the way it did on Saturday. That knee isn't the strongest--I dislocated the kneecap while sailing in college and several times afterwards. Since I learned to stretch it it hasn't dislocated again. I was discouraged to have it hurt (now and then) while bike riding Saturday, and it was stiff the next day so something significant clearly was going on. The rain kept me off the bike a couple of days, though I swam Sunday and ran a mile and a half yesterday. Today the stiffness in my knee was better and I tried raising my bike saddle and I only had one tiny twinge while riding. So I hope I've headed off that potential problem.

I was on the sailing team in college. Usually the women's sailing team had its own regattas, but the men's season started earlier and women were allowed to sail in men's races. So I was crewing in a men's regatta at MIT, sailing on the Charles River in Boston in early March in a Tech Dingy. It was windy, and I was hiking (leaning way out of the boat) with my foot hooked under the seat to hold me in. My knee gave way and next thing I knew I was in the water. The water was so cold that I didn't feel any pain--I didn't learn how painful a dislocated kneecap is until the next time it happened, several years later. I went to an orthopedist for the problem once and he said he could cut the tendon on the other side of my kneecap so both sides would be equally weak. I said I would wait until they invented a better treatment.

authority

Alwin wrote a response to my article on diabetes in which he talks about how publishing is power, made accessible by the web. Meanwhile I'm preparing for a class on Oral History in which my students and I will talk about the authority of history versus how people construct their own stories. In class I am going to use a two-dimensional spectrum. One dimension is the between the public and the private--from public commemorations of historical events to our private theories of history. The other dimension is between history--a theory about the past--and memory. I hope that will come clear when I try to work through it.

I'm suggesting there is a common issue, which to put it onto one dimension would be a spectrum from authoritative knowledge to personal narrative. Let me talk about the particular kind of authoritative knowledge that is scientific (or what doctors call evidence-based medicine) for a minute and then I will come back to history. Professionals tend to think in terms of a spectrum in which the scientific is valid and the personal is not, but actually both kinds of knowledge are useful in different ways. My thinking is that there are two kinds of authority--scientific authority, which is hopefully based on good experimental results, and the authority of experience, which isn't statistically significant but can be useful in several ways. My example is that scientific authority says X is the best treatment for ADD, because in a carefully done study 60% of ADD kids benefited more from X and 40% benefited more from Y. But what if my son is one of the kids who benefited more from Y? I find the experience of other people often more useful than what doctors say not only because the doctors may be wrong, but also because when I read other people's experience I have a better chance of finding the approach that will work for my unique situation (physically sometimes, but particularly psychologically), which often isn't the standard approach.

My oral history reading suggests that it isn't enough to talk about authoritative or scientific knowledge vs. individual experience, precisely because people use theories they get from the larger culture to think about their own individual experience. I told my diabetes story as a story of gaining a personal sense of control, an organizing principle that wouldn't come naturally to someone from a less elite background. Publishing may be power, but our voices are heard by particular audiences if we structure our stories in certain ways.

There is more there, but I can't quite get the pieces to come together. I hope that I do better when I have the energy of teaching.

amazing what people do

There is a bicycling sport called cyclocross, on terrain so difficult that you have to run carrying your bicycle in sections. But looking at some pictures, the people who really impressed me were the ones doing the course on unicycles.

Listening for the Heartbeat of God

I'm reading this book by Phillip Newell for Sunday School. I had never before run across the image of John the beloved disciple leaning against Jesus at the Last Supper and listening to the heartbeat of God. See John 13:23--modern translations have changed the meaning but the King James is closer to a literal translation: "Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved." Newell stresses seeing God in the natural world, which isn't very useful to me because it is where I started. I like the image of listening for the heartbeat of God as an ideal for human closeness. Newell also writes of the idea that every baby is born in the image of God. I'm still thinking about that one.