Thomas Eric Ruthford

The Shy Single Christian's Guide to Coffee Hour

2012-01-04T18:27:00.001-08:00

The Boundless Webzine has published a new article that I've written entitled The Shy Single Christian's Guide to Coffee Hour. This is exciting! Tell people about it! Send links! Tell them to read my book!

A blogger interviewed me about my book!

2011-01-26T21:56:00.001-08:00

Here's a link to an interview with me about my book, Heaven Help the Single Christian:

http://byztex.blogspot.com/2011/01/interview-with-author-of-heaven-help.html#more

And, if you're interested in buying the book, click here.

Promotional video for the book!

2011-01-18T20:27:00.000-08:00

I have created a video promoting my new book, Heaven Help the Single Christian! Thank you to everyone who helped with it! Please forward the link to all your friends and help me pay the rent!\

Context for Choice

2011-01-03T18:11:00.000-08:00

When Christians and unreligious people talk about Christianity, the topic that comes up most is freedom of choice. For me, as I wondered which church to join, and whether I should join at all, this was my central question – will I still have control over my own destiny? We have to think about freedom of choice, first, because it’s the defining characteristic of a human being. God gave us free will because He wants us to choose to be with Him – He does not compel our love, and is willing to allow us to reject Him. So often when something tragic happens, we ask “Why did God allow this to happen?” If God is all-powerful, and is all good, which He is, shouldn’t he be preventing us from having accidents, from getting attacked by criminals? The answer to this conundrum, hard as it is to accept, is that to stop all these bad things from happening, God would have to negate our free will, which would make us something that we are not – and He loves just as we are, and He wants us to love Him, as we are.

Secondly, we have to think about freedom of choice because it’s also the defining characteristic of an American – we love our freedom of choice both as regards religion (or non-religion as the case may be) and as regards our economic choices. Dutch sociologist Geert Herstede surveyed attitudes of people in countries across the world, finding Americans to be the most individualistic of all. (Great Britain and Australia were close behind as the rankings are available here.)

As Christians in America, we have to think about freedom of choice because it’s what most people have on their minds when they think about religion – whether they’re going to visit or avoid, respect or resist, love or withdraw. America is unique among industrial countries in that we both have a long tradition of religious freedom, and more people take advantage of the opportunity to choose a religion than other developed countries. In Western Europe and Japan, the favorite choice about religion is a non-choice – general disinterest. Here, however, 30 to 40 percent of the population still attends a weekly worship service. Researchers Robert Putnam and David Campbell in their recent book, American Grace, analyzed attitude surveys going back several decades and found that there has been quite a growth in Americans who claim “no religion” or “spiritual but not religious” in surveys since 1990, however, it would take a couple of centuries before the overall population became as secularized as Great Britain’s, where only 5-8 percent are regular service-goers. In our society of choosers, there is more interest in God, but people still care a great deal whether they are going to be controlled and judged, and how much freedom they will have to make choices.

As Christians, we sometimes get rather defensive about choice, looking at the church as a place to withdraw in our world of too many choices. Some of us like choose a church based on where we can be with other parents who are as strict with their children as we are, protecting them from immorality in television, teen magazines and the Internet. We expect the church to restrict our choices to protect us from a hostile outside world.

If, as I said, freedom of choice is what makes us human and what makes us American, it’s no surprise that unaffiliated people make an immediate U-turn when we talk about Christianity. They see it as a negation of choice, a place where they will not be allowed to be human or American. In similar manner to how we view the church as a fortress, they get very defensive about keeping the religious controllers out of their lives.

How many of us has had a conversation about our faith only to discover that we are having two conversations at once? We talk about Jesus Christ and the Incarnation and the Resurrection, and our friend is asking whether we dictate how members can vote in public elections, whether we let members watch the movies they want to see, and whether we send homosexual teenagers to special camps to “turn” them heterosexual. Every time I have this conversation, I end up saying “I don’t know” a whole lot because it’s so unrelated to what I usually think about.

Obviously there’s some disconnect between what we think people need to hear and what they care about when it comes to religion. We talk about how Jesus Christ saves us and improves our lives, and they defend their rights and try to keep all the nastiest elements of Christianity out of their lives, suspiciously wondering if all the nice stuff we say about Jesus is the sales pitch we use to trap them.

Choice then, is a specific topic that needs attention right at the beginning. We need to make clear that Christianity isn’t about dictating right choices to its followers; rather it provides the context for our many choices, and it tells us why the choices are important. Rarely do we get the right answer to a question in short form from Scripture or theology, but we do learn why we have to try as hard as we can to make the right choice.

The reason that our choices are important is simple – Jesus Christ has offered us the opportunity to dwell in heaven with Him. And, we hope, people also want to be in heaven with Him. Heaven was closed to us because of the separation between God and man caused by sin, and Jesus re-opened that path through Himself by becoming Man. By living as we lived, dying as we died, and being resurrected as we ought to be resurrected, He became one with us and gave us the opportunity to become one with Him, both by believing and following Him as a person, and by following His teachings.

Our choices, then, become the moment when we decide whether we want to take that opportunity. We aren’t Christians because Jesus provides the nicest moral and ethical code out of a group of equal world religions and philosophies, rather, Jesus provides our opportunity to be joined with God and live with Him for all eternity.

Christianity also provides us with a framework for our choices. The New Testament teaches us about eternal justice that will come in the age to come, which isn’t just an incentive for us to be good, but these teachings are there as a curb on our perverse human justice, which encourage us to requite injustice with misery, hurting those who hurt the weak.

The New Testament also teaches us that every person bears the image of God, which compels us to serve those who have nothing to do with us. We are commanded to love our enemies. We cannot curse at criminals. This is not because we’ve decided it’s rude, but because Jesus commands it. This choice is important because when we speak to them, we speak to God. When we decide how to treat those who hate us, it is the very same choice over whether we want to be joined to God in heaven.

It is true that becoming a Christian does mean giving up some choices, or at least some choices are strongly discouraged. If I told my wife to have an abortion, or if I divorced her, I would hear about this at church. I probably wouldn’t be allowed to go to Holy Communion for quite a while. Holy Communion is how we can be joined to God while we are here on Earth, and I would have to go through a lengthy process of repentance before I’d be able to get my full membership back at church. However, most of the choices we make in our lives aren’t so black and white as these – they aren’t such obvious moral issues, and Christianity provides us with the encouragement to take on these challenges and the framework to make good ones.

We also have disciplines within Christianity, which at first seem like restrictions upon our choices, which are there to help us get on the right path. The belief that we can be joined to God is not a change of opinion that we have in our minds all of a sudden, rather, it is a truth that has to be lived over a long period of time. We take on disciplines, such as prayer and fasting to humble our minds, souls and bodies so that we can accept these truths fully, and we take on these disciplines willingly. An interesting finding in another study by Sheena Iyengar cited in her book The Art of Choosing is that people in strict religions are actually happier than those in liberal ones. She interviewed 600 people from nine different religions, which she categorized as fundamentalist (Calvinism, Islam and Orthodox Judaism) conservative (Catholicism, Lutheranism, Methodism and Conservative Judaism) and liberal (Unitarianism and Reform Judaism). She had expected people whose choices were restricted to be unhappy because they couldn’t experience as much, but was surprised to find the opposite was true. “The presence of so many rules didn’t debilitate people; instead it seemed to empower them. Many of their choices were taken away, and yet they experienced a sense of control over their lives.” (Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing, New York: Twelve, 2010, p. 28) Iyengar goes on to describe her parents’ arranged marriage. If the restriction is accepted willingly, she argues, provides meaningful structure in the person’s life.

The Church, then, is the place where choices can be made meaningful, and this is what we can offer to modern humanity, awash in choices and living in a world where communications is losing its sense of context. Since the advent of television, each new medium that’s become available has been more immediate, more interactive, and more fragmentary than the previous one. We can communicate with anyone we want, which is a good thing, but as friends forward us pieces of wisdom, humor and news, it becomes more and more difficult to figure out who is speaking and why. With books, we could watch the tone and style of the author and editor as we turned the page to figure out their purpose, but Facebook, Twitter and its cadre of services are making knowledge, place and voice into relative concepts, negating what we call “context.”

In the Church, we can provide that context, that structure back into people’s lives, both with contemplative services that allow the soul to open rather than to bombard it, where truth is provided rather than opinions, and where our freedom of choice is not just allowed, but fulfilled, where choices are made meaningful. Christianity is the fulfillment of freedom of choice, and this is the fuller experience that we most need to show that we can provide to those who don’t see the use for religion.

Four stories of broken romance

2010-12-20T19:06:00.000-08:00

Here's a humor article I wrote for "19th Century Russia," an Orthodox Christian humor blog. It's managed by my friend Brigid Strait. The article is satirical, and it's four stories of broken romance.

We interrupt this interruption...

2010-11-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

As I sit in my parents' house, getting ready for my third winter as a professional resume submitter, I hear this voice:

"We interrupt this interruption to bring you the following important announcement: We have received a number of complaints from local observers in your area that an unusual number of lives seem to be on hold. We are aware of this problem.

"If this seems to be taking longer than it should, please note that recessions are caused by inactivity. What’s happened is that an unexpected amount of money and an unexpected number of people gathering at this point in spacetime have caused an unexpected amount of mass to coalesce, thus depressing the continuum. This may seem to slow things down, and the recovery, at least for an unenlightened observer such as yourself, stuck in the spacetime depression. While we apologize for the negative feedback loop you seem to be stuck in, please be reassured we will prevent you from crossing your own event horizon and creating a black hole. It is true that no one seems to think you have a right to a job, a place to live, or any of that other stuff they said you’d get if you studied hard in school, but please be assured that we are committed to the continued existence of your particles.

"If things seem a little blue when you try to look beyond your situation, that’s just because light is moving more slowly where you are. If you would like to take photographs, may we recommend a filter for your camera’s lens?

"Please feel free to move about the continuum. In fact, you might try moving and talking a little faster. From our perspective, you’ve got quite a drawl, which is pretty humorous.

"Please be assured that your life will eventually resume. Be glad for all that time you spent in post-Soviet republics. Your trajectory out of the spacetime depression will be curved, but the experience taught you to be thankful it isn’t parabolic.

"Thank you for your attention during the interruption. We now return you to your regularly scheduled interruption."

Getting published, inescapable committees, and a grade-school joke

2010-10-16T20:29:00.001-07:00

Dear Friends and Family,

There is this grade-school riddle that contains more wisdom than I would have thought when I first heard it: "Why was ten afraid? Because seven eight nine." I think it is an accurate description of our current economic situation. The recession started in 07, and developed into a panic in 08, devouring 09. And, despite the fact it's technically over, 10 is a terrified year, afraid to hire any of us.

Life for Miri and me continues to be full of educational and enlightening experiences, all of which offer inadequate pay and no benefits. But, staying sane is a matter of giving thanks for all things, for example, the time to write a book.

Getting a Book Published

After many months of trying to find a publisher, I have finally entered a contract with Regina Orthodox Press in Massachusetts, which will publish "Heaven Help The Single Christian: Your (Practical) Guide to Navigating Church as You Search for a Godly Mate" It's a humorous advice book that offers both laughs and a broader context of struggle for the single Christian. Much of it is based upon my own experiences of striking out at coffee hours, church conferences and monasteries before I met Miri, as well as the experiences of friends of mine. I've done as much as I can to remove identification from the characters involved, so all I can say if you recognize yourself in there is that you should have been nicer to me.

The book is due out by Christmas, which is light-speed in the publishing world. The director said he really needed something additional to go in the holiday catalog, and he accepted my book as a rush-job. The first printing run should be 1,000 or 2,000 copies, and the price will be $15-$17. At 10 percent royalties, it doesn't add up to much, especially when you consider that hardly anyone pays retail price. On the continuum of what I was getting paid as an author to what J.K. Rowling earns, it's, um, well, it's on the continuum, which is a blessing.

My task for 2011 is learning how to do a book talk, going to conferences and giving it, and selling copies of the book myself directly out of box from the publisher. Other authors have told me when you're starting out, that's how you make most of your money. If any of you knows of events and places with lots of single Christians, let me know, and I can try going and selling the book. And, it would be great if it were near your house so I can sleep there and eat your food. Publication date to come soon.

A challenge to your religion – committees

If I ever write that other book about religious conversion, I'm going to include a section on that point in your spiritual life when you feel an urge to wander because of all the committees you get appointed to. Once you're thought of as a regular, stable churchgoer, when there are events planned that need workers, it is impossible to avoid getting a staff infection.

In this case, the event is the All-American Council of the Orthodox Church in America, due to be held in Bellevue, Wash., in October 2011. Our previous parish council treasurer retired from her position so she could be the lay chairwoman of the event, and then I got elected treasurer to replace her. And now I am on a couple of additional committees for the council, one purposed with getting local media to cover the event, the other to create a city guide for the out-of-towners to check out the Seattle-Bellevue area.

We are renting a large hotel and are expecting 800 people to attend. This council is where all things administrative, financial, legal, spiritual and leadershipish get reported, discussed, voted on and hopefully settled. It happens once every three years and is kind of a big deal. The last one of these was akin to a very nasty marital therapy session, so we're really hoping that this one goes in a somewhat normal manner. It's the first time this event has been held on the West Coast, and we've even gotten Alaska Airlines to be our "official airline."

One scary thing in sitting on these committees is that I'm the youngest one there. Not that being 31 in a room full of 50-year-olds is scary, but this means that if I continue this habit of sitting on committees, I'll someday have more experience than most people and be more likely to get appointed. This makes me wonder if some of the early Christian martyrs decided to defy the Roman authorities as a means of getting out of chairing committees at church.

Independent Journalism for Important Stories

I'm also continuing my work these days as a news reporter. You may remember my story about the King County 10-year Plan to End Homelessness. Now I've got a story about a problem that's both disturbing, and very interesting because the campaign to help those affected by it is very new, and not fully developed.

The problem is commercial sexual exploitation of children, a long clinical term that basically means forced prostitution of underage girls. The further I delve into the topic, the more upset I get, and the more I'm convinced of the need for a story to get done.

I've been interviewing human-services people, police officers, and I'm going to interview someone who'd been formerly exploited.

The interesting parts of this story are the complexities of laws that both help and prosecute minors involved in prostitution, the comprehensive and expensive services to help them recover, and the fact that this is a demand-driven economy. The disturbing parts are the obscenely abusive things the pimps do to control their girls, the fact that the girls don't tend to live very long after getting in to "The Life," and finally the fact that every girl saved simply acts as an absence in the market, inspiring pimps and customers to try harder to get what they want.

This is a story that's getting funded through spot.us, a web site that puts journalists' story ideas up where people can pledge money for them. The story is about two-thirds funded right now. Another interesting feature is that people can take a survey for a group looking for research information and by doing so, earn $6 to $10 for the story. It gives us a boost whether you pledge or not.

Other notes

That's the news from Ruthfordville right now. Outside of that, life generally goes on – Miri continues her half-time job at the Point Defiance Zoo as a zookeeper and climbing toy for endangered leopards. Right now, we are winding up a mini-vacation to Helena, Mont., where my cousin, Robin, got married to a fellow named Grant. She planned some really cool things into her wedding, including a pre-wedding hike to the top of Mt. Helena. I also got to visit the Montana State Museum here, which had an amazing gallery of paintings by Charlie Russell, a painter who was hired by the Great Northern Railroad around the beginning of the 20^th century to paint scenes that would make people want to take vacations in Montana. Such a wonderful concept – paying an artist to increase your business, and making money for all involved, and getting enduring masterpieces out of it in the end. Sigh, now we raise money through sites such as spot.

There will be a load of lovely pictures both from the wedding and the hikes, but I'm still too much of a luddite to buy a digital camera, so it'll be a while before I get any of those up there for viewing.

Please keep in touch. I'd love to hear from you!

Love,

Thomas Eric Ruthford

I need a new title

2010-09-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

I have a publisher interested in my book, which makes me very happy! But, he says he doesn't like my title, "Coffee Hour Courting: Dating for the Devoted." I'm not actually that crazy about that title myself, but it was the best I could think of...

So I need a new title and have been banging my head against the pad of paper for a couple of days now. This title needs to be short, clever, and then it needs a subtitle that is a complete summary of what the book is about.

I can think of lots of "serious" titles that might make sense, like "Bringing your date home to Jesus" or " Meeting a Godly Mate" or some such variation. "Searching and churching" is just cheesy...

HELP!

I got published! And some other stuff, too...

2010-06-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

I have had one of those rare events in a writer's life recently, Getting Published And Getting Paid For It. Here is a link to my story that I wrote for the Seattle PostGlobe about King County's 10-year-Plan to End Homelessness. It's an ambitious plan that I hope succeeds, and the government and community leaders involved in the work have done a lot to coordinate their efforts, although the homeless population in Seattle and King County remains stubbornly high. I really enjoyed researching the story, and I got to apply a lot of what I learned from back when I was the chief financial officer of Raphael House of San Francisco, a homeless shelter for families.

This story was the first crowd-funded story in Seattle, meaning that it got funded through a Web site called Spot.us, which has a new way of funding independent journalism. News reporters put story ideas up on the site, and then donors pledge money to it. It's similar to how public radio gets funded, but one story at a time. In about a week, enough donations came in so that it became a paid job for me, and believe me, is that ever special. Thank you!

Miri (dearie wife) and I have had some other fun things that we've done over the past few months. One was Pascha at church, when Miri sang with the choir, and I got to take pictures with my trusty Pentax ME Super that is as old as I am. Several people at church said, "Your camera went click!" I like going to the special camera store and buying 1600 speed film. I'm still having a hard time adjusting to being an antique owner at the age of 30. Pascha (also called Easter) is a midnight service for Orthodox Christians (we don't waste time) and part of the service involves circling the church three times. I took this picture of Fr. Athanasius Shaw carrying a candle.

The Gospel passage we read on Pascha night is the Prologue of John. I like this picture because it has the priest carrying the light into the world, which is reflective of John 1:5, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Miri has had some interesting adventures in the world of zoos and aquariums recently. She began an internship at the Seattle Aquarium in January and got to take care of animals and observe the dominance patterns between a big old seal, Al and a smaller teenage-like seal, Commander who was challenging him for a while -- until the old man shouted him down and equilibrium was restored. They know that this happened because Miri sat and watched them for several weeks, counting up the number of times which one shouted at the other. The Aquarium internship turned into an Aquarium job, and now she is a part-time educator there. But, since it is summer, there are not any school field trips coming through, and she doesn't have work. But, in September, she will.

She is also continuing her part-time job at the Point Defiance Zoo, which has been full of excitement and camera crews recently. First, the zoo received a family of clouded leopards from Thailand. This is a rare species, and they are tree-climbers. Miri has gotten to play with the cubs several times, and she has gotten climbed on and drooled on several times. Here's a picture:

And if that weren't enough, the zoo also now has two Sumatran tiger cubs. They are younger and do not have teeth yet, and Miri has gotten to play with them a few times, too. It's believed that only 500 of them exist in the world, about 350 of which are in the wild. These tigers got on to the Today Show about a week ago.

The bandage is for tendonitis. This little girl cub does not have teeth yet. You can help name them. There's an on-line vote open now!

I don't know how many kids say, "I want to be a toy for endangered species to play with when I grow up," but Miri seems to have accomplished this.

I am still submitting lots of resumes, and getting the occasional job interview, so there's hope yet. Right now I am working on a marketing study for the Pacific Lutheran University bookstore and its quest for profitability. It's a nice change, but I'm still waiting for that Real Job With Benefits. I've also had one job interview recently, but I know from experience not to get my hopes up too high. This time of economic challenge has been instructive to us, however. I really think this is God's way of showing people who don't drink what alcoholism will do to their finances.

One recent accomplishment I made was completing a certificate in Geographic Information Systems. Our group project was to make a map of the avalanche paths surrounding Alpental Ski Area at Snoqualmie Pass here in Washington state. It was a fun project, although it made me realize that GIS work is more computer work than it is map work, and it was the map end of things that appealed to me. I am, however, hopeful that I can work mapping into a job soon.

Coming up soon, Miri and I are going to Vancouver, BC, for a two-day trip to see the science museums, aquariums and and such up there. We got a coupon with Greyhound and decided this would be an ideal trip for us. Additionally, we are going on a six-day bike trip across Eastern Washington. The trip is called the Ride Around Washington, and is put on by the Cascade Bicycle Club. Also, Patrick, my Dad, and Jeffrey are going on this trip. One cool thing is that I took my green custom mountain bike to the shop and got it modified so that it will ride more like a road bike, and ride faster. (This bike is 12 years old and went to Ukraine and back with me and helped me lose 90 pounds. That, and the borcsht.) Here's a picture from last year's trip:

This picture is one of the numerous scenic lakes you'll find going up Washington Pass, which we did on Day 2 of RAW last year. Thankfully, there won't be any mountain passes that challenging

Finally, we are looking forward to going hiking now that the mountain snow is melting. I recently bought a book about best hikes with dogs, and I want to try going to Dewey Lake, near Chinook Pass, with Jisa the brave scout dog.

View Larger Map

So, that's the news from Ruthfordville. I hope that you are well, too. Feel free to write me, or leave a comment on the blog -- I will get it even though I don't update the blog too often.

Your friend,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Spot.us story pitch

2010-04-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

My story idea has been featured on the debut of Spot.us, a new Web site that intends to fund journalism by proposing story ideas to the readers themselves and asking for pledges. Here's a link to my story idea, about King County's ambitious plan to end homelessness by 2014. This plan was drawn up in 2005 by community and government leaders to take a whole new approach to homelessness that aimed to end the shelter-based approach to maintaining homelessness to a supportive housing model that ends homelessness by quickly moving people from being homeless to being housed. One of the things they said that they would do is build or convert 9,500 units of housing for this purpose.

This plan is halfway through, and we're in the stages of an anemic recovery from a crippling recession, and it's time to check in on the plan -- are they still able to build these units of housing, and how much money is it saving us to use this housing approach as opposed to a shelter approach?

I am going to use my skills as a journalist and as a former manager of a homeless shelter in San Francisco to explain and illustrate this effort to end homelessness. And, I'll publish this on the Seattle PostGlobe, an on-line news Web site that is trying to find its path as a non-profit news organization. We had a nice meeting today of PostGlobe people, and the most memorable line was, "This organization seems like the Post-Intelligencer in Exile." And, this is unfortunately true. We need to get a new mission and a new purpose in our community-based journalism and let go of that defunct newspaper.

Miri and I are doing all right, but we're still looking forward to that wonderful day when we can get our own apartment again.When it will come, we don't know. She now has two part-time jobs, one at the Point Defiance Zoo as a zookeeper and the other at the Seattle Aquarium as an educator. I have two temporary jobs coming up that each should last about two weeks, one as a scorer of standardized school tests and the other as a customer service representative at REI's call center. This is positive news, but I really need a full-time job. I have had a few job interviews that went well recently.

Miri and I had a wonderful Pascha at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church and a short trip to Vashon Island, which was a lovely short and affordable getaway that we could pretend was Vancouver Island (location of our honeymoon in 2007). We took lots of pictures, and I'm attaching one here.

We hope you are well! Christ is Risen!

Places I've been published

2010-02-01T23:02:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

I wrote a review of an imaginary book, "Dumped But Dispassionate," and it got published on the Onion Dome. The Onion Dome is a news site with parody and lampoon-style articles poking fun at Orthodox Christians who take themselves too seriously.

Also, I've published some stories recently on Booksie, a cool site where authors can post prose. I've put non-fiction about my time in Ukraine on there, as well as three short fictional stories. I would love to have your comments on any of them.

Your friend,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Two of my favorite photos

2010-01-11T13:41:00.000-08:00

Recently I developed two rolls of film, and got two wonderful pictures. Here's one of Miri in Lowell's Restaurant at the Pike Place Market, which I call "Contemplatively Chocolating." For more of these, click here.

This other one is of me at Spray Falls in Mt. Rainier National Park. For more of this album, click here.

Fundamental walls

2010-01-02T11:59:00.000-08:00

I keep wishing I could write a good book about religion with broad appeal, especially to those without a religion, but I think there are some fundamental walls I will run into no matter what:

a. Most people are set in their habits.
b. Most of those people who are willing to change their habits aren't that interested in theology.
c. Given the focus on this-worldly justice that most non-religious people have, I think they'd make better Jews than Christians.

I keep thinking that if we could only find the right appeal to the unchurched, we could start an "Awakening" with the fullness of our sacramental life. We could be more than these chatty parishes of 100 or so people, one or two per city. I imagine myself as some kind of bridge between the world of unaffiliated ethical reasonableness and sacramental Christianity, but really, I'm just part of a small group that wanted to make this kind of change, and did.

And then, we Orthodox find other people who have come in this way, and we think we're witnessing a trend. It's a significant portion of those joining the church, but an insignificant portion of America.

In summary, this book is going to take a lot longer to write than I thought it would.

Winter update

2009-12-21T23:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Family,

Greetings from Maple Valley!

Recently, I developed some film and put it up on my photo blog, so I have these lovely pictures that are a little bit dated, but that's how film works, remember? Reminiscing is supposed to include an element of surprise at the stuff you forgot was there. I took pictures of the Fourth of July fireworks show we had in the street, all of which looks really cool with extended exposures. The hovering white blob in the third picture is Jeffrey wearing a headlamp lighting something.

Also, back in August, Miri and I got to go on a bike ride around Washington state. It was a 200-person supported ride, and Jeffrey, Patrick, Mom and Dad were there, too. It was six days, 400 miles and lots of lovely scenery. We started in LaConner, Wash., and ended in Kettle Falls, Wash. This ride was gorgeous and challenging, involving crossing Washington Pass in the North Cascades on Day 2. This was Miri's first mountain riding experience, and she did great. Patrick, as usual, went too fast, but did stop long enough to take this picture:

We then camped in the Methow River Valley in a small town called Twisp, which, along with nearby Winthrop, seemed like a wonderful place to go relax in a cabin or something. And, there were no huge resort hotels or anything. Interestingly, a major skiing resort company years back had wanted to build a huge downhill resort, and the town said thanks but no thanks, and the company decided to build in Whistler instead, and now we have a laid-back tourist town rather than a crazy one in Washington. I'd love to go visit again.

As we were riding from Twisp to the Grand Coulee Dam, we rode on a high plateau with gorgeous views, and there were these hovering white insects that sounded like rotating sprinkler heads. That was kind of cool.

Shortly after the bike ride was over, we went on a hike in Mt. Rainier National Park with our friends the Powells. We started out at Mowich Lake and hiked up to Spray Park. The weather was gorgeous, and I was so glad to get all these pictures. And, thankfully, the bugs were too small to be photographed. Father Barnabas Powell, and his wife Lela, have two children, Mila and Sava, aged 3 1/2 and 1 1/2.

Miri and I have been making a little bit of progress with our careers, although it's been kind of fragmentary progress. We are both eagerly awaiting Real Jobs that pay the rent and pay benefits. Miri still has her temp job at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, working with the animals in the Asia exhibit, and she recently got an unpaid internship at the Seattle Aquarium to work with the birds and mammals there. She's left her PetSmart job, which makes her happy.

I have a part-time temporary job at REI right now answering phones in the call center and placing orders for the customers. It is kind of a fun place to work, and we ring a bell whenever a membership is sold, and then everybody applauds. It's also nice when a customer calls in to ask about an item I actually own, and then you can hear their voice really light up. One mother was calling to order a sleeping bag for her daughter going a mission trip to Russia, and was going for major overkill with the bag and accessories, and I was able to reassure her: Yes, the buildings have walls over there. Moms can be so funny.

It's also fun working for a for-profit co-op. I've worked for lots of non-profits in my day, and they've all had meaningful missions, but they've been slow to respond to changes in the communities they serve, and they tend to like to do what the staff wants to do rather than what the communities need. REI has a more definite measure of effectiveness: Is it selling?

This job ends in a few days. I found another bit of short term work recently, doing business and administration work for a news web site, the Seattle Post-Globe, which opened last year. It's staffed by former Seattle Post-Intelligencer journalists who got laid off when the newspaper closed in the spring. Right now it's a non-profit, but thinking about becoming a for-profit co-op, which I think would be really cool.

I am also taking a class in Geographic Information Systems at the University of Washington. I am with a group of five students who are trying to map avalanche paths in the Cascades in hopes of using the maps for prediction and education. It's kind of a fun project, although the software involved with GIS is challenging.

So, that's what's up right now. We hope you are well.

In Christ,

Thomas Eric Ruthford

A lovely day out

2009-09-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

Miri and I went to Sequim, Wash., yesterday, and got to see some cool stuff. First, at the Dungeness River Festival, there was an exhibition of driftwood sculptures:

This one is a dreamcatcher inside of a piece of wood. I thought it was really pretty.

And then this one is the column of fire from the Book of Exodus that guided the Hebrews at night through the wilderness. (The wood, not the flower bouquet.)

After the River Festival, we went to the Dungeness Spit National Wildlife Refuge, a 5-mile barrier island that extends out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It's one of the few long beaches walks in Washington state that doesn't make you climb a mountain in the middle of it.

We found a really big piece of driftwood there, and tried to take some artsy pictures with it, but I was using a digital pocket camera that doesn't have a manual mode, so it kept setting its aperture so as to get a good picture of the bright stuff, not the dimmer stuff. Here's Miri sitting behind the driftwood, and my shadow in the middle of it.

Eventually, I made my wife squint so that I could actually get her image exposed correctly.

And, finally, my favorite of the bunch of pictures, in which I was able to keep my elbow-shadow out of it.

So that was our Sunday.

Recently, I have had a few interesting things happen. I got another article published on that news Web site, the SeattlePostGlobe. It's about the Seattle City Council considering a change in its single-family housing zoning laws to allow homeowners to build backyard cottages on their lots.

Also, I had two job interviews last Thursday. One job seemed like it would be quite an adventure, and would be a real career-builder. The other seemed like a pretty good job that might pay the rent. I'm hopeful that one of them comes through.

If you're a PLU alumni, I'll be at homecoming this Saturday, Oct. 3. Come find me and say hi!

That's the news from Ruthfordville. We hope you are well!

I'm a news reporter again!

2009-09-08T00:14:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to a news story that I wrote. It's about Mary's Place, a women's day shelter in Seattle in danger of closing.

I am a volunteer reporter with the Seattle PostGlobe, an on-line news Web site consisting of former news reporters from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Weekly. It's a non-profit organization, with a big emphasis on the NON right now -- not even the boss gets paid. So if you want to promote a great news site that increases the number of journalistic voices in Seattle, please visit the donation page.

How to survive a recession

2009-06-25T00:19:00.000-07:00

The way that you survive a financial panic is by the stuff you don't do in the two or three years leading up to the recession. There really isn't that much you can do to prepare for a recession unless you're an expert at making short sales several times a day.

I have been unemployed for the past nine months, having quit my job the same week Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. That part may not have been the best-timed decision, but now that I have plenty of time to ponder such things, I can remember a couple of moments when I blew some people off for their outlandish suggestions.

The first was at the beginning of 2005, when I became friends with a mortgage broker.

After he told me what he did, I said, "Sounds cool, but I have no money, just debt. It'll be a long time before I can buy something."

"You could borrow money from family," he said, "and then rent the house to people to pay the mortgage. You can make money off the rent from the increase of the house's value."

And I laughed. My new friend didn't know me that well yet; he was obviously assuming I had some resources I didn't have.

A couple of months later, I opened a bank account at Washington Mutual Bank in San Francisco. I had a personal liking for this bank because they gave my great-grandmother a home mortgage during the Great Depression on the house where my family lived when I was a baby. My initial deposit was less than $1,000. At the end of the initial meeting, the woman in the collared WaMu shirt gave me a certificate saying that I had been pre-approved for a home loan of $250,000. I snorted, quietly. I knew that offer wouldn't hold after I filled out all the forms and put on a tie and came in and tried to explain to a suit-wearing mortgage officer I could pay for a house or condo in San Francisco with my $30,000 salary.

Obviously, these people were talking about someone else. I blew them off. It wasn't a temptation I was resisting, as much as a joke that I thought was mildly funny. I forgot all about it.

As it turns out, they weren't joking. A month ago, I read this first person account by an economics reporter at The New York Times who really wanted to buy a house but was paying two-thirds of his salary to his ex-wife in child support. He found a mortgage broker who told him that wasn't a problem and started descending the credibility scale for types of mortgages available until he found one that would not require that aspect of his background to be put on a loan application. He told the broker he felt guilty asking with such bad history, and the broker told him that the broker's job was to make things possible for the customer, not to judge them. He bought the house and a year later, he had a hard time making payments, and called up the same broker to refinance. "No problem," he said. Calling the broker felt like calling a drug dealer. Eventually, he started missing payments and the mortgage was underwater, but the bank was too busy to foreclose. At the time he wrote the article, eight months after he stopped paying, he still had not heard back from the bank.

Reading this article made me reconnect the dots of some forgotten memories. I was angry over the fact I had been unemployed for eight months and living with my parents, but I hadn't understood that I had been very close to this bad mortgage nonsense without even knowing it. Washington Mutual, a leader in subprime mortgages, probably would've given me a home loan in 2005. Now they're gone, but my checkings account got bailed out by the FDIC. My friend the mortgage broker is still my friend, but isn't working now, either, trying to find a new job outside of real estate.

Now I have just finished a temp job. I have a moderate amount of debt (that isn't growing) and a room at my parents' house where my wife and I sleep. We're doing all right, mainly because of all that stuff we never did.

Thinking in negative terms -- benefits of things not done -- is so counter-intuitive, but now I know what economics professors mean when they tell us about opportunity cost.

Spring news from Ruthfordville

2009-05-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Family,

I have decided to give up my current occupation as Recession Victim and instead go in to the field of being a Misunderstood Genius. My first foray into misunderstood geniusdom is a photo essay I have put together about signs that you might have too many hobbies and not enough time. There are seven photos, just keep clicking "next" in the upper-right corner.

These days, I continue to apply for jobs. I've applied for seven over the past few days and Last week, I applied for a job as the PR guy for a chemical weapons depot. There's one assignment that won't get boring. Maybe I should get one of those "If you see me running, try to keep up" shirts.

Miri continues her two jobs, one at Point Defiance Zoo as an animal keeper in the Asia department, and the other as a dog-training class instructor at PetSmart. She likes the zoo better, although it's a temporary job and it's minimum wage.

I like the zoo, too. I got to visit Point Defiance earlier this month, and the whole place was really cool. The beluga whale was the most interesting creature there, with the way he squeaked and sputtered at his trainer. If you do want to see him, I'd recommend you go soon because the zoo has decided to send him back to Sea World in San Diego. Beluga whales are social creatures, and this whale had another whale in his exhibit, but he died a couple of months ago. Friendless, this beluga needs other whales to talk with, so they're sending him to Sea World.

Being a recession victim certainly is frustrating, although we have to keep in mind how we've got most of what we need. Our living situation isn't ideal, but at least we haven't been evicted or foreclosed upon like many people have with this burst housing bubble. We are living with my parents, which has been the inspiration for some aquatic land art (the aforementioned photo essay). Every few days I kick myself for having gotten in to this mess, and then Miri points out to me that there isn't any better way it could have turned out: Point Defiance was the only zoo that offered her a job, and despite the one hundred job applications I've sent out, I have not had any offers.

I wasn't crazy about my old job, and it just so happened that I quit during that manic week in September when all the banks failed. That job wasn't paying all the bills either, so it was a good idea to try moving. It's such a self-defeating way of thinking when you compare what you have to what you want -- rather, you should compare what you have to your other options.

I have had a few job interviews, most of which went pretty well, but in the end, I was not the lucky fellow who got chosen. Maybe I need to take this strategy:

With my free time, I have completed two manuscripts, one about the people whom I met in Ukraine and San Francisco when I was in the Peace Corps and working for the homeless shelter. The other is a humorous guide to dating for church-going singles. The second one, I think, has the potential for getting published and making money. Did you know that there are no funny books about Christian dating out there on the market? No wonder the American family is disintegrating -- nobody thinks being a good kid can be fun!

If you would like to read either of these manuscripts, please let me know, and I will send it to you. If I sent you my manuscript two months ago and you haven't done anything with it, hurry up before I start punishing the laggards. Ten lashes with a wet noodle! I am looking for content and context-based comments to answer the question: How interesting is this stuff?

I am also working on a short story right now about a choir director with an impossible singer.

I'm not really sure what's going to happen to these manuscripts, but I had been wanting to get them down on paper for some time, so it's satisfying to have them be real rather than ideas floating in my head.

Last bit of news: I got to see the new Star Trek movie twice, which certainly was exciting. The actors all got their parts spot-on, although Star Trek characters never have been particularly complex. It's not really science fiction anymore, though, as it didn't really raise any ethical questions about how our future should be.

Anyway, that's what's up. Let me know how you're doing!

Your friend,
Eric Ruthford

It's the thought that counts

2009-04-10T19:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your application for the public affairs representative position at the police department, but we're not likely to hire you any time soon. It's quite obvious from your application that you're a slob. Sure, your grammar and punctuation were all correct, and you graduated from a good school, but we could tell that you sneezed on your resume without covering your mouth. What professional would leave a booger on his resume? And don't think that a .025 mm booger would get past us! We're a police department and we can DNA test anything. Don't you watch NCIS? We can figure out far more than Abby can.

Sincerely yours,
The Duwamish County Police Department

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your application to work at Frederick and Nelson's as a loss prevention agent. Here, we mean "thank you" in the same way Flannery O'Connor wrote "she stretched her mouth politely" to describe the reaction of a woman who had just been insulted by a child. Did you really think we wanted to hire someone with a master's degree in public policy and management? What are you going to do, interrogate shoplifters about the socio-economic causes behind their theivery? Obviously you are looking for a crap job that you can leave at a moment's notice when something better comes along.

Sincerely yours,
Human Resources

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your book proposal about your time serving in the U.S. Peace Corps. While we enjoyed it, we regret to inform you that your manuscript is ineligible for publication due the fact that you are still living. We only publish memoirs posthumously. We are sorry to deliver you this disappointing news, but hopefully you can find a different publisher. If not, at least you have something to look forward to when you are dead. Besides Heaven, that is.

Sincerely yours,
St. Vladyka's Press

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your application for position 0009-4332-al@$-q14-SWFseeksSWMforbowling-4562 with the Department of Administrative Departmental Affairs. We regret to inform you that due to our unusually long hiring process that the position you applied for is no longer available. Unfortunately, because of the earth's wobbling on its axis, since you applied for the job, the area of the United States you would have been responsible for examining has gone through severe climate change and is now a desert. Since no one lives there any more, under U.S. Code √1024 x 2.3 relating to places that no longer exist, we cannot offer you a position.

Sincerely,
The Department of Adminstrative Departmental Affairs
$500 penalty for private use

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your proposal for use of stimulus funds to create economic activity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While your idea has merit for producing both results, I think you are a little ahead of your time. It is my hope that some day, we will see old boats refurbished and equipped with anti-gravity generators as a means of alternative transportation, but I do not believe it is the most appropriate means of using the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds at this time.

Sincerely yours,
Barack Obama

Kooky business idea No. 8

2009-04-05T21:23:00.000-07:00

I was pondering a business idea today; tell me what you think. I have lots of time to think about this sort of stuff, being unemployed...

Guilt lockers

Do you have a hard time giving away old stuff even though you haven't touched it in 10 years? Do you feel guilty getting rid of it because you might need it, or because some friend of yours could put it to good use? Do you wish it would just go away on its own, but the act of figuring out what to do with it just too much?

Guilt Lockers, Inc., has got a solution for you: Rent one of our lockers, and put all of the stuff that you're on the fence about keeping or tossing. If you get separation anxiety on some object, come back and get it. Pay rent on the locker until you've forgotten about it, and then we'll take it and find socially and ecologically friendly ways of disposing of it. We keep an elaborate database of secondhand purchasers, charities and recyclers that deal with clothes, furniture, electronics and cute little stuffed animals. If we succeed in selling any of your stuff, you can have 30 percent of the profits.

Clear out your living space free of guilt, sentiment, and decision-making. Help those in need, but in a totally passive manner.

Guilt Lockers -- get rid of it now, because it won't fit in your coffin.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know... don't quit your day job (if only I had one). But, you have to admit that it's better than my idea of refurbishing old boats for when antigravity gets invented.

Books I've been reading

2009-03-09T00:08:00.000-07:00

Wired for War, By P.W. Singer. This is a book about the current and future of robotics warfare. He talks about our military's current systems such as the Predator Drone that can do both surveillance and shoot missiles at targets, all being controlled by remote-controlled human pilots in Nevada who get very, very bored by their duty. He looks in to the future to robotic ambulances that could come rescue wounded soldiers, load them in to a vehicle and carry them back to a hospital.

He looks further into the future towards a paradigm shift he calls the Singularity, a creation of science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge. It's a moment when all the rules of technology change because the artificial intelligence will become so advanced that it, rather than we, will be creating new technologies in a new constant feedback loop.

As a teenager, I read an assortment of novels and short stories by Issac Asimov about robots, all of which were guided by the Three Laws of Robotics:

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These laws were hardwired into Asimov's robots, and it was impossible for a robot to do anything outside of them. I liked these stories, and I thought that this would help create a much better future. Alas, several practical considerations get in the way of implementing these laws. One is that technology doesn't yet allow the kind of thinking in a machine that would make such decisions possible. As one programmer put it, "They are in English. How the heck do you program that?" Another is that the military provides most of the funding. They want robots that can kill. Sigh.

Singer is a nerd who thinks robots are really, really cool and that comes through in the text, which sometimes makes a poor juxtaposition with the seriousness of the topic he's covering. However, he does cover a lot of really scary stuff, such as this difficult-to-argue-with point:

Marvin Minsky, who cofounded MIT's artificial intelligence lab, believes that we humans are so bad at writing computer software that it is all but inevitable that the first true AI we create will be "leapingly, screamingly insane."

Another was a quote from Senator John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, in which he referred to the high casualty rates of past wars:

"...in my judgment, this country will never again permit the armed forces to be engaged in conflicts which inflict the level of casualties we have seen historically. So what do you do? You move toward the unmanned type of military vehicle to carry out missions which are high risk in nature... the driving force is the culture in our country today, which says, 'Hey! If our soldiers want to go to war, so be it. But don't let any of them get hurt.'"

He mandated that by 2010, one-third of all the aircraft designed to attack behind enemy lines be unmanned, and by 2015, one-third of ground combat vehicles be driverless. And, the Congress passed it in to law.

What's most disturbing about Warner's quote is that the electorate of the United States seems to only care about saving American lives. War is fine so long as Americans don't get killed in it, something of an immature attitude in American foreign policy that the robotics revolution is only going to exacerbate. I remember one of Asimov's novels included a robot that actually did kill humans, but only because its programmers were successful at narrowing the definition of human to the residents of a particular planet. That story seemed to be more of an allegory for us than robots, as our country's guarantees of life and liberty are perfectly dispensable when dealing with "bad people" whom we say are associated with terrorism.

Pretty much every advance related to war, whether it be horses, gunpowder, flight or nuclear fission, has increased deaths. I have a difficult time seeing military robots helping matters much.

Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. This is a book about decision-making, focusing especially on times when we allow irrelavent information to cloud our judgment. I enjoyed this book very much, and it wasn't nearly so scary as the death-robot book.

Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics at MIT, and makes his living performing an assortment of experiments to test people's decision-making. One experiment he did was a taste test of beers -- one was a brand-name beer poured without modification, the other was the same stuff but with a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar in it. With blind taste-testing, the balsamic beer usually won, and then the experimenters told the tasters what was in the beer. When the experimenters told the tasters in advance what they were getting, the plain brand-name beer won.

He also explored the issue of "anchoring," when you make choices relative to the choices in front of you as opposed to relating it to what you can afford or what you want. An example: A real estate agent shows you a nice colonial house, a colonial house that needs work, and a contemporary house. Chances are you won't choose the contemporary house because you don't have anything to relate it to. But, you will like the nice colonial house because it's better than the one that needs work, and the fact it compares better to something else makes it more attractive. The real estate agent is trying to steer you towards the nice colonial, and the fixer-upper is just a decoy.

The most interesting part of this book is about the difference in rates of cheating when your reward is cash and when it is a non-cash item. He starts off the chapter with the following conundrum. Your spouse calls you at work and tells you that your daughter needs a red pencil for a school project. You could...

a. Go to the office supply cabinet and take a company red pencil.
b. Take a dime from company petty cash and go to the drug store to buy a red pencil.

If these are your only two choices, almost everybody would pick a, take the pencil. But why? The company is losing just as much with the pencil as with the dime. The experiments he goes on to describe how cash makes us more honest.

The series of experiments his group peformed involved having students take a test with 20 simple math problems. Test-takers got 50 cents for every right answer. The first group had no opportunity to cheat, making them the control group.

They then gave the test to several different groups, each group getting more opportunity to cheat. The first group got to see an answer sheet before they turned it in, thus giving them the opportunity to change answers, the next got to self-report to the number of right answers to the proctor after seeing the answer sheet, and another got to reach in to a jar of dimes in an unsupervised room and take out the amount of money corresponding to the number of answers they got right. A little bit of cheating took place in all of these cases, on average, test takers exaggerated their number of right answers by 2.7 answers. An interesting thing with these groups was that as the ease of cheating increased, the amount of cheating did not. The exaggeration rate stayed right around 2.7 answers.

The reward for the next group of test takers was not money but a token that could then be redeemed for money on the other side of the room. Then the exaggeration doubled, with the takers claiming to have gotten 5.9 more answers right. These tokens were obviously cash equivalents, but they weren't cash. The conclusion that Ariely draws is that when you separate stealing from cash, stealing becomes much easier.

A statistic he uses to make this point is very telling: Employee theft and fraud at the workplace result in about $600 billion in losses each year in the United States. This figure is much higher than the combined financial cost of robbery, burglary, larceny-theft and automobile theft ($16 billion).

He suggests that the directors of Enron, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, would have been unlikely to mug an old lady for $50. But, when it comes to moving around these large, abstract amounts, or miscategorizing them on financial statements, the association with cash and the association with the people who own it becomes so blurred that it becomes easy to rob your company, your employees and shareholders.

The Secular City, by Harvey Cox. This is a library book I have come to own against my will. I read it with great enjoyment, wrote notes about it in my journal and then put it in my bag and took a trip on a Greyhound bus. The bag was put in the undercarriage of the bus and it rained all day. The luggage compartment sprung a leak, soaking the bag and damaging the book to the point where the library made me buy it. Now I am the proud owner of this wrinkly thing. The librarian warned me not to put it on my bookshelf for at least a year for fear that mold might develop and jump to the neighboring books.

Unlike the other two books, which had been published in the past year, The Secular City was published in 1965, and its main purpose is to define the process of secularization as it relates to urbanism. It was a very instructive, interesting book, better than I thought it would be. What I especially liked was how Cox defined the limits of this movement as it is kind of amorphous and easy to associate with anything that isn't affiliated with an "official" ideology.

Secularization, he says, is the process by which people in a city focuses on pragmatism and profanity. Pragmatism is the question "Will it work?" and profanity literally means "outside the temple" or related to "this world." This becomes a helpful way of thinking for how to have a city that one would like to live in, rather than maintaining the power of an official religious group, regardless of its popularity.

It doesn't necessarily have to be come an anti-religious force, however, and Christians make a lot of mistakes when they try to oppose secularization. One example he gave was of churches that tried to organize prayer groups inside large apartment buildings, trying to spiritually connect the neighbors to one another. This effort mostly failed because it was really an attempt to take away the anonymity that the city offered and turn the apartment building into a village, stuck in the middle of a city. The apartment dwellers who wanted to go to church liked the number of choices that the city provided them, and didn't want to get stuck in a narrow social group. The ones who didn't want religion just didn't want religion.

Cox makes it clear that there are many anti-religious forces out there that aren't secular because they attempt to impose their own new ideology. "The rejection of meanings which do not contribute to one's own group is the opposite of secularization." When the pragmatism of modern people is allowed to degenerate into a system that focuses solely on function, what you have is a new religion, just one without gods in the sky. Nazism, he said, was a kind of tribalism in which only those who were "useful" to the new Reich were allowed to survive.

He gives a couple of other examples of "usefulness" going too far -- the business careerist focusing only on success, never on beauty or enjoyment, or the beatnik's resentment of everything established.

Christians and political conservatives alike have spent the past 60 to 70 years wringing their hands over what to do about secularization, and it's usually presented as a big scary force that's responsible for the general decline in church attendance and loosening morals. Every week I come across some essay about the dangers of secularism or of post-modernism. It's easy to write about it as a hostile, anti-God, anti-beauty, anti-life force because it's more fun to get in fights than come up with solutions. In those rare cases when secularism turns in on itself to become a new, aggressive ideology that seeks to impose itself on society, we should oppose it. (One example I can think of is an opinion I've heard that says contraception ought to be required for poor people because their kids cost too much to the taxpayers.)

But really, it's an opportunity for us to be really honest about our faith and live like real people who aren't trying to satisfy religious standards that artificially got placed on us. I'm trying to write a book about this, presently on version number 3 on how traditional religion can do a better job of speaking to those with a pragmatic, functional set of values. It ain't as easy as I thought it would be.

Decoy Pricing at Safeway

2009-02-19T00:57:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, an excellent book about times our decision-making fails us. One is decoy pricing. This is when someone selling you something presents you with something that is out of your price range, and then shows you something in your price range. For example, a television salesman shows you a TV that's $1,500, followed by one that's $850. The idea is to get you to think, "TV No. 2 is $650 less; what a deal!" Really, you ought to be thinking: "Is TV No. 2 really worth a week's pay?" or you ought to be thinking, "Is this the best deal in town for TV No. 2?"

The same thing applies to stores where you get to see the "regular" price, followed by the "sale," to make you feel good about how you don't have to pay the artificially high "regular." Today, I went grocery shopping at Safeway, where about half of the products have two price tags on them. Only at Safeway, they don't just clutter your eyes with irrelevant information, they force you to get a %$@! card to participate in their stupid decoy pricing scheme. Yes, you have to apply for the right to have your mind messed with.

I find this all rather exhausting. I think next time I am going to fall asleep in the bread section to recharge. If they ask me to explain this behavior, I'll tell them that I was thinking of taking a 30-minute nap, but if they stop this decoy pricing card nonsense, I'll reduce my nap to 20 minutes. They could save 10 minutes of a huge guy behaving weirdly in their store and frightening their other customers. What a deal!

A bunch of cheesy links

2009-02-12T23:34:00.000-08:00

Recently, I checked out a book called American Cheeses by Clark Wolf. It's a light read, and it gives some practical advice about how to store and serve cheese, and it has some tasty-sounding (and absurdly complex) recipes, such as Winchester Gouda and Basil Gnocchi with Porcini and Asparagus Ragout.

But, it also has the names and Web sites of an assortment of small U.S. cheesemakers, many of which I'd like to visit . . . when I have the money for gasoline again. Sigh. I'm picking out the Washington and Oregon creameries that sound interesting:

Sally Jackson Cheeses, Oroville, Wash. Sounds very interesting to me, with Goat, Cow and Sheep cheese. None of the links on the homepage work, though. Too bad she hired a Web designer that went out of business.

The Rogue Creamery, Central Point, Ore. It was founded by a co-op in 1928. They once won a "London Best" award for their cheese. Too bad all of their cheeses are blue cheeses, which make my mouth vibrate if I eat them. But maybe you like blue cheese.

Quillisascut Cheese Company, Rice, Wash. I had no idea there was such a town as "Rice" in the state of Washington, but there is. It's on the Franklin Roosevelt Reservoir. Clark Wolf says that whatever the cheesemaker, Lora Lea, makes, is an ingredient of choice of top chefs in Seattle and Portland. I'm very interested to find out what UFO cheese tastes like (who came up with that name?), but the Quillisascut Traditional Curado sounds the nicest to me, made from raw goat milk and having sweet, nutty and grassy flavors.

Willamette Valley Cheese, Salem, Ore. This sounds kind of interesting, especially the Brindisi Fontina. I have no idea what that means, but the product description assures me that it's "perfect for sophisticated tastes, yet accessible for less adventurous eaters." I think that's marketing-speak for when your Mom says, "try it, you'll like it" without telling you what it is.

Golden Glen Creamery, Bow, Wash. I rode my bike through this town 10 years ago, but was too tired to see clearly, so I must have missed this place. But it's in a very scenic location, just south of some lovely hills that overlook Samish Bay. Chuckanut Drive is the road you take to get here. Their Web site uses actual words I've heard, such as "cheddar," "gouda," and "feta." Maybe that merits a visit.

Samish Bay Cheese, Bow, Wash. Two creameries in the same town! That's kind of neat. They have one called the "Port Edison" that they make from raw milk. I want to try it.

Beecher's Handmade Cheese, Seattle, Wash. One of the few I've actually visited. They have some kind of robot stirer device that you can watch as it makes the milk turn in to curds. They claim to have the world's best macaroni and cheese.

Washington State University Creamery, Pullman, Wash. Another that I've actually visited. Back during the 1930s, they got the idea that it would really help our troops to have cheese in a can. I don't know if the Army really caught on to it, but it's got its own wikipedia page. They say that the cheese could stay good for decades in the can. I bought a can of it a year ago, and am still waiting for the right opportunity to open it. Every time I bring it to an event, someone else brings cheese, and we don't eat it. Maybe I need to throw my own party.

The Seattle Cheese Festival at the Pike Place Market. Who knew we had such a thing? And, how nice of them to plan it between Pascha and Pentecost.

The Oregon Cheese Festival, in Central Point, Ore. Who knew Oregon had a Central Point? Kind of cool, though -- my sister lives in a spherical state. But, unfortunately, it's two weeks in to Lent. Sigh...

The Pacific Northwest Cheese Project. They put on a grilled cheese contest and they give out scholarships for aspiring cheesemakers. And, this site has a whole bunch of links to creameries that didn't make it in to Mr. Wolf's book. Mr. Wolf said that he drove really long distances when he was in Washington state researching the book, and he was astonished at how espresso stands would appear at the oddest places. Maybe he got tired of driving.

Aren't you glad to know all this stuff? Mainly, this blog post is a list of places I want to go, later, when I have employment and money to buy cheese. And, by that time, I'll have given the book back to the library. So I figured I'd write this stuff down, and maybe you could benefit from it, too.

I guess the real summary of what I'm trying to say is, please, I need a job so I can stop thinking about abstract cheese! Somebody fix this economy.

A true patriot

2009-02-10T12:30:00.000-08:00

Here is an article that ran in The New York Times recently by the CEO of Netflix entitled "Please Raise My Taxes," offering a better suggestion to President Obama's restrictions on CEO pay.

I’M the chief executive of a publicly traded company and, like my peers, I’m very highly paid. The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I’d like to offer a suggestion. President Obama should celebrate our success, rather than trying to shame us or cap our pay. But he should also take half of our huge earnings in taxes, instead of the current one-third. Click here to continue reading

This, I think, is civic virtue at its best.

I'm not much of a political blogger, so I don't normally get in to the "see I'm right" kind of snippy posting, but here I've just got to say...

TAKE THIS, YOU SUPPLY-SIDE ZOMBIES! I mean that with all the love possible.

The Manuscript 2.0

2009-01-30T00:12:00.000-08:00

Dear friends and family,

At long last, I have completed my a new manuscript entitled Courage in Poverty. It's about the people whom I met as a volunteer in the U.S. Peace Corps in Ukraine and as a staff member at Raphael House, a shelter for homeless families in San Francisco.

This manuscript is 239 pages long in Microsoft Word, totaling about 72,000 words. I would love to have your comments on it. However, I'd like you to tell me that you actually want to read it. I had thought about sending a copy to everyone I know, but reading a manuscript is no small commitment, and I didn't want to foist it upon you.

So here's the deal: if you want it, I will send it to you as an MS-Word attachment. You can make all sorts of corrections and comments in the file if you like, just save it under a different name, for example, sticking your name at the end of the file name. You can enable tracked changes if you like that, use the "insert comment" feature, or simply use different-colored text for your comments. Or, you could use Word's highlighter feature if you just want to draw attention to a paragraph that makes no sense. Any comments you could make would be very appreciated -- even if you don't get through the whole thing.

Paper copies are available by request for free, but those require greater commitment. If you want a paper copy, you have to agree to actually read the thing within a month and mail it back to me. The paper and toner involved in printing a copy of a manuscript adds up to $5-$7, which I can deal with, but I need to know who really wants one. I like paper better myself because computer monitors tire my eyes out and I read faster on paper. Writing all over the margins with pen or pencil is fine.

Dr. Nordquist -- you get a paper one just because you made lectures so enjoyable without ever resorting to videos or Powerpoint presentations, the true thought-suckers of the classroom.

For those of you familiar with the first version of this manuscript, No Earthly Victory, this new one retains some of the stories and characters from that journey, but it takes a different tack, focusing on the stories of the people whom I met, and on the importance of finding a manner of service in which you feel you're really giving your heart rather than having it taken through guilt. It also describes the people whom I met in San Francisco at the homeless shelter, which the old manuscript had not done.

It's a less religious manuscript. The old one had focused a great deal on my spiritual journey and the enigmatic state of the church in Ukraine, which I still think would make a good book, but there are about six Orthodox publishing houses that publish things in English. Five of them rejected it and the sixth one just plain forgot. Still, I take the opportunity to describe the really cool monasteries and cathedrals I got to visit in Ukraine.

The curse of the author is the inner critic, nagging at him about problems in the cohesion of the story or whether it's even interesting. The inner critic tells him to quit and do something more productive. So, here are some of the questions I've been having through it.

It doesn't really have a plot. It's non-fiction, which usually doesn't, but the glue that holds the chapter together is simply that I met these people where I was serving in Ukraine or San Francisco, and I really admired them. Is that enough?
Is it too long? Are there parts that drag? I remember the middle 300 pages of the final Harry Potter book made me want to shout "Get on with it and stop freezing to death in that @$&% tent!" but I knew I'd miss vital plot nuances if I skipped forward. There's no explanation of Snape's true motivations at the end of this manuscript.
Can anyone think of a better title? I'm not exactly crazy about Courage in Poverty -- it sounds too much like the titles of Barack Obama's and John McCain's books about their "vision for America" and stuff like that.

So, if you want the manuscript, let me know. If, by some chance, you have lost my e-mail address, you can click here to get it back. erut...@yahoo.com You have to solve one of those annoying warped-word things to get it, sorry.

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

The Library: Sanctuary for the Unemployed and Bored

2009-01-29T22:49:00.001-08:00

Today I went to our storage locker to find a pair of pants for my wife that she needs at her new job. This 10x10 storage locker contains all of our belongings right now and has done this since October. We are still living with my parents. We have found an apartment where we'd love to live, but we lack a certain thing: income that pays the rent.

I spent about an hour there, going through every box I could reach, but not finding the pants, which are part of the uniform at PetSmart, where she is going to lead dog training classes. I did, however, find a CD that has been causing me all sorts of trouble. I checked out "Family Tree" by Nick Drake from the library back in September. I put it in the CD player and enjoyed it very much. Then, when we moved out of our apartment, I forgot the CD was still in the player. We put all of our belongings in the storage locker, and when the "your item is due" notice came, I searched for the CD in the room where Miri and I live at my parents' house, until I had an "Oh no!" moment and realized it was locked up. I renewed the CD three times, and then the library wouldn't let me renew any more and started charging me ghastly fines.

Today, while searching for the pants, I happened upon the CD player, pulled it out, found an electrical outlet in the ceiling of the storage facility, plugged it in and started cycling through the CDs in the caddy and found it. So now I can get out of "library jail."

This storage locker is kind of a symbol for our "in between" existence. I don't like to be "in between;" I like to feel like I am going someplace and doing something. I know that as Christians we have to accept everything that happens to us as a blessing because everything that God gives us -- trial or help -- is so that we can dwell in heaven with him for eternity. So what value does "in between" have? All I can think of is the dragons from the Anne McCaffrey books that my sister used to read and how they'd "go between" and teleport as part of their efforts to save the planet from raining Death Thread. I certainly would be willing to be "in between" to defend the planet against the Thread, so would someone tell me where to go to report for duty?

Alas, it's not that simple. But, I can go to the library and check out books, which keeps me busy. Here are a few that I've been reading recently:

State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. This a collection of fifty short essays, one about each state in the union, in tribute to the WPA travel guides written during the New Deal. I had no idea the WPA had made these travel guides, but they seem to be required reading for any rambler seeking the "soul of America." I only actually read three or four of them before I had to give it back to the library (they wouldn't let me renew it with my holds) but I really want to read it some more.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein. This book is liberal brain candy, which goes in to great detail about what happens when developing countries get too much capitalism too fast. The theme of the book is to criticize the effects of Milton Friedman's free-market ideologies. A very telling point is that the U.S. government spent great amounts of money having Friedman and members of his Economics School at the University of Chicago travel the world and spread free-market capitalist thought, and they also funded lots of academics from socialist-leaning countries in Latin America to come visit the University of Chicago. The government saw Friedman and his ideology as a means of combating worldwide Communism, and promoted it through covert means, overthrowing several democratically elected governments.

But, Nixon himself drove Friedman nuts by implementing price controls and wage controls at home, and Friedman ended up calling Nixon the worst president he'd worked with. Klein is a talented writer, and she's also very liberal, which made me feel obligated to read some things from the other side.

In Defense of Globalization, by Jagdish Baghwati. I didn't understand a single of his examples. After 70 pages, I just gave up.

Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowen. Amusing but forgettable.

The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy - If We Let It Happen, by Arthur B. Laffer, Ph.D, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous. This book's publication date was particularly unfortunate. It came out two months before the market meltdown at the end of September, and spends 300 pages talking about how higher taxes are going to kill the financial system if the Democrats get power. And then, the financial system killed the financial system because a lack of bank regulation allowed the world's investors to kite checks consisting of homeowner's mortgages, and create a whole bunch of wealth that didn't really exist.

It includes such priceless assertions that since the stock market tripled to 3,000 by the time Reagan left office (Reagan was a tax-cutter), and then tripled again to 11,000 by the time Clinton left office and made it all the way to 12,500 in 2008. Therefore, they say, the Dow ought to be able to get to 120,000 by 2020. "If Washington politicians do no harm, and stay on Reagan's road, that could be accomplished," they say.

Rather than teach me much useful stuff about supply-side economics, the book has more taught me why I dislike it -- it's a mathematical solution to a political problem. They talk for chapters about how their way, low taxes, is the way to maximize growth and make people rich. They try to sell me on how this helps the middle and working class by making them a little richer (and they admit that the super-rich become super-super-rich). They talk about how insuring incentives are the way to create a true meritocracy, where the most hard-working and the creative get rewarded. But they operate under the arrogant assumption that I actually want to live in a country with all this new wealth sloshing around. And, while I would agree that hard work should be rewarded, I have to ask how much room does a meritocracy have at the top if everybody takes the bait and works hard?

My graduate school textbook (written by Ben Bernanke, before he was the Fed chairman) made it clear that economists shouldn't offer an answer for which economic decision is more moral, any more than physicists should be deciding how atomic weapons should be used. This dreadful book made it clear to me that the study of economics needs to be put in its place. The question of how to best serve the people, and which consequence of a government choice would be better, belongs to politicians.

Anybody know of a conservative economics book that's written well? Okay, rant over. Now I'm taking this book back to the library.

OTHER NEWS

Uh... you're probably getting the idea from this post that I haven't had a lot to do. This is true. I apply for a lot of jobs. I've had four or five interviews, no offers. Miri is enjoying her part-time job at the zoo, and she's getting a second job at PetSmart and is now in training. She says it's stressful to work with humans again.

I have been delighted to discover the podcast for NPR's Wait, Wait news quiz. My favorite joke I've heard there is that Hilary Clinton listing off facts about the Botswana diamond industry sounded like Hermione Grainger as Secretary of State. So true.

So let me know how you are!

We Interrupt This Life To Bring you...

2008-12-16T21:52:00.001-08:00

I am hearing a voice broadcasting through the room: "We interrupt this life to bring you the following important bulletin: We are putting your life on hold for a while. You have food, shelter, clothing and water right now. Apply for jobs all you like, but it's a week before Christmas, and no one is going to want to schedule job interviews until January. Look at apartments all you like, but you won't have the money to start rent payments.

"Feel free to move about the reality, but there is ice on the roads that is not your standard Seattle slush-for-a-day-then-leave stuff. Your usual cost-free method of getting about, bicycling, isn't going to help you much on ice. This is not a time for starting new adventures; it is a time for being thankful for what you have. You are a reasonably talented person, but this is as far as you're getting right now. This is not a time for thinking about where your talents ought to be taking you. Making plans based on your hopes being fulfilled is going to make you unhappy. That only works if you're Barack Obama. The mess that you are in right now was caused by everybody feeling entitled to success, causing reality to be overpriced.

"Please be assured that the space-time continuum is functioning as it should. Your movement through time plus your movement through space will always equal the speed of light. If you don't seem to be going anywhere in space, you're going all sorts of places in time that people in spaceships don't get to have. Enjoy this time while you have it. We will inform you when we restart your life."

Your government loves you

2008-10-16T22:27:00.000-07:00

I got back from an airplane trip to find the contents of my suitcase was rearranged. At first I was afraid something had been stolen, but then I found a note from the Transportation Safety Administration assuring me that my underwear was safe to put on.

I'm proud to live in a country where the government cares that much about its citizens.

Las Vegas: It Makes Everybody Want To Do Something Bad

2008-10-14T19:52:00.000-07:00

One rule about Las Vegas is that regardless of what your moral orientation or strength is, you'll suffer from strong, destructive temptations. If you suffer from alcoholism or a gambling addiction, your problems are obvious. The same goes for those who love lots of food -- the buffets will drain your wallet and stretch your belt. If you're a sex addict, the pornographic playing-card-sized handouts from scraggly men on Las Vegas Boulevard will connect you to whatever kind of stimulation you need to implode your soul.

If, however, you don't suffer from any of these temptations, you'll still discover that your rather conservative mindset has a volatile nature when challenged. After a short while, you'll be tempted by some vulgar behaviors of your own, flipping off or cussing out the hustlers on the street, taking a megaphone with you as you walk, screaming "Move faster you fat ------- tourists!" An assault of images of what appear to be nude acrobats in positions that you would call vulnerable if they were humanly possible on a big screen TV the size of a tennis court advertising a show called "Zumanity" by Cirque du Soliel will make you consider taking advantage of Nevada's lax gun control laws to shoot holes in the bright body blaster above the boulevard. Or worse, upon being asked by a cocktail waitress in a top that reminds you of a balcony with no railings what you'd like to drink, you demand to see the manager just so that you can punch him in the nose for making her wear such a trashy outfit to support her kids.

My wife interviewed at Seigfried & Roy's Secret Garden to be a tiger trainer. I went along for the visit, and I can think of more than a few people I'd like to feed to those noble, toothy creatures.

Las Vegas, maybe?

2008-10-08T20:20:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Miri has been asked to fly down to Las Vegas to interview with Seigfried and Roy for a tiger-trainer job. We're going on Sunday.

I had a job interview today for an executive director job. They brought out the whole board of directors to grill me for an hour. I think I did all right, but I'm not sure I want to be a fundraiser (which seems to be what they're really looking for).

So Miri and I are both in transition right now, feeling a little stuck there. This classic Sesame Street song summarizes how we feel right now:

A 30 to 40 percent chance of scattered employment

2008-10-04T12:07:00.000-07:00

In meteorological parlance, there are these two words about rain that pop up a lot: scattered and isolated. When you have isolated showers (or thunderstorms) moving through an area, that means that a storm will do something, somewhere, but for any given observer, he only has a 10 to 20 percent chance of getting rained on. Scattered means that more rain is coming and a particular spot has a 30 to 40 percent chance of getting rained on. Growing up in Puget Sound, most of my life has been lived on days expecting scattered showers.

And now, I am getting into a situation of scattered life. I have looked at seven apartments, called 10 others, applied for 20 jobs and had one job interview (although the rejection letter just came for that one). In viewing the apartments or applying for these jobs, only about 30 percent of them seem remotely interesting -- but I feel obligated to make the queries anyway because we need to live somewhere and be able to pay the rent.

The apartments have mostly been all right, although a few have been ghetto or rent-controlled. The reviews of these complexes on the Internet, however, have been atrocious. I've been trying to determine if this anti-landlord invective has any merit, or if only cranky people go on these sites to wish fire, brimstone, locusts and frogs upon distant descendants of their former apartment managers because they took too long to fix a washing machine.

Some of you may be wondering how we ended up back in Puget Sound with a life like the weather. I guess this is where the cheery part of this blog entry starts. Miri got a JOB!

Yes, an actual paying job as a zookeeper taking care of exotic animals. She works part time at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma in the Asia exhibit. This is a very good thing as Point Defiance is one of the best zoos in the world. She gets to work with Asian river otters who sound like squeaky toys when they're vocal, tapirs, anoas, porcupines, Sumatran tigers, gibbons and siamangs. She feeds them and cleans their areas. (But don't worry, it's a protected contact facility, meaning the humans and animals never get to play.) Having a part-time job at Point Defiance is a resume builder job, meaning that they employ you for a year or two and then you have to go work somewhere else. (They rarely promote their own people into career positions.) We are hopeful that one of the other two zoos (Northwest Trek or Woodland Park) will hire her later.

I am searching for a job, and we're really hopeful that after I get employed, we can rent someplace to live that's halfway between the two jobs. If you happen to have a friend trying to rent a duplex, let us know.

We have gotten to do some fun stuff recently. On our anniversary, we went to a bed and breakfast south of Spokane and got to drive around in the Palouse country. Here's a picture of Miri at Kamiak Butte:

Click on the photo if you want to see more from that trip.

Miri's parents came to visit us in Spokane, and we went to Lake Coeur D'Alene to go canoeing. Robin and Grant happened to be coming through on their way to Missoula that day.

The other really cool thing we've gotten to do was a hike up at the Sunrise area of Mt. Rainier National Park. Here's a picture of Miri pointing at a black bear:

I got some pictures of Mr. Bear, but if you want to see them, you've got to click on the picture to get through to the album. That's kind of a cheap ploy, isn't it, but you want to see the album now, admit it!

So that's the news from Ruthfordville. Write back, say hi, tell us how you're doing. Jisa the dog wags her tail for you.

How to say goodbye at the airport

2008-08-31T21:16:00.000-07:00

In my family, there are two ways of saying goodbye at the airport. There's the Ruthford way, the way of my father's family. They give you a hug and tell you how great it was to see you, and they leave you at the curb. And there's the Fussell way, the way of my mother's family, when they check in to short-term parking and stay with you through check-in, baggage check, and then they go and wait with you at the gate until your flight actually leaves and through all of the flight delays, too (thank God Homeland Security no longer allows non-passengers past security). I much prefer the Ruthford way of airport departures because as you're doing it, your mind is on where you are going, not where you've been. My aunt Alice, who grew up a Fussell, refers to the Fussell goodbye as the albatross-around-the-neck goodbye.

I think Spokane is giving us a Fussell-style goodbye. Miri and I have been here for a year, and it's been a wonderful experience, but it really is time to move on. The zoo has been making Miri work 14-15 hours a day, unpaid, and I think it's been two weeks since she's had a day when she didn't visit the zoo at all.

I feel like I'm sitting in a chair at the airport, waiting for my boarding call to somewhere else, and my dear friend Spokane is sitting next to me, and it has one more story to tell. Miri and I left church early today just to avoid the possibility of people asking us what we do just because the answer wouldn't be civil. We're getting a little anti-social just because we know that we're not going to be around much longer so being chatty and making friends doesn't have much point.

So, Spokane, I love you, but let me read my book quietly while I wait for my flight! And no, I don't want to talk about what's coming next for me because right now the answer is, "Sitting still in a space the size of a refrigerator and eating pretzels." It's a touchy subject. Okay, rant over.

Never tell a tiger to buzz off

2008-08-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

A good gauge of your general mental attitude is how you respond to something that happens regularly. When you drive your car, are you happy to see the flowers alongside the road, or are you mad because traffic makes your car go so slow that there's little to do but look at flowers?

In my case, it hasn't been driving (I take the bus) but another experience that's had me saying, "I've had enough!" Specifically, it's been people informing me that I'm tall. (As any tall person will tell you, this is about as helpful as being told your head is attached to your neck.)

If I have a good attitude, my response is to answer their questions about height and try turning it into a more meaningful conversation about family and hobbies. If I'm in a bad mood, I mutter, "I'm 6 foot 9," and I wander off.

Recently, though, I've had a couple of obnoxious inquirers who felt it necessary to use three or four swear words when talking about me and my feet. My response has been a sudden, "Watch your language!" in my best how'd-you-like-to-go-to-the-office tone. It's been fun, watching their faces go from "smart aleck" to "survival instinct is kicking in." It's been something of a sadistic pleasure, making these guys know that something bigger than they is ticked at them, but it's really how I've felt. I've had enough.

This story is meant to illustrate a wider feeling of time-to-move-on-edness, which I think is a literary device known as a metaphorical anecdote. Or would that be allegorical?

I think that Miri, too, has had close to enough of the zoo where she's working, as she's on schedule to be working there four days a week but still manages to clock 60 hours there every week. (The internship advertisements said that students worked 32 hours a week, which would give them time to do things like study.) On the bright side, though, when Miri does get in to a 40-hour job, it'll be like a second honeymoon. (I'll have my wife back!)

This isn't to say that I'm annoyed about everything -- by no means -- it's simply that there are a number of things in my life that I used to endure with fake cheerfulness and now I'm just telling people to knock it off.

I have discovered, however, there is one fellow at the zoo who lets it be known he finds my height interesting, and getting snippy is not the best policy with him. It's also difficult to casually ignore him. His name is Zeus, and he's a 500-pound white Bengal tiger. Every time I walk past his exhibit, he holds still and looks at me intently. As soon as I turn my back to walk away, that's when the fun starts. He walks toward me, keeping his body low and sleek, speeding up until... he gets to the fence. Oh, darn, the fence! Then he paces quickly to the left and right, keeping up speed just in case the fence suddenly dematerializes and then he can chase me. From that moment forward, Zeus continues following me, finding the best point in his exhibit to keep an eye on me. Sometimes he rears up non his hind legs so he can get taller.

On Thursday, when we had this interaction, there were twelve other humans around his exhibit, and he was uninterested in them, staring at the wall until I came by. Then he came out, pacing and stalking me.

I know that it's my height because when Jeffrey and Patrick, my two tall brothers, came to visit a few months ago, the zookeepers noticed Zeus stalking them, too, through the whole zoo, and his exhibit does have a line-of-sight view of the entire zoo. This makes his exhibit an odd one -- for a human viewing most exhibits in museums or zoos, it is a transitory experience to see it, like listening to a portion of a song. You observe it for a little while, and then it's gone. This particular exhibit, however, continues observing you.

I've been trying to understand this behavior, and I don't think it's aggressive because Zeus makes this sound known as chuffling while he does it. Chuffling is sort of halfway between a sneeze and a purr, and it's a social behavior. If you want to know how it sounds, say chuffle" five times quickly while poofing out your cheeks like Louis Armstrong. Zeus' brother, Apollo, on the other hand, makes it very clear he does not like me by putting his ears back, growling and getting ready to pounce.

So, what other explanations are there? It could be that I look like a small elephant (food) or that he wants to come out and play, like he did in this video with the zoo director.

This leads me to believe that Zeus is not really that aggressive of a cat. Rather, I think maybe he just enjoys seeing a small person's face go from "happy-go-lucky" to "survival instinct." Sigh. Comeuppances are such a difficult justice to accept.

I will miss this tiger, and I think Miri will miss all of the cats when she leaves Cat Tales, although we both know it is time to leave. When we came to Spokane, we thought that if one of us landed a really good job, either Miri at the zoo as an instructor, or me at a company here, we would stay a while longer. She might get offered a job as a manager at Cat Tales, but we know that the pay is $100 a day with no benefits, long hours and no comp time or overtime, sort of like being a substitute teacher. Now, Miri is going to graduate on Sept. 21, and we are going to blow town like fugitives fleeing outstanding warrants.

We have a minor problem, though, and it is that we don't have a destination picked out yet. Miri has job applications out to zoos and aquaria in the following cities:

Tacoma
Seattle
Las Vegas
West Yellowstone, Mont.
Colorado Springs, Colo.
Pueblo, Colo.
Garden City, Kan.
Chicago
Boston
Norristown, Pa.
Baltimore, Md.
Washington, DC

The Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma would be by far our favorite both in terms of the work Miri could do and in being close to people we know. And, the head of the carnivore department of the Point Defiance Zoo is coming to Cat Tales tomorrow, and we're hopeful Miri can chat with him a little bit. We have also found out that Miri's been shortlisted at the Mirage in Las Vegas, where Seigfried and Roy run a small zoo and are said to be planning one show in 2009.

I'm still trying to decide what my great vocation should be in these fair cities. I took an aptitude test recently, and the testing agency suggested I think about urban planning, which would be kind of cool. One of my happiest memories from being 4 was building a system of irrigation ditches in the backyard of our house in Virginia with my sister. It was the only game we ever played with water that did not involve ambushes and soakings (usually me being the victim). . . maybe it means something.

I have, however, been able to find some other work than just working for the quirky non-profit. I wrote an article about huckleberries, and the local weekly paper published it. Click here:

http://www.inlander.com/localnews/305513576761415.php

Researching this article made me happy because I learned about how huckleberries might be possible to be grown commercially in a few years. Invest in mountain property with trees!

I got to ride my bike through quite a bit of huckleberry country recently, which was a great deal of fun. I went on the 2008 Ride Around Washington, a Cascade Bike Club event. It started in Packwood, and did a six day loop around the east side of Mt. St. Helens, down to the Columbia River Gorge, up to Trout Lake (which, by the way, I highly recommend as a getaway location), then to Goldendale, Naches (where we saw a cantaloupe cannon) and finally back over White Pass to Packwood. Five Ruthfords made the trip, and I took some pictures you can look at here:

http://www.pbase.com/allears/volcanoes_bike_ride_2008

The ride was a lot of fun, except for the fact that my poor wife had to work all the time I was gone and didn't get to do anything fun. But our dog made her go out and play a few times.

Anyway, that's the news from Spokane. We'd love to hear from you!

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Job hunting and such

2008-07-15T22:25:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

These days Miri and I are diligently looking for jobs that we can get in the same city. We know that this city won't be Spokane because the management of the zoo there is good at taking care of cats, but they're not so good at taking care of their humans. (And, there are a couple of 500-pound cats who seem to think I am a giraffe. I get the heebie-jeebies sometimes.)

Miri's internship at the zoo is winding down. She graduates in September, so, we're looking at jobs all over the country in places such as Las Vegas, Boston, Baltimore, West Yellowstone, Mont., and Garden City, Kan. Yes, there really is a zoo in Garden City. I don't know if Las Vegas has a zoo, but they do have Seigfried and Roy (and the tiger that tried to eat Roy Horn is still happily living there but we won't go in to that). Cool thing about working for Seigfried and Roy is if you're employed by them, you're employed by the Mirage, a big resort that actually pays benefits and stuff.

I am working in my job at the non-profit that is too quirky to be described. I am also teaching classes at our summer journalism institute for teenagers, giving talks on ethics and writing. Yesterday, we talked about adjectives, and how you have to be careful with your judgmental adjectives, such as "horrifying" or "every mother's worst nightmare." I made them listen to Alice's Restaurant and asked them why there was so much useless detail in the song, such as "implements of destruction" and "twenty-seven eight by ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back..." (Because there's so much useless detail in the draft.)

I am getting ready to do the Ride Around Washington at the beginning of August. This will be a fun spin around the volcanoes of southwest Washington. These rides are always 6 days long and take up around 80 miles. I have composed a limerick about the people who do the daily ride announcements:

Never make a promise that's impossible to fulfill
The war will be short, you can cure anything with this pill
The harm from the worst promise of all never mends
Rather, you'll lose 200 friends
It is to say, "Today's route is mostly downhill."

Usually when I make updates about what's going on in my life, I have some quirky, humorous story to tell like 6-year-old children lecturing me on the importance of paying attention. But alas, I don't this time. (Life is a little dull.) I have, however, been reading an assortment of library books that I can tell you about:

Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright. I found out about this book by watching an episode of the Colbert Report that also featured Cookie Monster. Bishop Wright, an Anglican Bishop, was there, too. This book takes a look at popular religion seen through funeral sermons and tries to connect that way of thinking back to the real teachings about the Resurrection. I've only gotten to chapter 3, but I am enjoying it so far.
Bottomfeeder, by Taras Grescoe. This book tries to take on the whole ocean at once as an ecosystem which can provide us with excellent protein. He talks about oysters in Chesapeake Bay, the monkfish, the bluefin tuna and salmon. His argument is that we should try eating from the middle of the ocean's food chain, with fish like sardines and anchovies, because they're not endangered. The section on shrimp farms was really gross.

Okay, that's only two books, but the other ones I've been reading are mostly cookbooks, or I just tossed them aside after the first chapter. But, there was this one article called "No," in the Kenyon Review about writers receiving rejection letters. Here's a link to it. It made me laugh, especially as I keep getting rejected, too. My wife tells me I ought to be a famous writer like J.K. Rowling, that way we can live someplace like West Yellowstone and I won't have to find a job driving a tour bus. But, I don't get discouraged -- persistence does pay off, as lots of asking did get Miri to marry me. Oh yeah, if you want to read some humor articles about Christians getting married, you can go to this blog, Orthromance, that I started.

Anyway, that's the news from Spokane. I'd love to hear from you!

Thomas / Eric / Thomic

p.s. A hysterical political video came out today on jibjab.com It's done to the tune of "The times they are a changing" The Obama section had me on the floor.

A new Onion Dome Article!

2008-06-30T20:14:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers,

Okay, time to brag again. I got into the Onion Dome again! Whoo hoo! Fame and fortune here I come! My article is about an Old Calendar parish resolving to observe the Fourth of July on the Old Calendar so that they can actually have meat. Click here to read it.

And, I have a new article here, about Christian romance, too, if it's not clear from the Table of Contents. It's called Early Babies and Other Hazards of Passion.

In Christ,
Thomas

The Best Rejection Letter Ever

2008-06-10T14:41:00.001-07:00

I hope I can get a rejection letter of this quality some day...

We have read your manuscript with boundless delight, and if we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. And, as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.

--A Chinese publication rejecting a writer, as quoted in the Kenyon Review

I just saw "Horton Hears a Who..."

2008-06-01T21:38:00.001-07:00

And the Mayor of Whoville reminds me of the Prophet Isaiah.

So here's what's up...

2008-05-19T12:06:00.001-07:00

Hi All,

We've put up some new photographs that you can look at. Miri has posted some pictures of the tiger cubs at Cat Tales:

http://www.pbase.com/allears/cat_tales

And I've put some pictures of Miri up here:

http://www.pbase.com/allears/pictures_of_cute_wife

We don't have a whole lot of news to report. The weather is very nice here in Spokane. Now that we have a warming trend after our absurdly heavy winter, we now have flood watches in effect everywhere. Our dog still likes chasing after her ball.

Miri has about four months left in her program, and we are likely to move this fall, although we still don't know where. If you hear of a new zoo opening up, please let us know.

Also, I've been entertaining myself and about four readers by writing a blog about the struggles of the single Orthodox Christian called Orthromance. Here's the link:

http://orthromance.blogspot.com

Some of the humor will be a bit on the obscure side, but I hope you'll find some of the jokes funny. Our newest feature is a little box where you can enter your e-mail address if you want to get the new posts as they come out.

And then, as always, here's my personal blog, where I just post random things that happen:

http://thomasericruthford.blogspot.com

We hope you're well!

Love,
Eric

I make the big time!

2008-05-06T22:24:00.001-07:00

Hello dear readers,

I got published in the Onion Dome! I'm famous now! Whoo hoo!

Here are the links to the two articles:

New Confession Guide Bans Retelling of Liturgical Gaffes

Top Nine Rejected Onion Dome Headlines

Now, a warning about the first article and the comments that follow on The Onion Dome: It will get inappropriate jokes stuck in your head forever. The subject of the article is those eternal jokes.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks for all of your kind comments. I am going to post some more Orthromance blog postings soon. I have an idea of what I want to say about "Match-Making and Other Bad Advice," my challenge is to make it actually funny. I also have written what I want to say about "Early Babies and Other Hazards of Passion" but I think I'll hang on to that until the end, since the blog has been, up until this point, mostly about the trials of loneliness, and that's about the next stage in your life, after you've found someone you're really enthusiastic about.

When I do think of something to write, I'll put it up.

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Benefits of anti-gravity

2008-04-07T13:12:00.000-07:00

I hope that anti-gravity is discovered during my lifetime because I would like to bake a spherical loaf of bread. It'll stay fresher much longer.

Ooh, I got paid to write again!

2008-03-27T14:58:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody,

Here's a link to a story I wrote for the Inlander, Spokane's weekly paper:

http://www.inlander.com/localnews/311943940048840.php

It's about parks in the Peaceful Valley. I think I'll get a whole $70 for it. Yow! I might make enough this year to qualify for a 1099!

Guilt and gifts

2008-03-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

I am convinced that plants and books are the most guilt-ridden gifts, but for opposite reasons. With a plant, you have to write the thank-you letter quickly, before the plant dies (as it will quickly, if you are like me) so that you can describe in the letter how lovely it is while you can still remember it. Otherwise, you feel guilty both for the death of the plant and for your vague, schmaltzy description of it.

The book is the inverse. With a book, you have to delay your answer until you have read it. The thing sits upon the shelf, making you aware both of your clodish insensitivity in not thanking its sender and in your incapability to write a meaningful letter including details from the book. Months pass and your cheery little note whithers like a dying plant until it has been almost a full year since whatever occasion prompted the book, and you open your mailbox with dread, looking for a sarcastic note inquiring whether your postman is still living and perhaps his widow might appreciate this year's gift more than you.

Lent + Romance = Grapefruit + Milk

2008-03-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

It’s Lent 2006, and I’m sitting in my bedroom, looking at a little paper sign. It says “The Old Cathedral would be a great place to get married, but it doesn’t #$*!ing matter.” The stars and symbols are really there because I didn’t want to put something that rude on the wall. Above that despairing phrase is the title, “Forbidden Thoughts 2006.”

I put that thought up there because I’d been having it entirely too much. The idea is that if I recognize that this kind of thinking will get me nowhere, I will stop hurting myself with it. (I think a shrink would call this “cognitive therapy.”) It’s like a gardener breaking up the soil with a pick. If he finds a rock that’s too big to be moved, he can keep whacking at it all day under the principle that he has the right to plant tomatoes wherever he wants, or he can leave a stake in the ground to mark the rock, and just go around it. My little paper sign is there to remind me to leave this rock in my head alone.

Why, you might ask, have I got a rock in my head? Well, I’m a bachelor, and I’m 26. I’m not too happy about it, and thinking about how you’d like to get married when you have no girlfriend is going to get you nowhere. The reason that the cathedral is in my head is that I just discovered this wonderful old church in San Francisco, the Old Cathedral of the Holy Virgin. This church was built in the 1880s by Anglicans. It’s a wooden church with Gothic architecture. The priest there tells me that it was built like a sailing ship, with no nails in it.

In the 1920s, large numbers of Russian refugees of the Bolshevik Revolution came across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. They bought this Anglican church and turned it into their own cathedral, filling it with beautiful icons. They named it after an icon of the Mother of God entitled “Joy Of All Who Sorrow.” (The short way of dealing with this is to call it “Holy Virgin Cathedral.”) In the 1960s, they built another cathedral in San Francisco, an even bigger one, with five gold onion domes that can be seen from the Golden Gate Bridge. That cathedral looks like it was brought by helicopter from Kiev. It’s also named after the “Joy of All Who Sorrow” icon, so there are two cathedrals with the same name in San Francisco (I don’t get this) but one is the Old Cathedral and the other is the New Cathedral.

The New Cathedral is famous enough to get into tourist guidebooks for San Francisco. Most people who walk into the place for the first time are a little overwhelmed by its towering ceilings, walls covered with frescoes, and not a word of English on any of the icons. There’s also the relics of St. John of San Francisco resting in a glass coffin in the cathedral. Yes, a dead person with his dark green hands and feet visible.

The New Cathedral is a popular place for Orthodox to get married, but if you’re going to invite a large number of friends who haven’t been to an Orthodox church, the grandiose, foreign design of the cathedral, and the dead body in the corner can kind of freak them out.

After having lived in San Francisco for a year, I’ve found the Old Cathedral. It’s a church with a few dozen members led by a priest, who, like me, did not grow up in the Orthodox Church. The services are half-and-half in English and Old Church Slavonic (a liturgical language which hasn’t been commonly spoken in 1,200 years). The cathedral looks more American and familiar, the services are long and contemplative, and the parishioners are a friendly multi-ethnic bunch of Russians, Ukrainians, Eritreans and converts. The cathedral is a large building that could hold 300-400 people easily, but we only get 40 or so people now (most of the founding families are going to the New Cathedral). The children of the cathedral take advantage of this fact because they can hide and play in the narthex of the church without disturbing the service going on up at the altar.

Up the street is Alamo Square Park, with its famous row of Victorian Houses, the second-most photographed structure in San Francisco after the Golden Gate Bridge.

So that’s the explanation for the little paper sign on my wall. The Old Cathedral would be a wonderful place to get married, but it doesn’t matter. Getting married is an abstract topic since I’m not seeing anyone, and it’s Lent. Yes, Lent.

Lent is a funny time for romance. Lent and romance are each appropriate in their own way, but together they’re like grapefruit and milk. You can have them together if you really want them, but it usually turns out weird.

Great Lent is the time in which the Church – meaning we humans – enter in to the spiritual condition of the Old Testament, in the words of theologian Alexander Schmemann. We are outside Paradise, outside of the gates of heaven, and no effort of our own will get us back in. But, the Old Testament tells of the coming of Christ, who can transcend that barrier. Our worship in Lent is a re-enactment of the Old Testament – thank God it’s only six weeks long rather than centuries of preparation! The services of Holy Week, which follow, put us in the shoes of the Apostles, who are seeing the most amazing and frightening events of their lives, who are then delighted in the Resurrection of their Master and God.

Father Schmemann calls the mood of Great Lent “Bright Sadness.” We are sad because of our sins but we are happy because we know what’s coming.

Great Lent is a time of prayer and fasting, of giving up non-essential activities such as television and going to concerts or bars, not because these activities are bad (they can be very helpful) but because you’re focusing your soul on the crucified and risen Christ. It’s the spiritual equivalent of boot camp. It takes a lot of focus, and we don’t try a lot of new things. Having a new girlfriend or boyfriend during Lent is like a professional baseball player painting an oil mural during spring training. It can be done, but do you really want to?

I became Orthodox in 2001, and my first Lent was in 2002. It was also my first year of serving in the Peace Corps in Ukraine. It was a wonderful time of spiritual discovery, with each service bringing me a little closer to the Resurrection. Also, I had discovered how Ukrainian dark bread is really good even without margarine. I ate it all through Lent and lost 40 pounds. It was great. When Pascha came around, it was like graduating from high school again or something – we made it!

Lent 2003 was a little harder to take because the Iraq War started in the second week of Lent, and it seemed like every Ukrainian I knew wanted to tell me what an idiot president that we had.

Lent 2004 is when things started getting complicated. I had just gotten back to the United States, and I was suffering badly from culture shock. (The culture shock of coming home is worse than going there.) And, there was this American Orthodox girl who wanted to spend time with me. She’d studied Slavonic language in university. She was beautiful, brilliant and tall, but she’d been a pretty shy person through high school and college and as a result had learned about men through reading Jane Austen novels.

We started seeing each other a couple of weeks before Lent. I enjoyed talking to her, but I wasn’t too sure about it becoming “a thing” with her. And, I wasn’t too sure about starting a new relationship during Lent in principle. She, on the other hand, was very enthusiastic. Sitting next to her, I thought I could hear the violins playing in her head, a crescendo moving to a climax of energy that could be let loose if we had our first kiss.

I thought we could just talk during Lent and maybe get romantic after Pascha. (And, stupidly, I thought that if I didn’t kiss her, we’d stay friends.) Anyway, it all fell apart a few weeks into Lent and I rarely hear from her now.

During Lent 2005, I met a tall girl at a church conference, and we got to talking about favorite books. She said she was reading Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. After the conference, we kept writing each other, and she invited me to travel to her town 200 miles away to meet her parents. I was really excited, and I went to the library and checked out Sense and Sensibility to read on the bus. I got through half of this piece of chick lit (the main character was wondering why her suitor had left unexpectedly and was mad that he hadn’t written or called). I met the parents, who really seemed to like me, and then the girl told me her true ambition was to be a nun.

When I got back home, I walked directly from the Greyhound bus station to the library and hurled Sense and Sensibility through the return slot with finality.

Now we come to 2006. It’s Lent again, and, smarting from the embarrassments of the past two years, I swore off talking to eligible women. And, I started attending Old Cathedral, a beautiful place to get married, which brings me back to my original scene of this essay – sitting in my bedroom, I’m looking at that paper sign which bans the use of that dreadfully negative thought.

Let me let the clock run forward some from Lent 2006 now, and I’m going to tell you how my resolutions turn out.

I almost succeed in my efforts not to talk to women during Lent, until I’m at another San Francisco Orthodox church. It’s the evening of Holy Thursday, and I’m in line to go up and kiss the large crucifix that we put in the middle of the church in remembrance of the death of Christ. There, I meet a tall, beautiful young woman with long brown hair who has just moved to San Francisco. We become friends, and I spend most of the next several days with her. She’s very stylish. She says that she likes San Francisco because you can find more unique cocktail dresses in the boutiques and you rarely have to endure the frustration of finding another girl at a party who is wearing the same dress as you.

We go to the Paschal night service together, and then at the feast afterwards, I’m so entranced with the girl that I forget to eat.

That story doesn’t get much further than that, though. Pretty soon, I discover why. I met her on Holy Thursday, but on Holy Wednesday, she went to a dance club called Ruby Skye and met a young man passing through San Francisco. A few months later, she moves to Canada to be with him.

I keep going to church at the Old Cathedral, which, unlike the other church I attend sometimes in San Francisco, has no girls. (I wouldn’t have any problem identifying the other church if it didn’t lead to the identity of the girl I’m talking about.) This is at once a relief and a frustration. It’s a relief not to have to think of the right thing to say.

I go to an Orthodox conference for young adults. There I meet a tall, beautiful young woman from Canada. I tell her a little about my Peace Corps service, and about how I lost weight in Ukraine because the diet is better.

“Now you’re slim,” she said.

“Not quite,” I said. “My ideal weight would be 230.” (I’m six feet nine inches tall.)

“What?” she said incredulously. “That’s how much I weigh. Are you calling me fat?”

That didn’t get any further.

I keep going to the Old Cathedral. One Saturday in July, I’m attending a vigil service, which is an evening preparation service before the next day’s liturgy. During vigil, we have two services combined into one. There’s Vespers, which contains an assortment of readings, mostly from the Old Testament. Then, we move into Matins, which contains the Canon, an assortment of readings about the New Testaments saints that are commemorated that day. It also contains a Gospel reading about the Resurrection. Like Lent, it’s a movement from the Old to the New, from darkness to light.

This particular Saturday, we have some visitors helping out with the service. Rather than the usual one reader to do the responses to the priest’s prayers, we’ve got a real choir director visiting from Boise with her daughter. And, the choir director’s husband is a priest, serving, so we’ve got two priests working together at the service. I hear the lovely singing and reading emanating from the choir’s corner at the front of the church.

The vigil service takes about two and a half hours. At the end, I walk over to the choir’s corner to say hi to the visiting choir director and her daughter. They’re both quite happy to see me. Later on, I ask the daughter out on a date, and rather than the usual “prove you’re worth it” routine that a girl will give you, she says yes.

And, the Old Cathedral turns out to be a great place to get married, and it does matter.

Getting paid for writing and other life in Spokane

2008-02-15T14:40:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Family,

Recently, I’ve experienced a rare honor in a writer’s life: having an article get published for which one is paid:

http://www.inlander.com/inlandway/74737699488100.php

They pay $.10 a word, and it’s for the local artsy weekly paper. It’s actual work. I think it’s the first time I’ve earned actual money for writing something in about six years. This story is about the zookeeper-training program that my wife participates in. All of the people I interviewed are classmates of Miri’s.

The zoo is kind of a cool place. They’ve got 45 tigers and two bears up there, and Miri’s been learning quite a bit about their care. Also, she’s been shoveling an awful lot of snow (we’ve had more than 70 inches this year), giving her muscle tone that’s better than mine, which is a little embarrassing. I have gone up to the zoo a few times to help with the shoveling, on Sunday afternoons. One of the things that makes the shoveling so difficult is that it can’t just be tossed to the side; it has to be put into wheelbarrows and taken to a pile. They now have three snow mountains that are each about eight feet tall.

I got to drive a wheelbarrow around the park last Sunday, and I shoveled snow in front of the exhibit of a lion named Jambo, who doesn’t like me very much. He gives me a death stare and crouches like he’s ready to jump every time I come by.

Jambo is a Barbary Lion, a species extinct in the wild, and he’s about 500 pounds in size. He looks kind of like Scar from “The Lion King.” It’s a little disconcerting having only a chain-link fence (even though it’s 12 feet high) between him and me. The other zookeepers tell me that there’s nothing to worry about; he just doesn’t like tall people.

To get from Jambo’s exhibit to the snow pile, I go past Kalki’s exhibit. Kalki is a leopard, he weighs about 100 pounds, and every time I go past, he makes it very clear that I really ought to be in the three pieces rather than one. He shows his teeth (and he’s got a lot) and he lunges at the fence. No amount of cheerful talking gets him to be nice.

As this article also mentions, the zoo has four Siberian tiger cubs, and they behave like a litter of kittens, except for the fact that they’re 25 pounds each. Miri supervises them on Sundays. They’re very cute, and they are a thundering herd when they’re playing. They’ve batted at my hands and tried to hold them with their large feet. They get cardboard toys to play with and Miri has shot several videos of them demolishing the toys.

I’m hoping to expand my work as a freelance writer to include other stories such as the efforts of a University of Idaho researcher to domesticate the mountain huckleberry. The deal with working for the Inlander is that I’m responsible for coming up with my own ideas, which isn’t easy when you’re new to the area. I’ve been writing to PR people at assorted universities and other agencies asking them for ideas and to put me on their press release list, which, I’m sure is going to get me a whole lot of e-mails telling me what a huge deal it is that they’ve raised $200,000 to build a new center to recognize rich donors. But, it’s a start.

WHERE WE LIVE

Miri and I are living in an apartment on the north side of Spokane, Wash. It’s a spacious two-bedroom apartment, and the rent is very reasonable. In San Francisco, we could have rented a doghouse for this amount, which might’ve made the dog happy; we’ve never had a doghouse. We live next door to our apartment complex’s landlady, and she’s very helpful.

We’d love to have guests. The guest room is cozy and well insulated. It’s also been really fun having our own kitchen, especially with all the cool cookware we got as wedding gifts. I’ve been learning all about cooking pot roast recently, although there’s always leftovers when only two people eat it.

MARRIED LIFE

Being married is neat. Miri is wonderful. I don’t know how to describe it beyond that except to say that I’ve relaxed quite a bit since being a bachelor. I actually go to the library and check out books now! That’s something I never did in San Francisco just because I never felt like I could relax enough to read a book. I’ve been buying the New York Times Book Review on Sundays, and the library has had most of the new books I’ve been interested in:

Some of the books I’ve enjoyed include:

The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex. This is one of the funniest books that I’ve read in the past five years. Several times, Miri came close to throwing me out of bed for laughing too much while she was trying to sleep. It’s a book about an 11-year-old girl and her cat saving the world from invading space aliens. It’s an obvious jab at America’s Indian policies, and a more subtle jab at our Iraq policies. And, it contains a lot of Huckleberry Finn in it as the 11-year-old girl becomes friends with one of the aliens.

A Mirror Garden, by Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian. This is the memoir of an Iranian artist who created a new art with lots of mirrors. As she wanders through this tale of development of her own artistry, she also conveys a great deal of cultural and historical knowledge about Iran. It’s a charming, engaging story, although it is kind of annoying how she mostly exempts herself from public affairs in her home country (that is, until she gets kicked out in the 1979 revolution). The dust cover says that it’s a grace-under-pressure kind of story, and that the author is sort of a Persian Audrey Hepburn. I guess that makes sense, but the only thing I know about Audrey Hepburn is that she makes middle-aged women think about pretty dresses.

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perotta. This is the story of a New England suburb where a fundamentalist church opens up and starts protesting the sex-ed curriculum in the public schools. The two main characters are the sex-ed teacher and a soccer coach who is a member of this church, and who happens to have the sex-ed teacher’s daughter on his soccer team. I didn’t enjoy the plot because of its moral ambiguity, but the characters are wonderfully written, and are very believable, real people.

God’s Politics: Why the Right is Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, by Jim Wallis. This book is 400 pages of political warmth, if there is such a thing, intended to prove that it is possible to be a Christian and vote for a non-Republican. I liked it, but there was a certain hippie-Jesus element in his religion that unsettled me.

There were several other books that seemed promising, but I never made it past page 50:

Sons and Other Flammable Objects, by Porochista Khakpour. The main characters were just too darn mean.

Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes, a fictional account of the youth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Well-written, but too proper and British to keep my attention.

Arguing the Just War in Islam, by John Kelsay. I just didn’t care.

FUTURE PLANS

Miri and I are looking for zoos where she can work, which is almost certain to be somewhere other than Spokane (there’s only one here, and we know the payscale). Places we’d like to go in Washington state include the Point Defiance Zoo, the Woodland Park Zoo, and Northwest Trek. We’ve also thought about zoos in Oregon, Colorado and a few other places. This means that we’re likely to move again before 2008 is over, which I am looking forward to. Hopefully we’ll land someplace with a more interesting job market.

OTHER STUFF

I joined a bowling league, and I actually scored 147 in a game last week.

I went caucusing last Saturday. It was fun meeting some neighbors. A whole 28 people showed up from our precinct, which was impressive.

I’m working on a book intended to make the Orthodox Church seem less weird to outsiders. Maybe the title should be, “Don’t Overlook Us Just Because Our Hymns Don’t Rhyme.” The book is intended to apply the principles of marketing to our efforts to communicate with multiple audiences (right now I think we only communicate to people like ourselves).

I finished all of the thank-you cards for the gifts from the groom’s guests at the wedding. At least I think I did. If you didn’t get yours and are wondering why this clod doesn’t write you, please let me know. Miri is still working on the thank-you cards for the bride’s guests and is threatening divorce over my being too smug about it.

So, what’s been up with you? Any of it worth a story in the newspaper, you think?

Please keep in touch.

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

28 is the Perfect Age

2007-12-14T23:00:00.001-08:00

28 is the Perfect Age

Dear God,

I’m 28. Thank You!

Thank You for all of the tidbits of other people’s lives I’ve been able to live. They have saved me time in determining my own.

Thank You for sending me on the press bus when Bill Clinton did his big tour through Washington in ’96. It was a great experience to have, once. By the end of the day, I’d heard him give his stump speech eight times and was bored to tears. My only real accomplishment was making a Secret Service agent smile. It taught me not to try being Wolf Blitzer.

Thank You for the Korean Neo-Confucianist-turned-Methodist pastor who taught me that I am not a Protestant.

Thank You for the extroverted, depressed and talkative girl who kept me as her “reserve boy.” Thank You for showing me the consequences of choosing one’s friends by breast size, and for not making me pay for it too much.

Thank You for two years in the Peace Corps to teach me that I am not Margaret Mead.

Thank You for two years working in a homeless shelter to teach me that I am not Mother Theresa. And, thank you for my psychotic but altruistic co-worker who taught me that regardless of the quality of an organization’s mission, I’ll never be happy unless I get along with the people in the office.

Thank You for the school shooting, which taught me never to try being a character from “Law & Order.”

Thank You for my large body and slow legs, which taught me never to try being Ricky Sanders from the Redskins.

Thank You for the 30-40 dogs I knew growing up, who taught me the joy of having one dog who will actually bring back your Frisbee.

Thank You for the shy, studious young woman who finished college at the age of 19. She was brilliant, but she learned about men from Jane Austen books. Thank You for teaching me the dangers of wanting a girl just for her brain.

Thank You for the crazy professor who led me up Pinnacle Peak, the top 300 feet of which are a cliff full of footholds that can be used by people with smaller feet than mine. Thank You for teaching me that it’s easier to climb up than down. Thank You for saving my life that day, for teaching me that by slow scooting, a large butt can grip what wide feet cannot, and for saving me from another expensive hobby. My Mom sewed up the shorts.

Thank You for the cheerful Cambodian boy who drew pictures of smiling people who were missing arms and legs. When I realized that they were land-mine survivors, I learned to be thankful for what you have, whatever you have.

Thank You for my current job paying bills for a non-profit too quirky to describe. Though I while away the hours typing things like “kumquat” into Google just to see what happens, I am sure someday I will understand why I had this experience.

Thank You for the former sorority president with long brown hair whom I met at church two years ago. I got such false hopes about her that when she turned out not to like me, I ran across the neighborhood to attend church at the parish with no girls in it. A lovely young woman came to help with the choir one day, and I married her.

I’ve had all these wonderful experiences, and now I’m 28, the perfect age. I know it’s perfect because 28’s divisors equal 28, see: 1+2+4+7+14=28. My next chance at this is 496.

I’m certainly glad I got to do this, especially while I was young enough to enjoy it and before I developed a standard of living. But, I want to ask You, what do I do next? What’s it all add up to? I wish all these parts of my life added up as well as 28.

Groom's Guide to San Francisco

2007-06-18T19:48:00.001-07:00

You’re a relative or friend of mine, and you’ve decided to come some umpteen thousands of miles to my wedding. I’m honored! If your personal budget is at all like mine, the cost of your ticket plus those lovely “just married” mudflaps you’ve got in your suitcase probably don’t have you enthusiastic about blowing $14.95 on the fish and chips basket at Fisherman’s Wharf (drink not included).

This guide is intended to help you have fun, see interesting and special stuff, save money, and pretend that you know the town when friends of yours from work fly here for their vacations to the West’s biggest tourist trap.

First, some cost-saving tips:

1. We have three airports in the Bay Area, all of which are sort of close to a rail station. Go to orbitz.com and run a search on flights from your home to SFO, and click the box “airports within 80 miles” and you might find some deals. (Don’t go to Monterey.) One caveat, though – the Bay Bridge is going to be closed over Labor Day weekend for earthquake upgrade stuff. If you want to get from Oakland to San Francisco, you’ll have to take the BART (underwater subway train).

2. Think about buying a Muni Passport. This is a special pass that gets you unlimited use of the buses and cable cars. A one-day pass is $11, a three-day pass is $18, and a seven-day pass is $24. You don’t have to specify which days until you actually start using the pass.

http://www.sfmta.com/cms/mfares/passports.htm

Or, if you want a little more fun, think about a City Pass, which gets you seven days on the buses and cable cars, and admission to your choice of one of several museums, and you can also go on a boat tour of the bay. It’s $54.

http://www.citypass.com/city/sanfrancisco.html

Now, stuff to do, most of which does not require a rental car:

Socialize with some of the other wedding guests. There are two nearby restaurants that are great for this (motel has no lobby). I would like to suggest Asqew, 3348 Steiner, a shish-kebab grilling place, and Mel’s Drive-In, 2165 Lombard, a classic-style American diner with heavy food that should be eaten slowly. (Public restrooms are often a challenge to find in San Francisco.) One delicious exception from the “heavy food” category – the Tuna Ahi steak sandwich. These two are within a block of the hotel.

See the Wild Parrots of San Francisco. Somebody made a movie about them. I’ve never seen it, but the parrots are real. There are two colonies of them that I know about – one on Telegraph Hill in the trees surrounding Coit Tower, and the other at the Lombard Gate of the Presidio (military base turned into housing and office space). The latter is a mere eight-block walk from the hotel. To get there, walk out of the hotel and cross Lombard at Steiner Street. Go one block to Greenwich and turn right. Walk until Greenwich ends at a T intersection at Lyon and turn right. Go one block to Lombard, turn left and go through the gate with the big cannons by it. The parrots live in the eucalyptus trees up above the park. They have red heads and green bodies, and a wonderful, musical cawing. You’re most likely to see them around sunrise, which will be 6:40 a.m. on Labor Day weekend, but I’ve seen them out at 8 a.m., too.

If you want to go to Coit Tower, which provides a lovely view of both bridges, it’s a 2.5 mile walk. Or, you can take the No. 30 inbound bus, which stops one block to the north of the hotel at Chestnut and Pierce. Take that bus to Washington Square, and get off. From there you can walk up the hill to Coit, or you can wait for the No. 39 bus to come get you and take you to the top. Even if you have a car, this is a good strategy because the parking lot at the top of hill is usually very full.

Another spot worth stopping at in this neighborhood: The Italian-French Bakery at Grant and Green (1501 Grant). It’s one of the few San Francisco bakeries where they still bake bread on site. A small roll costs $.60

Let’s go fly a kite! Crissy Field is a nice, wide, grassy field along the bay with excellent views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Some serious kite flyers like to bring large stunt kites that are fun to watch here. Also, if you’re the type of guest who would bring a wet suit and a sail board to a wedding (and I know one) this is your place to launch. Just be careful at low tide – the current going out of the Golden Gate is strong and getting sucked out to sea sucks.

Getting there. Leave the hotel and walk north on Pierce St. Turn left on Beach, right on Scott. When you get to Marina Blvd., you’ll see Marina Green, which is a very pretty field, too, but you’re not quite there yet. Turn left on Marina. Go to the right at the funny fork in the road, and go through the Marina Gate of the Presidio. (Now you’re on Mason St.) If you look left, you can see the Exploratorium and the Palace of Fine Arts. (Also neat places to go, but we’re flying kites. Focus, please…) Keep walking on Mason, go past a lagoon, and on the right will be a big field, and a beach after it.

Other beaches: There are two other large sandy beaches in San Francisco, Ocean Beach, which unsurprisingly is on the west edge of San Francisco facing the Pacific Ocean. There’s an area where bonfires are allowed. You can walk for about two miles on the beach, and then when you run out of beach, you’re near the San Francisco Zoo. To get to Ocean Beach, walk to Fillmore St. and catch the No. 22 bus going uphill. At Geary Blvd., transfer to the No. 38 Ocean Beach bus going outbound (left-to-right). Make sure it says “Ocean Beach” on the front, as there are several varieties of the 38. Take it to the end of the line (next to a Safeway) and walk into the wind.

And there’s Baker Beach, with its excellent view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s got bigger waves, and a few rocks you can climb on. To get there, use the above directions to walk to Crissy Field. At Mason St. and Halleck, wait at a No. 29 bus stop. Get on there. (Make sure you’re headed towards the Golden Gate Bridge.) Watch out the right window for signs for Baker Beach, and walk through the parking lot. One caution: as you walk towards the north end of the beach, you might see a fellow off in the distance who’s wearing a brown suit. Um, he’s in his birthday suit. That end of the beach is a favorite place for the fabric-free.

If you feel obligated to act like a tourist, you can go to Fisherman’s Wharf via the No. 30 bus mentioned above. At the end of Pier 39 (the singularity point at the center of the tourist black hole) there is a salt-water taffy shop worth visiting. Also, in that same neighborhood is In-N-Out Burger at 333 Jefferson. The burgers here are the best around in my opinion, and they’re cheap! If you’re a chocloholic and you feel drawn to Ghiradelli Square, it’s a fine place to look around, but if you want to actually buy chocolate, go to a drug store or grocery store anywhere in San Francisco, and you’ll find the same products for 20 percent less.

The other cool thing you can do in the Wharf is hop on the F Street Car, which is an historic streetcar line that runs on the surface. It’ll take you through the Embarcadero, and past the Ferry Building, where there is often a farmers’ market. From there, it goes down Market Street all the way to the Castro.

The other super-touristy spot in San Francisco is North Beach, although there are a few places worth seeing there, too. My favorite of them: Café Tosca, 242 Columbus. Order the House Coffee, which is really hot cocoa, steamed milk and brandy. It’s $5. Café Tosca was around back in the Beatnik poet days, so Jack Kerouac would’ve been drinking there. Spec’s 12 Adler Museum Café is nearby at 12 Saroyan Pl. It’s neat just for the signs on the wall. Two others worth visiting: Vesuvio, 255 Columbus, and Caffé Trieste, 601 Vallejo, is where Francis Ford Coppola took his typewriter for 8 hours a day and sat writing the screenplay to The Godfather. If you’re from Pittsburgh and feeling nostalgic, check out Giordano Brothers’, 303 Columbus, which is an almost exact copy of Primanti Bros. This bar/restaurant is famous for putting coleslaw and fries onto Italian sandwiches. (Odd but tasty.)

Nob Hill is also worth strolling around, and there are two spots up there worth seeing: The Top of the Mark, at California and Mason, which is a jazz club on top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, has excellent music and great views of the city. It became famous with a photograph during World War II of servicemen saying goodbye to America there before they shipped out.

http://www.businessimagegroup.com/sfimages/history/NobHill.html

Grace Cathedral is a gorgeous gothic church at 1100 California St., and in it is a carpet labyrinth that will keep you occupied for some time. Maybe not as good as the one Tom designed in the snow one year at Christmas, but definitely worth trying. Take off your shoes.

Down towards my neighborhood, you can find a few places worth visiting. Tommy’s Joynt, 1101 Geary Blvd., is a restaurant/bar that has very well prepared and tasty meat dishes for less than $10. If you’re set on fish and chips in San Francisco, try Piccadilly’s Fish and Chips at 1348 Polk St. They’re cheaper and better there than the Wharf, but eat them slowly. And, last in this group is Saigon Sandwich at 560 Larkin, the best value in San Francisco, where none of these tasty Vietnamese sandwiches cost more than $2.50. (It’s open 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.)

Getting to all of the above involves a 1.5 – 2 mile walk or getting on a Southbound bus on Van Ness.

Finally, two more gorgeous spots: Holy Virgin Cathedral, at 6210 Geary Blvd., is a beautiful, beautiful church with five gold domes. To get there, follow the directions to Ocean Beach but get off at 25th Street, and walk to the tall Russian Orthodox church there. (Side note – this church shares the same name as the one where the wedding will be. The congregation moved from the Old Cathedral, 864 Fulton St., where we’re getting married, to the New Cathedral, which is, in my opinion, the most beautiful Orthodox church in North America.)

And, I want to put in a plug for the Mt. Lick Observatory, which is a two-hour drive from San Francisco, but it is a really, really neat place where you can get a tour of the telescopes, look at a whole bunch of neat astronomical photographs and see a magnificent view of the Silicon Valley. Here’s a link:

http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/

I hope this guide has been somewhat useful to you. The paper announcements will be going out in a few weeks!

Love,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Good news from San Francisco

2007-01-22T10:49:00.000-08:00

January 22, 2007
San Francisco

I have a second-grade student, Sariyah, whom I tutor in the After-School Program at Raphael House. She's very serious, and doesn't let me get away with much. Last week, I tried telling her an elephant joke.

"How do you put an elephant in a refrigerator?" I asked.

"You can't do that -- it would hurt the elephant. He would be too cold and he wouldn't be able to breathe."

A few months ago, one of her classmates, Jenny, cut out a paper set of eyebrows and a musketeer's goatee, and taped them on her fact. Jenny came walking into the tutoring room wearing this. I saw Jenny and cracked a smile. Sariyah shook her finger at me and said, "We're working."

This isn't to say that she doesn't have a sense of humor -- she does, it just comes out at odd moments. One day, her father and 18-month-old brother came to pick her up.

I said to Sariyah, "You should be nice to your brother because he's a boy and some day, he'll be bigger than you."

"So should you," she replied, "because when that happens, you're gonna be dead or really old."

She's one of our most hard-working students, and I think, one of the most intelligent, although one wouldn't have guessed it when she first came to Raphael House a year ago. She read words in books very, very slowly, sounding out every syllable, and when she wrote, she spent about a minute and a half on each word, crafting every letter perfectly on the page. I encouraged her to go faster, but she wouldn't hear of it -- she wanted to get it right the first time.

Her language abilities were a bit behind her classmates' partially because she was learning English as a second language -- her family immigrated to the United States three years ago -- but I soon realized that her slowness was because she was a perfectionist. For her, this turned out to be more of a help than a hindrance. She had wonderful learning techniques, often while we were practicing spelling words, she would scold me if I didn't cover the words with my hands. "I won't learn them if I can see them! I have to have them in my mind," she said. Her knowledge base was limited, but she knew how to expand it.

Children who have been homeless are often mislabeled as "special needs" because they're behind in their academic abilities. But, their problem is usually a lack of a place and a time to study. We have an average of 28-30 children in the After-School program, and when they come on a regular basis, it's amazing to see them improve.

Sariyah's now about where she should be for a second-grader, and she can read books to me with minimal help. She's a remarkable child for another reason -- she comes from an intact family, unlike most of the families we serve, 75 percent of which are headed by a single mother. Her family is functional and healthy, and both the parents are hard-working, but even with the jobs they had upon arriving in San Francisco, they couldn't pay the rent, and they came to live in the Raphael House family homeless shelter. They were here for a few months at the beginning of 2006, and then they were able to move into transitional housing, and now they have an apartment of their own. Even though they don't live at Raphael House any more, Sariyah still comes to our tutoring program every day.

She has an unusual amount of social grace for a child her age, often asking me what's wrong if I'm tired or sad. Sometimes she and her classmates get philosophical, too, and I learn quite a bit.

Once, I was helping a classmate of hers, Jenny, with compound words, and Jenny whined, "I don't ge-e-e-t it."

I said, "A compound word is when you have two small words that make something else when you put them together. You know what a dog is? You know what a house is? A doghouse is something different."

"I still don't get it," she said in the same tone.

"What's a boy?" I asked.

"A person," she answered.

"What's a friend?"

"Someone you like."

"Well, a 'boyfriend' is someone a girl might kiss," I said, and Jenny, Sariyah and the two other girls at the table recoiled in disgust. Sariyah pulled up her jacket over her face to hide from the thought.

Jenny told me in her most authoritative voice, "No, it's not. A boyfriend is a boy you're friends with, which is more better. You don't do that."

Sariyah extended her hands out to her sides as if they were a scale. With one hand, she said, "That's in high school that the kissy stuff happens." With the other hand, she said, "Now, you don't do that."

Hearing Jenny tell me how it is made me happy. She's a girl who comes from a difficult family situation. Her family stayed at Raphael House twice. During the frist stay, her youngest brother was born, and our staff didn't know her mother was pregnant until she went into labor. (She was too shy to tell anyone.) During the second stay, Jenny's parents' marriage fell apart with both physical abuse and her father abusing drugs and getting deported.

Last year, Jenny would get into "moods" in which she was impossible to deal with, once standing in one place and spinning in circles for 45 minutes because she couldn't have her way. Also, once I had to restrain her by the arms to prevent her from running into traffic, and she squirmed and wrestled to try to get away (this failed; I have a mechanical advantage) and then she started stomping on my feet.

Now, she doesn't get into these moods, and given how well she explained the dangers of dating to me, she may just stay out of trouble as she becomes a young lady. (Another time, she shared a delightful joke with me: What do you call a pig who knows karate? Pork chop.)

I got an excellent bit of theology this week when Sariyah and Anthony, a third-grader, were talking about their futures.

"When I grow up, I'm going to be a babysitter," said Sariyah.

"When I grow up, I'm going to be dead," said Anthony.

I interjected, "That's true, but what are you going to do before you're dead?"

He answered, "Before I'm dead, I'm going to die."

"No, I mean what job will you have?" I asked.

"I'm going to be a doctor and cure people and then I'll die and I'll be dead after that, and after that I'll be dead and after that I'll still be dead."

Sariyah opined, "I don't want to be dead. I want to live forever."

I said, "There's the Resurrection, when God will bring all the good people back to life."

Sariyah said, "That's right. He's the greatest, biggest, most perfilous person in the universe."

"Perfilous?" I asked.

"I said powerful. He made everything and can do anything. He's everywhere."
Sariyah and Anthony began to chat about their day at school, while I pulled out a piece of paper to record the above conversation so I could remember it to write it here.

"What are you writing?" Anthony asked.

"Something to my girlfriend." I answered.

Sariyah sneered and said "ew." A minute later, she said, "I know her. She's got black hair and glasses and white skin, and she was here on Halloween."

Anthony added, "And you like her."

"Yes," I said, "I'm going to marry her."

Sariyah recoiled again and said, "We don't need to know that."

There was another pause in the conversation. Anthony stood up to get a glass of water, then tried repeating an old joke. "When I grow up, I'm going to be dead." (I should note here that his jokes are usually funnier, such as: Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.)

"I'm not going to laugh at that. It's not funny anymore."

He hugged me and said, "When I grow up, I'm going to be tall."

"How tall?" I asked.

"As tall as you!"

"You have to eat your vegetables and exercise to do that."

"And eat cake," he added.

Sariyah interjected, "When you eat vegetables, you get bigger this way," and put her hand above her head. "When you eat cake, you get bigger THIS way," and extended her hands to her sides.

A few minutes later, Anthony started his homework. He had a picture graph in which a smiley face represented six children. One question asked him to use smileys to represent three children. So he drew half a smiley. The next question asked him to represent nine children. He drew an upside-down smiley.

"Why'd you do that?" I asked. "Why not one and a half smileys?"

"One smiley is six," he said. "And nine is an upside-down six, so nine is an upside-down smiley."

THE ENGAGEMENT

You may have noticed that I mentioned to the kids that I'm getting married. This is true. You may also wonder why I buried it so deep in the story, and it's because I'm testing whether this story is compelling enough to drag you this far into the text. If you're still reading this, maybe it's a funny story. That, or you're still reading because you're hoping I'll give the punchline to the elephant joke. (Open the door and put him in.)

So, the engagement. Yes, I gave my lovely girlfriend, Miriam Ruth Moser, an engagement ring on Tuesday night, January 16, which was also her 27th birthday. So now she's my fiance, and we're looking to get married in the summer of 2008. She wants to go to school and go through a one-year training program in zookeeping, and we're looking to get married after she's finished with that program.

I met Miri at church at the end of July, and we've been dating since Sept. 21. I met her family over Thanksgiving, and she met my family over New Year's, and we've just been having the most lovely time together. I'm so excited about all of this.

Here's a link to some photographs:

http://www.pbase.com/allears/gallery/engagement

Keep in touch!

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

p.s. If you want to know more about Raphael House, you can click here:

http://www.raphaelhouse.org/

Coming back to Dneprorudny

2006-10-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

October 12, 2006
Dneprorudny, Ukraine

Dear Friends,

I began my lesson with the 10^th-A class by going over names. They had been my class for a year and a half, but I didn’t remember everyone.

The children gave their names by order of where they were sitting.

“Dasha.”

“Anya.”

“Sofia.”

“Vlad.”

“Mila.”

The sight of Mila set off a mental fire drill of sorts inside me. My body and my eyebrows jumped involuntarily as I tried to reconcile the Mila who had been my student when she was in the sixth form – a pleasant girl with blond hair who wore nice clothes and spoke English well. I tried not to look shocked at the sight of her, but now she had dyed her hair black, she wore a black shirt, black skirt, black boots and black stockings full of holes. Additionally, she had black fingernails, a leader dog collar with spikes and a leather belt – also with spikes.

As the lesson went on, I discovered that Mila hadn’t changed much in her personality. She still worked hard, helped her classmates and was very enjoyable to talk to. For more pictures, click here.

Arriving in a new country involves an awful amount of surprises for a Peace Corps volunteer, and the staff of the Peace Corps train the volunteers to avoid saying something too judgmental if they see something they don’t like. They call this managing culture shock. In the two weeks I’ve been here, a sweet little girl turned into a Goth gargoyle is the worst shock I’ve had to deal with. In general, it’s been a very nice visit.

Although I could find a couple of dozen Ukrainians to disagree with me, I think that things in this country have improved considerably since I left three years ago. In Dneprorudny, a town of 20,000 people, several dozen business have opened or gone through attractive remodels. The iron mine continues to work, and the miners get paid on time. The starting salary for a miner is $400 a month, up from $100 when I first got here. A beginning teacher earns $80 a month, up from $40 in 2001. To give some perspective on the spending power this involves, the Peace Corps gave its volunteers a stipend of $180 per month so that we could be “upper middle class,” even though we weren’t supposed to show it. I usually had money left over at the end of the month, and I’d been frugal, probably, I could’ve gotten by with only $80 per month.

Pay has gone up, and so have expenses. Natural gas and oil prices have caused the cost of train and bus tickets to go up 20 to 30 percent, and it’s getting more expensive to heat one’s apartment. I think the increase in pay is more than the increase in expenses, but more than a few people here have given me a very gloomy impression. This week, a group of students asked what I thought about Ukraine, and I said that the economic development was pretty encouraging. Their teacher interrupted me.

“But our lives are getting worse and worse. I am the most highly paid teacher at our school, and earn 600 greevnas (about $120). The cost of my four-room flat is 400 greevnas (about $80). Is it possible to live this way?” she asked.

I bit my tongue. There were a number of suggestions I could have made that she wouldn’t have found very helpful. I might have asked what a divorced woman with grown children needed with such a large flat. She could sell it and move into some place more manageable, an especially good idea since surging real estate prices mean that she could get more than $40,000 for the four-room flat. (Also, I should add that the $80 “cost” of her flat is maintenance and utilities, not rent.)

A number of people complained about the spike in real estate prices across the country, but most Ukrainians have some real estate. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the became the owners of the apartments and houses that the government had provided for them when everything was owned by the state. This is good in that it gives Ukrainians some added wealth, but it kind of stinks if you want to move to Kyiv, where housing is really expensive, and find a new job.

This particular teacher always gave me a gloomy appraisal of life in modern Ukraine when I lived here before. She’s Russian, and she has Ukrainian citizenship, something that annoys her. (Imagine a bunch of New Yorkers moving to Arkansas for work, then Arkansas declaring independence with the New Yorkers stuck there with Arkansas citizenship. That’s basically how Russians in Ukraine feel.) This teacher really mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Despite the doom and gloom I heard from the 40-plus crowd, I’m sticking to my opinion that life is improving. There is a certain portion of the population that will be complaining until bread again costs 16 kopeks per loaf. (Sixteen kopeks is three cents under the current exchange rate, although this doesn’t mean much . . . this desire has more to do with nostalgia for Soviet price controls.)

I did get to meet several of my former students in Kyiv and talk to them last week. They were enjoying their studies at the universities there, and they were a lot more optimistic than their parents’ generation. The University of Wisconson has opened a branch campus in Kyiv, and one of my students, Katya, is in her first year there, on a full scholarship! If she sticks with it and graduates, she’ll have a degree that’s accepted at any university in Western Europe or the United States. (There are only two universities in Ukraine that are internationally certified.)

STUFF THAT’S CHANGED

Cell phones

The cost of cell phone service has dropped, and now everybody’s got one. A lot of folks have several numbers because there are six or seven competing cell phone providers here, and if you call someone within your own service provider’s network, you only have to pay one-fifth of a cent per minute.

I noticed the explosion in cell-phone use when I lectured at the school where I’d worked before. At any given time, no fewer than three students were taking pictures of me with their cellphone cameras.

When I got here in 2001, 90 percent of the people I knew with cell phones were U.S. Embassy employees, and they cost $.50 per minute. The waiting list for a new plug-in-the-wall phone was 20 years long (yes, TWENTY) making it pretty obvious why mobile phones were so popular.

Politics

The political situation here took a funny turn at the end of the summer. You may recall Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 when there were two candidates, Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovich, running for president. Yanukovich was the chosen son of the outgoing president’s mafia, and he tried to steal the election. Yushchenko cried foul and took to Independence Square in Kyiv with hundreds of thousands of protesters in the dead of winter. The Ukrainian Supreme Court overturned the election and ordered a second runoff. Yushchenko won the runoff, and appointed a prime minister, Tymoshenko, who, at one time or another has been wanted for prosecution by the governments of Ukraine, Russia and the United States. Tymoshenko got fired about a year ago, and Yushchenko tried a couple of times unsuccessfully to form a new government. Two months ago, Yushchenko asked Yanukovich to be the new prime minister. I have one friend who was out in the protests in 2004 who felt sold out by the new union between the opposing politicians.

“The crowd is amazing,” she said of the protests, “It’s nothing but power, but it doesn’t have a brain.”

I have another friend, in her early 50s who basically viewed Yushchenko as the anti-Christ at the time of the election. Now that the Rada (Parliament) is working again, it’s considering raising the retirement age for workers from 55 to 60 for women, and from 60 to 65 for men. Olga really wants to retire at 55, and is now hopping mad at both Yushchenko and Yanukovich over the fact that bill is being considered. Now, she’s writing letters, which is something of an improvement for her – when I first got here, she was such a Russian nationalist that she refused to acknowledge the existence of Ukraine as an independent country.

OTHER STUFF THAT’S HAPPENED

Hot summer

About 25 km to the southeast of Dneprorudny, there is this village, Novobogdanovka, which contained an army ordinance depot. This depot had a large number of bombs built during the Cold War. During the summer of 2004, the temperature exceeded 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) and these bombs began spontaneously exploding. These were bombs were big, like as big as you can get without going nuclear.

The bombs destroyed houses in towns that were 15 km from the depot. Sometimes, when one bomb would go off, it would send the neighboring bomb flying several kilometers into someone’s front yard.

This depot happened to be near the major Moscow-Simferopil rail line, so it really disrupted the tourist travel of people going to and from the resort region of Crimea.

The Ukrainian sappers, or bomb disposal teams, used helicopters to hose down the bombs and keep them cool. Some of the bombs could be transported away and destroyed, others they had to destroy on site. It took the sappers a month to dispose of all the weapons.

When I saw the surrounding villages, my friends pointed out how everything there had been reconstructed with government money, and one village, Spaske, got a new church that cost $65,000 to build.

It would be tempting to call this the sign of country mired in post-Soviet decay, but I was very impressed with the reconstruction, and I should add that the Ukrainian sappers are the most experienced in the world – on a weekly basis, people dig find bombs and land mines left over from World War II, and they have to call the sappers to come take them away. To their credit, no one was killed, although 15 people were injured.

Cold winter

There was a small town in the Lugansk region where, last winter, the town’s heating system failed completely during a cold snap. The temperature hit -30 Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit) and the town’s residents had no heat source. About 100 of them froze to death. The president sent out teams to fix the heating system, but they weren’t able to work very quickly in such cold conditions.

MY PROJECT

Some of you may remember a park restoration project that I helped direct when I was a volunteer. (Some of you even donated to pay for materials!)

I am happy to report that almost all of the improvements we made to the mineral-water springs park are still there. The gate, the sign, the bridge, the bath and the channels are still there, and vandals haven’t been able to do too much to the place.

If you join the Peace Corps, there’s this word that you’ll hear until your ears bleed – sustainability – your project has to continue after you leave. You need to start the ball rolling and you need to find local leaders who can keep it rolling.

The park project hasn’t seen any progress since I left, but it did turn out to be sustainable in the fact that we used a whole lot of cement to keep people from stealing the stuff we built. I found this pretty satisfying.

Anyway, that’s about as much as I’ve got to say from week two of my trip. Next, I want to write about Svatogorska, my favorite monastery!

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Saying goodbye to a friend; re-meeting many others

2006-10-05T20:02:00.000-07:00

October 5, 2006
Zhytomyr, Ukraine

Dear Friends and Family,

Greetings from Ukraine! I hope this letter finds you well. I'm having a wonderful time visiting friends here, and I'm surprised by how comfortable I am meeting and talking with people here. The culture shock is minimal, and I've found the transportation system easy to navigate.

(For more photos, click here.)

I've been here a short time, and I'm reconnecting with so many old friends whom I met when I was in the Peace Corps. One of the first things I did was go to a memorial service for a priest whom I met three years ago, Fr. Seraphim.

I met him through random circumstances and he introduced me to a group of his choir members who decided to take me on a trip across Ukraine to the holiest sites that the Church has. I was one of the first Americans they'd ever met, and the only American who was an Orthodox Christian, which made me a celebrity, an oddity and a beloved brother. (Okay, I know that's a lot to ask readers to process in just three sentences. There is a longer version of what happened on that amazing trip, but it's 38 pages long.)

Father Seraphim was the fiestiest priest I've know. Within the first 15 minutes of meeting him, he was demanding to know my life's story while at the same time stuffing me full of strawberries and encouraging me to go with him to Pochaev, a monastery in Western Ukraine that is considered the country's spiritual center. (It is the only large monastery in the country that remained in the possession of the monks through the Communist years. I'm not sure, but the reason for this may be that the monastery's region was part of Poland between the World Wars.) He also gave me a beautiful icon that was too big to carry back to America, and a bunch of books that I couldn't read, given my bad English skills.

When you confessed a problem or a failing to him, he'd get all stirred up and tell you what your little bad habit could lead to, and would very enthusiastically tell you how much better things could be. He did this not to condemn or accuse -- rather, he was advertising aggressively for Heaven. He reminded me a great deal of his patron saint, Seraphim of Sarov because he greeted people with "Khristos Voskress!" (Christ is Risen), a greeting usually reserved for the first forty days after Easter. He did this at any time of the year. Also, he trimmed his beard the same way that St. Seraphim is shown in the icons.

The one other priest I knew who could get this fired up during Confession was Father Viktor Sokolov, and he did this near the end of his life with an oxygen tank in tow. He passed away on March 16, 2006.

Father Seraphim, a monk who'd been the priest at Holy Dormition Cathedral for 14 years, passed away after a long battle with an illness. He died on August 27 at the age of 43.

October 5 is the fortieth day after this passing, and the memorial service on that day equals the funeral itself in importance for Orthodox Christians. As Christians, we bear in our bodies the suffering of Christ so that we might also have his life manifest in our bodies. After Christ's death, burial and Resurrection, He remained with the Apostles for 40 days before He ascended. As such such, the fortieth day after a Christian's death is very important as we pray for his smooth entrance into the Eternal Kingdom.

In the case of Father Seraphim, he got about 1,000 people there at his Panikhida for that purpose, including a collection of friends whom I hadn't seen in three years. (I had kind of worried them back in 2003 when I abruptly disappeared from the Pochaev monastery after I'd gotten freaked out by some... stuff that happened. Again this is part of the 38 page version of that trip. All seemed to be forgiven, and they were very happy to see me.)

Before the actual memorial service could begin, the archbishop and eight priests and a deacon celebrated the Divine Liturgy. The archbishop was Father Seraphim's brother by birth, and another of his brothers, a priest, was service. The deacon was Fr. Seraphim's twin brother.

Given the manner in which they served Liturgy, I would not have guessed that anyone was dead. They didn't mope around, nor did they go around with fake smiles to conceal their grief. They served in the same steady tone that they would have if Fr. Seraphim had never left.

When I first became Orthodox, the sternness and solemnity of our church services kind of scared me (will I got to hell if I sneeze during the liturgy?) but now I'm glad that no one mood -- grief or joy -- is dominant in Orthodox worship. The Divine Liturgy is a re-entry both into the death and the Resurrection of Christ -- grief and joy. You can feel safe bringing whatever load of emotions you're carrying with you to church. The purpose of a church service isn't to pick you up when you've got the blues, but to give you a safe place to pray.

To tell the truth, I was in a very good mood at the service, delighted that I'd been able to make it. I bought my tickets to Ukraine only a few days after Fr. Seraphim's passing, but I hadn't know about it until the end of September, and the fortieth-day memorial was on a day that I could be there.

Father Lavr, a priest from Pochaev came out the Royal Doors with the Holy Gifts and people lined up for Holy Communion. I was glad to see him because we'd had some sharp words in 2003 when I last saw him. He solemnly recited the Old Church Slavonic prayer "The servant of God _____ received the Body and Blood of Christ for the remission of sins and unto life everlasting." When I came up, he stopped, smiled and said, "Do you speak English," which I think is one of the few phrases he knows in English

(If you're not Orthodox, the significance of this is a little difficult to explain. When it comes to getting funny while serving Communion, priests just . . . don't. In fact, I think it's the first time I've ever seen it.)

At the end of the liturgy, we went outside for the Panikhida. Father Seraphim is buried directly outside the church, and archbishop (whose name and see are completely unpronounceable) circled the grave censing and praying. The choir sang "Vechnaya Pomiat" again and again. (Memory Eternal).

On my way out, I passed a sign that was posted on the wall about the benefits of crossing yourself correctly. I thought it was a bit too strict, but I photographed it anyway. The top line shows a man crossing himself correctly. The middle line shows the effect of crossing yourself too quickly. The bottom shows what happens when you cross yourself slowly and correctly. If you want to see a larger image of this photo, click here.

At the end of the memorial service, one of the priests announced that everyone was encouraged to come to a memorial luncheon in the basement of the nearby Holy Transfiguration Cathedral. As he announced this, a little girl walked around distributing candy from a small basket she was carrying.

If there's one thing that you get from this lengthy e-mail, let it be this: If you get invited to a Slavic funeral, EAT! The meal after a funeral or Panikhida is always well-attended, signifcant and delicious.

So many people came to the meal that they had to do it in shifts. The small army of women who prepared the meal had no problem re-setting the talbes and getting the food out to eat (of which there was way too much). When I got to the meal, the first shift was already seated, so there was plenty of time to talk, and lots of people did want to talk. Now, I felt like a Peace Corps volunteer again. For many of them, I was the first real, live American they'd talked to. For all of them except Father Lavr, who once took a miracle-working icon to St. Tikhon's Monastery in Pennsylvania, I was the first Orthodox American they'd ever met.

There was a group of eighth graders who were the students of Svetlana Vaselievna, my friend. Svetlana is a choir member at the church where Fr. Seraphim served, and she invited Fr. Seraphim to the classroom several times. Also, she and Fr. Seraphim took the children on pilgrimages to Pochaev several times. They lined up three deep around me asking me questions in English about America and my life. I handed out small paper icons of St. Herman of Alaska and asked the children to translate his story into Russian for the adults, three words at a time. "St. Herman was a monk from Valaam who went to Alaska and brought the Christian faith to the native people. He served them and stopped a flood."

I also was found by a rather nervous English teacher at the local pedagogical university, Galina. I was the first native speaker she'd ever met, and she wanted to practice with me. She invited me to visit the university to talk with her students. She bemoaned the fact that the students never had the opportunity to talk with a native speaker. I explained that I used to be a teacher of English as a foreign language, and that the Peace Corps sent English teachers to universities such as hers to live and work for two years. That perked her up, and I gave her the address of the Peace Corps office in Kyiv.

I told the children about Joy of All Who Sorrow Cathedral in San Francisco, where the relics of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco rest. As I told the story, two old ladies began busily writing on paper.

The first shift of lunch ended, and we were able to go in to eat. On my way in, the ladies gave me the papers -- lists of names of the living and dead to be read over the relics of St. John. I promised to take them back with me.

The archbishop led us in the blessing of the food, and we sat down to a feast of meats, vegetables, bread, cakes, olives, fish, cutlets, candy and a few items I couldn't identify, but were tasty nonetheless. I sat next to Sergei, a cheerful fellow in his 50s who was very kind to me and asked me a bunch of tactless questions about America. That last sentence is something of a contradiction, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic. He was very nice, and he told me how we was delighted to see me and make my acquaintance and we talked about our respective families and jobs. And, he asked me a bunch of tactless questions about America. Any American who's lived here will tell you that this happens all the time. I think it's a national hobby to try to get foreigners riled up.

Five years ago, I'd have gotten mad, but having been through the experience a few times, I knew how to deflect the questions:

Sergei: "What do you like better? Here or Capitalism? Are you a Capitalist? Are your parents Capitalists?"

Me, singing: "Soyuz nerushimi, Respbulic Svobodykh..." (this is the Soviet National Anthem. It earned me some laughs.)

Sergei: Why does Bush make war everywhere?

Me: I take it by your question that you are the older brother of Vladimir Putin, and you can call him up any time and tell him what to do?

Sergei: Why is America causing the second coming of Christ by its destructive activities?

Me: How should I know? I'm a boy, not a prophet.

Three more ladies gave me slips of paper to take back to San Francisco.

We stood up to read the Thanksgiving prayers. Another lady, very insistent, urged me to visit a local monastery where a clairvoyant nun, Mother Raphael, had lived until she died a year ago. She wanted me to go with her right then, Also, there I could see the icon, "Joy Of All Who Sorrow."

I said that I might go later, but that I wanted to see more of my friends whom I had made three years ago. She urged me about five more times. (I'm sure that this monastery would open a whole new story better than this e-mail, but alas, I am only one person, and I had only one day in Zhytomyr.)

Another two ladies gave me memorial slips. I left the cathedral, and the eighth graders found me and asked me to the park with them to eat ice cream. They escorted me on to the trolleybus and continued to pepper me with questions.

Fr. Lavr soon showed up in a car and took out a bag full of ice cream and led the children in the "Our Father." He distributed the ice cream and brought out several bottles of champagne for the adults. (There were only four adults.) After the first glass, I tried to refuse the second by saying, "I am too big for you to carry home," which drew a burst of laughter. (Alcohol is central to Ukrainian humor.) After the fourth glass, I began singing "Oi, Moroz," a Russian drinking song in which a horseman sings to the frost, requesting that it spare him and his horse so that he can get hom to his beautiful, jealous wife. The final verse is, "I come home at the end of the day, hug my wife and water my horse." I revised it to: "hug my horse and water my wife," which earned me another burst of laughter.

Fr. Lavr suggested I lead the children in a nature lesson in English, telling them about the trees. I didn't know anything about the trees, but I took them on a history tour, going to the beach of the river and explaining, "This is where the Cossacks (Ukraninian national heroes) had their third Sich (council). They brought their wives, who invented a new dish they called vareniki. Don't you feel honored to be standing on the birthplace of the national dish of Ukraine? Over there in the river where Vladimir the Great tried to baptize his cat in 989. It didn't work. Am I right?"

"No!" They all shouted and laughed.

The party at the park ended, and the kids took me back to the trolleybus stop, and we went back to the city center. At Holy Dormition Cathedral, I found Fr. Seraphim's twin brother, who asked me to put the departed priest's name on the prayer list at the cathedral where the relics of St. John rested. And, then he added that it needed to be the _Canonical_ Orthodox Church, one of Metropolitan Herman's churches. I explained that St. John actually rested in a cathedral belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. He frowned and said that it wouldn't work -- that's a schismatic church. I tried to explain that ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate would be back in Communion by the end of the year, God willing, but he still didn't approve.

"For now, no. Father Seraphim was really, really against schisms. Please, one of Metropolitan Herman's churches."

I would add here that Metropolitan Herman has become a very popular guy here in recent years. His visit in 2003 to Kyiv and Pochaev was well-appreciated among the faithful. When I first came in 2001, it took quite a bit of explaining to make priests understand that there is an Orthodox Church in America. Now, often when I explain that I'm an Orthodox from America, they say "Metropolitan Herman!"

From there, I went to the bus station (another lady found me and gave me a list of names to take to San Francisco) and I got on a marshutka to Kyiv.

When I used to write travel journals when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I'd come up with some final summarizing paragraph explaining my amazement at everything that had occurred, at the strangeness of feeling like a celebrity, etc... and I don't mean to sound conceited, but this is pretty much what expected to happen.

A few final thoughts -- if you've gotten this far into this very lengthy missive, you're probably wondering what inspired me to fly all this way. No, I didn't bump my head and join the Peace Corps again – I still work for the Raphael House family shelter in San Francisco (and the people here are pretty amazed to hear that we have homeless people in America). I'm on vacation, and I'm just starting my three-week trip. (I've got two weeks remaining.)

Pray for me!

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford