Monday, April 19, 2004 :::
 
A whole week, and no A Mind That Suits. That is because he has been hard at work on something very serious. It has been hard to get it right, and so hard to get it written. Plus, the overall outlook seems more than slightly depressing, so few fun things have proposed themselves.

But these thoughts intrude on a sweltering spring day.

It's not just the government that gets things wrong in Washington. It's the weather. We literally went from late winter to summer in two days. Two nights ago, A Mind That Suits had to get up in the wee hours and stumble around blindly in the dark to plug in the fan, only to find that he had never unplugged it. (He always has to have moving air around him, and so uses fans on occasions during the winter, though at slow speeds.)

Forgetting the heat--which one must, in Washington--one is overjoyed that the flowers are in full bloom and glorious, and soon the trees will be laden with leaves.

Hurricane Isabel certainly did her worst on Rock Creek, which means that this spring and summer will be beautiful. Not until yesterday did A Mind That Suits focus on how far down the ravine she had worked her awsome ways. Something about the winter hid the devastation, or perhaps it was Eastern Standard Time that did that. Now, as fresh growth struggles to break through, one can see just how much underbrush is not there.

Which is helpful, because the DC government is unlikely to get around to it.

A colleague, an experienced teacher now in her eighth decade, expressed her concern about a student, a Central American Indian lad about whom A Mind That Suits has commented before. She was not sure he would succeed academically because every time she passed one of his classes, he looked up.

A Mind That Suits knows the young gentleman quite well, and is certain that he will do fine in the new homeland to which Mother Church has brought him. (He is a seminarian.) He has only one problem: he is male. Males, both the wisdom of the ages and the research of modern scientists tell us, have a hard time focusing until something catches their attention, and then they focus on it relentlessly until it is dealt with.

A Mind That Suits offered that as his explanation, only in truncated form. "He is," he vouchsafed,"a boy." Oh, said his colleague, demonstrating that female need to find a problem even if there is no problem and propose a solution even if no solution is needed, "then he's bored." So far as a sympathetic avuncular eye can see, this young man has no problems that growing up will not cure, and that is his business, not his teachers'. They can help, by not being boring, among other things. But that is never a problem with A Mind That Suits, and so he has few concerns about this particular young man.

In fact, he is happy to have this lad this semester, which has otherwise brought a timid and unadventurous lot to his classroom. As with all adventurous boys, this kid has a mouth on him, though a clean one. It's really quite funny.

This quotidian episode demonstrates a Catholic doctrine called the "complementarity of the sexes." It is one Christian doctrine that the sciences have amply demonstrated. The male and female brains are different, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever been in a family or been on a date. The virtues of one sex complement the virtues of the other, so that all that needs doing to keep humans alive gets done and the world can function as a harmonious whole.

Which is why, of course, both sexes spend virtually every waking minute complaining about the other.

And there are something like 30 wars going on at the moment.

There is another Christian doctrine called "sin," which the Protestant theologian Reinholt Niebuhr described as the only Christian doctine that was provable empirically. That was before science found out about the shape of male and female brains and proved that oldest of verities:

"Can't live with'em; can't live without 'em."

Later, friends.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:50 PM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.