I've read about numerous people, geniuses all, who either because of insomnia or because of the heat with which their brains burnt, needed almost no sleep and worked and thought and wrote throughout the dark hours of the night, not to mention those of the soul. Why is it, then, that when I wake at 3 AM unable to sleep, the only thought I can muster and fully form is a curse of my damnable luck?

It is an amazing fact—amazing to me, anyway—that after much experience over many years and often having earned it, I can still not stand not to be liked, or rather to be actively disliked. I'm sure there's a deep or shallow psychological explanation for it and I'm fairly certain I know what the (correct) explanation is. But, my mood and happiness are constantly in the hands of not just those I care about but almost anyone with whom I interact, since I apparently care enough about them to care that they not dislike me. Thus I am a bad debater fearing always that I might give offense, in spite of my temper I don't object even when I treated in egregious ways, I can't negotiate, I constantly want nothing more than to be liked. And that is a fault in so many ways.

Mourn the ones who count

Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Ed McMahon have all died and much of the USA and some other parts of the world seem to be atwitter. Meanwhile, a defender of family values and southern governor who screwed around on his State's dime will quickly be forgotten. But even more importantly—much, much more importantly—real people who have as much real connection to any of us as any celebrity and whose actions could actually affect the future of the world are dying in the streets in Tehran and I suspect that with the latest mortal activity in the celebrity sphere they will be forgotten. We all die, but some deaths matter.

One of the great pleasures of owning a big, energetic, demanding dog is that I am forced to walk him somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half each day. I am trying to intersperse some rollerblading with him to break it up and give him a different kind of exercise, but pretty much it's walking. This means that I actually have a sense of my (very extended) neighborhood and a feeling of being a neighbor. On our afternoon walk today, we were greeted with a beautiful and huge smile by one of the ladies working on El Cajon, we got into a discussion with our UPS man who was delivering ten blocks away but couldn't leave a package because of a barking dog who commented on how that's never a problem with Mateo and we were greeted by and greeted several other people, eliciting smiles all around. To quote Forster's epigraph to Howard's End, "only connect".

Love is something of which most of us are totally unsure. That's why we like to be told that we are loved and why, when we aren't told enough, we start asking, "Do you love me?" We just aren't that sure and hearing it said reassures us—or almost does, because there is something cheapening in having to hear it so often and, maybe, in hearing it so often. The same thing goes, I think, for saying it: so often when we repeat the words "I love you" too often, we are just reassuring ourselves as well as others that we really do love them, perhaps because we really aren't so sure that we do.

Social awkwardness

I am connoisseur, because a common recipient, of the unvite, the invitation made for purely formal reasons but which is never meant to be taken. It comes in many varieties.

There is the invitation to a party when the inviter knows for certain that you have a prior engagement or are going to be out of town. This is the province of the amateur.

The better variety is the invitation that comes just a little too late, say just the day before the event. Of course, this variety leaves open the possibility that the invitee might actually attend, but it is just this that makes this unvite a classier variety than the invitation that arrives after the event has already occurred or begun.

There is a hybrid—the work phone or work email unvite—in which the invitation is made via a message that won't be retrieved until after event though, for the honor of the inviter, the invitation was technically made before the event.

Another flavor is the misdirected invitation, sent to the wrong address, to the wrong voicemail, to the wrong email and its cousin, the "I told N. to invite you, didn't she?"

But perhaps my favorite is the invitation that gets to the invitee—or unvitee—with just enough time to plan to attend but not quite enough information. The time is missing, the address is incomplete or it's assumed that you know where it is when clearly you don't, it's unclear what sort of event exactly it is or what you're supposed to bring or whether you can bring a guest and everything is just unclear enough that you feel uncomfortable asking and so are guaranteed not to show.

This is probably the most masterful move. The invitee won't come, the invitation was made and the inviter will later get the social upper hand in expressing how much he was missed or asking why he didn't come.

A thought about universities

In the last several months, there has been a good deal of discussion within a certain subset of the blogosphere about whether my alma mater can still claim to be a Catholic university if it gives an honorary doctorate to a pro-abortion politician—or a pro-choice politician, depending on one's views. And, in the most recent edition of the student newspaper at my employer a former student of mine argued that my employer can no longer claim to be a Catholic university because not all members of the theology department are fully orthodox, many students engage in premarital sex and the liturgies are too progressive and perhaps not entirely rubrical. Leaving aside whether even in the high middle ages the students at the great universities were chaste—Chaucer, at least, gives us good reason to think that they were not—or orthodox—history tells us that there were major theological debates and that even Aquinas was thought to be unorthodox at the University of Paris—there is another issue in both sets of concerns.

What makes a university? Is the administration a university? This seems that it cannot be right. If it were, then the universities were extremely conservative and supportive of the government in the Sixties. But no one thinks this. Is the faculty a university? This seems hardly better. Are the students? The real answer is that universities are complex and organic institutions. They were the original corporations, i.e., bodies. It can be hard to tell what a university's views or positions or ideological slants are. And this is simply because universities are complex institutions, too complex to be judged by single actions or single years or single Presidents or classes.