as I live a few more questions

Your Sunday Dose of Joy

I believe this is the new, third edition of his video.  Every time I see it, it leaves me with a wide grin.

All your questions answered here.  And yes, Matt's video has become so popular that he now has a corporate sponsor, Stride chewing gum, which paid for all his newest travels.  (Lucky dog.)

Transcona Lutherans, 1988

This engagement photo was taken sometime in early 1988 (February, I think). We had met through the church youth group, and had known each other for a decade. Two good little Transcona Lutherans. I was 24, she was 23. We were both virgins when we married. (Remember, we were good little Transcona Lutherans.) We had followed all the "rules" laid down by our church and our society. We were absolutely clueless. Absolutely fucking clueless. Deer in the headlights. I wish I knew then what I know now, and I wish I had been strong enough to stand up for myself instead of pleasing my family and church. After our separation in 1988, I returned to Winnipeg while she stayed in Toronto. She came out of the closet as a lesbian, and I came out of the closet as a gay man. (How I found out she was a lesbian is a full story in itself. Another time.) I stayed at her place when I came to Toronto for Pride in 2002, and we had a chance to chat and get caught up on each other's lives. She told me the pink dress went to a Toronto drag queen. Somehow, that seems so very fitting.

Ryan and fianc�e, early 1988 Originally uploaded by Quiplash.

Ryan's ninth birthday, January 1973

I'm at work on a Sunday, doing two things: 1. I'm still moving stuff from my old office space to my new one. This is gonna take me FOREVER. 2. I'm scanning a selection of my old photos, as I was growing up. My brother has already scanned all his photos and burned them to CD, so I thought I would start scanning mine. The photo at right was taken at my ninth birthday party, in Winnipeg, in 1973. It was my first pair of glasses *sigh* I was a really nearsighted kid, one of the first in my classroom to have to get glasses. My best friend at that time, Rudi Schneider, is sitting next to me (right side of photo). He was older, ten I think. Maybe eleven. In the basement of his house there was a big cardboard box used to ship a refrigerator, which we decorated to made it look like a spaceship. We had lots of fun pretending that we were astronauts. He used to eat his boogers. This really grossed out my Oma (my father's mother) when she was visiting from Germany. God it's funny the stuff you remember. I don't even know what happened to Rudi; his family moved out of the neighbourhood a year or two after this picture was taken.

Ryan's ninth birthday, January 1973 Originally uploaded by Quiplash.

"To limit this offering to the notion that the only "real" family is one that has a mom and a dad fails to honour the millions of other families that grace our world and that truly do form the foundation of our society."

The United Church of Canada (my church) takes to task the lobby group Focus on the Family (you remember, the JHALLOTCFY crowd) for their recent extensive advertising campaign. I'm so, so proud of my church.

Really Cute Dogs

Like Caterina says: "Some people have cute dogs. And some people have really cute dogs."

DSC01224 Originally uploaded by kj&b.

Come and Play, Everything's A-OK

Oh, I know it's silly, but I just couldn't resist becoming Big Bird's friend on Friendster...

Eudaemonia: Happiness is Flow; and a Comparison of Virtues

Quote from an interview with Dr. Martin Seligman, President of the American Psychological Association (from The Edge):

The second one is eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music.

The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more—recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life.

Coming out this month as part of the DSM is a classification of strengths and virtues; it's the opposite of the classification of the insanities. When we look we see that there are six virtues, which we find endorsed across cultures, and these break down into 24 strengths. The six virtues that we find are non-arbitrary—first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster; second, a courage cluster; third, virtues like love and humanity; fourth, a justice cluster; fifth a temperance, moderation cluster; and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster. We sent people up to northern Greenland, and down to the Masai, and are involved in a 70-nation study in which we look at the ubiquity of these. Indeed, we're beginning to have the view that those six virtues are just as much a part of human nature as walking on two feet are.

Fascinating reflections. As an exercise, I tried to see if I could create links between the Nine Virtues of the Enneagram, and the six virtues enumerated by Dr. Seligman:

• "first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster": I belive this would correlate to the Enneagram Four (the artist) and the Enneagram Five (the thinker, the investigator, the innovator, the troubleshooter).
  
• "second, a courage cluster": Courage is the virtue of the Enneagram Six. This could also be said to apply to the Enneagram Eight (the challenger, the leader type).
  
• "third, virtues like love and humanity": This is the domain of the Enneagram Two (the lover, the caretaker, the altruist).
  
• "fourth, a justice cluster": This is clearly in the domain of the Enneagram One (the reformer, crusader, activist, and moralist type) and also the Enneagram Three (whose virtue is Veracity or Truth).
  
• "fifth a temperance, moderation cluster": Sobriety is the virtue of the Enneagram Seven.
  
• "and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster": This is the Enneagram Nine (the optimist, the reconciler, the peacemaker and peace-seeker, the utopian), that which encompasses and includes all of the other types.
  

Wow, the two sets of virtues actually correlate well with each other.

The Nine Passions and Nine Virtues

I have been tinkering around with the Moveable Type (MT) software all week, and I can understand why it has so many fans. It's very configurable and powerful software, and even though it lacks some of the features of other blog software like blogger and LiveJournal, I'm going to stick with it. There is still lots that I haven't investigated yet, notably how to change the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to overhaul the design of the Web site. I had found a Web site caled Moveable Style (I think) that illustrated this feature nicely, but I've lost the URL.

Oh no, wait, I've found it! Check this out: Moveable Style, which brilliantly demonstrates how you can make dramatic changes to the layout of your blog just by adjusting your CSS. Cool.

Anyway, one of the features of MT is the ablity to assign your entries to one or more named categories. It can be an interesting exercise to see how your life divides up into categories; everybody seems to have their own way of splitting life up into little boxes, don't they?

This past summer I attended a particularly funny one-man show as part of the 2003 Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. The show, Seven Sins, was written and performed by the openly gay American standup comedian James Judd, and featured vignettes from his eclectic and bizarre life and career experiences, demonstrating each of the Seven Deadly Sins in turn, to sell-out crowds at the Festival. And Judd has had a rich life to mine for material: at various times he has been a grape farmer, a criminal defense attorney, and an editor of a technology magazine during the height of the dot.com boom.

This got me to thinking: hey, I could use the same sort of thing to organize quite a few of my posts. But of course, I had to change things a bit, given that I've been studying the Enneagram for a full year now:

The Enneagram (pronounced "ANY-a-gram") is a geometric figure that maps out the nine fundamental personality types of human nature and their complex interrelationships. It is a development of modern psychology that has roots in spiritual wisdom from many different ancient traditions.    (Riso, Don Richard.  The Wisdom of the Enneagram.   Bantam, 1999.  p.10)

The Enneagram, as "an ancient tradition of remembering the nine Divine attributes as they are reflected in human nature" (Riso, p. 22), found their way into the Christian tradition in a flipped way; the opposites of the Divine attributes became the basis for the Seven Deadly Sins, or Capital Sins, or Passions.

So I went and created categories, not for the Seven Deadly Sins, but for the seven sins plus two (fear and deceit) which comprise the Nine Passions of the Enneagram:

1. Anger (Resentment)
2. Pride (Vainglory: pride in one's own virtue), associated with Flattery
3. Deceit (Lying, Arrogance), associated with Vanity and the Ego
4. Envy, associated with Melancholy
5. Avarice (Greed), associated with Stinginess
6. Fear, associated with Cowardice
7. Gluttony (not just for food, but for all positive, stimulating experiences), associated with (Over-)Planning
8. Lust (for intensity, power and control; does not refer only to sexual lust), associated with Vengeance and Revenge
9. Sloth (Indolence, Laziness)