29

Wednesday will be our 29th wedding anniversary, so it’s a good thing we’re still married, or I probably wouldn’t know what to write about this weekend. Or I imagine the tone would be a lot different.

This year, for reasons I can’t begin to explain or understand, the topic that won’t go away in my musings is love. Love is, among other things, hard to define, which is why the Greeks had somewhere around eight different words for love. Frederick Buechner put it this way:

The first stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love. The middle stage is to believe that there are many kinds of love and that the Greeks had a different word for each of them. The last stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love.

The apostle Paul put a lot of effort into describing love in First Corinthians:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves.

The Greek word Paul uses here is agape, which is a little hard to describe, but it is a sort of an all-encompassing love that is sacrificial, the type of love that Christ exemplified through his death. Buechner’s point is that you could substitute any Greek love word into that passage and it will still work. Brotherly love (philia), family love (storge), erotic love (eros), pick any of the eight or nine words the Greeks used and it doesn’t matter. Each type of love must be patient and kind and not be self-seeking.

I’m not remotely qualified to add to Paul’s description, but there is one more statement that could be added to his list. Love is not transactional. Marriage is not like a business where you sit down with your wife at the end of the year and write up an annual statement that includes a balance sheet. To truly love is to be willing to sacrifice far more than you’ll ever receive. It also requires that you be willing to accept the freely given sacrifice knowing that you’ll never be able to repay it. If you are married long enough, you will know that eventually you’ll have to live that out, either on the giving end or the receiving end. It sounds difficult and I suppose it is. It’s also incredibly rewarding.

Anyway, there’s my latest musings on the subject of love. I hope they have some value to you. Finally, to my wife of 29 years, thank you for saying yes. I am truly blessed, far more than I ever could have possibly imagined those 29 years ago. I pray we have many more together.

The Dilemma of the 3 Body Problem

Every now and then, I post a review of various shows we’ve watched recently on Netflix. Someday, I hope to be so good at these reviews and so deeply respected that Netflix FEARS me. Bwahahaha!

However, that’s not today and that’s not what this is. We just finished watching a science fiction series that Netflix recently released which has become quite popular. SciFi doesn’t always do that great on Netflix so I’m betting even they were a bit shocked at how many viewers it attracted. It’s called 3 Body Problem and since the show is very recently released and popular, it seemed appropriate to break my usual cycle and give some thoughts about it immediately after watching it.

3 Body Problem

Synopsis – Oh, dear! This thing is so complicated it is difficult to know where to begin. Let’s start with the major plot point and see where we go from there. Aliens in a distant galaxy find out about earth and decide to visit. Well, not visit like you would your grandmother. Visit like when the android visited the bar in Terminator. As it happens, the aliens are in a world of hurt, existing in a universe that routinely and unpredicably destroys their entire civilization. This ties into a well-known astrophysical dilemma called the “3 body problem”. It seems that planetary systems are easily predictable using computer models when you are trying to predict how two bodies will interact with one another. When you increase the number of bodies to three, sudden it becomes completely unpredictable. The aliens exist on such a solar system and every now and then, their world experiences extreme catastrophic collapse as a result of the unpredictable movements of these bodies. They’re looking for an escape hatch and one conveniently falls in their laps (or whatever anatomical part they have where something could fall into it) when an embittered Communist Chinese scientist in the 1970s finds a way to send a signal to them. The scientist is still angry over the murder of her father in a struggle session and also over the environmental destruction that surrounds her in the Chinese work camp she’s forced to work in. She decides the aliens are a better bet to run the planet, which is why she reaches out to them.

That’s the main plot line, but there’s a bunch of other plot lines. There’s the young scientists in modern day England who will try to determine how to stop the aliens before they arrive (in 400 years). There’s the religious cult that views the aliens as the last best hope for the planet. There’s the cop who is investigating the scientists and eventually becomes the bodyguard for one of them. When watching you might want to hit the pause button every now and then and write down a few notes.

The best thing about it – Well, it’s got good source material. I haven’t read the Chinese books the series is based on, but I have it from reliable sources that they are excellent. Clearly, there’s been some significant changes for English speaking audiences, since the heroes are all Chinese in the books.

The portrayal of societal reactions to the impending invasion is complex and, I suspect, accurate.

Benedict Wong as the cop is incredible! He is easily the best actor in the show. Eventually you realize, as the show moves forward that Clarence is smarter than the brilliant scientists he’s investigating. Wong should get some award for this, but it’s science fiction, so I’m sure he won’t.

Episode one is one of the most powerful shows I’ve ever seen. It starts with a graphic and disturbing portrayal of a Maoist Chinese struggle session and ends with a shocking exhibition of the alien’s power. It does exactly what a first episode is supposed to do – sufficiently grab your interest so that you don’t mind the parts of the series that aren’t quite as good.

The worst thing about it – Episodes two through eight aren’t as good and they get steadily, although only slightly, worse as it the series moves forward. The ending in episode eight isn’t bad.

While Clarence and the Chinese scientist, Ye Wenjie, are interesting and written as real and complex human beings, the rest of the main characters are just annoying. All of the young scientists are based on popular stereotypes for scientists. There’s the stoner scientist (Saul), there’s the idealistic moralizing scientist (Auggie), there’s the sellout scientist (Jack), and the socially awkward scientist (Will). I suppose Jin is also something of a stereotype as the hero scientist, but that type of stereotype is a little rarer, so I’ll give it a pass. Anyway, throw them all together and you’ve got an irritating and self-pitying lot with a bunch of moralizing and philosophizing thrown in for good measure. I’m sure all of them are good actors and none of them are bad in this series, but I dreaded watching the show every time they showed up.

Recommend? – I’m hooked enough that I will definitely be watching season two. There just isn’t that much good scifi on television these days. I would recommend it to others, but use the mute button whenever the scientists start moralizing. Or maybe turn it into a drinking game. Down a glass every time Auggie starts getting emotional over some moral dilemma.

One more thing – I’m not backing down on my recommendation, but there are other shows available that are better. The Tourist is really good, if you want to watch some top level entertainment.

Mom

So, it’s Mother’s Day again. Seems like it happens every year.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about Mom, describing her as the glue that held our family together. This was completely true and perhaps even understated her importance. All three of us kids would be drug addicts or axe murderers or possibly drug addicted axe murderers if it hadn’t been for her. Even Dad would have been the first to admit that parenting didn’t come naturally to him and if he’d had to do it on his own, we’d have been in a world of hurt. A few years before that blog post, I wrote another post about Mom that actually caused a bit of an “argument” with one of my sisters. We have a card game that we enjoy playing as a family called pitch and Dad was incredibly good at it. The dude was a brilliant guy and just amazing at remembering what was played and calculating the odds. Pitch is a game that is 95% luck, but he always won his fair share and I always admired how well he played. Then as I got older, I noticed something strange. Mom won even more than he did. Mom doesn’t have much ego to protect and she always treated it as a joke, but she was a better player than Dad. I think she was just better at reading people than he was. She is better at reading people than almost anyone I know.

That “argument” with my sister wasn’t really an argument. My sister simply insisted that I NEVER let my mother know I said that. I think I agreed without actually making a promise, which is a good thing since Mom only started reading my blog a few years ago and here we are. Sorry, Sis. I couldn’t resist.

Mom is quite old. I’ll pass on telling you exactly how old she is for internet security reasons, but she is many years past the average life expectancy for a woman in America. She is still in good health for her age and still of very sound mind. My sisters and I have told her many times that she should never make any major financial decisions without first discussing it with one of us to avoid problems with scammers, but we’ve got no cause for concern. She is still quite shrewd and just a little bit suspicious of other’s motives when it comes to her finances. Honestly, I’m a little in awe of her. I guess I always have been. I hope I have inherited generous portions of her wit and compassion and intellect. I hope I have done well by her in how I live my life. And to finish…

HI MOM! I’d like to say I’m sorry I spilled the beans about your pitch playing skills, but the fact is I wrote this piece and then edited it several times. I could have pulled that part of this post out at any point, so very clearly I’m not at all sorry. I hope this wasn’t some sort of state secret that’s going to get me investigated by the CIA. Even if it was, it was still worth it.

Happy Mother’s Day!