Married!?

Hopefully I'll ease into writing fairly often, but don't bet too much on that. I wanted to attempt a short series of posts on my married life, sans gooey-ness. I am sleeping in the same bed with someone whose pajamas match relentlessly. Every single night. I can't relate to that. I don't really have pajamas. I'm in the (hopefully permanent) stage where I look for any possible opportunity to introduce Ashley as my "wife," which makes my chest feel like a tire being pumped full of air. This is the person who has convinced me to maintain clean dishes, clean clothes, and generally acceptable personal hygiene! For anyone who has ever been to 165 Oxford Court in Athens, GA, you know what a feat that is. She didn't do it by convincing, though, I misstyped. She never said, "Hey, slob, clean up your act!" She's just very, very easy to live with and I realized that things would run a lot more smoothly if I was too. Great people are like that, and so is God; they make you a better person by making you want to be a better person.

On the Declaration of Independence and Jonathan Edwards

After having read the Declaration of Independence out of boredom and procrastinative curiosity at CUPS tonight, I'm inspired toward using more precise language to express my ideas. Keeping this resolution would solve some problems, I think, as well as simply improving my accuracy in conversation. The English of the Eighteenth century, at least in my head right now, is the English language at its height. Reading the Declaration of Independence felt like reading Jonathan Edwards. The subject addressed by each sentence is incredibly exact and explicit and the writing achieves a kind of scientific quality as well as a kind of poetic beauty, much like good theology and good philosophy, that is, both are painstakingly accurate and breathtakingly beautiful. Long, undulating sentences that are admittedly difficult to take in upon first reading emerge, once carefully studied, as perfectly cut gems focusing a precise beam of light on their subjects. See, I'm even being influenced, as I always am, by the beauty of this vintage of English, and I'm butchering the style. How can I help it? I live in a language full of "stuff" and "and stuff" and "whatever" and "like" and, as a high school friend of mine put it, our conversations rumble with the "distant thunder of approximate words." Read Edwards or Jefferson and hear lightning.