Ordinary People (like me) :-)

(liThis is a description from pages 447-450 The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in 1869 and translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett in a Bantam publication 1958, 1981.

Yet the question remains! What is an author to do with ordinary people, absolutely “ordinary,” and how can he put them before his readers so as to make them at all interesting? It is impossible to leave them out of fiction altogether….To our thinking a writer ought to seek out interesting and instructive features even among commonplace people. When, for instance, the very nature of some commonplace persons lies just in their perpetual and invariable commonplaceness, or better still, when in spite of the most strenuous efforts to escape from the daily round of commonplaceness and routine, they end by being left invariably for ever chained to the same routine, such people acquire a typical character of their own—the character of a commonplaceness desirous above all things of being independent and original without the faintest possibility of becoming so.

To this class of “commonplace” or “ordinary” people belong certain persons of my tale…

There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one’s own, to be precisely “like other people.” To have a fortune, but not the wealth of Rothschild; to be of an honorable family, but one which had never distinguished itself in any way; to have a pleasing appearance expressive of nothing in particular; to have a decent education, but to have no idea what use to make of it; to have intelligence, but no ideas of one’s own; to have a good heart, but without any greatness of soul; and so on and so on. There is an extraordinary multitude of such people in the world, far more than appears. They may, like all other people, be divided into two classes: some of limited intelligence; others much cleverer. The first are happier. Nothing is easier for “ordinary” people of limited intelligence than to imagine themselves exceptional and original and to revel in that delusion without the slightest misgiving. Some of our young ladies have only to crop their hair, put on blue spectacles, and dub themselves Nihilists, to persuade themselves at one that they have immediately gained “convictions” of their own. Some men have only to feel the faintest stirring of some kindly and humanitarian emotion to persuade themselves at once that no one feels as they do, that they stand in the foremost rank of culture. Some have only to meet with some idea by hearsay, or to read some stray page, to believe at once that it is their own opinion and has sprung spontaneously from their own brain. The impudence of simplicity, if one may so express it, is amazing in such cases. It is almost incredible, but yet often to be met with. This impudence of simplicity, this unhesitating confidence of the stupid man in himself and his talents, is superbly depicted by Gogol in the wonderful character of Lieutenant Pirogov. Pirogov has no doubt that he is a genius, superior indeed to any genius. He is so positive of this that he never questions it; and, indeed, he questions nothing. The great writer is forced in the end to chastise him for the satisfaction of the outraged moral feeling of the reader; but, seeing that the great man simply shook himself after the castigation and fortified himself by consuming a pie, he flung up his hands in amazement and left his readers to make the best of it. I always regretted that Gogol took his great Pirogov from so humble a rank; for he was so self-satisfied that nothing could be easier for him than to imagine himself, as his epaulettes grew thicker and more twisted with years and promotion, an extraordinary military genius; or rather, not imagine it, but simply take it for granted. Since he had been made a general, he must have been a military genius! And how many such have made terrible blunders afterwards on the field of battle! And how many Pirogovs there have been among our writers, savants and propagandists! I say “have been,” but of course we have them still.

Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin belonged to the second category. He belonged to the class of the “much cleverer” people, though he was infected from head to foot with the desire for originality. But that class, as we observed above, is for less happy than the first; for the clever “commonplace” man, even if he occasionally or even always fancies himself a man of genius and originality, yet preserves the worm of doubt gnawing at his heart, which in some cases drives the clever man to utter despair. Even if he submits, he is completely poisoned by his vanity’s being driven inwards. But we have taken an extreme example. In the vast majority of these clever people, things do not end so tragically. Their liver is apt to be affected in their declining years, that’s all. But before giving in and humbling themselves, such men sometimes play the fool for years, all from the desire of originality. There are strange instances of it, indeed; an honest man is sometimes, for the sake of being original, ready to do something base. It sometimes happens that one of these luckless men is not only honest but good, is the guardian angel of his family, maintains by his labor outsiders as well as his own kindred, and yet can never be at rest all his life! The thought that he has so well fulfilled his duties is not comfort of consolation to him; on the contrary, it irritates him. “This is what I’ve wasted all my life on,” he says; “this is what has fettered me, hand and foot’’ this is what has hindered me from doing something great! Had it not been for this, I should certainly have discovered—gunpowder or America, I don’t know precisely what, but I would certainly have discovered it!” What is most characteristic of these gentlemen is that they can never find out for certain what it is that they are destined to discover and what they are within an ace of discovering. But their sufferings, their longings for what was to be discovered, would have sufficed for a Columbus or a Galileo.

artificial sweetner

This is an interesting article about some of the research that is being done on the safety of artificial sweetners such as flavored water and aspartame. It also gives some URLs to other articles etc. explaining research done on this subject, and even the title of a 1000 page medical text by an M.D. I've done some research on this before, and know there is extensive information avaliable with the same conclusions as this article.

This is the Australian that I meantioned in my newsletter. He happened to come along with us and ended up organizig our wedding ceremony.

This is the dike behind CFM. We climbed up it and walked along it for a while. It was a little hard to balance on the wires filled with rocks, but we made it just fine. A few years ago, a typhoon came and made it rain so hard that the river overflowed the dike and flooded CFM.

We took this picture in Mapayao, one of the villages that we visited while my Dad and sister were here.

Going up to the Kalanguya villages is often not very comfortable. The day after our wedding, I put my family onto a dump truck, and we rode up to one of the nearer villages. Later, we all got onto the top of a jeepney (it's hard to see much from inside, so the top is better) and ended up in another village with very sore butts. We stayed with (Bob's) relatives both times, and had to ride down early the next morning so that we wouldn't have to hike down.

Mr. E :-)

My Newsletter

April 2007 (and everything before that)

Hello everyone! Sorry I’ve been neglecting my newsletter. In March, I was busy finishing the last module phase at AGS: Literacy Principles and Translation 1, attending some of the graduation events, and getting ready for our wedding. I actually graduated with a Graduate Diploma in Applied Linguistics on April 1, but didn’t make a big deal about it because I only have two classes left before I get my MA next year.
On April 7, B and I got married. The ceremony was held in Bambang, Nueva Vizcaya, at the Kalanguya mission/Bible translation center. The ceremony, which lasted for almost two hours, went well, thanks to some organizing done by one of B’s friends, an Australian missionary who happened to come along with us because Su San and Noah (my brother-in-law and nephew) had to stay behind in Korea at the last minute. We were only disappointed with a few things…. The main thing was that the one we hired for the ceremony decorations promised to sow blue tents, but used ugly tarps instead, and I thought we had paid for a mixture of roses and another kind of flower, but she used cheap flowers instead (and I didn’t like them). Other than that, it looked okay, the reception decorations were done well, the caterer was good, the weather that day was almost perfect, the singers were talented, and many of our friends were able to make it. There were about 200 guests at the wedding, and about 600 altogether at the reception, which is what we had planned for. I want to write something more detailed about our wedding sometime soon.
The thing that I was most excited about was that my Dad and sister came over for our wedding. It was even my Dad’s first time to fly, and I was happy to hear that he thought it was okay. We met them at the airport on April 2, then we traveled up to the province on April 4. After the wedding, since we had talked them into staying until Friday, we spent a few days together riding in dump trucks etc. to visit two villages and hanging around in the town, then spent a couple of days in Manila and went to Divasoria and Tondo (a squatter community in Manila).

After that, one of B’s sisters and a niece came to Manila to help us clean our new apartment and start to unpack stuff. Then we got onto a big ferryboat and traveled south for twelve hours to the island of Romblon in the Visayas where one of the SIL missionaries lives. He arranged for us to stay in the house next to his on the resort of a pastor that he knows well. After a few days, we sailed to another island to visit three Australian missionaries, who were as excited to see us as we were to see them (we were very excitedJ). The next afternoon, we traveled to another part of the island and found a small lodge to stay in (and it only cost $3.00/night/foreigner and $2.00/night/Filipino). We were supposed to catch a boat there the next morning, but there wasn’t one that time, and the man whose lodge we stayed in drove us on his motorcycle to where there would be a boat leaving for the famous Boracay beach. The boat was very small, and probably carried less than a dozen people. When we sailed out across the ocean, the waves got big and we got scared. Even the engine almost stopped after the boat was hit by a big wave, but that was probably normal for the sailors. Anyway, after spending a couple hours in Boracay, we headed back to Manila on a huge ship called the Virgin Mary. Someone told us that it can carry 2000 to 3000 people at a time.

The day after coming back to Manila, we traveled to the province so that B could speak at a VBS camp. When we got back to Manila a couple days later, I already had a bad cold/flue and had to be in bed for a couple of days. I’m doing much better now.

Prayer:
Thank you for praying for our wedding! Please continue to pray for B and I as we try to understand each other better.
Thank you also for praying for my health. I’m doing much better, but I still get sick too often. B has a bad pain in his right leg that none of the doctors have been able to diagnose. He’ll be going to physical rehab soon.
Please be praying for our visa applications to go smoothly. I’ll need to get a visa other than a student visa, and B needs to apply for a visa to visit the US so that he can meet the rest of my family, I can join a mission organization, and we can do our “partnership development” there since I didn’t do that before I left (except the money for school). B’s visa has to be processed like an immigrant visa since he’s married to me, and could take between 6 months to 2 years. Please pray that it won’t take long.

PS. You can see our pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/baglyandesther?pli=1

before walking over to the reception

we were watching the godparents/witnesses proceed to the reception area before we went there ourselves

the reception

Dad sharing-several people commented that they really appreciated what he shared. Everyone was listening...

Mitchell

throwing the roses

the cake (the flowers on the side were supposed to be roses, too)

the cake ceremony

Open wide!!! (Click on these pictures to make them bigger and see the people in the background:-))

after the ceremony