sundays with krstey

I'm not really sure what Tuesdays with Morrie are really like**, but I do have a great deal of experience regarding Sundays with Christiana.

Reunited yesterday evening after a lengthy couple of holiday weeks, two old friends met up in the bitter, bitter Brooklyn cold, had dinner, and went for a beverage on their favorite night (metal Saturday) at their favorite Greenpoint bar. The cold here permeates all things; it's no match for constantly opening doors or public spaces. The only safe havens are tiny apartments with overpowering radiators, and the only temperature decisions one can make involve freezing or sweating.

Last night, we chose to sweat. After the longest five-minute walk home in history, I arrived at Christiana's apartment with windblown tears streaming down my face and the runniest nose this side of the third grade. Moments later, I was face-deep in a hot toddy, re-learning what a fantastic film High Fidelity is. The wind picked up outside, and we could hear it shrieking around corners, and I started plotting routes home in my mind and realizing that I'd be impossibly cold for a possible hour before I got there.

Instead of a fate worse than death, I woke up this morning under a mound of blankets on Christiana's couch, and in the space between waking and preparing scrambled eggs, I did quite a bit of thinking. In the hours between 6 and 8 am in the winter months, you see, you are caught in the moment when it finally starts to get cold after the late-night halt of heater blasts, just before they kick in again for the morning. It seemed prudent to me to pass this time curled up on the couch with every appendage tucked under the covers, thinking hard.

This transitional morning period isn't solely tied to New York's weather patterns; it manifests itself in myriad ways. It's the lengthy gap that occurs the first time you sleep over at a new boy's apartment, while you're waiting for him to wake up and set the tone for the day. It's the way you feel after returning to your family home for the holidays and find yourself in a too-small bed listening to the whistle of a freight train outside. It's the memory of every childhood sleepover you never wanted to go to, and it's still where you do most of your best / most thorough / most disturbing thinking.

The biggest misconception about thinking hard is that there are conclusions to be drawn. This morning, I can't say I thought about things I've never thought about before, and I certainly can't say I came to any final decisions on any pressing life matters. Still, it was quiet and uninterrupted thought at its least structured. This means I spent a decent chunk of time thinking about certain men in my life and what the future will bring, and another bit of time thinking about running down the street and getting doughnuts before Christiana woke up, and quite a bit about mushrooms and the best way to cook them.

I also spent a much larger portion of time thinking about faith and whether its existence is a miracle or a nuisance. I thought about this Vonnegut quote: "Say what you will about the miracle of unquestioning faith - I consider a capacity for it terrifying and utterly vile." Then I thought about William James and his Will To Believe, which I checked out from the library yesterday because it seems to be haunting my dreams at night. That Vonnegut quote was the way I lived my life until I smacked headfirst into philosophy in college, and then I fell in love with James's radical empiricism and outlook on the world, and then from there it was pretty hard not to fall in love with the idea of what James calls a "genuine option."

In James's framework, a "genuine" option in life only occurs when a choice has three components. It must be living, meaning that both alternatives are truly possible for the chooser to take. It must be forced, meaning that the chooser has to pick one or the other (and can't decline to choose or pick indifference.) And third, it must be momentous, meaning that it is a unique choice that will significantly alter the direction of the path chosen, and that it is an irreversible decision that can't later be taken back.

James sets up this framework, of course, to examine the notion of religious faith and suggest that religious belief lives in an arena that doesn't conflict with reason and intellect, but is not really reachable by either power. The question of faith is one of very few opportunities that we have as humans to consider a genuine option. I don't always understand what I think about faith, and I'm not really sure how it entered my thoughts between the hours of 6 and 8 this morning, but I'm pretty crazy about the notion of genuine options, as they seem the only kinds of decisions really worth making.

Also, later on in the evening Christiana made me dinner and it was absolutely delicious.

**Based on title / inspirational classification, I always assumed this book was about visiting a dying man and learning about life, love, and mortality. Can someone confirm or deny this rumor?