I play hangman with Sammy in the church bulletin during services. This is one he made for me yesterday which am keeping on my desk as another work week begins.

Have had a miserable couple weeks; all of it (as always) first-world problems that gnaw at me until I manufacture genuine crises. Then, having it out of my system, I crawl gradually back into the quiet life of dull daily habits which I remind myself is a life 99% of the world would swap for.

In the midst of the crawl-back, I reluctantly return to a daily Bible reading. Of course I know it's critical. Of course I know it's the answer. But I never think I'll get anything from it, especially since my current reading plan is a survey of minor prophets.

Just the same, I picked back up today and it was the Book of Jonah, which every kid who ever spent a day in Sunday School knows since he got eaten by a fish or a whale or something. But that's really a pretty minor detail.

The real story is that God tells him to go save a group of people he hates and he tries his best not to. When left with no choice, he (sort of) does what God tells him to do, it works, and Jonah is incensed because he does not want them to be forgiven; they don't deserve it.

Ultimately God tries to give Jonah an illustration by providing him shade from the sun then killing the thing that provides the shade. Jonah is upset and God asks essentially whether he should care about the loss of the thing shading him more than a group of people who did not know any better than to be the sort of people Jonah hated.

It's a nice lesson about having compassion for enemies, but I've never really struggled with that. I forgive everyone everything because:

1) I tend to avoid situations where anyone could wrong me, and
2) I don't think I have sufficient value that it would be anything other than absurdly self-important to hold a grudge.

But this morning, I saw the story through the prism of when the enemy is yourself.

I could go on, and I usually do, but I'd just encourage you to read it (the Book of Jonah has only four, very short, books--maybe a ten minute read).

I'll only say that God does not need our guilt or our judgment, He needs our obedience. And even that, He can wait on. Nearly every action of Jonah's is disobedient in this book. And in a sense he recognizes it, and believes that God's just response should be to kill him. He has himself thrown into the sea, and eventually commands God to just kill him outright.

But his justice is not God's. And ultimately, he is left with a much greater challenge: to accept God's compassion.

For me at least, that feels easy to do unto others, but when I see myself as the wicked people undeserving, and also myself as the person demanding divine punishment, I find the real challenge.

The thing that comforted me most is in the last verse when God asks why he should not spare a city full of people who "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand".

When I hate myself, I think I ascribe a certain importance. It reminds me of crying once when I was very little when my dad opened a present that had been labelled as coming from me, when in fact I hadn't done anything to help getting it. I didn't even know what it was. As a father now, I know that sort of response from my child would make me sad.

Today too, though I consider myself a wise, mature person much more culpable in his sins, I believe that I am still, in God's eyes, a child who "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand".

I need to update this antiquated site to make it easier to share TikTok / Instagram / YouTube videos, but who has the time?

As a kid, I used to be much more interested in publicizing myself than creating any work worth publicizing (eg. in high school, my friend and I decided to make an independent film, and our first order of business was making film-branded t-shirts).

Getting older and looking back on it, I felt so embarrassed, I swung the other way and worked on things and never told anyone about them.

But now, I'm trying to land somewhere in the middle, and in the midst of a constantly shifting publishing-ecosystem, I figure its worth taking advantage of the egalitarian entry point of social media, so I've (cynically) started a series of mini-videos snarkily reviewing the first lines of novels.

Hopefully I can build up some kernel of literate followers that might make it easier to pitch myself to publishers.

You can check out the first entry in the series (Reviewing the opening lines of novels) at:

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pgmccullough/video/7536000328789921054

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNEuSITRAp6/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/00ZtWDz94j8

Would appreciate any TikTok followers...

Really like the original, but this cover came on while I was working today and I was really moved by it: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=l5zuvs8EZDY&si=4YLWEVx1hSmS-WBV

I've been getting a kick out of these wizard memes on Instagram, but found this one quite touching.

It reminded me of the verse "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness."

And arguably not really related but a line from The English Patient that often pops into my head: "Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again."

There are many wonderful aspects of having a fully remote job; working the hours that suit me, being able to do things around the house (apartment), et&... but there are also terrible hazards, namely the accessibility of my couch and bed where I can lie and pass literal hours scrolling through Instagram Reels for an IV drip of dopamine.

There is also the illusion of connection; which raises the other hazard of remote work, which is that it's not unusual for me to spend a day or two or five without any meaningful human, in-person interaction. Having a long for that sated by watching a story of a former student vacationing in Croatia likely isn't healthy.

So I deleted the app from my phone (though not the account, for now). I'd prefer to post things here anyway, in spite of the fact that Google Analytics informs me that it gets all of 3-4 visitors per day. It's nicer being able to see things all in one place, with the blasts-from-the-past that I always enjoyed about Facebook (eg. today I see is the one year anniversary of Cafe Maud's soft launch, which is wild because it's since become such a regular haunt--we did Father's Day brunch there yesterday.).

Bought a WeWork day pass yesterday and worked at the space on Irving and it was great. So signed up for a membership. Good to get out of the apartment and have unlimited "free" coffee and kombucha.

People Hold On - Noah Reid

These days I get up on Saturday morning and drive to pick up the boys in Callicoon and turn around and drive back to Manhattan, then Sunday evening drive them back upstate and turn around and come home. But until a couple of years ago I kept an apartment in Cochecton and I would take the train up Fridays after work, and we would spend our weekends upstate mostly, and I would take the train back Sunday night.

I remember YouTube Music randomly playing this song one of those Sunday nights when I was on the platform at Secaucus just before midnight, and it struck me and I listened to it regularly for weeks.

Just a few days ago I thought of it and tried and failed to remember and find it. I could only summon some snippet about a last cigarette, and it wasn't enough for Google to help.

Then just tonight it magically popped up in my YouTube Music recommendations. Funny how these things work sometimes.

View from the inevitable Hampton Inn in Monticello. Fun contrast to an Instagram post a couple of weeks ago at the Four Seasons in Casablanca as though that were real life.

I've wanted to write about the past couple of months. Fasting through a Lent that encompassed my fortieth birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of my dad's death and concluded with falling in love and finding myself alone again in the cave Mary Magdalene lived in somewhere outside Marseilles. But you flip through Netflix and feel so overwhelmed with the sheer volume of stories; of what value is ones own? I think Ayn Rand had a quote that was something like "Just because it happened to you does not make it interesting."

On the flight back from Morocco I sat next to a girl who journals then throws them away. I always felt like those were the real writers. It might represent a larger flaw of mine, that if no one reads it and loves it, it (and by extension I) has no worth.

Lent has been wild and wonderful and unexpected with no shortage of opportunities to be (like C.S. Lewis) Surprised by Joy. In the midst of all that's gone on and all that remains in the final days of Holy Week, it's amazing to finish Nicky Gumbel's one-year devotional read-through of the Bible (which I think I've been working on through fits and spells for 2.5-3 years... 😳). This is the third read-through I've done and it's always a strange feeling to come to the end.