Marla Parker's Weblog

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Today was my last day at Sun Microsystems, which I joined on July 7, 1986. I want to thank my colleague Katy Dickinson for her handy rif checklist which she posted last fall after her husband was rif'd from Sun. I'm just working through it, as you can see by this blog posting.

Please find me on LinkedIn and then.... hire me!!! :-)

DAFT Report
Before the LGUMC church bbq last Thursday evening, I announced there would be a DAFT meeting for anyone who cared to join in at 7:30, after dinner. No one remembered what DAFT was: Doubting Agnostics, Faithful Thinkers, D.A.F.T. which is just a silly name that I made up when thinking about the sort of conversations that I hoped to begin. Everyone, around a dozen people, who participated in the first three DAFT meetings in the spring seemed ok with this name, and we did indeed have some great conversations, exactly what I'd been hoping for.

After the bbq, four of us stayed for a meeting. We were two women and two men, none related, and we chose to talk about stories in the Bible or Methodist tradition that give us some sort of problem.

The most interesting exchange for me was in discussing the crucifixion and the idea that Jesus died for our sins. We all agree that it happened, but N. sees it as an example of man's inhumanity to man and rejects the notion that Jesus died for our sins (she calls herself a heretic). M. explained his view on the matter, and while I don't recall him addressing the question of dying for our sins, one thing he said did catch my attention. He described a scene in that Passion movie by Mel Gibson in which Mary is almost unable to go to Jesus as he struggles to carry his cross. I never saw that movie, and never will, but M. was very impressed with this scene. He said that Christ stumbles, and Mary sees her child in him briefly and is thus able to go to him in spite of her revulsion at the horror of his broken body. M. says that Jesus put his hand on her cheek and comforted her by saying, "I make all things new."

That gives me something to think about, because it seems an extreme example of the idea that we can find God in the response to bad things happening. I usually think of that in terms of natural disasters, but maybe it is equally applicable to examples of man's inhumanity to man.

I believe that how I practice my faith is more important than the details of what I choose to believe or not believe, but I very much appreciated talking with the three people who stayed to share their questions and thoughts about faith with me and each other. I hope to host a DAFT meeting after each Thursday night bbq for the rest of this summer.

From something I wrote in the spring:

What Does D.A.F.T. Mean? DAFT is merely an amusing acronym that captured my fancy as follows:

Doubting Agnostics
Doubt tends to get a bum rap, as if it is a negative thing that should never cross the mind of a True Believer. Doubt deserves more respect! Doubt is not the antithesis of faith. Choosing faith while setting aside related doubts may be a better foundation for life in this world than blind faith that acknowledges zero doubts.

The term Agnostic is often confused with Atheist, but the two are not equivalent. An Agnostic is somebody who believes that it is impossible to know whether or not God exists, or that it is impossible to prove. The problem with the English word “know” is that it is so overloaded: knowledge of the heart? knowledge of the mind? some other sort of knowledge we cannot name? But the Agnostic believes you cannot know about the existence of God in exactly the same way you can know that 1+1=2.

So the term Doubting Agnostic is sort of self-referential, since agnostics certainly doubt lots of things; or maybe it is self-contradictory, making a double-negative leading to the positive alternative to choose faith, since scientific divine knowledge seems quite out of reach.

Faithful Thinkers
This one is easier, people of faith who enjoy trying to figure out how to apply faith to every day life, how to practice one's faith. In discussing this with my sister, she suggested I should call it “Faith Thinkers,” to indicate people who think about faith, who believe thoughtfully. I agree that works, but I wanted to imply Faith-FULL Thinkers, too: people who are full of faith and thinking about how to put it into practice.

Time Warp
On Wednesday, a dear friend of mine, from the 1970s, sent me a link to I'm Tired of Voting For Men and wrote:

Whatever happens, I still believe that women in positions of leadership are important. Whether you support Hillary or not, isn't it great to see a WOman competing - and STICKING to it - for President of the United States.

Then on Thursday, the very next day, I received a link to Sexism, women and IT (Information Technology), a blog by a highly respected Java developer, Yakov Fain. This is his blog on the JDJ site, Java Developer's Journal[tm], the World's Leading Java Resource.

If the first blog, tiredofvotingformen, makes any sense to you, then the second probably will not. The second blog is not a spoof, by the way. He is completely serious, and in case you jump to the conclusion that he lives in some backwards country where women are still legally treated as property, if you google him you'll see that he works in New York. More importantly, he is completely sincere and, in a weird way, almost innocent.

If the second blog, sexism, makes sense to you, then the first one will seem quite silly. But to you I say: get educated. Because I assure you, the tiredofvotingformen blog represents the future, and dear Yakov's blog represents the past. Clearly not a past that is as dead as some of us would like it to be. Some of us. Don't kid yourself by wishing it were "most of us." (Where is that Feminism Consciousness Raising 101 Reading List reference when you need it, anyway? I think I misplaced it a few decades ago, oops.)

Langston Hughes certainly said it best, and beautifully, in 1938:

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be!

OK, so not even Hughes makes reference to women but I still think the above quote is the best I've heard to crystallize the idea that we have a great idea for a democracy, and we may be doing a better job of it than anyone else in the world, maybe, but the world we live in is really still a lot more like a feudal system of patronage and privilege than it is any sort of egalitarian democracy.

Hughes asks: Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

Although I'm fortunate enough to be one of the privileged in this wannabe America, I'd still like to send this answer to heaven for Langston Hughes: I am the woman.

fun with placemarks
I am really happy that the JUGs Community on java.net has made such great progress recently in creating their own worldwide JUGS Map using a kml file.

I followed their Check it out! link and quickly got sucked in to the world of kml and created this map:

View Larger Map

It works better if you view the larger map,and some of the placemarks are practically on top of each other if you are zoomed out to the whole world. Click on the placemark to see the info and picture - be sure to look at the ones in Norway. I created this quickly only because I had already spent an inordinate amount of time creating a more detailed one for my family pointing at more places and with links to the complete photo albums. This stuff is so easy my kids could do it (HINT HINT!!).

Update: What weirdness is this? I came back to this blog and found that the placemarks defined in this file were not showing. In fact, they don't show if I load the file manually in the location box on maps.google.com, either. So I copied the file from blogs.sun.com to my home server, and voila, it works again. The images referenced in the placemarks are still in blogs.sun.com/marla/resource, and they show fine. But if you load up http://blogs.sun.com/marla/resource/trips3a.kml in maps.google.com, it says "File not found at http://blogs.com/marla/reso...." I don't know where it is getting blogs.com from.

If anyone has a clue, I'd love to be enlightened. While you are at it, feel free to load the kml file into Google Earth and see if you can figure out why the double picture at Otter Point (in Maine) only shows one picture in Earth, though it reliably shows both in Maps.

Boy Takes Bath

Nicky turned 9 yesterday. Conversation this morning:

Me: Nicky, did you remember to take a bath?

N: (groans, and he has a cinnamon and sugar smile from breakfast that extends right across his cheeks)

M: Go look at yourself in the mirror.

N: I'll wash my face.

M: Take a bath! You're having a sleepover tonight and there wont be time for a bath after school and I don't want you to be stinky.

N: But Mom! I just took a bath recently!

M: When?

N: Like, 5 days ago!

M: Take a bath!

Of course he obeyed me. Next chapter could be titled, "Did you use soap?"

Question about Kyoto

A popular guest pastor preached a great sermon at LGUMC this morning. He went over five points, which I've mostly forgotten but one of them stuck: it was about taking care of the good earth. He went off on a bit of a tangent and got so worked up I thought of fire and brimstone, except the subject was Kyoto and Global Warming.

I've just finished reading The Success of Open Source, by Stephen Weber. The last chapter is called: The Code That Changed the World? As the question mark indicates, it is an interesting question, not a claim. But the sermon reminded me of that chapter, where Weber writes on p. 264,

"...The war against terrorism, the relationship between open source and proprietary models of software production, and the politics among transnational NGO networks and international organizations share characteristics that make them diverse cases of a similarly structured political space. I am certain that some of the most interesting processes in international politics and economics over the next decade are going to take place in this space, at the interface between hierarchies and networks (rather than solely within either one)."

So I wonder: is there an international organization that is tracking, or actively seeking, corporate commitments to Kyoto by multinationals that span multiple countries? Is there a website somewhere with the stories of the battles to sign up different companies, wins and losses, success stories of unexpected savings and nightmares of lost opportunities? (Well, here is a November 2004 report that might be close.)

It seems that if you could get enough corporations in the US to sign up, for example, it would not matter that the government refuses to do so. That is purportedly what the Bush administration has called for: industry should take steps to address global warming, but voluntarily.

And that reminds me of the children's moment back in church this morning, delivered by our regular pastor, not the visitor. He explained that volunteering is doing something that you want to do. Serving is doing something that simply needs to be done.

remember summer

It is fall and the weather is mixed but mostly nice yet I cannot help looking back fondly on summer.

Here is a picture that I took months ago in Maine.

I love this picture because the little urchins are so absorbed in fishing for crabs, which they can see clearly on the bottom of the harbour, and even a small lobster. The dock and jumble of boats are quintessential Maine to me.

stories

I'm sitting by my pool watching my son and a friend swim. One minute they are fighting, the next they are having great fun. Maybe the fighting is fun, for them, but not for me! Right now they are being good.

Expecting the battery on my laptop to die any minute, so this will probably disappear into a black hole. I'm on win2k, not JDS , because I have not tackled getting wireless to work on JDS. It was a huge challenge to get JDS on my Toshiba Portege 2000 at all! but it works great now, and everything I need is there except wireless and printing. Details, details. I have dual boot, so here I am back on win2k, in order to be wireless, by the pool.

This is a test post to see if my categories work and life work.

And to explain why I love the Global Fund for Women, the first link I've added to my page. It is my favorite organization in the world, and the biggest reason is stories. Attending GFW events, I've heard many stories about GFW grantees. They are great stories. Knowing that there are 1000s of grassroots groups lead by women working to tackle the immediate problems in their world, working hard to make things better, is very inspirational.

Here is what I know about GFW that makes it special: it gives small grants to women-lead groups; it chooses carefully, with help from advisers from former grantee groups I believe, but then it gives the grants with no strings attached, unlike most (larger) grant-making groups who give for specific programs and require specific reporting; it gives only to groups outside of the US; it is one of the first, along with Mama Cash, but now other women's funds are sprouting in other countries! It is good.