by Diane Tate

Hierarchy of Holy days

I’ve always contended (well, since I was about 20) that Easter just blows away Christmas. It’s a no-brainer: the Triumph clearly trumps the Entry. But within Easter weekend (thus excepting Palm Sunday the week prior), we have a range of options to contemplate, and within these, Holy Saturday comes out first for me.

Not that the other days – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday – are chopped livah:

  • Maundy Thursday provides the chance to wonder at how Christ revolutionized the Passover, or deliverance from servitude which, until that point, had most poignantly been instantiated in the Exodus story. By offering Himself as the ultimate sacrifice, He democratized and internalized this redemption for everyone beyond my peeps.
  • Good Friday is an important moment to ponder the gritty, real sacrifice made by Christ. The pain, agony, separation and acute trial He endured purely out of love, wholly undeserved.
  • Easter Sunday is a party: a grand celebration where we can take heart that death has been overcome, the victory sealed, and we simply wait until the full implications of this attained victory fill in.

….but Holy Saturday is beautiful and heartening in its very silence. The unfolding of Thursday and drama of Friday are over, and the closure of Sunday not at all a certainty. Instead, it’s a time in the gap…a time of waiting…a time where we must choose to trust and believe, in the midst of no circumstances or actions around us validating that choice.

Thus, Holy Saturday is the most like life as we live it today: we trust and believe that something dramatic and important has happened…and completion WILL happen…but right now, we live in the in-between. The silence. The ambiguity, where we simply must choose to believe despite signals around us which conflict – or simply don’t send us anything at all.

For me, the choice to believe is a no-brainer because the alternative – a life without hope, purpose, direction or redemption – is not really a life at all, but an animalistic, nihilistic bumbling about, hoping to attain enough pleasure or numbness to cover up this sad, broken, desolate alternative reality that is so unacceptable …because it simply is not The Reality. We struggle with it because we weren’t made for it.

So I will choose to believe on this Holy Saturday, and in this life, of the in-between. Because I really have no choice.


What does the Speck-ster Bunny think?
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by Diane Tate

good luck with Your Nonsense

In November I got to hear Henry Cho do standup; when querying the audience about current vocational pursuits, he proceeded to wish one member in grad school “good luck with Your Nonsense.”

Fast forward to this week: the world was riveted by the climactic launch of Apple’s iPad tablet…and a flurry of developments around geolocational services led to l’il ol’ me somehow serendipitously talking to a BusinessWeek reporter about why I love to “check in” to places so much….why being “The Mayor” is so addictive and hoarding Virtual Collectibles so satisfying….and other momentous topics of the day.

When my head stopped spinning from the giddiness of it all, I wandered through the various Ferry Building shops, trying to check in to each one, and was paralyzed by the 5-minute limit that Yelp happens to place on checking in to different spots (in contrast to Gowalla which lets you “faux”-walla into as many places you want regardless of when you do so – as long as you are proximate of course yadeyadeya…).

I only regained lucidity when, not knowing what to do with myself because I was unable to check in every second, I meandered over to a bench because it was located next to some sorely-needed power outlets for my Apple products and struck up a conversation with Eddie.

Eddie was enthralled by all of my gadgets. He had no idea why I was (unsuccessfully) trying to log in with a wireless card, why I needed to use my phone and laptop at the same time, and why I needed to sit 3 inches from a power outlet in the first place. This is because Eddie is unwired. And as it turns out, he also happens to be the Real Mayor of the Ferry Building.

Untethered and free. What was all that stuff I was trying to tweet, log in, check in and post to again?

Mint | Free, Simple Personal Finance Software
by Diane Tate

Cupid keeps on striking

I have unabashedly proclaimed my undying love many times in this forum, and I guess I’m promiscuous because the objects of my affection range from presidents to pariahs, from pundits to geeks, from economists to actors, and from comedians to guide dogs.

Nevertheless, I will risk my reputation once more and go to bat for yet another mensch: the (cross all body parts) next governor of “we’re our own worst enemy” State of California.

So I love Tom Campbell a lot. But love, unlike affection, must be earned. So here’s why I love Tom Campbell so much:

  • I love him for his breadth and depth of public service: this includes, but is not limited to: serving in the U.S. Congress, the California State Senate, the Federal Trade Commission, the University of California system, and as Director of Finance for the State of California.
  • I love him for his adaptability: he’s lived in Berkeley and in the O.C. He was a prof at Cal and at Stanford. (only the coolest of peeps can hang in both schools).
  • I love him for his finesse: “I’m most concerned about the dropping educational attributes of our population.” (whereas I would have cried: “BEWARE THE IDIOCRITAZATION OF OUR SOCIETY!”)
  • I love him for his ethics and class: when I raised the issue of smear tactics, he took a total Nash Game Theory approach to explain why such tactics are ineffective. Nice way to get out of the implicitly-smearing-by-saying-you’re-not-the-one-smearing rathole.
  • I love him for his consistency. When asked why he didn’t run as an independent because he is so balanced (aka “moderate”), he replied that he believes in personal liberties with respect to both governance *and* social issues. Thus, a conservative in the most classic liberal sense. He added that independents tend to skew election results to the extreme candidates, and cited Perot and Nader as recent examples (clearly he’s not loyal to the GOP then…. another point in his favor for me!).
  • I love him for his raw intelligence. Last night when he talked about the budget – which is really the main job of any governor (allocating the state’s resources) – he decried simplistic, soundbyte-appeal responses such as “eliminating waste, fraud and abuse” (as in, duh?) and instead did the heavy lifting that a complex environment like California’s requires and drew from finance/monetary policy, history, law, economics and legislative rules to develop comprehensive solutions. Not soundbyte-y but way more credible.
  • I love him for his unabashed humor: “I’d like to be more optimistic than the facts permit me to be. Go Bears.” He also humored an alum last night who begged him to recite some salty Irish chants. You may have had to be there, but it was priceless.

Susanne’s a lucky woman! Let’s hope the State can be so lucky.

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