Tomasino Blog

St. Augustine probably did more good than bad with his writing, but it doesn’t help me be any less frustrated. City of God, City of Man, two worlds which collide at an invisible line between the real and the unreal. The concept wasn’t his, but I still blame him for the popularity in common thought. Without Augustine, would we really have this all-pervasive gnostic sense about our own selves? Would we really see the spirit and the body as two separate entities? How different would our actions be if we never turned over the idea, if instead we knew ourselves as a whole, indivisible and inseparable from the here and now.

That’s the biggest problem I have with gnostic ideas. It’s not that there isn’t anything to be learned by classifying and delineating, but when we attribute individual value and stop seeing our bodies as part of our souls and vice versa, we stop seeing the entire person. More than that, we stop seeing each other.

There is no path to God through the soul alone. You can’t shed this flesh and ride your spirit alone up to the heavens. The body is not an anchor weighing you down. It is not a prison. All these ideas, they make us see ourselves in such a dark way, as if the only thing of worth were buried beneath a dirty mask. It’s a wonder how people survived with those thoughts at all!

Theology is a little beyond me tonight. It’s late and I’m only up because of an ill-advised nap this afternoon. In a few minutes I’ll be back in bed letting my slumbering mind take me on silly journeys where my cat is the conductor of an illegal space-train. I guess I just needed to get that thought out of my head.

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[It] is not knowing much, but realizing and relishing things interiorly, that contents and satisfies the soul.
    - St. Ignatius Loyola – Spiritual Exercises, Second Annotation (1522-1524)

A week ago I met with the Vocation Director for the Society of Jesus. The interview was long, incredibly personal, and quite draining on both of us; but in the end he invited me to continue my application for the Novitiate. Now I have approximately four weeks to complete another 5 interviews, arrange for 5 letters of reference, get a physical, dental exam, opthamologist exam, transcripts from everywhere, military service records, church records, a psychological evaluation, and a partridge in a pear tree. How am I taking it? I’m glowing with excitement.

This past week has been a blur of scheduling, e-mailing, phone conversations, distracted prayers, and insomnia. It’s been a long time since the excitement of good things has kept me from sleep. I’ve missed it.

Tonight, a friend from Atlanta talked to me about patience. He’s doing a study on it that sounds fascinating. He said something very important to me that reaffirmed what I’ve been feeling through the discernment so far, and what I’ve been feeling more than ever since that meeting last week. He said, “a patience person is an active person…active in standing either against something…or in the face of something.”

It’s the active part that resonates so well right now. This application has certainly not been something to passively let happen. The Jesuits have all been very up-front with me that to get through this process in the right mind to move forward, I need to keep up my prayer life and spirituality. I think that might be the action of patience my friend was referring to—actively standing (or praying) in the face of the challenge of constant discernment, interviews, and paperwork.

There is a certain quietness that comes from it, though, that reminds me of the sense of calm, passive patience I’m used to. Rather than being the core of the virtue, though, I’m beginning to see it more as the result.

The remarkable thing is how the process has done more than just force me to consider my call. It’s already begun changing my behavior, readying me for a life to come. A lot of close people have started remarking about the changes, and the support has been amazing. Whether from close people now or those far into my past, all the prayers and sentiments give me strength.

My choice to live my call is a continuous struggle to make the right decisions, the decisions to follow what the Spirit is asking of me each and every day. They are hard choices sometimes, taking me farther away from the familiar and sometimes hedonistic past experiences and out on to a limb where I am surprisingly exposed. That’s where God likes to keep me, though. It’s part of the humility I’m always learning more about. When we are exposed, weakened, without comfort, it is easiest to turn to Christ for assistance. “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mt. 19:24)

These next four weeks will be difficult to schedule, but they will also be spiritually full. Every day I learn something new about myself and my relationships with those around me. Spiritual indifference comes a little closer. Contemplative prayer becomes more natural. Some people call the application the true Jesuit postulancy, and I can see why.

As always, please keep me in your prayers. I’m praying for you too.

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A few weeks ago I posted about my new alarm clock, Zeo. Well, it seems that the rest of the world has finally caught on.

When I first tried it out, I had the inflated hopes of a child with a new fancy toy. I signed up for the interactive Sleep Coaching, monitored and scrutinized every line on all my various charts, and was generally annoying to all my friends. Things were new and cool and I couldn’t get enough of them.

So what about now? It’s been about a month since I started using my Zeo, how are things going these days? Well, I’ll be honest. Things are pretty great. I’m not obsessing about every little curve anymore, but I do make sure to note my ZQ (that’s Sleep Quality, folks) each morning, and every few days I take some time to review my time in each stage of sleep, how many full cycles I get in the night, and make sure to properly punish the cat for waking me up so much during the night.

I don’t fill out my sleep journal every day, but even without all the data it provides, I have still learned a lot. Stephan Fabregas says, “If you can measure it, you can manage it,” and he’s really hit the nail on the head. I thought the most valuable feature of my Zeo was going to be the SmartWake feature when I first started using it, and don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic. Perhaps more importantly, though, I’ve learned about some depressing trends in how I treat my body and my sleep during the work week. I see ZQ scores in the 40s and 50s all week long, and then bask in the glory of a 130 on Saturday. It just isn’t healthy in the long run.

I’ve already begun changing some things. Zeo makes me more accountable to myself, and that’s a good thing.

On a side note, just yesterday morning I found myself starting to wake up and cursing in my half-conscious state. I knew I was going to trigger the SmartWake if I woke up any further, and then my glorious night of sleep would end. Lo and behold, my pretty little alarm jingle started a moment later. Curse you, Zeo. You’re just too smart.

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When I was in the Navy I had problems waking up at 0400 to study before class like I needed. So, I went out to the NEX (Naval Exchange) and picked up the loudest, most obnoxious piece of machinery I could get my hands on.

The Westclox Model #22651 is a powerhouse in a tiny box. I’m fairly certain the alarm can banish demons. It certainly did the trick of waking me up in the morning.

I kept that alarm clock by my side for the next nine years. Very slowly over that time I have found myself becoming a little less startled in the morning and more willing to risk the snooze button. Still, it has remained an incredibly effective device, that is, until I dropped it eight feet onto my hardwood floors.

The alarm still sounded, but the clock itself was only visible from one small angle when you tilt the clock back 80 degrees. It made a nice audible crunchy sound when you click the buttons, too. It was pretty obvious. I needed a new clock.

So after all these years I found myself searching around for a new alarm clock online. I figured, if my last one lasted almost a decade, I should spend the time and pick one that is worth having around for a while. I researched different alarm types, clock radios, water proof ones, traditional bells, clocks that work with your computer, and a few crazy ones that wake you up with bright lights instead of sound. Then I found Zeo.

The Zeo is a different class of alarm clock altogether. With a sporty fabric headband, this device monitors you brain activity while you sleep and gives you detailed readouts about your night of rest. It distinguishes between REM, light, and deep sleep, and even tells you how many times you woke up in the night, and for how long. It gives you extra information too, like how long it took you to fall asleep, the total time you spent sawing logs, and tracks trends over time. Most importantly is has an amazing feature called Smart-Wake that wakes you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle so that you feel the most rested in the morning. You give the clock a range of times in the morning and if it detects you entering a lighter sleep phase, the alarm will go off quietly and slowly increase volume to ease you awake. It’s amazing.

In the morning, you can pop the SD card out of the clock and sync it up to their website and track all of your sleep data online. They’ve got a sleep coach e-mail program that I haven’t tried yet and a really cool interactive sleep journal so you can make notes of environmental distractions (I’m looking at you, Sniffles), reasons for waking up during the night, or other sleep information.

The website and device are wonderfully designed and relatively simple to use. Their sleep tracker website uses an Adobe Flex site with wonderful, pretty charting tools. And the alarm sounds are soothing, but unique enough to wake you up rather than put you to sleep.

The downside is the price. It’s a $399 alarm clock, when you get right down to it, but if you’re like me and you love unique tech gadgets, or you’re like me and have a horrible sleep schedule and can use a little more information, it might be worth the investment. If I can make this clock last for the next ten years, I won’t be complaining. In the meantime, I’ve only used it the one night so far, so there isn’t much data to review yet. I’ll tell you one thing, though. The chart above is my actual sleep results from last night. That little bit of "wake" time on the right was when my cat jumped on my head. This Zeo thing definitely does its job. Oh, and click the image for a screenshot of the full web application.

Sleep well!

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