The Mormon Monk

As previously mentioned, my accident in early May forced me to abandon my plans of doing light construction work this summer and to adopt an alternative form of employment. As a result, I have been working for an organization based in UNC-Chapel Hill’s library system called DocSouth, which stands for “Documenting the American South,” since mid-June. The organization’s goal is to preserve and make publicly available the texts and images that best capture southern history (so naturally, they hired a transplanted Yankee to determine what artifacts best represent southern life). If you are into history, I would encourage you to visit their website—it’s a great resource: www.docsouth.unc.edu . The long and short of my new employment is that I spend 25 hours each week reading slave narratives and writing summaries of them, so that DocSouth users will be able to determine which texts they want to read in full. In the course of my work, I’ve learned a lot about nineteenth-century American cul...

A funny thing happened on my way to work two months ago--I was hit by a car while riding a bicycle. At the time, I was less than thrilled. My accident left me without a job for the summer and with a concussion, serious road rash, a fractured pelvis, a police citation, and $16,000 in medical bills ($2,500 after medical insurance). My exciting ambulance ride notwithstanding, this was not a particularly fun experience, and the painful weeks that followed were hardly more so. But I've always been told that hindsight is 20/20, and the perspective of two months has helped me see the events of May 6, 2008 in an entirely new light. I am now very grateful for the accident that left me with a considerably lighter wallet and scars on all four limbs because that experience helped me appreciate the virtue of kindness. Before my accident, I had always thought of kindness as an attribute whose primary manifestation was an absence of hostility. Kindness meant not making a snide comment about the o...