Jason Coleman

While laying in bed tonight not sleeping I began to wonder about the phrase “Sleep like a baby.” I have a baby and, watching her sleep, it’s obvious why someone would come up with the phrase “sleep like a baby” to describe pure, untroubled, peaceful sleep. But why does a baby sleep so well? Why is a sleeping baby such a good example of serenity? I think it’s because they don’t have much to think about.

The thoughts that trouble us in waking life also have their sleep-time equivalents. My baby doesn’t have anything to think about by day: she’s still busy learning to deal with the immediate objects of her perception. If she’s not seeing a ball right now then she’s not thinking about a ball.

My two year old, however, has a more complex understanding of the world. She can not only identify objects in her environment but also map representations she sees on television to objects in her real life. Action seen on television is recalled and mulled over later. She sees Shrek yelling at Donkey and knows that this must be a moment of tension in the movie because she relates it to times when daddy has yelled at her. Later, when she dreams of Shrek, she dreams about him yelling at donkey, and then she dreams about him yelling at her, and then she dreams about daddy yelling at her, and then she wakes up inconsolable because she’s convinced daddy’s mad at her.

I have bad dreams for the same reason as my two year old: my mind rehearses and personalized the jagged edges of the day trying to make some sense of them. But I take the problem one step further: I don’t wait for sleep to replay and search for meaning; I begin as soon as I have a moment to think. I begin and then I can’t fall asleep.

Saying my name with different pronunciations and inflections while writing the previous entry made me think of this for some reason:

What kind of sin? JAY-sin. (Pronounced pretty much exactly as my name in pronounced: JAY-sen.)

Or how about this as an intro for my next pulpit announcement at church:

And now, you’re favorite kind of sin: JAY-sin!

So I have some explaining to do about the origins of the name “jasonfreude.” Let’s start with the German word schadenfreude. Schadenfreude means the enjoyment one feels at the troubles of others. That sounds like a perfect description of most weblogs, right? No one wants to read about what a good day everyone else is having: we want to read about everyone else’s problems. We read these things because we enjoy reading about the struggles of others. Maybe we read them because we enjoy the heroic and insightful ways that the authors deal with their problems, but no one’s going to stick around to read James Lileks or Steven Den Beste when they’re listing all the pretty flowers currently blooming in their gardens.

So anyway, if I’m going to write a weblog that’s only going to be interesting when I talk about my troubles, why not say so in the domain name? But to be original and coin a term, why not include my name in it as well?

I learned the word schadenfreude from an English teacher in high school. It turns out that she pronounced the word wrong. She said SCHAY-den-froy-duh with a long ‘a’ sound instead of the more German and therefor more correct SCHAH-den-froy-duh with a European ‘a’: soft and short.

So I thought: JAY-sen, SCHAY-den; those are pretty similar sounding words. Why not use jasonfreude as the domain name for my weblog? So I did. And then I learned that I had been pronouncing schadenfreude wrong and that JAH-sen-froy-duh sounds nothing like my name.

i’ve gone thru weeks of depression and feeling my faith slip further and further away.

tonight I prayed with a group of men who still believe and who esteemed our Father as truly a wonderful Friend and Lord. And I felt restored.

Could it be that my problem was simply one of location? Or rather, of situation? i was hanging out there on my own with no one to encourage me; no one to look to as an example; no one to lean on. when I became weak and began to lean there was no one to lean against: I fell all the way to the ground.

I need to find some friends to pray with. I apparently am no good without the encouragement.

I search on the internet all the time, and sometimes I’m searching for people. People I used to work with, friends from college, old high school buddies: I probably don’t go a week without searching for someone in one of those categories. I also regularly search for the phone numbers of local carry-out restaurants or neighbors I only know by first name and house number.

In fact, I searched for an old acquaintance today. One former coworker emailed me asking if I had any current contact info for another former coworker. “Why would I need that?” I thought, “I have a current version of the internet!”

So I searched for my former coworker. And why not? It’s not like she’s going to know about it. I won’t have to explain myself. One of the most enticing things about the privacy of Internet searches is that they go beyond anonymity and into obscurity. “Nobody knows who I am” is replaced by “nobody knows that I’m here.” I can be curious about someone without making them curious about me because they have no way of knowing that I’ve been asking questions.

Today someone searching for me totally missed the point, though: she called my house and talked to my wife.

Now, this person wasn’t searching for me me, but for someone named Jason with a similar last name to mine. Still, it was obvious that this person was randomly searching for the right Jason. “Is this Jason so-and-so? Do you live near some particular landmark? Do you remember Brenda?”

No, no, and no.

But it seems weird to me that someone would use the telephone as a search tool. Ever heard of Google? Anywho? Classmates? (If I provided links to those websites, dear reader, I would be insulting your intelligence.)

And the really strange part is how my knowing about this search has made me feel. All kinds of people may search for me on the internet for all kinds of reasons, but these searches are completely obscure and I don’t know about them and I don’t care. But the fact that some searcher went from obscurity to anonymity makes the search feel a little more like intrusion. Anonymity, at times, makes one more powerful and more frightening than identity.

Yesterday I had my first dentist appointment in eight years. I only went in for a checkup—-none of my teeth were hurting—-but I expected that I’d have a cavity or two after all of that time away.

I didn’t have any cavities!

This was a source of joy for me and consternation for my dentist. He told me, “The trouble with people like you—or with teeth like yours—is that you don’t need to brush or floss much to keep from getting cavities.” Do you see how he immediately lumped me into a category? Now I’m a dental scoff-law!

Apparently lack of cavities isn’t the same thing as lack of dental problems. He told me that one day my teeth would pay for my neglecting to see a dentist regularly. So you too, be warned!

Not long ago my method of dealing with stress was beer after beer after beer. It currently seems to be beer after prayer after beer. Shortly I hope it’s prayer after beer after prayer. The goal I’m working toward, of course, is prayer after prayer after prayer.