Where's My Plan?

Just not Pinterested

2012-02-20T08:17:00.001-05:00

Every few days--or sometimes a few times a day--I get a notification that "XXX is following you on Pinterest." This makes me uneasy because, well, because I haven't done anything Pinteresting with my account since I set it up. I only set it up in the first place because my wife told me to. I "pinned" a handful of books, but then I felt like it was taking way too much effort, so I quit. Anyway, that was redundant since more or less all the books I've ever read are associated with me on Goodreads. And then I pinned a great video of Gordon Ramsay making great scrambled eggs. Beyond that, I haven't touched it. Pinterest just doesn't work for me, because it's so visual, while on the whole I'm more interested in text--articles, blog entries, that sort of thing. And sharing those sorts of things--not to mention pictures and videos--is easy enough on Facebook that, really, what do I need Pinterest for?

But when I get those notifications, I feel like "Gosh, so-and-so is expecting me to share something interesting, and I most certainly am not." Just having an account feels like false advertising....

Can someone make the argument for me: why should I like Pinterest enough to spend any time there?

Book Review: The Magicians

2012-02-19T17:07:00.000-05:00

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Probably more like 3.5 stars, though I'm not sure how I could possibly be lukewarm on this novel, since most everyone who's rated and reviewed it seems to either love it or hate it.

The novel follows Quentin Coldwater, who begins the novel as an academic all-star (but one who's slightly eclipsed by his best friend both in excellence and in practical matters) in his senior year of high school. An avid reader of fantasy--particularly a Narnia-like fantasy about a land called Fillory--in his younger days (and still one, albeit as a guilty pleasure), he is invited to take a test to get into a very exclusive college: one that teaches magic (which turns out to be real, obviously). In a sense, the rest of the novel is an exploration of the Wilde maxim about one of the great tragedies in life being to get your heart's desire. In another sense, you might say it's a character study of the varieties of brilliant, over-achieving nihilists.

It is, no doubt about it, a dark novel. Calling it "Harry Potter for adults" is less accurate than to call it a deconstruction of Harry Potter. There's no Dark Lord to defeat here--well, there sort of is in the end, but not really. The darkness to be fought comes from within one's self as one reacts to a world that can never seem to measure up to the fantasies of childhood, that never seems to have the heroic spirit we imagine for it as children.

Magic, in the end, isn't so magical as Quentin thinks. It's hard work, tedious work. It rarely solves problems of any real importance, and it ultimately has nothing to say about giving a life meaning, fulfillment, or happiness. I had originally understood The Magicians to be a stand-alone novel, even though I knew it was followed by The Magician King. However, given how little real growth Quentin manages, that character arc itself makes the novel feel less than complete, even if the plot elements are fairly well wrapped up. He's been through a lot, he's changed a bit, but has he grown? Not really. But then, perhaps that's all part and parcel of deconstructing the naive fantasies of childhood and of, well, naive fantasies.

It doesn't mean I have to approve it.

But anyway, I did enjoy it well enough on its own terms--well enough that I'll pick up The Magician King.

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Happy Darwin Day

2012-02-12T23:34:00.001-05:00

As Americans, February 12 tends to resonate for us as Abraham Lincoln's birthday, even if he does end up rolled in with George Washington under the banner of "Presidents Day." But for the secular-minded and the science-minded, another great figure's birthday (in the same year) comes to mind: Charles Darwin. Some even think of the day as Darwin Day. What with Presidents Day and all, Lincoln's hardly using it anyway.

Darwin, of course, is a controversial figure, because evolution is still a contentious issue, since it challenges a religious literalist's belief system. The theory of evolution by natural selection, however, is about as rock solid as any big-picture theory in science can be. And when I thought about this entry, I thought I might spend some time talking about that, or why the resistance is so strong, or about why Darwin is, warts and all, a great man to celebrate. But now we're getting to the end of the day and I still haven't done so, and I don't have the time, energy, or brain-power to do it justice.

All that said, whenever I think of Charles Darwin, I think of my friend Dorothy Sutton, a poet who wrote a collection of poems called Startling Art, which revolves largely around Darwin and the artist Matisse (I also think of her when I look at the Matisses we have framed around here!). I'd like to share with my readers one of her Darwin poems, and since I've found it on-line elsewhere, I trust she won't mind if I share it here (and I'll happily remove it if she or her publisher don't want it up!). For whatever reason, this one particularly struck me today. As it would happen, this is not one of the 2 1/2 poems of hers that I've written choral settings for:

BUZZARDS CIRCLE THEOLD CHURCHYARD

Edinburgh, 1826
Darwin and brother Erasmus
meet John James Audubon, there to enlist
subscribers for Birds of America.

Black wings of fear hover in the air:
the man in the street might come to embrace
the notion that human beings evolved
independent of Supernatural Source,
cracking the Church's One Foundation
to leave it in ruins. If people think
of themselves as animals, they'll act that way.
Civilization so long in building,
they whisper, reverting to savagery.

Audubon tosses his long black hair
back over his shoulder, explains, as he roughs
out the buzzard on the drawing board,
to the students here for medical school
the intricate steps of preserving a carcass
to capture on canvas each exact detail.

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And, finally, I will let Darwin speak for himself, from the end of the first edition of "Origen of the Species":

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank,
clothed with many plants of many kinds,
with birds singing on the bushes,
with various insects flitting about,
and with worms crawling through the damp earth,
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms,
so different from each other,
and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,
have all been produced by laws acting around us.

There is grandeur in this view of life. . .
that whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning,
endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.

Book Review: Olive Kitteridge

2012-02-11T23:00:00.001-05:00

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm not entirely sure how this book entered my radar, it might have been through a Goodreads friend (though none of them exactly gushed over it) or it might have been because it was a Pulitzer Prize winner--in any case, that I read it is owed to the fact that it was available as an audiobook to download from our library consortium.

It took me a while to get into this short-story-collection-as-a-novel about small-town life in Maine, but when I did, it really captivated me. The title character, Olive Kitteridge, who is at least referred to in each story or makes a cameo, grows from middle age to old age over the course of the book, and although I don't even qualify as middle aged yet, I think it was this aspect of the novel that grabbed me.

For my part, I grew up around adults--my mother was 40 when I was born and my father was 50 (mom was the oldest of six in her family, but dad was the youngest of four). The people I was around most outside of school were all at least middle-aged already, and over the course of my life those people have grown into old age. While none of the characters were ringers for any of my relatives or the other people in my community growing up, I had the distinct impression of getting glimpses here and there into their lives, into the reality of their experience.

At the same time, I got to know the characters in Olive Kitteridge far more intimately that I know most of the people I found myself projecting that characters' lives onto, which is always the great power of fiction, the way it lets us know characters better than we know anyone else. Strout creates such fully-formed characters with interwoven lives--just masterful.

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Food Friday: Cream Cheese

2012-02-10T22:29:00.001-05:00

When I started cooking for myself, moving out into the real world, one of my first culinary rules was this: never use fat-free cream cheese. It's just not very good, and the point of cream cheese is, after all, that it is good. I mean good. No, really, it is good.

My mother used to say of my father that he could be happy with just a sugar bowl put in front of him, and I must have gotten those genes, because I have always loved sugar and sweets. Among my favorite sweets have always been those that one way or another involve cream cheese. Pumpkin rolls? Check. Pumpkin cookies? As long as they have cream cheese frosting? Red Velvet Cake? See previous note. And one of my favorites to make--indeed, the one that caused the above rule--was Pumpkin Cake. Easy to make thanks to all the packaged, processed ingredients, and so very good. When I want to impress and calories are no object, this is my weapon of choice (recipe below).

However, I've been eating healthier lately, following the so-called Slow Carb Diet, which basically means that every meal for six days of the week is comprised of a meat, a legume, and a vegetable. And on the seventh day, I eat whatever I want.

With that in mind, a whole cake is probably a bit much, even for me. So then, how do I get my cream cheese fix? Well, I've been experimenting.

Let me first say that I make an awesome pot of oatmeal. I mean absolutely awe-inspiring. My lucky little girl gets to eat it every morning for breakfast, but for me, it's a once-a-week treat, and that's assuming we don't go in for pancakes instead. But here's how I super-charge it: in addition to the standard incorporation of maple syrup, I like to spoon in some cream cheese and some cinnamon, turning my oatmeal into a high-fiber (and, yes, high-sugar and high-fat), smoothy iced cinnamon roll. Well, anyway, the oatmeal equivalent, and a lot less work, all in all. Love it, love it, love it.

On a similarly decadent day, I thought I would try adding cream cheese to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I have long been a fan of putting both cream cheese and jelly on bagels, so this seemed like a logical enough extension. Verdict: meh. Doesn't really add much, not worth the hassle.

One of the dishes my wife likes to make for parties are Artichoke Tarts, a recipe that she found while doing Weight Watchers, of all things. Who know cream cheese fit into WW? Well, it doesn't, at least not the fully-fatted stuff, but the recipe is yummy (what the heck, I'll include that below too).

For the Super Bowl, we put together a chip dip that was simplicity itself: spread cream cheese on a dish, sprinkle some taco seasoning (optional), layer on salsa, layer on cheese, and bake until its beauty brings tears to your eyes. That reminds me of a cold chip dip I used to make: you mix a can of refried beans with cream cheese and a can of diced green chiles. Layer a jar of taco sauce over that, then cheese, and finally diced tomatoes and green onions. Very tasty, but not nearly as quick and easy as the first one. Still, no oven required, so that's something.

Although I didn't get to eat it myself, because yesterday was not one of the food-gone-wild days, I found another good use for cream cheese yesterday: in mashed sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes + butter + cream cheese = A + M + AZING.Well, anyway, very good. Maybe my math skills aren't what they used to be. But my cream cheese skills have never been better.
-----------------------------------------------

Pumpkin Cake

I'm sure I got this e-mail from my mom, who got it from somewhere. Someone in the family? A cookbook? Beats me.

Combine

         1 cup pumpkin

         1 can evaporated milk

         4 eggs

         1/4 tsp nutmeg

         1 1/2 cups sugar

         2 tsp cinnamon

         1/4 tsp ginger

In mixer or right in a 9x13 pan. The mixer does make things easier. Sprinkle evenly over this

 1 pkg yellow cake mix

And drizzle with

 1 cup butter

Bake at 350 F for 1 hour.

When cool, top with cream cheese frosting. For that, mix together

 8 oz cream cheese

 1 lb powdered sugar

 some milk

Until creamy. Spread over the cake.

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The Artichoke Tarts recipe is here. I will just add that we tend to use more chopped red pepper (so as not to waste a bunch) and don't use the parsley at all.

MLK and church

2012-01-22T21:00:00.000-05:00

I had thought that I might fill last week with blog entries reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr. and the holiday honoring him, a post each day, but as it happened, the same sorts of things that kept me from blogging earlier in the month kept me from this dream as well.

Last Sunday, our Unitarian church's service was devoted to MLK, and it occurred to me that in all my years going to Christian churches--and in one of the most liberal denominations, at that--I can't recall a single service dedicated to Dr. King.

Of course, the Martin Luther King Jr holiday is not a religious one, and so perhaps I shouldn't expect a church to devote time to it. But then, neither is Thanksgiving a religious holiday, but there always seemed to be a sermon on thankfulness in late November. Startling coincidence or staking a claim? Right.

So why not MLK? He was a Christian who was driven by his beliefs to act. Shouldn't churches be eager to claim him?

Is it because he's black and the churches I've known have been predominantly white? While I certainly wouldn't be surprised if predominantly-black churches embrace the man and the holiday more readily, I also can't help but suspect that there's more to it than that. King, as someone who was driven by his beliefs to challenge the status quo, really calls on people--especially religious believers?--to make of belief something far beyond attending church on Sundays: to work for social justice with a passion that won't be quenched short of achieving justice (which, given the world we live in, probably means lifelong struggle). While we can all admire those who fight for change once the change has been achieved--or, anyway, once we've settled into the change and achieved a new equilibrium--people are generally much less comfortable with the process that it takes to achieve change, preferring stability. Every crusader--and King is a prime example--has had to fight as much against those who value stability over everything else as against those who actually have a stake in maintaining injustice.

I'm just throwing out ideas here; if anyone has another explanation, I'd be happy to hear it.

Sunday Dispatches

2012-01-15T23:00:00.000-05:00

If you’ve been paying attention to this blog since the endof Holidailies, then you know that there hasn’t been anything to pay attentionto. This isn’t so much because Holidailies ended as it is because the winterbreak ended. Yow.

The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed likethey were about as busy as could be, but this first week back has doneeverything it could to give those weeks a run for their money. Over the courseof this week, we’ve had to sort out our seniors into positions for the “secondmake” (we’re a military school, and at intervals throughout the year, ourcadets are eligible for new positions and new rank). Our seniors have twomakes, which means they interview for and are promoted to a position at the endof their junior years and then again halfway through (their rank can change atother intervals, but they don’t usually change positions). As a side note, thesophomores and juniors have three makes. This has to be one of my leastfavorite times of the year. You see, I like my boys. Some of them do a greatjob in the military system, some of the struggle, but I really do like them alland appreciate them for who they are. But right now, although I’m by no meanssolely responsible for the promotions for my unit, I am the face of promotions, and since there are so many leadershippositions available, and since this is in a real way the “last chance” forthese seniors (sort of—they can still be raised to higher rank, even thoughtheir positions won’t change again), we’re bound to have disappointed guys. Sometimesit’s a matter of a guy underperforming in his job and so not getting the nextposition he wants, but at least as often it’s a case of some other kid doing a great job and elbowing him out or havingto make difficult decisions between guys who have similar credentials. Weagonize over these decisions, but we’re still going to have guys who aredisappointed and we may very well look back in a few months and discover thatwe “made mistakes.” I put that in quotation marks because I’m not comfortablewith the terminology, because it seems to imply that we “should have” knownbetter, but the reality is that we try to make the best decisions we can, andfor one reason or another, those decisions may not work out.

Did I mention that this is not my favorite time of the year?

And then, so that our New Cadets don't feel left out, the end of this week marked our invitations to "First Boards." The Boards process is the process through which New Cadets become full members of the unit, by passing some tests, following the rules, etc. We have several invitations to Boards throughout the spring, but of course there's a certain prestige to being chosen for First Boards. In the long run, it's not that big of a deal, but right now it probably feels huge to the guys who are invited... and for some of them who aren't.

That's right: we find all sorts of ways to disappoint kids around here!

On top of all that, for myself I have to prepare and submitmy “Annual Performance Review” self-reflection, documenting what I’ve been upto for the past year. At the same time, we’re coming to the end of the semester,so we’re trying to push all of our cadets to finish the semester strong,getting in any missing work, preparing to the best of their ability, and allthat. Plus all the usual day-to-day stuff.

Not surprisingly, blogging has had to take a back seat towork and home life, especially giventhat the home internet service which was supposed to start working for us lastTuesday has not, in fact, started working. We didn’t even have time or energyon Wednesday to look into it, and when we did on Thursday, we were told thatsomeone was supposed to call us about it. Sorry about that! Turns out there’ssomething wrong with our lines (our money is on the DirecTV guy hitting thephone cable when installing his own) and they’ll have to send someone out totake a look at it. That should happen by the end of this week. Ugh.

So yeah, no way blogging was happening for me.

We had an up and down Sunday. The weekend as a whole hasbeen a nice recovery period. Then today we went up to church for the first timesince before break started, and we went to Fiddler’s Hearth afterward, which asa revelation for us. Wow! We had heard of the restaurant, but we were superimpressed. The food we had was all great and we loved the atmosphere. While wewere there, a guitar player/singer/harmonica player and a hammered dulcimer /improvised percussionist were performing, and they were great. The place issmall enough—and the tables large enough—that we ended up sitting at one end ofa table that was already occupied by another couple when we arrived. Actually,it was kind of nice. We could hardly help interjecting ourselves into eachothers’ conversations, which was no bad thing. I mean, sure, it could havebeen, but it wasn’t. And when they left and a family with a baby a few months youngerthan our daughter took their place, that turned out well too.

Unfortunately, we both spent much of the rest of the dayfeeling ill, and we never did figure out why. Something we ate? Are we comingdown with a bug? We still have no idea.

MONDAY UPDATE: Still no idea what had us down yesterday, but I'm feeling better. Lauren doesn't seem to be, but so far she's soldiering on.

Back in the Saddle(s)

2012-01-09T16:18:00.000-05:00

Although I actually spent all yesterday evening in the barrack on duty, today marked the official return to school. I had blogged earlier about the way that break takes us out of our routines, so I guess now it's time to blog about getting back into routines.
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I won't be writing about work, but the habit I'll spend my time on involved getting my fix of exercise. Even though my phone alarm failed to go off (I refuse to believe we didn't hear it at 5:30, since we certainly heard the 3 am "nature sounds" alarm on the radio out in the living room), I did get a workout in this morning. I continue to tinker with the routine, trying to find (decide) what fits my goals and constraints. Although I enjoyed my 90 days of P90X, now that Lauren and I need to either drive in to work together or else take two cars, I have trouble with a lot of the P90X workouts, because they tend to run to an hour and fifteen minutes or more. Anyway, I'm also very taken by the 4-Hour Body ideas of a "minimum effective dose" when it comes to exercise, and I suspect that P90X almost over-does it sometimes. So I think what I'm looking at will be something like this:

Monday: a pared down workout that focuses on exercises that work several muscles in a major group (bench press, deadlift, lat pulldowns) plus an ab workout with the dreaded Torture Twist. After three weeks off, they were, in fact, torturous.
Tuesday: yoga (I haven't done yoga in months now because of my shoulder injury, and I miss it), probably the P90X DVD.
Wedhesday: either similar to the Monday workout or some kind of shoulders and arms workout (maybe the P90X workout, but I'll probably cut it down to fit my schedule)
Thursday: I lead a plyometrics class, which is [ever more] loosely based on the P90X program.
Friday: an exercise routine that looks very much like Monday's
Saturday: P90X Kenpo X workout
Sunday: P90X X-Stretch

Day 1 back on the wagon is in the books. Assuming the scales haven't been recalibrated while I was gone, it looks like I haven't put on any weight in the past month, despite spending the holidays eating like the pig that we ate for Christmas. I'm back in the saddle and--so far--have no sores to report.

Book Review: Zone One

2012-01-08T10:26:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago, we heard an interview with ColsonWhitehead, talking about his zombie novel ZoneOne. I haven’t read anything else by Whitehead, but I was intrigued by azombie novel written by a writer with credentials as a “serious” “literary”writer. I also saw figured it was the perfect gift for a couple ofEnglish-teaching zombie-fanatic friends, so we bought a copy, read it, andpassed it on (yeah, we’re those people).

Considering that I identify as a huge fan of fantasy andscience fiction as well as an English major and former high school Englishteacher, this had the potential to be a great read by combining two greattastes that go great together. Unfortunately, it was only a good read.

The basic premise is this: the zombie apocalypse has comeand decimated civilization, but the remaining humans have come together to pushback the undead tide and reassert civilization. Our protagonist, called MarkSpitz, has survived and works for the government as a sweeper in New York City,working with a team to clear out the remaining “skels” and "stragglers" in Zone One of New YorkCity after the marines--the real soldiers--have been through. As part of Project Phoenix, they will pave the way for the resettlement of America's greatest city by the other survivors, who are currently holding out in protected refugee camps. The novel follows him and his team (Gary and his squad leader Kaitlyn) asthey go building to building, with frequent flashbacks to life before “Last Night”and his life in “the Interregnum” before the government (in Buffalo, of allplaces) started picking up the pieces. In some ways, it felt reminiscent of theliterature of the Viet Nam war, soldiers just slogging through, suffering fromthe effects of their horrific experiences, but continuing on with their routinesas sweepers. Their lives, either in the present or in flash-back, are not particularly heroic or action-packed, except for brief momentsthat are almost over as soon as they’ve begun (this is especially true since the zombies we see are mostly your typical slow-moving horde zombies, as well as a number of totally passive zombies who just sort of stay put, lost in some routine or memory, basically doing nothing).

Genre fiction is caricatured as being more shallow than“serious” fiction, particularly in terms of characterization and what we mightcall significance or meaning. The reality is that genre fiction can be everybit as deep, though it can also be every bit as shallow as its detractors thinkit is. But in any case, you would expect that Whitehead would be bringingsomething a little more to the zombie novel. And sure, he spends time oncharacterization and reaches for significance. The problems, as I see them, areat least two-fold. First, the zombie genre is pretty well developed in film andprint, and the zombie as symbol has been pretty well mined. Whitehead toucheson those interpretations of zombies, and sometimes he makes clever uses of thegenre’s tropes, but he doesn’t really show us anything particularly new. And atthe same time, as he makes the novel more “literary,” he makes it ratherpainfully slow at times. Say what you will about genre fiction, the plottypically moves along at a good pace, and even the writers who are striving fordepth in their writing can typically keep a plot zipping smoothly along at thesame time. Whitehead really doesn’t: call the process plodding more thanplotting. Not—I hasten to add—that this was a deadly flaw or I ever consideredputting the book aside. Whitehead did, in any case, do enough to make me careabout the characters and the world he was drawing, and at times he displays great cleverness or perfect phrasing; in large measure these elementscompensated for the slower plot.

I feel like I'm being quite critical, when the truth is that I enjoyed the novel well enough... just not as much as I hoped. And all that said—spoiler alert here—I did rather like whereWhitehead takes it at the end: instead of a resurgence of humanity, thebastions of resurgent civilization crumble, plunging those who escape its fallonto their own individual and small-group resources. Forget the happy ending,forget any sense of the inevitable resurgence of civilization. Mark Spitz and others like him may survive past the end of the novel, but it's a zombie world now, not a human one, and the old paradigms don't apply.

Why they’d tried to fix thisisland in the first place, he did not see now. Best to let the broken glass bebroken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let thecracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new placesfor things. That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had endedand now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because theyhad never seen it before.

Whatever the future will be like, it won't be like the past, which is what the human characters have more or less universally been trying to do. There's a sense that Mark Spitz may be able to make it, there's a sense throughout that this very average man (throughout his life, he was a B student, an average employee, excelling at mediocrity and never standing out for either competence or incompetence) is about as well-adapted to the new world as anyone could be, especially here at the end where he's realized the truth about the world he inhabits.

7 January 2012

2012-01-07T21:29:00.001-05:00

As noted earlier, we have been without home internet sincemoving. We had some good fortune as we figured out which neighbor had internetand optimized our computer and iPod placement in the house to pick up thesignal. Then the last two days, the wireless was broadcasting but for somereason it wasn’t connected to the internet. Hey! Neighbor! We’re counting onyou here! Reset your router!

Add to that the fact that we’ve been too busy to go seekingout internet at our offices or the coffee shop, and you have the reason why Ihaven’t been posting the last several days. Even when we went somewhere tocheck e-mail, I didn’t have time to put together a coherent blog post.

Finally, at the end of last week, we got a call fromAT&T telling us that they had finally figured out that, in fact, they couldprovide us internet. And they could get us hooked up… next Tuesday. Night. Ahwell. We’ll take what we can get. One thing they could do for us: give us theirfastest internet connection for less than we used to pay for their standardspeed (for the first year—we’ll see what it looks like in 12 months).

Today, the neighbor’s internet has started working again, asmuch as it ever did for us, but we’re looking forward to getting our own goingTuesday night. As it is, we’ve been pretty busy anyway: Friday, family startedshowing up to spend the weekend with us and then today was our daughter’ssecond birthday. For her party, she had 3 grandparents, 2 aunts, an uncle, 7children 5-years-old or younger, plus 9 of their parents. Most exciting of all,she had a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cake (Lauren did most of the work, though Ihelped).

In case you're not familiar, this is not some kind of Van Gogh take on Mickey Mouse--it's the Clubhouse, in which different buildings (it's more the Mickey Mouse Compound than a single clubhouse) are in the shape of different parts of Mickey's anatomy.

It’spretty amazing how much has changed in the last two years (or in one year, forthat matter!). Two years ago, we drove to the hospital in the middle of thenight. By morning we had 9 inches of snow and a beautiful baby girl. Now wehave an even more beautiful 2-year-old. She’s chatty and amusing and amazing,and thanks to Christmas and her birthday, she’s amassing quite a load of toysaround here. One year ago, she couldn’t feed herself, couldn’t really walk ortalk—now she’s more or less unstoppable. I’m sure by the time she turns three,she’ll be even more amazing to us—and by then she’ll be a big sister, whichwill represent an even bigger change in our whole family.

Darker Kiddie Lit

2012-01-04T20:46:00.003-05:00

Before Christmas, as we let our 2-year-old watch various holiday specials, we noticed something. She is a big fan of Mickey Mouse, by way of The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Naturally, then, we TiVoed the Disney special, which was a bunch of the old shorts (which we both remembered at least vaguely from our own childhoods. In one, Pluto chases around Chip and Dale, who have entered Mickey's house; Pluto's feelings toward the chipmunks are, well, about what you should expect from a dog toward rodents. In another, Donald Duck--in his usual cranky form--wages a fierce snow war on his nephews. What stands out for us is how, well, nice all the characters basically are to each other on The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. The main characters are always friends to each other; Pete sometimes acts as the "villain" of the show, but he's always brought around by the end, and everyone is always nice to him no matter what he does to them. The older shows have a much wider range of feelings and behaviors, particularly with regard to more negative emotions.

And then there's the Charlie Brown Christmas special. You know, one of the most-beloved animated holiday specials of all time. But wow. I'd forgotten just how mean the kids basically are to each other. Lucy bullies everyone around, characters call each other "dumb" or "stupid." At times, they're just plain mean to each other. Yet, it has endured--will any of the nicer, gentler animated features that are being produced today?

The thing is, much as we would like to think that it's otherwise, kids really are mean to each other (sometimes). They really do call each other names, even from a young age. It was the same when I was a kid in the '80s, judging by Charlie Brown, it was true of kids in the '60s, and I have no doubt that it's true today. It would be a better world if it weren't so, but it is, and perhaps that fact speaks to the special's staying power (and that of the Disney special I referenced earlier). Some people are jerks, sometimes even good people get frustrated and upset, and sometimes imperfect people see the error of their ways and sometimes they don't. File it under "art imitates reality." We can and should discourage our kids from treating each other so poorly, but that's not the same as insulating them from its fact.

Related to this, we recently heard little more than the fact of Peggy Orenstein (author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter) on The Diane Rehm Show. I heard perhaps 2 minutes of the broadcast and Lauren heard a blurb for it, but I mentioned it to her again later and she saw and picked up the book at our local library because it spoke to concerns she herself has had. Lauren read to me portions of one of the chapters, comparing the sanitized versions of various fairy tales to their original versions. She read a few, and she also pointed me to this passage from Orenstein's book:

if you believe the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, we avoid the Grimms' grimness at our peril. His classic book The Uses of Enchantment argues that the brothers' gore is not only central to the tales' appeal, it's crucial to kids' emotional development. [...] According to Bettelheim, fairy tales and only fairy tales--as opposed to myths or legends--tap into children's unconscious preoccupations with such knotty issues as sibling rivalry or the fear of an omnivorous mother. In their tiny minds, the fearsome giant may be transformed into the school bully, a menacing wolf into a neighbor's put bull. Fairy tales demonstrate that hardship may be inevitable, but those who stand fast emerge victorious. What's more, he wrote, the solutions to life's struggles that fairy tales suggest are subtle, impressionistic, and therefore more useful than either the spoon-fed pap that passes for kiddie "literature" these days or the overly concrete images of television (and now the Internet). He goes so far as to say that without exposure to fairy tales a child will be emotionally stunted, unable to create a meaningful life.

This speaks to me of the same issues I looked at above. Children may not be able to work through or understand all the nuance of the darker stories, but perhaps in the end that will be part of their appeal, part of what keeps drawing one back to them. What we acquire without effort is often not valued highly or really internalized.

There's surely something to be said for "age appropriate" material, but being sensitive to that probably shouldn't mean avoiding darker, more difficult material that is more challenging for children and adults as well. In the end, our job as parents is to prepare our children for life, and "Therefore, since the world has still / Much good, but much less good than ill," part of our job is to prepare our children for the difficult realities, and we can't do that without some exposure to the darker side of life, and stories allow them--and us--to do that in a safe(r) manner.

Your thoughts?

Grooves and ruts

2012-01-04T09:31:00.000-05:00

"I'm in a groove now, or is it a rut?" -- "Face Up," Neil Peart (Rush)

The simple fact is that we are creatures of habit. That's good when we can get ourselves "in the groove," but it's something else when we're in a rut and we can't seem to get out of it. The standard advice--and it's good advice, as far as it goes--is that we break bad habits not by resisting them directly but by replacing them with new habits.

Into this, add the experience of being an educator. One of the realities of being an educator is that we live on a peculiar calendar that we share with kids but not with most other adults (except, tangentially, parents). It's hard, of course, to overstate the positives of a 2 or 3 month summer vacation, not to mention up to a week at Thanksgiving (some schools, of course, have only a few days), 2-3 weeks at Christmas, 1-3 weeks in the spring... the vacations are nice. From the perspective of habits, these breaks can be blessings and curses. Throughout the years, I've found breaks to sometimes be just what I needed to break out of a rut.

Right now, though, I'm feeling the way that a vacation can break up good habits. During the fall, I formed some good habits in terms of diet and exercise. Not only has this winter vacation thrown off those habits, but the fact that we moved is going to make it more difficult to reestablish good habits. The primary way this manifests comes from our new distance from school. Formerly, we lived on the edge of campus. I could walk/jog to the gym when I woke in the morning and I could easily go home for lunch. When we start back to school, the routines are going to be different: we live a mere 2-ish miles from school now, but that will mean driving in the winter, and while I may bike to school in warmer weather, that too will be a very different schedule. If I drive in to work out in the morning, do I just stay on campus after my workout, showering and dressing there? In that case, I have to figure out a different approach to breakfast, and we'll be driving two vehicles to get Lauren in to work too. If I drive in and then drive back home, the timing will almost certainly be different. I already arrive more or less when the gym is opening, so I can't go earlier... will I need to shorten my workouts in order to get back in time to shower, eat, dress (in whatever order) and get back to work?

And then there's lunch. Do I go home for lunch, driving two ways (and risk losing my parking space)? Do I plan ahead in a different way to just take my lunch along with me? Eat more meals in the dining hall? With a little planning, I might manage some kind of hybrid plan, bringing some portions of my meal and foraging the rest at the dining hall. The new situation, I suppose, presents opportunities, but in some ways I'd rather just stick with what I already know works!

How are you seeing grooves and ruts playing out in your own life in the new year and the old?

Film Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

2012-01-02T02:23:00.000-05:00

I am one of the approximately dozen Americans who has not read either this novel or its sequels. Thanks to my in-laws babysitting for us, I have see the film, and Lauren and I both quite enjoyed it. (Wrote this review back in 2011).

I haven't read the novel, but something about this film gave me the distinct impression that it's awfully hard to transpose a mystery novel to the big screen. I read a writer once who claimed that a film is about a 120-page novel--meaning that anything longer than that had to be edited down. Certainly, we're all familiar with that tendency to pare a novel down to the bone to get it to a reasonable film length. The problem in the context of a mystery is that mysteries thrive when we have a slew of characters all with plausible motives for the murder in question and at the same time we have more than enough information to find the killer (which is to say, we have evidence of the actual killer and red herrings that lead us to suspect others). In a novel, a writer has a lot of space to do that; in a film, not so much. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, although we had a large enough cast of potential killers, it didn't seem like we ever saw enough of any of them--or their possible motivations--to have any idea which of them did it, much less why or how. And that takes away some of the pleasure of a good mystery. I have a suspicion that the best film mysteries are the ones that were written for the screen in the first place, because they are written to fit the form. In adapting a novel, there are so many other things to do, as the writers decide what to keep and what to lose, how to balance the needs of the fans of the book with the needs of the film-only audience.

From the standpoint of writing a film mystery, it doesn't help to develop the characters as much as they were here, but of course, that's also one of the compensations we get--the fact that our characters have a real sense of depth to them, which takes time to develop (and I suspect that this, too, may have been short-changed from the book to the movie, because such things almost always are, but it was here).

Another thing really helped: the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The did a fantastic job of building tension through the notes they played--and the ones they didn't. As Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) are putting together the pieces of the mystery, the score is ratcheting up the tension, and then in the following scenes, as the stakes are getting higher and higher, there's no music. It isn't needed. They've already done their job, putting us on edge, and now the action can speak for itself. Masterfully done, and that's just a representative example.

Okay, from here on out, be prepared for all sorts of spoilers.

My initial reaction to both the fact of and the speed of the sexual relationship between Mikael and Salander was disbelief. After being violated by lawyer Nils Bjurman (spot-on creepiness by Yorick van Wageningen), I was surprised that she would want to have a sexual relationship with any man... but then, we have seen her jump quickly into a casual hookup with another woman, and in both cases a key component of the encounter seems to be the fact that she is the initiator, she is the one who sets the terms. Similarly, it seemed to me a signal of how troubled she is, that she jumps into what Mikael acknowledges to be "probably a bad idea." And, at the same time, it's telling that she so clearly misreads the situation. When it ends badly for her by the end, it shouldn't have been a surprise: although he's a decent man in so many of the essentials, several facts are incontrovertible: he cheated on his wife to start this relationship with his co-editor, and has still had an on-going relationship with her when he went north to investigate. It's not surprising that he would be willing to have sex with another woman, nor is it surprising that he might do so casually. Recall that we're told his wife left him as a result of the affair--not the other way around. He's a cheater, but not necessarily a leaver.

In a number of ways, the story explores the theme of vengeance. We have Lisbeth taking vengeance on Bjurman; Blomkvist seeks vengeance on Wennerström (and, in a sense, so does Henrik, though his primary interest is in vengeance against whoever killed Harriet. We the audience are tacitly pulled into this, too, because while Lisbeth may make us squirm as she tortures and forces Bjurman to act for her, I suspect that most of us also continue to feel a measure of sympathy for her; we like her even though she's the kind of person who could, rather coldly, extract the full measure of vengeance. And isn't this because we can't help but feel like that bastard Bjurman is, in some essential respect, merely getting what he deserves? He is a horror, particularly as he combines the indifferent cruelty of the bureaucrat with the personal cruelty of the rapist and abuser. But doesn't our culture generally tell us that the right thing to do with such people is to let the proper authorities deal with justice rather than "stooping" to vigilante vengeance? Yet when Lisbeth does it, we the audience tend to want to cheer her on--or at least forgive her entirely. When she later approaches the trapped Martin, we know that she has asked--and received--permission from Mikael to kill him, and we have little doubt that she will do it, probably with no qualms. Fate intervenes and the car blows up, saving her from legal culpability and a moral dilemma which we have to doubt would have been any dilemma for her at all. None of this, though, has caused us to turn against her though, has it? For all that, we're meant to feel sympathy for her at the end when Mikael implicitly rejects her by returning to Berger, and I suspect we do. What does that say about us?

Anyway, I'm rambling. Ultimately, this was a film that we enjoyed watching and that stuck with us after we left the theater. It was also enough to convince me that I should read these novels.

Resolved: 2012

2012-01-01T11:54:00.000-05:00

Last year, my resolution was as follows: "in the next year, I intend not to eat meat that I don't feel good about." I kept that resolution for a little over three months, then in the interest of other goals, I shelved that good intention. Over the course of the year, I lost roughly 35 pounds (at my lowest weight--I put some of that back on before year's end) and got my cholesterol numbers from very high to very good without medication.

With any luck, I can fail my New Year's Resolution just as spectacularly this year.

I'm tempted to just go back to last year's resolution. Even though I put it aside by April, it's not as though I stopped eating meat that I felt good about: all of the meat I ate at home fell into that category, it's just that I ate more dubious meat when I was elsewhere. The point of a resolution, to my mind, is to live more intentionally. We take stock here at the start of a calendar year and make a decision to change some aspect of our lives for the better, to try to put our actions in line with our values in some way or another. Last year, when I went back on my resolution, I did so because other intentions became more important to me, not because I didn't have the willpower. Well, I suppose it could be argued that I didn't have the willpower to reconcile the two. Anyway, the point isn't so much whether I was rational or rationalizing, the point is that I was intentional about what I was doing, and I had good results, even if I didn't stick to the letter of my resolution.

That said, I think my reasons for wanting to make that resolution in the first place were good ones and that's why I'll take this opportunity to try to make that commitment again. So, in 2012, I intend not to eat meat that I don't feel good about, which again means meat that's raised in a humane way (as best I can figure) and sustainable way. More details at the link above.

In more vaguely-formulated goals, I would like to sustain and consolidate the health gains I made in the past year, through continued attention to diet and exercise.

Outside of resolutions, there's a lot to look forward to in the coming year. On or around my birthday, if all goes as planned, we'll have our second daughter. As I'll become twice as much of a father (that's how having a second child works, right?), maybe I should resolve to be twice as good a father (is that even possible?). We're in the process of planning our dream home, and there's a decent chance that it could be built this year (though given the nature of building projects, it's possible it won't be, too).

All in all, 2011 was a pretty good year for us, and it's to be hoped that 2012 will be as well. Here's wishing the same to you.

2011: The Year in Music

2011-12-31T10:40:00.000-05:00

All right, I don't really go through new (or even "new to me") music that much in a year, particularly not when compared to the books I read. In a given year, I'm lucky if I discover a few new songs, never mind new albums. Still, one of the blogs I love to read just did back-to-back "Year in" entries for books and for music (I was already doing the book thing anyway), and it got me thinking. I'm not exactly on any cutting edges, but the music I've discovered this past year has entered into me, and so it's worth reflecting on a bit, at least for my own sake.

Over the summer, I was thinking about the high school a cappella group I direct (students do the administration of the group, but I handle the musical side, which includes arrangements). So I was thinking about music and I was hoping to bridge the gap a little between my tastes and my students tastes, so I figured I would be well-served by seeing what was in vogue and, out of that cesspool of banality, choose some things that didn't make me gag.

Of course, with those prejudices on the table, it should be no surprise that my methodology probably left something to be desired, since I avoided entirely all of the official Top-40 type lists where that actually-popular music shows up. Instead, I ended up focused on Esquire's 30 Summer Songs Every Man Should Listen To. I listened to all 30, primarily with an ear to what would work as a cappella, but also with an ear toward what I myself liked. Judging by the few that I've put before them, my students have never heard of any of them.

One of them really grabbed both Lauren and me: "Anna Sun" by Walk the Moon. Not only did we love the song, but then we found out that they'd all gone to Kenyon (and the song itself was very Kenyon-referential). How we failed to buy their album, I'm not sure.

We also both really liked: "Lost in My Mind" by The Head and the Heart and "Losers" by The Belle Brigade. I was also a fan of "Coming Back to a Man" by Dawes.

Our big discovery this year was Miracles of Modern Science, which we heard one Sunday on NPR. Lauren, perhaps because she used to play viola, particularly loved this rock group based on violin, cello, upright bass, mandolin, and drums, so I surprised her with a copy of their new CD Dog Year for Christmas. As an added bonus, when I ordered the actual CD through their website, not only could I download it immediately and listen to it for almost a month before Lauren did, but I also received a personal thank you card from the band for buying the album. How cool is that? On the strength of this--and their quirky yet effective music--I have to give them the status of top album of the year. For the record, I did buy at least one other album this year. At least.

2011: The Year in Books

2011-12-30T14:30:00.000-05:00

Each year, I like to do a post looking back at the books I read in the previous year. In past years, this hasn't told regular readers much they didn't know, because I was religious about posting book reviews. This year, not so much. So if you see anything on the list that you want to know my thoughts about, just ask.

Thanks in large part to the iPods that Lauren and I gave each other last Christmas, my numbers are way up, though most of them are audiobooks. Last year was a record low (since I started keeping records in '99) 24 books read. This year marks a record high: 64. Of those, 50 (!) were audiobooks (the rest included 3 ebooks and just 11 dead tree books). A few different factors go into this: the low number of "real" books comes in part from the lack of reading time that having a young child involves and in part from the fact that I was re-reading the first eight doorstops of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series; the high number of audiobooks is because my iPod lets me listen to them faster than normal (and I can get them for free from a whole bunch of Indiana libraries via direct download). Speaking of re-reads, 11 of the 63 books I read were re-reads (Erikson's plus the first four books of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire in preparation for reading the new one).

Below, I've listed all the books I read by category, indicating which were audiobooks (aud) and which we re-reads. As I wrote above, if you're interested in hearing more about any of these, let me know, because I haven't reviewed very many of them.

Fantasy and Science Fiction (34)

Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay(aud)
Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice (re-read)

Orson Scott Card, Pathfinder(aud)

Steven Erikson, Houseof Chains (re-read)

Orson Scott Card, TheLost Gate (aud)

Steven Erikson, MidnightTides (re-read)

Orson Scott Card, Empire(aud)

Orson Scott Card, HiddenEmpire (aud)

Steven Erikson, TheBonehunters (re-read)

Scott Lunch, The Liesof Locke Lamora (aud)

Patrick Rothfus, TheName of the Wind (aud)

Scott Lynch, Red SeasUnder Red Skies (aud)

Patrick Rothfus, TheWise Man’s Fear (aud)

Guy Gavriel Kay, UnderHeaven (aud)

Margaret Atwood, Oryxand Crake (aud)

Janny Wurts, StormedFortress

George R.R. Martin, AGame of Thrones (aud, re-read)

George R.R. Martin, AClash of Kings (aud, re-read)

George R.R. Martin, AStorm of Swords (aud, re-read)

Jasper Fforde, Shadesof Grey (aud)

George R.R. Martin, AFeast for Crows (aud, re-read)

China Mieville, TheCity and the City (aud)

Steven Erikson, Reaper’sGale (re-read)

George R.R. Martin, ADance With Dragons

Jim Butcher, GhostStory

Steven Brust, Tiassa

Ransom Riggs, MissPeregrine’s School for Peculiar Children (aud)

Albert Brooks, Twenty-Thirty(aud)

S.M. Stirling, Islandin the Sea of Time (aud)

Steven Erikson, Tollthe Hounds (re-read)

S.M. Stirling, Against the Tide of Years (aud)

Janny Wurts, Initiate’s Trial

S.M. Stirling, On the Oceans of Eternity (aud)

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (aud)

General Fiction (7)

Charles Dickens, AChristmas Carol (e-book)

John Green, WillGrayson, Will Grayson (aud)

John Green, An Abundanceof Katherines (aud)

Alan Bennett, TheUncommon Reader (aud)

John Irving, A Prayerfor Owen Meany (aud)

William Faulkner, As ILay Dying (aud)

Vladamir Nabokov, Lolita(aud)

George Pelecanos, TheWay Home (aud)

History (1)

Barbara Tuchman, ADistant Mirror (aud)

Humor (2)

Roy Blount Jr., LongTime Leaving (aud)

Stephen Colbert, I AmAmerica And So Can You (aud)

Non-fiction, Self-Help, Leadership, Business (19)

Timothy Ferriss, The4-Hour Work Wrrk (aud)

Stephen Covey, The 7Habits of Highly Effective People (aud)

Timothy Ferriss, The4-Hour Body (e-book)

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peaceis Every Step (e-book)

Brooks Landon, BuildingGreat Sentences (aud)

Joshua Foer, MoonwalkingWith Einstein (aud)

Nicholas Carr, TheShallows (aud)

Malcolm Gladwell, Blink(aud)

Stephen Covey, The 7Habits of Highly Effective People (aud, re-read)

James Hunter, TheServant Leadership Training Course (aud)

Adele Faber, How toTalk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk (aud)

Daniel H. Pink, Drive (aud)

Chip Heath, Switch (aud)

James O. Toole and George Guidall, Leadership A-Z (aud)

Daniel Amen, ChangeYour Brain, Change Your Body (aud)

John Medina, BrainRules (aud)

Douglas Mason and Spencer Smith, The Memory Doctor (aud)

Novella Carpenter, Farm City (aud)

David Brooks, The Social Animal

The No-Internet Blues

2011-12-29T20:05:00.000-05:00

In other entries, I’ve alluded to the fact that, during ourwinter break from teaching, we’ve been moving into a new house. We’re movingroughly 3 minutes away from where we lived, just a mile or so outside of ourlittle town. The move keeps us juggling a lot of balls all at once, and one ofthose has been the question of how the outside world will reach us: internet attelevision. As we compared the various options, nearly-physical pain grippedme. Every option seemed to be vastly overpriced.

As we got deeper into matters,we discovered something even stranger: when we reconciled ourselves to theoutrageous prices, it turned out that no one wanted to provide us with what wewanted at any price. What?!
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A little personal history seems in order here. When it comesto television, since my college days, I have typically been a reluctantconsumer. In college, the only access to television was in a shared lounge, andI was generally too busy for TV anyway. When I went to graduate school, I livedoff campus but again didn’t have time for TV anyway. When I started teaching ata boarding school, I continued to feel that I didn’t really need TV, but thenat the end of my first year I discovered that I could have it for free with noeffort, so I got basic cable. I continued to have it through my five years atthat job, but when I moved to Rhode Island, I once again abandoned thetelevision. When Lauren and I moved in together, we used the rabbit ears togive ourselves some semblance of television, but we didn’t use it that much.When we moved back to Pennsylvania, I was finally moved to get television,through DirecTV, seduced primarily by the promise of NFL Sunday Ticket.Ultimately, I regretted the decision, but that’s another story. When we firstmoved to Indiana, we lived in an apartment owned by the school, which entitledus to get basic cable for $8 per month. Actually, I think the living situation forced us, but for $8 we were perfectlyhappy to have it. And to become quasi-addicted to it, even though our viewingnumbers are probably well below the national average.

The internet is a similar story.Whereas television in my childhood was free, the internet was non-existent forme until I went to college. There, of course, access to it was free. When Iwent to graduate school, I briefly got dial-up service through AOL until Ifigured out that I could get it free from my university as long as my advisorsigned off that I “needed” home internet access. Living and working at aboarding school after that, I had free internet access in my apartment (and 95%of the other places I spent my time). In Rhode Island, my upstairs neighbors sharedthe password for their wireless internet, and although we had said somethingvague about sharing the cost, they never told me what I owed them, so I hadanother year of free internet. When I moved several blocks away, one of theneighbors had kindly left his or her internet unsecured, and since I could pickit up in half the apartment, that was good enough. One year back in boardingschool made the grand total look something like this: 14 years of internetaccess for the cost of one or two months of AOL service. Not too shabby.
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But, of course, it couldn’t last, and here in Indiana, we’vepaid $40+ per month. Since we were moving, we decided to look at other options, and since $8/month television was no longer an option, we thought we'd look into the possibility of bundling our service for better value. Somehow, though, everywhere we've called claims not to service our address. That is to say, after they find our address. You see, for some reason, we don't show up. Oh, the post office knows where we are, but Google Maps can't find us, and neither can any cable, satellite, or internet provider. The house has apparently been there for the better part of 60 years, but for some reason, it can't be found. I have no idea what to make of it.

I'm surprised that living just a mile and a half outside of town means that no one provides service. as though this house, nestled snugly between neighbors on a stretch of road that's lined with houses, is too far into the rural boonies to get any of the conveniences of modern society. It seems crazy to us. With what we're ready to pay, it feels like they should want to come run the lines out to us, never mind already having them in the ground or the air or whatever.

But no, that's not how it works, apparently. Just as frustrating as the fact of their repeated denials is the fact that each time we call one of these places, it takes about 20 minutes of being on hold and talking to a representative just to hear that, sorry, we can't help you. Did I mention we've switched to a pay-as-you-go phone service with limited minutes per month? Gah!!

The result is that we have no internet and no idea when we might get it. On clear days, my wife's computer can poach internet from one of the neighbors, but neither our iPods nor my laptop can manage to wrangle the signal. I've had to go into my office at the school or to the apartment we're moving out of in order to check e-mail or post blogs.

It's a good thing that we're also incredibly busy getting moved, or we might go crazy without access to the internet.

I pulled a fast one

2011-12-28T10:55:00.001-05:00

Over the past several days (or weeks—maybe we should sayweeks) I’ve taken in far more calories than I needed. So yesterday, our day oftravel to return home from the holidays, I took in far fewer than I needed. Forsuch a largely secular person as myself, I’ve done rather a lot of fasting inmy lifetime.

I cannot now recall how we hit upon it, but early in oursenior year of college, my best friend and I decided to try out fasting one dayeach week. We chose Sunday not so much because of its commonly-held holiness orits supposed Sabbatical qualities, but simply because it was the mostconvenient. During the week, we figured to be too busy to go without calories.Anyway, if Saturday was particularly good—as college kids might define it—we wouldn’tnecessarily feel like eating much on Sunday anyway and some kind of cleansingmight well be in order.

For us, we didn’t consider it spiritual, per se. Certainly,there was nothing we would have called religious about the practice. Instead, itwas an exercise of willpower. Just as we expected exercise in the gym to payoff (mostly, we didn’t exercise in the gym, but we understood the principle),we expected this exercise to pay off as well, in greater self-control anddiscipline. Our fasting rules were pretty basic: absolutely no solid foods;getting liquid calories was permissible, but not ideal; drink lots of water; ifnecessary, food could be eaten after the sun went down (this was a sort ofsafety valve).

For the most part it went well—better for me than for him, Isuppose, as he had a tendency to get headaches, either because he wasn’tdrinking enough water or for some other esoteric reason. He used the safetyvalve more than I did. But in any case, we did it and we made it through, weekafter week. I found that it actually seemed easier to go without food than itwas to moderate my intake of food. Easier, you might say, to avoid being ledinto temptation than to be delivered from evil. If you don’t even go to thedining hall or spend time around food, it’s just not that tempting, especiallyif you’re able to distract yourself with something else. And as bright,motivated college seniors, we always had plenty to think about on a Sunday.

One of the benefits I found was that although I felt likethere was a certain edge to my consciousness—something that was hard to defineas better or worse, just different—overall I felt more even-keeled. Without thespikes and dips of blood sugar that typically go with eating, I felt verysteady. And either because of that steadiness or because I was spending 2-3fewer hours on the task of eating, I felt incredibly productive on thoseSundays when I fasted. Aside from that, we just felt after each fast some senseof being cleaner or purer or better thanwe had been before we did it. Even knowing that might well be illusory didn’tmean that the feeling didn’t have a real effect, and it’s hard to call thatmindset difference a negligible one.

Yesterday's fast went nicely. I had some grape juice in the morning, as well as some green tea, and some vitamin water as we were driving back, and a whole lot of water, which was more or less running right through me all day. The sugar in the vitamin water actually made me feel worse for a little while there, but I soon returned to an equilibrium. And now I'm back on my regularly-scheduled nutrition plan.

Routine Holidays

2011-12-27T09:56:00.000-05:00

Earlier this month, I mentioned in passing that I think diets and exercise routines work best when one is on a regular schedule, and the holiday season from Thanksgiving through New Year's is not, for most of us, very conducive to regularity. For us, we're traveling during both holidays, and with the break from school, we're also working to get things done--this year, it's moving: could there be anything more disruptive to routine?

But just because it's bad for a diet and exercise routine is no reason to think it's bad. Consider our move: we're getting out of our apartment and getting into a house, and we need to get that done by the end of the month. And taking a week or so to go visit family in Ohio in the middle will make for a hectic few days when we get back. But at the same time, we were both pretty physically beaten down after a few days of moving, so heading to Ohio was a good bit of R&R.

And while I basically decided to eat whatever was put in front of me, well, that was kind of nice too. I showed during the last year that I can lose weight, so I don't need to worry about putting on a few pounds around the holidays, as long as I'm able to really commit to my health regimen when the new year comes around. So yeah: that was nice too.

More to the point, the disruption to regularity was a wonderful chance for all of us to spend time with our family: our 2-year-old got time with her grandparents and her aunts and uncle, we got time with our parents, with Lauren's siblings and sibling-in-law. And that was great. Since we live 4-5 hours away, we don't get to see them very much in the normal routines of our lives, so the holidays are a great opportunity for us to make up for lost time.

Now as we get ready to head home, to finish up that last disruption (moving), and get back to our routines, we really appreciate the chance to break out of those routines for a while here at Christmas.

I Choo Choo Choose to Write About Trains

2011-12-26T17:31:00.000-05:00

Trains and their tracks have criss-crossed my life for as long as I can remember, intersecting nicely with this month's writing prompts at CafeWriting. I'm adapting one of the prompts there to give you seven vignettes about trains in my life.

1. I grew up outside a town that was criss-crossed by train tracks. I remember an elementary teacher telling us that if nuclear war broke out, our little town in the middle of nowhere was on the Russian target list, because it was a railroad hub. I doubt the story, but it speaks to the importance of trains in our town: The Railroad was the single largest employer in the town. The nearest tracks were less than two miles away, which was close enough that you could hear the trains if you were listening but mostly you would tune them out if you weren't. One of our neighbors had retired from the railroad and took his career to the extreme: he had a segment of railroad track installed in his yard along with a red caboose.

2. As a kid, I loved the model train we had in the basement. We had it set up on a one-piece ping pong table on top of our pool table. I built scenery for it, mostly pretty rough stuff, like a drive-in movie theater made from a cardboard box or roads made from paper. Imagination filled in the rest. I was older when a local man used our nearby community center to set up his own incredible model train town. It took up an entire large room and had such realistic scenery that it looked as good as the view from a low-flying plane. But in its way, my own train set-up meant more to me, because it was mine, because its places and history were populated from my own brain.

3. The practical effect of living near a train town was that you had to plan an extra 10 minutes for any trip if you wanted to make sure you arrived on time. To get to high school, I had to cross two different sets of tracks, and it was by no means impossible that I would encounter a train at both tracks. Even if you didn't sit and wait for trains, it still took time to make your way around the impediment. Train tracks and impatience worked together to ensure that most of us who grew up there got to know every possible way to get from point A to point B, as well as a decent sense of the probability that a given road's track would be unblocked by the time you got there, based on the direction of travel and the speed of the train. Trains coming into town tended to get gradually slower while trains leaving town sped up. You know, actually, if you grew up outside of town, you probably knew all the ways to get around on your side of town. The other sides might well be a mystery.

4. It wasn't until I went to Europe, in my early 20s, that I got to experience passenger rail travel--and fell in love with it. Of course, Europe is a different place (actually, lots of different places!) than the U.S. Without troubling about a car, the trains of Europe let me get wherever I wanted to go, easily, and all the time I could be sleeping or reading, walking around--whatever. After 8 hours of train travel, I could arrive feeling refreshed. Eight hours of driving? Yeah, right. Time in the train could be spent planning the next adventure with a guidebook, or writing in my journal about the last adventure, or writing postcards, or sleeping it off, or getting some reading done, or relaxing and talking with a traveling companion. Twice, I took advantage of a sleeping car, which doubled as transportation and hostel, taking us from an evening in Berlin to a morning through evening in Munich, and then another overnight train found us in Rome.

5. When we lived in Providence, RI, the trains weren't as good as in Europe, but they were serviceable. We could take a cheap commuter train into Boston on the weekend, getting there just as quickly as if by car, but without the need to find--and pay for--parking. There in the northeast, Amtrak is about as good as it is anywhere in the country, with more trains to more of the places you want to go. Lauren took the train into New York City just as easily. Now we live in north-central Indiana, and the commuter rail that runs across northern Indiana and Illinois from South Bend to Chicago provides a similarly easy way into the big city... except that we need to drive an hour to get to the train in the first place. Still, it's nice to avoid traffic and parking, and in a city like Chicago you can get anywhere you want to be through the use of other trains--the L in Chicago or the subways of other cities.

6. My hometown revolves so thoroughly around trains that it has a train museum. Despite the fact that my mother still lives in the house where I grew up, never in all the years that I or she has lived there have I gone to the train museum. A friend of mine assures me that it's pretty good, especially for kids, so we've put it on our To Do list for some future visit, but like so many local attractions, it continues to draw people from elsewhere while the locals ignore it--much like the caverns we have two miles from our house: never been there, despite going to two other caverns in my childhood. But anyway, we're going to get to the train museum. Some day.

7. One of the things that thrills my wife and me is the possibility of expanded train service. Rumor had it that a new line would be going from Chicago to somewhere by way of a town just 20 minutes from us. We were totally excited about that (and then the funding fell through). We heard they were going to build a high-speed line from Cleveland to Cincinnati. Even though it doesn't directly affect us, we have family in Ohio, came from Ohio, and just generally maintain an interest in the state. How cool would that be, connecting the three main cities of Ohio (sorry Toledo)? Bengals-Browns games? Take the train to the game and back--and sleep off the alcohol you had to consume to make that game bearable! Added bonus: residents of both cities can easily go see the only relevant football team in Ohio, the Buckeyes. Anyway, this apparently isn't happening either. ::sigh::

We didn't do it, but since we were honeymooning out in Oregon, we seriously considered taking a train out there--we just didn't have the time. Maybe some day. And maybe someday we'll be a country with a serious passenger rail service between most points A and B.

We can dream, can't we?

Christmas: Wars, Battles, and a General History of a Major Holiday

2011-12-25T08:15:00.000-05:00

Many social conservatives want to see a "War on Christmas," but probably more accurate a description comes from the title of Steven Nissenbaum's history of the holiday, The Battle for Christmas. It's not so much that we have a war on Christmas as we have had over the centuries a lively debate about what Christmas is and isn't. And yes, through the years some people have wanted not to celebrate it at all (but mostly those people were Christians--more on that later).

The date December 25 was taken for Christmas back in the 4th century, not because anyone had evidence that this is when the famous little tyke was born, but because those crafty Christians wanted to annex the pagan winter festival. From the Roman Saturnalia onward it was--and remained--a time of drinking and debauchery for many centuries. In 16th-century England, it was the center of a festival of misrule, in which people boozed it up, and the poor went door to door essentially demanding "trick or treat"--give us good food or money or gifts or we'll wreck $#!+. Think of carols like "We wish you a merry Christmas" and all its demands for figgy pudding, as well as all the wassailing songs and their demands. "Here we come a-wassailing," for instance, first reminds the listener that "We are not daily beggars / That beg from door to door, / But we are neighbors' children / Whom you have seen before"--and then they go on to ask for money, cheese, some of the Christmas loaf, and (of course!) some wassail. And in "Wassail, wassail," after they spend innumerable verses building up the master of the house, they get to the point, asking for drink and to be let in by the fire.

The holiday as a festival of misrule was basically accepted by the upper classes, too, as a sort of pressure valve for the lower classes. The social hierarchy is inverted once a year: no big deal. The wealthy would get angry with particular wassailer or particular acts (the common folk could get pretty rowdy and destructive if their demands weren't met!), but overall the drinking and singing and demands for food and drink and gifts were tolerated.

For exactly this reason, Christmas had a hard time making its way across the pond. The Puritans outlawed it on the basis of its nature as a holiday of drinking and debauchery, as well as on the argument that the Bible doesn't indicate when Jesus's birthday was, thus God has no interest in having us celebrate it. Nonetheless, people rather like an excuse to drink and revel, especially in the bleak midwinter, so it continued on the edges of legality in New England and had a bit more success in other parts of the country. Since it couldn't be ended, it ultimately ended up tamed--by a rather unlikely force.

In the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century, retail stores were just starting to take off. Standardized manufacturing was just getting going on a large scale, and retail stores were outlets for all these material goods. The problem? America was firmly entrenched with the so-called Protestant Work Ethic. That is, people worked hard, saved their money, and didn't buy stuff they didn't need. Retailers knew this would never do, so they are the ones who took the largest steps to inventing the Christmas holiday as we know it. They made Santa Claus big (okay, years of cookies and 2%-to-whole milk did that) and they marketed Christmas as a time of love and good-will and--you guessed it--gift giving. They employed writers to create the stories that presented this kind of Christmas. They made people nostalgic for a type of Christmas that hadn't even existed before: a warm, cheery, wholesome holiday--and it became precisely that. The St. Nicholas mythos got drawn into it (and St. Nick pulled to Christmas from his normal place at--duh--the feast of St. Nicholas in early December). And some of our ideas were just flat-out made up. In the process, Christmas went from being a public holiday to a private one, from one celebrated in the streets with the community to one celebrated at home with the family. From a drunken revel for adults to a child-centered holiday of gift giving.

I didn't get much further in the book, but I reckon it likely that, once commercial forces had sanitized Christmas and made it good and pure, Christianity decided it was high time to get back in the Christmas game, and they set about re-holy-daying it. That is, they claimed it for their own now that it was a wholesome time. And who can blame them? It's a nice little holiday.

But, of couse, retailers did their job too well. We've gone from the protestant work ethic to the consumerist spend ethic, and whether we work enough or not, by Visa we can spend! We don't just spend the money we have, we spend the money we will have, which is just a more positive way of saying the money we haven't. As the culture has changed and become more materialistic, so too has the holiday become ever more materialistic. Religion, naturally enough, fights against this tendency (we're reminded that "Jesus is the reason for the season," i.e. not Santa Claus or gift-giving). So, too, do more secular types who nonetheless see something negative in crass materialism.

Secular though I may be, I have at least that much spiritualism that I mistrust unchecked materialism--even as I enjoy the hell out of a limited degree of it. Because yes, I like stuff, just like most Americans do. But not to the exclusion of all else, and not beyond a certain point. There's a limit to how much stuff any person needs, and there are a lot of things more important than stuff. As long as we don't lose sight of those philosophical touchstones, gift-giving during this season is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Gift-giving is--to steal a phrase--an outward and visible sign of an inward condition. It's most meaningful when it comes from the heart and speaks to the heart, when it's freely given and not expected as a duty.

For me, Christmas isn't a religious holiday, though they're welcome to keep claiming it. It's a social institution that's evolved through many different forms and ultimately is--or will be--whatever we make of it. Although the name puts a distinctly Christian stamp on it, our brief look at its history shows us what an uneasy time religion has had throughout the centuries in trying to claim it. That's why I say it's a social institution: it has shaped our culture and been shaped by our culture, and anyone who participates in that culture, it seems to me, has a claim on that tradition in whatever form they choose to stake that claim. There was a festival at the winter solstice before Christianity claimed it by naming it Christmas, and I'd wager that in many places there was such a celebration long before Jesus was born. We need a holiday at this time of year, which is probably why many religious traditions--as well as non-religious traditions--have a holiday at this time of year. I suspect that even if something happened that caused everyone to cease believing in Jesus, we'd probably still celebrate Christmas, because it's just the sort of thing we want.

Never has that been more true than now, when I have one little girl and another on the way--the magic of Christmas has become for many of us the magic of childhood, as we adults are fueled by their excitement. And really, both of our mythologies speak to this reverence for childhood, whether it's the story of Santa Claus bringing toys to good little girls and boys or the story of a child born in humble circumstances and destined to change the world.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I should say two things: 1) this is based almost exclusively on Nissenbaum's The Battle For Christmas and 2) I've published versions of this in three previous years on this and my former blog.

Christmas Eve: Some Assembly Required

2011-12-24T23:30:00.000-05:00

We got to play Santa's Little Helpers tonight, putting together this:

Lauren had read on-line that it took a couple hours to put together. We hit a snag with the very first shelf, when the bolt didn't fit into the housing right. So after a few choice words, we moved on without it. If we need to, we can drill a hole and fix it later. It seemed to go pretty smoothly after that, and Lauren concluded that the people complaining about how long it took to put together must be idiots. Soon after that, our daughter woke up unhappy, so Lauren had to go get her to sleep, which meant that I had to finish without her (my sister-in-law Emily helped!). It took an hour and forty-five minutes, and there was a bit more frustration, but hey, it came together, which I guess makes me only slightly brighter than... oh well.

When she came out in the morning, she was still too dazed to be entirely excited, but the kitchen is vying with the doll house right now for "best toy ever." She also got pots and pans to go with it, so we had to nudge her to keep opening presents, or she would have spent all morning cooking "like Dada."

My sister-in-law and I also wrapped up a gift for my brother-in-law. He will never guess what it is:

Pretty cleverly disguised, don't you think? If you want, I can reveal in a future post what is wrapped up here.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Toddler Talk

2011-12-23T11:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's post's mention of our daughter and her language-learning suggested today's post: things our daughter does to amuse and/or exasperate us:

She has long loved phones, and will play with ours when they come within reach. She walks around, babbling away happily, but her conversations always start "Hello, this is John."

The other night while we were packing stuff, from the dinner table she yells out "I eat bread, okay?!" And sure enough, there she was with a loaf of Italian bread, gnawing away at it. She sat there and ate most of a loaf. Okay?!

Not too long after that, Lauren noticed her apparently painting. Painting the table and chairs. With butter. Not okay.

Last night, we caught her dipping water out of the dog's dish. When we said "No!" she dipped in one more time and backed away from the dish as she poured it on the floor. "Me wash floor!"

She can dutifully recite to us the information that if she's "naughty," "Santa no bring presents." She also knows that, among the presents she won't be brought, what she wants includes "kitchen," "phone," and doll house." When it comes to defining naughtiness, she can tell you "Me no touch TV." Of course, that doesn't stop her.

Speaking of presents, she was looking through the presents at grandma's house, she picked up one that was rectangular and thin and said "book." There's no fooling her, evidently.

For weeks now, she's been saying "Me help you," which we thought was a very nice, giving thing to say, even if we didn't need her help. Until we realized that she's actually saying that she needs our help. Which is useful information for us to know, I suppose.

She's gotten better about telling us when, for instance, she has a mess in her diaper, though she does sometimes give false positives in that regard, but when we say "Let's go change your diaper," she insists "No! I okay!" Even when she's got a poo-filled diaper or has pee soaking her clothes. "I okay!"

Light 'em up!

2011-12-22T08:02:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, my two-year-old and I were driving home late in the evening and she was just a bit fussy. To try to distract her, I got her excited about the Christmas lights that we saw. We'd pass one, she's be suitably impressed and occupied, and then... "More lights!"

Well, sweetie, that's not easy to do. They come when they come, and we live out in the country, so sometimes it can take a while. Still, we made it.

Then a couple nights ago we were all in the car together and we again got her to look at--and for--the Christmas lights. This time, though, her refrain is "I see more lights, please!" It's like her little brain is making neural connections at an astronomical rate or something....

I always loved Christmas lights when I was a kid. I referred recently to what may or may not have been the first time we enacted the tradition, but it absolutely became a tradition for us to drive around on Christmas Eve after the church service and look at light displays. Occasionally, we'd go to one of those all-out Christmas Village type things where you paid an admission fee to drive around and look at their displays, but mostly we just went to see what regular people had put up, free for the rest of us to view.

A part of me always wanted for us to put up some ridiculously detailed and inventive display of lights, but one way or another it just wasn't in us. I wonder what it is, though, that drives some people to create a huge winter wonderland on their front lawn while others decorate minimally (or not at all, though in that case there's often a very good reason, I suspect). This year, we didn't decorate at all, thanks to the move. We did put up the tree inside (that started as my gift to Lauren and ended as her first project before we settled in our first night (I put up the tree and got out the decorations, but I couldn't find the lights). Just yesterday one of our neighbors went from no decorations to enough white lights to read by without eye strain, so it's obviously not too late for us to decorate, if only we had the time or the energy. As it happens, we don't have either one. Anyway, since our neighbor's lights are powerful enough to blast through our black-out curtains, we really don't need to do any ourselves. I suspect our neighborhood is about to cause a brownout for the area anyway.

Cookies, etc

2011-12-21T20:55:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot of talk lately on Holidailies about baking cookies for the holidays, and I remember that tradition fondly from my childhood. But I always seem to find myself too busy, even when I'm not moving. Maybe next year? You know, when we have two children under the age of three. Yeah, I'll be baking like crazy.

My mother is supposed to take cookies to some kind of pot luck at the nursing home where she did rehab after a heart attack. She's refusing, though, insisting that she's going to make bars instead. I doubt that they'll throw her out of the potluck for her square transgression into a circular space. It's not like they asked for cookies and she's bringing sloppy joes. Even if she did, they'd be foolish to turn her away--she's always made mean sloppy joes.

My mother never considered herself much of a cook (though I suspect she'd put many, many people to shame in this regard), but I think she always knew that she could bake the heck out of sweets. Cookies, cakes, pies, but especially cookies. Cookie-baking was always quite an affair in our house--she and my dad would work together. She'd take out the mammoth Kitchen Aid mixer and stir up a batch of cookies that was at least triple the recipe (why spend the time if you weren't going to be able to feed several armies at the end of the day?). And then do the same for several other cookie recipes. Always we had chocolate chip. Our other staple cookies were peanut butter cookies and corn flake cookies. In later years, mom could never seem to bake cookies without doing (no joke) potato chip cookies. Other cookies would come and go. At Christmas, it was always a time for chocolate fudge and peanut butter fudge, and a few time she tried her hand at Divinity, which never matched up to what she remembered her mama making. Not knowing the difference, I certainly liked it well enough.

Other goodies that would be made this time of year included buckeyes (peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate) and her famous chocolate chip peanut butter squares. The squares she's planning to make this year in lieu of cookies are called Chewy Bars. It's not a great name for them, because 1) they aren't really "chewy" per se and 2) the name should really emphasize the fact that their active ingredient is cream cheese. Doesn't that knowledge make you want to say "yes please" faster than the name "chewy bars"?

I think it would be great to bake a whole bunch of cookies, mostly to give away. We would, of course, get to eat some ourselves, but mostly they would be for giving away. Maybe next year...

What are your favorite cookies to bake (or to have baked for you!) this time of year?

Moving loads, mostly just dumping off

2011-12-19T21:40:00.000-05:00

At the end of some days, you're so tired to can't sleep. Yesterday was one of those, and I feel another one coming on tonight.

You see, my wife and I are educators, and right after we sent the students to their scattered homes for break, we went into super-home-packer mode, as we're moving from our apartment into a house to make room for the upcoming addition to the family. Yesterday morning, I was up bright and early (thanks dog!) so I spent some time before 7 am building shelves in the basement of our new house, then came home and started ferrying good from one place to the other. Lauren set the goal for us to sleep in our new house last night, so like Cortez burning his ships, we packed our bed first (it's a Sleep Number, so we had to disassemble it), ensuring that we had to get at least that much done yesterday.

We did, but only just barely--it was close to midnight until any of us--including the 2-year-old--got to bed. Then the two year old woke up just about once an hour all night. And then the dog woke me around 6:15, which made me awake even if I didn't want to be, so I decided to go one further than Lauren: we would not only spend our first night in the new house, we'd have our first breakfast there. I just had to, you know, go back to the old apartment and get the supplies for breakfast!

Then we spent all day moving stuff. Thankfully, we had friends to help us. Our friend Marcy came over and spent 4 hours in the morning helping us pack, then she tagged out and her husband tagged in, helping us through the afternoon. About the same time, another colleague (Eric) showed up with high school boys in tow--yes! Eric had something else in tow: a trailer. With his trailer plus my truck bed plus four of us to load and unload while Mark and Lauren prepped things to be packed, we were able to work steadily. I should note that everything happened on a different schedule than we'd intended: we had originally planned to move Tuesday, but the weather reports called for snow/rain all day, which sounded like better unpacking weather than anything else. So even though we weren't really that ready, we made today The Big Move. Like I said, it worked out well, though. We didn't get our apartment totally cleared out (worse comes to worst, we have 'til the end of the month), but we got everything moved that we need help with, all the two-person jobs. With Lauren pregnant, we literally couldn't have done this, but even beyond this our friends were such a huge help to us today.

Now we're surrounded by boxes that, for the most part, are a random assortment of things that all just happened to fit into a box together.

Mutiny Before Christmas

2011-12-18T01:04:00.001-05:00

Two-hundred and eighty years ago today, my Sherck ancestor arrived in North America. It's not a story, unfortunately, that was passed down through the family, at least not through my branch of the family. I found this by finding the genealogical research that someone else had done. Anyway, I found it fascinating. Here's how it went down:

In May of 1731, Casper Schirch set out from Rotterdam with his wife and small child on the ship "Liebe und Einigkeit" ("Love and Unity") along with a number of other German Mennonite emigres. The name of this ship is the earliest documented example of extreme irony in my family, as you'll soon see.

The ship went to Falmouth, England, to take on supplies before heading out to cross the Atlantic. Twelve days after setting out, the passengers were assured that they were halfway there. Over six weeks later, still at sea, drinking water and food were being rationed. For the next six weeks, the passengers had no bread and only small amounts of water. Crew members sold rats to the passengers to eat. Oddly enough, no favorite recipes for preparing rat have come down through the generations of my family.

Many passengers died, and they were simply thrown overboard--stripped of clothes, not weighted down, simply left to float behind the ship. The captain demanded payment for the dead as well as the survivors. Looking for ways to meet this demand, passengers examined their trunks of possessions and found many things missing. Believing that the captain meant to starve them and take all of their possessions, the desperate passengers seized the captain and crew and took over the ship. Three days later, one week before Christmas of 1731, they landed at Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts after 25 weeks at sea. Only 48 of 156 passengers survived the crossing (Casper's wife and child did not).

The passengers were off the water, but they weren't out of the woods yet. The passengers took the captain to trial for his "barbarous treatment" of his passengers. However, the court acquitted the captain and crew because, well, that's what courts did (hmmm... wealthy ship owner or poor [German] immigrants...?). Officially, there was not enough evidence, so the Germans had to pay the court costs which, of course, they didn't have. So they were jailed. Welcome to North America, folks.

But he and his offspring did well enough in the end--in his lifetime, he became a successful farmer in eastern Pennsylvania. He remarried (twice) and had a whole bunch of children, many of whom had a whole bunch more children, and as far as I can tell, his lineage is in no real danger of going extinct.

Pa rum pa pum pum

2011-12-17T22:40:00.001-05:00

When we bought it, this seemed like a great idea:

But instead of fostering our daughter's musical creativity, tonight it interfered with the path of my foot as it sneaked the rest of me out of the bedroom after putting my daughter down to sleep. Nothing like the jangle of a tambourine and its friends to wake a toddler and make her twitchy. Instead of the half hour it initially took to put her to bed, I was in there for an hour and a half before I was able to sneak away.

Oh, and yesterday this box o' fun tried to kill me when I came to bed at 1 in the morning. I don't know what we have this for anyway: I'd like my daughter to be a musician, not a percussionist!

Just kidding--I didn't mean to denigrate any drummers out there (for the drummers: "denigrate" means to put down).

Mental Fitness

2011-12-16T05:37:00.000-05:00

I got up bright and early Thursday morning to go lead a fitness class at the school's fitness center. Sloshing through a rainy but warm pre-dawn, I arrived to find a line of the regulars waiting to get in. This is unusual, because usually the fitness center is open 15 minutes or more before its official opening time, 6:00. It was right around 6, and it wasn't open. No one spoke much and it seemed like everyone would have been content to wait there until, well, until they weren't, but I said "Well, for those of you who want to do it, we can have our fitness class up in the gym."

I thought I might get some extras into my class, but no, it was just my regulars. The class grew out of the plyometrics workout in P90X, but while P90X is designed to be done at home with minimal equipment, I can take advantage of the fact that our fitness center has stackable boxes made for plyo and add different exercises accordingly. Well, normally I can, but today I had to strip it back to a more minimalist workout and I had to do it on the fly. No problem.

Though not joining my class, most of the others who'd showed up did find something to do, mostly hopping on the ERG machines and rowing, or else walking the track. One older woman, though, felt the need to complain loudly about it all. When we thought we saw the fitness center monitor coming, she said "Only an hour late!" and said it again when she walked in (except that it wasn't her--whoops!). I let the woman know that I had e-mailed the Fitness Center's director and she said "Well, she's always late."

I don't actually think that's true. It hasn't been my experience, and although I've cut back my gym time, I had 3 or 4 months where I was there at 6 am four days a week, and I can remember one time that this monitor was late. But this woman was determined to be unhappy, and that was that.

I know in the past that I've reacted negatively to setbacks, and I'm only human, so I'll certainly do so again, but when you see it in someone else, it's easy to see how unproductive it is and the kind of negative energy it brings. I was glad, yesterday, to be part of the solution, getting people to go ahead and work out instead of just standing around or giving up and going home.

The key, if I may, seems to be flexibility. In my case, I just had to make some minor modifications to a workout whose ancestor, anyway, was done with almost no equipment, so that was pretty easy. But if, for instance, I had come in planning to do a chest and back workout, even if I really wanted to use weights and machines, I could get a pretty decent workout from push-ups and the chin-up bar that I know where to find. And if the workout I wanted to do was impossible, I could always go for a run or find something to do and not get too hung up on not being able to do what I planned. As long as you get something done, call it a win and get on with your life--it's too short to get so negative about it.

And you're all free to remind me of this if you catch me jumping to negativity!

Have a great weekend, everyone--maybe the reason positivity is easy for me is because we sent the kids home and started break. Three weeks! Which would be better if we didn't have to spend about a week of it moving, but c'est la vie. Best to you all.

Scarier: Santa or a 1000-pound animal?

2011-12-15T05:44:00.000-05:00

Someone got her first pony (okay, horse) ride yesterday. She warmed up on this beast:

And then she insisted that she wanted to ride a real horse:

And we walked her all the way around the riding arena, no problem. She was way calmer sitting on a horse than when she sat on Santa's lap last year. Heck, she was calmer on the horse than she is on grandpa's lap. I'm still laying even money that she cries when she sits on Santa's lap this year, though she did seem okay with getting a present from a horseback-mounted Santa yesterday. But again, there was a horse involved, so it's too early to call. Santa gave her this:

However, as you may be able to notice, its right rear leg is a little gimpy. I'm afraid we're going to have to put it down. Ah, the lessons the Christmas season can teach our children.

There's no Santa Claus?!

2011-12-14T22:43:00.002-05:00

On Facebook, a friend of mine wrote about her 9-year-old daughter finding out that (spoiler alert) there is no Santa Claus. She asked all of her friends when their kids found out. They told all these stories about how their children had been disillusioned in this regard. Since our daughter's just approaching 2, she barely comprehends Santa Claus, except to know that if she's good Santa will bring her a kitchen.

So, lacking a story to share, I just made something up:

My daughter is almost two and we've already told her straight up that there's no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no Tooth Fairy, and no God. She also knows that life is dark and meaningless. There's nothing cuter than hearing a 2-year-old say "I'm a nihilist."

I don't really remember when or how I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but I suppose it was ultimately good practice.

What about you? Do you have a story to share, either about when you found out or when your kids did?

Christmas Music

2011-12-13T23:47:00.003-05:00

Tonight was our school's Christmas concert, with an array of instrumental and choral groups, some dancers, and even a guest artist, a professional singer (alumna). It was nice, but I'm not going to say much more about it. Instead, I wanted to use it as a springboard to talk about some of my favorite memories of music and Christmas.

1) Vinyl. Growing up, our Christmas music in the home was on vinyl, and it was just about the only time of the year that we listened to music, aside from some patriotic stuff (Dad love Kate Smith's "God Bless America") around the 4th. The music I remember most was Mitch Miller's Christmas Sing-a-long with Mitch, which I think I loved as much as anything for the included singalong sheets. Also firmly lodged in memory were the Bing Crosby Christmas albums, particularly White Christmas and some record that had "The Little Drummer Boy," which was quite possibly my favorite Christmas song.

2) One year, right before Christmas, my parents bought a new car. From my young perspective, the most amazing feature of this vehicle was that it had a tape deck. I think we literally bought the car on Christmas Eve. On the way home, we stopped at a gas station and bought two tapes, both filled with Christmas music. That night, after an early Christmas Eve service at church, we spent a couple hours driving around looking at lights and listening to the two tapes we'd bought.

3) From my youngest days right up 'til now, I've always had a soft spot for Christmas Eve services, because they were almost exclusively made up of the singing of carols. That plus the solemnity of an evening service by candlelight equaled magic.

4) In high school, I was in our show choir, the Choraliers. I was in it three years, and with the director we had my last two years, it was awesome. We performed a lot of Christmas shows, and I loved it. Our director put together a good show and emphasized professionalism to us. It was so much fun to put on a good show, to bask in the appreciation of the audiences. I don't remember all the songs we sang, but two of the most fun were "Fruitcake" and "The Monotone Angel."

5) Also in high school, one year I had a solo at the Christmas concert. There's a tenor solo in "Twas the Night Before Christmas," and I had it. It was a real confidence-booster to be chosen for the solo. It was also a big dose of reality when I messed up at the concert. It would hardly be the last solo I would fail to carry off perfectly, but I survived the experience relatively unscathed.

6) My freshman year of college, I got pulled in to be the tenor in a barbershop quartet. It pulled me out of my comfort zone and gave me plenty more opportunities to botch music (the karaoke contest we entered was a particularly embarrassing example). One of the things we did, though, was to go around to the freshmen dorms and sing Christmas carols in 4-part harmony. It was so cool. Even after our lead--the guy who put the whole thing together--failed out of school, we got together a group the next three years to continue (and expand) the tradition. It was such a cool experience.

7) In graduate school, we did a Madrigal Feaste. So much work, so much fun!

8) As a young choral director at an all-boys school, I drew on my college experience and had our Double Quartet (which, sadly, rarely seemed to have 8 members) go around campus caroling every year. It would take us 2-3 hours on a night that was cold in a time of the year that was incredibly busy, but I don't think any of the guys ever regretted the time spent doing it. Their fellow students were appreciative (for the most part) and the faculty whose homes we went to were positively adoring. We could usually consume our weight in cookies and hot chocolate if they knew we were coming.

9) During one of the two years I lived in Rhode Island, I was pulled into a Victorian Carolers group called VOX (Voices of X-mas). We performed probably 2-3 times each week during the month of December, with gigs split charity work--hospitals, nursing homes, and the like--and swanky, exclusive events that paid well. Even the latter was ultimately charity work, because all the money we raised beyond operating costs were donated to charity. I loved that experience, and I've been meaning to recreate it where I am now, but it's just so hard to find the time when you're starting a family. One of these years...

10) The final spot is reserved for whatever it is I'm going to think of tomorrow, because right now I'm just rushing to get this thing written before the day's over! I'm sure I've forgetting at least one incredible experience with Christmas music. And if I'm not, well, then consider slot number 10 to be reserved for your own use, to share a story!

The Present Conflict

2011-12-12T22:08:00.001-05:00

Lauren told me today of a story a student told her from her childhood: at some point, her older brother sneaked down to the tree early on a Christmas morning and opened his presents before anyone else had gotten up. To solve this little problem, her parents started putting coded tags on the presents so that no one knew who each present was for until their parents revealed the code on Christmas morning. I thought that was a pretty clever solution.

But her brother wasn't nearly as bad as either Lauren or I were. Once, when I was probably preschool age or early in elementary school, sometime in mid-December I took a couple of my presents into a space behind the couch and opened them. I was definitely young enough that I had no plan whatsoever, so my misdeed was quickly discovered. Lauren, meanwhile, at age 12, had an aunt who taught her the tricks of opening her presents and resealing them without being detected. Another time, Lauren found the boom box that her parents were getting her and played with it--several times--before Christmas. She is, by her own admission, a terrible present-seeker: by which I mean that she has the terrible habit of searching relentlessly until finding them--she's quite good at it!

Speaking of hiding presents though, my mom had what must have been a terrible experience sometime around when I was in kindergarten. She was taking me to the babysitter one foggy morning when she ran into high water and pushed forward far enough into it that she got stuck. She made it worse when she opened the door and water flooded in. What I didn't know--but she was acutely aware of, was that she and my father had hidden all of my Christmas presents in the trunk of the car! She was sure they would all be ruined, but someone soon came by with a truck and pulled us out, and she discovered later to her relief that the gifts were undamaged.

So what stories do you have, either as parents or as children, of the arms race betwixt the two, in seeking to surprise or to be surprised (just a bit earlier than scheduled)?

The least-half-assed Christmas pageant ever

2011-12-11T22:21:00.001-05:00

Today was the kids' winter pageant. It was our first one in a Unitarian church, and it bore more or less no resemblance to the pageants of my childhood. Celebrating an almost ridiculous number of religions, it consisted of a parade of children with little readings--mostly from parents, but also from older kids--about the religions in question. Oh, and in between the congregation sang words that almost fit the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." It was nice enough, I suppose, and it seemed like they were working under entirely different constraints than we did when I was a kid, which is to say that they had no rehearsal time and no idea which kids would be there on the day of the pageant. Lauren ended up doing one of the readings, while holding Thea, who was holding a star. In my mind, that made her the star of the show.

The pageants of Christmases past were, by and large, the usual Christian fare: Mary and Joseph and shepherds and angels and wise men and wise guys. My mother was often critical of these--not the kids, of course, but the adults who were running it. Really, we were a fairly small, rural church--you can't expect off-Broadway Christmas pageants. As volunteer things not infrequently are, it was probably half-assed more often than not, put on by someone under-qualified and not particularly ambitious, either.

Neither of those adjectives described my mother in this arena, however, and one year she put her money where her mouth was, running the Christmas Pageant.

The first thing she did was throw out the script. We all know the story, so why bother telling it badly? Mom spent her working life teaching elementary school, mostly 5th grade, and at some point she had acquired a big book of Christmas stories that she would read to the kids. My mom loved reading out loud to the kids, and anecdotal evidence suggests that they enjoyed being read to. For that matter, I seem to remember loving when our teachers would read us stories throughout elementary school too. I wish I could remember the title--or, really, anything--about the story she chose, but I'm pretty sure it was something about bells. And then I'm pretty sure she paid someone in the community to write for our pageant a script based on this short story. Mom was determined to do it right and spare no expense.

My memory of the event is, admittedly, pretty vague. I think it was well received... but perhaps not as well-received as Mom would have liked for all the trouble she went to. In any case, that was her one and only foray into the dramatic scene of rural northern Ohio churches. I won't say, though, that it was because of a bad experience. I like to think there were just more half-assed things going on that she had to prove she could do better than whoever was making a mess of it.

Seriously, though, I think what sticks with me, with all the specifics stripped away, is the simple fact that she wanted to do something different and she wanted to do something well. The same old same old just wasn't good enough. And that's one of things I love my mom for teaching me by her example.

Introduction for Holidailies

2011-12-10T19:19:00.001-05:00

On the first day of Holidailies, I already had other things to write about, so my introduction got put off until today, when the well of inspiration was a little less wet.

I started blogging 7 years ago, sometimes blogging daily for years at a time. Since getting married three and a half years ago and having a child two years ago, I haven't been nearly as diligent about blogging. I'm an educator--once upon a time, I taught high school English and music, but now I work in residential life at a boarding high school. Sometimes, I really miss the classroom, but there's a satisfaction that comes from the sort of "teaching without a classroom" that I do in residential life.

My wife and I have moved quite a bit: our families live in Ohio, but we met in western Pennsylvania, then moved to New England (I spent two years in Providence, RI; my wife spent a year in western Massachusetts and a year in Providence), then we went back to PA for a year and now we're settling into Indiana with no intentions of going anywhere else any time soon. But that doesn't mean we've stopped moving--in fact, we'll be moving from the apartment we're currently in to another house before Christmas and then in another year or so we're planning to move into our dream house--we own 9.5 acres and we're currently working with an architect to design the home that will sit on it. In the meantime, though, we need the additional space because we've got another daughter on the way in April.

I'm an avid reader, reading quite a bit of non-fiction and fantasy, with some literary fiction and science fiction thrown in for good measure. I love cooking and I'm a fitness nut. I dabble in gardening and want to dabble more, and eventually I'd like to dabble in livestock: we'd like to have a little homestead and raise some of our own food.

My blog doesn't have a particular theme--it's about whatever I'm interested in, which covers a broad range of topics. I've written about my daily life as a husband and father, I've written about education, food, fitness, philosophy, politics, board games--the list goes on and on. As I said, I write about things that interest me, and I hope that readers will find these things interesting too.

I think this is my fifth year of Holidailies now--in the past, it's been a great way to connect with other bloggers and in recent years when blogging has been more fitful, it's been a good motivation.

Food Friday: Holiday Diets

2011-12-09T22:32:00.001-05:00

Quick note to anyone who may be interested: Holidailies, the blog-every-day web community, is back up and running again this year, under new management. It looks like they've gone back to the format before last year's Reddit experiment, and the month starts today.
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For the benefit of anyone who's new around here, I should say that through diet and exercise, I lost just about 30 pounds since the start of the year, which has put me at a healthy weight. At this point, I'm more interested in maintaining than in losing additional weight.

All that said, I believe the maxim that "It isn't a diet, it's a live-it." In other words, it's about changing eating habits and eating trends, it's about a lifestyle, not just a quick-fix (or even a slow fix). But whether you're at the point of trying to lose weight or just trying to maintain a healthy weight, the holiday season is a tough time, no doubt about it.

I can't speak for anyone else, but it seemed like the temptations started piling up around mid-October. As soon as the air got a bit cooler and thoughts turned to Halloween, candy and junk food started appearing everywhere. As I would walk around different areas of campus here, I would see candy out in bowls or bags, on offer to everyone, and doughnuts and pastries brought in for this group or that group. In our culture, it seems like we can't hardly think of a nice thing to do for individuals or groups that doesn't involve delicious-but-bad-for-you food. We buy food to bring in, we bake cookies or cakes... it's always about the simple carbs and the sugars.

And it's hard to say no, especially when people have baked something themselves, but even if it's store-bought candy, it can be tough to say no. "I'll just have one," we say, but one piece of candy spikes the blood sugar, which calls out the insulin brigade, which lowers the blood sugar... and makes us want more. That's not even to mention the tacit peer pressure of seeing everyone else reaching for whatever it is, or the way that our will-power gets drawn down each time we resist (studies show) and of course can be weakened by stress, fatigue, or distraction, all of which seem to ramp up just about this time of year, at least for educators like me.

Perhaps it's because of where I am (maintenance), but in some ways this seems like the hardest time to resist temptation. I mean, when you're in weight-loss mode, you've got your goals, you're immersed in your diet and exercise, it's easy (okay, easy-ish) to stay focused. But once you've reached your goals, it's easy to justify "the occasional" bad-for-you food because you know you're at a healthy weight. So what could one [insert food demon here] hurt? But of course, it's never just one, which is why for the last month or so I've found myself 5-10 pounds over my lowest weight of the year.

I suppose I can't really write an entire blog post just about the problem, even if I'm not exactly the role model for resisting temptation.

As these things go, the diet I'm following (the "Slow Carb Diet" outlined in Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Body) is easy to follow--I feel full, I enjoy the meals I'm eating, and there's a cheat day built in. For the first month or two, that was enough, and I followed it well. It's just all these temptations...

So here are some ideas:

1) Plan ahead: know what you're going to eat and when, so you aren't tempted by the bad ideas of others.
2) Convert others to your diet--it's so much easier when you have a like-minded community. If you can get your significant other on the diet, it's so much easier (Lauren is pregnant, though, and doesn't like the Slow Carb meals nearly as well as I do, so I'm on my own--it's okay, I understand). An on-line community of like-minded individuals is the next best thing.
3) Practice saying no. From "No thank you" to "I really appreciate the offer, but I'm on a diet that doesn't allow X," the more you say it, the easier it gets. It can be hard to say no, because a) you want the food and b) the people who offer it are so nice to do so, but as discussed above, decisions to give in to temptation have a tendency to snowball rapidly.
4) If your plan includes a "cheat day," be sure to remind yourself of that fact. "I would like to have X, and I can have X; I just need to wait until Sunday." Of course, that's hard because so often the food that's being offered so freely is right there, right now, and won't be anywhere near you when your cheat day comes around. Refer back to #3.
5) Take time to talk yourself up. Remind yourself of your goals, whether it's weight loss or maintaining the healthy weight you have. Giving your attention to these things before temptation arises makes it easier for you to say no when it does, because you're conscious of where you want to be and what you need to do to get there.
6) Drink lots and lots of water. It's not just that it makes you feel full, although it does. It's not just that it's good for you, though in general it is, because most of us don't drink an optimal amount of water. The thing is that we often mistake our bodies' signals for thirst as signals for hunger.
7) Stay focused and productive. If you're really engaged in doing something, whether that's work or play or whatever, you're less likely to eat. Haven't we all had the experience of getting so wrapped up in something that we forget to eat? And haven't we also had the experience of eating for no other real reason than because we're bored? Look to avoid distracting yourself, look to avoid multitasking (which is often a form of procrastination and distraction), and you're less likely to eat food you don't need.
8) Avoid temptations. If you know that so-and-so always brings in doughnuts on Mondays and leaves them out for everyone in the lounge, stay the heck out of the lounge! Find somewhere else to work or eat or take a break, take a route to the restroom that doesn't take you past there--do what you have to do, but don't put yourself in a situation unnecessarily where you have to exercise willpower. It's not about parading temptations in front of yourself to prove how great your willpower is, it's about getting results, so don't risk sabotaging yourself.

And I'm running out of ideas and I'm running out of time in order to get this in before Friday becomes Saturday, so I'll leave it at that--you're encouraged to offer your own ideas in the comment section, or to make any comments about the ideas I've thrown out there.

Oh what a night!

2011-12-08T21:57:00.001-05:00

But not that way.

Today, among my other responsibilities, I had to make a pitch about why I should move forward in the promotion process. As a result, I stayed up later than I'd have liked last night, given that I also had to be at the fitness center at 6:00 am to lead a class.

Naturally, going to bed wasn't bad enough--at 1:15, the dog woke me because she needed to go out. I fumbled my way into some clothes and stumbled my way the the door, then slid squishily the last foot or so to her leash. Wait. Slid squishily? Yeah, that's right--the dog had already pooped on the floor, and I stepped right into it or, anyway, slid right through it, smearing it just so.

I love this dog, but she almost didn't live to see daybreak. I did take her out, I didn't LEAVE her out as I was tempted to do, and I made some bleary effort to clean it up. Actually, I wasn't nearly as bleary as I'd have like to have been--stepping in dog crap does tend to wake you up.

An hour later, our daughter, from her cot next to our bed, woke up wailing. She had a bad dream, she was wet... let's just say she probably couldn't have been more upset if she'd been the one running into dog doo. Lauren, knowing it would take a while to settle her and that I had to be up early, so she suggested I might be happier in the other bedroom.

Grabbing my pillow, phone, and water bottle, I made my way into that room. The bed lay covered in all sorts of things, so I lay my burdens down to sweep everything else off. It's a shame the water bottle wasn't shut all the way, as it spilled over an area including the middle and one side of the twin bed. So I huddled into a dry spot and did my best to ignore my child's cries from the next room. I do think I got back to sleep before Lauren, so that's something.

I'm going to bed earlier tonight, made sure the dog's been out, and I'll hope for the best.

Kids say the darndest things

2011-12-07T08:27:00.001-05:00

I realized the other day that although my daughter counts "1-2-3-5," she has no problem with "11-12-13-14." I posted this on Facebook, and several other parents said that their children had trouble with four as well. Coincidence, or gap between the language and the way our brains are wired?

A few nights ago, while I was giving her a bath, our daughter said what sounded like "fungicide." I was startled not only because it's a big word for a little girl but also because, well, when the heck would she have heard "fungicide" from any of the adults she's around or during the limited TV she's exposed to? When I asked her to repeat what she said, it definitely sounded like "fungicide." She repeated it a few times, but it wasn't until she said "cumicide" that it clicked: "It's the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Come inside it's fun inside!"

She's not just a sponge for things she hears on TV, however. Ever since she was traveling in the car with mama and saw someone making an illegal turn, our daughter has been saying "What the deuce?" This sometimes causes confusion when her grandmother turns to chastising Lauren for the language her granddaughter has learned instead of getting her some juice ("want juice").

On a toy boat she has, there's a captain who she spontaneously named "Captain Pete." She carries Pete around almost as much as Mickey, Minnie, or Donald. Lauren did not appreciate my serenade of our daughter with "Captain Pete will get you high tonight!" especially when Thea started chanting "Captain Pete get high!" Lauren wasn't happy with me, so I determined to correct my error: "No, no, Thea. It's Captain Jack who gets you high." So I think we're all good.

We are, fortunately, still ahead of a friend of mine. When his children were young, the family had some sheep (he'd grown up with farm animals and wanted his kids to as well). They had five good sheep and one nasty one, which is how farm animals often come to you, I understand. A neighbor guy did their shearing, a real down-to-earth back-woods type who grew an unkempt beard, rarely showered, and frequently used colorful language. He also frequently struggled with that big, nasty sheep. He'd get the sheep ready to shear and then the thing would violently extract itself from him and he'd yell at it: "Fine! Go your own way, you son of a bitch!" One Sunday after church--oh, did I mention this friend was a minister?--they had some people over to dinner. After eating, they went out to see the animals, and that big, nasty sheep came running at them, at which point his 3-year-old daughter yelled "Get away you son of a bitch!"

So yeah. We haven't had anything like that yet. So I think we're all good.

Bad Parenting

2011-12-06T13:32:00.000-05:00

     "I suck! I suck!"
     Wow, I thought. She's not even two yet and my daughter already has a negative self-image. It's so hard raising girls in our culture...
   Oh, but actually what she was saying was that she's stuck. She says that a lot. Her self esteem is just fine--it's her tongue that's all twisted up in knots.
     That's a cute little anecdote, but I'm going to use it to lead into something that was neither cute nor funny. I was in a public restroom the other day, unfortunate enough to need to spend some time on the throne there, when I heard a man and a boy come into the bathroom. Within moments of entering, the little boy had done something--I don't know what--to cause the man (his father?) to berate him as a "dummy" and ask "why do you always have to be so stupid?"
     When I saw them, the boy probably wasn't older than 3 or 4, and the man, well, he hardly seemed old enough to merit the designation, maybe in his early 20s, but yeah, probably the father of this boy. And for all that his words were so mean, in his other words you could detect a note of concern, of care, trying to keep the boy from doing something he shouldn't, trying, perhaps, to do the best he could as a caretaker, but with no thought at all about the child's emotional health.
     Everything about the situation was sad. This guy shouldn't be taking care of a kid--taking care of himself was probably challenge enough. And this kid shouldn't be growing up with the constant message that he's stupid, inadequate, worthless. But there they are, stuck with each other, and I doubt their relationship is unique in its character.

Little Bitty Epiphany

2011-12-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, we had a nice time at church, but it seemed to be all downhill from there. (Fair warning: I'm going to talk sports for a while here, but that's not really what this entry is about. Skim if you must, if football really isn't your thing--I promise I'm going somewhere with all this!)

My Cardiac Cats, the Cincinnati Bengals, were playing divisional rival Pittsburgh, and it was a big game--both teams are fighting for a Wildcard spot, and though the boys in stripes lost the first meeting between the two, they only lost by a touchdown and had a lot of opportunities. They're a talented young team, and I thought there was a good chance they could win the rematch in Pittsburgh. I was hoping for a statement game like the one late in the 2005 season when they clinched the division there in Pittsburgh (I was fortunate enough to be at Heinz Field for that one), and I thought there was reason to believe this could be the game.

Lauren needed to work on her computer, so what we'd worked out was that we'd go to BW3's so that I could watch the game and she could use their free Wi-Fi to get work done (I'd have to split my attention between the game and child-care, but that was fine). We arrived just before kick-off, the Bengals held the Steelers to a 3-and-out, and drove down for a touchdown! I got distracted by Thea, then looked up to see that the score had been called back. Grrr. And they missed the third down conversion, so it was field goal time. Okay. They made the field goal, which was a bit of a letdown, but still an early lead. I got distracted again only to look up and see them re-trying the field goal... and having it blocked. Are you kidding me?

Meanwhile, Lauren was discovering that the Free Wi-Fi wasn't working. The laptop couldn't connect, and neither could our iPods. We talked to our server who talked to the manager, but we couldn't get anything fixed. Well, much as I'd like to see the game, we couldn't sit around with Lauren not getting work done! So we headed back to a place we knew closer to home. By the time we got there, the Steelers were up 21-0. ::sigh:: We sat down, ordered some food and beverage... and had similar problems with the WiFi. At least Cincinnati scored a touchdown soon after we got there to cut the lead, then they held Pittsburgh and got the ball back with just a couple minutes left in the first half--great opportunity to pull within 7. Except they couldn't, so they had to punt. Despite an obvious block in the back (I swear the Steelers always get away with ridiculously obvious penalties that anyone else would be called for), the punt-return-for-touchdown stood to make the score 28-7. And, like I said, the Wi-Fi wasn't working.

Oh, and did I mention that every time we walked out of anywhere, it started raining?

Lauren and I were both a bit grumpy, both a bit testy as we went to pick up a few things on our way home. Then we stopped to fill the car up with gas. Now, I have to digress just a bit here. When we drove back from Thanksgiving, I had some trouble getting the fuel door open (apparently because I hadn't turned the car off). I pushed at it, trying to get it to open, and only got it when I thought to turn off the car. Then, the next time I went to fill up the car... it wouldn't open. Period. D'OH! Last night, at the suggestion of someone on an on-line forum, I was able to open it by hooking the release latch up with the driver's seat belt (it's on the floor by the door) and pushing on it at the same time, so I was preparing to do the same thing today to put gas in the car, but when I pulled the latch, it just plain opened, easy as that.

Now, I don't know if it was the unexpected good fortune or the crisp air or what, but it suddenly occurred to me that I was grumpy, that I was letting all this crap drag me down. I mean, really: so "my" football team is losing--so what? I should be too smart and too sophisticated to care that much about any sports, much less professional sports. So our plans didn't workout the way we wanted them too--and our backup plan failed too. So what? What world am I living in if I think that plans always work out just because I make them? Certainly not the real world! I've got a great daughter, a great wife, a great job, a great life. Why, then, should I let myself be brought down by such trivialities?

I got back in the car, surprised Lauren with a kiss, and explained my little bitty epiphany, and the whole shape of our day changed. We both stopped being grumpy and had such a fun car ride home, spontaneously playing with Thea by repeating in chorus every word or sound she made.

"It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour." --Henry David Thoreau

Holidailies 2011: Sunday Salutations

2011-12-04T17:14:00.001-05:00

I've somehow let a month and a half go by without writing here. I may have to stretch out a little bit before jumping right back into blogging, otherwise I may pull some important writing muscle.

I was looking forward to Holidailies as a way to get back into regular blogging, but it looks like Holidailies may have been discontinued. I think it was moved to Reddit last year to take some burden off of those running it, but that life support may not have been enough, especially as a lot of us were less-than-thrilled by the new identity of Holidailies over on Reddit. I see that MissMeliss and Kymm are working on blogging daily during the month, so I'll try to commune with them a bit and follow suit.
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Our Unitarian church starts has a time early in each service for folks to light a candle of joy or concern (it kind of reminds me of how many approached Meeting For Worship at the Quaker school I loved and left). I'm not really the stand-up-and-light-a-candle sort (I'm more the go-home-and-blog sort!), but if I was, I would have lit a candle of joy (and, for that matter, of concern) about the following:

We're having some work done before moving into a house later this month, and for the painting we hired a professional painter who works on our school's maintenance staff. He came before Thanksgiving and spent the entirety of a couple days painting for us, which made a huge difference in the look and feel of the house, so we had him come back on Saturday to do more painting that hadn't been quite as critical to us but that we decided we'd rather have done than not. He once again spent most of the day working, and when I saw him after lunch to drop off some more paint, I asked him to give me a call when he was about finished with the work.

When he did, I went over to see the work, get back the key we gave him, and pay him for the work. He thanked me profusely for paying him right then and there because someone else who he does work for hadn't paid him on Wednesday as he'd said he would and he didn't really have enough money to make it through the week. He'd had to borrow some just to put gas in his car to get to work. I had no idea that this guy was in these straights, which in some ways made it feel even better to have helped him: it's amazing sometimes that just doing a little thing like paying right away instead of putting it off (I'm sure it wouldn't have been out of line if I'd said "Oh, I'll get the money to you next week," especially since I didn't know until he told me how much I was going to owe him. But by paying him immediately, his weekend and his next week were made appreciably better. But at the same time, it wasn't like charity--he wasn't asking for help (heck, he didn't even ask for the job, we sought him out!) and we weren't "trying to do a good deed."

Widening the frame just a bit, it also feels good to be putting our home improvement dollars into the local community (we also went with a local company for some carpet we had installed). Of course, widening the frame also turns it into a concern as we realize that there are probably lots of people in the community who are living on that same edge, similarly not asking for a handout, and so remaining invisible. We may not have been looking to help, per se, but we were conscious of spending our money locally to the extent that we could, and this experience sure reminded us of the value of doing so.

Emotional Middle Ground

2011-10-12T22:13:00.001-04:00

In an interview recently on The C-Realm podcast, one of the guests took an interesting point of view on emotions, thinking particularly of negative emotions.

His began from the premise that emotions are a sort of signpost. They tell us something, but there are two problematic ways that we sometimes deal with them: ignoring or repressing them on the one hand and becoming too attached or wallowing in them on the other.

What follows from that is that we should take our emotions seriously for what we can learn from them, but then we have to move on.

That said, I think there's still a thing or two to be said about what sorts of things emotions can signal, but as I need to get to bed AND I'm typing this on my iPod (computer's in my office), I'll leave those musings for another time, though you, dear reader, are welcome to comment as you see fit.

Harvest

2011-10-10T21:37:00.003-04:00

Here I go, taking another prompt from Cafe Writing, this time option 2. I don't claim that this is particularly good stuff I'm writing, but it helped me get something out on paper. No-Prize to the first person who can identify the formal constraint I placed upon myself in this work of free verse. I could probably re-write without it and get a better poem, but if I hadn't done it in the first place I probably wouldn't have stumbled on most of the lines that I like, so there's some value there, I think.

The prompt was to write a poem about gathering together or scattering abroad, using for inspiration the following quotation by Edwin Way Teale:

"For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad."

For a moment, think of the season beneath the rustling social fabric, to the bared,
goose-pimpled flesh of the Earth;

Man: imagine him not in his own context, but in nature’s;

Autumn not as football games and world series and leaf-blowers and costumes and candy.

Is it possible for you to imagine what lies deeper?

A moment of your

Time, a moment of your imagination. Consider:

Of all the festivals of ancient humanity, buried in our genes and memes,

Harvest is deepest.

Of course, it is only as old, really, as agriculture, but

Gathering as it does something of an even older hunter-gatherer tradition

Together with the twining roots of civilization, it is as deep and rich as the best soil,

For Harvest is where Humanity and

Nature entwine mostly closely like sometimes-lovers. Or, anyway, where they did.

It was, 100 years ago, a third of the country who farmed; 200 years ago, 90%. Today the number

Is less than 3%.

A paltry few, and harvest festivals speak to us less as we speak to Nature hardly at all, estranged lovers.

Time was, we felt the season’s celebration in our pulses, in our bones, in our loins, and in Nature's.

Of what essential of the season could we be oblivious?

Sowing with our hands and feet, legs, arms, chests, our hearts and minds, and reaping the same.

Of what, today, are we even aware of this, when we see not our farmers, when we are not our farmers,
when we know not our farmers,

Scattering them far and wide across the landscape? Seek them

Abroad, in the far country called the past, and in that other distant land, our future.

Book Reviews: the brain and memory

2011-10-09T21:03:00.000-04:00

I've been "reading" quite a few books (that is, listening to audio books), so it's probably time for me to knock out reviews of some of them. I've got three here that I read recently that all address similar issues.

Change Your Brain, Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

There's a vague patina of salesmanship clinging to this book, but overall it seems like very good information about the brain and its connection to the body's health. Amen is a neuroscientist who has, evidently, helped a lot of people to lose weight (or gain weight), feel better, be healthier, and function at a higher level. He discusses habits to develop as well as foods, supplements, and drugs. An important aspect of the book is understanding one's brain type, its needs, and the remediation for that type. There's also fascinating information about how we function. At times it can be a bit repetitive and seems to make fascinating stuff a bit dull, but overall it was quite interesting.

Brain Rules by John Medina

There was a lot of overlapping information with Amen's book, but Medina has the voice of a star lecturer (really--he was the one reading his audio-book, and he's a professor who, I'll bet, is a favorite at his university). Like Amen's book, this is heavily research-based--there are a lot of ideas in here not only for personal development but also ideas for ways to change institutions such as schools and businesses. Fascinating stuff, expertly presented with humor and grace.

The Memory Doctor by Douglas Mason

This book was a short primer on improving one's memory--not in a "preparing for a national or world memory competition" way but in a daily-life functional way. Some of the material went along with Medina's and Amen's research, though occasionally Mason's work seemed to references outdated work. Even so, the tricks and tips were practical and, presumably, effective even when some of the theory was off. It was short and to the point, good at what it did.

Thursday Threesome on Friday, which is fine, cause it's food-friendly

2011-10-07T17:53:00.001-04:00

Two posts in one week with ideas borrowed from CafeWriting.

Onesome- Coffee: Do you drink coffee? If so, do you ask for brewed or do you prefer the fancy espresso drinks? What’s your flavor?

I'm not a big coffee drinker, but I have fallen in love with our local coffee shop's Caramel Macchiato. With three shots of espresso instead of the regular two, it's my Sunday morning caffeine treat, but I had a regular two-shotter today because I had a free one coming thanks to my school's Faculty & Staff Association.

Twosome- Tea: Do you drink tea? Hot or iced? Regular, herbal or flavored?

I drink more tea than coffee, almost exclusively green tea, plain. I like it either hot or iced with lemon juice added. I've also started drinking yerba mate and like that too. Sometimes I'll make a yerba/green hybrid, cause that's how I roll.

Threesome- Or Me? Ok, not really me! Seriously, what’s your favorite beverage? Alcoholic or non, healthy or not?

My favorite guilty pleasure drink is Cream Soda, but I pretty much never drink it now. Do smoothies count as drinks? I love either a homemade blueberry protein smoothie or anything at Jamba Juice or Orange Julius or wherever (though I'm pretty sure homemade is better for me).

CafeWriting: Seven Things

2011-10-05T21:55:00.001-04:00

This prompt comes from CafeWriting by way of MissMeliss: "Give me seven of your favorite things about Autumn." I think I'd like to pick up some of the other prompts before the month is over, but this seemed like an easy place to start.

1. Even though the modern food reality is one where we can eat anything we want whenever we want, the autumnal foods like pumpkin and apples have a particular appeal around this time, like there's something coded in our genes that loves these foods more when the leaves are changing color, when the air is getting crisp, and when these foods are actually in season. I love pumpkin pies, pumpkin cakes, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin bread, and especially pumpkin rolls. I love apple cider, apple pies, and especially apple crisp.

2. I love being reminded of John Keats this time of year, particularly his poem "To Autumn," which I had to memorize as an undergrad. Broad swatches of it have, evidently, been harvested from my mind, leaving only stubble, but that just means I have to look it up. Most of the first stanza is still there, and I love the lines "or by a cyder press, with patient look, / Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours" (yeah, I had to look it up) and "Where are the songs of spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too." (No, not that one)

3. Football season. It's about as arbitrary and about as rational as believing the religion you grew up with, but I love football. I love the sport, I love cheering for my teams, and fall is the time of new beginnings. I don't get too over-the-top about my fandom, but I love football season.

4. I actually like the cool-to-cold weather. Today, even as I enjoyed the warm "Indian Summer" day out at the tennis courts, part of me kind of missed the cold day that was the backdrop for our match last Saturday. Yeah, I know it's weird.

5. Speaking of tennis, the high school tennis season is another of the things I love about autumn. I may have loved the girls tennis season in Rhode Island even more, because I was the coach for my girls instead of one of many coaches for my boys, but one way or another I love it. Last Saturday our boys won their Section. Today, they capped off a two-day victory at the Regional level. On Saturday, they will compete at the Semi-State level, and we feel like our chances are good this year of getting down to the State tournament as a team. What's not to be excited about?

6. Indulging in nostalgia. You saw it there in #5--without even meaning to, I found myself full of wist for a bygone era. Autumn in its natural state has all the metaphorical trappings necessary for a look back over what has been, because it's a time of transition toward The End that winter brings, because it's an analogy for old age.

7. I'm looking forward to the abundance of fallen leaves, because I know that our 21-month-old is going to love them. She's going to have so much fun with big piles of dead leaves--I just know it!

What about you? What are your seven things?

Running

2011-10-03T20:45:00.001-04:00

I woke up around 5 this morning, though my alarm wasn't due to go off until 5:30. I had my clothes set out for an early morning run. Rather than get up that early, I made myself go back to sleep to wait for my alarm. It's on thing to get up at 5:30 for a run, but quite another to do it at 5:00.

Except that instead of being set for "get up in time to exercise" it was set for "get up just in time."

My relationship with running goes back to junior high track, and it was not love at first sight. I only joined track because some of my friends were doing it and because I liked the coach, but I was terrible. I wasn't fast and I couldn't run long distances--or, really, any distance--without getting shin splints. I threw shot and discus for two years even though I was terrible at both.

Still, a year after I quit track, I found myself running when a 4-H project on fitness got me interested in fitness. Two of my closest friends--both in my heart and geographically speaking--would be legit high school runners, but I was just doing my own thing. I probably ran not more than a mile at a time, but I was doing it because I wanted to and that made all the difference. I didn't have any problem with shin splints, and running plus puberty plus a healthier diet took me from pudgy to thin, where I would spend the next seven to ten years.

When my alarm finally went off, it was getting to be too late to work out and, anyway, the air beyond our flannel sheets was not particularly inviting, cold as it was. The whole morning, from our apartment to my office, was a chilly one. I did my fair share of work and then came home to go for a run.

For the past five weeks or so, I've been nursing a shoulder injury. Its cause was overconfidence and under-attention, and I think I've been side-lined long enough by now to learn my lesson, but my body disagrees. I've had to lay off the bulk of my training: whereas I was lifting weights three days a week plus teaching a plyometrics class and doing some other cardio workout, now I'm saving myself for the class I have to teach--and I've rediscovered running.

I first really discovered running at the end of my junior year of college. I was on campus after most had left, because I was working Reunion Weekend, and I had some time to kill, so I was looking through books at The Kenyon College Bookstore and came across a book on running. I tore through it, quickly grasping the basic premise: if you can walk for at least 40 minutes at a time, you start gradually alternating running and walking, for instance running 2 minutes then walking 8 then running 2, etc, and gradually running more and walking less until you're running the whole 40 minutes. When I went home that summer, I started doing just that.

While I was at my office, the day had gotten quite nice--there was still a crispness to the air, but the sun was out and changing that minute by minute. I went home and changed into shorts, a t-shirt, and my Vibram Five Fingers shoes. I discovered Vibrams and "barefoot" running a few years ago--but long after my regular running days--after seeing Christopher McDougall interviewed about his book Born to Run on The Daily Show. I was intrigued by the things I learned about running... just not intrigued enough to really get back into running, especially since I was around 190 pounds at the time, with the cardiovascular fitness you'd expect of such a one. I bought the shoes back in early 2010 and ran some in them but hadn't really committed to running either in Vibrams or any other shoe. Until this injury limited severely my athletic choices.

I don't know how long it was before I was running for the whole 40 minutes, but I spent the next couple summers running the flat square miles of the Ohio countryside near my childhood home. The way I remember it, I was running 4 or 5 times a week at a steady 8:00-minute pace. I've never been fast, but I got to where I could churn out the miles. I remember a magazine describing a runner "eating up the miles with Zen-like calm," and that's how I envisioned myself. I experienced a real runner's high just once, while I was working at a summer school program in Connecticut: I actually ran about a mile and felt awful, didn't want to run any more, so I started walking, but then I berated myself into running--and just didn't want to stop. I ran for over an hour and felt like I could have kept going indefinitely, running 'til sometime after the sun had gone down.

Where I grew up in rural Ohio, all the county and township roads were layed out in a grid pattern with a mile between corners (state routes cut across willy nilly). This was great for my running, as I could easily mark out how far I'd gone, at least to the nearest mile. My usual route was to run down to the nearest corner, run 2 flat miles due west, and then come back, but often I would vary my routine to run around a while block. I was kind of bored, being home for the summer, and running was my escape.

Having read in The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss that I might encourage good running form by, among other things, keeping my stride rate above 180 beats per minute, I set about some weeks ago to put together a playlist that would keep me at the right tempo. When I started running 3 weeks ago, I put together the first list, but found it unsatisfactory. I found instead a bunch of old .midi files from back in the day, gathered ones that were nearly the right tempo and made them the right tempo, then also worked to emphasize the beats. That worked well, except for the computery sound of the music. Today I brought out another attempt at a playlist, and I went ahead and upped the tempo from 180 bpm to 200+. In other words, I may have learned something about what to do and not to do in the weight room, that wisdom is non-transferable to the running course.

I loved running enough in my early 20s to keep it up, at least occasionally, through my two years of graduate school, though as I got busier, the runs grew more infrequent, preparing my body for the years of not running that would follow. Once I got my first teaching job in western Pennsylvania, I was ready to close the door on my running career (without, it should be added, running a single competitive race). I thought I would keep running, but I think it only took one run with my taller, more athletic friend Tom to cure me of that notion, not only because I was hopelessly behind him in every way imaginable, but also because running in Pennsylvania meant running up and down hills. Growing up in Ohio did not prepare me for such things. I can remember vividly the hill that ate the soul of my running: it went up and up and up, and just when it looked like I'd reached the top, it turned and continued up. Twice. Twice it fooled me into thinking I had arrived, only to dash my hopes. I wouldn't be a regular runner much longer, contending with that, especially not when the hills were allied with fattening school food and generic adult busy-ness. I put on weight steadily through my 20s, though getting into weight lifting was at least some consolation, as it allowed me to carry my weight better.

I gamely set out through my yard at the faster tempo I'd set myself, working my way down to where I could run along the lake that borders our school campus. It's the same way that I've been running for the past several weeks when I've gone out, but it looks a lot different at 11 am than it does around 6 am, in that I can actually see the lake instead of the moonlight glinting off the lake, can actually see the grass instead of just feel it putting a damp chill up my feet and legs. I started off a few weeks ago running 30 minutes once a week, then twice a week, then upping it to 35 minutes. Today? Back to my college days and 40-minute runs. I had trouble staying on the pace I set for myself, but it was still a good run.

Ultimately it took two things to get me back into running, if that's what I am: an injury and losing 30-35 pounds. I'd been thinking about it before but it wasn't until I couldn't do my first choice workouts that I was able not only to go back to where my fitness journey started, but to reinterpret it through my experiences since then--the interest in biomechanics and "barefoot" running and a very different overall body than the one I had a decade ago.

Food Friday: Apple Clafouti Crisp

2011-09-30T21:20:00.000-04:00

'Tis the season to be eating apples! My reason for creating this was, in essence, because I wanted apple crisp and I also had leftover pancake batter to use up. But the result turned out pretty well, so I'm sharing it here. A result of putting the pancake batter over the apples before the crisp was added on top was that the pan of Clafouti Crisp cut up nicely into bars that held together for serving. With this recipe, it wasn't overly sweet, but you could easily add either sugar or warm honey or maple syrup to the batter if you'd like.

The night before, or several hours before, soak 1 cup whole wheat flour in 1 cup buttermilk.

Peel and chop enough apples to form a thick layer on the bottom of a greased 8x12 pan. I like to use an apple slicer and then cut the slices into small pieces.

To the soaked flour, add 3 eggs, slightly beaten, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 tsp vanilla, and 1/2 tsp cinnamon (optional: up to 5 T. sugar, warm honey, or warm maple syrup). Pour this over the apples.

Combine 2/3 c. flour, 2 c. oats, 1 c. brown sugar, 1 tsp salt, 2 tsp cinnamon, and 2/3 c. melted butter. Spread this over the apples. Bake at 375 for approximately 40 minutes.

Pasta Sauces

2011-09-29T20:11:00.000-04:00

I recently saw a commercial in which Ragu and Prego were compared in a taste test. I think Prego won, even among regular Ragu-ers.

In other words, among people with lousy taste in spaghetti sauce, when choosing between two mediocre sauces, one of them did, in fact, have to win.

And then there was the Chef Boyar-dee commercial, in which we were told the history of this American staple, how a restaurant's pasta sauce became so popular that people were asking for the recipe and instead, they started sending it home with them.

In other words, back in the 1920s, Americans had no idea how to make a decent pasta sauce.

Scene from an emergency room

2011-09-18T23:31:00.000-04:00

A police officer escorts in a young man in handcuffs who will later "swear to gawd" that he wouldn't have run if he'd known it was a policeman... or, anyway, if he'd known the officer had a dog. I guess they guy's hindsight is better than his foresight, especially when he a ragged wound in his forearm to remind him. Maybe that's not hindsight so much as houndsight?

But really, how was he supposed to know the guy was a police officer? As he noted, "It could have been anyone" shining a flashlight in his face. And saying "Stop! Police!"

Communing With Water

2011-09-12T23:03:00.000-04:00

Yesterday marked the third time in the six weeks or so that Lauren and I have gone to First Unitarian Church in South Bend on a Sunday. It was, in a manner of speaking, Kickoff Sunday for them as much as it was for the NFL, which I suppose made our first couple visits preseason games. We got to see how the Unitarian offense and defense stacked up against the other teams we've scouted in the past. For the record: they look good this year.

Anyway, they had an interesting ceremony, which I gather is annual, called Water Communion. People brought with them water they had collected at some point in the past year or else used some of the provided water to represent symbolically some of the water that's passed through their lives. Many brought water from vacation cottages they visited, many involving long-standing traditions--and many noting that it would be the last time they went there, for one reason or another. The few words each person or family spoke pointed to more or less significant events in their lives.

We didn't go up for our first Water Communion, but it did get me to thinking about the place water has had in my life. After falling into a pool in a motel in Michigan when I was pretty young, I had a deathly fear of water that persisted more or less into my 20s, though I at least got better at masking it. As a result, although I grew up just 25 minutes off Lake Erie, I can't say that it loomed large in my childish imagination.

Water really entered my life in a significant way when I went to Kenyon College. There, one of the first things we did was learn the school songs, including "Kokosing Farewell," which is a song about the river that flows past Kenyon. I would go on to sing that song through four years of Chamber Singers--its status as the unofficial alma mater meant that we closed all of our concerts with it. The song talks about how, metaphorically, we students both were and were not like the river, then looked ahead to a time when we would be far from that river and yet feel called back, even as our lives came to a close. It's good stuff, very poetic. Anyway, the fact is that the river itself wasn't exactly omnipresent--it was a bit of a hike to get down there, so it wasn't like we spent every day looking at the river. But it was there, and more importantly it was in our imaginations as a symbol of ourselves and or our experience. That was where water became important.

Water didn't figure into graduate school life very much, but I distinctly remember my experience when I interviewed for what would be my first teaching job. Most of the interviews were done and I was sitting in front of the main administrative building, beside a fountain, thinking about whether I wanted to work there (if they even offered). And I was reminded of just how soothing the sounds of flowing water are. I suspected even then there might be something innate in us to which is speaks, and now my parenting experience seems to confirm it: babies fall asleep with relative ease under the influence of white noise machines, presumably because it takes them back to the sounds of the womb, where mother's nurturing blood was flowing all around, rhythmic waves from her heartbeat to her child by way of a substance that's mostly water. And between that fountain there in the middle of campus, the pond and its fountain on the way to the gym, and the rivers that separate the school from the town and run along another edge of the bluff on which it sits, there was a whole lot of water around there, and something about that made me feel welcome. I took the job.

When I left there five years later, I found myself living in The Ocean State. I couldn't see water from either of the apartments I lived in, but it was all around. It was in the air, the ocean scent wafting up to us. It was in the seafood section of the grocer--so much fresh fish wherever you went. It was... everywhere. I loved it.

And then, after a brief stop back at my first school. we made our way to our current school, situated on the 2nd largest natural freshwater lake in Indiana. It's a beautiful, beautiful lake, where people have beautiful, expensive homes and great summers. Unless I forget, I see the lake every day, because it's right there where I live and work. Our first year here, we made our song of the year Carbon Leaf's "Lake of Silver Bells" because it captured a certain spirit of what we wanted our life to be, a "year of living dangerously happy" as we move closer and closer to our hopes, dreams, and ideals. So far, we still think that's the kind of place we live, and that brings us full circle, to water that is both literal and symbolic.

With regrets

2011-08-20T23:00:00.000-04:00

Well, the blog hasn't burned down in the last 18 days, even though no one's been around to watch for arsonists. That's something, I suppose.

It's been busy busy busy around here. When last I wrote, I was traveling with a generation up and down the family tree to and from Memphis. Almost immediately upon return and reunion with my wife, we set off to spend a few days at renting a condo at a resort in northern Michigan (lower peninsula). We had a nice time with sunny but coolish weather and no convenient internet. Almost immediately upon returning, we had meetings at school, followed quickly by the return of my entire unit (well, mostly) for Band Camp. One time, at band camp, I was very busy.

As you can tell from the number of times I transitioned with "almost immediately," things have been busy. Things still haven't settled down, but there's never a better time than the present to get back to things we want to get back to, so here I am going through the usual apologies for flagging attention to my blog and vowing with all good intentions to do better.

In any case, I do regret the blogs unwritten. While I was in Memphis, I got word that I had won our library's adult summer reading program, though you'd hardly know it from reading my blog... which is to say that I'm way behind on writing book reviews. Some of them may never get written, given the way that the most useful bits often quickly slip from the mind's grasp and make retrospective reviewing progressively more difficult. Likewise, the ideas that the books inspired within me are mostly lost, or at least subsumed in the daily chatter, though one might hope they could rise again given the right prompting. Mostly, though, I suspect most have passed, and that's regrettable.

Twos-Day Travel Update

2011-08-02T10:25:00.000-04:00

I'm currently traveling with my mom, visiting family in Kentucky and Tennessee (with forays into Mississippi and Arkansas). Here are pairs of observations...

Two things I wish I'd brought: 1) the maple syrup I put into a smaller jar to bring along for the oatmeal that I brought for Thea and 2) --and more importantly--my pillow. It was on my list and just didn't make it.

Two things I wish I could have brought: 1) Lauren. She could even take up both spots on this list, because wow do I appreciate not being a single parent when I'm not! 2) since I've got space for it, let's say a whole fridge full of healthy food and the means to prepare it. My breakfast this morning was so far from ideal.

Two colossal blunders: 1) letting Thea have a McDonald's chocolate shake in its original container--even though I lowered the level a bit to try to prevent her from spilling it, I failed. She spilled all over herself. 2) letting Thea play with a bottle of ketchup at a restaurant--she dropped it onto the floor where it shattered and scattered glass and tomatoey goodness all over.

Two books I've been listening to: 1) Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, 2) The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains by Nicholas Carr. They make a very good pair.

And there's the briefest snapshot of our trip.

Book Review: The City & The City

2011-07-23T16:15:00.001-04:00

In The City & The City, China Miéville gives us a murder-mystery that gets shelved under "Fantasy" only because of its location: the twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, which occupy the same space and yet exist as foreign entities to one another. Heck, maybe it's not even fantasy, per se: the mechanism of this divide is never really explained and may simply be a distinction that the citizens of each city make in their minds. In an almost Orwellian act of double-think, the citizens of each city must, from a young age, learn to ignore the other city and its citizens, to simultaneously see them (for instance, to avoid car accidents or tripping over homeless people) and un-see them. It's an interesting premise with, of course, real-world application. After all, even if the training isn't so formal, aren't we all conditioned to see certain aspects of our own world, our own culture, and of the cultures of others, and to be almost unable to see other aspects?

The action centers around Tyador Borlú, the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad detective who ends up investigating the murder of a graduate student who was apparently murdered in Ul Qoma and dumped in Besźel. Ordinarily, such a crime would fall under the purview of Breach, the name for both the laws against Besźel and Ul Qoma interacting and for the secret police who enforce those laws, but it happens that for technical reasons the crime does not, in fact, involve Breach, so Borlú finds himself working with his counterparts in Ul Qoma and on the edges of his city's laws to try to find justice for the murdered girl and to find out the truth that she died for--truths that are at the heart of the workings of Miéville's fictional world and which could threaten the status quo in a number of ways.

Overall, I found the novel to be an enjoyable read, a mystery that kept me in suspense well into the novel, in part because it's not a simple "whodunit" sort of mystery but instead involves a fairly complex skein of interests and motivations that illuminate the whole of this society. At the same time that I enjoyed the novel, I also felt like it could have gone deeper than it did, could have explored its own premise more deeply than it did. Perhaps that perception on my part is symptomatic of the fact that I listened to it as an audiobook, thus letting it pass through me more easily than it might have if it had been fully masticated and digested in dead tree format. If so, I would love to read a brilliant essay or review showing me my own shortcomings in this regard, because the novel did seem to have, philosophically speaking, more potential than payoff.

Food Friday: Kafta Casserole

2011-07-23T00:11:00.000-04:00

In a mad rush to make just that much more space in our freezer(s) to receive a split side of beef and ten chickens, I decided that I needed to use some packs of hamburger. I've also been experimenting with the so-called "Slow Carb Diet," though I've been better at adhering to the binge day than to the other days. In brief, though, the Slow-Carb Diet would mean a daily diet made up only of meats, legumes, and vegetables. Like I said, I haven't really been adhering to it, but I've been using it as a sort of compass. That and a couple internet searches comprised the inspiration for this recipe. I would like to tinker further with some parts of this recipe, but it makes an awful lot, so I'll probably have to wait on that.

This is pretty good as is, but even better with some Tzatziki, which you should prepare in advance so the flavors have time to blend.

2 onions, chopped
2 1/2 lbs lean, grass-fed hamburger
3 cloves garlic
2 cups prepared pinto beans
10 oz frozen (or fresh) spinach
1 zucchini, chopped into smallish pieces
1 squash, chopped into smallish pieces
2 bell peppers of various colors
1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp coriander
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp chili powder
salt and pepper to taste

In a large skillet, cook the onions, hamburger, and garlic, adding the last when the rest is just about finished. Add the beans and the spinach (you can add it still frozen). Add the various vegetables (fell free to add others!) and cook 5-10 minutes, until the veggies are tender. Add all seasonings, cook just a bit longer. Turn off heat and let sit for 5 minutes.

As for changes, I would add more of all the spices, maybe up the measures to 3/4 tsp each or even double them. I would go ahead and add more vegetables and more beans as well. Even as it is, you can feed a small army--presuming the army has a taste for food inspired by Middle Eastern cuisine--or have quite a few leftovers.

Anniversary Trip: A Comedy of Errors

2011-07-18T22:50:00.000-04:00

In a blissful state of ignorance, I woke up Friday morning at 6 am and almost put off going to the gym because I thought I would have plenty of time as the morning went on to exercise. But I did get up, I did go exercise, and it wasn't long before I found out just how full my morning and afternoon would be.

You see, Friday afternoon Lauren and I planned to head out on our anniversary trip to Indianapolis. If twice can be considered a tradition, then our tradition is to spend our anniversary--or thereabouts--in Indianapolis. Or thereabouts. I mean, we've never gone anywhere else, so it must be our anniversary place.

Some weeks ago, Lauren went on Priceline and reserved up a hotel... except that she only booked one night and they wanted some ridiculous sum to add a second night--something like twice what the other night was costing us. So it was back to the Priceline Negotiator, which shunted us off to another hotel for our other night. One could see that as an inconvenience or an opportunity--hey! we get to see a different part of Indianapolis and gain a valuable basis for comparison as to the quality of our hotel stay. Aren't we lucky?

So, besides the packing that I had to do--and the dishes and the childcare and all that--I sat down at some point Friday morning to map out where our hotels were and how to get from one to the other. I'd planned on figuring out where other places were as well until I ran into a snag. Well, the first snag was finding both of the reservations, because they were sent to different e-mail accounts (something to do with how many offers Priceline allows). That was a minor snag. A bigger snag was the fact that we had two hotels reserved for Saturday and none for Friday.

I called Lauren, who was not at all happy with herself. But what help was there for it now? She set about finding us a place to stay some few hours hence and I went back to doing the dishes. Doing the dishes is actually a very good place to do some thinking. Your hands occupied, your mind mostly free, the repetitive motions can sometimes knock something loose in the brain that needs to be jiggled a little bit, to put two and two together in a subconscious process much like that which sometimes happen while we sleep and then wake the next morning with the answer to some ticklish problem. As the plates and silverware jangled off one another, a few things jangled together in my head: 1) I hadn't been able to find the car key when I'd looked for it this morning, nor when I'd looked last night; 2) we only have one car key now; 3) Lauren was the last person to drive the car and, presumably still had the key; 4) the lone remaining key to our car was almost certainly in South Bend, an hour away. I called Lauren, and while "shit" is not a direct answer to "Do you know where the car key is?"--well, it's direct enough.

She didn't feel like she could borrow her colleague's car to bring the key to me, even if she could leave the work she was supposed to be doing. I didn't see how I could take two hours out of my schedule and still pack everything and rendezvous in a timely fashion with my in-laws who were taking both our 2-legged and our 4-legged children off our hands for the weekend. And, of course, I didn't think I could take that time even if it was somehow possible to take Thea with me, which it wasn't, since her car seat was neatly locked in the car. We have a truck and we're constantly talking about "what a big girl" our daughter is, but she's not that big, not yet.

Lauren suggested calling our new friend Allison, one of her new colleagues in the science department. We me Allison, her husband, and their daughter earlier in the summer, taking her out to dinner once to welcome her to town and having them all over for dinner on Independence Day. Nice folks, and their daughter is just a few months older than Thea. Maybe, suggested Lauren, they could watch our girl while I made the trip up. Well, it wasn't the worst plan we had.

So Lauren gave me Allison's number and I called it. A man answer it. Her husband? Her husband... her husband... oh hell. What was his name? I am lousy with names, and his wasn't on the back of my tongue, much less the tip. "Hi." A solid opening. "This is John Sherck." In the silence that ensued, he was no doubt going through his own mental rolodex. "Lauren and I" (I offer some contextual reminder of who I am) "were wondering if you and Allison could do us a huge favor." Clever, eh? Confirm I have the right number by throwing out the name I do remember. "Okay," he says. I explain our situation and he tells me that they have nanny interviews scheduled for the whole day... but they do have an extra car seat that I could borrow to use in the truck. Great. He--Brian, Lauren later reminded me--came over and it turned out that after some small discussion they didn't think another toddler underfoot would be any great impediment to their interviews--anyway, our kids get along fabulously--so I packed her into their back seat and sent her on her way.

Which, of course, wouldn't be the last time I would abandon her that day. But anyway, I spent a little over two hours just getting the car key, then grabbed a quick bite to eat, threw random baby items into random bags, since I wasn't quite certain what Lauren had and hadn't already packed for the trip over the river and through the woods. With baby packed in her car seat and dog packed in hers--that is, sitting on my lap Britney-style--we started our two-and-a-half hour drive to meet my in-laws. Then I detoured into the South Bend / Mishawaka area to pick up our farm share vegetables before coming home, where Lauren has returned once she realized that it made absolutely no sense to wait at Notre Dame for me.

Hours driven to this point: roughly 7 1/2.
Hours left to drive that day: 2

And so anxious was Lauren to finally get underway that she wouldn't even give me time to heat up something to eat, so I had to manage this leg on a more or less empty stomach. Let me tell you: Lauren is lucky to have a husband with such a good sense of humor, otherwise we might very well have needed both of those hotels for Saturday night and yet another on Friday besides!

As it was, we had a very nice, if unnecessarily expensive, trip to Indianapolis this past weekend, and our anniversary should consider itself well and truly celebrated. We saw HP7 pt 2, visited a yurt factory and decided we could probably stand to live in a yurt for a decade or more, ate at some very good restaurants, and visited more malls in one weekend than we have in the past year. But all that is a story for another post.

Thursday Think 'n' Share 3.7

2011-07-14T23:29:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned the first time around, this is a sort of "getting to know you" game that I hope my readers will join me in playing each week. The short of it is that I pull three random question from one of various decks of The Ungame and answer them. Readers are encouraged to post their own answers either in the comment box or on their own blog (or Facebook page). If you're not doing it in the comment box, do let me know where I can find them, because I'd like to get to know my readers better at the same time they're getting to know me. You can be as serious or as silly as you feel like being on any given day for any particular question.

If you could have been someone in history, whom would you have been?

I guess the version of this question we usually get asked is about meeting someone, because that's the way my mind tends to go with this question. In fact, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the historical figures I'd like to meet I would not want to have been--they had a tendency to die young and/or live unhappy lives. I guess that should make us appreciate better the times we live in, when life expectancy and standard of living are so high, from a historical perspective. At this precise moment, with A Dance With Dragons sitting near me waiting to be cracked, I might like to be George R.R. Martin, just to know how the series will end, but I'm not sure that's a good enough reason to be somebody (but hey, he's also a pretty brilliant, successful guy too, and those aren't bad reasons, right?).

When you feel sad, what is the best thing someone can do for you?

I guess that depends on the kind of sadness it is: sometimes I would want someone to listen, sometimes I would want to be left alone, sometimes I would just want someone to be there, available, but not necessarily needing to say or do anything. Doesn't it depend on the source of the sadness, too? I guess all three of those things I listed are assuming that I've got something to be sad about, but if I'm blowing something out of proportion, say, then maybe what I need is someone to pull me up and distract me, take me out and do something to get my mind out of the rut it's gotten itself into.

If you could have a motto or saying in every home in the world, what would it be?

How about "Live and Let Live"? We could do with a little more acceptance of others, so if we're going to impose one motto on everyone, I guess that would do. "Carpe diem" is pretty good advice for everyone as well, which of course is why it's the theme of so many poems, movies, etc. Or maybe we could borrow from Thoreau and encourage everyone to "Live Deliberately." We're all human, so we all need to be reminded of the same pitfalls, no?

Well, what about you?

Rural Third Places

2011-07-13T22:05:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine recently post an article on Facebook about why "third places" are particularly important in rural communities.

For those who haven’t heard of them before, third places are where people meet and socialize outside of their homes (first places) and their work (second places). Sociologist Ray Oldenburg is credited with drawing attention to third places through his influential book, The Great Good Place.

These are important places both for the ways they bring people together and the way that they foster a sense of community. Third places also serve to introduce newcomers to a community. The entry linked above got me to thinking about third places in communities I've lived in.

When I moved to middle-of-nowhere western Pennsylvania, I had friends who weren't afraid to become regulars at the local hole-in-the wall, a shabby-looking bar owned and run by an old biker and his wife. The main draws were $.70 drafts and cheap but tasty wings (only one variety, the kind with a spice rub). But it was also one of the finer third places I've known. I don't think this is true of all bars--most aren't Cheers. But this place, where the owner once plunked down a large handgun in front of me, I saw a patron in the process of being ejected fling a shot glass at the woman behind the bar, and there was a sign on the door disallowing spitting out the door, this seedy little place was well laid out to be an effective third place.

Why? The place was dominated by a U-shaped bar in the middle of the room, with just a few tables off to one side (plus a pool table and some ancient mechanical game involved metal discs that you'd slide from one end of a lane to another (think table-top shuffle board or curling). But the bar was the thing. Everyone sat around the bar, almost by necessity. So everyone was, more or less, looking at everyone else. It was easy to strike up conversations with complete strangers--and with the bartender too, as she was always in front of everyone. We more or less became regulars and we got to know a lot of the locals that we never would have gotten to know any other way. We taught at a boarding school--an institution of privilege--in a down-on-its-luck community, and that had led to a fairly sharp town-gown divide. Nonetheless, by making ourselves part of this third place, we bridged that divide in our own small way.

Where we live now, the third place that comes most easily to mind is our local coffee shop. Coffee shops seem like natural third places, because people often come to "hang out" there, but there's something about the atmosphere that also makes it easy to strike up conversations with other people there, even strangers. There are also special events there, such as musicians, which serve to draw people there.

Restaurants--and most bars that are set up like restaurants--do not function this way. In a restaurant, we tend to be more isolated. I'm at my table/booth, you're at yours, and we're unlikely to speak to one another. Even with people you know, you often won't speak to them, except maybe a quick hello as you or they leave. Perhaps it's because we go to restaurants for meals, which have a certain formality to them (as opposed to "grabbing coffee"); perhaps it's because of the set-up, with so many discrete tables and booths separated from one another. Whatever the reason, restaurants--nice as they are--tend not to make good third places. I'm sure there are exceptions, but that's how it seems to me.

What are some of your third places, and how do they work?

Happy Anniversary!

2011-07-12T21:20:00.000-04:00

In so many ways, I can't believe it's been three years since, in the eyes of the law and our families and friends, we married. The years have flown by, yet it seems like we've always been married. We had a nice, relaxed day--Lauren skipped her work commitments (she had an appointment with her doctor anyway, plus a school meeting), and we just spent some time walking downtown, having lunch at a place we've never eaten before (so far, we like it; we may even make it "our" new place), and then going to the coffee shop to just hang out and play a board game (Ascension). We're planning a trip to Indianapolis this weekend to continue the revelries.

In honor of our anniversary, I'm migrating from my old blog to this one the text of our wedding ceremony. As I said then, very little of it is "original," as we shamelessly cribbed from various internet sources. However, the way it came together is ours, and it said what we wanted to say. It's wholly secular and it was admirably brief. We got a lot of compliments on it at the time, mostly, I suspect, because of the latter quality. Our friend Kapoo officiated the wedding for us and largely wrote his portions (he was excellent in the role of officiant and solemnizer!). Without further ado, I take you back three years to a wedding ceremony in central Ohio...

Call to Order

Kapoo: Welcome to all friends and family on this beautiful and joyful day, Lauren and John have asked me to extend a very warm welcome to you on this their wedding day, and to call upon all of you gathered here to be fellow witnesses with me in their marriage. You were each invited to join us today so that you may share in the joy that Lauren and John are feeling as they pledge their love and commitment to each other.

John and Lauren believe marriage is founded on that sort of sincerity and understanding, which leads to tolerance, confidence and trust. They feel it involves respect for each other's individuality and that most difficult of tasks, the acceptance of each other's weaknesses, prejudices and faults. They believe too that those qualities, which have attracted each to the other and brought them here today, can obviously be best developed during a life spent together. A happy marriage, they both know, will enable them to establish a home where there will be love and stability, where you, their family and also their friends will find welcome, peace, harmony and support, and which will be a base from which the influence of their shared, and we hope strengthened life today by this wedding ceremony, can extend.

Declaration of Consent:

Kapoo: John, will you tell your family and friends why you are here today?”

John: I am here today to tell you that Lauren is the person with whom I desire to share my life and my love; a person with whom I want to build a home and start a family.”

Kapoo: Lauren, will you tell your family and friends why you are here today?”

Lauren: I am here today to tell you that John is the person with whom I desire to share my life and my love; a person with whom I want to build a home and start a family.”

Charge to the Couple

Kapoo: Before you are joined in marriage in my presence and the presence of these your family, friends and witnesses, I am to remind you of the serious and binding nature of the relationship you are now about to enter.

Marriage is a commitment to life, to the best that two people can find and bring out in each other. It offers opportunities for sharing and growth that no other human relationship can equal, a joining that is promised for a lifetime.

You have known each other from the first glance of acquaintance to this point of commitment. At some point, you decided to marry. From that moment of yes to this moment of yes, indeed, you have been making promises and agreements in an informal way. All those conversations that were held riding in a car or over a meal or during long walks - all those sentences that began with “When we’re married” and continued with “I will and you will and we will”- those late night talks that included “someday” and “somehow” and “maybe”- and all those promises that are unspoken matters of the heart. All these common things, and more, are the real process of a wedding. The symbolic vows that you are about to make are a way of saying to one another, “ You know all those things we’ve promised and hoped and dreamed- well, I meant it all, every word.” Look at one another and remember this moment in time. Before this moment you have been many things to one another- acquaintance, friend, companion, lover, dancing partner, and even teacher, for you have learned much from one another in these last few years. Now you shall say a few words that take you across a threshold of life, and things will never quite be the same between you. For after these vows, you shall say to the world, this- is my husband, this- is my wife.

Reading

from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

It is good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person...it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.”

Reading 2

from Owlsight by Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon

This bond, this joining, is not meant to be a fetter. A joining is a partnership, not two people becoming one. Two minds cannot fuse, two souls cannot merge, two hearts cannot keep to the same time. If two are foolish enough to try this, one must overwhelm the other, and that is not love, nor is it compassion, nor responsibility. You are two who choose to walk the same path, to bridge the differences between you with love. You must remember and respect those differences and learn to understand them, for they are part of what made you come to love in the first place. Love is patient, love is willing to compromise—love is willing to admit it is wrong. There will be hard times; you must face them as bound warriors do, side by side, not using the weapon of your knowledge to tear at each other. There will be sadness as well as joy, and must support one another through the grief and sorrow. There will be pain—but pain shared is pain halved, as joy shared is joy doubled, and you each must sacrifice your own comfort to share the pain of the other. And yet, you must do all this and manage to keep each other from wrong actions, for a joining means that you also pledge to help one another at all times. You must lead each other by example. Guide and be willing to be guided. Being joined does not mean that you accept what is truly wrong, being joined means that you must strive that you both remain in the light and the right. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that there will be no strife between you. That is fantasy, for you are two and not one, and there will inevitably come conflict that it will be up to you to resolve. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that all will be well from this moment on. That is a dream, and dreamers must eventually wake. You must come to this joining fully ready, fully committed, and fully respectful of each other. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side by side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

Vows

Kapoo: Marriage is not a legal document. No pastor or priest or justice of the peace [or drama teacher] can create a marriage because a marriage, truly, is nothing except the promises made and kept by two individuals. Today John and Lauren stand before us to publicly declare their love and to share with us their marriage promises.

Lauren, what promises do you make?

Lauren: I, Lauren, ask you, John, to be my husband, my companion, my partner in life. I will love you, honor you, and see you for the extraordinary person that you are.

I acknowledge that I am whole and complete as I am, and that all the love, the wisdom, the nurturing, and the strength that I need reside within me.

I am marrying you not in the hope of getting these things, but with the promise of sharing these gifts with you so that you may have them in even greater abundance.

I want us to make a home together, grow old together, and during this life make a difference in our world, living consciously and deliberately, surrounded by those we love.

John, you are my friend, my lover, my teacher, and my reminder of the beauty in life. In all that life brings us, my love and friendship are yours.

Kapoo: John, what promises do you make?

John: I choose you to be no other than yourself, loving what I know of you and trusting what I do not yet know. I will respect you as an individual, a partner, and an equal. I promise to learn from you, to communicate openly, to honor our differences, and never to become a stranger to you. I want us to make a home together, grow old together, and together make better the lives of our families, friends, communities, and world, living consciously and deliberately, surrounded by those we love.

I promise to always work with you and never against you, to nurture your best self as you grow, trusting that you will do the same for me. I promise to love you like family, like a friend, and like a lover.

I will love you when love is simple and I will love you when love is complex. I promise to listen and share, to be truthful, respectful, faithful, and always to be kind.

We stand united, joining our lives that we may be strong as individuals, and stronger yet together.

Ring Vows

Kapoo: Lauren and John have brought rings to present to one another as a symbol of their marriage vows today. Although there is no precise evidence to explain the origin of the tradition of exchanging wedding rings, the more ancient and widely accepted explanation, refers to the early Egyptian’s belief that a circle was the symbol of eternity--a sign that life, happiness, and love have no beginning and no end. A wedding ring, or circle, was placed on the third finger of the left hand, the ring finger, because it was traditionally believed that this finger was a direct connection to the heart -- the perfect spot to place a symbol, representing eternal love and commitment. The vena amoris, that is, the vein of love, runs directly from the “ring finger” to the heart.

John and Lauren: (repeating after Officiant) This ring I give you in token of my devotion and love, and with my heart I pledge to you all that I am. With this ring I marry you and join my life to yours.

Closing:

Kapoo: No one but you can declare yourselves married. You have begun it here today in speaking your vows before this company, and you will do it again and again in the days to come, standing by each other, sharing all the sweet and the bitter of life. Each tender act, each loving word will be the declaration of what was marked here today.

Begin it now then, with a kiss.

Food Friday (more or less): Blueberry Cafoutis

2011-07-09T21:23:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I'm a day late for alliteration, but whatever.

Way back at Easter, some friends of ours had us over for dinner, and among the delicious things we had was a fruit clafoutis. She blogged about it (including a picture), and tonight when I decided to make my own, I looked it up and found her original source.

And then I modified liberally. So liberally, in fact, that it would be hard for you (or me) to exactly recreate what we ate tonight unless you first made pancakes according to the Nourishing Traditions recipe found here. And then you would have to eat just over half of the pancakes and save the rest of the batter for later. Got it? (You might be able to re-create the experience by soaking 2/3 c. whole wheat or spelt flourin 1 c. butter milk and adding 1/4 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp baking soda, and an egg).

Okay, from there: take 1/4 c. honey and heat it up, then take a package of blueberries and rinse them, then mix the blueberries with the honey. Let them sit for about 15 minutes. They might give up some of their juice or do something else arcane. Or it could be completely useless because it's meant for different sorts of fruits. Anyway... now you'll preheat the oven to 375 and prepare a baking pan with butter or spray oil (I used a casserole dish).

At this point I added a few peaches that we had on hand into the dish before adding the blueberries to the dish as well. I scraped the rest of the honey/blueberry essence into the batter, while also adding 2 more beaten eggs, a tsp of vanilla, and 5 T of sugar.

From there, it's just a matter of pouring the batter over the fruit and baking it for approximately 40 minutes, until it's starting to brown on top. This was so incredibly delicious that mere words can't do it justice. I swear the blueberries almost melted into the cakiness of the clafoutis. Fantastic.

Jock

2011-07-07T00:05:00.000-04:00

"Of course, you're a jock," said a colleague of mine, a man in his fifties, like me working out in the gym around 8 am.

What part of this statement, I wondered, was most absurd? The classification as a jock, the certainty of that "of course," or the fact that this was evidence of a further assumption that my over-indulgence on the 4th of July surely would not be any concern to me, jock that I am and, therefore, easily shedding pounds with all my athletic endeavors--if such things as calories could even stick to such things as me.

Would anyone who knew me from elementary school through my freshman year of high school have put me down as a jock? That pudgy kid whose central competitive endeavor in all athletic occurences was vying to not be the last one chosen? Oh wait, I forgot desultory jogs with the junior high track team before going over with the shot and discus kids--where I was also hopeless (I was only in track because my friends were--I was never in danger of scoring even a single point for the team).

Or in high school, the skinny, nerdy kid who did band, choir, drama and--for crying out loud--quiz bowl? Who didn't take up a sport until his junior year and then took up tennis, the sport that at most public schools--and mine was no exception--contains the lowest concentration of actual athletes? Would any of my classmates have dreamed that I might ever be "a jock," much less classify me as such back then?

Nor was I ever, in college, mistaken for such a creature. Nor in graduate school. When I finally put on muscle in my mid-to-late 20s, I sheathed it in sufficient fat that I still wasn't likely to fool any jocks into accepting me into their fraternity, not even as a has-been.

And so it was faintly astounding to hear myself proclaimed a jock with such certainty. But then, I was talking to this man in the weight room, where he's seen me before, and it just so happened that after completing that workout (chest and back, plus abs), I would come back later in the day for a second workout (plyometrics), and then spend over 2 hours on the tennis courts later that night.

Maybe the idea wasn't as crazy as I thought.

Part of it, no doubt, is that thanks to diet and exercise I am leaner now than I have been at any time in the past decade. I'm not prepared to say "stronger," but I'm probably at least close on that score. Around the first of the year, I was at my heaviest ever, at 200 pounds, but since then I've dropped 30 (give or take, depending on the day).

Perhaps it's the weight of the years upon me, yet even though I can see how someone attach that label to me, I have a hard time fitting my mind into that role, fraught as it is with so many other assumptions: a "dumb jock," a big, insensitive brute, a physical presence with little intellect or depth. I know, of course, that those stereotypes aren't true--in fact, despite not being one, I was friends with a number of people who would naturally have drawn the label jock and even embraced it, while still being good students and decent people. Well, at least one or the other. But my point is that I might suddenly be in serious danger of being stereotyped. I will henceforth be unlikely to get any respect for my opinions unless the conversation is about protein, creatine, l-glutamine, or another non-rhyming sports supplement, or about the proper way to perform a squat or deadlift.

Or, as the colleague who sparked this blog entry did, people may assume that I will be competing in such things as the triathlon that's coming up next summer. Which means I have to either come up with a good lie ("I lost my left kidney in a triathlon once and vowed never to do another. Even though, naturally, I won, even as I left one of my kidneys somewhere on the course.") or admit that my 25-pound dog who's a little nervous around water--and won't go in for anything less than chasing a duck--is a far better swimmer than I am.Seriously: if there was a club swim team for adults, I wouldn't be on it; a club drowning team, I could probably captain it. For one meet, anyway.

And if I admit things like that very many times, I will--you understand--lose all credibility as a jock.

Patriotism, etc.

2011-07-04T23:59:00.001-04:00

The 4th of July holiday in America seems rooted in ideas of "God and country," and that same soil is where I put down my own roots and started to grow. Although I gather that he hated every minute of it, my father served in the military, and so did many of the adult men that I respected most when I was growing up. I proudly wore an American flag lapel pin whenever I had a lapel, proudly raised the flag at my school for a year while a cub scout, proudly sang the Star Spangled Banner whenever it was being played, and proudly won an American Legion essay contest when I was in high school with a sincere speech that I wrote--and later read at a Memorial Day parade--praising America and the flag and patriotism.

And yet, in the meantime, my ideas about patriotism have changed radically, as I've grown beyond my roots and branched out. Really, I have a hard time calling myself patriotic anymore--and certainly most "traditional patriots" might not call me so. Allow me to explain.

History teaches us several lessons about patriotism. On the on hand, there's the standard lesson of the importance of being willing to die for one's country and what all the great patriots of the past have done. Honoring our history, our ideals, our own sense of our country's greatness. We know that story well, I think.

Our concept of patriotism derives almost entirely from a movement which really gained speed in the 19th century: the idea of nationalism. And history clearly shows us that nationalism accomplished roughly two things: the unification of countries like Germany and Italy that hadn't been unified before, and strong feelings of loyalty to the idea of one's "nation." Which, of course, made people more willing to kill and die for their countries, leading to the killing fields of WWI and perhaps even more so to WWII. You want to see flag waving? Check out Nazi Germany or fascist Italy. Most of the countries of western Europe that I've traveled in feel a deep aversion now to this kind of flag waving, because they've seen where it leads. A British friend of mine visiting America was bemused and a bit uneasy by all of our flag waving on this side of the pond. As someone--it's hard to pin down just who--once said, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag and carrying a cross."

The danger of nationalism or patriotism is not in loyalty as much as it is in blind loyalty, the too-often-advocated "my country, right or wrong." And that's one of the things that become harder and harder about patriotism, that my country--despite all the rhetoric--has been wrong quite a bit more than we would like to acknowledge. There is another lesson of history.

Don't get me wrong: we've advocated high ideals since the earlist days of the republic. We've been all about freedom and equality. Kind of. Sort of. Except that we've never wholly lived up to those ideals. For almost half of our history, we enslaved other human beings, even after all of our European peers had ended it. The rhetoric of accepting immigrants has always thinly concealed a good deal of racism and ethnic bias. Our country and its government has, since the beginning, favored the interests of the rich. That's not something new--indeed, it has been ever thus. And let us not forget sexism, which also puts the lie to our ideals.

Yet, we might say, history shows us a trajectory of progress. Don't we do better than we used to? Fair enough, but it's essential to remember that none of these things happened inevitably. Nowhere was it written that things had to get better, and in few cases did it come from the top down. If "we the people" had not fought to make things better, it's almost certain that they wouldn't have gotten better, because our leaders have consistently been the representatives more of the status quo than of a progressive, better future. To say this another way: things haven't gotten better in our country because of blind patriotism or "my country, right or wrong" attitudes. Things have gotten better because people were willing to question the state of things and work to change them. So it has been and so is it likely to be as long as our nation endures.

And always high in our consciousness on Independence Day are the men and now women who've served our country. Is there something noble in risking one's life for our country? I would say yes. However, because these citizens are risking themselves for the rest of us, we have a duty to work to ensure that their lives are risked only in military endeavors which actually further the interests of the nation and not simply those of some minority of our citizens. Far too often, the military actions of our country have been been dishonest and/or hypocritical. The instances in which our leaders have lied to us or manipulated us have been too many for a short book, much less for my little blog. The times that our leaders have initiated military operations which put our soldiers in harm's way and killed the citizens of other nations in causes directly against our ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy have been, sadly, numerous. These, too, are the lessons of history. We have overthrown democracies in favor of dictatorships in order to further the economic interests of our elites as well as to further dubious, vague goals of "security." The military actions in the middle east following 9/11 are only the latest in a long line of American actions in which the citizens of our free democracy have been deceived about the aims and objectives of the war. My country, right or wrong? That's an easy way to brush aside such questions--and an easy way to ensure we get more of the same.

For that matter, should we look at our democracy? Our "true/false" democracy where we can choose a Democrat or choose a Republican, but don't have any other real options? And let's not forget the whole system of the electoral college rather than a more democratic, truly popular election. If real democracy is our goal--though it probably never has been--we could be doing a lot better.

And yet, I'm raising all of these points not to argue that America is a terrible place and not to argue that we don't also have a lot to be proud of as Americans. Our people are basically good-hearted and well-meaning. Our ideals of freedom and equality are noble ones. Even the execution of them haven't been terrible. When compared with the vast majority of all governments in the history of humanity, we have it pretty damn good here. Even compared to much of our contemporary world we're doing awfully well. But let's not go too far: we're not, in every way, "the best." And we're not--when measured against our own ideals--as great as we could be. And yet, there's the thing: we can be, but only if we are not complacent, only if we are not smugly self-satisfied with our country and blindly patriotic.

And this, to me, is true patriotism. Loving your country, respecting what it stands for, and being loyal to it, but ultimately being more loyal to the ideals than to the government (any government), more loyal to what is best about the country than simply to what is. True patriotism is being willing to make our country great, not quacking on and on about how great our country is, not excusing its failures or condemning those who criticize us.

Come sit by the window with me

2011-07-02T22:41:00.002-04:00

Being a true son of these United States, having absorbed the vocabulary appropriate to an American, there are few words in the entire English language more dear to my ear than "free." When, almost a month ago, the mother of one of my graduating seniors offered to leave with me her son's footlocker, I said yes even before I had any thought of a purpose for it--indeed, before I had any notion of its size. Even acknowledging that for three summers it carried the burden of an adolescent's life away from home, to say that it is a large footlocker seems not to be an adequate description. If, as the saying has it, "A friend will hide you; a true friend will help you hide the body," then this footlocker is roughly four true friends.

Naturally enough, I used it for some portion--probably less than half--of my board game collection. Which was good, because those games had to go somewhere.

Lauren, however, was tepid at best about having this monstrous chest just sitting around in any room of our apartment, so I set before myself a bit of a woodworking task that I was able to complete on some of our rainy days. I built--you might say overbuilt--this window seat, painted it, and then left the addition of cushions to Lauren and her sewing machine, to say nothing of her better taste for color and decoration.

The body pillow along the back was something we already had, and happily it matches the paint that we got for free--there's that word again!--from our local recycling depot.

The basic design is like this: I made three rectangles out of 2x4s, then used two 2x4s with dado joints to connect the three rectangles on the bottom and also provide something like a pair of skids to slide the footlocker in and out. I used 3/4" hardwood plywood to join the rectangles on the top and provide the sitting surface, then the thinnest (i.e. cheapest) hardwood plywood I could find for the side (only the one side visible is actually covered, since one opening is needed for the footlocker and the other sides are against walls). Then I used furring strips to dress it up a bit as well as to echo the look of the storage bed that Lauren built for the same room last year.

Mickey Mouse seems to like it well enough, as did our daughter:

The little bookworm seen here sits atop the pillows we first used on it, which were re-purposed from my original use of them to turn a twin bed into something resembling a couch.

Thursday Think 'n' Share 3.6

2011-06-30T21:40:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned the first time around, this is a sort of "getting to know you" game that I hope my readers will join me in playing each week. The short of it is that I pull three random question from one of various decks of The Ungame and answer them. Readers are encouraged to post their own answers either in the comment box or on their own blog (or Facebook page). If you're not doing it in the comment box, do let me know where I can find them, because I'd like to get to know my readers better at the same time they're getting to know me. You can be as serious or as silly as you feel like being on any given day for any particular question.

What do you dislike most about yourself?

One of my strengths is that I can see many different sides to a person or a problem, an idea or an institution. The flip side of that is "analysis paralysis." I can't make a decision, I can't move forward, because I'm too busy defining the situation or because I don't want to make the wrong decision. Similarly, I have a lot of interests--as the header says, I've been described as a Renaissance man--but I don't make the commitment or don't have the drive to focus exclusively on an interest to be truly exceptional at it. So it's that indecision.

Or maybe it's something else... ;)

Say something about ghosts.

I shared an apartment for some months with a girl who was absolutely convinced that the house she'd grown up in was haunted, that on multiple occasions she'd seen ghosts. She seemed sincere, and there's a certain power to hearing someone talk about first-hand experience, but I nevertheless remained--and remain--skeptical. It's not impossible, but the evidence doesn't seem great to me.

Finish this sentence: "The best thing about today is..."

that I didn't have much of anything I had to do. That was good for me, considering that we went to the drive-in last night, seeing Transformers 3, which stretched past midnight, followed by Super 8, getting us home on the far side of a quarter after three. Lauren took our daughter to her nanny's house for the day, so I was able to nap a bit while still getting a bookcase painted (two coats!), doing a few things around the house, and getting a wee bit of composing done.

Book Review: Under Heaven

2011-06-28T20:38:00.000-04:00

A number of my Goodreads friends, including an author I really like, are very high on Guy Gavriel Kay's work, so I've been meaning to check out his work. I picked up Under Heaven both because it stands alone and because it was the only GGK work available as an audiobook (which seem like the only kind I can find time to finish right now!). There were some elements that I really liked about Under Heaven, but on the whole I found it to be uneven work.

The story, set in a fantasy China (Kitai), revolves around the three oldest children of a renowned general. Our central figure, Shen Tai, the second son, has taken upon himself the task of living in a haunted valley where his father won an important victory, and burying some of the thousands of dead from both sides. He plans to spend the entire two year mourning period burying the dead, and his time is drawing to a close as the novel opens. During his time in this valley, which borders Kitai and one of its long-time enemies, both empires have honored Shen Tai's work by sending regular supplies to him. At the start of the novel, he is honored beyond such utilitarian aid when the Empress of the Taguran empire bestows upon him an extravagant gift of 250 Sardian horses, in a world where even one or two such horses would be a princely gift. At the same time, Shen Tai survives an assassination attempt. In other words, his life just got a whole lot more complicated.

All that happens early in the novel, so I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything. To talk about the roles of his older brother and younger sister, I would have to start spoiling, so instead I'll get to the review.

The good: I loved the sense of culture in the novel. Our characters live in a poetic culture: they quote poetry, they write poetry, and as he follows them, Kay's prose frequently rises to the poetic. I appreciated the sense of a culture that Kay establishes, their ways of seeing the world. Much of the plot revolves around court intrigue and the political implications of this gift--it both elevates Shen Tai and puts him in a difficult position as others try to manipulate or eliminate him to claim the gift for their own purposes.

The less-good: The pacing was very uneven. At times, Shen Tai's story moved awfully slowly (his sister's story moved along a bit better). Related to this, Kay shifted perspectives at times from a novelistic perspective written in the present tense to a world-historic perspective from some time in the future, distancing us from the action. This played a big role in making the ending of the novel feel rushed. What also happened, though, is that it seemed like the promise of the novel was revoked by the end. We tend to assume that our protagonists will make the decisions and play the roles that are decisive in the plot, but in a number of ways this wasn't the case in Under Heaven. Shen Tai's story--as well as his sister's--gets swept aside in the rush of larger events, and it's the decisions of others that make the difference. Our protagonists all become fairly passive at the crucial juncture, which is unsatisfying. We want to see our characters solve their own problems rather than having them resolved for them.

All in all, I'm glad I read Under Heaven, but it's not overly impressive. I haven't yet fallen in love with Kay's work.

Review: True Grit (2010)

2011-06-27T20:36:00.000-04:00

At the risk of offending some, I will say up front that I think the Coen brothers’ re-make of True Grit is, in virtually every way, superior to the original.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration I can give is a comparison of the opening scenes of each. In the original, we start with a cheesy musical theme followed by an opening scene at the Ross farm, where we see a capable young girl handling the family’s finances, we see her loving father, and we see the latter leave with the hired man, Tom Chaney, who will soon kill him. Our heroine Mattie Ross voices her distrust of Chaney as they ride off. Then we see a scene in a bar—Chaney is drunk and losing at cards, he starts making violent accusations of cheating, but Mr. Ross pulls him away from the table and outside before violence can erupt. After a brief confrontation, it does, with Chaney shooting Ross, stealing some money from him, and making his escape as men come out of the bar, drawn by gunshots.

True Grit (2010) begins in silence and darkness, the camera not quite focusing on some small source of light near the middle of the screen. As we come into focus, we hear Mattie Ross narrating what will ultimately be a slightly more concise version of what I’ve just related. What we finally see are two lights on the outside of a bar and the dead body of her father on the ground. Finally, Tom Chaney gallops by, though except for his legs, the horse’s legs, and some of its back, Chaney is out of the frame, unseen.

What we have in the comparison is a darker, starker world in the latter film, a bit more mystery and menace from our villain who is never seen, and Mattie Ross has been established from the beginning as our narrator and protagonist. And what a protagonist she is! Hailee Steinfeld just has that much more intensity, intelligence and grit than her predecessor. In a real sense, the original was John Wayne’s movie—this is Hailee Steinfeld’s movie, and that’s no small feat sharing the screen with Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon (and, for that matter, a number of other talented actors). All of which brings me to a second point of comparison: I think that the overall level of acting is higher in the new version, where every bit part and supporting player is more or less perfect. When I say that this is Hailee Steinfeld’s movie, I acknowledge that these other actors gave it to her—not because their own performances are sub-par, but because it’s her story and it’s supposed to be that way.Although it's a slightly different flavor, Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn is just as good as Wayne's, and Matt Damon improves the role of Le Boeuf considerably. JohThe supporting players, too, were uniformly excellent.

Another element that the remake offers that the original didn’t is a pervasive—usually dark—humor. There were quite a few very funny moments in the film, though they didn’t detract or distract from the film’s dark seriousness—if anything, they enhanced it. It felt more real, which I think is also a mark of the evolution of the film Western.

All in all, an excellent movie and an excellent re-make.

Thursday Think 'n' Share 3.5

2011-06-23T21:58:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned the first time around, this is a sort of "getting to know you" game that I hope my readers will join me in playing each week. The short of it is that I pull three random question from one of various decks of The Ungame and answer them. Readers are encouraged to post their own answers either in the comment box or on their own blog (or Facebook page). If you're not doing it in the comment box, do let me know where I can find them, because I'd like to get to know my readers better at the same time they're getting to know me. You can be as serious or as silly as you feel like being on any given day for any particular question.

Who in your family has the best sense of humor?

Me, of course. And if my wife tries to tell you otherwise, it's clearly just jealousy about how clever and funny I am. Actually, it might be our 18-month-old daughter, as she is always laughing. Except when she's crying. And sometimes even then.

Say something about dreaming at night.

Fortunately, it is night, because otherwise I would have to wait until tomorrow morning and it wouldn't be a Thursday Think 'n' Share. Actually, I don't tend to remember a lot of my dreams unless I'm not sleeping well, and when that's the case, they tend to be weird ones.

What are 3 things you would like to be doing in three years?

I'd like for us to be well-established out on our land, living there one way or another (and not having just arrived three years from now). I'd like to be raising a happy, healthy, beautiful, brilliant 4-and-a-half-year-old (and maybe another to boot?) along with a happy, healthy, beautiful, and brilliant wife--in other words, maintain the status quo, just move it up three years! And I will have just seen this year's freshman graduate, so I hope to be the Counselor to a happy, healthy, beautiful, and brilliant bunch of guys who will all have been working with me for their whole high school careers.

And you?

Book Review: The Lies of Locke Lamora

2011-06-20T23:29:00.000-04:00

With his debut novel, Lynch offered up a fairly slick caper-fantasy. Our setting is the gritty city of Camorr, a fantasy version of Venice, ruled by its Duke on the one hand and its crime boss, "Capa" Barsavi on the other. Barsavi has brought a certain equilibrium to the city through his "secret peace" that ensures that the nobility allow a certain amount of crime to go unpunished while the criminals avoid getting too greedy. Locke Lamora is a natural-born liar and thief, molded by his mentor, the false priest Father Chains, to be the Thorn of Camorr, pulling off long cons that break the Secret Peace and target the wealthy. And technically, Father Chains is an actual priest, but his patron god is the unacknowledged 13th god, patron of thieves, not the god that he professes to the public, but that's beside the point just now.

Lynch weaves together two basic timelines, a "present" story and a past story showing how Locke and the other Gentleman Bastards--Jean, the brothers Calo and Galdo, and the group's apprentice member, Bug--grew up together under Chains's tutelage and became the characters we see before us. The Gentleman Bastards are running a big con against a wealthy noble, but all this is hampered by other happenings in the city: the mysterious Grey King has entered the scene and seems intent on displacing Capa Barsavi. Locke and his Bastards are inevitably drawn into this struggle and forced to play both sides while looking for a way out.

The novel seemed to me to invite comparison with Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, and while The Lies of Locke Lamora kept my interest, neither the novel as a whole nor the characters seemed quite up to that standard. Locke is supposed to be some kind of thieving genius, but far too often he seemed over-matched and a bit passive. He doesn't have the panache of Vlad (nor of most other Brust characters) nor, ultimately, the same genius. Or self-control. But then, I do need to be careful: despite obvious points of comparison, I should remind myself that Lynch is not trying to create a clone of Brust's protagonist and I should work more to appreciate Locke for who he is.

One thing I'll give Lynch credit for (big-time spoiler alert--skip to the next paragraph if you're skittish about such things): he doesn't seem to hold his characters sacred. I mean, it's a bloodbath as he kills off the majority of the Gentleman Bastards. Not knowing initially that this was the first in a series, I half-suspected that this was a one-off with Locke dying at the end. That wouldn't have been a bad thing, per se, and it's to Lynch's credit that he raised the stakes that high, that he was able to generate that kind of dramatic tension.

One thing worth mentioning is the language: it's very contemporary and very coarse. I was ambivalent about it: at times, it felt jarringly modern in a fantasy setting; at times, it felt jarring just because I got tired of hearing the f-word so much (and I did hear it: I was listening to the audiobook version). At the same time, it's not as though I don't hear the same language in films without batting an eye, and I've said all such words at one time or another, so it's not a squeamishness on my part. One nit to pick is that I would have liked to have had more of a sense of language differentiation: a big part of the story revolves around disguises, but I felt like everyone talked with roughly the same level of diction, no class differences or even personal quirks. There was at times some creative swearing, but that was more Lynch showing off than anything particularly individual to a character or class.

In the end, I enjoyed it enough to see it through to the end and I enjoyed it enough to pick up the next novel in the series, but it won't go down as one of my favorites or as a novel I'd class among the best that the fantasy genre has to offer.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind

2011-06-19T18:20:00.000-04:00

I'd heard a lot of buzz for this novel as it was read by one of the book clubs I follow on Goodreads. Other than that, I didn't know much about it when I saw that I could check it out as an audiobook from my library. So, I did, and passed quite a few hours in the world Rotfuss created, with his hero/narrator, Kvothe.

There were a lot of things that I liked about this novel. First, I liked Kvothe. He's a hero rather in the mold of an Orson Scott Card hero: brilliant from a young age, destined for greatness, with a solid core of goodness. At the same time, Rothfuss avoids Card's preachiness and over-narration, while also giving him a bit of a darker streak that isn't (as it necessarily would be in a Card novel) mended.

The overall story is a bildungsroman, which is a snooty way of saying it's a coming-of-age story. [Warning: Lots of Spoilers Ahead] It's framed like this: our hero Kvothe is a legend in his own time--he's done great deeds that are known throughout the world--but he has, at what's still a relatively young age, retired from the world to a life of anonymity. A man known as Chronicler, who's made it his life work to seek out legends and suss out the truth of them, has found where Kvothe is hiding and seeks to get him to tell his true story, to reveal the man behind the legend. Oh yeah, and the sleepy little village where Kvothe hides begins early in the novel to be attacked by strange, dark forces.

All this, though, is a framing device. Although we get occasional "interludes" set in the present, the bulk of this novel deals with Kvothe's early life among the Edema Ruh (read: gypsies), the loss of his family, his hard life alone on the streets of a nasty city, and his entry into a university devoted to the study of magic in its various forms.

All in all, it was an engaging story. Many of the characters teetered on the edge of being flat and a bit generic--certainly, none of them has the vividness that Kvothe gets, though we do get hints of individuality and interest, at least from some of them.

A few things bothered me. First, although I like the idea of all the very literary things Rothfuss is doing--the framing narrative, his poetic opening that's echoed in the ending, some of his asides about "fairy stories" (read: simplistic fantasy), none of them quite seemed to click for me. One problem with the framing narrative is that, naturally enough, it lowers the tension on the main story being told. We know that Kvothe survives and thrives, because he's telling his own story and throughout the novel he hasn't yet done most of the things that will make him legendary. Indeed, all the suspense is in the "present" story, where we have sinister forces very active in the world and where we have what we soon enough realize is a broken hero: why has he withdrawn from the world, why has he apparently lost a good bit of his power and ability, and will he rise to the new threat (the one that actually does have suspense and interest on its side)?

The story that is the focus of the novel isn't nearly wrapped up. This isn't a surprise, really, given what we're told in the framing story, but it's still unsatisfying. It just kind of stops. Because the narrator is tired and it's time to stop for the night. Are some plot threads wrapped up? Sure. He calls the name of the wind, he avoids being expelled, and he even gets promoted to a higher level of student. But in so many other ways, it didn't seem like the right end to the story. Rothfuss has a poetic bit about a silence in three parts--the same thing he used to open the book, though it's a bit different by the end (of course). It serves to offer a sort of formal closure, the sort of thing that might work well enough in a song (appropriate enough, since Kvothe is, among other things, a musician), but the overall unsatisfying point at which he's left off the story can't be smoothed over by a formal trick--it just didn't work for me.

Still, the plot, the characters, and the telling of the novel were all good enough that I will be listening to the next book of the series before too long.

Food Friday: Cubed Steak Fajitas

2011-06-17T23:15:00.000-04:00

I put out a call recently for recipes to help me use some of the cuts of meat in our freezer whose usage doesn't come naturally to me. Over on Facebook, my friend Liz offered a recipe that I modified to make Cubed Steak Fajitas. They turned out pretty well, even if I did feel like I was basically throwing ingredients at a food processor to see what would stick. These numbers no doubt bear only a vague resemblance to what I actually used.

1 pkg cubed steak
1/4 c. olive oil
1/4 c. tequila
2 T lime juice
handful of cilantro
handful of parsley
3 cloves garlic
1 T. chilis in adobo sauce
a little olive oil
2 onions, sliced
1 green pepper, sliced
tortillas, preferably whole-grain, low-carb
avocado slices or guacamole (optional)
yogurt or sour cream (optional)
salsa (optional)

Slice the steak very thinly. In a food processor, combine next 7 ingredients, and blend. Pour this over the meat, mix, and let marinade for several hours. When ready, saute the onions and peppers on med. heat until softened. On high heat, stir fry the steak. Pile the meat and veggies into warm tortilla shells, add optional ingredients (note: plain, non-fat yogurt makes a great low-fat substitute for sour cream. Avocado is just plain yummy, and salsa is closer to a necessity than an option. Cheese, tomatoes, even cabbage could apparently be added to this--go nuts with it.

Thursday Think 'n' Share 3.4

2011-06-16T23:59:00.001-04:00

Well, this is coming a little late, but better late than never. As I mentioned the first time around, this is a sort of "getting to know you" game that I hope my readers will join me in playing each week. The short of it is that I pull three random question from one of various decks of The Ungame and answer them. Readers are encouraged to post their own answers either in the comment box or on their own blog (or Facebook page). If you're not doing it in the comment box, do let me know where I can find them, because I'd like to get to know my readers better at the same time they're getting to know me. You can be as serious or as silly as you feel like being on any given day for any particular question.

What is your favorite magazine or reading material?

I don't really read magazines regularly, but I do occasionally enjoy the Sports Illustrated that my mother gave me a subscription to. I also enjoy The New Yorker, which a student of mine passes on to me--I love the articles, which are diverse and typically so well written, so thorough and deep. My favorite reading material, though, are fantasy novels.

Would you say you are moody? Explain.

No. One ex-girlfriend characterized my emotions as "robotic," and though that's even less accurate now than it was then, it's still true that I don't have big mood swings. I'm sure my wife can tell you all about my moods though....

Complete the sentence: "My favorite time of day is..."

the edges. As long as I've gotten enough sleep, I love to get up early--it's my favorite time to work out. But I've also long been a night owl. Parenting has pushed me closer to "early to bed, early to rise," but parenting also helps me appreciate the night as time when our daughter's asleep and doesn't need anything from us.

And you?

Audiobooks

2011-06-15T23:22:00.000-04:00

I don't know who has the power to decide such things (I suspect the answer is "anyone"), but I saw today that June is "Audiobook Month." That "fact" won't change what I've been doing with regards to audiobooks, but it does give me ample excuse for writing about them. Which is convenient, since it's 11 p.m., I want to go to bed but can't come up with anything more substantive for a topic.

For me, this could well be the year of the audiobook. I've consumed the words in a mere 14 books so far this year, but fully ten of those have been audiobooks. To some extent, this is because we've done a fair amount of driving this year, from visiting my mom in Ohio when she was in the hospital to the regular sorts of trips that come up, but that's only half the story. The other half comes down to sheer availability.

When I lived in Providence, RI, I naturally had a library card. One perk of a Providence Public Library card was that I could check out audiobooks by downloading them onto my computer and from there either burning CDs or just putting them onto an iPod or mp3 player. In theory, the books expire after the lending period is up, but if one listens to them on CDs or an mp3 player, there appears to be no way for the library to enforce that. In any case, this service gave me access to quite a number of fiction and non-fiction works, and now Indiana's Evergreen system of libraries is offering the same kind of arrangement. And did I mention that I've continued using my Providence library card for the past 3 years even though I don't exactly live within the Providence city limits any more?

I don't just listen to audiobooks in the car, and this has caused occasional friction at home. I like, for instance, to listen to books while I'm doing household chores like cooking or washing dishes, walking the dog or doing laundry or picking up around the house. Probably 95% of the time, this is not a problem, but for the 5% of those times when my wife is trying to speak to me, well, she gets frustrated when I don't answer or have to fumble around with iPod controls, and even more so when I have to wash and dry my hands before fumbling around with iPod controls, or when I only mentally "surface" briefly enough to answer whatever question I'm being asked and then dive back into the waters of my audiobook.

Her response is, of course, understandable, as is my desire to fill the time when I'm doing tasks that don't require much mental attention. I've tried to be more judicious in my listening, but I've probably failed. When I'm all on my own, at any rate, is a perfect time to listen to audiobooks, including but not limited to the time when I'm out using my chainsaw. I have noise-dampening headphones to block out my power-tool-generated decibels, and they also let me listen to an mp3 player.

I've also discovered that, although I may miss out on some of the nuance that the voice actors have been paid to provide, I can set my iPod to play audiobooks at 2x speed and take it all in just fine. At least, I can with fiction--non-fiction might demand more time to ponder. But for someone who craves stories, audiobooks have been a good way to satisfy that desire.

Meeting the neighbors

2011-06-14T23:01:00.000-04:00

Pretty much since the first day we bought our land, over a year ago, I've been thinking about meeting the neighbors. Being a rural kid myself, I know that neighbors can make or break the experience of living in the country, even--or perhaps especially--as isolated as our land is. When we got our deed, there were names attached to some of the fields around us, and I tried to figure out who those people actually were, but so far the only neighbor I met was when I had to go begging at an old farmer's door for help getting my truck out of a snow drift--not exactly one of the textbook ways to win friends and influence people.

This week, my first week of summer, I've been spending a couple hours each day out at our land using my shiny new chainsaw to slice and dice trees that storms took down last summer. That's been a good learning experience--for instance, I learned yesterday how to flood the engine and more or less learned how to recover from that mistake. I also learned how hard I actually need to pull back on the chain break to disengage it, which is to say, harder than I thought before I talked to the guy at the shop (he will probably shake his head in wonder every time he sees me coming for the next decade).

This morning, when I went out to spend some quality time with my Echo, I was surprised to see a small tractor parked on my land since, you know, it is my land but it isn't my tractor. But I wasn't particularly worried about it because it's not like that part of the land is getting any better use. I pulled the truck further back onto our lot and started to get my things out when a pickup pulled up, dropped off one guy to go into the field, and then pulled up and parked near the tractor. This seemed like as good a time as any to meet one of my neighbors.

I decided that "Why are you parking your tractor on my land?" was a lousy conversational gambit, even if I had been dissatisfied with its parking place. Instead I just introduced myself and made his acquaintance. This man, perhaps in his 60s or 50s, farms the land across the road from us--or, rather, he and his brother do. We made a bit of small talk and he--no doubt noticing how quickly the wilderness is working to reclaim land that I claimed to want to build a house upon--asked if I wanted the land mowed. Hell yes I did! But I was rather more noncommittal than that, because I wasn't really looking to pay someone to do it. Though it could come to that. In any case, he said his brother might be interested in mowing it for hay. "He wouldn't pay you for it," he added, which at least also sounded like he wouldn't charge me for it, which was good enough for me. I gave him my phone number and counted it a good day, having met a neighbor.

I lugged my saw back into the woods and, naturally enough, the cursed thing wouldn't start for me. Ugh. So I walked back through the woods toward my truck, just as a jeep pulled up next to it, honking its horn. Which I probably wouldn't have heard if I'd have been sawing wood. This was the man's brother. We chatted a bit, he pointed out a nasty weed to me (for which he recommended Roundup), pointed out his family's house and barn, where they'd lived since the 1800s, I talked about my own roots in Ohio, talked about my plans to build a house, and finally mentioned that I worked at the nearby school--turned out his wife just retired from our admissions department. I don't know if it's a small world, but it's a small community, anyway.

At the end of the day, I met two neighbors and I'll be getting my grass mowed in a couple weeks. Oh, and the chainsaw started right up after that and was good for a couple hours of cutting.

A survey of our meats and a call for help

2011-06-13T20:10:00.001-04:00

Today, I asked our butler to conduct a survey of our larder and apprise me of the meats contained therein. Upon realizing we had neither a butler, a steward, nor even a manservant (or, for that matter, a larder), I went to the basement myself, opened up the chest freezer, and counted everything myself.

In the days right after receiving all the meat of our share of a cow or a pig, cooking is easy--if I want to cook something, well, I just go get the meat and cook it. Of course we have it: we have everything! Many of the most desirable cuts, of course, get eaten quickly, and now we're getting down to it, my friends. Which is good, since we'll be getting another split side of beef and another half-pig in just a few months. Now, though, the task before me is to figure out how best to prepare the meat that we still have.

Come with me and have a look at the meat ledger (one package unless otherwise noted):

T-bone steaks
Not T-bones, but labeled as such: 2
Cubed steaks: 5
Neck bones
Round steaks: 2
Oxtails
Beef steak for Swissing
Roasts: 9
Beef heart
Hamburger: 42 lbs
Pork hocks: 2
Pork neckbones
Pork spare ribs
Pork chops: 3
Pork steaks: 4
Ham shank
Smoked ham: 2
Bacon: 10 lbs
Sausage: 14 lbs
Chickens: 5
Chicken broth: 19 2-cup containers

And there you have it. Some of these things are easily dealt with. We'll cook a bunch of pork steaks just as soon as my in-laws come to visit, as they're from Missouri, which apparently is the land of the pork steak. The T-bones could very well be our anniversary celebration, and the chickens get eaten right along, at least one each week (we'll be getting more throughout the summer).

Some of these items, though, are rather mysterious to me. I've eaten my fair share of cubed steak throughout my life (after all, my parents always bought beef by the cow), but I've had very few good ones. Oxtails? Heart? And how do I Swiss my steak?

What I would love to do is to find enough excellent recipes so that we can eat all of this meat without ever having the same dish twice and always having an excellent gustatory experience. Dear readers, can you help me out? If you have great recipes or cooking techniques for the cuts of meat I've listed, please (please, please, please) send them to me. I would be grateful. I would blog about it. I would credit you as the source. I would probably even invite you over for dinner, especially if you live far enough away that you couldn't possibly accept. What more enticement do I need to offer? Leave a recipe in the comments or drop me an e-mail. Please.

Summer Cinema

2011-06-12T14:05:00.000-04:00

Recently, two movies we'd ordered from Netflix kept each other company for three months or so. Although I haven't done a cost-benefit analysis, something tells me that providing semi-permanent decorations for the top of our entertainment center is probably not the best use we could be making of our Netflix subscription.

That, of course, was during the school year. Now that we have two months of summer stretching out before us, we may be able to make up for lost time and, indeed, we've started that process, aided and abetted by a purchase I made back in the spring for the benefit of the cadets in my barrack. One of my fellow Counselors had suggested the Epson MovieMate projector/DVD player, and it turned out to be a very popular purchase. With a bit of clear wall space or a hung sheet, my boys can have big-screen experiences in the lounge or their own rooms, watching DVDs, movies from their computer, or hooking up their game systems for big-screen tournaments. All very well and good, but now it's summer and the projector needs a home. It's like the class hamster: somebody has to take care of it over vacation (and it cannot be flushed if care is not provided). So it's up to me to bear that burden.

Last night we watched Pandorum on our own big screen, streamed from Netflix without even getting a DVD in the mail. Between our two DVD allotment and the ability to watch many movies and TV shows instantly, I suspect we will be making up for lost time this summer, especially since I'm not working at a job as such and the research Lauren's doing up at Notre Dame is something she can leave behind at the end of the day. Now, if we can just get our girl to bed at a reasonable hour each night....

Note: we will need to go to the drive-in at least once this summer, to see a certain movie that comes out July 15.

Saturday at the Animal Park

2011-06-11T21:37:00.000-04:00

We don't have to drive an hour for a decent park, but we do if we want to see monkeys and tigers and anteaters and tortoises and their friends.

A few weeks ago, Lauren bought us a family pass to our nearest zoo, the Potawatomi Zoo in South Bend. It's good for a year, and there are at least two great things about this pass: first, we don't feel rushed to see things at the zoo, because we can always go back; second, it gets us in free to a number of other zoos, including the ones in Toledo and Cleveland. Today was our first visit to the zoo.

Granted, the Potawatomi Zoo, at least from what we've seen, is far from the most impressive zoo either of us has ever been to. Really, it's like a nice park with an assortment of animals to see. Some are exotic and some are not--we could see better horses than the pony that's there for a pony ride in a 5 minute walk from our house, and cows and goats aren't exactly something we have to seek out either. Even alpacas are easy if you know where to look. But red pandas, tigers, a leopard, an anteater, tortoises, otters, the pig-like peccary, toucans, and diana monkeys? Not so easy to spot on a casual stroll. And there were lots of animals that we didn't see that are rumored to live there as well. It was a very nice place to walk around and a perfect day for it--sunny but not too hot, and there were enough places there for us to get out of the sun.

Thea seemed to have a good time, at least until she got cranky (nap time), and even then she found things to get excited about. We also enjoyed ourselves, with the time passing very quickly. We're already looking forward to our next trip to the Potawatomi Zoo (maybe we'll see the lions next time!). If we can get there early--members can enter at 8 am, before the ~~rabble~~ general public are allowed in at 10--we could easily spend a few hours and then hit the nearby farmer's market and get home before the nap-needing meltdown.

Food Friday: Pulled Beef

2011-06-10T14:40:00.000-04:00

I've found what is quite possibly a new favorite way to cook a roast (or two): Pulled Beef. I don't know about anyone else, but I tend to think "pulled pork" before pulled beef, but it's really an ideal cooking method, especially for the leaner grass-fed beef that we prefer--low heat for several (in this case, six) hours. I like the fact that we can make up a bunch and save it for later, eating it either has sandwiches or in all its naked, beefy gloriousness. It's also nice that the recipe is relatively light on sugar or fat.

I started mine this morning before I left for our last day of meetings before summer starts, and it just came out a half hour ago, so I've sampled it and made sure that it's fit to publish. I've made a few modifications from the original, so I'll post my version here (I'm sure the recipe linked above would also be very good if I would just stick to what it says):

4 lb roast (bone-in or otherwise--a 6-lb roast would also be fine) or two 2-lb roasts
1 med onion, chopped
3/4 c. ketchup (may substitute catsup)
3 T vinegar (I like red wine vinegar, but cider vinegar or plain old white vinegar would all be fine)
1 T Worcestershire sauce
1 T salt
1 tsp pepper
1 tsp chili powder
1 1/2 c. water

Mix all ingredients. except the roast. Pour a bit of the mixture into the bottom of the pan, add the roast, and cover with remainder of mixture. For my part, I had two 2-lb roasts and put some of the sauce between them and the rest over the top. Cook at 300F for 6 hours (or more). When done, remove any bones and obvious chunks of fat. Use two forks to pull apart the beef, mixing with the sauce.
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You know what I really need? Great recipes for using cubed steak. It's my least favorite cut, so naturally it's the thing I have the most of in my freezer right now, barring (perhaps) hamburger.Ideas, dear readers?