bearing blog

Circus.

Tuesday we went to the Children's Theatre Company to see Madeline and the Gypsies, minus Mark and plus Hannah's 6yo Silas, who thought he'd died and gone to heaven what with the free pizza and the Fruit By The Foot I bought the kids during intermission, 

I love theatre, and I don't think I've seen a single production of anything not expressly for children since, uh, we had children.  Such is life.  But luckily, here in the Twin Cities, the children's theatre is top-notch, and we've enjoyed being subscribers.  Madeline and the Gypsies was especially fun, I thought, because it featured performers from St. Paul's Circus Juventas, the circus arts school for ages 3-21.  I especially liked to watch a father-son balancing act team -- the little boy was maybe 6 or 7, doing flips off his daddy's hands -- and a young man who did a routine on a German wheel, which I'd never seen before.  And if I was impressed, imagine the three boys I was with -- I thought they were going to pitch off the balcony from bouncing on their seats and pointing and squealing.

What, doesn't your town have a circus arts school?   For kids whose parents don't think they climb the walls nearly enough?  Courses are available in acrobatics, aerial, balance -- yup, high wire and all that -- clowning, juggling, various types of dance.  After watching the play I was tempted to sign Milo up for one of their 3-6yo classes.   Kind of pricey, but cool.

The Children's Theatre Company does shows expressly for older kids and teens -- they've done Antigone and Romeo and Juliet in recent years.  I'm looking forward to going with my kids to some of these as they get older.

A potentially useful illegal protest against the federal government.

But will anyone pay attention to it?

 ...[T]he [Transportation Security Agency] officer chicken-scratched onto our boarding passes what might have been his signature, or the number 4, or the letter y. We took our shoes off and placed our laptops in bins. Schneier took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled “saline solution.”

“It’s allowed,” he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the TSA’s three-ounce rule.

“What’s allowed?” I asked. “Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?”

“Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.”

They did not check. As we gathered our belongings, Schnei er held up the bottle and said to the nearest security officer, “This is okay, right?” “Yep,” the officer said. “Just have to put it in the tray.”

“Maybe if you lit it on fire, he’d pay attention,” I said, risking arrest for making a joke at airport security. (Later, Schnei er would carry two bottles labeled saline solution—24 ounces in total—through security. An officer asked him why he needed two bottles. “Two eyes,” he said. He was allowed to keep the bottles.)

Worth reading.

I do not think this word means what you think it means.

Okay, what's up with "humbled?"

How is it that when someone receives recognition, honor, and/or praise, or perhaps a political endorsement from an admirable person, they are always saying "I'm humbled and honored?"

It is, by definition, impossible to be both "humbled" and "honored" by the same event.

One is humbled not by endorsement, but by criticism.  One is humbled not by winning, but by losing.  One is humbled not by being told how effing great you are, but by how greatly you've effed up.  It comes from the same root as "humility" and  "humiliated" for a reason.

I think perhaps that when someone speaks this way, they are hoping to be viewed as having "humbly accepted" the praise, and they think that they can create this view by spouting about how humbled they are as they are accepting it.  

Really humbly accepting an endorsement is much shorter and quieter.  It does not make a good sound bite.  It goes like this:  "Thank you, sir, I accept."

Humbled rarely announces itself.  Occasionally decorum and closure requires it.  The proper kind of announcement that you are "humbled" is gravely, in response to a setback; it accompanies the sort of statement that is referred to as an "admission."

(Yeah, this was inspired by Sen. Obama's response to the news that Gen. Powell had released a statement endorsing him, but it's a generic nonpartisan complaint.  Everybody does this nowadays, it's not even limited to politicians.)

Serendipity.

Melissa's family just joined the local YMCA with a family membership.   They've been taking swimming lessons for some time, and Melissa is hoping to get more active herself.

Meanwhile, Mark's been pushing me to think about broadening my exercise regimen so it's not all swimming all the time.  I need to be more flexible, he says.  What if I get a sinus infection and can't swim for six weeks?  I need a backup plan.  He's right, but I've been unwilling to cut out any swims.  So I've been looking for a third workout per week that I won't be tempted to skip.

While Melissa's family was over at my house the other night for tea, her ten-year-old daughter asked, "Erin, can you and I go swimming together sometime?"  And the light went on.

I always take some time to myself on Saturday mornings.  Why not pick up Melissa and her daughter and hit the Y together?  If Melissa's husband is available, he can watch her three younger children while the three of us take a yoga class together or something.  And if Melissa's husband is busy, as he is some Saturdays, we'll take all the kids to the Y and let the middle two play in the "Kids Gym."  Melissa can walk around the track with the baby, and I can take Meira for a swimming workout.

Of course, I've already got my calendar filled for the next two Saturdays.  But after that -- I think it'll work!  Even better, my parish is on the way home from Melissa's, so I can even add to the routine the half-holy-hour --- no wait, make that a holy half-hour --- I 've been wanting to add to my week but unsure where to cram it in.

And I've been missing Melissa and her family.  Our schedule this year hasn't allowed us many days together.

Funny how everything can come together at once sometimes.

Your way and my way Our way.

I set down my second cup of coffee and leaned back in my chair, rubbing my eyes.  "Okay.  Write these two things down."  I paused while Hannah turned to a new page in her spiral notebook (past one that read If Hannah finds the broken pieces of the yo-yo on the floor Ben will pay her 25 cents, signed Ben, Witnessed Hannah).  "First.  ONE ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE.  Second.  SINGLE LARGE HOMESCHOOLING FAMILY."

We were at a Caribou Coffee in a little strip mall, not far away from Hannah's house, where presumably our husbands were playing chess, cleaning up chili, or turning on a DVD for our total of six children.   

We were looking for a new paradigm.

Hannah said at one point, "The problem is not that we don't know how to let go of the we-do-it-differently-in-different-families paradigm.  The problem is we haven't taken it past the Naptime Level."  I had to get her to explain that, and she reminded me:

When our children were all small and we would excitedly explain to other mothers, weary, isolated at-home mothers, how we had brought more balance and fun and connection to our lives by spending one or two whole days together every single week and sharing our work, the other mothers would listen, sometimes with a longing expression on their faces, and tell us how wonderful it sounded.  "You could do it," we would tell them.  "You could find a friend and just start spending lots of time at each others' houses.  We hardly even knew each other when we started.  You just have to make it happen."

And the other mothers would say, "It sounds great.  But it would never work for me, because my baby has to take his nap at one.  We would have to be home for his nap."  End of discussion.

We'd always been pretty proud of ourselves that we decided we would forget this whole "gotta be home for naptime" thing.  OK, so our children have a need that we usually meet by going back home, isolating ourselves once again in our own houses?  We won't ignore the need, but we'll find a way to meet it that meets our goal of staying together, of not being isolated.   Babies learn.  Our babies did.  They nap pretty easily in each others' houses. 

That was the naptime level.

Fast forward five or six years and we have some school-aged kids.  

The other mothers now ask us, "So, you co-teach?"  and we say, "Um, no, not really."  They can't imagine why we would be going to such trouble to spend all this time together without seeking the benefits of co-teaching.  

Hannah and I don't teach the same way.  Our kids don't learn the same way (a superficial example:  my Oscar does well with a list of stuff to finish each day; her Ben, all last year, thrived on a schedule of so many minutes studying one subject, so many minutes working on the next, and so on).  We don't teach the same subjects.   We have assumed all along that our differences mean we cannot really integrate our schooling.  When I spent a day at Hannah's, I lugged a big bag of "our school" to her house, unpacked it all, and we did "our school" at the table next to Hannah and Hannah's kids, then packed it all up at the end and carried it back to my van.  When she came to my house, she did the same.  Small wonder that we both have come to store our kids' school stuff in sturdy tote bags hanging on hooks in the schoolroom!  

It's exhausting, and it's kind of dumb.  We have to get past the Naptime Level.  OK, fine.  So Oscar "needs" to learn one way, and Ben "needs" to learn another.  So Hannah likes to teach one way, and I like to teach another.  So we plan differently, pace differently, organize differently.  This is not insurmountable.  If we decide we NEED to work together, we can find a way.

Toddlers have different nap schedules BECAUSE they are in different families.  They are not in different families because they have different nap schedules.

And though we thought we had to do school separately because we approached it so differently -- the truth is that we approach school differently on Tuesdays and Thursdays BECAUSE we have not done it together.  If we set out to work together on those days, we reasoned, we will find a way -- not the way that Hannah's family works -- not the way that my family works -- not some compromise, halfway between -- but the way that our families work when they work together.  

We're going to tear out the page that says TWO FAMILIES HOMESCHOOLING AT THE SAME TABLE.  

* * *

We've made up our minds not to mess with the curriculum for this year; next year, I guess we'll be choosing curricula together.  This year, though, we can take a look at the schedule.  Can the boys do their spelling together? (They can at least administer the daily spelling tests, one to the other, even if they are spelling from different lists.)  Can the boys do math together, one with Saxon, one with Singapore?  (They can at least listen in on each other's lessons.)  Can Silas and Milo learn to read together, even though they're at different levels in the same program? (We tried it yesterday and found a pattern:  Milo reads one of his workbook pages, and Silas reads one of his; they pass the pencil back and forth to trace their letters on their pages, taking turns.)  

Yes, I think we can do this:  we've done it with Naptime, we've done it with Teaching Kids To Get Along, we've done it with Housework, we now have to do it with School On Tuesdays.  It is going to knock us out of our comfort zones, but then... we've been through this before.  Making connections means resisting the culturally programmed impulse that says I have to do it my way and you have to do it your way.  But every time we've figured out an our way, that has turned out to be just as comfortable, and a lot more companionable.  

Spanish tortilla for one.

Yesterday's dinner used half a potato.  What to do with the rest?  It turns brown if you keep it around raw, so I diced and parboiled  the extra, and stuck it in the fridge while I decided what to do with it.

 By lunchtime today I'd made up my mind:   Spanish tortilla, otherwise known as "potato omelet."

I minced a small onion and cooked it with a half-cup of the potato in my smallest nonstick skillet, in a tablespoon of olive oil,  until the potato was tender but not browned.  Meanwhile, I beat two eggs in a bowl with salt and lots of black pepper.  I scooped the potato and onion out, mixed them with the eggs (plus a few pieces of sun-dried tomatoes -- an unnecessary but elegant extra that I had on hand), and returned the egg-potato-onion mixture to the pan.  I let it cook on low for 3 minutes or so, slid it onto  a plate and inverted it swiftly into the skillet (it worked -- this time).  A couple more minutes and I was sliding it onto the plate to cool.

After it got down to room temperature,  I cut it into wedges and ate it out of hand, with a big pile of steamed broccoli left over from last night.  My verdict:  a most excellent lunch.  (Counting the broccoli, I figure 434 calories, 34 g carbohydrate, 25 g fat -- I told you I don't do low-fat -- and 19 g protein)

The kids?   I gave them apples and double-egg French toast with maple syrup.  They were quite happy.

Remind me to send EVERYTHING to the school district by certified mail.

Yesterday, I got a letter letting me know that the Home School "Services" office at Minneapolis Public Schools doesn't have a record of my son's paperwork this year, and if I don't send it by October 20th they'll begin the "fact finding" process, yada yada yada.

I sent the damn stuff in the middle of September.

I suppose the post office might have lost it.  

The really annoying thing is that one of the forms in there was notarized, which means I probably will have to do the packet over again.  Oh well -- first they'll get a photocopy of the photocopy.  

Certified.  

A different kind of story, from the Strib: Resourcefulness.

Talk about thinking outside the box.

As he [the author's coworker Ryan] darted back out to the car, a woman stopped him: "Three guys just stole your briefcase out of your car and they went THAT way." He raced off toward the Nicollet Mall.

Everything was in that briefcase.... 

He ran back to his car and drove to Block E, the former clay cast for urban decay that has become a model for gussied-up decay.

He searched for "the biggest, baddest guy I could find" and called him over. The man walked up, tentatively, and Ryan made his pitch: Find my briefcase and I’ll pay you $100 cash, no questions asked. Here’s my cell-phone number.

The author of the article draws some odd morals from the story, involving Garrison Keillor, but the story's still pretty good.  Makes you hope it's true.

Things are looking up around here.

Back in August on National Night Out, our inner-city block party attracted a phenomenal number of people.  The firefighters who stopped by to let the kids climb on the truck commented that they'd already made a dozen stops (remember, lots of block parties on the same night) and ours was the most crowded.  Kids all over the place, neighbors chatting -- some of us doing our best to navigate a couple of different languages -- kids jumping in a rented inflatable thing.  "We have to do stuff like this more often," we said to each other.

You know what?  Slowly it's starting to happen.  Two or three households stepped up to the plate.  One young couple with a baby, and a lovely old remodeled house on a corner lot, apparently decided to be the house that always hosts the block club meetings.  They got a big wooden sign for their yard and started sticking it out front:  "NEIGHBOR MEETING 8 PM SAT HERE."  Another couple down the street, also with a young baby, started going door to door and dropping flyers.  "Litter Pick Up Saturday/Ayudanos Limpiar Nuestras Calles Sabado.  Doughnuts and Coffee Afterward/Despues compartiremos pastels y cafe."  We're lucky that each of those households has one adult who speaks fluent Spanish -- maybe that's why they were the ones who stepped up to the plate and really made it happen.  (Me, when I volunteered to drop flyers for National Night Out, I borrowed a neighbor girl to come along and speak Spanish for me.)

Yesterday I skipped my usual breakfast out and went to the litter pickup.  At least a dozen households showed up:  families with young children, a hairnetted elderly lady named Odessa -- I remembered her from the block party because she reminds me of my own grandma MJ, a Spanish-speaking couple with two little kids and Abuelita, being pushed in a wheelchair, herself pushing the stroller with the baby in front.We went all around four city blocks.  Along the way we collected a few new e-mail addresses.  At the end, after the coffee and doughnuts were gone, there were still four or five families left in the backyard we had retired to, all with little kids, and Mark and I invited them to our house for a grill out the first Monday in November.  (Political talk to be banned in the interest of neighborliness.)

I took on the job of trying to get an email list set up.  Not everyone on the block is interested, but it seemed like a good idea to try for a dozen or so.  Slowly it's going.  Also I started bugging the city about speed bumps.  Maybe it'll happen.

The foreclosed homes on our street have been standing empty for longer than I can remember.  Mark, who had been talking about moving west to the suburbs, has lately gotten more resigned to staying in our house for longer than he'd hoped; he's been talking about finishing out the attic, building a climbing wall in the stairwell (he says it's so he doesn't have to drywall it.  hmm).  I'm glad to stay here; I wish someone would open a coffee shop a couple of blocks away, of course, but hey, a Family Dollar and an auto parts store just went in less than a mile away; that'll be good for the neighborhood.  And with neighbors working together -- even if it's just a few households -- to know each other, to know the kids, maybe in time it will be a place where our children can roam the sidewalks, at least as far as the end of the block.

God does not exist.

I mean, depending on how you look at it. 

(Which could be restated as "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.")

In one sense, "God does not exist" is an accurate formulation of a very specific piece of Judeo-Christian doctrine, using a materialist's set of definitions.

Google "universe definition" and you will find that in several places -- though it's not the only definition -- the universe is defined as something along the lines of

"the totality of all the things that exist."

 There is no reason why you can't use such a definition of "universe" for the purposes of your argument.  It's just one way of drawing the boundaries around your system.  Draw it one way to solve Problem 1, draw it another way to solve Problem 2, just make sure you draw it usefully each time.

OK, what's that mean then to Christians?  If you find yourself in a discussion with someone where the ground rules of your discussion -- you did  bother to lay out some ground rules, didn't you? -- include the identification of "existence" as "part of the universe?"  

Isn't it obvious?  You cheerfully and clearly state that God does not exist.  Right?

Because you, being Christian and not pantheist or atheist, believe that God made the universe and is not, therefore, a part of it.  We have always maintained that.  If the universe is the set of all things that exist, then, God doesn't exist.

God must, then, do something else.

Transcends existence, maybe?  

Anyway, my point is that there's no reason a Christian can't have a discussion about the existence of God with a materialist on the materialist's terms.  Just be clear about it.  You will get nowhere, either of you, if one has in his head "existence = physical existence and membership in the physically observable universe" and the other has "existence = all physical things and also metaphysical truths and spiritual entities." 

This is so even if what you are arguing about is the existence of, say, right triangles.

Pick one and argue on those grounds.  "If existence is defined as 'membership in the universe,' then, no, God doesn't exist.  I believe God's not part of the universe; God made the universe and everything in it.  So a more fundamental question is, could there be -- using the  term broadly, mind you -- anything besides the universe?"  (Good luck trying to construct your discussion, I might add, without using the verb 'to be.'  I suggest you have recourse to some other languages.)

Redefining your terms can have interesting results, at least in your head.  If existence is membership in the physical universe, then God doesn't exist (He does something different -- and why not?  Maybe that whole three-and-one-at-the-same-time thing works out better that way), and then, of course, neither do geometrical entities exist (have you ever seen a sphere?  I mean, a real sphere?), nor do emotions, or will, or ideas of any kind.  All those things, instead of "existing," do something different.  What is it they do?  Unwrap, and wrap your mind around it a new way, through a new use of your language.  Old familiar things look new:  the Incarnation, for instance.

Sooner or later, though, you're bound to come up against something that reminds you that you're really playing a game with words -- a profitable game, I think, and a fun one, but a game nonetheless.  Wait a minute.  Remember the divine NAME?  "I am who AM?"  Didn't He kind of, you know, make a point of saying "Existence is mine?"  Huh.  Maybe it's better to say it's the universe that does "the other thing."   Still, next time I find myself discussing Life, The Universe, and Everything with a materialist, it might be edifying to step onto his semantic grounds.  

P.S.  Yes, I was thinking about this before I read Anathem.