bearing blog

Quick one-liner: wedding advice.

We attended a wedding this past weekend on Mark's side of the family.  

Afterward, as we arrived at the reception, we encountered a table where guests could leave a thumbprint, in our choice of several shades of green, on a black-and-white image of a bare-branched tree -- leafing the tree -- that would form a framed memento.  I thought that was a nice variation on the guestbook idea.

As I struggled in with one teenager and four more children in tow, my eye was caught by a glass container and a stack of notecards and a pen, with a sign inviting us to write our advice for the newlyweds on a card and drop it into the container.

This is not such an unusual variation, and I might have expected it, after all.  

As Mark and the kids went on down the hall towards the kids' room with the movies and coloring pages and the grownups' room with the open bar and the trays of hors d'oeuvres, I was the only one who paused to write something, but I did not have time to think for more than a few seconds.  On the other hand, I take questions like this rather seriously.

A number of things went through my mind.  I summed them up with this one line:

Never try to get even.

If I had had more time to think, I would have added:  "Interpret that as broadly as possible."

What one line would you write?

Enacting mercy, whether or not it exists.

The works of mercy are all the works of almsgiving or "charity." According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

The traditional enumeration of the corporal works of mercy is as follows:

• To feed the hungry;
• To give drink to the thirsty;
• To clothe the naked;
• To harbour the harbourless;
• To visit the sick;
• To ransom the captive;
• To bury the dead.

The spiritual works of mercy are:

• To instruct the ignorant;
• To counsel the doubtful;
• To admonish sinners;
• To bear wrongs patiently;
• To forgive offences willingly;
• To comfort the afflicted;
• To pray for the living and the dead.

 

From Disputations:

Rocco Palmo quotes Pope Francis:

"We cannot follow Jesus on the way of charity if we don't love those around us first of all. It's necessary to do the works of mercy with mercy! The works of charity with charity!"

Which is probably why I don't often find instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner brings me much peace.

Um.  Yeah.

So here's the question of the day.   If you can't summon up mercy and charity in your heart as the reason to perform any of these works...

...if you have some other reason...

...is it better to try to fake it and perform them anyway, or is it better to refrain?

 

 

Help me, I'm a calendar luddite.

So this is kind of a plea for help.  

It isn't that I'm not reasonably geeky.  Really, I am.  Very comfortable in the Internet, cloud computing age.

But.  This is the calendar app that I use:

(I thought I'd make sure to include in the photo the background skin I selected, complete with pirate ship and wildebeest.)

I have tried in the past to transition to a shareable online calendar and I have always failed.  Something about the paper-and-pen -- about the memory cues that are triggered by the color ink I used or by the scrawly arrows that mark off a whole week -- the way the month looks hanging up on the wall -- the fact that it's always visible in the same spot in my house -- something in there comforts me and makes me feel as if I am On Top of Things. I do not get that feeling from electronic calendars.  And I thrive on that feeling.

But it is starting to get annoying (not to ME -- to those pesky OTHER people) that I am always saying "I can't confirm that right now, I have to go home and check my calendar" or "ha ha, sure I'd love to share my calendar with you, let me find a photocopier and a stamp."

I think I might have to go cold turkey in 2014.

Does anyone know of a twelve-step program for making the transition?  And what's a good app to use?  How do I do this painlessly?

If this helps at all:  

• of the two people whose calendars I am most in need of being in touch with or sharing, one uses Outlook and one uses Google Calendar.  
• Our family mostly uses Macs and iOS devices, but we do use Windows PCs on occasion.

Thoughts?

 

Bleg: Preparations for the possibility of unplanned unassisted home birth.

In the post about weekends, we kind of went off topic in the comments!

Commenter Jenny mentioned that she had a history of precipitous labor, and I suggested that (even though she and her husband prefer to plan a hospital birth) it would be a good idea to make a few preparations at home in the event of a precipitous labor necessitating an unplanned unassisted birth.

(If baby's about to come out, you're likely to be much safer staying home than trying to race to the hospital.)

Jenny sez:

I would love some recommendations. When I first went to the OB with this latest pregnancy, she actually suggested my husband come in to get some birthing pointers, just in case.

My husband keeps plants in the tub in our bathroom (don't ask). During my last pregnancy in the last month, I insisted he get them out of there and clean up the tub. I was not going to be a happy camper giving birth unexpectedly amongst his plants!

Getting the plants out of the tub is definitely a good start.

I have some ideas, but as I'm about to rush off to the vigil Mass I'm going to put this up here and invite ideas, recommendations, and brief precipitous-labor stories in the comments.  Be back later!

UPDATE:  More here.

The semi-annual gluttony retrospective.

Well, it's that time of year again.

In May and November of every year --

yeah, I'm a little late this holiday season, but at least I made it to the crucial "between Thanksgiving and Christmas" metric --

I write a few posts about the maintenance of my 2008 weight loss.  

I do this for a couple of reasons.

First, it gives me the opportunity to clean up the links to old posts about gluttony, weight loss, and weight maintenance.  Taken all together, the posts about gluttony and weight loss and such form a lengthy and growing series, and it's one that gets a lot of hits.  I can see from the stats that often someone comes to read through the whole thing.  I like to keep it maintained if I can.  (Right now it's a little ragged.  I'll let you know when I get it all fixed up.)

Second, it gives me a needed semi-annual accountability fix.  It always seems that right about every six months, I've started to slide a bit, and writing publicly about my lazy bad habits generally shames me into paying attention to them again long enough to do me some good.  This is a long-term project and it needs regular upkeep, even as the frequency of upkeep has dropped quite low.

Third, time has refined and tested many of my theories and ideas about how to defeat gluttony and, secondarily, how to resist gaining the weight back; also, how to maintain mental health and raise children with healthy attitudes toward bodies, food, and fitness.  As I stumbled along, I got a lot of things wrong or at least not quite right, and as I get older and learn things, I like to go back and see what I used to think and write, and ask myself if I have learned anything new.  I want to find places where I was wrong, and point them out here in this space, maybe go back and update old posts.

Readers:  

• what would you like to see here in the next few posts?  
• any stories from the trenches you'd like to share?
• recommendations of articles or books?  (A few people have sent me some already that I've saved for this)
• any questions?

The combox is yours.

 EDITED TO ADD:   Really, only one comment or question?  Maybe I've finally exhausted the topic!

Post-election open thread.

How ya feeling, folks?

Postsecondary education questions: A tricky conundrum about parental responsibilities.

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

+ + +

 

So Mark and I went over my last post about parents' responsibility to help finish their kids' educations, and we identified -- in Catholic teachings, not in my meandering attempts to synthesize them -- a tricky bit:  three things that are hard to synthesize.  

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Here's what we have to reconcile.

From Gaudium et Spes, par. 52:  "Children should be so educated that as adults...if they marry, they can thereby establish their family in favorable moral, social, and economic conditions" 

 From the Catechism, par. 2230:  "Parents should be careful not to exert pressure on their children ... in the choice of a profession ...." 

and from the same paragraph:  "This necessary restraint does not prevent them - quite the contrary from giving their children judicious advice."

+ + +

So tell me:  How do you "give judicious advice" and  "educate" your children so that "they can establish their family in favorable economic conditions," without "exerting pressure" in the choice of profession?  

Clearly some people can't make certain choices and still remain able to establish a family in favorable economic conditions.  Is educating, advising, against these choices not a kind of exerting of pressure?

Discuss.

Post-secondary education questions.

I don't know if I mentioned it or not, but this week we started back to school.

I always have to work hard the first couple of weeks to help set the new schedule into stone, so I have clung to the self-discipline of not sitting down and blogging when I should be waking up the children and getting them started.

All this is to say: I have several posts queued up in my head, but haven't written them yet, and I hope to get to one this weekend, maybe Saturday afternoon or evening.

But I want to get one started, and I thought I would start with the discussion part.

The first one I want to write is about post-high school education (call it "college" if you want, and I will here to be concise, but I mean for it to be broader than that, encompassing trade schools, apprenticeships, certain military options that include training, community colleges, and the like). Questions for readers to get the ball rolling:

Do you anticipate that your kids will graduate into a significantly different economic paradigm, when it comes to paying-for-school, from the one you entered? Will the best advice for them be different than was the best advice for you and your peers?

Are you closer to the "parents should pay for their offspring's college" end of the spectrum or the "eighteen-year-olds are adults and they should be responsible for their own post secondary education" end of the spectrum? Is that different from your parents' view? If so, why do you think your view is different?

What is parents' responsibility when it comes to educating their children? What kind of financial or other assistance do parents owe their grown or nearly-grown offspring and is there an age when it needs to stop and the offspring should be "launched?"

How would you feel about having one or more of your offspring living with you the entire time they were in college? Would they have to compensate you in some way for you to be okay with that?

If you yourself are a college graduate, how attached are you to the idea that your kids should go to college at all? To the idea that they should attend college full time immediately after high school graduation?

Student loans: good idea, bad idea, necessary evil, or "it depends?"

Mark and I have been doing a lot of talking about this lately, because we feel we should have at least a rough idea of our options by the time our oldest starts 9th grade, and that is only two years away. Take the next couple of days to throw some comments out here, and then I will start writing.

Twitblegging.

Jennifer Fulwiler wants people to explain their blogs to her -- in fact to plug them! -- in 140 characters or less. I thought it might be fun to turn it around. Plugs are rationales for reading, and I figure I could use about five of them, so tell me -- why do you read bearing blog, in 28 characters or less?

___________________________

P.S. I am just going to ignore the little voice in my head that suggests such a question is too narcissistic to be entertaining.

P.P.S. When I typed the last sentence my iPad autocorrected "voice" to "VCR." That's my internal dialogue for you: rapidly declining into obsolescence, repetitive, and prone to glitches when moved rapidly between environments of different temperature and humidity.

P.P.P.S. Link fixed: now when you click on Jen's name, it goes to her post instead of to the Amazon page of the book The Psychopath Test. I am sure Jen will approve this change.

So, cough, anyway. 28 characters. Go!

Perhaps I should have titled that post "Grocery store gobbling."

The commenter on the "Grocery Store Munching" post who is quoted in this update, emails me a link from which I have taken the following photograph.  

(I'm being deliberately nondescriptive in my text to protect her from Googling that connects her to her job.)

Those Cheetos-stained fingers on the guy rifling through the grapes don't look so bad now, do they?