Teachers tournament on Jeopardy! What extra pressure! It's disorienting on a deep level watching them get things wrong.

Atheism, seriously

Alan Watts was looking forward to a “great many people are finding out that religion is not supposed to be taken seriously”.  Not sure if he got his way or not.  Most prominent atheists take atheism way too seriously, that’s just part of why they annoy me.

What's a music video

I could tell my four year old’s mind was turning over while watching this.  He giggled, “it’s like a song” and then, like he was sharing a secret “and like a movie”.  It was harder than expected explaining to him what a ‘music video’ is.

Whiskeying linguistics

There should be a word that means a word that becomes a word after the doing the word, like bonging, or whiskeying, and I suppose an opposite type of word would be regrettifying.

Parenting & Politcs 1: Backbones are complicated

Sometimes watching my son grow up makes me think about what it means to be an adult.  The country is currently quite fond of accusing itself of failing to grow up, so it’s worth thinking about.  My son is only four years old, so I’ve got a little time, although if ‘time-flyingness’ is an indication (or even a word) cars, jobs & women are just around the corner. 

I’ll start with the idea of ‘growing a backbone’.   What does that even mean?  Online dictionaries, those quaint relics of the early internet, seem to agree that it means both fortitude & moxie.  So:  both strength of character that ‘enables one to endure adversity with courage’, and ‘balls’.  That could be more helpful.

Everyone knows life isn’t always sunshine & roses, that’s not controversial.  Sometimes there are things that can’t be fixed, or even escaped, and ‘enduring diversity with courage’ really is the essential skill.   Many people, though,  are also stuck in crap jobs for most of the hours of most of their days of most of their years, forever perhaps, with no foreseeable end except death or lottery jackpot.  And most of the unemployed would even envy that.  They are trapped inside a system almost defined by its ability to strip meaning from things, and to replace the meaning missing in their work they find that ‘things that can’t be fixed’ can include their entire condition; that their everyday can be seen as that same noble suffering.   It means they see the dignity in bringing home a paycheck, no matter how meager, in taking things on themselves, of being that magnificent beast of burden for family & community to place their fears, responsibilities & obligations on- the dignity of soldiering on with the offsetting indignities of working for something that sees them only as a temporarily useful but disposable asset, lodged there by insecurity and disopportunity. 

If the adversity crowd sees their essential moment when a profound burden is accepted by the next generation, in ancient wisdoms renewed; then when you measure yourself by moxie instead, your moment is that in which you stand up to wrong despite being less powerful.  When they step in front of their mother to defend her, when they refuse to allow abuse on their brothers, and when they ultimately leave to find their own path: that is when the moxie group first sees backbone forming.  To them, then, it makes no sense why the others continue to submit to a system that uses and disrespects them. 

Those that remain & tough it out see it as a courage, but from the outside it can look like safe cowardice.  And for those who have left the system, they see in themselves bravery to walk a new path, to choose their own values.  From another point of view it’s easy to wonder how much adversity they really handled before punching out, to see them as avoiding the tough, significant things in life. To see spoiled ‘college kids’.  To see cheaters.

I’d suggest that, ultimately, both these characteristics are in need, and that the line dividing when to stick from when to sail resides in a vast gray area, and is probably determined as much by your family and community as your own personality.  It seems, like in many things anymore, this is a place we could do better at recognizing that there are often good reasons people stand on a different side of the fence.  I’m not going to try and convince everyone that every tough question has an impossibly complex & nuanced answer.  I mean that two ideas can both be right & good, even though they disagree sometimes.  And maybe, back to parenting, that flawed combination has more promise than either alone.

Garage Sale blues

VHS I'm most embarrassed to have placed in the 'kept' pile: Lifeforce