A Christmas Story (Paraphrased and with License)

While it is the case that the majority of Christianity would find my theological beliefs unpalatable and while I'm sure they also leave some people trying to figure out why I call myself Christian, I have always loved the Christmas season.  That might have more to do with family traditions and experiences growing up and my love of all things winter and hot cocoa while it's snowing but I also love a good story.

The wonderful part of the birth stories for me is that we essentially have a family who, for whatever reason, has fudged the cultural expectations of there day a bit. Joseph got Mary pregnant before their "marriage" was officially official.  The sticky wicket in which they found themselves, however, had more to do with political expectations.  Rome was in the middle of making sure they were getting all of there taxes (as empires do) from everyone they "owned" and it was decreed by the provincial governor that every man (along with his family, because, ya know, only men count) was to return to their place of birth in order to be counted and taxed accordingly.  It was a bit of a hooplah and Mary was in her third trimester.  I imagine Traveling with a very pregnant woman is no big deal.  I mean, there's only the threat of early labor, dangerous traveling conditions, potentially life threatening situations; if ever there were such a thing as a cake walk, this would be it.  They didn't really have a choice, so they went.

Thankfully, mercifully, gracefully they arrived in Bethlehem without major incident. I say major because I can imagine there were myriad and justified amounts of discomfort, complaining and anger from everyone involved.  What I mean to say is everyone arrived alive.  But of course, owing perhaps to the slower pace which they were forced to take on account of Mary's very pregnant condition, one of the few places left to stay was somebody's stable.  Soon after Mary went into labor. We have no idea how long or how hard that labor was for Mary (thanks, undoubtedly, to the male writers of the gospels and their keenly honed sense of important details).  From what I can cobble together from the women in my life, that shit ain't easy.  It's absolutely true that said labor involved lots of blood, body fluids, ungodly amounts of pain and a healthy stream of cursing unleashed in Joseph's direction.  Mary probably called him a viper a time or two which in today's parlance translates to something like, "Joseph, you fucking asshole, this is all your fault," (I looked it up).

Anyway, they did it.  Mary gave birth to a very loud baby, wrapped him in some blankets and laid him in a feeding trough as is the customary thing to do...kind of (but not really at all).  As good Jews they took the baby after eight days had passed circumcised him and bestowed upon him the most godly name they could think of, Jesus (or Yeshua or Joshua or something or other; the point is the name is actually quite ordinary).  And later, as is prescribed in the Torah, they presented Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem with a sacrifice honoring their god, their culture and their ancestors.

The point of all of this has nothing to do with Jesus as god's son born to save the world from itself.  That's not really my thing.  The miracle is in the fundamental and ordinary experience of creating and caring for life.  The wildly divergent emotions and expectations and everyday life of people sharing the struggles and joys of bringing a child into their lives.  The miracle is that life happens in some of the most peculiar and ordinary and exceptional ways.  For myself, there's no place for some fabricated fanfare about a virgin birth or a chorus of angels and there's no need for shepherds and wise men paying homage to a new king (although it does make for nice story-telling).  I feel like and think that the point has something more to do with the fact that the birth of and care for any child in any place at any time should be enough to call all us to hope (and act!) for peace and love to reign on Earth.  I think we would do well to pay more attention to those mundane things in life, to remember that ordinary doesn't preclude the experience of the sacred or transcending but that the ordinary is very much the heart of what is sacred and transcendent.

I'm not a Heroine Addict But If I Was I'd Be Good At It

It was an early nondescript weekday morning that I found myself entering an unassuming four story building the purpose of which was to deposit yet another sperm sample for doctors and embryologists to ogle.  Don't ask me why they need so much of my sperm, I can only assume that their sending it all over the country as examples in medical schools of what you don't want to see under a microscope. Posterity.  So, I walk into the office, write my name on the little sheet (even though I was the only one there), the receptionist hands me forms to fill out and turns to the nurses behind her saying, "The sperm freeze is here."  This is my life now.  I no longer have a name.  I'm just "the sperm freeze."

Being known around town for the state of your sperm is an interesting place to exist.  Most people don't know what to say or how to react when they ask how things are going or are unfortunate enough to make some quip asking "when are we going to have a baby" and are met with a stony, if not irritated, response. Being "the sperm freeze" brought it to a whole new level.  The nurses in the back kept repeating it to each other (to spread the news I guess) and I felt a tinge of frustration that was followed by incredulity and eventually ended in subdued acceptance of my new identity.  I guess there are worse things in the world to be known for...  And besides, this first step in the IVF process was but a small penance to pay for the insanely unfair position my partner would be in.

This week on Intervention...

I've been carrying around a fair amount of guilt over all of this.  I'm the one with the problem and she gets to endure all of the poking, prodding and monumental discomfort IVF entails. She's the lucky winner of shiny new nightly injections and a veritable cocktail of pharmaceutical magic.  And I get that this is just the practical piece of how this has to happen, I do, but man if I don't wish I could account for even a small piece of the shit end of this stick.  For now, I'll pay my penance by gearing up for lots of puke and poop clean-ups and attempting to find a way to be able to do those things without adding my own adult-sized vomit to the mix; no small task as my gag reflex is notoriously sensitive.  I still can't eat peas without an immediate involuntary heave.

So anyway, for about two weeks I stuck my partner with needles in order to entice her ovaries to produce as many follicles as humanly possible.  After more monitoring sessions in which I slowly watched her ovaries grow to the size of baseballs it was time for the retrieval, which of course meant more pain and torture for her.  This would require a doctor to stick a needle through the uterus and into the ovaries to suck out the follicles in which reside the eggs.  It all sounded very medieval to me.  They did at least put her under anesthesia for the surgery which probably doesn't mean much when you can't really stand up or walk for a few days afterwards.

All of this is a horribly abbreviated flash forward through a process that is about as satisfying as learning there is a cure to some long-standing grief that requires you to intensify and transform said grief in new and varied ways.  And of course it all ends with more waiting; waiting that can feel so interminably long that you almost forget you've already been trying and failing for years to have a child on your own. So we do the only thing we've been able to do and wait.  There are moments when we dare to hope and moments when we feel like we need to prepare ourselves for the worst but never a moment when we aren't acutely aware how long we've been waiting.  I guess, in a way, it's fitting.  Here we are in the middle of a season of waiting and we wait.  Small consolation at times but at least its helpful to be reminded that we're not the only ones in the world waiting for something.

ThanksChristmasGiving

This time of year always brings conflicting emotions for me.  On the one hand, I absolutely love the Christmas season.  I love the fact that I can enjoy a Christian holiday with quasi-pagan traditions and can be secretly more excited about the changing of seasons than I am about anything else.  I can enjoy family traditions and shoveling the driveway, we fluff the tree and hang lights on the bushes, it's all very festive and wonderfully cozy.  The problem, for me, is this little holiday called Thanksgiving, in which we completely overindulge on tons of food and try and act like we're thankful for things after throwing half the food away because we can. It's really just a thorn because Thanksgiving causes people to get uppity about when you are and are not allowed to put up your Christmas tree or listen to Christmas music.  People will flood Facebook with their righteous indignation upon seeing a Christmas display at the mall or Target because that's what Thanksgiving is for, getting pissed about Christmas being celebrated too early.

Basically all of this boils down to Thanksgiving being a terrible holiday.  For one, if we need a holiday to remind us to be thankful for things then we're already screwed.  For two, it's predicated on a ridiculous story about native people sharing with inept and intrusive Europeans who would later kill and steal form them all in the name of god and country.  This is a great holiday.  Let's remember to be thankful for all of that killing and stealing.  Besides, Thanksgiving comes courtesy of some of the worst culinary inventions in history.  What other time of the year is a dinner table graced with the presence of Green Been Casserole, Yams and Cranberries of which you are expected to mash all together and eat with something approximating pleasure.  I don't understand these things so mostly I just eat rolls and quietly sit through dinner.  I'm probably also shaking my head a lot and making rude comments, but that's beside the point.

The point is that Christmas is a far superior celebration than anything Thanksgiving can ever hope to muster out of it's sad revisionist history and apocryphal story telling.  Mind you, I'm not referring to Coca-Cola-commercialized-spend-to-your-absolute-limit-and-then-some-Christmas.  I'm talking about candle light midnight church service in which you sing carols and tell stories.  I'm talking about early morning breakfast that is both simple and wonderful all at once.  I'm talking about sharing gifts and lives and time and board games and general merriment involving good beer and conversation.  There's snow on the ground, it's pleasantly cold out, hot cocoa abounds and you can simply sit and be with people instead of feeling rushed by the next day's shopping extravaganza.  Life can take a break and you have a moment to breathe and relax and just be.  Why should I wait until after Thanksgiving to be excited about that?

Bottom line: Thanksgiving misses out on being the worst holiday only because Columbus Day is, inexplicably, still a real thing...yay European imperialism.

X-Mas 4 Life

Because Sometimes the Magic Doesn't Happen In the Bedroom...It Happens In a Lab

There are few things in life that garner praises of perfection. My partner's uterus is one of them.  I was under the impression that I'd been intimately aware of my partner's reproductive system for some time now.  Apparently not so true.  Thus we found ourselves beginning our first fertility treatment.  Part three of the continuing saga in which I become a man required that I first understood a fraction of what it means to be a woman.  It also required that my sperm take devastating hits to its self-esteem because that builds character, or something.

The moment that I realized this was actually happening was when my partner returned home to report on her first "monitoring session."  As she began recounting the experience I was swiftly waylaid by something called an internal ultrasound.  I was under the impression that ultrasounds only happen outside the body and require an instrument that looks something like a defibrillator paddle. Why in the hell would you want to stick something like that inside a person?  I was assured the instrument was a bit more stream-lined.  So, she goes in for this vag-o-gram and apparently passes with flying colors.  And I quote, "Oh Kelly! Oh my! Oh Kelly! You just have the most beautiful uterus! I ought to take a picture of that and frame it to put up on my wall! Textbook perfect!"  The, "Oh Kelly"'s were uttered in a breathy orgasmic tone; apparently the nurse was very enthusiastic, which I guess is a good thing seeing as one problem is more than enough.  All the while my poor deformed sperm were sinking deeper into despair.  They're textbook too, just of a different variety.  Not only are they under-performing, come with at least two tails and few in numbers, but now they had to deal with the shame of entering a perfect uterus in order to do their job.  It wasn't looking good.

In a show of support and solidarity we decided I should probably witness this vag-o-gram for myself, not least because this was really all my fault.  And mind you, I wasn't expecting this to be any kind of a picnic.  I've had doctors' hands up my anus.  I understand uncomfortable.  I was woefully unprepared for what came next. Before things started the nurse pulled out the the vag-o-wand which resembled a miniature mace sans spikes.  Fear level was about a 3.  It took me a minute or two to realize that this thing was going inside my partner's body.  Fear level rose to a 7.  As the actual vag-o-gramming began the fear level spiked and I quickly became concerned that the nurse was damaging the one thing that was healthy and going to allow us to have kids.  That thought was replaced by astonishment at the actual range of motion the nurse was getting out of her inserted vag-o-wand which was again replaced by fear.  So there I sat, in mixed horror and fascination, trying to make out anything other than gray matter on the TV screen set up for our convenience.  By the way, I'm still not convinced anyone can see anything on those things.  There is literally nothing to see.  I'm operating under the assumption that the nurses are just making things up until such time as we manage a successful pregnancy.

So anyway, a number of these "monitoring sessions" and a shot in the stomach later (which I administered whilst groggy sometime around midnight thank you very much), we were back at the office preparing for our first IUI.  IUI stands for Intrauterine Insemination, which, obviously.  Essentially what happens is they turkey baster the sperm past the cervix (which is where most sperm go to die) and right into the uterus.  The hope is that the sperm won't need to do much to successfully find and penetrate the egg that will be happily falling down the ole' Fallopian tube any minute.  In addition to this express train into the uterus, they put the sperm through a wash which is basically a glorified tilt-a-whirl ride with chemicals that leaves only the best and brightest behind.  I had a bad feeling when the nurse came in and informed us we would need to sign an extra consent as my sperm numbers were lower than is usually considered satisfactory for an IUI round.  I, of course, was cursing my partner's perfect uterus and Nurse Uteran-Orgasm for dropping the guilt hammer on my poorly performing seed.

About two weeks later we got our results: negative.  We were kind of expecting  it though hoping for the best.  After the IUI we had looked up statistics on how effective this was supposed to be and essentially halved it because of the added consent form we signed which basically told us this is not going to be successful. The one positive that came out of it was that our insurance accepted the doctor's recommendations to move on to IVF which I guess we can thank my bogus sperm for seeing as they turned in an absolutely abysmal performance.  So now we're gearing up for an all together different and exponentially more intense experience trying to get pregnant; one in which my partner will be transformed into a walking pharmacy and we brace for the possibility of wildly outrageous hormonal reactions.  I'm sure I'll be displaying couvade-like symptoms through all of this as well so it could also result in the end of all living things on Earth.  For now, excuse me as I go and shove a needle in her stomach.  Practice makes perfect.

Jacob's Hierarchy of Appropriately Fried Eggs

I'm a fan of eggs.  I like them many ways.  Scrambled eggs, fried eggs, even poached eggs.  So why the fuck can't restaurants make them the way I order? Seriously, I can make eggs like a bagillion different ways.  Why is it so goddamn hard for people, who are employed to do as much, make eggs to someone's order?  I get that there will always be a bit of room for variance (for a little artistic license if you will) but for the love of everything that is sacred can we please clearly define the differences in fried eggs?  This is consistently the most frustrating and annoying part of eating breakfast at any restaurant.  Let us begin:

Sunny side up is pretty straightforward.  You never flip the egg and baste the "uncooked" side.  It is generally accepted both with the white a bit runny or not. When you say sunny side up, you expect there to be a little bit of leeway with the consistency of your white.  Yolk is of course runny as hell.  This is the fried egg you want to order when you are looking forward to cardiac arrest.

Over easy is also not to difficult.  While it requires a delicate flip of the egg, over easy means your white is going to be runny as will your yolk.  It's pretty simple, though I have experienced the over easy as over medium in many places.  This revelation usually comes after over medium comes out over well and I have to send it back.  Actually that's not entirely true because sometimes I ask my partner to have it sent back since I'm really a giant wuss with microscopic testicles when it comes to asking the server to fix something.  I mean, it's honestly not their fault, they're innocent bystanders caught in the cross-fire.

Over medium.  I should probably stop saying these are not difficult as none of them are actually difficult but holy shit if this is not the bane of my existence. Apparently this one is difficult for everyone but me.  The appropriately made over medium fried egg has it's white cooked through and yolk still wet but a tad more solid than the runniness of the over easy.  This is your classic dipping egg.  The yolk is of excellent consistency for your toast and is usually held in it's bowl by the slightest layer of solid yolk.  You cannot actually order this in a restaurant.  They will give you an over easy egg or over well, but never over medium.  Why?  I have no fucking clue.

Over well is by far the simplest form of fried egg.  Just cook the fucking thing. Everything is solid, just don't burn it.  There is not a soul on Earth who can't cook this egg.

If you are not cooking your eggs according to this handy guide, you are doing it wrong.  And since I titled this "Jacob's Hierarchy of Appropriately Fried Eggs" let's place these types in their proper order:

Over medium - Superior in all aspects, the over medium fried egg contains the best of both worlds; cooked through white and nice liquid yolk.  It is, beyond a doubt, the best way to cook a fried egg.

Over well - This one is really a situational style but remains at the top of the list for the sole reason that you're not dealing with runny white.

Sunny side up (only if the white is thoroughly cooked) - Better than snotty ass over easy, the sunny side up with white cooked through makes a decent change of pace from the over medium and you can feel superior to other cooks by showing off your basting skills.  There is the psychological problem of knowing that one side of the egg hasn't touched your cooking surface and also the heart attack.

Over easy (as long as the runny white is minimal) - And I mean minimal.  If the white is barely noticeable in its runniness then this egg is serviceable for purposes of potatoes and eggs and skillets as the runny white gets hidden in the mixing of ingredients.

Over easy - Can be vomit inducing when the white is jiggling on your plate.

Sunny side up (non-cooked through white) - Fucking disgusting.

So there you are world.  I just dropped some knowledge on you and knowing is half the battle.  Go forth and prepare your fried eggs appropriately.  You're welcome.

In Defense of Difference

My partner spends her work week corralling 3-year-olds and exposing them to school for the first time in their very young lives.  Some of them are not potty-trained, most of them enter the year crying for their parents and all of them have a hearing loss of some degree or another.  The challenging part of all of this, as if there needed to be more complication, is the children (because of their hearing losses) generally come in to the classroom with very little language and quite often none at all.  Her job is to teach them to speak; sometimes with their voices, sometimes with their hands.  I think what she does is nothing short of miraculous, a fact she would never admit.

The other side of the world in which she exists professionally revolves around heated debate over auditory-oral and total communication modes of education. It's a debate that is nuanced on many levels and far too complex to adequately explain in a single blog post and yet, here is a ludicrously brief synopsis of each:

The auditory-oral methodology uses techniques for teaching communication by working with residual hearing (whatever hearing an individual still has) and speech in order to equip the individual with the ability to communicate self-sufficiently. Essentially, they want an individual who is deaf/hard of hearing to be able to speak and hear as accurately as an individual who is hearing.

The total communication philosophy attempts to maximize an individual's ability to communicate by using whatever works best for them.  This may include but is not limited to various types of sign language, body language and natural gestures, visual cues and auditory/speech training.  The aim is to provide each individual with the most suitable avenue to effective communication (which will look different from person to person).

The two "camps" are divergent initially in that one is a methodology and the other a philosophy and become more convoluted when expanding the debate beyond the education system.  Questions emerge over the tension between a majority hearing culture and minority deaf culture, the influence of money from cochlear implant and hearing aid companies behind the push for auditory-oral teaching and even the very definition of disability.  It all illustrates nicely some of the more telling pieces behind our reactions and interactions with difference.

I don't think that deafness and deaf culture would be so problematic for a hearing society if they weren't so adamant about remaining happily and productively deaf. To many who live within deaf culture, deafness isn't a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured, something that we hearing people either don't want to hear or don't understand how to hear.  For the rest of us (those who communicate by voice and ear) this kind of difference is inconvenient.  It might require us to exist (if only for a moment) in a world where we're not entirely at ease.  It would mean having to grapple with a culture we're not comfortable around and have very little knowledge.  It might, in fact, feel something like a deaf person interacting with a hearing culture on a day-to-day basis.  It's horribly privileged to think we need to fix what someone else doesn't identify as a problem simply because it's an inconvenience for us.

My partner recently shared a story with me about a friend who works in a school system where there is a student whose primary care-taker is a deaf grandfather. No one wants to deal with the grandfather because it's difficult and the school has all but stopped trying to communicate with this individual because he is "stupid" and "illiterate".  He'll sometimes be waiting in the parking lot for hours before dismissal to everyone's concern and school officials have actually been close to calling the police because he "touched" a student.  The problem with all of these characterizations is that they're completely a product of the school's ignorance and unwillingness to learn.  He's neither stupid nor illiterate.  He uses American Sign Language (ASL).  ASL does not use English grammar and sentence structure so when this man uses English to respond to notes written home by teachers you'll generally find that nouns and verbs aren't in the expected place because ASL follows a French grammar and sentence structure.  He waits in the parking lot for hours at a time because no one has been able to effectively communicate to him the days that are early dismissals and the days that aren't. His concern is that he won't be there in time to pick up his grandchild so he errs on the side of caution (which I think makes him a good parent).  And the "touching" of the student business?  The student had dropped something and the grandfather noticed and attempted to get the student's attention.  In deaf culture, one doesn't yell at the other person, because, well, obviously.  What people who are deaf usually do is tap each other on the shoulder, which is exactly what he did to this student.  And for all of this man's troubles he is treated as unintelligent, weird, creepy and a security risk.  God forbid.  The heartbreaking piece for me?  These are daily things most deaf people run into, mostly because the rest of us hearing people are too busy or too lazy to care.

Sometimes I can't help but hear comments made by people screaming about homosexuality ruining marriage or how black people need to get jobs and illegals need to go back home.  They ring in my head long after they're said as if I'd just heard them, like those things tend to do when you're disgusted by hate and frustrated by misunderstanding.  It's hard to reach for compassion and empathy when I hear those things and it's rarely ever the first thing I want to do.  If nothing else, we could all be better teachers and listeners.  PBS has a wonderful documentary, Through Deaf Eyes, that gives a good look at 200 years of deaf history.  I recommend a watch if only for the history lesson.

Trophy Husband

This past weekend I was fulfilling spousal duties and appeared as arm candy for my partner's 10-year high school reunion.  Granted, I'm something akin to a 10-year old strawberry bon-bon you find in the back of your junk drawer and are unable to satisfactorily separate from the wrapper kind of arm candy, but there I was anyway just as my partner insisted.  As the "trophy husband" I spent much of my time telling people, "My eyes are up here," and dropping hints about my partner's net worth.

My first clue that this was going to be an enjoyable weekend was when my partner mentioned her wardrobe change bag which she quickly glossed over after noticing my face and decided to refer to as a back-up bag "because there are some things in there that are back-ups...like a bra."  I guess she wasn't wearing a bra or maybe she was and anticipated some accident that would require a bra change, I'm not really sure.  It was all very confusing.  The concern and confusion grew as we got closer to our destination.

My partner is usually a very good driver.  A tad lead-footed at times, but a good driver nonetheless.  I noticed that her decision making ability was diminishing exponentially the nearer we got to Farmington.  "I don't see a speed limit sign," was apparently code for I'm going to begin driving like a fucking maniac.  There were some harrowing turns onto highway interchanges.  Of course, she could have simply been distracted by some awesome things we saw on the road.

Smitty's Sporting Goods sells guns and ammo as well as fishing and archery equipment.  Apparently those are the only sports down there.  Either way, there's nothing like a sporting goods store the size of a Waffle House.

I couldn't help but think of what a team President George W. Bush and Jesus made in the White House for eight years.  Nothing like having "the Decider" and the "Problem Solver" on your side to make sure things go smoothly.  What's that you say? President Bush's eight years were a complete clusterfuck?  Oh. Nevermind then.

My disdain for consumer Christianity was greatly mitigated by the fact that this church sells fireworks.  I want to go to fireworks church.  Who wouldn't want to go to fireworks church?  Clearly these people get it.  I am in.

This place wins the internet for best name ever in the history of naming things. This is in fact an ice cream joint (frozen custard to be exact) and is so eloquently named that we had to stop and sample the wares.  Sadly their frozen custard was terrible which I guess is why they had to come up with such a kick-ass name. Crafty owners they are.

The rest of the weekend was your general homecoming fair.  A parade, a football game, and of course the all important actual reunion booze and schmooze.  It was exhausting.  My plan from the get-go was heavy on the booze and light on the schmooze so I took up residence at a table with my beer and proceeded to yell at various football games on TV for the rest of the night.  The other part of the plan was to incessantly text my buddy with snarky remarks and wallowing self-pity until the night ended.  Did I mention that my partner graduated from a podunk town and the reunion was in the middle of nowhere?  Yeah, no reception and to spice it up a bit we almost hit a few deer on the way out there.  I was thrilled.

On the bright side, we did fill up the gas tank at the rock bottom price of $2.93 a gallon.

"Never Forget" Ten Years Hence

I was sitting in a student lobby watching TV's that had been rolled in on carts after a math class the morning of September 11th.  By then both Tower 1 and Tower 2 had been hit by hi-jacked planes and the news anchors were calling whatever had happened a terrorist attack.  I stood watching, trying to wrap my head around what was going on and soon after the South tower collapsed.  The first thing I thought was I need to know that the people I love are okay.  It didn't matter that they weren't in New York, it didn't matter that they weren't in any danger, I was simply grasping for something to steady the world in which I now existed.  And it strikes me now how starkly innocent and naive my reaction was compared to the world that we already existed in.  I lived in America where the true ravages of war or constant threat of terrorism had never entered the psyche of an entire nation. These things didn't happen, at least not here.  They happened to other people. Once I reached my (now) partner on the phone we sat on the line with a great deal of silence, comforted by each other's quiet voices and not knowing what to say.

The popular refrain since that day, "Never Forget," is one that haunts me and infuriates me and disgusts me.  Not forgetting means there's something we should remember and the tricky part about remembering is the onus to learn from those things we remember.  So what have we learned?

A year and a half later, when President Bush had made the decision to attack Iraq, I sat with my suite-mates in our college dorm room watching the video footage of the first bombs dropping in the Iraq War.  The live video feed was in that eerie night-vision green.  The cheers from various people on our floor echoed through the hall and in open doors as the bombs began to fall.  Finally, something was being done, someone was being paid back for what they had done to us.  Except, nothing was being done and no one that had anything to do with the September 11th attacks were being paid back.  Instead we learned a great deal about our own use of violence and war as a tool for personal gain and mask for a new world in which we no longer sat comfortably.

It doesn't surprise me that we attacked Iraq based on lies and misinformation.  It doesn't surprise me that both a Republican and Democrat have executed more wars since that day.  I'm not surprised by the notion that a larger military and greater defense spending will make us safer.  I'm not at all astonished by the amount of bigoted paranoia that surrounds so many public officials' statements about Islam.  It is, in fact, what we have learned since September 11, 2001.

The most poignant images and sounds that I've been unable to shake from the events of that day was the people jumping out of the towers and the faces of the firefighters-the split second registering of a crash followed by a punctuated moment of silence-as they try not to think about the sounds of the bodies while attempting to mount an effective rescue in the towers.  It represents in my head the confluence of the best and the worst of us.  It forces me to remember that, for all the hurt and malice and anger wrapped up in the perpetration of those attacks, there were those who were willing to put aside everything else and do what they could to help.  We could use more of those people and we could do a better job of making sure those people who did respond are taken care of today.  Instead we've become much more comfortable calling people evil and dividing the world between the good and the bad.

The controversy over the "Ground Zero Mosque" (as the media so ineptly termed it) is a heartbreaking reminder that we've forgotten a great deal since September 11, 2001.  We've forgotten about Touri Hamzavi Bolourchi, a 69 year-old retired nurse on United flight 175 who died when it collided with the South tower.  She was Muslim. We've forgotten Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a 23 year-old NYPD cadet whose remains were recovered months later after vicious rumors had circulated that he had fled in connection with the attacks.  His body was recovered near the North tower where he had gone to help.  He was Muslim.  We've forgotten Mon Gjonbalaj, a 65 year-old janitor at the World Trade Center who managed to call his son one last time to tell him, "I'm trapped. I don't think I'm going to see you guys again. Keep the family together. Be strong."  He, too, was Muslim.  I don't really hear people talk much about the Muslim victims of September 11th and the growing number of Muslims who have been (and continue to be) ridiculed, demeaned and accused because of what happened that day.  It is as if many of us don't want them included, as if we want to forget that Muslims lost just as much as anyone else.

Remembering "those people" and accepting that the world is more complicated than "there are good guys and there are bad guys," doesn't make for catchy slogans or powerful impassioned speeches by politicians.  But that's why we remember, right?  So when the next politician needs to paint his opponent he can invoke "9/11" to remind us all why so-and-so will let the terrorists win.  It's so a decorated military general can convince himself and others that war is the only answer.  People stop being people this way; they stop being people and instead become "evil."  In this day and age, can't we all just accept that calling people evil helps no one and does nothing but reinforce our own prejudice.  It's far to simple an explanation for some of the most complex moments in life.  It's the same reason why I've never liked the idea of hell and the devil.  It's to neat and tidy.  If there is anything I can be confident of since that day it is that life is almost always messy and living is never as black and white as many would have us believe.

To be honest, I didn't even register that this was the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks until a week or so before the date.  I'm not quite sure why it hadn't occurred to me until then other than to say I still have moments in life in which that day feels like it just happened.  We're still fighting wars that stem from the events of that day, we're still trying to solve the worlds problems by injecting a good dose of violence and we continue to act as if we exist in a world where we can completely insulate ourselves from everything that's happening beyond our borders.  I'm hoping that over the next ten years those things will begin to change. I'm not very confident that they will.

Return of the Chewy

This was an hour of terrible "photo-shopping". 

Chewy's back and without any gawd-awful orange ruining his sleek facade.  We've had words; he promises never to do that to me again.

I Worship At the Altar of Bo

September is peeking around the corner which means I'm allowed to talk about Michigan football without odd looks and poorly disguised attempts to exit the room at the first mention of depth charts and returning starters.  It'll be nice to be able to wax eloquent about college football in public without people thinking I sound like Jeffrey Dahmers discussing human anatomy - all is right with the world.  Of course, now that football is mere days away, lines are drawn and allegiances are run up the flag pole.  When people ask "Why Michigan?" I usually give a terse off-hand response about being born in Flint and brain-washed from birth but to be honest, that's not at all the reason I fell in love with Michigan.  Much of it has to do with my father and a bit of it has to do with one Glenn E. "Bo" Schembechler.

Football first appeared in my consciousness at a pretty young age.  The family packed up and moved to South Bend, IN before I started school and from then on I was inundated with images, dogma and fanaticism surrounding the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.  If nothing else, I am thankful for that experience because I was immediately aware of how much better college football was than pro football.  Give me marching bands and ancient rivalries over pyrotechnics and terrible rock music any day.  Besides, it was in the halls of colleges where this sport was born, nurtured and made; to transplant such a tradition into the sterile manufactured confines of professional sports arenas is simply a waste.  And while I'm thankful for all that living in a college town taught me, even if it was South Bend, I never once felt the pull towards Notre Dame.  That had a great deal to do with my father.

You have to understand a few things about my dad.  First, my father loves to call people by their first name, especially when he first meets you, especially before you've told him your name and most especially when you are a server at a restaurant walking on the other side of the dining area.  He has a "guy" for everything.  He is infinitely better at making friends than I am.  Second, my father will drop everything to help you out and I mean absolutely everything.  I have never met a person with a larger heart and more caring soul than my dad. He is infinitely more selfless than I am.  Last, my dad has an announcer voice that he turns on whenever he is excited.  The voice moves in a crescendo of exhilaration ending somewhere in a high-pitched falsetto that no longer produces discernible words.  He should probably be on the radio.

Dad

Catching college football on TV in the 90's was nothing like it is today.  What with ND's seeming ubiquitous presence on TV, thanks to their NBC contract, I remember seeing a lot of the Irish.  While no one in the family was a Notre Dame fan, it was football on a weekend and so that's what was on.  My dad would watch and he would comment.  His tone was almost always even-handed, his comments were respectful, it was clear he enjoyed the game but something was missing.  It wasn't until the first time I noticed Dad watching a Michigan game that I figured out what that was.  The announcer voice was out in force.  Much of Saturday afternoon would be punctuated by random spurts of loud high-pitched squeals.  He was alive and it was obvious and it was electric.  There was an honesty to the madness, a display of shear elation that I had never heard coming from another human being before and it was in those moments that my young elementary aged self was simultaneously intrigued and jealous by the reactions of my dad.  I smiled with him, I might have even clapped with him and I'm sure, at some point (even though I had no earthly idea what was going on or an attention span long enough to really care), I jumped up and down celebrating with him.  I wanted to know why and I eventually figured it out.

There was a name Dad used often when talking about Michigan, a name that would forever cement my love for the Wolverines and a name that is synonymous with the coaching greats of college football; Bo.  I bring this up because it's important to understand that my father never pushed his Michigan fanaticism on us.  It was never talked about without invitation; it was not force-fed.  Dad allowed us the opportunity and space to find our own paths through life which made some of the more important discoveries all the more meaningful.  So, when I heard the name "Bo" when talking about Michigan, usually in passing, I was intrigued, intrigued enough to listen to this speech the first time I saw it on television:

It was a sort of magical moment.  It struck something deep within me probably because it sounded exactly like things my dad had said and done before: not criticism, but encouragement; not me, but us; not for yourself, but for everyone together as a team.  It probably didn't hurt that it also appealed to my young budding socialist heart.  The funny part about all of this is that I didn't play organized sports in high school.  I spent much of my youth watching my brother's baseball games or my sister's softball games.  But what I heard in that speech, the thing that resonated because I had heard similar statements from my dad, was that the world was so much bigger than little ole' me.  That's probably the piece that I can point to and say, that's why Michigan.  Because Bo said things that I had heard from my dad, because my dad made sure to remind me that life isn't just about you and me (it's about us) and because my dad showed me that it was okay to be happy, embarrassingly happy, about something as seemingly meaningless as a college football game.  Sometimes I feel bad for people who can make it through a game without causing a scene.

So here's to another season of heartbreak and hope, euphoria and depression, new and inventive cuss words, beer, chex mix and Michigan vs. Nebraska with a few of the most amazing people in the world.

Why Lawnmowers are Ruining the World

Ye Old Time Mower

Anyone who knows me knows I can be a bit of a complainer enjoy righting wrongs via the use of surprising semantics and clever rhetoric, hence this post.  My beloved lawnmower, whom we will call Chewy, decided to take a giant steamy dump in the middle of mowing the lawn last week. Apparently it was time for it's nearly 10 year old battery to say goodbye. Well fuck you battery, you had one job in life, to hold a charge, and you fucking blew it right in the middle of mowing the lawn.  I don't blame Chewy.  Chewy has been good to me, I just think he could do a better job of picking and choosing who lives inside his little lawnmower heart.  To be fair, 10 years is a prodigious life for a lawnmower battery, but that doesn't excuse it's decision to really stick it to me in the end. And, also to be fair, I had a back-up reel mower that gamely picked up the slack after hitting Chewy with a few wrenches.

I would show you a picture of my beloved Chewy if I could find one floating somewhere in the vast reaches of the internet but it turns out my mower is so old that there's a recall on it and they have to pretty much replace the entirety of the mower's outer body and some of the electrical components.  When next I see Chewy (probably two weeks) it will look nothing like my old mower.  I'm sure it will feel something like picking up your ridiculously rich husband/wife from the plastic surgeon's office (minus all of the gauze, blood, and highly addictive pain meds).

Chewy's new digs, I can hardly stand
to look at him.

This disgusting looking thing (left) is what I will be handed when I pick up Chewy.  I'm sure the orange is some sort of safety precaution (you know, so you can dodge the oncoming mower in time) as Chewy was black where the orange is and green where the black is. Come to think of it, Chewy's recall probably had something to do with him being a stealth ninja mower seeing as he blended in so well with the grass and sounded like a vacuum.  Who would ever guess that a vacuum could be so deadly, thus sneak up on you and maim you, thus ninja mower, thus recall.  Flawless logic.

I wasn't really angry about taking Chewy to the plastic surgeon's office repair shop because of the old trusty reel mower and the fact that these old model electric cordless mowers are leaps and bounds better than the new ones.  I would survive a few weeks of mowing the old-fashioned way and perhaps even enjoy a boost in physical exertion and general well-being.  This was not to be as I am prone to the universal law of Shit Hitting the Fan All At Once, which makes for messy situations.  The old reel-mower took a dump as well (though not the explosive kind that requires you to clean up the toilet bowl afterwards).  It decided that I did not require it's handle to be attached to it's base anymore.  Why, you might ask?  Good fucking question to which it had no legitimate answer.  It was time to play hardball.

Then this happened

Under no circumstance was I going to throw in the towel and since we just dropped Chewy at the repair shop it was between me and the reel-mower.  After about an hour staring at various items in the garage it occurred to me how much faster my partner would have been able to come up with a solution.  Another hour later I had finally zero'd in on some crappy looking rope to tie to the handle so I could drag the reel-mower through the grass.  A few seconds in to plan B I gained unanimous consent from myself to declare this plan an absolute failure.  Plan C required me to acquire a tig torch, some oxygen and acetylene, and a crash-course in welding; this was not feasible.  Which left me with plan D, wait until the neighbor gets home and ask to borrow their lawnmower. Fucking piece of shit lawnmowers.

Fucking useless...

So basically, lawnmower's can fuck themselves, and grass can too.  Because, if we get right down to it, the only reason we have lawnmowers is because someone at some point decided that seeding one's property with grass was a great idea.  Fuck that guy too because now I'm stuck in this web of conspiracies and lies in which my neighbors call the village office if my grass is "unkempt".

I miss Chewy...


Update: Turns out the internet is vast and unending, you just need to know how to use it.  Anyway, a picture of Chewy in his prime that might help explain paragraph three:

The Trying and the Wanting and the Waiting

I was fortunate to have been raised by parents who, for all of their flaws and inconsistencies, couldn't have done a better job managing the struggles of life and raising three children.  My dad probably worked something like 100 hours a week and still managed to read my brother and I bedtime stories.  My mother, who was left with the enormous task of taming two rambunctious boys 14 months apart, somehow maintained her sanity while showering us with love and raising our much younger sister.  It was a tall order and us kids tended to not make it easy.  As is the cycle of life, I never really appreciated or understood what my parents did for us growing up until leaving home and beginning the process of becoming an adult.  And it's really only now, after nearly two years of trying to get pregnant and failing, that I'm beginning to understand a tiny bit of what it might mean to be a parent.

A curious thing happened to my memory over the long course of this endeavor to get pregnant.  I can still remember the excitement of those first few weeks and months after making the decision to try for a baby.  I can recall our optimism and the late night talks wondering what our future child might be.  It's all still there somewhere but there came a point when the optimism and expectation was replaced with something else.  At first it was confusion and frustration.  We were reassured by friends, family, and doctors that sometimes it takes time and so, despite the frustration, we soldiered on.  Eventually those emotions were compounded by miscommunications and arguments in which my partner and I struggled to express our own conflicted and painful feelings as those first few months turned into a year.  Soon after that year mark (and probably sometimes before then as well) the optimism was replaced with successful and unsuccessful attempts just to remain present in the month to month ordeal of tracking ovulation cycles, beginning the process of figuring out what could be wrong, and hoping beyond reason that damn blue line would show up.  The anticipation and expectation had been sapped from the process, replaced with a pall of unknown reasons and the specter of looming problems.  At times, it's difficult to even recall what the initial optimism and expectation felt like.  I still have the memories of it, I still recall those moments but it's like watching them through an old dusty window as if the lack of emotional connection leaves them in this strange detached place in my self.

When I was in seventh grade I began to experience a number of emotions that I neither knew how to identify nor manage.  I couldn't shake an overwhelming feeling of wanting to be alone.  I began spending most of my days cooped up in my room dwelling on god know's what and feeling desperately lonely.  It wasn't until my parents noticed some of the more obvious symptoms of my depression that I found myself at therapy with a man I had never met asking me questions I had never answered before.  I never did ask my parents what that experience was like for them, who they might have talked to or what they learned from it all and I think that had to do with the fact that I was acutely aware, perhaps for the first time, of the importance of my parent's presence in my life.

It's odd the places your mind takes you.  In the midst of this never-ending path to create a life, I've been unable to shake this memory of my parent's faces when I left my therapist's office for the last time.  There wasn't anything particularly special about that moment except that, in my mind, I have this wonderfully poignant and vivid image of my parents without any manufactured happiness attempting to mask the situation. They were concerned for sure (perhaps still a bit scared) but what I remember feeling from their faces was the warmth of their presence.  They were there.  They had been there at the beginning, they were there that day leaving the therapist's office for the last time and they've been there every day since then.  And the only thing I can think of now, in this moment, is that I think I can do that.  I think I can be good at that.

The first part of this experience ended with some pretty raw emotions drifting in a place somewhere between apathy and exhaustion which is neither a helpful or healthy state of mind for the having of children.  Waking up mornings and finding that your living with a person that is completely foreign to you is a scary experience for two people that have vowed to live their lives together.  You're forced to confront things never before imagined and ask questions that you may not want to hear answers to.  And you know what, it doesn't always end up okay.  Sometimes there isn't some magnificent plan (not least because if this is all part of a plan, then I have to interject that this is a horrifically shitty plan).  I'm thankful that we never had to traverse the road of ending our partnership together.  We've managed to come out of this in a good place and we at least have some answers and direction as to where we go from here.

Ghostbusters and the Quest to Become a Man

Men have a long history of infatuation with violence, overactive sex drives and an overwhelming need to spread their progeny.  We enjoy guns and UFC tournaments, have sex twice a day and measure our worth in life by the number of children we're able to sire.  Interestingly (probably only for my own self-awareness) none of this is true for me which, in turn, most likely means I'm not a man.  I'm fine with that, not least because the culture that we live in has constructed ideals of what it means to be a man (and a woman) that are completely idiotic and utterly lacking in any sort of realistic world in which actual people exist.  It probably helps that I don't really buy into the whole machismo thing anyway.  I bring all of this up by way of explaining the long and winding journey my partner and I have been on in order to get pregnant and have our own little bundle of poop and joy.  Part one of the Quest to Become a Man is probably more depressing than I'm willing to hash out currently so let's skip ahead to Part two: Finding out your sperm are stupid.

Towards the end of 2010 I was experiencing some minor pain in my side that was intermittent and barely noticeable.  The only reason I took note was because I have a history with a kidney stone that pretty much derailed an entire summer of my life.  Soon after that I had blood in my urine so off to the doctor I went.  The doc seemed completely unconcerned by the small amount of pain as it truly was a small amount of pain.  Anyone with any first-hand knowledge of kidney stones can tell you "small amount of pain" is not a phrase one would ever use during the process of having a kidney stone.  Instead the doc thought it was most likely some kind of prostate infection (It was, in fact, a kidney stone that I passed December 26, 2010 whilst in the middle of a cross-country trip to visit family, sorry guys!).  An entirely unexpected and unpleasant anal probe later we found ourselves chatting about the prostate and the possible problems an infection can cause.  I asked whether or not that can mess with two people's ability to get pregnant (we had already been trying for a year at this point, which is the magic number for most doctors and insurance people to start figuring out if anything is wrong).  And so began my quest.

The doc's instructions of collecting a sample of sperm were thorough and basically stressed that it is a time sensitive and procedurally sensitive process.  Get it to the hospital in 30 minutes and for god's sake don't miss.   We're talking about your standard pissing cup they hand out at the hospital mind you so right away you are questioning how it's even possible to fill this thing and if you don't, what is wrong with you.  It's essentially set up to make you feel like a failure even after you have successfully completed the procedure and delivered your sperm on time.  The best part is walking through the hospital with a clear plastic bag in which a clear plastic bottle with a sample of your sperm resides.  I wasn't shaking any hands or giving out high-fives.  My mission was simple: keep my eyes forward, walk fast and make it to the lab with as little fanfare as possible.  Thankfully this first time was relatively painless.  When the doc called a week or two later with the results he was sounding appropriately concerned and delivered the news that my analysis came back with some issues and he was referring me to a specialist.  Apparently, along with some lower than normal numbers my sperm are fond of swimming in circles and doing a whole lot of nothing.  Which is to say, they are about as stupid as thinking this whole business really is a quest to become a man.

Round two with the urologist for talking about my sperm came with another surprising anal probe (apparently even mentioning the fact that a previous doctor thought there was something wrong with my prostate, however incorrect, was an open invitation for him to make sure) and a request from the doc that I give a second sample for him so he can have some comparative data to talk about when next we meet.  Round two sperm collection did not go as smoothly as round one, of course, because that would require me to exist in an alternate universe in which I was not required to experience the more embarrassing things in life.

After a fair amount of runaround by the hospital as to where I was supposed to be delivering my sperm after collection I enjoyed the pleasure of being able to deliver said sperm in the company of others.  The nurse was with a few other people, one of which was an impressionable young girl; a situation in which my superbly honed instincts told me I would surely be waiting until this child was done getting blood drawn and out of sight before the nurse took care of my sperm.  Nope.  Instead she brought me into the next "room" (read: behind a mobile partition) and proceeded to ask me in a less than discrete manner a number of questions that made it more than obvious what I was there for.  My favorite was something along the lines of, "Did you collect this sample through masturbation without the use of any lubricants, spermicides, or condoms and were you able to collect all of your ejaculate in this vial."  She emphasized the words, masturbation, spermicides and ejaculate which puzzled me greatly but there I was.  After completing the questionnaire and signing the paper (because, ya know, signatures make everything official and more professional) I exited the "room" to realize that it wasn't just the young girl getting blood drawn.  Every seat was filled and every eye was on me.  I felt like I should say something or apologize or something.  Instead I just flashed an assuredly creepy looking smile and exited to go take care of some paperwork.  It was then I noticed the unfortunate shirt choice of the day bearing this wonderful logo:

To a lesser observer, one might immediately think, "Yes! Ghostbusters!" Unfortunately, at that moment, it was just a confused looking sperm with a no sign over it.  Thus concluded Part two of my quest in which the moral of the story is two-fold: everything they told you in high school about getting pregnant being easy is false and males, never mention your prostate while talking to your doctor lest s/he use it as an excuse to shove her/his hand unceremoniously up your rectum.

An Homage to Space

I would love to become an amateur astronomer.  I've never had a telescope, never lived in an area of the country where the night sky looks anything like this and have only seen a lunar eclipse (that I can remember with any vividness) once but I think I could do it.  Granted, I know nothing about telescopes, or where to point the thing to actually see something but I figure I could find something on the internet about it.  Which brings me to this little list of things in space that I love.  Starting with, perhaps, the most obvious of things in our sky:

The Moon - Our closest celestial neighbor (most of the time) in more ways than one.  I guess the moon is just kind of...well...the moon.  We've all grown up with it, lived with it, seen a gagillion pictures of it but it's also the only place not on this Earth that human beings have ever been.  It's our first step out into a whole new era in human history.  Without this little gem in the night sky, it's possible that life would have never been.  After all, the moon is us, most likely created from a large impact that sent this piece of the Earth sailing billions of years ago.  

Andromeda - Our nearest spiral galaxy neighbor in the cosmos at a mere 2.5 million light years and closing.  Andromeda has always featured in our night sky because it's so bright, but what makes Andromeda so interesting to me is the rate at which it is approaching the Milky Way and our little solar system.  In about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are expected to collide.  I have no idea what will happen when the collision occurs, but many scientists expect the galaxies to merge and became a gargantuan eliptical galaxy.  

  Colliding Galaxies - A glimpse into the future, here is a snapshot of a couple of galaxies in the process of collision.  We're actually looking at a couple of things here.  The colliding galaxies are at the top of the picture which, admittedly, looks like a mess of gas and stars and is difficult to distinguish one from the other (which makes sense if they're colliding).  The separate galaxy at the bottom is actually no where near the colliding galaxies and the trail of gas and dust in between the two pictures is somewhere over 100 light years long.

Exoplanets - An artist's rendition of the nearest exoplanet we know of that orbits nearby (about 10.5 light years) Epsilon Eridani.  I'm always overly thrilled by the discovery of new exoplanets, probably because I'm still waiting for that one definite sign of life (flashlight in hand) outside of our own terra firma.  A man can dream...

Horsehead Nebula - Properly known as Barnard 33, the Horsehead Nebula represents a curious and very human tendency to imagine things where they aren't.  I'm not sure if that's because we have a need to find the familiar in the stunningly alien or if it's just some odd sense of vanity left over from thinking that the Earth was the center of the universe, either way, it strikes me that we tend to do the same things with nebulae that we do with clouds on Earth.

Binary Stars - Perhaps because we live and exist in a single star system, I've always been fascinated by the existence of binary star systems.  In this picture we see two white dwarfs orbiting each other at the astonishingly shrinking speed of 321 seconds.  Eventually, they'll merge together and create a new stellar body.  Not all binary systems are doing this, some are in stable orbits and their planetary systems can orbit the gravitational center of the primary star and its companion star or just one of the binary stars.  It's all quite the dance.

Hubble Space Telescope - There's no better way to end this list than by paying homage to the thing that has given humanity its eye into the universe.  Most of the images in this post and most of the images of space we've seen comes from this single object.  Hubble has lifted the veil on nearly 15 billion light years worth of space and time.  It is, in a very real sense, our very own time machine and human knowledge will forever be indebted to it's magical mirrors.  

Yeah, space makes me want to be a poet.

An Homage to Earth and Earthling

I spent a good chunk of time in my formative undergraduate years in the concrete confines of Temple Hall.  Partly because it had a cozy nook at the ground level which I used for various study sessions and last minute reading and also because I minored in Geography.  I know, you thought that was a class you took in middle school, but apparently some people will let you get a degree in the subject. Geography allowed me to take my love of maps and topographic features to new, incredibly geeky, heights.  Here's just a few pictures of some of my favorite and most interesting things on Earth.

Mount Roraima - Is part of a larger plateau that marks the converging borders of Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela.  Mount Roraima is the highest elevation in that plateau chain.  Mountains have shaped the history and spread of human culture for the entirety of our short history on Earth.

Merapi - A stratovolcano in Indonesia known for some nasty eruptions complete with pyroclastic flows.  Beautifully deadly, the Javanese culture believe it to be the home of two spirits, Empu Rama and Empu Permadi. 

Cahokia, Monk's Mound - It may look quaint (and perhaps a bit unspectacular) but Cahokia was an ancient Native American city and this mound is the third largest pyramid in the world (by volume).  Cahokia serves as a reminder that cultures and civilizations use what is available to them.  The Mississippian culture didn't have ready access to iron or stone which is why there was no "iron-age" and their pyramids weren't made of stone which, in turn, is one of the reasons many people thought/think their civilization so "primitive"...this is incorrect.  It's population was larger than London at the time (c. 1250 CE) and the engineering that went into building the city would have rivaled anywhere else in the world.

An artist's rendering of Cahokia in it's prime, Monk's Mound being the big pyramid.  You can also see "woodhenge" on the left of the rendering which is reproduced at the site of Cahokia today.

Masai Mara National Reserve - The most well-known and acclaimed African reserve, Masai Mara also carries the distinction of maintaining a functioning Masai culture in the bounds of the reserve.  It's an interesting  contrast to the American notion of wilderness and nature in National Parks that maintains an absence of human settlement.

Aral Sea - The Aral Sea today is less than a fifth the size it was in the 60's when the Soviet Union began damming rivers that emptied into the sea.  The environmental degradation that resulted from human decisions stands as one of Earth's most poignant reminders of the ability of humans to affect this little planet.

A side by side comparison from 1977, 1989 and 2006.

Mount Washington - As mountains go, Washington isn't particularly high nor does it display any spectacularly original features.  What Washington is home to, however, is some of the most erratic weather ever recorded on Earth.  Temperatures have been recorded as low as -50 (that's without a wind chill) and the mountain held the record for highest surface wind speed at 231 mph from 1934 to 1996.  Things can get hairy up there.  

I imagine, for the majority of human beings, geography isn't the most stimulating of topics but the impact our world has on human interaction and vice versa should remind us of the power that place has on the human psyche.  To this day my first drive up a mountain still stands out in my memory.  It was the middle of summer in Colorado and we were able to drive high enough to find snow sitting on the ground.  I had found my paradise (I love snow).  Anyway, geography (and sometimes even geology...but only sometimes) is cool.  

Disclaimer: Most of the images were just google searched.  I was once told something about being a great writer and stealing from other people and that being okay.  I'm not a great writer so please don't sue me or shut down my little blog.

Classism and Other Easier Ways for White People to Talk Around Racism

Classism [noun] a biased or discriminatory attitude based on distinctions made between social or economic classes.

It seems in our "post-racial" America we are finding more and better ways to circumvent any real conversations about race in the public sphere.  We have a black president now which, apparently, magically alleviates our society of any need for reconciliation.  And because of that faulty assumption, so prevalent in certain corners of public discourse, talking about race in any way that does not conform to "color blind" rhetoric becomes taboo.  Suffice it to say, if you think a "color blind" society would solve all of our problems, you're probably white and spend time convincing yourself and others that you're not racist because you have a black friend.

Classism is the new racism for white America.  And it's a convenient way for white Americans to frame their understanding of inequality because, for an overwhelming number of us, it alleviates our feelings of guilt and/or paranoia over the reality of inequity in this country.  Most of us aren't rich so we can justify becoming righteously indignant over wealth parity.  We can talk about the increasing concentration of wealth (which equals political speech! Thanks Supreme Court!) without having to face our own staggering inability to understand the part we play in the systems of disadvantage we accept.  The word doesn't hit us like racism does.  It doesn't convict us or make us squirm or react so defensively when it is used in our presence.  No, no.  You see, we are the "middle-class" and we are normal, everyday, human beings.  We stand for middle class sensibilities.  We're the backbone of the American economy.

The problem with shifting the conversation from racism to classism so that we can "move beyond" the narrow focus of racism is that classism is still a system of disadvantage and privilege predicated on race.  It might be easier to talk about, it might be less threatening, it might not be full of so many uncomfortable conversations but that's the thing about Euphemism, easier to talk about with a healthy dose of disingenuousness thrown in for the sake of feelings.  I want to stress that I'm in no way implying that classism doesn't exist or that it doesn't disadvantage certain groups of people but I cannot accept arguments and conversations that treat classism as if wealth was the only thing standing between equality and disparity in this country.  Thus, a chart (from an interesting study):

It's pretty clear we're not just talking about wealth as the problem or, more accurately, that wealth is the all encompassing lynch-pin in the understanding of American disparity.  We're talking about red-lining and the lack of inclusion for minorities during the economic recovery of the Great Depression.  We're still talking about systems of disadvantage that have been orchestrated and maintained by white America.  And to a large part, I feel like we're still talking about the pathology of privilege that continues to feed on the fears of middle-class white America.  This well-known scene from Lee Mun Wah's The Color of Fear helps illustrate this pathology a bit:

So, we exist in a culture where the majority culture (power) has been willing to accept and promulgate (sometimes through ignorance) systems of disadvantage in which they readily benefit.  These systems are largely ignored and overlooked by the group that is implementing them because we have the privilege of not having to deal with their consequences and can continue to live in a state of ignorance.  And now, in this most recent economic downturn, white America has been unwittingly hit by these systems that have been used for so long to privilege their own.  We have experienced a piece of the disadvantage that our brothers and sisters of color have been living with and have known about for most, if not all, of their lives (and we've incorrectly placed the blame of this problem on our black president, a bastardization of the truth that so complete that if I were to actually call it racist in public I would be laughed out of the room).  And although it has come primarily in the form of economic hardship, it should provide us with a moment to reflect upon all the systems of advantage and disadvantage we navigate and negotiate in this country every day of our lives.  It provides us with an opportunity to raise our own consciousness, to challenge the fear and paranoia we accept into our narrative and accept the experiences of life in America that those with black skin and red skin and yellow skin have endured.

Yes classism is a legitimate problem.  Yes its reach can be felt across ethnic lines in society.  But to try and talk about classism without also addressing racism does us all a disservice.  It's a convenient way to gloss over the true lay of the land and a white-washing of the realities of experience in America.  It would be easy for us to latch onto classism as the explanation for the current climate of America's economy but my feeling is it would only serve to rob us of the opportunity to identify the fear we've agreed to live with, the fear that keeps us from accepting the voices of American experience that differ wildly from our own.