Planet RMFO Blog

I keep looking forward to a weekend that isn’t completely booked. I really don’t think that they exist. The last few weekends have consisted of many tasks such as:

moving everything that I own out of my apartment into a storage unit and into the house where I was house-sitting

cleaning said apartment

picking out bridesmaids’ dresses and tuxes

moving everything from the one house where I was house-sitting to the house where I am now dog-sitting

All very necessary things, but also very time-consuming and enery-sucking things!

This weekend will be much like the rest:

picking out flowers at the florist

taking engagement pictures with our fabulous friend, Karis! (Ok, this part will be fun, but also a bit energy-sucking.)

hopefully starting to slowly move a few things over to my friends’ house where I will actually be living for the next few months (until the wedding)

At least it is a 3-day weekend.

Oh! And in more exciting news, I won a book!

Behold, one of my favorite Rock TVs ever, newly scraped off the archives floor!

Buster Fonz: How to Host the Perfect 4th of July BBQ

Of all the Rock TVs our ministry ever put together, this one is probably our most requested. Whether it’s the silliness of the Buster Fonz character, the exuberant hyper-patriotism, or the glorification of meat, there’s just something about this video that works. One of my projects for the summer is to clean up copyright issues on some older videos to make them internet-friendly, and this was the first one I got to work on.

Like all our videos, this Rock TV has its weak points. I think that the Presidential Fitness Test requirement for a grillmaster is funny as a tossed-off line, but not necessarily as an extended gag. This also isn’t the most visually compelling thing we’ve ever done. Having said that, of the 70-something Rock TVs out there, this has got to be in my top five.

Enjoy!

June 1 – Everything before we drove to Ultimate Frisbee and got a bad phone call.
June 2 – One of my students said some very positive and uplifting things that made me feel good about my job.
June 3 – The thunderstorm (that I had to chat online during) did not destroy my computer.
June 4 – Mike and Alison made me go out to dinner for Girls’ Night Out.
June 5 – The parents provided pizza for lunch!
June 6 – We ran in a race and also our neighbors’ children had a party with a bouncy castle!
June 7 – Really enjoyed the sermon at church and got a lot of homework done.
June 8 – Was at Mike’s school briefly. His students said I was pretty.
June 9 – Got a massive amount of work done on my portfolio for class.
June 10 – Walked a lot as I administered end-of-year test retakes. Counting steps kept me occupied.
June 11 – Reading incentive for 6th graders went really well (though it was a long day – I didn’t leave work until 9:30).
June 12 – This was not a good day. But some people let me be upset without trying to fix it, for which I am grateful.
June 13 – Went wedding dress shopping with Alisa and ate the world’s largest banana split.
June 14 – The sermon at church was, again, very good. I really like this Dr. Seuss series.
June 15 – The last day of school for students. Enough said.
June 16 – Our only workday this year. I got to wear flip flops and jeans and had my nails done after school.
June 17 – It was a very rainy day. We ran a lot of errands and I made fun of Mike for taking the longest possible route everywhere we went.
June 18 – I got my new driver’s license. I was in and out of the DMV in 15 minutes and won’t need another one for 8 years. We will never move again.
June 19 – Had breakfast and went shopping with my Aunt Nancy. And later we went to Float Night.
June 20 – Went to a friend’s wedding that was lovely and beautiful. That night we went to the pool social and got to meet some people in our neighborhood.
June 21 – I went to church on Father’s Day for the first time in a couple of years and then hung out at the pool all afternoon.
June 22 – Mike and I took a very long walk together without saying much. Sometimes it’s just nice to be with someone who lets you be quiet.
June 23 – I turned in my last assignment for my summer class. And all my Facebook friends rejoiced, because I stopped complaining about that stupid class.
June 24 – Hung out with Melissa. She made me watch So You Think You Can Dance for the first time ever and I made fun of the trashy whoreish costumes.
June 25 – Mike and I went to see Tartuffe at Triad Stage and also he took me to Ben and Jerry’s. I never get to go to Ben and Jerry’s!
June 26 – Went to Smith Mountain Lake with my friends.
June 27 – Spent most of the day floating in inner tubes at Smith Mountain Lake. And ate massive amounts of delicious food. And had a birthday cake with sparklers in it while rednecks on a boat sang Happy Birthday to me.
June 28 – Had the most delicious steak I’ve ever had at a restaurant at an Expensive National Chain Steak Restaurant. (The steak really was good.)
June 29 – I took a swimming lesson and did not die. Even though I was really scared. Also I improved quite a bit. Went to see Away We Go with Mike and Andrea, and I was skeptical going in, but I ended up liking it. I cried.
June 30 – Went for a walk with our neighbor. She makes me walk fast and burn lots of calories.

(this actually happened 3 weeks ago, so pardon the tense it was written in, i just never got around to publishing it)

so last night i stayed up way too late playing around on the internet. nothing special, but i got caught up watching videos on youtube and reading about soccer. about 1 am, i turned off the computer and was turning off all the lights to go to bed. i decided to have a look at the hibiscus along the sidewalk in front of my house. it is one of the remaining plants from the flower bed renovation of 2006, and i’ve noticed the past couple of days since the more recent renovation, that it is starting to look like it’ll bloom for the first time since the summer of 2006. it was late, and i thought i’d turn on the front light and have a look. so i turn on the light and look out the window by my front door and look at the hibiscus, then i looked up and noticed a car parked across the street with people just hanging out. i turned off the light and the rest of the lights, but i found ways to keep an eye on these people. they were parked across the street along the windowless side of the house directly across the street from my house.

my street’s relatively quiet at night, because it’s not along the main road in the neighborhood. it’s really nice actually, unless there’s a mysterious car parked on it. i went into the front bedroom of my house and peered out the holes in the blinds, because obviously they knew i was awake, or had been, and besides, i didn’t want them to KNOW i was watching them. i didn’t call the cops for the same reason, they’d know who called the cops because i turned on the freaking front light to look at my hibiscus. i was just making sure they weren’t doing anything illegal. it just seemed really really odd. after about 10 minutes, i got tired of watching and went and brushed my teeth. i heard the car drive off right before i went to bed. i have no idea what those 3 (who i could see) people were doing, but next time that happens i’m calling the cops….unless i turn on the front light to look at the hibiscus again.

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I tell my students that studying Hebrew helps to keep their brain active which can stave off things like Alzheimers’ disease.

For example, here’s a lecture illustration I use. Which brain would you rather have?

But even with all that language study, there are days when you need some supplemental grey matter exercise. So, here’s a suggestion. This is a nice little surface maze (a sample from Dover Publications’ The Ultimate Maze Book by Galen Wadzinskiby) for your brain to tackle when you need to take a break from research, reading, writing, or whatever.

Dover Publications has lots of books with puzzles, mazes, and more to keep your brain cells active. I still have lots of stuff I want to coax out of my brain, so I’m going to do everything I can to keep exercising my brain cells.

Trails and footprints overgrown;
the saplings thick as your wrist
remain.

A deciduous puzzle: how snapshot
flashbacks fit the deceitful,
slipshod narrative.

Here, lost, stumbling past grove
after grove, you are a botanist,
cataloguing, classifying,

denoting, achieving a
particular kind of
amnesia.

1 – Clemson advanced to a Super Regional, while south carolina blew a 3 run lead in the 9th and lost in 10 innings
2 – saw a dancing drink cup outside Sonic
3 – rode my bike down to Sonic for the free root beer float
4 – sweet relief at work
5 – hang out time with the folks watching the LSU game
6 – slept late, watered the new plants, and grilled salmon, also watched the US beat Honduras
7 – mowed my lawn, relaxed the rest of the day
8 – bought sweet potato chips at the store
9 – set out to run 4 miles and made it
10 – made some good progress on something at work
11 – hang out time with the Taylors, and a Zephyrs game was going on in the background
12 – had a great salad for dinner at La Madeleine
13 – went to and from BR safely to take defensive driving class and the class went better than i expected; LSU won their first CWS game
14 – early church, breakfast with my mom, finally saw the cover for the new Mute Math album and LOVED IT
15 – LSU won their 2nd CWS game!
16 – dinner with my family for my mom’s birthday; RUM RAMSEYS!
17 – did two sets of exercises at the gym in less than 45 minutes!
18 – grilled salmon and broccoli….and beer
19 – grilled burgers and made sweet potato fries
20 – nice relaxing Saturday watching the US Open
21 – great Father’s Day lunch with my family
22 – Lucas Glover, fellow Clemson alum of ‘01, won the US Open, and I got to watch the last few holes
23 – fun dinner with my sister and aunt
24 – the USA beat Spain! LSU won the CWS!
25 – after a pretty terrible day all around, i got to have a long talk with a fellow counselor about youth group and church that pretty much made up for all the crappy stuff from before
26 – peach milkshake at CFA!
27 – figured out issue with something at work while being paid OT
28 – had parents over to watch the USA/Brazil game…..i think i may have converted them
29 – saw a Mastercard commercial that features a guy i’ve played poker with
30 – bought new sunglasses at Target on the way home (i was stopping there anyway)

This is a book about two people who hide their true intellectual talents – one because a concierge is not expected to be smart and the other because she prefers not to stand out as an overly intelligent twelve-year-old. It is a book about the beauty and meaning of life, about paying attention to the people around us, and about redemption. And how it is always right on time.

It’s slow at first, and it’s dense in some places, but the writing is beautiful and the characters are memorable. Here’s my favorite passage. It reminded me of why I enjoy the process of thinking of things to write about, even if I am just putting them here:

Indeed, what constitutes life? Day after day, we put up the brave struggle to play our role in this phantom comedy. We are good primates, so we spend most of our time maintaining and defending our territory, so that it will protect and gratify us; climbing–or trying not to slide down–the tribe’s hierarchical ladder, and fornicating in every manner imaginable–even mere phantasms–as much for the pleasure of it as for the promised offspring. Thus we use up a considerable amount of our energy in intimidation and seduction, and these two strategies alone ensure the quest for territory, hierarchy and sex that gives life to our conatus. But none of this touches our consciousness. We talk about love, about good and evil, philosophy and civilization, and we cling to these respectable icons the way a tick clings to its nice big warm dog.

There are times, however, when life becomes a phantom comedy. As if aroused from a dream, we watch ourselves in action and, shocked to realize how much vitality is required simply to support our primitive requirements, we wonder, bewildered, where Art fits in. All our frenzied nudging and posturing suddenly becomes utterly insignificant; our cozy little nest is reduced to some futile barbarian custom, and our position in society, hard-won and eternally precarious, is but a crude vanity. As for our progeny, we view them now with new eyes, and we are horrified, because without the cloak of altruism, the reproductive act seems extraordinarily out of place. All that is left is sexual pleasure, but if it is relegated to a mere manifestation of primal abjection, it will fail in proportion, because a loveless session of gymnastics is not what we have struggled so hard to master.

Eternity eludes us.

At times like this, all the romantic, political, intellectual, metaphysical and moral beliefs that years of instruction and education have tried to inculcate in us seem to be foundering on the altar of our true nature, and society, a territorial field mined with the powerful charges of hierarchy, is sinking into the nothingness of Meaning. Exeunt rich and poor, thinkers, researchers, decision-makers, slaves, the good and the evil, the creative and the conscientious, trade unionists and individualists, progressives and conservatives; all have become primitive hominoids whose nudging and posturing, mannerisms and finery, language and codes are all located on the genetic map of an average primate, and all add up to no more than this: hold your rank, or die.

At times like this you desperately need Art. You seek to reconnect with your spiritual illusions, and you wish fervently that something might rescue you from your biological destiny, so that all poetry and grandeur will not be cast out from the world.

My book club is discussing this one in the fall. It certainly gave me quite a bit to think about. I don’t give it my highest recommendation, but I did enjoy it. All the reviews I read called it bittersweet, and it was. In the best kind of way.

I had to say goodbye to my stereo today.

I received it as a Christmas gift from my parents back in 1992. The world was a simpler place back then - back before the Unabomber, before Y2K, before the Scary Movie films. It was on this little boom box that I listened to The White Album for the first time and thought to myself, “Wild Honey Pie is certainly the finest song ever composed.” During high school and college, I used this stereo to compile an estimated 300 mixtapes - some for myself, some for friends, but most for girls I liked who would most certainly return my romantic interests if I could only introduce them to a particular album cut by Collective Soul. As always, my reasoning was cogent and valid.

Well today, the romantic interest of my life told me that my old stereo is too big and ugly for our house, and told me I had to get rid of it. Bursting into tears, I pleaded for my old friend with haggard shouts of anguish and by holding my breath until I lost consciousness, but to no avail. It was time. Its CD player had long ceased working, and its cassette player ate tapes, basically rendering it an oversized AM radio used to listen to Vikings games and swear at.

It was time to take my sturdy old companion out back and mercilessly blast its head off with a shotgun, metaphorically speaking.

So I did. Upon returning, I sat down to write this post. Bitter, salty tears are dripping down my beard and into the heaping bowl of butterscotch pudding Bridgette prepared to help console me. Later today, we will go out and purchase a new stereo - a smaller one more suitable for the times we live in. I suppose I may grow to love this stereo, but it will never be the same as the one I had to leave behind.

Farewell, my old portable stereo. I hope you are being attended to by scores of virgins somewhere in home electronics heaven.

I have been wanting to go to Expensive National Chain Steak Restaurant for a while, so Mike used some of our credit card points to get a gift card for us to be able to do that. We went on Sunday. And the food was really good, though I have to say that Mike makes a mean steak that is kind of hard to beat. And we have an excellent creamed spinach recipe. And we can steam broccoli with the best of them. I didn’t have the mashed potatoes, but I hear they are excellent, though The Pioneer Woman’s recipe is pretty hard to beat in my opinion. So I am not sure it was worth all that money, even though it was fun and delicious. The only reason I am even mentioning it is that Mike and I experienced a little drama in the dining room of Expensive National Chain Steak Restaurant that I would like to share with you.

When we got to Expensive National Chain Steak Restaurant, we were the only people there, and we were seated in the dining room. About ten minutes later, another couple came in and was seated at the table directly behind me. Because that makes sense. There’s nowhere else to put them, right? Mike and I rolled our eyes at each other about this development and moved on.

The servers were very attentive (what else did they have to do, really?) and the manager did come by and ask how we were doing. Things were fine, we told him. And then, shortly after he left, the lady behind me started complaining loudly about the time they went to Arizona and she never got any southwestern food and she had to eat at P.F. Chang’s for a week. This went on for quite some time. They were apparently going on another trip and she wanted him to know that she wanted a different sort of experience this time. And she was telling him. Repeatedly. To the point that I was considering turning around and telling the guy that, you know what, he really might want to consider breaking up with her. It would be in his best interests.

After listening to her diatriabe for a while, I told Mike that if the manager came back by, I might say something about why they were seated directly next to us when the entire dining room was empty. But, of course, he’d already done his rounds, so there was no need for him to come back by. So I told Mike that I was going to mention it at the hostess stand as we were leaving, just to say, you know, there’s no reason to seat people directly next to each other when the dining room is completely empty. We did spend a good amount of money and we tipped well, and the whole idea of maybe seating people across the dining room from each other is not completely insane, right?

Now, you guys know that I have been, in the past, a little bit overly aggressive in these sorts of situations. So I was trying to be careful. And I don’t like to make a fuss in restaurants, because I don’t like to be That Guy. The woman opened the door for us, and as I was passing her, I kind of said my piece. And, y’all. She looked completely hurt. I thought she might start crying. I almost made the hostess at Expensive National Chain Steak Restaurant cry. It is possible that I am a terrible person. I don’t mean to be, but it is possible.

To the manager’s credit, I think he saw that something was up, and he headed right over and said we should be talking to him instead of her. Which . . . maybe. I was certainly not trying to make her almost cry. And she’s the one who seated us. To the manager’s discredit, when Mike started explaining the situation (I tagged out and made him take over), the manager (who was well over six feet, bald and tough and intimidating) totally blamed us! He said that we should have asked to be moved and went on and on about how we should have said something and we could have been moved to a private booth. We pointed out that it had gotten worse after he came by, but it was clear he thought we were jerks and idiots. Which, maybe we are. You know me and my jerkish ways.

All I really wanted was for someone to say, “You know what, you’re right, and we’ll consider that when we’re seating people in the future.” We were seated there first and it made it kind of hard for us to ask to move. Plus, we were already settled. We didn’t really want to have to move. My whole thing was that they shouldn’t have been seated next to us to begin with. When it was clear that we were getting nowhere with the manager, we just went out to our car. Mike looked at me and said, “He just blamed us! For where we were seated!” We laughed about it for a while. I added my main concern: “Should we have said we wanted to be moved right in front of the other couple? That was the whole problem! They could hear everything we were saying!”

I guess, Expensive National Chain Steak Restaurant, this is the end of our relationship. If we go back, the manager will probably try to beat us up. Which is kind of a shame, since you didn’t seem to have a lot of customers.

Ever feel this way when talking to someone?

Apparently I’ve taken it upon myself to scrutinize the structure of my previous attempt. I present the longer, smoother, better-tasting, “Gardiner Version 2″. Still needs compression, mastering, etc. Oh, and some more structure. But I digress.

The Structural Integrity of the Gardiner Expressway Comes Under Scrutiny (v2)

In your grey book of dust
you have pressed and forgotten
a wayward flower–

rose-red in the hardwood grooves,
blooming at your wrist–

the geography, the history, the
charts, the graphs–

aster-pink in the porcelain cove,
no stemming this tide–

no unlearning
the facts,
now.

This spring, I discovered that I have a special talent. If I am going up a set of stairs with a landing in the middle, I will almost certainly fall up the stairs somewhere on the second half. I don’t fall down stairs. Just up. I can’t figure out if it’s just me getting ahead of myself or losing concentration or poor coordination or some sort of harbinger of doom. One minute I was happily climbing the stairs, thinking of all the calories I was burning. The next minute I was bracing myself for a particularly graceful fall. Or trying to keep my balance in front of a bunch of middle schoolers. It is especially important not to fall in front of middle schoolers. They can see you sweat, but they cannot see you fall.

My tendency to get ahead of myself is not limited to stair climbing. No, in my attempts to be a realist, I like to scout out every possible thing that can go wrong and then worry about all of those things. At once. You can identify people like me by our large purses (besides, I need to be able to fit a book AND a water bottle in my purse as well as any and all tools that could be needed for survival) and our overflowing suitcases. In general, I have stopped apologizing for the overflowing suitcase, because I often find that, even if I don’t need all of those things, someone else might. And I think I’ve gotten better at packing anyway. (Though I did overpack for the weekend I just spent at the lake . . . but not by much. Mostly just the hairdryer. I managed to survive without it. I used pretty much everything else, though. Including my Padme beach towel.)

At the end of the school year, I got some upsetting news about what my year might look like next year. And I spent a couple of days being frustrated and sad. When I talk about it now, I still get a little bit worked up, but mostly I am trying something new. I am trying not to get ahead of myself and trying not to worry about what things will look like next year. (I say “trying” because I really do try and then things happen like me waking up in the middle of the night from a dream in which the worst possible scenario really did play out. Holy cow, talk about a nightmare.) I am trying to be faithful in this struggle, to focus on the present rather than falling up the stairs. Next year will be here soon enough. Until then, I am going to try patience and trust that the triumphant twist will either be that things work out the way I want or that I will miraculously be able to deal with whatever it is that comes. Even if I haven’t spent my entire summer worrying about it.

My wife was working this weekend, and I ended up spending all my time sitting in my sunroom engrossed in Thomas Craughwell’s excellent book Stealing Lincoln’s Body.

The text is a spare, compelling account of a bizarre 1876 attempt to hold Abraham Lincoln’s remains for ransom. The details of the heist itself aren’t enough to support a 200-page book, so Craughwell uses it to frame a vivid picture of America in the second half of the 19th century. He covers the crisis of counterfeited money following the Civil War, nativist Protestant resentment toward Irish Catholic immigrants, corrupt Chicago politics, and the development of the Secret Service. All these threads wind their way through the narrative of what happened to the remains of Abraham Lincoln. This is an eerie, haunted story that is sure to stick with me for a while. A fun read.

Here are some tidbits gleaned from the text. Do not bother to question them.

-The heist was a poor attempt by a ring of Chicago counterfeiters to secure a pardon for an imprisoned business partner, along with $200,000. They planned to break into Lincoln’s loosely-guarded monument in Springfield, IL, and remove his casket from the marble sarcophagas it had been placed in 11 years earlier. The grave-robbers managed to break in and had started to remove the casket from the sarcophagas when they were discovered. The entire endeavor had been amateurish and ill-advised; the kidnappers’ litany of mistakes would be more humorous if they hadn’t come so close to successfully desecrating Lincoln’s remains.

-A parallel scheme to kidnap the bones of Chex, Lincoln’s cat, failed when it was revealed that Chex was still alive, and was also not a cat at all, but Lincoln’s human son Robert.

-If Lincoln’s grave desecrators were alive today, they’d be blown away by our iPods and HDTVs. Then they’d go and desecrate Gerald Ford.

-The hero of Craughwell’s story is a man named John Carroll Power, the original custodian and self-appointed guardian of the Lincoln Monument in Springfield. Traumatized by the break-in, Power dedicated himself for the remainder of his life to protecting the remains of the Lincoln family.

-In a interesting historical curio, it is believed that President Andrew Jackson was never buried. Rather, he ascended into heaven on a cloud powered by Manifest Destiny where he punched St. Peter in the crotch to gain admission.

-Sometimes Abraham Lincoln watches me when I take baths.

-As a result the chaos following the break-in, and the ongoing structural problems of the monument itself, Lincoln’s coffin was kept in the corner of the monument’s basement under a pile of lumber for several years. Power and several trusted associates later secretly buried Lincoln’s remains in a shallow corner of the basement for several more years until a more suitable solution could be found.

-Barack Obama is also from Illinois, and is also good at giving speeches, and is also the greatest president since Lincoln or FDR, whichever one came later. I am an editor at Newsweek magazine.

-Troubled by fears that their efforts to protect Lincoln’s remains had failed, Power and several others took it upon themselves to actually open the coffin to positively identify the body in 1887. Later, in 1901, just before Lincoln was lowered to his final resting place, the coffin was opened for a final time. In both instances, onlookers were started at the remarkable preservation of Lincoln’s body (the result of the heavy embalming efforts utilized for the month-long funeral procession from Washington to Springfield back in 1865). His face was immediately recognizable, though the color of his skin had darkened as a result of the shattering of his skull. The men remarked that it was like looking at a bronze bust of Lincoln rather than the man itself. After the viewing in 1901, the lead coffin was sealed shut once again, placed in a cedar casket, and lowered into a concrete-sealed tomb below the monument where he has lain ever since.

-Dairy Queen’s Blizzard flavor of the month for July is Lincolndust.

I’m just about done packing. Tomorrow morning I’ll be riding in a car up to rural Illinois to go to my eighth Cornerstone Festival and I’m pretty excited. It’s a pretty familiar oddity at this point as I’ve experienced all the late nights, brutal heat, sudden storms and relentless, relentless, pounding hardcore music assaulting my ears before. Nonetheless, I get a thrill every year I get to do it. Adriene and her mom are watching the girls while I’m away and I’m really thankful to them for giving me a chance to escape for a while. If my math is correct, this is the first overnight that I will be away from the girls since New Year’s Eve and the first multiple nights that I’ve been away from them since they were born. I’ll miss my little pixies, but I think I’ve earned a little break.

Plus, this week is a chance to hang out with old friends, hobnob with some somewhat famous musicians and see a whole lot of live concerts. This year will be a great cross-section as some of my friends from the Square Peg Alliance will be performing at the festival. For some of them, this will be their first ever time here. Also, Jeff Elbel will be doing multiple shows and nobody loves us more than Ping. My friend David is doing a DJ session of his own. So, aside from all the bands to see, there will be personal reasons to catch many of the shows. I’ll be doing a little creative artwork of my own while I’m there. I’ll be shooting photos of the shows and scenes at the festival and uploading them to my Flickr site. I’ll also be regularly journaling the experience on the blog on the official Cornerstone Festival website. Check the sites regularly as I’ll be updating throughout the day. The best part of the festival is discovering new bands to listen to and God almost always surprises me with a couple lessons or thoughts to take away from the festival. I’m ready to expect the unexpected.

I’m eagerly anticipating the arrival of my copy of the soon-to-be-released JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible.

The illustrations look to be beautifully rendered. But even more than the illustrations, I am looking forward to reading the stories from a fresh point of view.

From the introduction:

My chief aim in writing this book has been to introduce American children to the language and rhythms of the Hebrew Bible.

You can download (PDF file) the introduction here. A sample chapter is also available for download.

But if you want to see more, and especially if you’re interested in reading the Author’s notebook which includes explanations about choices made for the translation (a very worthwhile read!), you can find sample pages of the book on Google Books. Here’s a link to the search I performed. You can also follow the link on the JPS page to another Google Preview.

At one point during in school last year I had a hard time explaining to my students how Michael Jackson could have been such a cool, universally beloved figure in the 80s - they had grown up with the absolutely bizarre behavior and child molestation charges surrounding him, and never got a chance to experience Michael Jackson as The Most Talented Man on the Planet.

As a kid in rural Minnesota, I idolized certain pop cultural figures like he and Kirby Puckett. Turns out both of them had their demons, but there weren’t any bigger in my world when I was young.

Well, now Michael Jackson is dead at age 50. He is survived by his children Blanket, Pickle, and Rainbow Bright.

Here is the bloated, but at times astounding video for Smooth Criminal:

I remember when this video came out, spending precious minutes at recess breaking down the dance moves and debating whether “the leaning” was real or doctored with special effects.

And here’s a lovely, haunting ballad from his later material - Stranger in Moscow:

R.I.P.

UPDATE: Over at the excellent Onion A.V. Club site, they put together a great collection of reflections on Jackson’s death. Here’s one that sums up my impressions particularly well:

Michael Jackson was the first celebrity I remember being aware of who wasn’t Han Solo or a Muppet. His stardom transcended music: At that age, I was far more interested in listening to storybook records than pop albums, so Jackson was less a famous musician to me than just this charmed entity who lived in an enviably magical world; I remember seeing that photo of him with E.T. and being very jealous that they were friends. A year later when I started kindergarten, Jackson was all anyone ever talked about, and it was never about, say, the merits of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” versus “P.Y.T.” For months after the Motown 25 special (which I would hazard a guess most of us didn’t even actually watch), all the boys tried to one-up each other moonwalking in the cafeteria, and the coolest kid in class was the guy who showed up one day wearing a replica of Jackson’s red patent leather, multi-zippered “Beat It” jacket—which he swore he got from the man himself because he was actually his nephew, and of course no one ever challenged him on it, and eventually everyone took to calling him “Michael” at his insistence (even though your name was really Dwayne, Dwayne). I remember going home and asking my mom for some parachute pants that very night, which she was smart enough not to buy me.

The thing is, liking Michael Jackson’s music was and is sort of beside the point—and hating his music is definitely beside the point. And all the crazy shit that just began to snowball not long after and never really let up (the Pepsi fire, the Elephant Man’s bones, hyperbaric chambers, the skin-bleaching, Macaulay Culkin, Neverland Ranch, and our seemingly inexhaustible repository of kiddy-diddler jokes), yes, that’s also beside the point. To dismiss the impact that he had on the cultural landscape, to deny the way his influence spread via osmosis through every facet of our existence—to where a little 5-year-old white kid in suburban Texas who didn’t even listen to music nevertheless wanted to dress like Michael Jackson—would be myopic. That we’ll see another artist in our lifetime who was that deeply entrenched in the national psyche, for better and for worse, and for so incredibly long seems unlikely. To me, it’s not just another pop-music star who died; in a way, it’s the notion of “pop” itself.

• On being pretentious.
  I do so enjoy Kari's stories.

With each gift another
smooth stone dislodged.
A river runs over it;
the quivering babble brooks
no jutting spur.

With each gift another
seedling stems the flow.
You damn the future with
each one that transpires;
you soothe the fortunate,
present in your passing.

In a crooked room
I leaned into you
and we knew–

Soon the hiss and sputter
of kindling voices would
subside–

Soon only the coals
would remain,
whispering on
our tongues.

Just a short instrumental, perhaps suitable for that short film you’ve always wanted to make:

The Structural Integrity of the Gardiner Expressway Comes Under Scrutiny

• Why Mark Driscoll Shouldn’t Bug Ya
  I pretty much agree with iMonk's summary thoughts on Driscoll.
  (tags: markdriscoll imonk review)

This week Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and the King of Pop Michael Jackson all passed away.

I’m a little too young to have been greatly affected by any of the three of these celebrities’ work, though I’m not sure there’s a non-Amish soul in America that hasn’t been at least somewhat affected by Michael’s music. I learned of Michael after he had already started to go crazy and turn himself into a white woman, so I feel like my experience with his music has always been a bit tainted. That said, there’s nothing like putting an old jam from Thriller, Bad, or Off the Wall and trying to moonwalk.

The man was crazy. We all know that. I just hope the legacy left is the music and not the insanity.

I use my own bags at the grocery store. We compost. We have a share in a farm and get most of our produce from there. We also buy a whole lot at the Farmer’s Market. From time to time, we shop at Trader Joe’s. (In fact, we have to drive to Chapel Hill to go to Trader Joe’s. Sometimes we catch an independent film while we are there.) In other words, Mike and I can be, well, pretentious. We know this. We don’t love it, but it’s just how things are these days. We would be crunchy except I’m not really the crunchy type. So we’ll just stick to being pretentious.

This school year, one of my favorite games to play with the band and orchestra teacher was to mention something pretentious Mike and I had done and then look at her to watch her roll her eyes.

“When Mike and I were at the Farmer’s Market this weekend . . . ”

“When Mike and I were shopping at Ten Thousand Villages . . . ”

“While we were in Chapel Hill to see Slumdog Millionaire, we stopped by Trader Joe’s and picked up some goat cheese. ”

Now, the band and orchestra teacher would want me to tell you that she recycles and she is for saving the planet. She just likes to make fun of me. She loves to give me a hard time about the Farmer’s Market and the lack of summer blockbusters in my life. And I like her so much that I encourage it. During the last week of school, I happened to see her in the hall as I was eating an apple, and I waved the core at her and said, “Just want you to know, I am taking this home to compost it!” She laughed and asked if that was true. “No. I’m taking it home to Big Bunny. But we compost her litter, so it’s kind of true.” (She rolled her eyes.) (Which, unquestionably, I deserved.)

Since it’s summertime, I kind of miss our interactions. I haven’t done very many pretentious things this summer. So far. Before I tell you about my latest and greatest pretentious move, let’s talk about olive oil. My mom went on a Mediterranean cruise and she brought Mike back some olive oil from Greece. This was The Greatest Olive Oil Of All Time and with it he made excellent hummus. After that, he declared that we must use olive oil from Greece. And we spent some time at the Teeter looking at their giant wall of olive oil. Which was, as I remarked upon at the time, incredibly ridiculous. No one needs that many choices when it comes to olive oil. I just want one from Greece.

Now we know it’s cheaper at Fresh Market, so I went there the other day specifically to pick up olive oil (who runs out of olive oil?). While I was standing in front of their slightly smaller shelf of exotic varieties of olive oil, I had a brain fart about whether we wanted Italian olive oil or Grecian olive oil. I considered calling Mike. I imagined the conversation that my fellow shoppers would overhear. “Dear, do we want olive oil from Greece or Italy?” It sort of made me sick. I looked back at the selection of many different olive oils, and I called anyway. He didn’t answer. After a minute, I managed to remember which one we needed, so I bought it – I had my own bag – and headed out to my car. At which time I called the band and orchestra teacher to tell her the tale. She was appropriately horrified. Here is a snippet from the end of our conversation.

KARI: When I was at the checkout, the cashier said, “I buy my olive oil in a big jug at Costco.”

B & O TEACHER: You know you are pretentious when the cashier at Fresh Market thinks you are pretentious.

KARI: I know. There is pretty much no hope for me at this point.

(I might have needed a break from school, but I kind of miss the other teachers.)

On this, another scorching June afternoon, I thought you ingrates might enjoy this favorite post of mine from the summer of 2005…

I’ve got a serious problem. My problem has nothing to do with money, love, or diabetes.

My problem is simply this - I’m sucking down Pop-Ice like a fiend.

I wish it were funny, but it really isn’t. I’ve found myself enjoying 12 of them in a single sitting. Sometimes I suck on the the sons of bitches while I’m using the toilet. My addiction apparently knows no bounds, and I’m helpless to stop it. Bridgette has thrice asked me to cut back, and each time my Pop-Ice passion leads me to spray her with urine and retreat into the woods. Seriously, without the 8 quarts of Pop-Ice running through my veins, I most likely wouldn’t have done that to her.

I like how cold the Pop-Ice is when I eat it. It feels like I’m in a refrigerator! Sometimes I chew it up so it’s slushy, and sometimes I suck on big chunks of it at a time. Either way, it is so delicious that it makes a milkshake taste like fresh raccoon piss. The Pop-Ice comes in many savory flavors that I enjoy. In order, I like red, pink, orange, purple, and green. Technically, blue is also a flavor, but I like to think of it as more of a horrible factory error that led directly to the death of an innocent child laborer in Taiwan.

Any way you slice it, Pop-Ice is with me forever, and none of you can change that. None of you! SHUT UP! You’re just jealous of the Pop-Ice! You can’t have what we have! Pop-Ice and I are going to live in a cabin in Vermont, eating Pop-Ice by day, and wolverine flesh by night, and I will feed Pop-Ice the succulent chunks of beast-flesh by the campfire until Pop-Ice melts and dies!

I just got in from mowing the lawn. It was hot and arduous, and I now look like Bruce Willis at the end of the Die Hard movies.

Now I am resting comfortably and eating a bowl of raisin bran for lunch. This is not analogous to the Die Hard films in any way.

I think I better take a shower, because I’m pretty sweaty (again, like Bruce Willis in those movies). However, it should be noted that much of his character’s sweat was from stress and “here we go again” style tension - mine is mostly from being in the sun and mowing the lawn.

This raisin bran sucks, you guys.

“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.” -Clifton Fadiman

I hope Mr. Fadiman will make an exception in this case, because I would hate to think what seeing zombies in Pride and Prejudice might mean for my character.

I have struggled a bit with what to say about this book. I did enjoy it, to a certain extent. I laughed on almost every page in the first half. The idea that zombies are plaguing England is undeniably funny. And the fact that the Bennet sisters have traded being accomplished for being excellent slayers of the undead made me giggle about as much as you would expect. All of them, even Lydia, fight the zombies with great skill and precision. But it did drag in the second half, even with the zombies and Lady Catherine’s ninjas (ninjas and zombies!) and the fact that Charlotte got married because she had been bitten and she was desperate to get married before she died and the idea that Mr. Darcy objected to Jane in part because he thought her severe cold signaled that she was afflicted with the plague of the undead. I laughed and it was amusing, but I had had enough.

I don’t quite agree with Cheryl Klein’s review, because I didn’t necessarily object to the changes. If you are going to add zombies, you probably need to make some changes, and I can understand if those changes include things like vomit and pus and the like. But I do agree with her about it growing a bit tedious at the end. Although my reasons are different, I can’t say that I give it a wholehearted recommendation, despite the fact that I did laugh quite a lot. And stop to read something to Mike on nearly every page whenever I was around him. It just needed some editing, because, really, by the halfway point, I had gotten the general idea, and it either needed to be shorter or it needed more zombie twists to shake the story up a bit to keep my attention. (This could possibly be because I know the story too well.) What I am most curious about is what someone new to Pride and Prejudice (a middle or high school student, for example) might think of it.

I think it boils down to this: If you think you will enjoy a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, my guess is that you will probably get enough enjoyment out of it to make it worth reading. If nothing else, flip through it and check out how some of the more famous passages have been altered to include zombie references. It will give you a good laugh. For my own part, I am happy I read it, and would not hesitate to read another in a similar vein. Cheryl Klein had some ideas:

And if someone would like to hire me to turn Sense and Sensibility into a vampire novel (with Willoughby and Lucy Steele as the undead who bleed the sisters Dashwood dry), or Emma into a werewolf book (with Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax as a secretly mated pair) — like Mr. Bennet after his daughters are engaged, “I am quite at leisure.”

I like her Emma, and I think Persuasion could be a good choice for a vampire book. Anne Elliot is older and unmarried because she is the slayer? She turned Captain Wentworth down because Lady Russell persuaded her that marrying a vampire could never make her happy? Something to ponder.

so this afternoon, i loaded up the text updated webpage for the USA/Spain soccer game. the way the US had been playing the last few weeks, and the fact that Spain had not lost in 3 years, made me think the US would be lucky to only lose by 2 goals. following soccer like i have the last couple of years, i know the US is not on par with the BEST TEAM ON THE PLANET. i’m guessing the players watched the pregame speech clip from Miracle or something.

i started reading the feed about the 20 minute mark in the game, and when the score updated to 1-0 USA, i had to read it a few times and refresh the page. the USA scored? they scored FIRST? what? after the first goal, i loaded up the text updates from the BBC. i scrolled back to see what they were saying, and i saw this quote from before the game that i thought was awesome:

Having been on the periphery of success for so long, Spain are now THE dominant force in world football. They are Euro 2008 champions, ranked number one on earth, haven’t been beaten in 35 games and have won their last 15 in a row. The perennial dark horses, Espana are now the hot favourites for next year’s World Cup. Faced with all of that, do USA give themselves a prayer of pulling off an enormous upset tonight? Of course they do. They’re Americans.

that’s right, because there is ALWAYS A CHANCE! the game got to halftime and it was still 1-0. i got to doing some other work, and kept an eye on the text updates. when the score changed to 2-0, i pounded my desk in amazement. how is this possible? how come no one else at work follows soccer? 2-0 on freaking Spain? this is Miracle on Ice stuff here! when full time was called, it was amazing. the US pulled the biggest upset in modern US soccer history. sure, they’ve beaten Mexico in Mexico, but Spain? SPAIN? Spain, the team loaded with players considered the best at their positions in the world, who were about to set a world record for consecutive victories as a national team? the same US team who were embarrassed last week against Italy and Brazil? INCREDIBLE!

i had seen a poll earlier this morning before the game asking “how much would it matter if the US beat Spain today?” 28% of the people on ESPN.com said “not at all”. hopefully after today some of them have changed their mind.

and then i came home and watched LSU handle Texas and win the CWS. while great, it was not as big a deal, because i guess i was expecting it, plus i’ve seen it 5 times before.

Yeah, those were the days. I have 12 drafts in my draft folder. Each one looking at me with its beady little eyes. Yes, my posts have eyes. And yes they’re beady.

But y’all. I’ve got nothing. Nothing funny. Nothing profound. Just nothing.

So I thought I would just give you a list. A bulleted list at that. What a cop-out. But it is a list of the stupid things I’ve done over the past few weeks. That’s entertaining, right?

Come on, humor me.

• Since we last met, I have done some fix-it projects around the house. And I’m really not sure how I’m still alive. Because in one project I shoved a screwdriver into a mass of wires that once was my ceiling fan.  And I didn’t turn off the circuit-breaker. Is that even what it’s called? Anywho, I learned that this is a way to get your friends to come fix your ceiling fan. Because they don’t want to be the ones to find my corpse. And I appreciate that.
• Speaking of my corpse (you gotta love a sentence that starts that way), this morning I fell in my bathroom and narrowly missed hitting my head on the sink. I’m thinking it may be helpful if I got one of those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” things to wear when I’m home alone.
• Oh, and then, last week, I had to replace a smoke detector battery. It was in a really high part of the ceiling. Aside–why would you put it there. So it will take longer for the smoke to reach it. And I can die. Anyway. I replaced the battery. But then I tested it. OH MY WORD. That thing was loud. I almost fell off the ladder trying to get away from it. Then I yanked the battery out to make it stop. Yeah, the battery I just put in it. My life is a comedy of errors.
• My friend Mandy came to visit a few weeks ago. I should have blogged about that. Because I love that girl. We are kindred souls. And she doesn’t get frustrated when everything goes wrong and I do something dumb. Like taking her to an outdoor festival minutes before a huge thunderstorm struck. Causing us to flee for safety in a bus stop. Where we ate Navajo tacos. Because there’s nothing like fry bread and refried beans in a bus stop. I am all class, all the time.
• I feel like I need one more bullet. Isn’t the rule you have to have five things in a bulleted list? I guess I could tell you that while I was in Togo, I discovered just how bad my French skills are. I went there knowing only one phrase, and it was a highly inappropriate one from a Labelle song. And while I was there, I kept getting confused when people would ask me how I was doing. I thought they were asking my name. And vice versa. So now there is a whole town in Togo that thinks my name is “Good” and I am doing very “Brandy.”

I can’t make this stuff up.

I readily admit I don’t read as much as I should. I don’t normally get excited about a book that’s not even out yet, at least I don’t remember this happening. Today I checked out what my friend Alton Brown is doing, and saw he has a new book coming out in October. Not only a book, a book about my favorite show, that apparently is so massive it is going to be broken up into 3 volumes! It’s like a food Lord of the Rings!

I hope he does another book signing tour again, because I had a great time at the last one. Thanks to some people moving back to the south shore, I may not have to go it alone.

• VIDEO: Kid makes an amazing trick basketball | GazetteOnline.com – Cedar Rapids, Iowa City
  This kid does a handspring w/ basketball in hand from the far free throw line, then uses the momentum to launch and hit the shot. Pretty fantastic.
  (tags: video basketball)

An announcement:

“Edward Cullen, please bring Bella her sunglasses.”

Right, like Edward would be at the pool. His sunbathing would be just a little bit too dazzling.

Do you see this dog?

This regal beast is the property of my in-laws, the man and woman who tenderly bore and raised my beloved wife. The dog’s name is Mausi (or Mitsy, or Muffins, or something similarly inscrutable).

Anyway, my point is that I cleaned up its puke this weekend.

For those of you unacquainted with hot, yellowish-green German Shephard barf, I think it’s safe to say that it’s one of the grossest things in the universe. I watched the wretched creature spread its jaws wide and silently disgorge a massive pile of vomit on the floor. Alone with my wife, I knew that we would have to clean it up, so I went to fetch some cleaning supplies. When I had returned, I found a similarly revolting barf-mound in another corner of the room.

In all, we’re talking more than a half-gallon of thick, chunky heavings left behind for me by this bastard dog.

Bridgette was little help in cleaning up the mess. For one, she is 6 months pregnant, so bending over is not the easiest. Secondly, she got a case of the giggles when she saw the disgusting sludge-heaps, so her “help” came in the form of laughing while I was suppressing the gag reflex, scooping the warm, nauseating stomach contents of my in-laws’ German Shephard into the garbage.

Hooray for awfulness!

P.S. When Bridgette read this post, she got the giggles again.

I went through a bit of a hard time at the end of the school year. In order to keep me from being completely pessimistic, the art teacher bought me this:

It says the same thing on both sides. There is no room for pessimism when it comes to our art teacher.

The next day, I was using it and she got so excited. We had the following conversation:

ART TEACHER: You’re using your new bottle! Yay!

KARI: Yes.

ART TEACHER: How is it?

KARI: The water is bitter and tasteless.

ART TEACHER: What? Really?

KARI: No, I was just trying to be pessimistic. It’s great. I like it a lot. Thank you.

ART TEACHER: *laughs*

KARI: Actually, bitter and tasteless doesn’t even make sense. How could it be bitter and tasteless? I am so pessimistic that I am incoherent.

ART TEACHER: *laughs some more* I thought you might make Mike use it.

I think this proves that I actually deserve no friends whatsoever. Good grief.

I will take this opportunity to post one of my favorite Far Side cartoons, one I think of whenever people talk about the glass being half empty or half full. I do, in fact, love cheeseburgers.

i don’t think it’s rained down in the NOLA area in like three weeks, maybe more. i’m having to wake up at 6 am to water the plants and the yard. it is crazy. where is the rain? i got in my car this afternoon to leave work and saw this:

ONE HUNDRED AND NINE! luckily my iPod didn’t melt in the car. i know this picture may work better as a twitpic or whatever people call them, but i’m not on Twitter. more about that another time. it’s too hot to think.

• A troubled week in Iran
  Great pics as usual. Tough topic.
  (tags: photos Iran)

From Boston.com’s Big Picture feature (HT: Robert Scoble on FriendFeed). Click the link in the post below to see some of the most amazing pictures from the situation in Iran.

I am enjoying being in Belgium, first of all. I like that it can be cloudy in the morning, and yet sunny in the evening. I like that last night at 11:15 when I crawled in bed, there was still a bit of light coming through my skylight. I appreciate being away from 90 degree weather in Chattanooga.

Yesterday, though, I had to laugh at the weather.
4:40 wake up to rain and the first light of the day
9:40 a little warm, but dry on the walk to the train station
10:10 train was a little late, and it began sprinkling
10:40 downtown Brussels, no rain
10:52 downtown Brussels, downpour of magnificent proportions while we waited at the tram stop
11:00 ran two meters to the tram and got wet.
11:20 got off our tram stop and ran to a block to church in serious downpour. arrived late, dripping wet. attempted to use tissue to dry off. fail.
12:35 looked outside at the pouring rain and decided to stay for coffee time after service
12:45 looked outside and saw the sunshine
2:00 sat down at cafe near Grand Place and soaked in the sun. actually got a little hot.
6:30 left house of our new friends (after an amazing meal of chicken, veggies, and couscous along with mint tea). as we walk to tram and train station, wind now blowing and temp has dropped about 15 degrees.
7:30 walk from train station home and remark on the beautiful, calm, warm evening.

*Wow, wouldn’t I have SUCH an interesting Twitter feed? All weather, all the time live from Belgium here. Sorry to disappoint, but I’m leaving for another country on Wednesday, where the weather is much more predictable.

Mostly to save my Tweeps from a half-dozen tweets venting my frustration.

I ordered a HDHomeRun networked tuner and a chunk of ethernet cable from Amazon on Friday morning, June 12. The tuner was ordered from Amazon proper; the cable from whichever of their providers had it the cheapest. I opted for Amazon’s super-saver free shipping, both to save the $6 and because I didn’t have enough $$$ on the gift card I was using to pay for shipping.

Additionally, I ordered a RAM upgrade for my Mac Mini from newegg.com on Tuesday evening, June 16. It came with free shipping.

Now, as to arrival times.

The network cable shipped the same day I ordered it, and arrived in the mail on the 16th. Snappy response, well done to the Amazon retailer.

The RAM shipped from Newegg on Wednesday June 17th, and arrived this morning via USPS. 5 days, including the weekend. Not bad.

Amazon finally got around to announcing that my tuner had shipped on the evening of Tuesday the 16th. So it took them three full business days to even get around to shipping it. And the USPS tracking number they gave me says that yes, they entered the tracking number into the system on the evening of the 16th. However, the arrival scan for the package doesn’t show up until the afternoon of June 19th. So between the time they boxed it up and the time they actually got it to USPS was another three business days.

Now they’re telling me that the anticipated delivery date to my home in Iowa (from, per the tracking info, someplace in Kentucky) is not until Thursday, June 25th – a full two weeks after I ordered it, and a full nine days after they told me it shipped. I know the USPS isn’t the fastest carrier, but hey, that’s just awful.

I have had better shipping service from Amazon in the past – maybe this is just a fluke. Or maybe it’s part of a strategy to dissuade customers from actually choosing their free shipping option. Either way, it’s pretty awful.

End rant. Carry on.

At the pool, I like to watch the kids who run off the high dive and squeal with joy as they fly through the air with abandon. I myself have issues when it comes to swimming, and I haven’t yet managed to attempt a jump off the high dive. I have, however, managed to ask the lady who teaches swimming lessons if she might possibly be willing to show me a few things. This is progress. (In case you are curious: my issues are less about a fear of water and have more to do with the fact that when I was small and taking lessons, I could not see very well, and thus I never felt very successful at swimming. But my new vision and I are maybe ready to try to learn a little better. Maybe. But don’t rush me.)

All the teachers in my family tell me that it takes a week and a half to two weeks to unwind after the end of the school year. This year, the end of the school year was particularly rough for me in several ways and we are not even a week into our official summer break yet, so I have to confess to feeling barely human. I want to spend time with my friends, but it feels like more effort than I can manage. Not to mention the fact that when I get busy and/or overwhelmed, I tend to batten down the hatches. Which makes me feel disconnected, and which can be alienating to people. I feel that I have alienated people in the past month or so, which I didn’t intend but which I also do not know how to fix. So I end up walking across the street with a book . . . yet again. (The book I’m into right now is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and it’s really good, but it’s also hard to pick up once you have set it down. And I should really tell you guys what I thought of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies at some point. I will work on that.)

I thought about some of this yesterday during the sermon. This week’s Seuss story was “What Was I Scared Of?” and our pastor challenged us to think of ways in which our fears keep us from following Jesus, the places we could go and serve if our fears – including fear of overcommitment – were not keeping us back.

I have a deep and abiding fear of overcommitment that dates back to my college days. I was involved in a campus ministry, and I overcommitted to the point that I was doing campus ministry and not so much . . . college. Now, we could get into a debate about the purpose of being in college, whether it’s about being there for Jesus or about being there to learn (and whether those two things have to be separate). In fact, I think that was a fundamental disagreement between myself and the leaders of the ministry. Regardless of who was right, I do feel that I missed out on some college fun both because of my overcommitment and because of my fear of what they would think of me if I did other college things instead.

It’s funny, because I fear both being overly involved and I fear rejection. Fear of being overly scheduled causes me to say no to things, which isolates me. Fear of rejection causes me to say yes to things I may or may not be able to do, which stresses me out. I don’t know how to live in the middle, because I don’t always seem to know what it is that I want to do.

I had a bad dream the other night in which I lay on the floor crying because I was not being granted a special favor or reward (I don’t even remember what the reward was) because I was not considered special enough by the person giving the award. Meanwhile, an acquaintance (I remember exactly who it was) was being lauded, right there in front of me. For . . . I don’t know, being charming and important and having a clean, well-decorated house. Or something. This fear of rejection, of not being included and important, it even haunts my dreams.

In the sermon, our pastor questioned why people are afraid of things they have never tried. I find that to be the easiest answer of all – fear of looking stupid. But as I was listening to the sermon, thinking about my ingrained fears, I started to wonder when it is that I get to live. Almost everything I want to do causes me to run up against some fear or another – fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of rejection, fear of overcommitment. What would my life look like if I was less concerned about what other people think? Our pastor concluded the sermon by saying, “Faith wins out over fear every time.” That is an inspiring thing to say, and I liked hearing it. But I don’t know exactly how it works.

This morning Shaun Inman pushed out (with notice via Twitter) version 1.01 of the Fever° feed reader. First of all, major kudos to Shaun for the auto-updater built in to Fever°. (Yes, I’ll go ahead and conform to the official naming of this tool, adding the little degree symbol to the end.) Once Shaun pushes the update out, Fever° will auto-update within 24 hours. Or, you can do an instant update from the menu. Very cool, very very simple. (Here’s the changelog for V1.01.)

I’m not sure exactly what all kicked loose, because it seemed like some feeds started working even before I pulled down the 1.01 update, but since updating Fever° is kicking butt. The scrolling issues I reported in V1.0 are all fixed, and the feeds appear to all be pulling in nicely. I’m gonna run it side-by-side with Google Reader for the day to make sure they seem like they’re catching the same stuff, and if Fever° passes that test, I’ll be saying adios to GR for the foreseeable future.

Now if I could just get him to set up some sort of referral bonuses…

I’m doing a bit of research right now that puts me into various genealogies listed in scripture. Many people have one of two reactions (or both) when encountering these passages–fear of trying to pronounce all the names and/or the need to keep poking themselves to stay awake while they read those sections. However, have you ever tried to pay close attention to the parallel lists? Have you ever noticed how inconsistent (names change from one list to another), ambiguous (is that person the father or the son? is that the daughter or son?), and downright confusing they are? I have! It definitely makes me wonder what in the world the purpose of some of these lists is.

Then I read my friend Ryan’s Facebook updates about a bill that has recently made its way to the U.S. Senate calendar (H.R. 31 to provide for the recognition of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina). Ryan is a member of that Indian tribe. And proud of it (I’ve got Indian blood too, I think I’m a generation removed from being able to be officially listed with the Lenni Lenape tribe, but that doesn’t make me any less proud to claim that heritage). So what’s the connection with name lists?

Well, as part of the process of the Lumbee Tribe being recognized various people have testified before the US Senate’s Committee on Indian Affairs. One such person was Jack Campisi, an anthropologist, whose testimony in 2006 was part of the official record for hearings on S660, the version of the Lumbee Bill considered by the 110th Congress. As part of his testimony he said:

The knowledge that the average Lumbee has of his or her kin is truly astounding. It is very common for individuals to be able to trace their parents’ genealogies back five or more generations. Not only are individuals able to name their grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents etc., but often they can name the siblings of their ancestors, the spouses of their ancestors’ siblings, relate where they lived in Robeson County, the church they attended, and the names of their offspring. It is common for an individual to name two or three hundred individuals as members of the immediate family.

Now, I’m not writing this post to try to convince anyone to start a new hobby tracing ancestry or pedigree (although, I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed learning about some very interesting characters in my own family heritage). No, the connection between these two examples of listing family kin is just that — kinship.

It’s not so much about who was the father or mother of which children, I think it’s more about the fact that the recitation demonstrates community. A specific community, one that brings together both the mundane aspects of life (like who stood at which gate in Jerusalem’s wall or the location of where a specific family lived) and spiritual connectedness (to each other and to God). We are midstream in the history of our own clan(s). We belong. So when we read in Matthew all the “begats” we aren’t only reading Jesus’ genealogy for a history lesson, we’re being told a family heritage that we can be adopted into. That community of righteous is now our ancestry through union with Christ.

Just as the Lumbee are demonstrating to the U.S. Senate that they should be a federally recognized tribe in part because of the generations of names that demonstrate community, so we too can embrace the community of God represented by the ancestral lists in scripture. It’s more than just “me and Jesus” — it’s me and this great big family who are all related because of Jesus.

Now be sure to go back and click on that link for the “begats!”

Sorry folks, no goofy post today. I’m actually going ahead with a post I’ve long been ruminating on: my top ten Paul McCartney songs you probably don’t know but should definitely check out.

For years, McCartney struggled to garner much critical respect; most critics dismissed his work as slight and throwaway. This was due to two factors: McCartney’s own inconsistant output, and the effort to canonize and mythologize John Lennon at the expense of his former songwriting partner. The last ten years has seen a welcome critical re-evaluation of Paul McCartney’s solo work. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and his bold, creatively-vital albums this decade have led people back to an appreciation of his career highlights since the Beatles ended. Now he headlines Coachella festivals and collects stellar reviews for new albums. How do you like him now?

Over the past few years, I’ve been poring over a lot of his work. Certainly not all of it is great, but it’s a pleasure uncovering more hidden examples of his effortless melodies and playful song suites. You don’t need this blog to tell you that “Maybe I’m Amazed” or “My Love” are gorgeous, or that “Jet” and “Live And Let Die” kick ass. Instead, I wanted to point you toward ten lesser-known tracks you won’t find on any brief greatest hits album. A couple of these were singles, but none were massive hits. Most of them are album tracks that have worn well. Think of this list as a multicolored buffet of sweet ear-pudding.

1. Junk (1970): McCartney’s first solo album was a homemade batch of songs that initially didn’t sit well with fans or critics expecting a sound on par with the superb production of the Beatles. “Junk” is a lovely little tune about a lonely antique shop, and its homespun, snapshot charm is part of its appeal.

2. Big Barn Bed (1973): This is a bizarre tune with an infectious groove. Like a lot of these tracks, McCartney played every instrument himself, and the production is strong (Jeff Tweedy nodded to this era McCartney and Wings as partial inspiration for the sound of the last Wilco album). The song is about life on his rural Scottish farm with wife Linda and their kids.

3. Rock Show w/ “Venus & Mars” intro until 1:10 (1975):
McCartney has a reputation as a balladeer, but his rock output is regularly awesome. “Helter Skelter” and “Jet” are his most celebrated songs in this vein, but I’d put “Rock Show” up with any of them. In it, he turns the tables, singing about the excitment at a big concert, the moment before the band takes the stage. The tune is fun puzzle with odd little side sections and a drug reference or two. It’s a bummer he doesn’t seem to pull this one out in concerts anymore - he tends to rely too heavily on the crowd-pleasers these days.

4. Goodnight Tonight (1980)

Here’s a song from the late disco era with hooks galore. It’s a clever little tune, with the singer pleading with his date to stay with him, while the countermelodies offer her replies of “I gotta go home”. Great singing, catchy melodies, and offbeat instrumentation make this a fun song to uncover. The 1920s-themed video has a goofy charm to it as well.

5. Tug of War (1982): This is the title track to an acclaimed album McCartney put out in the wake of John Lennon’s death. There are allusions to his relationship with Lennon in this song, which adds an emotional heft to it that isn’t always present in his work. The song itself is fine, but for me the real payoff is the bridge (at about 2:05 of the song) - it’s a soaring, yearning moment that can give me goosebumps if it catches me in the right mood.

6. Calico Skies (1997):

With a few exceptions, the late 80s and early 90s were creatively barren years for McCartney (and most of his generational peers). He seemed to break out of his slump with 1997’s Flaming Pie album. This track displays his deft acoustic guitar skills (similar to “Blackbird”) and the lyrics are a lovely ode to his wife Linda. He wrote it when she was dying of breast cancer, making it all the more touching.

7. Your Loving Flame (2001): Here’s an excellent late-period ballad from McCartney - just a beautiful, lovely song. The key to the song for me is the switch into the minor chords for the chorus. It adds enough bitter to the sweetness to make it a song worth returning to.

8. Friends to Go (2005): This is from Chaos & Creation in the Backyard, an excellent album produced by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Travis) and again featuring McCartney playing every instrument. I could have picked 5 or 6 songs from this album, but I chose this midtempo rocker with a sturdy groove and catchy hook. He said he felt like he was channeling George Harrison when he wrote it, which definitely comes through.

9. That Was Me live (2007): This is a fun autobiographical tune, like his memories being run through kaleidoscope. Again, the hooks are plentiful in this song, tossed out offhandedly with supreme confidence.

10. Sing the Changes (2008): This was released last year under the pseudonym The Fireman, a name he’s used for some of his past experimental electronic projects. This track, however, is a gorgeous, swirling song that soars beautifully. Written and recorded in a day, it demonstrates that McCartney, even at age 67, still has some magic left in him.

I’ve been tagged by my friend JD on his Ad Fontes blog to come up with the five books (or scholars) who have most influenced me in how I read the Bible. (I’m returning to the narrower parsing of this meme given by its creator, biblioblogger Ken Brown.)

Even after a seminary education, I’m not a Bible scholar (don’t even play one on the Internet), but I have definitely been influenced greatly in the way I approach the Bible, particularly in the past five years.

Here is my list of my top five influences in how I read the Bible today: