Midlife Meditation

Brace yourselves. This is going to be a rant. I am a skeptic, always have been, always will be. Blind faith is just not in my makeup. I was raised this way by a science-trained father who was a minister in a mainline Protestant denomination--the branch of Christianity that originated with theologians calling bullshit on Catholic dogma--and a New England Yankee mother who believed no gift came without strings attached. I did have a few gullible years in my teens, as most people do, but I quickly outgrew that phase, returning to my default mode of never taking anything at face value or valuing the authority of any source over the content of its argument. At times, this made me a troublesome candidate for ordination, an often disturbing presence in the pulpit, and a frequent burr in the saddle of employers. I say "at times" because, for the most part, I have kept my skeptical opinions to myself. I learned in college that challenging an idea that is believed on faith, rathe...

School's in! And I'm in--in the building, that is. All last year, my increasingly discouraged educational refrain was "I teach in a gym." To be more precise, I taught in two gyms, because I divided my year between two schools, both of which had phased out the music room when they cut back music during the recession. Last year, the Reynolds district partially restored music education, putting half-time teachers in every building but one (more about that later). At Scott and Hartley, they also restored PE half-time. Having the PE and music teachers trade places at the semester worked out conveniently for the schools: no need to force anyone else to move! Music could be in the gym when PE was in the other school, schedules did not have to change midyear, administrators were happy, teachers were happy... And I was not. Initially, just the chance to teach elementary music full-time carried me through the challenges of having a space that was far too big, far too lo...

Milderson Manor? Mark-Amy Acres? Milsh-Mark Manse? First things first: we closed. It took a solid hour of signing, dating, and initialing documents, many of them near duplicates of each other because, for some arcane titular reason, we had to break the purchase into two different mortgages; and then, called back from lunch, another hour because the bank rejected some of the dates we had scrawled as unacceptably sloppy; but finally, at around 3 p.m. yesterday, we became the proud owners of 6420 NW Starflower Drive. So here I am, married, mortgaged, joined at the wallet as I haven't been with anyone in fifteen years, and even then only for a few weeks, as that house purchase came at the very end of my short, troubled second marriage, and I was bought right back out of it by my ex as soon as we separated. Buying a house with my wife and actually getting to live in it with her is a whole new experience for me. There will be many more new experiences associated with t...

In Love Is Strange , a movie I'd like to see that opens in a couple of big cities today, but not yet in Portland, a choir director loses his teaching job for getting married. Why would marriage cost him his job? Because he's gay. Wait, how can it be legal for a gay couple to marry, and simultaneously legal to fire a man for being gay? Because he teaches at a Catholic school, and religious institutions are allowed to practice job discrimination based on sexual orientation. Ludicrous, you say? How could this happen in our modern, tolerant world? Ten years ago, it almost happened to me. No, I was not, and am not, gay; nor was I getting married at the time. What I was  doing was signing a petition opposing Oregon's "Defense of Marriage" ballot measure. The faith community I belonged to at the time was affiliated with the United Methodist Church, and took out an ad in the Oregonian  listing the names of every signatory as a demonstration that people of faith wer...

Catherine of Siena drinks the blood of Christ. This is going to get theological, philosophical, and gross. Much of my young adult intellect was wrapped around the two sacraments recognized by the United Methodist Church. A sacrament, in the traditional Methodist lingo I grew up with, is "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." More concretely, it's a ritual that gives believers a tangible experience of the ineffable. Methodists recognize baptism and communion as sacraments. In baptism, the believer is symbolically drowned so that he or she can be resurrected to new life as a Christian. In communion, the believer eats a small bit of bread and drinks a sip of wine so that he or she can be sustained by the symbolic body and blood of Jesus Christ. Although I grew up in Methodist parsonages, my parents were always Baptists at heart, and held off having any of us baptized until puberty, at which point my father found an immersion baptistry ...

Yesterday I came across a story about a UCSB women's studies professor who, several months ago, accosted an anti-abortion protester who was carrying an aborted fetus sign on campus. The professor was, herself, three months pregnant and found the sign offensive (and I would agree with her on that), but her reaction was inappropriate, ill-advised, and illegal. She was prosecuted, pleaded no contest, apologized, and will be performing community service. The story came by way of a blog called "Chicks on the Right," and spent considerable time ridiculing the professor, those who have risen in her defense, the discipline of women's studies, and feminism in general, using this incident as proof positive that feminists are a bunch of sex-obsessed hypocrites who'd rather hide behind their outrage than issue a simple apology. At one point, the writer uses this clause: "that's the thing about liberal pro-choice feminists." And that's where my hackles ...

America has a grief problem. Thank you, Bill Evans, for drawing my attention to this essay by Will Leitch  in which he takes on the Robin Williams grief train so many are jumping on. If you're on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media site, you've seen the steady stream of tributes and remembrances adding up to a virtual canonization of an actor/comedian with a spotty filmography and few quotable bits. Certainly he projected warmth and compassion as few entertainers can, and his basic humanity shone through his manic standup performances; but as Leitch observes, had anyone, on Monday morning, waxed rapturous over Patch Adams, Jumanji , or Night in the Museum , it would've been a short train indeed. Once his suicide became public, though, it was as if there was not a false note in his career, and everything he did was but a piece in the larger masterwork of his soon-to-be-sainted life. I will admit to being one small part of this phenomenon: I posted a piece on ...

Have you checked Facebook lately? That's a silly question. If you're reading this, you probably came to it via the link I posted on Facebook. So for all of us who spend reasonable to large chunks of time on Facebook, here's an observation: there's been a lot about the death of Robin Williams. I've clicked on some of it. I even contributed to it with an essay of my own.  It's understandable many of us would be affected by this great artist's tragic death. One also has to wonder, though, whether it's getting maybe a bit too much attention, especially when, in some outlets, it's crowded out coverage of what's happening in Ferguson, Missouri. That seems to be abating: a cursory glance at my Facebook feed just now (though please note that my friends list is rather heavily weighted with progressive activists) revealed more Ferguson than Williams links. Perhaps it's just people getting past their momentary obsession with a celebrity's dea...

Amy and I enjoy shooting pool together. Doing that in Bethany means going to the corner of 185th and West Union, where there are two bars with pool tables. One of these bars has a table in need of leveling, resulting in the balls rolling in strange arcs and all congregating at one end of the table. The other, a real sports bar, has five pool tables, all in good repair. Naturally we tend to pick the latter when we've got a hankering for pool. There is one problem with this bar, though: In the game room, where four of the five tables are located, there is an emergency exit door, marked prominently with the words "this door to remain open during business hours," that is almost always locked, and I don't just mean from the outside. It's impossible to use it at all. One night about a month ago, as I was settling the tab, I pointed this out to the bartender. He blew me off. I pressed my point, and he blew me off more rudely. I left furious, vowing never to return,...

This is not a political blog. If you've read much of it, you can be excused for calling bullshit on that statement, because, frustrated pundit that I am, I frequently use this space to comment on political issues. It's my soapbox, after all, and I can use it any way I please. Still, the primary reason this blog exists is that, at midlife, I find myself with much to think about, and writing has always been a good way for me to gather my thoughts. Having an audience is a side benefit, because it's a good feeling to know I'm not alone in my thoughts, whether they're spiritual, artistic, pedagogical, interpersonal, developmental or, as today, political in nature. One of the main reasons I'm not a pundit is the TLDR issue. I'm well aware that many of my posts are just too damn long for people to finish, and that they click away before they get to the end. In some ways, that's a good thing--I've never been good at endings, and tend to spin my wheels ...

This tribute to Robin Williams will not be like others. I almost entirely knew Robin Williams from his breakthrough role in Mork and Mindy, a 1970s sitcom that combined the sensibilities of My Favorite Martian and Three's Company. The character of Mork had been created for an episode of Happy Days , and proved so popular that he was spun off to his own show. For me, there was no reason but Mork to watch this show. Every other character was boilerplate sitcom. When Williams was on the screen, it sparkled. The rest of the time, it snoozed. But what a sparkle it was! I'm sure much of Mork's most surreal and hilarious moments were improvised. Robin Williams's standup was a tour de force of tangents, voices, juxtapositions of ideas mashed together in ways one never saw coming. It was manic, furiously busy, the comedic version of an Art Blakey piano solo. I bought a couple of his albums, and just didn't care for them, wondering how I could find Mork so appealing, an...

It shouldn't make that much of a difference, yet somehow, it does. Amy and I have been a couple for five and a half years. We've been living together for four of those years. Three years ago, I declared Amy my domestic partner and added her to my health insurance plan. Two years ago, we started calling our relationship a "mountain marriage." And less than a month ago, we started signing papers and putting money down to buy our house together. After all that time, you'd think that saying a few words and putting rings on each other's fingers would be a mere formality. Clearly we're in love and dedicated to being together for a very long time, so why make a big deal out of these circular pieces of silver? Is there really anything different about the relationship since putting them on? In a word: yes. For nine days, I've been in a state of euphoria. It's not overwhelming or incapacitating--I can still drive, read, do the crossword, write this...

Last week, driving through Washington state, I saw this bumper sticker: My first reaction was anger. I remember well how, following the 9/11 attacks, my country went insane with bloodlust. We wanted desperately to find someone, anyone, responsible and teach those monsters a lesson. We wanted to bomb their camps, invade their countries, obliterate every human being who was in any way involved with any organization that might have had something to do with this attack on America. And when rooting out the actual terrorists proved more difficult than we'd bargained for, and capturing the mastermind of the atrocity an elusive goal that was to prove, for more than a decade, unattainable, we found a different target, and rained down our fury on Iraq, a country that had had nothing at all to do with the attack, but did have a real jerk for a president. Just to be clear: for all the empathy I may have felt for that reaction, I opposed it. I was living in a community called the Pe...

If you've been out on a country road in Oregon anytime in the last few years, you've probably seen this sign: The sign's design and wording single out bicyclists as the travelers most in need of understanding and patience on the part of motorists. The main reason for making this distinction is that cyclists have fewer accident-avoidance options than walkers or runners, who can usually step off the road surface without risking injury (though, as I've pointed out in a recent post, this is not always the case, especially in areas with raised road surfaces and limited shoulders). The sign does suffer from a lack of specificity, however. An especially aggressive driver might interpret it to mean it's up to the cyclist to do the "sharing" by getting out of his or her way. In fact, Oregon law specifies exactly what a driver must do when overtaking a bicycle: ORS 811.065 Unsafe Passing of a Person Operating A Bicycle (1) A driver of a motor vehicle comm...