Midlife Meditation

I called this "Madonna of the Mutant Broccoli" when I posted it on Facebook, but those two bizarre vegetables are, in fact, romanesco. They're striking natural examples of fractal design, made up of patterns that repeat down to a very small level--though in romanesco the pattern doesn't extend into the micro-range. After spotting them at the farmers' market, Amy had a vegetable crush on romanesco for a couple of weeks. And then she had her fill. But they (and she) are something to behold! I just looked up chaos theory, something I first heard about in the original Jurassic Park movie, only to find out I was completely wrong about what it is. Please don't ask me to define the real thing; I would need far better mathematical credentials than my miserable showing in freshman calculus 34 years ago to have a shot at it. As best I can determine, chaos theory is about how estimates at the data level lead to apparently random results at the other end of a calcul...

Disclaimers up front: 1) I actually like watching football, except when I don't. 2) I am a heterosexual man. With those things clear, I can now go on to write some critical things about the Y chromosome--or, as I like to call it when I am, yet again, taking apart a dogpile of kindergarten boys, the "Why?!?!?" chromosome. From 2011-2013, I was band director at Banks High School. Banks didn't have a lot going for it. It was an independent school district with just one school for each (primary, intermediate, and secondary) educational level. Its tax base consisted mostly of rural homes, so it's still in the austerity part of the economic recovery. While it is now building a new junior high, and its elementary school was built in the 1990s, its high school is embarrassingly decrepit, with narrow hallways, decaying infrastructure, strange smells, all the hallmarks of a district that has made getting by with what we've got the status quo for far too long. For all...

Actually, I do know a thing or two about art; certainly not as much as my art major brothers, but enough to appreciate the good stuff, even the stuff that turns off casual museum-goers who prefer even a mediocre Norman Rockwell to anything by Jackson Pollock. I know enough to realize how much I don't see when I stand in front of a masterpiece: how the colors work together to achieve the overall effect, the role composition plays in it, how even the brush strokes matter to the final product. I know it would take me years to develop an eye for these things, years that would be well spent, but which are not part of my plan for the rest of my life. I walk around museums considering great works, sometimes being entranced by what I see without being able to put in words what has drawn me to this abstraction or that photo-realistic work, just savoring the experience, taking it in the same way I look up through trees at sunlight filtering through and feel my sou...