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 ...