It's the aftershocks that surpise you.

Note: I know I said I'd talk more about weddings and marriage today, and single people. I'll get to it. This morning, this started coming out instead. It's kind of about marriage, too.

Quite a while ago, I had a long and multi-faceted dream in which I was teaching in a very large high school. At first, thinking back this morning, I thought I'd had the dream the night before I started teaching at Turner, but it's more likely it was just a dream I had sometime well after I stopped teaching. Especially considering how I think one of the people in the dream was one of my favorite students, J. who was bubbly and deep at the same time, the sort of person perfectly suited to lead you through a dream. The dream covered a few weeks of classes, and a field trip, and as dreams do, the beginning and end of the school year, and lots of teaching and interacting with kids, and a lot to do with the end of the school day, bright and sunny and school busses.

The dream school building was made up of all different parts of other schools I'd been in, hodge-podged of different eras and insitutional architectural styles like Olathe North is. It had very long halls akin to my memory of visiting Lawrence High as part of a Stu-Co exchange back in high school (or maybe it was Free State; they're both huge). It had a central commons hub with hall spokes like Olathe South. A lot of the classroom halls were the two-story stacked hospital sterility of Olathe Northwest.

But the atmosphere of the whole building reminded me of my grade school's little theatre, which had a long snake-curved concrete wall that formed the back wall of the stage in the middle of a large room. The wall had a balcony you could get up to from behind, which is quite the amazement for grade schoolers, let me tell you. A balcony! Such fun! They cut some fat, curved steps into the concrete floor for seats. The whole thing, stage and seats and balcony, was thin carpeted. It was a wondrous place, a room open to the hall, right by the office, usually dark, except for special events. A room where anything could happen. I remember performing a melodrama there with the girl I always had a crush on, I wore a my dad's fedora and a trenchcoat and sunglasses, the first time I remember loving theatre. Brian Busby came once to speak about the weather. One of my most vivid memoeries is a speed arithmetic competition that I did not win, but always wanted to have won because I thought I was SO smart, and I still look back on for perspective on my own thinking processes.

So there was a magic and nostalgic sadness to the dream school. But also, there was the feel of the back stage, behind that snake wall, with the stairs up to the balcony, and the storage for the projection machine for making large primary colored posters with bold lines. I was in Mr. Lang's fifth grade class, and his room was down the hall behind the little theater, in between the two kindergarten classes. And on the way back from lunch or gym or music, or especially visiting the other two 5th grade classes, on the far end of the building, we walked in line by that backstage area, which was indirectly lit and littered with bulky school supplies like rolls of colored paper and that projector I mentioned, and there was a door to outside that we almost never used, but let light in like heaven when it was open, and it all felt like the back side of the world, God's scaffolding exposed.

They later filled the sunken seats in with more concrete and carpeted it over and remodeled the whole thing into an expansion for the neighboring library, and all the magic left. Which is the exact opposite you'd expect for filling a space with books, but that is what happened. That's the truth.

In this school in the dream, there was a sparsely-used wing, far off the commons, and the top floor had 50's style classrooms like Shawnee Mission North, with doors to the outside and untinted windows in the hall. But if you went down a dimly lit hall underneath, and then down a long ramp like the ramp at Olathe North, but done in the brick architectural style of Johnson County Community college and underground. Then you got to a small commons area, with a pod of classrooms on the other side like California/Chisolm Trail. But before that pod, on the left side, at the bottom of the ramp, across from the janitor's closet, was an old band room, dug into the side of the hill, which was my classroom. It had tiered seating going down, and I brought incandescent floor lamps, so it felt like home or a hobbit hole, and my desk was at the top in the right corner, surrounded by posters and shelves and knick-knacks, and I taught lots of interesting things, and it was good.

Last night, I went back to the dream school, and I thought it was Turner. Not until much later in the night did I remember what my actual classroom was like. I walked the classroom halls, and the corridors, and the dark overhang of the entryways off the commons, light streaming in through high windows, there in the waning days of the school year, after classes had stopped, but before the teachers had left. Summer school weeks away. This is when school buildings always feel the oldest. All the youth is gone home to play, and the motes hang in the shafts. It's closing time, you've cleared all your things and you've put them in boxes. But there are stragglers turning in last late projects, yearbook staff settling in for the last deadline work of the summer, football players hitting the weight room, teachers sliding laminated posters into drawers, finishing grades, really hearing the air conditioning fans deep in the ceiling for the first time since August..

I went down a hall, past a dark place that felt like the back side of the world, and down the ramp which was very much in the same place as Mr. Lang's classroom somehow, and into my old classroom. It looked much the same, the new teacher had posters, and her own floor lamps, and her own shelves. It'd been raining lately, and the ceiling had been leaking from the waterlogged earth above, and it was stained brown and peeling.

I had this long conversation with the wonderful woman who now taught in my old room. Some of her students came in and hung out, did some work, felt at home. She was young, and punky, short brown hair. We talked about how she was keeping up a lot of the things I'd done, without even knowing I'd done them before; the kids kept telling her. The incandescent lights, and the laid-back style, and hanging out with the kids like they were people, and teaching them with really good books how to read better. She'd had them reading Maus to expand their reading skills to graphic novels, something I hadn't considered. The year was good. She was hoping for another. Some of my old students came in and they said how much they missed me, but that the new teacher was good, so I didn't have to worry, that the new lady had taken over, and it was fine.

I've always felt a little guilty about leaving teaching. Sometiems I like to lie to myself that there's nothig I coud have done, but that's not true. There are many things I could have done, if I'd only started much sooner. If I'd known I'd teach before I taught. And yeah, I liked having a job that felt meaningful, but the profession? Meh, really. You can have that. Oh, but the kids? Ah, alas.

It's like I was SO important, and I needed to be there, those kids needed me to listen to their stories, and to teach them more stories. But this obviously isn't true. Other teachers can come along and be there, and other teachers do come along, and other people, too, adults and peers. I am just a man. Just a small part. But you love them enough, you think maybe you can change something. Surely you can change something.

I think the best teachers must feel like this. This is why they're always there, late at light, weekends, summers, preparing and thinking. Letting the building soak into you, and you become part of it. You've got something to offer those kids, like nothing else anyone can offer, so you've got to be there. Your life for theirs. Your life is theirs. That's why so many good teachers seem like they don't have other lives. Their lives have become the school. Giving your life up for someone gives your life meaning. Is teaching enough?

In my dream, I thanked the new teacher for for being there, and I meant it, she was good, and I said goodbye to the kids, and visted the teachers in the pod across the small commons, they had been my lifeline my "first year", and then I went outside on the hill next to the school and I buried my face in the cool grass and cried for a good long time, really letting myself mourn, for the first time, leaving teaching.

Weddings are, like, the biggest deal ever. Also, not a big deal at all. Part 1

Last week, 'a Monday, a good friend of mine asked me if I, or anyone I knew, was ordained and could perform a wedding. I told her about my dad, who is ordained seeing as how he is/was a missionary and Rev. is a useful door-opening title for missionaries, and about our mutual long-time acquaintance Ben, who is a youth pastor in town, and I forgot to mention my friend Maux who got ordained one time just to perform a wedding on a beach for some friends of hers, which is as good a reason for ordination as I know.

At the same time, I also asked my friend why she was asking, and she said that she was getting married that next weekend, if she could pull it off, seeing as how her affianced was going to be shipped out to Iraq at the end of June for 15 months, and she knew, I mean, knew, and the families were happy with the idea, and even suggested the this-weekend nuptials.

But it came out that she wasn't really asking me so much about anyone I knew, per se, rather me, specifically, re: ordained persons, and how even though Kansas doesn't require somebody official to say you are married, you can do it yourself, that the two of them would like me to do it, if I could. I was honored, quite so, as you might expect, and so I looked up my options on the internets, and decided to do it.

I decided to go with the more universalist option I found over a slightly more theologically distinct option, since the theologically distinct option costs, like, fifty bucks, and the universalists are free. All I had to do to be a Rev. in that church was believe in 1) religious freedom for all faiths, and 2) doing the right thing, and even though I'm a lot more specific than that when it comes to my own theology and praxis, I was willing to just roll with it for the sake of a friend, and signed up for a grade A, legal, internet ordination.

The bride and groom aren't really religious types anyway, and are pretty laid back, so they asked me to do a laid-back service, which they thought I could pull off. I think I did. Come Saturday morning, I officiated, gave a short homily as it were, oversaw vows, gave charges, and they even let me pray for them, and we signed papers, and had a substantial breakfast/lunch afterwards, and fielded the kinds of general, skeptical/reverent questions from the family that I can assume ministers always field at these sorts of events (and, I suppose, at all kinds of events in folk cultural religianity here in the US.). We did the whole ceremony in a park, with an arch and balloons provided by Austin, and we played on the playground afterwards. It was beautiful and simple and so right, and so was the weather.

The homily I gave was tailored to the couple, obviously, but the main point I tried to make was to ask why we were there at a wedding at all, considering we didn't have to be. And the two main reasons I gave were that marriage is, like, a really big deal, and not a big deal at all.

Heck, those are the two reasons I even officiated the wedding in the first place: I thought it was a really big deal, and I wanted to be there, and be supportive, and I also thought it wasn't a big deal at all, it's so right, so let's just do the thing.

Now, I've got more thoughts on the issue than would fit in the fifteen minute time limit for the whole ceremony (self-imposed) or were appropriate for that venue, so I compressed it, and tailored it, as you'd expect. But I'd like to expand on them a little more, more than I did there at least, and this seems like a better venue for general thoughts.

A lot of what I said then had to do with the fact that the bride and groom are going to be apart for most of the next 18 months, barring a single furlow. So, if you'll forgive me, and I do apologize, what I'm going to say here will be more universal than what I said on Saturday, and like all universals, it'll be less meaningful than a particular would be. Certainly less meaningful than being up there with a good friend and seeing her very real sparkling eyes and smile as she married the man she wants to meld the rest of her life with. But we'll have to deal. So, here's my take on weddings, then. Culled and edited and expanded on, I remind you, from something I wrote for two particular and wonderful people, and while, aiming for the universal, still completely from within my context, as everything I write is:

Marriage . . . Big Deal? Not a Big Deal? Yes, Both.

When you go celebrate a wedding for someone, right off you've got to ask yourself why. I mean, those two people standing up there, walking down the aisle, or appearing from the pastor's special secret door that far too many churches have for some reason, or coming in from the side, and/or lighting candles, and/or sliding down a zipcord, and/or jumping out of cakes, or just standing up and walking over from the tree, or whatever, those people didn't have to have a wedding.

They could have easily gotten together on their own, in secret, and gotten married. Kansas law permits it, for example; you don't even need an ordained me up there overseeing the whole thing like I did this last Saturday. It's all very catholic now. Or heck, they could just decide their love is enough, and who needs a marriage, it's just a piece of paper, and they could make promises to each other in secret and get on with their lives. But instead, they decide to bring you and all these other people in on it, to let you in on the secret, and more importantly to get you all to help keep and maintain the secret of their love for each other. And so you show up to affirm that. To be like, "Right on. You're taking a huge step, and we want to affirm that." So that's part of why you're there: you get to be a secret keeper.

But there's more to the big deal-ness of weddings than just the presence of the audience, a large part of it is because those two people up there, and this is really big, I think, have transcended their natural human tendency to be selfish and self-centered, and any time that happens, it is a cause for celebration. So, especially with two people you know and love. It's not everyday humdrum to give yourself up. It certainly wasn't with the wedding I did this weekend. Those two people were giving up, at the very least, 18 months of potential freedom to vow to love each other. They bound themselves to each other even in absence. That's amazing.

But for any wedding, the two people choose to give themselves up for each other, to give up their independent lives and their independent hopes and dreams to form this new project, this micro-community within a larger community that we've termed marriage, to morph their independence into interdependence, into shared lives and shared hopes and shared dreams. That's exciting. And if you look around you, it's not the norm for something like this to happen. Not in our culture. Not anymore, at the very least. Maybe not ever. People tend towards selfishness, especially in relationships.

And, to be honest, even though most marriages start out with all these ideals at the wedding, many times, they lose all the luster, and people get selfish again. The marriage couldn't overcome it. But it's that hope for a better world that drives us as humans back to the marriage project again and again. Maybe this one will work. Maybe they'll make it. Maybe people can be selfless. Weddings are the hope that people can be more than animals, people can be human. So if we can agree, I'm talking here about the potential of a marriage, not every marriage that comes along. And what else is a wedding than a celebration of the potential of a marriage?

Besides that, though, there are all kinds of reasons that we always give for a wedding being a big deal. It's such a huge commitment. It's a choice for forever. It's excluding other sexual partners. You're merging finances. You're leaving a family to create a family. Etc, etc, amen.

But we all know marriage is a big to-do, that's why most people spend so much on the ceremony, and people freak out about it, and there's this massive industry with magazines filled mostly pictures of depressed women in dresses (I always read those for the articles, if ya believe it), and parents tell their kids things like, "Well, when you grow up and get married and have kids you can . . ." when they want to justify their parenting decisions, and people are always trying to find a person to marry so they aren't lonely anymore, and little girls play wedding, where the older one gets to be the groom because she can do the threshold-carrying.

But I also want to talk about why it's not a big deal; it's the completely natural thing for people to do. Because I don't hear enough of that, how this is the right and normal thing for emotionally mature people to do when they fall in love -- to get married, to become this new person with another person, and to move on through life together.

First off, there's totally precedent. Looking back through history, we see this desire for two people to commit to each other playing out. Yeah, sometimes it was political, sometimes it was stupidly over-dramatically fakey-romantic, sometimes it was just convenient. But it's pervasive -- people coming together, giving up what they had on their own to go form this new marriage project. I mean, almost every culture has a specific wedding ceremony it practices. Cultures get people together. Look at how much we teach our young kids about it. And hey, it's even expected in a lot of our subcultures.

Marriage is even one of the primary metaphors God's relationship with his people in Christianity, our culture's folk religion. So when God his-very-self is trying to explain how much he loves everybody and wants us to know him and him to know us, he explains it using our terminology; he explains it being like a marriage. There was even a really strong parallel this weekend, with the whole Iraq deployment business, where that groom is like Jesus in , going off, and leaving the bride waiting for him to come back, and everyone's looking forward to that day, but no one knows how it's going to play out.

So, yeah, it's not a big deal because there's something very historically and culturally normative going on here.

But there's more than that. Another reason marriage is so normal is that people get lonely. And it's good for people to form deep, committed relationships they can rely on when they're lonely. Not even necessarily romantic relationships, singles take note. But when people are so in tune with each other, and so in love with each other, a wedding is just the natural outflow of that relationship.

But it is hard to stay committed to someone. People get selfish. So, like so many events in a healthy culture, we set it apart with a ceremony or a ritual, and in this case we bring along some friends and family to say, "Hey! You guys! Stay together! You can make it." Maybe even just to give the other people hope in a better world, right?

Another reason people so naturally get married is because it's a good, healthy place to raise kids. And kids are the future of humanity; if we want to keep it going, we need to have, at least, a few of them here and there. And it's hard to raise healthy kids on your own, without another person. And it's hard to be an emotionally healthy kid without a mom and a dad both, to learn how to relate to different genders. Not saying that you can't make it with a single parent, but it's harder. And it's a lot easier if your parents get along. On Saturday, I reminded everyone that we had the parents of the bride and groom there, and so I cut the kids talk off there, to try to avoid you know (wink), controversial subjects. But if you're going to have kids, a committed, loving relationship is a very good place to do it. I'm just sayin'.

One last reason I gave, and the last I'll give here, that it's so natural to have weddings is that people get horny. And there is no better place, in my opinion, to live out that natural and human desire for sex than in a committed relationship. I'd even go so far as to say it's best with a committed relationship where you've had some sort of ritual and people around to affirm your sexuality. In that kind of relationship context, sex can mostly easily become about maintaining this other person, not just consuming them like entertainment or just to get your own kicks. In other words, sex is better as a team event than masturbating with someone else's body.

Also, in my experience, there's something almost mystical about sex when you know you can completely be yourself, and this other person can completely be themselves, not worrying about what's next in the relationship, just being together, and you can trust each other, and you can let sex become, not this super-duper magical thing up on a pedestal, like a once-a-year trip to Disney World or whatever, but a wonderful, natural, normal everyday pleasure. With high points and low points, like eating, or sleeping, even, that is communal, though -- it symbolically and literally melds you into one person. Of course, with the two people I married, they're going to get some of that that once-a-year Disney World experience inside a committed relationship for this first bit here, so, congrats for that to them-- best of both worlds . . .

I don't know if what I'm saying here disparages 'sex without a preceding wedding'. I honestly don't even know if I want to disparage it or avoid disparagement, which. On the one hand, I don't want to play down things where people find connections, and can stave off the natural loneliness of life. On the other hand, I want people to have the substantial comfort of the ceremony and the community's encouragement as a context for sex; I've seen sex from that place and I think it's so much healthier and beneficial than it would be elsewhere. And I see a lot of people getting really hurt with sex in an amarital context. I dunno. Maybe I just think it works better in that context. It has the opportunity to be more everyday, and so can become more transcendant. I'll just direct anyone interested in a good spiritual take on this to Lauren Winner's delightful and insightful book Real Sex, which says what I'm trying to say here about a million times better.

From this point in the conversation on Saturday, we went on to the ring exchange and the vows and the charges and the making out and the clapping. It was all very beautiful, and I hope hope that it succeeds. That it becomes everything that we hoped for.

I didn't talk very much about people who are not getting married at that time. I did briefly mention that I didn't want all of that ceremony business to make it seem like single people have to get married to be happy or whatever. That marriage, because it is normal and natural, is also necessary. I left it at that, saying that I don't think we hear enough of that sentiment, but that was a wedding, and we were there for that. I've got a lot more to say about how weddings aren't a big deal, and how that relates to people not getting married, I'll come back to that tomorrow.

What a world, what a world.

We are having a group of users come to our facility next week for a conference. As a result, I was asked to remove the following comics (show here in the order they were asked to removed) from my cubicle wall for the duration of the conference, in order to keep from offending anyone:

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The following passage from Romeo and Juliet is still laying open on my desk, and I have not been asked to close the book, or remove it, even though I read it aloud yesterday morning to great laughter:

Sam: A dog of the house of Montague moves me.
Gre: To move is to stir and to be valiant is to stand. Therefore, if thou art moved, thou runnest away.
Sam: A dog of that house shall move me to stand. I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague's.
Gre: That shows thee a weak slave. For the weakest goes to the wall.
Sam: Tis true, and therefore, women being the weaker vessels are ever thrust to the wall. Therefore I will push Montague's men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall.
Gre: The quarrel is between our masters and us their men.
Sam: Tis all one. I will show myself a tyrant when I have fought with the men: I will be cruel with the maids. I will cut off their heads .
Gre: The heads of the maids?
Sam: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.
Gre: They must take it in sense that feel it.
Sam: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.
Gre: Tis well thou art not fish if thou hadst thou hadst been poor John . . . .

Take that for what thou wilt.

Why I Love Riding the Bus Home From Work

Junior high is brutal. Not only are you finally realizing that you have been a complete doofus since, like, first grade, why did no one tell you before?! (parents! I tell ya.), and you're trying not to be one now, and all your friends are SO cool, or maybe they aren't our friends, oh no!, how come you can't be that cool!?, I hope they like me, you find yourself eking out your day-to-day life in a school system bound and determined to skirt the edge of practical fascism as a matter of course. Re: to trust you a little as possible and enforce that distrust, shall we say, dictatorially.

I substitute taught for three years, and about half of that was in junior highs. I hated it. Not because of the students, who, I will admit got a little rowdy now and then, as you would expect of humans of that age, but because of the draconian behavior policies of the faculty and administrators. Nowhere in our society is fascism so socially acceptable as when perpetrated against junior highers. (Okay, also terrorists and prisoners, too, but let's not quibble.)

Look, I get it, you're afraid of mass chaos, kids stripping naked and fashioning spears or whatever, but maybe you should put your cross-referenced reference copy of Lord of the Flies down for a minute and actually pay attention to the real people you are dealing with. You know, treat them like people. Relationally. Because they are people. Also because junior higher are cool. No where else do you get that kind of enthusiasm about the world, that excitement about the possibilities of life, that passion for relationships and friendships. Get to high school, and while you may still have some of these a qualities, they're already beginning to be browbeaten out of you by the system, and your own bloated sense of self-awareness. Start something then, and you can go a very long way.

But Timothy, you might be saying, didn't you teach high school? Didn't you keep trying to get a high school job over a junior high/ middle school. Yes. And if I had to go back to it, I'd say the same. I have a hard enough time keeping my wayward and self-important vocabulary hospitable for peers, let alone your average-everyday 7th grader. So that's on me more than them. Also, I like high school subjects better. You can go even more in depth. But I'd do junior high if I was back in teaching if that was all that was available, sure.

Oh, and let's not even get into parents of junior highers. Is there anything worse than a parent who's spent the last twelve years of their life thinking they're raising a kid, who wakes up one morning, sees their kid's shoulders have broadened, or voice deepened, or breasts started to bud, and freaks the heck out that they're going to have an adult on their hands in half as long as this kid has been alive? Time to clamp down. Time to really dole out the what for. Darn kid, thinkin' he can grow up on me? I've got SO much to teach him, and only so much time.

And heaven forbid the kid does something remotely dangerous,.Like, running to the car, or holding hands with a real live GIRL, or heaven forbid again going on overseas mission trip! LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS, CHILDREN OF AAAAALLLL AGES, step right up, step right up, see the nicest, most culturally sensitive person in the world LOSE THEIR EVER-LOVIN' MIND and suddenly believe that every single possible non-American in the world is going to SLAUGHTER THEIR CHILD at the first opportunity.

So, yeah, being in junior high is the most carefully structured hell an otherwise normal society has ever devised. And not only that, these are pretty formative years, lemme tell ya. You may have had an idea of who you are, but all of a sudden come 11 or13, you realize you're a real person, and what kind of person you could possibly be. Yeah, yeah, your brain doesn't develop out of that impulsive stage until 22 or whatever, but junior high is when you start to know yourself, and while I'm not sayin' that's set in stone, that's where a lot of where it begins.

I spent my junior high years in Minsk. Which if you're not familiar with world geography, may be most familiar to you as the home of the first friend of our plagiaristic protagonist in Tom Lehrer's classic song 'Lobachevsky.' And while I can't say my outside-of-home-schools were particularly helpful, at least my parents, I thank God, were not the sort of parents who wake up one morning to realize their precious snowflake will someday soon be a snowman, instead, they fought those urges and decided to help, rather than hinder, me growing up. Starting with a this-guy-will-eventuallly-be-a-full-on-snowman-centric style of parenting from start, you might say. In Minsk, I walked to the park. I took the overnight train to Moscow to give tours to strange pastors (is there a better night's sleep than that train ride? Not for me there isn't. Not anywhere, not any bed). I took the metro home from late night youth meetings, I got involved in theatre with the international community, and oh yes, I took the bus (didn't think I'd finally get here, didja?)

Oh, the bus. I'd like to say that in grade school, for me, a to-school-walker, the bus was the magical transport to freedom from the drudgery of the humdrum daily grade school grind, but I don't have any clear memories of feeling this way. I do remember liking the camaraderie of a bus, the fun of going somewhere with these people that I knew. But it wasn't the bus, per se, but the going somewhere with that I liked. (I epitomize extrovert -- there are times that a person has left my presence, and I've completely lost my train of thought just because there was no one with me anymore.)

But I don't think the fact that I've ridden the bus home for the past two Tuesdays to get home in time to hang out with junior highers from my church and LOVED it has anything to do with that escape mindset. For me, it was the freedom of being a junior higher, with all of those typical body changes, and all of this proto-wisdom, and also, amazingly, the ability to go where I wanted, and the trust of my parents to go there. Need some fireworks? Let's go get them. Want to go shopping? Sure. Go see friends? Go ride the Super 8 roller coaster? Go where I wilt? Sure, sure, sure. As my friend Nick and I say, le's jus' go.

But really, really enjoying riding the bus home from work is obviously not exclusive to residual echoes of initial adolescent freedom. I mean, it takes me 25 minutes on a slow day to drive home, and an hour and twenty to get him by bus on a fast day. That's not freedom. So, what gives? Why did I get positively giddy juttering along on the JO Route R Olathe-Downtown Express? Why did it feel so . . . right?

I can do what I want on the bus. There are no responsibilities. I can read or write or think, or just watch the city move by, in sound-barriered air conditioning. Part of it is that I love seeing the city like that,like an outsider might see it, the way I see other cities when I'm there. I feel detached like a tourist, and so I naturally love where I am, like a tourist.

I was talking with my sister about why I like the bus so much, and she said that it's got to be something to do with how really formative growing up in a different country was. I remember feeling like I belonged where I was , living in Minsk. Yes, I didn't really speak the language. Yes, this wasn't my culture. And I was far from my own. So I created my own. While most junior high kids were getting picked on, and primping for the ladies/gents, I was developing a wild individualist streak, and enhancing and enforcing that in my own mind as much as possible. I didn't have to prove I was a different person than other people (a common source of teenage rebellion (and angst), I think), because I was clearly different than them. I was reading like mad, listening to sermons, playing video games and beating them with no contact with the outside world. I have a clarity of memories from those two years that far outshines my two years of college almost ten years later. I knew exactly who I was then. No doubts, full confidence.

Sure, I had stuff to work out, but I knew that, and was excited to get there. I didn't feel great all the time. I got angsty. I got immmature. But I knew I could work my way out of it. (It's part of that confidence, I think, that allowed me to get into a near-dating experience with a senior at a conference I attended on summer furlough the summer before my freshman year. But that's just bragging, ha-HAH!) I was drowning in beautiful certainty. Drinking it wildly.

So, it's not just the residual feeling of freedom from my junior high years. I have this odd residual feeling of belonging when I ride the bus that comes from echoes of feeling at home and completely sure of myself. It also throws me back before uncertainty came over and started hanging out all the time, poking me if I started falling asleep. Throws me back before the weight and exhaustion of high school academic responsibility. Before I had a girlfriend who became a wife who became a lover. Before debt, and before real freedom, freedom where you can step off the edge any time you like because the glass wall that you used to trust to keep you safe has been pulled away when you weren't looking. Throws me back before I had friends who were married, let alone divorced. Throws me back to when I believed in a simple system of belief, not a wild and terrifying and still somehow way more satisfying God. So, it's 5 o' th' clock and my ride is going to class until 8, so I'm off to ride the bus home again so I can cut the grass with our old school mechanical mower. Since I don't have a junior higher yet to do it for me.

Lay down your walls, they don't mean a thing. Keep on shinin', baby.

I used think I was a teacher. Most people who teach professionally do. Even the very good ones. Sometimes especially the very good ones. Ask them who they are, and they'll tell you, "I'm a teacher!" Of course they do. I've even said that in interviews, that I teach even when I'm not doing it professionally, that it's who I am, deep down. That I taught English not just because I loved language, but also because English classes are the best place to teach about life and how to live it. That is what they want to hear from you in that room, across the principal's desk, portfolio and a suit, that you'll give your life to this teaching thing at their school, because it is your life. Life identity and career match. What synchronicity!

While there is some truth to part of my identity being tied up in wanting to help other people learn and grow, that's a hollow story if I believe it's the full truth; it's just not enough. I've written about how long it took me to get over not being a professional teacher, and how much longer it took for me to realize that my identity wasn't any longer tied up in being a teacher. Now I am just a man. I am just a man.

My friend Adam works as an engineer. This is because he has a mind of a person who can engineer. He likes figuring out how things work. His brain plans and plots and schedules and thinks. But this is not who he is. He's a guy who gets lonely sometimes, and eats muffins whenever possible, and shows up to help when people need help, and likes playing board games, but not all the time, and walks to a place when he can, and more and more and more. All of which makes him a whole, deep, complex, person -- just like, and completely different than, everyone else. But the parts are just parts. And the appellations and descriptors are just that. Adam is a guy. Is he an engineer? Yes, but mostly no. Engineering is just part of it.

What got me started thinking about this, weeks and weeks ago on a sleepy Friday morning*, in the shower and the closet, is that I read a lot of blogs. Blogs on emerging Christianity, and blogs on poker (which I don't play), and gadgets (which I don't buy), and games (which my friend Jeremy would say I don't play), and compounds, and pictures of things in Russia, and lifehacking, and having a baby, and having already had a baby, and Photoshop disasters (two of those), and unnecessarily quotation "marks", and secrets, and satire, and for a while there, ampersands even. Most blogs are this way: I'm a christianarchohippy conservatarian, so I write about that. Or I play poker for a living and golf for fun, so I write about that. I'm famous, let me tell you how. There are people who write only about the sex they have and want to have, and people who only write about the cars they drive and want to drive, or people who only write about the food they eat and want to eat.

But my favorite blogs are where the writers slip the rest of their lives into the mix. It's no longer a blog about Topic X, which is of interest to you, but Topic X, which is one of the things in my life. Like when Pauly talks about how hard it is to be wrapped up in the degeneracy of Las Vegas, or his yearning to become the writer he wants to be and how his job writing gets in the way. Or when Wil talks about his kids and his wife and California sunsets, or how he learned to stop believing the voices that told him he could only find success in being an actor. Or when Gabe and Tycho take a break from gaming comics to talk about their kids.

Overall, blogging seems to be this deeply focused thing, like magazines, that strips away the essential mystery and confusion of being a whole person, and lets you say, "I am just this thing, and this thing makes me who I am." I am a lowrider owner. I am a woman who likes to be titillated. I am a man who likes the same. I am health. I am a person interested in making my living room remind people of the deep south. For me, though, I like seeing the person. For me, Topic X is just a means to the end of knowing a person.

This narrowing is the same sort of exclusionary definition that Rob Bell talks about in his book Sex God. How most people in our culture approach their sexuality from one of two extremes: animal or angel. You're either an animal who can't control your urges, so whatever feels good, do it, or you're a perfect angel, no physicality at all, no hormones, shove your body into a nice little Gnostic package and live like the spirit you truly are.

But we're humans. We feel like mating, and we can stop ourselves. We need to touch someone to feel connected and real, so we can hug and shake hands and sock shoulders and tickle. It's okay to embody your body. Lauren Winner talks a lot about that in her book Real Sex, how the number one indicator of girls not having sex as teenagers is being involved with a team sport. They learn how to use a body, so they don't get used by it.

Rob talks about how Hugh Hefner grew up in an "angel" household where nobody ever even hugged. And how that shaped all of Hefner's philosophy growing up. All the hedonism and depersonalization as the extreme of isolationism. How all he wanted was to break out of that lie that people don't need to be touched. All because his familiy didn't understand how to just be people. He never learned that just being human is okay. But it is. Human is what we are.

But the false dichotomy of Angel-Animal is just one example of how we define ourselves as anything but just a human. De-humanifying definitions abound and spread like memes. Okay, fine, they are memes. I wrote about his a while ago, but how often in a conversation do you hear someone ask you who you are, rather than what you do? Not often, I'd bet. Not that 'what do you do?' isn't a legitimate question to learn more about a person, but it's a form of shorthand, and too easy to depend on. That guy's a doctor, she's a lawyer, he's an engineer, they're students. I will define them as such. Just as easy to define someone by skin color or what they buy.

Obviously the answer to the 'what do you do?' question tells us something, there's something in a person's make-up that caused them to choose to be a chemist, or a salon's schedule coordinator, or a guy who sits at a desk and tells this person to do that and that person to do this, but it's not enough. There's a whole person lurking behind the iceberg tip of their job, or their blog, or their brand of t-shirt.

All the marriage books tell you that it takes a whole life to get to know someone, and you'll always be discovering new things. And all the pop-psych books tell you that it take a whole life to even know yourself. And there I go wanting to crush someone into a single sentence subject. Actuary. (Full disclosure: I don't actually know any actuaries. They have likely predicted this.) Avid reader. Cat owner. Slacker. Anime reader. Homeless guy. Nun.

Then there are terms like Tutsi, Hutu, Nazi, Jap, black, white, American, capitalist, Christian. Reduce, reduce, dehumanize, kill. It's all the same cycle. All the same mindset.

Now, I realize that saying something like "I am a teacher" is a form of necessary shorthand. And shorthand is how we mentally survive the chaos of historically normal life, let alone the rapidly accelerating life we live in this country. Like how we block out unnecessary visual info in visually busy environments (Hi, stretch of I-35 between the Southwest Trafficway entrance and downtown!). But forms of societal shorthand, even good ones, diminish the substance of the thing shorthanded.

For example, when the guy on the news says IED, most people know that means improvised explosive device (Some people may get them confused with intrauterine devices, of course, what with the similarity. How embarrassing.), but IED doesn't have the same lexical impact as the three words laid out. The object is improvised and it is explosive -- both words conjure their own set of ideas. In what kind of place would someone need to be to improvise something to explode? that's a questions worth asking yourself. One that wold unlikely come up when exposed to a term like IED. So, in short (not shortly enough?), shorthand has its place, but it's woefully inadequate. And besides, it leads to dehumanization.

And I want just the opposite. I want people humanized. Living deep in being a person. Loving life and loving people. Being loved. Being more than graphic designers and tech support technicians, and actors, being people.

I think my blog could be more popular if I focused on some topic, though. More marketable. If I wrote about politics or faith mostly, or living in Kansas City, or being married, wrote about games I'd played, or just conglomerated other things I'd found on the internet. That's how to get a readership. That's the kind of thing that draws me into reading someone else's blog, usually. But that's not who I am. Efficacy does not equal necessary action. People like to read things about topics, I know. But I write about topics because they are part of my life. They are the us-upon-a-times and the together-whens. The gathered cloudthreads of life, all woven into a larger whole.

And the reason I write about all kinds of threads in my life, rather than just picking one is because, deep down, I am a teacher. I want to show even one person who reads this thing, even in a small way, that my life isn't constrained to the one topic. Maybe if I write it, someone else can believe it. Just like how everyone with an audience wants to affect the audience to do something. Laugh and applaud, in most cases. Sometimes something more, but something. Even if they won't admit it to themselves. Just so, I want people to laugh and applaud, who doesn't, but more than that, I want the same thing I wanted for my students; I want people to live.




*When I finished writing this, as usual, I had to change the time from when I started it to when I finished it. This is usually a switch from 8:05 to 4:50, or summat similar. Date and time this blog started: 4:38 PM, 4/17/08. I have had the song 'Jezebel Eyes' by Dime Store Prophets stuck in my head ever since. I've quoted from it liberally here. I even considered changing the name of my blog to I Am Just a Man.

The haiku, re-examining some criticism, and some (possibly rhetorical) questions.

I'm not proud to say it, but I wrote a haiku back in January and I posted it here. As you might expect, I hate haiku. They seem to mostly exist in English as a cop-out for inept English teachers -- an assignment to give to students to make up for not knowing how to actually teach poetry. Sort of the moral equivalent of teaching the Macarena at a ballet class. Sure, it's dancing, but dancing for people who want to dance without trying. Easy to teach, and you sure as heck don't need to be able to make any value judgments on the quality of someone's Macarena skills. You don't need to critique someone's Macarena dancing if you're teaching a class on dancing; let people just enjoy themselves. Why critique any dancing at all while we're at it? Dancing is a method of expression, and expression is pure.

Or something. Most people teach the form of haiku and never touch the substance. I can write a quick and dirty poem in haiku form any old time. For example:

Poetry Teacher's Dream
"Darkness surrounds me . . ."
began the freshman's poem
I burned with Mein Kampf.

See, it's easy. 5-7-5, home for second breakfast. I even spent a little extra time on the images that I didn't really need to. Not for an English language haiku. English language haiku are lazy punk hooligans. In my opinion, the syllabic requirements for haiku should be thrown out, and we should set wheelbarrows, white chickens, and stations of the metro as the standard. Also, cold, sweet, plums.

But anyway, in January I was in the middle of a lot of people telling me that my blog posts were too long, and I was also in the middle of thinking about something that I didn't want to expand on too deeply at the time, so I took a stab at a poem to try to express it. Also, I didn't want to directly confront the person who was bringing up the things I wanted to address because I didn't hear it directly from her, and didn't know her that well. Also, some days I'm lazy. So, yeah, part irony, part artistic expression, part non-confrontation, part laziness. Here it is again:

Our roast hen cloister,
greasy fingers strumming loaves,
laughs. Is it moral?

Yes, it needs a title. Maybe I'd call it 'Fellowship' if I had to write it again. Clue you into the context. As if you needed it, O Independent Reader. But titles are polite.

My desire to write the haiku came out of some comments that F. (a friend of mine's ex-girlfriend) made to N. (this friend) about our group of friends, that N. mentioned to me as part of his wresting with the deteriorating state of their relationship. So this is partially hearsay, but I think the points are worth examining anyway. Besides, hearsay only means the veracity of the origin of the statement is in question, not the content of statement itself, per se. Especially in non-legal contexts. Also, because it's easy to be overly critical of friends' ex-girlfriends, to pull out the ol' ad hominim hose and spray indiscriminately, I'll try to take what she was saying in the most positive light. This is called self-censorship. Also, possibly, maturity.

F. came to know our group entirely through N., and I'd like to think we made her feel welcome. I know we tried. We love N.; darn right we do. So we added his girlfriend to our Facebook friends, invited her to things we were doing even if N. wasn't going to be there, chatted jovially with her at parties, etc, etc, amen. Welcoming things. I don't think she ever felt part of the group, though. From what I can tell (as I continue to try to be kind), part of the reason was that she felt like we weren't living up to what she thought our Christianity should have been. Or perhaps it was that our lives weren't Christian enough for her.

I've talked about this next bit elsewhere (finally getting back to it, you might say) but there was a time in my life that if I didn't have a board game with me when I showed up to someone's house, it surprised people. It still surprises people who have known me for a long while (Hi, Juliet!). Settlers, Icehouse, decks of cards for spades or Durak (my research has revealed our standard house game includes all the variants), Three-Dragon Ante, anything, really. As long as it was a game, and especially if there was a party. Back in high school, I took a lot of pride in the fact we played board games at parties and didn't drink (more on the drinking bit some other time). New Years parties were official board game fests. One time, back in the days of Jill-at-Avila, I even took a whole backpack of games to a party with her college friends. Not really their scene, it turns out. Apparently, their scene involved watching Resident Evil 2 and drinking. So, yes, I've seen Resident Evil 2; judge me if you will. But the drinking seemed to take precedence even over the people who might have been interested in some sort of game. Ah, alas, Alcohol, how you have thwarted fun activities time and again.

But I've been moving away from playing board games lately. Part of it is that Jill's not a huge fan of board games (but they are growing on her she said the other day, so WOO). I even quit playing D&D, which was not an easy hobby to give up (but that was more for the time commitment than anything else). I just kept feeling like when I got together with people, I wanted to have some sort of substantive conversation, talk about something meaningful. So, that meant fewer board games in my mind. Of course, just as often those conversations end up being just as meaningless (if not more) than the light-hearted camaraderie of sitting around a basement table and building roads out of six pressed sheep.

So, our group's board game playing sparked some of F.'s criticism, I know. For example, she came along to a party at N.'s house - I think it was our New Years party - and we played Settlers, as you might expect, and there were more games going - Spades tournaments and the like. We spent the whole party playing games. She didn't say anything then, and never to me, plus, they had another party to get to, but N. said (as I recall) that it wasn't just the games that bothered her at that party, it was how much time we just spent being together. Eating, playing, talking. Maybe she thought we should have been out doing things. Things she thought were substantive. Out protesting for change, or feeding people who were hungry, or whatever Christians are supposed to do. And those criticisms do resonate with me. I want the things I do to be meaningful, to have weight, to be worthwhile, to be in line with the things I think God is in line with.

And F. isn't the only one asking these kinds questions about the group. I been in several discussions lately where we talked about how much board gaming we do, and how many people come to parties we throw, vs. and how frequently people show up when someone needs moved, for example.

Is there even a 'supposed to' when it comes to action?

The amount of money Americans spend on ice cream every year is greater than the amount of money that not-for-profits have said they would need to raise to make sure everyone in the world can eat if they're hungry. Should I stop eating ice cream? Should I match the money I spend on ice cream with money sent to organizations that fight hunger? Should I match my ice cream money with money spent on feeding hungry people I know?

I know I'm always supposed to love people. I want to, and usually do, but I don't always know how to act that out. It's something that's taken me long enough to start learning in marriage, let alone with people I don't have the benefit of sleeping with. Is love love if it's not acted out?

So, I have to ask the question of the haiku again, for me, is sitting around a table and eating food with people I am similar to, and enjoy the company of, moral? What if, instead of chicken, it's a vegan meal? A freegan meal? Is sitting around a table and playing a game with the same, similar, people moral? Is sitting in the same room as people I am similar to moral at all, or should I only associate with people who are very different from me? People I don't like? If so, what is the point of reconciliation; what then am I trying to reconcile people to? Is sitting in a room moral? Is watching the Stanley Cup finals with a good friend moral? Are sports at all moral? Good friends? Watching movies? Reading books? Are games? Is anything that isn't sacrifice for the other moral? Is everything moral? Is nothing?

Or perhaps the better question is, what should I/we be getting up to these days? What's a good use of time? Is time something for which we should even appropriately consider the word 'used' to be used? Is fun ok if it's restful/sabbath? Is fun ok if it's with your enemy? Is fun always ok? Ever ok? Why if all things are permissible are some things even so forbidden (Hi, adultery and drinking blood!)? How do I reconcile the things I think I ought to do with the desire to not be legalistic? That is, is trying to be disciplined legalistic? Is encouraging other people to be disciplined legalistic? Can I do anything without discipline?

Is asking these questions even a good use of my time, or should I be out living what I already know, which I don't do most of the time anyway? I know a lot of easy answers to these questions. Answers like: love. But like I said. Love, how?

The (kingdom, block party, diaspora) of God is like a teacher teaching the haiku, who when he planned to teach it, could not decide how to discipline and forgive, be grace-giving and instruct, work hard and have fun. So he walked the tightrope of love and grace and discipline and told his students to both use the 5-7-5 format, and striking, fresh images, especially of nature.