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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Wake-up Call

Nothing will get you out of bed faster than certain sounds.

Previously, the top performer was the sound of a child retching, because, well, you know.  Second place was the baby gate being pushed over, because that meant the Kraken had escaped.  Sounds of potential home invasion were way, way down the list.

But we added a new one yesterday: the sound of a seven-year-old saying, "Don't worry about the ironing, Mommy!  I did it while you were sleeping."

Yes, he did.  A napkin, one of his brother's school shirts, and a pair of gym shorts.

The shirt looked great.  And he remembered to unplug the iron when he was done.

He left the iron face down on the ironing board, but, well, singe marks don't hurt anything.

So.  That was exciting.

We decided that it was past time to teach him to cook, then, since his appetite for Doing Dangerous Grown-up Things had clearly been unsatisfied.

Scrambled Eggs À La Theo it was, then.

If you want to make them, here's how:


Mix eggs (one per person, plus one extra), salt, and cream in a bowl.


Pour eggs into hot pan with melted butter.


Burn your finger a little, so that Mom remembers that people should wear shirts while cooking.


Stir gently to keep eggs from burning.


Enjoy a good breakfast with Mom.

Monday, August 25, 2014

First Day of Classes

Well, it's the first day of classes here at [my college].

Some cruel and thoughtless person sent me this link, and I was stupid enough to read it, even though he said it made him cry every time he read it:

All Legs and Curiosity

I've got a baby heading off to college next year.  So I get it. 

I've been thinking about it for seven years now, actually--right after Theo was born, and I realized, "He'll be home for ten years after his big brother goes to college.  How will he manage without his big brother around?  For ten years???"

But, anyway, I get it, Moms and Dads.  I get that my students are your babies.

I don't promise to love them as much as you do.

I certainly won't be keeping up with whether or not they wear socks, although I might chastise them for using tobacco or apologizing too much or texting in class (and definitely for texting while driving).

But I promise to do right by them, and to try to help them become adults, and to want better for them than they want for themselves (and almost as good as you want for them).

And I promise always, always to remember that they're somebody else's babies.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Finished Objects

I haven't been knitting for quite some time.

But a recent road trip provided lots and lots of knitting time, so I did get one little project done:




Of all my boys, Amos is the one to have mastered satisfying expressions of gratitude.

When I finished the first sock, I put it on him to try it for size.  He got wide-eyed, put his hand on his chest, and said, "Do you make-ded that sock for ME?"

I said yes, and he said, as effusively as any child actor assigned a "thank you" scene, "Oh!  THANK you, Mommy!"

When I finished the second sock, he hugged them, and then he hugged me, and he refused to take them off for the whole day.

Now, I recognize A Certain Son's genuine gratitude as expressed through a surreptitious, "Yo, thanks, Mom," and A Certain Other Son's as expressed by pestery requests for three more of whatever I've just given him.

But, you know, Amos's way is a nice change of pace.

Friday, August 8, 2014

What I've Been Reading This Week

This is a long, careful, and necessary article, written for those of us struggling to make sense of the life and writings of John Howard Yoder.  His description of Christian non-violence is as compelling and beautiful as his history of coercion and harassment of female students is horrifying.

One of the things that particularly strikes me about this is the way our language about such interactions frustrates the victims of them.  One woman, for example, told of receiving a letter from Yoder that described her body in wildly invasive personal and sexual detail--so much so that the only language she could conjure to describe the experience of reading such a letter was one of sexual violation.  "I felt as if I'd been raped."

I myself am struggling to find words to describe her experience--at second-hand, obviously, and therefore inadequately, but without reference to violent sexual assault.  She wasn't touched, she wasn't penetrated, her body wasn't forced to do anything against her will.  And yet something dreadfully wrong was done to her, something that women experience far too often at the hands of men, and something that men don't tend to go through life experiencing or fearing.  The legal language of harassment wasn't necessarily available during the earliest years of Yoder's career, but even today that language seems insufficient.

But using the language of actual sexual violence is problematic for at least two reasons.  First, it does, I think, some injustice to women who have experienced sexual assault, the way it does injustice to survivors of the Holocaust to have non-genocidal situations described as holocausts.  And second, it lets men give themselves permission to dismiss women's accounts of such experiences: "Seriously?  You got an explicit letter and you felt raped?  Gosh, you women sure take these things way too seriously!"

Still, somewhere between "he sent an inappropriately explicit letter to me" and "I felt like I'd been raped," there is a great yawning void in our language, and women are continually struggling against it.  The absence of language to describe what sexual harassment does to its victims (and even the word "harassment" has proven wildly inadequate to the job) only helps those who commit it.

By happy coincidence, I read the above article along with this one, about male privilege in the church.  The writer does an admirable job trying to put words to those experiences that do not rise to the legal definition of harassment and yet constantly hound women in the workforce.  While it would have been nice to have a #11 (You will go through most of your days neither fearing nor actually experiencing inappropriate sexual or personal barrages passed off as "jokes," constant references to your sexual availability, or having a colleague "accidentally" play porn at you when you walk into his office for a meeting), it is, I hope, helpful for men to think about what it would be like to have their work constantly qualified with reference to their gender.  No one ever says, "He's the best male theologian we have on staff," or "you're a really good theologian, for a man."

On the other hand, I have to say that very, very few of my experiences of being at a real disadvantage because of my sex have taken place in an ecclesial context.  I felt far more vulnerable to men's beliefs and behaviors the few times I've worked in entirely non-religious, male-dominated contexts than I have in the church or in church-affiliated schools.

Friday, August 1, 2014

You Should Start a List

. . . of all these awesome books I keep recommending for you.

Also, you should thank me for pointing out which ones have upcoming movies, like The 5th Wave. Normally, I wouldn't write about YA fiction on this high-class intellectual website. But since Rick Yancey wrote a book that isn't insulting to my intelligence, I will give credit where it is due.

T5W is about an alien apocalypse. It tracks Cassie Sullivan and some surrounding characters in their attempts to survive. The aliens in this book are surprisingly less cliche and aggravating than one would expect. Their planet is apparently out of commission, so they found Earth and decided to take it. Before doing so, they need to eliminate all the humans. 

But because they need to preserve the natural world, their approach is not as simple as "blow everyone up." (No, Michael Bay, you may not direct the film adaptation.)

As you should have inferred from the title, the alien takeover takes place in five waves. The first wave is the giant electromagnetic pulse which eliminates nearly all human technology, and also kills a whole bunch of people who happened to be flying in an airplane or speeding on the interstate at an unfortunate time. The second wave dropped really large metal rods on fault lines, leading to actual killer waves affecting all coastal cities. The third wave killed 97% of the remaining population. It was a modified form of Ebola which kept the same deadly symptoms but was genetically engineered to spread far faster. And in the fourth wave, the aliens enter human bodies and replace our consciousnesses with their own; these invaders are then used to snipe wandering survivors.

If I tell you the 5th wave, it would ruin, like, half the plot, and besides, you'll have a hard time sleeping tonight anyway. 

Cheers,
Isaac