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happy father’s day

First of all, since it’s Father’s Day, I thought I’d take the opportunity to plug one of my favorite blogs, which happens

Image via Googles LIFE photo archive.
Image via Google's LIFE photo archive.

to be written by a dad, and which I think will be turning into a book at some point in the near future: 1001 Rules for my Unborn Son.  Though I will say that I think most of the rules are equally appropriate for girls as well.  Which brings me to MY dad.

My dad has 3 girls.  Sometimes when a guy will mention that he has three daughters, other men will express sympathy that this poor man did not get to have a son.  And while my dad has, at times, loved to crack jokes about being surrounded by women, noting that even all of our pets have been girls, he truly loves it.  I know this, because my parents adopted their third daughter only a couple of years ago, so I’ve had the benefit of watching him with her, and seeing him as a dad with his daughter through the lenses of my adult eyes, filtered by my 24 years of experience as his daughter.  He loves being our daddy.  Every giggle or squeal that he can get out of us warms his heart.  He truly lives to make us smile.

Now perhaps it’s because my dad’s mostly a cerebral guy, not into male jock stuff, but we weren’t particularly raised with ideas of “boy stuff” and “girl stuff” or the idea that my dad would have any more fun with us if we had been boys.  He took us on car trips to dig up crystals and gave us long lectures on rock types and geological formations, and the way mountains are made.  It would not at all be unusual for him to  pull the car over to look at the strata of a particularly interesting sedimentary rock formation.  He forced us to dig in the garden and pull weeds and harvest tomatoes, chores I often hated, but appreciate now that I’m an adult, trying to grow some of my own food.  He created elaborate treasure hunts for us to follow, riddled clue by clue, until we got to the big treasure at the end.  He also created elaborate Halloween parties, with dry ice in cauldrons and his entire bug collection on display on a kitchen table, and all sorts of other delights that scared me so bad I wouldn’t go in our basement for several years without trepidation, but which were the talk of our friends well into high school. Continue reading “happy father’s day”

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captain of the bus

It’s been a while since I regaled the Interwebz with a wacky tale from my adventures on the bus, but I’ve got a good one for you this morning!  It had been a fairly normal ride, for the most part, notable only in that for the first time in over a week, I wasn’t huddling under an umbrella and trying not to get splashed by passing cars while waiting for the bus to pick me up.  A young man sat down next to me, listening to something I wasn’t even sure existed any more: a discman.  I flipped through my Google Reader on my Blackberry.  The bus approached one of the major stops on the route.  Suddenly, Mr. Discman stood up, grabbed the bar over head with one hand, and put one knee up, foot on the seat like he had a lil Captain in him.  HE THEN PROCEEDED TO PELVIC THRUST THE AIR RIGHT NEXT TO ME, wiggling his hips side to side, front to back, and all around.  He did not say a word.  The bus stopped.  The doors opened.  He got off the bus.

“FATHER IN HEAVEN!” exclaimed the lady sitting across from me, fanning herself.  “LORD! LORD!”

I just burst out laughing from the absurdity of it all and said, “I have no idea what just happened.”  She smiled at me.  We both laughed.  The bus moved on.

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i have baggage

So, I involved you, the Internets, in a quest for my new work tote.  And you voted.  And then I picked something else that wasn’t even in the original lineup.  And then I waited for it to get to me, all the way from Turkey.  And it arrived! And it was beautiful!

And alas….

It was too small.  My lunch bag wouldn’t fit in it, and it’s not like I have a giant lunch bag.  It pretty much just holds one small tupperwear or sandwich, a yogurt, and maybe an apple or orange.  So, my beautiful all-the-way-from-Turkey bag will have to be a purse used on non-work-days, leaving me again in need of a new work tote. Continue reading “i have baggage”

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this i used to believe? goalposts, grief, God, and Godwin’s Law

Image via thisamericanlife.org
Image via thisamericanlife.org

As I was cleaning my house Sunday morning, sweeping floors, vacuuming up dog hair, doing loads of laundry, unloading dishes, dusting, I was catching up on listening to several of my favorite podcasts.  In particular, I listened to an episode of “This American Life” called “This I Used to Believe.”  It’s a take-off from the NPR series “This I believe” about people who used to believe strongly in something, but no longer do so.  You can listen to this episode at this website.

The part that made me hit pause, walk away from my chores, and sit down to blog was the second segment of the show called “Team Spirit in the Sky”.  It was about a woman who saw a story on the news about a Texas football coach (I can’t help but picture Coach Taylor from “Friday Night Lights”) from a Christian school who touched the lives of an opposing team from a juvenile lock-up by having fans from HIS team learn their opponents’ names, cheer for them, form “spirit lines” for them, and root for them when his team played them.  For many of the lock-up’s players, it was a unique experience to finally be rooted for in any sense of the word, and for the coach, a chance to live out in some small way the biblical idea of loving one’s enemies.

The woman telling the “This I Used to Believe” story was a woman wrote to the coach after seeing the news story to tell him that though she was a lapsed Catholic who became an agnostic following the death of a close friend to cancer, she is glad that he is living out an authentic Christian faith for his players and everyone else in his community.  And at first, the coach responds, and I, the listener was thinking, “YEAH! This guy is getting it right!” The coach says he feels that God is speaking to him about this woman who has emailed him, and they begin a correspondence.  She even agrees to talk on the phone with him, intrigued that God has been waking him up many nights in a row, bothering him about what he needs to say to this woman who has lost her faith because of one of the most classic questions in theology: why do bad things happen to good people?

But then the coach totally drops the ball. Continue reading “this i used to believe? goalposts, grief, God, and Godwin’s Law”

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kicking it, kicking homelessness

The other night, Jon and I Netflixed a really great documentary called “Kicking It,” which is about the Homeless World Cup.  It was a great film, focused on six individual players from different countries as they make their way onto teams and to South Africa to play soccer.

At first, it may seem like a strange form of outreach, forming soccer teams of homeless people.  I mean, aren’t there other, more concrete things they need beyond a recreational activity?  But soccer is more powerful than it may seem.  Just being on a team, having goals, getting to celebrate small successes is a new experience for many of the players, who are often lonely outcasts, estranged from family, battling addictions.  One player from Ireland was attempting to end a heroin addiction, and being on the soccer team in essence gave him a reason to keep living, a reason for his mother to finally be proud of him, a reason to get clean.  Another player from America had been abused and rejected by his family, and was dealing with lots of anger and abandonment issues, but being on a team was sort of his first experience in a functioning “family,” one that expected him to deal with his anger in more appropriate ways. Continue reading “kicking it, kicking homelessness”

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murderers and humanity

I’m still thinking about and processing the violent, terrorist acts committed against George Tiller and yesterday at the National Holocaust Museum.  I’ve been

This image is what so profoundly affected me at the National Holocaust Museum.
This image is what so profoundly affected me at the National Holocaust Museum.

 to the Holocaust Museum twice, and both times, it profoundly affected me.  I remember sitting on the floor in a room filled with Holocaust victims’ shoes, sobbing.  This room is toward the end of the museum, and yet it moved me more than anything else in the museum.  Perhaps because of the idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.  Perhaps because it just engaged all my senses.  I could even SMELL the shoes.  Visiting that museum  gave me both a profound sense of the evil humans are capable of perpetrating on one another, but also of the indomitability of the human spirit.  You can try to take away someone’s humanity.  Treat them like animals.  Attempt to eradicate them.  But you can’t control someone’s spirit.  You can’t take away their faith.  

 

In the wake of horrible tragedies, it is easy to see the perpetrators as not human.  I’m guilty of it.  I am a pacifist, generally, but in the wake of something awful that one human has done to another, I know what it is to want vengeance, to want an eye for an eye, though I rationally know that this “leaves the whole world blind.”  I know, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “through violence you may murder a murderer but you can’t murder murder.”  While it may be easier to simply dismiss these hate-filled killers as somehow less than human, it just isn’t right.  The Nazis, in all their horrific violence, were still humans.  Scott Roeder is a human.  James von Brunn, hateful as his prejudices are to me, is a human.  Someone loved them.  These killers were someone’s babies.  How did they get from there to where they are now?  I don’t know, but it’s worth exploring.  People may hate, and people may have prejudices, but a variety of factors contribute to making a hateful person into a murderer, a terrorist. Continue reading “murderers and humanity”

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mawwiage, mad-dog, and fairness

Mr. Rogers taught me that no one knows what youre thinking and feeling unless you tell them.
Mr. Rogers taught me that "no one knows what you're thinking and feeling unless you tell them."

I write a lot about marriage equality and believe very strongly in marriage equality largely because I’m so happily married.  Though it seems some straight people see their marriages as somehow under attack from a threat of gay marriage, experiencing marriage has only more firmly convinced me how wrong it is to deny anyone a chance at this kind of happiness– spending every day with their best friend.

And today I am especially thankful for my husband and “dearest friend” (as Abigail Adams often referred to her husband John).  Yesterday I got home and was just feeling sort of mad-doggish (shout out to my English prof Dr. Robbins, who taught me this term from J.M. Barrie: “to be mad-dog is to kick out at everything, and there is some satisfaction in that” from “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens”).  It didn’t help that I had thought Jon would be home around 7:30 and didn’t arrive until about 20 minutes later than that, meaning the dinner I had made was overcooked and soggy by the time he got in the door.

So he arrived to be greeted by a wife who was seemingly annoyed at everything he said.  WHY ARE YOU TALKING SO WEIRD? WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHAT KIND OF VEGGIE IS THIS, IT’S AN ENDIVE, GAH!  YEAH, DINNER WOULD BE TASTIER IF YOU HAD BEEN HERE 20 MINUTES AGO!  The poor guy would have been very justified to get snippy back at me, but instead, in his typically patient manner, he just asked me why I was so annoyed with him.  But the truth was, I really had no idea.  I was just irritated at the world and I had no idea why.  And if that was frustrating for HIM, it’s also super frustrating to me.  It’s totally unfair when my feelings are a mystery even to me.  Continue reading “mawwiage, mad-dog, and fairness”

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that’s a framer

New semi-regular feature, “that’s a framer!”  This way I can share the occasional cool photo I somehow get lucky and manage to snap, despite my lack of skills.  (Seriously, only part I struggled to pass in journalism classes was photography.)

These photos were taken Sunday evening at Kiawah Island, South Carolina.

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not quite what i expected

These are the shoes I was wearing.
These are the shoes I was wearing.

I’ve blogged fairly extensively about my less-than-stellar experiences on and waiting for the bus.  I’ve been harassed, stared at, honked at, and whistled at, and made uncomfortable.  I’ve been chatted up by mentally ill homeless people and stuck sitting next to smelly guys day after day.  I’ve even been given a phone number by a man who apparently found the back of my head alluring, as he’d been sitting behind me the entire ride.  But I think I may have just had my strangest experience thus far.

I was standing at my stop, sweating in the full sun and trying to keep the wind generated by cars whizzing by from blowing my skirt up, wondering if I should just get out the umbrella to give myself some shade.  That’s when a car with two typical South Carolina preppy, fraternity types stopped at the light nearby.  When one rolled down his window, I was expecting more bus stop lewd/rudeness.

But instead I heard:

Hey! I like your shoes!

I was so taken aback all I could say was, “Thanks!”