Words on warrants

I get very tickled whenever I remember that Antonin Scalia is Catholic.

A whole lot of Christians misunderstand Judaism. I've been reading up on the Oral Torah, including Klinghoffer's Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, as well as a fair number of other interfaith dialogue works by folks like Amy-Jill Levine and Jacob Neusner. The notion is that the Talmud, which is filled with rulings and teaching stories from hordes of rabbis, is the written recording of an oral tradition that God handed down to Israel at Sinai alongside the written law that survives as the five books of Moses.

Not everyone goes along with it. Karaites accept the Tanakh as sacred, but reject all of the oral tradition as the work of humans and therefore not binding in the same sense. Jesus spoke against the oral tradition here, although digging out exactly how far His criticism went is more than I want to take on in this post.

To turn aside to Scalia for a second, I can report that he's the most rabid proponent of the idea that the Constitution ought to be construed only according to its original meaning, and that the legislative intent of Congress is irrelevant to understanding the meaning of a statute. In other words, binding documents are dead, not alive, and people who arrive later and explain their meaning anew using changed circumstance are doing violence to the best way of applying the law. He doesn't believe the Constitution is a living document; it means what it meant in 1787, and no more.

What tickles me about that is that the Roman Catholic church is, of the Christian denominations in the United States, the one closest to Rabbinic Judaism in its treatment of sacred scripture. Along with the Bible, there's the catechism, there's the magisterium, and there's a whole lot of tradition. Catholics include the Apocrypha in their Bibles, and popes, from time to time, announce that by divine revelation they've added to the understanding of what the Bible teaches, such as the immaculate conception and Mary's bodily assumption into Heaven.

Martin Luther's break with the church, with "Sola Scriptura" as his motto, is such a Scalian move. But in matters of faith, Scalia sides with people who want to make the Bible into a pliable, renewable, re-readable document in a way he'd never tolerate when it comes to the Constitution. I guess God is more in need of our help to clarify what He was saying than James Madison is.

Words over weddings

Just wanted to record this while the big' ol smile still hasn't faded from my face.

Not long after I arrived at NCU, a young man named Jordan transferred in from East Bay, and became the first Communication major that I didn't inherit from my predecessor. A semester or so later, a young lady named Tessa also chose Communication. The neat thing about that was, they were dating steadily. A few months ago he proposed to her.

And they just paid me a visit, and asked me to officiate at the wedding in July.

Wow.

Words on wheels

Korie Homan and Esther Vergeer reach the finals of the U.S. Open in wheelchair tennis ... in a walkover.

Less than two weeks later, after serving for thirty years as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking ... steps down.

40

So what do you do when you have two incompatible ideas in your head, and they both have that special gravitational force of being powerfully true? We've got all kinds of theories, from cognitive dissonance to dual-processing, but the matter is far from settled.

People live by symbols, and also by experience. Some rites of passage are experiential, like taking one's first step, and others are symbolic, like turning eighteen and becoming an adult in the eyes of the law. At the end of today, I'll hit one of the symbolic ones. This is the last day of my thirties, and tomorrow is the first day of my forties.

Forty isn't old; I don't have the slightest qualm about saying that. But I'm firm in my conviction that forty is no longer young. Teenagers are clearly young. People in their twenties are young adults. Even people in their thirties have lost only the outer layer of newness. But by forty, I've left being "young" behind by almost any reasonable measure.

The "almost" is in that last sentence because I don't feel "no longer young." I've always felt as though the conventional associations with my numerical age didn't quite fit; I felt like a young 30, a young 35, a young 39. Because I'm an academic, I get to indulge my eccentricities and approach a lot of my daily work very playfully, and because I deal with people in their late teens and early twenties, I get to soak up a lot of the enthusiasm and fun that they radiate like little quasars.

But it does feel as though something is changing.

Now, don't get the idea that I feel gloomy or depressed about turning forty. That's not it. But it has hovered in the dead center of my attention for the past few days, and out near the periphery of my attention for most of the past year. Forty has always felt as though it was going to mean something, as though something was going to change. Between those two statements, meaning and change, I think meaning is far more likely, since it is symbolic, rather than experiential. But it might turn out to bring change as well.

What I half-expect to happen is that mortality will become more real.

I know that I'm not going to live forever. I've known it since I was a very young toddler. But knowledge can be superficial or deeply internalized. Small children can repeat back the definition of death, and even paraphrase it back to show that they comprehend it, but it isn't entirely real to them so long as their world is half-pretend. And the idea that knowledge moves from symbol to a pattern of experience is something I've taught a whole lot of first-year students as they arrived on campus. I tell them a story of a gruesome accident that I almost had while driving on a rainy night, and how it took the dangerous and potentially fatal nature of driving from my conceptual knowledge to my lived experience, and made me a much safer driver. I tell them their awareness of the difficulty of college and the necessity of working responsibly and with discipline is only conceptual, but will have to become experiential if they want to survive. And I say all that to say that I think my awareness of the end of life is about to move another big monster step away from the conceptual and toward the experiential.

What's puzzling is how passing a purely symbolic milestone is supposed to accomplish that. Couldn't tell you. Beyond that, I'm not sure what changes will come with it. I have started to think across the span of what I've done to date and to weigh it, measure it, evaluate it. Is it enough? Have I used my years well? How much can I do with the years ahead? I don't regard them as scarce, but neither are they infinite. What in my life is wasteful? What areas of my life are about to fall out of my complacency and start to demand careful arrangement?

Age is just a number, and my rational faculties tell me it's silly to dwell on July 15, 2009, because it's unlikely to be categorically different from the 16th or the 14th. There's genuinely not a reason to perceive the crossing of a boundary there, because that transition is continuous, not stair-stepped. But the symbol is powerful, and it's working on me, and what that work turns out to be is something I'll have to wait and see.

Program note: I'm not, by any means, done with abortion thoughts. Those got shoved aside as I put more hours into getting my summer online classes ready to go, but I have several more to post. I imagine that'll be the last half of July.

Abortion 2

Years ago, a case came to the Supreme Court, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, which was about the state's duty to remove a child from the home if there was clear evidence of abuse. One of the issues batted back and forth was what was described as the razor's edge problem: you've got to protect the child, but if you're mistaken and the parent is not guilty of abuse, then you've done a horrendous injustice. The entire margin of error for acting correctly in such a situation is about zero. Social workers in that situation are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

That's not the only razor's edge problem in this world. I teach a number of classes that include major writing assignments, and a lot of the writing that students turn in is, honestly, embarrassing. I've worked for my entire career on what to do about it, but it's not as easy as it looks. My first instinct is just to knock off tons of points for sloppy writing. The problem is, that pushes many students toward being alliterate, of being anti-reading and writing, which is almost worse than never having learned to read and write in the first place. So I can't turn a blind eye to sloppy writing, but I also can't go in, guns a-blazing, and try to obliterate it with the force of my wrath. What I have to do is carefully balance points lost for errors with resources for improvement, as well as a good deal of encouragement anytime I do see good writing out of someone who'd previously struggled. This might seem a pretty simple idea, but it's tempting just to treat bad writing as an enemy, a pestilence, something to be stomped out with as much force as necessary. It has in common with DeShaney a fierce and desperate wish to pin down the problem to one simple target, and then bash away at that target with shock and awe tactics. In reality, the solution can be just as bad as the problem if applied bluntly, with no precision.

So I do understand that motive. I understand the feeling. I don't judge it and I don't condemn it. But I have to reject it. It's childish, and it's counterproductive. There are vanishingly few genuine problems in this world that can be done away with through an application of force to one spot, one straightforward cause. Almost anytime we hear someone assert otherwise, what we're really hearing is their fear, not their reasoning.

And abortion is the most glaring example of this.

I genuinely don't get why people who otherwise are so skeptical of government solutions to anything make such a huge, and completely irrational, exception to argue that outlawing abortion would be a step in the right direction. Outlawing alcohol worked great, didn't it? Outlawing gun ownership will certainly get guns out of the hands of criminals, right? Why, outlawing driving in excess of the speed limit has made our interstates safe enough to picnic on!

In the late 1960s and 1970s, before Roe v. Wade, there was a good deal of agitation for repeal of the laws prohibiting abortion. Doctors and nurses in particular knew just how many women were showing up in emergency rooms after botched back-alley abortions, or coathanger self-abortions. That is what is achieved by criminalizing abortion. Not fewer abortions, because I guarantee you that the botched and coathanger abortions succeeded in killing those babies. But they also resulted in gruesome deaths for the women, which is surely not what was intended.

I'm very much in favor of finding a way to make fewer abortions happen. Criminalizing them is not that way. It's another razor's edge problem. Ideally, you want to give the procedure to the medical profession, because that can have two beneficial effects:

• Fewer dead women.
• Less secrecy, which means more opportunity to talk, to offer help, to witness, to love.

Unfortunately, persuasion and witnessing don't work every time, and some women exercise the freedom the law gives them. But the solution is to step up the help and the witnessing. Getting impatient and swinging a sledgehammer blow at the procedure is just going to have the backfire effect of driving the women underground, where they will still kill the baby, and often themselves as well.

Peter didn't want to stand idly by while the soldiers arrested Jesus, so he lashed out at Malchus, servant of the High Priest, cutting off his ear. Jesus denounced Peter's act and healed the servant. Jesus never demanded imprisonment for sinners, but went to them, spoke to them, met their needs, loved them, told them to go and sin no more. That's the model we should follow. We clutch the idea of a law to ourselves as though it's the answer, but the only thing it provides is false, illusory comfort, and enough history of disastrous backfire that we have no excuse for not knowing better. Abortion is a razor's edge problem, and we stand more risk of getting it wrong by trying to cut through it than we do by waiting and praying and keeping our emphasis on Christ's Great Commission to all of us.

Abortion 1

Here, for the record, is Doyle on the issue of abortion as of June 2009.

Premise One: Every single abortion is a murder. Yes, you read that right. Keep reading.

• When does life begin? Unclear. That's not a scientific or medical question; instead, it's a philosophical question. You can make a case from Scripture that it begins at conception, at the first breath, or at the moment God created Heaven and Earth. Of the various arguable starting points, the case for any of them is not so much more powerful than the others that the matter is settled, so what remains is to decide which way to err. If a body in an Emergency Room might be dead or might be alive, doctors would err on the side of making sure they weren't letting the patient die. That simple, clear-cut judgment call illustrates an elegant way to settle the matter of which starting point should be accepted. Even if I can't make an airtight argument that a fertilized egg is a full human being, I can say that if such a claim meets minimal tests of rationality to become admissible, and no other framing of the question can dismiss it, then I ought to lean toward embracing it.
• It may be killing, but is it murder? That's an easy one: yes. It's premeditated, and the life being extinguished is entirely innocent.
• What about rape or incest? The conditions of the child's conception are in absolutely zero way relevant to this question.
• What about cases in which the mother's life is in danger? If we take our faith seriously, then we place such cases in God's hands and trust Him. I like to think I take my faith seriously. I'm not always perfect in doing so, but that's what it dictates in this matter.

Premise Two: Abortion should be completely and utterly legal. No restrictions, no waiting periods, nothing.

• I do not believe in outlawing abortion. I believe in stopping abortion. The two are entirely distinct. Anyone who believes in gun ownership should have an easy time grasping this: I assume that in your perfect world, zero people would die from gunshot wounds, but wishing for that world does not place you in favor of gun control. Outlawing something, criminalizing it, prosecuting it, has absolutely no necessary relationship to stopping it.
• Nothing in my Bible gives me permission to agitate for the passage of laws against particular sins, and then walk away satisfied. My Bible teaches me that my job is to spread the Gospel, and then leave each person's sins to their growing relationship with their Father, and to the transformative work of the Holy Spirit. That's how abortion can be stopped. Using the bludgeon of the law to stamp out abortion strikes me as profoundly un-Biblical.
• Would I, then, be opposed to laws against murder? Do I think there's any role at all for a criminal justice system? I think all of these human institutions are effectively playground equipment. I think they set up human encounters, and it's the way we handle these encounters that gives us the opportunity to glorify God, or else fail to do so. That said, I do not trust in law enforcement to protect me from being murdered. God has chosen the last moment of my life and the cause of my death. Until that moment, I am invulnerable. At that moment, nothing can save me. Again, if we took our faith seriously, we wouldn't bicker over these things nearly as much.
• I finally believe that dishonest, power-hungry, ambitious people routinely and deliberately exploit the very emotional, fervent opposition to abortion among Christians in order to make themselves powerful. I believe most politicians who talk the loudest about being "pro-life" actually want very badly for abortions to continue, because for them, abortion is a self-replenishing fountain of campaign contributions. All they have to do is step in front of a camera, make a statement whose language pushes the abortion button and the checks come flowing in. And it breaks my heart that my Christian sisters and brothers are so eager, so hungry, to be exploited in this fashion. It's true that a clear cut face-off between good and evil is more emotionally satisfying than a murky, complicated problem that's tied up with poverty, ignorance, and people's sin nature, but it's also true that our craving for that kind of satisfaction leaves us defenseless against deceit. The Bible is filled with warnings against those who will deceive us, and we're so convinced that when deceivers appear, they'll wear horns and a tail and a T-shirt with 666 emblazoned across it, that it never occurs to us that someone in a suit, with a southern accent and an American flag lapel pin, might be distorting God's word in the same way the serpent distorted it in the Garden. But scarcely a day goes by that I don't see exactly that happen.

There's more. There's a good deal more. But those are the four corners of my position on abortion. In the wake of Dr. Tiller's murder, I get the feeling it's going to be a long, hot summer, and for the rest of this month I plan to set down in words a lot of what I don't understand, what I do understand, and what I wish more of my Christian family understood.

It was a very jittery summer

So, here's the plan. Starting next week, every weekday morning, I'm going to visit a Eugene coffee house, order a Cafe Americano, take in the atmosphere, and record my impressions. I want to do a different one every day, and see how long I can keep that up.

I need your help making my list, since the yellow pages and Google maps both are woefully incomplete. Starting with them, and then adding others from my own memory, I've generated the list below, and I'm inviting your additions. But the two parameters are, they've got to be primarily coffee establishments, not just restaurants with good coffee; and they've got to be places I can walk to, just because places I can't walk to are places I'll never frequent.

The starting point is the Northwest Christian campus, and I'm willing to walk for up to an hour. That means I can make it to the far reaches of Willamette and the high 20s, but not places out on River Road, in Santa Clara, etc. I might entertain possibilities on Coburg Road, as I can walk there from my apartment.

With all those parameters set, here's the list so far. If you see holes in it, please fill them in.

• Espresso Roma
• The Buzz
• Dutch Brothers
• Full City
• Gary’s Coffee
• Wandering Goats
• Novella Café
• Perugino
• Bean Buzz
• Espresso Barn
• Midtown Coffee
• Java Generations
• Theo’s Coffee House
• Vero Espresso
• Amazon Coffee
• Allann Brothers Beanery
• Eugene Coffee Company
• Supreme Bean
• New Odyssey
• Café Aroma
• Quick Fix Coffee

(And no, before anyone asks it, I am not going to Starbucks!)

It was a very simple point

"To understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."

Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich are literally sick with fear that you might read the above paragraph. Why? Because it's the rest of what Sonia Sotomayor said. They've lied yet again, and their worst nightmare is that they'll get called on it. I'm more tempted by the minute to throw up my hands in despair that people fall for their garbage time after time.

What Sotomayor said was perfectly valid and needed saying, hearing, and taking seriously. The Supreme Court accepts all sorts of cases, including family law cases, hiring and firing cases, cases about police conduct during searches and arrests, just to name a very few examples. In each of them, understanding what exactly went on and what it meant is a difficult, complex task. The easy cases are filtered out by the lower courts: what reaches the Supreme Court is what no one else could resolve.

And have you ever noticed that both the Senate and the House of Representatives are diverse by design? They include people from all different parts of the country, because much of the legislation they consider looks very different to people who live in different places, and it's important to include all their perspectives in the vote. And have you noticed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff is made up of the heads of each of the different branches of military service? Whenever you must get the decision right, you've got to take input from people who bring every kind of background to the table. Refusing to do so, or even arguing against doing so, is sheerest imbecility. No one's proposing that we give Latina women all nine votes on the court. But Judge Sotomayor is saying it improves the Court's functioning to include one such vote, and she's dead right. Slam dunk. Not even close.

In my Organizational Communication class, we have a unit about diversity, and a lot of my students are surprised to find that among corporate CEOs, there's roughly zero-point-zero disagreement that diversity is good for business. In any organization, it's a powerful advantage, a generator of profits, to have people of different sexes, different races, different demographics of every description at the table, and the reason can be summed up as, they know things. They have different traditions upon which they draw, different experiences to bring to the discussion, identify with the public outside the organization a little differently, and in ways that add data to the decisionmaking pool. In the business journals, this is as obvious as gravity: diversity is good. Why a few wingnut loudmouths can't figure it out is a mystery to me, since you'd think as much as they worship at the feet of business leaders, they might pay some attention.

And yes, I know, there are some folks reading this who think that the law is simply the law, and interpreting it is no more complicated or ambiguous than double-checking the math after someone balances their checkbook. I'll refrain from calling that viewpoint stupid, in the face of very strong temptation. Instead, I'll just say that if that's your stance, then you don't know anything at all about the law. Nothing. You are miles and miles, light years upon light years, from understanding anything at all about legal decisionmaking. And anytime you're out of your depth, the humble and gracious and virtuous thing to do is to listen more than you talk. If you can't bring yourself to do that, and you simply must bray someone else's talking points over and over again, then be good enough to forgive us when we ignore you. Shh. Grownups are talking.

It was a very dirty trip

I last washed my car two years ago, give or take a month.

It struck me today that my car has Texas dirt on it.

And Oklahoma dirt.

Kansas dirt.

Colorado.

Wyoming. Utah. Idaho.

And Oregon dirt. Lots and lots of Oregon dirt.

I wonder, if I started an archeological dig on my car, would I find strata?

Artifacts?

And really, is there any reason I should put the effort into washing it?

That last one's not a rhetorical question. Can any of you think of a reason I should wash it? It's not as though I will, but if you've got one, at least I can feel properly guilty about not doing it.

It was a very bad thought

Here's a quick tip.

From now on, every time you hear anyone call Barack Obama in particular, or the Democratic Party in general, "Socialist," I want a little subtitle to pop up before your eyes, and it should translate their remark to this: I do not know what the word "socialist" means, and I have too little sense to avoid using words that I don't understand.

That's all.

It was a very good concert

Indigo Girls, with Matt Morris opening.

It was a very good year II

Post #100

Yesterday was a beautiful day, so we had class outside on the back porch of the Tri Pi sorority from Animal House. One of the afternoon's highlights was a visit by a pair of mallards, a drake and hen. They waddled up within a few feet of us, pecking at the odd bug, and continued on their way. I hoped they'd join the conversation with a "Mwack!" or two, but they weren't feeling talkative.

Parting

Last fall, one of the students in my Introduction to Communication class, a junior, came to my office and told me he wanted to switch his major to Communication. I knew him a little bit, and recognized that he was both likable and smart, so this was good news. He joined the forensics team and went to a tournament with us (no, he's not pictured below), and wrapped up Intro with solid work and a nice, high grade. Then he signed up for five, count them, five classes with me for this term. I joked with colleagues that after that kind of ordeal, he'd probably drop out.

Early this term, to my surprise, everything began to unravel. First, his attendance turned spotty, then he stopped turning in work, and finally, he just looked miserable in every class meeting. I sat him down in my office to ask if he was having problems, and we had a good talk. Despite that hopeful sign, all three patterns just accelerated: more skipped classes, more forfeited assignments. He became so disruptive in class that one day I had to bark at him, and another day I nearly threw him out. I announced syllabus revisions in all my classes to give myself authority to crack down, and that contained his behavior problems a bit, but the absences and zeros piled up. I worried about him much of the time, and began drafting in my head a tactful suggestion that he take some time off from school. He was just spinning his wheels, and his school experience had devolved into an empty charade. I had become more of an enforcer than an educator, and while that's also a form of teaching, it's not a good one. When it becomes a chronic problem instead of an occasional lapse, then radical changes are in order.

About a week ago, in the middle of a class discussion, he piped up and said he didn't like being told what to do, didn't like being required to follow assignment specifications in detail, didn't like having to be organized or systematic, and didn't understand why such things were necessary. He said his goal was to move the culture in the direction of authenticity and spontaneity, so no one would ever have to sweat over the minutiae of any kind of message. My suspicion, then and now, was that I wasn't hearing the output of his thinking, but the blowback of his frustration. He didn't truly think organization and detail were unimportant. I asked him a couple of probe questions about how, say, medical school should be taught, and he conceded that they're necessary in some contexts. But I think what I was hearing was exasperation passing the critical pressure and erupting. It certainly cast what happened next in an interesting light.

Yesterday afternoon, after skipping his (my, our) morning class, he came to my office and told me he was dropping out to enlist in the military. This from the guy who doesn't like to be told what to do. But it did mean he'd take himself out of the classroom and into a different environment, so I assured him right away that it was a good idea. He told me that most of his friends were opposed, since he's a second semester junior and could finish his degree in just one more year. But he had his parents' blessing; they said that if he was sure he'd be happier after the change, then they agreed. And I think they're probably right. True, he's going to bang his head against military discipline, but he won't be in a schoolroom anymore. I honestly think fifteen years of education burnt him out on this learning environment. He's got very distorted, romantic notions of what life is like outside the classroom, and at this point words are just bouncing off him. He's got to go see for himself.

My fervent hope and prayer is that this is an opportunity for him to grow, to rise to a challenge, to change his ways. I'm still fond of the kid, even though he's generated no end of stress and grief in my life, and the best news in the world would be to hear that he was thriving. He even hinted that after serving his hitch, his GI Bill benefits might bring him back here to school, but I don't expect that to happen. I think I'm seeing the last of him.

And last night, I grieved a little. This place is going to be different without him, and it's not the same kind of difference as saying goodbye to graduating seniors. That's poignant, but it's also a celebration and a success. It doesn't even feel the same as students transferring away, because at least there's a continuity and a next chapter ahead. This is a change that I hope, and have reason to believe, is positive and an improvement, but it's still a breaking off, a rupture, an unculminated, failed attempt at earning a degree. It feels right, but it doesn't feel good. Still, I woke up this morning in a much better mood about it, so I guess one night of grief isn't so bad. God's still got His eye on this kid.

Now, in about half an hour, I have to go to my morning class and nail a cheater. My week so far is not exactly an advertisement for my line of work.

Pescado/Pilgrimage

So on Saturday, I was enjoying a nice, slow breakfast at the OPH, poring over the Saturday Register-Guard, when I noticed in this year's People Choice Awards that second place for best sushi had gone to Izumi Sushi and Grill.

Izumi Sushi and Grill? I thought, wrinkling my brow. Then it hit me: there must be a new sushi place in town I'd never visited. And apparently a pretty good one.

Well, I said to myself, borrowing the words of the elder George Bush, this will not stand. And just a few hours ago, the Easter Bunny presented me with a first-time visit to Izumi.

泉 means "spring water," which strikes me as apt since I explored it on Easter Sunday, and also since it's located just a stone's throw from the McKenzie River, which supplies Eugene (and me) with tap water. And about five years ago, Organic Style magazine crowned it the best drinking water in the United States, so that's no faint praise. I will point out that the McKenzie flows out of the Cascade snowpack, so it's not exactly spring water, but no need to be pedantic. As restaurant names go, it's pretty nifty.

戴
き
ま
す

Lower left are two 鰻握り, eel nigiri. Upper middle are three 鮭巻き, salmon rolls. Lower middle is 鱈場蟹握り, king crab nigiri. And on the right side, from far to near, are とろ, toro, 鯖, mackerel, and 鱸, striped bass. The 麦酒 is 麒麟一番, naturally.

I tried the king crab because the odd associate of mine from Alaska recommended it quite wholeheartedly. Of course, that recommendation came with a warning that it has to be absolutely fresh to be any good. I hoped that Oregon was close enough to Alaska, and a good sushi place obsessive enough about the freshness of its product, that it might hit the mark. And I have to say, I was disappointed. It was crab meat. Nothing special. I mean, it wasn't bad. It wasn't, say, "imitation krab meat." But it's not something I'll order again.

The toro was also a letdown. I'm starting to think toro is mostly hype. I've had it a few different places now (Sushi Domo, Sada, and now Izumi) and it never lives up to my expectations. All the folks who say it's a delicacy must either have refinement to their palate that I'm missing, which is certainly possible, or else they're admiring the Emperor's new clothes.

The striped bass was nothing special. The mackerel and eel were both quite good, but they usually are. So far, nothing to rave about.

But oh. The mainstay of the meal. Oh my. Oh my my my my my.

Years and years ago I visited a place in Addison, Texas called Mr. Sushi. The sushi fans I knew in Texas always lowered their voices when they mentioned it. Once I finally scraped together enough scratch to afford a visit, I found out right away what they were whispering about. I popped tuna into my mouth and made a discovery.

I don't know if you can pinpoint a memory of first stumbling upon something new and wonderful. Maybe it's the first time you touched silk, or maybe it's the first time you smelled the perfume or cologne that hooked you. But it's an electric sensation, a combination of pleasure and utter surprise, a revelation, a sense of "This is all the more wonderful because I never dreamed this existed." That evening at Mr. Sushi, I finally understood all the yammering about appreciating sushi for its texture. It's a hard thing to describe. You've either experienced it, in which case you already know what I mean, or you haven't, and this won't help. But the tuna that night was firm, solid, had integrity, and then suddenly vanished when I bit down. I don't mean it was like cotton candy, insubstantial and unsatisfying; no, the farthest thing in the world from that. Biting down on it made it surrender, in a funny kind of way. It wouldn't dream of being stringy or tough or rubbery, because that would be rude, and this was an impeccably well-mannered mouthful of food. I slowed down to savor it, which I rarely do, and when it was gone, I wished for more. And dreamed of more for several nights following.

I went back to Mr. Sushi a number of times, hoping for a repeat performance. I usually enjoyed myself, but it was never quite as intense again. But tonight, at Izumi, the salmon was fully that good. As before, I was in awe of the food's texture, and even as I finished a mouthful and was convinced that I had a handle on how good it was, I always gave in to utter astonishment at how good the next one turned out to be.

Probably there's a point to this: the delicacies ranged from fair to mediocre, while the staple was spectacular. Probably there's an aesthetic principle at work. But why spoil a good meal by extracting too much lesson from it? Why chloroform a butterfly that's so beautiful, it takes your breath away?

ご
馳
走
様
で
し
た

Parody

I'm not sure where this came from. The person from whom I copied it said they found it in a Facebook group. My suspicion is that wasn't its origin, but who knows?

Regarding gay marriage, I don't think marriage should fall under government control at all, for either heterosexual or homosexual couples. The same legal force that (correctly) keeps prayer out of schools needs to keep badges out of weddings. But I'm also very, very pro-good argument and anti-bad argument, and, unfortunately, most of my Christian sisters and brothers are absolutely addicted to bad arguments. And what's listed below is a very impressive and entertaining demolition of some very bad arguments.

Enjoy.

Top 17 Reasons Why Gay Marriage is Wrong

17. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.


16. Gay culture is a new fad created by the liberal media to undermine long-standing traditions. We know this is true because gay sex did not exist in ancient Greece and Rome.


15. There are plenty of straight families looking to adopt, and every unwanted child already has a loving family. This is why foster care does not exist.


14. Conservatives know best how to create strong families. That is why it is not true that Texas and Mississippi have the highest teen birthrates, and Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire have the lowest. This is a myth spread by the liberal media.


13. Marriage is a religious institution, defined by churches. This is why atheists do not marry. Christians also never get a divorce.


12. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why our society has no single parents.


11. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.


10. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.


9. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.


8. Gay marriage should be decided by the people and their elected representatives, not the courts. The framers checked the courts, which represent mainstream public opinion, with legislatures created to protect the rights of minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Interference by courts in this matter is inappropriate, just as it has been every time the courts have tried to hold back legislatures pushing for civil rights.


7. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.


6. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because "separate but equal" institutions are a good way to satisfy the demands of uppity minority groups.


5. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.


4. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.


3. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.


2. Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.


1. METEORS and VOLCANOES.

Potty-training

No, no pictures this time. Pictures of potty training wouldn't be pretty.

It really, really stinks to be a baby. It stinks to be unable to move unless someone moves you, to be unable to see properly unless someone props you up and turns you in the right direction. A good portion of babies' crying is nothing but frustration at how helpless they are, until, little by little, they master their equipment, and become capable of moving themselves. Then all that pent-up desire and curiosity comes gushing out like a fire-hose, and that's what we call the terrible twos. Speaking of gushing out like a fire-hose, that's right around the time for potty-training. True, for some kids, all of that plays out prior to their second birthday, but I worked in a church nursery with two-year-olds the entire time I was in high school, and nearly all of them had at best a sketchy mastery of potty usage.

So, I got to thinking about potty-training this morning. A few things occurred to me.

• For the parents, it obviously can be a frustrating time: lots more messes that are gross, a fair measure of embarrassment, and the maddening reality that the kid may not be in any hurry to complete the changeover.


• For some kids, the prospect of potty-training is downright scary. Some find that big ol' appliance in the bathroom just a little intimidating. Some are troubled by the flush.


• For some kids, it's clear what to do and how to do it, but it's just too much hassle. Because they're still very new at getting from place to place and manipulating their toys in the proper fashion to have fun, it's a major investment of time to hike off to the bathroom and go through the proper motions for a mess-free defecation, and sometimes they just don't want to sacrifice.


• And really, all that's available to the parents is helping the child understand how it works, and then encouraging and reminding, all the while applying a light touch. Getting worked up or heavy-handed has two problems: it's equally likely to backfire as to succeed, and even if it does succeed, it leaves unwanted trauma in its wake.

Strange thing to be thinking about, I agree. But it floated into my head and stayed for a visit because of its uncanny resemblance to a struggle that virtually all college students have.

College students are a lot like toddlers. They're mastering their equipment, so when they try to carry out normal adult tasks, many times their efforts are slow, incomplete, sloppy, or not very well thought out. But at the same time, they're operating off this huge, pent-up gush of frustration and desire for autonomy that goes back years and years, all the way to, well, toddlerhood. Now that autonomy has (mostly) arrived, they're giddy with it, which means that sacrificing even a little bit of it for a clean and orderly outcome can seem like too much. Plus, the work itself may seem intimidating or scary, and procrastination works as a turning away, a refuge. Not a safe or permanent one, but one that's easy to hand.

All the while, we who work with them wait impatiently for the discovery that procrastination is not what people who want to succeed, or even just want a low-stress life, should practice. While they labored under the supervision of parents and high school teachers, the tempo was set for them: daily homework, daily parental insistence that they complete it before turning their attention to anything enjoyable. Effectively, the parents and teachers changed their diapers. Then, they arrived at college, and it was time to get potty-trained in a hurry.

And I know that I'd get better results if I could follow the advice I set down above for potty-training: if I could model the behavior, explain its benefits, and then wait for them to grasp on their own how much better their lives could be if they applied responsible, well-paced effort to their assignments. The problem is, the calendar is the boss of all of us. Pediatricians can tell young parents, "Don't worry; the child will pick up potty training on her/his own at the right time. They're not going to have to take their potty to college with them." Sound advice. But when I've only got fifteen weeks to deliver content and measure their mastery of it, there simply isn't the luxury of surplus time for them to mull over the merits of planning far ahead and distributing large tasks over many work sessions. Instead, I have to rig the classes to reward those who do, and leave those who don't defenseless against the consequences they heap up, and then dig in my heels and be ruthless about carrying out what I've constructed.

But it's the perennial struggle. If I, or anyone else, ever finds a way to help college kids tackle their work and do it in manageable bites, instead of bragging to one another about how cute and charming and awesome it is that they wait and pull all-nighters to get uncomplicated projects done, then the biggest portion of their stress will fade, and their biggest waste of effort and energy will be channeled into something more productive.

And, of course, I'm over-romanticizing. If I didn't have this problem to bash my head against, it'd be something else. That's simply the way the world works.

Pobrecito

Today we had a one-day tournament on the NCU campus. We named it for the little guy in the first three pictures. I won't post his name here, because posting pictures of a child together with a name on an open blog isn't the world's wisest move. But the rest of the pictures are of the (other) kids competing. A good time was had by all.

Periodistas

Last Wednesday, I saw the Newsboys in concert just a few blocks from my office. Here are some mementos. In proper Memento fashion, I've got them posted backwards, with the headliner on top, and the opening acts (Decemberadio, Vota, Bread of Stone) in reverse order of appearance below.