41 down, 525 to go

41. I have had periods of days, weeks, or months when I couldn?t take care of things because I couldn?t get going.

False. I have had periods of days when I didn't take care of things because I didn't want to get going. I am lucky in that I have not experienced the extent of depression to which the item refers. Of course, I am lucky in countless ways. As far as I know, my unluckiness has extended only to minor concerns (e.g., forgetting to bring a lunch to work today).

posted by Chris at 11:01 AM

On Rhetoric 2

First, a friend of ours had notoriously exciting rhetoric classes that may offer a good game or two. (She's also a medievalist who has studied Victorian saint's lives.) Her classes used to be online, but I can't find them anymore.

Second, my student workshops always went terribly. I didn't know how to control them, and so I didn't control them very well. As such, I rarely got good revisions. What I found helpful, eventually, was a secondary paper to go with a revision. I came to ask my students to supply (along with their revised essay) a defense of their work. "The defense should 1) describe what was changed and 2) explain why your changes make this a better essay." This revision assignment was designed for a lit class in which reviews were the primary text; in it you can see the defense request.

You might like a homework assignment that can be tweaked to emphasize descriptive writing. What makes it work I think is the surreptitiousness of the writing.

I mentioned below that an entire class could be developed over congressional hearings. I realized today that the assignment I made for that could be made into good in-class work. Adjust as befits it.

Who should survive? bangs out at least one class, but could be adapted to two.

I did most of my grammar teaching individually. The past two years, when I've noticed any student with bad problems, in my (typed) responses to their essays I would supply them contextual links to Purdue's OWL (which Kathy mentioned below). If the student had really bad problems, I'd make them correct every problem after reading the links I supplied. Sometimes I'd make a transparency from their own workthey hated that.

posted by Greg at 1:24 PM

That special Valentine gift

V-day is comingwhat are you buying for your special feline friend? Or perhaps you have a child on the way. We have the perfect gift for either! Introducing...

Ropy Shoe Board!

(Such is the birthright of unemployment)

posted by Greg at 1:39 AM

synthesis?

Interesting summary by William Saletan of Hillary Clinton's latest abortion/contraception-related remarks.

i wonder if he is right about her position? whether or not he is, there is a significant proportion of "anti-abortion" people who would be comfortable with rape/incest exceptions. likewise, there are plenty of "anti-criminalization-of-abortion" people who would like to see a near-zero frequency of abortions. rather than focusing exclusively on the actual moment of abortion, conceptualizing an actual abortion as an end-point in a process implicating economic/cultural/sexual forces seems more likely to actually reduce the number of abortions than does all the normal pro-choice/pro-life posturing. contrary to all the binary acopolyptic posturing from both extremes, it may be possible to satisfy an overwhelming majority of people on both sides of this issue.

could a position like the one saletan envisions be at least temporarily attractive enough synthesis of the thesis and antithesis to generate some productive movement/discussion on this issue?

posted by Chris at 3:59 PM

Condi, Condi

An offering of song in honor of the confirmation of America's new Secretary of State. Congratulations!

Oh Condi Condi beggin' on my knees
Open up your heart and let me in wontcha please
Got no money but everybody knows
I love you Condi and I'll never let you go
Sweet and dandy pretty as can be
You be the flower and I'll be the bumble be
Oh she loves me oops she loves me not
People say you're could but I think you're hot

Oh, Condi, Condi
Oh, Condi, Condi

Oh Condi, Condi I'm talkin' to you girl
What's it gonna hurt come on give me a whirl
Shake your body now let me see you go
One time for me Oh Condi I love you so
Skank for me Condi show me what you got
They say you're too uptight I say you're not
Dance around me spinnin' like a top
Oh Condi Condi Condi don't ever stop

Oh Condi Condi Can't you hear me call
I'm standin' in the street outside your garden wall
Pocketful of money belly full of wine
Condi in my heart and romance on my mind
Listen to me Condi don't be afraid
I come here tonight to chase your blues away
I'll never urt you I'll treat you right
Oh Condaleeza won't you come out tonight

Pretty little Condi precious as can be
Bet you never had another lover like me

Steve Earle

posted by Greg at 6:45 PM

movies

one thing people have told us...along with sleep and go out to eat is go to as many movies as you can. we have only barely followed that. but, when compared to the writing of the dissertation, we have seen many more movies in the past 2 months than we have in a long, long time.

over the xmas break we told the parents that they had to see "pieces of april" because it was the best holiday movie ever. (i was the one speaking. and this is hyperbole only because it's in the subjective.) for those who haven't seen this jewel (which came out on dvd last year and we bought), it is by the same guy that wrote "what's eating gilbert grape," peter hedges. it's the only film he's directed. it has an absolutely stellar cast that understands real acting is subtle: katie holmes is april, patricia clarkston (an absolutely goddess of control and nuance), and oliver platt (one of hollywood's top character actors) are stellar. but so are lillias white and isiah whitlock jr. (they play a married couple and it is as if they had been married for the 25 years that the script says they have been.)

what makes this movie the best holiday movie, in my estimation, is that it takes all the crap that comes out over the table and presents that as part of the journey to the meal. april, the rebellious older child, lives in the lower east side, in a dump of an apartment. her family lives in suburban pennsylvania. joy, the mother, is dying of cancer. the movie moves between the family's trip into the city and april's comedy of errors in the kitchen as she tries to cook the family's favorites, despite not knowing how to cook. in case anyone wants to see it, i will refrain from saying anything else about the plot. except, the movie is about mother, daughter reconciliation. each works through their own issues with each other as they undergo the ordeal of preparing for the moment of arrival and encounter.

finding neverland, johnny depp was stellar. i realize that it is unfair to both to compare them to each other, but the beauty of depp is that he is, in a real sense, a character actor, despite being a mega star. he disappears into his roles and becomes unrecognizable, tom cruise, on the other hand, (see i told you this would be unfair) is never anybody but bombastic tom cruise, parading around in his whitie-tighties while his parents are away for the weekend. but i digress. finding neverland was visually stimulating and worth seeing because of depp's and winslet's portrayals. but at the end of the movie it rings false. neverland is, as we can all imagine, a magical place where you can escape world and its problems. to go there you simply must believe and use your imagination.

depp befriends winslett, a widow, and her passel of boys. this provides depp's wife an excuse to go ahead and leave him. winslett, however, is dying of consumption (one assumes). and eventually does die. standing at the grave depp says: "i believed that we were going to go on forever." but, the cold reality of the world proves that this was just wishful thinking. the movie ends with one of the boys, the boy named peter who all along mistrusted depp's love of fancy, telling depp how much he missed his mother, to which depp says "well, you can go see her neverland." when they boy asks how, depp responds: "just believe."

last night we saw "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind." largely, all i can say is that i wish i had written this review. i walked away from the movie more amazed by the director than jim carey. because what you witness in this movie, more than a stellar performance by jim, is as edelstein writes "the straightjacketing of carey." after watching the dvd with all the bonus yum-yums (yes, i am one of those. yes, i should be writing and article or planning out my book), i realized how much of carey's performance was trying to keep him off kilter so that he wouldn't slip into his protective performance antics. in fact, the two most human moments of carey's performance are moments when winslett, following the advice of the director, surprises carey.

wheres i really liked "being john malcovich," i, like edelstein, thought that the end fell apart. and, i never was bowled away by "adaptation". in fact, i thought that "full frontal" was a better "critique" of hollywood than "adaptation" even down to the character with "writer's block." but "eternal" i really, really liked all the way through. on the one hand, i think it shows the maturation of kaufman as a writer, but also, after listening to the commentary between the director and charlie kaufman, i realized that the strength of the movie is that it has improved on kaufman. instead of fully obeying the script, the hands of many people during the filming and post-production tinkered with it and helped make it a truly worthwhile film.

well, i better go write that article!

posted by Jeremy at 9:54 AM

On rhetoric

Unfortunately my time teaching rhetoric was also my baptism-by-fire into teaching, period. Two years out of college and skinny as a rail, and I had only a one week seminar to show me how to prepare much less to help me prepare. On top of that, I was bound by a slave curriculum. To teach rhetoric at Iowa is to incorporate six major assignmentsthree essays, three speeches, all of them workshop'dinto a semester without luxury of a finals week. My ad hoc solution to the work was to set my students to read provocative texts in order to spice up discussion and to give them assignments that predicated the important challenges without much planned help from me. As a result, my lesson plans were often either improvised or without much pragmatic merit. I realized that teaching rhetoric was about teaching how (how to analyze a text or an audience; how to develop an argument; how to judge the effectiveness of your work) only after I moved from that department to literature and had the responsibility of reteaching rhetoric students by tutoring them in the writing center. Looking back, if I had rhetoric to teach all over again, I would bore my students to death by drilling them with series upon series of rhetorical situations and asking them to argue their way out of it:

Greg: Your best friend and leader has just been murdered by a bunch of his friends but only you know who did it. You've been asked to speak at his funeral in front of a thousand angry citizens. What do you say? And more importantly, why do you say it?

Do something of the sort every single dayor perhaps once or twice a week since students are prone to get boredand they may hate you, but boy would they absorb what they need to know.

But what I would do is not what I did. Nor is it what I have. What I have instead are a few primary assignments that seemed to work. Most are written specifically for the curriculum at Iowa, but they could be adapted pretty easily. That curriculum was steeped in controversy: the purpose was to initiate students in the ways of public discourse by asking them to argue to their hearts' content about abortion, censorship, war policy, elections. But then, they couldn't argue, either. First they had to master analysis of any single position; second, they had to expand those skills to analyze multiple positions within the controversy (first called "mapping," now "describing"); third, they became advocates. Or that was the intent. What I learned about assignment writing (both from writing my own and from reading tons of bad assignments as a writing center tutor) is that none of that stuff matters really. What does matter are the verbs. Most important in an essay assignment: write. Of secondary but approximate importance is write-how: define, categorize, explain, demonstrate, explore (students seem to take longer to learn this one than others). I think all of the assignments below are workable because with them I realized (consciously or otherwise) that verbs mattered most. You'll see in them something of what I spoke earlier when I projected what my new rhetoric class would be. Basically, it's this: when you are pressed for time, dictate the limits of what you want your students to learn and don't worry about much else. If you want them to analyze an audience, assign them an audience to whom they should speak. (One of my favorite speech assignments asked the class to speak to octogenarians at a conference.) Actually, that's pretty good advice for any class, so it's probably the case that you know it already. Still, much of this was my hardest task as a teacher. I could invent assignments to sing, but ask me to show how to sing in class, and I would blanche in embarrassment. That's why, I think, I began incorporating web sites with announcement pages in them: what I couldn't say, I could write later. (I could also write what I did say.) It doesn't work as effectively, perhaps, but it's what I did.

So enough rambling. Here's a few assignments, with notes, from rhetoric. Need I say you have my permission to use/revise them as you will?

• The unit for this was a fun one. We had read Flowers in the Dustbin and were reading further the US Senate hearings ca. Tipper Gore's censorship campaign. Transcripts from Senate hearings are wonderful rhetoric readings. (Think audience, argument, etc.) If you have any access to Gov't records (or Lexis-Nexis) you can get a'plenty. A great rhet. class could be built around only readings such as that.
• I don't know if you'll be able to do much with this. It's linked pretty specifically to our readings. Much of it is about recognizing parallels between 1950s cultural battles and today. I'm still not sure why that's an important task to master, unless it's to say, Look! American public concerns do not change that swiftly!
• What's good here: situational writing; what's bad: everything else. Supposedly my class at this stage had a continuing research project.
• I liked the idea of journal assignments. I also liked the notion of asking students to publish them in some way. This one was linked to a class Listserv.

So that's what I've got. I've a few more assignments that are linked even more closely to the class I was teaching if you'd like to see them. I could also supply a few speech assignments that could be altered. Or I could delve into my lit assignments. What, specifically, is the challenge (other than time) of the class? On what do you want to focus?

posted by Greg at 9:33 AM

me and the nyt

among my bookmarks is the "25 most sent stories" from the nytimes. this is a time-saving way to keep up with what is in the big newspaper and to find examples of real-world trends and behavior to talk about in my classes.

tonight i read about witness intimidation by street gangs, newt gingrich's health care positions, an editorial about social security, and a book review of malcolm gladwell's new book.

(quick social security questionnot to start any arguments, but if some portion of social security should be invested in the stock market, why can't that be done collectively rather than by establishing indiviual accounts? that is, why not just invest some percentage of the entirety of social security's funds rather than going through the hassle/controversy of individual private accounts? wouldn't this distribute the risk in a gentler way...if investing social security in the market would result in a net increase of value, wouldn't it be better to have everyone become a mid-range "winner" than to have some big winners and some big losers? probably i just don't understand something fundamental.)

the social security editorial opened with a description of loss aversionhow people are relatively more sad over losing something they have (e.g., $50) than they are happy when they win the same something (e.g., $50). (i.e., the widow would be more pissed about losing her mite than she would have been happy when she got a mite in the first place.) this is a nice social psychological principle that we used to talk about in grad school.

similarly, the gladwell book review mentioned four or five studies that i talk about in the classes i teach. in addition, the reviewer added to my odd feeling of familiarity with his review by name-checking a book about intuition written by one of my mentors.

one of the studies cited by gladwell and described in the review was one that i sort-of replicated with two of my students this semester. the idea of the original study was that peoplewithout noticingassimilate their behavior (e.g., score either poorly or well on a trivia quiz) to groups that they have been thinking about (e.g., supermodels or professors), but, if people have been thinkig about individuals instead of groups, theywithout noticingcontrast their behavior with the individual exemplars that they have been thinking about (e.g., Cindy Crawford or Einstein). in our little replication study, people who had just written about homer simpson in what they thought was "Study #1" did more creative work in what they thought was "Study #2" than did people who had described leonardo da vinci in "Study #1." basically, our little study applied the rationale of the original study to creative behavior (i.e., writing a haiku).

i like gladwell. he talks a lot about social psychology in an accessible and (perhaps too) enthusiastic tone. i used to talk about his tipping point book with my high school students back in the day. he does a good job of describing research without really distorting it. but, more importantly, he helps remind the rest of the world that we post-modern, ivory-tower psychologists do something that is worthwhile and that we often raise interesting questions for us all to think about...which is what we get paid to do.

posted by Chris at 9:25 PM

genealogy of the kitchen

my love of good food i got from my father; my love of cooking from my mother. my mother learned her love from her mother. but, in the case of both my mom and myself, neither of us learned to cook, really cook, until we had homes of our own. in college i cooked some. in fact, i cooked enough to make an arrangement with t: she would cook the books and i would cook the food. but it wasn't until the vows were said and cooking became a daily task that i really began to cook. the same goes for my mother. she had the good fortune of living in italy when she learned to cook, and so has a repetoire of classic italian dishes that have always been a part of her kitchen. even though she's a great cook and she isn't much of an improviser. a few of her signature recipes she does things by intuition, but even these the ingredients are rather set.

my dad, on the other hand, is notorious in the kitchen for creating some of the worst culinary disasters in the history of cooking. every once in a while he can make something that is good, though i can't remember what it was. he solidly takes something that's good and ruins it. most trips home, though this one was an exception, dad'll get in the kitchen and make soup with leftover turkey. the soup is bubbling away and he's gotten it to a perfect turkey based minestrone and something in him snaps. you can see it in his eyes, a sense of accomplishment comes into his eyes and he then gets a look that's a mix between the che's iconic heavenward gaze and captain kirk's going where no man has gone before. he then swings the fridge's doors wide open and begins rooting, much like a hog after truffles, for whatever leftover remains in the kitchen and this gets dropped into the soup. so the well-balanced minestrone soon finds itself with leftover sausage from breakfast of the day before, the spinach from three nights ago, the pork and beans from lunch. his ventures into the kitchen have twice created the most obscene, most foul creations on god's green earth. one was for a mother's day dinner when i was 13. his gift was homemade lunch, but more than lunch. he was also doing mom the favor of cleaning out the fridge of all the uneaten remains. his philosophy of cooking has always been as long as it boils it'll kill the germs. the irony of this is that it comes from a man who would serve two parmesans at his table, one for him (real, grated, block parmesan from padano), and one for guests (kraft, since they wouldn't know the goodstuff from the bad anyway). well, this concoction, which would have made the three hags from macbeth proud, was inedible. not matter how long you boil moldy, rotten cheese, it still tastes like moldy, rotten cheese (and despite blue cheese being mold, there is a big difference between cheedar gone bad and heavenly roquefort). needless to say, mom burst into tears at the table and we went for a late lunch to one of the swanker italian restaurants in santo domingo, despite it being slightly more than our budget could take. the other was one summer on break from college. a college friend was down to spend the summer with dad to see if medical missions was what he wanted to do. somehow dad came into the possesion of an ungodly number of cabbages and about 25lbs of green peanuts. i can only hope that the reason for combining the two was nutritional (protein plus ruffage...yum!), but he proceded to cook these together with a jar of mustard. it was utterly inedible. neither my friend, who was a good sport and did his best to eat my dad's cooking, nor i could eat it. after about three days of eating it, out of principal, dad decided that it was indeed an offense against god and country and threw it away.

tonight i made a stew that i will never be able to make again. we had a bunch of africans (about 7 sudanese boys) over for dinner. a week and a half ago, we were having people over, i'd made a braised brisket in a zinfandel wine sauce. it had onions, carrots and celery. i only used half the meat and we ate maybe a third of the dish. the fresh meat and the meat and vegetables from the brisket went into the stew. (i had frozen it, so it was still good.) then, a week ago, i made a french onion soup for t and me and we had leftovers. this went into the stew as well. and i got scared. i get scared most any time i am improvising in this way...i think...oh god, it's happening. i am turning into my father in the kitchen. i am going to make something so utterly inedible that it will be my downfall. thankfully, the stew was rather quite good.

i owe my love of cooking to my mother, and the fear that keeps my cooking grounded to my dad.

posted by Jeremy at 9:10 PM

Potatoes and Tomatoes: An American Romance

Just think without the discovery, we would have neither potatoes nor tomatoes, neither vodka nor gnocchi.

Sweet Red Pepper-Bacon-Vodka-Cream Sauce

Ingredients
Cream to taste
(up to a 1/2 cup of cream, depending on the amount of sauce you are adding to)
1/3 cup vodka separated
1 box 26 oz. crushed, strained tomatoes
(I use POMI, an Italian brand that comes in a box, it?s great, it has no salt and no additives and is already blended and smooth)
2 onions minced
2 cloves garlic mashed and minced
1 Roasted Red Bell Pepper
(I use the toaster oven to roast. I put in on about 400 and turn it every five minutes or so. You want to char the skin, but not the flesh. Once the outside is charedit doesn't have to be fully chared, just enough to get the skin to peel and for the sugars to make themselves known. I pull it out, peel it and chopp it up.)
≈- 1/3 lb bacon, chopped and fried
1 ˝ Tbs brown sugar
(you can use refined sugar, but I like the taste of the brown)
Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking Instructions
Fry bacon
(I chop it up before frying)
Remove fried bacon
Sautee onions, in bacon grease
(Or, if you are wanting your food to be a little more heathful, and often, we are, use olive oil to sauteing)
Add garlic
(Sautee, but do not burn garlic.)
Add roasted red peppers.
Sautee 2-3 minutes.
Add 1/2 of vodka, reduce while stiring
Add tomatoes
Bring to boil
Add a dash of salt and pepper
Add sugar
Add remaining vodka
(and, if this sauce is to be used immediately, add cream to taste)
Reduce heat
Simmer for about 30 minutes or until thick.

I usually store this sauce, sans cream, in the fridge and pull out enough sauce for whatever meal we are going to have.
When I reheat this sauce, I add salt to taste and enough cream to make it pink. If I add cream to the whole recipe, I usually add half a cup or so.

For the veggies among us, use only olive oil. I would add a cup of Rapunzel Vegan stock, for flavor. And would play with either a sage version or a basil, thyme variation. I would add 1 or 2 bay leaves to both.

Gnocchi

There are 1001 ways to peel a potato and do the simplest task. This is the gnocchi recipe I use. It is easy, if somewhat labor intensive.

*2 ˚ lbs potatoes, peeled whole and steamed. About 30.
(If you boil the potatoes, they get too H2O logged and dissolve when you try and cook the gnocchi.)
*Mash the potatoes with a little bit of salt and 1 ˝ cups of all-purpose flour.
*On a floured surfaceRoll out the potato-flour mixture into nickle sized rolls .
*Cutt off about ˝ an inch and roll them into balls, or ovals, whatever you preffer.
(My mother makes indentations in her gnocchi with the tines of a fork, this seems like more trouble than it's worth IMHO).
(It is important that you try to make them about the same size.)
(Don't stack the rolled gnocchi on top of each other; they will stick to each other and create quite the headache. If you have to make it ahead of time, place them on a greased cookie sheet, and separate with waxed paper in between the layers. This can be stored in the fridge for a day or two.)
*Cook in a large pot full of very salted boiling water.
*The gnocchi will rise to the top once they are cooked and you skim them off.
*It takes anywhere from 2-5 minutes for this heavenly pasta to rise.

posted by Jeremy at 11:29 AM

school

well, thanks for the response on the salad. if you would like, i will post another recipe. it is my vodka, roasted red pepper, bacon, tomato, cream sauce. (for the veggies, leave out the bacon, though this is central to the flavor, instead i would play with a combination of spices either just sage or a combination of thyme and basil and use rapunzel vegan bouillonmy favorite is the one with herbs). it goes good on almost any pasta, but is especially meant for gnocchi.

i have the beginning of a post in the queue, another one of the family visit that is also a movie review, but i've been too busy getting my classes together. thus, as well, i have been noticeably absent from the very engaging techie discussion. kudos to greg and chris for taking it on.

yes, school starts up tomorrow and instead of doing what i should, which is making sure that i know how the first day will go, i am posting here. i am nervous and excited about the two classes. one is an advanced undergraduate course on travel writing. we begin in the 21st century reading tourist travel accounts and move backwards towards the colonial era. this way we will move from the familiar to the less familiar, from travel as entertainment to travel as science, exploration, hegemonic control of empire, etc and end with Columbus' journey. the second is a graduate class solely on colonial writing where we will spend most of our time looking at figurations of the native.

posted by Jeremy at 10:37 PM

Reminder

Chris, don't forget to include meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" between the head tags. Otherwise, all the Mozilla browsers (Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox, Camino) as well as Opera will look way too codey. When (God forbid) I must use Windows, I prefer those Mozilla ones to Internet Explorer.

posted by Greg at 1:13 AM

while at my parents...or a conversation while chopping wood

as my dominican sisters have gotten older and my dad's step-mom has gotten worse with alzheimers, the family traditions begun when they were first "home" from being on the mission field have slowly disappeared. well, it helps that my sister, her husband and their four childern, are now in chile. they were always into baking and playing parlor games. our family traditions, in fact, were precisely this: baking an ungodly amount of sweets and playing dominoes or cards late into the night. but at some point they fell and rolled under one of the living room couches and nobody's picked 'em up.

that we don't bake our own army of sweets is good. it's good for the waistline and only slightly good for family sanity. cooking in my house, which can often be an entire family affair, at times is a wonderful experience, at others it is hell itself and my father is the arch-demon sent to torture us all. when it goes well, the task of mixing and chopping ingredients and dropping them on cookie sheets creates a space where we can talk. the menial task lowers our inhibitions and we have the most varied of conversations. well, varied is an exageration. they typically are theological or exegetical in nature. typically, as well, i walk away realizing that i read the bible in a radically different way than the rest of my family. when these culinary experiences are bad...they're bad. dad senses something is wrong and attacks the task at hand with a zealous fervor. in a way, i think he hopes that by attending to the details of the process the joy of the good times will somehow come back. however, this turns him into the worst kind of micromanager of all and us into resisting burros who can only find fault in the strange concoctions he devises.

but cooking did not happen and games were mentioned only once. and this, two days into our stay after sunday lunch. but much like the buzzards in a jungle tale, everybody just sat around and repeated, "so, we gonna play a game?" but, in house with a grandmother whose alzheimer's is so advanced that she practically has no short term memory, a semi-autistic child who had already gone outside and begun to sing her lungs out, a 21 year-old who doesn't know what she wants to do with her life but who hates being back home with the parents, a 14 year-old girl who wants to be respected by her older sister and who wonders why her other sister always gets her way, and an 82 year-old grandmother, my mom's mom, who has just found out she's got alzheimer's as well and can't stand the thought of ending up like my dad's step-mom, i knew that no game was going to be played. so, i got up and went to chop wood.

this fall, the parents had a huge oak taken down. it was dying and about to fall on their house. but, they hadn't split it yet. i, being the dutiful son...but also being someone who loves, yes, loves, to chop wood, spent our 4 days at home with wood maul in hand, swinging away.

after about 30 minutes or so dad came out to help me. it seems everyone else, besides t, who had gone to rest in the back, was doing their favorite thing, watching the pablum parade of lifetime's best holiday movies.

dad came out and choping wood became that space of conversation. i tried to convince him that my vote for the democratic ticket was just as morally defensible as the vote for the republican ticket. and, that despite the religious right upholding bush as a paragon of moral virtue, i couldn't understand why he surrounded himself with morally reprehensible characters and why his campaigns (both of them) rarely had problems with "character assasination." in the end, i only convinced him to go back to his previous position, which was to abstain from voting, something he has proudly done since mcgovern. i believe it was mcgovern that he voted for. we talked about how uncomfortable we both are with the religious right's belief that this nation is a new israel. yet, we end up on opposite sides of things even then. because i firmly believe in the separation of church and state (for all the reasons liberals believe in this but also because i believe that it corrupts the church), i have no problem with gay marriage or gay rights. we talked about how strange it is to see the cofc becoming political. we talked about how troubling it is that american individualism plays as large a role in american spirituality as it does. we decided, much to t's chagrin, to go to church that evening.

morning church was an awful experience. we walked in and the church, which has always been classic 1960's ugly, functional cofc aesthetics, had morphed into a blindingly white, clausterphobic (the foyer, at least) space that tries to imitate the t.v. church look. the auditorium, with it's clear plastic pulpit and free standing mics, had fake fica trees surrounded by billowy cotton that was lit up with white xmas lights was a gaudy, visually distracting place, but not as distracting as the powerpoint.

apparently, my parents church has decided to become the leaders of the area when it comes to multimedia (except music, of course) and they have a very high-tech auditorium. the sermon that morning was a tag-team affair, a father-son effort. the son is the fulltimer, the father preaches for another congregation. the son's sermon was the rather standard fare of jesus as pop-psychology guru. come to jesus and he will help you with leave your "baggage" in the past, where it belongs. the father's was different and, i thought, a rather well delivered sermon. but, at a certain moment he began speaking of peter walking on the water. his verbal images were really quite good, they put you in the moment. but, the powerpoint showed hawaiian beach scenes. he was talking about the power of a storm, the darkness, the danger and before us was a beautiful, perfect pipe-line wave of torquoise water with an azure sky above it and white sandy beaches. in fact, in one of the two slides, in the upper left-hand side, you could see a little black dot of a man surfing. the second rather distracting moment was when he wanted to say something about fear (and i've utterly forgotten the point he was making), he flashed up two yellow eyed lemurs. their big saucer eyes, i suppose, were to communicate fear. but there was a collective "awww" throughout the congregation and my 82 year-old grandma leaned over and said: "aren't they cute?"

still, despite all that, dad and i decided we needed to go hear the sermon that night. the father was going to talk about "the Spiritual Discipline of Guidance." given our conversation at the wood pile, and the title of the sermon, we assumed it was to be about elders guiding the flock, older men guiding younger men in the ways of God, etc. something more akin to monkish lifestyles than modern american cowboy spirituality. unfortunately, it turned out to be a sermon on how you, all by yourself, can determine God's will for your life. and we went back home, to eat, to converse around the table and to sleep.

posted by Jeremy at 10:28 PM

Transcript: Family Breakfast

Do you remember?who was that dictator who died last month?
Saddam Hussein?
Yeah, Saddam!
Saddam Hussein's not dead.
Well, when that dictator died. I'm pretty sure it was Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein didn't die!
Shoot! Then who was it?
Fidel Castro?
Was it Castro? Or Hussein?
Castro's not dead, either.
It had to be Hussein!
Pinochet.
No, Pinochet's not dead. He's been in the news because he was convicted of crimes against humanity.
Anyway, when that dictator died we were watching Without a Trace. Are you sure it wasn't Saddam?
Arafat?
Yeah! Arafat! It made us so mad! Everybody knew he was going to die, and then there was five minutes of Without a Trace left. The news guy interrupted the show. We missed the last five minutes! It made a lot of people mad. And nobody cared about the guy. They fired the guy who did it.
Who got fired?
So many people complained that they fired the news guy!
Which news guy? At the network, or at the local affiliate?
At the network!
Why would they fire somebody for that? It was pretty significant.
But nobody cared about Arafat. Everybody knew he was going to die.
It was like when they preempted the football game for Heidi.
It was a playoff game. The New York Giants were ahead with five minutes to go. And then they started Heidi.
But that was a big deal because Oakland came back to win the game.
It was just like it. They apologized. But nobody cared about the guy.
It wasn't just like the game! One was live TV that was interrupted by a prerecorded show; the other was a prerecorded show interrupted by a significant news event!
But nobody cared about the guy! And the news was about to start anyway.
Didn't they show Without a Trace the next night? They usually do that when they interrupt a show.
Yeah they showed it the next night, but then you had to watch the whole darn thing again to see the last five minutes.
You could have just watched the last five minutes.
Well, they shouldn't have done that.

posted by Greg at 10:53 PM

yes, i know i promised...

i promised a run down of the rather awful power point sermon and the family drama, i know i've promised an entry about school, if not two or three, yes i know i never told you guys about what happened after i sent the letter (revised) to the pastor (we haven't yet met for lunch). but, for the moment, i hope that this salad i came up with while at my parents will apease you.

Fennel, Pear, Avocado Salad
(comment: the fat of the avocado goes really nicely sweetness of the pears)

Ingredients

1. Dark leafy greens - (comment: I've made it twice, once with just Spinach, and once with Escarole, Romaine and Leafy Green)
   
2. 1 avocado, diced or sliced thinly
3. 1/2 of a bulb of Fennel, diced or sliced thinly
4. 1 - 2 Bosc Pears, diced or sliced thinly - (comment: dicing vs. slicing all depends on presentation...slicing is more elegant, imho)
   
5. dash of sea salt
6. dash of cracked pepper - (comment: you can leave this out)
7. 1- 1 1/2 limes, squeezed
8. white wine vinegar
9. olive oil

Add to serving bowl, leaving some of ingredients 2, 3, 4 out.

Toss.

Arrange the remaining fennel, avocado and pear on top, simply for aesthetics.

(comment: i am contemplating sending this into to Cooking Light (TM) if you try it and like it let me know. if you don't go jump off a cliff :-P. you must, however, like the three antonomastic ingredients. though, i would be remiss if i didn't say, t doesn't like fennel, but she likes this salad)

posted by Jeremy at 2:04 PM