A Learning Experience

I think I have yet to learn the simple value of being okay with myself.

I’m still overweight, still not doing much, still resisting making those changes that I need to make. And now I’m very envious of the success of a friend. I really couldn’t say who, so let’s just say that this person is doing a lot of the things I wish I could do or have done, and arguably this person has fought through harder circumstances to get there than I have. So, I should simply be happy for this person, right?

I’m trying. But still, there’s that part of me that is always measuring up against other people, no matter who they are, and evaluating for signs of weakness. And because it’s a large sample to evaluate against, I’m always going to come up short. I’m always not going to be good enough.

I know it’s easy to go back to high school and think it was all in those years, but let’s face it–middle and high schools are essentially the absolute worst place to have a kid socialize with others. Cliques form around various things, whether it be money, taste in lifestyle, activity, or whatnot, and when you have groups, you have outsiders. In high school I often wondered about trading intelligence for that social standing and whether I’d take that trade.

Even these days, to some extent, I feel like an outsider. I don’t have many really close friends, people to whom I could tell anything, and there aren’t any that are close by. Again, it’s that constant evaluation and wondering what I’m doing wrong.

The simple answer would be “get over yourself”, right? “Be happy for who you are and what you have.” “You’ve got these gifts.” I know that. I understand that, at least on an intellectual level, but what good are such gifts when all they do is separate you from everyone else? And if I have such gifts, why haven’t I done more with them? Changed the world? Done something memorable?

Maybe I have and am too navel-gazing to know it right now.

We were supposed to get together and play board games some weekend. It’d been a long time since we’d actually seen each other, but because our mutual friends had events, we kept on bumping into one another. And now I’m reminded of the times we had together–the disastrous cancelled ski vacation that we salvaged, doing stuff with the youth, all of those times.

And now, you’re gone.

I was there for some of those grand mal seizures. I remember how scary they were and always wondering what I needed to do to make sure you were okay. And then, just a few weeks after we’d talked about board games and kids and other little life points, another seizure takes you away, not just from me, but from your wife and children, leaving a hole that will be empty for a good long while.

Yes, I know that God has a plan, but that doesn’t mean I understand it, and it certainly doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. Tonight, I grieve.

In memory of Mark Fowler, a good man.

Today was Jacob’s first official organized soccer game. He’s in a YMCA league for U-8 (Under 8 years old). Due to no one else offering to take the job, I’ve been selected as volunteer assistant coach. I won’t know if I am allowed to do so until the background check comes in, but given that I’ve passed those before, this shouldn’t be any issue.

In U-8 soccer, you play on a 60′ by 40′ field with smaller goals. You also only play 8 men on the field. You need six to start the game.

Jacob’s team has a total of eight players on it. 3 Latinos, 3 African Americans, Jacob, and one kid whom I’ve not seen yet. If “The Bad News Bears” were translated into soccer terms, this would be that team minus the Chico’s Bail Bonds sponsorship.

Today, six showed up for the game. We played against a team from Richardson. Now, Garland’s a big city–the ninth largest in Texas. We have a wide range of socioeconomic factors going on. Richardson, or at least parts of it, is more homogeneous. Across from us were 16 kids, all decked out in matching outfits–shorts, socks, the full kit–against 6 rag-tag, 2 sessions of practice boys.

We had six; we played.

Jacob started in goal. Now, Jacob has the general idea of goalie down, meaning “keep the ball out of your net”, but he doesn’t have some of the basic goalie skills down, like “use your hands”, “pick up the ball”, and “don’t kick it straight to the other team”. These factors made the first half interesting. The other team kept pressing deep into our turf, but our one kid playing sweeper was doing an effective job as sole defender of the realm. The other three kids played… some sort of position. You know, no matter how much you tell them to spread out, they all cluster around the ball like bees around their hive. So we’d make a bit of forward progress, then one of our kids would take it from another of our kids, and….

Jacob failed to secure a slow roller right before halftime, and we went into the break down 1-0. The other team was only playing five people up, so we actually were able to hang with them.

After halftime, Jacob moved to forward. Surprisingly, most of the action in the second half was in the other team’s end. Jacob had a shot on goal that was stopped by the keeper, but he did get credit for the own goal the other team scored. 1-1. Maybe the underdogs could pull it off….

The Richardson team drove deep and got around our defense, sending probably the only really good pass of the day to a wide open man who deposited it in the back of the net. 2-1.

There were some flared tempers. One of our kids and one of theirs got into a pushing match that resulted in yellow cards for both of them. After that incident, you could see the other team ganging up on our guy, surrounding him and talking right in his face during throw-ins, etc. Real classy stuff. Admittedly, the kid on our team is a hothead who expresses himself physically, but still, the incident was over.

The game ended, and our heroes, outnumbered 20 to 1 by the enemy, survived and made a decent showing of it.
At the end of the game, the kids all slap hands and say “good game”. I was in line and slapped some hands, and some kids on the Richardson team had their hands turned around and were saying “bad game, bad game”.

Now, most of the time, I wouldn’t get upset about something this petty, but after the on-field stuff, after being outmanned, after our not giving up… if I’d had my act together, I would have grabbed the kids, taken them to their coach, made them repeat that to him, found their parents, made them repeat it to them, and then maybe, just maybe I’d be okay with it.

But I didn’t realize it until afterwards, and it wasn’t until after we were leaving the field that I got mad about it. This makes me wonder why I should get upset over this. It’s just a game, right?

No, it’s more an attitude of “better than you” that makes me angry. And sad, too, because those type of things are hard to take when you’re 7. Heck, they’re hard to take when you’re an adult.

So, Whitney Houston passed away. The day after her death, I was in the airport, subjected to CNN news, and the entire time I was there, the only topic was Whitney Houston.

Is it okay for me to say that, while any death on this planet is sad, the amount of public idol-worshipping of someone like Ms. Houston has been absurd. Shakespeare said that we come to bury Caesar, not to praise him, and there’s part of me that feels the same applies to Ms. Houston.

She led a troubled life. She was a talented singer at one point, but then her life spiraled out of control. She and Bobby Brown had a reality TV show. She denied using drugs one week then was in rehab the next. In short, she was as human as you or me.

Who of us will get the amount of celebrity coverage when we die like Ms. Houston, Michael Jackson, or arguably most famously Princess Diana have received? It is a telling fact that we thrive on schadenfreude, if only to make ourselves feel better. I personally believe it’s wrong in the first place to elevate someone to the point where a fall is a sideshow. We’re all the same with different gifts and talents–celebrate those around you instead of having your gods spoon-fed to you by TV and media. Value life to make good choices. When you fail, admit it and seek forgiveness, acceptance, and redemption. Was Whitney on that path? I don’t know. Her attempts at a comeback tour were disappointing, and no one except those closest to her know the demons she faced.

My faith tells me that God loves each of us, and it’s not my place to judge, so forgive me if this comes as a judgment of Ms. Houston. It’s meant to be more of a rant at the same old song and dance that’s foisted upon us by the 24-hour news cycle.

By now, I’m pretty sure we’ve all heard about the Susan G. Komen foundation’s decision, subsequent semi-apology, then reversal of course on the decision of giving grants to Planned Parenthood. In my opinion, you don’t make a decision like this in this day and age without being explicit about your reasons. The “not funding groups under investigation” only applied to Planned Parenthood and no other groups getting funding from Komen, so the convenience of that reason made it all the more transparent, especially after the retweets from Karen Mandel, former gubernatorial candidate in Alabama and now a Vice President at SKG.

Please take the next part as my opinion. It’s not an endorsement of anything, but more of a statement about what I think. There is nothing wrong about being pro-life. There is also nothing wrong about being pro-choice. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have the issue of abortion to deal with in the first place, but we live in a place that’s far from perfect.

What I have serious issues with are the deliberate brick-by-brick attempts at dismantling organizations like Planned Parenthood because of one facet of their operation. It’s a convenient target by people with absolute standards, and it leads to dangerous consequences, including the murder of doctors who perform abortions.

First off, as a man, I’m not entirely sure how much say I can have in the debate over a woman’s right to decide what’s best for her own body. Secondly, the theological perspective of when life begins has changed dramatically since the early days of Christianity. Thirdly, if we are to respect all life and treat it with dignity and kindness, what can we do to not be hypocritical about it when it comes to our own priorities?

It’s extremely unfair to paint a pro-choice advocate as someone who wants to kill babies. It’s just as unfair to call a pro-lifer a right-wing zealot. I don’t know of any woman who goes out and actively gets pregnant just for the sake of having an abortion. This segues into my next point.

Why do women feel the need to get abortions? One answer might be financial–there’s no way to afford to have a child. However, I think the largest single influencer on whether a woman has an abortion is shame, particularly from the men in her life.

“I’m afraid my dad would find out.”
“I’m afraid my brother would find out.”
“I’m afraid the father would find out.”

Where does this fear come from? It comes from our semi-puritanical view of sex, sex education, and biological desire. We consistently attempt for either religious or other reasons to impose moral constraints around sex, but they’re usually caged as “don’t do it”, or “if you get pregnant, I’ll kick you out of the house.”

Our bodies are hard-wired to experiment after puberty, and our culture only presents us with more images of sex and desire than we can stand. This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon, either. In his book “The Way Things Never Were”, Norman Finklestein lays out the truth about how our whitewashed view of “the good old days” was filled with as much unexpected pregnancy as it is now. The only difference is that the girls were sent away from home to a relative’s house.

I’d like to propose one way of handling this, and it’s a way that other countries (which MUCH lower abortion rates than the U.S.) use: demystify sex. Educate kids. Teach them about contraception. Teach them that it’s part of life. Teach them about the consequences of it as well (including pregnancy). Sure, you can still teach them about making the choice to wait for marriage (which I did, by the way), but if you turn it into a “must be pure for her husband” type of thing, that leads to the shame I mention up above. Now it’s not just disappointing her parents and family, it’s disappointing God.

Can you imagine having THAT as a burden?

This is where I admire my friends Kevin and Deborah Ausman and how they’ve treated their son with respect to alcohol. They’ve taught him about it in a practical, no “forbidden-fruit” kind of way, were present when he had his first beer (in Germany, no less), and encourage him to be moderate about it. If we could take that attitude of de-forbidding and apply it to sex, I truly believe we would have fewer abortions because we’d have fewer unexpected pregnancies. And as a person who is pro-choice, I’d still love to see the number of them drop.

Yesterday, Jessie was in her room, writing on a piece of paper. When Laureen asked her what she was doing, she said “writing to God”.

Below is her letter. To explain a bit, in her class, if you get in trouble, you get a “color change” and have to be in a different group.

I don’t know if many of the people who read this would consider themselves fans of “just one book”. Usually, it’s an author, series, or genre of which we become fans, but for my wife, there’s been one book that’s had a lasting impression: Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”.

Go look at the precis on Amazon, maybe check it out at your library if you can. It’s a complete fusion of the nanotechnological future and the styles and mores of a Victorian time. It’s a wonderful read, and surprisingly enough, it’s been relatively accurate in predicting what might become true future technologies. Those of you more well-read in SciFi than I can go ahead and smirk, basking in my ignorance, but I really liked the idea of having chopsticks that could essentially be displays for advertising, or the idea of creating items simply by interacting with a piece of paper.

One of the more unique items in the book is the Primer, a wealthy man’s gift to his daughter. It essentially is a textbook that opens new worlds for the reader, doing so through stories and interactive play. The idea that technology will not only enable us to learn but will, in essence, save us as a race is not new, but the desire to outfit every child with a laptop seems to be the latest incarnation of this trend.

I work in the embedded space, but by no means would I call myself a predictor of technological trends. However, there has always been this dream of making a laptop that was priced at under $100. Much like the Primer in the story above, it would be used to enhance learning for all of its students. Suddenly, the idea of giving every child access to the world’s data and allowing them to learn through it seems noble, almost virtuous.

I ask that we take a few steps back from that perch. Right now, technology is at a remarkable tipping point: you can, given enough volume, produce a tablet that can be drawn on with a stylus. It can use an open source operating system, thus driving the costs down even further. Admittedly, the lower the cost, the less technological you can go; you can’t get a capacitive touch screen (think iPad) for cheap, but resistive touch screens (think the old style poke-at-a-screen displays at airports and malls) are getting cheap enough where you could make a decent device that could connect to the internet for under $100.

But is that enough to give to a child? Great! You can access the net. However, is your network at school equipped to handle that traffic? Do you have the right software to open and utilize that online textbook? Here’s a case in point: Adobe Flash. If you want to integrate Flash into your system, it’s got to be “beefy” enough to handle it. Flash is a resource hog, and currently, the less expensive tablets that would fit our cost criteria just simply can’t run it well enough to provide acceptable performance. The same is going to be true of any other next technological leap, whether it be HTML5 or video or whatnot. We’re always going to have a barrier that people will want to cross, simply because they’ve invested a ton of money getting to this point.

This entrenchment is ultimately why any attempt at OLPC will fail.

The textbook companies have reasons for keeping their materials copyrighted and not in the public domain. Different electronic book formats with varying levels of copy protection can’t be negotiated down to one standard. And what body is going to start trying to impose order on that, especially when different states have different requirements for educating their students?

Countries like Korea and Greece — yes, that troubled financial mess of Greece — are planning to invest billions of dollars into tablet technology for students as a way to reduce other educational costs. Those countries may be able to make it work, but in America, with our firm belief in the power of the free market, there will never be a consensus as to what is best.

Even if by some miracle we’re able to reach that standard, what about students who have disabilities? Let’s say you want to learn Urdu, but you’re blind. What kind of textbook, written or electronic, will help you there?

Worse yet, what if you’ve already given up on your school system? If we’ve lost a sense of right and wrong and have nothing in the way of civics, what good will throwing a technological toy at a kid do? Especially one that’s less useful than their cell phone?

Again, much like NCLB, the OLPC effort is one that is noble in thought and goal but impossible to achieve. Pragmatically, I believe we should make technology accessible, but not make it the sole path to success, but until then, we’ll keep trying. And failing. And wondering why.

Yes, it’s another Wal-Mart rant.

1. I’d like to know how much shelf space Wal-Mart gives in its grocery aisles to pre-processed foods–cookies, crackers, frozen meals, etc. I’m afraid the number would be staggeringly high.

2. Good luck trying to prepare an Indian dish when shopping at the big W. No curry paste (yes, they have curry powder, but no, I’m not feeling like figuring out how to transmogrify it), no mango chutney (the jellies and jams section is reminiscent of Henry Ford’s color choices for the Model T), and no mincemeat filling. Actually, I don’t think I needed the mincemeat for the Indian dish (yes, I’m trying to broaden my horizons beyond naan bread), but still…. If you’re Hispanic, you’re covered pretty easily. If you’re Asian…. eh. It’s much like Chinese restaurants. They don’t serve authentic stuff but more Americanized versions of Chinese dishes. Italian? Again, Americanized, but you can find a decent variety of pastas there, some of them not made by Kraft and containing a packet of cheese sauce. Other cuisines? Let’s sing:
It’s a Small World

If I earwormed you with that or you managed to make it through the entire video, my deepest condolences.

3. The modern man has become a nocturnal hunter-gatherer at the big W. While the wife and kids are back in the cave, then men grab their steel chariots and move in synchronized chaos, consulting shopping lists, occasionally trading the knowing glance of “you too, huh”, as they waltz from the back of the store to the front. We forage mightily, searching for camouflaged prey (“store brand? What?”), always consulting the sacred parchment with the order of the hunt.

I still have a love/hate relationship with Wal-Mart. Check that: it’s more tolerate/hate.