Marking Time

Fill in the blank.

We’ve all said it. Many times, probably beginning the first month we could string a complete sentence together. Of course, at that point, we were probably saying, “When I grow up, I’m going to eat ice cream for every meal, nothing but ice cream.” 

What I never expected, though, is that I would still be using this phrase at age 42.

Some people, the George Baileys of the world, are just “born older”. Let’s call them the Settlers. I don’t mean anything negative in using this term. All I mean is that they find a groove early, they mostly stay in it, and they take whatever success or failure comes from this basically straight arc of a life path they have “settled into”. If they can get past that nasty old “midlife crisis” thing, they do pretty well for themselves, interpersonally and financially.

Some settlers start working at a young age, maybe even helping support their parents or siblings. Maybe they get married young or have a baby. Maybe they just have a clear vision and an ambition to get exactly what they are after, and they chase it down. High school, college, maybe grad school, then a steady climb up the ladder in a single field of work, until they hit some ceiling either within themselves or in society. They take a pre-worn path that makes sense to them, they have few regrets, and they take for granted certain “facts” and necessary compromises. Many existential questions, for a settler, are easily settled. There’s one right answer, and they live it out as best they can. They may not even be inclined to ask a lot of those kind of questions in the first place. Settlers are do-ers, and generally this is the type of person that makes the world go. 

And then there are the Searchers. I’m a searcher. I envy those damned settlers, with all their certainty and success and non-rebellious bliss. But I’m afraid I can never be one.

Searchers are internally tuned to search, to experiment, to wander through life a bit, to question what the settlers take for granted. A searcher can be like an advance scout, sent out to identify an entirely new path and test whether it’s safe or not, and where it will lead.

Except most searchers are self-appointed. We don’t often choose to be a searcher. No sane, responsible person would do something so foolish. To be a searcher is to agree that it’s okay to be lost for a time. Most seachers either intentionally leave or compulsively lose track of the path, a path that previous settlers so kindly laid out for them.

Sometimes a searcher is enticed to leave those well-worn paths by the promise of something exciting out in the woods, or just over the horizon in the other direction.

Other searchers are just dissatisfied with the path itself, and are compelled to strike out on their own by some vague internalized calling. They leave the path with a hope, and a faith (however they define it), that there is something better out there for them, and perhaps for everyone else as well. 

Searchers are not all narcissists, though. Most still want to play a vital role in the world. They hope to contribute to the community, but they have no choice but to do so by being a maverick (to borrow one of McCain’s favorite words), a discoverer, an outsider, a reformer, an advance scout in previously unexplored territories, using a machete to cut a wide and sometimes painful swath through the jungle.

[Since I brought up MCain, let me say I think the 2008 election may be the first in history, or at least the first since Reagan v. Carter, to pit two searchers against each other. Neither Obama nor McCain has proven themselves a true insider, entirely beholden to or accepted by their traditonal constituencies. If McCain's sidestepping of religious postures and Obama's "oreo" branding by Jesse Jackson and the black community has shown us anything, it's that these candidates are not afraid to go off-script in forging a political path for themselves. Certainly McCain is more a "company man" than Obama, but I think his basic identity is to be a reformer, which places him somewhere to the left of the neo-conservative movement. (My conservative ex-brother-in-law once called him a commie, but he was mostly just being the inflammatory jerk he's always been.) ]

Back to ordinary settlers and searchers like you and me:

I know several searchers now, over 35, who are in a similar place emotionally, professionally, or spiritually. One is adopting a child from Russia, at age 43. One is going to med school - she’s also about 43, though in a recent email she said she still feels 26 on the inside. My sister, now 36, is also back in school to get more training in some sort of design field. Whe she grows up she’s going to be some unique combination of artist and inventor, creating the next Furby, iPod, Post-It note, or other such triumph of creativity through new technology. Even my pastor, a classic searcher, is going back to school full-time to fill in all the gaps he’s felt for years in the what and how of his daily work.

While many searchers do have that hope that I discussed earlier, at our core we are perpetually dissatisfied. It may be a dissatisfaction with the world, and what all those doggone settlers have done to the place. It may be a dissatisfaction with ourselves, a drive to better ourselves, to find some essential answer to that age old question: Why am I here? It may just be a dissatisfaction with one particular area of life, like Dr. Richard Jarvik’s frustration over losing his father to a heart attack, which drove him to create the first artificial heart.

Whichever you are, searcher or settler, the bottom line is that we need each other. I’m married to a settler, for example. She’s very organized, high-functioning, and quite good at helping other settlers and searchers become smarter, stronger, more complete versions of themselves (myself included). But at her core, I don’t think she’s looking to reinvent the world. She’s just living in it, adapting to it, and whenever possible, admiring and appreciating it.

Whichever you are, go be the best you can be. And forgive the other type. They’re only doing what they gotta do, just like you. (Like my wife, who just kicked me off the computer, since I took too long to write all this up, and the day has 101 other little responsibilities that I have to take on.)

It’s always an eye-opening experience for me to go to a big, sprawling amusement park like Six Flags Great America (where I went yesterday), or one of the Disneys.

All the blinking lights, the noise, the walkingwalkingwalking, the junkfood, the tall purple-faced people dressed as comic book villains I don’t recognize, and of course the rollercoasters! It all hurts one’s brain and beats up on one’s body, but it’s a mildly pleasurable and necessary pain… the “no pain, no gain” type. The intra-body wave you ride, trying on purpose to get dizzy and euphoric and sugar-buzzed without going so overboard that you lose your lunch, is part of the fun.

So is the “taking the pulse of the country” aspect of being there, at least for me. Once again, the park reminded me that the culture I was born into is often simultaneously fun and toxic, brilliant and stupid. For example, I am often in awe of the scientific prowess and heavy-duty marketing knowhow it takes to build these rides and to run such a place, even as I bemoan the unconscionably high prices, and whine that the new Dark Knight coaster really sucked.

Yup, sorry to be the one to break the news, people, but Dark Knight-The Ride was not worth the 1+ hour wait (yes, an hour, …no I’m not crazy, just stupid, …and keep in mind that’s the wait on a non-crowded weekday). It’s an enclosed coaster which runs mostly in the dark, with mediocre blacklight effects and more of a semi-predictable, neck-thrashing jerkiness than genuine thrills, speed, or haunted-house scares.

I didn’t mind the “you’re in Gotham City now” pre-boarding total-immersion room, complete with a mock “live” press conference featuring characters/actors from the new movie shown on a courtesy screen in the mock subway station, with a red dot matrix fake Gotham news crawl running below it. But the letdown of exiting that room, only to board a coaster that doesn’t even equal the creative engineering of the Magic Kingdom’s Space Mountain (now over 30 years old), soon takes all the wind out of any Dark Knight rider’s sails. (Did someone say Knight Rider? I hear KITT came back again this year, too, but still sucked as much as the original… ha! The Hoff is such a joke.)

It wasn’t just our multi-age, middle class white party (ages 8-42) that thought the Dark Knight ride stunk, either. I made a conscious effort to listen to people as they were getting off, and also later that night when I again rode Superman next door (an awesome ride, BTW, day or nite). Both rides dump exiting passengers into the same DC Comics-oriented giftshop, and as people exited, it seemed nobody was impressed with Dark Knight-The Ride. It’s barely half the fun of the original Batman coaster on the other side of the park, which is a much underrated marvel (comics pun intended) of design and execution.

Maybe they just tried to squeeze DK into too small a space in the park. Maybe in their enthusiasm about all the high-tech pre-ride stuff, and the up-to-the-minute tie-ins to a summer 2008 Hollywood blockbuster, they thought the coaster itself wouldn’t matter to us. But it does. And it sucked.

That disappointment was piled on top of my already low-boiling chagrin over the massive “Virtual Army Experience” recruiting building Six Flags has allowed in the front parking lot. Apparently, existing propaganda that blurs the line between real violence and simulated violence still hasn’t been enough to fill the Army’s recruitment needs — not even with all the new Army-developed and endorsed “shooter” videogames on the market.

So now they are “taking their message to the people”, to where people show up by the thousands. I can almost hear their fatigue-clad carnival barker now :

Hey all you gung-ho twelve-year-olds! Hey you paintball fans! Come on in! Shoot at real holographic enemies! Test your speed and toughness! Plan a mission to take out the freedom-hating terrorists! Then go get youself a free t-shirt and a Coke, take a pamphlet, and go on into the park for other equally intense amusements, all at the low price of  $54 per person. Just think of it as your personal boost to our sagging economy,son. Amusement is your duty, and your right, as a red-blooded American. Now go do your duty, soldier!

Tomorrow: more reflections on Six Flags Great America, including how my body let me down, how the Geico gecko ruined my day, and the blessing of being with siblings who know you “by heart”.

Graham’s been taking a swimming class this summer, through the Skokie Park District. The district’s park and services were rated among the tops in the nation, and it’s a really nice perk about living here.

He’s doing pretty well in class, though he has a bad case of nerves sometimes when first getting into the pool. He’s six. It’s understandable. Plus, unlike me, he’s not a jump-in-headfirst kind of guy. Which is fine… a little innate cautiousness ought to keep him from doing too many of the dumbass things his non-cautious dad did (and still does).

But the odd thing for me, when I look at him during class, is how absolutely WHITE he looks. Part of it is the genes: he’s fair-complected, like my wife (whereas I’m half-Italian, and thus have some of that olive-toned Mediterranean melanin in my skin). But the main reason he stands out is that he’s literally the only caucasian student, in a class of about twelve or fourteen kids.

His teenage teachers –most of them probably members of the high school swim team– are all white. But Graham’s fellow students are all various shades of brown: Indian, Mexican, Israeli, Chinese, Uzbek (Uzbeki?), Persian — who knows?!!! Skokie’s such a diverse melting pot of a town, one gets used to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of mindset.

Not that I mind Graham being the only child of full European descent in class. I actually rather like it that my son has an opportunity at an early age that I did not have, to get used to the “browning” of the entire planet and the blending of its cultures. Maybe he’ll eventually come to “not see race”, as our pal Stephen Colbert playfully boasts he’s able to do. (”Oh, are you black? I didn’t know…”)

I grew up in a fairly lilywhite, newish suburb, where my upperclass Cuban friend Raul, whose father was a physician, qualfied as my one minority friend. He said “Ciao” instead of goodbye, his family spoke Spanglish in their home, but in dozens of other ways he was passing for white… or better yet playing up or down his ethnicity as it suited him. I don’t blame him, either. “It’s hard out there for a pimp”, as they say. 

Raul got married to Kelly, a stereotypical “white” girl in many ways (and I don’t mean that in either an insulting or celebratory way) from the richer part of town. Raul then went on to become an immigration lawyer, and as far as I know, they and their blended children are living a happy, culturally-blended existence in or near that same suburb where I grew up. I don’t know why he made all these choices, and it’s not for me to say, anyway. Yet why didn’t he become a corporate lawyer, instead of an immigration lawyer? Perhaps he chose to buck some of the cultural expectations of the environment and cultural heritage he came out of, even as he embraced others. Sometimes you just gotta pick a lane and move forward.

My point (now that I’m finally getting to it) is simply this: that awareness of one’s difference within a certain context can build character, and develop a sense of ownership about one’s background. It also gives ample opportunity for appreciation of people from other backgrounds. If everyone around Graham looked and acted too much like him, he might not be challenged as much to think about concepts like “privelege” and “nationality”. But instead, he’s internalizing these concepts in swim class, without even realizing it. He’s swimming and going to school and going grocery shopping in an environment where the business and politics of the world get played out right here in his own town now and then.

For instance, Graham knows what a mango is. (I’m absolutely certain I didn’t know this when I was six.) He’s partial to apples, grapes and strawberries, though. (How Northern European of him…) Thus, in the strange, multi-flavored stew that is modern America, he’s the potato.

Or maybe he’s the sweet potato, because he’s really sweet and kind and unprejudiced, which is a great gift. Plus… sweet potatoes are just more interesting than plain old white ones. And we all know how essential it is to be interesting, right?

Summer may not be beginning officially for a few more days, but for the Nielsens it has definitely begun — and with it, the sometimes delicate, often clumsy dance that we do when trying to make plans. Plans for weekends in Wisconsin. Plans for longer summer trips (which we never seem to be able to set up in February, when we stand a better chance of getting decent time-share locations, in places we actually want to go). Plans for the Fourth, our anniversary, my birthday.

And then there’s the plan for the day, or for the week: the goal being a balance of chores (now that we have the extended potential free-time) and personal interests from our individual and family lists (the beach, Millennium Park, read a book, go to the Chicago Botanic Gardens, write an overlong but hilarious blog entry, catch up on movies we’ve been meaning to rent, see a play, a concert, a class or two for Graham at the park district… you get the idea). Sue gets restless when her schedule is too open. She wants to fill it. And she can sometimes be a “work first and earn your playtime” kind of personality. That’s okay, but it ain’t me.

By contrast, I get loose and sometimes lazy. Freed from a world of deadlines and early rising, I want to make it all up as I go along. Maybe I’ll set a goal or two for the day, or the week. And usually I get to it, within a few days, or a few weeks. But it drives my wife nuts that I prefer to operate this way. In the summer, too often one of the three of us in the other’s face, or underfoot, and we can get kind of prickly. We love each other, but in seeing so much of each other, we can’t help but get under each other’s skin at least once a day. It’s complicated.

In theory, I was supposed to have another job by now, and we wouldn’t be doing this dance. And I have been looking. But it’s hard to stick with it, when there’s gardening to be done and Sue claims she hasn’t the strength to dig, and someone’s planning a camping trip I’d like to go on, and we’ve got a little cushion of money stashed away to prevent some desperate situation where I’ll have to take any old crappy job, just to make our bills. (That date is now somewhere around October, which will come quicker than I expect, I know…)

So if y’all know of a $75K per year job, at a museum or somewhere cool, one that’s a short walk from the beach, where I can spend my Friday half-days playing volleyball, and where they won’t mind that I have to drop my kid off at school at 8:30am and therefore can’t start early, be sure to let me know. Okay? And then when those pigs from the Lincoln Park Farm in the Zoo start flying, my life will be perfect.

PAPA Fest: People Against Poverty and Apathy Festival — a sort of Burning Man Festival and happening for the progressive Christian, community-oriented set. Happening June 19-22 (this weekend), in Tiskilwa, Illinois. Might be too late to register by now, but see for yourself, or read up on it after the fact. See the website for more details. Barter your heart out. If not for my friend Spencer getting a big L’Arche  service award in Chicago that same weekend, I’d be there in a heartbeat.

Here’s Martin Scorsese’s MySpace site, which I assume is fairly new and is mostly being used to promote his recent Rolling Stones concert flick/rockumentary, Shine a Light. Sure, sites like this are a boldface grab for attention, more marketing than art. But Marty’s such a fascinating guy that I just love to hear him talk or write, even if he is just trying to put butts in the theater seats. The Stones… I can take ‘em or leave ‘em. But Marty’s my main man.

They Might Be Giants takes over the world: This band still makes great, strange pop music (get the podcast). They do kids’ music and books. They did music video “bumpers” for Disney Channel, and some mighty fine kids’ DVDs. And for a couple of years now, they’ve done the music for a number of Dunkin’ Donuts commercials. The added advantage of having John & John involved with DD is that Rachel Ray just ends up looking that much more stupid and plastic… which I did not think was possible. I may go see The Giants at Milwaukee’s Summerfest next month. Anyone wanna join me?

Why we should never say never: I once mentioned here how the cutesy pictures of cats sprinkled all over the internet are nothing but a stupid, poor use of the technology, and that they show how shallow we are as a culture. Then I saw this cat site  (which I first heard about on Stephanie Miller’s radio show –Thanks, Mama!) Wilford Brimley is a golden god! (And his pal Stephen Colbert ain’t so bad, either.) Cat photo sites are still stupid… but who says brilliant and stupid can’t ride in the same car together once in awhile?

Brilliant, lesser-known foReiGN folk-rock: Kate Rusby (England), Richard Thompson (England), the late Serge Gainsbourg (France), Crowded House (New Zealand),  and Sarah McLachlan (yeah, Canada’s not so foreign, but it’s different and conscientious enough, in Sarah’s case, to merit a mention).

Men’s Rites of Passage: Father Richard Rohr and his male spirituality project is coming to Illinois this summer, August 13-17. Not clear yet if I will be able to make it. It’s a big 4-day commitment. But on the other hand, probably life-changing. Go to MALES website for details.

Wag the Dog & other David Mamet films. Tha man can flat-out write. Hands down, one of the smartest and funniest voices in American theater and film in the past fifty years. And a Chicago product, somewhat. At least he first hit it big here.

The Farrelly brothers’ Rhode Island flicks: Me, Myself and Irene; Stuck on You; and Outside Providence. For a regional (if sometimes silly) look at American culture, there’s none better than the “Something About Mary” brothers. Our smallest state delivers our biggest laughs in the hands of these distinctively odd, occasionally juvenile gentlemen.

Henry Nouwen’s books, in particular The Wounded Healer.

Anything by Kurt Vonnegut, but especially Cat’s Cradle. Here’s a glorious quote from Kurt:

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

The end of the internet: http://www.romlist.com/end/ 

Okay, so time has not stopped entirely. I recognize that. It just feels like it has, because it’s my last day of work, I’m packing up my office, and I’m here all alone.

Minutes have felt like hours today. So since for me, writing always seems to make the time fly, here I be. I have to stay here anyway till an evening sendoff/thank-you event around the corner tonight (why drive an hour home only to come back an hour later?), so  I thought I’d log on and whine a little bit. (You’re welcome.)

To make matters worse, I’m stuck with the unenviable task of closing out not one, two, or three, but up to four separate “departments” that work out of the gym and thus utilize this dusty, dark, windowless storage room/jail cell that has been my ofice for two years now. The music program (which I expanded to include fine and performing arts last year), and the former health classes, and the P.E. department, all have a home in here.

It’s hard, partly because I’m not just making decisions about what to put away for the summer, but also pitching some things for good, given the prospect that the school will be staying closed and thus have to store or give away alot of this material. In some cases, I’m pitching very old teacher texts. At other times, it’s equipment for mysterious unknown games that we never played in two years here, and that I never played as a kid.

In a few cases, I’m pitching perfectly good material… like the free 5th grade puberty-education and hygiene products sent to us by Procter and Gamble (I assume P&G does this to get kids hooked early on their products, since Secret deodorant and Always feminine pads are bundled in there). I feel guilty tossing out a dozen newish trial-size stick deodorants, but it would just feel too awkward to try finding them a good home. (I did, however, take a few for my own family… after all they’re ”strong enough for a man, but made for a woman”…)

I feel guilty throwing away books, too. But it’s clear they’re old, and haven’t been used in years. So whadya gonna do???

And I suppose I’m grieving a bit: another career avenue I once thought viable and semi-permanent, now gone the way of the dinosaurs through no fault of my own. Again I’m left out in the cold (well, …it’s eighty five and muggy here, but you get my drift), haphazardly looking for a job that actually makes sense.

Anyone in the market for a dozen sets of blue plastic basketball cheerleader pompons? Get ‘em while they last… I think trash pickup is on Monday.

Classes at my school wrapped up this week, possibly for the last time ever. Due to funding problems, Chicago Mennonite Learning Center will suspend operations for the 2008-09 school year, to do some fact-finding and determine if and how to re-open in some altered form.

I’m on a committee from Mennonite churches around the metro area, which is reviewing the situation and making some recommendations to the school’s board about future steps. Essentially, the problems arose from a combination of some minor past mismanagement, and greatly increased competition from charter and contract schools in the area. Who’d have thunk it? School reform in Chicago these days means a handful of savvy administrator/fundraisers get to set up public schools that function like private ones… with waiting lists, special programs, and a new brand of institiutionalized elitism. Meanwhile, the kindergarten in the “ordinary” public school down the street from ours reportedly had almost fifty kids this year, with one teacher.

So we at CMLC got lost in”no man’s land”: we charged a low enough tuition to be a workable option for families fleeing that blithely imbalanced CPS system (gee, what a surprise!). Yet we have no single on-site church to help us cover the daily costs beyond our tuition income (another 35% or so?). Couple that gap with a lack of experience getting the big grants from non-Mennonite sources and foundations, and you have a recipe for a financial crumble.

Last year, when the current principal looked like she would have to quit to take care of her elderly mother, I even applied to be the principal at CMLC. She ended up staying, solving her elder-care problems a different way. But even though I may have been effective in the role, I’m now glad it went down this way. For one thing, the amount of change I would have wanted, and the institution’s inability to move forward with those radical changes, would probably have frustrated me. Or else I would have focused on the students, teachers and curriculum, and as a result even the modest dollar-chasing that our principal has done this year would have been reduced in the process. There’s only so many hours in a day, after all, and I’ve never been the type to live, sleep, and eat my job. At the end of the day, I want to watch 30 Rock (who knew I’d agree with the lesbian community that funnygirl Tina Fey is red hot). I want to write a blog, or do a few other things that are for me and my family, activities not beholden to the Almighty, Soul-Crushing Buck.

I’ve worked on and off with small not-for-profit organizations for years, and our nation’s dirty little secret is that most of them are two steps ahead of broke, because they’re caught unknowingly in the middle of some serious class warfare. The infrastructure and free market system that holds sway in the U.S. means that most power structures don’t mind  letting the working poor or lower middle class languish away in substandard situations. In fact, we could make a case that it’s one more case of the rich getting richer, and the poor poorer. It’s no joke that community centers, small schools and local social service institutions are forced to compete with the Goodman Theaters, Northwestern Universities and Advocate Healthcare Systems of the world. Yes, they’re nonprofit in origin, but their bottom line and their fundraising force are both huge. Full disclocure: I’ve been a Goodman subscriber, and I’m an NU alum who got some serious grant money back in the ’80s to even be able to go there. So I’m not advocating pulling the plug on them. I just think we could do a better job of spreading the love around.

But since the flawed, shortsighted, trickle-down, ”thousand points of light” economic policies of the Reagan ’80s, which eventually led to the disparity we’re now faced with, nobody’s had the guts to admit we’re building this disparity into the very DNA of our culture. As long as the housing market was strong, and the Dow kept going up, nobody made a big ruckus about the economic losers, either here or abroad. But the house of cards is wobbling. So now what?

Obama shows signs of having some good sense, with things like the removal of Bush’s tax breaks for our wealthiest citizens and institutions. But even in a “Yes We Can” atmosphere of change, I suspect that our evenly divided Dem-publican society is too risk-averse to get ahead of the curve, on the environment and the new global economy and several other areas where there are quiet, looming crises — crises that have nothing much to do with Iraq, Iran, or the frickin’ inheritance tax. So maybe we’re in for a long, slow slide downward for the foreseeable future, until things get bad enough for folks to wake up and re-orient their priorities. Still, I’d rather have free-thinking Barack in the driver’s seat for those crises than political panderers and pawns like Clinton and McCain. Barack’s got the stones to make the tough calls –and believe me, there will be some — but he’ll do it with a measure of justice and fairness that gives more people a stake in the outcome.

Personally, I may or may not stay in teaching. I may move from kindergarteners to community college Composition 101 students, finally put this useless (so far) Masters degree to better use. Or I may sell out, write pithy corporate marketing copy for $50K a year, take advantage of dropping real estate prices in the far-flung suburbs, and leave the city and its problems to other well-intentioned swimmers against the tide. Because lemme tell you, people: I’m tired of using my best years and varied skillset in the service of losing propostions.

You might say I’ve “been schooled”, in more ways than one.

My friend Ruth “blog-tagged” me the other day… oops, it’s been over a month ago now, where did the time go? I don’t often get involved with chains, or forwarding stuff, but since this one is more like shameless self-promotion disguised as a game of tag – and I’ve always been a fan of shameless self-promotion – here goes…

Here are the rules if you decide to play along:
1) Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2) Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3) Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4) Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Ahem… and now, my seven facts (for which I make no claims as to their randomness or their weirdness, as I’m too far gone by now to distinguish weird from normal):

1) My earliest memory is a traumatic one: bleeding profusely from my right forearm, after snagging it on a cabinet hinge at about age two and a half, or three. (Yeesh… what a way to start, you sicko.)

2) My first job out of college was with Kartemquin Films, producers of the acclaimed film Hoop Dreams and dozens of other social-issue documentaries featured on PBS and in theaters. My name is even in the credits. I got fired from that job, though. (I was 22, and in over my head in terms of the specific, sales-oriented job I was supposed to be doing.)

3) My middle name is Sebastian, which was my maternal grandfather’s first name. (My son’s middle name is Brice, my dad’s first name, …and his first name, Graham, is similar to my father-in-law’s middle name, Gorham.)

4) I once missed a plane home from Paris, and was forced to stay an extra day or two. Not the worst place in the world to be stuck, let me tell ya…

5) Best comic timing I ever exhibited: my little sister spilled a glass of milk at supper, and some of it dripped into Dad’s lap, and he started screaming and swearing, and she started crying. After ten seconds of that, I piped up with this classic: “No use crying over spilled milk.” Everyone cracked up, including Dad. Crisis over. But my ambition to be a comic, or a humorist, or somehow use words to make people’s lives better was just beginning.

6) I took a date to a Cure concert once in the Eighties, mistakenly thinking it was the Christian rock band The Call. Never felt so out of place and awkward in my life, out there at Poplar Creeek Music Theater among 30,000 pre-goth, brooding, black-clad brethren, and me like a doofus in my yellow Izod LaCoste shirt. It was my one and only date with that girl, too.

7) My favorite food is lasagna. For all my other favorite this, that, and the other, check out my MySpace Profile. It’s one of the few things MySpace is good for anymore…

Seven other blogs I frequent:

1 - Brad Listi - A.D.D. - An actual published novelist. Doing a younger, hipper blog that has as many funny commenters as I’ve seen anywhere. Brad’s also funny, and capable of serious political and cultural analysis, too.

2 - Will Fitzgerald, aka Will.Whim . Words are the air he breathes… and he’s a fledgling Mennonite pastor, to boot.

3 - Jesus Manifesto - started by Mark VanSteenwyck (I think), this blog has grown up into a cool little webzine.

4- Alternadad - former Chicago Reader journalist and sometime novelist Neal Pollack, doing a blog about parenting a wild-ass six-year-old, much more colorful than my own kid. Neal leans more toward the profane side of my sacred/profane duality, but as the only person in this list who makes any MONEY at blogging (at Parents.com), he’s my hero anyway.

5 - Pastor and Author Greg Boyd’s Random Reflections. I first caught this cat on Charlie Rose’s interview show, on PBS. Then I read his book Myth of a Christian Nation. Then I started listening in to an occasional podcast of his sermons, and reading this blog.

6 - Rafiki James - one of my first and most consistent supporters for the MySpace side of MT. He does some fine spiritual and political essays himself, I must say.

7 - Carolynn Todd Burbee’s chatty little blog without a name. It’s primarily personal news and reflections, by an old college friend who teaches history. I mean… she’s not old. A year older than me, but then… oh never mind. I’ve already gone and stuck my foot in it…