It's official: Washington is the place where good ideas go to die.
The first of the two most recent examples occurred yesterday when the White House denied an online petition, signed by more than 25,000 people, to build America's own version of the Death Star, the planet-sized Starship of Destruction that the Empire used in the Star Wars movies.
The government's official response denying the petition is here:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking
I don't like to talk politics in this, um, Space, but some decisions are so incomprehensible they simply must be addressed.
America is facing a stubborn eight percent unemployment rate. Perceptions of the country's direction are near an all-time low, as are Americans' perception of their government. The public is increasingly divided, as Fox News and MSNBC convince their respective partisan audiences that the other party is Evil Incarnate.
Amidst this divided backdrop, an overwhelming mass of the public agreed on one fundamental proposition: We the People need a Death Star.
And the administration said no.
The official reasons were that a Death Star is too expensive, that we have no actual desire to blow up other planets, and that the vessel has a design flaw that can be exploited by one renegade starship, which can cause immediate explosion.
These petty concerns are beside the point.
The construction of the Death Star would provide jobs, both in the construction and storm trooper industries. The storm troopers jobs, to be filled by applicants unable to hit various human, robotic and Wookie targets at point-blank range, would also provide employment for individuals who, let's face it, probably couldn't get a job anywhere else. And the fashion industry would get a boost too, as various designers competed for government contracts to produce the chicest possible Storm Trooper designs.
It's a win-win for the entire employment sector. The job gains from this project would provide a boost to the economy sufficient to offset any initial cost.
The boost to the national morale the presence of a Death Star would provide, or the fear it would put into our enemies, also cannot be overstated. Would Iran continue with its nuclear program if we parked the Death Star on the Iraqi Border? And so what if we lose in the World Cup? We have an f'ing Death Star.
Critics suggest that the we don't actually need a Death Star, because we have no known extra terrestrial enemies. The key word in that sentence, however, is known. If we ever do meet visitors from neighboring galaxies, they are much more likely to be polite if we have the ability to destroy them on a whim. Besides, we'd be at a significant disadvantage, and feel more than a little bit silly, if we don't build a Death Star, and our alien visitors already have one.
It would be prudent be prepared for this possibility.
As to the complaint that the Death Star has proven vulnerable to one-man starships, this argument presumes that our attacking Intergalactic foe has seen Star Wars. We need not worry about this.
If any competing civilization started watching Star Wars at Episode I, they probably didn't make it to the end. Besides, when is the last time you saw a one-man starship floating around? This fear is unrealistic.
Still, the demise of the Death Star, was not the only bad news of the week. The government, on the very same day, decided against minting a one trillion dollar platinum coin.
The background behind this issue is straightforward. The government, like Enron and the Hostess Company, spends more money than it makes, and it's getting near the limit of what it can legally borrow. While the two most obvious solutions to this problem would be to either balance the budget or raise the legal borrowing limit, but both of those measures have the downside of requiring Congress to actually do something. As a result, neither seems likely to happen.
Instead, it was suggested, the Treasury Department could simply create a $1 trillion coin, deposit it in the Federal Bank Account, and the government suddenly would have a trillion dollars with which to pay its bills.
It sounds simple enough, but this possibility raised important and serious legal questions. For instance:
Whose face would be on this thing?"
Could the coin be used to fund the construction of the Death Star?
How would someone get change if they used the trillion dollar coin to buy a pack of gum?
The government had no answers for these questions, so the idea died this week. My answers would have been: (1) Montgomery Burns; (2) YES!; and (3) Store Credit, but no one asked me, despite the fact that: (1) Our First Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton is my ancestor, and (2) I have a blog read by at least 30 people last week. (If you count my cat as person. Twice.)
So instead of a quick fix to our nation's debt crisis, we'll have to wait with anxious breath as our self-serving, short-sighted, hyper-partisan politicians attempt to forge a bipartisan solution.
I just can't help but think I'd have more faith in Congress' ability to make that deal if the Death Star was pointed menacingly toward Capitol Hill.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Driving through the Wilderness
Here's some travel advice: never leave for an 11-hour road trip unless you have some basic idea where you are going.
If that tip seems mind-numbingly obvious to you, then, well, I wish you would have been in the car with me the last time I drove from Nashville to Washington, DC.
We were set to embark at 7:00 a.m., but due to the breakneck pace at which I tend to live my life, I didn't even have a chance to start packing until 11:00 the night before.
My cross-country flight connected through Dallas, where my connection home got cancelled. I raced to a distant terminal of America's most poorly organized airport in a failed attempt to catch an earlier flight, which I ultimately missed by just four minutes, because I had to go through a long security line when I switched terminals. Then I had to return back from where I started (passing through security yet again) to sit around and wait for a later flight that barely got me home that night at all.
When it did, I was shuttled to the airport parking lot in the driving rain and dropped off in the downpour only to find that I had forgotten where I had parked. (Answer: nowhere near where I was dropped off).
Once I got home, in my exhausted state (Tennessee), I was so focused on packing what I would need once I reached my next destination that it never crossed my mind to figure out how to actually get there. There's probably a metaphor in that somewhere, but I certainly didn't have the mental energy to think about it then.
I might have thought of it the next morning, but my wife and I overslept and had to scamper to load the car and get moving in order to get there before it got too late. We hit the road, and about three hours into the trip, when we hit the intersection of I-75 and I-40 in Knoxville, that it occurred to me that I had no earthly idea how to get to Virginia, and that while I-40 would eventually get me to North Carolina, the two states were not, technically speaking, the same.
Although perhaps they should be.
My brief panic subsided when our portable GPS happened to be in the car we were driving. I don't like helplessly relying on those things, but the alternative was stopping and buying an atlas, which would have cost money, made me feel silly, and further delayed our arrival.
Besides, we were making seriously good time, which as most guys know, is the most important thing about a road trip.
So we pressed on. I-40 took us to I-81, which took us to Virginia where we passed a house with a confederate flag and a functional-looking cannon sitting in the front yard, pointing at the interstate. If the Civil War ever resumes, and the Yanks come marching down I-81, at least one house will be prepared.
We pressed on, anxious to get out of whatever weird subcultural domain we'd entered. Before long we were in Central Virginia and according to our GPS, about 2 hours outside of the DC suburbs where we were headed. We were on pace to hit Alexandria in less than 10 hours, which would be the driving achievement of a lifetime. I was pumped.
It was then that things got interesting.
The GPS (We call her "Carmen" because she is a Garmin brand, has a female voice, and lives in the car) inexplicably told me to exit I-81 for another interstate heading toward Richmond, which was 120 miles away. It didn't sound right to me, but I didn't have a map, so I followed orders.
I was temporarily relieved when Carmen told me to get off the interstate again in after a few miles. It was a small road, and it had just gotten dark outside, but at least she wasn't taking me on a 120-mile detour to Richmond. We got gas and stopped for a bathroom, which proved to be the only good decision we made that night.
The people hanging around the rural Virginia gas stop had the look of the cast of Deliverance and gave us suspicious looks as we walked in, but no one physically accosted us, and there was no immediate sign of cannon fire, so we labeled the stop a success.
When we got back on the road, the lights of the interstate soon faded and it became clear we were on a windy two-lane road in the middle of nowhere with no clear idea of where we were going. Right around then it occurred to me that a map really might have been a good idea.
At least the road was only 13 miles, and surely we'd hit some better road at the end of that dark and winding stretch. We were driving a car with a slow oil leak and 185,000 miles on it, but as long as we didn't breakdown, we'd be ok. Although this detour was surely costing us a lot of time. Carmen now had us getting in at 8:17 instead of 7:58, but there was no driving any faster than 35 on this rural two-lane deathtrap of a road.
After the requisite 13 miles, we turned onto an equally deserted stretch of two-lane roads that eventually led us to a town, for some reason, called Orange. It was cute enough, but when we hit its quaint downtown, Carmen instructed us to take the second right at the roundabout.
We did that and soon thereafter heard: "recalculating." Meanwhile Carmen had pushed our expected arrival back to 8:30. We were in trouble. And once we got back on the interstate, I was going to smash Carmen into a thousand pieces in revenge for what she was doing to me.
We followed Carmen's instructions through another windy two-lane road in the dark night, only this one seemed to go straight up into a mountain. The thick trees beside the road absorbed any hint of moonlight, and the constant 45-degree turns on the narrow highway kept me on the edge of my seat. As my visibility shrank to about two car lengths, I prayed not to break down or run off the road, and suddenly became thankful we had already stopped for gas. Meanwhile, our arrival time changed to 8:42.
At some point on the interminable 22-mile road, we crossed a sign that was too dark to read, but seemed to indicate we were somehow in a national park. I said words to Carmen at that moment that can never be taken back--words that will permanently damage our relationship--but they were words that had to be said.
Our old car kept going, albeit at a very slow pace, given the darkness. I barely managed to keep it on the winding, unlit road as the exhaustion of the day's drive set it. The narrow mountain road had no shoulder, and with the fleeting amount of light drifting through the trees, I was sure we'd get rear-ended if the car ran into trouble and had to stop for some reason.
My wife, meanwhile, notice that our arrival time had once again been pushed back, gave up her fleeting hopes of a nice dinner and made a peanut butter sandwich. The only bright side was that the thick forest of trees beside the road protected us from any potential cannon fire.
As we neared the exit to this still unnamed national park, we saw the first road sign we'd seen since we got off the interstate. Surely, this was our ray of hope, and civilization was near. The long, harrowing journey through nothingness was about to end.
The sign read:
"Wilderness: 8 miles."
We were stunned.
I stammered: "You mean there's an actual place called Wilderness? And this isn't it?"
Indeed, someone had looked at the deserted place we were in, and the place we were headed, and thought the spot eight miles ahead looked more like "Wilderness" than the land that became the national park. And that was exactly where we were headed.
Through more twists and turns mixed in equal parts with prayers and curses at Carmen, we managed to make it to Wilderness. To our mild surprise, it looked no more or less like "Wilderness" than anything else we had passed since we made the regrettable decision to leave the interstate.
We saw no indication of civilization there, but then again, I guess that was to be expected.
From there, we made a couple more turns and finally hit I-95 in Fredricksburg, Va, where we would have stopped the car and kissed the 6-lane highway under our tires if our little detour hadn't already added an extra hour to the trip. It was now scheduled to end at 9:02.
Our literal detour through the Wilderness, from the time we left one interstate to the time we got on another, had taken slightly more than two hours, but it felt like two years. We could barely speak by the time we finished, and more than anything, we happy to be safe and in a car that was still moving.
After a short trip up I-95, we hit our destination, thanked the Hand of Providence, parked the car and enjoyed our stay.
We had made it in safely, but the detour through the Wilderness cost us an extra hour of travel time, for which I vowed to compensate on the drive back home, when I would use a different route.
And I would make sure to map it out in advance.
If that tip seems mind-numbingly obvious to you, then, well, I wish you would have been in the car with me the last time I drove from Nashville to Washington, DC.
We were set to embark at 7:00 a.m., but due to the breakneck pace at which I tend to live my life, I didn't even have a chance to start packing until 11:00 the night before.
My cross-country flight connected through Dallas, where my connection home got cancelled. I raced to a distant terminal of America's most poorly organized airport in a failed attempt to catch an earlier flight, which I ultimately missed by just four minutes, because I had to go through a long security line when I switched terminals. Then I had to return back from where I started (passing through security yet again) to sit around and wait for a later flight that barely got me home that night at all.
When it did, I was shuttled to the airport parking lot in the driving rain and dropped off in the downpour only to find that I had forgotten where I had parked. (Answer: nowhere near where I was dropped off).
Once I got home, in my exhausted state (Tennessee), I was so focused on packing what I would need once I reached my next destination that it never crossed my mind to figure out how to actually get there. There's probably a metaphor in that somewhere, but I certainly didn't have the mental energy to think about it then.
I might have thought of it the next morning, but my wife and I overslept and had to scamper to load the car and get moving in order to get there before it got too late. We hit the road, and about three hours into the trip, when we hit the intersection of I-75 and I-40 in Knoxville, that it occurred to me that I had no earthly idea how to get to Virginia, and that while I-40 would eventually get me to North Carolina, the two states were not, technically speaking, the same.
Although perhaps they should be.
My brief panic subsided when our portable GPS happened to be in the car we were driving. I don't like helplessly relying on those things, but the alternative was stopping and buying an atlas, which would have cost money, made me feel silly, and further delayed our arrival.
Besides, we were making seriously good time, which as most guys know, is the most important thing about a road trip.
So we pressed on. I-40 took us to I-81, which took us to Virginia where we passed a house with a confederate flag and a functional-looking cannon sitting in the front yard, pointing at the interstate. If the Civil War ever resumes, and the Yanks come marching down I-81, at least one house will be prepared.
We pressed on, anxious to get out of whatever weird subcultural domain we'd entered. Before long we were in Central Virginia and according to our GPS, about 2 hours outside of the DC suburbs where we were headed. We were on pace to hit Alexandria in less than 10 hours, which would be the driving achievement of a lifetime. I was pumped.
It was then that things got interesting.
The GPS (We call her "Carmen" because she is a Garmin brand, has a female voice, and lives in the car) inexplicably told me to exit I-81 for another interstate heading toward Richmond, which was 120 miles away. It didn't sound right to me, but I didn't have a map, so I followed orders.
I was temporarily relieved when Carmen told me to get off the interstate again in after a few miles. It was a small road, and it had just gotten dark outside, but at least she wasn't taking me on a 120-mile detour to Richmond. We got gas and stopped for a bathroom, which proved to be the only good decision we made that night.
The people hanging around the rural Virginia gas stop had the look of the cast of Deliverance and gave us suspicious looks as we walked in, but no one physically accosted us, and there was no immediate sign of cannon fire, so we labeled the stop a success.
When we got back on the road, the lights of the interstate soon faded and it became clear we were on a windy two-lane road in the middle of nowhere with no clear idea of where we were going. Right around then it occurred to me that a map really might have been a good idea.
At least the road was only 13 miles, and surely we'd hit some better road at the end of that dark and winding stretch. We were driving a car with a slow oil leak and 185,000 miles on it, but as long as we didn't breakdown, we'd be ok. Although this detour was surely costing us a lot of time. Carmen now had us getting in at 8:17 instead of 7:58, but there was no driving any faster than 35 on this rural two-lane deathtrap of a road.
After the requisite 13 miles, we turned onto an equally deserted stretch of two-lane roads that eventually led us to a town, for some reason, called Orange. It was cute enough, but when we hit its quaint downtown, Carmen instructed us to take the second right at the roundabout.
We did that and soon thereafter heard: "recalculating." Meanwhile Carmen had pushed our expected arrival back to 8:30. We were in trouble. And once we got back on the interstate, I was going to smash Carmen into a thousand pieces in revenge for what she was doing to me.
We followed Carmen's instructions through another windy two-lane road in the dark night, only this one seemed to go straight up into a mountain. The thick trees beside the road absorbed any hint of moonlight, and the constant 45-degree turns on the narrow highway kept me on the edge of my seat. As my visibility shrank to about two car lengths, I prayed not to break down or run off the road, and suddenly became thankful we had already stopped for gas. Meanwhile, our arrival time changed to 8:42.
At some point on the interminable 22-mile road, we crossed a sign that was too dark to read, but seemed to indicate we were somehow in a national park. I said words to Carmen at that moment that can never be taken back--words that will permanently damage our relationship--but they were words that had to be said.
Our old car kept going, albeit at a very slow pace, given the darkness. I barely managed to keep it on the winding, unlit road as the exhaustion of the day's drive set it. The narrow mountain road had no shoulder, and with the fleeting amount of light drifting through the trees, I was sure we'd get rear-ended if the car ran into trouble and had to stop for some reason.
My wife, meanwhile, notice that our arrival time had once again been pushed back, gave up her fleeting hopes of a nice dinner and made a peanut butter sandwich. The only bright side was that the thick forest of trees beside the road protected us from any potential cannon fire.
As we neared the exit to this still unnamed national park, we saw the first road sign we'd seen since we got off the interstate. Surely, this was our ray of hope, and civilization was near. The long, harrowing journey through nothingness was about to end.
The sign read:
"Wilderness: 8 miles."
We were stunned.
I stammered: "You mean there's an actual place called Wilderness? And this isn't it?"
Indeed, someone had looked at the deserted place we were in, and the place we were headed, and thought the spot eight miles ahead looked more like "Wilderness" than the land that became the national park. And that was exactly where we were headed.
Through more twists and turns mixed in equal parts with prayers and curses at Carmen, we managed to make it to Wilderness. To our mild surprise, it looked no more or less like "Wilderness" than anything else we had passed since we made the regrettable decision to leave the interstate.
We saw no indication of civilization there, but then again, I guess that was to be expected.
From there, we made a couple more turns and finally hit I-95 in Fredricksburg, Va, where we would have stopped the car and kissed the 6-lane highway under our tires if our little detour hadn't already added an extra hour to the trip. It was now scheduled to end at 9:02.
Our literal detour through the Wilderness, from the time we left one interstate to the time we got on another, had taken slightly more than two hours, but it felt like two years. We could barely speak by the time we finished, and more than anything, we happy to be safe and in a car that was still moving.
After a short trip up I-95, we hit our destination, thanked the Hand of Providence, parked the car and enjoyed our stay.
We had made it in safely, but the detour through the Wilderness cost us an extra hour of travel time, for which I vowed to compensate on the drive back home, when I would use a different route.
And I would make sure to map it out in advance.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
What I Learned in 2012
Never waste a failure.
-A writer whose name, for the life of me, I can't remember. But I read this quote last year, and it stuck with me. At least the quote did. The author, not so much.
2012 is over, and thank God for that.
It was the hardest year of my life, and not just because of all the idiotic facebook rants I encountered during the run-up to the election. Although that was certainly part of it.
2012 saw the country face a divisive choice: rehire a President who once promised to stem the ocean's tide but who instead barely managed to keep the government operational, or hire a guy who not-so-secretly hated half the population and never promised, specifically, anything whatsoever.
2012 saw the Mayans proven wrong about the End of Days. In their defense, however, they correctly predicted the death of Dick Clark, who would no longer be around to usher in 2013. So they kind of got it right.
2012 marked a summer where high temperatures reached 238 degrees, the debut of Gangnam Style, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember. It also featured the London Olympic games that included events such as handball (a game in which a player leaps at full speed into a human wall while attempting to hurl a ball into a guarded net), synchronized cat repelling, and the "modern pentathlon" featuring such "modern" events as steeplechase, fencing and hopscotch.
Ok, I made one of those events up. In fact, the modern pentathlon actually includes pistol shooting rather than hopscotch.
Those are the things that might make it into an almanac about the year that just passed. But the thing is, none of those things are all that important to me.
Ten years from now, if someone asks me what happened in 2012, I won't remember any of that stuff, except maybe the ridiculousness of watching an event called "modern pentathlon" that contained events outdated by at least a century.
What will I remember?
It is tempting to think that I'll remember that 2012 was the Year of Crap.
In 2012, my brother got cancer. The tenant who lived in my old house in St. Louis reneged on her informal agreement to buy it at the end of her lease term, leaving me with two mortgages and $11,000 in repair bills. A close friend moved away. Many others let me down.
The church I'd been part of five years didn't practice what it preached. My little brother in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program stopped returning my calls. For half the year, I ended up being forced into doing my boss's job responsibilities even though I'd been passed over for the promotion.
I suffered a displaced rib, strep throat, a colonoscopy, four sinus infections, a bulging disk in my back. My workload exploded beyond what I thought was possible.
Life suddenly seemed harder. And I haven't even mentioned the things I can't tell you about here.
Those are all things that happened to me in 2012. But they are not what I'll remember.
What I'll remember is that this was the year my brother got Stage 3c cancer, but completed a mini-triathlon in protest of his circumstances. I'll remember that I did it with him, even though I don't own a bike, can barely swim, and had a displaced rib poking into my lung that prevented me from taking deep breaths. I'll remember that I learned I can accomplish so much more than seems possible if I work consistently at something and refuse to accept defeat. I learned that I can far exceed the limitations I thought I had if only I have the courage to try.
I learned not to dwell on things that don't matter. My brother has always been one of the most important people in my life, but we let a silly political debate disrupt our relationship not too long before his diagnosis. If 2012 had been the end of his time on earth, I don't know if I could have forgiven myself for that. So I learned this year that my friends don't have to vote the way I do. Good people have differing visions as to how to make our country better, and as long as someone is motivated by the right intentions, I don't have to try to agree with what their view of what progress looks like.
I learned that peace is possible, even in the worst of circumstances, as long as one knows that life's inevitable tragedies are not endured alone. And I learned the importance of reaching out when someone else is in the midst of something difficult. I learned the importance of staying beside those who proved that they care, and the surprising joy of hearing from the people who unexpectedly did.
I also learned:
God doesn't always answer prayers with a "yes" or "no." Sometimes the answer is just a sense of peace, or a shoulder to cry on, until the answer comes.
Most of our trying circumstances will eventually pass. The ones that don't offer the chance to learn something. Use it.
God has accounted for our own stupidity in drawing up His plan for us.
Don't take anything for granted. Something you love might not be there when you are ready to appreciate it.
If you have three friends who are reliable, and with whom you can talk to about anything, you can consider yourself blessed. And I'm thankful to have more than that.
If a book isn't interesting by page 50, it's time to move on. No one is handing out medals for finishing bad books.
If you change out of your work clothes as soon as you come home, you'll leave the stress of the work day behind more easily.
You need to say "no" sometimes, even to the people who love you.
You can't please everyone, no matter how hard you try. But if you get to know yourself well enough to become comfortable in your own skin, you'll please the people who matter most, without really trying. As Oscar Wilde said, "be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."
There's an inner voice in your soul. If you don't listen to it now, you'll pay the consequences later.
In a good friendship, both parties' natural tendency is to replenish the other's spirit. Don't maintain a one-sided relationship where the giving only flows in one direction.
Forgive yourself and forgive others. None of us are perfect. But if someone keeps burning you in the same way, even after being confronted about it, it might be time to adjust your expectations accordingly.
Your vacation time is precious. Don't use it on something that won't refresh you.
Stop and look at what direction you are headed, and whether or not you even want to get there. If not, get off the road. You're still the one in the driver's seat.
Stop right now and think of one thing in your life that you want but don't have. Figure out how to make it happen, and start taking steps that direction. Your inner voice will yell at you until you do.
Above all else, be considerate.
Find a new author you like every year.
Life is seldom boring for long stretches of time. When you get a boring stretch, enjoy it and use it to grow while you have the energy free.
My life is a mess. Why anyone listens to me about anything is beyond my comprehension. But you, me and God will get through 2013, come what may.
I can't wait to see what happens next.
-A writer whose name, for the life of me, I can't remember. But I read this quote last year, and it stuck with me. At least the quote did. The author, not so much.
2012 is over, and thank God for that.
It was the hardest year of my life, and not just because of all the idiotic facebook rants I encountered during the run-up to the election. Although that was certainly part of it.
2012 saw the country face a divisive choice: rehire a President who once promised to stem the ocean's tide but who instead barely managed to keep the government operational, or hire a guy who not-so-secretly hated half the population and never promised, specifically, anything whatsoever.
2012 saw the Mayans proven wrong about the End of Days. In their defense, however, they correctly predicted the death of Dick Clark, who would no longer be around to usher in 2013. So they kind of got it right.
2012 marked a summer where high temperatures reached 238 degrees, the debut of Gangnam Style, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember. It also featured the London Olympic games that included events such as handball (a game in which a player leaps at full speed into a human wall while attempting to hurl a ball into a guarded net), synchronized cat repelling, and the "modern pentathlon" featuring such "modern" events as steeplechase, fencing and hopscotch.
Ok, I made one of those events up. In fact, the modern pentathlon actually includes pistol shooting rather than hopscotch.
Those are the things that might make it into an almanac about the year that just passed. But the thing is, none of those things are all that important to me.
Ten years from now, if someone asks me what happened in 2012, I won't remember any of that stuff, except maybe the ridiculousness of watching an event called "modern pentathlon" that contained events outdated by at least a century.
What will I remember?
It is tempting to think that I'll remember that 2012 was the Year of Crap.
In 2012, my brother got cancer. The tenant who lived in my old house in St. Louis reneged on her informal agreement to buy it at the end of her lease term, leaving me with two mortgages and $11,000 in repair bills. A close friend moved away. Many others let me down.
The church I'd been part of five years didn't practice what it preached. My little brother in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program stopped returning my calls. For half the year, I ended up being forced into doing my boss's job responsibilities even though I'd been passed over for the promotion.
I suffered a displaced rib, strep throat, a colonoscopy, four sinus infections, a bulging disk in my back. My workload exploded beyond what I thought was possible.
Life suddenly seemed harder. And I haven't even mentioned the things I can't tell you about here.
Those are all things that happened to me in 2012. But they are not what I'll remember.
What I'll remember is that this was the year my brother got Stage 3c cancer, but completed a mini-triathlon in protest of his circumstances. I'll remember that I did it with him, even though I don't own a bike, can barely swim, and had a displaced rib poking into my lung that prevented me from taking deep breaths. I'll remember that I learned I can accomplish so much more than seems possible if I work consistently at something and refuse to accept defeat. I learned that I can far exceed the limitations I thought I had if only I have the courage to try.
I learned not to dwell on things that don't matter. My brother has always been one of the most important people in my life, but we let a silly political debate disrupt our relationship not too long before his diagnosis. If 2012 had been the end of his time on earth, I don't know if I could have forgiven myself for that. So I learned this year that my friends don't have to vote the way I do. Good people have differing visions as to how to make our country better, and as long as someone is motivated by the right intentions, I don't have to try to agree with what their view of what progress looks like.
I learned that peace is possible, even in the worst of circumstances, as long as one knows that life's inevitable tragedies are not endured alone. And I learned the importance of reaching out when someone else is in the midst of something difficult. I learned the importance of staying beside those who proved that they care, and the surprising joy of hearing from the people who unexpectedly did.
I also learned:
God doesn't always answer prayers with a "yes" or "no." Sometimes the answer is just a sense of peace, or a shoulder to cry on, until the answer comes.
Most of our trying circumstances will eventually pass. The ones that don't offer the chance to learn something. Use it.
God has accounted for our own stupidity in drawing up His plan for us.
Don't take anything for granted. Something you love might not be there when you are ready to appreciate it.
If you have three friends who are reliable, and with whom you can talk to about anything, you can consider yourself blessed. And I'm thankful to have more than that.
If a book isn't interesting by page 50, it's time to move on. No one is handing out medals for finishing bad books.
If you change out of your work clothes as soon as you come home, you'll leave the stress of the work day behind more easily.
You need to say "no" sometimes, even to the people who love you.
You can't please everyone, no matter how hard you try. But if you get to know yourself well enough to become comfortable in your own skin, you'll please the people who matter most, without really trying. As Oscar Wilde said, "be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."
There's an inner voice in your soul. If you don't listen to it now, you'll pay the consequences later.
In a good friendship, both parties' natural tendency is to replenish the other's spirit. Don't maintain a one-sided relationship where the giving only flows in one direction.
Forgive yourself and forgive others. None of us are perfect. But if someone keeps burning you in the same way, even after being confronted about it, it might be time to adjust your expectations accordingly.
Your vacation time is precious. Don't use it on something that won't refresh you.
Stop and look at what direction you are headed, and whether or not you even want to get there. If not, get off the road. You're still the one in the driver's seat.
Stop right now and think of one thing in your life that you want but don't have. Figure out how to make it happen, and start taking steps that direction. Your inner voice will yell at you until you do.
Above all else, be considerate.
Find a new author you like every year.
Life is seldom boring for long stretches of time. When you get a boring stretch, enjoy it and use it to grow while you have the energy free.
My life is a mess. Why anyone listens to me about anything is beyond my comprehension. But you, me and God will get through 2013, come what may.
I can't wait to see what happens next.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Angel over my Shoulder
It's Christmas, so I might as well tell you about the time an angel came to visit me.
It's a long story, and to tell it properly, we have to go back to the afternoon March 16, 1995.
I was a junior in high school and at my surgeon's office for a final appointment before I was set to have knee surgery. It was to be a fairly standard arthroscopic procedure the next morning to fix a torn meniscus and remove some wayward cartilage I had suffered from a bad triple jump landing in track practice.
But the doctor entered the room with a frown carrying my MRI results.
He had noticed a small abnormality that no one had seen when they first got the results back. It might be just a smudge, he said, or it might be partially hidden tear of my ACL. Either way, he said, he needed to cancel my surgery in the morning.
They couldn't know exactly what was going on in my knee until they went inside, and if it was a ligament tear, the swelling would need about another week to subside before it could be operated on.
The doctor suggested rescheduling my operation another week so that they could fix whatever it was they found.
This was bad news on multiple fronts.
An arthroscopic surgery was a fairly minor deal from which I could recover in a matter of weeks. My track season would be over, but I'd be just fine long before basketball season next year, which is what really mattered to me.
A ligament tear meant full reconstructive knee surgery, months of rehabilitation and a strong chance I'd never fully recover. This possibility was devastating to my high school mind.
The world seems smaller in high school, so I was just as concerned with what the news meant in the short term. I'd been hobbling around my high school on crutches for 8 days. The foam in my crutches had absorbed my sweat from the exertion and was starting to smell bad. My classmates had grown beyond tired of helping me carry my books. Another week of begging for mercy seemed excruciating.
Plus, I had told the world I was having surgery in the morning, and one of my teachers had gone to great trouble to videotape a "Get Well Soon Party" in my absence. I was going to have a lot of unwelcoming explaining to do if my surgery turned out to be a false alarm.
I couldn't face it. I had to have surgery tomorrow.
I begged the doctor to go ahead and do the operation, just in case they were wrong about the ACL tear. He explained that it could lead to lots of unnecessary trouble if it turned out that I had to have another surgery a week later. And I didn't have insurance, so my dad was looking at the possibility of two $10,000 operations rather than one. It made no sense to do the operation.
So the expression on my face must have been one of abject misery, when, against all logic, both my dad and the surgeon relented and allowed me to have an operation the next day, even though I might need another one just one week later.
I went into the operating room nervous, not just because I was 17 and had never faced anything like it, but because the next year of my life, my promising basketball career (and a whole lot of my dad's money) was at stake. I would wake up from the operation either a couple weeks away from being as good as new, or I would wake up facing another surgery, a chorus of "I told you so," and months of rehab before life seemed normal again.
I didn't sleep well the night before, but once I was prepped for surgery the nurses gave me the happy drugs. I quickly fell asleep.
The next thing I knew, my eyes groggily half-opened to see a figure standing over my left shoulder. "Your surgery was successful," a woman's voice told me. "And you don't need another one."
I wanted to scream with joy, but I was barely awake and couldn't yet respond. I saw her disappear behind me and didn't have the strength to move my head.
After a minute or two, I managed to gather my wits and fully open my eyes, but the nurse in the room with me had her back turned across the room.
"That's great news," I managed to say.
"Oh, you're awake," she said, although her voice suddenly sounded very different from the one I had just heard. "But what are you talking about?"
"My surgery. That my ACL wasn't torn. You just told me I didn't need another surgery."
She had no idea what I was talking about.
The nurse had been assigned to the room I had been wheeled to to let the doctor know when I was awake, but she knew nothing about my procedure or my results. I asked if another nurse had been in the room, but she said it had just been her and I in the room for the last half hour. I looked behind my left shoulder in the direction where I had noticed the woman disappear, and saw nothing but a cinder block wall.
The only door to the room was on the other side beside where the nurse was standing.
A few minutes later the doctor came in. I met him with an exclamation: "My ACL isn't torn!!!! I don't need another surgery!!!!"
"Oh, it was torn," he said, as my heart began to sink. "But the tear was so small we could fix it with the laser. You were right about having the surgery." After a moment's pause he then asked:
"But how on earth did you know you wouldn't need another surgery?"
I hadn't had time to process what had happened, so I just shrugged off the question. But, in fact, there was no earthly way I could have known my surgery results. Instead, an audible voice that the nurse in my room didn't hear had accurately described my surgery and then disappeared into a wall.
Sounds reasonable, right?
It sounds even crazier considering that I don't know why it happened. I would have found out the same news from my surgeon five minutes later, so I never understood the point of this visit. And when I had a colonoscopy earlier this year that found three polyps, I was disappointed my Guardian didn't visit again when I came-to, forcing me instead to wait five days to hear whether or not I had cancer.
I haven't shared this story much because I couldn't come to grips with the point of it all. On one hand, there was no rational explanation for how I knew my surgery results before anyone at the hospital had told me. On the other hand, while I believe in the theoretical possibility of divine intervention, I couldn't grasp the point of it coming to give me a five-minute heads up on news I would have heard anyway.
No, an angel didn't come to tell me my surgery results. There would have been no point in that. As I consider it now, a much more likely possibility strikes me, though. My Guardian had been there for my whole surgery. She just happened to tell me my results on her way out the door.
Or rather, her way out the wall.
---------------------------------------------------------
As it turned out, I never fully recovered from my slightly torn ACL. My left leg is bigger than my right one, and I have back problems from the lack of cartilage in my right leg. I could never run as fast or jump as high after my injury as I could before it, and I didn't score as many points in my senior basketball season and I didn't get that basketball scholarship that I had dreamed of.
But now, every time my right knee barks at me when I run in the cold or don't stretch before working out, I'm reminded of the time that God sent an angel and proved he loved me.
All in all, that's a pretty good trade.
It's a long story, and to tell it properly, we have to go back to the afternoon March 16, 1995.
I was a junior in high school and at my surgeon's office for a final appointment before I was set to have knee surgery. It was to be a fairly standard arthroscopic procedure the next morning to fix a torn meniscus and remove some wayward cartilage I had suffered from a bad triple jump landing in track practice.
But the doctor entered the room with a frown carrying my MRI results.
He had noticed a small abnormality that no one had seen when they first got the results back. It might be just a smudge, he said, or it might be partially hidden tear of my ACL. Either way, he said, he needed to cancel my surgery in the morning.
They couldn't know exactly what was going on in my knee until they went inside, and if it was a ligament tear, the swelling would need about another week to subside before it could be operated on.
The doctor suggested rescheduling my operation another week so that they could fix whatever it was they found.
This was bad news on multiple fronts.
An arthroscopic surgery was a fairly minor deal from which I could recover in a matter of weeks. My track season would be over, but I'd be just fine long before basketball season next year, which is what really mattered to me.
A ligament tear meant full reconstructive knee surgery, months of rehabilitation and a strong chance I'd never fully recover. This possibility was devastating to my high school mind.
The world seems smaller in high school, so I was just as concerned with what the news meant in the short term. I'd been hobbling around my high school on crutches for 8 days. The foam in my crutches had absorbed my sweat from the exertion and was starting to smell bad. My classmates had grown beyond tired of helping me carry my books. Another week of begging for mercy seemed excruciating.
Plus, I had told the world I was having surgery in the morning, and one of my teachers had gone to great trouble to videotape a "Get Well Soon Party" in my absence. I was going to have a lot of unwelcoming explaining to do if my surgery turned out to be a false alarm.
I couldn't face it. I had to have surgery tomorrow.
I begged the doctor to go ahead and do the operation, just in case they were wrong about the ACL tear. He explained that it could lead to lots of unnecessary trouble if it turned out that I had to have another surgery a week later. And I didn't have insurance, so my dad was looking at the possibility of two $10,000 operations rather than one. It made no sense to do the operation.
So the expression on my face must have been one of abject misery, when, against all logic, both my dad and the surgeon relented and allowed me to have an operation the next day, even though I might need another one just one week later.
I went into the operating room nervous, not just because I was 17 and had never faced anything like it, but because the next year of my life, my promising basketball career (and a whole lot of my dad's money) was at stake. I would wake up from the operation either a couple weeks away from being as good as new, or I would wake up facing another surgery, a chorus of "I told you so," and months of rehab before life seemed normal again.
I didn't sleep well the night before, but once I was prepped for surgery the nurses gave me the happy drugs. I quickly fell asleep.
The next thing I knew, my eyes groggily half-opened to see a figure standing over my left shoulder. "Your surgery was successful," a woman's voice told me. "And you don't need another one."
I wanted to scream with joy, but I was barely awake and couldn't yet respond. I saw her disappear behind me and didn't have the strength to move my head.
After a minute or two, I managed to gather my wits and fully open my eyes, but the nurse in the room with me had her back turned across the room.
"That's great news," I managed to say.
"Oh, you're awake," she said, although her voice suddenly sounded very different from the one I had just heard. "But what are you talking about?"
"My surgery. That my ACL wasn't torn. You just told me I didn't need another surgery."
She had no idea what I was talking about.
The nurse had been assigned to the room I had been wheeled to to let the doctor know when I was awake, but she knew nothing about my procedure or my results. I asked if another nurse had been in the room, but she said it had just been her and I in the room for the last half hour. I looked behind my left shoulder in the direction where I had noticed the woman disappear, and saw nothing but a cinder block wall.
The only door to the room was on the other side beside where the nurse was standing.
A few minutes later the doctor came in. I met him with an exclamation: "My ACL isn't torn!!!! I don't need another surgery!!!!"
"Oh, it was torn," he said, as my heart began to sink. "But the tear was so small we could fix it with the laser. You were right about having the surgery." After a moment's pause he then asked:
"But how on earth did you know you wouldn't need another surgery?"
I hadn't had time to process what had happened, so I just shrugged off the question. But, in fact, there was no earthly way I could have known my surgery results. Instead, an audible voice that the nurse in my room didn't hear had accurately described my surgery and then disappeared into a wall.
Sounds reasonable, right?
It sounds even crazier considering that I don't know why it happened. I would have found out the same news from my surgeon five minutes later, so I never understood the point of this visit. And when I had a colonoscopy earlier this year that found three polyps, I was disappointed my Guardian didn't visit again when I came-to, forcing me instead to wait five days to hear whether or not I had cancer.
I haven't shared this story much because I couldn't come to grips with the point of it all. On one hand, there was no rational explanation for how I knew my surgery results before anyone at the hospital had told me. On the other hand, while I believe in the theoretical possibility of divine intervention, I couldn't grasp the point of it coming to give me a five-minute heads up on news I would have heard anyway.
No, an angel didn't come to tell me my surgery results. There would have been no point in that. As I consider it now, a much more likely possibility strikes me, though. My Guardian had been there for my whole surgery. She just happened to tell me my results on her way out the door.
Or rather, her way out the wall.
---------------------------------------------------------
As it turned out, I never fully recovered from my slightly torn ACL. My left leg is bigger than my right one, and I have back problems from the lack of cartilage in my right leg. I could never run as fast or jump as high after my injury as I could before it, and I didn't score as many points in my senior basketball season and I didn't get that basketball scholarship that I had dreamed of.
But now, every time my right knee barks at me when I run in the cold or don't stretch before working out, I'm reminded of the time that God sent an angel and proved he loved me.
All in all, that's a pretty good trade.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
The Meaning of Christmas? The same as last year.
I was busy selling a house this year, so I didn't even start Christmas shopping until December 20th. In the frantic rush of selling a house and buying presents, there hasn't been time to blog.
My brain has turned to mush anyway after enduring the ups and downs of 2012, so it might be for the best.
Don't yell at me.
There will be one or two more columns coming by the end of the year, so check back often. In the meantime, here's a peace offering.
It's last year's Christmas blog (Disappointed in my gift? Well, what did you get me for Christmas?).
I'd tell you what this post is about, but I really don't remember. Something about Christmas, and why it should be meaningful to everyone, and I think there's a reference to my favorite sitcom (Community) in there somewhere.
It was pretty good. I just can't remember the details. So see it for yourself.
http://www.andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2011/12/real-meaning-of-christmas.html
My brain has turned to mush anyway after enduring the ups and downs of 2012, so it might be for the best.
Don't yell at me.
There will be one or two more columns coming by the end of the year, so check back often. In the meantime, here's a peace offering.
It's last year's Christmas blog (Disappointed in my gift? Well, what did you get me for Christmas?).
I'd tell you what this post is about, but I really don't remember. Something about Christmas, and why it should be meaningful to everyone, and I think there's a reference to my favorite sitcom (Community) in there somewhere.
It was pretty good. I just can't remember the details. So see it for yourself.
http://www.andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2011/12/real-meaning-of-christmas.html
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Fighting the Good Fight Against Bad Christmas Songs
Everyone has a favorite holiday tradition. Mine is making fun of bad Christmas songs.
Don't judge me. Or go ahead and judge me, if you want, because I don't care. I will still drive my wife crazy overanalyzing every song on the radio for the next two weeks regardless.
I will even bear the burden of being called a Scrooge if I must. I know the holidays are a happy time when no one wants to criticize anything, but I am sticking to my principles on this.
Just because a song is about the holidays doesn't give it the right to insult the collective intelligence of humanity.
I believe this firmly.
It's not that I hate Christmas or the holiday season. I actually think it's the most wonderful time of the year. (you see what I did there?) Because I do, I feel justified in saving the holiday season from being corrupted by an endless avalanche of stupid holiday songs.
My favorite example is a holiday song so bad it's actually sort of entertaining. With the song "Do they Know it's Christmastime," a collaboration of musicians known as Band Aid got together and decided to advance every negative stereotype of Africa they could think of in the hopes of benefiting the people there. The melody is catchy and the song nobly attempts to raise awareness of hunger in Africa, but its actual lyrics couldn't insult the population more thoroughly if the musicians had flown to Africa and given every person there an atomic wedgie.
In the chorus, the song proclaims that the entire continent of Africa has no rain, rivers or plant life whatsoever, and the people there are too stupid and poor to own calendars. What's more, it presents as tragic the fact that people there might not even "know it's Christmas time at all," when the majority of the continent are not Christians and wouldn't celebrate it anyway. It never occurs to the well meaing but ethnocentric musicians that maybe the people there know about our Western holiday, but just don't care.
Similarly, the song bemoans that "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime." Is this really a bad thing? If the children are as barefoot and shirtless children and the song suggests, wouldn't they be thankful that it isn't going to snow? They'd freeze their butts off!
But I digress.
Plenty of traditional Christmas songs are dumb as well. "Away in a Manger" is a sweet, melodic and good-intentioned song, but the line stating "the little lord Jesus, no crying he makes" is flat-out heretical. The Bible records Jesus crying as an adult when his friend Lazarus died. So the song's suggestion that baby Jesus was free of human emotion is demonstrably offbase. More importantly, it runs counter to the central message of Christianity that God loved us enough to come to earth to live exactly like we do.
It's actually amazing how many religiously based Christmas songs get the details of the Christmas story completely wrong, considering the songs exist to celebrate the story.
For instance, take "The First Noel." According to the Bible, the shepards didn't "(look) up and see a great star, shining in the East beyond them far." Actually, the shepards saw an angel; it was the wise men who saw the star. And they came from the East, so the star would have had to appear them in the West. They also didn't "come sailing in" on "three ships" on "Christmas Day," they walked through the desert from Babylon and arrived long after Jesus was born.
Also, while the little drummer boy (who is not recorded in the actual Christmas story) might be a poor boy, Jesus was not. He wasn't born in a manger because his parents were broke, it was because the inn was full. In fact, by the time the wise men got to the scene, Mary and Joseph had already acquired their own house in Bethlehem, even though they didn't live there and didn't plan to stay. (If you don't believe me, look it up).
Secular holiday songs don't have to worry about getting factual details right, but they don't fair much better in the logic department. While "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" is one of my favorite holiday songs, I still don't understand why it references telling "scary ghost stories" along with tales of the glories of past Christmases. Who tells ghost stories at Christmas? And why? Is it to scare children into hiding in their rooms on Christmas Eve so the parents can play Santa?
That particular line is curious, but at least the premise of that song is logical, which is more than one can say about "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." The song is about a kid's confusion that his Mom and Santa are making out, as the unsuspecting doofus of a kid is unaware that his own Dad is the one in the Santa costume. But here's my question: why exactly is Dad dressed as Santa?
I can understand Dad dressing up as Santa while the kids are around. But in this story, they are supposed to be asleep already. So why is dad bothering to put on the costume? Is this some kind of role-play fetish on Mom's part?
I feel gross even thinking about this.
But even this song isn't as bad as the "Christmas Shoes." In fact, no song in the history of time is.
In the song, a hapless boy leaves his mother on her deathbed in an attempt to buy her some shoes, for the totally logical purpose of giving them to his mom so she can impress God with her pinache in the afterlife.
The boy is oblivious to the facts that he has no money to buy the shoes and that his mom can't take them with her anyway. It's never explained how the boy expected to pay for the shoes, and I can't help but think that maybe Mom would be in better health if she didn't have to worry about Junior roaming the streets and blowing what little money the family has on dumb, pointless crap.
But ultimately, someone steps in and covers the charge for the shoes on the boy's behalf, notwithstanding his lack of forethought. In the end, Mom gets her shoes and dies.
Uplifting, no?
I'm not sure what the message of this song is supposed to be, but it offends on every level. It exalts materialism over relationships, as it applauds the boy's choice to spend his mother's last moments shopping for her instead of being with her. It suggests that God cares more about how we look and what we acquire than how we live or what's in our hearts.
The plot rewards the boy's failure to think ahead about his decisions. Every time I hear it, I wonder how many kids are inspired by the song to take an expensive item to a department store counter in the hopes that someone will buy it for them if they look sufficiently downtrodden.
It's also an open question why the little boy's dad let him wander out of the house and into downtown while his mother is dying in the first place.
Whatever the message of the song is supposed to be, when I hear it, I mostly have grave concerns about this little boy's future. His only living parent is his irresponsible enough to let him wander around the city alone, and the boy has come to believe that the world at large will cater to his wishes whether he can pay his fair share or not.
In other words, this boy is the embodiment of Mitt Romney's 47 percent!
Merry Christmas!
Maybe I'm thinking about all this too hard. Christmas is supposed to be the time we stop analyzing things and enjoy the moment. There's no real harm in any of the logical or factual errors noted above, except maybe some cultural insensitivity and a heaping dose of consumerism.
So maybe there's no real harm done, and we shouldn't complain. After all, some people, even in this country, never get the opportunity to discuss in heated comfort the silliness of the songs they'll listen to as they enjoy an upcoming week of paid vacation. Instead, they'll be delivering your mail, bagging your groceries, or policing your streets while you and me enjoy our eggnog.
So instead of complaining, we should do something to show our appreciation.
What to do? Well, according to Band Aid, there's only one to express our gratitude at winning life's lottery and being free from the miserable burdens other people have to carry. I think we should do it now.
So tonight, thank God it's themmmmm insteaaaaaad of yooooooooooooou!
Merry Christmas, and enjoy whatever bad Christmas songs come your way! If you're like me, you'll miss making fun of them come December 26th.
Don't judge me. Or go ahead and judge me, if you want, because I don't care. I will still drive my wife crazy overanalyzing every song on the radio for the next two weeks regardless.
I will even bear the burden of being called a Scrooge if I must. I know the holidays are a happy time when no one wants to criticize anything, but I am sticking to my principles on this.
Just because a song is about the holidays doesn't give it the right to insult the collective intelligence of humanity.
I believe this firmly.
It's not that I hate Christmas or the holiday season. I actually think it's the most wonderful time of the year. (you see what I did there?) Because I do, I feel justified in saving the holiday season from being corrupted by an endless avalanche of stupid holiday songs.
My favorite example is a holiday song so bad it's actually sort of entertaining. With the song "Do they Know it's Christmastime," a collaboration of musicians known as Band Aid got together and decided to advance every negative stereotype of Africa they could think of in the hopes of benefiting the people there. The melody is catchy and the song nobly attempts to raise awareness of hunger in Africa, but its actual lyrics couldn't insult the population more thoroughly if the musicians had flown to Africa and given every person there an atomic wedgie.
In the chorus, the song proclaims that the entire continent of Africa has no rain, rivers or plant life whatsoever, and the people there are too stupid and poor to own calendars. What's more, it presents as tragic the fact that people there might not even "know it's Christmas time at all," when the majority of the continent are not Christians and wouldn't celebrate it anyway. It never occurs to the well meaing but ethnocentric musicians that maybe the people there know about our Western holiday, but just don't care.
Similarly, the song bemoans that "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime." Is this really a bad thing? If the children are as barefoot and shirtless children and the song suggests, wouldn't they be thankful that it isn't going to snow? They'd freeze their butts off!
But I digress.
Plenty of traditional Christmas songs are dumb as well. "Away in a Manger" is a sweet, melodic and good-intentioned song, but the line stating "the little lord Jesus, no crying he makes" is flat-out heretical. The Bible records Jesus crying as an adult when his friend Lazarus died. So the song's suggestion that baby Jesus was free of human emotion is demonstrably offbase. More importantly, it runs counter to the central message of Christianity that God loved us enough to come to earth to live exactly like we do.
It's actually amazing how many religiously based Christmas songs get the details of the Christmas story completely wrong, considering the songs exist to celebrate the story.
For instance, take "The First Noel." According to the Bible, the shepards didn't "(look) up and see a great star, shining in the East beyond them far." Actually, the shepards saw an angel; it was the wise men who saw the star. And they came from the East, so the star would have had to appear them in the West. They also didn't "come sailing in" on "three ships" on "Christmas Day," they walked through the desert from Babylon and arrived long after Jesus was born.
Also, while the little drummer boy (who is not recorded in the actual Christmas story) might be a poor boy, Jesus was not. He wasn't born in a manger because his parents were broke, it was because the inn was full. In fact, by the time the wise men got to the scene, Mary and Joseph had already acquired their own house in Bethlehem, even though they didn't live there and didn't plan to stay. (If you don't believe me, look it up).
Secular holiday songs don't have to worry about getting factual details right, but they don't fair much better in the logic department. While "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" is one of my favorite holiday songs, I still don't understand why it references telling "scary ghost stories" along with tales of the glories of past Christmases. Who tells ghost stories at Christmas? And why? Is it to scare children into hiding in their rooms on Christmas Eve so the parents can play Santa?
That particular line is curious, but at least the premise of that song is logical, which is more than one can say about "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." The song is about a kid's confusion that his Mom and Santa are making out, as the unsuspecting doofus of a kid is unaware that his own Dad is the one in the Santa costume. But here's my question: why exactly is Dad dressed as Santa?
I can understand Dad dressing up as Santa while the kids are around. But in this story, they are supposed to be asleep already. So why is dad bothering to put on the costume? Is this some kind of role-play fetish on Mom's part?
I feel gross even thinking about this.
But even this song isn't as bad as the "Christmas Shoes." In fact, no song in the history of time is.
In the song, a hapless boy leaves his mother on her deathbed in an attempt to buy her some shoes, for the totally logical purpose of giving them to his mom so she can impress God with her pinache in the afterlife.
The boy is oblivious to the facts that he has no money to buy the shoes and that his mom can't take them with her anyway. It's never explained how the boy expected to pay for the shoes, and I can't help but think that maybe Mom would be in better health if she didn't have to worry about Junior roaming the streets and blowing what little money the family has on dumb, pointless crap.
But ultimately, someone steps in and covers the charge for the shoes on the boy's behalf, notwithstanding his lack of forethought. In the end, Mom gets her shoes and dies.
Uplifting, no?
I'm not sure what the message of this song is supposed to be, but it offends on every level. It exalts materialism over relationships, as it applauds the boy's choice to spend his mother's last moments shopping for her instead of being with her. It suggests that God cares more about how we look and what we acquire than how we live or what's in our hearts.
The plot rewards the boy's failure to think ahead about his decisions. Every time I hear it, I wonder how many kids are inspired by the song to take an expensive item to a department store counter in the hopes that someone will buy it for them if they look sufficiently downtrodden.
It's also an open question why the little boy's dad let him wander out of the house and into downtown while his mother is dying in the first place.
Whatever the message of the song is supposed to be, when I hear it, I mostly have grave concerns about this little boy's future. His only living parent is his irresponsible enough to let him wander around the city alone, and the boy has come to believe that the world at large will cater to his wishes whether he can pay his fair share or not.
In other words, this boy is the embodiment of Mitt Romney's 47 percent!
Merry Christmas!
Maybe I'm thinking about all this too hard. Christmas is supposed to be the time we stop analyzing things and enjoy the moment. There's no real harm in any of the logical or factual errors noted above, except maybe some cultural insensitivity and a heaping dose of consumerism.
So maybe there's no real harm done, and we shouldn't complain. After all, some people, even in this country, never get the opportunity to discuss in heated comfort the silliness of the songs they'll listen to as they enjoy an upcoming week of paid vacation. Instead, they'll be delivering your mail, bagging your groceries, or policing your streets while you and me enjoy our eggnog.
So instead of complaining, we should do something to show our appreciation.
What to do? Well, according to Band Aid, there's only one to express our gratitude at winning life's lottery and being free from the miserable burdens other people have to carry. I think we should do it now.
So tonight, thank God it's themmmmm insteaaaaaad of yooooooooooooou!
Merry Christmas, and enjoy whatever bad Christmas songs come your way! If you're like me, you'll miss making fun of them come December 26th.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Answered Prayers
It was a long and winding road, but one that finally-- after a longer journey than seemed possible-- led to a happy ending.
After five-and-a-half years of trying, we finally have a contract to sell the house in St. Louis we left in 2007!
I repeat: WE ARE FINALLY SELLING OUR FLIPPING HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This changes everything.
It marks the end of a very long walk in the desert. It's the end of:
Five-and-a-half years of unanswered prayers, and wondering where God was in my life. Sixty-five straight months of making two house payments, while only living in one. 298 consecutive weeks where I saw something fun happening the upcoming weekend but couldn't afford to do it and dreamed of the day when I could. 2008 nights in a row of going to bed with a giant unresolved problem on my hands, and nothing I could do to fix it.
The worst part of owning two houses isn't the wasted money, though, it's the chains the situation puts around your life. There's a constant uncertainty about everything.
You can't visit distant friends and relatives very often, because you never know when you might need that airfare money to go toward closing. There are constant maintenance needs that you don't even know about until they've mushroomed into something huge, and the ever-looming threat of a break-in.
We had three.
You can't make any long-term plans whatsoever, because you haven't the faintest idea what life is going to look like a few months down the road.
It's a never-ending source of administrative headaches, from having to supervise repairmen from long-distance, to remembering to pay two sets of bills every month, to pleading with heartless insurance companies about writing a policy for a vacant house that's been broken into three times.
All that is ending now.
The house is selling, the extra bills are disappearing, and soon, whatever else goes wrong five hours away won't be our problem.
But that isn't even the best news I've received in the last eight days.
As I've noted here before, it was March 15th of this year when we heard that our former tenant at that St. Louis house was not going to buy it after all, and, in fact was breaking her lease and moving out.
But that wasn't the worst news of my day--far from it.
About two hours earlier, I listened as an emotionless doctor casually told my brother and his wife that he had a 48 percent chance of beating cancer and still being alive in five years.
It doesn't make sense, and my brother's issues were a million times worse, but the two problems had sort of been spiritually linked in my mind from that day forward, and I rarely prayed for one without the other.
After his appointment, my brother endured 12 grueling sessions of chemotherapy. His treatments ended at the end of the summer, but the doctors wanted to wait a couple months after to see if the treatment had been effective, or if the cancer had returned.
On Monday of last week, he checked out clear. No sign of cancer whatsoever.
It was late afternoon of the day before the results came, when my realtor called. The last few showings hadn't gone well, so I assumed he was calling with yet another maintenance issue. My wife even said that theory out loud when I announced who was calling.
Instead, the realtor was calling to say that a woman had offered to buy our house on the spot upon her first viewing of the house. And somehow, at that moment, I knew then that my brother was going to be just fine.
As I told a close friend today, it's funny how God seems to disappear for the longest time, only to beat you over the head with reminders of his presence at some point later on. In my case, God waited much longer than I would have liked to answer my two defining prayers, but when he did, he answered both of them at the same time.
I can't prove that God made all things new in my life in at once to show that he never deserted me when it all went South at the same time back in March. I don't believe in easy answer to complicated questions, nor do I pray to a Cosmic Vending Machine who answers prayers according to a specific formula or even in ways we are meant to understand.
But when I think about how the two defining problems that have shaped my 2012 were solved at the same time, and on the weekend after I'd come to the place of being able to write a blog about being thankful for life notwithstanding its difficulties, I can't help but shake my head and wonder how things look from the other side of Heaven.
After five-and-a-half years of trying, we finally have a contract to sell the house in St. Louis we left in 2007!
I repeat: WE ARE FINALLY SELLING OUR FLIPPING HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This changes everything.
It marks the end of a very long walk in the desert. It's the end of:
Five-and-a-half years of unanswered prayers, and wondering where God was in my life. Sixty-five straight months of making two house payments, while only living in one. 298 consecutive weeks where I saw something fun happening the upcoming weekend but couldn't afford to do it and dreamed of the day when I could. 2008 nights in a row of going to bed with a giant unresolved problem on my hands, and nothing I could do to fix it.
The worst part of owning two houses isn't the wasted money, though, it's the chains the situation puts around your life. There's a constant uncertainty about everything.
You can't visit distant friends and relatives very often, because you never know when you might need that airfare money to go toward closing. There are constant maintenance needs that you don't even know about until they've mushroomed into something huge, and the ever-looming threat of a break-in.
We had three.
You can't make any long-term plans whatsoever, because you haven't the faintest idea what life is going to look like a few months down the road.
It's a never-ending source of administrative headaches, from having to supervise repairmen from long-distance, to remembering to pay two sets of bills every month, to pleading with heartless insurance companies about writing a policy for a vacant house that's been broken into three times.
All that is ending now.
The house is selling, the extra bills are disappearing, and soon, whatever else goes wrong five hours away won't be our problem.
But that isn't even the best news I've received in the last eight days.
As I've noted here before, it was March 15th of this year when we heard that our former tenant at that St. Louis house was not going to buy it after all, and, in fact was breaking her lease and moving out.
But that wasn't the worst news of my day--far from it.
About two hours earlier, I listened as an emotionless doctor casually told my brother and his wife that he had a 48 percent chance of beating cancer and still being alive in five years.
It doesn't make sense, and my brother's issues were a million times worse, but the two problems had sort of been spiritually linked in my mind from that day forward, and I rarely prayed for one without the other.
After his appointment, my brother endured 12 grueling sessions of chemotherapy. His treatments ended at the end of the summer, but the doctors wanted to wait a couple months after to see if the treatment had been effective, or if the cancer had returned.
On Monday of last week, he checked out clear. No sign of cancer whatsoever.
It was late afternoon of the day before the results came, when my realtor called. The last few showings hadn't gone well, so I assumed he was calling with yet another maintenance issue. My wife even said that theory out loud when I announced who was calling.
Instead, the realtor was calling to say that a woman had offered to buy our house on the spot upon her first viewing of the house. And somehow, at that moment, I knew then that my brother was going to be just fine.
As I told a close friend today, it's funny how God seems to disappear for the longest time, only to beat you over the head with reminders of his presence at some point later on. In my case, God waited much longer than I would have liked to answer my two defining prayers, but when he did, he answered both of them at the same time.
I can't prove that God made all things new in my life in at once to show that he never deserted me when it all went South at the same time back in March. I don't believe in easy answer to complicated questions, nor do I pray to a Cosmic Vending Machine who answers prayers according to a specific formula or even in ways we are meant to understand.
But when I think about how the two defining problems that have shaped my 2012 were solved at the same time, and on the weekend after I'd come to the place of being able to write a blog about being thankful for life notwithstanding its difficulties, I can't help but shake my head and wonder how things look from the other side of Heaven.
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