Thanks once again to our host, Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who won’t mind if I’m slow on registering with Mr. Linky due to my temporary change in vices while I’m out here in the desert. Right Larry? Maybe?
Click and be amazed.
1.
This afternoon at lunch Dad saw me coveting the editorial page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and quick shoved a library book in my hands before a fight broke out:
What the monks already told you. Explained.
I’ve read as far as Chapter 4, and Kahneman has explained several of his and his colleague’s discoveries about human thinking and behavior that are, reportedly, surprising. I’d read a few of them elsewhere, so I wasn’t surprised when he introduced me to them. What surprised me was this: It’s all straight from the playbook of any Catholic priest worth his salt. Practical Tips for Advising the Penitent 101.
2.
Here are some samples.
Revolutionary Scientific Discovery: People can be primed to think and behave a certain way. For example, seeing images or hearing words related to a particular theme (money, old age, happiness) causes people to embody habits and values related to that theme, without even realizing it.
What Your Priest Told You: Read your Bible, watch EWTN now and again, and throw away that trashy magazine. We are influenced by what we see and do, so pick your influences wisely.
Revolutionary Scientific Discovery: Willpower takes effort. It’s hard to resist temptation when you are exhausted from another task.
What Your Priest Told You: Take care of yourself, get a good night’s sleep, and don’t surround yourself with temptations.
Revolutionary Scientific Discovery: You can only concentrate on one task at a time.
What Your Priest Told You: Fill your time with wholesome activities so you aren’t so tempted by sinful ones. If you feel tempted laying there in bed, get up and go do something else.
There’s more just in the first four chapters, but that’s a start. Great book so far, I’m going to try to find a copy when I get home. For those of you who don’t want to read 481 pages of summaries of scientific research, just go talk to your priest. He already knows what it says.
3.
I have really enjoyed wandering around the World Series of Poker.
Yes, that surprised me too.
3.5
. . . paper towels. They are our new controlled substance. I have to keep them hidden away in our bedroom, thus harnessing the power of sloth to defeat the temptation to extravagance. Otherwise we’d go through a roll a day, easy. Even though we have a basket of perfectly good dish towels right on the counter. Which each get used once before being tossed in the dirty laundry by certain people I live with . . . I’d lock them* in the bedroom, too, but I can’t tolerate that much sogginess.
***
Well that’s all for today. Tuesday is Link Day for all topics, help yourself if you are so inclined. I’m still out of town so comment moderation is slow, but as long as you limit yourself to one link per comment you’ll escape the spam dragon and your brilliance will eventually see light of day. Have a great week!
*The towels, not the children. There is no way I’d store my children in my bedroom. They’d use up all the paper towels.
Thanks once again to our host, Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who likes lawn tools. I think he’s serious about that.
Click and be amazed.
1.
Vice is on my mind this week, as I head out to Las Vegas to drink mudslides go on a very spiritual retreat with a group of NFP-lovin’using, mostly-Catholic ladies (and a few spouses). I’m also going to spend a few days with my dad and stepmom*, and have lunch with one of my favorite Orcas Island Fire & Rescue diesel-genius people.
SuperHusband is staying home to suffer mind the children. He’s going to pawn part of that job off on our unsuspecting friends.
2.
So, vices. We inherited one of these:
But we didn’t really need an ice box, what with already owning a big white electric-powered refrigerator. Also, the ice wagon hasn’t come to our block in ages. So we store other things in it.
3.
Which is how we started calling it the “Vice Chest”. Because at first we stored our liquor in it.
Then we had a child, and needed to store the liquor up high out of reach, and my brother gave us a television. And after a few years of owning a TV, it occurred to us that the magic box was not strictly limited to playing home videos (original purpose) or Raffi (new best friend). Rather than sitting home bored out of our minds because you really can’t take a toddler and a newborn to the symphony or the jazz club or art house cinema, and you really can’t do a whole lot else useful with a baby, toddler, and one on the way making you puke all hours . . . we could acquire a DVD player, and watch something other than hand-me-down Raffi videos.
And that buying a DVD — even at full retail — was cheaper than hiring a babysitter.
So the Vice Chest went from storing liquor to storing DVD’s. The name still fit.
3.5
And then I rearranged a year or so ago, and the Vice Chest moved to our bedroom, and all it held was old extension cords behind the top left door, and the poor piece of furniture was moping for lack of a mission. Until this spring I discovered the new controlled substance in our home, and now it holds
***
Well that’s all for today. Tuesday is Link Day for all topics, help yourself if you are so inclined. Post as many as you want, but only one per comment or the spam dragon will eat you up and I’ll never even know. Have a great week!
*Not as much my stepmom this round, because she has a sideline gig** cashiering at the World Series of Poker. My dad says it sounds like crickets in there. Literally. Silence and the squeak of chips.
**Technically her profession is running medical laboratories. And then for fun in the winter she works for H&R block doing taxes. We could basically say she is an exceedingly resourceful and hard-working fun hog.
It’s not about the people. To a man my fellow parishioners, and everyone I’ve met in my diocese and anywhere I’ve traveled (except that one cranky priest one time, but come on, everybody has bad days) — everyone is really very nice. Kind, caring people. No complaints. None.
Still, it’s lonely.
4.
And it isn’t a strictly Catholic problem. I’ve had multiple Evangelical friends — and if Catholics are a little shy and reserved, trust me, Evangelicals are not — I’ve had a number of non-Catholic friends wander from congregation to congregation in search of companionship. Someone to notice them. To care about them. To view them as something other than a potential nursery worker, or those people you smile at in the pews but really if they fell into a crevasse tomorrow, no one would much realize.
5.
Part of the problem is geographic. I see church people on Sunday, but the rest of the week we retreat to our different neighborhoods spread throughout the city. I can distinctly remember the last time I ran into an acquaintance from church outside of Mass — it was several months ago, at Publix — and interestingly, the time before that was maybe six months prior, same lady, at the library. But they just moved to Seattle, so that’s over. Oh wait — and I ran into the dad of one of my students at McDonald’s this winter — I had turned to look because I was struck at how polite he was, the way he spoke to the counter lady.
Part of it is structural. Our parish has five masses in a weekend — if someone’s missing, for all you know they just slept in an hour, or decided they like the 8:00 AM organist better. You might see an announcement in the parish bulletin if someone’s dead or nearly dead, if the next of kin notified the parish office. For all I know, I run into fellow parishioners everywhere, and never even know it, because we aren’t at the same Mass.
Part of it is architectural. You want to say to hello someone after Mass, but they slip out the other door. I used to go down to coffee and donuts, but the room is acoustically alive — too loud and you can’t hear anyone, so conversation is strained.
–> Something my parish does right: We have a fabulous playground right next to the church building. So the parents of young children do have a natural way to meet up and chat after Mass. Which I love, and have made many friends that way.
Part of it is economic. I keep befriending people who move away. I’m sure it’s not me. Sometimes I when I introduce myself to someone, I feel like saying, “Are you going to move or drop dead* in the next two years? Because I’d sure like some friends that stick around.”
Part of it is personality and state of life. I’m an introvert. I want one-on-one conversations about substantial topics. Just throwing us all into the gym for a giant spaghetti supper or pancake breakfast, and calling it parish-togetherness because we’re all in the same room? No thanks. But I’m not at a stage in my life when it’s easy to get out for a small-group bible study, or meet someone for coffee, or pick up the phone and talk for ten minutes without having to break up three fights and answer seven urgent questions, two of which really were urgent, and one of which involved the dog throwing up.
6.
Loneliness is no reason to leave the Church. It’s not a social club. It’s a place to worship the one true God, to prepare your soul for Heaven, to gear yourself up for serving others here on earth. The little Christs come to serve, not to be served.
And this is why I’m such a thorn in everyone’s flesh about solid theology programs. Because my goodness, I don’t care how wonderful your youth program is, or how great your ladies’ monthly luncheon is at making lonely widows feel at home, sooner or later as a Catholic you’re going to be in the pit. You’ll be the odd person out, the one nobody remembers to call, the one for whom there is no parish ministry that fits your life and your abilities.
Faith formation can’t be all about relationships and togetherness, or there’s no reason to stick around when the group doesn’t meet spec. If there’s one question religious ed needs to answer, it is: “Why should I bother coming to Mass when my parish is horrible?”
[My parish is not horrible. Far from it. I am usually so happy to be home after having to go visit some other place. Like the church with the horrid dentist-office decor, or the one with the oppressively low ceilings, or the one with no vacant seats up front . . . but I do kinda like the neon lights in the ceiling that change to match the colors of the liturgical season, out at my Dad’s parish in Las Vegas . . . though their traffic pattern for the communion line is inscrutable.]
7.
Solutions, anyone?
I do feel an amazing kinship with the lady I always see at adoration and who I run into other places around the parish, even though we rarely get to talk to each other, but you can just tell she’s your friend, and she has masses said for everyone including my grandfather when he died, even though she’d never met or even heard of him before it was listed in the parish bulletin. Most of the time it is enough to just see familiar people, to have that sense of home, even if you don’t really know them.
But sometimes you want more. Real live friends that you see outside of Mass.
I know the playground-after-Mass method works. And I’ve made friends teaching religious ed, volunteering is good that way. Haunting the local Catholic bookstore will make you at least be friends with the owner there (they go to another parish). Slowly, slowly, we build up friendships with other families through trying to set up dinner together this week, a park date that week . . . but it’s long work, and we’re all so busy, and our lives so separate that every get-together has to be planned, and often the effort evaporates when some small thing throws a wrench in the works.
***
Anyhow, all that to say, that if we aren’t welcoming to our members — really welcoming, not just smile-smile handshake-handshake — how exactly are we perceived by outsiders? As with catechesis, so with relationships: The new evangelization starts in the pews.
*Pleasantly few people I know actually drop dead after meeting me. God bless modern medicine.
This week I learned that someone was in awe of me. I advised her to seek counseling.
Not actually. I did tell her she has a vivid imagination. That explanation makes it a reasonable mistake – imagine you knew me only on the internet, and furthermore had seen pictures of my home when it wasn’t that terribly terribly out of control — it could happen. You’d be deluded. But an honest mistake.
2.
I saw the most amazing floors this weekend. Clean. You’re chuckling now, thinking you’ve seen such a thing before. No. Quite possibly you have not. I hadn’t. These were VERY VERY clean floors. They shined. They were smooth underfoot. No tiny grains of sand (of course we removed our shoes at the door). No coarse edges. No lint. No crayons. Clean. And my daughter who babysits for this family reports these floors are always this clean. Always.
Now to my knowledge, this family has no cleaning help. They do have a new baby, a preschool boy of the usual energy level of preschool boys, and a homeschooled rising kindergartner. Yes, this family does crafts. Yes, this family eats dinner. Yes, the children are home all day. And no, the mom is not a powerhouse of non-stop energy. She is just a very, very, clean person.
This is what she loves. I think she spends as many minutes cleaning as I spend writing, and as many minutes decluttering as I spend reading, and those two facts explain her home, my home, and our respective literary outputs.
Other than that, we’re both normal people.
3.
Now if you have spent an evening in one of these homes, it is truly a marvel. It was relaxed and comfortable — the furniture was simple and unpretentious, the food was home-cooking, the children chased each other in loops through the kitchen, changed into 70 different dress-up outfits (actually just three, rotated), and there was the rhythmic thud of a boy jumping off his toddler slide onto a pile of cushions into what would have been the dining room, if these were the sort of people who were interested in impressing rather than welcoming.
Instead it was just luxurious. So clean. So peaceful (to someone used to preschoolers). Plus: Jello-Whip Cream Salad, green. And I did marvel. Wow. God made a person who loves cleaning this much. It is truly a work of art. A gift to the world, however small and humble.
But because I’ve known Mrs. E all these years, I wasn’t intimidated. She’s a normal person who happens to have this one gift.
So that was great, and now I remind myself when I’m intimidated by someone, that it’s because I’m only seeing some small side, and not the whole picture. And when I’m unimpressed by someone — same story. You know there’s another side that tells much more. Just have to dig for it.
3.5
Chickens. Just two. Strictly as pets.
Pets you can eat.
***
Well that’s all for today. Tuesday is Link Day for all topics, help yourself if you are so inclined. Post as many as you want, but only one per comment or the spam dragon will eat you up and I’ll never even know. Have a great week!
Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who has earned your sympathy this week..
1.
People have stopped asking when we’ll be done with school. The answer is: Never.
At the beginning of the school year, it sounds great when you say, “We’ll take breaks during the year, but it means we’ll have to go longer into the summer. ” This is, after all, one of our big reasons for homeschooling. The weather is better September through May. But come mid-May, even people in my own home start saying, “We’re almost finished with school for the year, right?”
No. We are not.
Calendar says we’ll finish at the end of June, giving us six weeks break before starting back, which is all I could stand anyway. At the beginning of Q4 I gave two big kids a checklist of everything they needed to finish, and specified that although they had to do Math and Grammar every day, they could do the other subjects in whatever order they liked, but they were chained to the desk until everything was done.
This did not cause fairies to come replace my children with super-diligent, homework-completing robots.
2.
So I predict we’ll be done with almost everything by early July, and certain sore topics by . . . much later. SOME children might be sitting NEXT TO the pool doing homework, while other children swim IN the pool. I’m not shouting. I am not shouting. I. AM. NOT. SHOUTING.
Totally happy homeschool mom here. Oh yes. No irony whatsoever when my 10-year-old armchair physician says, “I think we all have ADD.”
Yeah. Just maybe.
But it really is easier to do school after all the school-year activities have ended. Much easier.
3.
Why is it I do all my school planning on a day after a very productive school day? Causing me to write up plans I know will overwhelm us. It’s like packing. I should put everything in the box, leave it for a week, and then come back and take out half.
3.5
Speaking of ADD . . . we’re getting a new species of pets. Come mid-July, we’ll have to have built housing for . . .
***
Well that’s all for today. I’m having one of those, “Is it really Tuesday? ^&*%$” days. Return to substantial topics coming . . . oh I don’t know when.
Tuesday is Link Day for all topics, shouting and fake curse words not necessary. Help yourself if you are so inclined. Post as many as you want, but only one per comment or the spam dragon will eat you up and I’ll never even know. Have a great week!
Homeschool Planning: You Can’t Do Everything in which I talk about the trade-offs my family makes in order to bring our curricular fantasies down to earth, and put together a homeschool curriculum we can actually sort of accomplish, more or less. Also in which we discover I’m much better about wanting to study Latin than about actually studying it.
Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who is also taking it easy today. Post-holiday light blogging. But scroll down he’s got some interesting stuff there — Where is the Daddy War? caught my attention. I’ll come back to serious topics a different week.
Click and be amazed.
1.
This morning I emerged from the bedroom, and found an assortment of children in PJ’s huddled around Sesame Street. Not surprising. An odd collection of blankets and pillows and trash paper spread about the coffee table. Not surprising. My five-year-old sitting there with paper in her mouth. *That* I had never seen before.
2.
“Why do you have paper in your mouth?” I inquired.
“We’re beavers.”
Ah. Beaver teeth. I had heard rumors of bunny teeth being made last week; after a weekend playing at the river, beaver teeth is the next logical thing.
I looked again at the coffee table. Everything covering the table was brown. Around it on the floor? Blue. And the bits of crumpled up tissue paper were either rocks or whitewater, depending on who you ask. The kindergartener crawled over to a length of 4″ PVC pipe with a green t-shirt top, made a buzzing noise as she chewed with her paper beaver teeth, and felled the tree. They only have one tree to chew, so they re-erect it after each meal.
3.
This is why I homeschool*. Because every now and then I can borrow Rocky Mountain Beaver Pond from the library, and all the kids abandon their regular school work in order to watch, even though they saw it already when they were in K5 or 1st or 2nd grade and in theory the big guys should find it boring by now, but they don’t.
And then instead of telling thirty kids, “Make a diorama about Beavers,” my kids build a live-action diorama in the living room when I thought they were just goofing off being edu-tained.
3.5
What is the proper place for the pink bunny and the purple hippos and the real live family cat, in a living room Beaver pond? The negotiations are fascinating.
***
Well that’s all for today. I’m catching up on the plugged-in life after the long weekend, so be patient with me as I work through the inbox. I noticed over at CWG there’s a nice set of Memorial Day posts from today on back through Saturday, go take a look.
Tuesday is Link Day for all topics, not beavers only. Help yourself if you are so inclined. Post as many as you want, but only one per comment or the spam dragon will eat you up and I’ll never even know. Have a great week!
*Other people have more impressive reasons for their educational choices. But seriously. I’m in it for the beaver pond.
An internet friend pointed me to Ova Ova, a fertility awareness site.
It’s sleek, modern, and explains the basics of NFP. In addition to the usual caution that FAM is secular-feminist amoral NFP with all the completely different set of issues that surround that world (and much that is good and true as well), let me also say quite vigorously . . .
2.
Please do not use condoms during your fertile time.
3.
Unless you’re trying to conceive, that is. Recall that 100% of condom failures occur during that one week of your cycle when you are actually fertile. Which means the condom effectiveness rates are massively overstated — 75% of the time, the condom isn’t doing anything at all, it’s just a decoration.
I completely understand that couples who don’t have moral objections to NFP might be tempted to use a condom during the non-fertile time of FAM, as “back-up”. Sure, whatever, this is not the place to lay into someone who’s willing to try NFP, or something like it, but is not 100% on board.
But listen: When you know you’re fertile, if you have a serious reason to avoid? Avoid. Maybe you could watch cable or something. Not that channel. A different one. Or how about hard physical labor? And separate bedrooms states. That works great.
4.
Okay, backing up a decade or three and completely changing topic, my daughter loves PrincessHairstyles.com. The YouTube channel is hair4myprincess. Given too much time on the internet, very little competition for the hall bathroom, and two younger sisters as willing victims, a girl can get pretty good at this stuff.
Weirdly, although this is the same child who is also the junior photographer, I can find no pictures of her handiwork on the PC. Sorry.
5.
I’ve got a couple of trips planned this summer, including the Catholic Writer’s Guild conference, where of course I’ll want to take lots of photos.
Small hitch: I own no camera.
Ellen Gable, Sarah Reinhard, and an empty space waiting for . . .
Solution: I’m renting the 10 y.o.’s camera – 25 cents a day. It’s a good deal all around. I need a few lessons in how to use it first.
6.
Don’t forget to pray for Allie Hathaway. Thanks!
7.1
I am so tempted to just leave the review for le Papillon here from last week. It doesn’t seem to be generating sufficient enthusiasm, so I persist in my mission. Here’s the picture to remind you that you should watch this film next time you get the chance:
7.2
Back on Tuesday (aka: Man Day), I posted part two of my Teen Boys and Chastity Bleg. If you are visiting here from Conversion Diary, might I ask you to take a look? You might know a gentleman who has a few ideas to add.
7.3
The difference between Catholic blogs and Evangelical blogs is not the statues or the rosaries. It’s the liquor*. If you didn’t see it already, visit Darwin’s Give That Woman a Drink. You can count on the Darwins for good Catholic drinking posts. My grandmother always had an old fashioned at the family get-togethers. Now I know what’s in them.
*Kids: Drunkeness is a sin. So is disobeying legitimate civil authorities.
Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, this bringing old meaning to Man, you’re sick.
Dozens of takes, 3.5 at a time.
1.
The reason I’m asking internet strangers, instead of my dearly beloved, for advice on teen boy chastity, is this: The SuperHusband has ample experience with “Teen Boy”, but neither he nor I had much exposure to the whole “Chastity” thing until well after our teen years. So while we can tell you all about the Marriage-NFP Experience, if we were to draw on our own high school experiences for guidance on how to parent our boy, well, that would not be the most successful method.
And since this is the AoA 3.5 Takes, the Man Event to exceed all Man Events, I’m going to keep on asking.
2.
Here’s the round-up of answers so far:
Darwin wrote from his own experience: Avoid Porn, Develop Aesthetics. That was very encouraging — we have both the porn-free household and the collection of art books (really just two or three, but it’s a start). And I never would have considered the topic this way. I’m really glad I asked!
I’d tell my boys that all the trash you see on the net or movies or mags has nothing to do with real men, real woman, and real sex. It’s just a way to get money out of morons. In fact it’s the opposite of those real things, and only idiots waste time on it and screw up any chance of meeting and loving a real woman like my wife, who as my children know is The Most Glorious and Beautiful Woman God Ever Created.
If you teach young men to value their first born, they will get in the habit of thinking about whether or not they’d want whoever it is they are looking at (and attracted to) to be their kids mom. It is very effective, especially if you imagine a smart little five year old berating you for your lack of foresight.
Valuable reminders, and it is so helpful to hear this from a man’s perspective. Larry D. assures me he has a post in the works (give him time, he’s got the plague), and I’m looking forward to that.
3.
So here’s a two-part question I still need you guys to answer for me:
How should a boy deal with the, shall we say, overwhelming physical urges, that are known to afflict young men?
And how does a mother, or father, provide these bits of practical advice without making the boy die from embarrassment?
The going advice in popular culture is not so helpful, since it tends to run exactly counter to CCC 2352 and 2396.
So guys, you know how ladies fill magazines with practical tips on cutting calories and avoiding over-eating at holiday parties? We need the pocket guide to keeping it in the pocket. I’m going to temporarily open this blog up to anonymous comments, and as long as they are Catholic* and on-topic, I’ll let them through the moderation queue. What works?
Please tell.
3.5
. . . Anna knew right away: Slugs. If you ever need a cheap date, invite a slug.
Well that’s all for today. Tuesday is Link Day for all topics, not just chastity and garden pests. Help yourself if you are so inclined. Post as many as you want, but only one per comment or the spam dragon will eat you up and I’ll never even know**.
*By “Catholic” I mean “all that is true and good”. Your own faith or lack thereof is not the question. A commitment to purity suffices.
** If your perfectly good comment gets stuck in spam, please TELL ME. My e-mail in the sidebar works. I get too much spam to check the spam folder post by post, but I will happily go fish out your misfiled comment if you let me know it’s in there.
QUICK UPDATE: I’ve turned off the anonymous comment feature (6/7/2012). Amazing how much spam this one post generated — apparently hit all the right keywords. I don’t *think* any honest humans were caught in spam (yes, I read it all), but you are always welcome to e-mail me if your comment gets eaten by the spam dragon, and I’ll rescue you. Thank you to everyone who answered, here or elsewhere. I’ll do a round-up post soon.
This morning I woke to the sound of the septic guy’s truck rumbling outside my bedroom window. I started to panic — they weren’t supposed to be here until next week, and I still needed to move some plants out of their way. Then I realized it was just the tank-emptying guys, not the installing-new-drain-fields guys, and I relaxed. But I quick put on yard clothes and went out to investigate anyways.
2.
And learned that the drain field guys would be arriving in twenty minutes.
3.
The drain field guys helped me get the last of the plants out of the ground. Thankfully it’s been wet all week. Now I’ve got homeless plants sitting in bins in my back yard, waiting for me to decide where to put them.
4.
The most interesting thing was watching the septic guys dispose of trash. The trench for the drain field is about six feet deep. They lay the drain pipes, and big columns of mesh-wrapped packing peanuts that are the new gravel of the septic world. And then anything that needs to be thrown away — shrink wrap, tin cans, old pipe dug up in the process of cutting the new field — they just toss it in the trench.
My sense of order was disturbed, but I reminded myself that if not here, then these items would just be hauled off to be buried in some other patch of earth. Jon pointed out that you would not want to touch the old drain lines — better to just let the backhoe nudge them back underground.
5.
It is really cool watching a skilled backhoe operator work in a tight space.
6.
Don’t forget to pray for Allie Hathaway. Thanks!
7.
Le Papillon is a mighty good movie. It’s French, very French, but no humans die and it has a happy ending. (It does have the obligatory smoking scene.) Beautifully rendered, the language is artful and the English subtitles do it justice. My five-year-old has watched it more than once, and she doesn’t seem to mind not knowing the words. The seven-year-old minds – but she needs to practice her reading anyhow.
Helpful film for the French student because the dialog is spare but covers lots of good language-learning territory. Advanced students will appreciate the word play and the chance to learn a few interesting idioms. Head’s up, the film ranges over a number of touchy subjects (abortion, mental illness, honesty, fit parenting, the Final Judgement, etc.), so parental presence is called for. You wouldn’t want to miss this anyways. Excellent film. I could watch it three times in a week.
