Historic Immanuel Lutheran Church in Pflugerville as the sun is about to set:

Stephen Roberds, a popular professor at Southern Utah University, was just fired, supposedly for using ‘the F word’ in class.
This story causes a flashback for me. When I was in high school, my health teacher, Coach Mac, was fired, also obstensibly for using the F word in class. I was in the class in question, and she did indeed use the word in the context of a lesson–though she never actually said it, opting instead to say ‘firetruck’ (it was some lesson about cognitive development or the like where Coach Mac used an example ‘little Johnny hears this word…’). She was a great teacher, and I, along with most of my classmates, attended the school board meeting and spoke in her favor.
Unfortunately, Coach Mac’s use of said cuss word was just a front for the real reason she was being fired: she was a lesbian and girl’s coach. Of course, nobody ever stated that publicly, but it was common knowledge. I honestly don’t know if she did anything inappropriate, but most likely, some parent deduced her sexuality and complained out of general homophobia.
As I understand it, the school board could have (and could still today) legally fired her for her sexuality, but they were chicken shits. They chose to use a front case.
This really makes me wonder what is really going on in the case of Professor Roberds as well.

In my recent post, Conformity and consumption, I linked to and quoted from The Rebel Sell. The article’s authors argue that our attempts to reject mass culture just lead to different types of consumerism. The authors believe that there is no real way to avoid this trap:

It is tempting to think that we could just drop out of the race, become what Harvard professor Juliet Schor calls “downshifters.” That way we could avoid competitive consumption entirely. Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. We can walk away from some competitions, take steps to mitigate the effects of others, but many more simply cannot be avoided.

Maybe we cannot avoid all forms of competitive consumption, but I want to believe that we can consciously avoid many of them.
Today I received an email from someone who had read my earlier blog entry. This correspondent lives on a kibbutz in Israel, and writes:

We are 20 families, living in smalltown Israel. Each of us has his/her professional life. All salaries go to one bank account and split
equally.
No member owns a private car. Not owning a car makes you indifferent to what make and model and year it is, as long as it goes from here to there with minimal comfort. It makes you indifferent to cars as objects.
What counts in this kind of life is what kind of a person you are to
your friends and kibbutz members, and not what you own.

Living in such a communal intentional community certainly seems to be one way to avoid many forms of competitive consumption, but it’s a pretty radical step for most people. From my research a few years ago into intentional communities, it takes a pretty strong commitment to withdraw together from the mainstream (it helps that so many intentional communities have a spritual basis, I think).
Many intentional communities just don’t make the break successfully. Or at the least, instead of competing with everyone in the culture, the members end up reproducing the same types of issues within their much smaller community.
The question is still open if and how I can ‘downshift’ in meaningful, though less radical, ways.

The brilliant Heather Armstrong writes:

I am constantly surprised at how different my child is than what I thought she would be, and therefore I am SO MUCH MORE understanding of people with children in public. So when Beth mentioned that she was going to bribe her boys to sit still for the picture, I thought, WHATEVER WORKS! The old Heather would have said, “Ok,” with skepticism dripping from her voice and would have thought silently LIKE A TOTAL FUCKING IDIOT, “I will NEVER have to bribe my children.”

Katie and I were married for nine years before we had kids, and throughout that pre-parental period, I would occasionally make statements about what I would and would not do as a parent. Whenever my father-in-law Harold heard these proclamations, he would just snicker quietly and shake his head, which usually prompted an “I’m serious. Really!” from me.
Now that I’ve been a parent for over ten years, I am beginning to understand Harold’s responses. Parenting is life’s most humbling experience. Pretty much every conceived notion I had about raising children has been stomped on by little feet and flushed down the toilet (only to stop it up!). In my more reflective moments (approximately once every 4-5 years since having children), I think this is a good thing. I’m coming to realize that a life well lived is all about questioning everything.

One of my coworkers has decided to leave the company. His last day will be this week. Since his last day at our company would be just a few days before Christmas, I asked him if he would be able to take the holidays off and start his new job in January. Aside from needing the paycheck to support his family, he said, he needed to start his new job in December so that he would not have a month without health insurance.
In our industry, it’s common practice for companies to continue a quitting employee’s benefits through the end of the month and to start a new employee’s health insurance benefits on the first of the month after the employee’s start date. My coworker is using this system as designed to ensure he has continued health insurance through his transition.
After talking to my coworker about this, I realized that this same consideration has played a major role in two job changes for me as well. So much for ‘fringe’ benefits (I notice that in recent years, the ‘fringe’ has been dropped). If you think about it, it’s a somewhat crazy system.
Of course, I try not to take for granted that I work in an industry where good health insurance that starts soon after employment is a pretty standard benefit.

If you’ve made it to this blog, then you’ve probably also seen that it is part of my personal web site, which contains a lot of information about me. I love the contacts I get based on my personal web site. These have included:

• A woman who found my needlework page when searching for information about four-way bargello. Turns out, she runs a needlepoint shop just a few miles from us. I loaned her my old bargello book.
• A man who bought an antique he thought was a grain probe. He found my eulogy to my grandfather and emailed me to help identify his object.
• This morning, I got an email from a programmer in St. Louis whose mother works at a community library in Austin. She was concerned about the quality of programming work being done to their cataloging system. Her son found my resume when looking for software quality assurance resources in Austin. I offered to talk with his mother about her concerns.

I’ve long thought of myself as an independent thinker and a skeptic of conformity and consumerism. In the last few years, however, it’s occurred to me that much of what I thought of as my rebellion against conformity was, in fact, just a different type of conformity.
Go back to high school. For reasons that I do not fully understand, in the U.S. we tend to think of teenagers socially as falling into two groups: the ‘socials’ and everyone else. As a non-social, I thought of myself back then as a rebel against the conformity of that group. In actuality, I now realize, I conformed quite well and willingly to the norms of other groups: band member, speech nerd, etc.

Pet strollers: “On your next adventure allow your pet to safely join in-whether over grass, beach, bumpy city sidewalks, or forest trails”

Everyone who has a Tivo or other digital video recorder has told me how it has revolutionized their television viewing: they watch their favorite shows on their own schedule, never watch something ‘just because it’s the only thing on,’ skip commercials, pause live television, etc.
After waiting impatiently for several years (since TiVo came out), our Cable company finally started offering a digital video recorder. I got one this past week. Sure enough, in just a few short days, we’re enjoying the revolution of broadcast/cable TV on our own terms.

Detail from the arena where Hannah Beth takes riding lessons.