Stan Taylor

For several years, we attended a church in Austin. We live in the ‘burbs, so it was a long drive (30+ minutes) and of course, nobody in the congregation lived near us. How we ended up attending this church is a long story, and we were never terribly comfortable with the congregation, not to mention the commute, so we never joined.
About 18 months ago, we decided to find a church closer to home. We attended services at the nearest Methodist church, First Methodist in Pflugerville, and at another Methodist church in the next suburb. The service at the Pflugerville church was okay, nothing to write home about, but we liked a lot of things about the other church: the senior pastor is one of the most dynamic preachers I’ve ever heard, they’re growing and have lots of different programs that interested us.
When it came time to make a decision, it came down to the following factors: the other church offered the things we thought we wanted in a church, but the Pflugerville church is our neighborhood church–our kids would be with the same kids at church as at school and in the neighborhood, etc.
I thought about this for a while and concluded that ‘church shopping’ is a bunch of bullshit because it’s all about your own personal needs and desires, not about other things, of which community ranks highly.
So, we ended up joining First UMC Pflugerville, and we’re really glad we did. For one thing, the issue of community has turned out to be correct. We’re really glad we’ve deepened our roots in our local community.
Today, I just ran across an essay that I hadn’t seen in a long time. I think it’s related to this topic: How to Find a Church, by Gordon Atkinson

I’ve been pondering President Bush’s possible motivations for his Social Security privatization push, and the only thing I can come up with is this: the private sector sees that massive pile of money sitting in the Social Security trust fund doing virtually nothing (well, except financing the federal deficit) and would really like to use it to capitalize commercial enterprises.
Joshua Marshall offers another, more nefarious, motivation: Social Security privatization is the first step in Bush’s plan to keep the federal government from having to pay back the trillions of dollars it has borrowed from the trust fund–and to destroy Social Security in the process.
I’m just as willing as the next liberal to believe that Bush is capable of such a nefarious act, but as compelling as Marshall’s idea sounds, he offers no explanation of exactly HOW privatization is the first step. When someone hypothesizes an entire chain of events that would tie the administration’s current efforts to this dastardly goal, then I’ll analyze it and see if it seems logical and fits the facts. Until then, I’m inclined to think it’s just your run-of-the-mill Republican privatization effort–granted, on a scale that’s unprecedented in American history.

Maddie protecting her Christmas rawhide from several much larger dogs

We’ve taken in two dogs from a friend who suddenly had to move away and couldn’t take them. These sweet dogs really need a new home, preferably together. If you live, or know people, in the Austin area, please put out the word.
I’ve created a web page about the dogs.
UPDATE: We found homes for both dogs.

Looking back, I’m amazed how many activities I took part in as a child and teenager.
At about age 10 or 11, I trapped fur-bearing animals to sell their pelts and mowed some yards for pay. I still cannot believe my mother helped me to skin small animals!
At age 12, I started working as a dishwasher on the weekends at a local BBQ and catfish joint. I continued working there as dishwasher, and later also as a cook, every weekend and summers until age 18. It was hard work, but the owners were very fair and I learned a lot–mostly how to work hard.
During high school, I participated in the following school-sponsored activities:

• Choir (all four years)
• Marching and concert band (all four years)
• Stage band (two or three years)
• Madrigal (elite choir–we didn’t have a class meeting; practiced after school)
• Band and choir solo and ensemble (I received a 1 at state solo and ensemble for my vocal solo my senior year, only the second such honor in our school’s history)
• I started a speech club, was its president for two years and participated in informative and persuasive speaking events
• German club: took part in various competitions, and served as an officer one or two years

In addition to those school-sponsored activities, I also tried out the following outside of school, though I didn’t stick wtih any of them for too long:

• Barbershop quartet singing with the SPEBSQSA chapter in New Braunfels
• Community theater: I got a part in one production, but the organization was such a mess that I withdrew before we got to performance
• Square dancing with a local club

On top of all that, I’m proud to say that I graduated third in my class of 170–though, to be fair, every year, two or three of my six courses were music-related (I got As), which certainly padded my GPA.

As I was stopped in traffic this afternoon, I looked over into the car next to me, and the driver was pulling ear hairs with tweezers. When he finally looked my way, I continued staring at him for a second, smirking.

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.