Diving

Warning: this will probably come across as navel-gazing. Feel free to ignore the melodrama.

Over the holidays, Laureen and I got to travel with my brother, Jim, and his wife, Pam on a car trip to our northern brethren. It was the four of us in the car, and we were talking about life. Jim asked me why I was feeling down.

I replied that I’d felt this way since before Thanksgiving, and I didn’t know if it was seasonal or what. We then talked about the big change that he made when he moved to Texas. (We moved before my freshman year of high school, but Jim didn’t come to Texas until one year later. This was because our mom moved from one high school to another right before her senior year, and I think in some small way she wanted Jim to have that continuity.) He stated that he made a conscious choice when he came to Texas; it was a fresh start. No one knew him, no one knew his past, no one really had a preconceived notion of him, so he basically picked up the ball and ran with it.

I envied his ability to make that choice, because there are so many times in my life where I feel like I have to present myself as what I’ve always been: the smart one, the guy who knows stuff about stuff. You want to see me go crazy? Ask me an answerable question, then take away my ability to use google and Wikipedia. Inevitably, I’ve always felt like I had to be right, because being right was the only way to not hear the calls of the jackals in middle and high school who saw every peg that stood out as a good excuse to get a hammer. So I survived high school that way. However, college was a different story.

In college, on my first programming test in COMP 210, I got a D. This was my supposedly chosen field, and I didn’t get it. The one real thing I had going for me was now no longer there. Here begins the grand illusion of my life. Once I got that D, I could have packed it in, admitted to myself that yeah, maybe I wasn’t meant to be a programmer, and found something else to do. But that would be against everything that had worked for me up to that point. Momentum is a funny thing–it carries you along even when you don’t really want to go in that direction. It carried me through college with lots of study groups and help from other people. It carried me through the different jobs I’ve had. So I stuck it out and wound up in testing. It’s a safer portion of the computer world; you don’t have to program, you just have to know about programming and how programmers approach problems. So for me, it’s been a decent fit. But still, it feels like this large part of my life, this part of who I am (because I have a hard time separating who I am from what I do) is built on a facade. It’s all built on the premise that no one will look too closely at the transcript and see Where I Wasn’t Right, or hear in the interview not about the times When I Was Right, but they’ll find out When I Wasn’t Right.

I know that fears like this may be in a lot of people. I know I’m not alone in fear of failure, but I don’t think I know of a good way to get out of it. I go to counseling, I take medication, I intellectually know all the things I should do to become a better person so I don’t Have To Be Right. I also know (again, intellectually) the spiritual side of letting go of it.

But I can’t do it. I don’t know any other way to live. However, at the very least I can say I’ve identified one of the things that’s driven me. Driven me crazy, probably, but driven me all the same.

Fried Okra Salad

Halve 1 container of cherry tomatoes.
Chop a bunch of green onions.
Marinate the above ingredients in catalina salad dressing.
Fry a half-pound of bacon to make bacon bits or use pre-packaged bacon bits.
Set the oil for deep frying the okra. Get a 24 oz. bag of breaded okra and fry it up. If you used store bought bacon bits, toss those in the oil at the end.
Dump the okra and bacon bits into the tomatoes and onions. Mix well. Serve and resist temptation to eat everything.

Someone Explain This To Me

I just finished reading an article from the online version of Fortune magazine written by a former congressman and former head of the Democratic Leadership Committee, Harold Ford, Jr.

The article states that the President should do the following:

  1. Don’t raise taxes on companies.
  2. Don’t create new regulations on businesses.
  3. Cut taxes on every form of income.
  4. Cut business taxes.
  5. Pretend that people aren’t trying to obstruct his every move.

Basically, government should cut taxes so that people can create jobs.

How, exactly, does this work? I have never seen any proof that cutting taxes is any incentive to hiring people. If a city gives a tax break to a company looking to move their headquarters, you don’t really create jobs; you transfer them from one place to another. If you cut personal taxes, that doesn’t create jobs. If you cut corporate taxes, you then just increase their profits. What incentive is there for a company to hire people when that costs potential profit? Lowering the taxes doesn’t provide any benefit at all except to investors who stand to benefit from increased stock prices.

Ultimately, companies should produce great products that people want to buy. They shouldn’t need tax breaks or subsidies to make that happen.

Jacob in the Workplace

There are times when I look at my son and say, “STOP DOING THAT!” ‘That’, of course, is usually something involving torturing his sister. Of course, she tortures him as well, usually through made up songs.

Since Laureen’s birthday is coming up, last night, Jacob called a meeting of the family-not-Laureen in his room. He stated, “we are going to build a castle out of Legos for Mommy.”

Trait #1: leadership — able to articulate a clear vision.

Jacob then assigned jobs for Jessie and me. Jessie was to find windows and match them to window frames. My original task was to find 2×4 lego bricks and 2×2 lego bricks. I started picking through the metric ton of legos, marveling how their shapes have gotten stranger and stranger with every generation, when Jacob told me: “Daddy, you’re doing a good job, but I need for you to pre-build some blocks for me with what you’re making.”

Trait #2: leadership — ability to correct subordinates when they go astray.

He then specified that I was to build a cube out of 4 2×4 bricks and then put two 1x4s underneath them. He never actually told me the reason why, but a look over at what he was doing made it clear; he’d built a little forklift, and these blocks were like pallets that could be picked up and “delivered” to the job site.

Trait #3: project management — knowing when you need better tools.

Trait #4: project management — delegation of busy work to Dad.

After I had built several of these little modules, Jacob said, “Dad, you’re doing great. Just three more and you can take a break.”

Trait #5: micromanagement. Can’t win ’em all.

After a while, I took Jessie over to her room to sleep. Jacob continued building legos in his factory, moving the raw materials to the job site, and constructing Laureen’s castle.

Religion and children

At dinner tonight, Jessie asked whether she was “baporated”. She was learning about it at her preschool (the Lutheran one), where one of the teachers had mentioned getting water poured on your head. Apparently, the LCMS does infant baptism.

So, we got to explain that to her, which led to the differences between being dedicated, baptized, and christened. Sigh.

The Islamification of Oklahoma

Among the general brouhaha of the elections of November 2, there was the little tidbit that Oklahomans had passed a measure banning Sharia Law from being used in their state. Naturally, this issue has raised quite a few eyebrows at Law Universities, since it seems to directly interfere with the first amendment, but that’s not the thing that drives me crazy.

People see Sharia as the “eye for an eye” and “beating women if they’re not covered” penal system that can be barbaric. However, this discounts the civil side of Sharia, a side that most people don’t know or care about. That side is much like the regular civil courts–mediating disputes between parties. Sharia allows Quranic principles to be applied to people’s lives.

Think about that last statement. Can we say we are a Christian nation where Biblical principles are being applied to people’s lives?

What’s the difference? Other than it being “them” and “us”, there is none. Absolutely none.

The sad thing is, the issue is ridiculously moot. In addition to the fact that there’s no real way to break the law or even challenge it (because someone would have to go against the law for it to be an issue in appellate court), there’s the matter of Article VI of the Constitution.

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

YOU WERE ALREADY PROTECTED, OKLAHOMA! The same mechanism that guarantees that no United States citizen will ever appear at the Hague as a defendant (because that would be giving power to a law over the constitution, regardless of how international it may be) is what also keeps Sharia Law at bay.

What a waste of time and paper.

Happy Birthday, Love of my Life

Today, November 2, is Laureen’s 40th birthday. I got her the sexiest gift I could find–a new clothes dryer.

Before you clonk me on the head for being “that type of husband,” please understand that our current dryer has a cycle of approximately 4.3 weeks for a load of jeans. There’s heat. There’s lint. There just isn’t dry clothes. It sounds like it’s about to explode out of the laundry nook, walk over to the railing on our second floor, and commit machinicide, leaving behind a “goodbye cruel world” written in a cursive twisted dryer vent hose.

So, the biggest challenge for laundry is “time”. If I can save Laureen (or me; I do laundry as well) time, that’s more time for us to spend together.

Pretty good gift, huh? Or at least good rationalization.

Happy Birthday, Laureen. I love you and the life we have together.