Baltimore Diary

Tele-gone.

Bart Simpson: You should treat yourself. You work hard for us, or at least you're out a lot.
Homer Simpson: You're right. I have been acting like Telethon Jerry Lewis, when I should have been acting like rest-of-the-year Jerry Lewis.

—The Simpsons, “Million Dollar Maybe” (1/31/10)

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Well, the 2011 Muscular Dystrophy Telethon has come and gone. If you were with me on Twitter and/or Facebook during the show, you pretty much have my opinions. After all, I nearly doubled my total Twitter output. (To be fair, it’s a new account.) However, I wanted to get in a few extra thoughts before I let it go for good, and perhaps clarify a few of my tweets besides.

• I realize that, given what I’ve seen on websites everywhere in the past day or so, many, MANY people feel that Jerry Lewis was screwed over with regard to his hosting of the telethon this year. Given that both MDA and Jerry have been kind of tight-lipped about the details, this is a debatable point, but I’m thinking that they’re right. Yes, Jerry is 85 years old and won’t be around forever, but between May and a few weeks ago, this telethon was to be his swan song, a genuine passing of the torch to someone else. As a result, the notion at the beginning of the show that Jerry “retired” felt disingenuous.
• A lot of people are also calling bullshit on the fact that the donation total for this year—which never appeared on screen but was instead reported the next day—was over $61 million. I’m willing to accept that figure as more or less accurate, even if the final take winds up being somewhat less (it always is). I’m thinking that a lot of the corporate sponsors and other groups (e.g. firefighters) pushed extra hard this year, thinking that it was Jerry’s last year, and trying to ensure that he’d go out with a big bang. Next year will be a different story; that’s my guess.
• There are several elements of the previous telethons that were missing from this year. One of the things we didn’t get was an array of “old-school” performers coming in and doing their thing. I’m willing to bet that a lot of today’s adults were first exposed to people like Norm Crosby, Freddie Roman or Henny Youngman through the telethon. Their heyday was over but there was still some respect for their brand of performance. Stars who were on the way up and down came by. Take a look at this clip from 1968, the first year of the “Love Network”, when the telethon appeared on four stations. Joan Crawford—who may be a little drunk, I’m not sure—comes out and reads a rather maudlin poem. I don’t remember this appearance, but I do remember when the telethon ran multiple phone numbers on the screen so that everyone’s phone call would be local:
  
  or, check out Jerry’s reunion with Dean Martin in 1976, as orchestrated by Frank Sinatra. There’s a bunch of unscripted clowning going on that could only happen here:
  
• The other thing that happened back then was, Muscular Dystrophy was very mysterious and absolutely untreatable, never mind curable. So the focus of the telethons then was more of a “pity these poor children and let’s fund a cure” mindset. As the years wore on, the focus moved into “look at the good your money’s done”, with the short films showing all kinds of Science Going On Here. But I still remember one film they showed when I was a kid, in the early 70s. A YouTube search didn’t turn it up, unfortunately, but it went like this: an older gentleman, sitting on a stool and with a black background, starts talking about Muscular Dystrophy. It quickly becomes clear that this guy is Muscular Dystrophy, personified. He says stuff like, “I am Muscular Dystrophy, and I hate people, especially children. I love to make their limbs shrivel up.” Next we see a small child sitting on the floor, playing with a toy. This man walks over to the boy, tousles his hair a bit, and walks off. A few seconds later the kid lays down and dies. This film absolutely scared the shit out of me. If I’d had an income, I’d give it all to MDA just so the guy wouldn’t touch me and make me die. 
• As a side note, I also mention this story from a couple of years later: I was in fifth grade so this would have been in 1974. I woke up one morning and, as I got out of bed, I fell to the floor. My thigh hurt and wouldn’t support my weight. I couldn’t walk! I worked my way down the stairs and tried again. I still couldn’t walk. It actually went through my head that I might have Muscular Dystrophy. The guy from the film came by in the night, touched my leg and now I’m crippled. I’m eleven years old and I’m going to be in a wheelchair; soon I’m going to die. By the end of the day, my leg had loosened up enough for me to walk, if still in a bit of a gimpy fashion, and I figured that I really wasn’t at death’s door. So that’s my story of how I beat Muscular Dystrophy, I guess. (In retrospect, it was probably a Charley Horse, but how I got one in the middle of the night is anyone’s guess.)
• Let me say something about the acts that were on during the telethon this year: really, none of them were all bad. Some of them were weird, but Jerry would have some weird stuff going on at about three, four in the morning too. I could have done without the Singing Tampon act called VocaPeople, but this is the sort of thing you get from the telethon. But it’s what comes in between the acts that holds the whole program together, and the four people who’d teamed up to replace Jerry just weren’t getting it done. Everyone simply handed off to the next act without linking anything together. And it was pretty clear that Nigel Lithgoe was cashing in a lot of American Idol chips.
• The best on-camera personality throughout the show? It was absolutely Abbey Umali, the 12-year-old MDA National Goodwill Ambassador. Her clumsiest moment was probably when she tried to identify 7-Up as her favorite soda, but even that came off as a little charming.

So with Jerry’s untimely removal from the show, I think we’ve lost an important part of show business in general. It’s not as though Jerry was going to hand the reins to someone else who would continue in a similar tradition, but I think that, with this event, we’ve been given an actual date for the end of this particular brand of showmanship, and we’re all the poorer for it.

You Know

I’m a knowledgeable guy. But there are times when I’m hampered by the possibility that there’s someone out there who’s more knowledgeable than I am.

This is going to happen; there’s almost always someone more knowledgeable than you are. And there are going to be times when acknowledgment of that fact is going to help (I’m pretty sure it got me a job once), and other times when it’s going to hold you back.

There’s a concept in business known as the Peter Principle, which reads that an employee tends to get promoted to his level of incompetency. More specifically, a competent person will continue to get promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer competent. There they remain, unable to be promoted any further. This is something of which I’m hyper-aware; I don’t want to move beyond my own competency. However, I’m usually a quick study and, more often than not, can reach competency without too much difficulty. The hard part, for me, is being comfortable in that level of discomfort.

One of the things we experience throughout our lives, but rarely take the time to understand or to acknowledge, is the fact that you have to be bad at something before you can be good at it. Instant success is rare in this world, and if it comes then it wasn’t a challenge in the first place. So for me I think the question for the future needs to be not “What do I know about this?” but rather “How can I learn what I need to know about this?”

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Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live in a society of advice columns, experts and make-over shows. Without even knowing it, you can begin to believe someone knows better than you how to live your life. Someone might know a particular something better – like how to bake a three-layer molten coconut chocolate cake or how to build a website – but nobody else on the planet knows how to live your life better than you. (Although one or two people may think they do.) For today, trying asking yourself often, especially before you make a choice, “What do I know about this?”

Suicidal Behaviors

Given Waldo’s definition of suicide below, I’m quite the suicidal fellow. However, this particular version of self-annihilation I’ve used as a springboard.

When I was at C. W. Post and working on my Master’s Degree, I was in a cohort with nine other students. Because we took all the same classes at the same time, we got to be quite the well-known little group among the Education Department staff, not to mention the Speech Department and a couple of others. And as we came to be a known element, we each slipped into our own roles within the group. One of us, the only other guy, was the rebel Bad Boy type. One was the Ivory Girl because she reminded you of the women in those commercials,  a sort of fresh-scrubbed All-American type. One was the Mom (naturally). One was the Organizer, who set up the graduation party we threw ourselves.

One of our professors dubbed me The Divergent Thinker, because nobody knew what was going to come out of my mouth at any given time. I had this odd habit, and a “tell” which the others learned to watch for: I’d take a point from the lecture and start turning it over and over in my head, run it through a few permutations and then suddenly I’d have a question. Of course, it was several minutes later, so the question, while reasonable, usually felt as though it was out of the blue. My tell was that I’d start biting on my pen. Once I did that, I was told, they knew that my hand was about to go into the air.

This is still a habit of mine, although I’m learning to channel it into making my own work better. Start with the intention of imitating, then work it and massage it and make it into something a little more mine. By the time it’s popped back out, the originator would have very little idea that it was their own work that was the nucleus of what I’d presented. And while good writers borrow, and great writers steal outright, perhaps it’s time that I spent a little more time seeking the Original Me.

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Imitation is Suicide. Insist on yourself; never imitate. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write down in which areas of your life you have to overcome these suicidal tendencies of imitation, and how you can transform them into a newborn you – one that doesn’t hide its uniqueness, but thrives on it. There is a “divine idea which each of us represents” – which is yours?

Five Back, Five Ahead

Five Back:

Hey! Let go already! You’re allowed to say things. You’re allowed to express yourself. You’re in a safe place, at least when you’re at home. Relax a little bit. Maybe things will go a little more smoothly for you if you do.

Say your piece, but work on your diplomacy skills. There’s a fine line between candor and being abrasive. I still haven’t figured it out yet, but who knows. Maybe you will.

Good Luck!

 

 

 

 

Five Ahead:

I hope you think it was all worth it. All the bullshit, all the politics, all the general crap you put yourself through, and to what end? Was it worth it? Are you in a better place now than you were then? If it was, then good for you, I guess. If not, maybe something needs to change today. Or perhaps tomorrow. Heh. (That’s an inside joke to myself. Tomorrow I’ll know if it was funny.)

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There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

What would you say to the person you were five years ago? What will you say to the person you’ll be in five years?

One Week!

Curiously, today’s prompt is something that I’ve been pondering for awhile. Of course, it’s been longer than a week so I’m all dead now and stuff, so what are you going to do.

There are so many obstacles that we perceive to be making it difficult for us to move forward with our aspirations—if only this, if I didn’t have to deal with that, if the other thing were more cooperative, if I knew someone in the business, if, if if if ififififififif.

But a lot of these obstacles are self-imposed. Not all of them, but certainly some of them. I think our lizard brains tend to hold us back with the little nagging “what if I fail?” fear. We think there’s far too much at stake: I could lose the house, my credit rating will suck, my family will disavow knowledge of me.

Thirty years ago, I had no house, no credit rating and a family I didn’t get along with very well. And it took several years before any of it improved. Was I in such a terrible place then? The higher we climb up life’s ladder, the more we feel it sway. It wasn’t swaying back then; I just wasn’t aware of it.

“Yes,” one might argue, “but you had your whole life ahead of you.”

All I have now is the life ahead of me. Everything else is just stuff.

The key is balance, and the maintaining thereof. What can I do to restore the balance to my life? I don’t think that’s going to be so difficult to figure out.

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Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you had one week left to live, would you still be doing what you’re doing now? In what areas of your life are you preparing to live? Take them off your To Do list and add them to a To Stop list. Resolve to only do what makes you come alive.

Bonus: How can your goals improve the present and not keep you in a perpetual “always something better” spiral?

Hello, Pot? This is Kettle.

Harry: Yeah, I called her up. She gave me a bunch of crap about me not listening to her, or something. I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention.

—Dumb and Dumber (1994)

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Last week, most of the teachers in Baltimore City returned to work. They spent some time putting their classrooms back together (most rooms get taken completely apart during the summer for floor waxing and other maintenance), they began planning for putting together lessons, they took care of a hundred other details. And, in between all of that, there was professional development. The principals put together a few things that they’d like to concentrate on this year, and there were sessions based on those.  If, for instance, you have a youngster in Baltimore City schools this year, look for the word “rigor” to pop up a lot. Also, “attendance”. Schools all over the city took a beating on attendance last year, partly because of the H1N1 flu and partly because of the snow, but Baltimore also seems to have a culture on attendance not being that important. If for no other reasons than it could mean literally thousands of dollars that go directly to your child’s school, it’s very important.

In addition to the professional development sessions that the individual schools put together, there were also city-wide PD sessions that were created by the folks at the Puzzle Palace. I didn’t create one, but a few of my counterparts did, and I helped present it to special education teachers. All thirteen of us in the Networks office teamed up with someone from another office (most of them were from the Nonpublic office) to ensure that the overwhelming majority of special education teachers were given PD on the changes to special education policies and procedures in the wake of the consent decree’s ending, and a new initiative for writing IEP goals and objectives called “One Year Plus”.

I’m not going to bore you with the details of One Year Plus except to suggest that it’s really a common-sense kind of thing, in my head: if you have a boatload of details regarding a student’s current level of academic achievement and functional performance, then you should be able to write appropriate goals and objectives for that student. We all have boatloads of data; we just don’t always document that data. So the key to One Year Plus is documenting the data. This is at the heart of the PD session I presented last week.

I had four groups with which I worked over the two-day period. One of them was incredible: they were interested, they were dedicated, they were smart, and they were genuinely able to grasp the concept and see that there was a concerted effort to present this as a true city-wide initiative. The other three groups were a mixed bag. One woman actually fell asleep twice (TWICE), so there’s an interesting way of expressing your opinion.

Because part of my presentation was supposed to take place on-line (a little hands-on training session in using some software), I worked in a computer lab. The room looked much like the one to the right, but let me note that this is NOT the room I was in. However, it’s important to get a handle on the layout of the room before I can tell this little tale. So picture this room with two tables in the middle, several feet apart. Got it? Good. Now, because the room is lined with computers, naturally the early arrivals grab a terminal and want to check email or some such. And really, who am I to complain about that? As long as you’re engaged during the session, do as you like before it starts.

So one woman came in before a session and sat in a corner of the room. She broke out her own laptop, fired it up and then connected it to the City Schools network using her own cord and an available network jack. When we began working, however, she left the laptop in the corner with the lid open. Well…okay. So long as you’re with us.

The problem was, she didn’t stay with us. At one point, about a half-hour into the session, I asked the participants to read a passage and then discuss it in small groups. Instead of reading the piece, she abandoned it on the table and went to her laptop, and started to surf the web. Now, if you’re sitting in a corner of the room with your back to everyone else, all of whom are sitting by the tables in the center, that’s going to catch my attention sooner rather than later. This holds especially true if the entire group (not counting me and my partner) is composed of only nine people.

I walked up to her and stood behind/to the left of her, essentially reading over her shoulder. I didn’t say anything; I just waited for her to sense my presence. This took at least a full minute. Finally, she turned around and looked up at me. I said to her quietly, “You know…your school isn’t good enough that you can afford to be over here.”

“Huh?” she cleverly replied.

“You need to be over there,” I said to her.

“Oh. Sorry,” she said, and she moved to the table.

A moment later, I think what I’d said had finally sunk in. She called me back over to the table. “What was that about my school not being good enough?”

I said to her, “I’ve been to [School XYZ]; I know what kind of reputation they have.”

“Have you been there in the last three years?”

“Oh yeah. There’s been improvement, but there’s still a ways to go.”

Now, this was all done sotto voce; I wasn’t calling her out in a public fashion. Anyway, I’d already engaged this argument much longer than I’d intended to, so at this point I simply walked away to let them finish what they were working on. But she wasn’t done with it. She kept trying to call me back and I kept ignoring her, assisting the people who were working on what they were supposed to be doing. A minute later she broke out a “smart” phone and began furiously texting to someone. Meh, whatever.

I will say this: when she participated, she did a great job, so more’s the pity that she couldn’t let this go. She gave me the stink eye the rest of the session, even when I kept referring back to good points she’d made, and noting immediately when she’d said something that everyone else could benefit from. Nevertheless, when we got to the end of the session, and I handed out the evaluation forms, she couldn’t wait to get her hands on it.

Comments on these forms are rather rare; I’d say about 20-25% of the participants will write something on the forms unless things go especially well or especially poorly. But needless to say, it was pretty easy to find hers. This is a paraphrasing but it’s pretty close: “He unprofessionally insulted me and the reputation of my school.”

Here’s the thing, though: she’s rather a trusting soul, given that she has to hand the completed form BACK TO ME, with the expectation that I’ll review it (or not) and then turn it in to the folks at the Puzzle Palace without A) destroying it, and/or B) replacing it. I did neither, but I did take the time to point it out to someone and give them the story behind it.

So if my calling her out on failing to pay attention and participate in this exercise was unprofessional of me, then how would she classify her own behavior? And, more importantly…

How does one “professionally” insult a person and the reputation of their school?

And The Horse You Rode In On

Rufus T. Firefly: Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself. You better beat it - I hear they're going to tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. You know, you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.

--Duck Soup (1933)

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So despite my worries—and I was getting kind of worried in the last couple of days leading up to the event—my Annual Pig Roast was a success. My mother came up from Florida and we got to play Tourist and see some of the sights in addition to the party prep. I picked up the pig on Friday night instead of my usual Saturday morning, and we iced it down (it was still semi-frozen anyway) for the evening so that it would be ready to go when we got the fire started.

Let me tell you: it’s kind of tough to get a fresh pig around here, despite being so close to farm country. To be more specific, I promised someone that I’d make an effort to get a pig from a local source, with a low cruelty factor and a few other criteria. This proved to be very, very difficult, and quite expensive for reasons unrelated to the pig itself. I called one place that couldn’t help me (and was 30 miles away besides), and when I did get through to someone who could, his smallest pig was far too large for our needs. Plus, we’d have to pay an extra $65 butchering fee—to the first place that was 30 miles away. And—AND—that place only butchered on Mondays. What was I supposed to do with this huge pig the entire week? So: I tried, but I had to fall back to my usual source, which is Fenwick’s Meats in the Cross Street Market. Fenwick’s, as it happens, gets its pigs from a place in Iowa, at least according to the sticker on the end of the box.

On Friday afternoon, Daughter, Wee One and I assembled the grill in the alley behind the house. We laid down a couple of sheets of aluminum, then a single layer of lava rock was thrown in. The cinderblocks (4 x 8 x 16, if you’re keeping score) are held in several places with rebar, which also provides anchors for the grills themselves. The grills, in case you don’t recognize them, are stainless steel industrial shelving. We’re able to remove (or pivot) several of the blocks to add or move fuel, or to squirt down flare-ups.

On Saturday morning, Wife woke me up at 8:00 and I stumbled downstairs by 8:30. I made a pile of about 10 pounds of charcoal and squirted lighter fluid all over it. Once that burned down to ash, I took an iron rake and pushed most of it to the sides (specifically the corners) of the pit. Then I put the pig, which had been butterflied by the butcher, on the grill. From there on out, about every 20-30 minutes I’d throw in either more charcoal bricks or a chunk of wood. Partway through the day, a co-worker of mine brought down pieces of apple wood and apricot wood, and while they were prone to burning outright instead of just smoking, they did a lot (I think) for the finished product. So the pig cooked on this arrangement from about 9:00 until about 5:30. Nice timing, that, since many of the guests were at the house by then.

I’m going to dance around a few details here, so my apologies if the next couple of paragraphs don’t feel especially linear.

My co-worker friend and I cut up the pig and put the meat into pans, and enlisted a couple of people to bring the pans inside. As we got near the end, I decided that I needed to wash my hands and took one of the pans in myself. So with my greased-up hands I went into the house and wound up ducking around some people who were blocking my way. I dropped off the pan (Wife and her mom were parceling out the food to people). On my way out of the room, I again found myself blocked by the same people. They hadn’t moved at all despite their standing more or less in a doorway. So, clearly a little impatient but trying to maintain some sense of humor about it, I said something in what I thought was a“ha-ha” tone of voice, and moved on through. (I don’t remember specifically what I’d said, but it’s not really germane to the story.)

Only, they didn’t take it that way. They got insulted, they got pissed off, they left the party. They said nothing to me about it, although at one point one of their kids came over ranting about something and I had no idea what he was talking about. But here’s the kicker: they weren’t so pissed off that they stomped out right away, no siree. They took their time to eat our food and then decide that they were too pissed off to stay. They were there at least a half hour before they left, which is one of the reasons I didn’t know what the kid was going on about. (The other reason is that he doesn’t always make a pile of sense anyway.)

Wife was annoyed at me as well, because I’d managed to drive them away and they’re such good friends. Really? These are the the folks who are such good friends that you gave them their Christmas presents at this July event because it’s been that long since we saw them? (They weren’t too insulted to leave those behind, go figure.) These are the folks who, when you look at the caller ID and see it’s them, you have to decide whether or not to answer the phone? These are the folks who left Pig Roast 2007, also in a high state of insult, because we didn’t want them in the house while we attended to two simultaneous medical emergencies? Really? Would those be the good friends you’re referring to? And, let’s not forget that these were the people who called around 11:00 the day of the party to say that they were having car trouble and wondered if we could go pick them up from their home an hour from our house. Because clearly on a day when you’re having fifty people over, you’ve got nothing to do before they arrive. Frankly, I’m not sure that she holds the same opinion at this point. Her mother probably talked her down a little bit; She pointed out to me that they’re probably not going to stay “mad at us” because sooner or later they’re going to need some favor out of us and by then, All Will Be Forgiven. She also noted that I say plenty of things to piss her off too, but she just writes it off as being part of my personality. Thanks, I think.

So their departure went largely unnoticed, and their absence was not at all conspicuous. The party continued on until a little after midnight and so far as I could tell, everyone had a very good time.

And if my mother-in-law is right (I gotta say it: she often is), then I’m just going to have to enjoy the peace until “sooner or later” comes along.

A Little Cream in the Coffee

Mike: Maryland is for... lovers. Bumper sticker?
Sue Claussen: Virginia. Virginia is for lovers. Maryland is for crabs.

--Management (2008)

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The other night I attended a Crab Feast that was held over at Martin’s West.

This is notable for a couple of reasons: first, because it was the first time that I’d attended this annual event, since it was the first time that I was a member of the school system’s administrators’ union; and second, because I’d never been to Martin’s West before. This, for some reason, surprised many of my co-workers. Then some of them decided that it was because of my skin color.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never been invited to an event that large since I moved down here. I will concede, however, that I did feel a bit like the inside of an Oreo.

I got to the event and, despite getting there only about ten minutes after the scheduled start, the place was hopping. There were lots of principals and several of my counterparts there, and there was a DJ up front playing music. Let me tell you about this DJ: he was terrible. If I’d been in a crappier mood, I’d have gone up to him to get his card specifically so I could tell you “Don’t hire this guy”.

Believe it or not, I say that rather reluctantly. I used to be a mobile DJ and I know what a tough job it is sometimes, especially when you get groups of varying types of people. When I did, say, birthday parties? No problem because everyone’s the same age and has similar tastes in music. But when you get those multigenerational groups, you get complaints when the music is too modern, or when it’s not modern enough, or the older people think it’s too loud and the younger people think it’s not loud enough, and you wind up playing the same few songs at these events and it just makes your brain hurt. So I know it can be a tough gig.

However: when you have a group like this, who are mostly of similar demographics, the job becomes stupidly easy. From that standpoint he did okay, but he had no sense of being able to go smoothly from one song to another (dude, it’s called a “segue”). He also found it necessary to play several songs more than once. I was only there for about two hours or so, and in one case I heard the same song three times. I’m kind of pissed off that my union dues paid for this guy.

For those of you who are white have also never been to Martin’s West before, it’s a pretty typical big Wedding Factory kind of place. Big, gaudy chandeliers, columns all over the place, sweeping staircases, heavy draperies everywhere and relatively dim lighting. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a catering hall with a terrazzo floor before, so there’s that.

The food wasn’t bad: it wasn’t just crabs that they served; there was an assortment of non-crab food out there, and they had a kind of “crab station” where you picked up your crabs three or four at a time, set up whatever condiments you liked for them (e.g. extra Old Bay, drawn-butter-flavored grease, etc), and an array of desserts, plus hot and cold beverages, including beer (which, everyone knows, goes fabulously with crabs).

The most amusing part to me, however, was the little tent cards that were propped up pretty much EVERYWHERE throughout the place:

One of my co-workers saw that and remarked, “That’s so ghetto.” I don’t know if it’s that, but it’s certainly something. For what it’s worth, I left with a cup of hot tea in my hand and nobody challenged me.

We’ll Have A Gay Old Time

Barney: I do not support this!
James: What? Gay marriage?
Barney: No, Marriage!

--How I Met Your Mother, “Single Stamina” (11/27/06)

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I’ve had numerous gay friends in my adult life (in my high school life, too, but they weren’t telling then), but recently I had the chance to attend my first gay wedding.

The grooms in question are friends of ours who live nearby. They moved in about a year ago, and announced a short while back that they were getting married.

The catch, of course, is that in Maryland, you can BE married to someone of the same sex, however you can’t GET married to them. Maryland will recognize a marriage performed elsewhere, though. Maybe this was a “small steps” increment which went over better politically, I don’t know. But OK. So they made plans to go out-of-state and get the “official, legal, piece-of-paper” wedding done and over with, and then they arranged to have a bigger deal among family and friends here at home.

Wife and I have plenty of experience with throwing the big parties at home, so they came to us and we gave them some advice, some of which they took and some which they didn’t. No harm, no foul either way: it wasn’t going to affect their relative success or failure, you know?

The “official” wedding took place during the day on Friday, in what I’m sure was an extremely Federal-looking building down in Washington, DC, with only a few friends and family in attendance. By Friday night, however, the party had already begun. I’d been at a friend’s house, working on his computer, but when I got home at about 10:30 I heard Wife’s voice carrying from their back yard, so I strolled over. That launched two hours of drinking and chattering, after which Wife and I went home. We were told later on that some of them were up until 3:00.

The Big Day itself, we were running back and forth, helping them to get their stuff together and putting some of the last details in place for the event. They’d invited people to come over mid-afternoon, then there’d be another ceremony, in front of all their family and friends (those who were able to come, at least), and then the wild rumpus could begin.

At one point Wife asked where the ceremony itself would take place, and someone pointed to a spot at the back of the yard. “Oh, that’s so plain,” she said. “We have to do something about that.” She and I had recently been kicking around the idea of purchasing an arbor for the back yard, so we decided to finally pull the trigger and make the purchase, assemble the thing and put it in their back yard for the ceremony. It looks kind of like the one to the right, except ours is made of metal and can be staked to the ground. Fortunately for us, assembly took only about twenty minutes. We carried the completed arbor to their back yard, which they thought was great. Then we ran back to our yard and grabbed a couple of plastic urns in which we’d planted flowers, and flanked the arbor with them. For a final touch we grabbed a pair of the dozen or so tiki torches that were around the yard and put them to either side as well. Instant Wedding Canopy!

 The ceremony was great, and I think this particular couple, upon sealing their vows with the kiss, received the longest sustained applause of any wedding I’ve been to. And, of course, the after-party was fantastic. Not only because this particular event had a higher-than-average percentage of good-looking women to scope out, but (also) because I think we made ourselves a few new friends that weekend.

The next morning we went over and I made breakfast for something like fourteen people (who were all drifting in, one at a time, as they woke up), and we got in a little post-party chatter before everyone went back home, or wherever their destination was for the day. And a great time was had by all.

To cap this post off, I’m reproducing the piece below. Despite my research, I couldn’t nail down the source.

Ten Reasons Gay Marriage is Un-American

1. Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.
7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.
9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Best Wishes to the Happy Couple! And thanks for bringing our stuff back!

My Food Is Holier Than Thy Food

Stanley Tibbets: [corrupting the Gestalt Prayer] I was put on this earth to do my thing…and you were put on this earth to do your thing…and if, by chance, our things should…meet…well, that’s groovy.

--Foul Play (1978)

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Lots of people in the world appear to be able to agree with the basic tenets of “live and let live”, with the obvious exceptions. Your right to swing a fist ends where my nose begins, and so on. It doesn’t matter to me what you do with your life, so long as nobody is unnecessarily hurt. As Lazarus Long reminds us, “Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful - just stupid).”

There are folks out there, however, who insist upon shoehorning some portion of their life into others’, posing it as some form of moral superiority. A good example of this would be back in January, when the Tiger Woods thing started to really break open. “Fox News Sunday” anchor Brit Hume commented that “[Woods is] said to be a Buddhist; I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.'" In other words, My god is better than your god. That’s some strong stuff, coming from a guy who’s working on the Lord’s Day of Rest.

Frankly, I have no problem with people who hold a given point of view. I have many friends who are devout Christians who may express things as “God’s will” or feel that they’ve been blessed by something, and that’s fine. Whatever gets you to the next day is all right, in my book. I also have Jewish friends of all stripes, from the ones who walk to Temple all the way up to the ones who come to my house because I make a great shrimp boil. And if they express things in those terms, well that’s OK with me too. This may be a result of me growing up in a town that was probably half-Christian and half-Jewish at the time. Either that or I just happened to have a lot of Jewish classmates. If I find myself in Synagogue, I wear a yarmulke and do what’s needed. If I’m in church, I sit when I’m supposed to and I stand when I’m supposed to. My attitude is pretty much “Don’t jam it in my face and we’ll get along fine,” and that philosophy has carried me a long way, thanks. It never hurts to respect the other guy’s custom you know?

But this post, believe it or not, isn’t (strictly) about religion. So, before it veers into "some of my best friends are Jews" territory...

Most of you know by now that I stage a Pig Roast every year. It’s a fun little gathering that My Child Bride and I hold, “little” being defined rather like the wedding scene in the film Easy Money:

The point of the Pig Roast is to gather friends, co-workers and family together in one place for a day or so. Sometimes people come a long distance and stay in the area for a couple of days; those folks have the most fun, I think. I know of a couple of rather tight friendships that began at some of my parties, so for some they’ve been life-changers. So while a roasted pig is served, and is sort of the “centerpiece” of the day, it’s not really the point. As I noted above, I do have some friends who don’t eat the pork. I have others who don’t eat meat at all. These folks do not go hungry at my parties, any more than the people who don’t drink alcohol go thirsty. This fact, I stress repeatedly.

Having said all that, what I don’t understand is when someone feels compelled to RSVP something along the lines of “I’d come but you’re cooking a murdered animal and I can’t abide that.” This is an exaggeration, but not by much. Look, I get that you don’t eat meat but if you’re going to avoid every situation where meat is served then you’re going to be running in awfully small circles. And you’re certainly not going to convince me, or most of my friends, to come over to your side of the fence with inflammatory language, any more than Tiger Woods would be convinced by Brit Hume’s comments. So I’m not really sure what the point of expressing it that way would be, other than to express some sort of moral superiority gained through diet.

There are people who don’t really like to see the pig roasting. That’s fine, I get that. It’s especially odd-looking when you first put it over the heat. It’s one of the reasons that we cook it in the alley beyond the fence; you have to make a bit of an effort to go see it. See? I have some sensitivity.

The part I don’t get is, if I invited the same group of people to, say, a Christmas Party, it’s not as though I’d get a bunch of people declining to come “because we don’t believe in Jesus Christ and can’t be around people who do.” I did once make the mistake of inviting a Jehovah’s Witness to a birthday party; their reply was a polite “no, thank you.” I didn’t get a sermon on the reasons why JWs don’t celebrate birthdays (it’s an interesting reason, though). So why the proselytizing on this subject? I don’t know.

I’ve spent a long time composing this post because I don’t want to anger anyone or hurt feelings but I realize that in the long run, that’s probably impossible. I will say this: this is not directed at either AW or LM; you handled it just fine so far as I’m concerned. But there have been a couple of other people…wow.

This is not going to get into a debate on the merits of vegetarianism vs. carnivorism or omnivorism (and I promise I’ll delete any comments which do go that route); the fact is that, unless you’re growing literally everything that you eat, you’re contributing to the death of animals. Do you think someone walks ahead of the combine swatting mice and rabbits out of its path? However, what I’m unclear on is why this particular group of people feels it necessary to couch their reply to a party invitation in rather rude terms. Come on, people, I just thought it would be fun to hang out for an afternoon.