AWESOME!

My weekend started at 4:45 on Saturday morning. Being awake and functioning that early on a Sleepinurday is an unnatural act, and I hope Thumper is in full agreement with me on this one. I expect him to wait until 10 a.m. for his breakfast on Saturdays. And Sundays, too, for that matter. But on Saturday, I set aside my normally strict adherence to the rules, and I volunteered to help with a triathlon for kids and adults. I reported for duty at 6 a.m., and I was amazed to find that not only did I manage to get up, but so did a whole slew of teenagers. Conscious and functioning at 6 o'clock on a summer Saturday morning! And nary a one was surly!

I was posted at one of the intersections along the bike route to help keep any over-zealous and under-patient drivers from running over the participants. All of the drivers were patient and considerate, though, and gave the cyclists plenty of space and time. Most even waved and smiled at me, and some even rolled down their windows to thank me for my participation. A couple of the adult cyclists even said thanks as they zipped past.

The kids raced first, and then the adults. My instructions were to stop oncoming traffic if cyclists were approaching; my instructions did not include cheering the kids on. But I could hear the guy at the next intersection hollering enthusiastically and clapping for each kid that went by. Then the event organizer that had posted me went by, riding alongside the racers on her own bike and telling the kids how AWESOME! they were and what GOOD WORK! they were doing. I had just been smiling at them as they passed, but I began to feel like I should be yelling encouragement, too. But I was inhibited by a self-consciousness of which I have never been proud. I told myself that I didn't know how long the course was, or where my relative position along it was. I was in no position to judge how awesome any kid was or how good was the work that any kid was doing. Rationally, I knew it didn't really matter, but I felt like an idiot the couple of times I said, "Lookin' good!" to some poor kid sweating along. I wish I hadn't worried about my dignity and just cheered them all on like any normal adult would have.

I also wish I'd done something about the two loose dogs that came upon the scene about twenty feet in front of me. One was a rottweiler with a limp, and the other appeared to be a mutt with some amount of pit bull in him. If they were a cartoon, the rottweiler would have been the streetwise thug and the other would have been his sidekick who uses wisecracks to hide his vulnerabilities. As soon as I saw them, I foresaw some sort of Tour de France-style pileup at best and a half-dozen mauled children at worst, and parents and event organizers blaming me in either case. But I couldn't think of a thing to do about it. In the end, they ran gleefully alongside a couple of kids for a few seconds before getting bored and wandering off, though. So no disasters ensued, but I still chastened myself for not being more proactive. I should have thrown myself on the dogs, sacrificing myself for the good of the children.

My favorite part of the event, by far, was the moment when the last of the kids went by. He was tiny, probably 5 or 6 years old, on a bicycle whose wheels looked to be about the size of dinner plates. He came along far, far behind the last of the stragglers who'd preceded him, but he was not daunted in the least. In fact, he was pedalling along with great enthusiasm. The last of the adults, when they raced a short time later, would not look nearly as fresh when she passed as this young man did. She would rather look distinctly wrung out. But this young man looked fresh as a daisy, and the AWESOME! organizer was pedalling slowly alongside him as he came. In the several seconds that they were in earshot, I heard his non-stop monologue, punctuated with her interjections:

"I'll probably play tennis, or basketball, but I don't think I'll ride bikes like Lance Armstrong..."

"AWESOME!"

"Or I might race NASCAR. My brother's almost eight, and he wants to race NASCAR too."

"NO WAY!"

And then he was gone, chattering cheerfully as he pedalled away. I think a little focus might have helped his finishing time a bit, but I don't think his overall enjoyment of the event could have been much higher.

Religioso

Thanks to MTAMM for her post yesterday on kids and religion. I've been thinking about it for years, actually, and I don't even have a kid yet. Some people have accused me of over-intellectualizing things. Well, of over-thinking them, but I had to intellectualize it up a bit.

A couple of years ago, Mrs. Rodius and I went to dinner with Big Brother and his wife. Because Mrs. Rodius and I were thinking about maybe beginning to consider the idea of having kids someday, I naturally jumped right to thinking about the religious education of our not yet even theoretical children. Of course!

So we got well into an interesting conversation. Big Brother and SWSIL (Social Worker Sister-in-Law), like many of the commenters on Minivan Mom's site, did not participate in organized religion, but did, at least in SWSIL's case, believe in God. I don't recall if Big Brother said he did or not. But they tried to live spiritual lives, and taught their children that many people believe many different things, and that that's OK.

On a side note, their 8-year-old daughter may or may not have had occasion this month to explain to her Baptist grandmother that she's Greek. As in, she believes in the Greek gods and goddesses. I never did hear the rest of that story. I'm sure it's bound to be a good one.

Anyway, we were deeply involved in our religious education conversation, with me wondering aloud if, by attempting to teach your kids all religions, you effectively teach them none. It seemed to me that it's more likely for a person to embrace a religion if he does so at a young age. And for a young person to embrace a religion, it seemed to me that he would have to be indoctrinated in it, not just educated in it. I don't think Mrs. Rodius, Big Brother, or SWSIL necessarily agreed with that position, though.

Suddenly, a woman from the table next to ours rolled her chair over to join our conversation. I'm not sure why Olive Garden has chairs with casters on them; perhaps it is to reduce the chance for abdominal injury by encouraging patrons to wheel their overly-full bellies well away from the table before attempting to stand. Or maybe it's just to make it easier for strangers to insert themselves into your conversation. I'm sure it was the subject matter that made her feel welcome to participate. If we'd been discussing the relative merits of a variety of sexual positions, she may not have felt so comfortable offering her own opinion on the matter.

I don't really remember now what she contributed, probably because I spent the entire time she was talking drowning her out with my own internal monologue of, "What the hell?" over and over again. I vaguely recall her taking the pro position on formal religious education. I also recall thinking that she wasn't quite understanding any of the counter-arguments that Big Brother or I may have tried to employ. But mostly I remember thinking, "What the hell?"

So I don't really think that conversation resolved any of my uncertainties of the time. I think I mostly just tabled those uncertainties until a later date. Myself? I'd call myself an atheist if I wasn't afraid God would strike me dead for my arrogance. I was not brought up with any particular religion. I attended services at a Presbyterian church for a few years with my mother and Big Brother. I was never deeply touched by the dogma or the services. I thought the giant cross was pretty cool. I enjoyed the grape juice and hawaiian bread. I liked to contemplate the practical mechanics of things like the distribution of the bread and "wine" and passing the collection plate. I wondered where one could get the plastic shot glasses for the wine in such bulk, or the red-velvet-and-brass carrying case with holes custom sized to fit those plastic shot glasses. Mom had her own spirituality going on, but she wasn't very open about it with her kids at the time, though she is much more so now.

I had regular playdates for awhile with the niece and nephew. Once, when I asked the niece (who is now Greek), what she wanted to do for our next playdate, she decided that she wanted to go to services at the Lutheran church where her little brother was attending pre-school. She glowed with delight when I showed up at her house to pick her up wearing dress clothes (including a tie, and shoes that were neither sandals nor tennis shoes. But it wasn't a suit. I don't own a suit.). If you knew me, you'd know that such an outfit is almost unheard of for me. I thought when she suggested it that maybe this would be the occasion that would open my heart to the church. The people there were very warm and welcoming, and I could imagine myself becoming a part of their community, volunteering to help at the barbecues, and so on. But the service itself just did not resonate with me. We stood when were supposed to stand, we sang when we were supposed to sing. We listened when we were supposed to listen. Neither the substance nor the ritual sounded an echoing tone in my heart.

So thinking of young Thumper and his religious education, I wonder:

Is it possible to indoctrinate your child into a religion without participating in it yourself?

If you teach a child that there are many religions in the world, and all of them have equal relative merits, are you not also teaching your child that none of them is actually right and true?

Is it possible to teach children to be ethical and compassionate without teaching them that there are grave and eternal consequences for not being so?

He's Just a Simple Caveman

And by that I am referencing Phil Hartman SNL skits and not Geico commercials. Does that make me old?

The simple caveman to which I refer is, of course, young Thumperino. He's just a simple caveman. He doesn't understand our fancy, modern way of life.

He says, "I want cranberry juice!" I just went to the grocery store yesterday, and nobody said anything about wanting cranberry juice. Thus there is no cranberry juice in the refrigerator today. I try to explain this to him. He says, "Cranberry juice!"

He has also done the same thing with meatballs. And chocolate. Granted, the chocolate thing was my fault. There's almost always chocolate in stock. He had every reason to believe it would be readily available. He's my boy, after all, and I live by the motto, "If it ain't chocolate, it ain't dessert." I'm afraid I let him down on the chocolate thing.

But meatballs? When was the last time we had meatballs in our freezer, just waiting for their chance to get called up to the Big Show? The only reason he knows he likes meatballs is because his Aunty T gave him some at the baby shower. We haven't had meatballs at our house since Hector was a pup! I mean, I'm happy to get the boy meatballs, but it would be helpful if he could, you know, make a list in advance or something. Let me know on shopping day. I tried to tell him that. He said, "Meatballs, please!" Sometimes he says please.

Big Pimpin'

My back still hurts. Speaking of money...

I got skillz, yo. None of them include pretending I'm young and hip, though, so I'll just stop there.

I've been posting to Craigslist, and I've found two clients so far, and a potential third. I've bought a domain name, and I've been thinking, but not acting, on forming a company and making a website. But it occurred to me this morning that I have a webpage of sorts. Perhaps it would be wise, odd though this may seem, to put it to a practical purpose. It's so crazy, it just might work!

AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION, $1/MINUTE

I type 80 wpm (you didn't think I've been two-finger typing all of these unnecessarily verbose posts, did you?) and I have transcription pedals. If you have audio that you need converted to text, I'm your man. So far I've transcribed seminars given by a vocal coach and phone and in-person interviews by a Ph.D. candidate. Both were pleased with my work. I'm fast, I'm accurate, and I give you my word that I will never promise a deadline that I can't meet.

FILEMAKER DATABASE DESIGN

I'm self-taught, and certified by no one in particular, but I can make Filemaker get up and dance. I created a scheduling application that is now the chief means by which my office schedules and disperses information about events in our building. It has multiple calendar views (color-coded and customized for a Monday-Sunday week) and automatically emails staff when an event is created or changed. It contains an address book, and it's used to keep track of a wide variety of event information from parking and police to contract status.

I've also written customized payroll applications that meet the highly specific needs of two different departments. One uses a barcode scanner to clock employees in and out, checks for employees that are working too many hours per week, and stores employee photos for printing identification badges. The other allows for a very complicated and specific system based on the type of work done, holiday or weekend hour multipliers, and journeyman or master status of employee.

Other databases I've created have been used to track telephone contacts with prospects, to track inventory, to play roulette and blackjack, to cheat at an online word game, and to store recipes. The recipe database calculates calories per serving based on information imported from USDA data files available online.

So do you have any use for either of those services? Email me with the link at top right, and let's talk about it.

Oh yeah, and if you've got any free advice about starting a small business, forming a company in the State of Texas and which type is best for my situation, I'd love to hear it.

Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging program.

Thanks for All Your Thoughts; Now Here's a Baby Update

Thanks for all your input. I think I won't exactly tell the BFF to piss off, but I'll just wait and watch it fade away after I tell him thanks but no thanks on the Forum in January. I don't think he's long for Austin, anyway. He's bought property in Costa Rica which will sustain him when the End Times come (i.e., when the oil runs out and the U.S. starts looking like location shots of The Road Warrior or, alternatively, we all start having to learn Chinese. Or when the Killer Plague comes. You know, six one, half dozen t'other).

In other news, Thumper is continuing his southern migration. This morning, the doctor could feel his head, but used some B word that apparently means he's not fully engaged yet. The cervix is softening, but not effacing or dilating yet. By poking, squeezing, and making faces, she estimated him at about 7 1/2 lbs. It'll be 37 weeks in two days; after that she'd be happy to see him come any time.

When Mrs. Rodius asked if a pedicure with leg and foot massage would be OK this weekend, the doctor said, "Oh yeah. You're ready. When women start worrying about their toes, they're ready." But is Thumper ready? He hasn't said if he's started worrying about his toes yet.

Crisis Point for a Lifelong Friendship

I have a friend. I remember quite clearly twisting around in my seat with the rest of the first grade to stare at him and his glasses at the back of the classroom. It was his first day at a new school. I don't remember introductions, or slowly becoming friends. We just were. His mother was our Cub Scout Den Mother. His father was our little league coach. His house was always stocked with home-made cookies and cakes and all manner of sugary delights. I may have spent more of my childhood in his house and yard than in my own. We were inseparable from 6 to 15, BFF's, though of course we'd never heard that term at the time.

After junior high, I followed Big Brother's example and transferred out of the high school that Phil Donahue once referred to as "Ken and Barbie High" to go to the rival high school a little further away. We weren't the kids whose parents bought them Mercedes and Mustangs for their 16th birthday. BFF wasn't either, but he chose to keep on at Ken and Barbie High.

Without seeing each other daily, the distance between us grew. Our activities and our circles of friends diverged, but we still remained friends. After high school, he spent a semester in the dorms of a college some 200 miles away. When he came back, I moved to Boston. We wrote letters to each other, in those days before email and instant messaging, and we played a long distance game of chess, one move per letter, over the course of years. He came to visit, and so did I.

We moved to Austin because Big Brother and his family had settled here, my parents and oldest sibling were only 200 miles away, and because I intended to go to grad school at the University of Texas. A bonus incentive was that BFF had settled here, too. With my return to Texas, our friendship was renewed. But now, it may be ending.

Since my return to Texas eight years ago, BFF has demonstrated a tendency toward evangelism. Not of the fundamentalist Christian variety, but evangelism nonetheless. He discovered The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity by Daniel Reid, and it became his bible. He felt healthier than he'd ever felt before. He no longer had problems with allergies or acne. He had found The Way that was right for him, and he immersed himself in it completely. He also gave copies of the book to many of the people that he knew, including me. The tenets of the book dominated his conversation for a long time.

He also became an environmental activist. Again, he gave away copies of books that were important to him, like The End of Oil by Paul Roberts. Daily, he forwarded emails from the various green listservs to which he belonged. He pointed out the dietary and environmental failings of his friends and lovers. He preached with the fervor of a born-again sinner.

It was important to him, and he was important to me, so I went along. I tried his diet for six months, and felt no different. I fasted twice a year for a few years, and I got a little bit more out of that, but not enough to make it a permanent aspect of my life. I debated politics with him, in person and in email, until I could no longer stomach the same arguments going around and around and around. As I've mentioned before, he helped curb my rampant conservatism, to a degree. But I finally had to tell him how weary I've grown of his relentess efforts to change me into the friend he wishes I was.

And now, he's discovered Landmark Forums. After a lull in our friendship, he called me out of the blue to apologize for not being a very good friend to me and to ask me to support him by attending a graduation ceremony for a class that he had taken called Landmark Forum. I was touched that he reached out like that, and I told him I'd be there. After I hung up, I Googled it. I was concerned by what I found. It struck me, rightly or wrongly, as a cynical combination of cult and corporation, manipulating their clients' emotional response to the carefully developed and presented content in order to convert them to recruiters to grow ever-larger the corporate bottom line. Is it an actual cult? I don't know. Is Scientology a cult? I don't know. Do the histories and ideologies of Landmark and Scientology intersect here and there? I think so.

The language BFF used in that phone call was repeated in the pages I found: he had been "running a racket" on me, creating "vicious circles;" he wanted to "be present" with me, and "create the possibility" of a better relationship. I read that the phone call he made to me and the invitation to the "graduation" were indeed part of the Forum, and that part of their purpose was to have current Forum attendees working on their friends and families to increase enrollment in future Forums. I found it disturbing. I called him back to tell him that, while I would attend his graduation, I'd appreciate it if he did not give Landmark my contact information and let me make the decision myself how much involvement I wanted to have with them. He agreed, though he felt I had their motives all wrong. I considered parking a few blocks away and walking, so they couldn't hunt me down through my license plate.

The graduation itself was less a celebration of what the attendees had accomplished through the class and more an hours-long marketing session for the rest of us. I managed not to fill out the contact information cards that were repeatedly offered, and they were much less pushy about it than I anticipated. Near the end, the attendees were instructed to invite the rest of us to sign up. I told BFF I was skeptical and wanted to do some independent reading on it. He seemed disappointed, but understanding. I told him that it seemed to me that what the Forum promised to teach me over a weekend were in fact the years-long lessons that make up a life, the kinds of lessons that define each of us as people. I told him I didn't believe there were any shortcuts to be had. Truthfully, I had no intention of ever signing up, and I hoped his passion for it would fade over time. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, though, and I didn't want to drive an even larger wedge between us.

I thought my hopes were being realized when he refrained from evangelizing for Landmark on the several occasions we got together for lunch since then. He barely mentioned it, only referring obliquely to his intention to take additional Forums in the future. Saturday, he called me while Mrs. Rodius and I were driving to meet some friends for dinner. He said he didn't want to distract me while I was driving and asked me to call him back when I got home. We took too long, though, and he called again as we were headed home. I couldn't for the life of me guess what was so urgent. Mrs. Rodius guessed that he was calling to tell us his ex-girlfriend was pregnant.

He was not. He was calling because he'd just taken another Forum and was again all fired up to enroll me. He told me Landmark had more power to positively affect the future of the earth and humanity than did his previously-beloved environmentalism. He wanted me to join him, because the two of us together, with Landmark behind us, could be such powerful agents for change. He told me that he knows me so well that he knows this was just the kind of thing I was looking for to make my life better. He wanted to get me into a Forum right away, before the baby comes, because he knows I won't have time for awhile after that.

I told him I don't have time now. I told him I can't spend the money. He said it's not about the money, and he'd pay for me to go. I told him I'm not looking for a change, because my life is exactly where I want it to be, and I'm happier now than I've ever been before. I told him again that I know this is important to him, and that he is important to me, but no matter what he said to me, the answer now would be no, because with the impending birth, I have no room in my life for the Forum.

But I do not want to lose him as a friend. I do not want him to become isolated from anyone in his life who is not a fellow proponent of Landmark. So I told him that if it was still important to him in six months, we could discuss it again. I did not promise to sign up, but I didn't make it clear that I won't be. I did not tell him that if he knew me so well, he would know this is exactly the kind of thing I would never want to be a part of. I did not tell him that it is about the money; it's not about whether or not I pay to attend the one Forum, it's about convincing me to be a recruiter, just as he has become. It's about convincing me to start a lifelong involvement with many more and more expensive Forums down the road. He would say that I'm "creating" that reality myself.

So now I am very sad. How do I keep my friend without signing up for a program that is utter anathema to me? Do I sign up in six months and let him pay for it (because I'm certainly not dropping hundreds of dollars on this thing after cutting our income significantly), just to keep him from feeling like I rejected it, and therefore him, without even giving it a try? What would you do?

Oh Crap, You Mean We Might Really Have This Baby?

Yesterday Mrs. Rodius, bent over in the laundry room, said "Ah!" and then just kind of stood there, still bent, forehead resting on the top of the washer.

"Are you OK?" I asked from the kitchen. When she didn't respond, I walked over to the laundry room and said, with a touch more concern in my voice, "Are you all right?"

"Just a contraction," she said calmly and straightened back up.

And then my brain said, "Ohcrapwehaven'tpackedabagthenursery'snotreadythediapershaven'tcomeIjustputaroastintheovenholycraparewereallyhavingababy?"

But it was just one of those practice contractions the uterus uses to work out with, pumping up its muscles for the real thing. So I had a little chat with Thumper later in the evening. I told him if he was going to come early, that'd be OK. In fact, if he's planning on getting any bigger, earlier might even be better. But really, this week's not good for us. If he could hold out until next week, at least, I'd really appreciate it. Do the ol' man a favor, would ya?