Copying Beth...

Beth has been posting very regularly recently, even with the weird tricks my little server seems to be playing on her... and most of the recent content has been simply a good picture and a sentence. Well, i've got two sentences so far, and the picture i took today isn't good at all, but it's still a picture. So basically, i like Beth's idea, and may copy it more in the future.

Today i took Houston and Zane to a motorcycle shop which specializes in enormous gas guzzling, chrome laden choppers with no rear suspension. Ow. They also sell scooters, which are much more popular the current economic climate. The store employee i talked to told Houston, "You've been so well behaved! Usually when little boys come in here I have to follow them around with a towel wiping fingerprints off of everything!" I was very proud of Houston's restraint. So the guy gave him a World's Finest Chocolate bar for free. Jackpot!

Settling in...

After retreats and vacations, there's always the let-down period. The post-party depression, if you will. One of the kids we took to Young Life Camp was obviously suffering from that, since he was really naughty today.

Me? I'm in a great mood. That's because i've been to camp five or six times, and returning is far more rewarding since the family, the center of my entire existence, is here to shower me with love and attention. But my body is exhausted. So i should go to bed. Mmm, bed.

Young Life Camp!

I'm HOOOOMMMMEEEEE!!!!!!!!!! I missed my family so much!

Camp was really awesome, but being away from my Karen and our kids was Sad. All is right with the world now. The picture for this post was, by the way, the only picture of me taken the whole week unless you count blurry pictures or ones where i was standing under a huge downspout of rainwater not wearing my shirt. Those are available by request, by the way. In that picture, you can see Sara, our dedicated and unimaginably competent leader. If disorganization and unfriendliness were butts, she'd totally kick butt. Like, into the next time code, or whatever. Also, Kia who's from my old hometown of Portland Oregon, and there's me. With the dreads.

The whole point of Young Life Camp is to trick kids into listening to the Gospel. The part where God gave Jesus, the perfect innocent sacrifice as a payment for the sin and brokenness of humanity and the world, and calls us to God's self through Jesus. But out of 16 waking hours, fourteen of those are spent being shamelessly entertained by: insane people acting out preposterous skits; intense, coed physical activity like boy vs. girl football where the boys must remain on their knees the whole time; swimming; tanning; eating delicious food; riding mountain bikes; playing pool or foosball or ping-pong. And more stuff. Oh yeah, they can also shop for stylish clothing and accessories, all Young Life branded and shamelessly overpriced.

These hours and hours of mind blowing fun are cleverly juxtaposed with the gospel message, and classical behavioralism teaches us that pleasurable stimuli affect the way we perceive simultaneous input. So, volleyball tournament followed by pizza and pop, followed by swimming = GOOD! Gospel message = GOOD! I'm sounding pretty cynical about this whole strategy, but i'm not. Not really. My background in Calvinistic theology is coming through. But God works in ways that i am utterly not equipped to comprehend, and my fondness for Molinistic theology helps me understand that everything does happen for a reason. The kids at camp are getting high on endorphins and suntan lotion (and, perhaps for the first time in years, not weed or booze). Those who choose God at that point, of their free will, do so because of God's irresistible call to grace... which includes launching waterballoons at relativistic speeds at bubble-wrapped grown ups (inside!!!) and playing "Musical Mono".

"Musical Mono" is a game which involves four boys kneeling on one knee, forming a kind of chair. In each of their mouths, they're holding an Oreo cookie. Five girls circle them, and when the music stops, they pounce onto a knee and extract the Oreo cookie. This is an extremely misguided game, in my responsible adult opinion, but there was much cheering, and almost a girl-fight.

So anyway, God works through lavishly expensive outfits like Young Life, and as long as i'm engaging kids with love and grace, trying to show them Christlike selflessness, i figure it's doing good.

I enjoyed camp very much. Youth is so beautiful. I got sunburnt. I scraped up both feet, and hobbled around in lots of pain one evening only to find the pain evaporated the next morning. Welcome to thirty-six, Juanito. I kicked higher than any of the other kids who were trying, and then warned the next guy that he was going to fall on his butt. I was ambivalently pleased and saddened to have been right.
Well, check out the ___more___ to see the panorama, if i can find the code.
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The Very Lonely Juanito

Tony's visiting again! So i can give Karen a ride on BMW motorcycle. Wearing flip-flops! Without a motorcycle endorsement! I should get one of those.

I'm going to be lonely. Not lonely, vow of solitude style, but i'm going to miss my fam. For the first time in a couple years, i'll be going to Young Life camp. Here's one of my previous experiences, here's another. It's always interesting, but i'm not excited. I'm never really excited about things for work until they actually happen. Except the Diversity Food Fair. I was excited about that.

So i'm going to be GONE for a WEEK. Zane is going to be taller! He won't recognize me! Houston will miss me! It'll be... fun and okay...... we'll see. But since i haven't been taking nearly as many pictures as... ever... i almost feel like leaving my camera home. But i'll take it. I'll go pack it right now. And everything else i'll need, like clothes and toothbrushes. Or just one toothbrush.

We went on a date!!!

When Karen and i saw Obama back in May, we kind of counted it as a date. But that's been the only date we went on for over a year. So Karen's mom told us to drop off the kids and go do whatever we want! So we went to see Get Smart, which we enjoyed, and then ate so much food that nine hours later, we're not even peckish. And then, we went to a park, lied on a blanket in the sun, and read. And read and read. We moved into the shade, nearer to the babbling brook, and read some more. It was utterly awesome.

So what did we used to do? Before we had kids? What did we spend our money on? Why didn't we have fifty grand in savings? Why didn't we do stuff like that ALL THE TIME? Crazy.

We really enjoyed today. Luckily, Karen finished Margaret Atwood's The Handmaiden's Tale, which provided us with fodder for conversation, where Get Smart didn't.

Totally unrelated: i just realized that i can move my mouse about two and a half inches, slowly, and get my mouse pointer to move across all 3,280 pixels of my desktop. That's very sensitive.

Happy Nursery!

We've been married FOURTEEN YEARS!!! That's the last double-of-a-prime we'll have for a while. Um, (counts on fingers...) eight years. The significant point isn't the characteristic of the number, but the fact that we've been married for FOURTEEN YEARS! That's a long time!

Today, Katrina came up from the basement with a strip of paper curled up randomly, holding the ends together, and said "Happy Nursery!" and gave it to us. "You can keep it!"

It's been, almost without exception, perfect. But there have been times... i'll try to list a few, because it's fun.

In our first year of marriage, we decided to buy a VW Bus, nearly gutted, not running, without a title. We spent a few sleep deprived months getting it running, mostly by replacing parts one at a time, starting with the crankshaft, block, and pistons and cylinders, and ending up with the interior carpet. It broke down a few times, notably on the freeway where a guy picked me up and started hitting on me and at the Dallas Fort Worth airport, where we got a ticket for "parking" too long. Because it was broken down and i was working on it. Then, on our way to move to Chicago, around our first anniversary, it blew a hole in a piston. This was the first of three times that happened.

The next winter, we drove our VW Jetta to visit relatives and friends in New York. The Jetta broke and broke and broke, mostly due to a design feature which dropped rainwater on a hideously over engineered fuse box. At Times Square on January 2nd. Under the biggest snowstorm in Pennsylvania in decades. More sleep was lost, lots of money was flushed, and we very nearly didn't make it to Tony and Julie's wedding. Seriously, hours to spare. On the way home, the rear wheel bearing became shards of filthy hot metal, and Andrew had to fly back to Australia the next morning and all the parts stores were closed.

When we got a job teaching English in Korea the next year, one of the things we looked forward to more than anything was NO CAR TROUBLE!!! You can understand why. However, there was a rat living between our building and the next, most of the Korean men couldn't stand Karen, our TV wouldn't turn off and the whole building was wired to one VCR which showed porn at random times, and our school quit paying us six months in. Technically, they still owe us $15,000.

Our fourth year of marriage, we went back to Korea where we slept on a park bench in Japan one night. That wasn't so bad. But then the Korean economy collapsed, mostly because of Karen. That's what one of our bosses actually said.

Our fifth year we moved to Grand Rapids, and besides having a couple jobs we couldn't stand (Karen was drilling doorknobs, i was painting dump trucks) we've lived happily ever after. And now we have three kids, one of whom was wondering today why we were calling today a nursery, but made us "Nursery crowns" anyway. Aww!
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Difficult description...

How do you describe, to an overweight, socially dim, hygienically challenged Magic playing kid about this one time when you walked into a comic book store and saw a huge group of, well, his peers playing in a Magic tournament? I couldn't convey the nuances of the social awkwardness, the multiple points on the spectrum of nerdiness, the straggly, desperately unshaven facial hair, the loud talking about spells and manna and artifacts, complete with confidently expleted expletives. I think the kid was thinking "Awesome!!!"

Yeah.

Later, he threatened to kill me. With a ball point pen. I don't know if there was a link.

Monday...

So...

Today i let Katrina draw pictures on Karen's Palm Pilot. Simultaneously, Houston was playing a game on my Palm Pilot called Traffic... except way less annoying. You pull blocks around the screen with your finger to let the white one out. Houston was astonishingly good once he figured it out. Before i knew it, he was up to level eleven. Katrina, on the other hand, had a screen filled with hearts and flowers and "Hugs and kisses" which she'd done with the circle and line tool. What kind of geniuses are we bringing up here?

Besides that, it's been a pleasantly usual day. I like those ones.

Food fair!

Yay! We had our Diversity Food Fair at Wedgwood today! I almost NEVER get excited about things like this, because work is just where i work. But this time i really got into it.

What you see in that picture is the word "Pakistan" written in Urdu-like script, a drawing of Benazir Bhutto, and a Pakistani flag. You can have one guess as to which one i did. Except i also colored the portrait of Bhutto with crayon. Here's another picture of naan, except this time i'm actually putting ghee on it. Okay, except it's not ghee, it's melted butter. But the solids have sunk to the bottom of the container, and butter fat is basically what ghee is anyway. Further destroying the authenticity is the fact that i'm using an electric griddle to cook the naan instead of a tandoori. But it was still awesome.

I've never written a recipe for naan here. So i will. It's basically a simple bread, except rolled thin, and cooked quickly on a hot surface.

Dissolve some yeast (one packet, but you could use half a packet or a yeast starter. Or even no yeast at all, your dough will EVENTUALLY rise, but no bets on what microorganism causes it, and yeast from the store tastes agreeable to we Westerners) in about a cup of water and a teaspoon or two of sugar for the yeast to nosh on. They're all like "SIMPLE CARBS MONG MONG" and expelling CO2 like "Whoah, was that me?" Okay, nevermind.

Let the dissolved yeast wake up for a little while -- you can tell because the mixture will be a little bubbly on the top, and then toss in three or four cups of good bread flour, and a tablespoon of salt. More salt for extra tasty. Don't omit the salt. The difference between killer delicious dough products (like pizza crust) and mediocre dough is often the amount of salt. Ace Bakery makes some really good baguettes, even though they're shipped here from Canadia. But besides the really nice high gluten wheat they use, it's the saltiness of the bread that makes it so good.

Right, so now you got flour and salt getting gooey in yeasty water. Gross. Well, pop the dough hook on your mixer and... what? You were using a normal bowl? Oh... well, get a Kitchenaid mixer and use that bowl instead. Use the dough hook to mix up the dough until it sticks in a nice lump to the hook and whirrs around. A rubber spatula and good timing will help you get all the flour mixed in. You can add flour or water to fine-tune the way the dough works out, but i prefer working with a fairly moist, "underfloured" dough. Knead in the mixer for five minutes or so. Longer if you want.

OR... if you don't have a Kitchenaid (i am looking at the alternate-universe version of me who didn't have our neighbor lady give us a perfectly functioning one) you can knead the dough by hand. It's a lot of work, and the sweat you might drip into the dough working at it is probably an excellent source of perfectly acceptable yeast, if you went with my earlier suggestion. To knead by hand without overflouring it, resign yourself to getting your hands covered with gooey dough, or just keep flouring your hands and the working surface. Squish the dough. Fold it in half towards you. Squish it really hard in the middle. Turn it and fold it again. Squish it. Fold it. Squish it. Do i need to go on?

Eventually, the dough will get "smooth" -- hand kneading might take ten minutes or longer. What has happened, is the little wheat protein molecule strands have been mechanically wiggled around a bunch, and they've hooked onto each other, just like hair will mat into dreadlocks if you fiddle... wait... it's probably nothing at all like that. But what does happen, is the molecules do link up and form longer bundles of protein. It's called "developing the gluten". The energy you provide by kneading is what allows this to happen. Stale bread will do much the same thing, and get flexible and spongy again if you dump energy into it by heating it up in the microwave.

Dough with long stretchy fibers of gluten will be pleasantly chewy, and provide an excellent bubble gum like environment for steam and CO2 bubbles to form and grow. And that's the next step. Let the dough rise, covered by plastic wrap or a damp (clean) cloth. It'll get double in size if you're patient enough. In a nice warm place, this bacterial "be fruitful and multiply" process will take about an hour. Then, punch the dough down (which feels really cool and lets out a heady burst of awesome bakery smell) and rip it up into doughballs. This dough can be used for little naan, (golf ball sized doughballs) larger naan (tangerine sized balls) or pizza crust (grapefruit or bigger, man!). Or elephant ears (fry it) or normal loaf-pan bread, or baguettes. Let the balls or loaves sit, dusted with flour and covered with plastic wrap or damp cloth, for another half hour.

THEN... to make naan... take the balls, roll them on a well floured surface, and cook them in a pan on medium high heat until there's big bubbles on one side, and then flip it and let it cook until the bubbles have burnt golden brown or darker. Then, to add delicious non-healthiness to your empty carbohydrates, brush it with melted butter or ghee, and sprinkle with sesame seeds. You now have an Awesome Blossom with extra Awesome, hold the Blossom. And add naan.

Hiccups

We're rearranging our living room, and even though it's late, and i work in the morning, i feel like i should do a little more work on it. Since most of the problem is my HUGE MALIGNANT MESSANOMA surrounding my desk.

But still, gotta post. Just now Karen said "Will you go to my gmail and reply to Tony with..." and so i did, because i'm using her computer, after all. And i got a roaring case of the hiccups. I have always gotten the hiccups really easily, and frequently. My parents confirm that i've always been this way. So i've discovered some interesting hiccup facts, which are totally true for me, but if you're into that pomo stuff, they might not be true for you. Whatever you find true, man.

Hiccups arrive upon unexpected change. We blink when we experience change. It's true -- notice yourself blinking. So hiccups are triggered by the same kinds of things, just more drastic. All tricks to help you get rid of hiccups involve getting you to concentrate. The tricks i've tried or been exposed to:

1. Drinking a glass of water. This one worked for me when i was a toddler. By the time i was six, drinking a glass of water as a waste of time.
2. Drinking a glass of water upside down. This one requires a lot of concentration, so still works well for me.
3. Eating a spoon of peanut butter. This one worked for me for years. It was my favorite until my hiccups mutated into "peanut butter resistant hiccupococcus aurae".
4. Being startled. This one still works. This is less concentration, more like that old amnesia myth where another knock on the head will make you remember everything. Another abrupt mental change makes the hiccups go away.
5. Grabbing your tongue. That's something which requires lots of concentration. Tongues are slippery. And kind of disgusting. Even your own.
6. Having someone hold out five bucks and say "If you hiccup again, I'll give you this five bucks." That one works great.
7. Asking you what you ate yesterday. This one worked for me once, but then it lost its potency.
8. The final one which is the only sure fire way for me to get rid of hiccups is plain concentration. As i've gotten older and more sophisticated, the gimmicks have lost their effectiveness. So i have to center my mind and concentrate. Usually i imagine an angle or a point, and i zoom in on it from light years away down to the sub atomic scale. Of course, the angle remains identical, since geometry is pure theory, but the context of the angle changes a lot. That's a nice thing to concentrate on.

So there's Sir Hiccupsalot's definitive list of hiccup causes and cures. I new a girl whose dad almost died from hiccups.

A day of fun!

Today i made Chicken Tikka Masala for Wedgwood's "Diversity Food Fair", which is where we celebrate the majestic variety of cultures on this world by stuffing our faces at a buffet. What an American way to celebrate... anything. This year i'm in charge of our unit's participation, and since i LOVE naan, i tossed in my vote to cook Pakistani food. Because my vote counts for 13, while each of our resident's votes count for one. I'm like a superdelegate of the food fair.

Right, so i've never actually had chicken tikka, but the ingredients look delicious. The complete menu: chicken, naan, jasmine rice, chai and dal with potatoes (mostly to keep it from looking so much like poo). I hope to take many pictures.

Today, however, i took pictures of the fam. This Christmas, Houston gave me a Styrofoamesque* airplane. It's been sitting on top of my desk since then. First it was too cold, and then i got distracted by a bug or something. Karen told me that Houston saw it the other day and was very sad that i'd never played with it. So today i pretended that i spontaneously decided to get the plane out from being mothballed in the Nevada desert, and we played with it for almost an hour. Houston seemed pleased, and it was a great deal of fun. It's mostly not broken now. Katrina got into it as well, although she's not as good at throwing the plane as the rest of us.

So it was an awesome day.

*Styrofoam is a registered trademark of the antichrist. Probably. Dow Chemical... so maybe.

Oranges are.

It's the best weather for gardening ever! We can virtually ignore our vegetable patch and flower garden and lawn, and while the weeds are finding conditions as favorable as the plants we actually want (like we can tell the difference!!!), at least stuff is green! And we're going to get green beans and zucchini and yellow squash and carrots and tomatoes, practically guaranteed.

I'm tired, so that's why i wrote that random thing. So i'm going to go to bed.

Oh yeah!!! We were sitting at the dinner table, and Houston was peeling an orange. Karen pointed out that the inner peel was white, so why don't we call them whites? Houston laughed. I said to Houston that since bananas are yellow, why don't we call them "yellows"? The immediate response: "There are many yellow fruits, but i think," he said with a grimace of uncertainty, "that oranges are pretty much the only fruit that's orange." Mensa!

And, here's the picture from the GR Press.

Bikes and weather

Tony was going to continue on his road tripping this morning at eleven, but instead he got on the road at one ten. Which is what you get if you move the colon forward one space. And change the A to P. But really he wasn't too far off.

He let me ride his motorcycle. It's a BMW. The most famous BMW motorcycle has a flat-twin engine, which explains the odd bumps sticking ungracefully out from the sides of those particular bikes. Tony's motorcycle isn't one of those, but it's not less weird. Instead of a graceful, if simple, air-cooled flat twin which any VW mechanic would recognize instantly, it's got a water cooled three cylinder inline engine, on its side, with the crank pointed straight ahead. It's called a "brick" engine, because that's exactly what it looks like. And like a brick, it doesn't vibrate at all. That's an inherent advantage of three cylinder inline engines, as first gen Geo Metro owners everywhere will attest to. But more importantly, Tony let me ride his K75 around the neighborhood!!! Okay, it's FAST. Not that i got it out of third gear, but i twisted it to half-throttle in first gear, and... well, my scooter has one fifteenth of the engine capacity, and it shows.

Tony drove my scooter, and was fairly quiet about the experience. The weirdest thing for both of us riding a scooter is the fact that there's nothing substantial between the knees. Tony's bike is big and heavy, but with a tank to grip, one feels a sense of stability and control. But the scooter has the ergonomics of an office chair, which isn't what springs to mind when one thinks about stability and control. Well, maybe stability. Really, the only times office chairs spring to my mind is when i want to sit down in an office.


Today Houston and i went for a walk at Karen's parents' house. The clouds were roiling and dark. I lied down on the grass and looked straight up. There was a cold front coming through. The line of clouds stretched across the entire sky, horizon to suburban horizon. The clouds flew over, textured and shadowed, with gaping chasms and hall ways, which i imagined flying through. The front rolled over us in less than two minutes -- i've never been so aware of air masses as i was today. Houston and i went back to the house with haste, where we put his bicycle back into our van and got inside about a minute before the rain came down like the tide coming in from up. One of my coolest weather experiences ever.
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Houston's a FIRST GRADER!!!

1. Tony is visiting!!! He was my first roommate, who decided to room with me even though he knew me, second hand, from my friend Sam. Brave, brave, brave fellow. Further proof of Tony's titanium banded courage: he drove here from New York on a BMW motorcycle, during a very windy, rainy, lightning-y day.
   
2. HOUSTON IS OUT OF SCHOOL!!!!! I don't think he's as excited about this as he will be for the next twelve or sixteen years, but seriously, he's a first grader. He's entered the non-imaginary year numbers.
   
3. Barak Obama won the Democratic primaries this week, so he's the first minority to be presented as a mainstream presidential candidate! Seriously, i'm geeked about this. Way back in the nineties*, i heard about Obama and thought with wistful glee about how cool it would be if someone with his charisma and racial background could become our national leader.
   *Um, i'm exaggerating.
   
4. It downpoured on me as i drove home today on my scooter. At one point, i drove through a puddle, perhaps three inches deep. Probably deeper. On a scooter, the engine sits pretty much under the bike, at the lowest point. Now, mine is already water cooled, so dunking the cylinder in standing (swirling, turbulent) water shouldn't crack anything or be too dramatic, but still, there's other things which don't get along so well with water. Electronics and the inside of the engine's crankcase and cylinder, to be specific. But the little scooter performed ADMIRABLY. My friend Andrew from PNG (who's pregnant, by the way -- or at least he wife Clare is) would know how 2 stroke engines deal with aspirating water... but like i said, the scooter worked awesomely.

Jon Stewart Clip

Karen and i have been watching The Daily Show every single day on the internet which, with Firefox and Adblock Plus, gives us a totally commercial free experience! So now we're totally well informed... on fake news. But as the one study showed, Stewart's audience is better informed than Bill O'Reilly's. And O'Reilly claims to have real news... kind of. How about the "War on Christmas!" Sheesh.

So anyway, there's an old clip with Steve Carell. It's funny. My favorite part is where he talks about the goldfish, and is so pleased with himself for being clever.

Just a video

This is another reversed video. I fall down. Houston gets flung. It looks pretty sweet. Zane stomps a puddle in the background. Fun! Be patient as my little server freaks out under the load.

Oh... and the sound is messed up. Dunno why.

Houston graduated!

When i was little, i took events like Kindergarten Graduation very seriously. I walked solemnly, because the teachers told us not to goof around. I sang clearly and on tune, mortified by the off-key wailings or shy silence of my neighbors. Other kids would wave to their parents, but i couldn't! That was not part of the performance!

But Houston's different. I would almost expect him to be a shy, subdued kid, based on how he responds in strange situations. But he's utterly silly, so i might expect him to ham it up. So he combines shyness with silliness. He waved enthusiastically at us, walking down the aisle. Up front singing songs with all his school's kindergarteners, he wiggled, grinned, and didn't sing. He would do the motions in miniature, or late, or a little bit silly. But then his hat fell off. So he spent the whole time up front either holding his hat, or balancing it on his head and catching it when it fell off. What a silly, cute, smart boy!

Besides that... who knows how to roll?

I mean, we all can roll, obviously. It's completely natural. But think about it. What bodily motions do you initiate and carry through to ROLL? Walking is a cinch, you tilt forward by flexing the front of your feet up. Put all your weight on one leg and let the other let pendulum forward, avoiding scraping the sidewalk by bending your knee, and then straighten that leg, and let the foot slap into the ground. Then, tense that leg in preparation for it to bear weight, and your body's momentum will carry you over that leg while you bend the knee of the other one to let it do its own penduluming. That's how you walk.

But how do you roll? Babies can do it, and babies are hyperbolically stupid, so it can't be hard. Karen thought that learning to roll at such a young age might be the very reason it's hard to describe. But thinking carefully about it, i know it has something to do with bending at the waist... or tensing your shoulders and arms... i'll do some experiments later.

Incredibly...

Oh MAN!!! I hate it when i have things i'm thinking about writing all day, and then i sit down on my gross blanket covered ex-Wedgwood office chair and suddenly i can't remember anything worth writing. I hear Linda writes her blog posts carefully, often with drafts! Over several days! I think that's why she has THOUSANDS of daily readers. My process consists of trying not to get distracted, and watching for Firefox's spellcheck underline thingy. Woo, two underlines in three words -- i guess "spellcheck" and "thingy" ain't words. Ain't is okay, though, while okay isn't. OK is okay.

Whoops, getting distracted.

Katrina came up to me today with a bottle of nail polish. She said, in the tone of one trying out a new phrase, "Incredibly, Zane found this and opened it, so I took it away from him and put the top back on!" Incredible. I LOVE watching our kids learn language. Since i love it too, even though i can hardly string a decent couple words together coherently.

Funny story...

Okay, so Karen likes to hear stories about work sometimes. Me, i don't need to talk about work. Probably one of my most useful skills in a job which can be very emotionally strenuous is a (probably scary) ability to disconnect one role from another. By the time i'm out of the building and on my scooter, i'm no longer a Staff, i'm a Juanito. Like, father, husband... computar haxor...... lover... But anyway, I told Karen a story today involving a guy licking and kissing a table leg and moaning in seeming sexual pleasure and ultimately, lying on top of the table humping our dining room table. Why? Um... to creep people out. To violate boundaries. But that story loses something in the sum-upping, and i can't go into more detail for confidentiality reasons.

But here's another story which isn't as unpleasant, but is ironic. There's this one kid who's been blaming every problem he has on racism. He's even called my Black colleagues racist, which isn't automatically impossible, but you don't get to be a staff at Wedgwood if you're Black and racist against Black people. That is pretty much automatically impossible.

This kid (let's call him Alistair) struggles with authority, and is frequently very disrespectful. If you're a young Black man in this country, there's no more common, and tragic, recipe for getting locked up than being disrespectful to authority. I told him so, and he pointed at his friend and said "Man, whatever man -- I look way more innocent than him! Look at him! He looks like a thug!" This is broadly true -- his friend is more muscular and has more naturally stern features. Like, 50 Cent vs. P. Diddy. However, this 50 Cent kid is very respectful. I'm confident that he'll stay out of trouble.

So i told Alistair "Your looks don't matter. It's the way you treat others."

So Alistair blew me away by saying, dramatically indignant, "So now you're judging me based on my ACTIONS???"

I'm pleased to report that in my line of work, laughing openly at kids when they're being preposterous is quite okay. So i did a little bit, and tried to rephrase Alistair's comment in a way to make it clear to him exactly what he was saying. But he really did want me to judge him based on how he looks.

To test it, this morning in church i accused him of throwing a wad of paper at one of his peers, which he had done. But he protested his innocence. So i told him, "See, i'm judging you based on your actions." He looked indignant again.


In other news, Houston has been riding a bike without training wheels for just over a week. And now? He's riding with one hand, and doing motions to songs with the other hand, and also doing tricks like putting both legs on one side of the bicycle while he's coasting down the sidewalk. Oh, and he can do little wheelies. Not proper powered wheelies, but enough to get his front wheel over a thin board lying there. Which is there for practice.