this one goes out to andrew whealy...

my sweet spizzwink who loves a capella music and yearns for the beatboxing of yesteryear... a whole album of ben folds songs covered by oh-so-delicious a capella groups from the ivies and beyond! click the link, then scroll down the page for youtube clips of the songs. you will not be sorry. unless you hate a capella.

unrelated matters

raise a glass to the beloved harper lee, who turns 80 today!

and the unrelated matter i mentioned above:
yesterday i listened to this podcast from american public media's speaking of faith, and i can't stop thinking about it. the subject is the importance of play in human development and well-being. it renewed my motivation to enjoy ben, to enter into his play and "regress" into play of my own.

thinking, teaching, work, tension, the past

yesterday i had a conversation with my sister about the process of recovering from the well-meant, but damaging, fundamentalism that infused parts of our upbringing. we were talking particularly about the influences that shaped our teen years, when youth group leaders and christian adults all around us sought to equip us for college by training us for intellectual combat against our professors-to-be, the minions of militant liberalism, socialism, feminism, relativism, post-modernism, etc. we went to sunday school classes and training camps with this exact goal (and when i think about the financial stress some of these camps put on my parents and the sacrifices they made to provide us with this training, i feel so bad).

time in the academy showed that the sort of proofs and arguments we were trained to use not only didn't persuade anyone else, they began from the wrong premise altogether and, when used, succeeded only in marginalizing us. in fact, against the odds we fell pretty hard for the life of the mind and came to feel drawn to the academy vocationally.

it also became clear that a person could love academics without signing some political deal with the devil, left or right.
and yet, parts of this old training stuck.

even after out-growing the alarmist, combative fundy-ism of our youth, we discussed being deeply haunted by the idea that a christian couldn't possibly teach literary theory at a secular university. and really be doing god's work. my sister is working on resolving this tension. it's causing her no small amount of pain, to think that the thing she loves and wants to do, teach literature, is somehow displeasing to god. she knows its a false dichotomy. but the echoes of those old ideas persist (being a missionary=good, being an academic=bad). the tension forces her to look hard at her ideas about god, and that's good, productive work. she said, i feel god being gentle with me while i'm thinking about this.

(a word in defense of my parents here. my dad's a right-wing nutter about some things, but he also has a healthy sense of rebellion (he's a biker now - you should see him) and always encouraged us to question everything. even when it leads to occasional brawls (immigration, the role of government and gender issues being the hot topics) at family holidays. my mom has a powerful sense of the moral right-ness or wrong-ness of things that could have devolved into a specific kind of controlling craziness, but is tempered by a good sense of humor and a deliberate cultivation of joy. i do not blame them for the wrong-headedness of james dobson or the summit. and i love them for being proud and supportive of our academic pursuits and our struggles to learn and grow.)

hungry

i have been famished all day. i'm on my second afternoon snack: grape tomatoes, kashi fire-roasted vegetable crackers and a certain verboten cheese. or i thought it was verboten during my first pregnancy, but thank the lord, i now know it's pasteurized. hard enough to do without beer and sushi.

saturday morning post

today i woke up early and sat in the window seat with a pillow and blanket because it was raining and i had a book to finish. then i made biscuits, then i fetched the boys and we had the biscuits with strawberry jam and scrambled eggs. then the boys sat on the couch and discussed _richard scarry's cars and trucks and things that go_, andrew in his white terry cloth robe and ben in his onesie and sweatpants liberally spotted with berry yogurt. they were looking for goldbug. i put on the amelie soundtrack and watered plants. it was a good morning.

she's always right

caron's been telling me to see the documentary helvetica for a long time. it's just what it sounds like: a film about the history and cultural impact of the font helvetica. it finally came up on the netflix queue and i just watched it while matching baby socks. what can i say? it's a brilliant film. it's so beautiful visually. it made me crazy to grab my bag and hop a flight to amsterdam. but the thing i loved the most: all the talking. the talking: the passionate, articulate, intellectual, esoteric, highly subjective and utterly self-referential talk about art, design, modernism, the twentieth century, beauty, function and the white spaces between black letters. i've never seen so many white guys with generic european accents in artsy eyeglasses, waxing marvelous about a font. oh, i loved it. i could almost cry. she knows me. she was right.

welcoming a newbie

we've broken the story to most of you in person, but i have yet to announce our happy news to the blogosphere: we're having a baby! we'll welcome him or her early in october, a few weeks before ben turns two.

the first trimester was difficult; i was exhausted and sick, and that's why i neither blogged nor socialized much from january through march. things have turned around in the last two weeks, though, and we're all feeling a little more energetic (and our clothes are cleaner) since i'm back on my feet.

anyway, we're really excited to welcome a new member of the family! ben pats my stomach and says, "baby," and makes kissing sounds, so i take that as a good sign that he's already feeling affectionate for his new sibling. and since the aforementioned stomach is beginning to show, i thought i'd clear up any misunderstandings about that. if you've seen us, you probably thought it's clearly either a baby or some serious overindulgence on easter candy. i'm not saying one way or another about the candy, but there's definitely a baby on the way.

we did our best

i thought, given ben's fondness for picking up little things off the ground, that he'd love hunting for easter eggs. but he was more into the sticks and pinecones. and using the plastic eggs to stir the dirt. like grandma arlie said, "he's a genuine boy."

he is risen indeed

a restful and happy easter celebration to you!

the band playing in the background of the chick video

is hem. the album, rabbit songs.

three cheers for the wind-up chick

odd...

i came home from running errands today to find a large group of people with clipboards on my porch, front yard and back yard. drawing our house. i pulled up and said, "eh?" and was informed that the environmental protection agency was training people to test for lead levels and they were using our house as a test case. i guess you have to be able to draw a house in order to figure out whether or not there's lead in the paint or soil. beats me. but it's a little disturbing that our house looks so likely to have excess lead, they chose us to train their minions.

blank page

thanks for nudging me back to the keyboard (you know who you are). i've been under the weather, in the weeds, nothing on my mind and little to say beyond "i'm tired and i hate the gray weather." ben and i are languishing away with a virus called pseudo-influenza type three, the gist of which is congestion, coughing, aching, repeat for ten days to two weeks.

one bright spot: i bought a neti pot and now the breathing is much easier. i know now why yogis talk about neti pots so much...breathing is a whole different experience. (i'm tempted to call it a snot pot. is that too crude? i don't know why that name keeps suggesting itself, other than it's such a nice little rhyme and i can't resist a good rhyme.)

there are some daffodils coming up, brave little souls. it's still so cold.

the neighbors behind us are re-doing their garage and ben is over the moon about the workers, with their hard hats, shovels and, most of all, their noisy digger. who tells seventeen-month-old boys to be interested in diggers? not i.

still reading mysteries. p.d. james' the lighthouse, and you know she brings the quality. i do love me some adam dalgleish. my reading group is starting annie dillard's the maytrees, so that'll get me out of the rut.

i told my doc i had the blues and she prescribed getting out of the house every day and conversing with a friend every day. and if that fails, bring on the lexapro! :) so if you get a call from me, consider yourself a beloved and valuable part of the cure.