Take responsibility

My mind has been musing over quite a bit the last little while. Religion, choice, parenting, entertainment, employment. Some of the musings have been personal enough that I haven't shared them here. Others seem a little shallow. It's been hard to nail down a particular musing long enough to formulate a blog post - hence last weeks lapse. Perhaps it is just a matter of me doing the BIC HOK method of writing.

That method might actually be very good for me. Not long ago my office did a Meyer & Briggs Typology Indicator workshop. Many of the people in my office are administrators of the indicator and provide it to our First Year Experience classes. I did the test a little over a year ago and showed up as an ENFJ (although there is very very little separating me from an ENFP). As an extrovert (someone who gets their energy from external sources and interactions) I often think out-loud - which can be really annoying for everyone, myself included. So my thoughts evolve as I communicate them. Perhaps that is why I have always enjoyed writing and why I started this blog.

Interesting enough I was thinking about the pro-choice / pro-life debate of planned parenthood and abortion when I saw this blog by Matt Walsh. I found it rather straight forward and will say that prior to reading it I agreed with him on many of his points. I consider all life sacred and power to create life is gift from God. I will say that in a life and death situation between mother and child that an abortion makes sense. I will also say that in the event of a pregnancy due to rape - where the woman had no choice - an abortion also makes sense. However, a parent or parents choosing to abort a child because it would be expensive, inconvenient, or not with the parents' life goals is very selfish and rather heartless reasoning. Pro-choice say they want to choose whether or not to have the child. That choice was there prior to the conception of that child. The choice to have sex, engage in intercourse, "do it," and every other euphemism and disisum used to describe the God given power of procreation was the first choice they made. If birth control was not used - that was the choice that was made. If birth control was used the responsibility for that child is still there. If both parties are unwilling to accept the commitment of having a child together then why were they doing the very thing that might lead to one?

I will readily acknowledge that physical intimacy is for more than just the conception of children. It strengthens relationships between partners. It brings people closer together. I find it very sad that there are people who engage in such a powerful, meaningful, intimate action in a carefree, flippant, or causal way - giving so much of themselves so readily with so few reservations.

The media of today would have you believe many things about sex. I can safely say that the bulk of what the media portrays can be called, "happy sex." "Happy violence" can be described as violence without consequence. This is what we see in cartoons as well as in live action comedies and even action movies. I love Screen Junkies' Honest Action videos. They had a doctor watch Home Alone 1 and 2 and all the Die Hard movies and report the number of times the villains (in Home Alone) and our hero (in Die Hard) would die. The numbers for Home Alone by itself are quite sobering. It would kill a combined total over 35 people if the violence in those seven movies were realistic. That's an average of 5 per movie and that's not counting everybody that is actually shown to die in Die Hard.

For a comparison, James bond has had sexual intercourse with at least 52 women over 22 films. Extrapolating from data from the WHO, it was estimated that just shy of 500 million people had an STD in 2008. Based on population totals for 2008 that would mean that just over 1 in fourteen people had an STD. Even if Bond had sexual intercourse with women who only had one other partner  he would have contracted 6 STDs over the course of his films. If the women had three partners - 10 STDs. Four - 14. If each were as promiscuous as he was - 193 STDs. At least. Also, assuming that Bond is not sterile I would imagine at least one pregnancy to occur, potentially 52. Bond is a prime example of Happy Sex, non-consequential, sexual intercourse. How many other portrayals of such behavior are spread throughout the media? With films with titles like "The 40 year old Virgin" and main stream cables shows named "Sex in the City" it is clear that sexuality is more pervasive and more accessible via media then previously. George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorielli talk about how media influences our perception on society. The more we consume the more we perceive what we consume as reality. This means that more more sexual activity we see in the media the more we feel that such behavior is normal - even though the contrary may be true. With such a flood of "happy sex" in the media is it any wonder that sexual intercourse has lost any meaning of intimacy.

So to bring it around to the original topic. Our media and culture pushes sexual intercourse as a causal act that has few consequences. When people adapt such an attitude it may lead to an unplanned pregnancy. When this happens the pro-choice crowed would have it a simple matter to avoid the unwanted consequence by aborting (killing) the child. I find it ironic that pro-choice mindset seems to disregard that the person already made a choice and now wishes to remove the choice from the unborn child. Even if the child cannot (or maybe should not) be cared for by the mother there are options that still give it a choice to live. It seems that the person who is being asked to make the choice on whether someone should live or die is the exact person who may have made the horrible choice of engaging in sexual intercourse without birth control. That doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I think that people need to take responsibility for their actions and let the consequences live.

No singing at the dinner table

While I was still at my parents (and even now when I visit) we would discuss the family rule: no singing at the dinner table. The discussion inevitably was about why we had that rule. In almost all instances, whenever that discussion was had, that rule would be enforced by the end of the meal. It's not that my family is against music, but rather that we are loud enough already that singing just takes the volume through the roof. While I've never considered music a huge part of my life, I've realized how much of an impact it's had on me.

I was musing on this as I drove home yesterday with my kids. I often sign to them in the car to keep them occupied and yesterday was no exception. However, yesterday was different for two reasons. First, we sang along to the radio (normally I sing a cappella) and second I had a bad cold. I normally don't sing when I have a cold as it throws my voice waaaaaayyyy off. My normal range is a nice comfortable baritone, but when I have a cold all I can do is sing deep bass or falsetto, and my falsetto is bad. So, there I was belting out popular songs to the radio in my falsetto voice and just not caring what I sounded like. As I sorted through the radio stations for songs I wanted to sing it really got me thinking how music effects us.

Just a simple search of the "effect of music" will turn up lots of search results. I took the low hanging fruit and just looked through the first one. I won't get into all of the stuff mentioned there (although it's pretty cool), but will give some of my reflections on music.

One day in elementary school my mother, a fan of classical music, gave me a CD of Handel's Water Music. Having grown up enjoying the NPR program "Shickele's Mix" on Saturday mornings I too enjoy classical music, but I am much more a Beethoven and Saint-Saens kind of person. Why was Mom giving me Handel? It turns out Water Music has been shown to help people spell better. It didn't help me, but I think i was supposed to play it. Like I said, I prefer Beethoven. Moonlight Sonate can relax me every time I hear it. It plays to the deep parts of my being and strums the strings of enchantment. It brings images of warm fires, bright stars, and dark rooms with large windows. The Piano Guys, one of my favorite music groups, did an adaptation called Moonlight, and while their version doesn't give quite the same feelings it still resonates with me. My wife and I are proud to be members of the Founders Club of The Piano Guys. Seriously, check them out.

I could post a lot more on music, but I think that is enough for now. Muse on your music and check back later.

Poetry and why I memorize it

This is a picture of my mother and my daughter headed back to the car after a couple hours of sledding. I was thinking about how lucky I am to have such a wonderful family. It was the first time that my kids have been sledding and while my daughter was running my mother and myself ragged, my son was more than content to sit and watch. And eat snow. He had a little difficulty as his thumbs were crammed in with his finger in his mittens. When I told my mother she immediately replied:

Thumbs in the thumb place,

Fingers all together.

This is the song we sing in mitten weather

When it's cold it doesn't matter whether

Mittens are wool, or made of finest leather.

Thumbs in the thumb place,

Fingers all together.

This is the song we sing in mitten weather.

I had to look this up. According to this website it is a song written by Rachel Buchman. I had never hear it before and knowing my mother she probably learned it from her childhood or just for the heck of it. Yes, this is my same mother that got me to appreciate math. Her professional training was in engineering, but she has always been an avid reader of literature, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She could of completed an English lit minor with all the classes she took. She passed that love of reading down to us kids and I hope to pass it along to my children as well.

Returning to the topic I proposed, I was not always an advocate of memorizing poetry. When I was in 8th grade I told my English teacher that we should "Never memorize anything you can look up." She was not impressed. Not even when I mentioned that it was Albert Einstein that said that first. I can remember having to memorize two different poems between 8th and 9th grade. There may have been more but I can't remember them. I only succeed at doing one of them - "Old Ironsides" by Oliver Wendell Holms. The other one I was didn't memorize was "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley.

While I have always appreciated poetry, I didn't always see a need to memorize it. I grew up on Shel Silverstein, and Jack Prelutsky, as well as the large binder of poems that my mother had put together for a poetry class she had in college. My father enjoyed poetry as well, reading to us from Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling when we were camping. I enjoy the flow of language and the way poets will engage in "word smiting" to create images. I even wrote poetry while in high school and little in college. However, I never set out to actively memorize a poem.

I think the turning point for me in actually wanting to memorize poetry came with my children. My daughter used to suffer from acid re-flux and I would sing to her as she would try to fall asleep. I looked up the complete lyrics to "Scarborough Fair," I pulled out children and church song books, and even sang her songs that I had learned in Russian. I like to think that my singing helped her fall asleep, but I think it just helped me bond with her. What are songs but poems to music. The flame was lit.

Then my daughter came to the age of questions and wonder. She is still very much in this stage, but a couple of years ago, I remembered my mother reciting poems to us as we learned about the world around us. Whenever my wife made meatloaf I cursed that I didn't know the words to "My mother made a Meatloaf." or "The Turkey shot out of the Oven" when we had one in the oven ourselves. I wasn't completely hopeless when it came to poetry. Often, when she helped me with the dishes (I was the dishwasher for the most part), I would recite "If you have to Dry the Dishes" by Shel Silverstein. But I wanted more.

The last reason for wanting to memorize poems was my own personal enjoyment. I wanted to have words close to me. There is a rhyme and reason (pun very intended) to poetry that tends to resonate with me. When I see the sunrise I think of "The Morning Song in the Jungle" by Kipling. When I walk outside into the cold winter air I hear "The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill McKie" by Service. When my daughter is filled with insatiable curiosities I remember "I Keep Six Honest Serving Men" (Kipling again). When I watch my son grow and learn new things I ponder upon "If" (Kipling once more). And when I find myself in trial and tribulation, "Invictus" bears me up. Yes, I went back and did what I couldn't do in 8th grade.

And I am very glad I did.