A church of oddballs

smile mask

The woman is wrong if she thinks that a great church means a place where atheists and agnostics and Christians should be able to just hang out and be awesome together. (We already have that: it’s called Starbucks.) But she is painfully right when she reminds us that, in too many places, Christian churches are places where you have the choice of being fake or leaving.
Read the rest at the Register. 

Benny and the Jerk Balloon

My three-year-old may be the most emotionally healthy person in the world.

I came across this old photo, and remembered the day. We were playing in a school gym after a baptism, and she found this half-dead balloon lying under some bleachers. Oh my gosh, she had so much fun with it.

benny jerk balloon 2

So, when it was time to go, I ignored the warning alarms in my head and said she could take it with her.

Of course, as soon as we stepped outside, a gust of wind came and swiped her precious balloon right out of her hands. At first I thought it would come back down, and we chased it across the parking lot, but it went up, then down again, then up just out of reach, and then up and up, over the trees, way over the church roof, and then it was gone.

Worst.

I remember being three, and I remember the desolation of the lost balloon. One minute, the world is buoyant and glad, and then suddenly it’s all grief and loss and wild injustice.

I’m getting old. I’m getting tired of the way the world is, where a little girl can’t even have an orange balloon to make her happy. I didn’t even dare look at her, expecting the sobs to come pouring out. I thought, “I can’t stand it. I’ll buy her another balloon. I’ll buy everybody a balloon! I’ll buy all the balloons in the world!”

She just stared after it for a minute, and then she said, “Jerk balloon.” And that was it. She was fine.

I want to be Benny when I grow up.

Who do we really mean that Jesus is?

V0034729 Jesus appoints Peter as head of the church; Peter kisses his

Thousands of years after Jesus walked the earth, we need to understand that Jesus wants to put us on the spot, asking us the same question He asked His disciples: Who do you say that I am? If we’re catechized, we’ll know the right answer; but the hard part is putting those words into action.

Read the rest at the Register.

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Roald Dahl > John Steinbeck (up to a point)

roald dahl portrait

Today was Roald Dahl Day. You’ve probably read all the famous books by him —James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches (which is seriously disturbing), The BFG, The Twits. I loved them all when I was a kid, and I’m more or less happy to see my kids enjoying them; but as an adult re-reading them, the constant drumbeat of “challenge authority” is worrisome.

If you read Dahl’s autobiography of his childhood, Boy, it’s obvious why he wrote his children’s books the way he did: the adults in his life were massively cruel and masochistic to him and the thousands of defenseless school boys who were churned through the barbaric British school system. The message of rebellion and retribution he works out in his stories is fine in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when only really wicked people lose, and they’ll all come out in the wash anyway; it’s a little upsetting in Matilda, when the heroine is nakedly contemptuous of her (admittedly contemptible) parents; and it’s even less fine in Danny, the Champion of the Worldwhen the immensely appealing hero father can poach game simply because the rich man is deemed unworthy of his riches.

Still, his books are good — great, even. Some of the short stories in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More are stunning. But my current favorite is Going Solo, the second part of his autobiography. I happened to read it at the same time as I was reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America. (You’ll have to pardon me: I don’t have either book in front of me at the moment, so I won’t be quoting any passages!)

Steinbeck is, of course, a master novelist and short story writer; but when he’s his own main character, it’s just about unbearable. Oh man, starting on page one, it’s just him licking his own paws adoringly like a narcissistic kitten, purring a little tune of self-admiration into the mirror as he thinks about how tough and gritty and honest and wise he is.  I couldn’t even finish it. So false, so preening, so stilted. Turns out it was all fake, anyway. Well, it sounded fake.

Dahl’s story of his own exploits is just the opposite. He survives and even makes good in the most ridiculous, bizarre misadventures, but he makes it clear that he’s just this guy, you know? As he writes, he’s clearly still angry at the RAF for sending him and his friends out into the sky with almost no training. He’s still a bit embarrassed by his failures. And he writes with stunning immediacy, making you seehearfeeltouchtaste the desert, the sky, the food, the boredom, the fear, the ridiculousness of it all.

To sum up:

Recommended: Going Solo
Disrecommended: Travels with Charley: In Search of My Own Magnificent Ass with Both Hands: Read It If You Can (But You Can’t Because It Sucks)

Happy Roald Dahl Day!

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What’s for Supper? Vol. 4: Workin’ on my night cheese

whats for supper

 

Alternate title for this week’s dinner round-up: This Is Why I’m Fat. Hey, if you have to die young, might as well die young while full of cheese. Specifically, feta, parmesan, mozzarella, pepper jack, cheddar, and provolone, all in one week. And we’re not even vegetarians. The cheese was just to help all the meat find its way around. Whee!

You can find the first What’s For Supper? post here. Vol. 2 is here; and vol. 3 is here.

At the end of the post, there will be a little blue InLinkz button, so you can add your own post; or feel free to leave a comment. You don’t have to be a fancy pants chef! This is just a place to talk about food, the good, the bad, and the cheesy. Don’t forget to link back to this post!

Here’s what we had this past week:

 

SATURDAY:
OMELETTES TO ORDER, HARSH BROWNS, HOSTAGES

To you, that’s “hash browns” and “sausages.”
Everyone likes omelette night. Anything made to order is always a hit, if somewhat complicated.

food blog omelette list

Their choices were mushroom, feta, pepper jack, fried onions, ham, and tears of a mermaid

Was there even any promotion for this movie? It’s fantastic. One of my all-time favorites, just bizarre and hilarious, and feast for the eyes.

A good omelette makes up for a lot. A LOT.

which is almost as good as a feast for the mouth.

I was never able to make decent omelettes, or anything else that involved frying, until I got a decent pan. I use this T fal stainless steel 12-inch pan, and it turns out I’m not actually a terrible cook! I just had terrible pans. So that was nice.

 

 

SUNDAY:
BBQ PORK RIBS, CORN ON THE COB, COLE SLAW

Pork was still on sale, so my husband made a dry rub from what we happened to have in the cabinet, which happened to be brown sugar, white sugar, garlic powder, salt, pepper, cumin, chile powder, and paprika, and he grilled the ribs outside.

with some help

with some help

I honestly thought it was going to be too sweet, but holy cow, they were fantastic. The sugar turned into this glorious, savory, mahogany, yes-life-is-worth-living glaze, and I made a complete pig of myself.

My oldest daughter made a wonderful coleslaw with a recipe I can’t find at the moment, but it was pretty standard. We don’t have a food processor, but the cheese grater works well enough. We didn’t have buttermilk, either, but used some plain yogurt instead. (You can also make a buttermilk substitute by adding a splash of vinegar to regular milk and letting it sit for a bit.)

 

MONDAY:
CHICKEN CUTLETS, ROASTED PARMESAN GARLIC BROCCOLI, ICE CREAM COOKIE SANDWICHES

My husband had the day off for Labor Day, so he and my third daughter made his sumptuous chicken cutlets, which involves pounding the chicken flat, breading, and frying it, and then topping it with a basil leaf and a slice of provolone, and then garnishing the whole thing with a ladle of homemade tomato sauce, so it all melts together.

The recipe is here, on Deadspin, which has many wonderful recipes, all full of cussing (which I can totally deal with) and a lot of extraneous narration (which I cannot deal with, but my husband can). I cannot say enough about this dish. It is so good. So good.

SO GOOD!

SO GOOD!

I tried a new roasted broccoli recipe from Damn Delicious, and I added a bunch of sliced mushrooms. It was tasty, and the recipe was super easy, but I will roast it longer next time, and probably dry off the broccoli better. It turned out a little damp. Probably the mushrooms added moisture, which I had forgotten they would do.

My daughter had made chocolate chip cookies the other day, and we miraculously had leftovers, so we used them to make ice cream sandwiches.

critically acclaimed

critically acclaimed

 

 

TUESDAY:
TACO TUESDAY!

I have no idea if we’ve always had tacos on Tuesdays anyway, or if the Lego movie made us do it, but we sure have tacos on Tuesdays a lot.  We love this movie, too, by the way. So weird and funny and sweet.

We’ve also figured out where to store the tortillas so they’re safe from the infamous ravening tortilla hound, who just can’t help himself.

quesadillas con dog bite

 

 

WEDNESDAY:
SPAGHETTI WITH SAUSAGE AND MEAT SAUCE

The completely wrong dish for a brutally humid day, but oh well. We had leftover (unseasoned) ground beef from the tacos, plus leftover wonderful sauce from the chicken cutlets, so I added those things to Aldi’s jarred sauce, which is not bad at all, and cooked up some sweet Italian sausages.

I seem to recall salad.

food blog just crawl away

This is Corrie just casually crawling away from a devastated omelette. What she did to the spaghetti was even worse.

THURSDAY:
PIZZA

Lovely pizza. One pepperoni, one olive, one olive and basil, and one basil, pepperoni, and red onion.

my pretties

my pretties

I like to put the toppings under the cheese, so they don’t get dried out in the oven; and I like to sprinkle garlic powder, oregano, and grated parmesan on top of the mozzarella, to give it a nice crust.

 

FRIDAY:
MAC AND CHEESE

This is what’s on the menu today. I use the Fannie Farmer white sauce + cheese recipe, but I tend to throw in a lot more cheese than is called for. I don’t even know how much I use, but it’s a hell of a lot more than half a cup. “Half a cup of cheese” is not even a thing, as far as I’m concerned.

For a topping, I either mix together melted butter and breadcrumbs (I find this technique easier than buttering each individual breadcrumb, ho ho), or else crushed Ritz crackers, because there aren’t enough calories in eleven cups of cheese.

 

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My goal for next week: less cheese, more vegetables. Corrie’s goals remain the same: EAT EVERYTHING.

corrie eating daddy's head

Why does the Church make things so complicated?

sheep-690198_640

If a dumb sheep starts nibbling on the medicine spoon, rather than drinking the medicine, that doesn’t mean that vets aren’t necessary. It means the sheep needs to be redirected to the goal, which is being healed.

Read the rest at the Register.

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So I says to God, I says . . .

mad mama

The following story is not for the squeamish.

You may have noticed that I haven’t written much this week. This is mainly because I, and several members of my family, have been hit hard with a bug that is taking its sweet time meandering its way through our intestines. In short, we have turned into incredible pooping machines. I seriously didn’t know it was possible to poop this much and still function, but there you go. The baby, of course, has it too, which means that I’ve been spending most of my waking moments racing back and forth between the bathroom and the diaper box. (No, she’s not getting dehydrated.)

Friends, it is all shit, all the time.

Then, a few days ago, one of the little guys messed with the dog’s electric fence transmitter, and the poor dummy got zapped just for coming out of his crate. So he got all shell shocked, and refused to go outside. This went on for a little too long, and the inevitable just happened: he crapped all over the house, and his crate, and his giant spongy cushion, and everything.

So, like the reasonable adult I am, I hollered and screamed at him, threw him outside, and cleaned up the mess. Picked up the shrieking baby, sat down to nurse her, and what do you know? She pooped all over my lap.

At this point, I did what any pious housewife would do. I yelled at God, “YOU GOT SOMETHING TO SAY TO ME?”

And He said, “Yeah, go to confession, dummy.”

FINE. Some people need to be drowned in poop before they even start looking for a shovel.

How about post-Cana counseling?

These cats are basically compatible and have more or less the same goals, but their relationship could still use some support.

These cats take their union seriously, are basically compatible, and have more or less the same goals, but their relationship could still use some support.

For many young couples, their main problem is that they simply don’t have any Catholic friends or family, and no one will know what they’re talking about if they are struggling with family planning, or educational choices, or how to maintain a family prayer life. What’s missing is not classes or seminars or programs, but direct human contact with people who understand.

Read the rest at the Register.

Happy birthday, Antonín Dvořák!

Born on this lavishly romantic day in 1841.

Dvorak

Did you know that he was a devout Catholic, and that his father was an inkeeper, butcher, and professional zither player? Does that explain a thing or two? Or not? Either way, here are a bunch of Slavonic dances to which you can whirl heedlessly around the living room.

P.S. This is exactly what a composer should look like.

Happy birthday, man. I love you so much and I always will.

 

Boys with sticks

boy with sword 2

Several years ago, a nice family came over our house. It was partly for a social call, and partly to see if our family would do well as a daycare for their two kids when the mom went back to work. The girl was about four, and the boy was about six.

As we adults chatted, the kids explored the house. At the far end of the living room were the toys, including a tidy bucket full of weapons belonging to our sons and daughters. There were bows and arrows, swords of all kinds, scimitars, light sabers, pistols, slingshots, rifles, daggers, and machine guns. I watched a little nervously, because I knew this mom leaned progressive, and was raising her kids to be non-violent.

Her little girl immediately found a baby doll, sat down, and put the doll to bed. The little boy scuttled over to the weapons, and before I could say more than, “Um–” he had grabbed two swords and swung them, with a natural expertise, in a gleeful arc over his head.

“HAHH!” he shouted, and held that pose for a moment, swords raised. Eyes on fire, happiest boy in the world.

I slewed my eyes over to his parents, not sure what I would see. Horror? Disgust? Outrage? Dismay?

They both looked . . .  immensely relieved. “Well, there goes that,” said the dad, apparently referring to the no-weapons policy they’d followed strictly for the last six years. I tried to apologize, but they both said, “No, no, it’s fine.” And it was fine. There was no tension in the room. Their son had hands made to hold weapons, and now he had some.

I wasn’t surprised to see the boy taking so naturally to swordplay, but I was fascinated to see his parents taking so naturally to the rules of our house, which were so different from the rules in their own home.  Once their son’s unsullied hands first made contact with the weapons of war, the whole family relaxed into that reality immediately.

In this short piece in The Globe and Mail, this mom’s friends need someone to tell them what our friends realized: Hey, it’s okay if your boy wants to swing sticks around. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with him, or that he’ll inevitably grow up to be a rapist or a sociopath or a steroid-fueled abuser. There is a place for fighting boys in the world, if we let there be a place.

She says:

When I was pregnant I dreamed about the sweet, sensitive child I would have. I imagined us sitting at the table engaged in some means of creative expression, perhaps painting or writing stories. I imagined sitting quietly in the park listening to the birds and finding shapes in the clouds. But it was not to be.

My wild boy chases the birds, leaps from the park bench. He runs and jumps and yells and climbs. More than once I’ve felt pangs of envy while in the company of friends and their sweet, quiet little girls.

Before you lambast for not valuing her son, read on. It’s clear that she loves and enjoys her boy, and gives him reasonable rules: he wants to swing a stick? She tells him, “Be careful,” and leaves it at that. She says,

 I’m through apologizing for Malcolm. His wildness is not a product of permissive parenting or the negative influences of a violent TV culture. His wildness is his own, and as such I embrace it even if others do not.

But what is she supposed to do when her boy comes into contact with other boys, who are repeatedly told, “Put the stick down”?  She notes:

I have heard many open-minded parents declare: “If my son wants to play with dolls or dress up in girls’ clothes, I’m totally fine with that.” But what if your son wants to play with sticks and do battle? Are we so afraid of the power of violence to overtake us that we are uncomfortable with its harmless expression in children’s play?

Yes, we are, and it’s making a mess of the world. It doesn’t make violence go away when we always tell boys, “Put that stick down.” Instead, it’s making a world where people, boys and girls alike, have no idea what to do about unjust violence.

Boys playing with sticks is not a meaningless game. It’s something that little boys absolutely must be allowed to do, if that’s how they want to play. A boy who wants to pick up a stick needs to know that he can, and he may, and that his affinity for sticks is not a bad thing. He needs to know that a stick is a powerful thing, and that the world needs men who know how to use their sticks.

Boys who are never allowed to be wild are boys who never learn how to control that wildness. Boys who are not allowed to whack and be whacked with sticks never learn what fighting is like. What’s so bad about that? Well, they may end up hitting someone weak, with no idea how much it hurts to be hit. Or they may end up standing by while the strong go after the weak – and have no idea that it’s their job to put a stop to it.

Either way, the weak suffer. The whole world suffers.

Boys aren’t a problem to be fixed. Parent should correct the little details when the way they play really hurts someone else, but we should let the main energy of our children go the way it wants to go. If that means finding shapes in clouds or writing stories, that’s fine. Don’t push our sons to be fighters if they doesn’t naturally run that way.

But if they naturally want to turn everything they touch into a weapon, then that’s fine, too — as long as they know there are rules.  If your boys wants weapons, then keep weapons in your house. Make a place for them. Give your boys permission to be who they are, and encourage whatever good impulses you see in them.

And give other parents permission to let their kids be kids, too. Some parents aren’t hearing it from anyone else. If your house is the place where their son first lays hand on a sword, don’t apologize! But let him know that swords come with rules. Don’t banish fighting; banish cruelty.

In the issue of violent play, as with so many other issues, we’re forgetting there’s such a thing as balance and middle ground. Parents believe that there are only two choices: we can raise our sons to be quiet, passive, nurturing empaths who could easily slide into a princess dress without making a ripple — or we can raise them to be swaggering, slavering beasts who exist only to give orders and mow down anything in their path.

There is, of course, an in-between. There are men who are strong and tough and in control of their strength, and these men were once boys who grew up with both weapons and rules. But it’s become impossible to talk about that kind of boyhood, without being accused of trying to turn boys into one extreme or the other. When I say that my son carefully carried around caterpillars when he was a toddler, I hear that I have a secret desire to castrate men. When I say that my husband protects our family, I hear that I’m perpetuating rape culture and the myth of female victimhood. When I say that there is a difference between men and women, I hear that I am the problem – I’m the reason there’s violence and unhappiness in the world – I’m the reason we can’t all just get along. I hear that if only we would all agree to put the stick down, we’d be fine.

Yes, well. When your daughter is the one who’s lying barely conscious on the front yard of some frat house, my sons will be the ones who will know enough to charge in, swinging sticks to chase the brutes away. They’ll know because we let them have sticks, we let them find out what sticks can do, and we told them what sticks are for.

Violence doesn’t take over when boys are allowed to have sticks. Violence takes over when no one tells boys what sticks are for.

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