Who wouldn't want to be this cool?

I don’t drink alcohol. I like it, fine, as far as taste goes (what little experience I’ve had with it). That’s partially why I don’t drink. I think I would like it too much. Another reason is because I can’t afford it. It’s also not good for me, so why pick up a habit that isn’t healthy when I’m working to get rid of bad habits I already have? (I haven’t had a soda in three weeks.)
People in my current age group (mid late-twenties) and lifestyle (parents of young children) don’t really make such a big deal out of drinking. You do, you don’t, whatever, who cares, let’s all just get along. In college, however, drinking seemed to be the very definition of who you are. You don’t drink? followed by incredulous look. It was as if I’d just said something like, “Oh, I don’t bathe.”
But the best part was what came after the incredulous look. It was inevitable.
“You don’t drink?”
Incredulous look.
“What do you do for fun?”

This is the point when the conversations became surreal to me. Then I wasn’t nearly so confident and witty uninhibited, so I usually just muttered something about… “Oh, I have fun with my friends, hang out…you know…” and looked for a less alcohol-infatuated person to talk to. Now that I’ve had time to reflect, though, I realize the absurdity of the question, premise being that the only way to have fun is to sit around and drink some sort of beverage.

Wow.
What a fun, fun life.
Sure hate I’m missing out on all that fun.
Woohoo.
Maybe I’m being too simplistic about the whole thing. I’ve never been drunk, myself. Perhaps I should try it and discover a whole new level of fun. Back in college I hadn’t had much experience with drunk people, either (unless you count the homeless guy who wandered around Starkville doing James Brown impersonations in hopes of a hand-out). But now, well, I’ve had plenty of experience with drunk people. Not lots, but enough to know this:
whatever drunk may be, FUN is not it. Stupid? Slaphappy? Depressing? Violent? Weepy? Ignorant? Carefree? Annoying? Loud?  Could be any of those. At its best, though, it doesn’t come close to my idea of fun. Maybe my standards are too high. Maybe if I’d taken up drinking at the tender age of 16 or so, as most of my college colleagues must have, then I, too, would have killed enough brain cells by my 20th year of life to consider the imbibing of an alcoholic substance and its subsequent mental effects to be the epitome of fun.
But I didn’t.
So if that’s fun, please excuse me from contributing to the collective pool of fun-ness. We’re just fresh out, here.

Image courtesy of guy-with-really-long-flickr-account-name. (Why do people do that?)

Wishing we didn’t have to be at church at 8 o’clock this morning. Actually kind of wishing we didn’t have to be anywhere at any specific time. Want to climb back in bed and stay hidden there for a week.

Good coffee. Joe bough some yum-great-smelling coffee beans at Soulard yesterday. For me. He doesn’t even drink coffee. Maybe doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you’re living a tight budget and your spending cash is low, an expensive pound of coffee is a big deal. (And why should it cease to be a big deal when you have a big budget and lots of spending cash? I’m not sure.)

I love going to Soulard. We brought home a lot of yummy produce which we will be eating on this week. Crispy iceberg and romaine for salads, a load of cucumbers and sweet peppers, spicy-fresh cilantro, Asian pears (which I don’t really like but Joe loves), a whole crate of grapes and a whole crate of strawberries. We got a crate of strawberries for $5. I think that’s 6 or 8 quarts. That’s why it’s smart to hit the farmer’s market on Saturday afternoon, when they’re all getting ready to close and just need to get rid of what’s left. Hallelujah. I love strawberries.

I am getting really frustrated with my dependence on a single client for regular, paying work. I am equally frustrated with my seeming inability to find time to do any of that paying work. I am learning to let go. I want to let go, but I also want to avoid the trap of poor-me-complacency. I’ve never liked the culture’s standards on what a Mom could and should do. I’ve never really liked the church’s standards either. I think they all miss the mark somewhere, hitting the extremes: be a career woman! don’t lower yourself to domesticity! Or stay at home! forget anything but being a mother!

Um… where is the balance? Conflict, conflict, conflict. Conflicting views, philosophies, perspectives. Leads to real conflict of words, judgment, separation. People get confused. There are too many voices, even within a single circle. Go read a selection from the Christian book store on parenting. You’ll get ten different kinds of advice, all “biblically based.” Read a selection from the secular realm (i.e., the whole world beyond church walls; what is “secular” anyway?), and you’ll get ten more kinds of advice, all different, all based on reason, psychology, philosophy, sometimes common sense, sometimes cultural nothingness. Sometimes those ‘secular’ books make a lot more sense than the ‘Christian’ ones. Sometimes none of them make any sense at all.

Yet how hard it is to turn off all the voices, to be still, to quiet down, to sit and wait for a single, clear, true voice. Some say that guiding voice is from within, it’s our inner wisdom or psyche or goddess or whatchawanttocallit. I say it is divine and I say it is available to anyone. No, not just to church-goers. It’s difficult, though, to pick it out.

There’s a rush of voices, constantly. The first step is shutting them out, those voices of the culture, the church, the friends, the family, the books we read. Then there are the other voices: the memories, assumptions, offenses, traditions, self-defenses, habits, fears, hopes, illusions, ideals. Then there are the darker, subtle voices, whether from deviant spiritual beings whispering to us or from our own selfishness… they intrude, with suggestions that seem so good. Easy.

Then, past that, is a single voice. Clear, crystal, bell-like, but calm, quiet, still. More than intuition. More than instinct. Beyond culture. Beyond pulpit preaching or soap-box shouting. Beyond long-held traditions. Simple. Waiting for an invitation to speak.

Waiting for us to forget the conflict and listen.

Image courtesy of Tim Morgan.

Here’s what a popular women’s health website says: “Repression is the only sexual sin against oneself. If you’re in a relationship enjoying regular sex, or you’re single and have casual sex, or if you’re celibate but have found creative ways to sublimate; that’s all fine. But if a lack of sex represents a deprivation or you’ve closed off your natural sexual energies, that’s not good.”

Silly me, all those years of thinking that it was a good idea to wait for my spouse. What naivete! All that repression, and I could have brought a truckload of emotional baggage, memories of other men, a handy “sexual satisfaction comparison chart,” and maybe even an STD just for kicks. What was I thinking? Instead I committed the deadly evil sin of repression. I deprived myself. I closed off those natural sexual energies until I got married, and I began that intimate relationship with my husband with no emotional regrets, no experience, no way to compare, no disease, no old memories.

I really got that messed up, didn’t I? Our relationship would have been so enriched if I had been able to say, “No, no, no, honey, you’ve got it all wrong. My last lover did it like this…” That would have brought us closer. We would be so much better off if I had to continually fight the memories of other faces, other moments with other men. I’m sure that would bring more sexual satisfaction for us.

When we justify what we desire without regard of the consequences, we suffer. Choose sin once, or twice, or a few times, and you will find yourself tied up with it. You’ll change your mind and decide life seems more peaceful free of it, but you can’t undo those knots. You are bound to your past decisions.

That’s why God says things like “Adultery is a dead-end road (Prov. 2:18)” and “Illicit sex is a honey-coated dagger (Prov. 5:3).” He created sex; I hardly think He did so just to deprive us pointlessly. Deprivation is necessary first so that you can have sexual satisfaction later. The kind of sexual perversions that we hear of so often today come from sexual saturation. There’s no age limit, no partner limit, no method limit. Get bored? Find someone new. Do something different. Eventually you run out of new and different and you’ve forgotten how to appreciate sex for what it is: physical fulfillment and emotional connection as an expression of love, service, appreciation, and awe for the one you’re committed to. Sex is meant to be exclusive.

When was the last time you had sex that felt that way? It isn’t possible outside of marriage. You might get some of the factors right, but you can’t show love without showing respect, and you can’t show respect when you’re giving someone a cheap, uncommitted experience instead of a real, exclusive intimacy.

Real deprivation is denying yourself (or someone else) the richest and best that sex can be, and attempting to be satisfied (or to satisfy) with a far inferior version. If that’s where you are, or where you have been, don’t stay there. If you’ve been walking the line, keep this in mind: if you camp out on the doorstep of sexual sin, you’ll find yourself walking in, staying a while, and then forgetting how to leave when you want to. Walk away.

It’s worth it.

So this article from David Sirota wasn’t really a surprise, just a confirmation of what I’ve long suspected: our trend toward “a global economy” has created a backlash, and we are beginning to experience it in our local worlds.

Sirota doesn’t actually discuss globalism, per say; he talks about the homogenization of American culture:

“The nationwide journey has been a blur — and not because I’ve been under-rested and overcaffeinated, but because America’s newly homogenized culture has made everything seem the same.

Indeed, in making anywhere into everywhere, homogenization has swallowed up not only our downtowns, restaurants and radio stations, but even our understanding of American democracy. The essence is that our culture has lost sight of the importance of local.”

Here. My backyard. We all got so excited about the immense possibilities opened up by the internet and other technologies that we decided hometown stuff was just, well, kind of boring.

I can flip on the radio and hear twenty commentaries about the Middle East, the trouble on Wall Street, or the latest presidential campaigning. I can find news about politics in Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and China. I can listen to live radio from Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Uruguay. But do I know the name of my aldermen? Have I been to a city meeting lately? What do I know about the people running for county assessor?

Hmm. Time for the trend to swing back the other way. Watch for hyper-interest in all things local, coming soon to your very own backyard.

Image Credit: woodleywonderworks at flickr.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning. Sir Winston Churchill

Just for the sake of being certain that I am not stripping myself of all sense and meaning, a few unreserved assertions:

I believe our culture lies more than it tells the truth.

I believe that society does not make the man, but that man makes the society.

I believe there is an order to the universe.

I believe “in the sun, even when it’s not shining. I believe in love even when I don’t feel it. And I believe in God even when He is silent.”
I believe that a writer should never start a sentence with “I believe.”

What does it mean to counter the culture? Our friends at Wikipedia tell us that “it is a sociological word used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day,[1] the cultural equivalent of political opposition.”

What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive? (Irv Kupcinet)

Our well-trained American minds immediately think of hippies smoking weed in the back of the VW, war protesters burning American flags… unproductive actions like that.

But what is culture? “All the values shared by a society” is the key phrase here. Our culture consists of those societal structures, traditions, and values which we accept as normal (thus, right) simply because they are. Everyone around us accepts them; they are familiar and comfortable. We do not question their rightness.

Culture is a particular society at a particular time and place; “early Mayan civilization”; the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group acculturation; all the knowledge and values shared by a society. – Princeton Wordnet

Most of us don’t question them. The ones who do are the rebels, the weirdos, the hippies. The counter culture. To counter something is to resist or respond in order to show the other side, as in counter argument. To counter the culture is to question what is culturally normal by asking, “Why should this be normal?”

The counter culture is the only way things change. Of course, the changes are not always for the better. Our own 1960s counter culture produced change both bad and good. More liberation, sure, but also more STDs, more AIDS, more unwanted pregnancies, more drug use.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry. (Randall Jarrell)

The typical response of the culture (the counter-counter-culture, that is…) is to point out the negative changes produced and say, “See, this is why you shouldn’t question the system.” But we have to question the system. We must, because no system is perfect. When people accept without thought “the way things are,” they perpetuate a cultural standard that may be fundamentally flawed. They keep building on that flawed foundation, which will handicap even the most well-meaning, well-thought plan to save humanity.

Being part of a counter culture does not mean disrespecting the culture that exists. It means recognizing that culture is a creation of people who sometimes get things wrong. We, as those who come a little after the culture creators, should look with objectivity on what has been made and determine if it should remain or be changed.