Judge Not Lest....

Help me out here: do people really feel so confident with their choices in life that they can put others down and not worry that the same can be done of them?

I recently read a Facebook status that questioned a parent's supervision of their child. The comments following were so vicious, that although I didn't agree with the parent's choice as I read it to be, I found myself wanting to defend the parent. What really baffled me was that the people commenting didn't seem concerned that the tables could be turned - that someone could so harshly judge a situation they handled and with only partial information. Ok, now I'm judging those who made the comments.

I have definitely done my share of gossiping, putting others down and not gathering all the facts before making a judgment call. I realize this and I seriously want to improve in this area. I also really do acknowledge that people can see me do something and make a snap judgment, but if they were to talk with me and find out why I made the choice I did, they might make a different call.

Where does this need to judge others so harshly come from? Do these judgments we make keep us from trying to understand people? Does putting another person down make us feel better about the choices we're making?

*I am also working on not ending sentences with prepositions, as I've done above, but sometimes it just sounds better to end a sentence with a preposition.

Words from Wilde...Again

I've said it before, Oscar Wilde is my go-to guy for observations on life. Sadly, based on the quote by him copied below, I guess he and I never could have been friends. We couldn't have met up for coffee, strolled and discussed our philosophies on life, gone to the latest independent film. Much of what I've read about Wilde deals with his homosexuality and I wonder, doesn't our society allow for men and women to be friends if one, or both, is gay? Doesn't that make it ok? What if a woman is gay, can she then not be friends with other women? How do we feel when our partners have a friend that could be competition?

“Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.”

Cue the Theme from Love Story

A friend posted this on his Facebook page and ahhh, it made me wonder and think: What is it about our first loves?

TEN years ago, my high school sweetheart and I liked to pretend we were disaffected expatriates living in some crumbly postwar foreign capital. In reality, we lived in an affluent New York City suburb.

Fortunately there was English class, where our teacher assigned “The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway’s 1926 novel about American and British expats who booze their way through Parisian cafes and Spanish bullfights.

Devouring the book, we thought the protagonist, Jake Barnes, a twentysomething American reporter, and his hot-and-cold lover, Lady Brett Ashley, were pretty cool. They were always visiting interesting places and discussing the meaning of life, or lack thereof. And even though their lives were a little messy, they always spoke so insightfully!

Sure, we concluded, Barnes, Lady Brett and other Lost Generation all-stars had dependency, identity, and substance-abuse issues. But in other ways, they seemed like the sort of people we’d be happy to be like when we grew up. They were adults, but they were much cooler than most of the adults we knew.

The summer after my freshman year of college, my girlfriend and I traveled to France and Spain together, Hemingway style, picnicking on the Seine and sipping wine with Basques in San Sebastián. After the trip, we corresponded via telegram-style letters and e-mail messages that went something like this:

Dearest Jake: Can’t bear staying apart. Stop. Please visit after exams. Brett.

Brett Darling: Will come on Greyhound Saturday. Stop. Arriving 6:40 p.m. All my love. Jake.

I was pretty sure I would marry her, just not anytime soon. I also assumed — taking my cues from Hemingway, Maugham and Fitzgerald — that I had years of globetrotting to do before I’d consider settling down with anyone.

The next summer she and I worked in California. On weekends we’d cruise to the Henry Miller Library, an oceanside hangout named after the footloose novelist. It was fun to gaze at the Pacific and quote him to each other.

My own travels would begin to feel Milleresque: That fall I went to Buenos Aires; the following spring, I volunteered on a coffee farm in Mexico; that summer my girlfriend and I traveled to Montana, where I had landed a job baking pies at a roadside cafe.

Thinking of Hemingway’s Ketchum, Idaho, I had looked for a beautiful place where I could write and fish. The cafe owners said they also had work for my girlfriend — they needed line cooks.

In Montana, we were happy living under big skies, among friendly strangers and away from the East Coast. But our cabin was cramped and mouse-infested, and my girlfriend — a vegetarian — quickly tired of grilling burgers.

We quit after six weeks and headed east in her car. The ride felt like a defeat. I broke off the relationship because I was restless. Stop.

More than a year passed before we met for pizza on a dreary November afternoon in Boston. I had come down for the weekend from Vermont, where I was starting to write for a newspaper, to attend a journalism conference.

She was thinking of applying to law school; I wanted to go abroad again. There was no spark between us, but I attributed that to bad timing, figuring we would eventually rekindle our romance in a different place and context. The fact that I didn’t know where or how seemed kind of exciting.

Three springs later, I quit my newspaper job and spent the summer wandering around China and Southeast Asia. I settled in Hanoi, Vietnam, partly because its sidewalk cafes, French-designed boulevards and bustling expat social scene reminded me of books I had read about postwar Europe.

I spent the fall and winter drinking coffee, writing travel stories, scratching away at a novel and dating women from other countries. Soon I would be learning the ropes at a European news agency, playing tennis with diplomats and feeling expatriated in a good, adventurous, Hemingway sort of way.

But I still thought fondly of my first love. From what she’d told me over the phone before I left the United States, I knew she had started law school. I resisted that plotline: I sensed that someday she would decide to come find me.

I hadn’t seen her in three years. Two months after my 26th birthday, I mailed her a letter: Living abroad was fun, I wrote, but I missed her, and I wanted to see her the next time I came home to visit.

She replied via e-mail that she couldn’t see me: she had a boyfriend, and she was happy.

Ouch. I hadn’t been pining for her per se, but I was upset that she didn’t seem to need to see me in the same way I felt I needed to see her. Also: what boyfriend? I had assumed that, like me, she had been drifting through lovers as one floats among so many ocean swells.

Then she e-mailed to say that she was in Washington, D.C. — Did I want to meet up?

I did. A few weeks later, I hoisted my backpack, hailed a motorbike taxi outside my apartment and began a five-week odyssey of work and travel that would take me from Hanoi to Moscow to Paris to Reykjavik to New York. Along the way I strolled the Luxembourg Gardens, ate crepes by the Seine, reported a story from Rouen, slept in departure lounges and on friends’ couches, rode Amtrak to Vermont, paddled a canoe across an Adirondack lake and caught a train back to the city, where in Chinatown I boarded a southbound bus.

The next day, a sweltering Wednesday, I finally arrived at my destination: the entrance of a Washington Metro station, where my high school sweetheart, in a black skirt and silver blouse, looked more beautiful than I remembered. We ducked into a Mexican restaurant and ordered beers to steady our trembling hands.

She said she had been dating the same guy for three years. I had met him once at a party but I wouldn’t remember. Anyway, now they were living together. She liked law school and had never felt so settled — in a good way.

“What about you?” she asked.

My throat crackled. I had been kidding myself assuming that I would marry this woman: We had each followed roads that the other had no interest in taking, and now she was in love with someone else.

Still: She was looking at me so prettily over the guacamole that I felt like whisking her away. Dearest Brett: Let’s start over together in Mexico City. Jake.

“Let’s have another drink,” I said.

We split the bill — it was almost half a month’s rent in Hanoi — and found a table at a high-ceilinged German brewpub on the next block. The lighting was dimmer there. Loosening up under the alcohol, I said the kind of playful, witty things I knew would make her smile.

Laughing, she said she wanted to hear more about my expat life. “A wire service in Southeast Asia?” I recall her saying. “I imagine you wearing one of those silly reporter hats with the wrap-around brim.”

We left the bar and walked toward the Metro. She pointed out that the station was closing in five minutes. She wasn’t inviting me to come home with her. She joked that she would be sure to send me one of those silly — —

When she noticed that I was crying, she hugged me as one holds a child who has scraped a knee. I held her hands and realized that the next time I saw her — if I ever were to see her again — she would probably be wearing a ring. She might even be a mother.

I dried my eyes on my T-shirt. A janitor was cleaning up. Otherwise we were alone. I scratched my sandals against the pavement. Perhaps I wanted to keep standing there because I had been traveling too much. Or maybe I sensed that I wouldn’t be back. Two or three minutes passed.

FOR the first half of my 20s, the Rest of My Life had appeared to wait patiently. And time, like a gift certificate, seemed like something I could hold on to and cash in later. But that night I felt as if the rest of my life was already upon me. Time was short, and I couldn’t think of anything to look forward to.

I grasped for something winning to say. Nothing came. I was drunk. She walked into the station and didn’t look back.

For a dizzy moment I considered chasing her down that escalator. Dearest Brett: Am lonely without you. Stop. Come to Hanoi. Mike.

The escalator stopped and the trains left. I walked on. I suppose I had my own connections to make.

Written by Mike Ives

See No Evil

Our daughter takes a class at a local art school and I absolutely, 100% love the exposure she gets to the craft as well as the exposure to the various art pieces in the building.

Sitting outside her class last week I ended up chatting with a couple adults about a painting in our children's classroom that depicted 2 adults about to engage in sex. I haven't seen the painting, but talked about it with Sophie and she nonchalantly said, "Oh yeah, I've seen stuff like that before. I think it was from another country." Hmmm, so to her, not a big deal. Again, I haven't seen the actual painting, but it has caused me to wonder:

How, as a parent (or if not a parent, just speculate), do you determine what is appropriate for your child to see? Are you the type that will absolutely not let them see a PG-13 film until they are actually 13 or are you more like me, you check why it's rated PG-13 and use your own criteria to determine if your child can see it before they are actually 13? Do you keep your child out of any art museum that has a nude sculpture? Why is nudity such a big deal anyway - it is how we all enter this world - ok, I like to think that I'm so nonchalant about it, but the reality is, I'm not...I didn't fall that far from my protestant upbringing and how will my views affect those of my child?

Just so ya know, I do plan on actually checking out the painting in question - I just didn't want the teacher to think I was a weirdo prudish parent....so I have to check it out as if I'm not checking it out...and preferably when nobody else is in the room in case I blush.

Committing the Crime of Comfort Seeking

The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul. -Khalil Gibran

Was Gibran right?

*My sister read from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet at our wedding:

On Marriage
Then Almitra spoke again and said...
"And what of Marriage, master?"
And he answered saying:

You were born together,
and together you shall be forevermore.

You shall be together when the white wings
of death scatter your days.

Aye, you shall be together even in the
silent memory of God.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Let it rather be a moving sea between
the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous,
but let each of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone
though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together.
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress
grow not in each other's shadow.

When I Was a Kid...

Steve and I were discussing the school of choice option so many parents have today. It's a wonderful thing - sometimes.

When we moved to Michigan and found out Jackson offered this option, we looked into a few of the public schools in the city and in the county. We ended up choosing the school our daughter would've gone to if this option weren't given. Although the school fit our criteria in other ways, one thing we really liked is how close it is to our home and that there would be other kids in the neighborhood attending the same school (though given the school of choice option, we were not certain of this).

I grew up in a very small town in Wisconsin and you either went to the public school or the Catholic school and only to the latter if you were actually Catholic. There was not a lot of diversity in my classes, most kids were from working class families with similar religious beliefs, hobbies and educational levels. I think racial diversity did not exist at all except for the one Spanish speaking student I can remember and my own best friend whose mom was from Greece. I never heard my parents talk about test scores, activities, programs, diversity or anything beyond the 2 parent/teacher conferences they attended each year for my first 7 years of formal schooling.

When we moved to Pennsylvania as I entered the 7th grade my parents purposely bought a home in the "best" school district around. Since I was from small town Wisconsin, I did not fit in very well in my new digs and sadly, I never took advantage of the programs offered. (Again, not a lot of diversity...) My parents absolutely did what they thought was right, but back then "best" was defined only by test scores.

Nowadays we still have the neighborhood schools, but we also have charter schools, private schools, religious schools, homeschooling and co-ops. How do we decide which school to send our child to? Do we want to find a school that is the best fit for our child and in doing so, are we setting them up to be less able to adapt to various settings? Does choosing a school become more important as our child gets older and their interests are developed?

Signs are Everywhere

We noticed a sign outside a store in Jackson today that read: If you need it, we may have it. This led us to discussing our other 2 favorite signs:

Also found in Jackson on a church marquee: Prayer is the ultimate internet.

No longer around, but once advertising for a go-kart place in Utah: If you ride them, you will have fun.