Annals of cultural confusion

I’ve studied the German language and Germanic culture for years, but sometimes the intricacies of cultural understanding still allude me.
Last week, I visited my company’s R&D office in Linz, Austria, for the first time. Please note that, as far as I know, I’m pretty much the only U.S. employee in the company who speaks fluent German–except the couple of Germans who work in the US offices, of course.
When speaking German, I assumed that all of my fellow software engineering colleagues would address me with the informal ‘Du.’ That was true with one exception.

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Drama in Pflugerville

As I opened the front door to walk Samuel to school this morning, I found five police cars and two news crews in front of the house. During the night, car thieves had abandoned a car across the street and shot at the police as they fled. The photo below was taken from my next door neighbor’s front yard.
pflugerville_drama.jpg

Bullying

This New York TImes article about school bullying and the corresponding discussion on MetaFilter brings back a lot of memories from high school.
I was picked on a lot in high school, and I spent many years trying to figure out why. After 25 years, I agree with the MeFi posters who say that bullying is all about enforcing social conformity. I think I was threatening to a lot of people–not because I was different, but because I was different and either didn’t know it or didn’t think anything of it.
For instance, I was tall and generally fit but not interested in sports. I realize now that I was fairly good looking but didn’t realize it (judge for yourself); I was smart but took it for granted; and I was ambitious, taking part and excelling in a variety of non-sporting school activities: band, choir, German club, and speech.
One particular provocation always comes to mind, and I think it’s a perfect example. My sophomore year, my assigned locker was in some out-of-the-way place, so my band friend Walter, a senior, offered to let me share his locker which was centrally located. Walter and I got constant hassling for sharing a locker, mostly by the ‘jocks’ and of the homophobic sort. Looking back at it, to have two band guys sharing a locker and not thinking anything of it must have been terribly threatening to the more narrow-minded and insecure among my high school peers. But at the time, that didn’t occur to me, that I remember.

The high cost of veterinary care

We certainly view our pets as much like kids as anybody, but when it comes to pet health care, my country upbringing reveals itself. Lately, we’ve been grappling with the high cost of veterinary care. We like our current vet a lot, but we feel like he prescribes optional services without informing us that they aren’t absolutely necessary. Today, I found an article on Slate about this very subject:

It’s just that if we’re coming to the point that we think of our pet’s health in the same way we do our own, I wish the vets I see would treat my pets more the way our doctors treat us. For example, over the years the pediatrician has heard a mild heart murmur when she has examined my daughter. But since my daughter is obviously in excellent health, the pediatrician has reassured me it’s nothing to worry about. But when the veterinarian detected a mild heart murmur in one of my cats, she immediately recommended I make an appointment with the veterinary cardiologist. What would happen to the cat if I didn’t do that? I asked. She had to acknowledge: probably nothing, but the echocardiogram only cost $300, and since my cat was a member of my family, surely I would want to do everything.

Suburban schnauzer wrangling

This afternoon, I opened my garage doors, intending to get out some gardening supplies so I could work in the backyard. As I stepped out into the driveway, I saw a guy chasing a schnauzer down the sidewalk toward me. I stepped to the sidewalk, squatted down and held my hand out to the dog, hoping I could catch him.
But the dog was too wily; he barked at me, ran past me and kept going. I saw that the dog was out-pacing the man, so, I stepped back into the garage, grabbed a leash and my bicycle and joined the chase. A few seconds later my neighbor Chris from three houses down the street came up on his bicycle, and he joined the chase, too. Chris is out on his bike and rollerblades a lot, so I figured he was either already out riding or had also joined the chase as it passed his house.
The dog led us across the street and onto the sidewalk that goes behind our subdivision’s pool and tennis courts. At one point, Chris and I managed to get the dog between us with some shrubs on one side, but the dog dashed between the shrubs and into the parking lot.
On the other side of the parking lot, we kind of cornered the dog between the tennis courts and some other shrubs. Chris and I both dropped out bikes, and Chris managed to get on the other side of the dog. He then squatted, held out his hand and called the dog in a sweet voice. To my surprise, the dog responded. When he got close, Chris grabbed for his collar, but the dog wriggled away and came toward me. I tackled the dog and held onto him until Chris could also get a hold and we got the collar on him. When I tackled the schnauzer, he bit me and punctured my hand in one place.
Chris then told me that the dog chaser was his visiting brother-in-law, and that the dog has escaped from Chris’ house. He thanked me and walked the dog toward his house, and I rode home.
While I doctored my wound, I told Katie and the kids what had happened–laughing hysterically the whole time. A couple minutes later Chris came over to thank me again and to give me my leash. Turns out, he’d been bitten, too.
All in all, the suburban schnauzer wrangling was worth the dog bite. It was actually a lot of fun.

Good bye, eMusic – Hello, Amazon MP3

Lat night, I bought my first album of DRM-free MP3s off of Amazon MP3. Reasonable price ($.89/track; $8.99/album), easy purchase and download experience (it puts the tracks directly into iTunes after download), and DRM-free MP3s. What’s not to love?
This morning, I canceled my eMusic subscription. I’ve really enjoyed finding new music on eMusic, but lately it felt like a monthly chore to find 90 tracks that I might like, listen to them all, rate them, etc. And now that I can buy DRM-free MP3s competitively to Apple’s DRM-laden iTunes Music Store, I think I’ll switch back to buying less music that I know I like for a while.
Hasta la vista, iTunes Music Store
Oh, and it warms my heart to see DRM finally losing out due to market pressure. People DO care about controlling the stuff they own.

eMusic rox, take 2

I’ve sung the praises of eMusic before, but I have another reason to like them today. After I downloaded all my tracks last month, I accidentally deleted all of them before importing them into iTunes. I was bummed that I’d lost $20 of music. This morning, I went to eMusic to start finding some music to download in the coming month when I realized I still had a few downloads available from last month. I decided to download a few of the tracks I’d deleted. After I downloaded one, I noticed that the number of available downloads hadn’t been decremented. I had accidentally discovered that I could re-download my previous purchases! I just recovered the lost tracks by downloading them again!

A humanist with spirit

This week, writer John Scalzi is blogging his answers to questions submitted by readers of his blog. Yesterday’s question was, in essence: What is the meaning of life?
Mr. Scalzi suggests that he devised his answer to this question via humanist (non-religious) means:

What I’m leaving out here, for the space of relative brevity, is a detailed examination of processes by which I came to this intellectual methodology, generated through years of self-examination and self-realization via intentional and unintentional experiential phenomena, to produce the robust heuristic structure through which I filter data.

Here’s the heart of his reply:

Finally, in the larger sense — the one in which I am a citizen of the world, that I like no man am an island, blah blah blah blah blah, it becomes a matter of asking one’s self first whether one wants to be engaged in the world, and then if so, how best to be of utility. I do enough things that I feel engaged in my world and I feel like I’m trying to do beneficial things (or at least I’m doing as little harm as possible). I think it’s my responsibility to try to make the world a better place than it was before I got here; I don’t feel obliged to be heart-rent at every thing that’s wrong with the planet. One person can make a difference in the world, so long as that one person realizes that one person can not do every thing or be actively concerned with every damn thing. I pick and choose; everyone does. I focus on what I think I do well, and where I think I can do good. (emphasis added)

I find his answer to the BIG QUESTION quite similar to my own, which I formed in the context of being a Christian. I guess it all comes down to the source of the responsibility, and his answer shows what I believe: that there are many ways to realize your obligation to ‘love your neighbor’.

What is a ‘liberal Christian’?

I frequently describe myself as a liberal or progressive Christian. Twice in the past couple of weeks, I have been asked exactly what that means. While I have some general statements, it bothered me that I didn’t have a concise, easy-to understand answer. In response to this frustration, I started reading Brian D. McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy (which Rick Diamond, who I recently met, recommends on his blog.
I haven’t yet gotten too far into the book, and I don’t yet have an answer to my question, but I found the first chapter of the book to be an informative brief theological primer. In this chapter, Mr. McLaren describes “the seven Jesuses I have known;” he writes a short summary of the unique characteristics of seven ‘branches’ of Christianity. At the end of the seven characterizations, Mr. McLaren writes:

I am a Christian because I believe the real Jesus is all that these sketches reveal and more. Saying that, a question comes to mind…
Why not celebrate them all? . . . I’m recommending that we acknowledge that Christians of each tradition bring their distinctive and wonderful gifts to the table, so we can all enjoy the feast of generous orthodoxy–and spread that same feast for the whole world.

I definitely identify with this viewpoint, so I think I’m looking in the right place to help me voice my views. Stay tuned…
By the way, ‘the Liberal Protestant Jesus’ is one of flavors that Mr. McLaren describes. Since I identify much more with Mr. McLaren’s viewpoint than this one particular flavor, I see why I’ve had trouble describing my own theology. I have a feeling I’ll end up abandoning the word ‘liberal’ as soon as I find a more accurate and less charged description.