It's fairly obvious that I haven't been blogging much lately. As those of you who do or did use Blog-City know, B-C is shutting its doors, and although that change is (I think) still a year or so away, it got me to feeling like there's no long-term future here. Maybe that's been part of my lack of enthusiasm for blogging, I don't know.

I've certainly had some good times here and through this blog I've made a lot of friends. Some of them I've had the pleasure to meet in real life, many I have not, but regardless, I consider them friends. I hope all of those friends will find their way over to my new blog. The address should be easy enough for regular readers to remember: http://wheresmyplan.blogspot.com. I'm hoping this will kick-start some regular blogging. Stop on over and say "hi!"

From a culinary perspective, my day got off to a smooth(ie) start. But before I talk about my own eating, let me digress to talk about Thea's eating. Lauren has been breastfeeding, but after 6 months, we started making purees of fruits and vegetables to feed her. We liked the control we had over the contents of the food as well as the cheap cost. We'd puree carrots or sweet potatoes or whatever and then pour it into ice cube trays to freeze it, then put it in freezer bags and thaw a cube or two for her when it was wanted. The problem recently has been that it isn't wanted. She's saying no to purees, though not all solid food.

And so, one of my goals with this morning's smoothie was to re-purpose some of that frozen puree and at the same time start my day with a sneaky serving of vegetables. My second goal, made more difficult by my first goal, was to have a smoothie that tasted good. So, to that end, I started off with some of our homemade coconut milk / almond milk ice cream (Lauren's been avoiding dairy almost since Thea was born, since it seemed to make our baby fussy). I added a cube of peas, a cube of green beans, and a cube of squash, a banana, the dregs of a peanut butter jar, some frozen blueberries (which we intended to puree for Thea), some almond milk, some oats, and some ground flax seed. Not only was it not the worst smoothie I've made/choked down, it was actually pretty tasty.

While we're talking about re-purposing, I should mention that the banana came from leftover food from our tennis match. Any time the students will miss a meal, we get from the dining hall a box of food that includes sandwiches, chips, fruit, dessert, gatorade, and assorted other goodies. You can lead an adolescent to free food, of course, but you can't make him eat. We've had countless dishes of apple crisp made from apples that the boys didn't eat, and a lot of bananas before the one I used in my smoothie have found themselves traveling from the tennis courts to a loaf pan or muffin pan at our house. The centerpiece of lunch yesterday was broccoli that I salvaged from such a meal. I don't blame the boys for not eating it: raw broccoli with no dressing or similar accompaniment is almost inedible. Cooked in some olive oil with garlic, red pepper flakes, and sea salt, however, it is delicious. It's really a shame how much food gets thrown out in this manner--we only save a portion of it and it's often a struggle to use all of it before it goes bad.

Although there's certainly a lot of sugar in my smoothie, I hope I can justifiably call it a healthy start to my day, but it wasn't really the healthy start to my day: that kicked off perhaps an hour earlier when I pulled myself out of bed and did yoga for perhaps 40 minutes. I've had some interest in yoga since high school when a confluence of a project on Buddhism and a workshop attended at, of all places, the International Thespian conference (and, I think, an episode of Three's Company from my even-younger days) sparked an interest. At the time, I didn't really know what I was doing--I read some books on yoga and sometimes put myself into various stretching poses, but I didn't really know what I was doing. Some years later, in my early 20s, a friend got me into yoga, which I pursued with the help of videos and an occasional class. For almost a decade, I've been an occasional practitioner, and even when I haven't been practicing yoga as such, I've borrowed some of the stretches for use in my other fitness routines.

Recently, a friend from college has been posting pictures from her month spent at a sort of yoga boot camp to train yoga teachers, as well as writing in her blog, and it's made me want to get back into--and even more serious about--my practice of yoga. The past week has been fair in that regard, with five of seven days including 30-40 minutes of yoga. My problem has been that it's been entirely self-directed, which for me means that I'm basically doing the same thing each day. The videos I have are actually VHS tapes, and our VCR has become unreliable. I've been trying to get the audio off the tapes, with mixed results and as part of a time-intensive process. If I keep going like this, though, I should soon have a pretty good habit established.

For his ethics class, one (actually two, but I haven't heard from the other one yet) of my students was supposed to interview me, specifically to ask three questions. Since I spent the time answering them, I thought I might as well turn that time spent into a long-overdue blog post.

It's hard to catch up after a lengthy absence, and my absece from blogging has been nothing if not lengthy. Speaking of lengthy, I could tell you about my job and the 10- to 15- hour days I've been putting in since preseason band and tennis started three weeks ago. I could tell you about how, just a week into classes, we had two students sent home and others in trouble. I could tell you about a great guest leturer we had or about students who already, in mere days, have been difficult or rewarding to deal with, each in their particular way. I could tell you about how Thea's been sick and seemed to have forgotten how to sleep but learned how to scream piercingly. I could tell you about the books I'd like to be reading if I had time to read, or the ones I finished but haven't had time to review. I could tell you lots of things by way of catching up, and you can see what a lengthy process that would be.

But instead, I'll tell you about putting Thea to bed last night.

That process, too, can usually be described as lengthy. Thea gets a bath to (we hope) settle her down, and then one of us puts her to bed. When I do so, I typically rock her in my arms until she falls asleep, then--without disturbing her too much--I lay down, which puts her sleeping on my chest, in my arms. Once she's settled in there and remained asleep--as opposed to the times, sometimes several each night, when she wakes up at this stage and I have to start rocking her again--I shift her over so that she's lying on the bed, though her head is still on my arm or shoulder. I let her settle in there, then proceed to extricate myself by whatever means necessary, and go about my night.

Last night was a bit different. She woke the first time I tried to lie down with her, but my back was aching, so instead of rocking her again, I stayed on my back and sat her up, which stopped the inevitable crying that had ensued when she awoke. I gave her a little rattle to play with, I turned on the white-noise generator and let her play with that. And then I started reciting bits of poetry, hoping the rhythms would help soothe her as well. I more or less got through a stanza and a half of "To Autumn" and less than a stanza of "O Solitude," and barely a few lines of "Stanzas" (all John Keats poems). I pulled out some bits from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Edward Fitzgerald.

You know, at some point in parenting an infant, we realized that people, when really drunk, are basically reverting to infancy with its lack of clear expression and even greater lack of fine motor control. At some point last night while I was dredging my mind for bits of poetry, Thea went into her drunken head circles. Now, I was laying on the bed and she was sitting up by my side, facing me, with my arm behind her. Oh, and I was rubbing her back too, to facilitate the whole going to sleep process. And she goes into her head circles eventually, and then her head just falls to my chest with a muted whump.

Passed out.

I let her sleep like that, in basically a seated position with her head down for about 40 minutes, in part to let her settle into real sleep before trying to move her and in part because I had, myself, fallen asleep as well. Anyway, our daughter's going to be brilliant, which means that she'll be bored in school: being able to sleep in a seated position is probably good skill for her to acquire, and she might as well start early. Anyway, a picture, I'm sure, could have told this story rather more eloquently than I can, but our on-staff photographer was otherwise occupied and, anyway, the light wouldn't have been good.

When I awoke, I got her into a more traditional sleep position and gradually extricated myself... after a bit more of a nap for myself. I think it's the best either of us have slept in a week.

Thea is getting herself closer and closer to crawling, finally lifting her belly off the ground. As she gets closer to mobility, we feel an imperative to get the apartment closer to safety. We're particularly likely to do this in cases where one of us was never really a fan of the old setup any. For instance, Lauren always hated these:

She's never liked their mismatched quality (thanks to being bought over the course of several years at several stores, combined with a complete disregard for interior decorating style), and no doubt that really tall white DVD tower, with its small footprint and great height, is a pretty big baby risk. The other two probably have decent roll-over potential as well.

Now, we've removed the DVDs from all of these cases and put them in the storage booklet shown at the bottom of the picture. All those DVDs, now in so little space, and considering how much use I've made of the DVD inserts, I probably don't need them that badly (though I just can't bring myself to throw them out--they'll go in a box or three in the basement).

Favorite education-related movie: The Emperor's Club. It often gets compared to Dead Poets Society, but it's not really a great comparison. The Emperor's Club is more about what it's like to be a teacher than it is about what it's like to be a teenaged boy who is moved by a great teacher. It's about the successes and failures of teaching, the hard work and difficulties, as well as the changing culture of boarding schools. It's pretty thoroughly wonderful.

Favorite Westerns: Okay, it's not that I'm a big westerns fan. I never watch them, though I grew up watching them on TV with my dad. But the three westerns I own are really, really good. Okay, actually I can't remember that clearly whether Tombstone is really great or whether I just loved it because it seemed great when I was in high school. I don't have any qualms about calling Unforgiven great, though, nor the original High Noon. Great, great films.

Biggest TV Series Regret: Never finishing Six Feet Under. My friend Kapoo and I watched nearly 3 seasons worth, two of which I own and one of which he owns, but we never finished the seasons we had, much less the ones we hadn't watched yet, and Lauren has no interest in it (she started watching it, then just read the synopses). Good series, though. Not necessarily better than the other two I own--Battlestar Galactica and Firefly--but good enough to regret not finishing. Probably better than the original V: The Mini-Series.

Intriguing movies that I can't really recall that well: Instinct. I remember finding it really interesting, but couldn't tell you much about it. The same pretty much goes for The Cider House Rules. It's just been that long since I've seen either of them.

Football movies I should re-watch: I do like a good football movies. Rudy is pretty good, as are The Program and Any Given Sunday. It's been too long since I've seen any of them, but my heart says Remember the Titans might be the best of the batch.

Best Foreign Film: I don't have any particular criteria for this, but of the handful of foreign films I own, the one dearest to my heart is Life is Beautiful.

Best High School Film: Pump Up the Volume. I loaned this to students one time when I lived in the dorm in boarding school, though I didn't really think they'd appreciate it: too 1990, you know? They loved it. Standing up to power is always a popular theme with the kids.

These aren't necessarily "the best" movies I own, but they're some of the ones I haven't seen in a while that, while putting them into the new storage system, most made me want to re-watch them.

There's probably something illegitimate about commenting on the comments on someone else's blog, but I haven't been blogging much lately, so I'll grasp at whatever's got my attention just now.

Paula Reed recently reviewed David Cullen's Columbine (really, her thoughts are broken into two posts, the other being here). For any of my readers who don't know her, Paula is a teacher at Columbine, and was in 1999 as well. The first main paragraph will give the basic flavor:

In the end, if you want the real story, I recommend this book .  Because of my closeness to it all, I already knew a lot of what was in there, but it was a relief to see it all laid out to a pubic that had been given a very skewed version of what happened.   One of the things that I think makes this a good book is it doesn't have an agenda.  I didn't feel like Cullen was trying to offer any glib, easy answers.  Of course, if glib, easy answers are what you're looking for, this book will disappoint you.  Apparently guns, bullying, video games, music--none of these things make mass-murderers.  Ultimately, there are certainly lessons to learn (communication is critical), but as long as there are psychopaths out there, and as long as people--parents, students, teachers, doctors, law enforcement officials, etc.--are imperfect (human), there's no sure-fire solution.

After comments by the author, me, and Paula, some days later, a commenter wrote:

If Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were alive, would Cullen claim that they were mentally ill? That would open the door to a legal defense that might lead to freedom.

To which Paula correctly responded that Cullen specifically claims they were not mentally ill, though Eric was a psychopath (which is not a mental illness in the sense this commenter seems to be thinking of it: confirmed psychopaths stand trial and are executed with no qualms. Dylan was depressed, but again, no one gets off for depression (and people who successfully argue insanity defenses aren't on the road to "freedom" anyway).

I followed the link back to this commenter's site, where it became clear that he/she has an agenda and a theoretical framework. Focussing on Columbine, this writer claims that the shootings were motivated by bullying and what I've heard referred to as a "jockocracy," a common theme to reportage in the immediate aftermath, but one that Cullen (from what I've read of his book around the halfway point) pretty thoroughly demolishes. But the commenter's website details a thorough typology of social classes within the hierarchy of typical high school life with the "alphas" at the top and "scapegoats" at the bottom and various types of enablers in between. I'm reminded of nothing so much as a college sophomore who's just discovered socialism or theoretical capitalism, or who have discovered in their English class that they can apply a Marxist or Post-Colonialist or Feminist or whatever sort of template to their literary criticism and have something to say about any literature (usually it's the same thing, no matter what the specifics of the work are). There's a framework, and there's a certain truth to the framework, and when the facts don't fit into the framework, they're ignored or argued away.

Thus, a book that doesn't have an agenda and doesn't give glib answers probably isn't going to satisfy this commenter. After saying he/she had Cullen's book on the "to read" list, he/she continues:

What I'd really like to know from someone who's read Cullen's book is how he treats the environment at Columbine high School and what effect it had on the killers' willingness to look upon their classmates as targets rather than as people.

In other words, does Cullen get it right or wrong according to what I already know to be the case. Paula responded with great diplomacy, I thought, perhaps already aware of this person's biases and not wanting to prejudice him/her against a really good analysis:

Cullen's research is incredibly thorough. He sifted through thousands of pages of police reports and spoke with many of the people involved. From my experience as someone who has taught at Columbine for over 20 years, he nailed the environment at our school, which derails almost all the myths the popular media put out there. As a psychopath, Eric saw all other people as the means to various ends, rather than as human beings. Forensic analysis shows that it took Dylan longer to get into firing his gun, suggesting he needed more impetus to enter that realm. If you are interested in what happened to us, this book should jump to the top of your list.

She doesn't duck his question, but the emphasis is on the quality of the research and the evidence for the position rather than on how completely wrong this person's assumptions are. Last I saw, though, this commenter seemed determined to plow ahead, on message:

Does Cullen give any credence to the belief that the social environment at Columbine transformed a potential killer into an enthusiastically committed one? I'm routinely amazed at how many people forget why our species is at the top of the food chain.

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I get the sense that as soon as this individual is clear that, no, Cullen completely disagrees with the bullying explanation for Columbine, the book will not--despite two indications of a willingness to read it--be read. But hey, I could be wrong.

I have not read it and probably won't. The group generally refered to as the 'fundamentalists' are not members of the LDS church. Like most things of this nature, if I wanted to know more I would go straight to the horses mouth. I could, fo...r example, read a book about muslims written by someone that is not a muslim (and is not likely to have an unbiased opinion), or I could acquire a copy of the Koran and actually talk directly with them to find out not only what they profess to believe, but also what the devout of their religion truly practice.

To which I responded that

for what it's worth, Krakauer is quite clear that the fundamentalists are not part of the LDS church. He traces the history of the LDS church largely to show the way that FLDS grew out of it but is clear about the many ways that the LD...S church has disavowed earlier practices like plural marriages and its other condemnations of fundamentalists. And he also, as my review suggests, seems to be exploring the history of the church because he's had so many Mormon friends from childhood on. Krakauer doesn't seem, to me, to be trying to do a "hatchet job" on the LDS church.

You're absolutely right about the importance of talking to believers in order to understand a religion, but it's not as though believers are likely to have "an unbiased opinion" any more than non-believers do. If I ask a Muslim, he will likely tell me that Islam is the only true religion; most Christian sects will tell me the same thing (they may or may not be "tolerant" of other religions, but the Bible does, after all, say that Jesus is the only way to salvation). Should I believe them both? And on what am I to base my skepticism of one or the other? Just my gut feeling? Or should I be listening to what both believers and skeptics have to say about each in order to make up my own mind?