not the new year.

It's October 15, so a great time for new resolutions, right? I am too impatient to wait for January 1st.

1) I am not going to answer "How are you?" with "Busy!" any more. Being busy does not make me special and it generally means I'm overcommitted.

2) I am going to continue to shed volunteer obligations that do not actually feed my spirit, heart, or intellect. I do not owe anything to organizations that do not know how to utilize volunteers effectively and/or make us feel welcome and valued.

3) I want to get back into writing again, and reading again, as pleasures I have left on the shelf for several years due to a lack of brainspace. Those of you who Facebook know about my recent addiction to the Poetry Foundation website, and I try to spend at least five minutes on it a day meeting new poems and poets through the "random" button. I've got at least one novel and one play in my head that I'd like to begin work on within the next six months, and some scholarly interests as well.

4) I want to be where I am when I'm there, with the people I'm with. I've been working on the "Be Here Now" principle for a few months now and I'm making a little headway, but it stays on the important goals list. I've just finished a book called "Hamlet's Blackberry" and one of the ideas proposed is an Internet sabbath for the family, which I think is brilliant. We'll see if I can convince Matt to implement it too, but I think it would make a world of difference as far as my own attention span goes. I am bringing too much of my work into my home life and vice versa, and need to work on my concentration skills in order to work more deeply on projects in the months ahead.

5) And while I'm thinking of it: I have the intention of writing snail-mail letters to people on my mailing list before Christmas instead of generic cards or e-greetings. I genuinely like special writing tools and fancy papers, and a little thoughtfulness every day would be a lot better for me than a big burden of obligation in late November. There, I've said it aloud in the blogosphere, so now it's official!

Rainy Day Sunday.

For the first time since September 4, I have gotten to be home with the kids all day long, without leaving the house.

We have played dangerbirdie (think fort-making plus occasional shouts of "Danger!" which drive both children into the "nest"), cleaned two closets, packed stuff up for charity, and are about to make vegetable soup. There have been Goldfish and grapes aplenty, and several Beach Boys dance parties. And naptime for Tuck brought snow-making with Miranda's science kit, and a sewing lesson...she is getting good at straight-stitching by hand, and better at playing with checkers. (It was an unusually long nap.)

After a solid month plus of some obligation every day, today was WONDERFUL. Although you could hear the screaming when I bathed my son at least three houses away...he survived and now has less than a third of the red sauce he started out with in his hair. He's not a redhead, he is just passionate about his pasta!

I am certainly ready for fall and for some time at home. Even if it is slightly less than contemplative, I am filling up on my good-stuff quota. :)

And in more local news...

The Tuck-meister has taken to attacking us all with oven mitts. But he's so thrilled to watch us scream, I think he may have a future in making horror movies.

Media and obscenity, part I (probably).

There's a hot story in Loveland, CO about a piece of visual art that garnered public protest and picketers, right up until yesterday when a woman from Montana destroyed it and was arrested. Coverage of the story continues, but honestly, what surprises me a little is that someone would come all the way from Montana to destroy a piece of art she viewed as blasphemous. That's dedication, but it may make it harder for someone to suggest later that the art goes against local standards for decency (a necessary part of building the case in court that an artwork is legally obscene).

For all the news coverage of the artwork, Chagoya's "The Misadventures of Romantic Cannibals," I have yet to actually see a reproduction of the artwork in TV or newspaper coverage of the story. (I did find one through a Google search, which quickly clarified why people would find it offensive; consider yourself forewarned if you do the same.) In media coverage, there are just photos of protesters.

This makes it hard to have an informed opinion on the work itself, but very easy to hold a position on the controversy. It's also clear that many of the people who are protesting are missing facts about the story (for example, the work was donated by the artist to the exhibit and no tax dollars were spent on its purchase, so the people who are complaining about funding the artist with tax dollars could use a fact-check). Some have valid points but most are jumping on the bandwagon with a minimum of information.

Judging by the coverage on the Post website, where it's the most-commented story of the day, people just can't wait to get into discussion about free speech versus blasphemy and public decency. The Supreme Court case heard yesterday about Fred Phelps' church protests at the funeral of a soldier is covering some of the same ground regarding distasteful speech in the public arena. Phelps' protesters followed local laws about the distance from a church that protests had to occur, and then picketed the funeral of a soldier with signs including "God Hates Fags" and "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" (for the record the soldier in question was heterosexual). Phelps' lawyer, one of his daughters, has tried to make the case that the first amendment should protect them from charges of causing emotional distress to the soldier's family.

Offending people's standards of decency gets media coverage for your ideas, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. I am repelled by the idea that the level of public discourse has sunk so low that tactics like these, of obscene images, cruel words, and hate-filled speech, are what it takes to be heard.

However, I think it reflects most poorly on the media that their stories do not raise the really important questions at hand, but simply mirror the polarization of our communities on moral values. I don't expect journalists to attempt answers to moral questions except perhaps on the editorial page, but I would expect responsible journalists to provide what good coverage of the Supreme Court does: accurate portrayals of the positions on all sides of a controversy.

Things you wish someone would describe you as.

I ran across an editorial in a Pueblo arts paper describing a political candidate as a "plucky policy wonk." I want to be one of those!

In and out of Doubt.

The past month has been frankly overwhelming. I am so proud of the work of the theatre company that's producing "Doubt" and it has been a great experience to work on the production with such a talented team of actors and designers...once we get production photos taken I will share some here. The big Denver and Boulder reviews are due out tomorrow, although a local student paper already published one that was quite positive.

The play itself has raised some heart-wrenching questions that audiences feel a (sometimes desperate) need to talk about. I have already met three victims of clerical abuse just in the week the show has been open, and am very glad I've had training to fall back on when met with this type of deep sharing from complete strangers. (The university's preparations for its instructors in terms of listening skills and redirecting to local counselling and other resources...well, they definitely generalize to other areas of life.) The play isn't really about abuse, though, and audiences recognize that.

To some extent it's about when humans open and close their eyes to suffering, and how much people choose to know or not to know about the lives of the people around them. It could be positioned as a play about how suspicion leads one to see evil where it does not exist; or as a play about the impossibility of maintaining innocence in a broken world; or in many other ways. I don't have a clean capsule summary worked out yet.

The first Monday after opening BETC sponsored an outreach panel, "Contemporary Catholic Culture: Faith in the Face of Scandal," and three speakers came to talk about Catholicism and the play. Because my blog is googlable I am choosing my words carefully here, but it is fair to say that there was a great gulf in interpretation between at least one of the speakers and the majority of our audiences in terms of the definitions and values of doubt and dissent in American culture.

Some people would like to return to the days of unshakable faith in institutions as well as in God. But study of history reminds us over and over that such faith is inevitably misplaced, and that even the most divinely inspired religious organization is still composed of humans. I see the role of questioning, of doubt and difficulty, as necessary to a critically examined faith, and it's not that the speakers at this event would disagree with me entirely. Perhaps they are further in their examination than I am given their ages and roles in the community.

But while the event was a great success in sparking community discussion, it was personally painful to see such a gap between the speakers and the audiences who wished to question their interpretations. (Audience members were very polite and were not aiming to challenge, but for example to provide evidence for alternate understandings of the play's events.) It is easy for a convincing speaker to dismiss a genuine, valid objection as "immature," for example...or to describe a character's choice as a "false dilemma" when no other options except two morally untenable ones existed within the world of the play. But basically most of the valid questions raised were left on the table without honest engagement, which was frustrating as an event moderator.

I will be reflecting on the issues raised for a long time to come, not least of which was one speaker's certainty that when doubt exists, the choice should always be made that protects children even if it means destroying an innocent man's reputation and career. She made this claim on her experience as a mother, but I am one too, and think that the danger of false accusation should not be dismissed so lightly.