Top Microwaver

As summertime wanes, I find that on occasion there are evenings that pass without the TV ever being turned on -- an act (or non-act, I guess) which, if committed in my Home of Origin, would have been grounds for an immediate call to the Primary Care Physician (actually, we didn't have a PCP in those days, just a "doctor". Who was a guy wearing a white coat who had been to medical school, and who on occasion could actually be persuaded to come to your house. But, seemingly inevitably, I digress).

A high percentage of the time it is on, you will find it tuned to SNY, the television home of the Mets -- with the sound down, so as not to assault the ears of the more baseball-averse among us. But on Wednesdays, even in the late innings of a close game, when the digital clock reaches 4 digits, the channel is always changed to Bravo for this week's installment of Top Chef.

This despite the fact that my program choice elicits scarcely more enthusiasm from the rest of the family than baseball. No, it's all about me; I'm not even entirely sure why, but I do love me some Top Chef.

It's not an enormous surprise; I have a documented fondness for what might be described as the higher class of reality shows -- that is, the ones where people must demonstrate some sort of ability. Still, my predilection for TC is a bit peculiar in light of the fact there's no way I'd ever eat anything they make.

Top Chef dishes are always filled with (to me, at least) esoteric ingredients from all over the world in unpredictable combinations. Any one of them would violate my First Law of Food: I never eat anything that has to be explained.

This belief is also tested spectacularly by our yearly purchase of the Entertainment Book. Since I love to eat, and avoid cooking, and practice frugality, the E-Book is a perennial in our household. I always more than get back the yearly fee in savings -- although left unasked is the question of how many of those outings would have been eschewed entirely in the absence of an opportunity to "save money".

There's a section of the book that's printed on heavier paper, with fancier fonts and so on down the line. It's called the "fine dining" section, and it's filled with all the places that serve Top Chef-ish fare. There's a printed Menu Sampler for each venue, including prices calculated to give someone of my philosophy more than a moment's pause (or even worse: "Market Price", which I suspect is menu-ese for "How much have you got on you?").

Mind you, I can be induced to crack open the billfold for good value. I can pay the price when it's warranted... but it never comes to that, because it's the menus themselves that frighten me away. There are just some words I never want to see on a menu:

• reduction
• demiglace
• fennel
• balsamic
• confit
• chutney

and other words I really, really like to see:

• fried
• pan-fried
• deep-fried
• cheese (or even better, "cheeses")
• Alfredo

I'm just not bred for the gourmet experience; I'm more at home with Friday's or Applebee's (or for that matter Pizza Hut or KFC (mmmm, fried chicken)). We went out to dinner recently for our 20th anniversary. She got dressed up in the Little Black Dress and heels -- "expensive restaurant" written all over her. We ended up at a BBQ place called Everglades. The food was delicious... although we were seated at a picnic table, under a tent (no candlelight!). She didn't sprain an ankle walking across the grass, fortunately, but she was a little taken aback at the ambience, approximately 1.5 steps up from the snack bar at the Little League field.

It's no different at home. I am the Top Chef around here, more or less by default; I enjoy cooking but I'm never going to be trolling through gourmet markets or devouring (so to speak) the latest cookbooks. I've always believed that the four basic food groups are meat, pasta, cheese/cream/butter, and frozen food.

OK, so my repertoire is somewhat circumscribed. Truthfully, if it were up to me, I'd probably rotate somewhere around 15-20 dishes, none of which require poaching or mincing, or fresh mint, or cilantro, or shiitake mushrooms. And if I were cooking solely for myself, I could probably alternate my favorites (chicken BBQ; Tortellini Alfredo with Chicken) every other day, mix in the occasional dinner out for a steak or a pizza, and be completely content.

At least for 6 weeks or so ... as I understand it, none of those menu items is available in the CCU (nor, for that matter, the CTU).

I'm probably fortunate that I'm not cooking for one; my kids prevent me from doing meat 7 days a week, and my wife prompts me to mix in some fruit or vegetables once in awhile. I think I've brought my menus a little closer to balanced... at heart, though, I'm still deeply suspicious of anything that contains ingredients.

Theology for Dummies: Sin-cerely Yours

So I've been thinking a lot about sin lately.

It's just vaguely possible that came out wrong, so let me come at it from a different angle. A lot of different inputs, including some reading and a Casting Crowns concert, have me meditating a bit on the nature of sin.

I'll mention first, as I have before, that Mark Hall of Casting Crowns has an amazing gift for boiling down the Christian life -- whether in a song or in his remarks from the stage -- to a phrase that goes straight to your heart. Well, OK, mine. Tell me if this is the way it is for you: when someone says something that's true (not just "factual", but a truth about God, about life, about something that matters), I can almost hear a little "ding" in my head. My belief, or at least my prayer, is that that represents God's gift of discernment in me. I don't think it's just me grooving on something I already agree with, because it's not always a message that makes me happy. Anyway, I find that almost everything Mark Hall says or sings sets off that little bell.

At the concert he was talking about sin -- which in itself is pretty remarkable; not the usual concert fodder, or for that matter talked about much anywhere in the Christian community. A lot of us would much rather hear how much God loves us (a lot of times with the sort of hidden implication that therefore what we do doesn't matter all that much).

But even that thought may lead us off in the wrong direction. Because although I understood this in my heart and I've probably even expressed it as some sort of significant insight of my own in the past, at the concert it struck me again and as if for the first time: sin has very little to do with what you "do" or the "rules" you might break, whether consciously or unconsciously (although one of my basic principles contends that we rarely do wrong unconsciously -- we usually look the wrongness right in the eye and choose to do it anyway, often with the help of a rationalization process that puts our "everyday" imaginations to shame. No, wait; that's just me... nobody else does that).

No (if you remember the original point before the parentheses started sprouting), the real definition of sin is anything that interferes with your relationship with God. Anything that takes your attention away from Him, anything that makes you less likely to listen to His voice, anything that takes priority.

So that can be a rule-breaking kind of behavior; anything we do that we know God explicitly doesn't want us to do -- and again, we usually do know... right? -- does move us a little farther away. Listening to that other voice not only makes the Original Voice seem less important, it also (I think) makes us a lot less eager to spend time with the Speaker. Again, probably just me... but I'd just as soon not be in the presence of Absolute Goodness when I haven't been very good.

But there's a mess of other things that are plenty wonderful that can take me away from focusing on God: jobs, family activities, blogging, church.... Yup, even church activities can make you so busy, and make you emphasize the wrong things. People who are "pillars of the church" are often so invested in making the church "work" as an organization -- and believe me, somebody has to think about those things -- that it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that it's actually one part of the Body of Christ and has higher expectations, literally, for how it behaves.

For me, I'm very involved in the "production" of worship: I have several roles in the music ministry and I help produce the worship PowerPoints. Even more than that, though, I've been occupied for so long with thoughts about How Worship Works that my first thought in any service is, how is this service going? Any glitches? What do we need to talk about fixing? How does that font/color scheme look on the screen? Is everyone singing? Maybe we need to not use this one again....

Matt Redman is a worship leader and top Christian musician who ran into a similar conundrum: he was so concerned with making the music performance perfect that he was forgetting the purpose of worship -- to meet God in person, to experience and enjoy Him, to ... um... worship. He found he needed to stop doing music for awhile in order to meet God afresh, and out of that came his classic song, Heart of Worship.

So I guess my point is that a lot of things get piled up between me and the view of God from here. Some of them are obvious, although no easier to eradicate; others are seemingly benign but can sneak into the way. I want to make sure I'm on the alert for both kinds of obstacles and concentrate on my first task: keep that pathway clear so I can see him and hear Him.

Party Affiliation

When our daughter turned 5 this summer, we let her choose three little friends to invite and we put on a "Pirate Party" here at the house; she's fascinated by pirates, for some reason. I'll freely admit that the whole affair was designed by my wife: we had bandannas and eye patches for the kids, a treasure hunt and some other pirate-y games, plus of course the fully-licensed Pirates of the Caribbean cake. I thought it was a pretty slick affair, all the way around, and the kids seemed to have a good time.

Although the spouse was definitely the producer, director and scriptwriter, I didn't get off totally scot-free. In fact, it followed the pattern of a lot of our projects around here:

1. wife hatches Clever Scheme in her head; it percolates for days or even weeks
2. she spends lots of time running around buying and otherwise assembling the necessary elements
3. at the last moment, I suddenly receive a list of tasks (OK, usually scut) that must be carried out in the last X hours before the event happens
4. then and only then do I find out, more or less piecewise, the true scope of The Grand Plan....

Oh well, I'm comfortable with the fact that I'm never going to be the visionary half of this partnership (can you sense it's hard enough for me to come up with a blog idea weekly?). And while it can be a bit stressful to be just part of the staff, in the end we did manage to execute a decent party for a handful of 5-year-olds.

This week one of the guests returned the favor and she got to attend his party... at a local family fun center. Think Chuck E. Cheese except backwards: instead of a pizza place with a game room attached, a recreation facility with a snack bar. The group of kids -- and I didn't get a count, but clearly way more than three! -- were treated to a big climbing/sliding facility with ball cannons, a laser tag arena, an arcade (with tokens supplied by the host), and a party room with pizza and cake. I picked up a flyer: the basic party starts at $179.

I can tell you that we didn't spend $179 on our Pirate Party... but I thought our treasure map drawn with markers on a piece of paper bag was pretty cool.

It seems to me that the ante's been raised these days. When the kids were in preschool, the parents whose kids had a birthday in a given month would provide the monthly birthday party. I'm thinking cupcakes, juice, maybe those little ice cream cups. I was not prepared for the other parents coming up with individual goodie bags for each child. I realize that's not quite along the scale of My Super Sweet Sixteen, but sometimes I get the feeling we as parents go a bit over the top... and why? Are we trying to please the kid, or beat the other parents?

I can be as guilty as the next one in occasionally trying to do something needlessly elaborate to make my kids happy (and often end up re-re-re-learning the "kids would rather play with the box" lesson), but I'm not going to keep up with the Joneses, and I certainly have no interest in trying to keep up with their kids.

A Funny Thing Happened at the Library

I am making every effort to prevent my writing from getting even more elaborate, florid, and generally baroque than it already is, and all because of one trip to the library.

For better or worse, it seems to me that my writing style (is it pretentious even to claim to have a style?) was inexorably shaped – or perhaps bent out of shape – in my teens. My reading habit at that point had worsened to the point where, had it been drugs I was consuming, I would’ve been a corpse within a week. In a desperate search for something/anything to keep my jones at bay, I stumbled in quick succession upon Twain, Thurber, and Woody Allen. A bit later there was P.J. O’Rourke, while at the same time I was marinating myself in Monty Python and David Letterman via TV.

That might seem like a disparate assortment, but to me the unifying thread is not just “funny” but a certain twisted sense of language – a sort of mining of the depths of the thesaurus that produces a little jolt to the synapses – as well as an unwillingness to say in four words what can be said in 12 words with a lot more syllables. In that sense, I can’t quite understand why I never became a true fanatic about S.J. Perelman, who fits comfortably on the same shelf.

In the late 70s, Woody Allen published three collections of short pieces which I eagerly snapped up, read and reread. And even though it’s been awhile since the last repetition, phrases still surface in my consciousness from time to time, and still make me laugh (inwardly, that is – I’m trying to stay out of the Rubber Room).

What I didn’t realize, as Woody seems to have shrunk somewhat from public view, and his movies are rarely anticipated Events (or all that funny), is that he is still writing pieces for the New Yorker. Unfortunately, the New Yorker always reminds me of a guy I knew in college. He was from Jersey, and when he found out that I was from Upstate New York, he remarked that he knew someone from upstate. When I asked where, he replied, “White Plains”.

The map of the world as drawn by the New Yorker would have Manhattan at the center, the other four boroughs arranged like petals of the flower, maybe Long Island along the edge, and then blank space (or as the medieval maps read, “Here be dragons.”). I’ve always felt like they’d rather go out of business than be patronized by the likes of me. I don’t read it much, is what I’m saying.

It was indeed a pleasant shock, then, to visit my local library and find not only a new book by the aforementioned O’Rourke, but also a new collection of pieces (some from the New Yorker) by Woody Allen. I dove into the Allen volume posthaste and was heartened to learn (and made to laugh aloud repeatedly) that his writing hasn’t changed a bit. Is that good, to sound the same 30 years later? Not sure, but mark me down in favor.

Some friends you don’t see for a while, and when you reunite, you're not sure why you liked them to begin with. With others, you forget how much you liked them until you see them. As it turned out, it was like a cool drink of water quenching a thirst I didn’t quite even know I had to open the book and be greeted:

Gasping for air, my life passing before my eyes in a series of wistful vignettes, I found myself suffocating some months ago under the tsunami of junk mail that cascades through the slot in my door each morning after kippers. It was only our Wagnerian cleaning woman, Grendel, hearing a muffled falsetto from beneath myriad art-show invitations, charity squeezes, and pyrite contest jackpots I’d hit that extricated me with the help of our Bugsucker.

As I was carefully filing the new postal arrivals alphabetically in the paper shredder, I noticed, amongst the profusion of catalogues that hawked everything from bird feeders to monthly deliveries of sundry drupe and hesperidium, there was an unsolicited little journal, banner-lined Magical Blend. Clearly aimed at the New Age market, its articles ranged in topic from crystal power to holistic healing and psychic vibrations, with tips on achieving spiritual energy, love versus stress, and exactly where to go and what forms to fill out to be reincarnated. The ads, which seemed scrupulously articulated to insulate against the unreasonableness of Bunco Squad malcontents, presented Therapeutic Ironisers, Vortex Water Energizers, and a product called Herbal Grobust designed to implement volumewise madam’s Cavaillons. There was no shortage of psychic advice either, from sources such as the "spiritual intuitive" who double-checks her insights with "a consortium of angels named Consortium Seven," or a babe ecdysiastically christened Saleena, who offers to "balance your energy, awaken your DNA and attract abundance." Naturally, at the end of all these field trips to the center of the soul, a small emolument to cover stamps and any other expenses the guru may have incurred in another life is in order.

It’s quite possible that the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of any Allen 10-page story would be two or three paragraphs long, but that’s what I love about him.

If nothing else, he makes my writing look like a txt msg....