Look Mom, No Morals!

Calculus…

They said I had to take it.
I argued.
They threatened not to let me graduate.
I folded.

So here I am, in the middle of a college level calculus class paying the consequences of a lifetime spent shunning math with a level of avoidance usually only reserved for things like ex-spouses, audits, and herpes.

For extreme right-brained losers like myself (who couldn’t pass the math portion of the college entrance exam), there was a pre-requisite course, “Business Mathematics” which wasn’t overly taxing – percentages, compound interest, cost of goods, even some basic algebra – and I got an A. So with new-found mathematical courage I ran headlong into calculus, only to stare blankly at things like this:

God hates me, doesn’t he?

By the end of my first day in calculus, I found myself espousing a strong desire to curl up on the floor in the fetal position and suck my thumb.

To be fair, I’ve known about my mathematical deficiencies for some time, but I’m not quite sure just how I achieved such a spectacular level of “stupid” in the numbers department. It might have been the fact that my freshman year I was caught chewing gum in Algebra once too often, and was forced to write 500 times, “Mr. Welch does not accept my feeble attempt to apologize for chewing gum in his class.” Isn’t it funny… I don’t remember a thing about quadratic equations, but I can still rattle off every damn syllable of that sentence.

Or perhaps it was my sophomore year, when my one-step-away-from-retirement geometry teacher wasn’t quite as interesting as, say… the triceps of the football player sitting in front of me.

In any event, a solid “D” average in high school math sabotaged what would have otherwise been a beautiful 4.0 GPA, and managed to put me just outside of the “acceptable” range for most anyone who was shelling out scholarships or grants. I suppose it’s safe to say that math was really the only reason I didn’t go to college when everyone else did. In the years since, I’ve learned that I’m quite capable at doing everyday math involved in business.

So on about the second night of calculus, as I was deeply resenting not only the content but the eight hundred and some-odd dollars that I forked out for the privilege of taking the class, I came to three realizations which culminated in one amazing moment of epiphany:

Realization #1: There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about calculus that will ever help me in my life or my career.

Realization #2: There are lots of people in the world who are good at this crap and might just need a few extra bucks.

Realization #3: I'm not poor.

Throw in the fact that when desperate I relieve myself of all morals, and you have one great epiphany:

CHEAT!!!! Yes, that’s right! The oldest trick in the book isn’t just for bad marriages anymore!

It took almost no time to find a good natured doormat on craigslist.com, and for a nominal fee I am getting all of my homework done first rate (he’s even getting a few wrong just for good measure). Now I am just savvy enough at “basic” math to have figured out how the ending grade will work. A on the homework + F on the final = PASS!!!!

(Pause here to visualize the Hallelujah Chorus chiming in)

Shady as this might be, I’m reminded that the ultimate goal of higher education is not to commit coursework to memory (can any college grads still do calculus??) but to teach one the skill of learning and exercising his or her brain in the direction of a resolution. In that regard, my flirtation with deception has done much to further my business degree. After all, I’ve assessed the problem, identified a solution, advertised, negotiated, and established a working relationship at a mutually acceptable rate. All this education in business and I still can’t do a quadratic equation… imagine that!

Forty Years After Stonewall

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969 the New York City police department executed a planned raid on a small inn in Greenwich Village which was known to be a hang-out for local homosexuals. In the red hot political landscape of the late 1960’s (racial tensions, anti-war protests, etc.) the propensity of law enforcement to crack down on what they saw as “morally objectionable” behavior was not unusual. What made Stonewall memorable is that there in that little inn, the gay community fought back in a way that gained national attention for their cause.

Within hours of the raid, gay and lesbian youth from around the city were organizing, demonstrating, rioting, and making their demands for non-discrimination heard. The emotion behind what would be called the Stonewall Riots spread around the country like a wildfire and within days, gay marches were happening all over the continent. For perhaps the first time in recorded history, homosexuals had banded together as a community to fight for equality. They had grabbed national attention, and they had achieved results.

As tempers calmed and cooler heads prevailed in the months after Stonewall, the gay movement began to take on a life of its own. In the decades that followed, a yearly celebration on the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots would become known as Gay Pride, and would be celebrated not with riots, but with parties, parades, carnivals, and festivals all over the Unites States and around the world.

Forty years to the day after the Stonewall Riots, I found myself in downtown Minneapolis, participating in the Twin Cities Pride celebration as a volunteer for the non-profit organization that puts on the festival. While the historical significance and reverence to the occasion was certainly not lost at Twin Cities Pride this year, we did manage to have fun! The weekend was exhausting but amazing and it left me feeling excited, energized, celebrated, and yes… PROUD to be gay:

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My friend Brian and I have a Pride tradition of getting matching tattoos (no, they aren't real). Because we have the same first name, we tend to call each other by our middle names: Michael & Eugene.

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He told me there was coffee in that mug... He lied!... Regardless, I enjoyed the contents so much that I couldn't even bring myself to look up for the picture. :)

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And whats a festival without a little dissent here and there?? These evangelicals were spreading a few hateful thoughts behind the shield of their "Holy Bible." Why does religion always have to do that -- can't we all just get along? The highlight of my entire weekend was watching them get arrested!

.Day one of the festival ended with a beautiful fireworks display over the water in Loring Park. Those are un-exploded fireworks back there, which I had never seen before. That's my friend Jeremy on the dock with the pyro-technician who facilitated the blasts. I don't have to point out which one is the pyro, do I?

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The parade on Sunday morning drew half a million people out onto the streets of Minneapolis. It was standing-room only down Hennepin Avenue.

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Have you ever noticed how gay men have an obsession with making an entrance? Nothing says Pride like dancing homos on a semi...

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And never to be outdone, the dancing lesbians on a semi followed close behind!

This lady's name is Cleo and her nephew there beside her is David. David's parents have not been supportive at all since he came out a few months ago, but he has a friend in his Aunt Cleo, who was perhaps one of the loudest cheerers at the parade. The plight of gay youth is disturbing and the suicide rate is staggering. Frankly, we need more people in world like Cleo -- lots more!

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With the parade over and the festival winding down, everyone seemed to converge on The Saloon for the Pride Block Party. The parts I remember were great... That's all I have to say about that. My poor liver!

Looking for the Answer

The television glowed this evening with images of the way we want to remember him… young, hip, charismatic, larger-than-life. It’s hard to imagine anyone whose name was so renowned around the globe, and it seems surreal to think that he’s gone.

I was about half-a-generation behind Michael Jackson, so I don’t remember the days of the Jackson Five, or the impact that young Michael had on Motown, or the popularity of the Harlem culture. In fact, before his racial identity ever became a headline, I don’t even remember thinking about him as a black man – he was just Michael Jackson, and in the Thriller days of the early 1980’s he clearly defined pop culture in a way that no one else could. In that regard, Michael’s legacy did wonders for race relations in this country.

Looking back, I can recall a brief fascination with breakdancing and I remember practicing the moonwalk alone in my bedroom late at night. He was just so cool.

His music is and will remain timeless. Whether you like that kind of music or not, there is simply no denying the intensity behind Michael’s style, and he approached his craft in a way that may never be paralleled. Who doesn’t remember Billie Jean, Beat It, and Man In The Mirror?

I will always believe too, that Michael was a good person – in fact an amazing person. Remember We Are The World in 1985? I was seven years old then and cared much more about the music than the cause, but I knew it was powerful, needed, and good. He did it again in 2001 when he hosted United We Stand after 9/11.

Like most celebrities, he had his oddities, and like most people I was part of the collective wince that occurred as his life delved deeper into weirdness and even tragedy. It made us uncomfortable and in fact it hurt. Still, one has to wonder: If Michael could be considered “normal” (is that a definable word?) would his talent have been less. Or did a lonely and gifted boy’s inability to come to grips with his missed childhood somehow help create the music that gave us goose bumps?

And then there was Farrah Fawcett, another 80’s icon who gave birth to a decade’s-worth of hair style. She too had her controversies and tragedies but her Charlie’s Angels attitude never really seemed to leave her. So what if she posed for Playboy at age 50? Good for you, girl – you only live once! Sadly, her legacy will always be overshadowed now by the man whose date she shares. I can almost picture a defiant Jill Munroe standing at the gates of heaven and saying to Michael, “You stole my thunder!”

Michael and Farrah – two symbols of my childhood who may have never found peace in this life. I hope it finds them in the next.

The Man Behind the Camera

Looking back through a pile of memories at my grandparents’ old photo album tonight, I notice a trend that most parents are probably guilty of: When they were first-time parents in their early 20’s, they took enough kid pictures to fill a chest. Then, the subsequent children got a few less pictures each as the camera fascination wore off. By the time my dad came along, when they were in their mid-forties, it appears as though the camera hardly made it out of the closet at all.

It’s a trend that has seemed to follow my dad throughout life. As I was thinking about Father’s Day this evening and searching for pictures of him, I find almost none… even from the days when I was a kid. There were certainly pictures being taken back then, but as I thought about it, and rummaged through old boxes of photos and sorted through data disks, I realized the reason why... He was always the one taking them.

In a strange way, his role in photos seems to represent the kind of example he has been and the father that he still is: Always there, holding up the camera, creating memories, keeping things together without taking center-stage, and metaphorically reminding me of who I am. I suppose it’s one of those fatherly lessons that I don’t take time to appreciate as often as I should.

I have a great deal in common with my dad. There are the physical similarities like eyes and chin, hair color, a general sense of posture, and a few other traits we share. But there’s also the underlying pieces of personality that seem to have transcended the generational barrier, and I find more and more of this as I get older. Like him, I always want to see new places and will often go on long drives just to kill a little time. We share a common shortness of patience when things aren’t going the way they’re expected to. And my general sense of pessimistic humor, or my ability to drop insults masked as compliments?? Some people might call those things passive-aggressive, but I just call them genetic!

There are other similarities too. Things like honesty, tenacity, empathy, punctuality, a sense of obligation, and being able to admit mistakes – these are strong tendencies I see in myself, and I don’t have to look far to know where they came from.

We do have our differences, both in style and personality, which some people might pick out faster than our similarities. While Dad is the picture-taker in life, I’m the guy who is handing off the camera to a stranger because I want to be in the shot, dammit! He appreciates the back-stage role, and holds a measure of pride in his ability to make things happen while avoiding the lime light. That quiet sense of astuteness is something I could never imitate because it’s just not me (though sometimes the skill would come in handy).

These days, I don’t see my dad nearly as often as I’d like, and neither of us is as good about calling as we should be. We appreciate each other’s company when it’s available, but we understand each other without having to reiterate emotion on a regular basis. I suppose it’s a guy thing. Still, I continue to see examples of his many lessons in my daily life, and the older I get the more I find myself relying on the simple wisdom of the man behind the camera.
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My dad at age three.

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His Senior year of high school. If Bob Newhart ties ever come back, I'm going on strike!

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My parents' wedding in 1977. Those are my dad's folks on either end, and my mother's aunt standing next to her. Dad is always the tallest guy in any picture, a characteristic I did not inherit.

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Mom & Dad in 2005, not long before they divorced. It's funny how time changes things... I'm forever grateful that they're still friends.

Footprints

He was the father of my grandfather’s grandfather, which I believe makes him my great-great-great grandfather. I know almost nothing about the man, and have little chance of ever finding much out – the reality is that it doesn’t particularly matter. But today, standing in a rustic old graveyard behind a historic Quaker chapel in rural Pennsylvania, I found myself deeply pondering the kind of man my ancestor might have been.

Jesse Harper was born the year before our country even became a country. He was the grandson of a Belfast immigrant of whom even less is known, though it can be assumed that he was of Scotch-Irish descent. Jesse’s son would go on to become a wheelwright, and in a time when trades were passed down, I’m going to assume that was probably Jesse’s craft as well, though I can’t be sure of it.

He would have been a small child during the war for independence, and I have to wonder if he grew up singing the patriotic songs, dreaming of being a soldier, or perhaps clutching a pillow late a night, curled in his bed while the cannons bore down on nearby Philadelphia.

He married at thirty, the same age I am now, and fathered three boys, who were all still children when he died. His only written history is simply the documentation of his birth and death, his marriage, and the births of his sons, so any insight into the soul of the man has long since succumbed to the ages.

The Harper family of Pennsylvania finds no mention in most history books, and they were simple people. Knowing enough of his descendants, I can assume that Jesse was a dark featured man of average height and girth, with kind eyes and a pure heart, but who was often misunderstood. Like his descendants he probably loved music, and likely didn’t waste many words, preferring instead to reflect on things rather than speak about them. I believe him to have been a spiritual man, because his descendants were, albeit of a different religion.

The boys who grew up without a father were of the generation that went west, and two of the three struck out early in life, one going to Iowa, another to Utah. The son who would become my ancestor was a leader in his community, and a patriarch of a large family, so I’m going to guess that Jesse was probably a man of similar caliber, because I believe that some of those innate qualities are as much a part of our breeding as they are our environment.

Still, for all my guessing and nailing down of puzzle-pieces, I have to wonder what made him tick. Who was this man whose stone I found on a muggy afternoon two centuries after he was buried there? What was important to him, and what did think about, pray after, or cry over? If I could meet him, would I see myself in him, or perhaps my father? How could it be that someone so far removed from me and having left no visible mark on the world to tell us who he was, could so captivate my imagination?

I came to this cemetery to waste some time on a rather boring afternoon during a business trip. There was history here – my history, so it was interesting. Now there was a reality, a cold weathered stone to attach itself to the name in a record book that would otherwise have no meaning. Yet for all my searching, and all my pondering, I left with more questions than answers, more blank spaces in a puzzle that no one remembers.

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Time is a thief in this place that drips with masked memories, and the telling breeze through the nearby oak grove offers curious sentiment, but no clues. I find history behind a vale in this tepid place of quiet beauty. Emotion here lacks heart and form has no reason. Still, without question, there is truth.

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Picture and a Quote

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

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Albert Einstein

The Oldest Profession On Earth

I could tell from the grammar and spelling in her letter that she was not an educated woman, and I was especially tickled by the line, “I ought to just sue you people for emotional distortance.”

Emotional dis—what???

Part of me wanted to just shred it and get on with my day, but something convinced me to reach out to this poor lady who had bounced a check at one of my company’s rural Nevada stores and was upset about how it had been handled. So I dialed the number from her letter expecting to reach a helpless elderly lady on a fixed income. I figured that when she got a call from “someone at corporate” willing to listen to her concerns, her anger would subside and I could win back a customer. The conversation went something like this:

HER (with a voice that sounded as though she had been smoking cigarettes since she was a fetus): Ya?

ME: Hi, is this Bertha Mayleen?

HER: Who wants to know?!

ME: Hi Bertha Mayleen, my name is Brian and I work for [name of company] and I’ve received your letter dated May the—

HER: You ignorant [edited]!!!

ME: Uh….

HER: Now you listen here. I write checks every day at the local motel here, cuz it’s part of my job, see. Since all this [edited] started with your [edited] [edited] [edited] store, the motel here in town won’t take my check no more.

ME: Well ma’am, it’s likely that the business in question subscribes to a check verification network that probably has—

HER: Well [edited] em’. I work for a living, and I rent motels every day for my clients, truckers mostly, and I don’t give a [edited] about what they verifying. I gots to write checks in this town so’s I can earn me a [edited] livin’.

ME: Uh….

HER: Further more, the check-cashin’ joint kin’ to the liquor store over on 8th street won’t cash my state checks no more cuz they’ze saying my credit ain’t [edited].

ME: Well, I understand your situation ma’am and I’m happy to help. If you can just pay the balance on the check, I’ll wave all the service fees for you. Would that help your situation?

HER: Why [edited], brother, that’d be real [edited] decent of ya. Serve you right too, eat them fees for pickin on a poor workin girl like me.

ME: Alright then, I’ll make the arrangements and send you out a confirmation. Have a lovely afternoon, ma’am.

Did I just make a deal with a hooker???