You Don't See This Every Year

That would be snow falling outside our house, not a usual thing here in Central Texas.

And this afternoon (when I presciently went out to buy a coat) it was in the mid 70s.

Those Wicked, Wicked Corporations

On a lark, I went out with some young friends last night to catch a late showing of Transporter 3, which was about as much of a goofy/fun action movie as one would expect. While various chases and fights were fun to watch, the plot itself was one of those confections which implodes on the least scrutiny. Particularly interesting to me, however, was the role of the Evil Corporation.

You would think that the rabbit like timidity of office park culture would not provide much grist for the action movie mill. Not so in Transporter 3. When the American-based Eagle Corp. is in danger of having their request to dump eight cargo ships a year worth of toxic waste in Ukraine, they kidnap the Ukrainian prime minister's daughter and threaten to kill her if he doesn't sign their contract. This leads to lots of tense staring at the contract with pen in hand, and plenty of black Audi and Mercedes sedans speeding around the continent -- as well as the occasional shoot out.

You can, of course, picture how this would go.

[Interior: Eagle Corp. conference room where waste management directors are in conference.]

Evil Corporate Man One: Report on the Ukrainian waste management plans?

Evil Corporate Woman: Unfortunately the Ukrainian Prime Minister has decided this is the time to boost his environmental cred in the EU. He's broken off negotiations and is planning to give a speech to the EU denouncing environmental destruction and explaining the need to preserve the planet for his daughter's generation.

Evil Corporate Man One: This kind of obstacle makes me feel like using non-board-room language. I'm open to creative suggestions.

Evil Corporate Man Two: The Prime Minister's daughter is a big player on the party scenes. Let's drug her, rig her with an explosive bracelet, and send her out across Europe in a fancy black car with an underworld delivery man while telling her father that he'll never see her again unless he signs a contract allowing us to dump even more waste than originally planned.

Evil Corporate Man One: That sounds like a reasonable suggestion. Any objections?

Evil Corporate Woman: I'd like to run your underworld driver choice by HR to make sure that they agree we're engaging in fair hiring practices. And of course you'll need to send the revised contract over to legal for review.

Evil Corporate Man One: I'll make a note of those action items. Evil Man Two, could you run our new scenario by the folks in PR to make sure they don't see any corporate image problems resulting from kidnapping and intimidation. Evil Woman, could you contact our negotiation team and ask if threatening the PM's daughter would result in difficulties in future negotiations?

Evil Corporate Man Two & Evil Corporate Woman: Got it.

Evil Corporate Man One: All right. Thanks for putting some good, outside-the-box thinking into this, team. I'm glad to see you're all living up to corporate value number three: dealing with ambiguity. That's all for today. I'm giving the last five minutes of our meeting back. Remember that year end reviews are coming up and you'll want to update the results in your performance plans. We can discuss that in our one-on-ones next week.

I Remember MrsDarwin: Can't Trust This! Edition

Happy birthday to me!

Turns out that many historic events have transpired on December 5, but the other 30-year contender isn't really an upper:

1978 - The Soviet Union signs a "friendship treaty" with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Boo to that, but hurray for the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition! And the 217th anniversary of the death of Mozart!

And now comes the part you've all been waiting for: our annual installment of I Remember MrsDarwin.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL MEMORY OF YOU AND ME.

It can be anything you want--good or bad--BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.

When you're finished, post this paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you.

Want to know how it's done? Check out the egregious falsehoods from years past:
I Remember MrsDarwin 2007
I Remember MrsDarwin 2006
I Remember MrsDarwin 2005

(Confidential to Big Tex: I'm old but you're older. Happy birthday, you big lug!)

Cannibalism?

Some may recall that the eateries and drinkeries around my workplace have all been going bust -- or at least bust-themed.

It has now become evident that this slippery slope goes down much further than previously imagined. Driving past Twin Peaks today at lunch time I noticed they had a big sign up reading, "Hot woman, cold beer. What else do you need?"

If that initial noun had been plural, we might have comforted ourselves by imagining that they were simply complimenting the appearance of their wait staff, but I think that with the singular noun we must conclude that the path from treating a woman like a piece of meat to serving her up as a piece of meat must be shorter than any of us had realized.

Tragic, isn't it. Drumstick, anyone?

What He Said

I'm with Dale Price on this one.

One of my co-workers, an immigrant from northern India, is a Jain. He eats no meat, including fish and any other animal. He once rescued a roach I was about to kill in the office and took it outside.

But he supports the death penalty, because although the terrorist attack in Mumbai last week were unique in scale and in happening in one of India's major financial centers, they're hardly unique in recent Indian history. I think one figure I read was that more than 4000 Indians have been killed in terrorist attacks since 2001.

When one of my American-born liberal co-workers asked him how he could be so emphatic on preserving life in all other cases, but support the death penalty he replied, "When someone comes into your village, and enters your house, and kills everyone in your family because they do not like your race, or they do not like you faith, they have crossed a line."

While I accept the wisdom of our Church's leaders that the death penalty is seldom needed in modern society -- but seldom is not never. If any of the perpetrators of last week's terror attacks in Mumbai failed to be escorted off this mortal coil by the Indian commandoes who sought to rescue their hostages, I could certainly find it in me to hope that they receive a short trial and a long rope.

The myth of "What's one more?"

Jumping off Darwin's post about whether "planning" is a dirty word: I've been thinking a lot lately about the myth of "What's one more?"

Some of you may have invoked this phrase as conversational protection. Someone makes a comment about the number of kids you have (or the one you're expecting), and you smile cheerfully and say, "Well, at this point, what's one more?" Short and pithy, this defense is intended to show that you're open to life, children are great, and that three aren't that much more difficult than two, four aren't that much more difficult than three, etc.

The trouble is, it's not exactly true. Here at chez Darwin, we're finding that four is a lot more than three. Baby's a treat; he's not that demanding (though he likes to be held most of the time) and he's at that delightfully gurgly three-month stage. But the addition of a baby changes the dynamic of the household, and highlights the behaviors of the under-7 crowd that are now more difficult to manage. It seemed like we were just getting to a point where everything was becoming manageable, but throw a newborn who needs the constant attention of one adult into the mix and suddenly all the parameters have shifted to some unknown point.

There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that -- except that since large families run against the cultural paradigm, it puts those parents into a constant propagandizing mode. In an arena in which most (though not all) families are consciously limited, the decision not to limit your family (or even proclaim a particular number as "it") stands out. Catholic parents don't want to seem as if we're participating in a contraceptive or limiting mentality, and so reflexively spin our answers to intrusive questions as positively as possible. (My current response to the "Are you done?" question is, "But every boy needs a brother!")

The truth is that families who have many children close together are taking the harder path. I don't use the phrase "choose", since not all parents who have children close together necessarily plan to do so. (We certainly didn't plan to have our first two so close.) Frankly, four seems as much as I can handle right now, though I expect that in the future I'll feel differently. For now, though, one more is an awful lot, and I won't make excuses for that-- in this friendly forum, anyway.

Is "Planned" a Dirty Word for Catholics?

Taking a quiet Saturday morning to catch up on reading the newspaper, I was perusing a WSJ article on the lost virtue of prudence in our modern American society when I came across this jarring note:

The puzzling thing is that, under normal circumstances, our Americanus prudens should be flourishing. By looking ahead and exercising self-control, these unassuming homebodies tend to do well in school, form solid families and make lots of money -- which they compulsively save, tucking it away in banks or mutual funds (once-sturdy institutions recently found by scientists to be hollow). The prudent have only the children they can afford -- prudential parenthood is inevitably planned -- but these offspring tend to thrive thanks to a stable home environment in which education is emphasized.

This threw me because the most financially prudent people I know at work are those with single incomes and large families -- while the most imprudent are generally DINKs who take several packaged vacations a year and insist that pet insurance is so expensive on their treasured dogs that they can't imagine how they could possibly afford to have children on a combined income of a mere 200k+ a year.

And yet, as I think about it, it's not that I think prudence plays no role in one's decisions about having children, but rather that I have a strong immediate reaction against ever discussing having a child as being "planned" or otherwise with anyone other than other committed Catholics I already know to share my beliefs about the nature of sexuality and marriage.

By chance I'd had a conversation with a young co-worker a few days before that had thrown this into relief for me.

Coworker (who had just been talking about how her "clock was ticking" but her boyfriend seemed in no hurry to propose): "I can't believe you've got four kids already. Are you guys done?"

Darwin: "Oh, I don't know. Probably not."

Coworker: "Oh my gosh! How many are you going to have?"

Darwin: "We'll just have to see. My wife is the oldest of six, so she's hoping to have a large family."

Coworker: "Are you guys Catholic or something?"

Darwin: "Well, yes."

Coworker: "Oh, okay. That makes sense. I mean, if you think God says you'll go to hell if you use birth control, that would explain having a lot of kids."

Darwin: "Ummmmm..."

Coworker: "I mean, I want to have a large family. But for me, large is four kids. I guess for you guys it's just however many children God sends?"

[pause followed by topic change]

I found myself unable to quickly come up with answers near the end of this conversation because of two conflicting things that I wanted to express yet couldn't think how to reconcile without making the conversation much more long and personal than I would have liked. On the one hand, "just however many children God sends" is not, I think, a very accurate description of married Catholic life as we know it in our family. Certainly, there is an element of being open to whatever happens. The use of NFP is not always exact (or easy), and one can be surprised. And yet, I think there is a valid part for prudence to play for a Catholic married couple. There are serious considerations that a married couple takes into account in regards to finances, the wife's health, and their ability to deal with the kids they already have well. None of this means that one imagines oneself to be in complete control of the situation, but one does try hard (and usually successfully) to do what is best for the family in "planning" when to get pregnant and when to wait.

Not only does "just however many children God sends" not accurately describe the experience of being a Catholic married couple (or our experience, at any rate) but an additional concern is that it doesn't produce a very attractive view of what that Church has to say. (And while many people know that traditional Catholics don't use birth control, few in the outside culture seem to know that modern NFP exists and works.) The teaching, it seems to me, is not at all that one must do no planning and simply wait to see how many children appear, but rather that sex and procreation and intimately connected and that in order to avoid having children one must forgo sex at certain times.

And yet explaining all this, and how it works, is not something that I find myself eager to do with a female co-worker in what started out is a casual cube-to-cube conversation.

"Planning" one's children is something which I (and I think many orthodox Catholics) strongly associate with the contraceptive culture and with explamations of, "Oh my gosh, I couldn't possibly have another. Two is so hard!" And so when asked these questions I generally only feel comfortable with saying something like, "You never know" or "It could happen". Because the only other option involves explaining far more about married Catholic sexuality than I'd really like. And yet, I fear that this inability to discuss the Catholic approach to "planning" (out of hesitation to get into lots of messy details of how NFP works) makes it all the more difficult to spread our understanding of marriage and sexuality to the wider culture. An understanding which society could probably use to hear a bit about.