Three Good Things for Sunday, March 3rd

Another gloriously warm day, perfect for several bike rides. Lucas loves his new hand-me-down bike, declaring it his favorite bike ever. We went on an afternoon ride around Vilas Park, and the wind was so strong that he was riding at a slant. A good day, and a long day, and I'm bushed so here, briefly, are today's good things:

1. Our neighbors who have repurposed their Halloween lighting scheme into a whole lifestyle.

2. The Wisconsin State Capitol.

I know that some think it's a boring and trite copy of the national Capitol, but I don't care, I love it and catching a glimpse of it makes me feel hopeful and at home. And I love experiencing it in unusual ways, like this reflection in the office building windows near Wonder State Coffee.

3. This enthusiastic mural inside A La Brasa, on Broom St. The torta I ordered was monumental, easily enough for dinner and today's lunch, and the horchata was great - not too sweet, and well seasoned.

Comments

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to...

Suspicious? What month is it?

So I had a great post written on questions of agency and identity as explored through Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and High Fidelity (I focussed more on the film by Stephen Frears than on the original Nick Hornby book), and it mysteriously disappeared. I, of course, blame the government . The crux of my post was that letting outside events and relationships with other people shape your life is fundamentally selfish , and that each of us bears responsibility for claiming our own agency . One of my favorite lines from Richard Linklater's Waking Life is an offhanded remark by a passerby , late in the movie, who tells the nameless protagonist (played by Wiley Wiggins ) "As the pattern becomes more complex , it is no longer sufficient to be swept along," or something like the same. The patterns are becoming more complex, and we face peril if we are satisfied with passivity. But, like I said, that post got erased, so here's a BMW z3 Coupe, ...

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