All About Her

You know those people who hate when anyone makes a fuss over their birthday? They try to let it pass unnoticed, reject any suggestion that something should be done to commemorate their special day, act sheepish if they're found out.

I do not understand those people at all. I believe in the Birthday Month approach, wherein anything you do in the thirty days bracketing the anniversary of your birth can and should be rationalized as a celebration. So you won't be surprised when I publicly declare that tomorrow is my birthday.

You may be surprised when I say that I'm voluntarily not celebrating it. 

My oldest daughter, along with 17 other kids from our church, is being confirmed tomorrow. The program that our church pioneered for confirmation, the sacrament by which a child becomes an adult in the eyes of the church, is called Confirm Not Conform (CnC) and is now nationally syndicated. Starting last September, the kids began meeting 2-3 times/month to talk with clergy and lay leaders about various aspects of Christianity, their own spirituality, and their personal values. Field trips to various area houses of worship were mandatory, as were stints at a soup kitchen and food bank.

Each child was assigned a mentor who took a special interest in their progress, encouraging them and helping them along with what was a significant time commitment. Throughout the experience, the kids are supported in the journey and reminded that it is 100% their choice whether or not they actually choose to get confirmed at the end of it. It is designed to leave them with a lifelong framework for evaluating spiritual and moral choices.

Sounds great, right? But it's been much harder than I anticipated, when I decreed last summer that my daughter would have to do CnC this year. Much as she likes the CnC program and adores her mentor, the schedule has required my daughter to miss her ballet class every other week, for 9 months. You and I, grownups that we are, understand that  in the grand scheme of things fifteen missed ballet classes are not earth-shattering. But you and I are not 13 year old girls who really love ballet. 

Every other Wednesday, same fight. "I'm going, because I HAVE to go. Because you are MAKING me do it." Dueling eye rolls.

"I am MAKING you do it so that you will have something priceless to carry with you, your whole life - an understanding of the values that are important to you." Teeth grinding glare, hands on hips.

"BALLET is what's important to me!" Slam, slam, stomp, stomp. 

Every Wednesday I almost give up. She's got justification; I'm pretty convinced her repeated absences cost her a role or two during  last December's production of The Nutcracker. But having a solid spiritual grounding has been an invaluable help during troubled times in my own life. So I stubbornly hold on to the threat of mothers everywhere: "You'll thank me for this one day!"

But what do I know? You really have to wait until they're 35 or so to see the results of your parenting experiment. Even then - how much of it is because of the way you parented? And how much is due to the self-determining child who pushed back when Mom and Dad went too far? I'm thinking of that eighth year of piano study over which I fought with my parents. They eventually agreed to let me quit, and I went on to other activities like student council and writing for the school paper that felt much more relevant.

At any rate, that's why I am gladly making tomorrow - and today's video -  be all about her.  The video shows the Kirov Ballet dancing the Mazurka from Coppelia, the dance that my daughter and her younger sister will be performing with the Oakland Ballet School in June (and for which she has had to miss three rehearsals this week while practicing for confirmation.)

Giving my birthday over to celebrate her seems like the least I can do in exchange for her perseverance in seeing this through.

SpongeBob's Teachings on Corporate Lies

I am a lousy church school teacher. Having regarded my formative years as an Episcopalian as more of a social event than anything else - some of my best school friends attended the same church, so most of the praying that went on in class was over tests and who would ask who out for Senior Ball. I never read the Bible or anything Jesus-y like that.

Still, it taught me the benefit of taking part of a faith community, and I definitely buy into the whole "love thy neighbor" message. So when the call went out for church school teachers for the 4th,5th, and 6th graders at church recently, I signed on, breathing a sigh of relief when an email told me that our entire curriculum would be based on SpongeBob Square Pants.

It's clever, really. Our church school leader selects a Sponge Bob episode for the kids to watch, and develops with questions that tie it back to key teachings - "How might SpongeBob have been a better neighbor to Squidward? What does Jesus say about the way we treat our neighbors?" type of thing. Lively discussions ensue, often with sidebars on farting and bodily fluids. It's all good - the kids want to come back.

Recently, though, I got to class and the DvD for the week was missing. Faced with a roomful of staring kids who were moments away from stampeding back to Coffee Hour,  I said "I know! We'll pop in a random episode and you'll tell me what the spiritual message is!" In the episode, SpongeBob drew a little squiggle with a magic pencil, which quickly became a Zombie  2-dimensional SpongeBob wreaking havoc all over Bikini Bottom. Horrified at what he's wrought, it become SpongeBob's job to capture and erase the squiggle before it does any permanent damage.

All of which is a very, very long way to say that even SpongeBob, and the kids in my class, know that a lie can careen out of the liar's control and do terrible collateral damage.  Which is why I'm so pissed off to read columnist Kathleen Pender's piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today about how, exactly, U.S. corporations like GE and Cisco avoid paying a penny of tax to the federal government, even when they're raking in billions of dollars in profits. It involves a shell game of hiding profits offshore, using techniques like "the double Irish" and "the Dutch sandwich" (mmm, lunch.)

 In 2004, the government gave major corporations a one-time tax holiday to repatriate their foreign profits at an effective tax rate of 5.25% (which ended up being closer to 3.7% after foreign tax credits.) The idea was that these cut-rate foreign profits would be used by the companies to boost investments in R&D and training in the US and create jobs. But a study from National Bureau of Economic Research found that not only did that NOT happen, but that "a $1 increase in repatriations was associated with an increase of almost $1 in payouts to shareholders." Furthermore, as Pender reports, "A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said that companies including Hewlett-Packard, Pfizer, Ford, Merck and Honeywell announced large layoffs shortly after repatriating funds."

In short, these corporations are lying about their obligations, and getting away with it. Love they neighbor (and pay your fair share) be damned.

Guess what? My biggest client is a UK-based publishing company that pays me in British pounds. As such, they are not required to file a W-9 for me; it's up to me alone to report that income to the US government and pay taxes on it. 

It would be easy for me to not do that, and personally lucrative. Instead I track every penny of those payments, report them to the government, and pay taxes on them. You know why? Because I find it exhausting to even contemplate the web of self-delusion it would take to convince myself that doing the wrong thing is right.* I know these corporations may seem faceless, but there are actual human beings running them. 

How they sleep at night is a Holy Mystery, perhaps even beyond SpongeBob's ken.

*Yes, I recently wrote about the white lies I tell my kids. And now they know it's not the cleaning man's fault their things are missing, and I'm paying big time.

Purely musical

Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Carnival - all the eating, drinking, and partying came to a head on Tuesday night, in a big blowout before Ash Wednesday and Lent. Even if you're not Christian, there's something appealing around rolling around in your own appetites and urges for awhile, assured that a hard stop followed by a finite period of asceticism will wipe your transgressions clean and help you fit back into your pants. What's wrong with eating that whole box of Do-Si-Dos that the Girl Scouts dropped off, when three days later I'll only be eating kale?

As I am a great maker of resolutions and clean-wiper of slates, I look forward to Lent. As a kid, the quest to figure out what exactly I would do without for 40 days took up a lot of time in the weeks approaching Ash Wednesday. Would it be easier to give up chocolate or ice cream, or would my parents fall for it if I gave up cleaning my room? (Answer: no, and to my children: don't bother.)

My next door neighbor and best friend was a parochial school student and we spent afternoons lying on the yellow rug in my bedroom comparing religious requirements related to Lent so that we could cherry-pick the least onerous. Mary Beth had to eat fish on Fridays, but assured me that Catholicism let you off the hook on Sundays from whatever it was you'd given up, so you could fill up on chocolate or ice cream or cookies.  (And it is true that if you count Sundays between now and Easter, there are 46 days. Ain't nothing in the Bible about Jesus in the wilderness for 46 days. It specifically says 40.) Our Episcopal church was ok with the Friday meat, but we ate soup on Wednesdays and collected pennies for the poor. 

One year when I was about ten, our groovy hippie youth minister reminded us that you don't just have to give something up for Lent, probably because he realized that abstaining from Pop Tarts for six weeks didn't really bring his youthful charges closer to meaningful spirituality.  "Better you should take something on," he said. "Start to do something you've been meaning to do."

Ever since, that's my battle cry at Lent - taking on habits like "If it occurs to you to donate money to a charity, do it before you can change your mind," or "spend five minutes meditating before you start work every day." The discipline of taking on something new for 40 days has helped me to clear away the excuses and distractions, and creates new, intentional habits. This year my Lenten resolution is to take on a "device-free" period for a few hours every day - no smartphones, iPads, and laptops- so I can be more in the moment with my family. It's going to get very 2004 all up in here.

Speaking of simplifying, a few weeks ago we had the chance to see Nora Jane Struthers play a house concert at the lovely home of our friends Jonathan and Tiffany, and as funny, fresh, and musically talented as she is, what struck me most was the purity of Nora Jane's voice. No amplification, no fancy Xtina vocal embellishments, no dance moves. Just strong, clear, honest singing, like here in "Greenbriar County."

Sometimes all you really want is to focus on the basics, and save the Pop Tarts for another time. Here's to a weekend of good intentions, friends -