Jason Coleman

Althaea Officinalis shares a first-person account of making ends meet as a single mom. It makes me think and feel so many different things that I can’t sort them into a sentence here.

Tequila Mockingbird is such a great name for a blog personality that I just had to point it out.

I can’t speak for everybody, but I have layers that I put on and take off based on the social situation I find myself in. When I’m by myself I can let my thoughts flow freely around any topic: why I haven’t gone to see “The Passion of the Christ” yet or what I think about same-sex marriage, etc.

If my wife is with me I will add a very thin layer that is designed to filter my outbound opinions. The point of the layer is to ensure that my thoughts are communicated clearly but in a way that won’t cause marital discord.

Put me in a public place where my conversation may be overheard — like a store or a restaurant — and another layer is added to scrub anything that might be interpreted as rude or inflammatory by others. This may be as simple as keeping my potty mouth in check while children are around or as complex as avoiding the use of gender-specific pronouns when replying to someone whose yellow clad, androgynous-looking child has been brought to my attention. This layer still has as its goal the clear communication of the ideas filtered through it, but it will also ensure that certain topics are avoided until more privacy is available.

Finally, put me in church or any other place where I assume that everyone around me holds a given set of social and political views and I’ll add a final layer to keep anything I say from conflicting with these “acceptable” positions. This is mostly an expedient. I assume that I know your opinion, I don’t care to explain mine, so let’s just keep our conversation paper thin and puddle shallow and get through all of our interactions with as little friction as possible. That after all is the nub of civility, right?

The purpose of this final layer in not the clear communication of my thoughts. This layer ensures easy headway through the crowd. This layer answers the question, “How are you?” with the pat answer, “I’m fine, and you?” I may not be fine but I’m not going to tell you about it here. You probably asked the question just to be polite anyway. My pat answer is polite too.

So now you know about my layered personality: my social situation determines the amount of variance between what I think and what I say. While I would never filter my opinion so radically that I end up lying about what I think, I may filter my words so carefully that you’d never have reason to suspect that my opinion is different than the pervasive “acceptable” view. I’m drawing a distinction here between the intention to deceive and the willingness — or possibly even the desire — to be incorrectly perceived.

When Jesus tells the parable of the talents, it’s a shame that the word for the ancient currency, the talent, is the same as a word we use to indicate a special ability. His illustration went to the lowest common denominator: we all handle money. We work to earn it, we buy food, we pay bills, we save for the future. Everyone who manages to sustain their existence does so by the use of money. But in the english translation of the parable we read about “talents” and are tempted to think that Jesus is talking about a chosen few receiving some special skills that they’re supposed to use for incredible returns. This isn’t how we should read it. Jesus isn’t telling us to be faithful and productive with the few but extraordinary things that God has given us, he is telling us to be faithful and productive with the many but mundane things God has given us.

Can you see? Watch out for others. Can you speak? Then speak up. If you are strong, work hard; if you are weak, work some.

In the parable the productive servants weren’t shown more favoritism based on who produced more. Instead the servant who was given little and did nothing with it was rebuked. The parable isn’t about extraordinary abilities, but what we produce with the abilities that everybody has.

This week I’ve been studying the parable of the Good Samaritan. (Luke 10:29-37)

Today I left my lane to drive around a homeless guy because I was too impatient to wait for him to finish crossing. I was leaving a shopping center, he was crossing my turn-only lane. He looked about 60 years old; he was stooped over in the old-age, sore back sort of way which left him looking straight at the ground; he shuffled at about 2 feet every 10 seconds. The cars in front of me started driving around him instead of just waiting. I did too.

Stop and wait for him to cross so my van stays between him and any impatient drivers behind me? No.

Roll down my window and ask, “Sir, can I help you?” No.

Get out of my van, take him by the arm and help him up the curb? Of course not.

I drove around him.

In lots of the spam that I get, the body of the email is filled with random nonsense so that the email will not match any spam-identification patterns used by spam filters. If you skim through such a stream of random words you can sometimes find something interesting, such as “Christian angry compassionate.”

Mull that one over. I like it. I don’t think it describes me per se but I know some people who could be described this way. Generally I’d say it seems to apply to some of my politically active Christian friends.

And my personal 3-word description for what motivates my politics right now? Probably something akin to “Christian dismay abrogate.”

Is there a medical term for dying in your sleep? Terminal sleepiness. Relaxation expiration. Nocturnal necrosis. Rigor mortis repose.

It’s been about a month and a half since I’ve added anything to this blog. The beginning of that period of inactivity coincided with the birth of our second child, Callie. A shift in the normal schedule occurred whereby the time formerly used for sleeping was devoted to cooing and bouncing and soothing the baby, and the time formerly used for blogging suddenly became time for a nap.

I have spent time working on the website during my absense from blogging. You can find the fruits of those labors in the new version of our photo gallery. (Not to be mistaken with the NUDE version of our photo gallery!) I’ve migrated all the images from the old to the new, but haven’t finished — in fact have barely begun — migrating the comments that go with each picture. I’ll eventually update all the links on the site to point to the new gallery instead of the old.

I’ve also begun a family video project that probably won’t be available online, but I can at least talk about it here. I’ve had a video camera for about a year now, having talked my wife into the idea that we’d want video of Cora’s first words and first steps and — if late night infomercials are any clue — of her first “gone wild” scene. And it worked out okay: I’ve got tapes of the first words and steps. The problem is that this footage isn’t very consistent: I’ll get on a video kick for a couple of days and shoot lots of stuff — Cora eating, running, sliding, sleeping — and then put the camera down again for weeks or more. I end up with tapes that, upon playback, seem like I’m sitting through absurdly long sections of nothing interesting in order to get to the couple minutes of footage that I was imagining when I bought the camera.

So I’ve decided to change my goal. Instead of trying to record “big” events in the lives of our girls that I think we’ll want to play back, I’m going to record events for a monthly family movie. Whatever footage I get for the month will be dumped to the computer, whittled down to what’s interesting, given titles and scene transitions, and then burned to DVD.

Changing the goal from capturing life changing events to capturing some of what was going on at our house in November 2003 will satisfy the desires that led me to get the camera in the first place. When Callie starts talking, I may not get her first words — at least not in the sense that I have 20 minutes of tape showing me trying to coax Cora into saying “daddy” — but I’ll at least get footage of her during the first month that she was speaking. In 10 years that’ll be close enough to the actual event (and far enough from the current reality) to be satisfying. Also, by adding the additional step of selecting the best footage from each month I’ll solve the consistency problems I’m currently having with subject and pacing.

We’ll see how it works. I’m going to officially start in December. That’ll give me Cora singing her first carols and Callie having her first Christmas. I’ll spend the rest of November practicing my video editing and DVD technique on the countless hours of footage I have from the past year.

Here’s an excerpt from the poem April Day in November, Edinburgh by Norman MacCaig. This poem arrived by email today and seems very appropriate with the gusty winds we’ve had turning homeless leaves into a colorful, energetic parade.

For gaiety’s funfair whirls

in the gray squares. Energy

sends volts from suburb to suburb.


	
And April, gay trespasser,

dances the dark streets of November,

Pied Piper leading a procession

of the coloured dreams of summer.

Fallen leaves as the coloured dreams of summer. Beautiful.