I miss the white pages ✏️ 🎤 🎵
I hereby plead with governments, universities, and commercial real estate developers: If you’re going to erect a public clock, please make sure it keeps time. Otherwise, you’re just littering our built environment with noble-looking embarrassments whose only effect is to remind us that everything is broken and most of us don’t care.
headlamp + summertime + living next to a large park → reading a book while meandering outdoors at night 🔦📚
I don’t usually like what Katherine Watt writes. But this illustration is dynamite good.
I enjoy watching my family do things I suspect other families do not but which I consider healthy. In this photo, all three of them are leaning out or about to lean out past the boardwalk rail in searching of jewelweed pods ready to pop.
It turns out the seeds are edible!
To our surprise and disappointment, Council voted 3-2 to reject the ordinance as written. That settles the matter until at least after the next election; to insist Council take the matter up again any earlier would be inconsiderate and likely rejected.
How they can go from a consensus agreement at the previous public hearing to keep the chicken ordinance alive, directing staff to make specific modifications, to a 3-2 vote at this public hearing to completely reject the ordinance, staff having made the very modifications they specified, is baffling.
I am very proud to walk town with my children. Among several reasons that came to mind this evening, Éa insisted we take this photo of this 150-year-old magnolia tree planted by Fred Waring, the northernmost species of magnolia—because she loves her friend whose middle name is Magnolia.
Childhood’s Gate Children’s Garden at the Penn State Arboretum is a wonderland. Thank you for building it.
But please tell me this sign is meant to be ironic.
For the second consecutive year, I’ve been referred to Chris Kiver by an outstanding member of the State College Choral Society to audition for the Orpheus Singers: Colleen emailed me today about it.
Other than the remarkable depth to which my telling her as an aside that I wasn’t going to sing with the Choral Society this season felt like a confession, the thing I found most remarkable about my emotional response to this message was how much it stirred up again my desires to be a specialist. To pick something, just one thing, and concentrate all my energies into mastering it. Choral singing, solo singing, pop singing, hootenannies, improving neighborhood walkability, improving neighborhood bikeability, building relationships in my neighborhood, front-end web development, sales, tweeting, music appreciation—the list of possibilities feels endless. However, nothing pulls my affections like singing, perhaps because it’s the one with which I have the longest history, the one for which I feel most guilty not having pursued.
But unless my soul changes, I need to consider the following: I want to do those other things. If I plunge into singing to the depth I feel like I want to, I will not be able to tweet, organize Houserville Social Club, engage civically, work on my house, listen through the classical repertoire, or any of the other activities I so enjoy. I would only be able to stand utter commitment to becoming a singer for so long before I’d bail in favor of my life as an enthusiastic generalist.
Walking is one of my favorite activities. That means this afternoon made my happy: I not only got to walk the sheep pastures with God and sing snippets of Delirious? numbers to Him, but also got to walk from Sunset Park to Pattee Library to Rec Hall and back—about one mile each way—with Sullivan and Éa, who enjoyed seeing the sights and climbing things as much as I enjoyed watching them enjoy them.
On our Saturday morning errands, feeling proudly countercultural, I suggested the kids walk ahead of me to Barnes & Noble while I returned spoons Carla had bought from Ross Dress for Less. Sullivan’s eyes widened with excitement at the prospect. So they did it, following the sidewalk as much as they could, as instructed.
In my perfect world, there would be sidewalks connecting Ross to Barnes & Noble, and it would not be extraordinary for a six-year-old to walk to a building three hundred feet away from his dad.
(The photos is from our walk back to the car together.)
A simple experiment in making friends (and thus a community): Let’s gather for a potluck dinner on the second and fourth Thursday evenings of each month.
Open to anyone living in Houserville, Bathgate Springs, Clover Highlands—anyone at all, really, but intended for folks for whom, say, Spring Creek Park is a walkable destination.
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured” (Kurt Vonnegut).
This write-up of mine describing the Houserville Social Club on the potluck sign-up sheet on SignUp Genius and the accompanying Vonnegut quote has taken on increasing value in my life recently. As if it really is my mission. Maybe it’s Robin Williams’ death and the admissions of depression that are being published everywhere in its wake that has helped galvanize it.
After an evening with the Houserville Social Club that included a LifeFlight helicopter takeoff, new friends Janine & Kimberly joining us at the table, Wengyi signing up for the email list, a game of cups (frickets) played heartily with Carla, Lara, and the kids, then more dowel/disc/cup fun with just the kids, I find further peace in my current station. I am a:
- lover of God,
- husband,
- father,
- brother,
- son,
- dilettante,
- DiamondBack Truck Covers desk jockey,
- church member,
- neighbor,
- community organizer,
- someday adopter of children in need,
- helper of the cause of the Gospel in the Maldives,
- prayer warrior,
- and patient, skilled, act-ive lover of anyone who happens to be around me at any time, regardless of socioeconomic class, IQ, or other human differentiator.
The list above is enough of an identity and set of pursuits to satisfy this hungry-for-meaning soul. I need do no other “great” things. If I fulfill my roles above with all my might (the specific, mutable ones subject to Your redirection), I shall be happy, and I shall not blink on Judgment Day.
More importantly, I shall no longer be subject to judge-and-second-guess-myself day, which used to happen, like, every day of my life but now wanes in frequency until it shall soon disappear completely.
And as for my doubts and questions, whether You are a restrictivist, an inclusivist, a universalist, or even a religious figment, my life will be best lived if I live it as though You are completely real. My prayer is that my doubts have three effects: More sympathy, less dogma, especially toward my children, and more action, since faith-as-action is much more important than faith-as-specific-credence to Inclusivist Yahweh, and Restrictivist Yahweh seems to prefer action as well.
I like Shardas. And FarmFest.
Carla: Are you ready for your [chickens] meeting tonight?
Scott: Yeah, it’s just a brainstorm and catch-up meeting.
Sullivan: Ketchup? Ketchup is for eggs. Ketchup? Ketchup is for eggs.
The sun woke up over Mount Nittany.
— Sullivan on a morning walk to the park