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Milk carton catapult

The enduring sound of this recession in my memories will be the barking of small dogs. The enduring image will be the devices I composed in my mind to launch small, light projectiles at them.

Due to bad timing and bad precognition, I quit my last full-time job right at the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007. I quit my part-time job the week Lehman Brothers collapsed, or the beginning of the Great Panic of 2008. Then came the Great Encore Presentation of 2009, during which I was doing nothing, followed by the Great Hangover of 2010, when I was bumping around in some temp jobs, which led to the Great Rehydration and Swearing to Never Do It Again of 2011, when they said things were getting better, but it was hard to notice. And now we seem to be on to the Great Getting On With Your Life of 2012, or at least I am -- now I have two part-time jobs that add up to 40 hours a week and I am applying for apartments.

Lots of people had housing problems during this time. Some had their homes foreclosed on, some got evicted. I went to live with 12 dogs. How these dogs came to be is not important; for the purposes of this essay, they simply exist and bark. They bark a lot. They bark when you come home, they bark when they’re hungry, they bark when they’re bored.

As a human, you’d probably like them to stop, and you’re inclined to give them a correction. There are some basic rules of dogs that they use to thwart you in this effort.

1. The three-second rule. If you want to correct a dog for negative behavior, you have to do it within three seconds of the dog’s actual transgression. After that, it’s meaningless, and does not build an association. If you come home and your front room is shredded, do absolutely nothing to the dog -- he has no idea that it happened.

2. Yappy dogs love attention, and seeing a human get up and come over to them is attention. They are pretty bad at telling the difference between good attention and bad attention, sort of like how teenage girls can’t tell the difference between confidence and arrogance, much to the disappointment of many a well-behaved freshman boy. (Off-topic, sorry.) Yelling at a dog is attention even if you’re saying “Shut the %*@! up!” In your meanest tone possible. You’re just barking at the dog. The author of the delightful blog Hyperbole and a Half does an excellent job of showing what it sounds like to a dog to be yelled at:


3. Smacking the dog, while tempting, is both wrong and will only encourage the dog to bark more as it warns friends and asks for help regarding the Big Scary Human.

4. Dogs also understand the three-second rule to a fashion. Since the universe is only three seconds long, they will do nothing wrong while the human is close enough to correct them within three seconds.

Several methods of correction are available within these constraints -- must happen within three seconds, must not equal attention, and must not involve actually hurting the dog -- however they’re not easy to accomplish on a regular basis.

First is the super soaker method. These things have a range of 30 to 40 feet, so you can keep it on your desk and squirt the dog when it barks. This also indulges another fantasy of something to do with a gun. Another, my favorite, is the milk carton method. Empty plastic milk cartons are light, good at flying, and loud when they land. Do this enough times and they’ll learn to behave just because the milk carton is sitting on the counter. (As an aside, when I was four years old, we got a dog named Popcorn and trained her with a milk carton. When Hurricane Gloria came through northern Virginia, an Enemy Milk Carton flew across our backyard and Popcorn went berserk.)

A third is to cause a distraction to the dog that makes them think about something other than the public service they’re performing by breaking up the boredom by barking.

Yet another, less effective method, is to ignore the dog. In my experience, dogs can sustain an I’m-bored barking soliloquy longer than a primary election. A side effect is that if this dog has anxiety issues, this can cause the dog to go from Bored Dog Mode to Abandoned Dog Mode, at which point they will engage either the Worn-Fan-Belt Sound Effect or worse, the Car-Wreck-in-Progress Sound Effect.

Given those rules and possibilities for correction, here are the devices that I fantasize about building.

Device No. 1: Milk-carton catapult. A spring loaded device that would toss a milk carton in to the dog run, landing on or near the dog and upsetting him, briefly engaging Submissive Dog Mode and building a negative association with barking. This would be a remotely controlled catapult so that it be set up in the garage (where six of the dogs live) and launched by pushing a button in the house. No yelling, no human coming out, just the Plastic Thing of Doom crashing on you.


Device No. 2: Sound-triangulating and image-recognition self-aiming water gun. With multiple dogs, you need a device with two or three microphones that can cause your gun to aim at the guilty bored dog, not the well-behaved one next to it. You need it to pick the right dog, and then actually aim at the dog’s present immediate location (hence the image-recognition) and then squirt the dog with a small burst of water.

Device No. 3: Dog spatula. When the dog is barking, the dog spatula will get under the dog’s feet and turn it over on its side, thus distracting it and breaking the recursive barking loop.

Device No. 4: Unpleasant noise generator and fence shaker. This will be a speaker that broadcasts sounds of large objects being dropped while simultaneously shaking the fence of the dog run back and forth.

Device No. 5. Dropping milk carton. One dog likes to go to the door and dig and beg to be let in. This will be a milk carton tied to the top of the door frame with a string coming through a hole in the wall. While the dog digs, the human unties the string, bonking the dog on the head.

Device No. 6: Large gerbil wheel. Design a six-foot-tall wheel that is clear, has a solid floor and has room for the dog to walk around when the wheel is not moving. When the dog barks, the wheel turns a little, requiring the dog to walk, and distracting him from Bored Barking Mode.

Device No. 7. Guided milk carton. For outside when the dog has freedom of movement. A puff of compressed air will launch the milk carton, which will have wings that are radio-controlled, much like the radio-controlled gliders that can be used at beaches with steady wind. A camera attached to an image-recognition computer will tell the glider how to stay on target, so if the dog moves, it’ll still be hit by the milk carton.


Device No. 8: (Dependent on future discoveries). After going to Alaska and studying the barks of wolves, I will come back with a recording of the Secret Growl that a mother wolf uses to tell her pups, “Shut up, you’re attracting grizzlies.” I will play this recording whenever bored barking starts up.

You may be thinking something else more constructive: Why not train the dogs and engage them in Useful Dog Mode, which will make them happier and less annoying, and involves far less engineering than these launchers and spinners? All true, but this falls in to the category of Tasks I Don’t Want. And, there are 12 of them... and when training requires an hour a day, I think you understand the problem.

The short of all this: I’m glad to be working again. Maybe I’ll start learning Chinese so I have somewhere to go for the next recession.

Career update: new part-time job

It’s time for a career update: Recently I started a new part-time job. This means that I now have two part-time jobs, both as the financial manager of a small non-profit organization. The new one is Hanford Challenge, an advocacy and education non-profit that focuses on the clean-up efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation here in Washington state, which was the site of industrial-scale plutonium from 1943 to 1989 for making nuclear weapons. The site needs to be cleaned up, a long, long, long process. The director of Hanford Challenge is a lawyer who advocates for Hanford workers who bring up safety concerns. The organization also pushes Congress to provide more independent oversight of Hanford.

Hanford Challenge’s office is in the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle, on the same street as the other office where I work, about a mile south of it. This means I work one place in the mornings, the other in the afternoons, and I walk during my lunch break. It’s pretty convenient, and I am now working a total of 40 hours a week.

The morning job, as I’ve mentioned before, is the Northwest Natural Resource Group, which certifies forest sustainability practices for small private landowners. We have a couple of foresters on staff who draw up tree harvest plans that are consistent with Forest Stewardship Council standards, and we get a fee for that. The organization also puts on events to educate landowners.

I’m the finance person for both organizations, which is a pretty good job, although I really hadn’t envisioned bookkeeping as my main occupation back when I was in graduate school. The job has taught me a new appreciation for a couple of financial controllers named Peter and Bob I’ve known at other organizations. They weren’t big fans of abstract questions in accounting, a field of discrete answers. I’ve started saying things like “That’s the kind of mushy stuff that drives me nuts,” when people want to change the budget in the middle of the month just to see what it would look like, or “Don’t use synonyms with your accountant,” when they use multiple names for the same account or grant.

 There’s plenty to learn, and I hope it’ll eventually get me in to some project management kind of work. What I’m looking for next is work that will give me experience specific to the program that the agency is working on – analyzing the efficiency of carbon credit sales, managing a project to sample soil at Hanford, or something like that. One of the hazards of being the finance person at an organization is that at your next job interview, you explain that you “just did the books,” which gets you another job “just doing the books,” but it doesn’t get in to any of that interesting stuff that non-profits do to make the world a better place.

The two jobs add up to enough to start doing risky things like paying rent, so Miri and I are looking at apartments now in Federal Way and Kent. We’re intending to remain a one-car family, so we’re putting a big emphasis on bus and train routes that go downtown. Miri still has two part-time jobs, one at the Point Defiance Zoo and the other at a veterinary clinic in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. Our baby is due in August, and she’s planning to take several months of maternity leave at that time, and from there, we’ll figure out how her hours work.

So, that’s the news!

The Shy Single Christian's Guide to Coffee Hour

The Boundless Webzine has published a new article that I've written entitled The Shy Single Christian's Guide to Coffee Hour. This is exciting! Tell people about it! Send links! Tell them to read my book!

A blogger interviewed me about my book!

Here's a link to an interview with me about my book, Heaven Help the Single Christian:

http://byztex.blogspot.com/2011/01/interview-with-author-of-heaven-help.html#more

And, if you're interested in buying the book, click here.

Promotional video for the book!

I have created a video promoting my new book, Heaven Help the Single Christian! Thank you to everyone who helped with it! Please forward the link to all your friends and help me pay the rent!\

Context for Choice

When Christians and unreligious people talk about Christianity, the topic that comes up most is freedom of choice. For me, as I wondered which church to join, and whether I should join at all, this was my central question – will I still have control over my own destiny? We have to think about freedom of choice, first, because it’s the defining characteristic of a human being. God gave us free will because He wants us to choose to be with Him – He does not compel our love, and is willing to allow us to reject Him. So often when something tragic happens, we ask “Why did God allow this to happen?” If God is all-powerful, and is all good, which He is, shouldn’t he be preventing us from having accidents, from getting attacked by criminals? The answer to this conundrum, hard as it is to accept, is that to stop all these bad things from happening, God would have to negate our free will, which would make us something that we are not – and He loves just as we are, and He wants us to love Him, as we are.

Secondly, we have to think about freedom of choice because it’s also the defining characteristic of an American – we love our freedom of choice both as regards religion (or non-religion as the case may be) and as regards our economic choices. Dutch sociologist Geert Herstede surveyed attitudes of people in countries across the world, finding Americans to be the most individualistic of all. (Great Britain and Australia were close behind as the rankings are available here.)

As Christians in America, we have to think about freedom of choice because it’s what most people have on their minds when they think about religion – whether they’re going to visit or avoid, respect or resist, love or withdraw. America is unique among industrial countries in that we both have a long tradition of religious freedom, and more people take advantage of the opportunity to choose a religion than other developed countries. In Western Europe and Japan, the favorite choice about religion is a non-choice – general disinterest. Here, however, 30 to 40 percent of the population still attends a weekly worship service. Researchers Robert Putnam and David Campbell in their recent book, American Grace, analyzed attitude surveys going back several decades and found that there has been quite a growth in Americans who claim “no religion” or “spiritual but not religious” in surveys since 1990, however, it would take a couple of centuries before the overall population became as secularized as Great Britain’s, where only 5-8 percent are regular service-goers. In our society of choosers, there is more interest in God, but people still care a great deal whether they are going to be controlled and judged, and how much freedom they will have to make choices.

As Christians, we sometimes get rather defensive about choice, looking at the church as a place to withdraw in our world of too many choices. Some of us like choose a church based on where we can be with other parents who are as strict with their children as we are, protecting them from immorality in television, teen magazines and the Internet. We expect the church to restrict our choices to protect us from a hostile outside world.

If, as I said, freedom of choice is what makes us human and what makes us American, it’s no surprise that unaffiliated people make an immediate U-turn when we talk about Christianity. They see it as a negation of choice, a place where they will not be allowed to be human or American. In similar manner to how we view the church as a fortress, they get very defensive about keeping the religious controllers out of their lives.
 

How many of us has had a conversation about our faith only to discover that we are having two conversations at once? We talk about Jesus Christ and the Incarnation and the Resurrection, and our friend is asking whether we dictate how members can vote in public elections, whether we let members watch the movies they want to see, and whether we send homosexual teenagers to special camps to “turn” them heterosexual. Every time I have this conversation, I end up saying “I don’t know” a whole lot because it’s so unrelated to what I usually think about.

Obviously there’s some disconnect between what we think people need to hear and what they care about when it comes to religion. We talk about how Jesus Christ saves us and improves our lives, and they defend their rights and try to keep all the nastiest elements of Christianity out of their lives, suspiciously wondering if all the nice stuff we say about Jesus is the sales pitch we use to trap them.

Choice then, is a specific topic that needs attention right at the beginning. We need to make clear that Christianity isn’t about dictating right choices to its followers; rather it provides the context for our many choices, and it tells us why the choices are important. Rarely do we get the right answer to a question in short form from Scripture or theology, but we do learn why we have to try as hard as we can to make the right choice.

The reason that our choices are important is simple – Jesus Christ has offered us the opportunity to dwell in heaven with Him. And, we hope, people also want to be in heaven with Him. Heaven was closed to us because of the separation between God and man caused by sin, and Jesus re-opened that path through Himself by becoming Man. By living as we lived, dying as we died, and being resurrected as we ought to be resurrected, He became one with us and gave us the opportunity to become one with Him, both by believing and following Him as a person, and by following His teachings.

Our choices, then, become the moment when we decide whether we want to take that opportunity. We aren’t Christians because Jesus provides the nicest moral and ethical code out of a group of equal world religions and philosophies, rather, Jesus provides our opportunity to be joined with God and live with Him for all eternity.

Christianity also provides us with a framework for our choices. The New Testament teaches us about eternal justice that will come in the age to come, which isn’t just an incentive for us to be good, but these teachings are there as a curb on our perverse human justice, which encourage us to requite injustice with misery, hurting those who hurt the weak.

The New Testament also teaches us that every person bears the image of God, which compels us to serve those who have nothing to do with us. We are commanded to love our enemies. We cannot curse at criminals. This is not because we’ve decided it’s rude, but because Jesus commands it. This choice is important because when we speak to them, we speak to God. When we decide how to treat those who hate us, it is the very same choice over whether we want to be joined to God in heaven.

It is true that becoming a Christian does mean giving up some choices, or at least some choices are strongly discouraged. If I told my wife to have an abortion, or if I divorced her, I would hear about this at church. I probably wouldn’t be allowed to go to Holy Communion for quite a while. Holy Communion is how we can be joined to God while we are here on Earth, and I would have to go through a lengthy process of repentance before I’d be able to get my full membership back at church. However, most of the choices we make in our lives aren’t so black and white as these – they aren’t such obvious moral issues, and Christianity provides us with the encouragement to take on these challenges and the framework to make good ones.

We also have disciplines within Christianity, which at first seem like restrictions upon our choices, which are there to help us get on the right path. The belief that we can be joined to God is not a change of opinion that we have in our minds all of a sudden, rather, it is a truth that has to be lived over a long period of time. We take on disciplines, such as prayer and fasting to humble our minds, souls and bodies so that we can accept these truths fully, and we take on these disciplines willingly. An interesting finding in another study by Sheena Iyengar cited in her book The Art of Choosing is that people in strict religions are actually happier than those in liberal ones. She interviewed 600 people from nine different religions, which she categorized as fundamentalist (Calvinism, Islam and Orthodox Judaism) conservative (Catholicism, Lutheranism, Methodism and Conservative Judaism) and liberal (Unitarianism and Reform Judaism). She had expected people whose choices were restricted to be unhappy because they couldn’t experience as much, but was surprised to find the opposite was true. “The presence of so many rules didn’t debilitate people; instead it seemed to empower them. Many of their choices were taken away, and yet they experienced a sense of control over their lives.” (Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing, New York: Twelve, 2010, p. 28) Iyengar goes on to describe her parents’ arranged marriage. If the restriction is accepted willingly, she argues, provides meaningful structure in the person’s life.

The Church, then, is the place where choices can be made meaningful, and this is what we can offer to modern humanity, awash in choices and living in a world where communications is losing its sense of context. Since the advent of television, each new medium that’s become available has been more immediate, more interactive, and more fragmentary than the previous one. We can communicate with anyone we want, which is a good thing, but as friends forward us pieces of wisdom, humor and news, it becomes more and more difficult to figure out who is speaking and why. With books, we could watch the tone and style of the author and editor as we turned the page to figure out their purpose, but Facebook, Twitter and its cadre of services are making knowledge, place and voice into relative concepts, negating what we call “context.”

In the Church, we can provide that context, that structure back into people’s lives, both with contemplative services that allow the soul to open rather than to bombard it, where truth is provided rather than opinions, and where our freedom of choice is not just allowed, but fulfilled, where choices are made meaningful. Christianity is the fulfillment of freedom of choice, and this is the fuller experience that we most need to show that we can provide to those who don’t see the use for religion.