Real Joe

We’re heading to Lake Superior this weekend for a little more adventurous geocaching in the Duluth area while we take in the fall colors. I doubt the colors will be this good

because of the drought we’ve had this year. But no matter… we’ll take what we get.

Lake Superior can be more than a tourist destination for me. The dozens of trips I’ve made there as a kid growing up, as a teen on my own, with my wife while we were dating, and then with all our kids as they grew up have collectively carved a special place in my psyche. There’s a spiritual element now when I go, or at least a potential one, depending on what I’m doing there. I won’t have much time for solitude or reflection on this trip, but that’s okay. I’ll just be grateful for the recreation with my wife and daughter, plus whatever sweet memories get triggered.

Tomorrow is the 150th anniversary of St. Peter’s Church in Mendota, MN.

My family belonged to the parish while I was growing up and I went to its Catholic school from 5th through 8th grade. My mother was a teacher there for many years and is still a member of the church.

This StarTribune article today on the celebration features the current pastor, Kevin Clinton, a guy who was a year ahead of me in the seminary, both Nazareth Hall and St. John Vianney.

I have mostly fond memories of the church and school, even though we had to go to Mass every day, memorize the Catechism, and follow silly rules like no talking at lunch. The nuns (Sisters of the Precious Blood) weren’t the vicious type. And the priests were okay — no evildoers that I know of.

Now that I think about it, I think the small, intimate nature of that school and church community played a part in my getting involved in the launching of Prairie Creek Community School (now a charter school) back in the early 80s when our boys were starting school. The big local public elementary schools were foreign to me, and my wife and I wanted something different for our kids. This influence continues. This year, my daughter is attending the new ArtTech High School here in Northfield, also a charter school and small — about 100 kids.

Utne’s Web Watch has a blurb on the Sexiest Movie Scenes Without Sex by Leo Schlink. The link to the original article is broken but here’s the working link.

It’s all part of Utne’s Sep/Oct cover story, Unleash Your Erotic Intelligence.

“Everybody’s not doing it. That’s the word from Newsweek, The Atlantic, and other trend watchers: Couples are having less sex these days than even in the famously uptight ’50s. Why? Busy, exhausting lives is the easy answer. But how Americans view eroticism in the wake of recent sexual and social revolutions may be an even bigger factor, according to a growing number of researchers and social observers. — The Editors”

The lead story is online: In search of Erotic Intelligence: Reconciling our desire for comfortable domesticity and hot sex by Esther Perel, Psychotherapy Networker. (The other articles require an online subscription.)

Thanks to Tyson (one of my kids) for pointing me to this Washington Post article yesterday:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson prayed on his Christian Broadcasting Network, based in Virginia Beach, that Isabel would turn from the coast. He asked God to put a “wall of protection” around Virginia Beach and the East Coast. “In the name of Jesus, we reach out our hand in faith and we command that storm to cease its forward motion to the north and to turn and to go out into the sea,” Robertson prayed on “The 700 Club.”

My prediction: no matter what the storm does, he and many other like-minded ministers, will “thank God that the storm didn’t do more damage” or that “no lives were lost” or that “more lives weren’t lost.”

In this week’s Time: Real Men Get The Blues: Depression is twice as common among women as men, but it may be the guys who suffer most.

Often just as effective as any drug is cognitive therapy, a form of the talking cure that teaches depressives to reframe their view of the world, questioning the catastrophic or fatalistic spin they put on otherwise innocuous events. The two approaches — medication and therapy — work especially well together.

The Time piece doesn’t explain why the two approaches are often equally effective, but here’s a site with an explanation:

“… our brains are physically altered by what we experience and thus learn. It is as if the chips in your computer were actually rewired somewhat every time you ran a program. In brains, the software is the hardware is the software. (Computer geek-speak for brains: “squishware.”) This helps explain, for instance, how both drugs and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) can not only relieve depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) — they both have been shown in PET scans to have very similar effects on patients’ brains! (Trivial point: CBT for depression and OCD usually produces more lasting results than drug treatment, i.e., it carries lower risk of relapse.)”

I’ve never been depressed that I know of, but being aware of my mistaken ideas/dumb-fuck thinking and then reframing them has made (and continues to make) a huge difference in my daily life. So cognitive therapy ain’t just for big problems, IMHO.

A footnote to earlier posts (here and here) re: married men visiting strip clubs: Lap dancing banned in Los Angeles: “The City Council has voted to ban lap dances and all other physical contact between entertainers and customers at strip clubs, bikini bars and adult bookstores. A “no-touch” rule would require dancers to remain at least six feet from customers – even when dancers are tipped.”

Seems like a good idea to me.

My wife and I went geocaching for several hours last weekend. On the last hunt of the day (covered bridge park near Zumbrota), we met three delightful local kids on the trail (Jeffrey, Crystal, and Cassie) and they asked to join us on the hike back to the cache.

I met and fell in love with my wife when we were both working with troubled kids at St. Joseph’s Home for Children in Minneapolis back in the early 70s. Among the various reasons I was attracted to her was her magnetism with kids: she delighted in them and they in her. And I saw it all over again on this little geocaching jaunt. The kids were just mesmerized by her. And I loved watching it unfold. I’m a lucky guy.

My kids and I took my mother out for pizza this week to celebrate her 80th birthday.

It went okay but it pisses me off that I let myself briefly turn into a teenager once again.

I can’t exactly remember what triggered it, but I told her about a scene from a Sopranos DVD that my wife and I just watched. Tony and his wife Carmela host a reception at their house after their son Anthony’s Confirmation ceremony. They catch him smoking dope in the garage with a couple of friends. Carmela screams at the kid: “Can’t you be a good Catholic for 15 fucking minutes?!”

At some level, I knew both the swearing and the poke at Catholicism would upset my mother… and it did, though to her credit, not very much and only momentarily.

I have to get better at how I draw my boundaries with her. I know how, but unless I’m vigilant, I relapse.

I’m experimenting using Google’s AdSense service. They give you code to place on your site and it generates context-sensitive text ads automatically. When people click through to the ad’s website, you earn varying amounts of money.

I have the option of filtering out sites it selects that I don’t like. I’ve discovered that it’s reading the text of the weblog, since one set of ads I’ve noticed is related to what I posted here. Which ain’t bad, but I’m trying to fine tune it. (BTW, I’ve edited this post to remove references to the ads that I’ve removed, since Google sees that text and generates ads for it.)

Real Live Preacher tells a story about his wife’s love for him: “In the days when J. and I were engaged, she once answered the door of her apartment with a banana in her hand. Understand that this woman hates bananas with a religious zeal. The smell of a banana makes her skin crawl, and one bite makes her gag. She was in a very silly mood that night….”