How To Read More Books When You Have A Million Kids

...or just four kids.  

If there is one thing I think all moms universally long for (besides babies who sleep through the night and a cyberoptic forehead readout that tells you the optimal way to raise your particular child) it’s that we all wish we had more time to read.

My mom used to find me hiding under a giant pile of laundry or stuffed between the beds feverishly trying to consume a book on the down low. After oh so gently fussing at me, she would say something along the lines of, “Just wait until you have your own kids…”.     Well... Cough Cough.  She seriously underestimated my ability to get sucked into a new book.  And since necessity is the mother of invention, consider this a trade secret swap because you can never have too many ways to sneak books into your life.  Here are a few tried and true strategies.  

Read in the car

Buckle everyone in and then read 5 min before you pull out of the driveway, and another 5...er...10 min in the grocery store parking lot.  

Make Tacos for dinner

Or something else that can be mindlessly done on auto pilot. I have found flipping tortillas is the most mutually beneficial dinner strategy.  You can easily do that and brown ground beef while also flipping pages.  

Get an Audible account

This one is boring, but effective.   Everyone has mental “muscles” with some working better than others.  For the sake of evenness I try to exercise the auditory ones because they don’t work as well as my visual processing ones, but it’s difficult.  Still, laundry becomes so much more interesting when you’re listening to Diana Gabaldon's reader say “Sassenach”.  

Lay on the floor

Debut as a human jungle gym.  Kids usually just want to be around you, they don’t always need you to follow them around describing things like an interactive preschool app “Yes, ball...roll ball….good roll ball”  (although let's be real, we all sound like therapists these days thanks to Daniel Tiger).  Sometimes the most serviceable solution to buy yourself a chapter is to lay on the floor and let your spine become a deck and your feet a rudder as you’re tossed to and fro on a sea of fishy crackers.  While the wee pirates sail on grand adventures, you can consume a few precious pages.   

Spontaneously declare a 15 min “Super Secret Book Club”.  

Solemnly inform your kids they need to clean their rooms, empty the trash and wash the dishes.  Then freeze, cock your head like you’re listening to some invisible messenger and say “I’m getting an incoming order from the Interplanetary Secret Reading Order and they need us to drop everything right now and read for fifteen minutes….hmmm...can we? should we?  Perhaps we have no choice but to put off chores and attend this very important super secret club meeting.”  Reluctantly set the timer for another fifteen minutes afterwards when everyone clamors they’re not quite ready to go clean yet.  

Of course all of that assumes you haven’t been banned from your local library and have a healthy relationship with Amazon.   Ahem.  But what say you?  What are you reading and how/where do you read it?  

How Church Is Like Hot Yoga

Granted, I don’t know much about yoga...hot or otherwise (i.e. does “hot” define the goal or the physical temperature? That’s how little I know). But I noticed the New York Times has no compunction about telling Christians what they believe, so I’m taking advantage of this “hot” new trend. Har Har. .  

I recently read Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion” which scared me a little. I thought maybe it would work like a Harry Potter spell and I’d find myself magically transformed into a neo atheist de facto. It didn’t. Not that atheists aren’t lovely people with heartfelt ideology, but the book wasn’t an intellectual heavy hitter. It did however, lead down a personal rabbit hole on the existence of God, which is all a less-than-innocuous way of showing I’m cool enough to have doubts and pander around with the smart people. All of my toe dipping though lead me to a tangential realization “You are what you love”. The physical is shaped by the abstract. Humans can’t help but be liturgical beings.  

We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart to certain ends. So we are not primarily homo rationale or homo faber or homo economicus; we are not even generically homo religiosis. We are more concretely homo liturgicus; humans are those animals that are religious animals not because we are primarily believing animals but because we are liturgical animals—embodied, practicing creatures whose love/desire is aimed at something ultimate. (p. 40)  James K.A. Smith - “Desiring The Kingdom”

Some people have CrossFit liturgy, other people have yoga liturgy, I personally have more of a messy house and laundry liturgy. Instead of reciting the Athanasian Creed or doing downward dog, I step on a lego and then hop around gesticulating wildly while speaking in tongues.    

Not that there is anything wrong with Stay-At-Home mom liturgy, but thank goodness that isn’t the only liturgical process in my life. I have The Church. Not church, but the one with the big C that goes backwards in history and forward through time and will exist long past hot yoga’s expiration date. I think I failed to grasp this growing up in Calvary Chapel (which I won’t diss right now because it’s all still a part of the big “C”). I thought Christianity was more an abstract concept, and church was sort of “Weight Watchers” for Christians. In which case of course you stop going if you decide you don’t need or want to lose weight. Or you maintain that while you do want to be healthy or love Jesus, you don’t prefer to do that at Weight Watchers or church. I didn’t realize Church with the big “C” it is quite literally magic. It’s the wardrobe to Narnia. You walk through the doors and regardless where those doors are, what denomination it is or what race you are, they’re magic doors ushering you into the presence of God.   

You can't escape the liturgical shaped hole in your heart.  It's just a matter of what you put there.  

Unpatriotic Patriotism

What if America is not the total sum of its parts…. In a rhetorical sort of way where hindsight is the opposite of 20/20. For instance, pretend “1776 to 2016” is a painting of Noah’s Ark, with bears lumbering about, zebras and camels everywhere and a rainbow going over the whole thing. But if you’d asked George Washington he would have told you in 1776 everyone thought they were painting just a picture of a bear...or maybe bears vs zebras if you were Jefferson and Hamilton.  Ahem.  

With history you don’t always know who’s going to get the biggest paintbrush and the most say. Assuredly the founding fathers saw their posterity’s future quite differently...without things like a potato famine across the ocean changing everything...or an altruistic poet writing things like “...give me your poor, your huddled masses” which would end up carrying such emotional power as to add a few kangaroos, lions and monkeys to the painting.  

Add Manifest Destiny, a few world wars and globalization and it’s like a historical game of children’s “Telephone” where “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” becomes “Ten pink elephants lit a gas car”.  

Which is what it is.  We are (for better or worse) what we are. But if the past in this case teaches anything, it’s that you can’t rely on the intrinsic correctness of whatever “picture” you think we have. Maybe the Noah’s Ark painting is actually Dick Van Dyke on a unicycle reading a children’s magazine…. And maybe that Dick Van Dyke picture is on a cereal box….floating in an ocean on the back of a mutant flamingo.   

Who knows.  

Happy Fourth!  

3 Logical Fallacies And Why They're Good

There is literally no one less qualified to talk about this than me, but since that’s actually kind of the point… I’ll carry on and hope Aristotle doesn’t roll over in his grave.

A long time ago someone observed the way humans argue about things (the kind that wasn't entirely comprised of stabbing them or something). This person waxed eloquent with a pen for a very long time and dubbed it "Rhetoric" i.e. "How to convince someone Trump is Hitler by saying "I can't even....<emoticon> <emoticon>" (I kid, I kid, that's obviously only one example). 

There are two sorts of Rhetoric, external and internal.  External is boring, so moving on…

Internal Rhetoric is where it’s at. It’s the Rembrandt of persuasion, the beauty of The Colbert Report and pretty much the gas station that fuels Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (my exact age can probably be deduced Sherlock Holmes style from that sentence). Under this internal rhetoric is a whole bunch of important stuff like charisma and logic but zooming way in there is fallacy (which sounds vaguely dirty and probably has some etymological correlation). Fallacies get a bad rap these days and it’s such a bummer. Instead of thinking of fallacies as bad logic (which it is), think of it as shortcut to winning! Logic is like bringing a knife to a gunfight...you can only use knives if everyone else is.     

For your perusal, here are the three best ones to use during this election season. All sides, including my own bastardized side use it, so I’ll try to be fair. 

Ad Hominem

The two presidential candidates aren’t even the guiltiest of this and you see it mostly in comment threads when things get heated. I think the reason is actually biological. When someone encounters views they consider dangerous the first instinct is to do the philosophical version of curling up in the fetal position and yelling “LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS!”. If you feel your chest start to tighten up and your blood start to pound in your ears as you can’t believe the rubbish someone is posting this is a warning sign you might be about to launch an ad hominem attack.  

Correlation does not imply causation

This is a personal favorite and I find myself using it all of the time. In my defense I think humans are infinitely suspicious creatures and it’s second nature to see connecting strands. Often times those connecting strands might even be correct! I vote everyone puts their correlative/causation opinions in a big jar and bury them in a time capsule. In twenty years take them all out and see which ones Father Time has fulfilled with missing pieces and see if there is a pattern on who had the more right correlations. I think this is what Solomon would do.  

Strawman

Straw man fallacies are more of a team sport. It typically happens when you’ve split a concept into two sides (Vaccines are bad/good...public school is bad/good…immigration is bad/good). This sets the stage for the strawman catapult which is a projectile you launch into the enemy camp with the word “seems” loaded on it. Anytime you see someone say “it seems like…” you can rest soothingly in the knowledge you’re about to get taken out by a strawman attack. Related to this is calling a position “hate” or arguing for “love”. Both are abstract concepts with a multitude of interpretations, but they carry strong emotional weight so it’s an easy way to take the opposing side down.  And it’s understandable, humans like to win. If we didn’t, we would have died out a long time ago. No one wants to be on the losing side, and no one wants to look foolish so we all hope we’ve picked, if not the winning side, then at least the righteous side.  

Of course the number of fallacies are like stars in the sky, and this list barely scratches the surface, but knowledge is power and all that. My rule of thumb is this: If the person is waving the white flag of reason, then by all means bench the fallacies and discourse accordingly. But if the battle lines are drawn and everyone has shown up with rhetoric, then it’s not only a waste, it’s counterproductive to use anything dialectic, so let it go and let your fallacies fly.