Merry Christmas, Homophobic Hunters, and Overreacting

It is that time of year again folks! That time of year when everyone gathers together with beloved friends and family members to share in a great bounty of loving kindness and generosity. It is that time of year when we strive to think the best of people and treat everyone with fairness and compassion. It is that time of year where nigh everyone is celebrating some Holiday or another, and people are full to bursting with excitement and anticipation. There is so much love, thoughtfulness, and goodwill toward men floating around the air it is almost overwhelming!

Isn't it wonderful how you can go out shopping and jovially wish someone a Merry Christmas just to have them glare at you and return a bitter sounding "Happy Holidays"? I can't tell you how much I love seeing my Facebook news feed exploding with debates over a Louisiana Duck Hunting hillbilly's personal opinions. The best part of those debates though is that they consist of a lot of mud slinging and insulting of the opposition. I mean, I was afraid I was going to start missing all the political warfare and vicious slander from last year's presidential debates, but thankfully Phil's statement seems to have sparked enough controversy to keep that kind of heated "debate" going during this generous and gift giving season.

Ah, can you smell that *deep breath* that's the smell of peace on earth and goodwill toward men; the smell of yet another special season being turned into a battleground for personal grudges and a ravenous desire for controversy.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have some pretty strong feelings about politics and religion (as you've probably seen in my other posts), and I'm not suggesting anyone lay aside their beliefs and look away for the sake of us all just getting along. I am the other of "The Opinion Section" after all, and I hold to the principle that if you believe in something you should fight for it. If you honestly feel like the Duck Dynasty vs. A&E issue is something worth beating to death over the internet through inconsiderate comments about your opponent and whining over the bigotry/hostility of the world then go for it.

Far be it from me to rain on your parade.

What frustrates me is something that everyone in every party of every current debate seems to be guilty of (including myself). People establish a personal opinion on a topic like wishing Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays or on freedom of a TV Celebrity to make a racial slur, and that's all fine and good. It really is a good thing to have an opinion on the issues of the day, but what I find to be utterly ridiculous is how passionately and yet simultaneously irrationally people drive their opinions forward while beating senseless the opposing opinion.

I'm a Christian, I'm a confessional conservative Lutheran who believes that Christmas should be a celebration of the Nativity of our Lord and Savior, and so as we approach the twelve days of Christmas I'm going to happily wish people "Merry Christmas!" because I think that something like the Son of God coming down to earth as an infant human for the sake of growing, living, and dying for the forgiveness of our sins is something worth celebrating and sharing. Maybe you aren't Christian, maybe you don't believe any of that stuff I just said. If you don't we clearly have a pretty major disagreement, but I can respect that. Despite what some people might think, I am not trying to shove my religious beliefs down the throats of every atheist, Jewish, and Islamic person in the world. However, neither am I on a crusade to keep the Christ in CHRISTmas and ensure that the whole world know that the only think worth celebrating and thinking about in the month of December is the birth of our Lord.

See, while I celebrate Christmas the way I do because I am Christian, I am not ignorant of the fact that other people celebrate the month of December for other reasons and I am not not going hold that against them. The Fourth of July isn't a religious holiday and has absolutely nothing to do with my religious beliefs, but I have no problem celebrating that occasion and wishing others a Happy Independence day. If someone from another country (Britain for example) comes to the States and I happen to see them on the 4th of July, and I wish them a Happy Fourth, I am not trying to shove my political stance and beliefs of my nation down their throats and force them to start a revolution in their country for the sake of founding a Democratic Republic. Likewise, if someone wishes me a Happy Holidays or a Happy Hanukkah, I am not going to take offense and rage at them about destroying the meaning of the Christmas season. They are celebrate their own holiday, they are celebrating their own thing and even though that thing isn't my thing, I have no reason to oppose them celebrating. If anything, I should be happy that they have a reason to celebrate! The fact that other people don't celebrate the birth of Christ in no way endangers Christmas or the fate of Christianity itself.

Instead, I will smile and be happy when someone returns my "Merry Christmas" with another "Merry Christmas" because they are someone who is sharing my own joy, but if someone wishes my a "Happy Holidays" or "Happy Hanukkah," I will return the same greeting, because I truly hope that they will enjoy their celebration as much as I will enjoy mine. These greetings are not about taking a side, or forwarding the cause of your particular religion/holiday, but about sharing each others' joy, appreciation, and celebration of the season and everything that is happening. If you are a Christian, there is no reason for you to think that people referring to Christmas as "The Holidays" is going to somehow undo Jesus's birth, and if you are an atheist you shouldn't feel like someone wishing you a "Merry Christmas" is going to result in a god appearing who will inevitably mess up your science.

Just share the spirit of community and happiness that surrounds a holiday, any holiday, and try not to make something that should be a happy occasion into a source of contention and rivalry.

Granted, I am greatly to blame for picking fights where fights aren't necessary and for overreacting to silly things, but I acknowledge that I am acting wrongly, foolishly, and pointlessly when I do that. I achieve nothing, and potentially inure quite a lot.

I think, at the heart of the problem, humanity seems to feel an urge to drift towards conflict and controversy. We aren't really content with the idea of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. I mean, we can't even get along at family holiday gatherings, how are we supposed to get along with the entire rest of the world?!?! If something of a controversial nature springs up you only have to sit back and wait for the masses to spring upon it like ravenous wolves starving for a good bit of juicy controversy. Those people on Facebook who spam their own walls with memes about the same issue over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again almost have to be passing out with giddy excitement when something like the Duck Dynasty issue emerges.  "At last!" they say "I can once again lock myself into mortal combat with the great enemy (insert political or religious affiliation here) and demonstrate my superior intelligence, wisdom, and righteousness by insulting and belittling them till the cows come home!"

Since starting college, I have a much wider variety of political and religious beliefs scattered amongst my Facebook friends. Now, when some "news worthy" event occurs, I get to see both sides of the argument begin to swell within my news feed, and the thing that really saddens me is that I see a very similar approach being taken on both of the sides. Whether or not I agree with them, it seems like everyone is intent to contribute the most shocking and antagonistic posts to their cause for the sake of seeing how people will react and baiting them into an argument. I see blog posts, I see memes, and I see comments that come out of the blue with no rational evidence supporting them that ultimately boil down to "I disagree with you and you are a complete and utter moron for having that opinion of yours."

After the Duck Dynasty controversy started spilling out all over Facebook and I hear multiple variations of the story, I went ahead and looked up what Phil actually said to cause such an uproar. I realized several things as I read the quotes from his interview. 1) Phil is not a very tactful or eloquent person, 2) some of the things he said actually did seem rather offensive 3) I agreed with his overall opinion and 4) the obsession over what he said is entirely unwarranted.

Now, I'm not gay, I'm not black, and I am not supportive of homosexuality by any stretch of the imagination, but homosexual people are still people and I can totally see how the gay community would be offended and irritated by his comments. I can also see how the black community would be fairly miffed, and it seems like his comments about slavery were pretty ignorant (although they certainly didn't seem malicious). What doesn't make sense is how violently people responded to his comments, and how violently people responded to the violent response! I get that if you're gay or you great-grandfather was an abused slave you'd have a bone to pick with Phil, but there is absolutely no reason to get the dude fired and call for his public humiliation and downfall. At the same time, if the liberals are going to go nuts and lose their heads over something as inconsequential as one man's personal opinions (one man who realistically has no power or political influence), then what do you really hope to gain by entering the battlefield guns blazing?

Sure, Phil is entirely entitled to his own personal opinion. Sure, what he said was said in a private interview in response to a question. Sure, his opposition is being hypocritical and unfair because they say just as bad things about red necks and hillbillies, but fighting fire with fire accomplishes nothing and just puts you on the same level as the people you are fighting with (same goes for you liberals). 

I feel like our society, as a whole, has no concept of agreeing to disagree. I feel like everyone is under the impression that not fighting to the death for the truth will resulting that truth no longer being true, when in fact the truth is not dependent on anyone's personal opinion, regardless of how many anyones there are. If you believe that Phil's comments were those of a bigot, and that he sorely misunderstands both slavery and homosexuals, than ignore him as an ignorant and insensitive southern duck hunter and move on with your life assured by the fact that his comments can never change the truth. If you believe that Jesus Christ was both God and Man, born of the Virgin Mary for our sakes, then don't get your knickers in a knot over people celebrating other things because they can't change what Christ has done for you!

There are things worth fighting for. There are things worth dying for.

A person's holiday greeting and the personal opinions of a celebrity don't fall into either of those categories.

We all make mistakes. We all get carried away, and I do so on a daily basis. There is always the temptation to overreact and take up arms, especially for a sensitive issue, but ultimately that isn't excuse. When you are struck, turn the other cheek and rest assured that no earthly prince can ever actually harm you.

I grew up being homeschooled (and I'll never regret that), and in the homeschool community we tend to kind of look down on the publicly educated. I grew up conservative (and I remain that way), and in the conservative community we tend to look down on the liberal. I grew up Christian (and I remain that way), and in the Christian community we tend to look down on every other denomination on top of every non-Christian. I continue to hold onto the values and beliefs I grew up with, but since entering the secular university setting I have realized more that your education, your political stance, and your religious beliefs don't change the fact that you are a human being for whom Christ suffered and died upon the cross, and in a world where we are all sinful human beings wrought with the disease of death, none of us has the right to look down on anyone. All men were created equal under God, and whether or not we disagree with each other doesn't change that.

Next time someone says or does something you don't like, remember that a person's a person no matter how small and everyone deserves your respect regardless of whether or not that deserves you support and consent.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and God Bless.

Pax

The Love, Relationships, and Controversy Series Part IV: Couples

Now that it is more than a week past when I originally planned on posting this, I am finally getting around to typing out the last of my posts in this series. Thus far I've talked about the way we develop friendships and express love, the kinds of love and friendship between men, and the kinds of non-romantic kinds of love and friendship between people of different genders. At last it has come time for me to write about what we all typically think of when we think of love and relationships.

Within my personal social circles there are very few topics discussed and debated quite as much as that of relationships and how they should be handled, viewed, carried out, introduced, etc. etc. It is a topic that people tend to be both passionate and biased toward, and one where there is a great reluctance to listen to any contrary pieces of advice or suggestions from anyone else because either A) there is no way anyone else could ever understand what they are thinking or B) they have enough experience under the belt and have studied relationships enough that they clearly know better than anyone else how relationships should function. It is a topic where the pendulum of opinion seems to either swing toward the extreme of absolute slackness and freedom within a romantic relationship to the extreme of their being only one proper way for every relationship ever to be handled.

I am going to try and walk the line between those tempting extremes and lay out what I have observed, experienced, think, and feel about the whole subject in a way that you can at least appreciate if not agree with. The key thing to understand when thinking about relationships of a more romantic nature is that, while there are certainly truths and realities about human nature that apply to pretty much the entire human race, everyone is different and when you start putting two people together, an even more unique situation occurs. It absolutely a good idea, in my opinion, to draw upon past experiences and knowledge you have gathered in your own relationships and the relationships of friends/siblings/children/parents etc, but always try to keep in mind that the circumstances and nature of every relationship is going to vary. This is something I tend to have trouble remembering myself, but I encourage you all, as I divulge my personal opinions, to take my words with a grain of salt and understand that I am not trying to lay down an unwavering ultimatum.

No, on with the show...

Because there is a kind of natural chronological progression for romantic relationships between the interest being sparked and the knot being tied, I figure it makes the most sense to start at the beginning and conclude with the ending.

I know it sounds a little bit cheesy (w are talking about romantic love here), but your future spouse should be your best friend, and I think every romantic relationship should be founded on a strong friendship. Feelings and twitterpation are all fine and good, but they aren't going to stand the test of time all on their own. Before you even consider entering into a more serious, romance orientated relationship with someone, you should a friendship already established and a friendship based on common interests and beliefs. Your significant other should be someone who believes the same foundational principles as you when it comes things like politics and especially religion. While it is entirely possible for relationships between people of different political stances and faiths to work out, I don't see how that could ever be easy and I've seen several scenarios where it makes things rough for both the couple and their children. If you think about it, your religious faith is a pretty massively important thing, and if you really believe the teachings of your religion that you have to hold those teachings above your personal feelings for another person. If you can't have common ground on issues like then you are asking for trials and troubles ahead.

Long term, functional relationships are going to need some kind of common ground to stand on when the going gets rough and the rough gets going, because real life likes to throw a lot of curve balls our way, and during those times we tend to get depressed, frustrated, angry, and confused and if you are in a relationship with someone where your passionate feelings and emotion based love for them is what you are depending on for success, that depression, frustration, and anger is going to override your twitterpation and things are going to go south pretty quickly. (No offense Texas.)

Of course, this is all assuming you are looking at relationships being a long term investment in the first place. For me, when you enter in a romantic relationship with another person and become "an item" you are making a decision to work towards something. These relationships aren't stationary things that exist in some kind of limbo. The longer you are in a relationship, the more difficulties and temptations you are going to face, and if you don't have some kind of goal or purpose to which you are working, things are going to get messy. Regardless of how you operate your boyfriend/girlfriend experience, I firmly believe that every romantic relationship should be founded on the purpose of either moving towards marriage or determining that your boyfriend/girlfriend isn't someone you could marry. If you reach the latter conclusion you should back out and end the thing, because otherwise you are committing more and more of yourself and your time into something that is going to escalate without ever having a way to vent or focus that escalation.

I have heard the argument that you have to date a variety of people, or enter into open ended relationships because otherwise you don't have any way of finding out whether or not someone is "the right person" or not. There appears to be this idea that it is only through expressing outward romantic affection, dedicating vast amounts of time to a specific person, and potentially going as far as living with/sleeping with someone are you able to determine whether or not they are someone you could marry and love for the duration of your life. I would like to propose that this way of thinking is utter nonsense.

Firstly, if you are getting to know someone as a close friend like I have already suggested as being important for a relationship to work well, than you should know that person pretty well already before you ever enter into a relationship with them. When you are in dating/courting someone you do learn things about them that you don't in regular routine interactions, but when it comes to figuring out whether or not someone is the kind of person you could spend your life with, it is the day to day routine activities that are most likely to make or break the deal. How someone handles stress/frustration/anger disappointment, how someone treats other people of your gender, how someone treats their parents and siblings, and how someone juggles their responsibilities are all things that you can learn pretty easily without ever moving in with them. These things, along the previously mentioned political and religious beliefs, are significant traits and points of interest about someone that you find out about just by being close friends.

Secondly, you don't exactly "figure out" whether or not someone is a person you can love and dedicate your life to. Twitterpation and infatuation are all fine and dandy, but the lightheaded thoughts and feelings you experience about that special person early on in a relationship aren't going to last indefinitely. so it isn't like you've found "the right person" as soon as your heart starts fluttering. The  kind of love that is associated with couples is the kind of love that you chose. You make the individual choice to personally nurture and grow the relationship between yourself and another person, and from that comes the kind of lifelong, steadfast, loving relationships that we see in couples celebrating their 40th, 50th, 60th, and greater wedding anniversaries. It is true that when you are in a relationship with someone before marriage you should be looking for evidence that you two will be able to function as a couple later on in life, as well as reasons to why you wouldn't make a good married couples (if you find those you need to address them or end the relationship), but ultimately you have to choose whether or not that relationship is going to work and then you make it work.

Relationships are growing and changing things, and like and growing thing, you have to care for them and watch over them to make sure that they remain healthy and strong. The most beautiful and magnificent flower in the world will wither and die if left uncared for, and if you "find the perfect person" and then decide that you were meant to be together and that nothing could go wrong as a result, there is a lot of potential for things to turn pretty nasty. Likewise, a neglected and seemingly unspectacular plant could end up growing and flourishing under a nurturing and tender hand. A seemingly unlikely relationship could end up working out quite well if both parties decide to actively work together on it. Love is something you have to work at, and you have to choose to work at it. When you enter into a relationship with someone you have to commit to putting your back into it and pouring blood, sweat, and tears into making it turn out right.

Eventually, once you and your best friend have made the active and continual decision to pursue a relationship, and you have found that you share enough common ground, beliefs, and opinions that you actually want to spend the rest of your lives together, you get to move onto the next stage: Engagement.

Again, I understand that everyone is different, but I don't understand the decision to enter into an engagement and then wait two... three.... four... or more years until you actually get married. Once you have made the for sure decision to get married and share your lives than you don't want to wait any longer than you have to. I haven't been engaged myself, but I've known quite a few people that have been engaged and I've watched a lot of those relationships go from beginning to end. During the engagement seems to be when emotions are the most fevered, and feelings are the most sensitive. That's when people seem to start questioning their decisions and getting panicky just because the time to make that final commitment is rapidly approaching. Once you have gotten engaged though, you have essentially promised to make the vows that you will on your wedding day. You aren't actually married yet, but you have promised each other that you will be, and I don't see why you'd want to drag out the time between making that first promise and fulfilling it.

Instead, it seems to me like it would be so much more helpful to you and your spouse to be if you wait to get engaged until you actually are ready to fully commit and get married in the very near future. Spend the time leading up to that point getting to know each other better and better, because there is really not much you can do as couple before engagement that you can do as couple engaged. Like I said, I haven't been engaged yet myself, but the only thing I've seen prolonged engagements do is weaken relationships because the hype surrounding them can only last so long and eventually seems to turn into impatience, frustration, and a lack of interest... but that's just my two cents.

When the day finally comes for the wedding however, I feel like there are a few things that I can speak to with absolute certainty. For one, we are far too receptive to the idea of divorce in our culture. When you get married you are making a promise, a very serious promise, to love and cherish your spouse until death do you part. Baring abuse, there is almost no good reason for two people to divorce. The wedding is that point where your choice to continue loving and caring for someone gets locked in, and you really shouldn't be able to just back out anymore. You take relationships and engagements leading up to that point seriously, because once you have exchanged vows and the service has ended things should be set in stone.

Honestly, I think one of culture's greatest weaknesses when it comes to this entire topic is that we don't, as a whole, seem to really understand what marriage really means. When you marry someone you are leaving your mother and father behind and are becoming one flesh. You and the person you marry are entering into a vocation ordained by God, and it is a vocation that should not be taken lightly. What God has brought together let no man break asunder! Marriage is really not for the sake of personal convenience or pleasure, it is for the benefit of the community and world at large when husband and wife appreciate and understand the significance of their duties to each other, and to their children. If you never get married there is nothing wrong with that, but if you do it should not be because you want to make yourself, or even your spouse, happy. Marriage is about family, it is about the church, and it is about making you and your spouse better people for the wider community.

Unfortunately, what I cannot figure out how to say what I want to any more eloquently than that. For honestly, what more is there to be said? At its heart love is a choice that you make, and one that you fight for against you own sinful temptations and flaws. Acknowledging this, and acknowledging that love and relationships are not about us and our personal happiness, makes everything so much clearer and easier.

I cannot say that this series went exactly the way I wanted it to. I never feel quite satisfied with what I have to say once I finish, and I fell way behind schedule, but my hope is perhaps some of you gained some insights from my thoughts, or at least enjoyed/appreciated reading them. The whole topic is infinitely more complex than what I touched upon here, and I could write a million posts without being able to say all that there is to say, but hopefully what I did say is worth reading.

If you got this far, than thanks for reading and have a Merry Christmas!

Pax

The Last Post is Coming Soon...

So, I know I am way behind schedule with my last post in my blog series, but I just finished Finals today and things have been kind of crazy around here with getting through the last stretch of the school year. I wanted to make sure I put the right amount of thought and time into this last post, and hopefully over the next week I'll have more freedom to do that.

The post is coming and has been started... I've just bee slackin' too much to get it out yet...

The Love, Relationships, and Controversy Series Part III: Friendzoned

My have I fallen behind. My plan was to crank one of these out posts every week of November and I have two left to complete and only two more days to go before December begins. Ah well, I said I would complete four blog posts in this series and four blog posts I shall complete.

Last time I talked about the significance of love and friendship between men so the next topic I want to address has to do with love and friendship between men and women apart from romance, twitterpation, dating, and marriage. In the same way that brotherly love and companionship among men is important, non romantic friendship is very significant and healthy between young people of different sexes. There is this stigma that seems to be prevalent among men (at least of my generation) that if you are going to be "friendzoned" then there is a any reason to develop a close friendship with girls.

That's stupid.

Regardless of whether or not their friendship becomes one of a romantic nature, there is a lot that young ladies and gents can learn and gain from each other just by being friends. It helps to reduce, if not eliminate, confusion over how the opposite gender thinks and communicates, it treats guys how to be respectful of women, and teaches women what it means for a guy to be a proper gent. In the cases where close male/female friendships do grow into a more romantically inclined ones, I think things are going to go significantly better and run far more smoothly if a strong "friendzone" based relationship was already in existence.

Again, I can't very easily talk from the standpoint of a girl, but I have experienced firsthand a lot of the benefits that come from getting to know a girl as a strong and close friend and companion without any romantic activity involved. This summer I have had a lot of opportunities to play big brother to a few very remarkable young ladies, and I have learned a lot from them through our conversations and interactions.

Talking these girls, getting to know them better, and building a sense of trust between us has helped me to understand a little bit better the thought processing and rational of the female gender, it has provided many more opportunities to operate as a respectful and supportive gentlemen (not that I always take advantage of those opportunities as much as I should), and has broadened my capacity for compassion, empathy, and sympathy. The more people that open up to me, the more sensitive I become of the feelings of individuals around me and the more understanding I become of everyone in all the different spheres of my life.

I can't claim to have gained infinite wisdom and constant compassion through this friendships, but they have helped, and I would like to think that they have helped me to be a more sage and sympathetic as a result of getting to know these girls.

On a more selfish level, developing this friendships and learning to love these girls has done marvels to boost my self esteem and confidence. I am single right now and was feeling pretty depressed and frustrated with that for quite a while, but the bigger role I begin to play in the lives of my various female friends' lives the less I am bothered by the fact that I don't have one particular girl for whom I can dedicate my time and interest. I am consoled by the fact that, for as long as I remain single and unclaimed, I have the opportunity to serve and support all of these girls like they are my sisters and that my friendship seems to mean a lot to them.

Too often guys complain about being friendzoned and criticize girls for "stringing them along" and acting like they were interested when all they really were interested in was being friends, but more and more I am seeing that girls (especially in their young teens) are really appreciative and desirous of having a guy that they can trust and depend upon without that friendship necessarily being tied to romance. In our selfishness, the masculine gender doesn't seem  to take that seriously or understand that, but when I look around the teen and young adult women I know, I see them desperate for proof that there are guys that they can trust and count on for more than just being interested in them for sex and romance.

Women have great value that extends and greatly exceeds their body alone, and in a culture that seems intent on sexualizing and romanticizing all male/female friendships, that value is too easily disregarded and thrown out the window.

When the young teen several years my junior comes to talk to me about the emotional turmoil in heart over another guy, the exhaustion she struggles with from sleeplessness, and the frustration she has over the behavior of another close friends I am not going to turn her away simply because she has put me into the "friendzone" and I have not romantic benefit to gain from our friendship. The sad fact is that, for some people, that may sound like me bragging about how chivalrous I am, but honestly, every man should be willing to listen and respond to any female that comes to him for comfort and advice.

I argued in my last post that men need other men as close friends because there is support and comfort that guys can provide for each other that their female friends can't, but it is also true that there is a lot of support and comfort that can occur between male and female friends that is not going to come as smoothly in a friendship just between guys. Men and women are different (sorry feminists, but it is true), and male/male friendships are just as necessarily as male/female friendships, and they are both necessarily because the provide different things and meet different needs.

Then, of course, boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse relationships are on a completely different level that meets and entirely different set of needs.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I personally think that the friendzone is an integral part of growing up and has a lot to offer. Whether or not you agree with me won't change the fact that I am going to continue doing the best that I am able to learn and grow from the friendships I have been given with girls that I will never date and never marry, and God willing they will benefit from knowing me as much as I benefit from knowing them.

Pax

p. s. Happy Thanksgiving!

The Dangers of Minimum Wage

(Note: I apologize for the weird font/type size. I copied and pasted parts of this from my outline and it messed the formatting up slightly. :P ) 

So, I have been falling terribly far behind in my series of posts for this month. It was probably not a good idea for me to plan on tackling big topics at the same time that all of my semester projects are coming due, but I will get the last two installments of the Love, Relationships, and Controversy series finished and posted at some point. If they end up leaking into December, then so be it.

In the meantime however, I've had several requests for a much easier post to write. Over the last week I participated in a Speech competition at my university and last night my speech actually won me first place. A number of my friends and family members requested that I post my speech somewhere for them and this seemed like as good a place as any.

Every time I gave the speech it was slightly different, because I was working off an outline rather than reading off the text, but this is a pretty close approximation.

The Dangers of Minimum Wage 

By: Nicholai Stuckwisch 

        Wouldn’t it be awesome to be making ten dollars an hour? If you already making that much or more then you may not care, but if, like me, you work at a minimum wage position you may be feeling the brunt of the economy downside and wishing that a $10 an hour minimum wage requirement was installed. In fact, according to the GallopPolitics statistics website, an overall 71% of Americans approved of raising the minimum wage to $9 back in March of this year. Underneath the outward attraction and appeal of a higher minimum wage, however, there are some major risks that go along with it. 

          I’m no Ben Bernanke, but in the course of pursuing a business degree here at IU, I’ve taken a few Economics classes and the principles that expose the risks associated with the minimum wage are pretty fundamental and important. Using these principles, I hope to show you how the seemingly amazing ideal of a high minimum wage could actually be highly detrimental to the lower classes. The sad truth is that a high minimum wage decreases employment for young and unskilled employees, increases market prices, and actually widens the economic divide between classes. 

         All three of these points may seem counter-intuitive, but I can support each of them. 

         Firstly, higher wages create higher labor expenses for people that often translate into layoffs. If it costs you more to employ a position than you will be forced to either to make job cuts or take a loss in profit. At the same time, because the minimum wage is not very high right now, some employers can afford to hire young and unskilled employees, but it the cost of employing those individuals became more expensive, employers would be pickier about who they hire because it is costing them more. 

         The wage level that works best for our society is determined by the economic principles of supply and demand. Essentially, what supply and demand tell us is that at some point the demand for something and the supply for something are equal, and at that point you have an overall, optimal equilibrium level that is best for society. If wages are raised above their equilibrium level, you end up with a dead weight loss that translates into layoffs and unemployment. Professor Dr. Gregory Mankiw, author of the textbook Principles of Microeconomics, states that “If minimum wage is above the equilibrium level… The result is unemployment. Thus, the minimum wage raises the income of those workers who have jobs, but it lowers the income of workers who cannot find jobs.” 

         Those enamored with the idea of raising minimum wage in order to increase income are often oblivious to the impact it will have on those who end up with no income at all. Sadly however, the dangers of raising the minimum wage are not limited to employment. 

         The second point that I would like to address is that higher labor costs result in higher prices. If employers want to maintain a similar staff to one they held prior to a wage increase, they will be have to raise the prices of their products and services to compensate. It makes sense if you think about it. If it costs more to produce something, you will have to charge more for that something to balance things out. 

         The increase in price that occurs as a result of trying to balance things dilutes the effectiveness of a greater income. Just because you might be making more money under a higher minimum wage law, doesn't mean you are better off if you then have to pay more in order to acquire the things you purchase. According to Christina Romer, a journalist for the New York Times, “[A] reason that employment may not fall is that businesses pass along some of the cost of a higher minimum wage to consumers through higher prices. Often, the customers paying those … have very low family incomes. Thus this price effect may harm the very people whom a minimum wage is supposed to help.”

       Also, it is unfortunately true that the amount of money people are being paid to accomplish a job does not increase the usefulness of that job. Just because it costs you more to produce something doesn't mean that thing you are producing is worth any more than it was previously. Susan Rhea, and journalist for the Huffington Post writes in an article that “[T]he middle-lower class, barely gets by because discount stores like Walmart have taken over the mass retail market. If Walmart were to start paying employees … a living wage, and [gives] health care to all employees, their prices would go up.” 

       Increasing payment for a job that paid out just as much as it did previously raises prices and dilutes the value of the dollar. 

       One of the major arguments for raising the minimum wage right now is that the rich are earning far too much compared to the poor. Unfortunately however, raising the minimum wage can actually hurt the lower classes without damaging the upper classes nearly as much.  

      The last point that I want to make is that a nation-wide wage increase actually helps to create a wedge that creates an economic divide between classes. When layoffs from a forced wage increase occur, they occur for those working at minimum wage positions, not those earning a large salary. Typically, people working at these lower wage positions are working there because they are either A) new to that job, or B) working a job that is not entirely vital to the life of the company. So, when cuts occur, they are going to occur at the minimum wage positions. 

      On top of that, increased prices, while not fun for the wealthy, are not nearly as damaging for the upper class as they are for the lower classes. The wealthy already have enough money to spare so if everything rises in price they won't be happy, but they'll ultimately be fine. The lower classes, and those on fixed incomes however, are often already strapped for funds and barely get by at the current wage levels. If prices increase they will be hurt significantly. 

      The market, as I said, is governed by the laws of supply and demand, and the upper class simply as a higher demand than the lower classes. They have a higher cost threshold and are able to more easily adjust to price increases. David Neuremark, a University of California Irvine professor argues, according to journalist Damien Paletta from the Wall Street Journal, that "A lot of the benefits of minimum wage leak out to families way above the poverty line." 

       I want to apologize if I have ruined your dreams for a higher national minimum wage, but hopefully you now see that it would not actually be beneficial for all of us to be making as much as we might like. Ultimately, raising wages across the board would result in unemployment for the young and unskilled, higher market prices for us to deal with, and an even greater economic divide between two already bitterly separated classes.  According to a survey of my class, 40% of them believed that raising the minimum wage would have an overall beneficial effect on the economy, but hopefully you now realize that this is not necessarily the case. 

       So, the question then is: How do we keep these problems from arising? The minimum wage should be a state issue and so it is to our state leaders that would should turn to to deal with this topic. Contact your governor, you senators, and your state representatives  and let them know that the young people of America do not approve of our jobs being lost, our prices being raised, or our economy being split. Tell them to vote against and bills supporting a minimum wage increase and fight sending our economy back into a downward spiral. 

      Thank you.  

The Love, Relationships, and Controvery Series Part II: The Brotherhood

In part III I will get to non romantic relationships between men and women, but in this portion of my series I am going to talk about male friendships. If I wanted to cover all of the bases, I would write a post about female friendships, but since I am not a female I feel like that would be rather presumptuous. Instead, I am going to be doing all of my writing from a male standpoint, and this post is going to be dedicated to looking at love and friendships between men and how our society has destroyed and contorted their image.

I am most certainly a "straight" guy, but I will not hesitate for a minute to admit that I dearly love my close male friends. Doppelganger Otter, The Near Sighted One, Captain Corgi, and Colonel Raymond in particular are some of my closest and most reliable allies. I trust them, I can depend on them, I care about them and their well being, and I often turn to them for advice and support. The Doppelganger Otter is named thus because we joke that we personalities split from the same person. These men, along with many others I am proud to call my friends, are people I would die for and who I know I could count on to stand up for me if I needed them to. I know that they would do so for me because we love each other.

Our society hasn't completely disregarded the idea that two men can be close without being homosexual, but people still seem far too hasty in classifying two men as being gay simply because they are close. I may be wrong here, but it certainly seems like close, emotionally intimate friendships between women are regarded as perfectly normal while friendships of a similar kinds between guys are often viewed with skepticism or stereotyping. If you actually look at the kinds of conversations I have with the guys I mentioned above (especially The Near Sighted One), girls and our relationships with them is probably our number one topic of discussion.

Even though it is typically true that men are significantly less touchy feely than the average woman, we still do have feelings, thoughts, and opinions and about emotional subjects, and it is helpful to talk about those things with other guys a lot of the time. Guys are typically looked down upon for now being manly, however, if they open up and share their feelings at all, and if they go to another guy for more personal/emotional conversations then the chances seem pretty high that the community at large is going to make assumptions about them that are not necessarily true at all.

 Unfortunately, I see the fear of being labeled as being gay serving as an obstacle that prevents guys from comfortably establishing close friendships with their male companions. Guys that are not homosexual seem to feel the need to prove their masculinity by being aggressive, competitive, and dominating. Friendships between men under that kind of a scenario are not likely to be anything beyond shallow acquaintances, and if men can't learn how to open up and interact with each other then learning how to do so with women is just going to be all the more challenging.

The modern view of masculinity turns men into solitary, unfeeling robots of pent up emotion. Men are typically viewed as insensitive, oblivious, and inconsiderate, but how can you expect them to ever learn how to treat other people decently if they are unable to open up to their male peers for fear of being labeled as something they are not?

Strong, open, and loving friendships allow us to think beyond ourselves and develop more care and compassion for other people, and that can most certainly start between individuals of the same gender, especially during the early teenage years when our personalities are undergoing massive development and we're typically terrified of anyone in the opposite sex. Strong male friendships can actually train guys to be more sensitive and considerate of women simply because they teach us how to think about other people, their thoughts, their feelings, and their opinions.

On top of that, it typically isn't particularly easy for a guy to go to a girl when he's messed up something or made a mistake and needs consolation. It certainly impossible or unheard of, but in my experience, it feels pretty humiliating to have your female friends know about your errors a lot more than it does to 'fess up to another guy. If a guy doesn't have a close friend he can vent with and work through things with, he is going to pent it all up inside and it is going to eat away at him.

Really, young men need other young men as close friends, because it actually makes them stronger, better people and doesn't at all deteriorate their masculinity. Doppelganger Otter, Near Sighted One, Captain Corgi, Colonel Raymond and my other masculine friends help me to a better man, and do a lot to help teach me how to be a better man for my female friends as well. As cheesy as it sounds, we do belong to a brotherhood of guys that can trust, depend, and build on each other. It is a brotherhood founded on love, respect, compassion, and personal knowledge of each other.

I have never been in the military, but it certainly seems like men who have been understand this whole concept a lot better than the rest of our society. Removed from their homes, their family, and their loved ones, men in the military must depend on each other, their brothers in arms, not only for combat support but for all of their emotional and mental support as well. I've watched  a few documentaries about submarine crews, and those men develop a firm love and trust among each other based on the fact that without each other they'd go insane.

We may not be trapped in a metal capsule under the ocean, but if we, as men, are not able to open ourselves up our brothers and hide from the friendships and companionship we desperately need, we are isolating ourselves in our own internal, emotionless capsules, we will drive ourselves mad. We become the same insensitive, inconsiderate, and often violent men that seem to dominate so much of the male population in my generation.

I love my male friends, and I'm not afraid or ashamed to admit it. When my future wife and I get married, I will have no lack of potential groomsmen to choose from.

The Love, Relationships, and Controvery Series Part I: Languages of Love

I see a lot of blog posts about relationships and love float around the walls of my Facebook friends and get shared about, and they are usually pretty good. I also find that they are typically fairly short(ish) and sweet. They get to the point and are fairly organized/direct in their approach. Unfortunately, I  don't know how to write that way. If you have read any of my other blog posts you probably know this already, but I tend to take a pretty rambling, roundabout approach before I actually  make the point that I want to.

Something else, however, that I've noticed about most of the relationship blog posts that get shared among my friends is that they all focus on marriage and "romantic" relationships. Discussing Dating/Courtship, pointing out the importance of selflessness in marriage, and debunking the idea of souldmates are all perfectly valid topics for discussion, and far be it from me to pick on either the writers of those posts or the people that eagerly re-post them.

What I think is missing from these posts full of Relationship Advice and Insight (often written by young couples a year or two into their marriages or the parents of young married couples) is that they never explore or address the fact that there are a lot of very significant relationships that exist outside of the realm of marriage. It makes sense that you would dedicate a single post to a single concept, but I feel like there needs to be some discussion over how love and relationships exist outside of the context of the whole marriage/dating/courtship realm. As a result, the first three out of four posts in this series are going to be dedicated to talking about our relationships with family and friends, and you'll have to wait until the end of the month to see my thoughts and opinions about the "Dating Game" and soulmates.

In this first installment of the series I want to take a look primarily at how we interact with other people, express our love and feelings, and develop relationships with everyone around us (including the people we may not like or know that much). This post is more of an exploratory one than one aimed at making a particular point, and I am happy to hear the input and thoughts of y'all in the comments.

If you think about it, we are actually participating in some kind of a relationship with everyone we know and come into contact with. We have a relationship with our parents, our siblings, our children, our friends, our coworkers, our employers, our classmates, our professors, our arch enemies, and so on and so forth. Relationships are not confined to a romantic setting; they're not even confined to amiable ones. However, even if our relationships with other people aren't the kind that fill our stomachs with butterflies and our heads with infatuation, we still express our feelings toward each other through some form or another of the five love languages.

There is a website titled "The 5 Love Languages" (http://www.5lovelanguages.com/) that, oddly enough, talks about five different means through which we communicate our love and feelings between ourselves and our acquaintances.Typically people have one or two Love Languages that they are more sensitive to, meaning they express and receive more potent emotion through those one or two languages than through the other three. On the website there is a test you can take that will supposedly inform you what your distribution between the five languages is.

The five languages, according to the website, are A) Words of Affirmation B) Acts of Service C) Receiving/Giving Gifts D) Quality Times  and E) Physical Touch.

If you primarily express/receive emotion through Words of Affirmation, then you are pretty sensitive to what other people say, and you put a lot of weight and significance on the value of your owns words. You probably don't make a lot of flippant comments, and you don't take comments from other people very flippantly. If someone compliments you it means a lot, but if someone makes  a jibe at you, it is going to really hurt.  The long name for this language may be Words of Affirmation but I think you can pretty easily simplify it down to just Words.

However, if your primary love language is Acts of Service , then you put more weight in walking the walk instead of talking the talk. You hold the door open for people you respect and care about, you help them with the groceries, you run their errands, you drop everything to go out and pick them up after their car breaks down, and it means a lot to you when others do the same for you. Acts of Service, or just Acts, is the process of actually doing something for someone else. The thought is nice, but the actual action of performing a helpful act for someone is all the more meaningful.

The interesting thing about both Words and Acts is that regardless of your primary love language, we should really treat everyone around use respectfully through these two particular love languages. We should be willing to be courteous and respectful through our words and actions toward our closest friends, complete strangers, and everyone in between. Words & Acts can be used in more personal and intimate ways, but they are the love languages that I think are most applicable to all relationships we have with anyone.

The third languages, simplified down to Gifts is more personal than Words & Acts. If you primarily show love and affection towards others through the giving of gifts, chances are you become pretty popular around Christmas and Birthdays. Having Gifts as your primary method of showing affection means simply that you like to give people things, and it probably also means that you like to receive things from others as well. Presents and gifts are going to be rather precious and meaningful to you. One of the differences between Gifts  and Words & Acts is that giving gifts to people is a much more personal way of showing kindness and love. Unlike Words & Acts, we typically do not go around giving anyone and everyone we meet presents. Usually, presents are reserved only for our friends and family, even if Gifts is not one of our primary modes of amiable communication, and honestly, most strangers would find it pretty weird if we went around handing them gifts.

Even more personal than gift giving however, are the last two love languages, and the two that I think are most directly correlated and connected to our most personal and intimate relationships.

Communicating through Quality Time means communicating beyond small talk and idle chit chat. It can mean sharing a deep conversation about complicated or difficult topics, or it can mean going off on some kind of adventure together (think hunting or camping),but it essentially means that you are developing your relationship through means that go beyond that of a simple acquaintance. It means getting to know each others thoughts, feelings, personalities, personal quirks and hobbies, by doing things together or talking about things that open you up to a deeper, more meaningful friendship.

Quality Time takes both Words of Affirmation and Acts of Service and goes another several steps further.

Lastly, you have Physical Touch, which I believe is the single most personal and intimate of all the love languages (feel free to disagree with me on this). There really aren't many ways to break down Touch, because it is really quite straightforward. It covers hugs, hand holding, arms across the shoulders, pats on the back, kisses, and every other physical interaction that you can think of. It is not a love languages strictly limited to romantic relationships, but is the love language most often associated with them, and I think that is because it is such an intimate one. Actually physically touching someone is a pretty significant act most of the time, and conveys a lot of meaning.

If you think about it, neglect and verbal abuse are both terrible things, but is physical abuse that is most likely to get someone sent to jail. Especially to those of whose most prominent love languages is physical touch, physically abusing a person ranks as one of the most terrible things you can possibly do. Even when you shake hands with someone, that often goes beyond a typical greeting where you merely share a "hello" or "nice to meet you." The people you stop to actually shake hands with are the people with whom you have a slightly more substantial relationship.

So, while it is almost certainly true that everyone has their own primary love language, and that we will all express our feelings and emotions differently on a case by case basis, but I think that you can apply a fairly general overview of the five languages to the development of relationships in general.

In the most basic level of relationships that we have, we interact primarily through Words & Acts. We treat new acquaintances and strangers  that we like, or at least have no reason to dislike, with courteous words and friendly acts of service. If we think they do well or have succeed at something we compliment them, and may be willing to lend a helping hand. If, however, we disagree with someone,  and don't know them well, we tend to fall back on verbal arguments and we will be less inclined to provide any kind of serviceable act for them. At their worst, hostile strangers are reduced to wild mockery and petty insults (coughYouTubecoughcommentscough). In all relationships at all stages, we use words and acts of service to express our emotions toward someone, but in the case of undeveloped relationships, that is usually where our communication ends.

As relationships progress, however, I think that the other love languages come into play a lot more. The more we get to know and like someone, the more inclined we will to spend quality time with them, to give them gifts, and the less awkward physical interaction with them becomes. In order to really develop a relationship and help it grow though, I think you actually have to spend some quality time together, because relationships of any kind can only grow as a result of two people getting to one another better. Quality time ends up being a cycle where you start getting to know someone better, and if you like them, you start spending more quality time with them and if you like them even more after that, you spend more quality time with them and so on and so forth. If, however, you spend quality time with them and you develop an aversion to them as a result of getting to know them better, you start to avoid spending any further quality time around them.

In many ways, I think that Quality Time serves as the gap between the kinds of relationships that communicate primarily through Words of Affirmation and Acts of Service and those that make more use of Gift Giving and Physical Touch. Once you have spent enough quality time with someone and have gotten to know them well enough, you are more inclined to express your affection and friendliness toward them through the giving of gifts, through physical touch, and through additional quality time.

The one point that I definitely want to draw from all of this though, and the one that is going to come into play a lot more in the next two installments in this series, is that none of the love languages are limited to romantic interactions. It is perfectly possible to express your love and affection for someone through any one of the five without having a relationship with that someone of a romantic boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse relationship.

All five means of affection communication stem naturally from the development of friendships built upon quality time spent together.

I feel like that is a pretty abrupt place to end a post, and I'm not really satisfied with how this one turned out, but I don't want to start spilling over into the subject matter of my next post. Just think of this one as laying the groundwork for the next three, and as an exploratory piece where you have the chance to share your input on the development of friendships and ways of expression love and affection before I start getting highly opinionated.

Stay tuned for the following installment "Part II: The Brotherhood" coming next week in which I will look at the development of loving male comradery/brotherhood and how it has been distorted by modern world culture.

Pax

Introducing the November Love, Relationships, and Controversy Series

Because I like to think and write about impossibly big issues and ideas, I have been wanting to write a blog post on Love and Relationships since I started this blog, but every time I sat down to try and write something I became overwhelmed with the massiveness of the issues, the number of points to be addressed, and controversy I could stir up. In order to try and bypass those first two obstacles I decided that I would make the project a month long one. Instead of trying to cram all of my thoughts on Love, Relationships, Marriage, Dating, etc. etc. into a single post, I decided to divide the topic up into a series of posts over the course of November with each post dedicated to focusing on a different topic within the realm of Love and Relationships.

As for the controversy part, this is a blog titled "The Opinion Section" after all.

Seriously though, I am pretty sure that what I'm going to say in these posts is not going to sound entirely agreeable to all of you. In fact, I'm pretty sure I am going to say some things that have a high likelihood of being highly objectionable to you. Many of the people I know read my blog (Hi Grandma) will, I hope, actually be in agreement with me on most, if not all, of this, but there are a lot of people I can see getting rather upset with me and my opinions on this particular topic. Because of that, I wanted to make a few points in this here introductory post.

1) I Am Not Specifically Attacking Anyone: I may be highly opinionated and firmly set in what I believe, but that doesn't mean I am trying to attack everyone who holds a different view point. I truly believe that there is a very real difference between right and wrong and in a very real distinction between right and wrong, and I will defend and forward what I believe to be right and true, but that doesn't mean that I am setting out to bash, insult, mock, ridicule, or belittle anyone that stands by what I believe to be wrong or untrue. I disagree with you, that is true, but my goal is to express the truth and uphold what I believe is good, not to attack anyone.

And that leads me to my next point...

2) Just Because I Don't Agree With You Doesn't Mean I Hate You: Being the opinionated person that I am, there is a very good chance that we are going to disagree about something. Even my closest friends do not agree with me 100% about everything. A dispute or disagreement between us does not necessarily mean that I hate you and your guts. Again, I will defend what I believe is right and true, but just because you do not believe what I believe does not mean I want your head upon a stake. As another human being (and likely a friend if you are reading this), I respect you and your stance on any given topic even if I think it is wrong. Depending on the significance of the issue, I may try to persuade you otherwise, and I will never condone that that goes against my beliefs, but I don't hate you.

About my beliefs and opinions...

3) The Bible Is God's Word: I'm not going to even say "I Believe..." for this point, because the truth of the matter is that my personal belief doesn't have anything to do with it. The Bible is the infallible Word of God, and the teaching of the actually confessional and liturgical Lutheran Church are the foundation for night everything I believe in and hold to be true. You aren't going to persuade me to believe something else through Blog comments, and those beliefs are going to come out in this series of posts and pretty much every other post I write (if you haven't noticed already). If you have an issue with the Lutheran Confessions, or Christianity in general, than I am very sorry and I will respect that, but you aren't going to agree with me and it is going to be fruitless to try and refute my arguments by attacking my faith. I will entertain the possibility that my personal opinions about Love and Relationships are invalid or flawed, but attacking my underlying beliefs and faith isn't going to get you anywhere.

I write on this blog for a few specific reasons. A) It helps me to think about things and obtain a better grasp on what it is I really think and believe about complicated issues, B) Some of my friends/family asked that I have a blog, C) Some of my friends/family seem to enjoy reading what I write for some reason, and D) Because I believe that real good can come from us making our stances and beliefs known. I do not write here because I believe I am going to change the world, because I have a vendetta against anyone, or because "haters gonna hate."

I may be Mr. Opinionated, but I'm not a jerk.

Anyway, back to the November Love, Relationships, and Controversy Series... At this point I am thinking that there will be four installments with one post coming each week and the first one completed and posted by Friday.

Pax

College is About Trying New Stuff Right?

Last night and tonight I participated in my first ever formal audition.

To give you a little bit of background: I work as an usher at my university's Box Office and get to see all their theater performances several times during their run. Since before I even started school last year in the fall, I was pretty sure that I'd want to try out for a theatrical performance at some point during my time in the university setting, and I this last month I decided that sooner is better than later.

Outside the realm of academia, I'd already cut my teeth on the entire acting thing years previously under the watchful eye of the Great Duchess Olivia. Being a lowly, socially awkward homeschooler, I never had the opportunity to participate in school plays but the Duchess Olivia was kind enough to rally the troops of my church's homeschooling families together to give us all an opportunity we were missing out on. The Duchess exposed us to the world of theater, albeit informally so, and I discovered a whole world of interest for me.

All the way, way back in 2010 I played Peter in the Duchess's own rendition of "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe." That show was, to be quite honest, pretty silly and cheesy in many, many ways, but it was a new experience and opened the doors to a new realm of potential entertainment and learning for me and my peers. The roles in that show were pretty small, the lines undemanding, and the talent fairly minimal, but it was the first step toward going much, much farther.

The following year (2011) we took a huge leap and quit playing around with simple C. S. Lewis level stuff and moved into the big leagues. The Duchess believed that we were ready to take on the works of the master bard himself: William Shakespeare, and I got the role of Demetrius in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The difference in difficulty between Midsummer and LWW was night and day. The language was totally new, the lines much longer, and the roles much more intense/involved. Heck, even the swords Erik the Red blacksmithed for us were more legit. LWW was my first exposure to acting, but Midsummer was my first exposure to Shakespeare and I loved it. Whether it was because I had the opportunity to swing real swords around at good friend Lysander, or because I got to openly fawn over lovely young ladies, Midsummer was a spectacular experience. It most certainly had its downsides, and the skill level of our performers was still... pretty mediocre, but it was a vast improvement and the door was opened even wider. Mostly, it was amazing because we had pretty little kids (like 10 and 11) performing huge Shakespeare roles in almost their entirety.

Then we heard through the Grapevine that the 2012 homeschooler's acting extravaganza would likely be reserved for the younger kids. The Duchess wanted to work more with the smaller crowd and seemed to be thinking that some us older folks, while free to assist with the shows, should probably take a step back. Saddened, but not deterred, the Lovely Lena (Helena of Midsummer and the Witch of LWW) decided that us older outcasts would put on a smaller show of our own. She was only thirteen at the time if I remember correctly, but Lena made an exceptional director as she led a small rag tag group of teens through a shortened production of "The Taming of the Shrew." Wielding my cape, decorative marine sword, and fedora as Petruchio, I worked to tame the vicious Kate with my incredible charm and decency... Ahem, Taming was yet again an entirely new experience. Our director was half the age of the Duchess and was actually participating in the show with us. We had a small enough cast that a few people doubled up roles... and would play both characters on stage at the same time through method of a bit of funky costume work (you just wish you could have seen it). We did, however, maintain true to the original Shakespeare even if we cut a fair amount, and we did a pretty spectacular job (I think) for the goofballs we all were/are.

However, surprise surprise, the Duchess decided that she needed more cast members for the 2012 production of "Peter Pan" than she had originally realized and a bunch of us older folks got roped back into the "big" performance. I was cast as Hook and apparently reduced a child or two to tears during our actual performances. (Sorry kids... didn't mean to) Peter Pan's language was a step down from the difficulty in Taming and Midsummer, and I had a lot of personal stuff going on outside of the play at the time, but it was fun, it was silly, and it was yet another great acting experience. The distraction of the play actually turned out to be immensely helpful with all the other stuff going on, and it was our last play with some of our dearest and most talented actors. One of our homeschooling families ended up moving away that summer, and we were all quite saddened by the fact that we would be losing them. So, we made it the best play that we possibly could.

When this spring rolled around, I was pretty sure I wouldn't actually be taking up an acting role again. I had become an adult and the Duchess's life was getting busy enough she was going to need an assistant director in order to get the show off the ground. It looked like I would be working on the other end of the stage for a while, but at the last minute on audition day my brother revealed that he didn't actually want to act and so I swapped with him and became an actor while he became assistant director. This show was to be the last with the Duchess before she completed her doctorate and moved out yonder to teach at some distant university, and so we wanted to make it the best show ever. So, naturally, we chose to do another Shakespeare. In both Midsummer and Taming we cut a fair number of lines, but for Twelfth Night we cut next to nothing. I took up the role of the infamous and totally ridiculous butler Mavolio and dove into my role like never before.

Twelfth Night ended up being incredible. Like all four of the other plays, it had plenty of drama offstage and backstage as well as onstage, and there were some tense moments, but it ended up beautifully. My role was a little bit... no, a lot of bit crazy, but I went with it and I got into it, and I went all the way. I loved the entire experience, and was very truly sorry to see our Duchess leave this summer.

Duchess Olivia (named so because she ended up playing Olivia in Twelfth Night for one of the performances), taught me how to act, to love to act, and to love Shakespeare. She gave me a talent and interest that will probably never really come into play in my professional life, but that has become a significant part of past and personality all the same. The Duchess is the reason I chose to go ahead and audition for my university's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

(Now we're caught up to the present)

This year, my school's theme is all Shakespeare. This semester the theater department just finished doing King Lear and in December they will be doing a three person play that is a compilation of all Shakespeare's works into one play (dunno how that will go yet), and next semester the Children's Show (a show for children not by children) will be a shortened version of Midsummer while the musical will be "Kiss Me Kate."

Knowing that I would never survive a musical, I went into auditions planning only to audition for A Midsummer, but discovered that regardless of what show you were interested in you had to do the same stuff for both.

On Saturday at noon there was an audition workshop for anyone interested in getting some extra help and advice before the actual auditions and despite the fact that it turned out to be three times as long as I was expecting, I'm really glad I went. For our first round of auditions we were all supposed to prepare two one minutes monologs and a 32 bar song. My understanding had been that the song would be sung without any accompanying music or anything. Well, I find out at the workshop that we would actually be having an accompanist playing the piano and that we would need sheet music.

Now, I've been told I have a decent voice, but if there is one thing I am terrible at (and I mean terrible) it is music. I cannot keep a tempo or stay in the right key to save me life. I can play some piano and flute, but I have no real understanding of music theory or... well, anything music related. So while I was pretty confident in my ability to just sing a song for the director, I was totally thrown off by singing along with a pianist.

Anyway, finding that out was... interesting, but at the workshop the twelve or so people that showed up would, one at a time, get onto the stage and deliver the stuff they had prepared for the Acting and Musical Directors. I was one of the people to go in the middle, and as soon as I got up on the stage I was totally thrown.

As I've already said, I've done acting before. I've done stuff in front of a live audience many of times and I'm even taking a speech class this semester, but when I got on the stage I experienced what I am pretty sure people typically call stage freight. Maybe it was because I felt unprepared with my song, or maybe it was because I didn't actually know the people watching me, but I felt instantly awkward, uncomfortable, and intensely nervous.  The Music Director ask that I sing my song for him even though I didn't have the sheet music with me, and he told me I had an amazing voice, but in the nicest way possible he informed me I don't know how to sing. (No surprises there.) He had me try several times and he said I sung in a different key each time (personally I didn't even notice), and I could tell I wasn't even singing as well as I usually do because nerves were making it hard to focus.

Really, I think it sounded quite awful.

Anyway, from the terrible singing I switched to my prepared monologs and those went neither amazingly or terribly. I only actually had time to go through one, and the director just told me to focus on involving the audience more when I spoke. After I was done with that I climbed off the stage, shuffled back to my seat, and watched the rest of the people there sing far... far better than I ever could.

After the individual work we all gathered together to learn part of the dance routine for the show that we would be doing in the auditions today (Tuesday). I've also done some dancing before, but that was all country/contra dancing and the new stuff was not coming to me very well. It was kind of intimidating working along side theater/dance majors who knew the kinds of steps were doing already, but I was doing my best and kind of flip flopping my way through it.

Once the workshop was done, I went through the rest of my day feeling pretty pessimistic about my chances in the actual auditions. I figured I'd perform my song even worse when I sung along with someone playing, and the dancing really had not gone over well for me either.

Then yesterday (Monday) night I showed up for my actual audition. It lasted about five minutes and was... awkward. First off, the pianist playing for me was my coworker from last year in the Box Office, and secondly I was spot on about singing terribly with the pianist. My timing and my tune was off and it... wasn't great. My monologs I felt went pretty smoothly, but I was kicking myself all the way home for my vocal performance.

I kept telling myself that at least I had given it a shot, and it was worth it for the experience, but I was pretty disappointed in myself overall and was highly, highly skeptical of having any chance at all of actually getting cast with a part.

Then tonight we had the "call backs" where everyone who had auditioned came to participate in learning the dance, singing a song from the actual musical, and then worked in groups on cold readings from the scripts for both "Kiss Me Kate" and "A Midsummer."

Well, tonight was a complete different side of the coin in so many ways. Maybe it was because I'd already convinced myself it was fine if I didn't get a part as long as I had fun enjoying the new experience of auditioning, but I was so much more relaxed and into the stuff we did tonight than I was last night. We started off learning the dance as a group (there were somewhere between thirty and forty of us) and somehow I'd gained the ability to actually dance between Saturday and today, because while I wasn't anywhere near the best, I wasn't doing half bad. Several of the people from the workshop told me I improved vastly in the dancing, and I was able to concentrate less on the moves and more on simply enjoying the experience. We did the same intense footwork (we were moving fast and hard) for about an hour and a half as we danced in a large group, and then split into smaller groups and it was a millions of fun.

After the dancing we split into odd and even numbered groups, and the actors with odd numbered tags went to go work on cold readings for Midsummer while the evens began working on Kate. We learned the opening piece from the musical and, once again, singing was my weakest part of the night, but it went well enough and from there we got into cold readings. The girl I was working with is one of the better actresses in the theater department and we really got into playing Kate and Petruchio. In the few short scenes we were given to do we screamed at each other, stomped around, mocked each other, and she even slapped me in the face (with permission). It was a ton of fun, and brought me back to the good ol' days of when the Squirrel was playing Kate and I was playing Petruchio in Lena's version of Taming of the Shrew.

Eventually we switched with the even numbered actors, and started working on Midsummer stuff. We had some time before we actually were called upon for auditioning so I started working with a few of the others on practicing the slates we were given for the cold readings. I got to try out being both Puck and Oberon, and it was really interesting getting to know some of the people I'd been watching on stage for the last year. Some of them were pretty cool, and all of them were quite different from the characters I'd seen them play on stage. (Also, Martyr, the guy that looks like you looks less like you close up.)

When I left school a little after 10:00 pm, I felt much more optimistic about the entire auditioning experience. I still have no idea if I'll get a part or not, but I believe my chances are better now, and even if I don't I'm very glad I took the time to go through this whole thing. It was yet another new experience and step in the world of theater, and I'd never would have had the opportunity to try in my homeschooling acting.

Mostly I am happy with myself for trying, and for sticking to it even though I was feeling pretty pessimistic last night. It was something new and exciting, and it added yet another fun bit of history to my life that I will be able to call upon in years to come. I got to meet some interesting new people, and I learned some fun new things, and that's part of what college is all about right?

Now longer it is no longer even Tuesday, but I haven't gone to sleep yet so I am going to pretend it is. I should probably go through and edit this, but I'm afraid "ain't nobody got time fo' dat" right now. As I wrap up this latest addition to "The Opinion Section," I just want to thank the wonderful Duchess again for all the time, effort, and attention she put into planting the interest in theater that got me to even go out and try this.

Thanks Olivia, it was great.

Pax

P.S. Here's a picture of me being Mavolio in Twelfth Night for your enjoyment... or terror. Whichever.