Why We Aren't Moving (Yet)

I feel like a need to preface this post with a whole bunch of background history, but first of all, let me explain the motivation behind it. We live in a mildly run-down, older part of Tempe, nearby ASU. Our house is perfectly fine, it was build in 1960 and we've had our share of problems with it, but with the exception of the kitchen, we are getting it near the way we want it to look. Our front yard is landscaped nicely now, the outside has been recently painted and I love it. One bathroom was over-hauled, the other one was improved. We've re-done most of the flooring. We're down to the kitchen, basically... And I have the money to do it, I just gotta get it done.

Size-wise (my wife won't agree with this), it is perfectly adequate, at least for now. It's 1500 square feet. We have four children, but they are mostly small and in my opinion its perfectly sized for our family. As they age, things will start to squish. And we home school, so my wife would prefer more space for all of our home schooling stuff and a better dedicated space for school. But honestly this is a first world complaint (please don't tell her I said this) and we are getting by just fine with what we have.

And despite all of this, the location has a lot of benefits. We're right in the middle of a sprawling valley. Nearly anything we want to get to is within a 30 minute drive. Right now, my wife is driving all the way out to Queen Creek to take advantage of some seriously kick-butt violin lessons for our oldest daughter and even Queen Creek, situated as it is on the edge of the population, is still a manageable distance away.

When we bought the house, the housing boom was just beginning and we were really hesitant to jump in.  I was seriously handicapped by trying to make this decision by asking the question, what would my older sisters do. Well, I know what they would have done, they would have bought a house in the Coronado District or similar, and that's what we tried to do as well, going as far as making an offer on a house. But we couldn't follow through because, you know, I'm not them, and this area, for all of its charm and historic value, was not for us.

Meanwhile, the people most like me, those my age in the tech industry were making much different house buying decisions than me. Their houses were much larger, brand-new, meant-to-look impressive sort of houses in the suburbs and exurbs, houses with pillars, and granite counter-tops and stainless steel appliances with big windows and vaulted ceilings and lots of space. 

At the time we finally made our house purchase, I was working in South Scottsdale, and my wife was working at ASU, so actually Tempe made a ton more sense than downtown Phoenix and in my opinion it made a ton more sense then far east Mesa, or far south Chandler, or Gilbert and beyond. But the houses in Tempe are either really expensive or kind of lame and often both. We did the best we could and ended up with the house we have (kind of lame, kind of small, kind of run-down).

But it has worked out. We made friends in our church congregation, got to know our neighbors (the ones we are most friendly with are the older, been here almost since when the neighborhood was new. The others are renters, typically ASU students and are harder to pin down). And it has worked out. But we've aged and our kids have aged, and our friends are starting to move, in droves to find bigger nicer homes elsewhere.

Our church congregation tends to have very small number of youth who regularly attend and they are in a rather transitionary demographic, a lot of renters who are passing through typically. Our primary (children under 12) is fairly nice sized, but after 10 or 11, the population drops off a cliff. And this past week, another family is leaving the ward a family whose son is our son's age, a boy our son considers his best friend.

But you know, and I said it in my home schooling post, I like doing what eveyone else is not doing:

Not too many people would agree with me, but I do have a rebellious spirit inside of me. It's wildly constrained by fear, but I do rebel. I like to turn against the status quo at times, to do something unique only to me, swim against the tide, establish my own identity. But I just don't rebel for random reasons, I have to have really, really good reasons. I need to have a great story to explain my rebellion, so that I can justify it to others. Maybe, so that I may even get someone else to join me...

And as people our age leave our church community one by one replaced by young couples half our age, I want to dig in. I want to zig while others zag. I want to recommit myself to the Peterson Park Ward of the Tempe Stake for as long as I can.

And by the way, I think this General Conference talk is particularly relevant to this point:

One thing we have often been taught is to bloom where we are planted. Yet sometimes we are tempted to migrate to some new area, thinking our children will have more friends and therefore better youth programs.

Brothers and sisters, do we really think the critical factor in the salvation of our children is the neighborhood where we live? The apostles and prophets have often taught that what happens inside the home is far more important than what our children encounter outside. How we raise our children is more important than where we raise them.

Certainly there are other factors involved in deciding where to live, and thankfully, the Lord will guide us if we seek His confirmation.

Another question is “Where are we needed?” For 16 years I served in the presidency of the Houston Texas North Stake. Many moved to our area during those years. We would often receive a phone call announcing someone moving in and asking which was the best ward. Only once in 16 years did I receive a call asking, “Which ward needs a good family? Where can we help?”

In the early years of the Church, President Brigham Young and others would call members to go to a certain place to build up the Church there. The irony is that even now we have faithful Church members everywhere who would go anywhere the prophet asked them to go. Do we really expect President Monson to individually tell more than 14 million of us where our family is needed? The Lord’s way is that we hearken to our leaders’ teachings, understand correct principles, and govern ourselves.

Our son just started Cub Scouts. In the past week, three Cub Scout leaders are in process of leaving or have left. I am committed to helping my son suck every last ounce of benefit from the scouting program and am more than willing to help other boys if asked.

And our children are hardly bereft of resources. I mean, we live within biking distance of a major university. Our kids have participated in an amazing Chandler Children's Choir, they sporadically get gymnastic training from a school run by a woman who won a gold medal in the 1996 olympics. And even without those perks, I have an awfully talented wife.

Now, this does not mean we are staying here forever and we could move sooner than this post implies (maybe much sooner). We still would like to live closer to family and we would eventually like to have a nicer, bigger house, especially as our kids get older and our needs change.

But for now at least we're here and enjoying it. Zigging while everyone else seems to be zagging.
  

My Wife's Master's Recital

Some time back, I tried to get my wife's master's recital stored on the web reference-able.  The links are now dead, so this time I'm going youtube. This is really half of the recital unfortunately. The second half is Schumann's Carnaval. It last almost thirty minutes and is broken up into 19 tiny movements. I'm haven't figured out how to get it up to youtube yet.

Some brief commentary. This is my wife at her absolute musical peak. We weren't married yet, we had started dating seriously that semester before she performed it. It was difficult for me because she was so stressed out about it and was focused so hard on it, I didn't get to see her nearly enough.

I hope that one day, when the children are older and she has more time to focus on it, she can try to get at least some of this back. 

Mozart Sonata in D Major K. 576

Movement 1, Allegro:


Movement 2, Adagio:



Movement 3, Allegretto:


Ravel Sonatine

Movement 1, Modere:


Movement 2: Mouvement de menuet


Movement 3: Anime


Prokofiev

Sonata No. 3 in A Minor, Op 28

Let's end the Cultural War with a Compromise: Legalize Gay Marriage, End Abortions

My preference, of course, is to find a muddied compromise on both issues. Find ways to extend to gay couples the benefits they request while finding cultural space for traditional view of marriage for those individuals and institutions that want to still believe in it. Even more so, I hope we can come to what I think is the basic understanding that gay and straight relationships are fundamentally different and that the rules, taboos, constraints and support may inevitably be structured to respect, honor and support these differences. Here's Andrew Sullivan:

Ross sharpens this by noting that in Massachusetts and Spain, for example, there are now three kinds of marriages: gay male, lesbian and heterosexual. Experientially, these are different things because of the power of gender. I do not dispute this at all. Ross, I think, is particularly worried about monogamy in this context - because it is so unnatural a state for most of us. The threat to monogamy, of course, is not universally - but largely - a function of testosterone and evolutionary biology. And the heterosexual marriage ideal offers social status to males to stick to one woman for the sake of children (and his wife).

On abortion, I think we should do more to support and sustain women so that pregnancy is intentional and occurs under the best circumstances, but when it does occur, they are supported throughout their pregnancy and the newly created child has every opportunity to be raised in a home of loving caregivers, ideally bound to the biological parents who produced the life.

However, I think these two issues have a lot of complementary features and could easily be worked through in tandem. If the choice is between an aborted baby and a gay couple willing to provide a loving home for that baby to thrive... Well, I'm not sure how this choice is difficult. If marriage is less about creating life and more about binding romantic relationships than the taboos around unwed pregnancy disappear.

Finally, I think gay marriage is becoming increasingly inevitable as the polls seem to be going in that direction. It seems though making abortion illegal could also have the same air of inevitability as science is increasingly showing that perhaps the unborn fetus is not only a living entity but quite possibly, well you know, a person?

I think this article provides a brief abortion history but makes what I think an important point:

But my sympathy for the beliefs of people who oppose abortion is enormous, and it grows almost by the day. An ultrasound image taken surprisingly early in pregnancy can stop me in my tracks. In it is much more than I want to know about the tiny creature whose destruction we have legalized: a beating heart, a human face, functioning kidneys, two waving hands that seem not too far away from being able to grasp and shake a rattle. One of the newest types of prenatal imaging, the three-dimensional sonogram—which is so fully realized that happily pregnant women spend a hundred dollars to have their babies’ first “photograph” taken—is frankly terrifying when examined in the context of the abortion debate. The demands pro-life advocates make of pregnant women are modest: All they want is a little bit of time. All they are asking, in a societal climate in which out-of-wedlock pregnancy is without stigma, is that pregnant women give the tiny bodies growing inside of them a few months, until the little creatures are large enough to be on their way, to loving homes.

Or read about how Penelope Trunk describes here abortion here:

People think abortion is such an easy choice–they say, “Don't use abortion as birth control.” Any woman who has had one will tell you how that is such crazy talk. Because an abortion is terrible. You never stop thinking about the baby you killed. You never stop thinking about the guy you were with when you killed the baby you made with him. You never stop wondering.

So the second time I got pregnant, I thought of killing myself. My career was soaring. I was 30 and I felt like I had everything going for me — great job, great boyfriend, and finally, for the first time ever, I had enough money to support myself. I hated that I put myself in the position of either losing all that or killing a baby.

 And finally:

But also, here I am with two kids. So I know a bit about having kids and a career. And I want to tell you something: You don't need to get an abortion to have a big career. Women who want big careers want them because something deep inside you drives you to change the world, lead a revolution, break new barriers.

It doesn't matter whether you have kids now or later, because they will always make your career more difficult. There is no time in your life when you are so stable in your work that kids won't create an earthquake underneath that confidence.

Increasingly, I also think we should try to avoid sperm donor babies. I doubt its practical to legally prevent it, but it does potentially lead to crazy stuff like this, where a man finds out his wife is biologically his sister.

When my wife and I met in college, the attraction was immediate, and we quickly became inseparable. We had a number of things in common, we came from the same large metropolitan area, and we both wanted to return there after school, so everything was very natural between us. We married soon after graduation, moved back closer to our families, and had three children by the time we were 30. We were both born to lesbians, she to a couple, and me to a single woman. She had sought out her biological father as soon as she turned 18, as the sperm bank her parents used allowed contact once the children were 18 if both parties consented. I never was interested in learning about that for myself, but she felt we were cheating our future children by not learning everything we could about my past, too. Well, our anniversary is coming up and I decided to go ahead and, as a present to my wife, see if my biological father was interested in contact as well. He was, and even though our parents had used different sperm banks, it appears so did our father, as he is the same person. On the one hand, I love my wife more than I can say, and logically, done is done, we already have children. I have had a vasectomy, so we won't be having any more, so perhaps there is no harm in continuing as we are. But, I can't help but think 'This is my sister' every time I look at her now. I haven't said anything to her yet, and I don't know if I should or not. Where do I go from here? I am tempted to burn everything I got from the sperm bank and just try to forget it all, but I'm not sure if I can. Please help me figure out where to go from here.

Or in the one thread of Parks and Recreation, a character weighs the responsibility of fatherhood when he is asked to donate his sperm, implying that donating a sperm is much, much more than just donating a sperm.

 If we do expand marriage to include gay couples (which we already are), my ideal would be that those relationships would exist to support straight couples who have much more at stake in terms of creating life. Support those who get pregnant unintentionally, adopt children who would otherwise not be adopted. Push abortion into the taboo fringe where it belongs.

Can we find a compromise? Extend gay marriage, end abortions?

As a side note, illegalizing abortion makes me uncomfortable in some very serious ways. I don't ever want a return to this:

At Belle­vue, my mother had twice attended dying young women who were victims of botched abortions, young women—“girls,” she called them—who spent their last hours on earth being interviewed by policemen. Terrified, alone, dying, neither would reveal the name of the abortionist; “they were too frightened,” my mother said. If I had to put money on which of the roommates bravely went to the girl’s apartment, I’d put it on my mother.

And I would prefer if we could end abortion through culture pressure and taboo than through threat of jail, but I hope that we could at least have the discussion that goes beyond simply Roe v Wade.