A Mind Like a Steel Trap or My Dad Was Right

A Mind Like a Steel Trap or My Dad Was Right

December 19, 2010 by · 1 Comment

Photo via John-Morgan on Flickr

I’m 31.  When I was in high school (1994–1998) it was right at the time Bill Clin­ton was being inves­ti­gated and impeached dur­ing the Mon­ica Lewin­sky scan­dal.  I don’t remem­ber much about it.  To be hon­est, I really wasn’t pay­ing much atten­tion.  What I do remem­ber is think­ing that Bill Clin­ton was bad.  Repub­li­cans were moral.  Democ­rats were immoral, irri­tat­ing, and excus­ing Clinton’s behav­ior.  I think this might have been the begin­ning of my move­ment to the right.  The polit­i­cal right.

In col­lege, I fell in with a pretty con­ser­v­a­tive crowd.  Many of my friends were self-identifying evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians.  Many of them had grown up in both the church and con­ser­v­a­tive fam­i­lies.  This was not my back­ground.  My par­ents are Methodist, and they are both social work­ers.  They tend to lean left in polit­i­cal mat­ters.  One time when I was in col­lege, I was try­ing to explain some­thing polit­i­cal from my point of view to my dad.  He in turn was try­ing to con­vince me that my view­point may not be empir­i­cally cor­rect or the only side of the story.  Because I was 19 (or so), had a dif­fer­ent point of view than my par­ents, and saw things pretty black and white, I was pretty sure he was wrong and didn’t have much inter­est in think­ing through what he was say­ing.  After the con­ver­sa­tion, he was talk­ing to my mom and said some­thing like, “She has a mind like a steel trap.”

I assume what he meant was that I wasn’t will­ing to open my mind to let any new ideas into it.  At the time I was sure that he was wrong.  He was wrong, wrong, wrong.  Of course he was wrong.  Wrong, right?

When­ever I didn’t know much about a can­di­date, I went back to abor­tion.  If I thought that abor­tion was wrong and there were thou­sands of abor­tions every year I had to vote for the party who was work­ing to pre­vent that, right?  So, even if I wasn’t quite on board with the Republican’s thoughts on taxes, edu­ca­tion, or another issue it some­how came back to black and white and abor­tion.  Even now as I explain, I’m hav­ing a hard time get­ting it out clearly.  I think at the time it wasn’t nearly as clear in my head as I wanted it to be.  (I got stuck at this point on the post for sev­eral days.)  Now, sev­eral days later, I still can’t do any bet­ter at explain­ing that thought process than I could then.

Grad­u­ally, my views began to change.  First, I started think­ing about the death penalty.  I had been in favor of the death penalty, and grad­u­ally I real­ized that I had begun to believe it to be incon­sis­tent with my val­ues.  While I real­ize there are times in the bible when the death penalty is insti­tuted, I think that there are so many things wrong with the way our soci­ety has insti­tuted it, I can­not sup­port it.  From the chances of exe­cut­ing an inno­cent per­son to the racial dis­par­ity in its use, I have many oppo­si­tions to it.  After I changed views on the death penalty, I began to think about other issues.  One by one, I found myself real­iz­ing that the core of my being did not believe the views pro­moted by the Repub­li­can party and par­tic­u­larly the Tea Party move­ment of the GOP.

From the GOP’s move­ment from a pay-as-you-go phi­los­o­phy to a cut-as-you-go phi­los­o­phy to their oppo­si­tion to any sort of uni­ver­sal health care to their view of cli­mate change, I real­ized one day.  What the heck!?!?  I am not any­where near a Repub­li­can.  Gulp, in fact, I might be a…Democrat, and my dad might have been right!

I’m not try­ing to pre­tend like I sud­denly think the Demo­c­ra­tic party is per­fect.  They have their share of peo­ple I’m not thrilled with.  They make deci­sions I don’t agree with.  They make mis­takes.  I’m hes­i­tant to label myself as any­thing right now, but I have to say my beliefs do fall much fur­ther to the lib­eral side of the spec­trum than to the con­ser­v­a­tive side.

Don’t tell my dad.  :-)

Filed Under: Decisions

A Place to Call Home

May 24, 2010 by · Leave a Comment

For the first 18 years of my life, I lived in one house. I love my par­ents’ house. It’s not huge or fancy. It’s not even what I would con­sider the per­fect lay­out, but man, I love that place. After I left home to go to col­lege, I lived in 11 dif­fer­ent places. These include dorms, sum­mer camp cab­ins, home with my par­ents for a sum­mer, apart­ments, and the house we owned for three years. Of those places, the house def­i­nitely felt the most like home even though we were there only for three years.

After liv­ing in the house for three years, we started to reeval­u­ate our sit­u­a­tion. Did we really want to live in a place where it was a 10 mile drive each way to go to work, church, the gro­cery store, friends’ houses? In addi­tion, our house had two bed­rooms upstairs and two down­stairs. At the time, we weren’t expect­ing any chil­dren to be born in the near future, but we knew it would prob­a­bly be an issue when Baby #3 was on the way. I also had a really hard time meet­ing any­one in the small town where we lived. It was pri­mar­ily a bed­room com­mu­nity with no great places to meet other moms or kids. We talked about what to do for quite a while. Stay or sell? In the end, we decided that most of the things which we con­sid­ered to be issues or prob­lems were not going to change. We decided to put the house on the mar­ket and see if any­one would buy it. To our sur­prise we ended up with a buyer after the first day on the mar­ket. After that, we had a whirl­wind 5 weeks of look­ing at houses, find­ing none we liked, look­ing at apart­ments, doing last minute fixes on the house, and moving!

We’ve been liv­ing in our cur­rent apart­ment for just under a year now, and while it’s not ideal, there are def­i­nitely things I really appre­ci­ate about liv­ing here. We are close to friends, close to a park, within walk­ing dis­tance of Jason’s work. The apart­ment is pretty afford­able. It’s really pretty big for an apart­ment. The laun­dry room is right off the kitchen and easy to access for me dur­ing the day. It has a deck on the north side of the build­ing which allows us shade in the after­noon sun. It has under­ground park­ing so I don’t have to take the boys out­side to get them in the vehi­cle in the win­ter. We have a bike path prac­ti­cally out our front door. We are just a cou­ple min­utes from both gro­cery stores that we fre­quent. So, as I said, there are many *many* things to like about it. Obvi­ously there are things which I don’t like about it, but I think every house or apart­ment has things like that.

Orig­i­nally, our plan was to live in this apart­ment for a year and find a house this sum­mer. Then, when I found out I was preg­nant, we thought it might be bet­ter not to go through the work and stress of buy­ing a house and mov­ing dur­ing the preg­nancy. One of the cri­te­ria we had decided on in our search for a house was an attached garage. It’s North Dakota. It can be cold in the win­ter. It can be rainy or windy through­out the year. Hav­ing an attached garage would be really nice. Unfor­tu­nately, the more I look at houses the more I won­der if that is a real­ity for us. My hus­band is the Chief Tech­nol­ogy Offi­cer for his com­pany and does almost all their computer-related work. He also does some web pro­gram­ming on the side. I am a for­mer spe­cial edu­ca­tion teacher, but I am stay­ing at home with our kids right now. It’s a pri­or­ity for us to spend time together as a fam­ily. Lots of time by some accounts. I could work, but I would be sac­ri­fic­ing time with my young chil­dren and my awe­some hus­band. Jason could work more than he already does by doing more pro­gram­ming, but he would then be sac­ri­fic­ing his time with me and his time for run­ning, relax­ing, and sleep­ing. How much can (or should) one per­son work???

So, because of our pri­or­i­ties, it seems like we have a cou­ple choices. We can con­tinue to live in this apart­ment and save money and hope that a house in our price range comes up with an attached garage. We can look at houses and go for one that doesn’t have an attached garage. We can wait until this fall (when I will be 7 1/2 months or more preg­nant) and look at houses when the pre-winter price reduc­tions happen.

I’m guess­ing that part of the rea­son this has become a major issue for me again is because I’m preg­nant and prob­a­bly get­ting some of those nesting-type feel­ings. Also, while it’s so much eas­ier to find things to do with the boys in the sum­mer, it’s really hard to keep two boys occu­pied in the win­ter. Think­ing about doing that and hav­ing a new baby is def­i­nitely some­thing that’s on my mind reg­u­larly. I’m also real­iz­ing that even if we stay here another year, with all the money we can save it still will prob­a­bly not be enough to get a house with an attached garage. *ETA* As soon as I hit pub­lish, I real­ized that I for­got an impor­tant thought! I loved my house grow­ing up, and I want that same sense of place and com­fort for my kids.

So, until then, I will be here in our pretty darn good apart­ment. Not lov­ing the wimpy air con­di­tioner but feel­ing thank­ful for the many things which are work­ing out with us being here. And pondering.

Filed Under: Decisions Tagged With: , ,