I'm in the middle of The Magicians by Lev Grossman right now and it's been interesting to see something of a parallel between magic and a Reformed vision for life. I've grown up and worked in institutions that espouse a comprehensive framework for living faithfully in this world. Cue the Abraham Kuyper mantra: "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'" In some ways, this vision is liberating, but I've talked with many who also feel the burdensome side of it. Accepting the significance of all things means you have to think about everything and do something about it in a faith-informed way--nothing is neutral. Exciting...or exhausting? Especially for students who have caught the vision and then are thrust into a world of few jobs and ballooning debt, it tends to be the latter.

The Magicians is about a smart, nerdy kid who's always been obsessed with magic, but assumed it wasn't real. When he's about to go off to college, he discovers that magic is real and ends up at a magical school. Where it differs from something like Harry Potter is that it's so much more acute in the area of young adult malaise. The main group of friends in the book graduates with a burden of magical responsibility, but they have no idea what to do with their lives, so they move to New York City together and basically start partying their lives away--all the while feeling guilty and restless because they know there's something more. The story has been resonating strongly with conversations we've had about the burden of the Reformed vision, how it's desirable and beautiful, but can also be a ridiculously demanding burden as we simply try to make our way in life. For an example, try reading this passage on two levels, the surface and the Reformed vision parallel:

When he left Brakebills for New York, Quentin had expected to be knocked down and ravished by the sheer gritty reality of it all: going from the jeweled chrysalis of Brakebills to the big, messy, dirty city, where real people led real lives in the real world and did real work for real money. And for a couple of weeks he had been. It was definitely real, if by real you meant non-magical and obsessed with money and amazingly filthy. He had completely forgotten what it was like to be in the mundane world all the time. Nothing was enchanted: everything was what it was and nothing more. Every conceivable surface was plastered with words--concert posters, billboards, graffiti, maps, signs, warning labels, alternate-side parking regulations--but none of it meant anything, not the way a spell did. At Brakebills every square inch of the House, every brick, every bush, every tree, had been marinated in magic for centuries. Here, out in the world, raw unmodified physics reigned, and mundanity was epidemic. It was like a coral reef with the living vital meaning bleached out of it, leaving nothing but an empty colored rock behind. To a magician's eyes, Manhattan looked like a desert.

Grossman even squeezes in a "square inch" as he describes the results of an education that's intended to open up an infinitely meaningful world, but instead imposes a weight of ordinariness that's almost too much to bear. I'm interested to see where the story goes, on many levels, and to reflect more on how to initiate college students into ordinariness with hope and humor.

Birthday cakes. An absurd variety of pies for Thanksgiving. Cookie time at the cottage on Bass Lake in Knox, Indiana.

I have no idea what the occasion for celebration was in the picture above, but it seems representative of my Grandma. She obviously loved her family and showed it through cooking and baking; she always seemed to be preparing for and then hosting special events--from holidays to birthdays to mundane Sunday night family gatherings.

Hand and foot. Scrabble. Pinochle. Bananagrams.

Grandma loved to play card games and word games with my Grandpa before he died and with her kids when they'd gather for parties. During summer vacations at Bass Lake, every night featured epic card games in the kitchen with my aunts and uncles while my cousins and I attempted to sleep (often unsuccessfully).

Oxygen. Dialysis.

Grandma moved in with my parents shortly after my Grandpa died. At that point, she needed an oxygen machine to help her breathe 24 hours a day and needed to go in for dialysis several times a week--both as a result of secondhand smoke. She was extremely tired and wasn't able to bake anymore, but she still played games with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

My mom called this morning a little before 9:00 to tell me that her mother, my Grandma Deenik, had just passed away. She was my last living grandparent.

One of my first "unofficial" jobs was working for the billboard company for which my mom was an office manager. I swept floors, organized gallons of paint by Pantone color, and painted over old plywood panels and billboard flex (the large vinyl sheets billboards are painted on) for reuse. Not particularly exciting stuff ...

The painters, though, seemed to be really cool things, especially to my 14-year-old eyes. It was endlessly interesting to watch the art for ads go from small designs on paper in the office to huge paintings on vinyl in the cavernous shop. The one or two guys who hand-painted directly on walls throughout the city were especially revered (and you can see why below). In fact, our shop was the company that painted the famous Bigsby & Kruthers wall along the Kennedy on the north side of Chicago. During one of the Bulls' championship runs, Dennis Rodman was featured prominently on the wall and the painters would change Rodman's hair color on the mural every time he changed his; it became such a traffic nuisance, they had to remove it.

I was intrigued, then, to see "Up There," a short documentary about the dying art of hand-painted billboards in a new digital age. Watching the apprenticeship process and the years of training necessary to paint wall murals gave me newfound respect for the guys I worked with so many years ago. Though painting ads probably isn't what many of these painters would like to be doing with their considerable skills, their dedication to the process is fascinating.

My dad's mom passed away this week in Arizona and I won't be able to make it out to the funeral, but my thoughts, of course, have been there with my family all week. Here are some memories of my grandma that I sent over to my dad.

Rob and I have moved around quite a bit in the almost-ten years we've been married. Most of our possessions have found their way to us through thrift stores, garage sales, hand-me-downs, curb sides and dumpsters, so when we box up our lives, there are very few objects I'm overly concerned about packing well. Among those very few is a teapot Grandma Marge made for me in her ceramics studio.

Maybe it came from spending her formative years around so many men--her father, brothers, husband, sons--or maybe it came from having parents with deep roots in the sometimes dour world of Dutch Calvinism, but Grandma wasn't overly sentimental. And yet, her affections for her long-distance grandchildren found ways of coming through. I still remember the excitement of greeting her and Grandpa in the terminal in the days when such a thing was still possible. She'd be wearing white sandals with hose, an Arizona tan and all pastels. During her visits, she'd play with our hair and give an occasional hard squeeze or pinch on the cheek with her characteristic inside out laugh.

As Grandma and Grandpa grew older, so did I, and soon I was the one showing up on their doorstep with my overnight bag, ready to pick citrus fruit and play Rummikub, ready to enjoy tater tot casserole and bran muffins. On one visit, I admired the glaze on a set of ceramic coasters she'd made--a foggy blue gray misting over a brown background. Then, not too long after I returned home, I was browsing a thrift store when a set of four Chinese teacups caught my eye. They were lovely, but wanting for a teapot. I don't remember exactly how the conversation with Grandma went, but within a couple of months, a package quietly arrived containing a set of blue-gray ceramic coasters and a teapot to match.

This past spring, I unpacked my teapot to find its place in what will hopefully be our home for a long time: a second floor apartment above an 1865 storefront in Three Rivers, Michigan. The last time I talked with Grandma on the phone, she said she didn't think she'd be able to make it up the stairs to see our new place when she came to visit next. I doubted that was true, and told her so. I guess neither of us knew how very true it would be.

Over and over again, we humans prove true that even while we mark the deaths of our loved ones, they continue to live on in memory, in objects, in ways of being that make their ways through generations in both nature and nurture. In that sense, Grandma's here in our home every day; neither a cross country flight nor a flight and a half of stairs can get in her way. She and Grandpa watch over me from one of their wedding photos as I write at my desk; the massive flower bouquets and the ocean of a train on her dress are almost as big as their smiles. And of course, among the less tangible traits she's passed down to me through my dad, there's always the teapot, waiting to offer a hot beverage as a symbol of hospitality to our guests as they come in from the cold of a Michigan winter. And maybe some day, a cup of tea will be one of the concrete ways I demonstrate my love to my own grandchildren, along with laugh and a squeeze and a pinch on the cheek.

This is the amount all U.S. Banks charged in overdraft fees in 2009, according to Harper's. $38,900,000,000. Having had a good deal of personal experience with overdraft fees, I would wager that most of that figure is just plain robbery of the poor by the rich. Many fees simply don't need to be assessed and only seem intended to add to bank profit.

For example, when a checking account is overdrawn, it would seem reasonable that the debit card associated with that account would be declined in an attempted transaction. This would be a false assumption. Instead, banks charge you at least $30 per transaction for their overdraft "service" to cover the transaction cost. While this kind of service makes a good deal of sense to cover checks, it seems plainly ridiculous to extend for debit card use.

We recently experienced this very thing firsthand. A large automatic transaction posted to our account sooner than expected while we were on a trip. As I am not in the habit of checking our bank account daily, I didn't realize this payment had been deducted. Over the course of one day, we purchased several small things (coffee, parking, lunch, etc.) while our account was overdrawn. When we returned, I discovered that we had been assessed a whopping $420 in fees, almost all of which were debit card transactions that could have easily been declined at the point of sale--which would have also informed me that our account was overdrawn.

Now, I've heard the argument about how these fees are intended to promote responsibility. Sure, I get that. But in the end, this isn't a question of responsibility; it's a question of access to resources. Wealthy folks generally don't incur these fees because they have enough resources to keep them from overdrawing. This doesn't mean they're more responsible; it simply means they have more money.

Unfortunately, most people who are assessed these fees are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to work out of low income or high debt situations. In the end, then, overdraft fees are only charged to the people who can least afford them. These folks aren't necessarily irresponsible, they just don't have enough resources; if they had enough money, they wouldn't be overdrawing their accounts. And it would help if banks were more honest about assessing fees.

Thankfully, Kirstin and I are in a position to recover from our recent "gift" to our bank (though not happily). For many in more precarious situations, though, this kind of thing serves only to keep them on the edge financially or, worse, sink them entirely. And that just seems like unjust policy to me. At the very least, banks should have smarter and less predatory policies for debit card transactions.

Okay. End of rant.

Cornel West's advice to President Obama: "Don't just be the friendly face of the American empire."

I wish the Promised Land didn't still look so far away ...

Yesterday, Kirstin and I celebrated being together for half of our lives. We've now been dating or married for 15 years ... and we just seem to like each other a lot more as we go along! :)

On October 14, 1994, my brother and I had a big party at our house while our parents were away for their wedding anniversary. No, there wasn't any drinking at the party; but the music was (apparently) so loud that people from across the Boerman Expressway in South Holland (my parents house backed up to I-94) complained about the noise, leading the police to shut things down within a few hours. Some folks ended up staying, though--hanging out, walking around the neighborhood and talking late into the night. Sometime during the course of the evening, Kirstin and I realized we liked each other. I mean ... like liked. And the rest, as they say they say, is history.

See mom and dad: that party wasn't nearly as bad as you thought!

It's a bit surprising to see Audi promoting diesel through connecting it to political history (even taking shots at American automakers along the way). It's actually refreshing to see such a frank assessment (from a car company, anyway) of how our transportation choices have far-reaching and often unintentional effects.

Now if only Volkswagen and Audi would start bringing more diesel options to the North American market!

On July 15, 2004, I blogged about having reached 100,000 on our beloved Volkswagen Jetta TDI (read: Diesel). Well, today we reached the next milestone in mileage achievement:

Two things to note:

1. Yes, we did take this photo while driving 60 miles per hour.


2. The check engine light is on, but it's for something different than the check engine issue indicated in the 100,000 mile photo.