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.

I don't know how often my grandparents hosted such crowds in their home as our family of six, but every time we came out, my grandma would mix up her famous bran muffins. With a batter that can be stored in the refrigerator, the recipe resulted in hot muffins every morning to accompany freshly-picked citrus fruit. And it's a recipe equally suited to feeding a household of just one or two, since the batter will keep for up to six weeks.

It's a testament to my grandma's coming of age in the processed food era that the main ingredient in her version was a box of Raisin Bran. My tweaked version substitutes plain old wheat or oat bran and raisins for the cereal. But I do honor her thrifty ways by making this whenever I have a substantive quantity of sour milk in the refrigerator, which happens quite regularly since we participate in a local herd share program and get a half gallon of milk every week, whether we need it or not (though I have recently begun making homemade yogurt as well, which will cut down on the sour milk supply).

Here's my version of the recipe, with some alternate suggestions at the end. It's quite flexible and, now that fall is on its way, I'm sure I'll be mixing up batches even more often. I've enjoyed customizing muffins on the fly according to guests' preferences (no raisins? extra walnuts?) and making huge batches to fortify groups on work days at the Imagining Space project. And every batch is a good opportunity to remember my grandparents' legacy and how I'm attempting to carve out my own life of generosity and abundance in their footsteps.

Six-Week Bran Muffins

2 ¼ c. oat or wheat bran
1 c. raisins
Add extra raisins if you like
1 tsp. salt
3 c. sugar or 1 c. molasses and 1 c. brown sugar
5 tsp. baking soda
5 c. flour
1 qt. buttermilk or sour milk
4 eggs beaten
1 c. oil

Mix all ingredients together and store in the refrigerator. Make muffins as needed. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.

More options:

• Leave out the raisins when you make the mix so that you can add whatever you're in the mood for (and have on hand) when you make the muffins--raisins, cranberries, walnuts, cherries, blueberries, almonds...


• Sprinkle flax seeds on top before baking.


• Substitute a cup of orange juice for a cup of the milk and include the grated zest of two oranges. You could also put a glaze on top--powdered sugar mixed with a little bit of o.j. and cinnamon.

P.S. The city code permits raising chickens on residential property within certain reasonable parameters, so all you urban homesteaders out there should come on over.

Here's one of my favorite ways to use up sour milk, adapted from a random pre-printed recipe card I picked up somewhere. These are a very light biscuit texture, with an interesting twist of cardamom.

Sweet Cinnamon Biscuits

1 c. white unbleached flour
1 c. whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 c. oil
3/4 sour milk or buttermilk
4 Tbsp. butter, softened
1/3 c. brown sugar
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. cardamom

Combine flour, baking powder, salt and baking soda in a medium bowl and mix well. Stir in vegetable oil and milk. Stir until just blended.

Knead the dough briefly on a lightly floured surface. Roll the dough into a 15" x 8" rectangle.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease a 9" round baking pan.

Spread butter over the dough. Combine sugar, cinnamon and cardamom in a small bowl and mix well. Sprinkle over butter. Roll up rectangle, starting from one long side. Pinch seam to seal.

Cut the roll into 1 1/2" slices. Arrange the slices in prepared baking pan. Bake until lightly browned, about 15-20 minutes. Remove from oven and serve warm!

I was super crunched for time when they requested a recipe to go with my essay and I tried to submit one for tomato soup, but they already had a similar one, so I ended up going with the uber-simple option of Grilled Zucchini. If I'd had more time to think and experiment, here's the one that I wish I could have submitted. I cooked this one up in the first week of January when my creativity was being refreshed by a much-needed vacation.

Grown-Up Tuna Noodle Casserole

I grew up loving the old standby that was simply a combination of a bag of egg noodles, two cans of tuna and two cans of cream of mushroom soup. I would guess it's second only to green bean casserole in the Campbell's condensed soup recipe empire. Our family always had buttered bread and apple sauce on the side, with vanilla or butterscotch pudding for dessert (one of only two meals ever followed by dessert in our house--the other was chili and chocolate pudding).

This recipe may seem like it has a lot of steps, but you're basically preparing four different elements to combine and bake into creamy, comfort food goodness: noodles, garlic cream sauce, crumb topping and a combination of sautéed ingredients. It's well worth the effort! And unlike some other comfort food reproductions, it really does scratch the nostalgic itch of four cans and a bag of noodles, but with much higher quality ingredients and an herby, lemony twist. Enjoy!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, in a large pot of boiling, salted water, cook until tender:

• 8 oz. thick egg noodles (I like Amish-style noodles myself)

Meanwhile, in a large frying pan, sauté:

• 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 16 oz. mushrooms, chopped
• 1 lg. clove of garlic, crushed
• ½ tsp. salt
• plenty of freshly ground pepper

When mushrooms are nearly cooked through, add and briefly sauté just until heated:

• 1 c. peas (fresh or frozen)
• 12 oz. white albacore tuna*

Transfer mixture to large casserole dish and wipe out frying pan to use for next step: bread crumbs. In the frying pan, combine and heat:

• ¼ c. olive oil
• ½ tsp. dried dill (or more if you really like dill)
• ¾ tsp salt
• 2 tsp. lemon juice
• 1 ½ c. bread crumbs**

Saute and stir frequently until bread crumbs are crisp and beginning to brown. Remove from heat and set aside. Next, you'll tackle the cream sauce. In a medium saucepan, melt:

• 3 Tbsp. butter

Then, whisk in until it forms a paste:

• 3 Tbsp. white unbleached flour

Be careful not to let the mixture brown. Add all at once and whisk into flour mixture:

• 1 ¾ c. warm milk

Bring to a boil. Add:

• 1 lg. clove of garlic, crushed
• Salt and pepper to taste

Lower the heat and stir while cooking 2-3 minutes more as mixture thickens, then set aside. Last step before combining everything to bake--prepare:

• 1 c. sharp cheddar, shredded

Now that you have all of your ingredients prepped, stir the cream sauce and noodles into the casserole dish with the tuna mixture. Top casserole with shredded cheese and then bread crumbs. Bake at 350 degrees until bubbly and cheese is melted.

* I used canned tuna in water, but you could also substitute other varieties of fish--even leftover salmon.

** I throw bread ends, pitas, rolls, etc. into the freezer any time we have extra and then I use an immersion blender to turn them into crumbs whenever I need bread crumbs.

After much delay, I finally launched a relatively simple web site design for The Hermitage, a Mennonite retreat community in Three Rivers, Michigan. There are still several design and feature additions I'd like to make, but the site is now fully editable via a Movable Type interface.

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.

For a loooong time, I've been wanting to figure out an alternative way to store the bulk coffee we brew at World Fare. However, with such tight margins all the time, we haven't been able to afford one way valve containers and I didn't want to use disposable vacuum seal methods. We've been re-using and re-using one pound bags that one of our volunteers brought in, but the zip-lock seals have been coming apart, which sort of defeats the purpose of the one-way valve bag. They've started to look pretty crummy, especially when they're held closed with paper clips.

But...TODAY I finally found a solution that I could make with items we have on hand. (Rob says he came up with it before, but I just wasn't in the right brain space to hear it then.) I took jars that we'd purchased some time ago from Global Infusion and, after cleaning them thoroughly, drilled small holes in the lids. I then cut out the one-way valves from the coffee bags we've been using and taped them inside the lids. Voila!

Thanks to this web page for the idea! (And also Rob. :)

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.

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 morning, I spent some time composing a reply to a comment on another post on this infrequently tended blog, which caused me to reflect again on the notion of neighborliness, particularly in the context of virtual vs. face-to-face relationships. I find myself less and less willing to get worked up debating abstract ideas, especially online, and more inclined to spend my energy on the complications of face-to-face relationships in a place. Ideologies and dogmas inevitably break down when we attempt to know each other and ourselves fully in all of our inconsistencies. And ideally, when we're working side by side toward a common goal or eating and laughing together around a table, our differences become qualities that decorate our unique selves, rather than walls that cut us off from each other. We may still passionately disagree, but we can do so in the context of that time we showed up at the city commission meeting to represent the same side of a local issue or that time we sat on the park bench together, swapping stories about our junior high experiences while our kids played together on the playground.

I don't want to dismiss the ways in which internet technology can contribute to deep and complicated knowing of other individuals and communities, but I'm skeptical about that knowing being the rule, not just an exception. As I and the technology grow older together, these issues become muddier, not clearer for me. I'm the editor of an online magazine. I contribute to several blogs and other virtual publications. But I also help run a non-profit store in downtown Three Rivers, and I turned compost on Saturday outside a 27,000 square foot building that my husband and I are hoping to make something of for the benefit of the neighborhood. Bricks and mortar, flesh and blood collide in my life daily with megabytes and megapixels, cyberspace and server space.

What is the common thread running through it all--or are these really two different worlds with different ethics?

Are the virtual versions of ourselves inevitably going to be incomplete caricatures?

To what degree should people's variously (un)generous readings of our virtual selves constrain what we post online for all to judge?

By way of example: by posting my concerns and questions here, I may be projecting to un-careful or unknown readers a singular opinion for both myself and my husband, but we would answer (and even ask) these questions quite differently at this point in time. If we were to commence a heated debate via the comments, what would people assume about our marriage? Would those assumptions be true? Would a public record of our disagreement have positive value in the virtual public square or would it have negative value in terms of distraction, abstraction and confusion?

And what in the world does neighborliness have to do with all this?

While this article by Tim Wise for the San Francisco Sentinel beats its main point almost to death, it's an important point that needs to be made...and heard. 75 white boys with guns protesting the current administration isn't too scary to me, but affirmative responses to their behavior in mainstream media outlets is troubling indeed.

Trust is the prime constituent of the social atmosphere. It is as urgent not to damage that atmosphere by contributing to the erosion of trust as it is to prevent and attempt to reverse damage to our natural atmosphere. Both forms of damage are cumulative; both are hard to reverse.

To be sure, a measure of distrust is indispensable in most human interaction. Pure trust is no more conducive to survival in the social environment than is pure oxygen in Earth's atmosphere.

But too high a level of distrust stifles cooperation as much as the lack of oxygen threatens life.

Sissela Bok
Common Values (1995)

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.

The task of representation is to change the system to meet the needs of the people. But with the power of global capital ... now, instead of being represented, people are being managed. People are being changed to fit them into the system instead of the system being changed to meet people's needs. And that's a huge transformation.

The rest is also well worth watching; Benn seems like a pretty delightful fellow with deep convictions.