One of the coolest things about where I work is the mission. We’re talking truly life-transforming and belief-shaping. Pornography is the easiest example. Before I started at my job, I found it morally objectionable but was personally ambivalent for non-Christians. (This is my default stance on many issues: I may find a behavior objectionable, but I’m not going to force someone who doesn’t share the basic tenants of my faith to live under my moral code.) Now, almost two years later, my opinions on porn are much more closely aligned with my opinions on drugs. In short: “NOOO DON’T DO IT YOU’RE RUINING YOUR BRAIN YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO HAVE A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP STOP WATCHING IT NAOW!” Seriously. There’s a ton of science behind why it’s just about one of the worst things you can do to yourself sexually.

*climbs off soapbox*

So the point of that whole tirade is really to say that I get to dig into a lot of really fascinating issues regarding the brain and social trends. For example, 9 months ago or so I wrote an article about advertising. Fun fact: A lot of advertising standards changed in 1983. I was one year old. So I’m a member of a generation raised under Pavlovian advertising conditions. Advertisers got their hooks into me (us) at a young age and built brand loyalty into us before we even knew what it was.

See also: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. If you know me at all, you know I have a great affection for this show. In fact, it’s one of only two shows I watch (the other is NBC’s Community, which totally deserves its own blog post because it is Just. That. Awesome.)

Anyway. My Little Pony. I have fond memories of the old show. Some of my favorite toys were My Little Ponies. I have a traumatic memory of giving away my favorite My Little Pony ever because I had a misguided concept of sacrifice when I was 8. (By the way, if anyone ever wants to give me a vintage Glory My Little Pony, you’d be my hero for, like, ever.)

And now, as an almost-30 adult, I still watch My Little Pony and buy the toys for myself my niece myself and my niece. And next time McDonald’s offers them as a Happy Meal toy, I am totally going to buy a bajillion Happy Meals. (Also, a hamburger happy meal with Diet Coke is only 13 points on Weight Watchers, so it’s sort of healthy. And cheaper. And comes with a toy.)

Again, I degress. My point is this: A 29-year-old single woman should not be going out of her way to watch a show for 7-year-olds. Yet here I am. Why? Because, in part, advertisers got their hooks on me, saying if you like this cool product you should give us all of your monies forever in order to buy derivative products forevarz. (The fact that current-gen My Little Pony toys are kind of ugly has saved me a ton of money. No joke.)

Is it fair to blame advertisers for my personal desire to own every cool fan-made My Little Pony or Community t-shirt ever created? No and yes. There’s personal responsibility, certainly. On the other hand, my admittedly limited research leads me to the conclusion that there’s something to be said for the whole idea that kids these days have a horrible sense of entitlement. We’re the boomerang generation; we stay with Mom and Dad well after the age our parents would have married and had kids; we waste our lives playing video games and buying toys and stupid t-shirts. And advertisers are at least partially to blame in a very Pavlovian sense.

Without further ado, here’s the article that I wrote for the June 2011 issue of Pure Minds Online.

Sold for Life: How Advertisers Influence Children, and What You Can Do About It

You’ve no doubt seen the kid in the grocery store, throwing a temper tantrum because his parents wouldn’t buy him the new toy or candy he wanted. Maybe you’ve even been that parent, and you know the sting of the dirty looks for not giving up and buying your child the treat, just to get him to calm down.

Or maybe you know a boy whose love for Spider-Man extends so far that his bedroom is decorated solely in that theme, and he’ll only eat Spider-Man mac and cheese because it “tastes better.”

Perhaps you’ve even seen a group of 5-year-old girls celebrating a birthday with pedicures at a salon.

The common thread to these is not bad parenting, as some people may be quick to assume. The common thread is advertising. Marketers are doing everything in their power to influence your purchases through your children.

Read the rest of the article…

I’ve actually done quite a bit of writing over the last year, mostly for work. Since this website was at one point supposed to be a portfolio, I figure I’ll cross-post some of the pieces I’ve written for anyone who’s interested.

So! Since it went live on Monday, here are my thoughts on singleness via my workplace.

4 Reasons Accountability is Critical for Singles

“It is not good for man to be alone.”

If you’re at all familiar with this verse, you’re probably used to hearing it in the context of marriage. Perhaps you’ve heard it in a sermon or during a wedding ceremony.

And if you’re living in prolonged singleness, perhaps every time you hear it, you feel somewhat less-than-sufficient for not having somebody. Or maybe the opposite is true, and you have a sense of smug superiority, and you think to yourself, “Relationships are for other people. Me? I can do it all on my own.”

But this verse is about more than marriage. Nobody, not even those who choose singleness, is ever called to do life alone. Jesus always sent the disciples out in pairs, and Paul always traveled with companions. Or consider James 5:16, which says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.”

In reality, we singles need to stick together. Those of us who live alone are especially vulnerable to temptation simply because there’s nobody there to walk in on us. So whether our temptations are to watch pornography or to waste our lives on TV or video games or to wallow in bitterness over our lack of relationships, accountability is critical for us to continue growing in Christ.

Read the rest…

This is my local grocery store. More to the point, this is the construction blocking my usual parking spot at my local grocery store.

I was…less than thrilled when I saw this, mostly because this work required a change in the flow of traffic, and also because there was no advanced warning. Most construction areas have some sort of sign, advertising the future site of some building or other. Nothing here, though, just signs telling you that all of a sudden the drive is one-way, and lots of fences and confusion. All this on a busy Sunday afternoon when the students are back in town. Needless to say, it was not the most enjoyable shopping trip I’ve ever had.

A friend called just after I finished unloading groceries. She’d had a bad week and, understandably, needed to decompress. (Among other, more personal things, she was forced to switch offices because hers had black mold.) And she asked me how a rather large personal project was going. (The answer? Stressful.)

And after she hung up the phone, I thought about the grocery shopping experience in conjunction with my friend’s and my stress, and thought: “Construction is irritating and inconvenient. But this means improvement follows. Sometimes the outcome is visible; sometimes it’s not. But it often means good things are coming.”

1. Visible Outcomes

Inconvenience is easiest to deal with when you know why it’s happening. For example, I’m usually patient with road construction, especially if it’s on a road I drive frequently. I can handle a few months of slower traffic if it means that a large patch of potholes are going away. Or Weight Watchers. I’ve been on it for a year now. It’s a pain to forego the candy or french fries, and I know I’ll always have to be careful about what I eat, but the positive goal of actually being a healthy weight for the first time since high school means I’m willing to keep at it, especially since I’ve already seen certain benefits.

My personal project falls in this camp. It requires a lot of hard work and eats up a lot of my free time, and there’s no guarantee of success, but if things work out it will be well worth the trouble.

(By the way, I’m not quite ready to talk about the personal project on public channels, but I’m willing to talk about it if you ask.)

2. Invisible Outcomes

It’s harder to deal with inconvenience (or worse) when you don’t know why it’s there. My friend’s office move falls into this category. My own office had its own set of stupid drama about a year ago. I’ve seen a depressing number of people lose jobs. My dad was (semi-voluntarily) unemployed for several months. Several friends have had rough pregnancies. At least one has had a miscarriage. My car has broken down more times than I can count. Some of these are worse than others, and I feel bad about lumping things like, say, my office drama and my friend’s miscarriage in the same category. “Inconvenience” is far too mild a word. But large or small, such things result in a (hopefully short-term) lifestyle alteration, often with no visible purpose.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I’m a firm believer that “All things work together for the good of those that love God.” For instance, at my workplace, we had constant upheaval for months. It seemed like just as we finally adapted from the previous change, some new chaos was introduced. But we finally shook things out, and honestly, all the turmoil truly did make the Marketing department, at least, a much better team than we had been. Or for my friend, the inconvenience of having to switch offices may result in better relationships with her new officemates. Or, in a rather dramatic example, my company’s president lost his wife and children in a horrible accident with a semi, and eventually used the settlement money from the trucking company to start the company. I quite possibly would not have a job had he not lost his family years ago, not to mention the fact that the service our president created has helped countless people overcome Internet pornography addictions.

This don’t make inconveniences, big or small, much easier to handle. But just about all inconveniences can be opportunities if you let them.

The Last Rose faded to oblivion on a Wednesday. On Thursday, I read Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? while waiting for the technician to arrive. On Sunday my car died. Long story short, but I did not like the dealer where I took it, so I only had them fix one of the two things that went seriously wrong with it. (It since died again and I got the real problem fixed…another saga for another day, perhaps.)

These things are not why it took me so long to write this post.

A friend of mine loaned me a car while mine was in the shop. Driving back from work that Tuesday in late June, my mood still black, I parked and looked in the rear view mirror and nearly cried.

My rosebuds were gone. Maintenance had come through and hacked at the roses. Pruning, technically, but in the same way that tying your hair in a pony tail and chopping it off in one fell swoop is a haircut. One had even been starting to open. Only one bud was left, and for the sole reason that it happened to be lower than the rest.

I picked up my car the next morning, half-fixed, and contemplated Job on the drive. Job, who lost literally everything in a very brief period.

At 3:00 that afternoon, the managers pulled the entire company into the conference room to make an announcement.

Trying to explain this tactfully is why I’ve had a hard time writing this post.

I was only tangentially affected by the announcement, but (keeping this purposefully vague) the decision they announced was not one I – or many coworkers – wholeheartedly agreed with. And there was a distinct sense of loss associated with this decision. I trust them to have not made the decision lightly, and am still happy there. But there was discontent among the ranks for a time after the decision was announced, and for me personally, this moment marked the end of the Honeymoon period. Things are still good there, but (cough hack) the rose-colored glasses are off.

One of the nice things about where I work is that there is strong support for walking – a mile at 11:00 and 3:00 every day for those who want to go. At 3:45 that day many of us took off for our customary walk around the block. All of us were buzzing: “What? Why?”

All I could think about, though, were my roses, so roughly pruned the night before.

There’s a concept – resource allocation. Carefully distributing your resources. In business, this means investing more heavily in one project with higher impact than a low-impact project. My friend Lindsey studies a similar concept in house wrens. I’m probably summarizing her research badly, but basically wrens will invest more heavily in eggs of a certain shell color – a better quality – than others. Plants, I think, are the same way. Sure, you can let a plant go everywhere, but my very rudimentary understanding of, say, grapes on a vine is that grapes grow larger on pruned vines because there are fewer places for a plant to distribute resources than in an untended vine.

This is one of the reasons my rose bushes were pruned, though an actual gardener (as opposed to the apartment maintenance guy) would have probably left more of the buds for me. Pruning happens. Sometimes it is painful, but it is necessary for growth.

And that’s the third lesson of the rose bushes.

When I got home that night, still unhappy from the day, I turned to the last remaining bud.

“You had better be the most beautiful rose yet,” I told it.

The story of my last few weeks can be illustrated through my roses. I have a few rose bushes growing right next to my apartment door. Note that I had nothing to do with their existence; in fact, as they weren’t in bloom when I looked at the apartment, I didn’t even realize they existed. Over the last month, they’ve become one of my favorite things about this apartment. At least part of that is because of what I’ve learned from them. Since there’s a surprisingly long list, I plan to write several entries.

Today’s story is tied up with my fridge. I started my lease a week before I was due to move in. The first day of the lease, I did three things. The first was to unpack a very small number of items I had brought with me. The second was to start the inspection process (during which I discovered a major leak in the downstairs bathroom sink). The third was to buy groceries, since I was coming from renting a basement and had very few refrigerated or frozen supplies. With these things done, I left and didn’t return again until Thursday.

My friend Ellen came with me that time. “Ooh, you have roses!” she said. I still hadn’t noticed, though they were probably starting to bud at this point. I gave her a quick tour and, in the process of this, opened the fridge door to reveal that the fridge (which, I could tell, was brand new) had stopped running, ruining everything that was in there. A call to maintenance had me pressing the reset button on the outlet. Fridge running, I left.

I stopped by on Friday again, mostly to drop off sandwich materials for the move the next day. I then discovered that the fridge was no longer working and I couldn’t reset the outlet.

There was a rumble of thunder as I called maintenance. (His solution, for the record, was to run an extension cord to the living room.)

Saturday was the move, followed by the discovery that the pilot light on my gas had burned out, meaning no hot water. Monday I lost water pressure in the kitchen sink. The fridge saga lasted until the following Thursday, when they finally brought me a new fridge. A month and a half later, this one still works, but there are a ton of other minor maintenance issues that I’m just avoiding for the time being.

What does this have to do with my roses?

On Saturday, as I escorted my parents out of the apartment, I happened to look at my rose bushes and discovered a little toad, hiding from the heat among the thorns. I think I sat and watched him do absolutely nothing for a good five minutes. It may have been just a brief pause for him; I haven’t seen him since.

But object lesson 1 is this: There is shelter, even among the thorns.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to generate a list of some of the things I appreciate about being single right now. This is not to say I never want to get married. If I ever do, I sincerely hope I can look back at this list and say why I’m glad these things are no longer true. But to any of you out there who’s single and struggling with that fact (including my future self, most likely), if this list helps you cope at all, then my perpetual bachelorhood will not have been a waste.

1. I don’t have to worry about anybody’s allergies or general preferences. Cooking-wise, as someone who loves almost all kinds of food, I’m only limited by what’s already in my fridge. So if I feel like making tofu one week or buying 2 lbs. of Swiss chard for a Greek-style pie, nobody else will complain. Similarly, when I eventually get a dog (assuming I’m still single then) I can get the breed I want. I don’t have to worry if my husband is allergic…or doesn’t even like dogs.
2. I can work late. Most of my coworkers have to leave work by a certain time to make sure they’re home to help out with the kids (or to simply spend time with their spouses), but if I’m in the middle of something I can stay as late as I need.
3. I can stay up as late as I want with no concerns. Some friends and I regularly get together every other Friday for gaming; if we’re running past midnight one week, one of the guys will get a call from his wife (who chose not to participate), making sure he’s not dead in a ditch somewhere and is on his way home soon. While the concern is enviable, so is the position of being able to stay out as late as I want.
4. I’m not interrupted at home. I’d regularly interrupt Mom while she was in the middle of her daily devotions as a kid; as an adult maintaining my own devotional life, I’m very grateful that I don’t have to deal with that. My only interruptions are from e-mails and phone calls.
5. I don’t have to hide anything. This is one of those weird things I just don’t think about. Two coworkers today were talking about hiding their browser history for positive reasons – for example, buying gifts for their wives. One of them actually makes sure to time Amazon purchases just after paying the last credit card bill so his wife won’t see and question the expense until the end of the month (when, hopefully, he’s already given her the gift). That never even crossed my radar as something married people would have to consider.
6. I get to grow in faith in a unique way. Marriage implies having someone to specifically turn to when things go wrong. We singles can turn to our friends, yes, but in a lot of ways we’re reliant first on God to put the correct people for any given situation in our path (say, to take care of my car). It’s like the team building exercise of falling backward and trusting your partner to catch you; my only partner is invisible. A friend of mine who spent some time in Albania once told me that over there miracles of healing are a lot more common because they have less money and it’s literally a choice between prayer and a doctor they can’t afford. Singleness is a very little bit like that.

So what are some things you like about where you’re at right now?

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I’ve sung this song dozens of times over the last decade or so. In all honesty, I’ve never been a huge fan. Repetitive, very little theological depth – but then, I was raised on a steady diet of hymns and Rich Mullins and Degarmo and Key. So I don’t actually know why it made me choke up a little today. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling blessed, surrounded by friends, working at a job I love. And every apartment hurdle has been overcome slowly but surely.

This joy lasted until I walked out to my car and discovered it wouldn’t start.

My immediate thought was that it was the battery, since it had died once a few months before. Mercifully, two friends (Alan and Tina) walked out of the church only a few moments after I did, and with their help and the assistance of one of the facilities managers at church, we spent the next 45 minutes determining that, actually, the battery was fine and it was probably the starter.

“Do you have a remote starter?” asked Alan. Well, yes, though I never use it; I had actually taken it off my keychain several months ago.

I called a tow truck and had them take me to Sears Auto, which is mercifully open on Sundays. “It’s probably the starter,” they said. All signs pointed to being able to drive home.

After about half an hour, they came back. “Do you have a remote starter?”

It turns out that something in the remote starter had gone bad and burned something or other out. And because of how the remote starter was wired in, they didn’t feel comfortable doing the maintenance themselves.

Well, then.

If you ever want to hit me where it hurts, take away my car. You’d think I’d be used to it by now; this car is car #3, the first car having died a sudden, painful death, and the second having died an extended, possibly more painful death. I got to be on a first-name basis with my mechanics back in suburban Detroit. This car, remarkably, had largely escaped major problems; it’s needed maintenance, of course (including one memorable repair that spent all but six pennies of my federal tax return), but I don’t think it’s ever left me functionally stranded before.

It hurts. It hurts to have to rely on friends, however willing they may be. It hurts to not have the flexibility to go where I want to go whenever I want to go. Being without Internet was frustrating, but I could still go to work or Panera to go online. But with the exception of Panera, pretty much anywhere else I’d like to go is outside of walking range, and my job is out in the boonies, far beyond the range that I could reasonably ask anyone to drive me.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I cleaned my car while I waited for the tow truck to arrive. Basically, this involved throwing random bits of rubbish into bags to throw in the trash later. On the floor under the steering wheel I found a single penny.

The story of the pennies is a long one. In brief, it involves me working through some of my debt issues and prayerfully trusting God with my finances. Within a week of making some very important decisions (including the decision to start tithing again) I took my car to the repair shop. I had been planning on using my income tax return for these repairs; though the repairs wound up being much larger than I was expecting, the refund covered it almost exactly. With six cents to spare, in fact. These six pennies got returned to God in that I sent one each to various people who were either involved (directly or indirectly) or needed the encouragement. I think I had planned on keeping one myself – taping it to the steering wheel or something.

It’s doubtful that the penny I found today was one of THE pennies, insomuch as they were ever tangible objects, but still.

God hasn’t let me down yet.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

The book in question is Carolyn McCulley’s Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? Noel had mentioned it in church this weekend – had actually asked single people to go out and read it and let him know if it was worth recommending.

The short answer is that it absolutely is. I expect this book to be a treasured resource for me in the years to come, and one that I pass along to all my single female friends.

There are three main reasons that I love this book. The first one is that it actually, heaven forbid, looks to more than just the book of Ruth or 1 Corinthians 7 to explore Biblical singleness. I mean, any book that actually seriously references the book of Leviticus gets major bonus points from me.

The second is that McCulley goes for breadth, not depth, in offering strategies for living as a Proverbs 31 woman. Things like whether or not to buy a house (if you’re financially stable and able, her answer is to go for it). Or ways to strategically develop relationships with the families in your life, and to be an influencer among kids outside of, say, Sunday School. She touches on so many things that it’s easy to find several specific tips that I can actually apply to my own life.

The last point requires an explanation of me as a single person. I am a self-described perpetual bachelor, having adopted this term for myself as early as 2002. I’m 28 and have had one boyfriend. One. And I really shouldn’t have been with him in the first place, since there were glaringly obvious religious differences. We dated for a month, then I got a grip on myself and called it off while we could still remain friends. (There is, of course, a much longer story behind this.) But other than that one weird little blip in 2003, I’ve never been in a relationship. And, to be quite honest, the only times I’m unhappy with being single are those times I have an active crush on someone. If I never get married, I think I’d be content. But the problem is that I keep meeting Nice Boys, thus disrupting my contentment. I’ve prayed during my last four crushes that the guy in question would be the last, and that whether nothing happened or we got married, I’d never have to go through another crush again.

I needn’t state how that turned out.

So that’s one of the ways this book was refreshingly honest and strangely encouraging: McCulley actually talks about the fact that the desire for a husband never really goes away. The last chapter starts with a conversation with a 50-year-old woman named Lisa (go figure) who mentions that she still wishes she could be cuddled up on the couch watching football with her husband.

Like I said, bizarrely encouraging. Those who talk about the gift of singleness as if it were something handed out like the gift of serving or the gift of speaking in tongues probably don’t get it. They’re probably married and quite possibly assume that single people are single because something’s wrong with them or they’re between relationships or have some sort of supernaturally-given lack of desire for a spouse. The latter may be true in a handful of extremely rare cases, but there *is* no magic switch that says, Okay, you’re now a card-carrying member of the Society of Perpetual Bachelors, and as such you’ll never fall in love again.

It’s a simple, stupid realization, but honestly, I needed that jolt. Because of course life doesn’t work that way, but I keep waiting for that moment to arrive – the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. But the reality is, even if I never get married, and if I die an old maid at 90 in a nursing home, I’ll probably still have a crush on the nice 87-year-old down the hall who still has most of his teeth.

Weird, right? That this would be encouraging? But it actually is. Like, I’m not doing singleness wrong if I *do* like a guy. That doesn’t give me liberty to obsess, of course, but when in the course of time I inevitably do, it’s because I’m a single human female who may one day yet get married, and not one who absolutely never will. It’s because both singleness and marriage are temporary states, both of which could end at functionally any moment for any number of reasons.

The thing about this fact is that it’s so patently obvious that nobody ever addresses it. Even this book only addresses it incidentally. Most seem to ignore it entirely, instead focusing on the whole “don’t be the aggressor in the relationship” thing. These books always feel like they operate under the assumption that (1) women choose when they fall in love and (2) single women are by default desperate enough for marriage to initiate a relationship. Okay, talk about that, but (1) initiating a relationship as a female does not guarantee its failure, and (2) some of us have long since learned that knowledge and can we please move on to something else. So it’s also really nice to have a book that helps you live like a single in spite of your emotions toward any particular man.

So those are my two cents. This book did raise one other interesting question to me, though: are there books written to single men? Every book on singleness that I’ve read has been written to the ladies. Since in the general Christian culture the man is supposed to be the initiator, though, I’d think that in some ways a book on singleness would be highly important to them. Like, a brief bit on what men should look for in wives, but also how to handle rejection and whether or not they should make the concrete decision to never get married.

So: do books for single men exist? And are there any books in particular that have helped you out?

I think it was when Elika, the princess of the city, described the population’s decline from several thousand a few hundred years previously to fewer than 200 that it struck me: Prince of Persia is really a rather apt metaphor for the urban decay of Detroit, Flint, and, well, the rest of Michigan. Detroit in particular fits this mold well. The population declines; the merchants stop coming. Corruption–physical, political, metaphorical–inescapably spreads. The way the auto industry is faltering–it’s like the final seal containing Ahriman is cracking.

What, then, can we do about it? If only the metaphor carried through to the healing of the city! In the game, the Prince and Elika, with the help of Elika’s magic provided by the creator god Ohrmazd, kill Ahriman’s lieutenants and heal the fertile grounds. I suppose there are urban renewal programs and churches to “meet” both counts. But is it enough? And how can more be done? What can be done to bring Detroit out of its ruin?

“While politics is about power, an ethical framework can be seen as a ‘counterbalance’ to power, or at leat as a way to mitigate some of the potentially negative impacts of power.”

(Source: Cathy Gibson, 2009).

Mostly, I’m throwing this up here for the sake of storing it somewhere, but it really synthesizes some of the vaguely politicky thoughts that have been stewing in the back of my head. Namely, this is why the Right cares about issues like Gay marriage and abortion and the sexual exploits of politicians and whatnot–it represents a decay, perceived or real, in the mitigating force keeping those in power in check. And it’s why presidents like Bush, love him or hate him, could get re-elected: again, real or perceived, as a proclaimed Christian, many who voted for him perceived him as being guided by an internal counterbalance to the power–the human conscience.

It’s the entire purpose of the law: it’s not solely about keeping society in order, but it provides a structure by which leaders can help society maintain this order without losing control or, more frequently, gaining absolute control. Without moral absolutes, what is there to stop those in power from seizing it? Indeed, without moral absolutes, what does it even matter?