No, I Won't Let Business Jargon Dominate the Way I Communicate

Recently, a friend of mine worried that, as an MBA candidate, I won't be able to escape adding business jargon to every sentence I produce. Every sentence I speak, he warned, will start sounding like I memorized the latest fad-speak from that new must-read management guru or one of those blog posts designed to help you to be a better leader and enhance your productivity.

Don't worry. I may be incubating in business jargon, but I won't let it change me! And I have good reasons for this. 

Let me unpack the difficulties with business jargon. Business jargon fails to align end user desires with the marketing intention of my communication targets. This results in a loss of communication value which disrupts the synergy I normally have with my ideation partner. Such disruption means that both myself and my communication partner fail to ideate to the scale that we are accustomed to and our productivity falters. Another result of the loss of communication value is a lack of bandwidth available to accomplish the day's deliverable, which could cause me to lose leverage with communication customers.

Likely, if some business evangelists are utilizing business jargon beyond their building capabilities, they won't be able to circle back to their core competencies on their own. They need a change agent willing to give them the face time needed to provide a life hack to see that their interests are aligned to a more customer-centric, value-producing style of communication. The change agent will reach out with a holistic approach to sustainable communication, streamlining words and sentences in ways that make the end user feel empowered. The key pivot point is a strategy of organic communication vocabulary that breaks through the clutter for maximum impact. Once sustainable communication becomes part of their DNA, each sentence, email, or text will have a positive value-added for a greater return on investment, enabling communicators to develop their own personal brand and emerge as thought leaders. Communication sustainability will provide the right end-user solutions to every enterprise.

So don't worry - moving forward, I won't be drinking the Kool-Aid of Business Jargon, because communication transparency is a win-win for everyone involved.

Kindled

A long time ago, in a world different than our own, there arose a reading tablet called Kindle. You might remember those times - Blackberry was the hottest smart phone, Tony Soprano was the hottest antihero, Apple computers were white and plastic and came with tiny, colorful iPods. Back then, though a Kindle was an expensive luxury that I, a late-adapter from the lower-rungs of the nonprofit world, could not afford, I was under no illusion about the future of reading - electric readers would take over for the same reasons MP3s took over - mobility, access, frugality, and choice would move the masses from the page to the screen. But I lamented my affection for the book in book form, and worried about further isolation and individualism that these devices promote.

Well, I finally joined the last decade when my in-laws gave me a Kindle Fire for Christmas. There's a bespectacled book bore in me that doesn't want to admit the device's advantages, first of which are a healthier back for not lugging around three hardbacks when I go to the supermarket. The sheer volume available is breathtaking - a book-lover is the proverbial kid in the candy store. I started to consume: The entire Sherlock Holmes for €2.99! Hey, I haven't read The Three Musketeers yet! (still haven't, but the pixely plot awaits my time and inclination, and hey, it was free.) Oooo, a journalist I like just tweeted a Kindle book deal - click, click, BUY! Ohhhh... an internet connection.... I won't be too long....

Choice is also the problem, you know. The opportunity cost of sitting and enjoying a good book is not just any work I could be doing or any relationship I could be building, but the thousands upon thousands of books plus the World Wide Web at my fingers. Not only do I not need to get up to distract myself - I don't even need to move my head. That nagging voice of "would you rather..." or, "you could always begin this again...", not to mention, "has anybody liked my clever Facebook post yet?" is now inseparable from the book I'm actually reading. They share the same page. With an electronic reading device, suppressing this voice requires an extra and unwelcome force of will to reach the patient pleasure of good literature.

Good literature is a patient pleasure, and that is why it's so rewarding. Like marriage, friendship, art, worship, or a good meal, it's a pleasure that can start slow, requiring a thousand tiny steps of faith, faith that our world's most urgent noises can be ignored at this one moment and the moment after that in order to get there. Oh, but once you get there! It is a deep, abiding, and enriching experience, and there is nothing else like it. For this, I am thankful for authors. Aside from those who were willing to have a real relationship with me, it's hard to think of anyone who has done me more of a kindness than to write something well for me to read. I've experienced this on my Kindle, of course, and the best prose finally quiets my distracted mind and gets me to stop thinking about how pixels are less personal than paper. The distance, however, is greater.

There's another problem. I own a Kindle Fire, which is useful for me as a grad student because it can process academic documents for research. However, the Fire also means Amazon advertising. We're used to the intrusion of adverts in magazines, radio, and television, but a good book is sacred ground. Sure, I supposed you can advertise after some bubble-gum mystery thriller, and I love reading those. But after I finished Home by Marilynne Robinson, I wanted my heart and mind to be left undisturbed. My finishing the last precious, perfect sentence was the worst, I mean the worst moment to flood my screen with, "if you liked this book, you'll love...." type ads. I wanted to sit on my couch and continue to feel. I didn't want to consume.

I'm writing these words as someone who will still continue to kindle. (I'm using the word as a verb completely divorced from its original meaning. You're welcome, Amazon.) The physical experience of reading is comfortable - better than the competitors I've seen and better than the Amazon app on the iPad. As much as I poke fun at the tyranny of choice, it has given me access to books that would be otherwise more difficult to reach, particularly here in Germany. Moreover, it's become part of my regular devotional ritual. I hope it's not sacrilegious to say that I find the digital Book of Common Prayer more navigable than the paper form, and it's also handy when I'm reading devotional literature, which can be bulky in paper form. Ironically, the discipline of simply setting aside time to read Scripture diminishes the problems I have with distractions and advertising that I have with novels. I may, of course, use the classic print and page form the next time I buy the kind of fiction that I expect to be a great read. And yes, I do worry about the company's competitive practice and treatment of workers (some good discussion here on the NYTimes Editorial page during Amazon's dispute with Hachette and it's not an infrequent conversation topic during my studies - may collect my thoughts for a later post).

It's part of our humanity to be surprised by rapid change - printing presses, trains, steam ships, automobiles, all sorts of horrible machines of war, and it tangles our minds to drift with the times, all the while wondering what's happening to our souls. I could be trying to have my cake and eat it, but I have hope that the irreversible digitisation of reading won't take its soul.

Loving Language in a Time of Commerce (or Happy National Grammar Day)

Once, when I taught upper-intermediate English to a design team at a major German auto company, one of my students showed me a grammar mistake in an email from an American colleague. This group of students was advanced enough for me to run a pretty tight ship, grammar-wise, so he was a bit amused that his native-speaker colleague would make the sort of grammar faux pas I would always pounce on during class.

Of course, the grammar mistake wasn't all that important. It didn't inhibit communication in anyway; the colleagues could continue business as normal. In commerce, it's clear communication that counts. I even read, in a Business English textbook of all places, that poorly-written emails are a sign of someone moving up the corporate ladder. Well-written emails reveal someone with too much time on their hands, but non-capitalized words clumsily spat out on a smart phone - that's a person with places to be.

Still, I loved unpacking little grammar secrets and the purposes of "why-we-do-this-when-in-German-you-do-that" mutual detective games in my English classes. It was great fun. But at the end of the day, I know that the need for international business is not elegance but to just do enough to overcome Babel, even if it ain't always pretty.  (I consider "ain't" a pretty part of the English language, but that could be a byproduct of my Appalachian)

This is thrilling, of course. There's communication! People who once may have never understood each other understand each other now! This also part of the dual nature of being an ESL teacher. I love language, especially written prose, but I also love it when people use language as is, discovering different channels and springs of communication along the way in our eternal effort to be understood.

This is partly why I blog, because my own electronic scribble creations are an outlet for me. There's a danger, though. I so wish I could be a real grammar snob and publicly rage against those native-English writers who fail to achieve every literal jot and tittle. For me, a fun way to spend the afternoon is a comma discussion by way of a memoir on the website for America's best source for all things prose. But a blog is a bad way to brag, especially about grammar. I bet, in fact, that as soon as I upload this, regardless of rereads by my wife and me, some grammar mistake will pop out like a pimple on my website, and a real grammar snob, if he had even bothered to read that far, would have to bite his fist to stop screaming. My writing goes on in fits and starts, a patch here, a paragraph here, an idea that occurred to me when I should have been thinking about something else, months of busyness when ideas collect like pollen waiting for the Spring, and some ideas are even remembered. Little time for editing, for prying my big-picture brain into a detail-oriented mentality. So I hit publish, hoping that the "you'res" aren't "yours" or that I didn't confuse "affect" and "effect," all the while wondering if I should mail Bill Gates a thank-you-note for blessing the world with spell check. Then, if I catch a mistake post-publish, I put on a hair-shirt and whip my own back 39 times. Ok, I don't do that, and I know the world doesn't care, but I can tell you that vanity-reading your own stuff isn't good for the soul.

Then, there's foreign languages. Over half of my MBA courses are in English (yippee!), but most of them are taught by non-native speakers, so the lectures are peppered with grammar mistakes which, as an English language trainer, I can analyse, explain, and suggest improvements. But I say nothing, not only to keep my professors' good graces, and not only because their mistakes rarely inhibit communication, but also because, often enough, it's my turn to speak German, and, and C1 fluent that I am, there's no way this side of heaven that I am going to get every detail of this language right. I'll never remember every gender of every non-gendered object, I'll continue to mix up their backwards numbers, and I insist that the differenced in pronunciation between o and ö is zero, null, nil, nada, and nothing. I am in deep need of grammar grace - at the university, at my church, in my family, and in any future employment.

Good writing with good grammar is beautiful. I can recognize it in German, even if I'll never produce it myself, and I can strive for it, however imperfectly, in English. The letter of the law, in language as in elsewhere, shows purpose, making communication effective, elegant, and enjoyable. But in our world of international commerce, international friendships, and international families, we get to communicate with each other, even if we'll never be maestros, and our strivings are beautiful in and of themselves. What should we do otherwise? In language, as with anything else in life, the best way forward is to love both the law and the person who will never perfectly fulfil it. We need to be full of grace and truth, and for this, we have an example.

Meanwhile, should you catch me in grammatical error, your welcome to point it out.

Back in the US of A

My daughter must think Florida is a tropical Christmas land. We harked the herald in the Sunshine State last year, and we're back again, novelty German presents in tow for another round of palm tree cheer. The same houses on my parents street have the exact same decorations around their palm trees. Yup, my daughter has no proof that Florida ever removes its Christmas kitsch. Come to think about it, neither do I.

As I write this, Germany's under a blanket of snow and will likely remain that way through the Yuletide season. We, however, spent the day on a beach just north of Naples, Florida, worrying about getting sunburned. Sure, I know you're supposed to dream of a white Christmas. Anyone who has lived in Florida for more than three years might dream of a white Christmas until they actually (re)experience one. Then they realize that snow never shows up without cold and darkness and then "In the Bleak Midwinter" becomes the appropriate carol. Enjoy your hot cocoa folks, but I'm happy to pop open a cold one while soaking up the vitamin D this December. "Snow on snow on snoooowwwwww....."

Of course, coming back to America is a reminder of the things I miss and don't miss. Here are some back-in-the-US-of-A observations, in no special order:

1. Patriotism - "the American flag!" squeals my daughter from the back seat of the car at pretty much every traffic light. Now, I'm doing my duty to teach her to wave the flag and smile (She's not quite old enough for the "Fifty Nifty" song, but she'll get there. If you don't know what the "Fifty Nifty" song is, ask your American friend), but sometimes you forget how much patriotism you can fit in a square block. The used car lots are surrounded by so many flags you'd think the bones of some hallowed president were buried under the Toyota Tundras. Of course, I was proudly patriotic when I went to see Lincoln. When I found out about the film a couple months ago, most of my German friends gave me strange looks when I got all giddy. I loved the film (Daniel Day Lewis is worth the price of admission), though something in me, planted by almost two years on European soil, rebelled in silent protest whenever the film became too sentimental. 
2. Trader Joe's - It's good to see you Trader Joe's. Thank you for opening in Florida just down the street from our little vacation condo. The chips, salsa, bean dip, peanut butter, and various American craft beers were just like old times. Of course, this time around I'm less impressed with the fact that you have Rittersport. 
3. Fashion - Everyone knows day-to-day American fashion is more casual than day-to-day European, but it's always a small culture shock when you actually see it, and I come from a part of Germany that's not exactly a world fashion capital. But wow, it's Christmas and the gym clothes are out! You can't waive an American flag without hitting someone in yoga pants, gym shorts or tights. Speaking of tights, I had the strange experience of being startled by body openness coming back from Europe. Somehow, between the time I left two years ago and Advent 2012, tights transformed from something women wore under skirts to an appropriate trousers alternative. Walking through the Atlanta airport, I thought that I had stumbled into the locker room at the local ballet. The times they are a'changin'. In any case, I take full advantage of America's casual attitude combined with Florida's pleasant weather. No, I'm not ready for tights yet (unless I'm running in the winter time) - I still feel a continental need to wear something that requires a belt when I go anywhere. But man, hello flip flops! I wear them in Germany too, though I get judgmental stares in the supermarket, because in Germany sandals combined with socks, are indoor-only attire. But flip flops are to Floridians what leather loafers are to Italians. Wear them all the time. Do you feel that breeze, feet? This is America. This is Florida. This is freedom. 
4. Plastic bags - Good gravy, America, do we really need to use so many plastic bags!? If we stacked up the plastic bags we've used since Thanksgiving we could probably get back to the moon. The lady at Target will double your plastic bag if you buy a pack of gum. The Germans have the good sense to charge for them. Everyone goes to the store armed with baskets and cloth bags, not just the types who pack their NPR totes with arugula. I remember when a plastic bag tax was introduced in DC  - people cried out as if they were being forced to go to the dentist. But it seems to have worked. Let's cut back, folks. 
5. Southern hospitality - Southern hospitality, oh I've missed you. I didn't even realize how much I missed you. We all love to feel welcome, but as a parent, you hope for a special place in heaven for those who welcome your child. This was especially true when we touched down in Atlanta to hit customs before our connecting flight to Orlando. Few people are happy to see a child in an airport, but the Atlanta airport staffers delighted at the sight of a tired, curly-haired almost-3-year old in our umbrella stroller. I near' thought they were going to invite us in for a glass of sweet tea. And it wasn't the whole smile-with-your-mouth-not-your-eyes plastic hospitality you sometimes get. The good folks in the ATL were happy to see us. We felt welcomed. 

Pay to Potty? Only Under the Following Conditions

Whenever I'm in Europe (nowadays, that's pretty much all the time), I get a lot of advice. No, not personal advice, except for one time when a lady at a restaurant said I shouldn't allow my daughter to throw silverware at her. (strict, these people! Strict!) No, I mostly get advice about how my home country, the good ol' US of A, should be run. All sorts of issues come up, but lately, economics have been the hot topic. You see, they blame our current economic difficulties on a brand of cowboy capitalism that enriches the fat cats at the expense of Joe and Jane Average. Now, I agree, it's horrible to enrich yourself through exploitation. But friends, I've seen an insidious form of exploitation, exploitation of our basest needs, right here in virtuous Baden-Wuerttemberg. It happened while I was at Stuttgart's Main Train Station and I urgently had to use the restroom (note to my British readership: restroom is American for loo, which is slang for toilet, if you're still not with me).

Now, as the patriots over at Stuff America Does Best have pointed out, public restrooms are treated as a right, are readily available, and unlike other public institutions, they don't have to make ends meet with funding drives. But this isn't so in Europe, as I discovered in Stuttgart. No, in order to come to the appropriate place of relief, I needed to fork over a Euro (which is like a buck forty!) to a company called "Rail and Fresh Public Toilet Facilities," which is just one brand name of Hering International. Do you know what that means? Somewhere sits a German fat cat wearing a pin striped suit, legs crossed and propped on his antique oak desk, teeth clenched around a cuban cigar that he only takes out to yell at his Swedish secretary (named Kitty), and all he has to do is listen to the Euros plop every time we have to go plop. This is an atrocious form of predatory capitalism - demanding our cash when we're vulnerable and dancing in desperation. 

Ok, I know Rail and Fresh offers clean facilities and scent sprayers among other amenities, and plenty of women have already told me that they'd gladly shell out a Euro for a clean place to sit, but such luxuries necessities should be a given, not extra incentive to have us pay to do what our ancestors have always done for free using chamber pots kept under the bed. To get my hard-earned Euro, Mr. Monopoly Man's German cousin, you're going to have to offer the following:

1. Scent sprayers must spray top-of-the-line cologne, none of the cheap stuff. I prefer Eternity by Calvin Klein, but you'll have to offer a variety to suit the needs of your clientele.
2. Complimentary champagne, served in a crystal glass
3. Sauna, complete with steam room and optional Thai Massage 
4. An assortment of wordy and snobby newspapers and magazines, including the following: The Economist, The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Die Zeit, Die Welt, Der Spiegel, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine, Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung and all of their French, Spanish, Italian and Turkish equivalents. What? USA Today? If you must. But no tabloids. We want this place to be classy. 
5. A flat screen TV in each stall and over each urinal 
6. Silk toilet paper
7. Relaxing music, yes, but performed live by a professional string quartet
8. Professional cleanings, yes, but by the cast of Downton Abbey 
9. A short Circus Olay show, repeated on the hour
10. Beat Poetry reading every Friday
11. A warm towel after you wash your hands provided to you by a man in a tuxedo who speaks a southern accent. Doesn't matter from which country - it could be the southern part of the U.S. or the southern part of Portugal, as long as it's a southern accent. 

If none of these services are offered, then I will be forced to go with the competition. And by competition I mean a dark corner of the train station. Or one of the port-o-potties reserved for the Stuttgarter 21 protestors. Or a toilet on a parked train. 

Nones and Lovers

I've been wanting to write about Eric Weiner's New York Times column on Americans and God since it came out in December, but I've been busy doing other things, like trying to work for a living and thinking up warm-weather holiday songs. And the truth is, I wanted to give it some thought, because I think it's worth responding to as a Christian. Weiner represents a form of non-belief that is probably more prevalent than the faith of convinced atheism. He's undecided, a self-described "None." What's a None? Well, here:

We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt. Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”) 

I suspect that Nones number even more than the increasing number of people who check "none" on the surveys. I bet that many who cross "Catholic" or "Protestant" or "Muslim" or whatever belief are practical Nones, the cultural inheritors of a religious faith without significant bearing on their thoughts, decisions or prayers.

Weiner's "Noneness" is more nuanced than the None who just hasn't thought much about the afterlife between work and family and recreation. After a "health scare", this "rationalist" began to explore faith. In doing so, he went on a literal spiritual journey, traveling the world to sample the varieties of religious experience, which he chronicled in his book Man Seeks God: My Flirtation with the Divine. At this point, I should make clear that I haven't read Weiner's book, and answers to the questions and criticisms  I'm about to write may be found there. Nevertheless, his Times column has made a statement about the Nones' view of religion in America, and it's worth addressing.

For starters, let me say "amen" to the None's strong discomfort with the cross-pollination of piety and politics. While there have been times when the church should have done much more (I don't think Weiner would argue with Dr. King here), and I've wrote here before how unimpressed I was by large Christian gatherings using lots of (self-serving?) superlatives in their marketing. It's the sort of thing that would have made me want to clutch Noneness like a life-preserver had I not already been spoken for.

Weiner himself thinks humor is important, and I agree with him (note my heading). He thinks that "precious few of our religious leaders laugh. They shout." Yes, I hear them shouting too. I hear them shouting every time CNN talks to the latest loudmouth to draw a crowd or some doomsday prophet gets much more media attention than they deserve. But I can testify that while every church will have its sour-faced mice, much laughter can be heard between the pews. I grew up in a laughing family, surrounding by laughing people, and all of them thought you could know the Lord personally and would be happy to talk about it. We Christians run the whole gamut of emotions if you take the time to get to know us. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and disagree with Weiner's Chesterton quote: "It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it." Well, every religion can be joked about, and the best jokes come from within the ranks. Rather, it is the individual's jokes that are the test of his own character. Are they capable of joking? And when they do, is it in the right time and place for the best effect? Or are their jokes there for reasons of poison, to prey on the innocent and to build themselves up at others' expense? As some religious guy wrote somewhere, for everything there is a season. If you're a None genuinely seeking God and you visit a church that seems incapable of humor (and I've been there), give it one more week to make sure that your perceptions aren't clouded by a bias against the kind of people who show up there every Sunday (I have to watch myself there too). But once it's proven that the jokes are either unavailable or inappropriate, run (don't walk) to the exit. Bad humor's a good reason to find another church, but it's be a poor reason to try and put distance between yourself and God.

If Weiner has distance between himself and God, humorless blowhards have contributed to it. He needs a new kind of religious leader. He writes:

The answer, I think, lies in the sort of entrepreneurial spirit that has long defined America, including religious America. 

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

A Steve Jobs' of religion... sounds nice doesn't it? It sounded nice to me until I began to unpack the analogy. I'm a fan of Apple products, and I am using one to write this blog post. But as sleek, hip and user-friendly as they are, they aren't for everyone, as Microsoft's "I'm a PC" commercial slyly picked up on. Weiner's religious space wouldn't be something for all of us. It would be one more niche in a crowded market. Furthermore, high-technology is effective to the point that it is individualized, that I can sit alone in my computer which is my own electronic kingdom, filled with my apps and my favorites and my bookmarks and social networking sites where I can pay attention and ignore people at my own leisure without fear of boredom, pain or small talk. It's straightforward, unencumbered, intuitive and interactive because it's mine, made in my image and serving my purposes and, for the small price of targeted advertisement, I can be as spiritual and unspiritual as I want, I can experiment, celebrate my doubt or my faith with no book or leader to tell me that I might be in any way off base (and if they do, I can simply delete their comment). I can utter whatever the hell I want, because as far as I'm concerned, I'm alone.

Christianity, to my daily dismay and glory, has a different user experience. It involves other people. I go into a church and I sing songs and say prayers and listen to words with all sorts of people. People with the wrong politics, the wrong interpretations, the wrong family traditions, the wrong styles, the wrong jokes. Their flawed behavior is rarely intuitive and often encumbers me. It's interactive, alright, but the interaction involves me putting aside my desires and agendas to meet other people where they are. It can be very tedious and often takes years to fully feel like part of a Fellowship (and having recently moved, I'm feeling these bruises once again), but it is well worth it. To sing and pray together with someone else in the presence of Almighty God... to have actually done that makes it worth it to come back and drink from the fountain, again and again. Weiner contrasts the private and public nature of religion, but his conclusions are too individualistic. Spirituality is private and public, yes, but knowing God is a communal experience - it's community with Him and with everyone else who has taken the plunge. It's there that we "become more loving" and experience "human grace."

I sympathize with the Nones' desire to remain outside all of this. I sympathize, because I detect something in them that I know in myself: a fear of commitment. Let me explain by way of politics. I confess that I find it difficult to commit to a particular political viewpoint. While living in Washington, I knew people who delighted in this commitment. They had strong politics, and they could argue them so well that I would be convinced until I talked with my next friend who had a different view. Everyone was right, and they could prove it. Moreover, the incivility and ill-humor of our political leaders and the media's appetite for scandal and provocation makes me feel about politics the same way Weiner feels about religion. But at the end of the day, I have to vote. I have to check the box next to the candidate I think is best and which statue or bill sounds the most reasonable. If I don't participate, my voice is completely marginalized and I miss out on the privileges of representative democracy.

Much like politics, religions have their loud blowhards and people who take what I feel is an uncomfortable delight in having strong opinions. But the responsibility for my participation does not rest on them - it rests on me. Commitment to God is less like buying an iPad and more like getting married. It's all encompassing, and we don't get to sever our ties when confronted with suffering, discomfort, other people or the fact that it's often us that needs changing. But the reward, and Christianity's key selling point, if you will, is love. Indeed, the Bible says that God himself is love and that all of God's law is summed up in loving God and loving each other. We're invited into this love through an act of love. Jesus died on a cross 2000 years ago that we may experience God's love through communion and fellowship with him, even when we're humorless blowhards with bad politics. The question then, is not whether we have the right operating system. It's whether we embrace Love or none.

Frankfurt

I'm in Frankfurt for the next few weeks, and I must say, Europe's financial capital is making a wonderful impression. The heavenly weather helps, of course. I've always had a little bias against Frankfurt - it seemed to me like Wall Street without the rest of New York. (Indeed, I learned today that a nickname for Frankfurt, besides "Bankfurt", is "Mainhatten." Main - pronounced "mine" - for the river hat runs through it, and the rest, well, if you don't get it ask your neighbor...) I saw plenty of people with power posture and chic suits, and the skyline is a neighborhood of skyscrapers with the names of banks shining proudly at its points, but Frankfurt has more to offer.

I've only been here a couple days, but here are a three things that Frankfurt has going for it:

1. The Main River - Majestic, and with a splendidly-kept river walk, the Main is clearly the place to be where there is good weather. Joggers, bikers, walkers, lovers, picnickers and (happy day) biergartens rest on either side.
2. Transport - I've never seen a metropolitan so bike friendly (of course, I've never been to Amsterdam, but I've been to Berlin and Munich), and the Frankfurters take full advantage.
   
3. Diversity - In my mind, there are few things finer than walking among a spicy mix of nationalities, languages, colors, sizes, shapes, ages and activities. I suspect that part of this was tourist and the American military bases, but the whole gumbo must also think the international financial institutions, the university and the general life of the city of Frankfurt.
   

That Horrible, Horrible Place Called Ikea

Let me start by outing myself as a user of Ikea products. I sleep on an Ikea bed with two mattresses - my wife's was specially made for her, but mine was from Ikea (we have two-mattress beds here in Germany - which is quite sensible, the more you think about it). My clothes are folded (mostly) and jammed into one of those sturdy, practical Malm dressers. I get a little emotional when I think about the white Erktop couch we left inside the Washington beltway. In fact, I think the chair upon which I sit was a result of that merry band of Swedes, but I'd have to ask my wife as she bought it a long time ago.

But the Ikea shopping experience, which has happened to me several times, is a flagrant violation of the Geneva convention. Their enhanced shopping method is several surreal labyrinths of household goods, worthy of Dante, Kafka, Hitchcock and the latter levels of the original Super Mario Brothers. The purpose of this, to the best I can ascertain (it's always difficult, after Ikea, to remember what's real and what isn't), is that each display, each fluorescent lamp, each bag of affordable power strips, lands a body blow to the mind. Overloaded with information, color, stimuli and a complex series of numbers that supposedly guide the shopper/victim through their warehouse (final level where you fight the big boss if you have enough power points and appropriate ammo, though I really don't remember if that part is true), the shopper is unable to make competent purchasing decisions, so he buys everything on his list and requires a military convoy just to get it all home.

This week, my family, against our better judgment, embarked to Ikea. We have two Ikeas to choose from - I think they hover around major metropolitan areas like those space ships in Independence Day. They lured us in with an email: kitchen chairs were on sale - 20 Euros off. We needed kitchen chairs - four of them. To boot, we also wanted nightstands, various kitchen items and curtains. We hopped in the Ford Focus and drove over there, the day calm, the weather hot but cheerful, rock'n'roll on the radio. We arrived at the mothership and were ushered (invited? Tempted? Who can say?) into a parking garage - it had only two levels, but the first one must have been as tall as Mt. Rushmore, because we drove upwards for miles, our car twisting up the ramp like it was one of the screws holding an Ikea dresser together until, nauseated (and in no condition to drive a car through a busy concrete enclosure, not to mention actually parking the darn thing), we reached our destination.

Somehow I parked, and we walked in, already disoriented. There's a friendly-looking place where you can leave your child with a friendly-looking Ikea employee. I looked over there. Our daughter is only a year and a half years old, and the kids need to be three to be left there. All the kids were watching a movie. I couldn't see what it was. There was a Pixar poster on the wall, but I bet that was a diversion. I suspect that the kids were really watching an instructional video on breaking kitchen chairs and nightstands, so as to send parents back to buy more as soon as possible ("Hi kids! Today, we're going to see what a hockey stick can do to a table leg!").

I'm told all Ikea stores are basically the same, but I never remember what comes first. Beds? Couches? Bathroom? Kitchen? All I remember is that there is a lot of furniture, surrounded my mesmerizing displays of idyllic rooms full of suspiciously perfect right angles. I'm also told that there are shortcuts through Ikea, and if you know what you're doing, you can actually get through the store quickly, kind of like how, at Target, you can buy what you need and escape unscathed (except for being forced to breathe in that inhumane popcorn-maker smell when you walk in the door, but that's for another blog post). Maybe it's true, who can know? But I think it's just a rumor that the Ikea authorities let fester for the sake of false hope. All I know is that when we were in the bowels of the Ikea kitchen displays, we could no longer find the sale we were looking for. Filled with panic, my wife realized she had not printed the sales email. We looked at each other. Beads of sweat grew on our foreheads as I struggled to hold on to my squirming daughter. I knew that if she ran off among the maze of cabinets and high stools, I might never see her again.

My wife took out her cell to call her parents to make sure the email was correct (conveniently, we left our notebook computer on their kitchen table). No signal. Not a bar. I took out my phone. Same results - just a blank screen that glowed uselessly until its automatic lock-down kicked in. In Ikea, no one can here you scream.

My wife and I locked eyes. That's all we had time for. She was beautiful. Quietly, but with a sense of purpose, she raced back the way we came (we had left a trail of those papers where you're supposed to write your product numbers, just in case). Ikea can bring a couple together in our desperation. But it can also tear us apart. I observed another couple arguing. It was a heated, angry exchange about what to buy for their bedroom. The woman was arguing on the authority of her nesting instinct, magazine articles, color patterns and thousands of childhood dreams. The man was arguing on the authority of their bank account and the actual size of their apartment. I didn't see how it ended. In an effort to distract her from the gravity of the situation, I took my daughter to make faces in a full-length mirror.

Time is different in Ikea. Who knows how much time passes outside of the store, or how long we were actually in the store. What I do know is that my wife made it back to us, but I really don't know how long it took. My beard was thicker, though, and my daughter was taller, but that may have been the mirror playing tricks. My wife's parents were able to confirm the sale, even if there were no indications in the mother ship.

Bruised, tired and hungry, we made our way to the cafeteria. Some might argue that the cafeteria is one of Ikea's redeeming features. After all, Ikea is one of the few places in Europe that offers free refills. But, chugging down my third glass of Ikea-brand cola like a Roman oar man on a break, I realized that the that was the catch. The free refills! What spurs the obesity epidemic if not the mass availability of sugar water? And what causes furniture to sag, slouch and break more than obesity? I looked down at the cream sauce oozing over my salmon. I looked over at the fries my wife was sharing with my daughter. I felt my chair creak and struggle beneath me as the conspiracy formed in front of my eyes. I returned our trays, shaken, and we quietly made our way down the escalator to the lower level.

The lower level of Ikea is room after room, stage after stage, of small appliances, lights, silverware, art prints and potted plants. There are baskets of products so inexpensive and appealing that you find yourself filling up your yellow bag with them without really thinking. "Yes, I'll take six of those three packs of picture frames." But the good news is that the cunning furniture displays have mostly stopped, though the damage has been done.

The warehouse is the final stage. The warehouse is where you actually get your furniture, vacuumed packed into immovable boxes, stacked on shelves, row after row after row, like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. After an Indiana Jones-like search, we found our chairs and night stands, which we put on a pushcart and made our way, wearily, yearning for freedom, to the checkout lines. The checkout lines are automated. I scanned the chairs. Still no sale. I swiped the Ikea-family card, which usually is good for a free cup of coffee. Sale! We got what we came for! We got what we came for! My wife and I embraced. My exhausted daughter napped in the umbrella stroller.

We hurried out, making no eye contact with Ikea employees or other customers. We wanted to see the sun again. Under the weight of six, compact boxes, the Focus bent but didn't break. We drove away. What day was it?

Later, struggling to build our new nightstand, I realized I put a shelf in backwards, compromising the entire project. The white boards of some sort of pressed meatloaf wood, twisted and scratched as I tried to correct the error. The horror. The horror.

Did a Big Idea Make Big Ideas Elusive?

This weekend, some friends sent me Neal Gabler's interesting New York Times commentary, "The Elusive Big Idea." In it, Gabler bemoans the lack of influence compelling intellectual ideas have on modern Society. We make icons of those who, in the past, not only thought of something new, but also captured the attention and commanded the respect of the rest of the Western world, to the point where their ideas not only transformed their own field but impacted society as a whole. Freud's study in psychology brought about a paradigm shift in his own profession and influenced literature, theology and much else. The same could be said of Einstein with physics, Niebuhr with theology or Keynes with economics. Not only that, Gabler argues, but the ideas, and the intellectuals who argued for and about them, held more respect in popular culture. He writes:

"A big idea could capture the cover of Time — “Is God Dead?” — and intellectuals like Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal would even occasionally be invited to the couches of late-night talk shows. How long ago that was.

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé."

Now, you might be thinking, isn't the screen I'm staring at now a pretty big, transformative idea? Couldn't we add the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to our pantheon of people with good, world-changing ideas? No, writes Gabler.

"Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some, like Steven P. Jobs of Apple, have come up with some brilliant ideas in the “inventional” sense of the word.

Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational."

In fact, all this information technology is part of the problem.

"Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions. It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. It is largely useless except insofar as it makes the possessor of the information feel, well, informed."

I understand these this intense need to be informed, and the makers of social media, not to mention search engines, were smart to capitalize on this. A few minutes ago, I had to close the tabs with my Facebook and Twitter feeds just so I could stay focused on this blog. Gabler goes on to write how traditional media, the disbursers of big ideas, is suffering in an instant information society. Print is shrinking in market share, and popular television talk shows no longer invite intellectuals to sit on their couches. Instead of pausing to think, we now have the means to gorge ourselves with information, and we use it.

We're a narcissistic society, it's true, though I'm sure other professors had said that about their students a generation ago. Also, I don't think profit and intellectual thought are as antithetical as Gabler says it is. He admits that there are indeed thinkers with ideas to give and mentions a few examples, but they just don't have the same impact or attention of the idea generators of the past. But I largely agree that today, with our glut quick, instantaneous information and fewer ideas that manage to influence everyone.

Here's the thing, though. Isn't the death of a big idea, in part, the result of ideas themselves? Gabler laments the fall of enlightenment thinking, which he says is related to the death of the big idea, but he never mentions a big idea that critiqued the enlightenment itself: postmodernism. Postmodernism's flagship tenet is the deconstruction of meta-narratives, which is another way of saying big ideas, is it not? Postmodernism became popular, because some big ideas, full of influence, impact, debate, scholarship and much else, were devastating. Consider this neat summary from an Economist article five years ago (about which I wrote here):

"The founding post-modern text (as books are called in pomo) is by two Germans, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Published in 1944, “Dialectic of Enlightenment” examined the culture that had given birth to Auschwitz. It declared that “enlightenment is totalitarian”—that the 18th-century attempt to replace religion with rationalism had supplanted one form of mental slavery with another. God had been elbowed out by fascism, communism, Marxism, Freudianism, Darwinism, socialism and capitalism. The post-modernists thought their job was to “deconstruct” these grand theories, which they called the “meta-narratives”. The pomos would free people from them by exposing their sinister nature."

What hath big ideas wrought? Yes, Freud and Einstein had big ideas, but so did Hitler and Stalin. Perverse as they were, they were birthed in an enlightened culture where ideas, to use Gabler's words, were not "intellectual playthings," but had "practical effects." Indeed, it was fear of Hitler that caused Einstein to apply his big ideas towards the creation of the atomic bomb. If big ideas are less important to many of us, it is, in part, because they managed to destroy themselves in the process.

What is the result of the postmodernist critique of big ideas? Well, one is mass individualism, which Gabler laments without naming. As the Economist article points out, Capitalism has taken advantage of this with niche marketing, which is perhaps why Mark Zuckerberg has probably had more of an impact on most of us than Steven Pinker (to use one of Gabler's examples). Aided with technology, we all get to pick and choose what we read, what feed we follow or whose pictures to tag. But it doesn't necessarily mean we cease to think; our thoughts rarely rest in conformity with our preferred ueber-thinker, and when they do, that thinker has less impact on society as a whole. I primarily use Facebook to share links and read the links my friends have posted, and much of it is good, substantial stuff. Ideas are not extinct, but there's a lot more of them, and, for better or for worse, it's less likely that the big few will dominate.

Yes, this leaves all of us wide open for narcissism. Furthermore, I share Gabler's dislike of celebrity gossip and the computer-like gestation of information without thought, not to mention a preference for long, thoughtful essays over the verbal volleyball of cable punditry. I wish Letterman would feature a prominent professor for every actor he hosts. But I would rather live with our frantic, electronic marketplace of ideas and distractions then go back to a time when an evil idea could become so dominate.

Will Wilkinson, in reply to Gabler, believes (and "would bet his immortal soul") that "more big ideas... were studied, discussed and produced in 2010 than in 1950." He goes on to put a sunnier face on modern intellectual discourse:

"A TED talk or a book-talk spot on "The Daily Show" may not have the audience or cultural centrality of a half-hour with Dick Cavett on ABC in 1970, but more people are consuming and discussing big ideas, old and new, than ever before. The difference is that the audience and the discussion has become fragmented and decentralised.

The fun part is that I, as a lay thinker, can join the discussion right here on the information super highway. For those of us who prefer a cooler, more intellectual environment, the answer is to remain relentlessly thoughtful, reading and considering the ideas we come across. Before, of course, we post them on Facebook.

A Summer Fashion Proposal

I just visited weather.com, and it looks like some afternoon storms are cooling off the DC area. That being said, I felt nothing but sympathy for the residents of my former hometown, who have spent the last couple of weeks sweltering in the hundreds. Here in Germany, it's been in the 70s, 60s when cloudy (Sunday felt like winter in Florida).

The summer months are particularly tough on the men of Washington DC. Women business attire allows moderately short skirts and short-sleeve blouses. This attire can handle the mid-Atlantic heat. But the conservative business dress of the District mean that men, from Capitol Hill to K Street to Think Tanks, must enclose their sweaty necks in a tie wear a suit jacket Amazon-like conditions. Moreover, male business attire ensures that the energy-guzzling air conditioning units of every office, restaurant and government building will be running until every room could house a flock of penguins (with Morgan Freeman's soothing voice narrating their activities. Hey, I'd watch it).

So, with debt payment and spending buts pending in Washington, perhaps they should consider their AC bill, not to mention the sanity of any man who has to walk from his taxi to the Longworth House Office Building as if going through a sauna.

Once again, Japan is showing the way - not just in reliable automobiles and penalty kicks, but in hot weather business fashion. Facing a summer energy crisis after the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese government is encouraging their suit-wearing class get rid of the jacket and tie for a look that conservative-dress purists would deride as business casual. And, really, why not? What's so important about the convention of a long-armed suit and a piece of silk hanging in front of your shirt that you couldn't withdraw them for a season for the expressed purpose of everyone's felicity, not to mention comfort and less energy spending. It may even help politics. Perhaps the current fiscal debates would be more effective, not to mention more courteous, if President Obama and Speaker Boehner were wearing short-sleeve cotton button downs with a throat capable of breath.

Plus, everyone can put their suit and ties back on in October. And in January, to save energy, not to mention the heating bill, everyone can wear fashionable, colorful sweater vests.

A Few Words About Our Ferienwohnung

1. Ferienwohnung literally means holiday apartment, but the German word sounds so much better, I will continue to use it.
2. Ferienwohnung is pronounced “FAIR-ee-in-VOH-nung.”
3. The Ferienwohnung belongs to an elderly couple, whose pleasantness and helpfulness are so genuine that I never had the feeling it was a professional customer service. There are several Ferienwohnungen in their house, here in Serfaus, Austria – a resort town in the Alps. Every day, our hosts work to keep the back yard pristine.
4. The back yard includes a well-behaved lawn, a vegetable garden, a flower garden and a small goldfish pond.
5. My daughter loves the little goldfish pond, and we visit it every morning. There’s also a statue of a little boy holding his hands out. My daughter feeds the little boy by putting clovers in his hands and refers to him as “Boob.” Please be advised that “Boob” is southern German slang for “little boy.” If you are the parent of a little boy, I apologize in advance if my daughter calls him Boob.
6. Our Ferienwohnung house is one of many, all over town and up and down our particular street. Each of them are in good condition and, presumably, making money, and there are cranes here building more. I detect no sense of bitterness or competition between the house-owners. Indeed, while visiting Boob, my daughter and I got to know the man who owns the house next door. He invited us to use there swing, and we took him up on it. Every morning, after we visit Boob, my daughter and I hop the wooden fence to use the neighbor’s swing.
7. Our Ferienwohung itself is on the bottom floor of the house, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s easy for us to get to the garden (to visit Boob), and all of our windows face the valley to give us a majestic view of the Alps.
8. Speaking of windows, the one downside to our Ferienwohnung is that this is the first German house I’ve been to without Rolladen (or roller blinds, but the German word is better), or at least very dark curtains. Our curtains are sufficient for modesty but useless against the summer sun, and useless for a napping 1 and a half year old. The solution? We put her pack’n’play inside the bathroom and hung our picnic blanket over the window, the only window small enough for our picnic blanket. She’s sleeping peacefully as I write this. Thankfully, the toilet is in a different room.
9. The Ferienwohnung has a dishwasher. Hallelujah.
10. The Ferienwohnung has a flat screen TV with digital cable, so we are not missing the Women’s World Cup.
11. The digital cable package includes two embarrassing Evangelical channels, a German one and an American one. The American one showed a prosperity gospel preacher in the morning, and in the evening showed a concert featuring Michael Tait, formerly of DC Talk (where’s he been?). I did not watch much of either. The German evangelical channel is much more subdued and features elderly people talking about spiritual matters, as well as nature scenes and piano muzak in the background.
12. There are also several channels that primarily feature German folk music. Think lederhosen, oompa bands and liter biers. I think elderly people in Germany watch these channels the same way my grandmother would always watch Lawrence Welk reruns.
13. Other channels produce "Schlager" Music. Schlager music is the music of choice for German beer halls since the 70s. Schlager combines German folk music, disco and Tom Jones for a sound that makes you want to drink more. I saw a schlager singer with the combined powers of Luke Skywalker's hair Clark Gable's mustache.
    
14. We’re saving money by not using the Internet. This is a forced fast, and not only do I feel very uninformed, but my hands are beginning to shake.
15. The furniture, from bed to wardrobe, is firm, comfortable and of excellent quality.
16. All in all, this is a comfortable place to return and reflect. Beauty and nature mean processing. I do this better when I turn off the television and sit where I can look one direction to see my wife and another direction to look out the window for an awe-inspiring view of the Alps. Why look elsewhere?
    

Small Mercies

Germany is almost finished with what is set to be the driest spring in over a century. The news has described the whole season as summery. If so, then it's been the summer of love for the trees and grass on these hills. The plants have been spewing pollen like their Eyjafjallajökull (yes, I copied and pasted that), with few showers to wash the earth (and the cars, and the deck chairs, and anything else I left outside) clean. And for our household allergy sufferers (my wife and myself - my daughter, not yet, but genetically, she's doomed) it's been pretty nasty. During the afternoons, I feel like Godzilla emerged from the river to make my nose itch.

But this morning, rejoice, there was a rainstorm. It was a Godsend, and I mean that. It was as if the earth was given a million little baptisms, wiping away the pollen - not to mention my itchy, goopy tears. Afterwards, the air was so clear and fresh and revitalizing - it's like the feeling the commercials tell you you'll get from deodorant soap. It was a gift, and I needed it today. I needed the energy, the clean oxygen, the clear head and the ability to keep my nerve (I love it when I have that!). I needed it because we visited a place that must be in violation of the Geneva convention.

How To Spot a Christian Buzzword

If Christian marketing uses the word twice in the same sentence, chances are, you've got a buzzword. Consider this, from the back cover of The Wisdom of Stability by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove:

"A work of startling authenticy, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's new book speaks to each of us who seek an authentic path of Christian transformation."

I'm not sure I can handle that much authenticity. Is this one of those places where "keepin' it real" goes to far?

No to knock the book, of course. The Wisdom of Stability was recommended by a friend. My wife has read about a third of it, and I've read the first chapter. Wilson-Hartgrove might overstate the scriptural case for his points (though I should reflect more here), but I'm thankful that he wrote a book about staying rooted. As someone who's trying to settle after wandering for the better part of a decade, I resonate with the theme. After all, it's a book of startling resonance for everyone who wants to resonate with authentic Christian transformation.

Surviving the Commute

I remember reading (or hearing) somewhere that the length of your commute is one of the most consistent happiness indicators. Regardless of classification (such as nationality, religion or social-economic status), those with shorter commutes were happier than those with long commutes. It made sense to me at the time, and now Anne Lowery has done the world a favor by documenting the horrors of the long commute in Slate. She writes, and I second, that:

"Commuting is a migraine-inducing life-suck—a mundane task about as pleasurable as assembling flat-pack furniture or getting your license renewed, and you have to do it every day. If you are commuting, you are not spending quality time with your loved ones. You are not exercising, doing challenging work, having sex, petting your dog, or playing with your kids (or your Wii). You are not doing any of the things that make human beings happy. Instead, you are getting nauseous on a bus, jostled on a train, or cut off in traffic."

She goes on to examine the research that shows the correlation between commuting and obesity, divorce, loneliness and other maladies.

An obvious take away is to sacrifice those big things we want in a house - a spacious yard, fireplace, enough TV channels to entertain the entire population of Tokyo - to pay a little extra for a smaller flat or house closer to where you work. Lowery points out:

"Given the choice between that cramped apartment and the big house, we focus on the tangible gains offered by the latter. We can see that extra bedroom. We want that extra bathtub. But we do not often use them. And we forget that additional time in the car is a constant, persistent, daily burden—if a relatively invisible one."

Not to mention high gas prices. Also, if are an employer, I suspect that employees with shorter commutes are not only happier, but more productive and less prone to that creeping resentment about work cutting into their personal life. I may be worth the investment to pay additional salary to employees who live within fifteen minutes of the office (for the business minded, is anyone out there aware of companies who do this? Would it work?).

In the mean time, more and more of us find themselves living like that opening scene in Office Space where the protagonists stop-and-go through the traffic. If we're unable to make the potentially life-saving lifestyle change to reduce the commute, what should we do? I have a few suggestions based on my experience, but these fit to my personality and may not work for everyone. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

1. Embrace Public Transportation. I had a long commute in DC, and it was actually a little bit shorter to drive in than to Metro (or in sometimes, bus-then Metro) in. Complaining about Metro is one of Washington's number one pass times, up there with the Army 10-miler and bashing the leaders of the opposing party. But whatever Metros problems, the train system is much safer and much less stressful than driving inside the beltway. DC area drivers are an unholy alliance of important people who can't stop blackberrying, college students, tourists and people with diplomatic immunity. Plus, the designers of the northern Virginia road system must have had population control in mind. And folks say I'm a relatively calm person, but behind the wheel I can turn into a cussing, raging hulk. Even if it took a little longer, riding that train got me to and from work in a safe and more-relaxed manner that was better for my soul. On top of all this, public transportation is better for the environment. Not every town has public transportation, but if it's available, I recommend taking it.
   
2. This leads me to my second point, which is to use your commute to catch up on your reading, pray, catching up on the news, or whatever else that may cut into your home life. One of my old pastors mentioned that he uses his Metro time to veg out. He has five kids at home, so on the Metro, he reads interesting news articles on his iPhone. Vegging out of the way, he can focus his energy on his kids when he got home. In Washington, I had a pattern where I would pray in the morning (I pray through prayer cards, as suggested by Paul Miller his book, A Praying Life, which I reviewed in December) and devote my ride home to pleasure reading. This is more difficult if you drive of course. But if you decide my commute is where I catch up on the news or listen to a book on time, then that's one less thing your hours in traffic will take away from you.
3. If you can, make exercise a part of your commute. It makes sense that people who have long commutes have health problems; they simply have less time to move around. They come home and face the choice: do I spend time with my family or do I hit the gym? One way, of course, is to bike to work, which is what my wife's Uncle Gehard does. Now that I live in a bike-friendly country, I hope to be a bike-commuter as well. I did not bike in Washington (it takes a brave soul to bike in DC), I got off the Metro at a place (Farragut West, for those of you familiar with the area) where I would walk twenty minutes to my office (DuPont Circle). This is not the way to get perfect abs, but it got my limbs moving and my heart pumping ten times per week, which ain't bad.

Again, these may not work for you, and none of these are a perfect answer. But I find that if you can use your commute to accomplish one of your daily goals, such as exercise, reading or simply staying informed, your less likely to experience the commuting hazards Lowery describes. How is your commute? How much would your life improve if it were shorter? What are your commuter survival tips?

Business Classy

That's right. We flew business class. That seven-hour plane ride from Washington-Dulles to Frankfurt? Luxury. Luxury like a De Beers commercial. It was pimp my ride, Lufthansa addition, and baby, we ain't going back.

Ok, we will go back. I have a hard time envisioning a scenario when business class tickets will be in my price range. But, as Ferris Bueller once said, "if you have the means..."

Our business class tickets were generously bought with my in-law's frequent flier miles. The reason? We were moving, and we had a lot of luggage. More luggage than Paris Hilton. Plus our stroller. Plus my guitar, who in a perfect world would get her own seat and be lovingly polished by stewardesses once an hour during the flight. And if you fly business class, as we discovered, they smilingly and with much care and gentleness accommodate so much luggage that you wonder if the plane will pull a trailer behind it as it soars through the clouds.

Actually, it's probably a clever strategy. Most actual business travelers fly to their high-powered meetings like George Clooney's character in Up In The Air, no baggage except a mini-rolling carry on. These men are under so much stress and pressure, that they could do without the uncertainty and lost time that comes with checking a bag. Thus, when families travel business class, there's plenty of room for checked luggage. And to my surprise, we were not the only families in business class. I had feared, with some justification, that my babbling, crying, ever-exploring daughter would draw the ire and angry looks of haggard executives seeking solace in their in-flight martinis. In fact, the closest people to us were a beautiful Indian family who, angelic son and daughter in tow, were flying from Washington to Mumbai. I bet they had enough luggage to fill the Taj Mahal.

On top of that, we found out that the business class section on our flight wasn't even half full (or should I say half empty? I never know...). The lovely woman at ticketing informed us of this as we checked in. She gave us the kind of customer service you give to someone who saved your mother's life. "Since we will have extra seats available," she said in a voice that was both soothing and truly grateful for my families' existence," why don't we put you and your wife on either side of an empty seat. We won't actually be selling the seat for your daughter to use, but if no one needs it, feel free to put her there." You mean my daughter won't need to sit on my lap for seven hours straight? Yes, please. To my right, I looked over at the masses in the common, er... economy class, crowded in their line, angrily quarreling with Lufthansa workers about the size of their carry ons. They must have been waiting in line since President Obama's inauguration speech.

After checking in, we said our tearful goodbyes to our Scottish friend and my lovely sister who is known for Scottish poetry, both of whom were kind enough to caravan us and our possessions to Dulles (Washington area residents will know that this is a sacrifice in and of itself). Then we made our way to the plane.

There they were, three seats in the middle of our plane for our family, and enough room between any other seats for gnomes to play volleyball. As predicted, plenty of those seats were empty, including one for the baby to use. The only downside was that my beautiful wife was far away from me. Economy class is always a good excuse to snuggle with my wife, which is one of my favorite activities. She was so far away that I wondered if I would have to send the butler with a hand-written note on the family stationary every time I wanted to communicate with her. I peered towards the rear of the plane where, for a brief moment, I saw the commoners, packed together like caged chickens. Graciously, a flight attendant pulled the curtain so we couldn't see each other. I would hate for their envy to boil over into a full-fledged Marxist uprising. Plus, I didn't want to have to deal with empathizing for my fellow man, his knees pressed uncomfortably against his food tray, trying not to touch the fat man with a head cold to his right, nor the unwashed college student in pajamas and flip flops to his left.

I had so much leg room that Dwight Howard could have sat comfortably in my seat. The chair itself, by way of an assortment of buttons conveniently located at my right hand, could bend in several places into a thousand positions. It took a little time and effort to find the position of maximum comfort for my dainty, business class body. Ah, but I found it! There was even a massage function. Unfortunately, all that ever happened was some buzzing under my thighs. I was hoping that an in-flight masseur would come and work out all the knots that parade down my spine. Maybe I didn't push the button hard enough.

Let's talk about the Lufthansa flight attendants for a moment. Lufthansa has the best flight attendants I've ever come across, even before experiencing the niceties of business class. They are the best, because they are the best dressed. They still wear the wonderful flight attendant uniforms American airliners (who knows why) gave up in the seventies. Their perky yellow scarves, their dapper berets cocked perfectly to the side, their sailor outfits all tell you, if I'm willing to put this on for you to have a good flight, you will have a good flight.

Of course, they are even better when you fly business class. They fawned all over my daughter the entire flight. Not only did they set up a lovely bassinet for her (which proved ineffective and perhaps a little unsafe for a fifteen-month-old who wants to grow up to be a mountain climber - hey, it's the thought that counts), but each one on different occasions throughout the flight bought her luxurious snacks, mostly German bread, which is luxurious, and wonderful, Lufthansa-themed toys. We are now in possession of several stuffed, fluffy airplanes and a felt mobile with dangling clouds, stars and planes. More importantly, the flight attendants knew that a luxury flight was incomplete without plenty of luxury drinks. Before our flight had taken off, when I was testing the bending limits of the joints in my chair, a smiling stewardess offered me a glass, not a plastic picnic goblets you get at Target, but a glass of Champagne. The wine menu's elegant selection was available to me the duration of the flight. Oh, and the food...!

So much airline food seems like frozen stuff the supermarkets were unable to sell, so they provide them bulk rate to the major airline carriers. That, of course, is the lot of the common, I mean economy class. In Business class, I had a three course meal with real silverware and plates. We ordered off a menu. Lufthansa business class meals are the creations of German celebrity chefs, whose bios were conveniently available in our inflight magazine. The salad I ate was by far the least-rubbery grouping of vegetables I've ever experienced on a plane, but the highlight was the main course. I can't say if it was the best lamb I've ever tasted, but it was up there. You'll pardon the cliche, but the meat really did melt in my mouth. The sauce was a spectacular curry-based combination of flavors that told my taste buds, yes, this is what you've been waiting for. Heavenly. For dessert, my wife and I shared an exquisite combination of fruit and cheese, artistically arranged on a porcelain serving tray. I'm sure back in common, er... economy class, they were sticking their sporks into a half-thawed chicken thigh filled with cheese or trying to digest some uncomfortable, gas-inducing pasta sauce, wondering if a cup of table wine really is worth five Euros. Not I, feet up, belly full of contentment.

What else could I talk about? My own little TV, where I got to choose from dozens of movies or TV shows, and that I could watch on my own time? The little toiletry bag they gave us or the warm towel to wash our little faces? I didn't even mention waiting for my flight in the business class lounge with a buffet and open bar. They even came to get us so we could board before all the riff-raff.

There was, however, one aspect of intrigue. Whenever I needed to use the bathroom, a frequent event after all that bubbly, I noticed an inviting, spiral staircase to another compartment on the plane. That was the staircase to first class, something all the poor souls who sit in business class aspire to. Naturally, I wasn't allowed to go up. But what did they have up there? Did each person have a personal flight attendant who had spent a month studying their subject beforehand as to anticipate their every possible need or desire. Did they get not only a spacious seat, but an entire suite, complete with sauna and aged wine bottled before the invention of the airplane? Were they all hooked into a computer program like the Matrix, except to experience the sort of pleasures not available to the rest of us in this life?

I know one thing they did get: their own chariot to the airplane itself. I know this, because I saw it in Frankfurt while my family and I waited for our connecting flight to Stuttgart. There we were, sitting in the terminal with all the other sheep, looking expectantly at the small jet in which we would all squeeze, when suddenly, a brand new Porsche pulled up right by the plane. The driver, with the efficiency and elegance of the best-trained servant, got out of the car and opened the passenger door. Out stepped a tall, middle-aged man whose suit probably was about as expensive car, only to be matched by price of his perfectly-placed sunglasses. All eyes upon him, he strolled easily onto our plane, many, many minutes before even those carrying business class tickets, babies or both.

Now that's the way to travel.

Paint the Town Green

In moving to Baden-Wuertemberg this year, I am experiencing a little piece of history. You see, B-W is one of Germany's 16 states (I like impressing, or at least thinking I'm impressing, my Germans friends by telling them I can name all 50 U.S. states. Thank you, "Fifty Nifty" song), the one that lies in the southwest corner. With the exception of the wonderful college town of Freiburg, which the Sueddeutsche Zeitung's "Jetzt" blog called the Portland of Germany (actually, they called Portland the Freiburg of America), the state is about as conservative as you can get here in Europe. It was the home of the Pietist movement and is still the closest thing to a Bible belt you'll find in these parts, plus it is a center of industry, boasting top companies like Daimler, Porsche and Bosch. All these combine to make B-W the German equivalent of a red state. Except that in Germany, the red party is actually the Social Democrats, who are the heirs of the socialists and currently their main left-leaning party. The color of the more conservative Christian Democrats is black, perhaps making it the Batman of political parties.

Except that now the Greens are in control. Yes, Green means the same thing here that it does in the States, except that in Germany the Greens are a viable political party. Foreign policy buffs may recall that the Greens even held a national coalition government with the Social Democrats several years ago. Americans may best remember Joschka Fischer, that same government's foreign minister during the Iraq war. During a speech about why he thought the war was not a good idea, he famously switched from German to English when Donald Rumsfeld took off his translator headphones, though I don't know if he actually shouted, "pay attention, Rummy!" In their parliamentary democracy, the dominant left- or right-leaning party usually needs to form a coalition with a smaller party in order to control the government. The Social Democrats like to partner with the Greens to form what nobody except me calls a Christmas tree coalition. The Christian Democrats like to partner with the Free Democrats, the yellows, to form a bumblebee coalition. The Free Democrats are what the Tea Party would be if it were dominated by university intellectuals.

But now the Greens rule Baden-Wuertemberg. Or, more accurately, they are the dominant party of a coalition with the Reds, which is a bit like having Ralph Nader asking Barack Obama to be Vice President. For more bad U.S.-German equivalencies, let me say that the Greens winning in Baden-Wuertemberg is a bit like having the Green party take over Texas. Our (I write "our" saying even though I'm not a citizen, I am a resident with healthcare and Kindergeld) new Minister-President - B-W's governor - is Winfried Kretschmann. Even though he shares a barber with Kim Jong Il, I actually find him to be a sympathetic figure. He's over sixty and comes from a small town in the Swabian Alps, Germany's answer to the Appalachian Mountains. True to the Green roots, he does not want to be known as a Landesvater, or "Father of the State," which is usually a perk of the job, though I don't know exactly what it means. He prefers to be a fellow citizen, who happens to be in charge. He has a strong Swabian accent, which is important as the governor of Mississippi saying "y'all", but he spoke enough high German for me to understand him on the news last night. Unlike pretty much every politician I've seen speak on either side of the Atlantic, he doesn't come across as a salesman. He has a reputation for being pretty even handed and fair and gave more diplomatic answers regarding his pro-bike, pro-train transportation plan (unlike his new transportation minister, who, in an interview with a national newspaper yesterday, called some Porsche-driving as a libido-form of car driving, which probably won't go well here in Germany's motor-city).

How did the Greens take over? I'm not sure exactly, but evidently everyone was upset about a train station, which the Greens bravely stood against because of tree-removal, but the other parties supported, because they had already paid for it. I just came from Washington, where the problems include two wars and a huge debt. It's not bad to move to a place where the biggest problem is a train station.
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The Italian Barber

Somewhere between packing, catching diseases, moving countries and being a family man, I forgot to get a haircut. In college, and during both of my years in Germany, I simply let my hair grow. The style around the turn of the millennium (if you can recall to those days of Y2K scares and mobile phones without screens) was for a man to have each of his hairs shorn tiny and combed forward so it came to a single point at the front. Everyone respectable had it, which bothered me for some reason, so I let my locks grow. I cut it short and pretty again every time I needed a desk job, but as a student or missionary I played Sampson (without the muscles). Some Women protested (though when long hair became fashionable again half a decade later they protested when I cut my hair), but sometimes my hippie hair invited comparisons to Jesus, John Lennon and Vigo Mortensen's version of Aragorn. Not bad company, if you ask me. Of course, I was also cast as a mental patient and a hobo...

I spent my last half-decade as a respectable DC urbanite with a matching haircut, and here in Germany, I need hair that assures anyone I meet (an immigration official, for example) that I'm ready to have a place in society. So, I went to a barber.

My in-laws recommended the Italian barber their Uncle Helmut frequents. Uncle Helmut lives across the street and used to worked at the town's brewery before he retired (sadly, the town's brewery also had to retire). His hair always looks distinguished, so I agreed. Plus, you don't need an appointment for this particular Italian barber.

Many barbers in Germany are Italian. In my German course during our Freiburg years, we once practiced our auditory understanding by listening to a funny story about a German housewife charmed by her Italian stylist. Many of them immigrated to Germany with their families in the 60s and run barber shops and restaurants today. Yes, as Texas is a good place to find Mexican food, southern Germany's not a bad place to find an Italian restaurant.

When I opened the door to the barber shop, I felt like I had walked into a retirement home. The men (even though the sign outside said they cut ladies hair, the posters, the magazines, the clientele and the barber were clearly masculine) ahead of me and behind me in line were long in the tooth, to say the least. Their short hair suggested they visit the barber shop every week (where my roadkill toupee look suggested other priorities), but, at least while I was there, it lacked community of the classic neighborhood barber in the States (not that I would really know about that with all my visits to Hair Cuttery - I only know it from books and movies). If the old men were regulars, they did not acknowledge one another. Part of me would have enjoyed a waiting room filled with old men telling stories, but it's not in the German nature to talk to strangers, at least not without a couple liters of beer in the belly. Instead, everyone sat in their chairs looking as if their previous appointment was for a root canal.

The Italian barber, veteran immigrant that he is, adopted the German custom of not being talkative, but his lips were curled in a constant Cheshire Cat smile. His movements and features, though not animated or (to northern European/North American eyes) overstated, betrayed his heritage. His forearms had almost as much hair as some of his clients. I watched him over my borrowed copy of Geo, Germany's answer to National Geographic. He worked with concentration, intensity and excellence - the sort of way I imagine the classic Italian artists working. Each of us received a run-of-the-mill men's haircut - no colors or frills, but the results, including mine, were somehow classier and much more attractive, then they would be had we visited a bored stylist who wished he could be sculpting the locks of the new Dutchess of Cambridge, much less a national haircut chain. It was as if each one of my hairs were given love and attention needed to become a better part of a whole.

So, if you are ever in Germany and in need of a haircut, let me make one suggestion. Go Italian.

The Joy of a Job Well Done

I'm sure you've had this experience before. You're doing a task you don't particularly care for, perhaps even at a job you don't like, but in all of the repetition, you start to feel joy. You grow in excellence and work quickly, and the satisfaction of a job well done sneaks in like an unwelcome guest at your negativity party.

I don't know whether or not the man who packed our belongings into a 200 cubic foot pod liked is job or not, though I suspect he does. He has been at it for fifteen years, ever since he moved to the States from Guatemala. He packed, taped and carried boxes of books, clothes, wedding presents and baby toys with a sort of gusto that comes from professionalism and know how. He was only about 5'6", maybe even less, but I think he could bench press my entire extended family if they all sat evenly on a metal pole. He was cut. In fact, with his shaved head, tanned skin and action movie physique, he looked just like Vin Diesel.

The best part was when taped up a box. Here his motions were more Bruce Lee than Vin Diesel (though no high-pitched Kung Fu screams). Within the span of a single second, he would rip off a piece of tape, close the box lid, tape it firmly and without creases or bubbles and without danger to any of the box's contents and, with that same gusto, tear off the end of the tape from the roll. He did this with machine-like precision. Whenever I tape up a box, the same process takes me five minutes and usually involves wasting too much tape as the pieces fold in two or get stuck on the floor. I look like a chimpanzee trying to open a jar of pickles.

I stood in the corner, nibbling my lip as I fretted about our worldly goods, wondering if they would all fit in the pod, while Vin Diesel/Bruce Lee merrily boxed and carried. I bet he could have fought 20 ninjas at once. It was a beautiful morning, and later, my wife and I stood outside to see him and his two partners pack everything in. It was incredible. My wife got annoyed when I hummed the Tetris theme song. Everything fit and then some. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding, that all of our belongings make it in tact to Germany. In the meantime, like a sunny spring morning, it does the soul good to watch someone take joy taping, boxing and carrying.

Football Teams Should Be Named After Local Industries

Rick Reilly points out that the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers, who (you read it here first) will play each other in the Superbowl this evening, are the only two remaining NFL teams named for local industries. Way to support the American worker, AFC and NFC champions! This is the sort of boost the American economy needs. In fact, I think other teams should follow suit and re-name themselves after their local industries. Here are some suggestions:

1. Houston used to be the Oilers, before the Oilers became the Titans and moved to Tennessee and the Texans took over in Houston. Changing the Texans to the Oilers, and bringing back the ketchup on pail-blue uniforms would be a start.
2. Speaking of Tennessee, it is nowhere near Greece or their mythology, so Titans won't cut it. Tennessee is known for the music industry, so here are some ideas: The Banjo Pickers; The Record Producers; The Elvises; The Partons; The Tennessee Twang
3. Wait, aren't the Cowboys a local industry in Dallas? Maybe I'm wrong...
4. Piracy is no longer a thriving occupation in the Tampa Bay, moving to Somalia in this era of globalization. As the church of Scientology has bought up most of the Clearwater area, one idea would be to change the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the Fightin' Hollywood Stars. This works especially well as LA no longer has an area football team.
5. Atlanta is known for Coca Cola, not for Falcons. So let's change their name to the Secret Formulas. Or the Corn Syrupers.
   
6. The Bay Area is home to the new engine of our economy, the tech industry. So change the 49ers or the Raiders (again, piracy has long been outsourced) to the Techies. Or the Red Bull Consumers.
   
7. Detroit already has a car-themed basketball team, but the Lions could still change their name to the SUVs, or the Engines, or the Hummers (please add your joke about them not lasting as long as a Japanese football team here).
8. New York has two teams. The Giants should represent the beleaguered finance industry. They could be the Financiers or the Hedge Funders. New York Jets could change their name to the New York Hipsters, representing that other great NY industry, and attract players who are "over" the whole sports thing and want to show you their vinyl collection.
   
9. My local team, the Washington Redskins, has plenty of options. The Presidents, the Senators (once Washington's baseball team), the Congressman, the Justices, the Battlin' Bureaucrats, The Military Industrial Complexers, the Lobbyists, the Protesters. Perhaps the Kansas City Chiefs could move to the D.C. area and change their names to the Commanders and Chiefs...

After what local industry would you name your local team?

As a Bears fan who thinks Troy P. (sorry, didn't want to look up the spelling) has amazing hair, let me say, Go Steelers!