Michael Braun's Blog

What Madison gathering is more famous than Halloween? Badger games, Art on the Square, Party in the Park, A Taste of Madison, the Ironman, Mifflin Street Block Party? No, no, no, no, no, and no! Halloween, every year, is the number one performer. People come from all over to join in the revelry. Unfortunately for the past 4 years, violence has marked the end to the gathering on State Street, prompting the police to use tear gas to break up the crowds and send people scattering.

With these blemishes marking the last four celebrations, the city tried a different tactic this year. They cordoned off State Street with entry and exit points and charged people five dollars to get in. In terms of reducing violence, the plan was a success. The night did not end in riot gear and gas masks for police. And the city pulled in around $150,000, great for helping to pay the police for the extra time they spent serving.

But it was not all roses and chocolate. Attendance on State Street was way down – only 35,000 – compared to usually at least double that number. Subsequently, it was not especially crowded walking down the street. And it was actually possible to get into a bar. The wait wasn’t even that long. Overall, the experience was still fun, but I do fear that city officials will be so pleased with the lower attendance that they won’t take away the ticket policy.

I guess that’s alright. I still had a great time. My co-worker John and I first headed over to Dan and Woodie’s place, where they were throwing a party. We stayed there for 2 hours, which was amazing, before walking down State Street and meeting up with another co-worker Amos and his girlfriend Steph, who I had several classes with over the course of our 4 years in college. We walked with them for a little while before breaking off to go to a party that co-workers Mike and Lauren were at. We hung out there, on the porch of a house for a while before John left to go home. Brittany also came by. Eventually she and I walked down State Street and back to her apartment on Langdon. Then I walked back to my car and went home. It was a lot of fun.

Anyway, who knows what will happen next halloween. I’d like to see the crowds back up to their normal number, but at the same time, I didn’t miss being disappointed at students and other partiers for starting trouble. And it was nice to not get constantly jostled while walking down the street. What ever they do, it’s nice to see the tradition continuing. Next year will mark the unoffical 30 year anniversary. I can’t wait!

Last night, the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series over the Detroit Tigers. The Tigers came in with great expectations and left with hard times. But this tale of two cities was more than some old curiosity shop. It was a great story for the Tigers, only ending in defeat. BAM! Four Dickens’ titles in two sentences. Beat that, Shakespeare!

Anyway, I like baseball. I think it’s a great sport. But it sure is hard to watch during the regular season. With every team playing way too many games, they end up not meaning anything. When it’s considered a mark of success for a baseball team to have a record of over half wins, there isn’t much point, unless you are passionate about one team or its a clash of two giants. But playoff ball actually matters. Everything’s on the line, each and every game. Each pitch a chance for greatness, each strikeout another feather in the pitcher’s cap.

I watched a good number of playoff games, and it was great. People complain that baseball is too slow. And, of course, it’s not much of a contact sport or even an action-packed sport. But every batter up to the plate has another chance to score. And the power of the defense is often more glorious than defense in any other sport.

I don’t have any particular team that I root for in baseball. I don’t much care about any team in close proximity – Twins, Brewers, Cubs, White Sox. And, whereas I normally like teams named after birds (like the Ravens) there are no cool bird teams in baseball (Cardinals, Bluebirds – boring). But that actually ends up kind of nice. When I watch baseball, I only want to see a good game. Lots of defense, some great double plays, and a few amazing hits. Playoff baseball is the place for all of that.

Of course, Badger football is also exciting. But not when the Badgers are down by 14 points against Illinois! C’MON BADGERS!! How are we going to make it to the Rose Bowl like this?

I read somewhere that an important thing for a parent to do is to always come home happy, to make sure that your children don’t get the impression that work is hard and depressing. Parents who walk in from work looking exhausted and haggard, immediately have to have a drink and sit down for 30 minutes before anyone can talk to them are, according to this article, likely to show their children that work is not fun. I brought this up to my dad, when I read it a couple of years ago, and he thought it was interesting, but he also said that he hadn’t lived up to that.

So as I was leaving work today around 6:15, whistling while walking down the hallway towards our underground parking and my car, I got to thinking. I can’t imagine keeping a job that kills you inside, so much that you can’t even enjoy LEAVING the job. Now, I like my job a whole lot, but even I get happy thinking about coming home. And you should have seen my Friday. It was such a huge relief to realize that it was finally the weekend and my long and stressful week was over. I was dancing around my apartment, singing, It’s the weekend!

If I ever start to complain about my job in a way that makes it sound like I hate it, somebody punch me. To keep myself sane, I should quit that job and move on. Now, you never know, there may be serious circumstances that keep me in that job. I may have a lot of debts that force me to keep working. But, I at least should be looking for new employment if I’m so unhappy. It’s not even about how you come off to your children. It’s about how you treat yourself.

It snowed last night, making the first time I opened up my blinds this morning and gazed out upon the day a most glorious moment. Nothing polishes up fall like a little bit of snow. I’m not advocating some sort of 2 foot snowfall, where everyone ends up in the ditch and whatnot, but a nice inch or so can really make things see beautiful. That said, hopefully it all melts so that I don’t have to worry about my feet getting soaked just from walking around.

Anyway, snow is just a guise for the topic of this post. As some of you may know, I have a lot of questions about people’s faith in a higher power. In short, I just don’t understand a lot of things about religion and spirituality. Here’s a short list of what I get.

1. People have many reasons for believing in a higher power, often to deal with their own uncertainties on earth.
2. People want to believe that, when they die, they don’t actually die.
3. People want to believe that, when their loved ones die, they have a wonderful place to go to.

Ummm… yah, so that’s it. With such a short list, it’s no wonder that I am filled with questions about the other aspects of religion. Like, why would people want to believe that there is a cosmic standard for behavior that we are all doomed from birth to fall short of? Why would people believe that some book of amalgamated stories is the word of a god? Why would people believe that some weirdo guy is the son of a god, just because some weirdo made a “prophecy” before he came and John the Baptist “recognized” him as fulfilling that prophecy? Why do people constantly LIE TO THEMSELVES?!

Now, I’ve read some of the bible. Not a lot, but some, and there’s some good advice in there. But I also write a lot of stuff, including this blog, journals, stories, poems, and there’s some good advice in these writings as well. There’s good advice in just about any novel you read, any newspaper editorial page, any textbook. And the one thing that all of these writings have in common – they all try to give you a point of view. Even this blog post is attempting to influence the way you think. How disconcerting! If this fact troubles you, and you read the bible for divine inspiration or to know your god better, then maybe you should take a look at all the history of how the bible was assembled and realize that this holy book is far divine.

And what about this savior, this Jesus of Nazareth? I’ve got to hand it to the guy; he sure knew how to draw a crowd, preaching his communism, his forgiveness, his help the poor. But the way I figure it, if you think the guy just had some good stuff to say, then you can break apart his speeches, and take out what you think is good. I’m all for it. But if you think the guy was the son of a god, and that you better follow his words so that you can get into heaven, then I’m sick and tired of you parsing out everything he has to say just to find the pieces you can personally accept. That’s not how it works, friends! And don’t give me no excuse about how we’re all sinners. What kind of just and rightous god (loving though he may be) would accept the fact that just because you know you did wrong you can still shine in his holy light? How is it that a rightous person who doesn’t believe in Jesus goes to hell, while you, you the sinner, go to heaven? Is this the kind of unjust system you would want in place on earth? One where people are judged by their thoughts and not their actions? A large part of Genesis is dedicated to how much this god has put of himself into earth and humans. So if a system seems terrible on earth, why would it be awesome up in the cosmos? Can you imagine some sort of theocracy on earth judging people in that way? The US would overthrow them faster than Iraq (if they had oil).

So, enough complaining. If you are strong in your faith, you’ve already written me off as Satan or something. And maybe I am; you’ll never know until you let me lead you astray. Of course, maybe I work for the CIA; I couldn’t tell you if I did. Let me lay out Michael’s Guide for Believing in God and not Being an Idiot.

1) God, cool. Religion, stupid. Don’t tie yourself to a hypocritical system.
2) Belief, cool. Telling everyone, stupid. If you are cool with how you live, then you should be cool to be the only one on earth who lives that way.
3) Standards and morals, cool. Breaking those standards constantly because they are not reasonable, stupid. If you are going to have a moral code, make sure it’s one that you can live up to.
4) Peace, love, harmony, cool. Paying lipservice to these while living your life in a completely different manner, stupid. Think about how your beliefs and your actions differ.

Religious people – you can be cool too. But think about what you believe, make sure it makes sense, and then (still!) question every single person who tries to influence what you believe (including pastors, priests, parents, friends, and most of all, ME!).

Wow, this last week is the hardest I have ever worked in one week for any job. My hours weren’t so much higher than usual (only a little over 50), but Thursday and Friday, I put in a lot of time to make sure that I was ready to meet a deadline that had been set for me. The person who set that deadline apologized, saying that everyone had underestimated the complexity of retreiving a certain piece of data. And it didn’t help any that I wasn’t aware of the number of questions I would need to ask prior to moving forward. But gosh golly, what a week! Thursday was the busiest as I stayed at work past 9.

So what I have I learned from this whole experience? I love my job. Or maybe not love, but I sure like it a lot. Even though I was at work very late on Thursday, I was still up and ready to go back on Friday. And on Friday, I also stayed until 6. Serious time commitments, but I’m excited to get back to work on other projects on Monday. I love that kind of responsibility; you get done with one thing and start immediately on another. I think it would drive me crazy if I constantly felt behind, but when I walked out of work on Friday, knowing we had met our deadline, it was the best feeling in the world.

It’s the weekend now, and I’m looking forward to relaxing, seeing some people, and getting some work done around the house. I’ve got some plants that need moving around, and I’m not yet sure how I’m going to tackle that. And who knows what else I’ll do, because I’ve got two full days to do it in. Next week will surely not be as busy, and that will be nice. But, hey, I know that I can handle that pressure and perform well under it. It’s a good feeling.

Another dull title line, mostly because I feel like I should write something but am not much interested in actually trying to pick a topic and stick to it. And I’ve got a list of topics too, so it’s not like that’s a problem. Stay tuned in the future for discussion on self-delusion as it corrupts opinions and why the stability of America is what makes it great. Maybe even something on baseball playoffs. But until that happens, you are stuck with this post recapping the last few days.

I haven’t written anything since I learned that Megan’s mother passed away and wrote the post about that. All last week I just didn’t feel motivated to write much of anything; there wasn’t anything to say. Over the weekend, I went up to visit my dad, and go, on Saturday, to Algoma to visit Megan and her dad. It was tough, there’s no doubting that. Both of them were clearly upset, as you would expect, Megan’s dad more than she even. Not that they were incapacitated or denying what had happened, but, as Megan’s dad said, “all time has stopped.” It’s like nothing else matters for them anymore. We went out to lunch and I stayed until nearly 6 (after getting there at 11), so it was a lengthy visit.

Work has been busy lately, though not too much. I worked around 50 hours last week, and look to be on course to do the same thing this week. That’s not necessarily bad, because these weeks are especially busy. Also, I’m doing real work, but am still not as proficient as an experienced person who would be doing the same work. Thus, getting some issues solved takes longer than what it might take someone else. I’m gaining experience quickly, though am still scared of some things that get assigned to me, especially when I have to start from scratch to figure out how to solve the issue. If there is one thing I have become very good at, it’s asking for help. I’m a pro in the true sense of the word, because it’s what I spend the most time doing every day.

I haven’t done much around my apartment lately. I’ve got a crazy wall going in my living room with a lot of strange stuff hung on it. Basically, if I have something even remotely artistic or intersting that can be hung on a wall, I put it up. I have the cover to my 8 mm projector (it’s sitting on the counter), a cowboy hat, and an old skateboard deck all hung up (among other things). I like to find new things to put up all the time. It’s my favorite spot of artistic expression in my apartment. The temperature in my apartment has been great lately. I haven’t had to turn on the heat or open any windows. It stays nice all the time. We’ll see how long that lasts. I expect that eventually I will need to turn on the heat. I can’t expect to have the sun and neighbors do all the work forever.

That’s about it from me. I will write a better post later, but until then, let this one satisfy your cravings. Cravings for nachos.

My phone rang as I was about to leave work. It was Megan calling to tell me that her mother passed away last night. Megan herself had just found out. I drove home in silence, still in shock.

I can’t imagine what it feels like to lose a parent, especially a mother. The emptiness of knowing that she is gone, the shock of trying to imagine your life as it now changes completely. And especially knowing that Megan’s mother’s death was not expected. She was at home, asleep, not in the hospital with a terminal illness. There was no time for goodbyes, no time to come to terms with the fact that she was going to die.

Megan’s mother had also recently (July) undergone surgery (an angioplasty) to clear her arteries and prepare her for further surgery (gastric bypass). The doctors found her heart 90% blocked, meaning she could have died at any moment. But afterwards we all believed that the danger had passed. And even though she had a difficult recovery period after that procedure, I expected that she would go on to recover and eventually undergo her other surgery, putting her on the path to weightloss and health.

I hope that Megan is not filled with “what ifs”, though knowing her as I do, I suspect that she is. I suspect that regret must be the hardest part of losing someone you love. Every moment you look back upon, thinking how you would have acted differently if only you had known what the future held.

Jan Sluyter is the closest person to me who has ever passed away. I have been fortunate in that very few of my relatives have died. I have lost 4 great-grandparents, but I did not know any of them particularly well. And Jan was just 2 years older than my dad. It’s a sober reminder of how easy it is to lose those we love the most.

I think it’s a good time for everyone to pick up the phone and call their parents, tell them how much you love them. It’s never a bad time to remind them of that.

I doubt there are many people on earth who wouldn’t identify me as critical. I have opinions on most every subject and seldom hesitate from expressing them. I like to think that most of my opinions are backed up by fact and logic, and for that reason I don’t mind at all if someone wants to challenge my way of thinking. In the end, I feel that it makes me a more thoughtful person, and more often than not, it makes me less critical. In short, argument that leads to greater knowledge increases the strength of beliefs.

Now, as most of you know, I am highly critical of religion and religious people, especially those who chose to actively talk about their faith and how it affects their daily life. I find this posturing frequently hypocritical. Thus when I meet a person like this, I try to steer the conversation towards the subject of a religion as a way of challenging the other person’s beliefs and as a way to help me understand them better. I am very willing to admit that I do not understand religion or spirituality and I like to hear other people’s takes on the matter. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy talking with Krista so much. She is quite devout, but very willing to argue for her beliefs and try to back them up with logic. I find our conversations on religion to be most enjoyable, even though we fall of distinctly opposite sides. It helps that we’re both liberal.

The daughter of family friends of my dad’s and I have been e-mailing each other regularly for the past couple of months. It’s been a pleasant exchange. Religion and faith play a large part in her life, and she is right now in England working at some sort of Christian facility serving god for a year. She frequently brings up religion and spirituality in her e-mails, working it in to many parts of conversation, especially when she writes about what she has been doing. Assuming that she wasn’t trying to convert me or something, I figured that she puts that in there because faith plays such a huge role in her life. And so, naturally, I decided to take her to task on her faith. I laid out a large number of points, doubts I had about Christianity and the logic of modern Christian faith. It was a direct questioning of faith, but also done with a kindness behind it; more of an introspective look at how I view faith than an attack against her. I raised questions about the validity of the bible, the concept of loving god the most, and the use of traditional Christian ideas in today’s society. Overall, I thought the questions were very thought-provoking and suitable for a meeting of atheists or a bible-study group. She did not have the same response.

Before you start worrying that I horribly offended her, caused her to forsake god, or make her start a crusade, her response was, in my opinion, much worse than any of those. She basically chose to actively ignore my questions. Most certainly, it is her right to do so. If she didn’t have an answer to reconciling the idea that the bible is divinely assembled but also a product of historical politics, I’m not surprised or bothered. But her response was to acknowledge the questions and then leave them by the wayside, saying that she is not a good person for debating about religion and faith. She also noted that she would never try to push her beliefs on anyone else, but I think that ignores the basic issue. If your belief exists without a backing in logic, how can you buttress that belief with further knowledge?

If we were all to start fresh, as blank slates and to set out to develop a completely new set of principles for ourselves, we would go thru life for a few years, collecting knowledge, learning lessons, gaining experience, and when those few years were up, we would sit down and think about what we have learned, what we have found to be true based on our experiences. Some of us might decide that there is a higher power, others would laugh at that idea. But we would all have our own experiences, our own TRUTH to back up our beliefs. Religion can be the same way. There is much talk in Christianity about a spiritual journey, especially for so-called born-again Christians. It’s real life experience that has lead them to believe that there is a god, that he loves us, that he sent his son to die for our sins, and that we are now saved. Sure, a lot of us laugh at that idea, but they’ve got their own experience to back it up. I’ve got no beef with that as long as they don’t try to push their believes on me and as long as they let me talk with them about what they believe.

But what good is saying that we believe what we believe with no argument or experience behind us? It’s weak, that’s what it is. It’s president Bush going to war on faulty intelligence. You go to church every Sunday, repeat what the pastor told you, believe his interpretations of the bible, and suddenly you’re drinking at the cup of lies, just like so many congresspeople and senators before the Iraq war. Suddenly, you’re just another stooge. No doubt I’ll be criticized on this later, by a religious person who both chooses not to argue or defend their faith and who says that they don’t believe everything that their pastor tells them. That’s all well and good, but then please start taking your beliefs to heart. Please start questioning what you believe, not as a way to weaken your faith, but as a way to strengthen it.

Believing what you believe is fine, but refusing to reconsider those beliefs is the ultimate sign of weakness. Whether you are scared of changing those beliefs, scared of losing an arugment, or just plain scared to actually think about what you hold most true in your heart, it’s still cowardice. Stand up for what you believe; consider it an important part of your daily life to cast down everything you think is true in your life, and then only pick back up what hasn’t broken. Those are the strongest pieces of what makes you YOU.

Mark Foley, former Republican US Congressperson, resigned from the House Friday after it was revealed that he had sent inappropriate, sexual e-mails and instant messages to underage male pages serving at the Capital. The messages could easily be read as sexual advances, often talking about arousal and nudity. Foley has now chosen to reveal that he is a gay man, that he was abused as a youth by a priest, and that he is also an alcoholic. The revelation regarding his sexuality has started a wave of anti-homosexual talk, giving an excuse to Foley’s behavior.

It’s time we get real about sexuality. A strong desire for sexual contact is natural. Seeing a 16 year old and finding them sexually appealing is natural. Youth is appealing, and a 16 year old can look very much like they are 18, 19, 20. But it is not natural to deny your own sexual orientation, to hide the fact that you prefer sexual contact with one sex over another. And it is not natural to act out on sexual desires when you know they are inappropriate, immoral, and illegal. When you feel sexual desire that you cannot control towards a target you know you should not go after, that is when you must seek help.

But now republicans are using Foley as another reason to bash gay men. Their fallacy goes something like this. 20-30% of child molesters who molest boys identify themselves as gay or bisexual. Therefore, 20-30% of gay men molest children. They ought to use this statistic as a reason why Americans are behind the rest of the world in math skills. If they presented the argument that way, Americans would stand behind any increase in testing for their children, even if it meant sacrificing all other subjects just to focus on statistics. In short, these republicans are idiots.

Mark Foley is both a gay man and a sexual deviant who sought to prey on children. The two have nothing to do with each other. The number of women raped everyday is no where near the number of children molested. Are gay men also responsible for these rapes? No, actually I would bet that a much higher percentage of rapists identify themselves as heterosexual than child molesters identifying themselves as homosexual. In the end, we must realize that sexuality has nothing to do with sexual deviance.

That’s called getting real. That’s called looking Mark Foley in the face and telling him that it’s okay he’s gay and that it’s not his fault for getting molested as a kid. And then we get even more real, and we tell Mark Foley that when he meets someone he loves, an adult who loves him too, that they two of them can get married, and have a family, and live together, as husband and husband. And that that is just as wonderful as a man and a woman getting married. We tell Mark that he shouldn’t have to be scared to go to work and let people know (if he wants) who he loves. We tell him he no longer has to go home and live in shame, that he can get help for his sexual attraction to boys, and for what has been done to him in the past.

Mark Foley is sick; he sought to engage in sexual contact with children, and he needs help. But our society is sicker; we seek to make it a crime to love who you love, and be who you be. When will our society get the help it needs to get better?

On Thursday, Brittany and I went to see Al Gore’s film ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ To summerize the film, it’s basically Al Gore delivering a slideshow about global warming. That may be the most boring sentence ever constructed, containing both the words Al Gore and Slideshow. That being said, the movie was fabulous. It was highly informative about global warming, the dangers, the causes, and what we can do to stop it. It was very motivating, the takeaway message being that we need the political will to reverse global warming. Regime change was certainly a common theme, though never openly stated. Al Gore was warm, approachable, and extremely knowledgeable. You could tell he was very prepared to talk about a subject he has been concerned about for a long time. I thought the movie was excellent.

In addition to the theme of regime change, there was a lot of talk about the wonders of human society. This was presented as a key reason why we ought to work to reverse global warming. If we do not, the entire human race is at risk. Now I know that uniting the world’s people against a common foe is an important first step towards finding a solution to any problem, be it poverty, terrorism, or a hole in the ozone layer, but I couldn’t help look out onto human society and think about whether we are worth saving or not. In the end, I started to wonder – what’s so great about human society anyway?

We haven’t figured out how to live in peace with each other, as hundreds of thousands of people die because of war every year. We often can’t even figure out how to get along with those around us. Think how many people you know have beef with their roommates, their close family, their co-workers. We can’t figure out how to treat nature so that it survives. And our focus on money and posessions drives some of the greatest evil the world has ever seen.

We’ve made advances, to be sure. But these technological advances have often hurt the earth and fellow humans just as much as they have helped us. Every advancement that has helped us keep peace has also helped us better wage war. And all our mechanical advances have kept global warming a serious concern. We’ve worked to make things more equal, but comparing all people worldwide, the richest to the poorest, and you realize that wealth is not distributed very equally at all. One man has everything he could ever want, another lies in the street starving to death, these two men separated by mere miles. I can have something shipped overnight from Japan, but I can’t seem to find a way to feed a starving child in Africa as quickly.

So would it be such a bad thing if the human race were to go extinct? We’d be the first species with the brainpower and knowledge to understand our own deaths who actively worked to bring an end to our entire species. It’ll be nuclear bombs or global warming.

I’ve read this quote a few places. Google tells me it’s from Edna St. Vincent Millay. “I love humanity, but I hate people.” This woman was an idiot. Humanity is what will bring an end to their own life on earth. We work actively to destroy ourselves, as a species. But humans, individual people, are what make life worth living. If you support the ideas behind this quote, and you have friends, I hope that you never move, because the chances you will make friends in your location seem slim to none. If you really hate people, then these few friends you have must be very rare and wonderful folks. I support the opposite of this quote. Humanity has destroyed the earth, but I choose to try to save the human species because I would really miss the friends that I have, those wonderful individuals who bring me so much pleasure.

If you take any sort of higher power out of the entire equation, then the human species should be free to do whatever it wants. We should be free to kill ourselves. Our lack of adapatability should spell our doom, just like any other species facing massive change. But it’s that darn notion that we are created by some higher power who wants us here on earth, who has CREATED US, nonetheless. If that is the truth, then why should we worry about global warming? God wants us here and he wouldn’t do anything to go against that. He’ll save us, by golly!

Too bad that’s not the case. I believe that humans can survive, but maybe our time is up. In the end, whoever arrives next, I suspect, will give us nothing but mixed reviews.