March 30, 2012

A New Dad’s Tips for Dressing Your Baby

Trust me, I have 9 months experience talking here.

Buy your baby miniature versions of clothes you would wear yourself as an adult.

It's not weird. It actually looks really great.

You know what's weird? Bonnets. You know why? Because no one besides babies wears them.
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March 29, 2012

Hoodie Prejudice

The tragedy of Trayvon Martin's death has captured me.

We were introduced to this story as a hate crime. George Zimmerman, a Latino man who heads up his neighborhood's volunteer watch program called the police to report a suspicious individual in his neighborhood, Trayvon Martin.

The neighborhood had recently suffered a rash of burglaries, and Zimmerman was hot on the trigger. He called the police to report, started following the individual on foot despite the 911 operator's insistence he shouldn't, and the story ends with an unarmed 17-year old Trayvon Martin lying dead from a fatal gunshot wound.

The moral we were told to take from this tragedy was to stop being prejudicially suspicious of black youth.

The mere idea that Trayvon "appeared" suspicious was troubling to us all. That the mere presence of a young black man in a hoodie would warrant a police call. That, if we were being honest with ourselves, we might also pause unsettled and take another look at Trayvon Martin if we noticed him walking through our neighborhood.

It was a convicting story.

And then, the story kept unfolding.

It still is.

It turns out Travyon Martin may not be altogether innocent. He may have escalated the incident, attacked Zimmerman and beaten his head repeatedly against the curb before being shot,  as a lone eyewitness seems to corroborate.

And whether or not you deem it relevant, it appears Travyon may have a troubling past. School suspensions for drug (residue) possession, vandalism and possession of theft implements.

Does his short rap sheet make his death any less tragic? No.

But, the issue here is stereotype.

The moral we were told was that television and the media have corrupted us all into prejudicing young black youth into the same scary bucket. We were told this prejudice was without merit, and to magically stop being suspicious of fictitious fears our culture has wrongly ingrained within us.

And now what do we do with this new information? This unfortunate example that builds up the very stereotype this story initially led us to fight against?

Perhaps our society/media/culture has indeed wrongly influenced us into our expectations of a young black man wearing a hoodie.

But, is Trayvon Martin immune to that cultural rub-off? Or is there a part of him who willingly chose to embrace that identity? Who found strength in it. Power in it.

That's the issue I'm stuck on.

And I think we need a Cosby episode about it.
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March 28, 2012

Passionate Career or Passion and Career?

You can either find an incredibly demanding job you're passionate about...

Or you can find an incredibly boring job that gives you time to spend on your passions.
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March 27, 2012

Sabbath: Taking Sunday Off

I never understood the idea of the Sabbath.

Taking Sunday off.

I think I thought something about the day itself was holy. That since Sunday was church day, we were supposed to honor the rest of the day, too.

Now, I'm starting to think God just wants us to take a break.

And it wasn't until this new period of my life when I'm busier than I've ever been that I realize I need this.

I need a day of rest.

So, the last few weeks, I've been making my Saturdays a little worse. Staying up late and making sure all my freelance work gets done in order to make sure my Sundays can be free - with only church and spending time with my wife and Daylia on the schedule.

And it's been pretty awesome. Refreshing. Recharging.

It doesn't always work. Stuff gets in the way sometimes. But, it's become a priority we're shooting for at our house.

I get the Sabbath now. Just like other "God rules", they're not weird legalistic things. They're just awesome advice designed by the one who intimately understands how we work and what we need.
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March 26, 2012

Moneyball Works for Everything

Thought I'd better post this screen grab now in case Ohio State loses next weekend...



And yes, I'm "Sabai". For those of you who only know this blog as "All Opinions Are Not Equal", it started off as sabaisays.blogspot.com, a less Socratic, more dictatorial blog approach with daily spouts of why everyone are morons.

I think it's better this way...or at least now my dictatorial rants are better disguised as group think...

But back to the point. Seriously, Moneyball works for everything!
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March 23, 2012

Look at it This Way

Today, you have to go to work for 8 hours whether you care to or not.

So, you might as well figure out a way to care passionately.
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March 21, 2012

You’re Selling the Wrong Thing Nutra-Fast…

I don't think most exercise and diet infomercials get it.

I'm not looking to change my life.

I'm looking to look better and live longer with as little lifestyle change as possible.
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March 16, 2012

Please Don’t Invite Me

I don't invite people to events I participate in because I'm confident they wouldn't be interested. And I don't want to put them in the awkward position of either an obligatory attendance, or a guilty decline.

That's why I'm always confused why people invite me to their own events regarding things that I have never shown a shared interest in.

Now I'm realizing that perhaps people actually enjoy doing things...
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March 15, 2012

Should the Weather Control My Joy?

Because apparently, it does.
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March 13, 2012

Child Rearing by Science and by Odds

When you find out you're going to have a kid, you realize you start having to make important decisions regarding things you are completely ignorant about.

Should I have an epidural? Should I breastfeed? Should I vaccinate? Should my kid only eat organic foods? Should I throw away my laundry detergent? Should I throw away everything plastic in my home?

And we spend the 9-month gestation period trying to become experts at things we had never thought of before in our lives.

Now if you spend 9 months learning French only in your spare time, and I put you in Paris today, alone, you wouldn't be able to get very far.

Yet, we make these decisions with such confidence that we then evangelize them to the masses.

"Don't you dare vaccinate your child!"
"Don't you dare feed your child that!"

And we kind of know what we're talking about. But, at the very least, there needs to be some humility here. Because how confident can we be in these decisions? How can we make objective decisions regarding the very important job of parenting?

My wife and I are slightly unique in the fact that we had already jumped on the crazy train a few years before Daylia was born regarding organic eating.

How convinced are we that organic eating is better for you? Pretty convinced. And this is, at least partially, where sheer probability comes into play. Is something with pesticides in it probably worse for you than something without? Probably. Does a diet with animal protein (meat, milk) carry significant health risks? We find the correlating evidence pretty convincing. Do vaccinations cause autism? No, we're convinced they don't.

So, our child slept in a co-sleeper. We solely breastfed. Went with cloth diapers. Non-toxic laundry detergent. And we are vaccinating her (except for Hep B thus far).

We're playing the odds as we understand them. These decisions weren't black and white. And we are fully aware that even the smartest in the medical community don't fully understand the cellular effect of our food, our drugs and our environment at a microscopic level. So, we probably lean more toward the "natural" and the cautious than even science dictates we should at this point.

But, these are not only decisions based on science and odds. But, on value as well.

Because would Daylia be safer if we moved to a much nicer neighborhood? Probably. What if we spent $20,000 on a state-of-the-art security system for our home? Most definitely.

Yet, we have done neither. Our relative poverty also insists upon relative neglect.

In short, people who yell, "Don't you dare vaccinate your child!" think they have a chance to save your baby's life. That's why they're passionate. They just also happen to be wrong.
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