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We had a fantastic time at the Greek Festival at Holy Trinity on Tuesday:

Sarah and Josephine met Charles and me there, and my parents showed up later, so that we could all enjoy Greek beer, lamb sandwiches, Spanakopita, all that good stuff. Delicious, satisfying, and fun. Charles even picked out a cheap bracelet to give to his mommy, which was amusing. It even matched her shirt, somehow. That boy has STYLE.

The only complaint is that, just like every other year, the hired some half-idiot DJ to provide musical entertainment. The church has speakers on the outside through which they play light traditional Greek music (or so I assume; I’m not particularly versant in the genre), but apparently they decided to ramp up happy hour so we got to listen to two idiots do soundchecks while we ate. For 20 minutes. “Check…check one…check two…check-check…check one…” Then they put on mindless dance beats and fiddled with the volume, turning it on and off, adjusting God knows what because it all sounded like bass and hi-hat. Then they went back to “Check..check…check one…check one two…” until finally I had enough and yelled over “IT WORKS! STOP IT!” Which, despite my complete and utter lack of authority, they did, at least until about a half-hour later when they started playing Greek pop music at a volume designed to interfere with internal pacemakers.

If you’re not familiar with Greek pop music: it’s not very good. It’s mostly modern American pop instruments (guitar, synthesizers, drum machines), but intensely modal. It’s like if Schönberg and Justin Timberlake had a baby together, and that baby had Tourette’s.

Anyway, aside from that, the festival was great fun, just like every year, and we even managed to arrive just after Tuesday’s microburst storm, which cooled everything down and lightened the crowds nicely. You’ll find the usual lines at the gyro tent, but why would you bother, anyway? You can get a gyro anywhere.

My homegirl Raw Rach hath alerted me to a really nice Garrison Keillor column from the weekend. I find him a little insufferable at times, but this is nice:

And an intensely quiet blond girl, a math whiz, who, with no reluctance, sat down at the piano when I asked her if she played piano, squared her shoulders and played the exquisite Chopin Prelude No. 2 in A minor, the notes of the slow movement like raindrops on birch leaves, smoke drifting by, an anguished old man pacing in the grass, and played it so beautifully it transformed the entire evening.

A little overwrought, to be sure, but a pretty sentiment.

Are marching band geeks athletes? Heck yes. I do have some experience with this; I can report that my first year of college, after I stopped doing marching band, I gained roughly 40 pounds. Of course, most of my meals that year consisted of Corn Pops, but still.

Most of my readers are aware that I was in an a cappella group in college, the frequently-apologized-for University of Delaware Y-Chromes, which was obviously much fun and had some bearing on later musical endeavours (warning: ’tis an mp3). As an alumnus, it’s my responsibility to try and help the boys out whenever I can (it’s like being in a frat, but less stupid, albeit with a roughly similar amount of homoerotic behavior).

Another alum, Colin The Black (to distinguish him from a contemporary member, also named Colin, who is labelled The White), found out in March that he has leukemia, and has spent the bulk of his time since in the hospital getting radiated, chemo’d, and generally poked and prodded. A friend of his is running a lengthy charity race to raise money, in Colin’s name, for a search for cancer cures. If you have a few loose bills laying around, it’d be nice if you could chip them in.

Also: love to Colin, who’s fighting like a gladiator against a grizzly bear. Get well, doggle.

Andrew Sullivan is often my source for political analysis; I should probably look around for more pundits, but he tends to wrap up analysis from all over the spectrum, whether he agrees with it or not. I say this just to point out why, for roughly the 7,000th day in a row, I’m linking to him again, on the topic of this nifty gallup poll:

Andrew’s take:

If gays are really serious about marriage rights, they need to accelerate the process of coming out…

Yes, donate and campaign and blog. But for all of those of you out there who are gay and do none of this, one simple political act can do much more: let your family, friends and co-workers know who you are. If you don’t, please quit complaining about your lack of civil rights.

As a straight dude, I don’t quite have Andrew’s perspective. But he and I both live in parts of the country where homosexuality is more than tolerated; it is often embraced. I have dozens of gay friends; I like to say I was raised by a collection of gay “aunts.” If my son were to come out as gay, I’d be all for it. It’s not like that in every family on the east coast, but a gay man is certainly going to have an easier time coming out in New York or Philadelphia than, say, Patonga, Oklahoma. (I should point out that I know nothing about Patonga, Oklahoma; it might be the West Hollywood of Blaine County, for all I know. I literally went to Google Maps and found a random city in central Oklahoma.)

Any place where the majority of the population knows no homosexuals (either because they simply don’t live there, or are closeted) is a place where a gay man or woman is least likely to want to come out. So while Andrew’s solution, “Come out, dammit,” would probably do good things over the long-term, it carries with it a pretty high personal cost for the homosexual individuals themselves.

One problem with being a parent is that you occasionally find yourself semi-responsible for the acts of other people’s children. When your kid plays, he tends to play with other kids, whose parents may not be as…attentive as you are. You’re just trying to keep your kid from eating mulch, and suddnely a bunch of other halfwit rugrats are digging through trash cans and throwing old “forty” bottles at each other.

A few weeks ago, I took Charles to the park near our house, which has a nice little jungle gym with a couple slides. It’s usually a nice place to go because he gets bored with it quickly and wants to go home. On this occasion, while we were playing, we were descended upon by about a dozen children, ranging from a few months to 9 or 10 years old, and their grandmother, who was very friendly and nice but clearly overwhelmed. She focused mostly on the baby, while the rest of the terrors ran around injuring themselves and each other. One odd child decided the fun thing to do was to wait until my back was turned and throw a frisbee at my head. It was a pity that Granny was there, as I would have enjoyed dropping the kid out of a tree.

Charles played nicely, as is his usual wont, aside from occasionally trying to “borrow” toys from other children, which I corrected as needed. At one point, however, the older kids wandered to some nearby trees and started climbing them. Fine by me, they were 9 or 10, I was climbing trees when I was younger than that. Peer dynamics being what they are, however, most of the other kids wandered over to see what was going on. I convinced Charles that he was too small to climb trees, but by then the kids were picking up sticks off the ground and swinging them haphazardly. Hey, not my kids, not my problem, unless they came near Charles, in which case I’d start kicking butt and taking names. They didn’t, so I didn’t interfere.

This, of course, was when Granny swooped in, yelling at the kids to stop beating each other with flora, and giving me a nasty look for, I assume, having permitted her malignant seed to do such dangerous things. Because it’s my fault she showed up to a park with a plethora of idiots she couldn’t control.

I dislike other people.

Do you like poetry? I like poetry. Here’s a neat new one by Jill McDonough. Warning: it has some bad words. Many, in fact. Turn down your outrage meter so it doesn’t get blown out.

Yesterday’s murder of an abortion doctor has thrust the debate back into the national headlines. (One wonders whether the killer did so to affect the confirmation process of Sonia Sotomayor, but given the fact that he chose to advance his pro-life agenda by taking a life doesn’t seem to indicate a lot of intellectual depth.) Andrew Sullivan has been all over it, posting reader responses and emotionally draining stories about couples who have chosen to end a pregnancy despite their personal misgivings. One such story can be found here: Catholic Doctrine and Merciful Choice.

At 17 weeks gestation our baby had been diagnosed with major heart defects requiring a minimum of three risky open-heart surgeries beginning at birth, and would later require a heart transplant. At 19 weeks we were finally given our amnio results which revealed our baby also had Trisomy 21. A surgeon at the major teaching hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram informed us that even if our baby somehow survived his palliative surgeries, this latest diagnosis meant he would not ever be eligible for a heart transplant.

As we sat talking quietly in our living room, our priest shared with us that he’d spent time at the same hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram and where our son would have had surgery. He was there to support the family of a three-month-old who was having heart surgery. In the three weeks or so that he tended to this family, he also met 10 other families in the waiting room, each of whom also had young babies undergoing heart surgery. Sadly, within the short space of time our priest was there, every single one of those babies died.

Our priest came away from that experience feeling that this world-renowned children’s hospital was basically experimenting on babies. He saw their futile suffering and likened it to being crucified. The family he had gone there to support later told him that if they had only known what their baby would be forced to go through before dying, they would never have chosen surgery.

Our priest told us that he believed we were not choosing our son’s death, only choosing the timing of his death in order to spare him a great deal of suffering. Something he said that brought us great comfort was “God knows what is in your hearts.” God knows our choice was based on mercy and compassion. Who would better understand our hearts than God, who made the choice for His own Son to die?

I’ve made about a 105-degree turn on the topic of abortion, caused mainly by the births of my own kids. I had always believed that a fetus was little more than an organ, part of a woman’s body, to be discarded at her whim and without my or my government’s interference. But once you feel your baby move inside your wife’s belly, there’s no way to consider that as anything but a child. (Interestingly, I’m told that historically, the Jewish standard for “life” was when the fetus could be felt moving.)

I still think abortion should be legal in almost all situations (although I’m very, very squeamish about late-term abortions).

This contradiction stems from the fact that in the end, it’s both a woman’s body and a child. If I were a woman, I couldn’t end my own pregnancy (unless, perhaps, I was faced with the above situation). But I have no business forcing that position on a woman than someone else would have telling me I can’t eat meat on Fridays. Each person has to have their own conscience on the subject.

I pose the following query: which is the more compassionate action? Ending a pregnancy, or subjecting an infant to a month of suffering before letting it die on its own?

Oh snap! I totally forgot to post things today! Stupid, you know, other tasks. Well, while I try to come up with something better for later in the afternoon, I give you: Some crazy guy who says you can cure mental illness by boxing someone’s ears. It’s a lot like TimeCube, if you’re familiar with that, and if you aren’t, well go check that out too and consider yourself edumacated.

Remember all those other times I said I knew why the internet had been invented? I was wrong. Oh God, I was so wrong. This is why the internet was invented: 30 Awesomely Bad Unicorn Tattoos