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I am a firm believer in Hollander’s Theory of Idiosyncratic Credits. I figure the key is to be balanced in how you cash in your idiosyncratic credits and to use them wisely. Get the most life-enhancing benefit from them — like an odd hobby that brings you joy, a food item that is odd for your culture but very healthy, that kind of thing.

How about a shoe that gives you all of the benefits of going barefoot, allowing your foot to be unshackled from the strictures of shoedom, but with all the grip and protection? My latest “allowable eccentricity” is my beloved Vibram Five-Fingers shoes. I am spending the idiosyncratic credits like crazy, but I don’t care!

I admit that they look funny. My daughter is mortified when I wear them. My wife just tolerates being seen out in public with me wearing them. But. I. Love them.

I wear them anywhere I would wear flip-flops. They attract a lot of attention, which is a down-side. (Why can I not have near-barefoot shoe comfort in peace? Why? Why?)

I saw them in an Adam Sternberg article called “You Walk Wrong” in NY Mag. I initially was looking to buy the Clark’s Vivos, as I am a fan of Clark’s shoes, but they are of limited availability in the US. (I plan to buy some as soon as I can get some, though)

I bought the Five-Fingers as a second choice to the Vivos. But now I am as in love as a person can be with an inanimate object that makes your feet feel free, protected, and respected as individuals.

While I managed to play four games of racquetball in them last week, I doubt I will ever try parkour or breakdancing in them. But they are my default hanging-out shoes.

I am a visual learner. And I have a desire to be a better visual communicator both professionally and personally. So I was delighted to find this rather exhaustive periodic table of visual communication methods.

I am increasingly interested in information art lately. It’s like a “seam topic” that brings together my interest in art, mathematics, lean six sigma, futures studies, and even my faith.

This Lenten Season my project is a visual survey — a “map” if you will — of the four parallel Gospels. I have learned a lot so far, being able to see the four accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings in parallel like that.

One thing I have learned is that the weight of the Gospels is about what Jesus taught. I think modern Christianity tends to focus more on who Jesus is and what he did at the very end when he died. We tend to dismiss him as a teacher more or less. I don’t think the two should be separated from the same context, but they often are. We take him out of context way more than we should. But you kinda hafta see the context to get that impression. Hence the need for visual communication.

Another thing I have learned from this Lent is that, as much as I love information art, I lack many of the skills needed to execute it. I want to take some graphic design classes.

Walla!

Type “I-for-one-welcome-our-*-overlords” into Google and see what you get.

I came across this great article which articulates a spiritual storm front that has been gathering up inside me over the last few weeks. At mid life I have become a pretty decent knowledge worker. I am the product of an education system that has groomed me to succeed in the cube farms of the world and, praise God, I have done pretty well in that environment. At least good enough to support my family pretty well.

But lately I have been lamenting the fact that I have missed out somehow on the opportunity for balance — knowing the satisfaction of being able to accomplish things with my mind and my hands together. Auto parts stores feel like foreign lands to me. Tools and harware mock me from the shelves of the Home Depot. I solve home repair problems with my checkbook.

Problem is that I equate the opportunity cost of the time it would take me to learn how to do something handy with the time it would take me to work at what I know to earn enough to pay somebody to do that same thing for me. The comparison does not make financial sense.

But what I don’t factor in is the value of seeing the effects of my work in the world instead of in conceptual space. The satisfaction of a result I can see. The fruits of my labors. There is spiritual value to be found in that.

And as I round the corner past middle age, I assess what frontiers still lie ahead of me. The world of skills and trades lie unexplored on the map of my life, kind of like Darkest Africa or the Orient to Victorian Era factory worker. As I drive my leaky car around and walk past small holes in my sheet rock or sticking doors I wonder if I will indeed go through the rest of my life feeling helpless in the face of such practicalities.

So here’s my question — how does a forty-something wannabe renassance man find basic instruction in the trades? Are there classes for this kind of thing — general handiness? Or do I teach myself and inflict my education on my own household? Anyone know of a really good book that summarizes the world of “handiness?”

So, we have this DVR which is the irresistible force that pulls me in the opposite direction of my personal GTD efforts each evening.

We also have set it to record, among many other shows, Two and a Half Men. I can’t say exactly why, except that Charlie Sheen is pretty funny in this series if you can ignore the fact that he’s basically playing himself. A womanizing Charlie Sheen on a madcap sitcom is kind of amusing, a womanizing Charlie Sheen in real life is kind of sad. But it’s a sitcom, not real life. And I like John Cryer.

Anyway, I noticed one night that a slide with a bunch of enigmatic writing on it showed for a split second as the Two and a Half Men credits were rolling. And, well, me — moth, enigmatic writing — flame. I had to check it out. Now we’ve taken to freezing this frame after every show so we can read director Chuck Lorre’s Vanity Slide. Apparently Chuck’s been waiting for us to catch on since he’s got all of the vanity slides he’s ever shown, including the ones shown at the end of his other show Dharma and Greg, stored on his very own vanity slide website.

Chuck is a witty guy and the cards read like a blog. Chuck Lorre may very well be the first TV Blogger. Granted he has a rare platform from which he can TV Blog, but still. Isn’t this some kind of cultural first?

You know the guy with a new hammer thinks everything looks like a nail. And my latest new hammer is Michel de Certeau’s “Practice of Everyday Life”. And I say Chuck Lorre is a nail.

de Certeau talks early on in his book about how culture is defined not so much by the products — books, movies, magazines, plays, TV Shows — that are provided for our consumption, but the ways in which we as “consumers” appropriate, adapt, and subvert them to fit our own needs. We use “tactics” to exploit cracks and crevices in the structures of production, taking advantages of oppotunities to exert our individual power and express ourselves. Many Lifehacks ( a concept now in vogue) are in this spirit…

(You think my words sound pretentious? You should try to read de Certeau’s over the top academic prose.)

… anyway, Chuck Lorre has done exactly that. He’s found a little crack in the TV production machine and he has appropriated it in order to express himself. More power to him, I say.

This is not exactly hot off the presses, but apparently scientists hypothesize that the Female Orgasm is a “happy accident” and serves no evolutionary purpose, kind of like nipples on men. Let’s see, women get the big O and men get nipples. When it comes to evolutionary accidents, the men got shortchanged big time.

Not that I don’t subscribe to the theory of evolution, mind you. I do. But I don’t believe it explains everything. It’s amusing to see how scientific materialists attribute everything that falls outside the explanatory bounds of current scientific theories to accidents — chance, randomness, fate, whatever you call it.

Seems to me such attributions require as much faith as my personal Christian beliefs about God. Randomness is a very useful concept, but cannot be proven to exist. God is a very useful concept, but cannot be proven to exist. So I guess which you choose to use to explain things beyond the grasp of current science depends on your faith.

And don’t even get me started on Occam’s Razor. Besides being a distortion of its original intent, using Occam’s Razor as a test against faith just tranforms one subjective question into another subjective question. Who’s to say that your concept of chance or randomness is simpler than my concept of God? You do? Your faith is stong, my friend.

Back to orgasms. I like the idea that women have them for reasons other than reproductive advantage. I like the idea that something so enjoyable exists as a gift from God, for the pleasure of it. Maybe it’s all part of the Plan and not just a happy accident.

“Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet they don’t just exchange facts; They transform them, reshape them, draw different conclusions from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards, it creates new cards.”

– Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity

My wife and I have started another attempt at fostering regular creative conversations in our community . One Thousand Blank White Cards and Bad Art Night were mainly niche ideas and did not have a sustainable draw (or at least I did not have the promotional chutzpah to sell them properly.) This time we’re going at it a little more mainstream, but it’s still rewarding and fun.

My wife and I got the idea from our failed book club (did I tell you we were starters?). We could never decide on a book to read and nobody actually read before the discussion sessions anyway. So we decided to ditch the book, keep the discussion and dictate the topic to everybody else. Then the invitees could self-select and do whatever reading they cared to do to prepare for the conversation. Walla! Second Thought!

This is the third month so far. The first two were a rousing success. Here’s the blurb we send out at the end of each monthly invitation:

“How Second Thought Works

Second Thought is a conversational salon held on the second Saturday of each month. Each month’s conversation has a different topic. We cycle each quarter through three themes — issues, spirit, and fun.

Think about the theme and come prepared to express your thoughts. We don’t care how you prepare — review a book, scan the news, pen a poem, paint a picture, say a prayer, tell a story — just as long as you prepare something to share. Each person will have a chance to share uninterrupted for up to five minutes before the conversation opens up.

There are very few rules for this conversation. Courtesy is paramount. Participation is a must. Come prepared to change only one mind — your own.”

This month’s topic is the “Fun” topic — Summer Fun in Houston. More on that topic later.