9 Things I'm Passionate About This Week
Shoes, pants, music, documentaries? Yes, please.
OK so maybe it’s a month since I made this list … but that’s OK. I’ve been busy — and for good reason. As you know, Christopher and I signed a book contract with Workman to write our little passion project: Talk To Your Boys, an easy-read guidebook to 27 (or so) conversations that can help you bond with your tween or teen son and set him up for a happier, healthier future.
But you all know that already.
What you don’t know is that you can now fill out this charming Google Form with any questions you have that we might cover in the book. We may even answer them (you can be anonymous) in a future Substack!
Now, onto the fun stuff from the last month:
1. I got new trail running shoes
Despite the fact that I can no longer run (I was born with bilateral hip dysplasia and my cartilage is very rudely running low), I like to pretend I can every once in a while when I’m hiking. It’s like I get a little pep in my step and go bounce bounce bounce down the trail for a few feet at a time, hopping over rocks like I did when I was 25, all carefree and stuff.
In order to do this, I need really supportive shoes with huge grippy lugs (my balance is terrible). The kids got me these Craft running shoes for Mother’s Day and they’re my absolute favorite. So far, no pain and no major falls!
2. My son’s band
These children are so dang cute I cannot even stand it.
Before you’re a parent, you can’t imagine looking at four 18 year-old boys on a stage and see them as sweet little babies. And then you have a sweet little baby and he grows up and has a band and suddenly it’s like, oh my goodness look at those sweet little babies up there! Those are the sweetest little babies!
Meanwhile, teenage girls are swooning in the audience like these sweet little babies are Guy Patterson or Deco Cuffe or Jeff Bebe or something like that. Weird.
The drummer in the song I’ve isolated here (Maple Syrup) is usually lead guitarist — this is the first song where he’s played drums. That’s what I love so much. They’re all mixed up and trying new things in a way that’s unique to your youth, unique to that time in life when (almost) nobody is watching, and everything you do is just kind of great.
Thank you to our friend Juan García for taking this video. He is a real-life professional DP and camera operator (and talented actor!) and through the years, as his sons have played sports alongside our boys, Juan has taken the most beautiful photos and videos of our kiddos. This video is one of the greatest gifts we could’ve gotten.
3. This article about the Camel Mode stage of parenting
Basically, you disappear into the life of a parent, into the needs of your children and your home and sometimes your partner and often your dogs and cats and the snake and the lizard and you find yourself buying things like spinach-apple-oat puree pouches and swim diapers and butt cream and superworms for the lizard and pretty much never showering.
Your handbag is a backpack with a cooling pouch and a two-hour block of sleep at night is a relief. Your skincare routine is hand cream on your the dry patches around your chin. This is Camel Mode.
Here’s an excerpt that struck me hard:
Emergence from camel mode is a misunderstood stage of adult development. We call it by a lot of names — “midlife crisis” is one, or “moms gone wild.” I’ve always found it infantilizing to call an adult “wild” when, chances are, their wildness occurs in tightly prescribed windows. Wild as an English garden, maybe […] Can you really call something “wild” when it’s all happening according to a plan? I’m not dismissing “wild” parent behavior, just suggesting a reappraisal of it as a rational, deliberate reaction to a certain time of life rather than wildness. Often, “wild moms” are just trying to reanimate themselves into three dimensions the best way they know how.
Emerging from camel mode is about relearning how to feel desire again — any kind of desire, toward anything. This is not about “getting your libido back” or any other euphemism for having sex with your partner after a long fallow period. Feeling embodied and alive takes practice, and it can be forgotten and relearned. And forgotten again.
It’s great. And yes, I’m still in Camel Mode to some degree, but I feel myself emerging from it. I mean, I better emerge from it, I’m about to write a whole entire book. Well, half of one, considering Christopher will be there. But my point stands!
4. The Hulu Hillsong documentary series
I was not expecting to feel a single thing about this series. In fact, I put it on to make myself sleepy after a stressful evening.
I grew up in an evangelical community and know plenty of blandly attractive white pastors and their unmemorably attractive, obedient wives. I have enough experience with the mildly built-up bicep peeking out of a youthful looking “church shirt” and the way these types of guys pause in the middle of a sentence, look sideways, then raise an eyebrow before hammering home their message on a Sunday morning.
I am not interested.
But here I am talking about this series and, I hate to say it, about Carl Lentz, the pastor who exposed nearly his entire block-and-tackle on a hike with Justin Beiber — as if that’s something guys just do when wearing pants.
Aside from that, he really is the King Of All Youth Pastors. He’s got the hair and the aesthetic and the overdeveloped traps, but they’re all cranked to about 300% of normal — as is his style of message delivery. He doesn’t just pause for effect during a sermon, he pauses to take a breath and then looks up at the sky so he doesn’t cry. This isn’t just a church, it’s a church service in a literal nightclub packed to capacity with a velvet rope and lines around the block.
Knowing all of this, I was not expecting to feel empathy for Carl Lentz. No part of me cares about yet another white pastor from yet another anti-gay mega-church. Yet here I am watching this series and waiting week after week for the latest episodes because … ugh … I feel bad for this guy.
Ultimately, the big question I am left with after watching is this: Is being incredibly charismatic a burden?
I don’t mean it’s an oppression, so don’t yell at me.
When you watch Carl Lentz, you get the sense that whatever he was born with, whatever it is that makes him so undeniably special, is a burden.
As an anology, imagine being 6’8” and athletic in 9th grade and everyone wants you to play basketball. Everywhere you go, everyone asks if you play basketball. The dentist, the library, the community pool. Are you a basketball player? The high school coach follows you around. The principal of your school calls you into a meeting. When are you going to join the team?
Now imagine that if you didn’t join the basketball team, people’s souls would be lost. They would burn in hell. After all, Evangelicals and Pentacostals believe that the only way to not end up eternally damned is through accepting Jesus Christ as the one true Son of God.
If you’re a Christian and you’ve got that magic Carl Lentz thing about you, that undefinable thing that makes everyone hang on your every word, then using it to advance the Word of God is a moral imperative.
If you’re 20 year-old at Hillsong University and tapped by a megalomaniac to lead one of his churches, you simply have to do it. People’s souls are on the line.
You do that for years — decades, even — until one day the church senses big, systematic trouble on the horizon. And your sexy tattooed arms and publicly-exposed V are the perfect sacrifice to save the big man in charge. No, not God, but Brian Houston, the church’s founder.
The question now is what happens when one of those guys who cannot help but draw the eyes of everyone in any room loses his stage? What happens when he loses his pulpit? What happens when he loses everything, not just because of a (very common) indiscretion — but because someone very powerful, someone who is supposed to be sacred, decided you would be the one to take the fall?
5. Savannah Bananas social media
If you don’t know the Savannah Bananas baseball team, you’re missing out. Fans who’ve been to their games say they’re fun, funny and actually great baseball players.
For those of us who can’t just pop into a game, there’s the Savannah Bananas TikTok … and boy, is it good.
Watch the (painfully attractive) outfielder, Noah Bridges, who busts out of the dugout to dance around the field to the TikTok viral hit “Ceilings”…
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When a commenter said the video could only be made better if he were in a flowy yellow dress, Bridges and the Bananas knew just what to do.
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This, ladies and gentlemen, is the opposite of toxic masculinity and I cannot get enough.
6. Tiny Desk Concert archives
We all know that the KCRW Tiny Desk Concerts are amazing, but what’s even more amazing is that they’re all just kind of sitting on YouTube waiting to be consumed.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Chris Stapleton (with his wife, Morgane)
Usher Raymond
Sting and Shaggy (I don’t know how these two came together but thank you to whomever it was who thought of it)
I also highly suggest watching the Tiny Desk Concert of the late Mac Miller. It’s wonderful to see him in his glory — dynamic, enchanting, talented. His death to addiction is such a loss.
There’s something about these concerts that shows you who people are, and when you get a peek into the energy of a legend who passed tragically, it’s a gift.
7. The ‘Mom Dance’ we did at the Seniors’ last pep rally
I’m so sorry to my son, who was horrified, but this was a blast.
A group of moms (and one dad), led by the school’s assistant principal (and higher level math teacher!), surprised our seniors by busting into their pep rally and doing a dance.
Yes, the music went out halfway through (then picked up again after we all looked around, bewildered). Yes, we were overall quite terrible. But it was great fun and my son already agrees it was a fun surprise. I’m the one in the white socks and I’m not sad that you can’t see any of us all that well.
(Go watch the video before they decide to take it down due to a copyright violation from the music.)
8. These cargo pants
I splurged on these and I do not have one single regret.
They’re a denim-linen blend from Imogene + Willie, a Nashville-based small manufacturer, and the design is based on a vintage pair of trousers one of the designers loved.
These take me back to a pair of Old Navy cargos I had in the late 90s that I wore into the ground, but now I’m old so I cuff them, belt them at my waist and tuck in a form-fitting tank or tee so I don’t fully disappear in them.
Everything old is new again, y’all. When I shop, I try to only buy things new if I can imagine keeping them for ten or more years. While these are a little trendy now, they can be styled in ways that, for me, make them timeless.
9. This song
I loved Amanda Shires before I heard this album. I loved her when she played with Jason Isbell (her husband) on his Tiny Desk Concert and I loved her in The Highwomen, so I was absolutely delighted when this album was released.
This song wasn’t my favorite at first. It’s … well … it’s a lot. It’s heavy, it’s warbling, it’s intense. But, my God, how it’s grown on me and into my skin and my soul.
Trilling in the tree, the way I measure you
Fractured thirteenths, that grin that you give when you want me to quit
Falling further and falcon swift
I know what the cost is
In the octaves of consequence
I know the cost of flight is landing
And I know I can take it like a man
I don’t know what any of these lyrics mean, but I’m sure if I tried hard I could figure it out. For now, though, I’ll just listen and disappear.