Wu-Wei and Chinese Social Work

In the past few months I've been thinking off and on about the Taoist concept of "Wu-Wei" and (as always) I've been thinking also about social work. In conversations about what differences might exist between social work as it is (or should be) practiced in China and the United States I've been thinking about the nondirective technique. I've just re-read A Way of Being by Carl Rogers, and I'm going to put some things together here.

First, some observations about China and social work in China. Most social workers in China work for the government, and often they are working for the Civil Affairs Bureau. In Chinese culture, and political theory, and Confucianism, a responsibility of the government is to establish and maintain harmony and order. Currently the so-called "Communist" government in China is especially interested in maintaining a peaceful and harmonious society. In fact, when the Chinese government fails to maintain harmony, some truly horrific things can happen (The Great Cultural Revolution comes to mind). The Civil Affairs Bureau, and the social workers who work for it, try to solve social problems with an ultimate goal of maintaining harmony, unity, order, and peace.

In Chinese tradition, the government has authority, and people should do what the government tells them to do. Social workers who work for the government are agents of the government, and they carry with them the traditions and responsibilities that tell them they should direct people (clients) how to behave and how to reform. Thus, if we are seeking differences between Chinese social workers in China and Western social workers in the United States we can expect that Chinese social workers will be more directive, and will have less respect for client autonomy, and will more often just dictate to clients what the clients must do. The Western social workers will do more to protect client autonomy, and will be more willing to use nondirective techniques. That is what we expect to find, at any rate.

But, who are some of the great founders of this Western social work idea that clients must have autonomy and we as therapists or social workers need to listen to clients and trust that clients can find ways to change themselves if we ask the right questions and listen carefully enough? Well, Carl Rogers is probably one of the persons who significantly contributed to this idea that we should let clients have power in the process of helping them. And, where was Carl Roger's inspired to come up with this idea of nondirective therapy? Well, partly he found it through his own life experience, and party he was inspired by existentialist theologians such as Martin Buber and Soren Kierkegaard, and partly he probably took it from the American culture that emphasizes individual autonomy and dignity and is in general suspicious of authority and experts. But ironically and very significantly, Rogers was very strongly inspired in his theories and techniques by his study of Chinese philosophy and the religions of the Far East. He mentions Taoism and Zen Buddhism as being especially important to him.

In fact, in his paper, "My Philosophy of Interpersonal Relationships" Carl Rogers quotes four passages from or about Taoist teachings. These the only things he quotes in this whole paper about how he developed his theory of interpersonal relationships. I'll share those quotations here.

Carl Rogers says these words from Lao-Tse "resonate very deeply":

It is as though he listened
and such listening as his enfolds us in a silence
in which at last we begin to hear
what we are meant to be.

Then Rogers quotes from Buber's 1957 book, Pointing the Way:

To interfere with the life of things means to harm both them and oneself.... He who imposes himself has the small, manifest might; he who does not impose himself has the great, secret might....

The perfected person ... does not interfere in the life of beings, he does not impose himself on them, but he "helps all beings to their freedom (Lao-tse)." Through his unity, he leads them too, to unity, he liberate their nature and their destiny, he releases Tao in them.

Then Rogers says the definition of an effective group facilitator can be found in the writings of Lao-tse, and he quotes from W. Bynner's 1962 translation, The way of life according to Laotsu:

A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists,
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him....
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will all say, "We did this ourselves."

And then Rogers closes with what he says is perhaps his favorite saying that "sums up many of my deeper beliefs" from Lao-tse (from M. Friedman's 1972 Touchstones of reality.)

If I keep from meddling with people, they take care of themselves,
If I keep from commanding people, they behave themselves,
If I keep from preaching at people, they improve themselves,
If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves.

Well, I can think of hardly any way this could be in greater contrast to the way a political dictatorship works, or the way social workers approach their tasks when they simply tell clients what the clients must do. If Chinese social work really is currently almost completely contrary to these teachings that come from Chinese philosophy, then I think we must admit that the differences between so-called "Western" non-directive autonomy-preserving social work and and "Chinese" directive, commanding "social work" are rooted in historical circumstances, politics, and not rooted in culture. That is, Chinese culture (Taoism) is one of the influential sources of the so-called "Western" approach in nondirective therapy. Nondirective therapies may be less acceptable to social work agencies in China, but this is likely because of the political philosophies and government structures now dominant in China, and not because of some cultural variable that makes nondirective therapies more suitable in the USA, Europe, and other "Western" societies, and less suitable in "Confucian" Sinic societies.

One might say that Chinese culture has both Taoism and Confucianism as opposing traditions. Sure, Taoist teachings may suggest that nondirective therapies are best, but Taoism is the "opposition" and "counter-culture" tradition in China, while Confucianism is the mainstream tradition of the powerful, the families, and the government. That is a point worth considering, but I notice that in terms of actual manifestations of enthusiasm and practice in daily life, Taoism and Buddhism are far, far more popular and mainstream in Taiwan than Confucianism, and Taiwan is a place where Chinese traditional culture has been kept in tact, while in the Mainland the "traditional Chinese culture" was attacked and driven out of the mainstream by official policy and practice for a generation, from about 1950 to 1980.

Listening to the Radio

I like listening to the radio. Here in Springfield I listen to two local university stations that are NPR affiliates. These are WUIS (my university's station) and WILL FM (from Urbana). Both stations have excellent classical music and some of the better public radio news and general interest programs. I also listen to the non-commercial community music station, WQNA, which has some interesting programs.

With iTunes and the Internet I'm also able to listen to some of my favorite stations from other places I've lived. I listen to KDHX (the community radio station in St. Louis), for some of their programs of folk music, world music, and eclective independent and alternative music. I also listen to KPFK (the Pacifica Radio station from Los Angeles). If you have iTunes, you too can listen to KPFK. It's there in the radio section under public radio streams. This past weekend there was a great program about the universal healthcare bill for a single-payer health insurance system in California (the Sheila Kuehl plan). I had never even heard of this bill, which was actually passed by the California legislature, and I hope it comes back and gets passed over Schwarzenegger's veto. My own governor here in Illinois hasn't suggested any thing with as much common sense as the California Senate Bill 840, which is a great pity. Anyway, I'm glad to have access to KPFK again. I also sometimes tune in over the Internet to WILL AM in Urbana, which has one of the great interview programs with its Focus 580 program hosted by David Inge. When Robert Jay Lifton came to the Urbana campus to give a talk and was interviewed by David I remember him remarking afterwards that David was as good as any of the national news talk hosts or interviewers, and I agree.

When I was 18 I worked at KYMC in St. Louis. That was a great station, owned by the YMCA of West St. Louis County. Kids (like me and my friends) could get experience working there as DJs. It recently went off the air because the YMCA couldn't afford to keep it running. That's a shame.

- Eric

Musings on my interest in Chinese Social Welfare

When I was a child in middle school in the late 1970s and early 1980s the United States had just established relations with the government in Beijing. I remember going to see a performance of a Beijing Opera company in Oakland with my grandparents, either in 1977 or 1979, but whenever it was, the exposure to Chinese culture made a big impression on me.

I became interested in China as my awakening interest in politics and economics was growing. While in sixth grade I had an interesting art teacher who was also my social studies teacher. This man had been in the Army infantry during the Second World War, and he had fought on the front lines for many months, and survived some of the worst battles in Italy, France, and Germany. He was a teacher who was dedicated to peace, and he often encouraged his young students to think of people in “the enemy” countries of the Communist Sphere as potential friends. He was of course very enthusiastic about freedoms and advantages of our political system, but he always urged us to think about social justice and peace as well. I also had a Korean War veteran as a social studies teacher in seventh grade, who again taught us to consider American history and politics from a point of view that emphasized the concerns of workers and oppressed groups. These two teachers were echoing things I picked up in my family, about the importance of looking out for the interests of the “little guy” and seeing everyone with unprejudiced eyes as equal.

Well, in the early 1980s we had a horrible president named Ronald Reagan. He was awful, but not as bad as our current president [George W. Bush]. In fact, Reagan was a nice person, with some good values and idealistic ideas, but he wasn’t very smart and he was surrounded by bad people. And really, his ideology was stupid as well. At the time the USA and USSR were poised for war, and the possibility that any day we could all die in a nuclear conflict was weighing on our minds. I knew the horrors of the Soviet Union’s purges and police-state, and I was aware of the problems China had with the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Great Cultural Revolution,” so I had no illusions that Communism as it was practiced in the USSR or China was a good thing, but I read Marx and Engels (when I was 13-14), and I read other radical social theorists (like Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Trotsky), and I was impressed. I wasn’t a “true believer,” but I was impressed. I figured that there were some good ideas at the root of Socialism, but these ideas had been wrongly and brutally applied in the Communist nations, something like the way Christianity was twisted and distorted during the crusades or the religious wars and persecutions of European history in the 12th to 17th centuries.

I learned about the successes of Marxist parties in the Indian states of Kerela (and, to a lesser degree, in West Bengal) after my father married a woman from Kerela. My step-mother was no radical, in fact she was a sort of Ayn Rand conservative, but her experience coming from Kerela gave her a fresh look at the American political system, and her deep criticism of America seemed sometimes right to me.

So, with my disgust with the Communist countries and my dissatisfaction with the economics and politics of America, where could I turn for an example? Well, in the 1980s China seemed like a promising place. It seemed for a time as if China would show the world a third way, keeping the best aspects of socialism or communism while embracing some of the advantages of capitalism, and there was hope in the 1980s that China might move toward more democratic and liberal politics as well.

When I was in college I became friends with a classmate from China whose father was a professor of American studies. Dan Pan told me his perspective on China and America, and so I learned more about China. Another friend of mine, John Wells, spent a summer in Hong Kong, and he also had some interesting views about China and its future. I talked a lot about China with these friends, and I read some Chinese history. At the University of Redlands I took a course on Chinese history from Robert Eng (the economic historian who is an expert on the history of silk) and a course on political development in East Asia from Michael Ng-Quin.  I learned that the Chinese government had guys I didn’t like, such as Mao Tsedeng and Li Peng, people I thought were better, such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Hsiao-Ping, and people I actually admired, such as Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang. Modern Chinese history had heroes like Liang Shu-ming and Sun Yatsen, and villains like Yuan Shih-kai and Jiang Qing.

Anyway, in the 1980s the people I liked most, such as Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang were in the ascendancy, and China’s future looked bright. I thought China might find a “third way” and surpass the Communist and Capitalist nations in terms of human development and human-centered economics. As I got into high school and became active in the peace movement in protests against nuclear weapons and American support for terrorists and evil governments in Latin America (and our stupid undeclared war against Nicaragua) I became less interested in traditional socialism and more interested in the Green Movement and the Green Party, which was then forming and establishing itself in Europe. The American Green Movement wasn’t yet a political party, but I liked the basic core values of the Green Movement and thought of myself as a “Green Democratic Socialist” in my political thought. I knew enough about Chinese philosophy from Taoism and Buddhism to Confucianism and Chinese Humanism to think that China might evolve into a nation that embraced many of the best values of Democratic Socialism and the Green Movement. In the late 1980s, this seemed a possibility.

In the summer of 1985 I visited the Soviet Union, and met lovely people from Russia and East Germany. When Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union and began his reforms it was clear that things were changing. I admired Gorbachev, and even put a picture of him up in my dormitory room at college in a place of honor. Then, in the summer of 1988 I went to East Germany as a guest worker in a youth brigade to work on construction sites around the Berlin suburb of Mahlsdorf. The people I met in East Germany were extraordinary. But as we cried and waved goodbye at the checkpoint where we crossed back past the Berlin Wall I knew that things were changing, and soon, I thought, the East German Communist Party would have to liberalize and get rid of the wall. About 14 months later this is exactly what happened.

But about six months before that happened, Hu Yaobang died (in April of 1989). He had been forced to resign as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party two years earlier because he had been too “liberal” and sympathetic to demonstrators. The memorial and funeral events were amazing, as so many young Chinese people came out to honor him. And they didn’t stop coming. All through the end of April and May more and more were coming into the streets. My friend Dan Pan was using my phone to call his friends in China and learn what was happening. It was very exciting. John and Dan and I would get up each morning and get together to read the newspaper and talk about what was happening in China.

But things changed in June, and I lost faith in the idea that China would be any sort of an example to the rest of the world.

I didn’t lose my interest in China. The events of 1989 and my friendship with Dan Pan made me admire the Chinese people. Then, in the summer of 1989, I met a Chinese graduate student at Northwestern University, where I was spending the summer, and we fell in love. In 1989-1990 I was a senior in college in southern California while my girlfriend was a graduate student at Northwestern, and she was a couple years older than I was. Her love cooled, and so did mine, and our long-distance relationship didn’t really work out. We were on very friendly terms, and kept in touch for several years, but that experience of being in love with someone from China made me even more interested in China and Chinese culture.

As an undergraduate I was studying world development. I took courses in sociology, history, economics, and political science, but most of the courses I took were related to development in Africa, Latin America, and East Asia. I even spent the fall 1988 semester in East Africa with the School for International Training. My experiences studying economics and politics in East Africa made me feel very discouraged about poverty alleviation and justice in Africa. But the changes I was seeing in Eastern Europe and East Asia looked promising to me. When I graduated, I decided I wanted to go to East Germany (I studied German in college) or else East Asia (Korea, Hong Kong, or Taiwan). I had been a volunteer at the local high school in Redlands, California (where my university was), and I had experience teaching English to children from Mexico, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Romania, and Ethiopia. So, instead of looking for a career in development, I decided to get a job as an English teacher for a couple years while I figured out what I wanted to study in graduate school. I was interested in medicine (I thought I might do research on tropical diseases or work on cures for malaria or water-born parasites), economics, urban studies, and social work. After a couple years teaching English in Taiwan I decided I would study social work, and after I earned a doctorate, I hoped I could return to Asia.

Well, I earned a doctorate, but my wife, who is from Taiwan, does not want to live in Taiwan. She doesn’t mind going back for a month or two on extended visits, but she thinks we should stay here in the United States.

I’ve maintained my interest in poverty in China. I remember how in 1994 my wife and I visited her brother in Dong-guan (near Guangzhou), and we met a group of young children selling flowers and other cheap little items. Some seemed as young as six or seven years old, and the oldest seemed perhaps 11 or 12. I had been studying Chinese in Xi’an that summer, and so I was a little more fluent than I am now, so I looked at those children and started to talk with them. I asked them about their lives, and their families, and their work. It seemed no one had ever stopped and talked with those children, and certainly no non-Chinese person had spoken to them in Mandarin. They were excited to tell me about their lives. The children told me they had been taken from their parents, and couldn’t go back to their parents. They couldn’t go to school or visit their parents because their bosses wouldn’t let them. I didn’t have enough cash or gifts to give the children much, and we were going to dinner. When we came out of the restaurant, one of the children gave me one of the roses he was trying to sell. He wouldn’t accept money, and told me it was a gift.

I’d like to do something in my career that would be helpful to poor children in China. It’s a personal feeling I have. And so, I remain interested in social work in China.

Bush vetos something

I'm not a fan of my president. In fact, ever since he seized power in 2000-2001 I have been unable to hear his voice without feeling sick, and I have turned off the radio or television every time he appears or has his voice broadcast. But, I try to find the good in everyone, and there have been a few (a very few) policies out of the White House that I respect or admire. I liked his statement about protecting Taiwan from China (back in the spring of 2001). I like the general idea of moving from temporary shelters to permanent housing for the homeless (but he ought to fund that idea more than he has). And, believe it or not, I like his veto of the embryonic stem cell research thing.

What? How can this be? Am I against embryonic stem cell research? No, hardly! I support it. I'll donate my own money to medical research that uses frozen human embryos with joy. I have no qualms about this, as I cannot believe, and won't believe, that the sacredness of human life begins at such an early stage in human development. In fact, people who think a frozen blastula's have souls and precious human life seem sort of nutty and weird to me. "Irrational" I'll call them.

But then why do I support the President's veto? I support this because in a democracy we must not have a tyranny of the majority. I'm in the majority on this issue, thinking that frozen blastulas (early stage embryos) aren't human and don't deserve protection from medical researchers trying to find treatments for spinal cord injuries and so forth. But there is a sizable minority in my community who vehemently disagree with the majority. They think those frozen embryos are basically frozen children. To throw them out or perform medical experiments with them would be, in their view, a terrible evil. And the bill, as I understood it, would have allowed government money to fund this sort of thing.

When people feel their most basic beliefs about God and ethics and morality are being violated by some Government program, I think the program ought to be either not funded by the government (let private non-profit corporations and free enterprise do it without direct government subsidy) or else a fund ought to be established for people to pay into what they would otherwise pay in tax.

So, for the strict pacifists, they shouldn't have to pay for military spending beyond the costs of medical care for military personnel. People who oppose abortion or stem cell research shouldn't have to pay for government medical research or or Medicaid-funded abortions. And people who "have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny imposed upon the mind of man" shouldn't have to pay for our military or financial aid to despots and dictators. And strict vegetarians shouldn't need to pay for the agricultural policies that support the beef, pork, or chicken industries. With the exception of military spending and funding abortions for poor women, I'd say in most of these cases the government should just stop supporting these sorts of policies that violate some people's most basic sense of right and wrong. It's just easier to not fund stem cell research with the public purse and let others fund such things with private funds or public funds from more local sources (states, counties, cities, whatever).

But when policies can't be abandoned to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority another possibility would be these alternative funds. One could fund only medical care for veterans and government workers (including military personnel). Another might fund some utterly non-controversial government project such as environmental clean-ups, maintaining national parks, paying down the national debt, or subsidizing affordable drugs and quality medical care for sick people in poor countries. When people pay their income tax they should have a chance to testify that they have a strong ethical belief that is violated by some form of government spending (such as military or abortion funding), and so rather than having their funds go into the general revenue of the United States government they demand that their money go only into one or more of these funds.

In the case of stem cell research, I'm not convinced that avenue of research really promises as much as some people claim. The government can fund research on umbilical cord tissue or some sort of artificially-generated stem-cell tissue instead of violating the most profound ethical beliefs of the wackos who think frozen blastulas have sacred human life. In a democracy it's just doesn't do for the 75% of us in a majority to entirely alienate and frustrate a sincere and passionate minority, at least when that minority is as large as the 25% or so of us who oppose stem cell research with embryonic tissue.

Hadley-Ives family update

Hadley-Ives family update

I just sent a letter to my U.S. Rep and Senators about the Israeli-Lebanon conflict:

I feel as I'm sure most Americans do, that the so-called "Hezbollah" (if God does favor a party, certainly they aren't it) represents evil and terrorism. I hope Israel is successful in inflicting tremendous casualties upon the so-called "Hezbollah" fighters and leaders, and I wish Israel success in that respect.

However, I'm writing because I think the Israeli Defense Forces are going crazy. Why are they killing Lebanese regular army guys? I thought Israel claimed it wanted the regular Lebanese army to exert more control over the so-called "Hezbollah." Also, I can't understand this bombing of water-drilling trucks in a Christian area of Beruit. And what is going on with bombing whole villages and hamlets, destroying all the homes and houses? Maybe some of these homes are military targets because the so-called "Hezbollah" uses them, but surely other homes are inhabited by innocent civilians.

I fear that Israel is sinking to the same level of evil and wickedness as the so-called "Hezbollah". When the so-called "Hezbollah" shoots unguided missiles at Israeli cities, that is a war crime. When Israeli Defense Forces bomb civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and indiscriminately kill civilians and terrorists together without using surgical strikes, that is also probably a war crime.

I want the U.S. government to make this clear to Israel. I want you to let the Israeli ambassador know how concerned your constituents back in Illinois are about this. How can Israel ever achieve security and peace with its neighbors if it does such bloody work? A strong military response to the so-called "Hezbollah" is understandable, and I'd support it, but what we're seeing instead is total madness. And if America goes on defending this particular Israeli craziness we'll be hated even more.

So I'm pleading with you to support any House resolution that calls on Israel to show restraint and focus its military actions against the so-called "Hezbollah" and refrain from committing war crimes such as bombing civilian areas that are of no military value to the terrorists.

Zoo Tycoon.

It's nearly the end of the Fifth of May.

I decided today I'd eat at Cinqo de Mayo Restaurant at the Travel Lodge along Sixth Street. I pass it most days when I drive to campus to work at my office, and I figured it was a good day to try it out. I ordered from the lunch menu the Cinqo de Mayo burrito. It was big, and pretty good. In fact, it was so big I hardly needed to eat any dinner.

It might have helped that I also had a couple bowls of ice cream at our celebation of service award at UIS. We created a "leg-of-the-stool" award for service. The UIS says that faculty are supposed to have a balanced mix of scholarship, teaching, and service, and the university is kept steady by a balance among these activities like the legs of a stool. Well, the service leg isn't as strong as the teaching and scholarship legs, and this celebration was an attempt to start changing that.

I got home and I was exhausted. I was up late trying to help a student who is close to failing a course I'm teaching. I edited their paper and wrote more comments and suggestions than I think they had written in their own paper. This was a paper that should have been turned in a couple weeks ago, but I only saw it for the first time yesterday. So when i got home I was sleepy and took a nap.

Waking up, I went into the basement and tried the new computer game my sons have been raving about this week. I gave them Zoo Tycoon (with all the expansion packs) for the 12th Day of Ridvan, and they've been playing it an awful lot. I thought I would give it a try and see what it was like. That was about 8:00, when I went downstairs. At about 11:00 Jeri came down and reminded us that it was far past our bedtime. Wow, I didn't have those three hours to waste. I should have been giving feedback to students.

I guess that is what I'll do now.

Hey, it's working again.

Well, I had tried to post to this blog several times in late December and January and "Blotspot" (Blogspot) kept forgetting my password and username. It was strange, and then the semester began, and I didn't have time to post here.

It's nice to see this is up and running. I'll need to start posting here.

One thing I've learned this past semester, never teach three on-line courses in one semester. They are far too time-consuming.

Just Friends

I was driving on my way to work the other day and heard a song on the radio in which the singer plaintively says, "and you say that we're just friends" as if this is something terrible. Well, it could be terrible, as sometimes the phrase, "I just want us to be friends" means "I don't want to have anything to do with you beyond our being nodding acquaintances" and it can be said after a long and intense relationship. But, I think our culture is impoverished by this diminishment of friendship and the exaggerated reliance on the romantic relationship of marriage or the romantic (but non-sexual) alternatives to marriage.

This brought to mind my great-grandfather Mac. This was my great-grandmother Ruby's second husband, and my grandmother Nel's stepfather. I remember in the late 1970s Great-Grandpa Mac telling me about friends he had made in France when he was stationed there during the First World War. There were some families and some young men or boys who had been exceptionally friendly and affectionate to Mac over in France, and he enjoyed telling stories about how much they loved him and how much he loved them, and the things they did to endear and cherish each other. One of these little boys grew up to fly in the French air force, and I can remember Great-Grandpa Mac sobbing and crying when he recounted how this friend of his perished when his aircraft carrier was sunk and his plane ditched at sea during the Second World War. So, this was a friendship that he enjoyed recounting sixty to fifty-five years after it bloomed, and this was a death of a friend that had occurred 35-40 years ago and it still made him cry to remember and retell it.

I was recently at the Society for Social Work and Research conference in San Antonio, where I met (as I do every year) old friends from my time as a graduate student, or from my time as a professor at the University of Illinois. It is always so nice to be among friends and learn what discoveries they are making. It's also a pleasure to work with friends, and to think along with them, or write with them. I need to make more time in my life for that.

Christmas Eve Report

Finally after three weeks of freezing weather it started to warm up in Springfield, and it was time for us to drive down to St. Louis for Christmas.

This is the third year in a row that we have come down to St. Louis to have a Christmas with my St. Louis family (my mother and step-father). My sister Jennell brings her family from New York as well.

As a Baha'i Family, we still celebrate Christmas, at least when we are in the United States where it is a traditional family holiday. I think if we were in Taiwan with Jeri's family we wouldn't make so much of it. I remember I didn't make a big deal of it on Christmas 1990 or 1991 when I was in Taiwan.

Saint Louis is a great town to visit. And it's always a pleasure to visit my parents and see my sister and her family. So, I'm feeling pretty good.

I'm spending much of my time working on a calendar project for some friends or reading about human nature.

December 20

Yesterday was a fairly slow day. It was too cold. I think it was -15 C when I woke up.

Went to the office to try finishing up grading student papers. There are still a few in my on-line course who haven't turned anything in for the final assignment. I'm waiting.

Went to a party for some friends from the Philosophy Department. Met Gary and Karen, Nathalie, and Eve (Peter's wife), as well as John from the philosophy department. It was a good scene and I was enjoying myself, but after only 30 minutes I had to come home and take the family to the Cub Scout pack meeting. Arthur carried the pack flag in, which is a big honor for a Tiger Cub Scout. The pack meeting was fun.

Last night I wrote a long post to Talisman9, a newgroup listserve I read regularly.

Today (the 20th) I'm helping clean up the house and prepare some gifts. While sorting photographs I came across some good pictures of old friends. There was a nice image of Henry Lee, a high school friend who died of brain cancer who died about six years ago. The photograph was taken at my sister Jennell's high school graduation. I'm glad Henry's family keeps in touch with us.

I'll spend the afternoon in the office finishing up some loose ends from the Fall semester (I hope the students have turned in their final assignments), and get to work on the courses I'm teaching next semester. I also must remember to buy a car battery. I've given up on maintaining my older car (a 1988 Honda Accord with 163,xxx miles), as it would cost thousands to make it nice and I'd rather just save for a different car. My grandfather's car (1995 Honda Accord), however, get's good care (over $1000 worth of good care this month!) We've had it since 2000, when my grandparents died. Anyway, if I don't get a new battery for it soon, one of these mornings I won't be able to start it.

First Post

I've decided to start my 39th year (I'm 38 today) with a family web log. I look forward to posting news and photographs of the family here.

Today was my birthday, although we did most of the celebrating yesterday. The gifts were exciting. I received two laundry containers where I can throw my clothing at night when I undress, and then use these amazing inventions to easily carry my clothing downstairs to the place of washing. I also received a mirror with medicine cabinet to replace the mirror that had been over our sink in one of the upstairs bathrooms. There was also a little storage thing to put in the wall where we may now hang towels and place shampoo bottles. But this was not all. I also received a watch, a warm, white synthetic fleece pullover, a white scarf, a white hat, and an artificial Christmas Tree. I also gave myself several books and music CDs. These included a couple books by historians Christopher Buck and Juan Cole, a book about 'Abdu'l-Baha edited by Steve Scholl, and some books about human nature to possibly use in creating lectures for the class I'll be teaching next semester. The Music CDs include Rimsky-Korsakov's opus 30, a Piano Concerto in C sharp minor that I previously only had as a scratchy version I digitized off an old album I loved as a child. A recording of Carmina Burana by the Illinois Symphony Orchestra, a couple CDs of the New Age group Secret Garden (like Enya), A couple Litolff piano concerti, Sharon Isbin playing baroque pieces on guitar, Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale, the singles of Jesus and Mary Chain, and Orchestra Baobab "Specialist in All Styles". The Rimsky-Korsakov and Orchestra Baobab are my favorites among these, although it's also great to hear the Jesus and Mary Chain stuff from the 1980s again.

Went to church with my parents this morning, but attended Sunday school with them. I did that fairly often when we lived in St. Louis, but since we moved to Illinois I haven't been back so often. Today the topic was forgiveness. There was a fantastic aphorism I hope to long remember shared in this class: "Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person gets sick."

After church we went to watch my nephew Brett play an indoor soccer game. His team is amazingly good. A bunch of third graders who play better than I ever did in high school. Sebastian and Arthur enjoyed watching their cousin Brett play. He had spent last night with us down in St. Louis.

Bought Jeri a ticket to go back to Taiwan for a month (mid January to mid February). She'll be gone from the time I get back from the SSWR conference (Society for Social Work Research) until we pick her up in Chicago just as the CSWE conference begins up there (Council on Social Work Education). It would be nice if we could all go back to Taiwan for Chinese New Year, but our work and school schedules don't allow it. We're planning on all going back in June for a month, God willing.