How offensive. Michaelangelo, you have made me feel I don't belong here. Please cover this with a tarp, too.

“Our Heavenly Father,” the prayer begins, “grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful.” It goes on for a few more lines before concluding with “Amen.”

For Jessica, who was baptized in the Catholic Church but said she stopped believing in God at age 10, the prayer was an affront. “It seemed like it was saying, every time I saw it, ‘You don’t belong here,’ ” she said the other night during an interview at a Starbucks here.

Since the ruling, the prayer has been covered with a tarp. The school board has indicated it will announce a decision on an appeal next month.

Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer, NY Times, 26 Jan 2012

I have many atheist or agnostic friends. There was a period of my life where that was my thinking, too. But even then, sincere religious expression never offended me. When I drove by the Sikh temple on my apartment complex’s street, I never felt alienated. If I saw a prayer for healing on a friend’s Facebook feed, I may have thought “and see a doctor, of course,” but it never offended me.

I’m the diplomatic sort. Always have been. It actually causes me pain when people fight. I don’t like it.

But this trend, of late, is actually starting to piss me off. I fully recognize that we are not a Christian nation, in the sense that Iran is an Islamic nation. But to act like the faiths of most of the founders of this country, and of almost every major thinker in our nation’s history, is some weird, alien, offensive, freedom-threatening philosophy is beyond silly.

Yes, terrible things have been done in the name of religion. Faith has often been the tool of government. But that does not make religion in general, or Judaism and Christianity in particular, the problem.

Most of our American ancestors were taught to read by the church. The abolitionist movement was a church movement. The civil rights movement was a church movement. Sure, there were people saying the Bible or God told them differently on those issues, and they were what we contemporary Christians call “wrong.” :)

This phoney, pseudo-liberal nonsense that says “every culture and expression is fine except the majority’s” has got to be recognized for the bullshit that it is. Atheism is fine. I have no problem with an ethical atheist. But I do not agree that freedom of religion also means freedom from ever seeing religious sentiments in public. This newer brand of hyper-sensitive, highly intollerant phoney progressivism needs to stop being coddled and start being called out for the nonsense it is. Not by threatening kids who stand up for their ideals, like Jessica, but by teaching them, in exactly the same way we teach kids to tolerate other races and genders and cultures, to do the most liberal thing of all — tolerate the majority culture of their own country.

Why your boyfriend doesn’t want to marry you

He is inundated with anti-marriage messages in exactly the proportion that you are inundated with messages saying you’re not sexy.. Let’s face it — the only happy marriage ad he’s seen is for old men who need boner medication.

You are a bitch 25% of the time. (Think about it.)

Batman: Arkham City, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim each cost $60 — the same price as taking you to a modest dinner. Three of these will deliver 100+ hours of entertainment each and 0 hours of complaining.

Why your girlfriend doesn’t want to marry you

She is inundated with anti-marriage messages in exactly the proportion that you are inundated with messages saying you’re insufficiently rich, muscular, or hairy. Let’s face it — the only happy marriage ad she’s seen is for old women with sleep number beds.

You are a dick 75% of the time: when you wake up, when you get home from work, and when you’re asleep (you both snore and fart — what a charming combination).

NetFlix is $10 a month, and ice cream and popcorn don’t smell as bad as beer bottles and chicken wings when left on the coffee table overnight.

You thought I was miffed about calling a computer system sensei.

Check out what another division of our company, overseas, is calling their three levels of consultants:

1. Warrior
2. Ninja
3. Jedi

I shit thee not.

Do grown men run companies, or are all CEOs 14 year old boys at heart? Because if I were 14, I’d think being a warrior, ninja, or jedi who consulted a computerized sensei would be freaking awesome. As a grown man, in reference to my professional life, I’d be… what’s the word? Nonplussed? No, too soft. Embarrassed? Well, obviously. Defamed. Now, there’s a word you don’t use daily.

Besides, I’d rather be Batman.

p.s. My wife has decided that the fact that I care, in itself, proves I’m an even bigger geek.

This sticker, which I placed to highlight a dent someone recently added to my beast, has been admired by many a teen. It's an icon you find in the Gears of War games, when there's a prize nearby ("cog-tags," i.e. dog tags, from a fallen soldier).

I used to say I got attached to people, not to things. It sounded mature, other-worldly Zen Buddhist, give-to-Caesar Christian, and it placated me. The truth was, I got attached to things, too, and losing them hurt.

I went to three elementary schools and two high schools. During my four years in college, my parents moved to three different states. When you play that game where you imagine your bedroom as a child, I cannot participate. I just can’t.

After my divorce, I decided to commit suicide. I acted it out every month. I “lost” this or that. I threw something away, in disgust. I gave something away, because it was nice, because I wanted someone else to have it, because nice things did not belong in my life.

It wasn’t enough.

I compulsively changed phone services, email services, banks, watches, apartments. Everything with my name on it felt wrong. Sure, in the beginning I was avoiding creditors. I settled with most of mine, but there were many trying to get money out of my ex, and I just got tired of it. But even after all that settled down, things just felt wrong. Most things. Every thing.

Earlier this year I bought a Ford POS. I couldn’t afford to deal with what was needed for the Chevy, and instead of financing something else I could barely afford, I just took most of a paycheck and bought a 15 year old car for cash from a deputy sheriff in Denton County. He and his wife needed the money to go to a family reunion in Montana. I had driven about a dozen other cars in the last week. It seemed better than all of those. There was nothing obviously wrong with it.

Over the course of the next six months, I replaced things, cleaned things, learned things. I argued with mechanics who wanted to charge too much for work that I now understood. With the help of a friend, I did a lot of it in my own back yard. I made mistakes. I did things twice. I got gasoline in my eye, cuts on my knuckles, aches in my shoulders from crawling around on concrete. That fucker became mine.

Recently my mom came into some money. She offered to add $2,000 to whatever I could sell the car for, just to get rid of it, and buy something more reliable. It was a generous offer, and it would be a rational thing to accept it.

I am not yet rational.

That car is mine. I understand it. It is old and beastly, but it’s my horse, and I do not want to put it down.

Just watched the preview. Familiar with the character, mythos, and Christopher Nolan’s work. I say, instead of getting his back broken by Bane (as in the 90s comic), Batman is going to be killed by Bane, and a new Batman will take his place: probably the cop played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Nolan’s clearly a student of mythology, and I don’t think the title “Rises” means Christian Bale’s incarnation of the Dark Knight gets back up.

We’ll see.

Work can be dehumanizing. A friend of mine and I have had this conversation for years: He says the tipping point was when we changed the name of the department from “personnel” to “human resources.” While personnel has a military ring to it, it’s better than resources. Coal and pork bellies are resources.

Recently I had an emotional response to a mock-humanizing shift in corporate culture. My VP and his directors suggested we call our new e-learning system “sensei.” I hated the idea. A fancy database is not a sensei. It sounded like he was trying too hard to be Japanese; my employer is an American branch of a Japanese parent company.

I asked them to get some native Japanese input on this; they did, and the Japanese folks were fine with it.

The problem, then, were my feelings on the matter. I had to step back and chew on it a while.

I realized that the reaction I had to “sensei” was due to having one throughout my 20s and 30s, and now being one. My own sensei was a father figure to me (my father died when I was young), so I wasn’t being rational where this term was concerned. Also, most of my Japanese friends are via the arts I’ve practiced, and sensei has special meaning for them that it doesn’t have for the typical Japanese. So, my understanding was skewed, and human.

In fairness, sensei is not a magical term. It just means teacher. It’s a term also used for lawyers, and other experts.

So, just as I decided to let traditional uniforms go, I had to let traditional ownership of a word go. The whole Japanese martial thing has gotten silly and over-used, anyway. Today, you can get a black belt in project management (Six Sigma); in Japan, you can get dan (expert) degrees in baseball.

So, now we’re human resources, and a computer is our sensei. Fine.

Is it any wonder that I teach karate at a church? I could do it at a city rec center, but that never intuitively appealed to me. I am, perhaps desperately, holding on to the few sacred things I’ve found that survived into the 21st century, pruning and tending them, hoping they survive our cultural winter. I am Don Quixote, jousting with data farms, an anachronism bleeding into a blog, looking for what? Dignity? Doesn’t that come from within?

“We’ve learned that when companies treat talent as a commodity, the consequences are severe,” said Ms. Toledano of Electronic Arts. “It takes years to repair a reputation.”

Zynga’s Tough Culture Risks a Talent Drain, NY Times

Of course it does. But when that inner dignity is not nurtured by the environment, eventually, it dies. And there seem to me few dignified environments left in this world.

This is what they used to wear when practicing karate. We're not taking it that far... though the clogs would have a certain Ru Paul panache, in 2011.

As it turns out, news of the death of my karate class was greatly exaggerated. The rec center director wasn’t getting our attendance reports. I have a steady group of 10 folks, which is fine. She thought no one had showed up in months.

But, the whole death-rebirth thing was a good experience, nonetheless.

First, I found out how much my students were enjoying the class. I suspected they were, but this brought their true feelings out, in a very nice way.

Second, it gave me a feeling of freedom, in which I decided to make a few changes I had been pondering for years. For those of you who know me well, it may surprise you to know that unlike email addresses or cell phones or jobs, in one area of my life, I am quite conservative and unchanging: relationships. And, for me, budo (Japanese martial arts) has been a major relationship.

My Mom pointed out to me that I’ve been practicing karate for 20 years. I really hadn’t added it up. (I practiced aikido for five years before that.) I had simply mentioned that I needed minor wrist surgery, due to a striking-related injury, and she said “I know Karate has caused several injuries, but it seems to have more positive results for you overall.” And, I fully agreed.

Karate is a funny thing. It’s not rational. The Japanese army tried to include it in basic training during WWII, then rejected it, because you can’t learn it in six weeks. If you want to learn basic self defense, there are much quicker ways to do that.

Karate is so eclectic, it’s almost not Japanese. (They really like consistency.) Unlike judo, which was founded by one guy in the 1880s, karate had dozens of legitimate masters when it was introduced to mainland Japan in the 1920s, and they just don’t all teach the same way. It had been practiced in Okinawa, Japan since at least the 14th century. There are a mix of Chinese and native influences. It’s really kind of a mess. An interesting mess… but a mess, nonetheless.

And, there are some pretty big egos involved — including my own. After all, I broke off from my own teacher’s group, to do things my own way. He did the same. As did his teacher… and so on. In my case, I wanted to teach fewer things, and focus more — but, I teach for free. For him, it was his only source of income, and to be fair, he charged very little, and was a great teacher for me, for about 7 years. I stayed another 3 out of loyalty. After 10, I knew I’d learned what I was going to learn, and it was time to move on. I visited China (where much of karate comes from, originally — Okinawa was a Chinese territory for 500 years), and visited a Chinese teacher’s class for a few months back here in Dallas. He helped me understand some of the origins of the forms and techniques, which helped me appreciate Okinawan karate even more.

What I’m doing now, in rebirth, is truly “old school.”

We’re not wearing karate-gi (white Japanese uniforms) and obi (colored belts) anymore. We’re wearing workout clothing, with a t-shirt of the same color as the belt. This is what I saw them doing in China, and what the Okinawans used to do, before karate was introduced to the Japanese PE system, when it adopted the judo uniform… which was originally just the white long-johns people wore under their kimono (robes).

Let me finally say this, out loud/in print: Karate-gi suck for karate. If you kick or squat, you have to pull your pants back up, and sometimes retie your belt. If you punch fast, the shirt comes undone, and if you’re female, your boobs fall out. They hold sweat in like giant, rough towels, and give you armpit and crotch rashes if you spar too long. But, it’s the tradition, so I did it… for 20 years… before going, “ok, enough.” We’re now wearing grey jogging pants, and a t-shirt of whatever belt color you are at. The students love it. I have a plain black shirt that’s made of some new sweat-whisking material, and I freaking love it.

We’re also doing weight training, as part of regular class. This is what they did before WWII; there are a variety of tools they used for resistance training while doing karate-related movements: gripping heavy jars, and swinging or pushing hand-held weights (usually taken from fishing or farming equipment). We spend almost no time punching air. We’re punching bags, or each other.

I think part of what opened me up to making this changes has been working for a Japanese company, and marrying a woman who lived in Japan for a decade. There are many aspects of Japanese culture that she and I really enjoy, but we also understand quite clearly that we are not Japanese. I am free to be loyal to the best parts of tradition, without being a slave to the parts that don’t make sense in my life.