Duck, Duck, Gray Duck

Rachel and I hadn't seen each other since 2017 - an almost unforgivable sin - so we decided that the best way to ask forgiveness was for Jon to take a trip to St. Paul, Minnesota

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Christmases Long, Long Ago: Countdown Week 4

Jon revisits some Indiana memories and shares a delicious cocktail concoction that he learned about when he moved to North Carolina, and Rachel recalls the sensory impressions associated with various Christmas markets she has visited throughout her young(er) adulthood by providing a recipe for the classic German seasonal hot drink Glühwein.

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Christmas Special 2020

“Camille understood that people often wanted to erase the pain of what they’d been through, to reinvent the past and their part in it.”
-Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites

Around this time of year, we are frantically trying to buy and wrap all the perfect presents, decorate for the benefit of ourselves and guests, prepare for long-distance travel or hosting the perfect holiday party. For all the hardships and weirdness 2020 has brought,

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R, Matey!

R is a really interesting sound. Or rather, it's a letter that has an interesting range of possible pronunciations. It can be rolled or glided in the back of the throat like in some dialects of German, trilled in the front like in various Spanish dialects, or pronounced as a fairly tight, fluid liquid up against either the palate or alveolar ridge, like in English. In some Asian languages, R and L aren't well defined,

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Ask Me Why I Don’t Eat Meat

My dad just sent a picture of a majestic buck standing in the yard of my childhood home, with my parents’ dormant vegetable garden in the background. Right now, with the blog and the book ever-present in my mind, I was reminded of my first ever attempt at writing an essay for Superman and God, one that arose from an advocatus diaboli argument Jon and I were having one Sunday morning at the IU library.

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No More Feckless Pondering1

Near the end of her book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, psychology professor Kristin Neff asks if you could go back in time and change something, would you do it even if it meant you would no longer be you? For a lot of years, perhaps decades even, my answer would have been an emphatic "yes!" But recently, a series of experiences and decisions conspired to bring me to this moment,

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Intros

Superman and God is the brainchild of Rachel Bachmann and Jonathan Tweedy. Beginning as an arbitrary book title suggestion in the Fall of 2001, it gained traction in our minds over the years, simmered on the back burner through the ups and downs and twists and turns of our lives and our friendship, and then started to boil over when we reconnected several years ago. Initially intended to be a collection of essays, it evolved from a book idea into a blog idea because of the immense diversity of the discussions that we find ourselves wrapped up in whenever we talk.

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