#1 "Expectations" -- Don

Welcome to our public conversation.

I'm just going to go ahead and put this out there: I love my daughter Olivia deeply, but we do not agree on some really important stuff.  I blame her mother.  (I keed, I keed).  It's okay.  The truth is it's not all that important to me that Olivia agree with me on everything or even most things -- even the really fundamental, nitty gritty stuff like religion, relationships, and the correct placement of condiments on sandwiches.  As long as I get my chance to have my say and she's still willing to speak to me afterwards, I guess I'm willing to settle for that.  And since she's over 21, and I can no longer threaten to ground her, I reckon I have no choice but to settle for that.

Although -- to be perfectly honest -- there's plenty of subjects in which we're more or less in complete accord (I like many of her favorite new bands), it's our differences that drive our passions and challenge our capacity for tolerance.  A few years ago, Olivia decided to go to college in Idaho, and I was dead set against it.  Not only was the school 1500 miles away, but it was a church college and I have a long history of being hostile to anything officially sanctioned by her church (Olivia is a steadfast Mormon and I'm a diehard agnostic).  After much cajoling and soul-searching (at least on my part), we came to a quiet entente: she would go to BYUI and I would do my best not to complain unceasingly about it.  How well that's worked out is an excellent example of how our world-views are more likely to collide than converge.

Olivia and I have decided that over the coming year we would try and maintain a blog in order to share our perspectives on a little bit of everything from the superficial to the sublime.  While neither one of us expects to be "the voice of our generation," I expect that the differences in our perspectives will offer some interesting and thought-provoking reading. At the very least, this blog will give us both an outlet to ramble on about the wide variety of topics that we've selected (see the "Coming Attractions" link at the top of the page) and may offer our readers a chance to see how an aging, married, 50-something, agnostic hillbilly with a Ph.D can keep a frank and loving relationship with his 20-something, single, sincerely LDS, working-enough-to-get-by, adventure-seeking daughter.