How Happy is the Little Stone

Chaos theory - and what I really want to tell them

2012-02-03T21:48:00.000-08:00

At school, during an off moment, - the beginning of class, maybe, while the teacher is taking roll, or waiting for a group to make their way to the front of the room - there is a functional chatter that comes over the classroom. I love this chatter, one, because it means my students are alive – which, in the middle of a compelling lecture on Chaos Theory, I am not always sure is true – and two because it shows that they are caring about something – which is my dream for them. But the chatter carries with it, also, for the teacher (at least the new teacher) a hint of anxiety. What you don’t realize when you are a student that you do realize as a teacher (I could definitely write an entire book on this topic) is that any nervousness you might have over the teacher overhearing the things you are trying to tell your friends, is only possibly one one hundredth of the nervousness the teacher feels over possibly overhearing you. If all my students were polite, they would keep their inappropriate comments, gestures, and noises to a dull roar, so that I, in turn, could politely pretend I didn’t notice them. But there are always a handful of future politicians among the bunch who are already in the habit of using their brains only subsequent to using their mouths (loudly and without attention to who is nearby), and ignoring these students would make me a terrible teacher. So when the functional chatter picks up, I must begin a careful tight rope walk of both hearing and not hearing everything taking place in the classroom. (Hence the hint of anxiety.) This is all the more true in a middle school classroom where you never want to hear anything they say, but almost always must address it. Because while high school students say inappropriate things that are also entertaining and interesting, middle schoolers say inappropriate things that are merely inappropriate and often downright mean.

So there is something special and almost relaxing about being in an EL classroom, where the functional chatter is still there, but consists of languages that are mostly not English. Do I know you’re talking about me behind my back? Yes. Do I have to pretend to care? No. Diminished anxiety. I currently have a class of 36 EL students who come from 13 different countries. 13! This simply fascinates me, especially because I haven’t heard of at least two of the countries and couldn’t immediately place a handful of them on a map. It’s a class of students who all know each other, and only a small minority take the class seriously. I won’t even get into my many opinionated hypotheses about why this might be true. Whatever the reason – or reasons – it means that I spend a disproportionate amount of time on behavior management. I admit I have become fairly cynical about the maturity level of most of these students, which means that I focus – perhaps two heavily – on sticking closely to my (brilliant) lesson plans – instead of telling them what I really want to tell them.

What I really want to tell them is that their native languages are potentially one of the greatest natural assets they have in America.

What I really want to tell them is that if they learn to communicate well in English – combined with their native languages – they can get themselves into any job or school they want in the country.

What I really want to tell them is that they should spread the beauty of their own cultures all around them, and take in the beauty of the new culture all around them, any chance they get.

What I really want to tell them is that it is this combination of cultures that is shaping who they are right this moment, and that is reason enough to love it.

I do not – have not – told them any of these things. I am busy, day in and day out, with the ordinary teacher struggles of a rowdy class: getting them quiet and print-equipped for SSR; monitoring their excessive use of hand sanitizer; repeating the day’s page number – or pointing to where it is written on the board – a hundred times in the hour; trying to avoid overhearing commentary I am loath to address…

But the fact is that all my reflection is only any good if I can apply it to practice. And I hope that a time will come in my teaching career when I will have the class organized, and managed, well enough that it becomes a place for all of these things to be said, and discussed. A place conducive to the real point of my lessons, the real value of an English class, and all those small truths about life that you can only really understand from thinking about them yourself. That will give them something to talk about!

-R.E.A.

If You Give a Kid a Post-It

2011-11-10T21:50:00.000-08:00

If you give a kid a post-it, he is going to stick it on his forehead.

If he sticks it on his forehead, you will ask him (politely, as though you are assured of his maturity) to take it off his forehead.

If you ask him to take it off his forehead, he will attempt to take four minutes to do so.

If he attempts to take four minutes to do so, you will tell him he has five seconds and begin counting down from five.

If you begin counting down from five, he will make a great show of rushing to remove the post-it from his forehead before you are finished counting.

If he makes a great show and rushes to remove the post-it from his forehead, he will inadvertently send it flying to the ground.

If he sends it flying to the ground, he will lean down to pick it up and then wave it in the air, asking, “Then what do I do with it?”

If he asks “What do I do with it,” you will tell him to set it in the corner of his desk and throw it away after class (foregoing the entire point of giving him the post-it to begin with, with the realization that your well-rehearsed plan will obviously be impossible).

If you ask him to throw it away after class, he will ask if he can throw it away right now.

If he asks if he can throw it away right now, you know what will happen: the rest of the class will also want to throw their post-its away and your sense of fairness and determined commitment to consistency will not allow you to tell them “no” when you told him “yes.” The entire class will get out of their seats to throw their post-its away and a good twenty minutes will pass before they are securely in their seats again, successfully defeating the purpose of the original five minute post-it activity, as well as any other activity you had planned for that day.

Because you know what will happen, you say, “no.”

If you say “no,” the student will set his post-it in the corner of his desk as you originally asked (seven minutes ago).

If he sets his post-it in the corner of his desk, he will notice it again fifteen minutes later. In his state of perpetual distraction, he will forget everything that happened fifteen minutes before. He will think that you must have just given him the post-it.

And if you give a kid a post-it, he is going to stick it on his forehead.

-R.E.A.

Halfway to Oregon, headed south

2011-08-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

It is understandable, I suppose, for a person to feel rather at odds with herself when – after 24 beautiful years at home, with a beautiful family, she finds herself suddenly with her bags packed and her car loaded down with boxes, and all the inextricable, indefinable, extraneous paraphernalia of a life that does not fit into 12 by 14 cubes of cardboard tossed haphazardly into bags of various shapes and sizes pretending order, and further finds herself traveling at 70 (or perhaps 75) miles per hour up a highway for seven hours until she reaches, finally, a city she only really knows about from fourth grade geography and a last year of intermittent exploration, a town 400 miles away if it is a mile, and then finds herself plopping herself down in a tiny, sweet, little apartment that cannot possibly be hers, but that, for the next year at least, most certainly is hers, and hears in the back of her boggled mind a voice (her own) telling herself that she has arrived home and that this girl is now who she is. So if I’m a little not myself, please forgive me. For the past three weeks, I have had the continuous, unsettling feeling that I just might have inadvertently snuck into someone else’s life and that my own still awaits me somewhere on the other side of this, whenever I come to my senses.

Let me assure you – and myself – that this blog is not to become the “Unending-Journals-of-Roya-as-she-Unpreparedly-Embarks-on-her-First-and-Startling-Journey-into-the-Real-World-and-all-that-that-Implies.” But between July 14 and now, there have been a hundred or so topics I have begun to write about and then discarded as being unqualified to appear before the public, no matter how small that public may be, or how little they may care. And now, this topic keeps waving its exuberant little arms in front of my face like a student with a question (though not a high school student, high school students being far superior to raising their hands and being, instead, absolutely certain of their propriety to discuss aloud any intelligible or unintelligible subject about which they hold an opinion, with the air in general if no one else will listen); or like a squirmy little squid, similar to the one in Finding Nemo who “inks” every time he gets anxious. And I could ignore it, like I do with many things I simultaneously want and do not want to write about. But it remains stubbornly the elephant in the room (do not excuse my long-winded, only moderately adept mixed metaphor here; it is ghastly and entirely inexcusable), and to skip over it would be like skipping over adolescence with the expectation of reaching adulthood painlessly and quickly but still with all the knowledge and experience those years acquire.

My new residence in Sacramento is:

418 miles from my home, my mom, my dad, my sister, my birds, and my cat;

413 miles from my hometown, my favorite coffee shop, my favorite bar, my favorite bean and cheese and breakfast burritos, and my favorite sandy spot; and

109 miles from the nearest glimpse of the Pacific Ocean

It is also:

4.1 miles from Jason’s front door;

17 miles from my school (go Aggies!) and all the cows, horses, and chickens who there abide;

11.6 miles from the Yolo Fruit Stand off of County Road 32B, and the Yolo Causeway, which spans the Yolo Wildlife Area, consisting of gorgeous wetlands always spotted charmingly with white herons who remind me of home; and

0 miles from my first own front door, paid for, in part, by the Federal government, and, in most, by my parents’ blood, sweat, tears, money, and love.

You can see how a girl could feel torn in a million directions.

When you are young – an adolescent – you think – or at least, I thought – that a day would come when adulthood would calmly and systematically enter my life and I’d be “grown up.” Then my full identity – who I “am” – would be reached. But as I have grown into what I can really only assume is adulthood (there unfortunately being no universal alarm to warn people of the impending event), I have come to realize that I am constantly becoming a new person – constantly renewing who I “am” based on new or amended ideas of who I “want to be.” And for me, being among the messier class of developers, this also means that I am constantly floundering about, between moments of self awareness, in states of “Who the hell am I?” and “Is this really me?” So here I am. (I think). A grown up. (I suspect). Living a new life. (Which is supposedly my own, but suspiciously unlike me). And I am almost positively, quite practically certain, that I am (at the very least) myself. (Though who myself is is quite up in the air right now.)

Luckily, I am used to being lost. I once got lost trying to find my way out of a hospital, got lost again attempting to locate my car in the parking structure outside the hospital, and then found myself in that section of Long Beach that consists entirely of one way streets, even though that particular section of Long Beach was, in relation to the hospital, in the opposite direction from my home. If the streets in Sacramento weren’t conveniently named after the alphabet and intersected by chronological numbers, I doubt I would be sitting in my living room typing this right now; I would probably be halfway to Oregon and still convinced that I was headed south. Come to think of it, if there is one thing that should make me feel at home in Sacramento, it is that the streets here were obviously named with people just like me in mind. Here is the city for lost wanderers who, on their weary ways up and down highways and across city streets, never located their destinations, but instead found a grid of avenues they could actually make sense of. And so they decided to stay

So in some ways, it’s a typical state of being for me. Maybe it’s from all the ocean flowing restlessly, relentlessly through my veins. Alas, I doubt I am so poetic as this. For me, change has always come rather gracelessly, with a resilient jolt rather than a gentle acceptance. It ain’t pretty, but I’m still mostly happy on the other side of it so I guess it’s all right. I can’t get over being gone, maybe mostly because I don’t want to get over it, because I’ll only accept this girl sitting right here on my couch if I know she is also still firmly the girl back home, only in a different light. And maybe it’s wrong to say I’m out of sorts and not myself. Maybe I am so very very much myself these days that I find it hard to recognize me.

-R.E.A.

There are no Mr. Smith's in Washington

2011-07-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

I’m a patriot when it comes to America, but a cynic when it comes to American politics. I think the United States Constitution is the greatest document to ever contribute to human society, but I think our modern government is a royal mess (with intentional use of the word royal). I think Capitalism is the only economic system that has a snowball’s chance of working but that the free market in this country has, for all useful purposes, disappeared. And I often think that the divide between political parties in the U.S. is unbridgeable, so vastly different are the principles that drive us. But sometimes I am wrong.

I am the first one to become disillusioned with people my age. Mom is constantly telling me that my generation is still young and we will figure some things out by and by and not be such grave idiots. But I mostly find I can’t believe her. People my age are so saturated with over-worked, feel-good clichés about war and peace, entitlement and fairness, diversity and racism, that we practically sweat irrational decision-making skills. We are more closed-minded than anyone – and particularly any young person – ought to be. And often, we are just plain dumb. In this day and age – and at our age – there is no excuse for being just plain dumb; at this point, it’s a choice.

We have been handfed absurd notions about “culture” and “diversity” under the guise of open-minded progressivism. Instead of teaching us how to become empowered using whatever assets we have, we have been taught that all minorities are entitled to something. Instead of teaching us that we are each different in inexplicit, intricate, and beautiful ways, we have been taught that everyone should remain true only to the stereotyped culture of their skin or native tongue, unless they are white, in which case they have no culture at all. In efforts to support diversity and equality, we have coined terms like “reverse-racism,” “tolerance,” and “color-blindness” without actually paying attention to the fact (or maybe all too aware of the fact) that these concepts achieve exactly the opposite effect. And now that we have come of age and have no excuse for merely parroting our elders’ opinions, we go right on believing these dangerous misrepresentations, with a little bit of bleeding-heart youthfulness thrown in. We know sociology and psychology and poetry like the backs of our hands, but possess absolutely no skill at using them creatively, realistically, or resourcefully.

My “critical thinking” class in college was so obscenely biased in one direction that the professor actually used fallacies to teach us fallacies. To him, critical thinking meant thinking what he did and fallacious argument meant any argument against him. Students jumped on board. Of course I’m the first to admit that a good rant-fest with people whose political beliefs are similar to mine is what I call a really good barbeque; I’m not above a good joke at the expense of the liberals; and sarcasm, well, let’s face it, I use it too much. But I think none of those things are particularly in place in a classroom setting that is supposed to be nurturing the skills of logical reasoning and strong persuasive argument, where objectivism should at least be considered and different opinions encouraged. Which is why I suspect that the title of the class was only a ruse for someone’s ulterior agenda, much like laws we pass to squelch small business, or reduce individual and state’s rights, or create a welfare system. The same thing happened with feminists in my Milton class (Lord help me, that was by far the worst!), and Muslims in my cultural studies class. Worse yet, this sort of thing doesn’t merely begin in college where we (hopefully) have more independent thinking skills. It begins much earlier in grade school when our teachers are still our idols and our opinions still so malleable as to be affected by The Little Mermaid.

But here’s what I, in my frustration, forget: that people in a classroom setting are much more influenced by the people around them than any of us would like to believe. It’s easy to think that because nobody calls bluff on the handful of people with the same and loudest opinions that they consequently agree with them. But it’s not true. Often the smartest and most logical people (on either side of an argument) don’t bother speaking up simply because they don’t feel it’s worth the effort or important enough in that particular setting. And it’s much easier to have principles than to fight about these principles with other people, just like it is much easier to keep talking once your bandwagon has filled up than it is to be the lone hand in the air admitting that you fundamentally disagree.

Welcome to the real world. Because I feel like this picture of the college classroom is a microcosm of the political environment that we, the citizens of the United States, face right now on a scale so much larger that it’s like navigating a dinghy out of Alamitos Bay to board a clipper bound for Cape Horn. Politicians are the professors and the people with the loudest voices in class. We are the students who come to learn and to think and to argue ideas, rationally, and for our own good and the good of those things we believe in. And I, perhaps more than any other type of person in America, am quick to become furious at the professors without ever turning to the guy sitting next to me and asking what he actually thinks. But I don’t buy it anymore – that the loudest and most powerful ones represent the way most of us feel.

In about the first fifteen minutes of watching the Republican debate in New Hampshire a couple weeks ago I had eliminated all but one of the candidates from my “list-of-people-I-might-actually-want-to-be-president.” I didn’t eliminate them for a slight disagreement either. Mild disagreements are inevitable and probably healthy. I eliminated them based on fundamental principles that are the core of my political beliefs. Principles that I could tell they either do not have or will not represent. The one guy I didn’t eliminate by the end of the debate I still know so little about that I would be unwilling to let him plan my day, let alone my country’s next four years. And these are the conservatives! Who are these people? I keep asking myself. At best they come off as immature, condescending, petty, and tiresome; at worst, unyielding, irrational, unprincipled, and vicious. And I become disillusioned. Not about our government so much as about my fellow Americans. I begin to believe that these Republicans and these Democrats represent my neighbors. And let me tell you, it makes me think none too fondly of my neighbors. It’s enough to make me wonder if they’re trying to pit us against each other. But if conservatives in Washington are not adequately representing the values that I hold, then why am I so quick to assume that conservative and liberal politicians are adequate portrayals of the conservatives and liberals around me? Indeed, why are we all so eager to vote in people who are inadequate portrayals of who we want in office merely because they claim that they are more like us than the next guy? Which is why I’m beginning to believe that they definitely are not.

If I had to guess I would say I am more like the liberals I know here on earth than the conservatives orbiting around their self-made lunacy up in Washington D.C. Politicians know as little about being a human in a human world as celebrities do, and, like celebrities, they masquerade as common Everymen with a bout of good luck and more money (and an apparently irrepressible need to sleep with people other than the ones to which they are married). They are not. Like all of us, they are stuck in their own delusions, but unlike the rest of us, their delusions are directly affecting and altering our own ways of life. Which is why they have a responsibility to resist those delusions that affect their constituents. That is what it means to take public office. That is why no ordinary, sane human being wants to do it. Imagine stripping yourself of your greatest delusions in order to represent the delusions of others. How naked and lonely and confused you would feel. With few exceptions, politicians do not do this. But in their valiant Everyman attire, they try to convince us that their purely self-centered actions are indeed in support of us.* We’ve made it very easy. Call yourself a Republican and I’ll probably believe you more than the guy standing next to you with a donkey on his lapel. Say “Healthcare is a right,” or “Tea Party” or “No on prop 8” and I’ll know what to think of you.

But there is something more important than the fact that politicians’ views do not encompass those of the citizens. What is more important is that the citizens recognize this. I say this because it’s true of myself. I judge liberals as a group much more harshly than I judge the liberals that I know personally. Certainly, we have fundamental disagreements and sometimes these disagreements are founded on belief systems and principles that inevitably separate us because we each want to be in the company of people who are good and righteous, however we define those two terms. But too often, I suspect, we merely let other people (namely the ones who show their big fat faces on TV) steer us where they will. Washington says: “Do you want money spent on defense or on education? and “We can bail out big business or let the economy (and all your jobs) tank.” and “We must either create a “Security Act” (to be read as “illusion of safety”) or be completely open to another terrorist attack.” We constantly take what we’re fed and debate it within Washington’s black and white terms: defense or education; debt or poverty; security or death; Republican or Democrat. But those aren’t the only terms. Washington is all about false dichotomy. But we don’t have to be. While we’re getting caught up in left and right, other options are being neglected. We have a flagrant tendency to compromise with the lesser of two evils, but why do we not fight harder for what we believe is not evil at all? It’s not easy to do, the way our system works right now. Not, I don’t think, because the system is innately flawed, but because of what we have let it become. I will punch the ballet on November 6for whichever Republican is on the ticket, even if it ends up being one of those five from the New Hampshire debate that I have already eliminated in my head. But I am not now and never have been a Republican. I am merely closer to being a Republican than I am to being a Democrat. And I’ll feel like I’ve done my best. But have I?

Voting is a big deal, I’m the first to shout this from the rooftops even though I live in a state that will never, ever go red, even if I punch that darn ballet until my face is. But voting is a part of the system – the good part of the system, the foundation of the system, if you will, and it does make a difference, even if sometimes in more subtle ways than we hope. I speak from experience when I say that yelling at the television screen can also be productive, like a cool breeze after a hot day of mosquitos buzzing in your ears. But I think the step this country most needs right now is smaller. I think the step we need right now is to talk to each other. Not on big platforms where mob mentality or those irritating people who feel like they have to be leading everything all the time or talking loudest or admiring themselves in the mirror shadow other people and make us believe that everyone agrees with them and that we are the odd birds out. Small scale. To each other. As friends. And neighbors. And generally decent people. And maybe stop talking about Bush or Obama or the Queen of England and what we are so convinced they have done right or wrong, and talk instead about what we actually want our country to look like. Maybe we will find that we have a more similar vision than we think. We will have disagreements about how to get there, of course, but perhaps we will not have so many disagreements about the types of people we want leading us there.

If conservatives want to prove to liberals that they are not heartless, they must explain – and show – how benevolence can be achieved using conservative principles. If liberals want to prove to conservatives that they are not irrational, they must explain – and show – how their ideals can be translated into an achievable reality. And certainly no politicians are going to be able to prove these things (being as they are, after all, preoccupied with photographing their own crotches). It takes individuals to make these connections. Individuals who are receptive to each other and to actually making positive changes, instead of trying to scam each other. Not trying to “win” but rather trying to reach common ground. Then, if the jokers in D.C. really are just using us in their own game of cards, we can all recognize it. This is not the time for catch phrases or the same old fall-back crutches we use against each other, but rather a time for patriotism, citizens coming together for a common cause, which is a country they love and want to improve, in a world that they also love and want to improve.

I say this now, after a brief political discussion with a friend, and a couple other small incidents that gave me inspiration and renewed faith in the people around me. We’re not so bad, I think most of us would agree. Tomorrow I’ll be blogging anew about how frustrating I find every last person on earth and how we deserve everything we’ve got coming. I’ll probably be hard-headed and unyielding and scathing and I’ll sound like a hypocrite. But I still think it’s worth the effort, this business of turning off the tube and talking to the people with whom we actually share the space we occupy. We won’t reach agreement – indeed in a progressing society, agreement should never be achieved – because we each base our thoughts on society and politics on different philosophies. But agreement is not the same thing as solidarity. I care more about my neighbor’s best-interest than my senator’s. And I care more about my friend’s cause than anyone abusing their power back east. And maybe, if I let discussions with these actual people guide my understanding, we could find genuine solidarity.

-R.E.A.

*In the Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines politics as: “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

The It's Not Worth It Advisory Freeway Sign Philosophy

2011-04-23T10:15:00.000-07:00

You know those electronic signs they have on the freeways now that flash up Code Adams or tell you the wait time for getting to specific destinations? Well, lately, along the 22 and 405, when there is nothing better to flash up on the electronic signs, they say:

HANDHELD CELL TICKET

$159+

IT'S NOT WORTH IT

And every time I see that message it reminds me of another issue I’ve been going over in my brain regarding healthcare and how to get people to lead healthier lives. I’ve been going off of a very specific example and analyzing why it bothers me so much and in this message on the freeway signs, I have found at least part of my answer. Let me give you a brief rundown of the healthcare issue I’m referring to. A particular public health school of thought supports the use of monetary incentive to induce people to lead healthier lives. For example, excess consumption of soda has been linked to increased risk of type 2 diabetes. The thought, then, is that if we place a tax on soda, people will be less inclined to purchase (and thus consume) as much soda. Furthermore, the tax money could be used to educate people about why soda is bad for your health. The resulting decrease in life-style induced type 2 diabetes, extrapolated, would allow medical resources (which – despite the heroic argument circulating around the country these days – remain limited) to be used toward unpreventable diseases. Now, I am all for a redistribution of how healthcare funds are spent, trust me! But this tax idea really irks me, and it’s not even primarily because taxes in general irk me. I have determined that it is all in keeping with my views on this electronic freeway sign message and how upstanding societies are built – a strain of ideas I have coined the It’s Not Worth It Advisory Freeway Sign Philosophy. (You heard it here first.)

I’ll start by saying (as you’ve probably already surmised) that I abhor these signs; they make me cringe every time I pass by them, which is about a hundred times a week. Not because they call it a “handheld cell,” which is vaguely redundant and cannot be attributed to common usage and which, worst of all, misrepresents the word “handheld” as meaning “something that you are, at this exact moment, holding in your hand.” And not because it so kindly informs me, without really giving me any useful information, how much I will be charged when my civil liberties to use my own damn cell phone on my own damn time are shamelessly inhibited by superfluous laws. (Not useful because, let’s face it, all it really leaves me wondering is under what circumstances will my fine actually be on the + side of $159.) The reason these particular signs really excite my gag reflex is because of the fabulously condescending third line: IT’S NOT WORTH IT.

Now call me paranoid, but when a random sign who doesn’t know my little silver Mazda from the random silver Mazda two cars away, much less me from the other random Mazda driver, on a random freeway tells me that something is or is not worth my doing, it necessarily makes me mildly suspicious. The reason being, of course, that besides the fact that the sign is inanimate and thus can’t actually formulate its own advice, it also fails to take into consideration the thirteen million different things that may be going on in my life that would make a handheld cell ticket of $159+ worth it to me. I know, in this country, we are very eager to join everyone into one beautiful and disgustingly unvaried mass of “color blind,” “non-sexist,” socioeconomically “equal” sheep, but let me suggest that we are all, in fact, very different. If you will – at least momentarily – accept this premise, then it is possible to suppose all sorts of situations in which the ticket would indeed be worth it to a given individual. What if I am a pregnant millionaire about to go to into labor and I couldn’t get in touch with a single person I know before I left the house? My water has broken and I am driving myself to the hospital because I know it will be quicker than waiting for the ambulance to get there and because, more importantly, my 89 year old grandfather is dying of lung cancer at the very same hospital toward which I am headed. What is $159+ really worth to me then? What if my friend of 25 years is suicidal and I am attempting to talk her out of jumping off of a high-rise building while simultaneously driving to her house to see if I can bodily save her life myself? What if it’s something smaller? What if I am on the phone with the love of my life and my best friend after an exhaustingly depressing week and it is the first time I have laughed the entire day? To hell with drinking on a Thursday night, I’ll spend my hundred bucks talking on the phone on my way home from work. What if I am some delusional, transcendental idealist with some ridiculous ideas of nonconformity and I want to disobey the law and I want to be pulled over so that people will understand the plight of the politically oppressed? Don’t tell me, oh-ye-sign-of-great-presumption that you know what $159+ and a cell phone conversation are worth to me!

Okay so it’s not the sign I’m mad at. It’s the bureaucratic force that decided it would be a good idea to look down from a high seat of grandiose power on the peon citizens who pay their paychecks and imply to all the supposedly adult and responsible people (responsible enough, anyway, to be given driver’s licenses) that they are school children who need to be instructed on how to make judgments for their own lives. Instead of informing me that there will be a fine for breaking the law and then having the decency to allow me to weigh my risks and benefits in this regard, they instead instruct me – in what they pretend is a sort of witty and helpful commentary – to follow their rules for my own benefit. (Instead of informing me that excessive soda consumption causes increased risk of diabetes, they force upon me what they pretend is a generous and helpful incentive, to follow their rules for my own benefit.)

What if instead, they treated me like an intelligent, reasoning being? (Now, I know it’s a big step to attach those characteristics to human beings as a whole, but if we don’t use that assumption, then it follows that they are just as akin to chimpanzees as I, and thus we are still on equal footing). What if they told me straight, “Hey, Roya, we don’t give a rat’s ass that you think this law is unconscionable. It’s a law and if you break it, we are going to delight in pulling you over and we probably won’t even help you scrape out the spare change from under your car mats to pay the $159+ that you now owe the state.”? (What if they told me, straight, “Hey, Roya, we don’t care that you love soda so much that you can’t pull your fat ass together enough to refrain from drinking it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And we don’t care that you now have diabetes. We’re not paying for you to get fixed, because, frankly, there are people who deserve medical care more than you do.”?) Is it possible, that if we as a society, made the assumption that people were going to be responsible for doing the right things for their own selves, instead of being connived into doing what we as a collective think is best for them as a collective, is it possible that people would then find it necessary to actually take responsibility for themselves? We all complain about dumbing down American schools. Why are the schools being dumbed down? Because we don’t want to tell the kid who doesn’t learn math as quickly as the Einstein sitting next to him, “I’m sorry life is harder for you kid, but suck it up, embrace who you are, work your ass off, and be a good person anyway.” We don’t want him to feel this vast unfairness. So we take care of him for him. We say, okay, you only have to know as much as the dumbest kid here. But who are we really crutching? As always, the people who are going to take advantage of the system. The ones who would be amazing and brilliant if they took responsibility can now slide by on nothing and populate our world with dopes. Because that’s all we expected of them.

What bothers me is this idea that people who have more knowledge or power in a particular aspect of life are so quick to insult the intelligence of the people who, for many different reasons, lack that same knowledge or power. But that is not what knowledge and power are all about. People who we put in charge of our government – people who have the education to be our healthcare leaders – should not be persuading us to believe certain things. Rather, I argue, their job – if they are indeed public servants – is to help bridge the gap between the vast amount of knowledge they have acquired from devoting their lives to a certain subject and the understanding of those of us who have devoted our lives to other subjects. Thus allowing us to place as much trust in them as our own intelligent and rational brains suggest that we do; thus acknowledging that the difference between us is not intellect versus stupidity, or superiority versus inferiority, but rather expertise versus novice. And I really think if we can make that distinction, citizens will become more involved in their own lives because they will realize that society and community are not sociological concepts that ebb and flow around them, as though disjointed from their opinions and actions, but rather that they themselves are society and community and they must make it what they will (dumbasses driving people off the road, life-style induced diabetics, or healthy, resilient, considerate individuals).

Will there be casualties? Most definitely. Will there be innocent casualties. Unfortunately, but inevitably, yes. But at some point we have to recognize that a society that artificially crutches people’s weaknesses in order to “protect” them nurtures individuals who become too lazy, apathetic, and irrational to make their own responsible decisions. And in that society, the number of casualties - innocent and otherwise - will be vastly greater.

-R.E.A.

Camellia February

2011-03-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

February must be camellia month in Sacramento. There may be other camellia months here, but February is the one I have been witness to and thus the most special to me. I have always loved camellias. Loved them for their sweet, ruffly bursts of voluptuous color. Opal and crimson and blush and so large and moonish and perfect that they make you wonder why roses get all the credit when they exist in a world with camellias. Loved them for their round marble buds with just the faintest tips of petal showing at the edges, hinting at what they might be, surrounded by soft coats of gentle spring green. Loved them for the two in particular who stood gracefully by the front door at our Birchwood home and for the way they look, bobbing charmingly in shallow bowls of water. And so, I thought, I loved the camellias as much as a person could love them. And then I met February in Sacramento. Here, in February, the camellias are in bloom on nearly every front lawn and in hedges along the side walls of apartment buildings. They are covered, covered in blooms, their strong branches hanging heavy with flowers and scattered about in the grass are the fallen petals of flowers left long and glorious on the limb. Camellia trees resound. If you have ever loved a camellia, you should see them when they are trees. Not cropped into unhappy square hedges of awkward heights, camellia trees are resplendent in their low, exuberant grandeur. Until the camellia trees, I had thought of my drive through the grapevine this trip with a small hint of sadness that I had come too early yet to see the lupines scattered among the poppies on the mountains. But if I had made it for the lupines, I may have missed the February camellias and so I know that the timing was right after all.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about muses. It may seem like muses have nothing to do with camellia trees or camellias with muses, but for me, they most definitely do. Writer’s block, the opposite of the muse, I don’t believe in. I suspect that any person staring at a blank page covered endlessly in empty blue lines, or an empty computer screen with a lethargically blinking cursor, must necessarily find her stream of thoughts and words strained in the face of all that expectant potential. But that’s not writer’s block, that’s just distraction. Like how sometimes at night when the silence is so complete in the darkness that it pounds in your ears and you can’t fall asleep, so tense are you, listening attentively for any faint sound of proof that you haven’t gone deaf and that the world is still breathing around you. And I know some people have a fear of putting words down on paper if they are not polished and complete and wise. Indeed, I ken that fear well. But that is not writer’s block either; that is a nervousness to commit and an insecurity over the relevance of our own intelligence. I don’t believe in writer’s block because there really is no actual block. Not even in our frightened, unintelligent, inarticulate brains. Just the whole world going around and around and waiting for us to write it. Besides, I have a cure (yes, I realize that I can’t believe in a cure if I don’t believe in the problem. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”). But I have a cure, nevertheless. The cure for writer’s block is a word. What word, you ask? Any word. The first one that comes to mind. The last one that comes to mind. Whichever one you put down on the paper. It doesn’t even have to be a real word. It could be something like scklerge. The cure for writer’s block is scklerge. That’s it. Just write scklerge down on your paper, or type it down on your computer, and voilà, writer’s block is banished. It never existed. If you find scklerge less than inspiring, follow it up with another, better word. Something like clarf or ricochet or malarkey. Malarkey is particularly fitting in meaning as well as pronunciation. So maybe when I say I don’t believe in writer’s block, what I really mean is that I don’t waste my time with it.

But muses I will waste my time with. Muses, I believe in. (In the spirit of: if not the con, the pro; if not the yang, the yin), I don’t believe in a something that keeps me from writing, but I believe in a something that facilitates it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it is an obstinate hope that even when I’m feeling my most droll and un-unique, there is something that can raise me up before I lose myself entirely. Something that reminds me of the beauty and rapture in the world around me, that reminds me of God and grace and love and freedom and nostalgia and heartache and tragedy and sadness, and long, lingering, humid summer twilights, and fireflies.

The original muses lived on Helicon and Parnassus, mostly, when they weren’t rendezvousing with the gods on Olympus, and there were three or nine of them, depending on whom you ask. Actually, it’s silly to say they were the original muses because I suspect that as long as mankind has existed, so has the muse. Certainly Adam and Eve found something to inspire them: the God who created them, the great blue sky, the bounty in the garden in which they lived, even perhaps, in the whisperings of a beguiling serpent. So I don’t think the muses of classical Greece were really the originals, but certainly they are the most famous.

If those geniuses of yore ever graced us modern-folk with their presence, I would hope most for a visit from Polyhymnia, of the nine younger muses. Polyhymnia is the singer of songs to the gods, and though I am far from presuming that I may follow in her shoes, I think that she embodies what I aspire to in life and in art: a grateful recognition of all that has been offered me by the Powers That Be and a rejoicing through the way I live and work. Also, Melete, (of the three older muses) the muse of practice. For me, that is precisely what my writing is born of. I lack the natural gift that would enable me to sit down and weave the truths of light and darkness into an impeccable story in a day or a heartbeat. If I wait a month before I write again, I am as rusty as an old garden latch, the strings of my story partly unraveled, loosened, and all but lost from my grasp and it takes time for me to find them again and put them back together. For me, practice makes up for the natural talent that I lack, and if it weren’t for the ragtag pages of my journal, I would hardly be able to call myself a writer at all. If Melete deigned to visit me here in the 21st century, she would doubtless come through the pages of my journal. Melete is also reported to be born from the movement of water. And certainly, my greatest lone inspirations have come to me out of the crashing waves, when I have sat, my toes buried in sand, watching the sea gulls and the vast freedom of the sky mingling into the ocean on the shores of my hometown. After all, if Melete was ever to come to me, it would probably be there, up out of the sea at Seal Beach, and indeed, maybe she has.

Mona Lisa was also a muse, from what I hear, and her great tragedy is that she sits now in a museum behind a glass wall and a velvet rope where people can admire her only half-heartedly from a distance without ever getting close enough to feel all that she once inspired. And what about Poe’s raven? Creepy, to be sure, but if anyone were to have or create a creepy muse it would be Poe. Keats’ Fanny Brawne, though he seems a bit melodramatic (but whose to judge one man’s muse from another?) Shakespeare appealed to the muses so frequently that they may almost have become tired of hearing him call, but apparently not tired enough to forsake him entirely.

How many times a day does a person need a muse? I suppose it depends on the person. Maybe the muse comes naturally to some people. So much so that they no longer notice its whispering in their ears and only think that that is the way life is, perpetually inspiring. And then maybe there are those who are so unfamiliar with the muse that they don’t even miss it, and inspiration to them is only an unreality, something that other people talk about, that doesn’t touch them. But I suspect most of us are somewhere in the middle and we find our muses here and there, along the roadsides and scrappy byways of our lives. Sometimes they are people, sometimes mystical, sometimes neither. Sometimes they are great and poignant, like the muse we find in a brilliant sunset. Sometimes we must recognize them where they lie, neglected and murky in the gutter somewhere, and we pick them up and wipe them off, tenderly, because we suspect they are more than what they appear to be. Sometimes they are not; sometimes they are merely pieces of sewage-y tumbleweed. But sometimes they are a muse disguised, the lyric in a song that hits us with shocking fierceness, uplifting and motivating in all its honest simplicity; or the color white, splashed unmarred on a large surface, that makes us think of vibrant brush strokes and potential and reminds us of the great, blinding gift of sight. I once had a muse in the shape of a small grey mouse who ran across my path for a fleeting moment and then disappeared forever from my sight...but not from my vision. I have found more muses in raw wood than I can probably count. And also a hundred million muses that dwell in fire. And there is a special kind of muse I find only in the smell of old book pages, and another in the new ones. I don’t think you have to be a parent to have found a muse in a child’s laughter. And there is a muse, for me, in a February camellia tree.

I don’t take any kind of Calvinistic view of the muses. I don’t think they are divinely sent to a chosen few who, effort or no effort, are graced with their presence and all the diversity of wealth it invokes. No, to me, a visit from a muse is as hard of work as the art she inspires. Muses do not come to those who sit lazy and self-satisfied on the sidelines of life, waiting for the desert to which they believe they are entitled. In fact, it seems to me, that muses must find entitlement nearly as abhorrent as apathy. A muse will not come to you for nothing. You must find her. Wherever she is, on any given day, at any given moment. Through listening or guidance or a long-overdue adventure. Through curiosity. And it seems to me that it is worth it to try forever and ever, whether you mostly strike out or your hard work is oft rewarded, to find inspiration in things that are yours to see and hear and feel and think. Muses come to those who seek, and sometimes you find them in wayside places and unexpected forms, waiting for you to notice. And you know they are there because of the gentle but indelible way they grace your life, and everything, at least for a moment like the beat of a hummingbird’s wing, changes.

-R.E.A.

Oh, Wisconsin!

2011-02-26T19:50:00.000-08:00

Over the past few days, as things in Wisconsin escalate to atrocious levels and I read the protest signs in the videos on TV with growing irritation and think again that protesting is all well and good as a Constitutional right, but it sure doesn’t bring out the best in the individual, I feel a growing self-induced pressure to develop an educated opinion on the topic. For one thing, I am going to be a teacher. Those are my future colleagues out there and no matter how badly modern-day unions heighten my gag reflex and make me lose faith in American humanity, I would like to understand the situation as it relates to them, and also as it relates to me as a citizen. I also would like to form an educated opinion because I have an interview for a teaching credential program in a few days and Jonathan so kindly brought to my attention that they may ask me about this. Oh great. Chalk one up for absolutely not getting into this school. And thank God I had some interviews before this whole thing started or I would really be in the fire.

My problem is, that as I continue to research this current event, I keep getting hung up on the most basic moral issues I have with the entire process taking place in Madison. I have an enormous problem with people blatantly NOT doing their jobs and being legally ensured that they will not be fired for it. I don’t care who you are or what you do, if you are not doing your job, you shouldn’t be getting paid for it. I read an article once about the government offering agricultural subsidies to some Amish farmers. The farmers agreed to stop growing the crops, but they refused to take the proffered government money. They said that they would not take money for work they did not do. I was fairly young, but I can remember having such a profound respect for the integrity behind the Amishmen’s decision. It has always stuck with me and I think of it from time to time, when questions of work ethic come up in my own life. Though I would not have blamed the farmers for taking the money under those circumstances, I would want to be the type of farmer who did not take the money, despite the burden it might place on me.

The point is that if we want to hold our teachers or any other workers to high standards, if we claim that we want them to be competent and diligent, we must expect a level of professionalism and work ethic. And yet, unions nurture an utter lack of any of these positive characteristics. If people cannot motivate themselves to have these qualities (which, I have to say, I would greatly hope my children’s instructors would be able to do), there should at the very least be a risk in the workforce of losing your job if you lack them. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think people shouldn’t be allowed to protest. But if they want to protest under the circumstances that they are protesting, it should be a choice between going to the picket line and keeping their jobs. If they are adamant enough about their cause; if they truly feel that a vast injustice is being done and it needs to be stopped; if they can afford to hold staunch principles over the need to make a living, they will risk their jobs for the cause. And who knows, if it really is such a terrible wrong being committed, if the conditions really are unbearable, enough people will protest to make it dangerous and unlikely for their employers to actually fire them. This is the basic premise of a protest as it should be. But the inherent risk is a necessary part of the process. Otherwise, picketing simply becomes a platform for whiners.

I also have a problem with people who are in any of the “caring” professions going on strike when they should be with the people who need them. I’m not saying that a teacher’s altruism should outweigh his desire to make a decent living. Trust me, that is the last thing I’m saying; I don’t put a whole lot of faith in the common altruist. But if you want to convince me that teaching is an important profession, necessary for our children and our society and thus deserving of good pay and good benefits, first show me that you care more about your students than your special interest groups, and, more importantly, that you believe that your job is so important and necessary that you would not dream of missing days of work if it is not directly benefiting your students.

Furthermore, when people get into a group like this, it truly brings out the very worst in them. The signs people hold up at these sorts of fiascos are embarrassing at best and ignorant, fallacious, and disgusting at worst. I understand the need to make your voice heard. But then let your voice be intelligent and rational. Strongly support your opinion instead of coming up with angry tag lines that insult opposing opinions without actually proving that yours are superior. Don’t blindly repeat the ranting coming out of a nearby megaphone, like a bunch of Hitler-Jungend. Say something of value and convince people that you are right. If you tell me that it is impossible for a group to cause a stir in this way, I will tell you that you are wrong. What you really mean is that it is easier for a group to cause a stir the other way and I do not think this is a legitimate or convincing reason for doing it.

And don’t even get me started on unions. The modern-day union is as far from the original American unions of its ancestry as I am from Xerxes the Great. The risk of getting your arm ripped off by an unruly, poorly built textile machine is not the same thing as having to work an entire four hours straight without a fifteen minute break. Wake up and smell the coffee, people, just as it is your right to quit a job whenever you want to, it is an employer’s right to fire you anytime he wants to. Does that make life more risky? Certainly. Does it lower your job security? Perhaps. Or maybe it effectively balances out the job market. If you are good at your job; if you are competent and qualified, and financially and professionally “worth it” to your employer, you will get a good job. If you want a raise, because you need it and you think you deserve it, it is up to your employer to decide how “worth it” you actually are. Are you so good that they can’t afford to lose you, even at a heightened cost? Or maybe they can afford to lose you. Then it’s up to you to decide how much you need the raise. Do you need it because you want to take an extra vacation in June? Is that vacation worth the inherent stress and risk in finding another job that will pay better? Or do you need it because you can’t afford to survive without it. If you can’t afford to survive, the inherent stress and risk in finding another job that will pay better is probably worth it. There is a balance here between employer and employee needs. And a company that consistently mistreats employees, through poor working conditions, low pay, or any other way, will lose qualified employees to companies who are willing to take better care of their employees. Maybe if the education system was run this way, we would not have so many problems with the quality of our teachers and our curriculum.

Now enter the almighty Union. Why people who have a good thing (with a few unfortunate side effects) are willing to scrap it all for a bad thing (with a few hundred unfortunate side effects) is beyond me. Capitalism...gone. Democracy...gone. It’s all very inspiring. What used to be an attempt on the part of the working class to avoid being abhorrently taken advantage of, has now become a success on the part of the American privileged to have the “perfect job” (one in which they get an inflated salary, other people paying into their retirement funds, an inability to be fired regardless of competence level, and as much opportunity to get paid for not working – or working poorly – as for working at all) without having to have any qualifications or put forth any effort (besides, of course, the effort it takes to march around carrying pre-made signs and clamoring about unfairness).

So that’s how I feel about the situation in Madison. It has nothing to do with Walker – who I suspect is a jerk – and very little to do with the specific grievances of the specific people picketing in this specific circumstance. It is difficult for me to separate their problem out from the greater more general problem under which they are functioning. Do I want good things for workers? Yes. Do I support peoples’ right to assemble? Absolutely. But I neither support nor respect the manner or the pretenses of these protestors...or indeed of the senators who left the state. Lord help me when I have to join the Teachers’ Union!

-R.E.A.

I challenge anyone to tell me one thing that is innately wrong with being rich

2011-01-24T23:09:00.000-08:00

I am the type of person who has never once in my life expected to grow up to be the kind of person with a whole lot of money. Okay, okay, I’ve fantasized about winning the lottery (although I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life). And it’s true that I never wake up in my imaginary grown-up house without looking out onto my imaginary 60,000 acres covered in imaginary trees and gardens and horses – and all those things, unimaginary, cost money, to be sure. But when I boil myself right down to reality, I have always been able to face the fact that my career choices (and yes, I have gone through several hundred) have never inclined even slightly toward the path of making-me-a-lot-of-money. So this is my disclaimer to anyone who will try to overturn my upcoming argument by saying something like, “the only reason you say that is because you have a lot of money/will have a lot of money/come from a lot of money/etc./etc./etc.” Do I know rich people? Yes. I even love a few of them. I also know and love some poor people. What I’m trying to say is that this argument is not a personal one for me. I am not defending “my people” or the “people I want to be.” I am simply trying to draw attention to what I consider a grave flaw in our developing American social mentality.

The other day I was watching some news commentary show and Roseanne Barr was on. (Now, as a side note, I would like to know how it happened that every Tom, Dick, and Harry Hollywood entertainer is suddenly considered to be an authority on politics simply for having an opinion. Just because the world knows your face [okay, the whole world might be a little bit of a stretch for Roseanne Barr, but at least anyone in the country born between 1952 and 1992], doesn’t mean you are magically validated to have a relevant argument. And yes, if you’re wondering, this DOES have to do with my pent-up aggravation over not being able to get paid to rant MY political opinions on national television.) Okay, so I am not going to insult liberals by grouping them all in with Roseanne Barr, because any rational human being of any political persuasion would only need to watch her speak for about two minutes before realizing that, regardless of the righteousness of her opinions, she is, in general, an irrational and inarticulate type of creature. But she did touch on something (over and over and over again) that I think is in keeping with many of the opinions in today’s America. Somehow, “Rich People” have become synonymous with “bad people.”

Now, I don’t know exactly how this came about, but I have some guesses. To begin with, most of the schmucks in Washington and New York and other places who are messing up our government and our lives are rich. And many of these schmucks are also bad people. I think we’re all in general agreement about that. But to group the two characteristics together is fallacious. (To say that somebody = A + B is not the same thing as saying he = B because he = A) Are they scumbags? Yes. But trust me, it wasn’t the money that made them that way. There is a concept we talked about in my domestic violence training class when we were discussing alcohol abuse. The general point was that, although alcohol may incite somebody to be violent toward someone else, it is not the cause of the violence. Id est, if a dude’s the type of person who hits his wife, he’s going to hit her with or without the alcohol. The alcohol just may make him feel more free to do it. I think this is exactly the case with politicians. If you’re a scumbag, you’re going to be one with or without the money; money just may make you more likely to pull a really scumbaggy move. So we can’t blame the corruption in our government and other areas of society on the money itself. Money just makes the corruption easier.

So what else is wrong with richness? Well, it makes poor people feel bad. And let’s face it, human nature being the way it is, even those of us who are not particularly poor always seem to find it extremely easy to list all the people who happen to be richer than we. What I mean is that Americans are privileged. Even people who are in America illegally are privileged. Before everyone gets their panties in a wad, let me explain that by privileged, I don’t mean that they are necessarily treated justly or rightly or that they have everything they want or need. What I mean is that, if you walk up to a person in, for example, the “Democratic Republic of the Congo” (which I put in quotation marks because it is neither democratic nor a republic), any person, – besides maybe some piece-of-crap government official or drug dealer – and give them the opportunity to leave the Congo and instead become an illegal immigrant in America, I bet you at least 9 out of 10 would take the opportunity. Why? Because for all that everybody loves to hate America for all her issues and inconsistencies (which I fully acknowledge she has), this country still has the highest standards for human rights of anywhere else in the world. That, my friend, is privileged.

I concede that you may be able to find some impoverished Americans who are on par with impoverished people in the rest of the world. But I suspect that the number is significantly, significantly lower than anywhere else. America also has an incredibly wide spectrum of incomes. Here you are not necessarily “rich” or “poor.” You can also be “middle class,” as well as “upper middle class,” “lower middle class” and any number of classes in between. And if you ask people what income “class” they are in, they consistently answer lower than the actual numbers imply. Maybe it’s because somewhere along the line, the concept of the American Dream changed to a delusion. Instead of America being the place where everyone has the potential to be wealthy, it became, in the minds of hopeful people, the place where everyone is entitled to be wealthy. So anyone who notices his neighbor has a nicer car (when I think about this, I am always reminded of the commercial where the guy is riding on his lawnmower in this pristine front yard in front of a nice house and he’s wearing this fake smile and he says, “I’m in debt up to my eyeballs...please help me.”) suddenly thinks himself poor and feels crappy about it. It does feel crappy to not be able to buy everything you want (obviously), but more specifically it feels crappy to not be able to buy the things you know would enhance the quality of your life. Here’s what I mean: it stinks to not be able to go to the store and buy the upgraded Apple iphone 4G with an eco-friendly sage green rubber case and $13 plastic screen guard to protect against any and all possible disasters that may occur on land or at sea. Everyone knows that stinks (okay, I’ll admit that I don’t even remotely want the upgraded Apple iphone 4G with or without eco-friendly protection, but you get my drift), but everyone also knows that you can’t always immediately have everything you want exactly when you want it. (Well, not everyone knows this. There was a little boy shopping with his mother at work the other day, carrying around a 40 dollar deluxe Lego set despite the fact that I personally heard his mother tell him eight times that she was not buying it for him. I’m pretty sure he didn’t know this lesson, especially gauging from his shrieks when she finally pulled the inevitable plug and physically pried the box out of shaking fingers. We all have our lessons to learn. Trust me, little kid, it’s still better to be young than to be old.) But most people know this lesson pretty well and they can come to terms with it. C’est la vie. But the line gets foggier.

I think everyone envisions a certain style of living for themselves. I don’t just mean, “oh, yeah, I want a nice car!” I mean, we all picture the ways we want to live our lives. As an example, I’ll paint you something similar to my personal picture: I’m somewhere rural. Somewhere with fields and trees and horses. I have a huge garden and I can things in the summer to eat in the winter. Every now and again I have a glass of wine with dinner. I drive a crappy old car, but it has four wheel drive and can take me wherever I want to go. I just toss my dogs in the back seat and jet. I run and hike a lot. Some weekends, I drive into town in my fancy pants and heels and go dancing. I write. In my grown-up picture, there is also a man (presumably my husband) and several children in my painting. (I’m not there yet, but I still have the picture). That’s it in a nutshell. But only the surface. What do these things really mean to me? They mean that I lead a healthy, active life: good food, good exercise. They mean that I work at a job that I love (writing). They mean that I feel good: physically, mentally, and spiritually. Those are the things I really want: health, happiness, security, peace of mind. My picture is probably vastly different than yours, but I bet a lot of our things mean the same thing to us. Do health, happiness, security, and peace of mind cost money? Not necessarily. But does my picture cost money? Absolutely. Money for land and seeds and wine and gas and dog food and running shoes and hiking boots and fancy pants, and high heels. (Wow, do a remarkable number of my things have do with spending money on shoes? I might have a problem. But that’s another topic.) My point is that it is much harder to accept the fact that we do not have enough money to purchase the things that give us the lifestyle that we desire, because they are so closely linked in our minds with the intangible things that we really yearn for (health, happiness, security, peace of mind). And we deserve these things. And we need these things. Do you see the fuzzy line between “things-we-want” and “things-we-need?” Running shoes are not imperative to my existence, but yet in my mind they are so closely linked with good health that they are practically the same thing. I want running shoes; I need good health. That’s the distinction. But even writing it down makes me feel awkward. Because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I am under the conviction that I need those running shoes as I need good health.

And right now, I am poorer than the guy down the street who can afford new running shoes anytime he wants them. Hell, he could even afford to buy me new running shoes along with his own. And his richness makes me feel bad. Or if not bad, at least frustrated, keenly aware of what I am unable to do. But does that make him bad? Is it his fault that I can’t afford my own running shoes? Is he undeserving of his running shoes simply because I can’t have mine? I would argue that his money situation and mine are mutually exclusive. They have nothing to do with each other and thus my feelings about my own situation cannot be blamed on his situation. Thus, the fact that the existence of rich people makes poor people feel bad also does not seem a valid argument for making “rich” and “bad” one and the same.

So what is so wrong with being rich? Ms. Roseanne Barr is not the only reason that I know we have this mentality against the rich in this country. For one thing, what is the deal with not having a flat tax system? If we are so eager to be “fair” and equal in this country, this seems highly hypocritical. I don’t care what you claim the purpose of having separate tax brackets is, what it ultimately does, besides everything else it may or may not do, is punish people who make a lot of money. Okay, maybe you will say that “punish” is not the right word. But at the very least, it is detrimental, discouraging to those who are “rich,” those who have, quite probably, worked just as hard to earn their money as the poor guy down the street worked to earn his. Take me, slaving away in a big bookstore with crappy pay. Do I work my butt off? Yes! (Did you not hear me tell you about the shrieking Lego kid; my job is exhausting!) But do I need any advanced skills to do my job? Not at all, really. My job could just as well be given to a reliable middle school student. How about Boeing’s IT guy? Could a middle school student do his job? Certainly not. Could I? Heck no! He’s working his butt off, just like I am, probably, but he’s got skills and his skills earn him money. So what? We tax the hell out of him for having skills? We call him bad? We assume he is corrupt and greedy and undeserving simply because he has paved a way for himself that makes him more money than we make?

President Obama thinks that “at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.” And Nancy Pelosi says that not only should we “equalize income,” but we should also, “limit the amount the rich can invest.” Now, I can understand people wanting to assist poor people, but what is this obsession with doing it by bringing down the rich ones? You know what a rich person becomes when you take away all his money? A poor person. If you keep up at that rate, you’re going to have used up all your rich people and then what will your poor people do? (None of which, of course, is even the point.) What I’d like to ask all the people who think that being rich is so terrible is: what characteristics should a person have to be a good member of society? It seems to me that, as a society, we should be targeting the types of people who are not upstanding society members, whether they be rich or poor, instead of targeting people off of the over-generalized assumption that because they have money they must have done something wrong. I challenge anyone to tell me one thing that is innately wrong with being rich. It does not behoove us as a society or as individuals to condemn someone based on jealousy or spite. Is there, then a good reason for condemning our rich, or has wealth merely become a scapegoat?

-R.E.A.

Meanderings of a musing bibliophile

2011-01-02T22:11:00.000-08:00

Ever since I was little, I have been slightly in awe of librarians. I’ve always suspected they have the most secretly joyful and subtly enviable profession out there in the world. Imagine, sitting all day in the middle of a room packed full of books. Old, brittle, well-read books that are perhaps outdated but none the less beloved. Books worn by curious hands, careful and uncareful, but yearning all the same. Yearning for something, whether they find the answer between the books’ pages or not. Yearning until they are satisfied and a new yearning takes its place; or yearning always unsatisfied in star-crossed happiness. The library is as much about the people who read the books as it is about the books themselves.

When I was little, I was also slightly in awe of librarians because my particular librarian, the one who checked me in and out when I came and went with my mother and our armloads of books, was stern and dower with a set scowl on her face, disinclined to talk or to smile. In my beautiful, young world, I had never met a grown-up who disliked me so I didn’t quite believe this could be the case with her, but certainly she didn’t appear to like me very much. In fact, what scared me a little bit was that I suspected that she was actually mad at me, for some past offence I didn’t know I had committed and for which, being unaware of what it was, I could never atone myself. The librarian never hesitated to tell people to hush up when they were being too loud, even when they were only little children, littler than I, there with their mothers. If you forgot to get your library card out before you set your books on the counter to be checked out, she just stared at you without saying anything until you realized your grave mistake. My library card, of course, was always ready, perched obligingly atop my book stack and I would stand on my tip toes and set the books down gently on the counter to avoid a reprimand.

The same lady is still my librarian and I wonder every time I go in if she remembers me growing up there. Year in and year out, I have tiptoed into that library, read, checked out books, studied, paid late fees. Sometimes months go by before I go in again. College studying and responsibility and a more expendable income make me a less frequent visitor of the dear old place. She never seems to change at all, though I’ve known her without knowing her for twenty one years.

But something is different. I’ve seen her laugh with some of the other librarians a time or two. And the other day when I went in I noticed that she got cold and had to put on her sweater – a very human action for someone I once suspected of being slightly supernatural. Also, I love her now, which always sheds a kinder light on people. I love her because I have known her almost all my life and I love her for what she represents to me and I love her for being slightly scary but good at her job just the same. I love her for all the things she must know and I love her for being the type of person I wish I knew better. And I’m not scared of her anymore.

The other day I took a walk to our new library to return a book. I love that I can walk to the library in less than five minutes now. Love that it’s tucked in right next to our puny city hall in what I think is the only shopping center belonging to this town. It is just a wee slip of a library. One small room with a handful of bookshelves lined up and a desk off to one side behind which the two librarians were standing. Two young, chatty, laughing librarians, eager to give us a tour of the room whose every corner we could already clearly see from where we were standing. They were nothing like my librarian. And yet, as I looked at them, standing there behind the library counter, I realized that the course of twenty years and the new, unfamiliar demeanors hadn’t changed anything. I am still in awe. Born of good-natured envy and heartfelt curiosity, and this great longing to spend my day sitting among these benevolent books. To walk around the little room and touch every one. To keep them shelved and organized; to hold the hand of a bright-eyed young reader and pull just the right book off the shelf and place it into his eager little arms. To make sure the bindings are crisp and the pages un-dog-eared and to tend to the old, worn tomes with glues and threads and presses. To be a keeper of books. To linger in the soft, dusty smell of them.

If my little corner bookstore ever comes into fruition – red brick mortared in, wooden bookshelves built up, small purring cat sprawled in a patch of sunlight. If I ever find myself behind an unassuming wooden counter, sipping hot tea, facing a little red door with a small bell eagerly anticipating the tentative entrance of some precious, curious customer, I hope that it will feel just like a library, warm and rich and full of the histories and heartbeats of the books and their authors and of the people who come to run their searching fingers along the shelves; old and young alike (books and customers), where money is only exchanged to keep the roof up and the cat fed. The kind of place that inspires fancy, and sagacity, courage. And awe.

-R.E.A.

A letter

2010-12-31T22:07:00.000-08:00

Dear January 1, 2011,

The 364 days following you have a lot to live up to. I have spent nearly 24 other years full of joy and beauty and grace and mercy and love and wonder and blessings. I have spent countless hours nestled in the sand and good books and the love of my family, feeling God and the world wash over me and wrap around me and I know what happiness is about. Just this last year, a hundred little blossoms in my life bloomed, for better and for worse. But mostly for better.

The prospects of things to come are enough to make my heart and mind do back flips every time I think of them. I have little inklings of where I will go and what I will do, and a hundred million emotions to go along with the inklings, mostly fear and excitement and a couple different kinds of bittersweet. But they are merely inklings and the real prospect of 2011 for me is all the wild, unruly, boundless uncertainty of it. The 364 days to come, dear January 1, hold a lot of responsibility in that boundless uncertainty.

I wrote once that 2010 would be either the best or the worst year of my life. It was neither. That was a frivolous, theatrical remark to make to begin with, and entirely impossible to quantify (though quantification is not nearly as relevant as it is sometimes supposed to be). But 2010 was beautiful and surprising and the grave fears with which I started it out were alleviated. 2010 was remarkable and unremarkable, as the best years are, and, what’s more important I love it with the fullness of my heart. This, too, places high expectations on the 364 days to come (large shoes to fill and all that).

Besides all this, the world is tens of billions of years old, and the pressure a single year must have to make a difference in the whole huge vastness of it must be rather daunting. Nor am I the only living thing placing a hundred million conscious and subconscious bets on the coming year (even excluding all the new year’s resolutions pertaining to exercise or weight loss). I don’t envy you the universe’s demands, 2011, although I suspect that they are linked exponentially to the greatness of your potential.

And I have no particular words of encouragement. Certainly the year is more adept at its own success than I. So long as it is reckless and upright and paradoxical, it must succeed magnificently and as for the amount of work we will all put it through, well that is the nature of its existence and I extend no pity. Like people, 2011 is entitled to nothing. Life is for living.

But this letter is to you, January 1, 2011. (Because perhaps the writing of a letter to an entire year is too intimidating for me.) But also because – if I may be so presumptuous – there are things I wish for you. Small day. Small moment. Things that are more within my realm than the hugeness of this whole year which will, ultimately, do-with-me-as-it-will.

Here are the things I want to tell you:

Wiggle your toes, January 1. Wiggle your toes in the Milky Way or in the Nile, or in some small, obscure, marshmallow cloud or creek somewhere and indulge in just being you.

The grave responsibilities of the world are not yours, though you play a hand in them. Play your hand with grace, but don’t let it weigh down your heart. The smallest of things – even one 365th of a whole – can make an enormous difference. Make that difference, but have faith that others will make a difference too.

You can be a sleepy day, January 1. With the whole year ahead. Be sleepy and gentle and soft, but also kind and generous and wonderful for you are setting this year’s stage, you are planting the year’s wildflowers, you are making the first impression.

Though you are small and fleeting, flourish, dear day. Be gusty and charming and confident. Don’t shy from challenge or sadness or change or other things-which-make-us-grow. Learn everything you can and if you must err (and you must), err toward sensibility before apathy and credulity before mistrust.

In truth, these are things I wish for you and me, both, January 1. And all “the good ones,” whatever corners and grand moments they occupy this year. It is nothing like the wisdom of the mountains or the ubiquity of the wind. It has neither the wit nor the timelessness of the writer-I-hope-to-be. It is, January 1, merely-me to merely-you.

With Love,

R.E.A.

P.S. Please write back.

It’s Christmastime and I don’t want to be like those people in the parking lots at the mall

2010-12-18T23:42:00.000-08:00

I am an angry driver. I know this because, for example, the other day I spent ten minutes parked in a parking lot writing down how I feel about turn signals. This is what I wrote:

“Turn signals are not optional. They’re a part of driving – or at least driving-as-we-know-it. If you’re the type of person who drives, you don’t just randomly get to be the type of person who doesn't use your turn signal. There’s a reason we don’t give six year olds driver’s licenses, besides the fact that their feet won’t reach the peddles. A car is a piece of heavy machinery that, without competent supervision, can drive over a cliff at 100 miles per hour, or ricochet around corners without warning the life-loving humans in the general vicinity.

“Putting on your turn signal should practically be a reflex. Like turning the lock before running out the front door, or shutting the toilet lid before you flush. Not doing it should feel more conspicuous than doing it.

“I understand that there are situations where a turn signal is not necessary – driving up the 15, for example, between Nowhere and Barstow, when you haven’t seen another car in 157 miles. But seeing as how the last time I drove around Long Beach without seeing another car for 157 miles was...never, I don’t understand why turn signals are so scarce around here.”

I also know I am an angry driver because I am only half kidding when I say I’m going to attach a light-up neon sign to my bumper that blinks the word MERGE in enormous letters every time someone fails to merge properly, a fairly simple task that a surprisingly large percentage of the driving population apparently never learned.

Every time I am stuck in traffic I am not only annoyed, I begin contemplating the dangers of overpopulation and considering the possibilities of launching the worst of the drivers around me into orbit around some other planet, not only relieving the traffic, but also relieving the human race on earth of a portion of its stupid gene. The only way to refocus my brain to anything less homicidal is to roll down my windows and start singing “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma” at the top of my lungs. I’m serious. I do all of these things.

I know my spontaneous anger at random drivers is (at least sometimes) irrational. I know I make driving mistakes all the time and have no way to communicate my apology to the person in the other car who is probably contemplating the possibility of launching me into orbit, or something much worse. Somehow I can’t seem to give anyone else who’s driving the benefit of the doubt. If you see my glaring, glazed-over face and my angry white knuckles death-gripped to the wheel, I am probably in the process of summoning the wrath of karma from wherever it resides in my dark mind down upon your head and - assuming karma even remotely listens to me, which I’m pretty sure it does not - you had better hope that you have done something in your life akin to saving starving orphans, as this is your only chance of redemption.

Anyway, the point is that I’m trying to be a less angry driver. I like driving. I like listening to my music loud and rolling my windows down and blasting the heater on my feet so my toes don’t freeze off (which, between the months of September and May they are consistently at the risk of doing). I like being lost and passing through places I never knew or cared existed and suddenly finding that I do care. It’s not the driving that I dislike. It’s the other drivers. And if I get right down to the root of the problem, it’s not even the other drivers themselves, the mothers-fathers-sisters-brothers-aunts-uncles-friends who are driving down the road. It’s the shameless, spineless, vast rudeness of the other drivers that really gets me.

I’ll be honest, when I first realized I had a problem, I considered alternatives to the obvious learn-how-to-manage-your-rage solution. For several months, I decided to try using my horn as a signal of my aggravation, not only in times of danger, but also when the driver in the other car was obviously a moron and needed to be taken down a peg or two. I realized this was a bad solution for two reasons. One, I never think to use the horn until it is too late, even in situations that are actually dangerous and where the horn could really come in handy. Somehow, I am unable to locate the great, giant anywhere-in-the-middle of my wheel and pound down on it quickly enough to make any sense. Come to think of it, perhaps I should get my reflexes or hand/eye coordination checked out by a doctor, as I can see how this could be detrimental in other aspects of my life. Second, the situations in which I contemplated using the horn began to get out of control. There are many, many let’s-walk-out-into-oncoming-traffic-with-our-two-strollers-and-fifteen-kid pedestrians I really wouldn't mind scaring the dumb out of instead of politely slowing down to a halt to accommodate their stupidity. The same is true for some bikers, skateboarders, and police cars...you can see how the idea was becoming more and more dangerous.

The thing is, I’m never actually rude to other people in traffic. I don’t believe in that stuff. I’m just blood-boiling mad by the time I finally get home and I’m really not thinking very kind thoughts about my neighbors either. In fact, I’m generally thinking that a planet with no such thing as neighbors – or any kind of people – might not be a bad idea. I've lived in suburbs my entire life and somehow I am still not even remotely used to how darn many people are here. We’re seriously like ants, teeming all over the earth, except we’re bigger, more colorful, and less organized. It’s not like road rage is my first hint that I should be living somewhere in the middle of 60,000 acres in Wyoming where my only company is the people I don’t wave off my property with a shotgun. And I don’t count PCH in any of my complaining here because I’m pretty sure I could drive 60,000 miles on PCH – people or no people – and not feel upset about it. It’s just that driving bumper to bumper down the street with obscene quantities of retail stores on either side of the road is pretty much the height of depressing. It’s so easy to begin contemplating all the numberless gorgeous places in the world that you've ever been, or never been and only dreamt about. And that way lies insanity.

But here’s the thing, it’s Christmastime, and, as you may have heard me mention before, I really don’t want to be like all those people in the parking lots at the mall. Besides which, I haven’t yet received a memo from God or the universe letting me know when the opportunity to squat on 60,000 acres in the middle of Wyoming may come my way, which means that, for the time being at least, suburbs are my fate. Seal Beach Boulevard, Tustin Avenue, Freeways 405, and 22, all the wonderful people of Southern California, these are my routes and driving buddies on the current road trip of my life. And since I have neither the power – nor probably, when all is said and done, the heart – to really send all these people into orbit around another planet, there are really only a couple things left for me to do if I have any chance of keeping my sanity through 2011: toss the map in the back seat, roll down the windows, turn up the heat, and hit play...”Santa Monica Freeeeewaaaaaaaaaaay, sometimes makes a country girl, bluuuuuuuue...”

-R.E.A.

Home is the most important place in the world

2010-11-24T08:14:00.000-08:00

One time when I was driving past IKEA, they had a giant sign stretched across their even more giant, blue building that said: “HOME IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PLACE IN THE WORLD.” Now, I have to confess that IKEA, as a store, pretty much gives me the creeps. Not because I have any silly hang-ups about mass produced furniture. And, in fact, their random sections of rugs and wine glasses and things really delight me if I have to be at the store to begin with. It’s just, have you ever noticed how it’s set up like this huge, life-sized maze? Like those terrible mirror mazes at fairs except that instead of running into yourself you run into furniture. And I don’t care how cheap or how delicious it is, there is something off about a giant furniture store serving breakfast in its own personal furniture cafe. It’s like it’s trying to be its own self-sustaining microcosm. Weird.

But the sign struck a chord with me. It’s trite, I know, and, in this case, an advertising gimmick. But yet it is so, so true. Harry Emerson Fosdick (who, incidentally, I think I would have disagreed with on a lot of things, but who I wholeheartedly agree with here) said, “He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland.” He was talking about home in the bigger sense. A home nation. But it’s the same gist. Most of us can name hundreds of places we would love to jet off to. Tropical islands and quaint mountain towns, exotic forests and five-star resorts. Many of us could even name several “places-we’d-live-if-we-didn’t-live-here.” But there is something about “home” that is distinct from its setting, its place on the map or in a country. There is something about “home” that is so much more important than how beautiful, or un-beautiful it is. Home has a tighter hold on our heartstrings even than that delightful place we most want to visit. At least it does for me.

Last week, my family moved out of what has been our home for the past 12 years. It’s funny how different a house looks when it doesn’t have you in it anymore. The family room, without our couches and tables looked bigger than normal. But my sweet, sunny bedroom with the marzipan walls seemed smaller somehow. The last 22 years of my life, indeed all my remembered life, save for a few select memories, I lived in that neighborhood, that town, that community. Standing in our empty family room, feeling the home all around me, I realized how well it knows me. There, under that roof, I figured out how to be who I am now. And I learned how to be happy on my own account. That house has seen pretty much every emotion I have ever had. And I love it.

Our new house is a dream come true for many reasons. And it’sbecoming home. But the transition from “just another house” to “the most important place in the world” is a gradual one. Though it sounds ridiculous, I miss the ocean. (Now 20 instead of 5 miles away). The little town we left along the shoreline is pretty much my idea of perfection here and I miss its Main Street and its familiarness and its sea smell and its proximity to other things that I know and love. I even miss the silly things like my bank and post office and Trader Joe’s and library. Here there are also banks and post offices and Trader Joe’s’ and libraries, but they are not part of my home yet. Maybe most of all I miss the jostling, gentle, sunshiney, fresh-aired, certain feeling of being there and belonging there.

Have you ever watched the final episode of “Friends?” Because everything in life has a “Friends” moment, I will tell you about it here (For those of you who are six years behind the times and still care, this is a spoiler alert. Better to be safe than the jerk who spoils the ending). Monica and Chandler (yes, I will talk about the characters as if you already know who they are because, if you don’t, you should go learn as soon as possible) are leaving the city (New York) to live in a suburb just outside to raise their newly adopted babies. It’s 30 minutes away (I did some smart mapquesting to get that info, by the way) and all the other friends are staying in the city. It’s not like they’ll never see each other again, or even like they won’t see each other often. It’s not like anybody died. In fact, everybody has happy things going on in their lives at the series finale. And yet, at the end of that episode, when they all lay their keys on the kitchen counter and walk out of the apartment for the last time, my heart breaks every time. Because that fake little plywood apartment with the funky colored walls and a hole in one side for the studio audience is home - the most important place in the world - and they are leaving it, and so must we.

The older I get, the more torn apart I feel. The people I love are strewn about the world. The places I love are hundreds of miles apart. Sometimes the things I want and the things I need are in two different places. Indeed, sometimes two things I want or two things I need are in different places from each other. Happiness is here and there and all over, and yet sadness too is perennial.

I love this new place. I really do; I’m not just saying it to try to convince you, or myself. I love that we watched it grow into what it is right now, with us inside. I love it for how hard my parents have worked on it and because it has a gorgeous big backyard where Mom can garden. I love that it means good things for my family. I love that some of my favorite people – and animals – in the world are here with me. I love the hardwood floors. I love that right now I am sitting here listening to the rain come down outside and the record player playing Christmas music. And those are the things that homes are made of. So I’m not worried. My problem, it seems, isn’t that I feel homeless, it’s that I have too many homes. And yet, with my heart here, full to bursting in all its confusion and joy, I wonder if that’s really a problem at all.

-R.E.A.

In recognition of National Library Month

2010-10-22T00:03:00.000-07:00

In recognition of National Library Month (or something like that) the UC Davis School of Medicine library served free coffee, tea, and - depending on how long after they set them out on the table you got there - cookies. Now, really quickly before I go on, I’d like to clear my conscience, and my record. I did indulge in both tea and cookie, even though I have never contributed anything to the UC Davis School of Medicine, financially or otherwise, and in fact even used up some of their toilet paper and soap in the bathroom. It is my – and my conscience’s – hope that Jason’s tuition over the next four years will pay for my celebration of National Library Month. If your conscience tells you otherwise, please don’t let me know, because I have a guilty suspicion that I wouldn’t care. That tea and cookie were delicious!

But matters of the conscience are really not what this entry is about. This entry is concerned with the much more philosophical topic of cookies. And stickers, a little bit. But mostly cookies. Cookies and stickers have something very relevant in common. It’s relevant because it has to do with joy. And with the simplest kind of pleasures. Cookies and stickers are alike because nobody, young or old, can resist them. I watched people as they walked past the coffee-tea-cookie table set up in the library. Coffee and tea were, for most, uninteresting. Coffee and tea are easy to come by. Most of them had had at least eight cups already that morning and many were carrying with them thermoses full of cups nine and ten. But then their eyes would catch the plate of cookies and, without fail, their step slowed. A hesitance came into their conviction that they needed to get over to that table and start studying right away. Cookies had been introduced into their feeble day. Seven out of ten made the unstudious decision to grab one and carried it with ceremony and relish to their study table. The other three, who made the more somber decision to pass by, still could not remove their eyes from the plate of cookies until doing so would require turning around and walking away backwards. One, after passing the table twice, came back and took one after all. This room full of diligent aspiring doctors and nurses, people who got 35s on their MCATs and, in a couple years, will be saving lives, could not resist a measley plate of cookies. (Ah, how beautiful it is to be human!)

Now students are notoriously starving. I’ve known people to sit through hours of boring presentations about things they do not now and never will care the least bit about just for a free sandwich of questionable cheese and day-old bread. Who am I kidding? I’ve done it myself. More than once. Free food is like extra credit in the game of life. And students know all about extra credit, in and out of the classroom. So maybe you think a bunch of graduate students rejoicing over a plate of cookies is no great indicator of the cookies’ power. But let me tell you about the doctor who came in.

Middle aged, balding Indian man with serious glasses. Tall, wearing nice slacks and a tie and a white coat. The long kind, that goes below your knees and shows you’re the real deal. A physician. A seasoned one, by the looks of him. He came in and went straight to one of the low shelves in front. He knew where he was going and what he was looking for. He pulled out a ginormous encyclopedia-like book and opened it up, thumbing confidently through the pages. He pulled out another, then another. He spread out four or five doctor-reference books across the low shelves and pored over them, running his fingers up and down the pages. This guy had something on his mind.

I don’t know when he noticed the cookies. I was busy writing, or contemplating life, or brushing cookie crumbs off my shirt. All I know is that I looked up to see the doctor striding across the floor to the cookie table (no offense to the coffee and tea, but let’s face it, they were merely supplements; the table belonged to the cookies). The encyclopedias were shut, lined up neatly atop the shelf. The doctor was at the plate of cookies. He started with coffee, but his eyes were on the cookies the whole time, contemplating. Everyone knows how they like their coffee without thinking about it. You ask a man how he takes his coffee and he’ll tell you like reflex. Black. Cream. Sugar. But cookies are a little more complicated. Even if you’re certain of your preference. Even if you’re a chocolate chip or an oatmeal raisin or a sugar person, there’s always that ooey gooey chocolate dusted one whose name you’re not sure of but who looks scrumptious in all its mysterious glory. His hands were pouring coffee, but his eyes were on the cookies. (He’s a doctor, he has skills).

Actually, to be really honest, his eyes were on the cookies except for the few brief moments they were on the creamer. (He was a cream, no sugar man). It was that questionable, non-dairy dry stuff whose origins nobody really understands. He didn’t believe it was creamer. He asked another doctor standing nearby – who, incidentally, was munching on a cookie – about it. She assured him it was cream. He was convinced it must be some sort of off-whitish powdery sugar. I don’t think he ended up using it. You can call a shoe an apple until you’re blue in the face, but at the end of the day, it still tastes like shoe. Personally, I think it’s when you question the validity of the creamer, instead of just pouring in whatever you see and scarfing it down, that you know you’ve transitioned from being a student to being a physician. (People tell me there are other ways of telling, but I think that must be the clearest).

But even the physician had nothing on the wiles of the cookie. After the creamer episode, he picked one. With relish and ceremony, just like the students. He sat down to enjoy the National Library Month celebration, but the information he needed from the encyclopedias must have been too pressing. After a few sips, he tossed the coffee and got up. Still munching his cookie, he strolled back to the bookshelves and diligently went back to work, heedless of the cookie crumbs that settling into the book bindings. (He’s a doctor, he doesn’t have to care about cookie crumbs). It doesn’t matter who you are. Young or old, thick or thin, seasoned professional or starving student, there is something wonderful about cookies.

Have you ever seen children at Trader Joe’s or Wal-Mart or somewhere when the cashier or greeter gives them a sticker? One puny, monochromatic, half-a-cent sticker. Have you watched their faces light up? Next time, don’t. Instead, look at the child’s parent. Though parents are just a bystander in the delightful giving and receiving of stickers process, their faces reveal their own personal delight. And parents know that sometimes, if it’s a good day, the sticker becomes theirs after all, clinging to a purse or cell phone after the child has melted away into peaceful slumber. It’s not just a reaction to seeing their child happy. I’m convinced that it’s the sticker itself that brings a twinkle to a parent’s eye. Give the child a lollypop and the parent will likely become concerned about grown-up things, like stickiness and cavities more than with their child’s delight. But give the child a sticker and the parent can’t help but smile. With age and wisdom, a parent may forget the cherry-watermelon-raspberry jubilee of flavor in a sucker, but somehow, as with cookies, we never forget the simple wonderfulness of stickers.

No child ever got spoiled by having too many stickers. They’re not destructive like markers can be. The worst case is nothing a little goo-gone can’t fix. Stick ‘em on virtually any surface and after a good day’s work, they’ll peel right off again. Price tags will not. Price tags are not real stickers. Smiley faces are real stickers. And Lisa Frank kittens, and hologram dolphins and frogs, and sometimes letters that spell out your name in different colors. R-o-y-a. Or y-o-R-a if you get too excited and accidentally stick them on wrong.

But I don’t think parents like stickers just because they’re less destructive to the furniture and a child’s mental well-being. I think parents like stickers because they are irresistible. Have you ever noticed how excited people get over the “I Voted” stickers at the polling place? The love of stickers is totally non-partisan. You might vote “yes” and I might vote “no,” but we share solidarity in that small inexplicable burst of joy we get over that little waving flag sticker. The polls are the one place where stickers are for grown-ups, not for kids. I know people who vote just to get the sticker. I don’t condone it, but I don’t blame them either. I secretly suspect people who vote absentee of some small thread of lunacy simply because they knowingly forfeit their flag sticker rights.

Cookies and stickers. There's something magical there. I don't get it, but I feel it. Simple pleasures. Small joys. It's nothing to write home about, but it works on almost everyone. Maybe not profound, just some dough or gluey bits of paper. But it makes me think about what the world's made up of. Something from nothing. Some creativity making for a whole medley of small joys.

-R.E.A.

Oh, let me tell you about the ocean today

2010-09-08T19:01:00.001-07:00

Oh, let me tell you about the ocean today. The way it leapt choppy and turquoise in the strong wind. Valiant. Each wave an unsung hero. The way it mingled without mingling with the periwinkle sky hung with charming clouds oblivious. The way the wind unyielding blew the stock still sand into low dust clouds and the palms’ fronds crashed raucously like youth unconquerable, and poppies bobbed and bowed as though it were only a friendly breeze. The way the ocean spray became the air and the whole beautiful golden day was washed in unruly joy.

-R.E.A.

A swallow stirring

2010-09-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

Having spent the first large chunk of my last entry discussing my feelings on how little I regard seasons other than Summer, I would like to begin this entry by saying that I have begun getting the stirrings of Autumn in my sinews and they always spark a special kind of excitement in me. I admit that I find myself a little angry at Summer this year. September sixth is entirely much too early for Fall and I wonder what Summer’s rush is. I am frustrated with myself, too, for the excitement that I feel. This happens to me every year. The changing seasons work a magic on me and I am ready for whatever comes. Especially Fall. But it is also with Fall that I regret the most. Because several weeks or a couple months, or even sometimes only a day or two in, I think back longingly upon Summer: warm feet and boogie boarding and...well, you know all about that, and I spend the rest of the year missing her. So there, that’s just how it is. I am angry and frustrated and sad and yet somehow tentatively inspired by the Autumn smell that keeps blowing in my window this week. As Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself... ”

If I could, I would let the seasons change every three months, as is their wont, but each time they would change to a new season for merely a few weeks and then they would faze right back into Summer. It’s bland of me, I know. And ungrateful. Peter Spier wrote a children’s book called People in which he talks about how boring it would be if everyone and everything were all the same, lacking different cultures and tastes. And doubtless, seasons fit into this concept as well. It is boring and unenlightened of me to want it to be Summer all the time. Perhaps it is immature. But in this, I concede to being childish. I don’t think I can help it. You see, I’m love struck.

But that being said. There is something old that awakens in a young soul at Autumn’s dawn. It is timeless and pecular and sage. Perhaps it is Fall itself, unfolding inside us and greeting her other half without. It whispers of nostalgia, and of a deep-rooted and unyielding joy as boundless as the world itself. It’s a swallow, and a wild rose, and a misty grey mountain, and a falling russet leaf. It is unsettling and invigorating both at the same time. It is greater and stronger and older and wiser than I, but it is in me, then, at the turning of the seasons, for a brief spell, while Fall emerges.

And then there is the sound of football playing on the TV, the only time I can appreciate ambient television noise while I am going about my everyday life. And really, if it’s Fall time, something is sorely missing without it. It’s the sound of the cheering and the whistles that makes you think of huddling around the screen, waving Terrible Towels and munching on football snacks and sipping hot chocolate with marshmallows and tiptoeing outside in a scarf to feel the blustery chill of pre-dusk and the smell of cold that reminds you that you are alive and makes you love everything. It’s the sound of yelling from the next room that makes you jump out of your seat so high that you hit the ceiling and then in the same motion bolt out to catch the replay of whatever you just missed. And for me, now that I’m out of school for the time being, it’s the free and beautiful feeling of not having to bury myself in school work just at the moment when I feel most like curling up under a blanket and indulging in my own personal thoughts and enjoyments instead of some aggravating instructor’s incoherent syllabus.

Don’t get me wrong, Fall, this message goes out even to lovely you, I am yet unwilling to wave the Summer of 2010 farewell. The sand was still warm when I roamed on the beach yesterday and I can still smell bonfire some nights wafting down PCH from Huntington. We are barbequing burgers tonight, Summer dear, and my boots are tucked artfully away in my closet for another day. It’s still only preseason. All I’m admitting is this: in the days ahead, when my feet turn numb and hunker down into the wool hiking socks that I stole from Jason for the rest of the year; when the Summer beach tourists fade away and parking on Main Street is no longer impossible and damp wind sweeps in from off the ocean so strong and chilly that it numbs the nose in the crash of a wave; when my heart comes to that sad, sad, sadness of Summer gone and that restlessness wedges in my bones and makes me miss things I have never had; when lady Autumn is truly upon us, you’ll find me perched on my bed by the window, breathing in the crisp, sweet air, with a good book and a cup of tea and perhaps a foxish little cat sitting on my feet; and I will be okay.

-R.E.A.

An impertinent title that has nothing to do with the entry that follows

2010-09-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening was the last Band at the Beach performance of the year and to keep my sanity, I had to remind myself several hundred times that just because September is here and school is back, and it gets dark way too early, Summer is not technically over yet. People can rave about the beauty of Autumn, and how Winter probably has the best holidays, and hurrah for lusty scarf and hot chocolate days; and I know the wildflowers bloom in Spring, and there is certainly something mysterious and lovely in the changing of the seasons, but nobody could ever convince me that Summer isn’t the most inspiring, joy-inducing, wonderful season of them all. Summer is the barefoot, free-spirited, sunshine, fresh-cut-grass Queen of the Year and I love her. And so, after her three months fly by, it is always hard for me to let her go. As an homage to Summer, I made a list of some reasons why:

Bare feet in the warm sand is the simplest form of happiness.
Flip flops, and sweet tea, and fruit smoothies, and sunbathing, and the windows down.
Long days.
Summer memories.
The ocean. And ocean water, the best skin-toner and hair-shiner I have ever found.
Blissfully warm toes. (From approximately late September until late May, my feet are in a perpetual state of coldness. In the Summer, they come out from their wool sock wrappings and layers of blankets and, for three fleeting months, are warm again.)
Humidity.
Fireflies.
Homegrown tomatoes.
Fresh berries. (And fresh berry cobbler).
Bonfires.

So back to Band at the Beach, yesterday evening, and the Elm Streetband playing songs like “Summer of ’69,” and “Brown-eyed Girl,” and “Hotel California.” We were sipping wine and snacking and looking out at the ocean and the palm trees and the American flag at the foot of the pier, and watching the day turn to dusk and loving life. It got me thinking about one of my favorite Ty Herndon songs where he says, “Tell me something, who could ask for more / than to be living in a moment you would die for.”

I had just spent the day poring over my CSET study materials at the bookstore. Too much air-conditioning, too much sitting still, too much eye strain, too much stress (I really am stressing out a lot about this exam). And the only thing that kept me at it so diligently was the knowledge that I’d spend the evening draped on a blanket at the beach, listening to good music, sipping wine with some of my favorite people, at one of my favorite places in all the world. And sitting there, in a moment that represented all the things I value most, a moment “I would die for,” unwinding, I got that sense of satisfied exhaustion that the best little and big events of life bring me.

I think it’s that exhaustion that makes the memories. That moment after the Moment (or sometimes during) where you contemplate it, let it sink in, and truly realize how good it made you feel. It comes in all forms in life: physical, emotional, intellectual, perhaps even spiritual. It seems to me that some of the best feelings in life come in these still moments of exhaustion: the times that I feel healthiest, and happiest, and strongest, and most secure and certain, when my perspective is the clearest.

There are times, after a good run, after I’ve worked the kinks out of my legs and my breath is coming a little easier, that I lay flat on my back on the driveway, against concrete warm from the day, and look up at the sky, usually sprinkled with a few stars or Venus or the moon – and this is going to sound really new age and hippie and maybe a little creepy, but I can feel the Earth working. I can feel the natural world moving and growing and struggling, I can feel peace and war, and I can feel the skeleton of the world, the rocks and mountains and minerals, solid and strong. I can feel God. And sometimes, I even catch little glimpses of my place in the scheme of it. My blood is flowing and my skin is glowing from the run and my body’s exhausted and somehow my brain is clearer and I feel healthy and strong in body and mind and I am totally grounded.

The same thing happens when I spend a day in the ocean. My irrational fear of crabs aside, I love everything about the seashore. They say if you are born by the ocean it is in your blood and I believe it. One time, I went surfing. For a little while I floated on my stomach on the board over and between the waves, getting the feel of the board and the tide. My confidence mounting, and Jason instructing me from the water, I decided to ride a wave, just on my stomach, nothing heroic. I picked the wrong wave. An experienced surfer might have been able to ride it, but probably wouldn’t have bothered. It wasn’t the type of wave that carries you gracefully toward shore. It was that temperamental, ornery sort that slaps hard against you and tumbles you under. I didn’t know it was the wrong wave until it was on me. I watched Jason’s face turn from focused attentiveness to a look of concern. Then he yelled something un-encouraging. The look on his face, his response to my completely hopeless situation was too much for me. I went under laughing. Laughing is all well and wonderful, but it doesn’t give you much of a chance to hold your breath. I came up scraped, bruised, choking…and laughing. I couldn’t get his face out of my head. I left the beach scraped, bruised, breathless, laughing, and tired. Salty, water-logged, and exhausted, that is the only healthy way to leave the sand. A run, a swim, going on a walk with an over-exuberant dog, a long hike, horseback riding, they all bring on the physical version of this exhaustion I’m talking about.

But there are other kinds. For a couple years, I worked at an elementary school in downtown Long Beach as a teacher’s aid. One of my favorite things that I’ve ever done in my life. I generally worked with kids in small groups or one-one-one and helped them with everything from reading (my favorite!) to math. Some of them had actual behavioral issues (products of drug-using parents and stuff like that), some were just too young (six is way too immature for the valuable knowledge you are expected to gain in first grade), nearly all of them lacked basic manners. I spent less time teaching kids the alphabet than I did teaching them how to sit still long enough to hear it recited. If I had thirty minutes to spend with a small group, I could expect that at least fifteen of them would be spent getting them to keep their feet off the table and their hands to themselves, and at least five of them would be spent at the end getting them to line up in a quiet row to leave. That left ten minutes to teach five struggling children to read Is Your Mama a Llama? (Or, as one of my favorite students, Geraldo, insisted on calling it, “Is Tu Mama a Wama?”)

So on group days, I would start by going through my rules. Now I’m a rather organic person – the type who gets uncomfortable around Bonsai Trees and has some new-fangled notions on how children should be treated – so it took me perhaps longer than most to realize how important these rules were. As a compromise between upholding my beliefs and maintaining my sanity, I kept my rules simple and few, but I stressed to the kids that they were critically important.

One typical day, Louisa came in “tattling” about how Louis, who I had already observed had an obvious head-over-heels crush on her, had called her a despicable name. I looked over at Louis, one of those students who just breaks your heart because he is so smart and capable and so much stubborn trouble, and he was making an obscene face at Louisa and her voice was getting louder and louder in complaint. I knew there was no way for me to win because everyone was fully prepared to deny everything against them and claim unbridled innocence, so I did the only thing a good teacher can do. I copped out. Looking at Louisa, I asked, “What is my number one rule?” She rolled her eyes and recited it, Louis mouthing insolently along with her, “always be nice.”

I’ll be honest, I wish it were more pithy. I love words and something like, “To err on the side of kindness is seldom an error,” or “The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid” would have made me feel much better, but I’ve learned that witty anecdotes are unappreciated by most first graders (although it is delightful to talk to those ones who understand them), so the rule was just “be nice.” Be nice because I don’t want to referee between you. Be nice because we have a hard book to read today and there’s no time to argue. Be nice because I abhor meanness, especially when it is petty. Be nice because you will need it later – because the more difficult your life is and the more un-niceness you encounter, the more you will require it. Be nice because there is too little of it in the world. Be nice because, more than you know, even more than I can understand, I want you, sassy Louisa and stubborn Louis, to be twenty five years old and kind.

With kids, you can’t ever only be paying half attention, not only because you will find, when you turn around, that they have slingshotted all your erasers around the room and stuck pencils to the ceiling, but also because you will find that the moment your mind wanders just the littlest bit, to lunch, or the errands you still need to run, or that story you’ve been working on, they will hit you with a question so poignant and relevant that the entire universe stands still to carefully await your response. (And trust me, there is nothing like the pressure of knowing the entire universe is awaiting your response to leave you tongue tied, unless it is a small earnest first grader staring you intently in the face). Better yet, they will tell you a story.

“My brother came home yesterday,” Christopher, aged five, told me as we sat at a table in the back of the class with a book opened in front of us. “Really, from where?” I asked naively. “They got him in jail,” he told me, unabashed. “The police came and they put handcuffs on him, but he’s back now with his girlfriend.” His unhesitating words were accompanied by hand gestures and there was no chance for me to be embarrassed by my question for the earnestness of his response. Besides, I was busy trying to come up with a smooth way to transition from criminal family members to rhyming words. I could practically hear the universe snickering at me.

I only worked short five or six hour shifts three days a week at the elementary school, but those hours left me drained. The hours I spent, and spend, thinking about those kids: the things they said, the ways I wanted to treat them, what I hoped they would learn from me, and what I had learned from them, far surpassed the time I spent in their presence. It made me laugh and cry, it inspired me, it made me think, it left me exhausted.

You know what I think it is? It is an exhaustion borne of an utter lack of apathy. As an aside, I will tell you that I abhor apathy. I think it is a despicable quality, particularly for a race of animals that is supposed to be self-conscious and aware. You can disagree with me, you can be uninformed, or unintelligent, or aggravating in a hundred other ways, but you only really become worthless when you become apathetic. Those moments of healthy exhaustion grow, I think, from caring. From working your body or your brain or exercising your emotions. From feeling. This is the kind of exhaustion that I hope for in life. There is a quote from Albert Schweitzer that plays through my mind at both my most and least ambitious moments: “The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.” And so, I think, these moments of exhaustion are, ironically, our chances to become renewed and re-inspired, to last another day, another hundred days, another hundred years. For me, a day well spent, a successful day, is one that ends in utter exhaustion. The invigorating exhaustion of knowing that you cared, that you gave it all you had, that you took as little as possible fore granted, that the joyful awareness of this Moment is a happiness that you have earned.

-R.E.A.

A roving book gathers no dust

2010-06-15T23:05:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing how peaceful and still a bookstore can be early in the morning, a few hours after the closing booksellers have locked up, trickled into their respective homes, and tucked their aching feet into bed; before the front door has unlocked for the day’s customers and all their human joys and problems. It’s the kind of amazing you can only really understand if you’ve worked in a bookstore and been cured of the misguided notion that they are calm, orderly places to begin with, stocked with friendly, fashionably dusty books, or stately classics standing sentinel on shelves awaiting passionate and slightly nerdy readers to pull them off, smell their pages with secret delight, and take them home to sit on nicer, wooden bookshelves and grow old with the thumbing of eager fingers. If ever all my dreams come true and I find myself owner of my own small bookshop on Main Street, this is the way my books – and my customers – will be. And I shall reserve the right to refuse service to anyone who doesn’t have proper book etiquette.

Most bookstores, however, hope to at least scrape by with a semblance of a profit and will take any customers they can get. And so the modern bookstores – at least the ones that survive – are corporate and trendy, a marketer’s dream, and sit in strip malls next to restaurants and movie theaters where people who find themselves with time to spare between the two can wander in, collect dozens of magazines from their proper places on the shelves, and plant them stealthily throughout the store, behind books, under tables, and in the bathrooms, as an amusing pastime before the movie starts. In the modern bookstore, the doors open and awaiting customers rush in to buy the latest self help or “How to Become A Millionaire on 20 Cents a Day” book to the whir of the blender mixing up frappuccinos and lattes in the cafe where not even a small tidy bookish cat is allowed to show so much as a whisker for fear of violating some health code or another. For this, the rest of the store suffers too: no cat napping on a stack of books, no singing canary or tended geranium in the window to let you know you are in a place of beauty and truth and excitement and intellect, a place of kindred souls, and paradoxically opinionated harmony.

Back in the children’s section, some disobedient child or another strings books and plush across the floor in clear sight of its conveniently near sighted parent who has some newfangled opinions about never telling a child “no” and who apparently never learned manners from the child’s grandparents. Some blasphemous faux-author has published a book called Pride and Predjudice and Zombies and it sits shamelessly on the shelf next to J.R.R. Tolkien, pretending not to hear Jane Austin rolling over in her grave. And some young teenager who will never know the joys of Wuthering Heights or Gone With the Wind picks it up and walks around the store with it until she either buys it or deposits it on a shelf somewhere in the travel section. The globes are plastic, not metal, and nobody ever looks at them.

And by midnight, because corporate retailers don’t have the decency to close at a godly hour, the store is a veritable mess, with manga, and sex books, and magazines, and crummy children’s literature lying in heaps thither and yon and Poe and Shakespeare forgotten on a shelf somewhere. The computers are whirring, and the air conditioning, and the florescent lights. And booksellers are marching back and forth like sleepy ants collecting and replacing and tidying here and there.

The few dark hours that the bookstore catches to itself are, I suspect, more peaceful than any I have seen there. I observe it only at the end of these dark hours, when the booksellers come trickling back in, only a couple at a time, and set to work again. But the store feels rested. Rested and renewed, and the books do stand rather like sentinels, proud upon their shelves. Though by tonight, they will lie again, haphazard and bent, this morning they represent anew the truths within them, they recall the paths they have forged and lighted. This is the time when I walk between the shelves, my feet soft against the carpet, and the store is a place for books again: not uncouth children or negligent adults, or movie-goers or complainers, or caffeine junkies, or thieves or Playboy purchasers – though true readers can be all of these things. When you strip away all the corporate retail “charms,” you find that after all there is something innate in printed volumes that remains intact despite all these things. And it is amazing to find, in those few early hours, that you can still hear their quiet, timeless strength and wisdom.

-R.E.A.

Study shows that lowering minimum-wage could end world hunger

2010-05-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

A recent scientific study has honed in on the problem of obesity in America and in a mindboggling show of scientific and social expertise has determined that low income is the culprit. The argument begins with the supposition that poorer people generally have less access to fresh, healthy food options which can contribute to poorer health. Now I agree that this is generally true, although it’s important to differentiate between rural and urban poor communities (as rural populations are more likely to grow their own fresh fruits and vegetables, whereas inner-city communities are more likely to get their only semi-fresh, hormone-enhanced greens at the 99 Cent Store – us city folk always get the short end of the deal). Nor do I rule out the possibility that lower-income populations are more likely to be obese. What I have trouble believing is that the lack of healthy food options, as brought on by an inadequate income is responsible for the obesity problem. It’s very convenient, don’t you think, that our country’s obesity issues have been found to not, in fact, be an effect of eating too much crap and having too little exercise, but rather the fault of...big surprise...the rich people. It’s only part of America’s growing awakening; in the past several months, we have apparently come to realize that, indeed, all of our problems have been brought on by the wealthy.

What I love best about the study is its solution to the problem: raising minimum-wage. There are so many problems with this conclusion and the way it is drawn that it must be some kind of fallacy, if only I could ever remember the list. To begin with, the study found “that minimum-wage employees are more likely to be obese than those who earn higher wages, adding to growing evidence that being poor is a risk factor for unhealthy weight.” “Being poor is a risk factor for unhealthy weight,” is a rather obvious statement, except that it seems to me that having no money would more frequently lead to unhealthy weight in the negative, rather than the positive (if you will) direction. Furthermore, anyone who has worked in retail in any kind of shopping center can tell you that a thirty minute lunch at a place like that doesn’t leave you much opportunity for eating anything other than greasy fast food, unless you are of the enigmatic and dying race of people who somehow have the time and energy to take a sack lunch to work every day. As such, I would be inclined to believe that it is the greasy fast food, and not the minimum-wage that packs on the pounds.

According to the study, raising minimum wage “could increase purchasing power enough to expand access to healthier lifestyle choices.” The rhetorician in me notes the use of “could” instead of “will,” as in “the sky could fall tomorrow, but will it?” I wonder what the likelihood is that raising minimum wage will actually make people living in poor communities rich enough to travel farther away to get healthier food. To begin with, if all the places that currently pay minimum wage had to pay their employees more, they would also have to raise the cost of whatever it is they are selling. Since a lot of jobs that involve getting different kinds of food to different populations require large volumes of minimum-wage employees, the cost of food would necessarily go up. Is it beneficial to a person to raise both their income and the things they purchase simultaneously? Of course, the alternative is to raise minimum-wage and put a cap on the cost of food. We all know that businesses are evil anyway. This would cause most grocery stores to go out of business, making unhealthy food for minimum-wage employees more difficult to obtain. Obesity problem solved! Except for the small fact that it would also make healthy food for minimum-wage employees more difficult to obtain. With the obesity issue in low-income populations solved, perhaps nobody would notice the correlation between minimum-wage incomes and starvation?

Besides this, the only way I can figure to calculate how much raising minimum-wage could directly expand access to healthier lifestyle choices is to:

Calculate how much it would cost for the average minimum-wage employee to travel to buy healthy food.
Calculate how much it would cost this same person to actually purchase the healthy food.
Add 1 and 2.
Calculate how much it already costs the average minimum-wage employee to travel to buy healthy food.
Calculate how much it already costs this same person to actually purchase unhealthy food.
Add 3 and 4.
Subtract the answer to 5 from the answer from 3.
Determine how much more each minimum-wage employee would need to be paid per hour to equal the answer in number 7.

As a side note, if the answer to number 8 requires that minimum-wage be raised from $7.75 to $20.75, should we consider any of the problems that might arise from a $13 raise in minimum-wage?

As a preface to what I am about to say next, I would like to mention that ever since my AP Statistics class in high school, which I thoroughly enjoyed (and no, I’m not being sarcastic), I have frequently argued that the greatest thing about statistics is that it means absolutely nothing. If the world were a vacuum, perhaps a perfect statistical study could be achieved. Since it is not, statistics is entirely bogus. It is my opinion that you could conduct the same exact statistical study and very convincingly and successfully draw two opposite and true conclusions from it. The secret of statistics is not that it can give you insight into a particular topic, it is that you can use it as fake proof that your own personal insight on a topic is true. This particular study had a sample size of a mere 6,312 people who were supposed to be a representation of the approximately 300 million people who actually live in the United States. But that’s not the best part. The best part is that 85% of those 6,312 people were men and 90% were Caucasian. So basically what the study can say with honesty is that out of a population of mostly white, mostly men (which does not exist in America), of the ones who were heads of households, those ones who were making minimum wage were mostly fatter than the ones who were making anything other than minimum wage. And what the study is arguing is that poorness leads to fatness. Mild disconnect? Maybe it’s just me.

In support of the argument that poorness leads to fatness, the study states that, “People living in the southern United States – where state minimum-wage levels are among the lowest – were more likely to be obese than people in other regions.” But I wonder, could this have anything to do with fried chicken? Baking chicken should cost about the same as, or less than, and use fewer resources than breading and frying it and yet somehow the poor minimum-wage earners in the southern states are growing obese off of it. Can we honestly blame minimum wage for this? What I’m saying in a mildly offensive and unpolitically correct way is that the study seems to completely leave out the effects of a person’s culture on what he eats. Canned corn, for example, should be reasonably available even in low-income areas where fresh vegetables are not available. Although canned corn is not as nutritious as fresh corn, it is significantly more nutritious, and probably cheaper, than, say, Taco Bell. Could convenience factor into bad eating habits? Could taste? Could education?

In keeping with the kind of thinking behind this study, I have come to the conclusion that if raising minimum wage would directly improve obesity levels in America, then lowering minimum wage would actually allow the starving populations in America to gain weight. The implications could even be global. Who would have thought that the solution to world hunger was as simple as lowering income levels? Now Americans are faced with a very difficult decision: should we raise minimum wage and save the obese people, or should we lower it and save the starving ones?

-R.E.A.

"I'm Nobody! Who are you?"

2010-05-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

I saw lupines growing wild for the first time in my life last month, something to check off my List of Things to Do Before I Go. It may seem like a small thing to make a big deal out of, but ever since I read Granny’s Miss Rumphius and then found out that Lupines are California natives, I have dreamed of seeing them growing wild. Poppies of various types we have in abundance and they are one of my favorite flowers of all time. But an unfarmed field strewn with wild poppies and lupines both...I suspect you aren’t quite a real Californian until you’ve seen one. I spotted my first glimpse of purple in the Grapevine and something in my soul basked golden. Every Spring since time immemorial, the Grapevine has wakened to the golds and oranges and amethysts of the poppies and lupines tucked away between meadow grasses and mountain rocks, heedless of me. But this year, I was there to see it.

We had a beautiful time in the Central Valley: roaming around the City of Trees (which is not as lovely as, say, the countryside just south of it, but which is nevertheless quite charming as far as cities are concerned); coming around to the surreality (not a word according to the red squigglies on my computer – squigglies, according to the red squigglies, also not a word) of Jason going to med school there, and all that that implies; spending time with beloved friends who also happen to be good people; and jogging along the Stanislaus River (whose name alone can make you forget the my-legs-are-about-to-fall-off, I’ll-never-breath-again, why-can’t-I-just-be-fat feeling of what they tell me is the “best” kind of jog.)

There is a smell that comes up over a river in the gloaming with all the lush shrubbery growing by its banks breathing softly and the animals of the day settling into their nests before the animals of the night begin their stirrings, and a million insects, individual in their own rights, of the thousand billions of their kind. There is a smell that comes up over a river who has seen a season of good rain and decades of unchanging changingness. This is not unique to one river in particular. I think it is kindred of all rivers, though to a practiced nose the scent is subtly different, like nectarines from peaches. If I had to guess, the Stanislaus River smells slightly of almond blossoms, but I cannot speak with the certainty of a native of its banks. And doubtless much like the ocean, its smell alters with the ground against which it washes and the breeze that wafts above it, and the trees – or rocks – that grow along it and turn to mulch – or sand – over the course of many tomorrows.

There is something about a narrow green footbridge across a river that makes the person jogging across it feel important somehow, in the best kind of secret and humble importance, as though the river wants you there above its banks, and as though all the storms and quakes and ferocious winds of its history have deemed it all right that you be there simply by not bringing it down before you got there. Like the bend in some random road that brings you up on a field of wildflowers. They weren’t put there for you, certainly, but somehow you’ve been granted the privilege to partake.

There is a place called Alpine, Wyoming that boasts the only stop sign within forty miles. I think to myself that I should be very happy living somewhere just outside of Alpine, Wyoming, somewhere where the stop sign is not too much of an inconvenience, a place that will be sufficiently overlooked when people travel to observe the Alpine landmark, somewhere only secretly, humbly important by Alpine association. Should I ever move there, you will find me sitting somewhere on a narrow footbridge, surrounded by native flowers, feeling important in my obscurity. Don’t feel badly for me; I have been 23 years searching for important obscurity. I suspect it will be a good deal longer until I find it, but I know it can be done. Cowboys have done it, and some sailors, and perhaps those questionable people you see backpacking along the side of the road sometimes, with an old happy dog following along on a string. When I doubt it, I simply contemplate all the out-of-the-way footbridges I have never seen, all the silvery creeks, all the wild lupines, all the lone, rocky outcroppings upon which I have never perched. I think of sitting on a quiet hill in Buchanan, Virginia surrounded by Black-Eyed Susans and cows and blue country sky. Important obscurity. It exists. You just have to find it.

-R.E.A.

The Story of a Mollusk and What Did Not Happen Because of Him

2010-03-21T22:06:00.000-07:00

I am not going to talk about healthcare. Instead, I am going to talk about mollusks. One particular Mollusk, in fact, who just happened to be a mussel and to live in a gentle River that wound and twisted between the low hills and through the woodland forests of a very beautiful country indeed. Here is the story of that Mollusk and what didn’t happen because of him...

Chapter 1: What Happened When the Eelgrass Grew Over

“I absolutely cannot do a thing about it. I haven’t the time.” argued the Otter, standing on the riverbed with his hands on his hips. “It isn’t as though I’ve had an easy time of it. The large fish were terribly low this year. And the small ones certainly seemed to be snapped up quickly.” He gave the Owl a rather accusatory look, as though owls, and this Owl in particular, were all to blame for his inferior fishing skills.

“Well,” said the Owl, ignoring the Otter’s stare, “Then I don’t know what to do now. I’ve tried but we owls aren’t very good at flocking together. We’re rather solitary creatures, you know.”

The Otter barely waited for him to finish. “Well, the River absolutely must be cleared,” he said firmly, “If the Eelgrass gets any thicker this Spring, the fish won’t even be able to get through. Then what are we supposed to eat?” As though the Owl didn’t know the situation.

Suddenly, the Otter snapped his fingers. “We’ll have the Mollusk do it!” he said eagerly, surprised that he hadn’t thought of it before.

It was the Owl’s turn to stare, “The Mollusk?” he said, “But the Mollusk hasn’t ever done a single thing well.”

“Yes,” said the Otter proudly, “But he has done a good many things poorly.”

Chapter 2: The Brackish Water Fiasco

“But we don’t want this done poorly!” exclaimed the Owl sharply. “It’s a very important matter. Don’t you remember the Brackish Water Fiasco?” The Owl didn’t wait for the Otter’s response. He took quite a delight in monologue once he got started. And so he began his retelling...

“When the Brackish Water came in, the catfish were the first to notice. ‘Gather together our best thinkers,’ they said, ‘If something’s not done, we’re all in for a great deal of trouble.’ But our best thinkers could come up with nothing in agreement. Some of them thought we should deal with the Brackish Water as we had dealt with similar things in the past. Others thought that new actions were required for the changing times. In the midst of the great arguing and upheaval that ensued, a lone mollusk stepped forward.

‘I will come up with a solution,’ said the Mollusk selflessly. And suddenly, everyone was silent. ‘But I will need time,’ he said. ‘I haven’t fins, like you,’ he said, inclining toward the catfish, ‘nor brains, like you,’ he nodded at the beavers. ‘So I need time. But I will find an answer.’ The Mollusk spoke with such confidence and the animals were so tired of arguing and arguing and getting nowhere that they agreed. They designated the Mollusk the Official Solution Finder for the Brackish Water Influx.

The Mollusk went under a rock and shut himself up and didn’t come out for six months at least, though the animals grew impatient and knocked several times on his shell. Those were the days when the Eelgrass first began infringing upon the River. Finally the day came when the Mollusk inched slowly out from under his rock. He wouldn’t say a word until he got to the center of the River and then, slowly, he opened his shell and revealed a tiny pearl. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, and ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he said again, ‘our grave problem, for which I went into hiding for six months at least, was Brackish Water. Ladies and gentlemen, I have taken our problem, and I have created a Pearl.’ And he opened his shell wide for all to see. And that was all he said.

Finally a timid sole spoke up. ‘But what does it do?’ asked the Sole.

‘Nothing,’ said the Mollusk with an odd look. ‘But it is beautiful isn’t it?’

‘But how will it solve the Brackish Water?’ asked a frog, who didn’t much care about the Brackish Water, but was still curious to see what would happen.

‘Yes,’ said a small trout, ‘it has very little to do with what we needed.’ But the Trout was only being polite. The pearl had nothing whatsoever to do with what we needed.

The Mollusk was offended, ‘I should think this beautiful Pearl would be sufficient for you, considering what I had to work with,’ he said stiffly. ‘Work requires gratitude and I should think I am entitled to some of that.’ And the Mollusk was so hurt that he inched back to his rock and didn’t come out for several days. And,” said the Owl taking a deep breath, “we still have Brackish Water to this day.”

Chapter 3: The Only Thing To Do Was To Put It To A Vote

The Otter cleared his throat politely. He, after all, knew the story and he didn’t care. At the sound of the Otter, the Owl came out of his reverie with a start. “How do you expect the Mollusk to clear the River, anyway,” he asked practically.

“He is very good at delegating responsibility,” replied the Otter, who had an answer for pretty much everything, though it wasn’t always a very good one. “It’s perfect. This way, we shall have none of the responsibility and shall be able to do all of the complaining if things go awry.”

“When things go awry,” answered the Owl sternly.

But the only thing to do was to put it to a vote. All the animals who cared about Brackish Water gathered, except for the many that did not. The votes were tallied. Then all that was left to do was to ask the Mollusk.

Some of the animals were surprised when the Mollusk agreed to take on the responsibility after what had happened the last time with the Pearl. The Mollusk was brave and inspiring and did not so much as hint at the incident. The animals felt very kindly and grateful toward the Mollusk and many went home that evening thinking that the Mollusk really was a stand-up a fellow after all, and that they could all learn from him a thing or two about forgiveness.

There could have been others like the Owl but they did not speak up. He suspected that the Mollusk had only agreed to the task for want of a new pearl to covet.

And that is the story of the Mollusk and what did not happen because of him.

-R.E.A.

word'i-ness (n.): using 676 words when 55 will do

2010-01-21T23:34:00.000-08:00

One of my creative writing profs back in the day introduced me to this book called, The World’s Shortest Stories. Steve Moss, the compiler of these stories has (or had) a contest each year to see who could submit the best stories in 55 words or less. Here’s an excerpt from Moss’s introduction:

“How short can a story be and still be considered a story? Charles Shultz had an answer to that question several years ago in his ‘Peanuts’ comic strip. Crabby old Lucy was once asked by Linus to please, please, please tell him a story. Lucy grudgingly obliged. Said she: ‘A man was born. He lived and died. The end.’

That’s the shortest story I’ve ever read. But, like Linus, I was left somewhat dissatisfied.

So maybe the question should be asked differently: How short can a story be and still be considered a good story? What’s the briefest possible narrative that still allows for a satisfying read?”

Without a doubt, there is a difference between a story and a plot and most of the time we (or at least, I) expect both out of anything I am going to take the time to read for pleasure. E.M. Forster uses this example to define the difference between story and plot: “’The king died, and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot.” For him, the difference is causality. While both sentences have a time sequence, it is the plot that introduces an explanation. He writes, “Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say, ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask, ‘why?’”

I would like to add to Forster’s plot distinction. Being of the old-school lit critic class, I find theme drastically important not only to my life, but also to the literature that I enjoy. I think James Thomas would agree. Moss quotes Thomas in his intro: “Like all fiction that matters, their success depends not on their length, but on their depth, their clarity of vision, their human significance – the extent to which the reader can recognize in them the real stuff of life.” Needless to say, if writing a story in 55 words or less is doable, writing a story with a plot in 55 words or less is something more of a hassle.

You may be wondering at this point why I am writing what appears to be a rather shoddy sort of Literature 101 essay. In fact, you may have traversed so far into the realm of boredom that you have passed that wonderment entirely and are now simply wondering why you are still reading. I can only really answer the former of your wonderments. For one thing, I admit that I truly miss my days of writing shoddy lit essays. But the real reason is because of how the 55 word story relates to a quote by Josh Billings that I read a katrillion years ago. I was pretty young when I first started writing stories and I didn’t understand most things (some things never change) but even then this quote spoke to me because I had (and still have) an enormous problem with wordiness. Billings says, “The great art of writing is knowing when to stop.”

Writing short stories has become a way for me to practice "knowing when to stop." The 55 word short story takes this practice to a whole new level. Up until now, the shortest story I have succeeded in writing, and still loving, was 118 words over the limit. So after significantly more than 55 minutes of writing and many many more than 55 words erased, I have come up with two elementary attempts at the 55 word story, plots included (or at least attempted). They came out very differently from one another and with varying flaws. Here they are. I encourage you to try some yourself. They are surprisingly intriguing and surprisingly frustrating - part work of art and part logic problem.

First attempt (52 words)

Determined to Start Over

When Calvin turned ninety six, he decided his life had been miserably unsuccessful and determined to start over.

The doctors said they could do nothing.

Philosophers promised him it was impossible.

In desperation, Calvin prayed.

Came a voice: “You’ve started over thirty five thousand, sixteen times. How many more do you need?”

Second attempt (55 words):

Words Like Brushstrokes

Twenty years, words like lashes fell so forcefully upon her she supposed they were who she was.

Until she read somewhere, “All the world’s a stage,” – Words like brushstrokes on a painted scene – And she made her exit.

Looking back, she views the painting from afar, espying a raven perched above it. Quethes he, “nevermore.”

-R.E.A.

My New Year’s resolution is to be more like my mom

2010-01-04T12:02:00.000-08:00

I have said elsewhere on this blog that I don’t make New Year’s resolutions but this year that turns out not to be true. My New Year’s resolution is to be more like my mom. This may sound strange. I have heard that as girls get older they spend much of their time trying to avoid becoming their mothers, usually to no avail. I, however, have wanted to be like my mom since I was very little and the feeling only grows each year.

My mom is the least judgmental person I know. The only time she bashes people is if they have hurt someone she loves and even then she listens more than she bashes. The exceptions to this are, of course: anyone playing against the Steelers, and people with extremely unintelligent political views. (But after all, there is only so much one person can take quietly, particularly if she is a Kaufman and football or politics are on the line.)

Mom’s faith in things from God to earthworms inspires me all the time. She says “All shall be well” and she believes it. She also believes in grace. When she believes in something, she believes in it all the way through. I don’t know if she has her own doubts. I’d be surprised if she didn’t. But something Mom’s taught me is that having doubts is not the same thing as lacking faith. Here are some of the things Mom has taught me to have faith in:

God
rain, compost, and the wisdom of nature
good books
things built to last
people
conscience
roots
wings

Don’t even get me started on the kind of mother Mom is. Mom sang me “Would You Like to Swing on a Star,” and “Que Sera Sera,” and “Joanie,” and read me “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” and “The Runaway Bunny,” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” I can still remember sitting in her lap with my big stack of books and her arms wrapped around me. Or laying under blankets by the fireplace before bed and listening to her read - some of the most comforting memories of my life. Mom nurtured in me a love for reading, writing, country music, mountains, and a hundred million other things. And when I am stupid and boring and wrong, she tells me that she knows I’ll make the right decision and that everything will be okay. She’s not faking. She really believes in me and in the world. Mom has always wanted to hear what I have to say, or at least pretended to. And trust me, once I get started, I don’t stop easily. Never once in my entire life has Mom not had time for me.

Mom doesn’t care when you cry or how you cry or why you cry or whether you’re being a big fat ridiculous baby. She always gets that soft sympathetic look in her eyes and holds you close. Even if you’re not her kid she’ll do that. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hold a candle to her as a mother, but I know my kids will be okay because they’ll have Mom as a grandmother.

I bounce ideas off Mom almost before I bounce them off my own brain. That’s because Mom is one of the smartest people I know. I know I’m probably biased, but I think Mom may be one of the smartest people in the world. Mom knows things: useful and otherwise. There’s no enjoying Jeopardy when she’s in the room; you only wind up feeling badly about yourself. Alex Trebek gets to read the cards, but Mom knows the answers. Mom’s also a talented thinker. She doesn’t mind people questioning her beliefs. She’s thought them through and she can defend them. And she knows there’re some things she doesn’t know. She’s willing to think about those things too. Mom knows history and current events and how to pronounce words and scientific concepts and how to grow a hundred different plants and what they’re named (common and scientific). There’s a difference between intelligence and wisdom and Mom’s got both.

More than anyone else I know, Mom knows how to put things into perspective. I was on the phone with her the other day concerned because I was calling to tell her how I had spoiled a plan she had made. Mom just laughed. She never tells people they should have done what they should have done. She lets the silly stupid things that happen pass without making people feel badly about themselves. Mom can make a meal for four turn into a meal for ten in the time it takes for the front door to open and close six more times. And when you’re not there when you said you were going to be, she doesn’t grudge you the leftovers. Mom knows how important it is to feed the soul.

I’ve heard that it’s impossible to fathom the depth of the love you will have for your children before you have them. I’m sure this is true. But I know from experience that it is impossible to fathom the amount of love you can have for your parents even when you are in the midst of that love. I could say that to have parents and a sister such as mine nearly sets me up for failure – so much do I have to live up to and so great is the pressure. But it’s not true. To have parents and a sister such as mine is to have all the tools and guidance needed to make a life worth living.

(Disclaimer) I have tried, in saying what I have been trying to say, to avoid clichés fit for Mother’s Day greeting cards, none of which do Mom the credit she deserves. I know that I have, for the most part, not given the other influential people in my life their due in this entry. This one’s for Mom. She deserves that. And truthfully, I have not halfway gotten to the wonderfulness that is Mom. If you know her, I’m sure you’ll agree. But if 2010 gets me one step closer to possessing the grace and strength of my mother, it will truly be a successful year.

Taylor Swift's "The Best Day": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4_6eQm7RTQ

-R.E.A.

Pettiness, perspective, and the new urban threat

2009-12-11T16:27:00.000-08:00

In our 21st century world, danger lurks on every corner and even in our own front yards. Actually, as that Chesapeake Virginia guy knows all too well, the danger of politically correct, meddling, small, angry, purposeless and snooping women is prevalent even in our very homes where we can no longer smoke, sneeze, or (apparently) be naked. But for many of us our homes do protect us from most harm. The same can no longer be said of the sidewalks just outside.

A new and urban threat – one that has probably been there all along but that we are now finally beginning to take note of – is accosting our neighborhoods. And it is known, officially, as The Scavenger. Why have we suddenly begun noticing The Scavenger even when we have overlooked or ignored him in the past? Because city officials have begun listening to the politically correct, meddling, small, angry, purposeless and snooping people calling them on the phone. Why have they finally begun listening to these people? Because the city is losing capital. The city, that manages to spend nine months on a project that would take me and a semi-muscular donkey two weeks to complete, has conveniently noticed that it is losing money on peoples’ trash and it would like to inform all worthy, hard-working, trash-producing citizens of the threat that is inundating their communities.

So who is The Scavenger? He is your neighbor, your co-worker, your local store clerk, probably slightly poorer than you, but perhaps slightly smarter as well. I am fairly certain I have been a scavenger, of a sort, before, only I always thought of it as picking up other people’s liter. But this truly dangerous Scavenger is not merely picking up trash thrown onto the street by people lazier and more self-centered than he. We do not call that man a scavenger – we call him a good Samaritan, even when he makes five cents off of the bottle we paid for and left lying on the sand. No, the urban threat, the true Scavenger actually goes into our garbage cans as they sit, innocently awaiting the lumbering, smog-producing, gas-guzzling garbage truck to empty them out. And do you know what this Scavenger does when he goes into your own personal garbage can? He takes stuff! He takes your own personal garbage. And do you know what he does with it? He recycles it. Bottles, boxes, clothes, all of these things that can be turned into other things or worn by people who find a sweatshirt from a garbage can better than no sweatshirt at all. The Scavenger takes all of these things that (and before you call my bluff I admit to being sometimes guilty of this myself) you should have recycled yourself. He steals your garbage. The threatening, thieving, capitalistic Scavenger steals your trash and profits from it. He sells it. He recycles it. And every two dollars here and fifty cents there that he makes, he pockets. That Scavenger grows rich off of our garbage and this is why city officials have decided to step in.

See, the city was brilliant enough to come up with an electronic trash truck capable of scooping up garbage cans and dumping trash at the touch of a button. And the city was brilliant enough to come up with a green program that divided each person’s trash into ordinary, recyclable, and organic. But the city never thought of – or was never willing to employ people to actually sort through trash and remove valuable items. I have brainstormed for some time and have come up with some reasons why the city may have neglected to do this. Here are the best ones:

nobody would take the job.
health codes prohibited it.
it would take too long to get the plan approved.
paying people $7.75 an hour to sort trash would cost the city more than it would make on beer bottles and yard sale sweatshirts (although the city perhaps forgot about Saturday nights in college towns).

So the city can’t actually gain anything (or much) from enacting a sort-peoples’-trash-by-hand plan. (The city would, of course, like to employ robots to do the job, but Arnold says we’re bankrupt and I tend to agree). Incidentally, can anyone make me a t-shirt that says “Arnold says we’re bankrupt”? The city would in fact probably lose money on the whole thing (as the city is wont to do). So why are city officials up in arms? Because The Scavengers are making money. Never mind that the reason they are doing so is because they are a one-man show and do not have to pay themselves minimum wage. Never mind that five dollars to a person who is homeless or unemployed or even me is worth significantly more than five dollars to a city fund. The city is resentful that The Scavenger is making money off of what is rightfully its own. Apparently once we place our trash in the city-approved trash bins, it becomes city property.

I suppose I shouldn’t expect much from a government. But why are ordinary citizens up in arms? The only logical and justifiable reason I can think of is because they are concerned, not about the garbage, but about The Scavenger himself who could be anybody and is probably not somebody they want their children playing with. I am not speaking for the lady who says in an appalled tone that she believes The Scavenger walked across her front yard to reach her garbage cans which she had carefully tucked behind some trees in the hopes that he would not find them. I think she is concerned about her grass and perhaps something akin to pride. Nor do I speak for the man who worries that important and personal documents will be pulled from his trash cans and made public knowledge. To him I say, perhaps he should recycle some of his bottles and use the money to buy a paper shredder. Didn’t his mother ever teach him never to throw whole important documents into the trash?

I do, however, understand the concern of people who wish to feel safe stepping out their front doors. But let’s truly consider the threat of questionable people who spend their spare time rummaging through garbage instead of, say, robbing liquor stores. This is not to say there is no threat; it is merely to say that before we stage a defensive attack on the guy with a bicycle basket full of Coke cans, we should perhaps put things into perspective. (Might I also suggest sending a camaradic* smile his direction) To help with the concept of perspective, and because I believe in the parallel between real life and art, I am including a copy of Shel Silverstein’s vaguely related poem “Hector the Collector.” I’m pretty sure Shel Silverstein was smarter than most city officials:

HECTOR THE COLLECTOR
by Shel Silverstein

Hector the Collector
Collected bits of string,
Collected dolls with broken heads
And rusty bells that would not ring.
Pieces out of picture puzzles,
Bent-up nails and ice-cream sticks,
Twists of wires, worn-out tires,
Paper bags and broken bricks.
Old chipped vases, half-shoelaces,
Gatlin’ guns that wouldn’t shoot,
Leaky boats that wouldn’t float
And stopped-up horns that wouldn’t toot.
Butter knives that had no handles,
Copper keys that fit no locks,
Rings that were too small for fingers,
Dried-up leaves and patched-up socks.
Worn-out belts that had no buckles,
‘Lectric trains that had no tracks,
Airplane models, broken bottles,
Three-legged chairs and cups with cracks.
Hector the Collector
Loved these things with all his soul –
Loved them more than shining diamonds,
Loved them more than glistenin’ gold.
Hector called to all the people,
“Come and share my treasure trunk!”
And all the silly sightless people
Came and looked...and called it junk.

*to people (or dictionaries) who would argue that my word selection here is not actually a word, I would direct you to a pin that I once read: “ENGLISH MAJOR: If I say it then it’s a word.”

-R.E.A.

When I was 22 I had a midlife crisis

2009-11-11T23:10:00.000-08:00

When I was 22 I had a midlife crisis. (Having now turned an august 23, I can admit this here without...ahem...too much pain). First came the epiphany that I was far, far from where I wanted to be. Then came the crash. And by crash I mean tears. Lots and lots of tears. Endless tears. Big fat sobbing into the pillow, ugly blotchy face puffy eyes the next morning tears. This wasn’t the midlife crisis. This was only the fairly damp process leading up to it. After the tears. No, let me be honest, when the tears had subsided enough to allow the headache behind my eyes to clear up long enough for me to know I had a brain left, I got out. Fast. Like a bat out of hell. Like a man on the run. Like a bullet from a barrel. Like our kitten. Tulare when the bath water goes on. Claws out. Hair sticking straight up. Eyes wide. Out. Fast.

Then came these long, grateful, blustery days of calm. Home days. Tea Days. Prayer days. “Thank God for everything I still have and leaving everything I left behind me” days when the puffy white clouds (I was noticing clouds again) floating across the blue Pacific sky bellowed down “AMEN” so loudly that I kept looking around to see if anyone else on the beach had heard them. This wasn’t the midlife crisis either. This was the period of grace that the blessed Lord above gave me before the midlife crisis came. (Although I admit I am almost always sarcastic, this is not. It was [and is] grace and it was [and is] the blessed Lord above.)

But there is one thing none of us can run from. Not a bat, not a man, not a bullet, not even sweet little Tulare who is so cute she has been able to wheedle three consecutive bowls of milk out of us just by meowing. Certainly not me. The only difference between them and me is that I care and they do not. I concern myself with the answer to the question that every well-intentioned, concerned, loving, sympathetic, single person (including myself) asked after I bolted out of law school and all that it implied: “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO NOW?” And in that single question, the mid-life crisis was catalyzed.

Doubtless every person who asked the question had a good reason for doing so. Some were practical. My parents had been making my car, insurance, and phone payments my entire life and though, to their extreme credit, they have never even so much as suggested that they would rather make do without extraneous multi-hundred dollar monthly payments, they had, I’m certain, allowed themselves the smallest amount of personal interest in the idea that in three years I’d be earning enough to make my own payments and perhaps a few of theirs.

Furthermore, my father, God bless his over-worried soul, had always assumed that his youngest daughter (me) in all her English-y glory would eventually proclaim her intentions to build a hovel in a field somewhere and make novel-writing her career. He didn’t worry about her now. He worried about her when she realized that the world didn’t have an extreme amount of sympathy for a mediocre writer who lived in a hovel and had no other life experience and when she also realized that despite her most stolid convictions, you in fact did need money to survive after all. When I announced I was going to law school he was cautiously optimistic that perhaps I had finally chosen an actual profession. When I got accepted to law school he allowed himself actual joy at the prospect that one of his very own daughters would be a lawyer.

And then I quit. And further to his extreme credit he accepted this. Never has a single person who has made such a sumptuous mistake as I made ever had more support from the people around her than I have had. And so, the question, when it comes, is not in all capitals, as I hear it when it is asked. It is tentative and gentle and concerned. It says “I love you” even while it stops me cold in my tracks. Even while I stand there tongue-tied, like a prisoner in an interrogation room, it is not accusatory. It’s an open door and no handcuffs. It’s a question that says, “you don’t have to answer me.” But it echoes back on itself, “but eventually life itself will demand that you do.” The echo is all I hear.

The echo, perhaps, is me more than them. Because when I ask myself the question, I ask it in all caps and I mean for it to be answered. And there is perhaps no more frustrating and difficult state of mind to inhabit than the one in which you must look yourself square in the eye and admit that you don’t know. Because you will inevitably wonder, “THEN WHO THE HELL AM I?" And that question is the fuel on which the mid-life crisis runs.

Some people, mostly acquaintances, ask out of what they assume is kindness. They think it will be helpful for me to talk about what I am doing now. They think it will inspire me to remind myself that though I am a failure at law, I can be a success at something else. They want the opportunity to encourage me to follow my dreams. They want the opportunity to tell me that law is not for everyone so that I have the opportunity, since I am clearly one of those people, to explain to them what is for me, what I am if I am not the “lawyer type.” I am extremely adept at foiling their plans. Bless them. When they find out that, apparently, I have no dreams at all, they assure me that I will find my way. It takes all of us time to find our way, they tell me. And I agree. Except that not all of us waste thousands of dollars and nine months, break a few hearts and a couple of contracts, and discover they have no identity in the process. The mid-life crisis snuggles down into the nest she has created in my life and sips a cup of tea. She is not going anywhere.

If a person could make a living out of loving many things, I would banish the mid-life crisis from my life. I would wield my weightless, mud-luscious sword beneath her self-satisfied nose and cry out something profound and wonderful, like, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” And though she wouldn’t understand what I meant, she would leave. Because a person who has made a living exclusively off of loving many things does not have the doubt it takes to nurture a mid-life crisis.

If I were less fickle, if I felt less like a whirligig beetle and more like an Oak tree, if I didn’t have five million plans for the next five years and a fear of death, if I didn’t want a career that was everything to me and that I could also pack up and leave at a moment’s notice, if I was less like me and more like someone else (a lawyer, perhaps), I would have transitioned from knowing what I was doing to finding something else within a normal spectrum of time and perhaps the mid-life crisis would have passed me by, would have glanced my direction, realized I was a mere 22 years old and still relatively permitted to royally, fabulously mess things up, kindly put me down on her list for 25 years down the road, and passed me by. But instead I am me.

So now that I am 23, you ask (if you have gotten this far, perhaps you still care) – so now that I am 23, has my mid-life crisis passed? As with most questions, I have no answer to this. I have neither shiny red Corvette nor beach-front property to show for my crisis. I have no defined answers to any of my questions: what am I doing now? who am I? can a person make a living off of loving many things?

I have tried yoga (for which I am too impatient) and meditation (during which my legs inevitably fall asleep). These techniques are too sophisticated for me. They are not, it seems, at peace with the philosophy-of-Roya as it is. I still have times when my life flashes in front of me and it is blank with random moments and actions and dreams rolling about disconnected in different directions and it still makes me catch my breath and wonder about San Diego. I still don’t know what’s next. But despite knowing so little, I am extremely happy. Perhaps we have grown more used to each other, my mid-life crisis and I. Like two old neighbors who gossip officiously to one another day in and out but would still miss each other if one of them left. Perhaps she is biding her time. But perhaps I am biding mine as well. This was not, after all, meant to be a story of inspiration.

Finding myself unemployed and now only an echo of a scholar, I have taken time from my busy schedule of battling demons, sketching a map of my brain, and avoiding online application forms to learn an important phrase in six different languages (okay so I already knew it in a couple, but let’s not split hairs). This phrase, my ohm, if you will, is my defense against the unanswerable questions, the mid-life crisis, and, indeed, myself, having several times in the past few months been on the brink of understanding myself and then suddenly finding that I am afraid to know:

peu à peu
chotto zutsu
poco a poco
yavash yavash
nach und nach

little by little.

...goodbye 22; it's been lovely...

2009-11-01T11:35:00.000-08:00

Today I’m 23. My birthday always feels rather more like a new year than January 1st does and though I never make resolutions either on the national new year or on my own new year (why set yourself up for depression the following December 31 [or in my case, October 31] when you realize that, after all, you’re only human and the year, though wonderful, was just a year), here is what I hope becomes of me this year:

I hope to delight in getting to know 23. I hope that this new year I am braver and stronger, that I learn how to love better and to be less judgmental but more honest. I hope at 23 that I find the words, whatever and wherever they may be, and that I do many things.

A new age never comes without having to say goodbye to the old one. In some ways, 22 truly kicked my butt. I experienced, for example, my first mid-life crisis (more on that later), discovering, in the mean time, that who I was at 17 is not who I am today no matter how much I loved that girl. I realized also that I still lack any form of wisdom, in its broadest and narrowest senses, officially placing me in the age range of “too old to be wild and free and too young to be over the hill.” Having once been in the age range of “old enough to know better but still too young to care,” I can tell you that reaching this new plateau is, to put it nicely, an extraordinary disappointment. I don’t care how romantic it is to be a song lyric, there is nothing romantic about much of growing up.

Still, 22 is tucking itself away in a corner of my heart and I am sad to see it go. Why? Because 22 taught me something else about growing up. It doesn’t stink as much as I thought it did. Okay so it’s not romantic, but some things still are.

For the first time, at 22, I felt like perhaps I wanted to be an adult, wanted to view relationships and events in my life from that perspective and act accordingly. And for the first time I felt that being an adult may be beautiful in that you never lose the child that you were because it was she who brought you to this place and because you and she are one and the same. The five-year old, big cheeked, enormous imaginationed Roya is still in me, the eternally eight Roya, the wildly happy 11 Roya are too, even the 17-who-I-am-not Roya is still something I was, and so something I am today. Growing up, perhaps, doesn’t mean losing childhood entirely; it means having the strength built up from all those ages you were to create who you have become.

At 22 I began to learn how to slow down, to discover happiness in waiting and stepping lightly and moving forward only a step a day instead of in leaps and bounds. I learned about ties and how to have stronger and better relationships. I have never been more successful, in fact, in the past have failed miserably, at holding up my end of a friendship, or a loveship. I began to grow into myself. Cranberries became my new thing. I organized all the old letters people have sent me throughout my life.

And now, here comes 23 and this is what I have come to realize:

I now have only five years left during which to acquire a horse and a piece of land on which to put it.
I am the same age as my mom was when she got married.
I have yet to learn to play guitar, learn Spanish, or learn to surf.
This just may be my year to write the next great American novel...but the pressure has never been greater.
I am still afraid of crabs.

In light of these realizations, and others, I have gathered together some quotes that I hope will guide me through 23 – some profound sayings that remind me that I have never said anything this remarkable, but also that there is always hope...

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” ~Matthew 7:7-8

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” ~Blaise Pascal

“President Roosevelt once said, ‘speak softly and carry a big stick.’ I say to you, ‘yell loudly and swing a yard stick.’” ~Jason

“I defend myself against failure in my main design by making every inch of the road to it pleasant.” ~Emerson

“So damn easy to say that life’s so hard. Everybody’s got their share of battle scars. As for me, I’d like to thank my lucky stars that I’m alive and well...And today you know that’s good enough for me. Breathin’ in and out’s a blessing can’t you see. Today’s the first day of the rest of my life and I’m alive and well.” ~Kenny Chesney, Dean Dillon, & Mark Tamburino

“There are instincts for all the crises of life.” ~Victor Hugo

“I heard what was said of the universe / Heard it and heard it of several thousand years; / It is middling well as far as it goes – but is that all?” ~ Walt Whitman

-R.A.

A List Of Things That Very Likely Should Cease To Exist

2009-10-17T20:41:00.000-07:00

I have often thought that the city of Los Angeles (although it is arguably more a pit than a city) is really quite worthless after all is said and done. But recent events have started me thinking that there are many other things that the world would most probably be significantly better without. So I have begun compiling a personal list of Things That Very Likely Should Cease To Exist. The list is very much a work in progress. Please feel free to add your own.

A List Of Things That Very Likely Should Cease To Exist:

Los Angeles, the city

Obama as president

The Nobel Peace Prize

mean people

in-car video players

pants with stuff written on the butt

litter

anything besides the military that the federal government feels the compulsion to spend money on

veal

"presidents" who are actually dictators

My own personal literary and philosophical theory

2009-09-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

This is my own personal literary and philosophical theory. Years of higher education and practiced BS convinced me that to be a true intellectual I absolutely must have one. So here it is, complete with hypothetical example and strong bias:

“Science is an art;* art is a science. Everything is everything.”

There it is, guaranteed to explain and interpret any conceivable literary or philosophical ideas, past, present, or future. I like to explain it using the great wall example:

You are in a room with a great, blank wall. Someone hands you a marker and says, “please write your name on the white board,” indicating the wall in front of which you stand.

“That’s not a white board; that’s a wall,” you tell him. But you are wrong. If the wall has characteristics like those of a whiteboard, is it not a whiteboard? It is hard and upright and smoothly white. You can write on it with a marker. And, some way or another, you can wipe it off. If you want to split hairs you can call it a wall. If you want to be specific, pointed, descriptive. If you want to be picky, intellectual, uncompromising, you can call it a wall. If a behemoth, muscular giant approaches you and says walls are life and whiteboards are death and you value life, you may call it a wall. But really, it is just as much a whiteboard as a wall, a science as an art. Everything is everything.

P.S. Some people may tell you this is not a theory, but an anti-theory. Don’t believe them.

*Please note the semicolon, without which my own personal literary and philosophical theory is incomplete.

-R.A.

I woke up this morning and realized there were starving people all over the world

2009-09-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

I woke up one morning and realized there were starving people all over the world. So I wrote the White House: “It has come to my attention that there are starving people all over the world and I find it outrageous that no one else has done something about it before this, particularly you, Mr. President, as you are the moral guardian of our nation. Please fix this problem.”

The White House wrote me back one line, “Where do we get the money?”

I found this response disappointing, irrelevant, and downright offensive. These are STARVING PEOPLE we’re talking about; what does money have to do with it? So I compiled a list of facts about starving people and sent it to the White House.

The White House wrote me back one line, “What is the solution?”

It seems surprising to me that a mere citizen like myself should be expected to have answers to problems. What, I ask, is the government for if not to help the unintelligent general public find enlightenment? But I compiled another list because it is my duty as a human to find ways that other people who are also human but less compassionate than I to help people who are also human but more victimized than I. I sent my list to the White House. It looked like this:

Solution to World Starvation

· Provide all starving people all around the world with a balanced diet.

· A balanced diet includes all known vitamins.

· Provide all starving people all around the world with kitchens in which to cook their food.

· Provide all starving people all around the world with good medical care.

This last bullet may seem like a different issue entirely, however I believe it is important so I included it in the list. If the government follows my list exactly, I will have solved not only the world starvation problem, but also the problem of subpar healthcare for all around the world.

The White House wrote me back one word, “How?”

I have spent my entire life dedicated to the belief that money is bad, making people greedy, heartless, and selfish. Marxist philosophy is the closest a human has ever come to truth. But I think you will agree that my Solution to World Starvation list makes it evident that the starvation problem requires money. Lots of it. So I made a list, cataloguing the many uses of money in saving the starving populations. “Take it all,” I prompted, “all the oppressive capitalistic money and give it to the starving populations and they will be fed and the money will be cleansed.”

The White House wrote me back one line, “There still won’t be enough.”

All I have left to say is this: I am fed up with the unambitious, nay saying, skepticism of our government. Apparently, as a private citizen, not only am I supposed to solve the problems of the world, I am also supposed to fund them. I find the government’s utter lack of understanding of the severity of this situation absurd. I have provided them with a clear answer to the WAY THINGS SHOULD BE. Why, I ask, should rationalism get in the way of it?

Talk about not ending up where you started out

2009-07-21T23:02:00.000-07:00

You know what phrase I currently dislike more than any other? “Reverse racism.” This phrase is meaningless. There is no such thing. Racism is not this grand golden ticket endowed to minority populations as a defense against the majority. A black man voting for a black president simply because he wants to see a black person in office is just as racist as a white man voting for a white president because their skins match. A Hispanic judge ruling for a Hispanic public servant who is less qualified than his white colleague is as unjustified as a white judge ruling for a less competent white man.

Reverse racism implies that a minority directing racism at a majority is a secondary form of immorality – a more recent form of social injustice based off of – even perhaps a result of the first – racism itself. It is such a disgustingly beautiful way of allowing minority populations – bigoted and otherwise – to remain victimized and to dedicate only a measure of acknowledgement to majority recipients of injustice.

The implication is that I, a white majority, may have been dealt with unjustly based on my race, but only after I – even if only by association – dealt unjustly with others. The injustice dealt to me is – reverse racism admits – still an injustice, but it is, practically if not actually, based off of my own unjust treatment of another and thus less sympathetic and – on the grand scale, perhaps more deserved.

If I were a minority I would be, at my best times aggravated, and at my worst times irate at my fellow minorities' constant attempts to victimize me. How, I would like to know, can I be both an empowered individual and a predestined victim? Injustice is wrong and should be righted by individuals and society as a whole. But playing the victim in order to right the wrong is counter-productive. How can a woman who is attempting to prove to her world that she is as capable of rational thought as her male counterpart do so by portraying herself as the weak puppet of fate? How can she expect to be seen as strong and competent when all she will focus on is her oppression? If I want to impactfully prove to the world that I am capable, I will not ask for fairness from a population that has no faith in me and then attempt to prove myself on the “equality” that they never actually granted me because they do not yet believe I deserve it. I will practice and grow and learn and then I will prove myself, without any of their grace or assistance, against the odds. This is strength.

What happens when a population focuses on being victims is that instead of gaining freedom and respect they gain entitlement and think it is the same thing. This is why politically correctness is so disgusting. A feminist changes women to womyn and believes she has won a victory. But all she has really done is changed a spelling and not the opinions of the people who believe women are inferior to men. John Morley said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” If a society insists on calling white people Caucasians and black people African Americans, it does not follow that they have expelled racism in that society. I can call a man anything I wish to his face and still vote, speak, and act against him.

Treating people with equality is not the same thing as treating them the same. I am different from both the white woman and the black woman sitting nearby and I am glad of it, as, I’m sure, are they. Please treat me differently than you do the person in the corner who is fascinated by computer engineering; I would much prefer a good conversation on Steinbeck. Equality involves opportunity. It means that I can choose between computers and literature, not that I am forced into the same field as everyone else in society’s attempt to neutralize and to avoid racial, gender, and socioeconomic categorizing.

Equality is also not the same as being on equal footing. It’s like Emerson’s squirrel said to the mountain, “If I cannot carry forests on my back, / Neither can you crack a nut.” If I wish to be a philosopher, but my eyesight is so terrible I can’t read Aristotle, society does not owe me laser eye surgery. Equality does not mean we all get the same thing; it means we all have a chance at these things. Circumstance, character, and work must carry us the rest of the way.

…I have been searching in these past few paragraphs to find some thread of my original topic and I am fairly certain no such thread exists. Nevertheless, I have one more story to tell on the topic. I was listening to some political commentators on TV the other day (please don’t even get me started on commentators…I have no idea who you have to know to get one of those jobs but I cannot believe that I am the chump going into debt for law school when there are people out there who get paid to verbally blog) and one of them said something about how white males in today’s society have more restricted first amendment rights than others. The other commentator actually said, of course they do…they should have more limited freedom of speech; they aren’t a minority. This is not “reverse racism.” Don’t attempt to soften it with modifying adjectives. As Yann Martel says, “Don’t you bully me with your politeness.” The word for this kind of opinion is Racism. Just because society has chosen to be less appalled by it in this form, does not make it any less vulgar.

P.S. A note on my last entry: I received an email today from LSAC (Law School Admissions Committee) which is the avenue through which you funnel all your recommendation letters, LSAT scores, essays, etc. when you apply to law school. The subject line read “IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING YOUR LSAC ACCOUNT” (I do not exaggerate, the all-caps were their own).

I think: something is expiring, something didn’t go through, I’m missing a prereq, they lost my LSAT score, USD rejected me after all…

This is their urgent message: “Starting in 2010, the US Department of Education will be requiring significant changes in the way educational institutions collect and report race/ethnicity data. Accordingly, on July 19, 2009, LSAC changed the race/ethnicity designation in your LSAC account.

So I think: Lukas is right; they’re going to make me check Persian/American.

They continue, “Your previously reported ethnicity, Caucasian/White, has been changed to the subcategory Other Caucasian/White under the category Caucasian/White. Please log in to your LSAC account to view/update your race/ethnicity designation. Additional categories have been added, and you may select multiple categories.”

The problem was that classifying people within only one category was too limiting. It turns out that there are too many minorities nowadays. The US Department of Education finally read a history book and realized that only 2% of the population is purely British and 0% is purely American, officially making every single person a minority. They also realized that if you trace things back far enough everyone actually came from Africa, making everyone a majority. Subcategories were the only way to organize all the muck. How else could they know who to send scholarships to? The LSAC people kindly left a number at the bottom of the email for me to call in case I had any questions or concerns. I am calling them tomorrow to ask how much tax-payer money the US Department of Education spent on reorganizing the way educational institutions collect and report race/ethnicity data. I will also ask why, if they have extraneous money lying around, there are so many teachers receiving pink slips and so many students being rejected from the CSU system.

-R.A.

Juror # 866389501 - race: white

2009-04-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

I got a jury summons today. Call-in, for June, by which time I will have completely forgotten everything about it and will spend a few gut-wrenching days worrying that the federal government is going to come to my door and take me away to be locked up in a prison for nonconformists because I forgot to call. Recently I had put my contempt for the stupid things written on government forms on the backburner, but I just filled out the jury summons questionnaire and it all came flooding back, began boiling, if you will, to avoid a mixed metaphor. There are so many things wrong with the summons and questionnaire that you will think I am just splitting hairs if I list them all. You would probably be right; I lose more and more patience with both the government and stupidity with every passing minute and am un-inclined to give either one any benefit of the doubt. The icing on the cake is that I, in my civic duty, have been reduced to a number and a barcode – every patriot’s dream.

They make you fill out your race on the questionnaire. Well, first they make you answer whether or not you are a citizen and whether or not you are over 18 which is proof of their incompetence because why the hell would they be sending jury summons’ to someone who is neither a citizen nor over 18. But then they make you fill out your race. It’s a weird policy of mine to never fill out the race section of these bubble-in forms because (I’ll admit ignorance here) I am never certain of exactly what they mean by race (white is a race?), and because it annoys me that they ask this question because the only two things it could possibly be used for are a) their own curiosity which is a waste of my time, and b) some sort of discrimination (most probably to screw over the whites and to give preference to minorities). Usually these sections are optional and so I can go on my way feeling as though I have stuck it to the man in my own small way. On the jury summons questionnaire, the race section is mandatory. Their explanation is this:

“Federal law requires you as a prospective juror to indicate your race. This answer is required solely to avoid discrimination in juror selection and has absolutely no bearing on qualifications for jury service. By answering this question you help the federal court check and observe the juror selection process so that discrimination cannot occur. In this way the federal court can fulfill the policy of the United States, which is to provide jurors who are randomly selected from a fair cross section of the community.”

There is so much wrong with this explanation that I almost give up on it, but let’s face it, this is me and I have to blather. First of all, I cannot fathom what kind of reasoning allows that they have to KNOW your race in order to AVOID discrimination. This is such a perfect example of how the people and the government (which are supposed to be the same thing but have never been farther from it) find a problem and try to fix it by creating an even worse problem. It’s Einstein’s whole “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” concept, except that apparently we are going to try to until we run ourselves into the ground. Let’s backtrack…wouldn’t it be much simpler, and make much more sense, if they DIDN’T know your race and so could pick jurors based on their actual qualifications and the randomness that is supposed to be involved in the jury selection process?

But no, the government has redefined discrimination. What they mean in saying “to avoid discrimination,” is that they are going to ensure that there are not too many white guy jurors beating up on criminals. What they mean by “to avoid discrimination” is that they are in fact going to discriminate based on race so that they have an even distribution of races within a jury. Why didn’t they just say so? Discrimination is “the act of distinguishing differences,” according to Webster who is, I think, still considered an expert by both liberals and conservatives. So, the government is in fact discriminating in order to have jurors of multiple races. Discrimination is also “a showing of partiality or prejudice in treatment.” By specifically choosing, for example, 1 white guy, 1 black guy, and 1 Hispanic guy, instead of 3 white guys, isn’t the court showing partiality? I’m not arguing whether or not the practice of having an even distribution of races within a jury is the right thing to do. Rather, I am arguing against the way the government and all stupid organizations use buzz words to get away with doing whatever they want. DISCRIMINATION is bad. Thus, if the mandatory race section of the questionnaire is “to avoid discrimination,” it must be good.

Which leads me to my personal favorite buzz word FAIR. I am saddened and disheartened (and I’m not being sarcastic in either of these two words) that our JUSTICE SYSTEM is using the word “fair” as justification for their actions. What the hell is a “fair” cross section, anyway? The implication of a cross section of a population is that the percentage of races represented within the cross section is proportional to the percentage of these races within the entire population. How do you make this fair or unfair? But fairness…we all want fairness, right? Thus it must logically follow that, if the race section of the questionnaire ensures fairness, it is a good thing. This is not just semantics. This is not just me bashing the incompetent, but probably relatively innocent writer of the questionnaire because I am a crazy English major who has spent the last four years dissecting the way people should and shouldn’t write. I honestly believe that misused language supporting faulty reasoning is a technique for pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes and that peoples’ acceptance of this technique leads to the demise of democracy. Do I really care about the race section of the jury summons questionnaire? Not a hoot. It took me two seconds to bubble in “white,” I got over the fact that I hate filling out race sections and I moved on. Please see that that is not the issue, it was only my springboard.

There is a separate box that asks you to check yes or no to the question, “are you Hispanic?” I have no idea why they ask this question. But can you IMAGINE the outrage if they instead asked you to check yes or no if you are white. Even if they were using the question to screw over all the white people, the whole world would be up in arms over such a racist question. Racism in this country is misused in the same way as discrimination is misused, not as it pertains to all people across the board, but only as it pertains to majorities screwing over minorities. When the discrimination, or racism, is in the other direction, everyone averts their eyes.

I have more, but this blog is getting too long. I’m still saving the notice from the tax commissioner to all law abiding citizens that was on my federal tax form this year (and probably yours too, you were just smart enough not to read it). I’ll admit that I almost forgave the jury summons people because the envelope that I had to send my questionnaire back in was one of those ones that tastes faintly of watermelon instead of the kind that makes you think of public toilet seats. But then I flipped the envelope over and saw that I had to pay postage. As a potential juror fulfilling my honorable civic duty, apparently they still see me as a regular old chump who has to pay postage. Big surprise!

A story

2009-04-09T13:48:00.001-07:00

The sun was brisk and burning on Jonas’ shoulders as he bent over his work in the clay-ridden soil that consumed this long coastal valley. He leaned up to stretch his sore back, taking in the thirty acres that were his life and had been his father’s life before him.

“A farmer can’t be faint of heart,” his grandfather had once told him, “But the land repays you, boy, if you give it all you’ve got.” Jonas had learned that a farmer’s payment had little to do with monetary wealth, but he had come to consider his grandfather’s words truth. With just he and his wife, Annie, on the farm, their pains were more than enough for them both. As he knelt over his work, Jonas heard a faint breeze toil gently around the tall grasses as though it was speaking to him. It filled his spirit with the strength he needed to finish the field.

Jonas didn’t hear about the plans to build Highway 57 through town until a man wearing a black suit and pasty white skin knocked on his door and asked for the thirteen acres they would require through his fields.

“No, thank you,” Jonas told him and shut the door. But the man returned with more government people in more expensive suits who cajoled and preached and threatened him. Finally when the men were nearly defeated by Jonas’ obstinate refusal, one of them in the back stepped forward waving a paper like a victory banner in Jonas’ face. At the top of the page was printed, in bold, swirling font, “5th AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” These were pages and pages of explanation about how and why the government could take Jonas’ land and they gave him a week to read them. Jonas read every word. The government men returned in a jovial mood, willing to be friends now that Jonas had surely come around, even if he had been rude and unaccommodating at first.

“Public good,” the man in the black suit misquoted, and nodded his head, certain that now finally, Jonas understood their altruism. But Jonas still didn’t understand. It hadn’t been for the public good, for example, when Eastern Port had been attacked from without and the government hadn’t sent the military because it might incite war. The bombed wreckage of the three square miles around the port was like a dark hole burned out of the country’s landscape and it whispered across the nation the message that they hadn’t until then been able to convince the public of. It whispered that the government’s modern role was regulation, not protection. And Jonas suspected that the Constitution was as good as lost in the wreckage.

“Your signature, sir,” said the official, clearing his throat, and Jonas’ hand, signing away the deed to his grandfather’s land, didn’t shake.

“Drought,” he told himself. “The drought of ’74 dried up the entire farm, not just thirteen acres.” The only solution then had been to work harder. And Jonas did work harder, now, as he had then, until the exhaust from the motors and the shaking ground from the incessant traffic permeated across the remainder of his land and the crops curled up into black rolls, like ashes, and the farm was ruined.

Jonas was 45.

“Only 45,” he said to his wife when he told her he’d have to get a job in town.

“Only 45,” he told himself the day he left his home and walked onto his first building site. And he put the thirty years he had devoted to the land behind him.

When Jonas was 47, he was allowed to become an equipment operator.

When he was 50, he became a mason.

By 55, he was foreman, and had never been paid as much money before. He tried not to notice the farm, overgrown, and still patched with black from the old ashes, and it wasn’t too painful because hard work was what he had been taught, and as long as he was doing that, and providing, he knew he had everything a man should have.

It was for the debt, at first, the national debt, that they raised the taxes.

And then the schools, because there were more kids now, and they were entitled to college, not just grade school.

The hospitals needed it next, but not the hospitals, really. The insurance companies needed it because healthcare was a right, not a privilege, but some people couldn’t afford it.

And this time, a tax-collector came to the door and waved a form in Jonas’ face.

“Wrong tax-bracket, sir,” he said, “You filled out the wrong form. You’re in the upper bracket now.” And Jonas found that this meant that he paid for twice as many doctor visits for people he didn’t know.

And then one day Annie died. Jonas’ Annie. And he finally knew what heartbreak was. The muscle inside him seemed to be ripping out of his chest like the roots of an ancient tree that has survived hurricane and blight, but finds – at the last – that time itself is more than it can bare. The tears fell down his face in rivulets, running the course of each work-worn wrinkle on each long cheek as he knelt by her coffin. For three days straight. Until, on the fourth day, his forehead resting on his arm against the coffin, he heard the preacher whispering to a sympathetic parishioner.

“They say this kind can be treated, if it’s caught fast enough,” the parishioner said, “But each day counts with these things.”

Jonas knew then that it wasn’t the cancer that had killed Annie. It had taken them eleven months to get her an appointment with an oncologist. When Jonas raised his head, his eyes were dry, even as he watched them lower the coffin into the ground. Foreign ground. Because family burials on private land were no longer legal.

Eventually, business moved away from that bustling city on to another, as business will. Route 57, that ran across Jonas’ thirteen acres, was all but abandoned. He watched people roll out of town. First the truckers and workers; then the homeowners and their families; then the business-owners and public officials. Each parade of cars fancier, shinier, than the one before. He recognized the tax-collector leaving in a convertible.

Jonas was left on what was left of his farm, supporting his countrymen through forced charity what he would have given them freely out of his own hand. And that was how it was. That each good, hardworking man worked for naught. That his neighbor – whom he would have liked to befriend – was ashamed to show him his face, for for each new motion of laziness and ineptitude that he committed, his neighbor worked harder and more futilely than before.

They called it kindness, fairness, humanism, that each man might live unconditionally granted the rights with which he was born. But it was just a more vicious kind of injustice.

Just a note

2009-03-18T17:20:00.001-07:00

There are significant differences between the words fairness and justice and a good lot of people would do a lot of good to learn the difference and then choose their words accordingly.

(For the sake of self-betterment, reading the United States Constitution through a couple times - or even once - wouldn't hurt either.)

A new level of low

2009-03-18T17:14:00.000-07:00

I disagree with the current administration and the politics that back it on virtually everything. I think the campaigning for this election was underhanded and graceless and I think that the American people are not only being fed, but also eating lies. But I watched scapegoating on TV today and I think this is a new level of low from our current “leaders.” I don’t intend to go off on the AIG “scandal” for too long or to dissect or quote people on the subject. But has anybody been watching Congress tear Liddy apart on the subject of AIG? Congress has turned AIG (and its questionable integrity) into a scapegoat to hide its own huge mistakes which involved:
1) throwing bailout funding (money that, incidentally, doesn’t even exist in America)around like it’s Monopoly money when they shouldn’t have approved any money to go out to begin with, and
2) not explicitly stating what the receivers of the money were and were not allowed to do with it.

AIG’s use of bailout money is not the problem we are facing; the problem is the bailout itself. And everyone (some with excruciating slowness) is beginning to notice. Now, realizing their own horrendous mistake, Congress has decided to find a conveniently big name like AIG and try to bring it down with the support of the taxpayers by framing it to look like it is AIG’s fault that the government stole and negligently used taxpayer money. It’s a beautiful thing: a whole slew of Congressmen against Liddy, asking him obscene questions that he can’t answer because if he does they will tear him (or his associates) further apart for the way he worded something or for some promise he made that he didn’t actually make but that they can make it look like he made. Liddy actually said (okay I am going to quote) “I’m sorry to be so evasive, but…” (and he went on to explain his concern for his associates’ safety if he revealed names and other information). When was the last time we heard a politician or corporate head or any other big shot ADMIT that he was being evasive and then explicitly explain why he was being evasive for good cause? It indicates to me that Liddy is still a human being which is more than I can say for the majority of Congress sitting “stone cold dead” on their high horses trying to make AIG look bad so that nobody will notice their own failures. And the bald guy yells at Liddy (actually interrupts him with), “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE EVASIVE…” And all I can think is that this guy must have done something really terrible because anyone who is that passionate about bringing someone else (who is not even guilty) down must have a lot of his own hide resting on it.

So President Obama’s stimulus crap continues to fail (Caterpillar is still laying off tractor-loads of people) which is no big surprise to any rational human being; Congress is too stupid to insert a small clause that says, “you can only use this money for the following ten things…;” and AIG gets blamed. It’s very convenient. Because Obama stands up there comparing himself to Lincoln and people keep swooning over him and AIG is the type of Big Bad Business that everybody loves to hate. Well played. This game is a great test of the public’s intelligence.

Maybe this is what Limbaugh means by failure

2009-03-03T23:04:00.000-08:00

The headline on CNN right now says: “FIRST STIMULUS PROJECT ‘A WASTE?’” They’re in St. Louis making some enormous deal about how shocking and offending it is that stimulus money in St. Louis is being used wastefully and I think – out loud and to the misfortune of everyone else in the room attempting to have a peaceful evening– how amazing it is that they are SURPRISED by the fact that stimulus money is being used negligently. To think that billions of dollars worth of money being negligently thrown at people by a government that has no respect for fiscal responsibility to begin with should then be used negligently by companies and industries that were irresponsible enough to get themselves in the situation to need the money! To think that people who are fiscally irresponsible have not magically become responsible after having large sums of unearned money thrown at them! To think that billions of dollars worth of money does not make people smarter!

But what I really want to say is: thank goodness for companies like Northern Trust (who, before you call me shortsighted, I fully admit probably has a lot of low, unethical, and wasteful action going on behind the scenes that has no association with their recent “infamy”) and God keep me from strangling the virtual necks of the unintelligent people who comment on these news reports! The story goes (and it is startlingly difficult to get a straight story. “Where the press is free and every man can read…” – Jefferson, right?) that Northern Trust Bank threw a huge appreciation gala for a bunch of their clients and execs after having received federal bailout money. The golf tournament, music extravaganza was the second annual Northern Trust event and, according to some sources, raises large amounts of charity money. According to Northern Trust, they never wanted bailout money to begin with. The company made $641 million dollars last year and didn’t need any federal money, but “agreed to the government’s goal of gaining the participation of all major banks in the United States.” Supposedly, they are more than willing to give the money back, albeit gradually. According to some sources, however, Congress, despite being up in arms about the incident, won’t actually accept the money back. People are even angrier because Northern Trust apparently laid off 400-some employees in December. This doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly large number, but that’s not the most important point. The most important point is that laying off employees that are not needed is one of the ways to keep your business from flopping, as is schmoozing loyal customers. Both of these actions on Northern Trust’s part seem to me well-thought-out business decisions, not extraneous acts of negligence.

But all of this is irrelevant when compared to the fact that Northern Trust never wanted or needed government money to begin with. Furthermore, if their gala cost them less than $641 million, then it is a totally justifiable argument that they were not spending government, but their own money. Besides which, there were no specific directions by Congress prohibiting this type of spending with bailout money. Thus, for the government to condemn Northern Trust is a blatant attempt to exert even more excessive control over the banks. If Congress can arbitrarily proclaim that a company, industry, or individual is not using “their” (i.e. my) money “properly,” then there are virtually no lines at all that they can and will not cross.

I’ve left out another relevant detail. Apparently, Northern Trust signed a contract two years ago that they would host this event for the next five years, well before any bailout money was offered to (or forced on) them. The article on ABC news online by Maddy Sauer ACTUALLY STATES: “Critics say even if the bank has contractual obligations, money could have been saved by canceling concerts or staying in budget accommodations.” So now, a company is free to spend its money as it pleases unless socially moral and intelligent judges like Barney Frank proclaim that they are being (and I quote) “lavish.” I see.

Tom Schatz, some meager human being with the title President of Citizens Against Government Waste (reminds me of the Dr. Seuss book where the watcher needs a watcher!) suggests that, “that’s really the issue more than prior commitments. You can cancel a concert.” Apparently, a contract no longer means anything. This is good news for me as the state is stealing $23 in taxes from me this year and I am glad to hear that the signature I put at the bottom of my tax form is null and void and I can keep my twenty three bucks. But Schatz doesn’t stop there. He is, after all, a concerned citizen. “Firing” (I read a shirt once that defined liberalism as changing the definitions of words to suit their own needs) 450 employees, Schatz says “isn’t great…for the morale of taxpayers.” He’s right! When I heard that Northern Trust had laid off 450 employees, I was on Prozac for weeks, but when Obama raised everybody’s taxes and stole hard working people’s money to give to failed businesses, that was only fair.

Apparently, though, some people agree with Schatz. If the articles on Northern Trust aren't ridiculous enough, people’s commentary on the (this was the favorite word) “greed” of the Big Bad Bank is over the top. Aside from the patriotic citizens like “help this country,” who said things like “the bailout was rewarding bad behavior to begin with,” so many people seem to believe that Northern Trust’s extravagant spending (of their own money) is an insult to hard-working Americans, though stealing our money to begin with was all in the line of duty. “lalibertekai0111” asks “Why was the money taken if they DID NOT NEED IT!!!” (apparently, “lal” entirely failed to actually read the article) and wants to “build some kind of database that every corporation should install therefore tracking exactly where the money was spent” This amazes me! Granted, random people leaving messages at the ends of online news articles don’t have to qualify as intelligent (at the risk of sounding egotistical, random ranting bloggers don’t have to be qualified either), but this person calls himself (for all the politically correct crusaders out there, this is not me being sexist, this is just me being unwilling to write: him/herself every time I don’t know someone’s gender) an AMERICAN and wants a universal database through which companies have to input all their spending for government surveillance. “So this is how democracy dies - to thunderous applause.”

Apparently, “lal” isn’t the only one touting socialism. According to him, “we ALL [emphasis mine] agree that the money should go to the most appropriate places as long as it revives the economy.” In fact, when I wrote 90% of my hard-earned salary away to the feds, I specifically noted that ALL of my money should be used in the MOST appropriate places JUST SO LONG AS IT WOULD REVIVE THE ECONOMY. I trust that Congress will be able to judge what is “appropriate” for me, as I am clearly not competent enough to do so, but I asked for a contract stating that I would receive a refund if the economy was not dramatically improved by Tuesday. They signed the contract, but Tuesday has come and gone and the economy still stinks. I can’t even get two cents on eBay for the signature because this is America and we don’t abide by contracts here.

This other guy (P.C. gal), "pinkpoppies09," says that “the actions taken by Northern Trust were a slap in the face of every hardworking American who is going to have to pay higher taxes down the road for the bailout money they were given.” This represents truly superior thinking because I am sure that, had Northern Trust adamantly resisted the money being forced down their throats to the point of being sent to jail for nonconformity, the government would have taken their allotted money and redistributed it to all of us hard-working Americans, thus reducing the katrillion dollar debt we have already prepared for our children by 0.0000000023%. Six-digit disability money being given to a woman who thinks she is Angelina Jolie and is birthing large quantities of babies without any prospect of acquiring a job is not an insult to taxpayers. Taking more money from rich people who have earned their money through blood, sweat, and tears, and distributing it to people who lack the motivation, ambition, courage, or persistence to do the same is just the American way. Northern Trust using their own money to further their business, now THAT’S a slap in the face.

There’s still hope. IberiaBank Corp. is sending the money back. Based in Louisiana, the bank has filed paperwork to repay some $90 million from the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s Capital Purchase Program (the more words, the more vague and gray appears the evil), because, they say, “We believe recent actions, interpretations and commentary regarding various aspects of the program places our company at an unacceptable competitive disadvantage. Our board of directors has determined that continued participation in this program is no longer in the best interest of our company and its shareholders.” (i.e. lalibertekai0111’s universal database is scaring the need out of Iberia) So what if the companies realize that the government intrusion on their livelihoods isn’t worth the pay? And what if the people realize that the way their money is being spent isn’t worth the working hours? Well, what if America becomes a free-market again? Maybe this is what Limbaugh means by failure.

La liberté éclairant le monde

2009-02-15T22:45:00.001-08:00

I went to New York City for the first time recently. It was a whirlwind trip that involved miles of walking and a longer list of things to see coming home than I had going. It was amazing! On the advice of a New Yorker, we went to Frauncis Tavern, the place where George Washington gave his farewell speech to his troops before heading home to Virginia, about a week after the British left New York City, effectually ending the Revolutionary War. He would soon become the first president of the new United States of America, but just then he was "only" a general, a military man through-and-through. The parting with his troops was an emotional one for all of them. They had just won a war and created a nation and it was truly the end of an era. I stood in the room on the third floor where the men had gathered...where George Washington himself had stood.

People call me an idealist and they are unarguably correct. I can't help it. And I'm realistic enough to know that Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and the others weren't saints or gods or superheroes. But it disgusts, actually disgusts me to compare our politicians of today with our founding fathers. Washington never wanted to be president. He was a general, a military man through-and-through. And I thought of that when I read these lines from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: "perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who...have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well."

I inevitably think (and this is my proof that I am not a pure idealist) of this past election and the shameless, graceless way in which candidates from both parties "fought" for the presidency. Mud-slinging is too subtle a word for what went on, and has been going on for some time. This was downright meanness, lies, and deceit. Not one time in the entire race was I convinced that our current president wanted to win the presidency because he believed he would do great things for America, indeed because he believed in America at all. Rather he, and all the candidates, seemed to be running against the other candidates simply to win, simply to watch the other ones lose, like a "grown-up" version of a high school prom queen election. Who was the prettiest candidate; more importantly, who was the most successful at pulling the wool over the American people's eyes and making them believe that the poor semblance of humanity before them was competent enough to be president? Politicians no longer even remotely act as representatives of the people. Rather, they pose as strong, perseverant, capable leaders who will lead the people blindly around. And the worst thing about it, the thing that infuriates me the most, is that the people buy it! Apparently, at least 53% - and more probably closer to 80% - of Americans no longer even want a representative. They want a protector, an all-powerful presence who will ensure that their lives and livelihoods are safe and comfortable, no matter what the cost.

We didn’t have time to take the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty so, although seeing her from shore was at the top of my list, I didn’t expect much more than I have seen on innumerable postcards. We walked through Battery Park and, to my delight, came upon the harbor. But the sight of the Statue of Liberty left me in awe. I couldn’t turn away. I cried. I sat there in thirty degree weather and just stared. She is beautiful, and graceful, and even from that distance has a presence that I would never believe a copper statue could possibly have. And she defies the tumult and corruption and confusion that currently grips America, that I believe (call me an alarmist) currently threatens the basic principles upon which we were founded. She says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" And she still believes it.

These days I often think of something Vonnegut wrote in Cat’s Cradle about some character whose name I’ve forgotten: “Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone cold dead.” Seriously, I wonder, in our political “leaders”, where intellect, rationale, and righteousness have disappeared to. I hope the Statue of Liberty, and a few Americans, can keep the faith.

2009-02-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

isn’t it amazing
the way that right song
just fills your bones
and makes your heart open
up to the crazy world
that beats against you
and sometimes makes you
– dead

the
way
each
curling
windswept
tide-swirled nine-
katrillion-grains-of-
salt-twirled, re – lent – less, pounding wave
comes in to shore and back out
just like
that

that it’s no real feat at all
– but sometimes you wake up
and can’t see the goodness of a day
let alone the strength that makes you

that just one breath
inside your going-for-a-hundred-years
body means
some immeasurable
– unfathomable
– uncoincidental
number of things went right inside and
you’re alive

Okay class…today’s lesson – PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY…

2009-02-08T22:22:00.000-08:00

Remember when you were ten and you really, really, really wanted a puppy? And you begged and begged and all you got were lectures about how much care a puppy needed: “a puppy needs walked, and bathed, and brushed, and fed twice a day, and taken to the vet, and trained, and cuddled, and read to, and helped with its homework, and frequent trips on private jets…” and “you don’t even make your bed in the mornings! What should make me think you would take care of a puppy?” and “if you show me that you're responsible then maaaaybe I will begin to possibly consider getting you a dog someday.” So you promised up and down and inside out that you would make your bed every day, and brush your teeth, and go to bed without being asked, and do your homework early…And finally when you were sixteen and your interest in puppies was finally waning in comparison to sports and members of the opposite sex, your parents decided you were responsible enough to get a puppy. “But you can bet,” your mom told you in the firm voice that only years of motherhood can master, “that I will not so much as lift a finger to take care of that thing. It is entirely your responsibility.” And even while you accepted the challenge you knew that if that puppy ever left so much as one single hair on the furniture and you didn’t pick it up, you would go down in infamy as the most irresponsible person to ever defame the family genes.

Remember that? Or maybe you don’t. Because apparently, based on the current adult population, children no longer learn lessons of responsibility from their parents. Instead, they learn entitlement. How much they are owed by everybody else for being alive and how frequently they are viciously robbed of their rights by those who do not appreciate laziness, ineptitude, and corruption. A puppy? You want a puppy? Get a puppy! If you find you can’t take care of it, Washington will certainly bail you out. It is, after all, your right to be negligent in a free country such as ours.

I was raised (yes, actually raised. Not set in front of the TV, or in the alley behind our house, or aborted entirely. RAISED) by parents who not only required us to be personally responsible, but also taught us not to pass the blame on to others, even if they deserved it! Yes, even if they deserved it. If it was a matter of justice, life, or death, it was acceptable to make a case for yourself in defense of something you were accused of doing, but didn’t actually do. But even if you knew who did do it, even if their eyes were burning holes through you, you didn’t, unless it was a matter of justice, life, or death, tell who had done it. My parents never stormed into a room and shouted, “Who threw the paper towels in a puddle of water in the bathroom?” Instead, they stormed in and said, “Somebody better go pick up the paper towels that are sitting in a puddle of water in the bathroom.” If you had done it, you fixed it and the case was closed. If you hadn’t done it, you fixed it and got the satisfaction of knowing you were a bigger person than the one who had done it. It’s a method of deferment. Defer the blame to fix the problem. A shouting match about who did something graceless, obscene, or stupid, would never have gotten the damn paper towels out of the puddle because anyone, if he is human, is going to get defensive when somebody points a big, accusing finger in his face. Don’t demand to know who messed up. Fix it. SOMEBODY JUST FIX IT. Take responsibility for your world. Be an upstanding, responsible human being, even if the whole world is exploding around you. And, most importantly, when you mess up, however small or obscenely huge, accept the blame and do what you should.

It’s a simple lesson, but it is not one that applies solely to deviant ten year olds who leave paper towels in puddles. And that’s the problem, it seems. The majority of American “grown-ups” – those who are in high places and those who are not – seem to have completely forgotten those basic childhood lessons. “I have bad credit because I spent more money than I made and made the assumption that rectangular pieces of plastic would solve my problems. So what do I do? Stop spending money that I don’t have. Why bother? The world owes me money and there are dozens of lawyers and companies that are more than willing to screw around with the numbers and cut me a break I don’t deserve.” “I am a bank giving enormous loans to people with bad credit and pretty soon my funds will run out and people are going to freak out and try to withdraw money, but the money’s not there because I loaned it out negligently.” Should we allow the bank to go under, allow the basic principles of capitalism on which this country was built to prosper and let the incompetent companies fail? Heck no! Socialism is the answer. The government will save us.

There was a little blurb in USA Today the other day entitled “Museum joins list of economy’s victims.” Apparently, Brandeis University in Massachusetts is shutting down its Rose Art Museum because, according to the school’s president “The Rose is a jewel but, for the most part, it’s a hidden jewel. We felt that at this point, given the recession and the financial crisis, we had no choice.” Oh horror of horrors! Call in the troops! You mean this place is actually taking the initiative to manage its finances responsibly? You mean that it is willing to sacrifice something that is a drain on the system in order to make some money and avoid biting the dust? Victim indeed.

If one more person above the age of seven tells me that something or another about his life is not “fair!” I’m going to spit in his face. Is mine the only mother left who taught her children that life is not fair? The world doesn’t owe anybody fair. And the government certainly doesn’t owe anybody fair. Sometimes you work hard and good things come of it. And sometimes, you work hard and crap happens. That’s not a problem, it’s not an injustice, or a tough break. That’s LIFE. And instead of crying about it, or calling for other people more incompetent than yourself to “fix” it, suck it up and fix it yourself. Take responsibility for your life, whether it’s your own fault or not!

Speaks for itself!

2009-02-04T13:50:00.000-08:00

"My daddy taught me in this country everyone’s the same
You work hard for your dollar and you never pass the blame
When it don’t go your way
Now I see all these big shots whinin’ on my evening news
About how they’re losin’ billions and how it’s up to me and you
To come running to the rescue
Well pardon me if I don’t shed a tear ‘cause they’re selling make believe
And we don’t buy that here

'Cause in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down
While the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town
And DC’s bailin' out the bankers as the farmers auction ground,
Yeah while they’re livin' it up on Wall Street in that New York City town,
Here in the real world they're shuttin’ Detroit down.

Well that old man’s been workin’ in that plant most all his life
Now his pension plan’s been cut in half and he can’t afford to die
And it’s a cryin' shame, ‘cause he ain’t the one to blame
When I look down and see his caloused hands,
Let me tell you friend it gets me fightin’ mad

'Cause in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down
While the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town
And DC’s bailin' out the bankers as the farmers auction ground,
Yeah while they’re livin' it up on Wall Street in that New York City town,
Here in the real world they're shuttin’ Detroit down."

"Shuttin' Detroit Down"
by John Rich
www.johnrich.com