Comment by The Not So Little Drummer Boy about Buzzfeed:
“They have the most ridiculous lists — things like “The top ten episodes of Seinfeld as seen from the perspective of Stanley Kubrick.” Um, that’s not actually a list.”
I wish it were. It would be a lot more interesting than a lot of the Buzzfeed lists.
Still here. Still writing, although not here. (Playing around with Scrivener, hoping to increase my productivity.) Struggling with depression and isolation. Coming to terms with the imminent (as in the next year) of two, possibly all three, of my sons. Stressing out about college admissions and rejections, and upcoming financial aid offers. Job-hunting, while hoping that I get called back by my former employers.
Watching too much television. Right now, the shows I am scheduled to record (yay for DVRs!) are The Voice, Criminal Minds, The Amazing Race, old episodes of Good Eats when they appear on the Cooking Channel, and my latest fave, Comedy Central’s @midnight.
(@midnight mocks the Internet, specifically social media. Comedians comment upon social media clips, ranging from Twitter, Youtube, Vine (which I did not know was a thing until this show), Yelp, and other places people can generally make fools of themselves publicly. My favorite segment is Hashtag Wars, in which the “contestants” create fictitious items that fall into bizarre categories. The first show I saw had a Hashtag War of #stonervideogames, such as “Chronic the Hedgehog,” “Hash Bandicoot,” “World of Weedcraft,” and my favorite, “Grand Theft… what are we doing here again?” I started watching because one episode had the Sklar Brothers, whom I have had an unremitting crush on since I saw them on History Channel’s United Stats of America. Geeky, middle-aged twins. Wonderful. Another show had the incomparable Will Wheaton.)
So, surviving. Whether this counts as living is another matter altogether.
By now you, and most of the connected world, have heard the story of Marius the giraffe killed by the Copenhagen zoo. He was a healthy, surplus teenager, as far as the giraffe world goes. And, as hard as it may seem, the Copenhagen Zoo did the right thing in his case.
Marius could not be bred to other giraffes — he was too closely related to other giraffe breeding stock in the European zoo association to which the zoo belonged, and they were prevented by the association rules from sending Marius to an outside institution. He was old enough that he would face difficulties integrating into the rest of the zoo’s herd. The zoo did not have the resources to house him separately.
The outcry against his death was immediate, and completely foreseeable, but wrong. Humans often anthropomorphize individual animals, while ignoring threats to species and ecosystems as a whole, and often without looking at the long-term prospects for the animal in question.
This tendency — along with economic interests on the part of owners — causes support for trying to save racehorses which have suffered injuries which should have resulted in euthanasia. I have written about Barbaro before, and my dismay at the heroic — and misplaced –efforts to keep him alive long after he should have been put down.
Animals are not people. We forget that too often, treating the death of even a single animal as though it were the death of a person. We treat pets as though they were children. Don’t get me wrong, I love my cat, but the pain that I will feel at her death (given feline life expectancies, and the fact that she is now middle-aged by cat standards, I expect I will outlive her by many years) is nothing compared to the pain of losing a human loved one.
As far as I am concerned, the only people who have standing to oppose Marius’s death are vegetarians (actually, probably only vegans) who strongly oppose zoos.
What makes a zoo animal more important than a cow bred for milk or meat? Or a chicken? (Or, to look at a wild animal, a lobster? Conservationist talk about “Charismatic Macrofauna” — the cute or impressive birds and mammals that almost everyone agrees needs saving. There is less public enthusiasm about the delta smelt, although courts have upheld conservation efforts.) Is it domestication? Why should that matter? In any case the animal is cared for and fed by humans; it is only what we ask of them in return that is different. It is not like Marius is a “wild” animal in any sense: he was born in a zoo, raised in a zoo, and would have been totally unfit for life in the wild.
There was also dismay that Marius’s corpse was autopsied in front of children: from what I understand, the zoo makes all necropsies open to the public. If school children were present, it would have been with the permission of the parent. And as far as feeding Marius to the lions — that is what would have happened to him in the end were he in the wild. It is only fitting that the zoo use the meat for predators. What do people think lions eat on the African plains? Kibble?
I think there are strong philosophical questions about zoos. I know that there are people who object to keeping animals for the purpose of entertaining humans. It is true that not all zoos are well run. It is also true that collection of animals for zoos in the 20th century furthered the decline of some species’s populations in the wild.
I happen to think zoos serve an important purpose: not just educational, but in preservation of species. I would have never seen the California Condor in the wild had the San Diego Zoo not had an intensive breeding program which resulted in birds being released back into the wild. One of my favorite non-domesticated species, Pryzewalski’s horse, was brought back from the brink of extinction by the dedicated work of scientists in zoos. It now has been reintroduced into the wilds of Ukraine and Mongolia, and although it is listed as endangered, its population has increased from 12 individuals in captivity in the 1960s to at least 1,500 in the 1990s. The animal has gone from being classified as “extinct in the wild” to “critically endangered” to “endangered.” It is not out of the woods completely (a herd of 200 horses in a preserve in Ukraine was reduced to just sixty by poachers), but there is hope for the species. The same can be said for the California Condor, and the European Bison, and the Red Wolf.
We are rapidly destroying habitat, from Amazon rain forests, to United States old-growth forests, to California rivers and streams dried up so that water can be diverted to support agricultural, manufacturing and municipal needs. Animals are killed by poachers, predators are killed by farmers. We are driving entire species to extinction.
All of that should weigh more heavily on the popular consciousness than the euthanasia of one teenage giraffe in captivity.
[Edited to fix some very stupid typos. I’m sure there are others I did not catch. One of them was the responsibility of an autocorrect system that did not recognize “smelt.” I would say “Damn autocorrect,” except that it has caught far more than it has gotten wrong.]]
I have previously written about lolmythesis.com. I have noticed people starting to add the title of their thesis under their statement of what the thesis is about. The often discord between the two makes them even more amusing.
Examples:
Imagine Settlers of Catan but featuring Game of Thrones’ Dothraki horselords. Then the British start playing and they bring guns. Guess who wins., Archaeology, University of Oxford: The BaPhuthi Chiefdom, Cattle Raiding, and Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth-Century Maloti-Drakensberg
or
Blah blah blah; you stopped listening anyway becase it’s about statistics.,Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: A New Method for Multivariate Analysis of Rank Order Data
or
Stephen Colbert, Nude, Draped in the American Flag, 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature, Berkeley: The Influence of American Exceptionalism on the Contemporary American Body of Work
or
Oh, You Fancy, Huh?: Bros Edition, Art History, Florida International University: The Elegant Construction of Man: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Upper and Upper-Middle Class Masculine Identity Formation During the Late 19th and Early 20th Century
Sometimes the thesis titles themselves are entertaining:
Having sex with dead people sure is weird, but shouldn’t be illegal, Law, Thompson Rivers University: Cracking Open a Cold One – An Exploration into the Cold, Dead Recesses of Necrophilia
or
Nobody likes Communists., History, Middlebury College: Black, White and Red All Over: Communism, the Press and the Trial of Willie McGee, 1950-1951.
Of course, there are always the ones where I wish I knew the name of the thesis:
a chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion. American literature, Penn State.
or
In the Final Jeopardy! round, it’s better to have more money and greater knowledge of trivia than your opponents. Mathematics, Princeton. [Note: Can someone please explain to me how Final Jeopardy could be relevant to mathematics? My hunch is that this thesis had to do with game theory and betting strategies.]
or
What’s up with the people who do the kinky sex? Psychology, University of Calgary.
At any rate, I found them funny.
I have not been writing frequently, my desires to the contrary notwithstanding. There has not been a lot going on in my life, although there has been too much going on in the world at large.
As I wrote earlier, work ended on January 31. The first week was “Hey, I don’t have to go to work!” Subsequent weeks have been “Damn, I don’t have work to go to.” There is a possibility of work coming up later in the spring, and I did have an interview with a Manpower representative, but things are still slow.
There was a car accident in my family. I can’t write about it because, as corporations often say when controversy arises, it will probably entail litigation, but Vincent the black Mustang was totaled. I keep thinking I should write a memorial for him. It is odd to write a memorial for a car, but then Vincent was unusual car. He was not Kit (for one thing he broke down too often), but he had history and personality.
We have survived the college application process with the Red-Headed Menace. We are now in the awful waiting for results stage. It is not as bad as it might have been, as he has already been admitted to a relatively highly-ranked engineering program. It is not one of his dream schools (we realize all of them are unlikely to admit him), but on the other hand, he got in somewhere, so we don’t have rejection after rejection coming in. (He actually got into another school, but only in the school of humanities, not in engineering. So that one is out of the running. While RHM plans on a double major of bioengineering and philosophy (go figure), he realizes that philosophers have poor job prospects. Bioethicists, his favorite job possibility, have poor job prospects as well, but a boy can dream, can’t he?) With the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy, his admission letter came after a lot of rejections. That was a terrible time.
So we are in March. Spring begins in March. We are getting a little rain now, but it will not be enough to affect the drought. It is going to be a long, dry, dusty summer. We are not in a region likely to face fire, but we are sometimes subject to smoke from grass-fires. It is the worst scenario: just enough rain to cause some growth, but not enough to ease the fire-danger.
“Let it Go” has replaced “Defying Gravity” as my go-to Idina Menzel empowerment ballad. “Defying Gravity” was sightly problematic for me for various reasons, and I like the “go-to-hell” vibe of “Let It Go” better anyway. That, Sarah Bareilles “Brave,” Pink’s “Raise Your Glass,” Lorde’s “Royals, and Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” are in heavy rotation on my iTunes these days. (Speaking of Pharrell, I’ve also started listening to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” as well. It’s disco, albeit very well done disco.)
Well, time to go back to job searching. Blech.
I am done with Angry Birds. I don’t like the game well enough to pay for it, so I play the free version.
I don’t mind the ads; it’s a free game, after all. I understand that Rovio has to make money off of it somehow. The ads between levels are no problem, but they now have ads which partially obscure the field of play.
How can I properly deploy my black bomb-birds if I can’t see where all the green pigs are? Whine.
My younger two sons are having what can only be described as moderately heated discussion about the historical timing of the rise of secularism in Renaissance and Baroque art.
They are both right about some things but I refuse to get involved.
MIT releases its admission decisions on March 14, at 1:59 am. (Just to state the obvious, that would be at 3.14, 1:59.)
I can’t decide whether this is endearing or annoyingly smug.
1. The title was obnoxious and condescending. Sorry, I was cranky.
2. I was wrong about the financial issues surrounding GMOs: as Sarah Huffman points out, Trader Joe’s does not carry GMO products and they have been in my experience price competitive on most products they carry. I still think this is a market based solution: producers and retailers voluntarily identifying themselves as GMO-free is the way to go.
3. On that note, while I do not support mandatory labeling of GMO products, if you are going to mandate labeling, make suppliers really source their ingredients. Don’t allow a weasel label such as “might have been made with GMO ingredients.” Make them identify which specific ingredients are GMO. Do not use consumer litigation as an enforcement mechanism, and allow for a small tolerances for GMOs, the way that there are regulations for other adulterants in food. This will protect producers who inadvertently have their crops contaminated by GMOs.
4. Finally, keeping with the “not all GMOs are the same,” I have to state that there are GMOs I am quite concerned about. The Roundup resistant soybeans bother me not because they are genetically modified but because by their nature they allow for greater use of pesticides. I am worried about the ecological effects of the pesticides — but I would be even if that had been obtained by hybridization than more technological methods.
(I actually have been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks, but life intervened.)
About the GMO/labeling debates:
1. Organisms that are genetically modified are not all genetically modified the same way. Soybeans genetically modified to be Roundup-resistant are not the same thing at all as golden rice that has been genetically modified to have higher levels of beta-carotene in the grain. Saying that GMO is evil simply by virtue of genetic modification, regardless of the nature of that modification, is superstition, pure and simple.
2. David Suzuki says GMOs are all horrible. The AMA, WHO, American Association for the Advancement of Science and a score of other organizations beg to differ with him. I think I will go with the people who aren’t publicity-seeking.
3. People who want to avoid GMOs already can — by buying organic. Labeling of GMOs may not be required, but there is what appears to be a successful voluntary effort to label foods that are GMO-free. Ah, but what about people who cannot afford to buy organic? They would not be able to buy non-GMO foods in any case. The only way that a labeling campaign makes any sense is as a stepping stone to either an outright regulatory ban or to put pressure on manufacturers to drop GMOs.
I am not adventurous. But tonight I am in the audience for an NPR show I have never heard of, Ask Me Another. It sounds like fun, but what sold me? Jonathon Coulton heads the house band, and Adam Savage is one of the contestants. Swoon.
My latest adventure in temporary political outreach has ended.
I am no longer employed as a Certified Educator for Covered California.
The operative word is “employed.” Once an educator, always an educator: within the past 48 hours I have had two different conversations about the Affordable Care Act and some of its provisions. One was with an interviewer from a temporary agency, who expressed an interest in passing along info to her friends, and the other was with a good friend and concentrated on Medi-cal expansion. I have a suspicion that I will have more of these conversations, at least for the next few weeks. I plan to keep abreast of developments so I can be as accurate as possible.
My job wasn’t really political, either, at least not in the partisan sense. We were not asking people to like the Affordable Care Act (although if we changed a few hearts and minds along the way that was great), simply to know that they had to buy insurance, and what their options were if they didn’t already have it. It was surprising to me how many people were ignorant about the new law. It’s a little appalling the number of people who don’t follow the news. There was also a lot of misinformation out there: whether the ACA actually applied to certain classes of individuals, what the IRS could do to you if you chose to take the penalty (the people who thought the IRS could take their houses or wages I lay at the feet of Tea Partiers), and about the expansion of Medi-Cal.
As far as I am concerned, the most important work we did was not strictly about Covered California but about Medi-Cal: we were helping the most vulnerable people, often people who were dealing with the fallout from the economic crash. We helped people who had been just been laid off — and people who had been looking for full time employment for years. The stories I heard were heartbreaking: there are far too many diabetics and people with high blood pressure who have been skipping their meds for months or years because of lack of health care. In some cases it was a choice between health insurance and rent or food; in some cases, especially with people with pre-existing conditions, insurance rates were astronomical, if insurance was available at all. There was the parent who had to make the choice between their blood pressure meds and their child’s psychiatric medications. There was the woman who bought her husband’s medications on the black market, from a man who illegally imported them from Mexico.
In some ways it seems like I did this forever, in another that it just started. In fact, it was five months, ending at the end of January.
It was a good job: I liked the hours (I am not a morning person, in much the same way (to quote Neil Gaiman) that “the moon is not a fruit bat”), I liked my supervisors, and I liked my coworkers. I had worked with many of them before, on either 2012 campaigns or the Chavez campaign of the spring and summer last year. It was different from political campaign work: campaign work is sales, this was customer service. The most important attribute in the former is confidence, which I often lack; the most important attribute in the latter is empathy, which is one of my strong suits. I am good at helping people.
It was hard at times: I have written before of some of the tolls the job took on me. But it was also rewarding.
My last day, one of my last calls was to a woman in Southern California. SoCal calls were a crapshoot — Orange and Riverside counties have a lot of angry Tea Partiers, San Diego less so. (The Central Valley was better than the OC — conservatives there were polite before they hung up. They seemed to recognize that I was working; people in OC seemed to think that I was a personal representative of the administration. More than one person instructed me to tell the President how awful he was. (I am not joking about this.) I wanted to say “If I had a direct line to the White House, I wouldn’t be talking about you.) This woman lived in San Diego. When I told what I was calling about, she said flatly, “I have insurance.” This was usually a prelude to a rant about Obamacare, so I thanked her for her time and was about to hang up when she said, “I think what you are doing is very important. Thank you for all your hard work.” I told her that she was one of the last calls I was going to make, and thanked her for her kind words. “It’s nice to be able to go out on a good note,” I said. I was almost in tears.
I often wished I could change the world. I am changing the world, at least for the people I helped. And all the people that spread information to their friends. Quiet revolution one person at a time.
If there is one kid who lives to adulthood because his cancer was diagnosed early, thanks to his parent’s insurance plan, if there is one grandfather who is able to see his grandchildren graduate from college because of his Medi-Cal coverage, if there is one child who spends the first months of life at home rather than in a neonatal ICU because her mother had prenatal and maternal services, if there is one mentally ill person who is able to be a contributing member of society because they can get the medications which allow them to control their symptoms, then all of the work I and my coworkers did, and all the crap we had to put up with, will have been worth it.
We did good.
FML.
It turns out that, although I thought I had set my email program to archive emails letters I did not delete, I hadn’t. We changed providers and poof! fifteen years of email gone. I have been trying to recover them from backups with limited success. I suppose we could check with out former provider to see if there is a grace period before they wipe accounts….
Not all the email is gone: I have Gmail accounts, and that mail is untouched. But I had four accounts from our house domain name; two of those were inconsequential. One account was simply a notification account for comments from this blog and Facebook, one was an account I was in the process of making my business email, since the Gmail I use for that purpose is simply bulky, and I am trying to get away from using Gmail, anyway. Right now, all that last account has is email forwarded from Gmail.
The other two, though… One of them predated my Gmail accounts. Although it had increasingly silted up with spam, there were a lot of personal messages in there from years ago. The more recent account I set up three years ago, and was for strictly personal messages. I never used it for anything but email to and from actual people. I checked it religiously because when an email showed up there, it meant something.
I have lost email from people I will never be able to speak to again; I have lost email from people I am very unlikely to ever see again. Some of these emails were painful, but even so, I treasured them.
I have bad memory; sometimes when I look back at my life I find myself asking “Did that really happen? Am I remembering that or just imagining it?” Emails help ground my reality. I need that grounding.
I hate being stupid.
Something crappy has happened. In the big scheme of things it matters to no one but me. The fact that I have nothing to blame but my own serious incompetence makes the heartbreak worse. I am not writing more right now since I typing this on my phone. (I have no internet at home right now, and am on serious amounts of muscle relaxants to cope with a very very painful back, so going out to find wireless is not possible. (Also this post is incoherent because, well, drugs.) I don’t like using my phone as a hotspot unless I need to, mainly because I have large fingers and typing on the phone sucks, and writing can wait.
Please universe, help me find good things right now.
Edited to Add: To add insult to injury, the post I wrote about what happened was eaten by WordPress
I am sitting at my breakfast table drinking from my favorite coffee cup. It is an attractive large white mug with a deep blue interior. It holds twice as much as a regular mug, which means I do not have to keep getting up for more coffee.
It also has a very imposing logo on the side of a muscular, mean-looking man bending jail bars surrounded by the company name: Bad Boys Bail Bonds. It’s a great company name — all that alliteration, not to mention the pop culture reference. They give out great mugs, which have their phone number (the memorable 1-800-BAIL-OUT). The mug makes me feel sort of bad-ass, although anyone who goes by the Santa Clara County Courthouse on a given day would likely have one as well.
I have never had the need to use Bad Boy, but I know that, if the need arises, I know their number. Fortunately, no one in my family has ever been in trouble with the law.
I got the Bad Boy mug when went down to the courthouse for a sentencing hearing for a friend of mine. Bad Boy representatives were passing out tchotkes to everyone who passed by. After refusing keychains and several attempts to give me a mug, I finally reneged and took one. I’m glad I did — I wish I had grabbed two. I mean if Bad Boy is willing to give them out…
The mug, then, is a memento of my friend, J. He is a wonderful person, or at least he has been in the more than a year that I have known him. He is funny, smart, gentle, compassionate and, in all my dealings with him at least, principled.
He is also currently serving seventeen years in prison, courtesy of the State of California.
I don’t know what he did other than according to both him and his mother the charges stem from crimes when he was a teenager. (He is currently in his early thirties.) He also told me that there “strikes” involved, which of course would result in sentence enhancements.
He is at peace with the result. He had turned himself into the authorities, had expressed remorse for his actions. (He might have received a shorter sentence, except that the judge, a former prosecutor married to a current prosecutor announced to him the intention to give him very significant time.) He said that the guilt for whatever it was (he has still not told me about the circumstances) had gotten too great for him to live with. Another friend, more cynical than I am, told me that he probably turned himself in because the authorities were about to catch up with him anyway.
Whatever he did must have been very serious for them to have been looking for him so long. There are a few crimes in California which carry no statute of limitations (fleeing from justice is one of them; murder is another). I could look it up — which would require me to do some legwork — or pay any one of the myriad of Internet sites which do criminal background checks.
I haven’t yet. It will irreparably change how I view J. Homicide would be difficult for me to accept. If he were to have committed rape or sexual assault of a minor, I would never be able to write to him again, let alone visit him in jail. In the end, I don’t want to know.
People do stupid crap as teenagers. People get involved in situations that spiral out of their control. Teenagers act before they think, and sometimes act criminally. I recognize this. I also know that people change — the person I was when I was fifteen was a pretty horrible young lady.
I want to think of J as I know him now. The letters I get from him show a man at peace with himself and his circumstances. No confusion, no protestations of innocence, only descriptions of what his life is like and what he is doing to improve himself while inside bars. (This includes getting clean of a serious over-the-counter drug addiction which I did not know he had.) An occasional joke about prison life.
I, on the other hand, am confused and grieving. I do not have a window into every soul I am friends with, but this? Something heinous enough to result in a man being put away for a of his life? How could I have had no inkling that something was so wrong? (Not to mention the drugs. When I visited him in jail while he was awaiting sentencing, after he had detoxed, he looked five years younger and clearer-eyed than I had ever seen him. I am really naive not to have seen that he had problems there.)
This is not the first time that I have been wrong about someone, but it is by far the most serious. (Usually it is people who disappear when they find out about my disabilities or some of the other circumstances of my life.) I question my ability to judge others. Am I so desperate for human contact that I will come to be friends with anyone who shows a willingness to care about me?
I am crying as I write this. I am on thin ice here. I do not know if I am self-centeredly crying for myself, or crying for J. Some of both, I think: they are tears of fear for my grip on the world as well as pain and confusion, and fear for J.
All I can do for my friend is what I have been doing: responding to his occasional letters, and visiting him if I can. I saw him when he was in County Jail; unfortunately, he is currently in Southern California. (At least he is in a mild-medium security prison.) If he gets reassigned to a facility within one or two hours of me, I plan on seeing him. Oddly, I find myself praying for him. I pray that he is able to continue to be at peace with himself, and that he is not hurt: prisons can be dangerous places.
I still count him as a friend. (At least one other person who knew about his arrest and jail has cut him loose completely.) I do not know if that makes me loyal or stupid, and maybe it doesn’t really matter.
He is a friend. Whatever he has done, and without minimizing the circumstances which resulted in his incarceration, he has good in him. I am choosing to remember that, and hold on.
The Wild Winds of Fortune 