Bush gets played
Musharraf makes Bush look like a fool. Frank Rich tells all.
Democrats develop a spine
Publicizing a more accurate figure for the cost of the war is great and all, but where were they when the budget got written?
Ok, so on Wednesday I got called in for a meeting on Friday, during which we would discuss my 'excessive use of force' with a student. Wha? There were 5 kids at the door, 3 of them had a pass but wouldn't give it to me, one girl ducks under my arm, I grab her shirt and then let go, and this is excessive use of force?
So I'm meeting with the assistant principal and my union rep, and the union rep had counseled conciliation and apology, so I was trying so hard to do it. And the AP is all, this is regrettable, you should never touch a child, blah blah blah, we'll see if the parent is ok with what you said, you should talk to your students the way you would like your own child talked to. You're the model, and you need to set a good example even when things are frustrating. Oh, and we hear you're not doing Drop Everything and Read the last 15 minutes of the day like you're supposed to! Every day! In math class! With no books!
In the Political Schmientist's words, "She called you in for one bullshit thing and then started giving you shit about another bullshit thing?" Yes. Indeed, that is what happened.
During the meeting, she gets a call. Another teacher was covering my class (the class in which the alleged incident had happened), and there had been so much noise in the room that the discipline head for the ESOL department - a woman who has been teaching in the school for 32 years - came down the hall thinking there was a fight. No fight, just chaos. They call one school police officer: no effect. Two school police officers: not much. The discipline head for the students in the class: nope. There are now five adults in the classroom, and it's still kind of a mess. So the assistant principal comes down, and I come down, and she screams at them about how the joke's going to be on them in life and threatens to suspend all of them unless they spend the last 20 minutes of the day (including the reading time) doing the worksheet they were supposed to do.
1. It took 7 people to cover my class for 54 minutes, and I'm the person getting in trouble for discipline issues.
2. Guess who prevented the students from dropping everything and reading for the last 15 minutes of Friday's class? Not me. The person who scolded me about how I wasn't doing it.
3. Every student turned in a paper with a name at the top. Maybe 8 or 10 of those didn't have any real work on them. Only one person got suspended. News flash: when you don't follow through on your threats, you make them meaningless! So now the assistant principal will have no clout with my students, which is bad for me and, ultimately, bad for them.
The CDC just reported that being overweight makes you less likely to die, over-all. When you consider all sources of mortality, people who are 'overweight' are much less likely to die from a number of diseases, which cancels out a higher death rate from a few well-known ones. They also found that being underweight is associated with higher mortality, and I think it's worth pointing out that the article didn't mention any possible alternative explanations for obesity being associated with higher mortality, but listed several possible alternatives to the heresy that being skinny is itself unhealthy (e.g. people get thin because they're sick or smoke).
Like many other ideas about body size, the idea that being over a particular size will kill you was one with scant or no evidence; now we have actual evidence against it.
In response, a preventive medicine specialist told the New York Times that "excess weight makes it more difficult to move and impairs the quality of life." Let's stipulate that there are people for whom this is true. But there is no evidence that people can lose weight and keep it off except becoming obsessive about it in the way that anorexics are obsessive about it; and I would bet money I don't have that for most people, "excess weight" mostly "impairs the quality of life" because people are assholes about it, because there's practically no positive media about anyone over a size 4, and because of the constant pressure to get thin. Those issues, incidentally, affect almost all women of all sizes, and use up a good chunk of the brain power of a couple generations. Have I mentioned that fat is a feminist issue?
One of the researchers very sensibly said, "If we use the criteria of mortality, then the term 'overweight' is a misnomer."
Another, after stressing that it was his personal opinion, said, "If you are in the pink and feeling well and getting a good amount of exercise and if your doctor is very happy with your lab values and other test results, then I am not sure there is any urgency to change your weight."
Which is such sensible advice, and so well supported by his research. And yet fat is such a crazy issue in American medicine that he had to qualify the hell out of it. Being sensible is a dangerous position in the diet wars.
OK, there've been two meat recalls this week, one for tainted beef (over a million pounds from Cargill) and one for frozen pizzas with pepperoni. The pizzas have caused illness so far, the beef not. This is a ridiculous problem, because it's totally avoidable and absurdly common.
E. coli contamination: totally avoidable. No reason it should ever happen. All the types of E. coli that cause illness not only live in cowshit, but also only live in the feces of cows who eat corn, not cows who eat grass. A corn diet turns a cow's rumen acidic - it's supposed to be about neutral - and makes the digestive system a hospitable place for illness-causing E. coli. The strains of E. coli that make you sick literally can't survive in a cow that's eating grass, which is what cows' digestive systems are adapted to.
So of course almost all beef is raised on corn.
Beyond that, notice that the Cargill plant that produced the tainted beef produces 200 million pounds of ground beef a year. That's a huge amount. The recall applies to 1 million pounds, also a huge amount. Notice also that Cargill is "working closely with the USDA" - that's because even though every meat plant has to be USDA inspected, the USDA has no authority to issue a recall, no authority to order product destroyed. Instead, their authority is only to close a plant, which they are under enormous pressure not to do. Because plants are so enormous, a shutdown becomes a huge loss to a company; also because plants are so enormous, a single piece of contaminated meat immediately gets ground up with all the other meat, contaminating the rest of it. But any USDA inspected plant has to have facilities (including a private office and separate bathroom) for an inspector - a legitimate need, considering the threats USDA inspectors have gotten, but one that weighs heaviest on small plants; the USDA has even told a few small slaughterhouses that they were too small for the USDA to bother inspecting, effectively shutting them down. It's a major barrier to small, local, quality meat, which you can read a lot more about in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma or this New York Times article about the Farmers Diner.
The way the USDA treats meat and contamination is also pretty interesting. I've been told by sources I can't cite that plants often understate the fecal contamination of their products by as much as 90%. My parents run a small business making prosciutto in a traditional Italian style: when my father went to Italy to learn about it, he learned that in Italy the slaughterhouse is responsible for delivering clean meat to the prosciutto maker; here, the prosciutto maker is required to treat the meat as completely contaminated and guarantee that the curing process kills any pathogens. I don't know which of those is a better system from a public health standpoint, but they say something about what the slaughterhouses in the two countries are probably like, and about the availability of alternatives.
And yet we keep treating food poisoning and contaminated meat on a grand scale as inevitable.
From the professor in my math methods class, in response to a question about how to teach kids something particular on a graphing calculator: "I would just let them explore. They absolutely know more than we do about technology. It is their world. When we look at the calculator, we have so much more trouble understanding it."
This to a group of people who had spent the previous half hour playing Block Dude on the calculator and reminscing about how Drug War was the best TI-89 game.
I got to school at 7:41, but I hadn't made my copies so I had to run down the hall, make the copies, run back to the office and sign in, run back to class, get things started.
And then the whole soccer team and all the kids who know someone on the soccer team were yelling at each other, about what I eventually figured out was their loss last night in the semifinals, possibly due to racism by the referee, and the ensuing fight/riot.
And then in second period we were observed by four people: the new assistant principal who's been giving out 'unsatisfactory' ratings, the head of the English department, the school growth teacher, and the principal.
And then kids complained about having a discussion and dragged ass moving their seats, which is what was happening when the assistant principal left.
And then we had a discussion which started out practically dead and ended up with kids jumping out of their seats to talk about Beowulf, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, boasting, and the definition of a hero.
And then the principal said, during morning announcements to the whole school, that our class was what American education should look like, and gave one of our kids $20.
And then I met the parent of my most trouble-making ESOL kid, and the girl who was there while I was talking to him said that what I told the dad would get the son beaten.
And then Joey rolled up his black pants to right below the knee so you could see his black socks pulled all the way up and it looked like he was wearing pantaloons, put on his girlfriend's jean jacket, and started dancing.
And then I gave him and these two other kids a problem they got wrong, which was awesome because those three are way underchallenged in my class.
And then it was lunch, and the copier was busy, and I was almost late to class.
And then this girl - a senior now, someone I know from last year - came huffing along down the hallway to say, "You are one hard person to find. Here's a letter." Which also contained a check for five hundred dollars. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. For my class!
And then this kid showed up 10 minutes late to class, complaining about it, and his cousin who got suspended yesterday for saying obscene things to me ("She's like a mosquito, she can't stop sucking" + noises, gestures, etc) was there too, and the cousin wouldn't leave.
And then this girl showed up halfway through class who's NOT IN MY CLASS and inexplicably wants to be in it and she wouldn't leave either.
And then school security had to be called.
And then some girl broke a glass pane out of my door.
And then I couldn't help this girl do math because I had to write pink slips instead, so I told her that this was why I didn't like it when people misbehaved, and she was all, yeah, that's true, that's a problem.
And then I was all teary and pissed off in the women's bathroom during lunch, and this other 2nd-year teacher was nice to me, and before we talked she checked under the stalls to see if anyone was there, which was great.
And then it was the last period of the day and my 5th period kids were back and almost as bad as before.
And then this girl started picking up broken glass and wouldn't put it down and I was worried that she was going to hurt herself.
And then at the end of the period the girl I talked to about how people misbehaving screws up her education asked if I was ok and I said no and she asked if it was the class (yes) and her personally (no) and then she started cleaning up the classroom, and it was the best thing ever.
And then I gave the kids who did their work candy.
And then it was Outward Bound club meeting, and that was really fun.
And then this kid from Sierra Leone talked in Krio and Liberian English and Nigerian English for a while, and can I get him a stand-up comedy gig? He really is that funny.
And then they all wrote paragraphs about why they want to go on another Outward Bound trip.
And then they talked about getting t-shirts made with pictures from the Outward Bound trip and having the principal have an Outward Bound day so they could wear them to school.
And then I ran around getting suspension slips delivered.
And then I missed my workout.
And then I came home and put on my coziest clothes and wrote this.
And then I was completely exhausted.
There's this idea, beloved of conservatives, called moral hazard. It's the idea that if you don't bear the full pain of a problem, you're more likely to take risks with it: not locking your car if you're insured against theft, not worrying about getting pregnant if someone else is going to pay to raise the child (or for an abortion). The concept crops up in many, many conservative social policies. One of the most notable is the opposition to birth control, abortion, and sex ed - there's a strain in the anti arguments that people (specifically women) need to experience the immediate negative consequences of sex so they won't have it.
Moral hazard is also the key to understanding most conservative health care schemes. Paul O'Neill, former secretary of the treasury, wrote an op-ed arguing for a health care system that insured everyone against catastrophic health expenses, but required people to pay out of pocket or for private insurance until then. In his words: "since most Americans would have a significant personal cost until the catastrophic coverage took over, they would, at least in theory, shop for the best product." Otherwise, he argues, we lack incentive to care for our health or choose a good insurance plan, which drives up over-all health care costs.
Problem is, moral hazard isn't an especially useful theory for either of these situations. People have sex regardless of the consequences, because the incentives to have sex are so powerful: making people bear the most negative consequences just results in more people in bad situations. Health care is even worse from a moral hazard perspective. People mostly don't avoid seeking care for emergencies because of the cost - as Bush so insightfully pointed out, you can just go to the emergency room if it's bad enough. Instead, our health care system already accounts moral hazard, and it's a disaster: preventive care is expensive, so people avoid it or treat it as optional, so their conditions get worse, so their care becomes more expensive. O'Neill has it absolutely and totally backwards. Making basic care expensive and insuring against catastrophe just leads to people skimping on basic care, and getting to catastrophe: it's more of what we have now, which has given the US the world's most expensive health care mess. Instead, we need universal access to preventive and maintenance care - the kind of thing that prevents kids from dying of their dental problems, because they won't have dental problems.
I think I find this interesting mostly because it's such a great example of a flawed theory of human nature leading to flawed policy ideas. O'Neill has this idea about how people act (so do the abstinence-only sex ed people), but it's not accurate - and not only that, he's not willing to modify his theory based on the evidence (and neither are the abstinence-only people). Instead, he continues to argue that "at least in theory" people will act a certain way.
I see this as a major failure in the relationship between political theory and reality, as much as a sign of O'Neill's personal intransigence. There are tons of political theories out there that just don't work, because their theories of human nature are all wrong; yet no one's gone back and figured out how to communicate between political theory and how people actually act. Similarly, this policy idea of basing health care on moral hazard isn't just ineffective, it's based on an wrong-headed idea of what it's like to be human; until we have some clear talk about what it's like to be human going on with policy-makers, we're going to keep getting bad policy.
J.K. Rowling just announced that Dumbledore is gay.
Awesome, but why not put it in the book?
There's this one kid, call him Joey, though of course that's not his name, who drives me crazy. Absolutely batty. He does not come on time or sit in an assigned seat or follow directions or behave predictably or stop swearing or stop throwing paper or not sing irritating and obscene Akon songs. He does learn math - like crazy, as fast as I can teach him, more or less - and dance and ask why all the time and smile this wolfy secret grin when he gets caught doing something. I love him.
The other day, while I was dismissing the class one at a time, Joey walked over to a girl three seats over, took the bright red, pointy-toed 3-inch spike heels off her feet, and put them on his own. Then, dressed in black Dickies, a black school logo polo shirt, and red stilettos, he sashayed down the hallway to lunch.
As many of you know, I teach 9th and 12 grades at an under-resourced neighborhood high school in Philadelphia. My school, built in 1939, lacks books and technology, giving my students little chance to develop the academic and technological skills they need. In my second year, I teach 4 periods of 9th grade math a day, plus a senior English class another teacher and I designed to prepare our students for college. We are teaching Beowulf, which is the first text in the senior curriculum, but our students do not have their own books: they cannot read at home, write notes and definitions in the margins, or underline particularly important parts, all of which are critical for college preparedness and basic understanding of such a difficult text.
This can change - not just in the long term, but right now. I set up a donations page through the Amazon Honor System: please consider donating $5 to $20 if you can. I also set up a blog to keep people posted on the projects I'll be doing with the money: the first is to buy individual paperback copies of Beowulf for my seniors (less than $200). You can read about it at laurelsclassroom.blogspot.com, where I'll also be posting pictures.
It's 3:45. Ms. Z wants to talk to me. It's about paper for the copy machines. I'm using too much (300 pages a day, she says, though I'd estimate 180, max), and half of my classes aren't even ESOL. The paper comes out of the ESOL budget; I need to go get my paper allotment from whichever unknown administrator controls the department that has it. Is it the assistant principal? Is it the military administrator? The central message is that I need to track down this paper, some way, somehow. It's my job.
This is one of those moments where resource scarcity in the urban schools comes front and center. Not just material scarcity (of paper, of all things!), but time scarcity, knowledge scarcity. Ms. Z is volunteering her time to administer the ESOL program, since the normal administrator was badly injured in a motorcycle accident. She's fine - she's TFA as well, interested in running her own school someday, trying very hard to do good work - but she's never done it before, and she's very conscious of the fact that she's not being paid for it. She doesn't want to be the one tracking down the paper, but she also is absolutely emphatic that it must happen.
In a school that didn't ration paper, this wouldn't be an issue at all. In a school with more time available, I imagine that administrators, several of whom probably have the same issue, could get together and work out some kind of system. If she'd been here for years, we'd know how to deal with this without fuss.
One of the results of a broken public school system is that teachers become responsible for everything. Supplies, funding, real-time curriculum development, meetings, sports: if you don't organize it yourself, there is precious little chance that someone else will. Hence, being awake from 5:30 AM to midnight on Tuesday, with maybe a total of 2.5 hours when I wasn't working. You know what takes 2.5 hours? Eating breakfast, eating lunch, eating dinner, and taking a shower, that's what.
Dear everyone,
My parents are Bon Appetit food artisans of the year for 2007.
That is all.
North
Context: I'm at school. First day back. No kids yet, a bunch of newbies (even newer than I am! 52 out of 157 teachers have been here two years or less!), not bad, except that the teacher who had my room last year left the detritus of 40 years of teaching here. I'm talking manuals for software for the Apple IIe. If software fossilizes, does it turn into hardware? I just filled two large trash cans and 10 boxes with most of the stuff I'm not keeping, and I'm hoping to give most of the rest of it away on Thursday. I've been at school for ten hours so far. I think I'm going home soon because I'm too hungry to stay, not because I'm done.
Event: I read this article describing the Republican prospects in the Senate for 2008. Each paragraph is better than the last, but these three stand out. First, for sheer color:
"It's always darkest right before you get clobbered over the head with a pipe wrench. But then it actually does get darker," said a GOP pollster who insisted on anonymity in order to speak candidly.
Nathan L. Gonzales, political editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report: "If Idaho ends up the fire wall, they are in deep trouble."
"About the only safe Republican Senate seats in '08 are the ones that aren't on the ballot," a GOP operative with extensive experience in Senate races said.
So, before we continue, I have a question. If your state representative only lists her home phone number on her official web page, can you call her at home? Because I definitely need to call her. Because today, in Des Moines, two guys got married. You can read the AP story or the Des Moines Register story.
I'm, ah, delighted. Overjoyed. Amazed. Shocked. That's my hometown - I may have visited the courtroom where that decision was made - and if I'd had to lay odds on a state, even a Midwestern one, being next for same-sex marriage, it would not have been Iowa. My faith in my state, sorely tested after the last election, springs up again.
So, of course, homework for everyone. School starts Tuesday, too, so do it now.
1) Call your state legislators, if you're an Iowan. Hell, if you're not, email the governor's office to say how great you think this is for Iowa's reputation and how it's made you think of Iowa in a whole new light. Provincial coastal denizens, I'm talking to you.
2) Look at the Justly Married photo set, and think how damn cute all those couples are. Then look at the pictures of Phyllis Martin and Del Lyon getting married and think how damn cute those two old ladies (who were out lesbians in the 1950s) were.
This is the kind of thing that gets people really excited and then sinks. But you know, it really does mean something to all the queer people in your life if you hear about this and get excited and call your legislators and everything. Not only does it make us all feel a little warm and fuzzy about our friends, but all the legislators on the fence? The ones who aren't sure they can get away with supporting same-sex marriage? Or who don't have much of an opinion but don't want to lose their seats over it? One of the things they look at is how the calls are running. If they get five times as many supportive calls as negative calls, they're going to think they won't get eviscerated for this in the next election, and maybe support the same-sex marriage decision. Or even just not actively oppose it. And that's how things get a little better.
Remember how at the beginning I asked if it was ok to call my state legislator at home? That's how small Iowa is. In a place like that, it's easy to swing a decision by saying something about it. I have a couple of pretty crazy stories about things I did in high school - before I could vote! - that permanently affected state policy. Not just me, of course, but stuff I helped organize.
Hurray for my state! Hurray for political participation!
Health care is the single most important issue in the primary, and maybe in the general election too. Bar none. More important than Iraq, more important than the environment, more important than education or queer rights or feminism or trade agreements or crime or abortion or immigration or whatever the hell else they're talking about these days.
Here's why: it's urgent, and it's distinguishing.
All the Democratic candidates are pro-choice and have sort of moderately pro-environment positions. None of them are going to do a damn thing for education as far as I can tell - and I don't blame them, since I've never heard of a president doing much that's useful for education other than funding it. I sincerely doubt any of the candidates will negotiate any kind of trade agreement that improves the world.
Meanwhile, Iraq is going to be a disaster from hell no matter who's in charge. None of them have any kind of environmental or energy position that will really protect us from peak oil or climate change. Queer rights? Who cares what they think? There's not going to be much done for queer rights at the federal level for at least another ten years. These are not salient issues right now, because there's no real national consensus that something must change in a particular direction. Even immigration, which I think is maybe the next issue up, is something around which there's tremendous conflict at many levels - it's more like same-sex marriage than health care in that way, and the next president will most likely not have the opportunity to enact major reform.
Health care is different. Since 1992, the last time we had a go at health care reform, the insurance situation for middle-class people has worsened dramatically. Even many upper-middle-class people are finding health insurance dramatically expensive or difficult to obtain. I've been thinking back to my American politics classes, which strongly suggest that when something becomes a middle-class issue (and especially an issue that affects the professional and upper middle class), there's an opportunity for policy change. Some of the most popular, least politically touchable programs are the housing subsidy for the middle class (home mortgage interest tax deduction) and Social Security, which provides benefits to people at all income levels and thus has a really broad base. We don't have a health care program, but the current conditions give the next president a major opportunity to create one. I think our health insurance system has become so problematic that it will change substantially within the next 5 years; whatever we get is likely to become politically untouchable, so it better be good.
Conveniently, the candidates have very different plans. Put the Republican candidates aside, as they have plans that I generally find fairly repellent (ranging from Giuliani's tax breaks to Romney's unsupported individual mandate1 to Brownback and Thompson with no plan at all) and I wouldn't vote for them anyway. To spell out what I'm looking for: a plan that will provide us with the major benefits of universal health care enjoyed by all other industrialized nations. Those benefits include better public health outcomes because everyone has access to necessary (and especially preventive) care; and lower costs, both because people get treatment before their conditions get too complicated and because the government has negotiating power with the agents who deliver care and supplies.
Let's look at the three major Democratic Candidates. Obama's plan is too complicated, and I think it's unlikely to lower costs or improve public health outcomes in the way that universal health care in other countries does. Clinton doesn't have a [published] plan, which I think is because she got so badly burned organizing the Bill Clinton health care plan in 1992. She's by far the most experienced and knowledgeable of the three about health care, but I'm concerned that she will have the exact same reticence as president that she now has as a candidate.
Edwards has by far the best plan. It would lower the over-all cost of health insurance by spreading the risk through a wider pool (i.e. everyone), and ensure that everyone could get into that pool by mandating that insurers offer coverage to everyone regardless of health history and with no surcharge for previous health problems. He also spells out how he'll support and fund the plan, and dude, it would work.
Go Edwards go!
Kitten status: adopted in record time by someone at the vet's office. All us suckers are way relieved that we're not stuck with her.
WallyAnn Radio Hegemony Cricket is not my cat. But maybe she's yours! She's 13 ounces of adorable gray fuzz with big blue eyes, bat ears, and a pretty little white nose. Her meow will rip your heart right out of your chest. In fact, she's already suckered 5 people who are determined that they (um, we) do not want a cat into feeding, bathing, and flea-combing her, not to mention taking her home and carting her all over town. Wanna take her home?
There's an article in the New York Times pointing out that it is logically impossible for men and women to have different average numbers of sex partners. Which is a problem, since men and women report significantly different lifetime averages (e.g. 4 sex partners for women, 7 for men in the US, or in Britain 12.7 for men and 6.5 for women). Anyone who is decent at math and remembers the definition of the mean will be able to tell you that in a world with about the same number of men and women, it is impossible for men to have more hetero sex partners than women. Indeed, a mathematician has actually proved it. So, explanations?
1. The researchers say it might be that men have significant numbers of sexual experiences with women who aren't counted in the survey, like prostitutes or women in other countries. That would mean that there's got to be some country somewhere where women have many more sex partners than men, and thus far no one's found it. Also, I question their ability to screen prostitutes out of the survey data.
2. Men and/or women are lying their heads off in what they think are the socially approved directions. I think this is quite likely.
3. Men and women have very different distribution patterns for their data. The mean number of partners must be the same for men and women, but that doesn't mean the median number of partners must be the same. As an example, imagine that there are only 5 men and 5 women in the world, and a total of 13 sexual partnerships. The men have had 0, 1, 3, 4, and 5 sexual partners; the women have had 1, 1, 1, 5, and 5 sexual partners. The mean for both groups is going to be 13/5 = 2.6 partners, but the median number of partners for men is 3, while the median for women is 1. That's a huge percentage difference just because women had a few people with high numbers of partnerships, while most women still had fewer sex partners than most men. Is this likely on a large scale? I don't really think so - it's a lot harder to skew data like that when you're not making it up and there are thousands of people in your data set. But I don't really know, and apparently the social scientists who could find out for us aren't. My best guess still goes to #2.
This is an example of bad math education perpetuating a particular social ill, namely the idea that men get around more than women. To his everlasting credit, the mathematician who inspired the article points out exactly this: that taking this data as accurate works to “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females" and may skew self-reporting and behavior. If math education were better, and people understood mean and median and interpreting statistical graphs, and if the news media could therefore publish graphs of the statistics in question, there'd be a lot more ways for people to check stereotypes against reality.
When will those darn math teachers do something about it?
Iowa is a certain kind of hipster heaven. We have trucker hats, dive bars, cowboy boots, soda fountains, and cheap beer. We have craft shows and karaoke.
Only thing is, there aren't any hipsters. This stuff is for real.
Everyone talks about the caucuses. Everyone. Instead of "How 'bout that local sports team?" it's "How 'bout that Democratic candidate?" Or occasionally, "Damn, the Republican field is pathetic." Which it is.
I can pretty much do as much running on the bike path down by the river as I want. With the dogs. Best thing ever in the morning? A big fluffy blonde dog and a smaller, sleek brown dog with green eyes chasing rabbits and messing around in the water.
I like my parents but I'm glad I don't live with them.
People remember me. A state rep I volunteered for in college remembers me. My parents' friends want me to move back. Sometimes it's nice to remember that if I want to move back here, there are things I can do.
I drink more here than I drink anywhere else. The average might be down to 2 glasses a night by now, after I cut back a bit. Glass of wine while you cook? Glass of wine with dinner? Go out for a beer with friends? Yeah, I think I'm safe to drive.
Bull testicles. My friend Aroog's birthday party involved bull testicles and karaoke and his little sister trying to get me to go to church with her the next morning. I ate Rocky Mountain oysters (just a smidgen - beans and rice for real dinner), sang "Goodbye Earl" and "Boy Named Sue," and bought Aroog's mom a rum and coke, which is funny because that's what he pours at his infamous New Year's parties. As far as the karaoke went, two of my high school friends have talent. The rest of us have heart.
