Los Angeles

Beauty

I really didn't expect LA to be beautiful. The parts on LA not on the beach I pictured as a smog-filled concrete jungle. I didn't expect the sunny skies and flowers and palm trees, the green hills, and the vines and grass growing naturally on the sides of the roads. I heard birds chirping outside my room in the mornings, something you wouldn't hear in New York or London.

As for the beach, well, it didn't disappoint. I've seen big bodies of water in my travels the past few years, and I'm very familiar with sand living in the desert, but the last time I saw a real beach was 11 years ago. I wanted to stand at the Santa Monica pier and just stare at the water for hours, even with the cool sea breeze blowing back my hair.

Wealth

I came back from LA with a new idea of wealth, based on the shopping excursions my friend C. took me on. We walked around a place called The Grove, where we passed Zara, the Apple store, the American Girl store, etc. We finally stepped into a store called Anthropologie. I would pick up things and be so shocked at how much they cost I would put them back down immediately. A soap. I will get myself a soap as a souvenir -- $14?! On second thought, I won't get a soap as a souvenir. There's something immoral to me about spending that much on a bar of soap.

I experienced some sticker shock, but these places stay in business, so there must be people out there who will spend $14 on soap. I don't personally know any of these people, but I did see a lot of BMWs on the freeways and houses high up in the hills.

LA is home to the stars. The names of many of these important people are literally written into the sidewalk on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, lest you forget.

I oohed and aahed over the Kodak Theatre, where the Oscars were held, and of course there was an adjoining shopping center, which seemed a monument to the power of the entertainment industry with its big elephant statues.

I enjoyed being glamour-struck, but I also found displays like this excessive, because my friend certainly isn't rich, and she said she knows a lot of aspiring actors and actresses and filmmakers trying to make it in LA. To me a lot of it just seems like a tease, like this could all be yours...but it most likely won't be, and that is sad to think about.

Traffic

The traffic in Los Angeles is as bad as its reputation, which is awful. The roads were confusing as hell to me, and the congestion made my El Paso morning and afternoon commutes seem like child's play. It seemed any outing required an elaborate plan: A) How do you get there? Look it up on Google Maps, write it down on a piece of paper. 101, 110, 10, 60, 5, which one do you take? Even with directions it's easy to get lost. B) Get in the car, get to the highway...and wait in traffic. I don't think there was any place we went that took less than 30 minutes to get to. The traffic is bumper-to-bumper, often, depending on the time. Avoid rush hour at all costs. C) Get off the freeway, get near your destination...then drive around for another half hour looking for parking. Which you have to pay for. D) Go to your destination (the beach, the tar pits, the museum), have a great time but be sure to get your parking validated, then E) Do the whole process in reverse.

Weirdness

Besides the traffic and congestion, California has a reputation for liberalism, or what some might call nuttiness. When I first arrived C. showed me around her beautiful house, which she shares with two roommates. On the bookshelves were a mixture of New Age-y and Buddhist-influenced self-help books. "You can eat any of my cereals, and the turkey, since my two roommates are vegetarians," she said. Two vegetarians? She said her roommates would be in and out of the house, and the woman she sublets her room from might be stopping by, too. "See the picture of the nude woman on the living room wall? That's her." It was a tasteful, artistic picture, but still, posting nude photos of yourself on the wall, is this a California thing? (I actually did end up meeting the woman in the picture and she was very nice.)

I turned on the TV one morning and the screen was black. Turns out only the DVD setting worked. How can you not watch regular TV? No "American Idol," no "Daily Show," no TV news? Hmm...

We went to not one, but two, farmer's markets.

My friend got her handwriting analyzed in Santa Monica.

The Scientology center on Hollywood Blvd. has a sign that lights up at night.

I think there's some truth behind the "nuttiness" stereotype.

Epilogue

C. and a couple of her friends and I went to a club one night, and we were hanging out on the back porch talking while one of them smoked. "How do you like LA?" C.'s friend asked. I said I liked it, it was just a lot of driving. "You thinking about moving here soon?" I laughed really hard. "NO." You'd think with all the sunshine and free-thinking vibe, it would be an easier place to live, but on the contrary, LA seems like a city that grinds people down and sends them driving back to their hometowns in tears. Los Angeles is an awesome place, a place much more amazing than I expected. But for all its impressiveness, I'm sure it's not the place for me to be.

- Today I broke the knob that switches between heat and A/C in my car. I was trying to figure out why the heat wasn't coming out as hot and thought the knob might be to blame. But I ended up popping the whole knob off and now it is stuck on A/C forever (or until my dad can rig up some solution possibly involving duct tape). Genius.

- Feeling tired. Is it weird that a vacation can make you even more tired going back to work?

Home from LA

I'm back home tonight after four days in LA. Funny how I'm still in awe of big cities, even though I've visited a lot of them in the past few years -- Chicago, New York, London. Los Angeles was every bit as amazing. I'll have much more to say and pictures to post in the next few days...

Time has a great article this week on the implications of the health reform legislation:

Contrary to the rhetoric that has permeated the reform debate, insurance rates in most cases are rising steadily not because of price gouging but rather because underlying health care costs are increasing at an unsustainable and possibly unstoppable rate...Slowing the rate of increase is the only solution to a health care crisis that is still looming. On its own, the law does not necessarily do that.

A couple of interesting items in the New York Times:

- This review of new books about technology's effect on society, while not exactly ground-breaking in some of its observations, is worth reading: “I have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,” the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. “I think it’s driven by people who are” slacking off at work and “surfing the Internet.” He added, “It’s like a country run by ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”

- I was also trying to sort out the new health care law and spotted this piece, which pins the law as an attack on wealth inequality. "The bill...aims to smooth out one of the roughest edges in American society — the inability of many people to afford medical care after they lose a job or get sick. And it would do so in large measure by taxing the rich...In effect, healthy families will be picking up most of the bill — and their insurance will be somewhat more expensive than it otherwise would have been." I was thinking about this as I listened to one of the radio morning shows this week, where the hosts were griping about how their premiums were probably going to go up. Who wants their expenses to go up, and yet, isn't it right for a society to take care of all of its members?

- Absolutely delicious to have a Thursday off. *Love* going to Wal-Mart and not being suffocated by all the people crowding the aisles.

- But there is some bad news: I'm going to need a root canal. And a crown. I don't know how my tooth got so rotten. I've been eating less candy the last few weeks hoping to protect the rest of the teeth.

- Don't know what I'm going to do the rest of today. It's a nice problem to have.

So I'm sitting with my friend I haven't seen since December. It's around 9 at night, we're sitting at the glass table in the living room over plates of freshly baked double fudge brownies (my idea). The high ceiling in the room feels higher than usual. I find the light in the room too dim for the bigness of the room.

She asks me how I'm doing. I talk about work. Work always seems to come first when anyone asks how I am. Work is good. I'm not just exchanging pleasantries, it really is, even with my sometimes odd schedule and the stress.

How is everything else going?

At this point I am not as ready with an answer. I know what she's getting at. Should I tell her that all has not been well on the social/emotional/spiritual front in the past three months? I don't know if she really wants to know about Saturday nights spent alone, disillusionment, and grasping at the remnants of friendships. A little bit of it dribbles out and I find myself getting emotional, because I almost never talk about this. I am lonely and it bothers me. I admit it but don't get too detailed.

I don't know how much she can relate. My friend is engaged to be married, and she and her counterpart are always together, it seems. It's rare that she and I hang out alone like tonight. I don't even think of her and her fiance as separate anymore, I just kind of assume that her fiance will be there at whatever she happens to be doing. Their names are fused together in my mind, like "Brangelina." She mentioned earlier that he cooks for her all the time. That sounds nice to me.

I wonder if that is the exact thing missing from my life, a hole in my heart where that kind of relationship would fit. Am I jealous of what she has? Saturday nights wouldn't be spent alone, I probably wouldn't be so dried up emotionally. But even at this lonely point it seems a bad trade. In my mind I'm not the kind of person who wants to be joined at the hip with anyone, however special that person may be.

I don't feel comfortable asking her, do you ever get annoyed with living so close to someone? I want to but it seems too intimate of a question, especially when I have shared so little myself.

Her attempt to engage me in some girl-talk comes to an end, and we start talking about books. I tell her about Reading Lolita in Tehran, and I actually sound excited. She tells me how she loves Cormac McCarthy's books, which I have decided I don't want to read without having even skimmed through any of them. Something to do with seeing the author on Oprah.

She leaves at 10 p.m. I was enjoying the conversation and wanted it to continue for longer, but oh well. I pack up the brownie plates and put them in the sink. I turn off the light in the living room and go upstairs. Work tomorrow, I should go to sleep...

*crosses fingers* Please let the health care bill pass the House. Looks good so far.

Health update

- Breakfast: pack of strawberry and coconut snack cakes. Lunch: two slices of veggie pizza followed by a slice of going-away celebration cake. Exercise: none.

- Went in to get a crown for my teeth today, was told I still might need a root canal. Oh no.

- Long day at work and I need a vacation.

Review: The Bible: A Biography

Again with the spiritual questions. Maybe it is a mistake to think I will find the answers in books. I expected that after reading The Bible: A Biography I'd have a much clearer vision of Christianity, but that's really not the case. Karen Armstrong's book is more about the history of the study of the Bible than the actual authorship of the text. So we begin down the road of ambiguity.

In their (the Pharisees') view, there was no single authoritative reading of scripture. As events unfolded on earth, even God had to keep studying his own Torah in order to discover its full significance...The meaning of a text was not self-evident. The exegete had to go in search of it, becuase every time a Jew confronted the Word of God in scripture, it signified something different.

I've never thought a literal reading of the Bible made sense, and I continue to believe that. This is something Armstrong emphasizes over and over again:

In the last years of the nineteenth century, the Bible Conference, where conservatives could read scripture in a literal, no-nonsense manner and purge their minds of the Higher Criticsm, became increasingly popular in the United States. There was a widespread hunger for certainty. People now expected something entirely new from the Bible -- something it had never pretended to offer hitherto.

I can't say I don't hunger for certainty, too. But Armstrong's point in this book is that it is not there.

A single text could be interpreted to serve diametrically opposed interests...At the same time as African Americans drew on the Bible to develop their theology of liberation, the Ku Klux Klan used it to justify their lynching of blacks.

That is truly mind-boggling.

This book really raises more questions than it answers, which for me was both frustrating and challenging. It's not meant as a reference book on who wrote the Bible; for that a study Bible is what you need. Armstrong avoids simplistic literal-minded answers. Instead she advocates studying the Bible for yourself, not as a fact collector but as a spiritual seeker.

This is an interesting way to make money.

Lunchtime drama

So...I was going to meet a friend at Starbucks during my lunch hour. I debated on packing a lunch then figured I should since Starbucks doesn't serve "real food." I packed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some crackers. I put it into the refrigerator at work in the morning.

Fast forward to 1:30 p.m. I'm running late to meet my friend, decide to just grab whatever at Starbucks since I'm not famished. Mocha cherry latte (decaf) and a croissant if you must know. Come back to work, figure I should grab my lunch out of the fridge and take it home. Open the fridge door - there is nothing on the shelves. No sandwich. The Wal-Mart bag I brought it in is also missing. But on the shelf inside the door I spot my pack of crackers. *agh* This makes me sooo angry. Who does that? Just steals someone's lunch like that? And leaving the crackers I find even more insulting. I didn't eat the lunch that day, fortunately, but what if that *was* my only lunch for the day? Do I need a lunchbox with a lock on it? Sad that I do.

My car window is broken. I pushed the button for it to go down when I was going through a drive-through this weekend and it never went back up. *sad face*

There's nothing in my car worth stealing (church pamphlets, random trash, sunshield, tape player), so I wasn't too worried parking it like that. I hoped for no rain and no strong dust storms. I'm not ghetto enough to get out the duct tape and plastic tarp.

I've been driving with the window down for three days. It was kind of amusing at first to pretend I was in a convertible with the wind rushing over me. Today it was cold going to work, so I turned up the heat on high trying to get a wave of warm air to counteract the blast coming from my left side.

$225 to fix, and I won't get the car back until tomorrow morning at the earliest. The hassles of life.

- Wondering how many calories of carbs I consumed this week. I know it was a lot.
- Long and crazy week at work. Felt on top of the world and close to tears at different times. Sometimes at the same time, actually. Need to heed my own advice from a few weeks back about not being so hard on myself.
- Trying to tone down the negativity. My Facebook status updates are one negative comment after another. Reminder: good things do happen.
- Whip It: a chick flick that I respect.

Thoughts after finishing Reading Lolita in Tehran:

- I'm grateful for every single opportunity I've had to study literature -- formal, informal, in a group, by myself. My education in literature is very incomplete and scattered at best, but it's funny how I'll remember things from my British lit class in college, a word or phrase from a John Donne meditation or Shakespeare sonnet a professor went over nearly 10 years ago. Or how much I miss my grad school reading group, all of us holding our copies of Neruda poems or Bukowski short stories or novels by Nabokov or Cather or Lawrence, sitting in a circle of chairs at Starbucks, the analysis preceded and followed by a good measure of gossip and random thoughts on life. A class or a reading group can change who you are. Not overnight, but more like how waves shape the sea shore. I know this firsthand.

- I have my complaints about the United States but I should thank God every day I was born here and not Iran. "I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination" is what Nafisi wrote in her notebook the day before she left Iran. Something not to be taken for granted.

- I regret not having read Daisy Miller and having merely skimmed The Great Gatsby.

- You should read this book. Seriously.

Nice to wake up and not have my first thought of the day be 'I want more sleep.'

- My SiteMeter stats for this week show I got 64 referrals to this blog from Blogger's NextBlog link. I also have three new followers. Hmm...I checked Blogger Buzz and I think this might have something to do with it.

- I went shopping for my cousin's baby shower today. Are wipes too practical of a gift? I saw all these cute baby blankets and toys that are sure to provoke an "Aww." Wipes, not so much.

The Franklins

I see these mountains nearly every day of my life, and yet after hiking this weekend I realized I don't really know them at all. It's something else to walk in them and experience them up close:

Can you see the cave?

And who knew there were so many rocks?

Ben Casnocha blogs about the earthquake in Chile. Glad he's OK.

I suppose emotional slumps are a natural part of life, like catching a cold a few times a year. Work is stressing me out lately. I'm on a more rigid schedule than I've been on in a while and I don't have the time I used to for those daily tasks of self-renewal like journal writing, exercise, praying, reading, spending time with friends. I used to consider those things important, now they're expendable. When I finally have a moment that I'm not busy, the neglect of those things catches up with me and it's like, whoa, where am I, I'm lost without a map. I can feel the rotting inside. Parts of me that used to be strong are not any longer.

It's a Saturday and I vowed to take some alone time today and not stay cooped up in the house doing laundry as I usually end up doing. I attempted to make plans with friends, those didn't materialize. I realized I hadn't bought a birthday card for my sister, so rushed to the store then to the post office. Then the afternoon, where I ended up taking a two-hour nap. Where did my serious self-reflection time go? I'm looking for the hour of enlightenment that will make me see things differently. Lately I feel like I'm just surviving things, not experiencing them. I'm a robot, there's no joy there.

Maybe this is a scheduling problem at its root, a matter of prioritizing those things that will help me not feel so overwhelmed. Maybe I need to quit the TV habit and stop working those extra hours. Maybe I just need to change my attitude about work and not take it all so seriously. A life where you don't have time to explore and ask questions and try to find the answers is not one worth living.

- Interesting link via Intersections: "Which country is most routinely miscovered in the U.S. press? There are clearly many candidates, but for me one stands out: Mexico...Journalists peddle a sort of drug-war pornography, salaciously and insatiably dwelling on the most lurid aspects of the trade: narcos, gangs, smugglers, pipelines, cells, mass graves, severed heads, torture chambers, dirty cops."

Comments are interesting, too. Author of the article Michael Massing responds: "Wouldn’t it be great if journalists devoted as much energy to assessing the drug war as they do to covering the drug traffickers?"

- This is what we're using the Internet for in 2010? Disturbing.

- Eric Blair was quite a guy.

Such a drama queen. Feeling better today. Will write more later...

I wake up from my stupor and the questions with no answers come back. What is right, what is wrong, what is true, what is false? Can I trust you? My head aches, my heart pounds, my palms sweat, angry words form inside, tears well up in my eyes. I say I want peace but I'm not finding it. Maybe I don't really want it. I'm ready to fight, not sleep, I'm ready to expose every lie that is masquerading as truth.

Good song for the drive home:
Oh! Darling, please believe me
I'll never do you no harm
Believe me when I tell you
I'll never do you no harm

Oh! Darling, if you leave me
I'll never make it alone
Believe me when I beg you
Don't ever leave me alone

When you told me you didn't need me anymore
Well you know I nearly broke down and cried
When you told me you didn't need me anymore
Well you know I nearly fell down and died

A quote from this article nicely sums up my attitude toward chocolate: "For me, eating chocolate is like an ongoing love affair -- to be enjoyed in small portions every day of the year. I don't pay attention to the legends about chocolate's health and aphrodisiac theories. There's just one good reason to eat quality chocolate: It tastes good."

Heather Armstrong on HGTV? Are you serious?

Blogging grows up

This article does a nice job of summing up the state of blogging these days:

Could it be that blogs have become online fodder for the — gasp! — more mature reader?
A new study has found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief, and mobile. Tech experts say it doesn't mean blogging is going away. Rather, it's gone the way of the telephone and e-mail — still useful, just not sexy.

Actually, I think blogging hasn't been "sexy" for quite a few years. And this blog, well, never, lol. According to the article, about 1 in 10 adults in America has a blog.

All of that rings true to Sarah Rondeau, a freshman at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
"It's a matter of typing quickly. People these days don't find reading that fun," the 18-year-old student says.

A college students says 'people these days don't find reading that fun?' What kind of place is College of the Holy Cross?

"Five years ago blogging was a club," says (David) Sifry of Technorati. "There was this wonderful, delicious feeling of being able to talk privately or semi-privately with people who shared your interests. And there were few consequences of being able to share with your friends on a blog.
"I think we're seeing a deeper awareness of the perception of privacy and how that can affect your life if it's violated."

I definitely see all of this. I now tend to see blogging as a regular hobby, like stamp-collecting or short-story writing, not a social networking trend.

Also, the privacy thing is always on my mind when I'm posting something, and that definitely wasn't the case when I started my first blog in 2001.

And the original generation of bloggers who thought blogging was the coolest thing ever and have continued to post, well, we're all old now, no longer the college students or slacker young adults we once were.

But I like my blog, even if my fondness for it makes me seem old. Twitter annoys me, I'm losing patience with Facebook, texting does nothing for me. For a person (like me) who wants to do some real writing, I think there's really no better hobby for you to have.

- Got today off work and thank God for that.

- I never used to get what a big deal traffic alerts were until I started doing the 8-to-5 schedule thing. Wreck on the freeway = misery.

- Today's reading material: a short story by Nabokov and The Bible: A Biography.

- Bad idea not to collect the mail for four days in a row.

- I think I may have to buy Patti Smith's new book. There's an interesting profile of her in New York Magazine: " 'A day doesn’t go by where I don’t create something,' says Smith. 'Sometimes it’s a rough day and I’m about to go to sleep at eleven o’clock, but I’ll get my Polaroid and take pictures of a series of things. Then I go to bed really happy because I have something to look at, something I did.' "

- Departures is an amazing movie.

A good analysis of the iPad:

An iPad won't do everything a laptop does. It's not supposed to do everything a laptop does. The relationship between iPad and laptop is similar to the relationship between a microwave oven and a set of pots, pans, and cooking utensils. The pots, pans, and cooking utensils can produce more satisfying meals than the microwave can, but often you just don't want to drag all that stuff out and clean up afterward. A microwave is a good complement to a well-equipped kitchen.

Night of the nerds

I didn't expect to spend my Friday night eating atomic wings with five nerdy guys. "Do you want to join us?" my friend asked after our reading group. I hesitated. I glanced at their T-shirts and hipster-ish hair cuts. I know next to nothing about animated series, comic books, Star Trek or trendy music, which I had heard them discussing earlier. "Uh, sure..." I'll try anything once. I could go in anthropologist mode, observe and take mental notes.

We spent 10 minutes deciding what wing package to order and how to pay. One guy's wallet was literally made out of duct tape. The dinner basically turned into a contest over who could eat the most atomic wings. I joined in laughing as faces contorted and changed colors. Two of the boys ate 4 or 5 each, a vegetarian knocked back a huge glob of sauce, one guy didn't eat and spent most of the night texting. I ate one and it was enough for me. Such a girl.

As expected, the 20-minute discussion of South Park flew right over my head, and I think I insulted a couple of people when I said I hated Snow Patrol. Smile and nod, eat a wing and some fries. I definitely have a geeky side, but no, I am not that kind of nerd. Time to go.

I was the odd girl out, but whatever, I did it. Would I do it again, NO, please give me someone who knows more about the news than anime, but for one night it was OK.

Moby asks, has anyone else noticed that almost every movie has roughly the same indie soundtrack? Yes.

No such thing as privacy on Facebook

I totally agree with this article about Facebook changing its privacy settings: "350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it." Neither do I. I think it's all about $$$.

I really DON'T want the whole world to read my dopey status updates. Nor do I want a record of every time I comment on or 'like' someone's status update, or to wade through what everyone else on my 'friends' list has commented on or 'like'd.

I find it very scary that Facebook users have so little control over how the company uses their information. A cautionary tale.

Work notes

I think in every job there is a ratio of things you love versus things you hate. Let's just say, in other jobs the percentage of "things you hate" was a lot higher than it is now. Let me preface this by saying that I like my job, I really, really do.

Still, a job is a job is a job, and I don't know if I'll ever stop pining to be back in grad school. Last week an acquaintance and I were comparing notes about dress codes and work lunches and sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day. "What I miss most about school is the flexibility, being able to choose your own schedule based on what you want to do." Oh, yes. Actually, what I miss most is learning about obscure stuff then talking about it with smart people.

Work reminds me of the "other" school, the K-12 years, going to bed early and being told when to take a lunch and when you can use the bathroom. Seeing the same people every day and caring what they think. You seem to spend a lot of time counting down the days, hours, and minutes.

In the midst of the stucture you can only dream about that other life that you know is out there, the one besides rush-hour traffic and meetings and presentable clothes. The existence where I could stay up late and walk outside in the middle of the day and I could wear jeans and it wouldn't be frowned upon.

I've noticed the number of people I hang out with on weekends has been steadily declining since I got out of school. I was actually invited to go to a club on Friday night but I said no because I was about to pass out because of tiredness. Last week I went to bed before 10 p.m. a few times.

It's funny but I think if I was still in school I'd have had a totally different response to the Haiti earthquake. I'd get on the Internet and look at stuff for hours. I'd reflect on it more, take some time for it to absorb instead of what I did, which was acknowledge it then quickly move on to business as usual. How different of a person am I from what I used to be? Am I that fundamentally changed?

But this is what you do to have your good name and money in your bank account. Yes, of course, a job provides its own forms of freedom, financial and opportunity-wise. And I really don't miss forking over several thousand dollars every semester, over-long lectures, and wondering if what you're studying ultimately matters in the real world. Maybe I'm also forgetting about the stress that came with school, the homework and the uncertainty. Still I can't help thinking about those years as the golden years. They may have ruined my outlook on work for life.

Adventures in cooking

- I used Google to find out what fennel is.
- I now know how to supreme an orange.
- Probably better to grate the cheese before you actually need to use it.
- Spaghetti carbonara is *really* good.
- It took me much longer than 30 minutes to make one of Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals. False advertising or am I just a disorganized cooking dunce?

Jennifer Lopez grows up.

Last night I finished reading Columbine, Dave Cullen's comprehensive account of the Columbine massacre. It's kind of hard for me to admit to buying this book. Even at the checkout at Barnes and Noble I wondered if the clerk thought I was some sick monster for wanting to read so much about this horrific event.

It's really not that I'm fascinated with the crime and wanted to take in all the gruesome details, I just wanted to finally know the truth of what happened after all these years. I was a junior in high school when the massacre happened in 1999, and I remember how much it shook me up. I was only a year younger than the attackers, and from what I read about Columbine High School, it seemed the school was scarily similar to the high school I went to. I always felt the truth was not all there in the news reports about the attack. Mostly I thought the "why" of the attack was always absent, which is what I really wanted to know. From the news media I came away with the idea that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were motivated to kill by bullying, Nazism, and violent video games. But, as I suspected, the media were off the mark, according to Cullen. It wasn't the violent video games, more like one psychopathic kid enlists a suicidal depressed kid to help carry out a sadistic plot. Not so much a product of the high school environment in the late 20th century but the kind of anomalous evil occurrence that has happened since the beginning of human existence.

My other interest in the book was to find out how the media got it so wrong. It's so disturbing to me how easily one story gets put out and never gets corrected and people just accept it as the truth (i.e. the Cassie Bernall story). It goes to show that sometimes you do need a book to tell a story of this magnitude, not CNN headline news or a 20-inch newspaper story. Cullen provides some insight into how the media perpetuated the myths surrounding Columbine. He writes about the feedback loop that all the live TV coverage created, with some students' "eyewitness" reports being influenced almost immediately by the TV coverage. He also discusses how the sheriff's department investigating the Columbine massacre took an entire year to release official reports about the attack, leaving plenty of time for misinformation to spread.

The book is a lot of tragedy to stomach, which is why it took me about six months to finish. I would read a few chapters then put it away for weeks. I suppose a book like this isn't meant to be a quick and easy read. Overall, Cullen does a good job of balancing narrative and exposition in the book's organization. He focuses on the victims and their struggles as much as the killers, which I think is the right approach. At some points I wished the book had more of the artistry of a novel, rather than the sort of "Reader's Digest" quality the storytelling has to it. On the other hand, I appreciated that Cullen wasn't unnecessarily gruesome and didn't glorify the attackers in any way in his account of the events.

I really respect an author like Dave Cullen who goes after the truth and takes the time to get the facts right and set the record straight. The book is groundbreaking simply for how well it does that after all these years of myths and misinformation.

Once again, NPR reports from Juarez:

But Clara Rojas, who teaches political rhetoric at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, predicts it will take decades for the city to recover.

The violence stems from deep social fissures, she says, and until those are fixed she predicts the killings will continue.

She traces the roots of the current violence to the murders of hundreds of women in the 1990s that are still unsolved. Most of the victims were young women, many of them factory workers or students, murdered and in some cases tortured and sexually abused.

Rojas says that impunity for that wave of killings sent a signal to the drug cartels and other thugs that Juarez is "fertile ground" for criminal activity.

"There is no way you can change anything if everybody thinks this city is a trash can for whatever they want to do," Rojas says.

Sun Bowl

I never really go to Sun Bowl games for the football. For me it's more about the spectacle. El Paso on display. My notes on the day:

- The sloooow Sun Bowl shuttle has me thinking I don't want to rely on public transportation in the near future.

- Stanford in red, Oklahoma in white. What else do you need to know, really?

- I have never seen Sun Bowl stadium that full. Ever.

- I was *obsessed* with the Stanford tree.

- I think part of the fun of any sporting event is the $10 lunch of nachos and Sierra Mist. Where else does that meal make sense?

- I heard two guys talking about El Paso while I was in the line to get nachos: "There's nothing to do, but everywhere you go, people are so nice." So true.

- David Archuleta is the cutest. Too bad he was facing the other side of the stadium. Here he is on the Jumbotron:

- Final score: Oklahoma 31, Stanford 27. Didn't see the end of the game, unfortunately, because I had to work. But I saw most of what I wanted to see. I had an amazing time with my older cousin who doesn't live around here.

- Great bowl game. Let's do it again next year :-).

Top 10 favorite lists for 2009

(Note: Some of the stuff below I know was not released this year but it was what I watched/read/listened to this year.)

Movies
(500) Days of Summer
The Class
Entre Líneas
Everlasting Moments
Food, Inc.
The Hangover
Man on Wire
Rocket Science
Sin Nombre
Up

TV
"How I Met Your Mother"
"In Treatment"
"Lost in Austen"
"Mad Men"
"Top Chef"
"The Wire"
Didn't watch enough good TV to fill out the next 4.

Books
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman
Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
King Dork by Frank Portman
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Idiot's Guide to Philosophy by Jay Stevenson

Music
"I Love the Unknown" by Eef Barzelay
"This Modern Love" by Bloc Party
"If You're Thinking of Me" by Dodgy
"This world is not for the faint of heart" by Hypernova (don't know the name of the song, only this lyric from the chorus)
"Heartbreak Warfare" by John Mayer
Wait for Me. by Moby
Grandes Exitos by Shakira
Far by Regina Spektor
No Line on the Horizon by U2
Boy for You by Astrid Williamson

- RE: my last post - Is it really such a big deal to be so uncommitted? I'm 27, not 40. *sigh* Too much thought.


- I think the allergies that made my life miserable earlier this year may be back. *double sigh*

Uncomplicated

It was around a year ago that I was describing my life to someone and the adjective that I used was "sheltered." In the years since I graduated from high school (in 2000), it seems like I've made an art out of dodging major social and financial entanglements. In the first big decision of my life, I decided on good old UTEP right here in El Paso for college. It was simpler that way, that was the main reason -- I had a scholarship, so I didn't have to spend anything on tuition, and there were no dorms or flights at holidays or credit card debt. I finished my bachelor's degree (well, education is the exception, at least there's *something* I committed to) but I didn't get into a "real" career straightaway, instead meandering through years of grad school and working part-time at a newspaper, not a career choice I think most grad students in computer science typically make. Even as I've settled into more lucrative work, I still have never had a car or house payment. Too much commitment, even if I had the money for it. I have lived with my mom all except for one year out of my life. I've never been married or even had a serious relationship, and I've never had a kid to take care of.

Am I very weird? Maybe I just don't take so-called achievements or life milestones very seriously. I didn't really want the degree from a name brand college or the high-pressure job that pays a lot of money. To me loans and debt have always seemed like having a bag of rocks tied to your ankle for life. I'm happy with my old Honda and upstairs bedroom and four-year-old cell phone. I laugh at status symbols, nice clothes and iPhones and shiny new trucks, I like to think I don't need them to prove my worth. As for romance, I don't really like the idea of being chained to another human being, especially a man. Men who I have previously admitted that I don't understand. Don't I have enough quirks of my own, without adding someone else's unpredictable neuroses to the mix?

I've stopped just short of living in a convent with the simplicity thing. Looking back I see the simplicity as a choice, a willful act of defiance, because the default seems to be complexity. Complicated finances, complicated relationships. But looked at another way, I suppose there's something else in the self-imposed course of avoidance. A fear. I fear investing too much of myself into anything, only to have it not work out. And immaturity. I've written before about being shy, and I've read that shy people are slower to reach life milestones like the ones I've written about. Not that it's true for everyone, but it has been true for me. It's taken me years to get a tentative grip on the career and relational issues I gather that most other people figure out much earlier.

I think all this is on my mind because I see things about to change for me as I head further into my late 20s. I anticipate admitting more complexity into my life as I get older. I tell myself, the pared-down life is weird enough in your 20s, in your 30s it will just seem absurd. I can't see myself as George Clooney in "Up in the Air," with nothing in the backpack. I've already moved into a somewhat stable career. My car will break down at some point, wouldn't it be nice to get a new one? A place of my own seems more and more tempting. And as I see friends and family my age getting married off and starting families, won't I want the same someday? It terrifies me now, but maybe one day it won't.

But can't we just toss out the timelines, that you get a real job at 23 and get married by 27 and have your first child at 30? I don't much care if I'm the exception. At this point I don't think I'm a general commitment-phobe. It's more like I'm running things on a case-by-case basis these days, and I think that it's just not the right time for some things in my world, that's all. But maybe it will be soon.

Another Christmas has come and gone. My Christmas loot: $75 in Barnes and Noble gift cards, yay! I don't know yet which books I will choose. A couple of sweaters and shirts. A box of truffles. Day-by-day calendar of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die (why did they include the word "die" in the title, it sounds so morbid). A scarf. Money from Mom and Dad. Etc.

I'm getting addicted to New York Magazine. This end-of-decade reflection is awesome:

Ever-increasing bandwidth and mobile computing brought us tantalizingly close to a world of infinite, instantaneous communications. Those who saw this coming convergence at the start of the decade were the winners. Those who didn’t were the losers.
...
Is all this good or bad? Depends where you sit. If you’re reading this magazine, meaning you’re capable of maintaining your concentration for more than 140 characters, it’s probably bad.
...
The fear now is that no one is in charge. That we are all adrift in a vast, roiling sea, the contours of which none of us can fully discern.

2009

This has been a good year. I've been to London and back. I got a job I really like, the job I kinda/sorta envisioned myself having at this age when I was a kid. I was able to forgive people when I very well could have chosen not to. I started Spanish classes again and plan to continue them. I was busy, but not too busy to hang out with interesting friends and see indie films and read good books.

Looking back, the continued positive direction of my life seems so tenuous. One unexpected disaster or unpleasant circumstance could have made this year something different, but it didn't. Some wonderful things in my life this year were just plain luck, blessings that I don't deserve and can't take much credit for, and for those things I say "thank you," for God's grace shining down on me for one more year.

Nice Sunday night -- good dinner, excellent company, a movie starring Harry Potter, and no work tomorrow.

The NY Times asks, "Can Anybody Make a Movie for Women?". Apparently Nancy Meyers can. Upwards of $12 million per film. Wow. I don't love all her films but I've seen "The Holiday" three or four times and find it a nice bit of escapism.

Can't remember the last I was so grateful for a Saturday afternoon.

Christmas shopping update

As of yesterday I'm done with 98 percent of my Christmas shopping. Yay! I went shopping during the day and thought the stores wouldn't be crowded, but they were. Toys 'R Us was an especially unpleasant experience -- babies crying, almost getting run over by shopping carts, long lines. They also didn't have any good Twilight merchandise, which is what I was looking for. Fortunately I was able to find nearly all of the stuff on my list at other stores within three hours, so I won't have to make a return trip to the mall and surrounding stores. Thank God, that's really a Christmas gift in itself...

Juárez

Before I start, let me make clear that the following is all my own opinion and not those of any current or former employers. OK, enough with the disclaimer.

So my friend and I are standing outside an El Paso bar on a Friday night and the topic of conversation turns to Juárez. She said she has heard from her Juárez friends that the violence there is getting worse and the situation is more hopeless than ever. The family of her friend was carjacked, and there was a shooting at the nightclub her friend's brother owns. Her friend is planning to move away to another city in Mexico to get away from the violence.

"When will the violence be over?" I wonder aloud.

She doesn't answer me and we fall silent. There's not else much we can say about the drug cartel war in Juárez, the Mexican city across the border from El Paso, where over 2,250 people have been killed this year. Here is a good summary of the current state of things, if you haven't read much about it. Body after body has been found gunned down on the streets. Some are found tortured and dismembered. The victims have included women and children. There are also reports of a rise in crimes like extortions, kidnappings, and carjackings.

Reports of the violence across the border typically come to me secondhand as above, through a friend of a friend or through the media. Enough for me to give a polite "I'm sorry to hear that" sort or reaction, not enough to provoke the gut-wrenching reaction that comes when the crime is against someone you know well. The streets of El Paso remain very safe, and even when it's in the city nestled right up against my beloved hometown, the violence to me is still in the abstract, a shadowy, humongous problem that there's not much I can do about, like AIDS in Africa or global warming.

Am I hopelessly insular, that I have so little direct knowledge of Juárez, its citizens, and the violence tearing it apart? Even before the drug cartel war started, I always associated Juárez with danger. It was the place my mom always said she was afraid to go. I suppose that childhood fear is why I can count on two hands the number of times I've been to Juárez. Three times to visit the mercado, once to Villa del Mar, a seafood restaurant, three times to a church camp. That's seven times in 27 years of life, none of those visits in the past two years, when the war has been going on.

Also, unlike a lot of native El Pasoans I have no family members in Juarez. I have acquaintances who live there -- people I went to school with, former co-workers, friends of friends -- but no one in my inner circle, which I suppose makes me lucky. It's not my parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, or close friends getting killed or seeing the bodies pile up.

But when the media do their job and start digging into who these people being killed actually are, I am reminded how closely these two communities are connected. People who lived and worked and studied in El Paso have been killed. Some of the most disturbing headlines this year:

• A 7-year-old boy who attended an East El Paso school is gunned down on the streets of Juárez.


• A woman who worked in an El Paso Goodwill store, who her co-workers said used to sing and dance to the radio at work, is shot to death in front of a house in Juárez.


• A 15-year-old girl who attended the same high school my sister graduated from is killed at a family party.

A 7-year-old? Yeah, it's unbelievable, it's utterly horrible, tragic, despicable, and unfair. But solutions that will end the violence aren't forthcoming. The Mexican government has sent in thousands of soldiers to the city. It seemed like the answer, then it failed. Decriminalizing drugs in the U.S. has been suggested, but that likely is not going to happen any time soon.

The U.S. government has added more southbound inspections to curb weapon and currency smuggling into Mexico, and some Juárez groups even want to bring in U.N. peacekeepers. Meanwhile, the BBC suggests poverty and corrution are the real problems.

The experts have done the analyses and some solutions have been tried but the killings continue, and we're back to "what a pity" then silence. It's like this wall of frustration builds up. We need the facts on why the situation is getting worse and not better, but it's not a situation where we can get all the facts, given the dangers for anyone who dares to investigate.

And what's really frustrating is that there is so little that any one average person can do. Tell people about it, I guess (part of the reason I'm writing this). Write to representatives in Congress or to the White House, maybe, and some protests have been organized.

But I think the attitude that "there's nothing I can do" leads to complacency. I'm frustrated by the lack of urgency in the conversation at this point in the war, the attitude that the murders are unstoppable. Especially here in El Paso, where you'd think we'd be hypersensitive to what's going on just across the border, people like me who don't have close ties to Juárez continue on with our lives that are mostly undisrupted by violence, and it starts to fade from our consciousness. I've been guilty of this, too. I'm busy with my own life here, and I am tired of thinking about drugs and violence and death. But in this situation it's not a matter of choice. With about 4,000 people killed in the past two years, and an average of between 200 and 300 killings a month now, we in El Paso and the rest of the U.S. and the world need to keep thinking about it and keep talking about it, and express our solidarity with the citizens of Juárez.

No, I don't have answers for the problems plaguing Juárez. I'm as bewildered by the situation as anyone as I sit here writing from my safe perch. All I'm saying is the fire's still raging there, and we shouldn't allow anyone to forget about it.

TIME calls the '00s the "decade from hell": "It was almost as if we as a nation said in previous decades, 'Why do today what we can put off until the first decade of the 21st century?' But we didn't rise to those challenges. What we just lived through, then, was the chickens coming home to roost."

Snow storm

Woke up to this bleak scene:



Took these photos near my house after the sky had mostly cleared up in the afternoon:




Makes me not mind winter so much.

Ben Casnocha on immigration as an antidote to world poverty. Great argument, also includes a link to this graphic on the current process of obtaining American citizenship.

Thanksgiving

Another good Thanksgiving this year. Plenty of turkey and holiday pies and I ended up playing about 30 rounds of hide and seek with my little cousins. I forget how much fun it is to play with kids. They are so grateful for the attention, and it was really refreshing not to talk or think about grown-up stuff for awhile.

I was thinking this morning about how much I have to be thankful for -- family, friends, health, a job, an abundance of food, living in a community that is safe despite a war that rages on across the border just a few miles away. I get caught up in my little day-to-day stresses sometimes but the truth is I have nothing to complain about.

- Interesting profile of Sonia Sotomayor in the latest issue of Latina magazine. According to Latina, Sotomayor is a Supreme Court justice who "makes tasty salads and hooks up a mean churrasco with a tangy lemon marinade."

- Hair tip from Zac Efron: "Shower before you go to bed, and then sleep on your wet hair. Towel-dry it. In the morning, it's all messed up naturally. If you have that messed-up thing going when you wake up, it's more willing to stay that way. That's Zac's hair tip."

Warning: this doesn't work for girls with long hair.

- My mom bought a Dyson and I can't think of another time I've been so impressed by a machine. It's lovely and amazing. This takes my vacuuming hobby to another level.

- My teeth finally don't hurt as bad today. And I'm off the all-liquid diet.

- I'm starting a new job tomorrow. But you'll have to e-mail me if you want to know what it is.

Wisdom teeth gone

I had my wisdom teeth extracted today. I've put off doing it for years, but I couldn't ignore them any longer. One was jutting crooked into my lower left molar, causing my front teeth to crowd in an unsightly way. I do not want to be known as that woman with bad teeth. And then I was horrified when about two weeks ago I noticed my upper left wisdom tooth breaking through the gumline. Something I've always wondered -- how are teeth programmed to come up or fall out? Why at age 27 is there an urgent need for these teeth to appear? It's like an invasion.

Anyway, I went in at 7:45 and the surgery took about an hour. I got an IV with anesthesia so I don't remember anything about it. I remember the dentist putting in the IV then asking me, "Do you feel anything right now?" And I said no. And he said, "You will very soon." Then nothing. I don't remember nodding off or feeling woozy then going to sleep or anything like that. The next thing I remember is waking up and leaving the dentist chair. It was like getting up from a good night's sleep. I thought it was strange that I felt so fully awake and not detached or disoriented after being so soundly asleep.

My mom drove me home, where I promptly lay down on the couch and slept for a few hours longer. So I guess I wasn't as awake as I thought. The lower half of my face was numb for about eight hours after I got home and I had to keep changing gauze pads out of my mouth to soak up the blood.

But really, the pain hasn't been bad even after the numbness wore off. I took some Motrin, that helps. My jaw feels like it's bruised in places and I can feel large gaps in my gums where the teeth were removed.

I think the worst part of all this will be not eating the foods I'm used to eating. Yesterday I ate a spicy chicken burrito just because I knew I wouldn't be able to for a while. Some staples of my diet like salad, fruits, gum and crunchy cereal will be out for another couple of weeks *sigh*. I like to eat and yogurt and pudding for dinner just don't do it for me. I can move on to soups and noodles tomorrow, according to the dentist. Whoo, exciting. I'll be very glad when my jaw and teeth function normally again.

Moby writes about insomnia:
"insomnia is so odd, as it's so self-destructive, but yet solely the product of the self. it's only the self. the self at war with itself. the brain deciding it somehow knows best, even though it's crippled by delusion."

It has been another intense week in which every day I get home from work and don't have the will to do anything besides watch a few hours of TV. I am now a fan of Castle, Top Chef, and Project Runway and a sort-of fan of Dancing with the Stars. I also watched Jay Leno's show a couple times this week. I don't think it's as funny as it was in late night but I still like it better than Conan's.

I feel a little guilty about my TV habit. I like to think of myself as the sort of person who would rather read than watch TV in her off-hours. I have the best intentions of doing work for my Spanish lessons after work. And blogging, of course. But somehow none of those things happens on a weeknight as a numbness of mind sets in.

Has work turned my non-working self into a zombie? I guess that's what weekends are for, to snap out of the work-TV haze.

Sunrise

It's a rare day that I'm actually out of bed to watch the sun rise.

- Forget violent video games, I think piñatas at kids' birthday parties are really able to bring out children's violent tendencies. I just watched one particularly brutal beating where the kids went about ten rounds before the thing was finally torn apart. The youngest kids in line were three years old! But I'm not so PC that if I had kids I wouldn't allow them to have one.

- Last night I watched the season 3 finale of "Mad Men" on DV-R. Of course it was amazing and reminded me why I watch the show, for its un-nostalgic portrayal of the '60s. Here's an interview with the show's creator where he talks about the finale. I was close to tears by the closing song. That, my friends, is art.

Technological genius

This whole week there wasn't a dial tone on any of the phones in the house. I finally called the cable company on my cell yesterday to find out what the problem was with the digital phone line. After getting through the voice recognition answering system and not one but two customer service representatives, we finally got to the bottom of the problem: the line was plugged into the wrong phone jack on the back of the modem. Nothing mechanically wrong with the line, it was merely plugged into Line 2 instead of Line 1, which I inadvertently switched when I unplugged the modem and then plugged everything back in. If I had thought about the problem for more than a minute I probably could have figured out the answer. D'oh.

I bet it gets pretty annoying to answer dumb calls like that all day. But in fairness, I think it's an easy mistake to make based on the design of the modem. The Line 1 jack is actually below the Line 2 jack. This problem is probably right there on their FAQs list.

I just hope there weren't any important calls I missed during the week. Fortunately, the "land line" isn't the number I typically give out for important stuff.

Love when they play moody British rock on the radio in the mornings:

I just bought another box of Claritin. The 12-hour kind, not the 24-hour kind, since it freaks me out to think of being on any drug 24/7. I don't know what the deal is with my allergies. It's been over three weeks since I first felt all this throat congestion, and if I go off the allergy medicine it seems to come back right away.

It's strange, I wonder what has changed. I was living and working at the same places last year and I didn't have this problem. Is this how it's going to be from now on, the boxes of Claritin and tissues, the stuffy nose, the coughing, etc.?

Picture taken yesterday morning from the balcony. Snow in October, it's hard to believe.

I wrote my fingers off today, wrote until I had to stop to make sure the words I was writing still made sense to anyone besides me. Sometimes I find myself typing phrases into Google to see whether people actually ever use it or if I'm making up a new grammatically incorrect phrase. It's kind of hard to know what's "correct" in writing a lot of times, because sometimes there is no correct or incorrect, only smooth or awkward, and the line between those gets blurred sometimes.

When I talk in Spanish and say something unfamiliar to me, I'll ask my teacher, is this common? If it's not then I don't want to say it. I think with languages, that's all you can go by, really, what's common and what's not.

Whatever the standards of correctness, it's funny how writing still makes me happy. Finding out the right information, smoothing out the transitions, correcting the spelling and punctuation until it's all clear and strong and powerful. I smile inside at that.

I think I've reached the point in the year where I get home and immediately wrap myself in a blanket. It's frigid outside. I'm also wearing my flannel pajama bottoms with cute little sheep on them. Why does winter have to come around every year?

- It's genuinely cold in El Paso this week, not merely a little chilly in the mornings. I turned on the heat last night and I'm wrapped in a blanket writing this post. I don't like cold weather. But it is the last week of October, so we've had a pretty long spell of warmth. I should be grateful for that.

- I went to the dentist yesterday for a consultation on getting my wisdom teeth out. The dentist did a good job of explaining all the risks and benefits of the surgery. Mostly I am concerned about all my front teeth turning crooked, which I noticed has been happening more in the past six months. The surgery is scheduled for Nov. 20. *sighs* I'm not scared but I'm not exactly looking forward to it.

I must give a plug to Movies in the Canyon. I went to see "Back to the Future" last night as part of the outdoor movie series in McKelligon Canyon and it was really amazing. The quality of the picture was great, the amphitheatre itself is beautiful in the mountains where you can see all the stars so clearly (even a couple of shooting stars), the ushers kept the audience orderly (well, with the small exception of a couple dumping popcorn on each other in the row in front us), and the admission was free. The weather was surprisingly not too chilly even at 9:30 on a late October night. And really, who gets tired of seeing Marty McFly and Doc Brown and hearing "Power of Love" even after the millionth time? It was a great time, so kudos to whoever thought up Movies in the Canyon.

Good column by Judith Warner on the "Female Happiness Conundrum":

Life for women has not come together...Our workforce and education system is still sex-segregated, operating along generations-old stereotypes that steer most women into low-paid, low-status, low-security professions. Women pay more for health insurance than men, have more extensive health needs than men, and suffer unique forms of discrimination in their coverage...Regardless of the number of hours they work, they continue to do far more caretaking and housekeeping work at home than do their husbands.

Today I had another drive home on a rainy night, the kind of drive I'm so fond of writing about. At one point the windshield wipers were on maximum speed and I was driving at a crawl. On the radio, "Sweet Child of Mine" then a program in Spanish where two women were discussing the health benefits of eggs. I stopped paying attention when it got too rainy. When I got home I put a plastic bag on my head and made a run for the door.

Now it keeps raining off and on. I don't dislike rain, I just wish it would rain for a short time then stop and not rain again for another month or so.

Can't say I disagree.

Another weekend where I didn't go out much. My illness, which I still suspect is not a flu or cold but just a bad case of allergies, cleared up some but I still sound hoarse and still have regular coughing fits. So I'm not the best company these days.

It was actually really nice to have an excuse to catch up on my magazines: America Ferrera interviewed in Latina (what does she say about her alleged feud with Lindsey Lohan?), how bacteria communicate in Discover (gross), the state of the American woman in TIME (should give men more credit, they seem to accept women in power OK), the kidnapping fixer in The Atlantic (saw it on kottke, yes, it's worth reading).

Also finished American Wife (as I thought, more of a study of a woman's life, albeit a woman who is quite similar to a certain First Lady, than political satire). Curtis Sittenfeld may be my new author hero.

Funny how much I don't miss going out. I think my natural inclination is to be to be a shut-in. Which is exactly why I don't let every weekend to turn into read-a-pile-of-magazines weekend.

The New York Times reports from Juarez again, this time about how Mexican law enforcement investigates crimes:

The federal government refused to provide statistics on how many arrests had resulted in convictions, how many suspects were still under investigation or how many arrests had proved to be mistakes. But independent reviews by scholars suggest that only about a quarter of crimes in Mexico are ever reported and that only a small fraction ever result in convictions.

Compounding matters is the sheer number of crimes, especially murders. On a single September night in Ciudad Juárez, 18 men were shot to death in a drug treatment center near the border, more than the number of killings all year long in El Paso, just across the Texas border.

This video is also worth watching, if gruesome.

I don't know why I'm so stubborn about not staying home from work when I feel sick. I know some people are much less so. Midway through the afternoon, I was coughing up a storm and my co-worker literally touched my forehead and said "a little warm, are you OK?" My throat was burning and my head throbbed. I was exhausted, too -- I hadn't slept well two nights in a row since I kept waking up coughing. If I were being honest, I would have said, "No, I feel like crap, but I'm staying here until 7 regardless." But instead, I said, "Yeah, I'm OK." Just so I wouldn't have to explain.

Me and my stupid principles. Is it really so bad to stay home if you're merely sick, not deathly ill? I think it makes me brave or stoic or something to not stay home at the first sign of sickness. But after a certain point it just makes me sicker and makes everyone else sick, too. I think I reached that point today.

Oh well, I made it through my allotted work week, now I finally feel free to rest and get better.

The end of the experiment

So my little experiment of posting to this blog at least once a day for 30 days is at an end. From a ratings point of view, this seems like a failure. Here are my page views in the last month. As you can see they haven't shown a clear increase since I started the experiment. Twelve views in one day was the high point. Not what I was hoping for.



And here are the page views over the past year:



Nothing much happening there, except a continuing slight decline. Though to be fair, I didn't start until nearly halfway through September and October isn't over yet. I continue to have only one "follower" on Blogger. I guess people could be reading through newsreaders and I wouldn't know about it. I've had a few more comments, which is good, though I don't know how much that says about readership.

I sometimes wonder why I keep this blog. My blog is a contradictory thing, since I both want people to read it and want to keep it a secret. I suppose some people keep blogs so their friends can keep up with them. But that's never been what this has been about. I don't advertise the blog to people I know. It's more for random strangers to stumble across and be fascinated with and come back and become regular readers. But the days of that happening on a regular basis seem over, as indicated by my stats. This past month it has been more like something I do for myself, something to prove I still have something to say as a blogger with my writing, photos, and links.

It has been interesting to be reminded of why I was drawn to blogging in the first place. I had forgotten what it was like to constantly think "I should blog about this" when something happens. Andrew Sullivan once wrote that blogging was like jazz in that it's improvisational. It's not high art, generally not stuff you would publish in a book. It's on the fly, conversational. It's also personal. For me, I've always seen a blog as like a confessional. Sort of like what they used to do (still do?) on the "Real World," where you go into that little room with the camera and say what you really think about your roommates. You say things you wouldn't say to people in real life, but somehow posting it to the Internet is OK. That instant intimacy can get you into trouble, but it's also what makes blogs fun to read. Some of my secrets have come out in the course of these 30 days, and I think that's fine.

This has also been an exercise in forced creativity. It has been good to try to coax a little creativity out of myself. Some days I can't think of anything to post, but there is always *something* to write about, even if it's just some random musing about work or being tired or a link. The idea of applying principles of work to your hobby is a little foreign to me, I'll confess. But the end result can be worth it. Forget the ratings, I made it through 30 days of posts! *pats self on back*

Will I continue to post every day? I don't think so. Better to shut up when you don't have anything to say and save the words for when you do. Let me come home from work and not feel obligated to get on the computer, ah, that will be nice. But I think the reward for putting more work into my hobby is proving that yes, I still have a voice and yes, I can force myself to be creative day after day. And it's made me more energized about blogging. Maybe I won't neglect my blog so much in the future, and maybe I'll be more motivated to put some work into it and produce some decent posts.

One final thing: if you're reading this, would you drop me a line in the comments section? I'd appreciate it.

After looking it up on WebMD, I don't think I have a cold, pneumonia, TB, strep throat, the regular flu or swine flu. As far as I can tell I just have allergies. No fever and three days since it started I don't feel better or worse.

I'm giving myself a break from tonight's blog post for medical reasons: I have a runny nose and a cough and I'm really tired. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow.

Chick lit weekend

I skipped the bars this weekend and caught up on my chick lit instead. I watched all three hours of "Lost in Austen" plus the behind-the-scenes featurette. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit how incredibly entertaining I found this mini-series. The star Jemima Rooper is like your favorite fun-loving female friend, and it was really fresh to see the characters of "Pride and Prejudice" in a new plot with new clever dialogue to recite. Plus I'm even fonder of the palaces and countryside of England now that I've seen them in person.

Keeping with the chick lit theme, I'm also reading "American Wife." Halfway through I'm still trying to figure out if it's a serious study of a woman's life or a political satire. I almost hesitate to call this chick lit, since it seems too high-brow and chick lit seems to denote more of a guilty pleasure, but on the other hand, I really can't imagine a man reading this book and getting the same enjoyment out of it.

Yay for chick lit, eating pastries in bed, and not going out.

Reasons NOT to be a writer

- Newspapers are going down the tubes.

- So are magazines.

- Good luck getting a book published if you're not a celebrity, Stephanie Meyer, or Eckhart Tolle.

- User manuals aren't fun to write.

- Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, text messaging, e-mail, and blogs have made it so that everyone's a "writer" now. (This link is seriously funny, you should click on it.)

- You have to give away your secrets.

- You might get carpal tunnel syndrome.

- Words don't always come easily.

I learned the following in Spanish today:

zapatos de tacón high heels

al revés upside down

en ves de instead of

pecera fish bowl

My original plan was to speed through the textbook in record time, but I'm going much more slowly than expected because I ask my teacher to explain every little thing I don't understand. It's kind of frustrating to be going so slowly, but I realize focusing on the little details is exactly what I haven't done that I should be doing as far as learning Spanish. It's classic me to get the general idea of something but not ingest all the details. Maybe learning something slowly but thoroughly is the better way to go.

Yet another reason I *heart* President Obama: He won the Nobel Peace Prize! And gave a fantastic inspiring speech afterwards:

We can't allow the differences between peoples to define the way that we see one another, and that's why we must pursue a new beginning among people of different faiths and races and religions; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.

And we must all do our part to resolve those conflicts that have caused so much pain and hardship over so many years, and that effort must include an unwavering commitment that finally realizes that the rights of all Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and security in nations of their own.

We can't accept a world in which more people are denied opportunity and dignity that all people yearn for -- the ability to get an education and make a decent living; the security that you won't have to live in fear of disease or violence without hope for the future.

I'm "good tired" tonight, that is, super tired but not caring that I am, resolved to stay up as much as I possibly can, fit in as much as I can because why should you sleep your life away anyway? It's kind of exciting going through life fighting sleep. On the other hand, being tired means I'm not very coherent, so no long-winded blog post tonight. Will resume tomorrow.

By the way, here's a video to go with yesterday's song lyrics. Who makes these YouTube videos? So bizarre. At least you can hear the song.

Song lyrics from this morning on the radio:

I'm waiting for a friend to come, to help me off the ground
Better come sooner than later, can't stop feeling down
Scattered memories drifting back from my stereo
Of how we dream this could be and how we let it go

If you're thinking of me, you've got to let me know
'Cause loneliness seems such a waste, I can't stop feeling low

Tonight I called a friend I haven't called in months. I called her once after she moved away in June, then tried to call her a few weeks after that but she never called me back. I also wrote her a letter (responding to one she sent me) but didn't hear back. So I stopped trying these past few months.

But I felt bad about the whole thing, wondered if we were ever going to talk again, if we were still friends even, so I finally tried again. She picked up the phone and we talked and it was like nothing ever happened. Things like that happen all the time with me. I take things hard, I take them as signs of rejection, I wonder if I'm turning myself into a pest and figure I should just quit being so abnormally needy. Maybe I'm too sensitive. Actually, I think it's called "being shy."

One of my best memories with this particular friend involves a moonlit walk one night around this time of year with her, her husband and my sister. She let me borrow her jacket, which was way too big for me. We walked on the dark roads among the trees and falling leaves, talking and laughing. I remember we cut across a field at one point, and I had no idea where we were. I'm usually afraid to walk around outside at night, and I hate the cold, but there was no sense of fear this time, and I didn't mind the cool weather. A good memory. Memories like those make being so far away that much harder. Hearing her voice on the phone was nice, but it's not seeing her face or borrowing her coat or talking under a moonlit night sky.

Why can't people stay put?

Another day. I was about to write "just a boring, generic day," but that's not true. With my job, every day is its own crazy mix of adventures. Like shaking up a kaleidoscope, you never know what you'll end up with. I sometimes think I could remember each day of my job individually. If you just say, remember the day when x, y and z happened? And it will come to me, oh yeah. Xday, X the Xth.

Michael Jackson died on a Thursday. The tsunami happened on a Tuesday. We found out about the guy found dead in Juarez on a Wednesday. (OK, so I just had to look up the dates of those events, so I proved myself wrong. But I do tend to remember when things happen at the beginning, middle, or end of the week.) And the narratives of the events themselves are sharp and bright in my mind like they are in a kaleidoscope. They're part of my consciousness now. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing.

More about the Chamizal from the National Park Service:

"In 1968, Congress established Chamizal National Memorial to commemorate the Chamizal Convention (treaty) of 1963. The Chamizal treaty finally ended a long-standing border dispute between the U.S. and Mexico

...The memorial fosters goodwill and understanding between the people of the United States and Mexico and provides a center to present activities that celebrate cultural exchange."

Will have to go back sometime when it's not dark.

A night for Chopin

I attended the Chopin Music Festival tonight at the Chamizal National Memorial theatre. It was a rainy, overcast evening, the perfect night to stay inside and hear some romantic piano music.


Actually, I think the pianist really shined playing Mussorgsky rather than Chopin. But she was wonderful on all the pieces, of course. At so many points, the performance seemed like a magic trick. My eyes couldn't keep up with the pianist's hands flying over the keys and producing the intricate melodies.

Did you know the Chopin Music Festival is blessed by the Pope? According to the festival website, "His holiness the Pope sends prayerful good wishes for the El Paso Chopin Music Festival and he invokes God's abundant blessings upon you and upon all taking part."

You need to read this: "Polanski, rape, and the myth of Not Like Us."

Nothing like National Geographic Traveler magazine to reignite my dreams of traveling the world. Last month I was longing to go to Sardinia. This month it's their 50 Places of a Lifetime. I like the magazine but the articles are frustratingly short. How can you describe places like these in one photo and five paragraphs? Maybe the articles are only good to spark your interest so you can experience the place for yourself.

And the Olympics go to...Rio? Chicago didn't even make it to the second round. I'm genuinely disappointed after all the hype. But I suppose it's only fair that a South American city can finally host an Olympics...

Interesting article about hybrid books that mix in video and web features with the regular book text. I was just thinking about this when watching "Food, Inc." I started but never finished the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which covers a lot of the same ground. I remember reading Michael Pollan's pages-long description of the avalanche of corn produced in America but seeing the mountain of corn on video was still much more striking. If only that were in the book...

Hybrid novels don't sound nearly as appealing, though. The article mentions adding video clips to romance novels, which I think is stupid. If you're going to do that, why not just watch a movie instead? But I think it would be cool if a novel mentions music to include that with the text, i.e. a music-enhanced version of "High Fidelity."