Sometimes I think my 9-year-plus fixation on blogs is coming to an end. Lately it seems I spend more time doing other stuff on the Internet: browsing craigslist and Amazon, going through Facebook, checking e-mail, even watching music videos on YouTube. The number of blogs I read on a regular basis is dwindling, and lately I haven't found new blogs to replace the ones I don't follow anymore. Maybe I just need to find some new blogs to be excited about. (Any recommendations, btw?)


Could it also be that I see the Internet differently? Maybe I am slowly coming to see the Internet as a giant mall.


Or maybe a blog is now simply another tool in the ever-expanding social media toolbox. The longer version of a tweet or status update (though I like to see a blog as having a more artistry. OTOH, see my last post).


In any case, even if I don't find blogging as essential as I used to, I'm still here after 9 years. There's still a place for it in my life. I still read blogs and I will continue to churn out posts, some about sandwiches, some about more profound matters.

There's now a sandwich with two fried chicken breasts in place of the bread? What has the world come to?

After watching "District 9" I'm wondering why this movie didn't win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Today is my birthday. Last year I was returning from the UK. This year I'm also lucky enough not to be working, but it's not quite as exciting. Instead it's the morning routine -- feed the fish, walk the dog, check my e-mail (thanks to everyone who said happy birthday, I'm very grateful), a little "Regis and Kelly." Chocolate cake for breakfast seems like a good idea.

Steven Johnson defends "oversharing" on the web:

There used to be a large crevasse separating the intimate space of private life and what's exposed by the klieg lights of fame. But in the Facebook age, that crevasse has broadened out into a valley between the realms of privacy and celebrity, and we are starting to camp out there and get the lay of the land.
...
Now, we have to choose whether we want to venture into the valley of intimate strangers, and how exactly we want to live there....It requires that we acknowledge that certain kinds of sharing can, in fact, advance a wider public good, as well as satisfy our own needs for compassion and counsel.

Anyone with a virtual life has dealt with these not always easy choices. I think for myself and a lot of bloggers web sharing has gone in reverse of Facebook: at first by default everything in your life is fair game for your blog, then you don't share much of anything private when you realize people are actually reading the blog, then you move somewhere in between. In between is a good spot, I think.

I heard "Walkin' on Sunshine" on the car radio the other morning, in a parking lot, and was compelled to stay in the car to listen to it. Isn't it just impossible not to smile at that song, no matter how blah of a day you're having? Then this update on Katrina and the Waves comes out on NPR. It's a mostly happy story, I'm glad the band has made a lot of money on the song.

- My caffeine-fest yesterday turned out to be a very bad idea. Coca-Cola with lunch, iced caffe mocha at Starbucks, iced tea with dinner. Awake at 2 a.m. I think the caffe mocha did it.

- In poker, as in life, no guts, no glory.

"These are the songs I keep singing"

My computer monitor conked out yesterday. I would turn the power on and the screen would flicker on for about 2 seconds before making a little noise and going black. Maybe the 4 1/2 years of constant use were too much for it? Now I regret the times I've left the computer and monitor on all night, sometimes for days in a row. I switched over to an old monitor today. Funny how bulky and archaic the old one seems. Curved glass screens are such a thing of the past, and I had to sit the monitor on a coffee table book and a few magazines to make it the right eye-height. A new computer and monitor are likely in order. Good thing my birthday is coming up.

Update to my post on the new fish tank: The fish do have names, according to my sister. Zelda is the one with the triangle marking,the leopard danios are Leo and Dan. The orange one is not a puffer but a balloon-bellied molly named Molly. The algae-eating one is a plecostomos named Falcor. Yay, fish! They are all still around. I'm cleaning their tank tomorrow, wish me luck.

Does anyone actually respond to these?

In my spam folder:

Hello to you
I miss you more than words can say and my love will reach any distance and fly to be in your dreams (URL redacted)
I'm looking for a man who will be both my partner and friend. With whom I could share my life and every bad and good moment.
I really enjoy life but I miss my soulmate to share it with. I am caring, honest, sincere, patient, like healthy lifestyle. I enjoy quiet evenings at home, eating ice- cream late at night.
I would like to meet a man for a serious long term relationship where we try to understand each other, to love and to care for.
It doesn't matter where I will find that man or where I will live in the future here or in another country I just want to be happy.
T.

Too bad I am that woman, not a man :-). I like the part about eating ice cream late at night. Nice touch.

Toast to Juarez?

I had a mixed reaction to this piece I read in a local weekly newspaper, basically, "let's drink to help Juarez":

We can’t fix Juarez. But we can help, a little, and reclaim a little of our Juarez, the one we remember. I propose that next Friday we go to the Kentucky Club. We can do it to pump a little money into the local economy, or we can do it for our own selfish gratification. We’ll sit at the bar, and drink Kentucky Club margaritas, and watch the long shadows cross the street. We’ll tip the bartenders, and they’ll take the money and buy groceries, and the money will flow through the Juarez economy, percolating up instead of trickling down.

Um...OK, you do that. Interesting idea, sort of noble, but more tongue-in-cheek than anything. In short it's the sort of thing I'm usually up for. On the other hand, I don't drink and have no nostalgia for the "old Juarez," and even if I did I probably still wouldn't go now out of fear of the remote possibility that something *could* happen. Judging from the reactions published in the article it seems a lot of people feel the same way.

Check it out: a reimagined international bridge.

Tank girl

My exciting news of the week: I have five new pets. A. dropped off her fish tank at the house on Tuesday since she is moving away until October (sad). Honestly I never thought I'd have a fish tank. I had wanted to get a fish tank seven years ago and decided against it because it seemed way too complicated. No thanks, I'd rather have a dog, if I'm going to go to that much trouble. Dogs are much more affectionate than fish :-).

Looking over the array of accessories we took out of my sister's car, it did seem like a lot for a few fish -- a net, a bottle of chemicals, a siphon, three cylinders of food, filter, heater, light-timer, bubble-blower, etc.

I saw something move in the water while we were carrying in the heavy tank. "They're in there now?" I asked. "Yup." Five fish were in the tank: a big gold one (puffer), two silver ones (danios), one with a big triangle on it (?), and an algae-eater that usually doesn't come out of the castle.

We carried the tank up the stairs and plopped it down next to the TV in the lounge area. A. brought in loads of water from a white plastic bowl to fill it up. Suddenly I didn't know if I was going to be able to do this. So much could go wrong. I asked question after question: How often do I clean the tank? Do I have to dump out all the water when I do it? How much should I feed them? When do I turn on the light? How do I know when it's dirty? What if the filter breaks down?

My sister went over how all the gadgets work but seemed nonchalant about it. "Just clean it when it looks a little dirty, around every two weeks." Ah, but what if all the fish are dead when you get back?

Two days in and they're still alive, so that's a good sign. They seem complicated to take care of but most of it is automatically controlled. I'm enjoying these fish so far, somewhat unexpectedly. The whir of the tank was there to greet me when I got home late the last couple of nights. I fed them first thing when I got up this morning, watched them come to the surface to eat the particles of fish flakes. I peered into their world and wondered what it's like to spend your whole life in a 10-gallon tank with four other fish. In my nervousness I forgot to ask A. what their names are, or if they even have names. They should have names, I think.

Thank you, Time magazine, I finally know who Justin Bieber is other than a trending topic on Twitter. My gosh he is young.

Love story

I raised an eyebrow at a lot of Michael Moore's generalizations in "Capitalism: A Love Story" (capitalism=bad, socialism=good), but there were some really shocking facts in this film. Who knew about "dead peasants insurance"? And that new airline pilots can make under $20k per year? The facts page on Moore's website is worth going through after you've seen the movie. You can call this movie one-sided but he isn't making this stuff up.

- Three parties in two days. With enough practice, could I be a decent conversationalist and not a person who sits there and says nothing? I don't know how people can love parties. I get to a party and start plotting how early I can leave without it looking weird.

- I don't want to say good-bye to my sister.

- Working on a Sunday feels wrong.

Music to drive home to: I bought a ticket to the world/But now I've come back again....Huh hu hu hu-uh hu/I know this much is true

Time to break out the Claritin again.

NY Times poll: Fifty-one percent of Americans say the new Arizona law on immigration is "about right" in its approach, even though 50 percent say it will likely lead to racial profiling. Only 13 percent of respondents were Hispanic.

"Three quarters said that, over all, illegal immigrants were a drain on the economy because they did not all pay taxes but used public services like hospitals and schools." But the NY Times writers note, "In fact, many illegal immigrants do pay taxes into the Social Security system, but never see a return on their contributions."

Another thing to consider with the article linking chocolate and depression: obesity is also linked to depression: "Obesity, Luppino and colleagues found, increases the risk of depression in initially non-depressed individuals by 55 percent and depression increases the risk of obesity in initially normal-weight individuals by 58 percent."

Peace and prayer for Juarez

May 1. The International Peace and Prayer Day for Juarez. I almost didn't go to Saturday morning's event at the Chamizal National Memorial. I had stayed up until past 2am, and there was laundry to do. But I thought back on the horrors of Wednesday and felt I needed to go to an event like this. I wrote last year about a need to express solidarity with the citizens of Juarez. Well, here is a chance to do this, to show up and say I am not OK with the way things are going. I was late but I was there, the white ribbon a volunteer gave me in hand.



I sat down in the grass at the outdoor amphitheatre and my first thought was, wow, there are not very many people here. A few hundred people were in attendance. I've seen the Chamizal packed with thousands of people for summer concerts, and this was pretty skimpy in comparison. I don't know what it is about El Paso. I know it is not that the people don't care about what is happening in Juarez. They do. I think that is just not this city's mentality to get up on a Saturday morning and show up at a rally. (Actually, I wrote this and then saw this story about Arizona immigration law protests, where around 400 people showed up. Maybe it depends on the issue and the type of event?)

I listened to alternating choirs and speakers. An all-girls choir sang in heavenly harmony "This little light of mine/I'm gonna let it shine." A women's group leader read (in English and Spanish) a powerful long prayer written by some women from Juarez. She said, I want my mother not to tell me, God watch out for you when you go out and when you return. Her voice cracked with emotion. A reverend invoked Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, and even the book of Exodus in comparison with the oppressive violence in Juarez. Then another choir followed with gospel songs. "I Never Lost My Praise" is the one I remember most. It's a thought-provoking song. How can you be joyful even when you are suffering? Over five thousand murders in the past 2 1/2 years, and you can still find a way to praise God?

It was such a beautiful morning. The sun finally came out after two days of hiding. I looked at the border fence a few hundred yards away from where I was sitting and thought, the sun is shining just the same on the other side. There is still sunshine in Juarez, still joy, still good people, even with the seemingly never-ending stream of deaths.

The portion of this event I saw was beautiful and I'm glad I attended. Still, I was a bit frustrated by the lack of specifics. A couple of speakers prayed that all evil would end. I don't disagree with a general sort of "deliver us from evil" prayer. But my mind knows that it is the specifics that will help put an end to Mexico's drug war: laws, money, and focused courses of action. What do community and religious leaders agree should be done to help Juarez?

The other thing was, well, I wanted to see more anger. I'm all for peace and tranquillity, but I think there's a place for anger, too, even at a peace rally. I found myself thinking about a different sort of event that could be held with picket signs and loud rock bands, something that might draw more attention (and possibly more people).

But I know there are different ways to demonstrate, some quiet, some loud. Does every event have to involve marching down streets and shouting slogans? Here the emphasis was on peace and healing, solidarity of the community, and connection with God.

- The winds today are so annoying. I can taste the dust.

- My root canal and crown ordeal is over. It only took nearly $500 and five visits to the dentist and endodontist. It's strange that one of my teeth isn't real.

Great article in Time, even if the subject makes me blush. I was embarrassed to take a magazine with an article about "The Pill" on the cover to work with me. Should I be?

Here's an interesting quote from the article:

"When I was growing up, Rob and Laura Petrie didn't sleep in the same bed, but we were taught about birth control in health class," recalls Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood. "And I grew up in Texas! Not exactly the cutting edge. My kids grow up with sex everywhere, but birth control is not talked about in school."

Accompanying video is good, too:

This story from NPR is disturbing (to me) but not exactly surprising: eating a lot of chocolate is linked to depression.

So three researchers from the University of California, San Diego asked 931 people who'd come in for an unrelated study about cholesterol how many times a week they ate chocolate. The people also filled out a depression questionnaire.
People in the group with screening scores suggesting that they might have major depression ate 12 or more servings a month.

Why?

It could be that people are self-medicating. The researchers can't say that on the basis of this study. Other possibilities: depression may somehow initiate chocolate cravings, or chocolate may trigger depression (though they note this isn't likely).

My pet theory: women are more prone to depression, and they are more likely than men to go for chocolate versus the salty stuff. But apparently using chocolate as an anti-depressant doesn't work, at least not in the long term.

Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Here's the next in the stream of nonfiction books about women that I have read: "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot. Quick plot summary: In the 1950s, doctors take cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman from Virginia, without her permission. Scientists are looking for cells that can grow in culture and won't die quickly. Lacks' cells don't die, they keep on growing, a breakthrough for biological research. Lacks dies, leaving five children behind, and her family doesn't find out her cells are being used extensively in research until 20 years later. They think about suing but ultimately don't see a penny of the money that has been made off Lacks' cells.

It's a great premise: the author takes a footnote in a biology textbook and literally writes a book on it. The book is about science, yes, but it's also about history, ethics, racism, and poverty. In the first part of the book the author jumps between two very different worlds: Henrietta Lacks' life of hardship and deprivation, culminating with her death from an acute case of cervical cancer, then to the 1950s Johns Hopkins research lab where scientist George Gey is looking for a breakthrough.

Skloot then goes into painstaking detail on the decisions regarding Lacks' cells and the handling of her medical records. In the process she brings up a slew of ethical questions. The scientists who took Lacks' cells were not acting improperly, according to the standards of the time. But as a massive industry developed around these "HeLa" cells, shouldn't the family have benefited from it in some way or, at the very least, been informed on what was taking place? The author also talks about the development of informed consent procedures, which weren't put in place until the 1970s, something I found shocking.

One thing I particularly liked was how Skloot doesn't shrink from describing the poverty of Lacks' relatives. She writes about visiting Lacks' elderly cousin in a two-room wood cabin in rural Clover, Virginia, and how she befriended Lacks' daughter, a woman with many psychological and health issues. It seems like poverty is really a key ingredient in this story: poverty means not having the resources to hire a lawyer, and it means not understanding enough of what's being done with your relative's cells to be able to protest.

"Quietly passionate" is how one reviewer describes this book. The details build up and at the end you are finally just enraged at how unfair this situation is for Henrietta Lacks' family.

UPDATE: Worth a look -- Rebecca Skloot's blog

Lately it's not the love of God I ponder; I fixate on His omniscience. God isn't just for the ignorant, God knows science, as witnessed by the intricacy of the creation. I picture Him as the joyful inventor creating all the wonders of the universe, and I smile a little.

But it also frustrates me to think of a supreme intelligence, one that won't readily share in a way I can understand. I turn my mind to the mysteries of this existence and I feel like God is laughing at me and putting me in my place -- far, far below Him. Is that the way it's supposed to be? Well, too bad then. It's me and my books and newspapers, my 21 years of schooling, trying not to be ignorant. Like my own Tower of Babel where I'm trying to reach some sort of enlightenment but it all gets scattered at various intervals and I'm back to nothing.

Sometimes I feel like if I want to be religious I have to pretend not to know about Buddhism or postmodernism or existentialism, but um, if God is truly omniscient, doesn't he already know about all that? Didn't He create a world that could be looked at from those perspectives? Why do I have to hide it?

Should I just accept my ignorance and stop trying to figure things out? Is that the proper response?

Heard this on NPR driving home. Love the extra-long title of this "must-read" book: "George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals -- and a Few Unappreciative Observers."

This weekend: Marble Slab Creamery ice cream, homemade fish tacos, the poetry of Dolores Dorantes, church at a coffee shop, and Leonardo Da Vinci.

It's been a long while since I've given a presentation to a room full of people. I wasn't expecting *that* many people to be there. I can't say it wasn't intimidating, but I actually liked doing it...

I remember why I loved the movie "Once" after watching it again this weekend. "I don't know you, but I want to..."

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.