Think of the Children

Someone I used to work with who is now a public defender just posted this link for my perusal, and it made me angry enough to want to share: read the article here.

I've found my perspective shifting when I read stories like this. I used to get angry when I considered the defendant's point of view as they navigated a Kafka-esque system that seems designed to do nothing but ruin their lives. Now I find myself thinking more about the kids involved and getting even angrier. I used to work for Child Protective Services back in my home town, and maybe the particular agency I worked with was just unusually short on resources, but we didn't have spare foster parents, money, or time to yank kids out of homes where they were living with their actual parents and were in no noticeable danger. Where does New York find the time? And all the extra foster parents? And what is the point of doing that, anyway? Why are marijuana and heroin being used in the same sentence like they're similar substances?

I'm trying to keep my blood pressure down while I'm pregnant, but New York is not helping me do that. Grumble.

God Bless 'Murrica

Since I'm trying to balance long afternoon cravings for chocolate with a very good motivation to eat a healthy diet, this is just terrible news for me. DH's crazy uncle had told me about a rumor that Oreo was coming out with a Triple Double, and now it's been confirmed. They're hitting the shelves this summer.

How can something look so gross and so desirable at the same time? I'm sure that's not just the hormones, right?

At Least We're Number One at Something...

I've been learning about prisons and how they affect people for years now, since my first post-college job at a halfway house for former Illinois State Penitentiary inmates. As DH can attest, there were days in that job that left me completely drained - people come out of prison broken, there's no way around it.

My thesis looks at some of the bigger-picture problems with prisons, but you don't want to read my thesis (definitely not now - the data analysis is a shambles). Instead, you should take a glance at this infographic about the "Land of the Free".

The United States locks up more people per capita - and more people in sheer numbers - than China. Oh, and that fun fact didn't even make it in to the infographic.

Why aren't we protesting in the streets about this? Good question.

The Best Recap

So it's a new year, and 2010 was certainly a mixed bag. In my personal life it was pretty great: my family expanded to include a new, ever-cuter niece, two new sisters-in-law and whatever you call the Speaker (Longest-Friend-In-Law? Whatevs). Also, I did a triathlon and baked a couple of fairly impressive cakes.

In world events, things were closer to terrible much of the time. But I'm not going to re-write what's already been said so well, so I'll be a blog slacker and just re-post Dave Barry's year in review.

I should note that I grew up reading Dave Barry's weekly column - when I could wrest it from the clutches of the rest of my family. He made my mom laugh Every. Single. Sunday. for years and years, and I have to thank him for making her almost spit-take her post-church coffee a few times. He made my dad snort a few times, too (Dave Barry is also one of the few people who's made Dad do his patented "running out of breath" laugh, which is very hard to describe, but when my siblings and I try to imitate it we usually just end up running out of breath laughing, ourselves).

I stopped reading his stuff, though, when it started to feel stale. I do think Barry probably ruined a lot of his readers by raising their humor standards to a difficult-to-meet level. This recap just made me love him all over again, though: He's at his best when he's making a reader guffaw about something that is essentially pure tragedy.

I've been reading Gene Weingarten too much lately. I'll write about him later, I'm sure.

Anyway, here is Dave Barry's year in review. I'll have another, way less interesting "Schmei's Year in Review" post in a bit, and then it's so long to 2010, since we're already 6 days in to the new year. I work better when I'm past a deadline, clearly.

Abraham Day-Lewis

The "team of rivals".

I have lived for the past ten years in Illinois, called the "Land of Lincoln" because it's where Abraham Lincoln got his start in politics. Before I moved here, I lived with my Civil War re-enactor parents in Ohio - my dad regularly portrays a member of Ulysses Grant's staff - and I've worn a hoop skirt several times for Civil-War commemoration events in my home town. There are bookshelves in my childhood home that are heavy with books of Civil War history, biographies and battle analysis. When the Ken Burns 10-hour documentary came out on PBS, it was an enormous deal: my parents taped every hour and have watched and re-watched it many times.

I share my parents' interest in - though perhaps not their devotion to - what happened during those bloody years in our country. The scale of the thing is impossible to comprehend, and of course the Civil War and its aftermath are still affecting our country.

Which is why I'm pretty geeked about this: according to various sources on the series of tubes, Daniel Day-Lewis is going to play the part of Abraham Lincoln in a biopic directed by Stephen Spielberg. In my opinion, Day-Lewis has the perfect face to be Honest Abe, even if he isn't an Amurrican.

I won't be surprised if my parents are already camped out at the movie theater.

Well, shoot.

I'm wearing a sweater and I just updated all my calendars: it's November. Election Day is tomorrow and I'm going to vote because it's my duty as a citizen and especially as a woman - I think anyone who isn't a white, land-owning male in this country who "forgets" to vote needs to bone up on his or her history. Gotta exercise our rights, people.

Speaking of exercising rights as an American, I saw a billboard on the way home from Michigan yesterday that was advertising skeet shooting, and I thought, "I would really enjoy learning how to shoot a rifle at a moving target".

Then I spent a moment wondering why I had that thought.

Now, I grew up in a rural area, and I knew plenty of people who owned guns. Hunting season was a big deal back home - some high-school kids skipped school with their parents' blessing to go shoot deer. I recall entering a friend's garage in late fall and being faced with the sight of a fresh deer carcass hanging from the ceiling. My friend's older brother had shot the deer, and his parents were thrilled: for low-income families, deer hunting isn't just a hobby, it's a very affordable source of lean protein.

Guns, in the right hands, are tools that can be used to feed a family and cull overpopulation of deer herds. As long as people are educated about their guns and keep them unloaded and locked up around their kids, I have no problem at all with responsible gun use and ownership.

However, I can't say I've had much of an interest in using a gun before now.

A friend of mine here in Chicago had a similar impulse in her late twenties, and eventually she and her father spent a day out at a rifle range and learned all about shooting. She had a great time. Her husband was appalled by the trip, as they are both urban, liberal, crunchy-granola peacenicks. I thought it was a neat idea at the time - though not something I was interested in. Plus, a little outdoor father-daughter bonding is a good thing: I like to go camping with my dad. Heading to the firing range has its similarities.

As I was mulling through my new, more real interest in learning to shoot a gun, however, I remembered this: my friend who spent that day at a rifle range did so a few months before she became pregnant with her first child.

This morning I found myself wondering: as a woman of childbearing age, is wanting to shoot a gun a harbinger of other desires? Does interest in learning how to shoot imply a no-longer-latent yearning both to provide meat and to protect home and hearth... and, eventually, children? Perhaps craving firearm control is the first step toward craving midnight ice cream?

I want to ask my friend if she was thinking in those terms when she was shooting targets or clay pigeons. Because if shooting a gun is an early step to motherhood, maybe I should wait a little while on that trip to the firing range.

No, seriously, think of the children

I promise there were more pleasant topics about which I was going to post, but when I saw this article about a pertussis outbreak in California that's killed 10 babies so far, I almost threw up. So I'm writing about this.

If you were to meet me in person and we were to talk about vaccines and you were to tell me you weren't going to vaccinate your children, I would consider punching you in the throat. And then I'd probably go through with it. There's zero reason for people not to vaccinate their children - especially against highly lethal, completely preventable diseases - and there are many, many reasons to do so. Sadly, 10 more reasons just manifested themselves in California, and it probably isn't going to change anyone's minds over there.

Wow, schmei, get over yourself. You don't even have kids. Who gives you the right?

Good point. Allow me to explain:

My father was the youngest of 4 children. He had two sisters and a brother. Only, wait, he never met his sisters. They both died, several weeks apart, of pertussis, commonly called whooping cough. The older girl was almost two, and her little sister was only a few weeks old. Some infected asshole decided to stop by and visit my grandmother with her new baby and her toddler at home. Over the next few weeks she watched, completely helpless, as whooping cough killed them both.

The pertussis vaccine came out about 2 years too late for my two aunts.

My grandparents went on to have two more children - two boys - and I can't help but wonder how it affected my grandmother, to lose her baby daughters and then to have two boys instead. Maybe it was better, really, because they were completely different. I don't know. By all accounts she was a loving mother to her sons. Additionally, from what I've heard about her, she never really recovered from her daughters' deaths. She died young, and still heartbroken. Her sons were in their early twenties. They're both in their sixties now, and they don't really talk about it much.

Last year, my graduate program ordered me to get a pertussis booster, which I thought was annoying at the time. But I read more about it, and it turns out that in adults, pertussis vaccination can wear out over time. It's recommended to get a booster every five years or so.

I was very glad I had the booster before I met my newborn niece. And I'm glad my sister is completely reasonable about vaccinating her baby, because the study that claimed a connection between vaccines and autism was terribly flawed and has since been recanted. Sis is a scientist so she gets that... but it's information that really doesn't require a degree in physics.

Sadly, recanting that article hasn't stopped stupid people from refusing to vaccinate their children. What those stupid people don't realize is that it's not their own children they're killing, most likely it's other people's infants.

Gratefulness

Making a list of stuff I'm grateful for and posting it the day before Thanksgiving is so obvious it's almost trite, but this is my first Thanksgiving with a blog, so I'm doing it!

*I'm grateful that I'm married to someone I really, really like. I love him, too, of course, but you know how you can love someone and not like them? I'm glad I'm not in that situation. My husband rocks. He takes good care of our kitty and he fixes broken things and he remembers to pay the rent every month and he's very tall and gets things off of high shelves for me. Also, he plays several musical instruments very well and writes good songs. And he went to a fabric store with me this weekend and didn't get bored... which makes him better than me, in that regard. He listens to my endless yammering with patience. He laughs with me, especially at fart jokes. And he's a good hugger. This is becoming a list-within-a-list, so I'll pause there. But I'm a fan, and I'm very thankful for him.

*I'm grateful for employment, which in this economy is not to be taken for granted. And it's a job that indirectly does good things for people, and it's working with grad students which means there's always food around - I'm mostly grateful for that, except when I start to show that I've been visiting the cheesecake bites a little too often.

* I'm grateful for the students I work with. They. Are. Awesome. Well, most of them. Most of the time. Which is a pretty good record for anyone with whom one works, right?

* I'm grateful that I'll get to spend some quality time with both of my siblings and both of their significant others and both of my parents, all in the same place on Thanksgiving, and that we'll get to meet my new baby cousin, and that another cousin of mine (who, once upon a time, was considered the "baby" herself) will be there from Europe with her fiance, who we all get to meet. I'm happy that all these people are alive and healthy and talking to each other (OK - the baby's not really talking yet. She was born in July).

* I'm grateful for good friends I can trust, and who trust me in return. I currently know exciting secrets of two close friends - which I'm obviously not going to write in this list - and it's touching to hear "listen, I haven't told anyone else about this but I'm really excited and had to share it with you..." It makes me feel like I'm doing something right, to know people trust me like that. I think the first step is not telling anyone else the exciting secret. So I will stop typing about this... now.

* As much as I complain about it, I am grateful for the opportunity to go to grad school. And I'm very grateful that I'm mostly finished with it at this point.

* I'm grateful that I'm basically healthy, that I'm still (occasionally) running, and that I've got a couple of athletic events planned in the next year or so that could be awesome.

* I am grateful for inspiration and prodding and minor butt-kicking that prompted me to start a blog. Writing is good for me, and this format seems to suit me.

* As a part of that, I'm grateful to you few stalwart folks who read this blog. Thank you for taking the time to read these words.

I hope you all have a safe, warm, fun Thanksgiving full of turkey and cute babies and board games and laughs... or whatever family traditions you tend to go for. I expect that posting will be light-to-nonexistent until Sunday around here, on account of food and family and whatnot.

Tidbits about America.

I saw a new penny today. The back of it looked like this:

I really like this image of the American hero, sitting on a log, reading a book. It speaks to me about the best qualities of this country.

The image reminds me of something I learned a few years ago from a professor of literature who had translated Conrad's Heart of Darkness into Italian. He pointed out that Italians have no word that is the equivalent to "wilderness".

"It is," he said (and to do him justice, please envision this being said in a lovely Italian accent), "an American English word. In Italy, we haven't had truly wild places for thousands of years."

That's cool to think about. We in America still have wilderness... and we even have federally protected wilderness areas. I grew up presuming wilderness is a part of everyone's life, but wilderness is American.

Speaking of Pioneers and wilderness and America, have you seen those new ads for Levi's jeans? I don't want to get emotionally affected by someone's ad campaigns - and I'd feel weird providing a link for an advertisement, but they're just beautiful. And very, very American.