from sniping to solutions

When I was young, I had very few female friends. I suspect that it was because I just didn't have the patience for gossip and because I saw how fickle young girls can be. But as I've grown older, I've come to appreciate the gentle ear and sound advice of my girlfriends. They're been the ones who talked me through the decision to get divorced, encouraged me to take a chance on new love, and gave me good perspective on my relationships at home and at work.

Girl Talk Has Its Limits
By SARAH KERSHAW
Published: September 10, 2008
MOST teenage girls love to talk to their friends. And talk. And talk.

As Debra Lee, the Brooklyn mother of a 13-year-old, observes about her daughter Tessa and Tessa’s teenage friends: “They just keep talking. All day. On the phone all night. Sometimes I think they just like to hear each other breathe.”

Virginia Woolf said, “Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”

Female friendship, in all its lovely layers and potentially dark complexities, is inexhaustible grist for film, television and literature — from “Heathers” and “Mean Girls” to “Thelma and Louise,” “Sex and the City,” “Gossip Girl” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.”

And who has time to keep up with all the falling ins and falling outs of celebrity BFF’s and Frenemies?

But recently female friendship and girl talk, particularly among adolescents, has drawn growing interest from psychologists and researchers examining the question of how much talking is too much talking. Some studies have found that excessive talking about problems can contribute to emotional difficulties, including anxiety and depression.

The term researchers use is “co-rumination” to describe frequently or obsessively discussing the same problem. The behavior is typical among teens — Why didn’t he call? Should I break up with him? And, psychologists say, it has intensified significantly with e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook. And in certain cases it can spin into a potentially contagious and unhealthy emotional angst, experts say.

The research distinguishes between sharing or “self-disclosure,” which is associated with positive friendships and positive feelings, and dwelling on problems, concerns and frustrations. Dwelling and rehashing issues can keep girls, who are more prone to depression and anxiety than boys, stuck in negative thinking patterns, psychologists say. But they also say it is a mixed picture: friends who co-ruminate tend to be close, and those intimate relationships can build self-esteem.

For boys, such intense emotional conversations, which tend to occur less often, did not contribute to heightened anxiety or depressive moods, according to research by Amanda J. Rose, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

“When girls are talking about these problems, it probably feels good to get that level of support and validation,” said Dr. Rose, whose latest study on co-rumination was published in the journal Developmental Psychology last year. “But they are not putting two and two together, that actually this excessive talking can make them feel worse.”

Teenage girls are particularly vulnerable to co-ruminating — and depression and anxiety — because “there are so many stressors in adolescence and a lot are ambiguous,” Dr. Rose added. “So things like starting dating or starting serious relationships with boys, concerns about cliques, being popular — these very social stressors, they can be really hard to control and they really lend themselves to rumination.”

Dr. Rose first published a paper on co-rumination in 2002, in the journal Child Development, and has, along with other psychologists, continued to study it. In her study published last year, she followed 813 third-, fifth-, seventh- and ninth-grade girls and boys over six months. Researchers at the State University at Stony Brook will soon publish another paper on co-rumination. Both studies confirm Dr. Rose’s earlier findings.

The relationships the experts looked at will certainly be familiar to many teenagers and parents.

Ms. Lee’s daughter Tessa Lee-Thomas said she sometimes felt worse after talking to friends about problems. “Sometimes we get into disagreements,” said Tessa, who lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. “And we have to settle them. My friends think that my other friend did something wrong, but she didn’t do something wrong. Sometimes it makes the situation worse than where we were when we began. It spiraled into something bigger than it was.”

Patricia Letayf, a sophomore at Tufts University, said she tended to overanalyze situations and ask many different friends for advice about the same problem, which at times made her feel more anxious.

“It’s like you want to solve a problem whatever it may be, but the advice of one person never satisfies you and you’re constantly on the hunt for more advice,” she said. “I think a lot of times you are looking for empathy and you want someone to feel the way you do. You want your feelings to be justified. In the end, I hope to feel better. You want them to say, ‘It’s O.K. he dumped you, you failed the test.’ You’re seeking reassurance.”

Ms. Letayf, 19, spent the summer as a camp counselor and said she noticed that the nine-year-old girls at the camp were already starting to obsess about their problems — talking about the boys at the camp and about conflicts between two groups of girls.

“I could see it starting already,” she said, adding that she has made a concerted effort recently not to dwell on her own problems with friends and to try to stop negative thoughts. “From sixth grade, it’s boys are stupid, boys have cooties,” she said. “And then it progresses to boys have cooties but 20-year-old cooties. So you might as well change it when you can.”

Trish Gilbert, a Brooklyn mother of 11-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and a 16-year-old daughter, said she worried sometimes about “kids giving kids advice.”

But she said she was pleased when her younger daughter, after feeling mistreated by a fifth-grade classmate last year, decided with some other friends to do something about it, rather than just ruminating. They consulted the American Girl series book “Friends: Making Them and Keeping Them,” which offers suggestions, for example, on how many chances to give a friend. The girls talked about forgiveness and even did some role-playing.

THE research into co-rumination has looked only at symptoms of depression and anxiety over short periods and has not established a basis for predicting long-term negative effects.

But a related mental hazard is what psychologists call “emotion contagion” or “contagious anxiety,” in which one person’s negative thoughts or anxiety can affect another’s mood, sometimes over a long period. Research has shown that people who live with others suffering from depression tend to become depressed themselves. Teenage girls who intentionally cut themselves are said to draw friends into the behavior.

A great deal of research, including the work on co-rumination, has shown the emotional benefits of friendship, particularly in instances of physical bullying among boys or “relational aggression,” which is more common among girls and typically characterized by teasing, rejection or even emotional torture.

With co-rumination, psychologists studying it say, one way for parents, and friends, to avoid the negative consequences is to focus on problem-solving, rather than on problem-dwelling, much as Ms. Gilbert’s daughter and her friends did in consulting the American Girl book.

“It’s a fine line,” said Joanne Davila, associate professor of psychology at the State University at Stony Brook, whose paper on co-rumination is being published by the Journal of Adolescence. “We want to encourage young girls to have friends and to use their friends for support, but we may want to help them learn how to use more active techniques. So if there is a problem, how do you solve it?”

Toby Sitnick, a Brooklyn psychologist who works with adolescent girls, said therapists had also tried to move away from focusing on problems to focusing on good experiences and solutions.

“There are quite a few adolescent girls who have high levels of obsessive thinking to begin with,” Dr. Sitnick said. “They often do this with their mothers as well. It certainly does seem to be a female behavior, and grown women do it, too, ruminating about certain issues and experiences. It can become a mutual complaint society.”

condition a

Living well really is the antidote to death.

Cases: Perhaps Death Is Proud; More Reason to Savor Life
By THERESA BROWN
September 9, 2008

At my job, people die.

That’s hardly our intention, but they die nonetheless.

Usually it’s at the end of a long struggle — we have done everything modern medicine can do and then some, but we can’t save them. Some part of their body, usually their lungs or their heart or their liver, has become too frail to function. These are the “good deaths,” the ones where the family is present and knows what to expect. Like all deaths, these deaths are difficult, but they are controlled, unsurprising, anticipated.

And then there are the other deaths: quick and rare, where life leaves a body in minutes. In my hospital these deaths are “Condition A’s.” The “A” stands for arrest, as in cardiac arrest, as in this patient’s heart has all of a sudden stopped beating and we need to try to restart it.

I am a new nurse, and recently I had my first Condition A. My patient, a particularly nice older woman with lung cancer, had been, as we say, “fine,” with no complaints but a low-grade fever she’d had off and on for a couple of days. She had come in because she was coughing up blood, a problem we had resolved, and she was set for discharge that afternoon.

After a routine assessment in the morning, I left her in the care of a nursing student and moved on to other patients, thinking I was going to have a relatively calm day. About half an hour later an aide called me: “Theresa, they need you in 1022.”

I stopped what I was doing and walked over to her room. The nurse leaving the room said, “She’s spitting up blood,” and went to the nurses’ station to call her doctor.

Inside the room I found my patient with blood spilling uncontrollably from her mouth and nose. I remembered to put on gloves, and the aide handed me a face shield. I moved closer; I put my hand on her shoulder. “Are you in any pain?” I asked, as I recall, thinking that an intestinal bleed would be more fixable than whatever this was. She shook her head no.

I looked in her eyes and saw ... what? Panic? Fear? The abandonment of hope? Or sheer desperation? Her own blood was gurgling in her throat and I yelled to the student for a suction tool to clear it out.

The patient tried to stand up so the blood would flow into a nearby trash can, and I told her, “No, don’t stand up.” She sat back down, started shaking and then collapsed backward on the bed.

“Is it condition time?” asked the other nurse.

“Call the code!” I yelled. “Call the code!”

The next few moments I can only describe as surreal. I felt for a pulse and there wasn’t one. I started doing CPR. On the overhead loudspeaker, a voice called out, “Condition A.”

The other nurses from my floor came in with the crash cart, and I got the board. Doing CPR on a soft surface, like a bed, doesn’t accomplish much; you need a hard surface to really compress the patient’s chest, so every crash cart has a two-by-three-foot slab of hard fiberboard for just this purpose. I told one of the doctors to help pick her up so I could put the board under her: she was now dead weight, and heavy.

I kept doing CPR until the condition team arrived, which seemed to happen faster than I could have imagined: the intensivists — the doctors who specialize in intensive care — the I.C.U. nurses, the respiratory therapists and I’m not sure who else, maybe a pulmonologist, maybe a doctor from anesthesia.

Respiratory took over the CPR and I stood back against the wall, bloody and disbelieving. My co-workers did all the grunt work for the condition: put extra channels on her IV pump, recorded what was happening, and every now and again called out, “Patient is in asystole again,” meaning she had no heartbeat.

They worked on her for half an hour. They tried to put a tube down her throat to get her some oxygen, but there was so much blood they couldn’t see. Eventually they “trached” her, put a breathing hole through her neck right into her trachea, but that filled up with blood as well.

They gave her fluids and squeezed bags of epinephrine into her veins to try to get her heart to start moving. They may even have given her adenosine, a dangerous and terrifying drug that can reverse abnormal heart rhythms after briefly stopping the patient’s heart.

The sad truth about a true cardiac arrest is that drugs cannot help because there is no cardiac rhythm for them to stimulate. The doctors tried anyway. They went through so many drugs that the crash cart was emptied out and runners came and went from pharmacy bringing extras.

When George Clooney and Juliana Margulies went through these routines on “E.R.,” it seemed exciting and glamorous. In real life the experience is profoundly sad. In the lay vernacular of Hollywood, asystole is known as “flatlining.” But my patient never had the easy narrative of the normal heartbeat that suddenly turns straight and horizontal. Her heartbeat line was wobbly and unformed, occasionally spiked in a brief run of unsynchronized beats, and at times looked regular, because chest compressions from CPR can create what looks like a real cardiac rhythm even though the patient is dead.

And my patient was dead. She had been dead when she fell back on the bed and she stayed dead through all the effort to save her, while blood and tissue bubbled out of her and the suction clogged with particles spilling from her lungs. Everyone did what she knew how to do to save her. She could not be saved.

The reigning theory was that part of her tumor had broken off and either ruptured her pulmonary artery or created a huge blockage in her heart. Apparently this can happen without warning in lung cancer patients. Only an autopsy could tell for sure, and in terms of the role I played in all this, it doesn’t matter. I did the only thing I could do — all of us did — and you can’t say much more than that.

I am 43. I came to nursing circuitously, following a brief career as an English professor. Often at work in the hospital I hear John Donne in my head:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.

But after my Condition A I find his words empty. My patient died looking like one of the flesh-eating zombies from “28 Weeks Later,” and indeed in real life, even in the world of the hospital, a death like this is unsettling.

What can one do? Go home, love your children, try not to bicker, eat well, walk in the rain, feel the sun on your face and laugh loud and often, as much as possible, and especially at yourself. Because the only antidote to death is not poetry, or drama, or miracle drugs, or a roomful of technical expertise and good intentions. The antidote to death is life.

Theresa Brown is a staff nurse at a hospital in Pennsylvania.

when 1,826 days means you're done

I'm five years kidney cancer-free today, and considered "cured". Woo hoo!

I got out of bed at 6:15 this morning, but instead of heading to the hospital for surgery, I went to Toastmasters, then work, then class, then my wines class with Leo. It was an extraordinary day that unfolded ordinarily. It was somewhat anti-climactic, but so comfortable to come home, have leftovers for dinner, and enjoy some Buffy with Leo. This weekend, we're celebrating in earnest. Meanwhile, Ruby's got to pee, so I'm off.

speaking of outrageous double standards ...

Jon Stewart on the Sarah Palin Gender Card

the diamond invention

I had heard that DeBeers had changed centuries-old Japanese marriage customs in just a few decades and created soaring demand for diamonds. Now I understand how they did it.

The Diamond Invention
By Edward Jay Epstein
In Japan, the matrimonial custom had survived feudal revolutions, world wars, industrialization and even the American occupation. Up until the mid-196os, Japanese parents arranged proper marriages for their children through trusted 'intermediaries. The ceremony was then consummated, according to Shinto law, by the bride and groom both drinking rice wine from the same wooden bowl. This simple arrangement had persisted for more than a millennium. There was no tradition for romance, courtship, seduction and prenuptial love in Japan; and no tradition that required the gift of a diamond engagement ring.

Then, in 1967, halfway around the world, a South African diamond company decided to change the Japanese courtship ritual. It retained J. Walter Thompson, the largest advertising agency in the world, to embark on a campaign to popularize diamond engagement rings in Japan. It was not an easy task. Even the quartering of millions of American soldiers in Japan for a decade had not resulted in any substantial Japanese interest in giving diamonds as a token of love.

The advertising agency began its campaign by subtly suggesting that diamonds were a visible sign of modern Western values. It created a series of color advertisements in Japanese magazines showing very beautiful women displaying their diamond rings. The women all had Western facial features and wore European clothes. Moreover, in most of the advertisements, the women were involved in some activity that defied Japanese traditions, such as bicycling, camping, yachting, ocean-swimming and mountain-climbing. In the background, there usually stood a Japanese man, also attired in fashionable European clothes. In addition, almost all of the automobiles, sporting equipment and other artifacts in the picture, were conspicuous foreign imports. The message in these ads was clear: diamonds represent a sharp break with the Oriental past and an entry point into modern life.

The campaign was remarkably successful. Until 1959 the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began in 1968, less than 5 percent of Japanese women getting married received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972 the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond on their ring finger. And, by 1981, some 6o percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere thirteen years, the fifteen-hundred-year Japanese tradition was radically revised. Diamonds became a staple of the Japanese marriage. And Japan became, after the United States, the second largest market for the sale of diamond engagement rings. It was all part of the diamond invention.

The diamond invention was an ingenious scheme for sustaining the value of diamonds in an uncertain world. To begin with, it involved gaining control over the production of all the important diamond mines in the world. Next, a system was devised for allocating this controlled supply of gems to a select number of diamond cutters who all agreed to abide by certain rules intended to assure that the quantity of finished diamonds available at any given time never exceeded the public's demand for them. Finally, a set of subtle, but effective, incentives were devised for regulating the behavior of all the people who served and ultimately profited from the system.

The invention had a wide array of diverse parts: these included a huge stockpile of uncut diamonds in a vault in London; a billion-dollar cash hoard deposited in banks in Europe; and private intelligence network operating out of Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg and London; a global network of advertising agencies, brokers and distributors; corporate fronts in Africa for concealing massive diamond purchases; and private treaties with nations establishing quotas for annual production.

The invention is far more than merely a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of power and romance. For it to ultimately succeed, it must endow these stones with the sort of sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them onto the market. The illusion thus had to be inculcated into the mass mind that diamonds were forever-- "forever" in the sense that they could never be resold.

The invention itself was a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Up until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were a genuinely rare stone. They were found only in a few river beds in India and the jungles Brazil. The entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to only a few pounds a year.

In 1870, however, there was a radical change in this situation. Huge diamond "pipes" were discovered near the Orange River in South Africa.

These were the first diamond mines ever discovered. Now, rather than finding by chance an occasional diamond in a river, diamonds could now be scooped out of these mines by huge steam shovels. Suddenly, the market was deluged a growing flood of diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly came to realize that their investment was endangered: diamonds had little intrinsic value, and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. They feared that when new mines developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only a semi-precious gem.

As it turned out, financial acumen proved the mother of invention. The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control the mines' production and, in every other way that was necessary, perpetuate the scarcity and illusion of diamonds. The instrument that they created for this purpose was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., a company incorporated in South Africa.

As De Beers penetrated and took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it also assumed many protean forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known under the all-embracing mantle of "the syndicate." In Antwerp, it was just called the CSO-- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization (which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company). And in Black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with such names as the Diamond Development Corporation or Mining Services, Inc. At its height, it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa, it also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. It was De Beers of course that organized the Japanese campaign as part of its worldwide promotion of diamonds.

By 1981, De Beers had proved to be the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce. For more than a half century, while other commodities, such as gold, silver, copper, rubber and grains, fluctuated wildly in response to economic conditions, diamonds continued to advance upward in price each year. Indeed, the mechanism of the diamond invention seemed so superbly in control of prices-and unassailable-that even speculators began buying diamonds as a guard against the vagaries of inflation and recession. Like the romantic subjects of the advertising campaigns, they also assumed diamonds would increase in value forever.

My interest in the diamond invention was sparked originally by a chance meeting that I had with an English diamond broker in St. Tropez in the summer of 1977. The .broker was Benjamin Bonas, and he represented De Beers' Diamond Trading Company. He was visiting some friends of mine for the weekend, and during the course of a leisurely lunch the subject of diamonds was broached. Bonas explained that despite revolutions, hostile governments and general turmoil in Africa, De Beers still firmly controlled the production of diamonds. He pointed out that this arrangement had proved so successful that even the Soviet Union sold the diamonds from its Siberian mines to De Beers. He did not elaborate at this point on the actual mechanisms used De Beers to lock up the flow of diamonds from diverse quarters of the world. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the idea that a South African company, aided and abetted Black African and Communist nations who were pledged a total embargo of South African business, had succeeded putting together a truly global alliance to protect the value and illusion of diamonds. As the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique got their full independence, the pressures throughout Africa, and most of the world, to isolate South Africa would drastically escalate. How would the diamond cartel survive?

In Washington, later that year, I filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for all the investigations of the Justice Department concerning the diamond Cartel. The resulting archive of documents provided a fragmentary picture of De Beers' conflicts and near collision with antitrust laws of the United States, the clues all pointed to mining companies in South Africa and the distribution arm in London. I therefore began my inquiry into the nature and future of the diamond invention in Johannesburg.

Via this hilarious thread on Slashdot

things you don't want to hear in the emergency room

"It says here your tetanus shot is no longer current."
"They wrote 'laceration' on your chart, but this looks more like a puncture wound."
"See this thing I just pulled out of your leg? It's a fleck of bone."
"Sorry I was gone so long, the orthopedists were arguing about your x-ray. They should be done any minute now."

Thankfully, Leo's injury was minor. He had a dime-sized divet in his leg that some stitches closed up and lost a small bit of his tibia after his indoor soccer league game last night. He also had a damn impressive bump on his shin, but that's what happens when you're shoved from behind as you're about to kick the ball ... and you kick the metal goal post ... two inches above where your shinguard ends. Meanwhile, it's bedrest, antibiotics, and vicodin for Leo.

second-place citizens

Like many Americans, I've slapped an Obama '08 sticker on the back of my car. He's our only hope in the Obi-Wan sense -- our country just can't afford another four years of the GOP, and McCain will literally be business as usual. Sure, Obama's inspiring. Sure, he chose a running mate with great credentials. Sure, he's change we can believe in. But he wasn't my first choice for the job.

I got goosebumps when I heard that Barack, a black man, had enough votes to win the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. It made me proud to think that our country had come this far and the message that his nomination sent to American children and, indeed, the world.

But knowing that you can be a black man and be President isn't enough. Despite the 18 million cracks made in the glass ceiling, women are still taking a back seat to men. And that also sends a very powerful message to American children and the world.

Excerpted from Second-Place Citizens
Op-Ed Contributor
By SUSAN FALUDI
Published: August 25, 2008
For all the talk of Hillary Clinton’s “breakthrough” candidacy and other recent successes for women, progress on important fronts has stalled.

Today, the United States ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20 percent range for 15 years; women’s share of state elective executive offices has fallen consistently since 2000, and is now under 25 percent. The American political pipeline is 86 percent male.

Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years. Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women’s ability to sue for pay discrimination. The salaries of women in managerial positions are on average lower today than in 1983.

Women’s numbers are stalled or falling in fields ranging from executive management to journalism, from computer science to the directing of major motion pictures. The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, grade school teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, cook and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20 percent, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers and their children uncollected.

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women’s “feminist — new style” pseudo-liberation — the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

As it turns out, they won’t have one. But they will still have all the abiding inequalities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolized. Without a coalescing cause to focus their forces, how will women fight a foe that remains insidious, amorphous, relentless and pervasive?

“I am sorry for you young women who have to carry on the work in the next 10 years, for suffrage was a symbol, and you have lost your symbol,” the suffragist Anna Howard Shaw said in 1920. “There is nothing for women to rally around.” As they rally around their candidate tonight, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters will have to decide if they are mollified — or even more aggrieved — by the history she evokes.

putting the puzzle together

I've posted before about SuperBay, a 7-year old who is fighting Rhabdomyosarcoma. His mother's fortitude left me speechless this morning.

Essentially, Bailey's had this cancer for half of his life. He's been poked and prodded, spent his formative years in and out of Children's Hospital of Orange County, and pretty much endured more than any human being should.

Here's the latest update from his mom:

On Tuesday during Bailey's chemo I saw his oncologist. So we were talking about Bailey's scans and how they are due again and how Bailey was doing overall. Then he asked me if I had any questions. I asked him the one question that I knew I shouldn't ask and the one that I pretty much knew the answer to but asked it anyway (of course). Little background, when Bay relapsed we were told that Bay would be doing chemo for 2 years, 6 months into relapse we were told that he had 2 years left, 1 year into relapse we were told that he had 2 years left, are you seeing a pattern? It has been 18 months since relapse so I thought that maybe we should ask again. Let me just say that the pattern was broken and it is no longer 2 years. Before you get the YIPPEEEE out let me just say that it is now 3 years if not longer. I pretty much knew that we were not close to being done but that was not the answer that I wanted to hear. Just the thought that Bay would be 10 years old before we even think of stopping chemo is just a very long time.

Tuesday was also Drew's [her husband/ Bailey's dad] birthday and somehow I thought that telling him that Bay had at least another 3 years left would not go well with the socks and shorts so I debated on telling him, but since we have always told each other everything I ended up telling him. I think that being a year older really helped with receiving the news because he handled it really well. He just said that we should just think of it as a chronic disease that we just have to deal with long term. We both also know that really we have no right to complain because we still have him and heck if we are doing chemo 3 years from now that is 3 more years that we thought that we would never have 18 months ago. We have met far too many wonderful families that no longer have their kids that we are just very grateful for every day that we have together.

We have learned a lot in the past two and a half years. The biggest gift of all is that we learned to cherish what we have. We have been incredibly blessed. We thank God everyday for everything that he has given us. I could not imagine our life any other way. This is the journey we are meant to go on. I have mentioned before about this journey being like a puzzle. When you dump out the entire pieces to the puzzle it doesn't make any sense at all but as you start putting the pieces together you start to see the entire picture. I like to think of our journey that same way. The only difference is that we don't have all of our pieces yet and we have no clue what it will look like at the end. The one thing that I can say is that I have faith that at the end it will be the most beautiful puzzle that I have ever seen. I also feel as we go on this journey we are given pieces to our puzzle here and there. People we have met along the way, things that we have done, and experiences that we have been through. So only God knows what our puzzle will look like at the end but I truly so have faith and look forward to seeing the completed picture someday.

I'm hoping for a picture that includes a happy, healthy Bailey, surrounded by the Spoonies and all the people whose lives have been touched by this journey.

sauteeing and spying

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- Julia Child was a total badass.

She's one of my heroes because she broke all sorts of gender barriers and taught me, my mom, and most of this country how to cook French food. Now, there's one more reason to have her at my dream dinner table -- she was a spy and it would be interesting to hear about her time with the OSS.

Chef Julia Child, others part of WWII spy network - CNN.com
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world.

While Julia Child was cooking pheasants, she was also part of an international spy ring during World War II.

They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The full secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750,000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.

They were soldiers, actors, historians, lawyers, athletes, professors, reporters. But for several years during World War II, they were known simply as the OSS. They studied military plans, created propaganda, infiltrated enemy ranks and stirred resistance among foreign troops.

Some of those on the list have been identified previously as having worked for the OSS, but their personnel records never have been available before. Those records would show why they were hired, jobs they were assigned to and perhaps even missions they pursued while working for the agency.

Among the more than 35,000 OSS personnel files are applications, commendations and handwritten notes identifying young recruits who, like Child, Goldberg and Berg, earned greater acclaim in other fields -- Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian and special assistant to President Kennedy; Sterling Hayden, a film and television actor whose work included a role in "The Godfather"; and Thomas Braden, an author whose "Eight Is Enough" book inspired the 1970s television series.

Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.

The release of the OSS personnel files uncloaks one of the last secrets from the short-lived wartime intelligence agency, which for the most part later was folded into the CIA after President Truman disbanded it in 1945.

"I think it's terrific," said Elizabeth McIntosh, 93, a former OSS agent now living in Woodbridge, Va. "They've finally, after all these years, they've gotten the names out. All of these people had been told never to mention they were with the OSS."

The CIA had resisted releasing OSS records for decades. But former CIA Director William Casey, himself an OSS veteran, cleared the way for transfer of millions of OSS documents to the National Archives when he took over the agency in 1981. The personnel files are the latest to be made public.

Information about OSS involvement was so guarded that relatives often couldn't confirm a family member's work with the group.

Walter Mess, who handled covert OSS operations in Poland and North Africa, said he kept quiet for more than 50 years, only recently telling his wife of 62 years about his OSS activity.

"I was told to keep my mouth shut," said Mess, now 93 and living in Falls Church, Va.

The files will offer new information even for those most familiar with the agency. Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society created by former OSS agents and their relatives, said the nearly 24,000 employees included in the archives far exceeds previous estimates of 13,000.

The newly released documents will clarify these and other issues, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.

"We're saying the OSS was a lot bigger than they were saying," Cunliffe said.

both candidates back old blue eyes

Turns out Obama and McCain have one thing in common -- they both list Frank Sinatra in their top-10 songs ever. And despite McCain's inclusion of two (yes, two) ABBA songs and one Neil Diamond item (and, admittedly, a few other good picks), he's still a cranky old man who doesn't represent me and won't get my vote.

White House DJ Battle
On the eve of the Democratic and Republican conventions, Blender polled Barack Obama and John McCain for their top 10 songs. Then we enlisted trusted sages Randy Newman and Girl Talk to analyze their picks.

By Jon Coplon
Blender July 30 2008

BARACK OBAMA
1. Ready or Not Fugees
2. What's Going On Marvin Gaye
3. I'm On Fire Bruce Spingsteen
4. Gimme Shelter Rolling Stones
5. Sinnerman Nina Simone
6. Touch the Sky Kanye West
7. You'd Be So Easy to Love Frank Sinatra
8. Think Aretha Franklin
9. City of Blinding Lights U2
10. Yes We Can will.i.am

JOHN McCAIN
1. Dancing Queen ABBA
2. Blue Bayou Roy Orbison
3. Take a Chance On Me ABBA
4. If We Make It Through December Merle Haggard
5. As Time Goes By Dooley Wilson
6. Good Vibrations The Beach Boys
7. What A Wonderful World Louis Armstrong
8. I've Got You Under My Skin Frank Sinatra
9. Sweet Caroline Neil Diamond
10. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes The Platters



Do these guys have time for music?
GIRL TALK: Candidates all seem like robots and machines. It’s funny to think about them listening to these songs gearing up for a debate.


ABBA?
RANDY NEWMAN: I find them irresistible. Listening to “Dancing Queen” alone too many times, though, would be suspicious.
GT: I mixed ABBA in on a previous album. McCain should check it out.

Better Sinatra song?
GT: McCain went with the more obvious pick, but if you wanna be a big dog, you should go with the biggest hit.

Why’d they both pick Frankie Blue Eyes?
RN: It says a lot about the long ride Sinatra got out of being phenomenal for two years in the ’40s.

Weirdest pick?
GT: I couldn’t tell if it was cool or creepy for Obama to have “Yes We Can.” Maybe he’s in love with himself and wants to hear his speeches over and over as collaged by will.i.am.

Any snubs?
RN: The Beatles! Also, Streisand’s not on there; that’s more of a McCain pick.

McCain: Hip? Or hip replacement?
GT: It’s easy to knock McCain for being old, but I love meeting old people who know about music.

Who gets your vote based solely on this list?
GT: If there’s a candidate with Fugees’ “Ready or Not” on his list, I have to vote for him.
RN: McCain has a really likeable list. Then again, Hitler liked some good music, you know?

hay que venir al sur

Leo, to me this morning: "She's Italian. And those guys are amazing."
Apparently, she was a disco queen who rivaled ABBA (in terms of popularity) back in the day.

Rafaella Carrá - Hay que Venir Al Sur

back in the world of disposable emotion

I loved this song back in the day. Yes, it was cheesy. But cheesy is a given when it comes to HoJo circa 1989.

Anyhow, I listened to this song a few times today and felt very lucky to have found a friend and a lover divine. And it was awesome when I asked him about the song tonight and he mentioned the mummies, then said that he knew (and liked) the song, too.

quotable

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960), Algerian-born French author, philosopher, and journalist who won the Nobel prize in 1957.
Via Heidi

orzo with summer squash and toasted hazelnuts

So you open your weekly CSA delivery and find a whole lot of summer squash. What to do? Bust out some orzo and you've got the side dish any meatloaf should be proud to accompany on your plate.

Ingredients
3/4 cups orzo
1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup finely chopped shallots
1 medium zucchini, cut into 1/3-inch dice
1 medium yellow squash (we used farmer Joe's mystery green squash), cut into 1/3-inch dice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3/8 cup hazelnuts (we used pecans), toasted, loose skins rubbed off in a kitchen towel, and coarsely chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
2 teaspoons finely grated fresh lemon zest

Preparation
Cook orzo in boiling salted water until al dente. Reserve 1/2 cup cooking water, then drain orzo in a colander (we did not need to use any).

While orzo is cooking, heat butter and oil in a deep 12-inch heavy skillet over moderately high heat until foam subsides, then sauté shallot, stirring, until golden, about 5 minutes.
Add zucchini, yellow squash, salt, and pepper and sauté, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are just tender, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in nuts, parsley, basil, and zest.

Add cooked orzo to skillet and stir gently. If mixture seems dry, moisten with some reserved pasta water. Season with salt and pepper. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Active time: 40 min
Start to finish: 40 min
Servings: Makes 5 servings
Via Epicurious

turkey meat loaf with sun-dried tomatoes

Due to a slight purchasing miscalculation, Leo and I ended up with way too much ground turkey. The solution? MEATLOAF!!!

The only problem was having to take sides in the crucial tomato v. milk meatloaf debate. You think gay marriage is divisive? Pshaw. Thanks to sundried tomatoes, we can straddle the fence and reach out to moderates on both sides, just like Obama and McCain do in real life. Except we follow through on our promises.

We served this with an awesome orzo, zucchini, and mystery summer squash side dish (recipe provided in separate post) and James' patented Area-51 corn. We'd share the recipe for that one, but then James would have to kill the lot of us.

Ingredients
1.25 pounds ground turkey
1 onion, chopped
1 cup toasted breadcrumbs
1 egg, beaten to blend
1/2 cup toasted pine nuts
12 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, drained, chopped
1/3 cup milk
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary or 1/2 teaspoon dried, crumbled
2 teaspoons chopped fresh oregano or 1/2 teaspoon dried, crumbled
Salt and pepper to taste

Preparation
Preheat oven to 375°F.
Combine all ingredients in large bowl.
Season with salt and pepper and mix well.
Transfer mixture to 8 1/2x 4 1/2-inch loaf pan.
Bake until loaf pulls away from sides of pan and top is golden brown, about 50 minutes.
Serves 6
Via Epicurious

otters holding hands

Leo and I love to watch the river otters and the monkeys duke it out at the zoo. But these sea otters have to be the cutest thing I've seen in a long time. (Sorry, Ruby.)

Via Andrea

health care lessons from france

The United States spends an average $6,402 per person annually on medical care. France spends about half that — while providing better maternity benefits and complete coverage for people with conditions such as diabetes and cancer. Compare the systems.

Health Care Lessons From France : NPR
France: Health Care for All
by Joseph Shapiro
Day to Day, July 11, 2008 · In 2000, health care experts for the World Health Organization tried to do a statistical ranking of the world's health care systems. They studied 191 countries and ranked them on things like the number of years people lived in good health and whether everyone had access to good health care. France came in first. The United States ranked 37th.

Some researchers, however, said that study was flawed, arguing that there might be things other than a country's health care system that determined factors like longevity. So this year, two researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine measured something called the "amenable mortality." Basically, it's a measure of deaths that could have been prevented with good health care. The researchers looked at health care in 19 industrialized nations. Again, France came in first. The United States was last.

French Lessons
Now some American experts say there's a lot Americans can learn from the French.

For starters, the French system is not what most Americans imagine, says historian Paul Dutton at Northern Arizona University, author of Differential Diagnoses: A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France.

"Americans assume that if it's in Europe, which France is, that it's socialized medicine," he says. "The French don't consider their system socialized. In fact, they detest socialized medicine. For the French, that's the British, that's the Canadians. It's not the French system."

France, like the United States, relies on both private insurance and government insurance. Also, just like in America, people generally get their insurance through their employer.

In France, everyone has health care. However, unlike in Britain and Canada, there are no waiting lists to get elective surgery or see a specialist, Dutton says.

He says the French want pretty much the same thing as Americans: choice and more choice.

Universal Coverage, Not At Expense Of Choice
Dutton says these shared values come out of a shared history. Both countries are products of Enlightenment-era revolutions.

"The French hold individual liberty and social equality very dear ... 'liberty, equality, and fraternity' — of course the slogan of their revolution," he says. "And in this country, of course, we have similar ideals: individual liberty, social equality — equal chances for everyone."

But the French have done a better job of protecting those values in health care, Dutton says.

Americans often assume that when people get universal coverage, they give up their choice in doctors, hospitals and care. That's not the case in France, Dutton says. The system is set up both to ensure that patients have lots of choice in picking doctors and specialists and to ensure that doctors are not constrained in making medical decisions.

In France, the national insurance program is funded mostly by payroll and income taxes. Those payments go to several quasi-public insurance funds that then negotiate with medical unions to set doctors' fees.(Doctors can choose to work outside this system, and a growing minority now charge what patients are willing to pay out of pocket.) The government regulates most hospital fees. This system works collectively to keep costs down.

When someone goes to see a doctor, the national insurance program pays 70 percent of the bill. Most of the other 30 percent gets picked up by supplemental private insurance, which almost everyone has. It's affordable, and much of it gets paid for by a person's employer.

"There are no uninsured in France," says Victor Rodwin, a professor of health policy at New York University, who is affiliated with the International Longevity Center. "That's completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs. In fact, the system is so designed that for the 3 or 4 or 5 percent of the patients who are the very sickest, those patients are exempt from their co-payments to begin with. There are no deductibles."

Treating The Sickest
In France, the sicker you are, the more coverage you get. For people with one of 30 long-term and expensive illnesses — such as diabetes, mental illness and cancer — the government picks up 100 percent of their health care costs, including surgeries, therapies and drugs.

France has made an unusual guarantee that every cancer patient can get any drug, including the most expensive and even experimental ones that are still being tested, says Dr. Fabian Calvo, deputy director of France's National Cancer Institute. This kind of access is why the French — unlike Americans — say they are highly satisfied with their health care system, he says.

"It's a feeling of safety — that if you have a big problem, you could have access to the good therapy," Calvo says.

When compared with people in other countries, the French live longer and healthier lives. Rodwin says that's because good care starts at birth. There are months of paid job leave for mothers who work. New mothers get a child allowance. There are neighborhood health clinics for new mothers and their babies, home visits from nurses and subsidized day care.

The Cost Of Care
It's expensive to provide this kind of health care and social support. France's health care system is one of the most expensive in the world.

But it is not as expensive as the U.S. system, which is the world's most costly. The United States spends about twice as much as France on health care. In 2005, U.S. spending came to $6,400 per person. In France, it was $3,300.

To fund universal health care in France, workers are required to pay about 21 percent of their income into the national health care system. Employers pick up a little more than half of that. (French employers say these high taxes constrain their ability to hire more
people.)

Americans don't pay as much in taxes. Nonetheless, they end up paying more for health care when one adds in the costs of buying insurance and the higher out-of-pocket expenses for medicine, doctors and hospitals.

France, like all countries, faces rising costs for health care. In a country that's so generous, it's even harder to get those expenses under control.

Last year, the national health system ran nearly $9 billion in debt. Although it is a smaller deficit than in previous years, it forced the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy to start charging patients more for some drugs, ambulance costs and other services. Debates over cost-cutting have become an expected part of the national dialogue on health care.

comment dit-on "localtarian"?

Reason #4,269 that I want to move to France: good, healthy, reasonably priced food in public high schools.

Chef Proves School Lunch Can Be Healthy, Cheap : NPR
Morning Edition, July 2, 2008 · Chef Dominique Valadier starts each day at 5:30 a.m., just as the fish market opens in the southern French provincial town of Salon de Provence.

On one particular day, he picks up 20 pounds of fresh, live mussels at the market before heading off to Lycee de l'Emperi, the public high school where he is the cook.

At the school, he prepares meals for about 800 students, using all fresh, local ingredients. The introduction of healthy school lunch programs, like this one, is one major reason France has been able to curb childhood obesity rates after two decades on the rise, according to two recent studies.

From Within 30 Miles
The menu on this day at Valadier's high school: mussels in cream sauce over rice with leeks and stuffed turkey thighs, accompanied by a squash au gratin casserole.

Nothing here is frozen or pre-prepared, Valadier says.

"Voila. This sticker here shows where these mussels came from and when they were harvested," he says. "This guarantees their freshness."

Eyes twinkling and knives flashing, Valadier opens up the plump turkey thighs, cutting out the bones.

The flattened turkey filets are wrapped around a stuffing of ground up parsley, garlic, cheese and smoked pork shoulder. The loaves are then tied with twine and baked for three hours at low temperatures to keep in the juices and flavor. When sliced, they will serve hundreds of students, 10 times the number that could have been fed on the plain turkey thighs. Preparation and proximity are the keys to high quality meals at lower prices, says Valadier.

"We try to get our base products — meat, fish, vegetables — within a 30-mile radius, because there are fewer intermediaries and we can negotiate prices and quality with the producer. These turkeys were raised and slaughtered just near here," Valadier says. "If I have a problem, I'll ask the producer to come see me, and I can guarantee you things will be a lot better the next time!"

Healthy and Cheap
All around the school kitchen, food is cooking in various pots and pans. Gallons of bechamel, a seasoned white sauce, bubble for the squash casserole. A vat of chickpeas boils for homemade hummus. It is hard to believe this is a public school cafeteria and not a three-star restaurant.

Perhaps what is most impressive about Valadier's meals is that they cost the students only $3 a day, less than the typical fast food fare served at many French high schools.

Another way Valadier saves money is by getting maximum use out of every ingredient. He never throws anything away. In one corner of the kitchen, he is boiling down the fish heads, flesh and bones from yesterday's salmon to make a tasty bouillon for today's mussels.

As lunch hour begins and the students file in, Valadier serves them while answering questions about the meal. He reaches across the counter with a forkful of the squash au gratin to give 17-year-old Valentine Biemence a taste. Biemence says she and her friends have all but quit eating lunch at McDonald's and have discovered a lot of new dishes.

"It's all the time different food and very, very good," Biemence says. "People are really happy, because it's really hard now to eat well and cheap."

Investing in the Future
Valadier once worked in the glamorous world of Riviera restaurants. He says he left that life for something more meaningful. Investing in students' well-being is also an act of citizenship, he explains. If young people learn to eat well early on, they will cost the country's health care system a lot less in the future.

He has clearly found his calling here, while winning over the students — and teachers. Danielle Viou teaches drama and English at the high school.

"We are very, very lucky because it's a real project. It's not just doing the cooking, it's a whole concept of educating and taking time and enjoying it," Viou says. "And it's artistic at the same time."

quotable

"The less you know, the more you believe."
Bono aka Paul David Hewson (born 10 May 1960), musician and activist best known as the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2. Bono has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, was granted an honorary knighthood by the United Kingdom, and was named as a Person of the Year by Time magazine.

black is gorgeous

We didn't set out to adopt a black dog, but realized that several of our "favorites" -- dogs whose photos we'd seen online and wanted to meet (before Ruby) were black. We're thrilled with Ruby and love her shiny, jet-black fur (even when we're vacuuming it off of our maple hardwood floors). We're not alone -- check out these photos of beloved black dogs.

You mentioned a walk, no?
by comment dit-on

Black pups face doggie discrimination
Dark-coated pooches tend to linger in shelters the longest
By Melissa Dahl ,MSNBC
updated 5:34 a.m. PT, Wed., March. 5, 2008
It's not like Pamela Gregg was a stranger to helping out the underdog. She thought she knew what kinds of pooches linger the longest in animal shelters: Older dogs, abused dogs, sick or injured dogs — dogs like George Bailey, the hound mix she'd rescued after he'd been struck by a car.

But black dogs? While searching for a companion for George Bailey, Gregg was shocked to see a banner on an Ohio animal shelter's Web site that detailed how tough it is for big dogs with black coats to find homes.

"It said something like, 'We know that you people prefer colors, but we've got wonderful black dogs here, won't you please consider them?'" recalls Gregg, who's 49 and lives in Xenia, Ohio. "I was shocked, because I think that black dogs are beautiful — and I couldn't believe people would not get a dog based on its color."

To the uninitiated, the idea seems so strange — doggie discrimination? But among those in animal rescue circles, the phenomenon is commonplace enough to have earned its own name: "black dog syndrome."

"There's not a lot of that type of statistics on many aspects of sheltering," says Kim Intino, the director of animal sheltering issues for the Humane Society of the United States. "But I think that every person that has worked in a shelter can attest that in shelters animals with black coats can be somewhat harder to adopt out — or to even get noticed."

Even after a year had passed at a Los Angeles animal shelter, no one had noticed Estelle. Except, of course, for the staff; they fawned over the big black dog and her gentle demeanor. They started letting Estelle roam the office during the day, which let one couple see her in action — outside her cage and calmly interacting with people. They fell for her, and took her home.

But not every black dog is lucky enough to get that kind of special attention, says Madeline Bernstein, the president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Los Angeles.

"They're the hardest to adopt out, they're in the shelters the longest and therefore, they're most likely to be euthanized if nothing happens," Bernstein says. (Breeders don't tend to face this problem at the level that shelters do, simply because they have fewer animals to deal with than a city shelter that takes strays in every day.)

Bernstein has plenty of theories about why people might not want black dogs in animal shelters. It's mostly an unconscious thing, she says, which may explain why black cats have the same problems finding a home. People who are aware of superstitions about black cats (don't let them cross your path!) may also be unconsciously harboring superstitions about black dogs.

In British folklore, such as stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Walter Scott, the black dog is a creepy, spectral figure that haunts cemeteries and is an omen of death. (Non-lit geeks who've never heard of those stories have at least seen "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," in which a big black dog called the Grim stalks Harry.) Another Englishman, Winston Churchill, battled serious bouts of depression which he called "the black dog."

But some speculate that black dogs just don't have the right look to catch the eye of potential adopters.

"Black dogs might appear older; even when they're young, they have bits of facial hair that may be white or gray," Bernstein says. And the ignored breeds are often those who simply look a little big and scary, and whose bad reputations may have preceded them, such as Rottweiler, Doberman pinscher and pit bull mixes.

Bernstein says some people turn in their black dogs to the shelters because they've gotten new furniture and don't like the dark fur their pet sheds.

Too hard to see
But it may be the simplest reason that's costing these dogs a good home — their black coats can make them invisible in poorly lit kennels. (Same problem happens with amateur photos on shelters' Web sites, which is how many people find the dog they intend to adopt.)

"Sometimes if a potential adopter sees a whole row of black dogs, they think, 'Maybe they're not being adopted for a good reason. Maybe there's something wrong with these dogs,'" Bernstein says.

So volunteers at some shelters put extra energy into getting their black dogs noticed. They place brightly colored, eye-catching blankets and toys in their kennels. At Bernstein's shelters, they tie pink ribbons around the necks of the girls, and fasten big bow ties around the necks of the boys.

"In our kennels, the black dogs are all decked out," Bernstein says.

One shelter in Kettering, Ohio, the Society for the Improvement of Conditions for Stray Animals even ran a special discount on black dogs in February, slashing adoption fees in half after executive director Rudy Bahr realized that out of his shelters' 42 dogs, 28 of them were big and black. Bahr instructs his employees in the same sort of tactics Bernstein's shelters take to attract attention to black dogs, like tying bandannas around their necks and taking the dogs to a well-lit area outside to have their photo taken for their Web site.

It was that kind of photo on the shelter's site that attracted Gregg's attention as she continued her search for a companion for George Bailey. "I was trolling through their pictures and there she was," Gregg says. "She was a hound mix like George Bailey, but Molly is sleek, shiny black. As soon as I saw her I completely fell in love. I couldn't get in my car fast enough."

Molly and Bailey turned out to be a perfect match, and if Gregg someday rescues another dog, she says she'll definitely go for a big black dog.

"If and when I get another dog, I will probably deliberately look for another black dog, only because I've learned of black dog syndrome," Gregg says. "Bring 'em my way, because I love 'em."

the future is unwritten

"I'd like to say that people can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world. Show me any country and there'll be people in it.

It's time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. You know, think on that ... without people, you're nothing."

Joe Strummer's cover of "Redemption Song."

Via Ryan E.

failure and imagination

I was very impressed by the commencement address J.K. Rowling gave at Harvard on June 5, 2008. I learned more about a woman whose creativity captured my imagination and admire the challenge she issued to Harvard's graduates.

“The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

why i'm voting republican

Learn why I'm voting Republican and then do something about it.

Via Bucky

the ghosts of a different philly

I got the chills last week when NPR declared Obama the first-ever Black major party nominee for president. I would've felt proud to hear that Hilary was the first-ever female major-party presidential nominee, but it clearly wasn't her time. Thankfully, she made 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling.

Barack Obama's victory stirs Mississippi ghosts
By Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 10, 2008
PHILADELPHIA, MISS. -- Some places are defined by a single event. Roswell, N.M., will always be known for space aliens, Dallas for assassination. And this little town in the Piney Woods of eastern Mississippi will forever be the site of one of the most brutal crimes of the civil rights era.

But Philadelphia -- situated in a county once dubbed Bloody Neshoba -- can now add a remarkable footnote to its most nefarious chapter: The rural county where three men were killed for trying to help black people vote has cast the majority of its ballots to put a black man in the White House.

But much is the same. For all the excitement about Barack Obama and his history-making run for president, there is anxiety, too, because the present is still a hostage to the past. Everything in this slow town of one-way streets and more than 80 churches is viewed through the lens of race. Obama's success makes some people as anxious as it makes others proud.

"It's just the impossibility of it," Campbell said again and again of the presumed Democratic nominee. She had just come from a weeknight Bible study at her church, Mt. Zion United Methodist, which the Ku Klux Klan once burned down. "I know Mississippians. Barack Obama will never change the uneducated whites from the South. I don't care what he does. If he made some of them millionaires, he'll never change them."

Obama's victory in the primaries comes just as Philadelphia prepares to mark the 44th anniversary of the killings that put it reluctantly on the map. Racial tensions are not as violently overt as they were then; today the slights are subtle, from the glance averted on the street to the job application that is never considered. With five months of fierce presidential campaigning ahead -- black against white -- there is a sense that simmering racial tensions are about to boil again.

"What happened all those years ago -- that just keeps coming up," said Doris Gray, 81, who is white. The presence of an out-of-town newspaper reporter in her son's chili cafe not 24 hours after Obama cinched the nomination confirmed her fear that people are going to start poking around in matters better left be.



Around here, that always leads to the same date, June 21, 1964, Father's Day to be exact. Mt. Zion, a black church on the outskirts of town, lay in charred rubble, and three civil rights workers -- two white and one black -- came on the heels of that violence to register black people to vote.

The three were stopped by law enforcement officers in league with the Ku Klux Klan and were jailed for speeding. Released that night, they were chased down a country road and shot, their bodies found six weeks later in an earthen dam outside town.

Eighteen reputed Klansmen went to trial on federal civil rights charges, including Edgar Ray Killen, the part-time Baptist preacher believed to have masterminded the plan. An all-white jury deadlocked in Killen's case. The story was fodder for the 1989 movie "Mississippi Burning," which played right here at the old State Theatre. A new trial held in 2005 finally sent an 80-year-old Killen to prison.

With every turn of events, the media converged on Philadelphia, an otherwise uneventful town with a population of more than 7,000 -- 55% white, 40% black. But no one ever seemed interested in its friendly people, low crime rate, quaint shops or the county fair that brought visitors in from all over.

The way it looked to some, everything boomeranged to the town's racist past. Ronald Reagan chose the fair to announce his 1980 candidacy for president -- Nancy sat on his lap in a wood rocker, red Mississippi mud on her white shoes -- and critics questioned whether he was implicitly condoning racism by deciding to come here at all.



Now there's Obama, Philadelphia's most sensitive subject personified.

"I just wish he'd stop talking about race," said Taneil Long, 30, who owns a nail salon on Beacon Street.

A client walked in, a young black woman, with her daughter in tow. Most of Long's patrons are black, ever since seven years ago when word got out that she was dating a black man. Most of her white clients deserted her. Her white landlady told her to move out. Her cousin from Memphis hasn't spoken to her since.

Long is biracial -- part Vietnamese and part white. A Democrat, she likes what Obama has to say, but the subject of race repels her. It runs against the local grain to discuss the matter openly, and it's hard to avoid it whenever Obama's face comes on TV. In fact, that's when she usually changes the channel.

She doesn't think an Obama presidency would change the minds of people who haven't changed their minds already.

"It's just unbelievable how hateful some people can be," she said. But then she decides that maybe a black president isn't such a bad idea. "If he goes in there and does a remarkable job, maybe some will say, 'Hey, maybe I didn't have the right feeling about that situation.' But as far as Neshoba County goes? You will never get nobody to admit it."

The South of the Old Confederacy is changing, outpacing the rest of the country in population growth and jobs -- CNN, Coca-Cola and FedEx are headquartered there. Once-rural states like Georgia, Florida and Tennessee now have more racially tolerant metropolitan centers.

But in Deep South states like this one, change has come more slowly. Two Indian casinos outside of town have boosted the economy, and Philadelphia is, as they like to say, fixin' to get a bowling alley.

A stronger black leadership has stepped up to demand better police protection and community services, such as equal distribution of parks money, making sure the one in the black neighborhood doesn't get short shrift.

James Prince, editor and publisher of the Neshoba County Democrat, framed the progress this way: "There are people who, if they could get away with not doing the work in the black park, probably would, but they are not going to get away with it."

Patricia Madison is a clerk at All About Her, a boutique that sells purses a few doors down from Long's nail salon. It's owned by a young black woman, and that in itself is a departure from how things used to be.

Still, Madison, a 39-year-old African American, can point to uneasy moments. A restaurant with an all-white staff advertised for a waitress, but wouldn't give her a second look. When her white friend invited her to her wedding and the groom's parents objected, she stayed away so as not to create a disturbance.

Maybe Obama's candidacy -- or presidency -- could help break stubborn stereotypes, she mused, sipping a soda between customers. "Maybe people might view us different -- see that we are not ignorant. Some of us have class. We can do more than work in the kitchen and be somebody's housekeeper."



Just about any adult you talk with here has experienced racial prejudice from one side or the other. Steve Wilkerson, a white lifelong resident of Philadelphia, worked in high school for a service station with one bathroom for men, one for women and one for "coloreds." The first two were cleaned daily, the third once a week.

Now Wilkerson, 55, owns Steve's on the Square, a landmark clothing store downtown. He is a member of a multiracial commission that has worked to bring healing to Philadelphia: The attorney general issued a formal apology, and Highway 19 now bears the names of the activists who died there: Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white college student from New York; Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white social worker also from New York; and James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from nearby Meridian.

But Obama's strong performance in a county that is 65% white is less a sign of racial tolerance than of white flight to the Republican Party. Those voting in the Democratic primary were mainly African American or white liberals.

Wilkerson predicted Obama will have a hard time winning Mississippi's white voters in November. Those who do support him will do so discreetly.

"They won't have bumper stickers and lawn signs. It would not be comfortable."

On this warm, humid night, Margaret White, 54, stood outside Mt. Zion, the church she has attended all her life. Today it is rebuilt in fire-resistant brick rather than wood. The old bell -- all that was left from the arson -- is in place and a gray stone engraved with three names stands outside the sanctuary, laid with a wreath every June.

It's a proud time for the church, but there are no high-fives or yelps for Obama's victory. "Low-key is the way," the Rev. Willie Young tells his flock.

White went into work clapping her hands the morning after Obama won. But she was careful not to flaunt her enthusiasm in front of her white colleagues at Mississippi State University, where she works as a program assistant teaching nutrition. "Here, you have to know somebody to get a job," she said. "You can't afford to tick people off."

She doesn't hold much hope that Obama's rise will reform old-school Southerners, but she can't help but notice the changing attitude of the next generation drawn to his candidacy.

Color is not the dividing wall it once was. While neighborhoods remain somewhat segregated, workplaces are more diverse, biracial couples more common. Children -- black and white -- play together on sports teams; they grow up not only to attend each other's weddings, but to take part as bridesmaids and groomsmen.

"One day, the old history will just die off and race will still be there, but it won't matter so much," White said, swatting away the mosquitoes as children, freed from Bible study, ran in circles around the memorial stone, oblivious to its meaning.
Via Hilstah

bailey's plea

Bailey is the son of a high school friend that I just reconnected with. He has Rhabdomyosarcoma and is fighting tall odds at CHOC (Children's Hospital of Orange County).

Rhabdomyosarcoma is a fast-growing, highly malignant tumor which accounts for over half of the soft tissue sarcomas in children. Rhabdomyosarcoma tumors arise from a cell called a "rhabdomyoblast", which is a primitive muscle cell. Instead of differentiating into striated muscle cells, the rhabdomyoblasts grow out of control. Since this type of muscle is located throughout the body, the tumors can appear at numerous locations.

His comments in the first video are a good reminder of what's most important in life.


Bailey and his sister Gaby loving each other


Bailey (SuperBay) and his sisters Gaby and Addison enjoy Halloween at CHOC.

it's good to be on top

From the maps section of Scandinavian Airlines' magazine.

Proof (yet again) that it's all a matter of perspective.
"Upside-Down" North America
Originally uploaded by Claire L. Evans

Via Mercedes

breathing again

This semester was arguably the most stress I've endured in my academic life. It wasn't so much the difficulty of the subject matter -- it was the confluence of circumstances that left me spent.

I realize that most of this stress was due to choices I made, but I survived it, in large part because Leo kept me pointed in the right direction and did all he could to help me keep it together.

Here's a snapshot of what I've been up to since January, which may explain why the hell I haven't been blogging on a regular basis:

1. Academic highlights: My two classes in two different colleges included midterms one day apart, short papers due biweekly (one day apart), 15-page research papers and 30-minute group presentation projects one week apart.
2. Professional highlights: Getting and starting a new jobby job, one with corporate hours and a very steep learning curve in an industry that's new to me and a product release cycle that's dizzying.
   
3. Health highlights: A "routine" surgery on my right wrist that was anything but routine and required Leo to feed, bathe, and dress me for a while.
4. Family highlights: Adopting Ruby, who is super smart, amazingly cute, awesomely gentle, and very willful and taking the time to properly socialize and assimilate her into the pack order of our home.
5. Mental health highlights: Agreeing to do a big favor for a friend when I should've held my ground after saying "no" several times. Feeling bad about doing a crappy job for that friend because I really didn't have the time to do the job correctly. Coming to terms with regret, finding peace, and saying goodbye to a different friend whom I should've been a better friend to while he was still alive.

I'm just grateful that I got through it all and managed to taking a week to get out of dodge with Leo and enjoy the California coast between San Diego and Monterey. There are plenty of other things to celebrate, like good friends getting engaged, me regaining almost full range of motion in both hands, and other friends finishing chemo and radiation. But right now, I'm just glad that I don't have to be in a classroom for two whole weeks and that there are only 219 days until my MBA is done and I get my life back.

do you wear nail polish? dress for breakfast?

I routinely put my ice-cold, candy apple red-painted toes on Leo to warm them up.

Clearly, that explains why I'm not marriage material according to this marital suitability rating scale.

obey

I love the Duderino.

keep calm and carry on

My colleague was sent this after she had an especially craptastic day at work this week.

The poster is a reproduction of the British government's message during World War II. As the Battle of Britain wore on and Nazi bombs were falling left and right, the government urged citizens to adopt a stiff upper lip and not to give the Germans the satisfaction of disrupting every aspect of daily life.

I find it refreshing and sage advice and a stark contrast to our own government's pumpkin, fuschia, and chartreuse color-coded warning system. I'm hereby adopting this as my new mantra. It should be particularly helpful as I finish graduate school.

Only 231 days, 03 hrs, 04 mins, 30 secs to go.

Keep Calm and Carry On: sage advice from a sane wartime government
Back in WWII, when the UK was being pounded by daily barrages of high-explosive, the government's message to the people was Keep Calm and Carry On. Not "ZOMG TERRISTS GONNA KILL US ALL ZOMG ZOMG ALERT LEVEL BLOODRED RUN RUN TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES MOISTURE BOMBS ZOMG!"