The Drawing Board

I haven't just been twiddling my thumbs, you know.

2009-03-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

I know it's been awhile, but at least I've got a good reason.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last

2009-01-20T10:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my roommate deftly inserted a little MLKJ into his evening prayer over the dinner table.

This morning, Obama's White House website has a new page.

Maybe this is the first year I've really understood Martin Luther King Junior Day.

While we stood and watched

2009-01-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

In a poetry class this morning, we discussed the varying implications of words in different contexts and cultures.

"For example, the word 'change' has very recently become a loaded word in our culture," said my professor. "You have to be careful how you use it anymore."

Why? Have people really become so offended at the idea that things might not always stay the same?

The inaugural address is being shown on every TV on campus. Students cluster in front of TV screens, silently staring, arms folded tightly. It's as if everyone lost the same bet and now we're all nursing wounded pride.

In the commuter lounge an hour ago, the only conversation about this morning's swearing in of our next president lingered on the fact that Obama stuttered repeating his lines. People got a real kick out of that one. Apparently you had to be there.

This morning, I walked to class and watched the clouds blanketing the Pacific and instead pictured the Mall, lined with thousands and thousands of people. It seems like years ago that I was there.

In general, I like San Diego. I like it a lot. But today more than ever I feel out of place, like I'm supposed to be back on the Mall screaming with thousands of other people just like that night months ago in front of the White House.

But no. Today, I'm sitting in the computer lab in Ryan Library on the beautiful Point Loma campus in San Diego, California and thinking about DC, waiting for my New Testament class to begin.

So this is the new year.

2009-01-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

On my mind so far:

-I have resolved not to make any New Year's resolutions.
-I will never live in/near Humboldt County. It's a disgrace to the state of California.
-Fitting everything you own into a Toyota Camry is neither easy, simple nor fun.
-I'm tired of seeing my life in cardboard boxes and suitcases.
-My sister would make a bitchin air traffic controller.
-Life is better as a redhead.
-The post-holiday semi-annual sale at Victoria's Secret was a gift from God.
-Relationships are worth it.
-I really wasn't lying when I said I felt too sick to go to church today.

A new kind of Christmas.

2008-12-24T18:32:00.001-08:00

Everything is different this year, isn't it?

It's one of those years where you try to follow in old traditions and relive good memories and convince yourself that it can all be the same.

Um...I'm here, too.

2008-12-16T19:29:00.001-08:00

Since leaving DC, I've been spending time in Salt Lake City with Douglas and his family.

No, they're not Mormons. But nearly everyone else here is.

The other day, Douglas took me on a grand tour of Temple Square. We learned fascinating facts about the 21,000-seat auditorium in the Conference Center, watched ads about Mormon families in the visitor's center, and ended up seeing the new movie about Joseph Smith (thankfully, Douglas got the time wrong and we missed it).

We even saw Space Jesus -- almost as badass as the web-footed Mer-Jesus outside Saint Monica's and Saint James' Episcopal Church in DC.
Almost.
Every time we walked into a visitor center, or other any building in Temple Square for that matter, we were approached by friendly old tour guides or hosts or missionaries.
They were warm and welcoming, offering us information and tours and the right way to salvation and everything. Well, they offered Douglas, at least.

I mean, we were holding hands and we were walking around in Temple Square. It was obvious what kind of relationship was at work here. So naturally, the friendly Mormons approached the only possible option: the man. I stayed quiet and played my part, nodding sweetly whenever I was referred to in conversation ("Does your girlfriend live here, too?").

I think maybe Douglas liked doing all the talking. Maybe it was the idea of a subservient, domesticated little girlfriend he relished for a change. And though I don't deny that I make a mean Thanksgiving turkey, I'm quite certain that I'll never fill that role.

Besides, ankle-length skirts just aren't my thing.

Today, I'm tired of being a student.

2008-12-07T16:40:00.000-08:00

It's one of those days when you'd trade brick row houses and snow flurries and the Capitol building for a rather ugly looking house in the Tracy ghetto with mismatched icicle lights and a homemade skateboard ramp in the driveway.

I'll miss this place. I think I want to move back one day. But for now, California, here I come.

It'll make a believer out of you...

2008-12-03T16:56:00.000-08:00

Jack Black is Jesus?

Everything makes sense...

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Megadoses

2008-11-23T15:40:00.000-08:00

I'm a skeptic about a lot of things.

But when it comes to medicine, I'm sold, so to speak.

I subscribe to the whole package. I don't know my driver's license number and I sometimes get foggy on my SSN, but I have my Kaiser medical record number memorized. I get 300 percent of my daily values from taking my one-a-day Women's Multivitamin, which is about the only thing I do religiously. Oh, and I recently gave in to a colorful internet offer advertising "renewed energy and health" through capsules of green tea extract. (Which I'm still taking, twice a day, until the offer expires.)

I grew up with chewable Scooby Doo vitamins, echinacea extract and those orange-flavored Vitamin C pills that come in bulk from Costco. My overall theory on health care is based on the belief that pills are good, for the most part. They keep away pain, babies, and general discomfort of any kind. They're good for what ails 'ya. I'm a big fan.

So when I stumbled upon a New York Times article questioning the effectiveness of vitamins, I was shocked and slightly offended. How dare they suggest that "News keeps getting worse for vitamins" or that "The best efforts of the scientific community to prove the health benefits of vitamins keep falling short??"

It's as if they were talking to me:

...many people gobble down large doses of vitamins believing that they boost the body’s ability to mop up damaging free radicals that lead to cancer and heart disease. In addition to the more recent research, several reports in recent years have challenged the notion that megadoses of vitamins are good for you.

I'm not sure whose notion they're challenging. It's certainly not mine. I'll take my pills, thanks.

Like being born again...

2008-11-22T21:22:00.000-08:00

One of those moments I'll never forget: the day I cooked my first turkeys, and even the sharpest critics praised them.

Today was just a practice run. Thanksgiving ain't gonna know what hit it this year.

"Compassion Fatigue?"

2008-11-19T19:40:00.000-08:00

Today, Tmatt handed me the latest issue of the Weekly Standard. I don't even remember why or what we were talking about at the time.

But I couldn't tear my eyes from the cover illustration.

Needless to say, I looked up the article online as soon as I got back.

In early 2006, the first charges of large-scale harvesting--surgical removal of organs while the prisoners were still alive, though of course the procedure killed them--of Falun Gong emerged from Northeast China. The charges set off a quiet storm in the human rights community. Yet the charge was not far-fetched.

Yeah. It's that horrific.

The story goes on to say that the harvesting of "death row" prisoners' organs after execution has been a practice in China since the mid-1980s, when the state began selling corneas, livers, kidneys, and other body parts to Chinese and foreign customers who would pay tens of thousands of dollars in return.

Persecution of the Falun Gong, a religious and idealogical group that became popular in the 1990s, began in 1998 when the Chinese Communist Party decided (for largely unknown reasons) to stamp it out entirely.

At any given time, 100,000 Falun Gong practitioners were said to be somewhere in the Chinese penal system. Like most numbers coming out of China, these were crude estimates, further rendered unreliable by the chatter of claim and counterclaim. But one point is beyond dispute: The repression of Falun Gong spun out of control. Arrests, sentencing, and whatever took place in the detention centers, psychiatric institutions, and labor camps were not following any established legal procedure or restraint.

As an act of passive resistance, or simply to avoid trouble for their families, many Falun Gong began withholding their names from the police, identifying themselves simply as "practitioner" or "Dafa disciple." When asked for their home province, they would say "the universe." For these, the nameless ones, whose families had no way of tracing them or agitating on their behalf, there may be no records at all.

I finished Ethan Gutmann's article numb with disbelief. Just weeks ago I'd peered over the wall marked "Caution: Graphic Content" at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and watched black-and-white footage of Nazi doctors performing "experiments" on victims. Many of them were children. The connection was unnerving.

Dai Ying is a 50-year-old female refugee living in Sweden. As 2003 began, 180 Falun Gong were tested in Sanshui labor camp. The usual our-party-especially-cares-for-you speech was followed by X-rays, the drawing of massive blood samples, cardiograms, urine tests, and then probes: "They had us lie on [our] stomachs and examined our kidneys. They tapped on them and ask[ed] us if that hurt."

And that was it--organs only, hold the corneas--a fact that Dai, almost blind from torture at the time, remembers vividly. Corneas are relatively small-ticket items, worth perhaps $30,000 each. By 2003, Chinese doctors had mastered the liver transplant, worth about $115,000 from a foreign customer.

How is this happening? How is it possible that all we have are statistics showing the unaccounted disappearance of thousands of Falun Gong followers and correlating spikes in organ sales in China, and a handful of testimonies from survivors? Where are the human rights' activists? The media attention?

Gutmann has a theory of his own.

Washington faces its own imperatives: The riptide of Chinese financial power is strong. Those in government do not want to hear about Falun Gong and genocide at a time of financial crisis, with China holding large numbers of U.S. bonds. So the story continues to founder under the lead weight of American political and journalistic apathy. At least the Europeans have given it some air. They can afford to. They aren't the leader of the free world.

On the bright side: Falun Gong harvesting appeared to have been shut down by the government during the Beijing Olympics. Obviously they wanted to avoid any uncomfortable situations.

And now that the Olympics are over?

Both the Taiwanese doctors who investigate organ harvesting and those who arrange transplants for their Taiwanese patients agree on one point: The closing ceremony of the Olympics made it once again open season for harvesting.

Critics will say there is not conclusive evidence. And there never will be, not when numbers are only estimates at best, when no surgeons or witnesses can come forward, when the Party has become so good at "eliminating."

What happens when American journalists ignore the country that has found a new and profitable method of extermination?

McCain: 75 Percent Off

2008-11-18T08:36:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of DCist:

On the flip side, Obama merchandise has been called the biggest thing for publishing since Harry Potter.

Either way, it's a good shot at getting Christmas shopping done early this year.

2-Minute Politics

2008-11-18T08:26:00.000-08:00

Everything you ever needed to know about the final weeks of the 2008 presidential election ("even though you've been paying attention"), summed up nicely in two minutes flat.

This is some funny stuff.

Thanks to Ashley for bringing this to class one day.

Worth it.

2008-11-14T22:55:00.000-08:00

Tonight I was inspired to believe again in people, love, redemption, and Danny Boyle.

This was possibly the best eight dollars I have ever spent in my life. It's worth yours.

Straight to the Dinosaurs

2008-11-11T20:42:00.000-08:00

Today, Mitzi and I decided to take advantage of the holiday.

We got off at the Smithsonian metro stop and joined the eight grade groups at the National History Museum.

Let's skip the boring stuff, she said, saying what we were both thinking. I nodded and we walked past the Early Cell Life exhibit and headed straight for the dinosaurs, where we found ourselves staring up at a gigantic triceratops skeleton.

Mitzi peered critically at the exhibit. I don't really buy it, she said skeptically. How can we know what the dinosaurs really looked like?
I shrugged. Who knows? It sure makes a hell of a visual.

And besides, she added, pointing to an excavation exhibit, those tools aren't even real.

We followed middle schoolers and moms with strollers around the museum, stopping for only the most exciting things---Rastafaris with dreads in the African Voices exhibit (Mitzi squealed a few times), gigantic preserved squids in the Ocean Hall, tigers and giraffes and such in the Mammal Exhibit (where we argued about which animals were stuffed and which were fakes), and of course, the Hope Diamond. Who needs Tiffany's when we have the Museum of Natural history?

When we were thoroughly bored of natural things, we made our way to the Hishhorn Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, where everything was very quiet and serious and artsy and definitely unnatural. After a scare by a bored security man who told us the cameras had caught us and we needed to follow him to the control room (it was supposed to be a joke), we decided we'd had enough of museums for one day.

But we learned a lot in the process. Namely, that fierce prehistoric creatures are fun to look at any old day, and live video footage of orcas attacking baby whales should have a rating attached to it, and you should never buy coffee from that entertainment shack next to the carousel on the Mall.

Oh, and that there's nothing wrong with skipping the boring stuff and going straight to the dinosaurs. Who are we kidding? We're still kids, after all.

It's Already Over?

2008-11-09T19:22:00.000-08:00

Aside from being a giant "that's what she said" (I couldn't resist), it's the question that professional blogger Nick Carr seems to have answered about the fate of the blogosphere:

Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there's good reason for the teeth-gnashing. While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there's still a "blogosphere." That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they're part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

Isn't this the opposite of what they're telling us?

What Really Happened?

2008-11-07T12:11:00.000-08:00

I remember driving to work every morning last summer, listening to NPR and BBC World News as increasingly detailed accounts of the Russian attacks in Georgia came in. It was hard to get a clear picture of what was going on at the time, even when every news source was flashing blurbs about the war.

Enter the crisis on Wall Street and the emergence of Sarah Palin, and domestic issues took center stage again.

Today, the New York Times revisited the story, this time with new information about what really happened this summer.

TBILISI, Georgia — Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

Georgia moved forces toward the border of the breakaway region of South Ossetia on Aug. 7, at the start of what it called a defensive war with separatists there and with Russian forces.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

Yesterday's story suggested that Georgia's military forces fired more cluster bombs than imagined--some of which may have actually missed targets and hit Georgian villages.

Media coverage tended to center on Russian attacks throughout the brief conflict, giving special coverage to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's call for the country to remove its troops from Georgian villages.

Why are we just now beginning to question Georgia's actions and intentions?

Worth a Thousand Words

2008-11-05T11:58:00.001-08:00

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

Remember Remember, the Fifth of November.

2008-11-05T09:49:00.000-08:00

The mood here today is less frenzied than last night, but still excited.
People who danced in the streets all night long are in suits today, back at the office. Students are in class. Voices are hoarse from chanting "Yes we can," "Yes we did," "Yes we will."

Last night, I watched history in the making. I spent the final countdown hours at Bus Boys and Poets with hundreds of Obama supporters, all settling in with their laptops and iphones to track the progress of the polls, which were being shown on every TV screen. The line to get in stretched around the outside of the building for hours. People pressed their faces against the glass to check the TV screen. No one was willing to give up their seat, including me.

When the news came in, the place exploded. People were clapping, cheering, crying. Everyone hugged everyone. People got out their cell phones and called friends and loved ones with tears in their eyes. The cooks and servers burst out of the kitchen, banging pots and pans together. There were people standing on chairs, dancing on tables, beside themselves with happiness.

A woman turned to me and said, "Do you feel it?"

Outside on the corner of 14th and U Sreet--the exact place where race riots broke out 40 years ago--traffic had stopped in the streets. People of all ages and races were hanging out of cars, climbing on the hoods, waving American flags, dancing over the center divide.

Was this really only a presidential election?

Later, we made our way to the White House, where hundreds and hundreds of mostly college kids had gathered to bid President Bush an energetic goodbye. I've never heard the Star Spangled Banner sung so many times and with so much--well--hope.

I look forward to the next four years.