Charlie

I get to go see Audra today! I've been looking forward to this trip all month. Vegas: You're in charge while I'm away. Try to behave yourself.

C: Jeez, first yours, then my brother's, then my dad's, then your mom's. Lots of September birthdays!
A: September babies are common.
C: I guess.
A: It is because December is a good month for staying in bed.
C: Every month is a good month for that, dear. :) December just isn't good for anything else.

I've had a hard time reading the news about healthcare legislation, lately. I'm very interested in where this goes, but the progress of the debate, and the coverage around it, have really made my skin crawl.

( Here's why... )

I'll probably have more to say on this later. For the last five years, I've been working in the industry of administering and auditing public healthcare programs here in the U.S., so I do have a little perspective on what's right and wrong with those programs, and the industry around them. For the moment, though, my strongest reaction is just revulsion. We have prevented a debate that we needed to have.

Interesting segment on yesterday's Democracy Now, about the drug war in Mexico. Their guest, journalist Charles Bowden, did a great job connecting U.S. drug policy with the human rights situation in Mexico. This piece struck me as a prime example of what alternative news outlets do best.

Second, I bitch at my senator enough to be on his mailing list, and there was a line from his latest email blast that made me smile: Talking about building up Nevada's clean energy industry, he said "Our solar, wind and geothermal resources can provide jobs for generations of Nevadans..."

That's a really pretty way of saying how much blazing hot, wind-blasted, uninhabitable wasteland is just outside our back door, here in Nevada. I get a kick out of seeing that become a precious resource, all of a sudden.

Hey, I haven't updated this thing in about 4 weeks, have I? Life's still good! I just finished my English class and school is awesome. Just at the moment, I'm in Seattle with Audra, riding the Bainbridge ferry, just for the fun of it. Back Sunday. If you're lucky. :)

On Saturday, I went to a party thrown by my buddy Chris, who I've worked with for the last couple of years. She was celebrating being finished with the treatments for breast cancer she's been going through, for most of the past year - I can only rely on other people's descriptions of that process, thank God, but ending it sure sounds like a good occasion to celebrate, and she went all out. There was a bouncy house, guys. No fooling. More specifically, she called it a Thank You party, from her, to all the people she considered her moral support during the treatments. I thought that was sweet - Chris is, among other things, a very tough person, outwardly, so I think she just wanted to be sure and say 'thanks for being there' in a way that no one could miss.

The party itself was interesting - she invited people from a few different circles she runs in, so there were a lot of new people to meet. But around the fourth or fifth Komen Foundation/pink ribbon/"Peace - Love -Ta-tas" t-shirt that I saw, I was struck with what a moment it's become for breast cancer, lately.

I mean, you really can't throw a stone without hitting one of those ribbons these days, can you? There is a lot of campaigning going on, and it's an odd thing, sometimes. (I mean, really - is someone 'on the fence' about cancer? I there someone who is not, strictly speaking, aware of this disease?) Fundraising for research is going on, obviously, but there's something else happening, too, and it's fascinating, to me: people are actually out campaigning for compassion, and trying to end the isolation that so often accompanies severe illness. That's not a vocabulary we use much among strangers, in this culture, and I am fascinated by the way the conversation is unfolding.

And most surprising of all, it's having an effect. I am cold on imagining heroism where only misfortune has actually happened, and breast cancer awareness campaigns do teeter on that line, occasionally. But, I approve whole-heartedly of anything that lets hurt people look past their own pain, and place themselves in a bigger story. And I'm amazed by the change that's come about in the experience of cancer, just in the last decade or two. It's gone from something that happens in a tiny little hospital room, cut off entirely from the rest of human life, to something that can be the subject of public discussion - even a party. That's an accomplishment, isn't it?

When I was in kindergarten, a teacher once asked me 'what does your father do?' And my answer, as mom still likes to reminisce, was 'he reads me the Sunday funnies.' What? It seemed like a perfectly relevant answer, at the time. If she'd asked me his job, I would've told her he was an aerial photographer, and yes, I could spell it. But reading me comics from the Tulsa paper on Sunday mornings was, to my mind, a much more important part of his weekly routine. He was introducing his son to the power of small, short-cycle local publishing. And it worked. I've grown up with a healthy reverence for newspapers. I have friends in the business, and occasionally heroes. Hell, I was at the Review-Journal's last Christmas party. I respect the paper.

And I'm only telling you this so it won't sound like a grudge, when I say that the newspaper industry has been the sole architect of its own demise. I am genuinely sorry to see them disappearing. The loss of an outlet is very real. But there's something in the way the industry is trying to eulogize itself, lately, that sets my bullshit detector off. Here it is, in paraphrase:

"The mission of the local newspaper is to provide citizens with responsive, original reporting on issues of relevance to their community. Unfortunately, we were unable to remain competitive in the face of competition from the internet."


The problem is, both statements can't be true. If Craigslist beat you at your own game, then your game was not journalism. Sure, their business model was broken. Well, welcome to the century. If these companies had so much faith in the product they were selling to readers, they could have monetized that value. People will gladly pay for a newspaper - Ask any 7-11 cashier. But the industry didn't make any effort to change the game, ever. Readers were the product, not the customer. They assumed that people would buy the paper, no matter how hard it became to find the news content (or for that matter, the funnies) beneath all the ads, or how many local reporters they dumped in favor of one more wire-service column - and they were wrong.

In short, they died because they offered so little to the reader, they lost relevance to advertisers. Only, now they're crying about all of us local non-subscribers, who just didn't love democracy enough to support our local paper. Is anybody else offended by that?

Yeah, I'm kind of on a kick, this week. This is a very simple 'freehand' example of a tesselation, one of the really hard kinds of origami. The good news is, they always look awesome in photographs.

Welcome, three-day weekend!

There's a change in our culture since 9/11 that often strikes me as an unmarked loss: The word hero used to mean a person who had accomplished something especially valorous or inspirational. And shortly after - I could probably pinpoint the day, if I had to, it changed and split into two phrases. Our heroes is now shorthand for a certain group of professions (police, military, firefighters,) and hero, all by itself, seems to mean someone willing to subscribe to a certain new idea of civic responsibility. A lame idea, at that - one where a bumper sticker or a rubber bracelet is considered 'action', and where we pretend that meaningless curtailments of civil rights are okay, as long as they make people feel safe. Call it civil obedience, if you like. But I'm offended to see a perfectly good word misappropriated.

I'm especially reminded of this, a few times a year, when I donate blood. 'Hero' is the catchword of their marketing campaign to potential donors, and it really grates on me. I don't mind cheapening the word to include me, per se, but 'someone who bleeds when you stick them' is setting the bar a little low.

On the plus side: This incredibly cute waitress gave me her number when I was out for dinner, and that cheered me right the hell up. So, a pint low and seven digits richer. I'll call it a day. :)