Posts (page 2)

I just love Mike Rowe:

So, on the subject of infrastructure, I've been wondering about two things:  One of them is something Mike already mentioned a bit, although I've been wondering about it from a slightly different angle.  The kinds of education programs that Obama seems to support don't really have much to do with training people for infrastructure-related jobs.  Granted some of these jobs do take a college degree (drafting, engineering, and so on require different kinds of degrees), but a lot of the jobs we most need people to fill--especially since they effectively cannot be outsourced--require apprenticeships rather than college of any kind (although some apprenticeships do have some technical school courses as a component).  But, as Mike points out, it's hard for Ivy League wonks to get their heads around the idea that these people who didn't go to college and work in some kind of dirty job or another have an inherently important role to play in society and can and do have meaningful lives.  I've said it a million times before, but going to college doesn't make a person smarter or their life more important or meaningful or anything, though most college-educated people like to fancy that it does.  And it seems clear to me that the last thing this fucking country needs is more people running around with lit degrees.

The other thing that has occurred to me is that Obama's big push to send people to college is really rather a setback for us, at the very least it is a setback in terms of competing with other nations.  There was a time when a high school diploma meant something.  It meant you were educated enough to be a functional citizen and capable of doing or learning most jobs.  It doesn't mean that anymore.  Now, so often in this country, you need some kind of college papers--even if it's just a two-year degree.  Effectively this means that we need a minimum of 20 years to turn out functional, employable people, where most other European and Asian nations only need 18.  There are, of course, further ramifications, including the ever-increasing need for remedial classes (only most colleges aren't supposed to call them that anymore, lest anyone be made to feel badly about themselves).  Since a college education, even at a university that offers advanced degrees, so often begins from a level that should have been mastered sometime in high school--and, believe me, some of the remedial composition classes start at levels that should have been mastered by the sophomore year of high school--the level of discourse in all classes is lowered (except, in my experience, some of the less popular disciplines.  Philosophy professors still seem to hold to a basic, if outdated, idea that if you don't understand the material, it's most likely your fault and you probably just need to study harder). 

The problem is that nobody really seems to know how to fix our public schools, do they?  Well, there are some ideas--even a few that I support--but it's all very political, and no idea that might actually work is ever going to happen.  So, what the hell?  Give up and see if we can just push more people through college.  For our kids, we're planning to use a combination tactic that includes homeschooling and some time in the paramilitary schools of Japan (kiritsu!).  Right now and for the next couple of years, my son goes to public school, but we supplement at home with our own program (his preschool is doing a good job teaching him phonics, so right now we're focused on science, arithmetic, and learning to read Japanese).

But anyway.  Today is one of those great days when I just don't care about the news, and thank goodness, because it's fucking dismal.  None of it--not Chris Dodd, not the breathtaking incompetence at the Treasury Department, none of it--is going to bother me today.  Because today was a beautiful day, and we took a stroll through the garden (the snow is all melted for now), and there is not only spinach coming up already but also the rhubarb is pushing up through the mud and mulch, and it's looking like a good year for rhubarb.  We're already dreaming of the rhubarb cake and cobbler and jam.  Oh, yum.  I guess spinach and rhubarb are related, right?  That's why they're our first two performers.  Oh, well, there is also radicchio, but I never know what to do with it anymore since my husband has decided he hates it.  And so, with the prospect of new fresh food on the way, we're starting our yearly push to empty out the pantry and freezer.  Tonight I'm putting a compote of dried fruits in the crock-pot.  We'll eat it for breakfast, and it should use up some of the fruit I dried last year.  Yum. 

On that note, I just finished reading Consuming Passions:  The Anthropology of Eating.  Interesting stuff.  That stuff you hear about how the Asian concept of "meal" is, basically, "rice" is true, at least for my husband.  He can eat a big spaghetti dinner and not feel full until he's gone and had a nice bowl of sticky white rice. The thing is that, for him, it's not just rice, but white rice, and not just white rice, but Japanese white rice.  The jasmine rice doesn't quite cut it, and if I make brown rice for dinner (as I often do, because I think it tastes good), he still needs some white rice after.  It's really weird.  I was talking about it with my mom (she's the one I borrowed the book from) and we were talking about what might be like "rice" for an American.  I speculated that it might be bread, but I actually think now that for most Americans, it's meat (and especially if you can expand your definition of meat to include eggs).  I think the American conception of a meal revolves around the meat, whatever meat it is.  Mine doesn't really, although I guess I usually assemble meals based on what's going to be our protein and then what will complement that, so I guess that's still the American mindset at work, because in Japan I know I cooked differently.  In Japan, I cooked more Japanese-ish, in that I thought, "OK, there's rice and there's side dishes.  Tonight for side dishes, I want X, Y, and Z side dishes."  Rice is always given, though.  I guess when I cook Japanese food now, that's how I think about it, too, but since we have access to so many different things here than we did in Japan, I only cook Japanese a couple of times a week (and almost never for breakfast, much to my husband's chagrin.  But you just can't buy natto around here). 

Now I'm re-reading a book from one of my philosophy seminars called Poor Richard's Principle by Robert Wuthnow.  I thought it would be interesting to re-read it in light of the current state of the economy, and it is.  I know when I read it the first time around I severely underestimated the importance of it.  Not "important" in the sense that it's going to make some big difference in the world, because, yes, I know:  nobody has read it.  But "important" in the sense that they probably should.

One final thing:  I've been reading on another site a debate about abstinence-only education versus comprehensive sex education, and people have been citing these statistics that purport to show that "abstinence education doesn't work."  To me, what they seem to show is that there is not much difference in the behaviors or attitudes between students who receive abstinence-only ed and those who receive comprehensive sex education (although every study shows something different, so who the hell knows?).  To my mind, that doesn't mean that "abstinence ed doesn't work"--it means neither of them "works."  I mean, I see that the point is that abstinence-only education doesn't cause extraordinary abstinence.  But that doesn't mean that comprehensive sex ed, then, must work better, just because we've set that up as the opposite.  As far as I can tell, it doesn't have a great impact on when kids start having sex or even how likely they are to use protection routinely.  In other words, I think this is a totally false debate.  Neither "works."  This is not at all surprising given the completely mixed signals kids get from our culture as a whole.

Meh.  Anyway.  Fruit compote! 

Well, it was bound to happen.

And if fetuses are OK, then why not infants?  Peter Singer has already gone there, basically, so what's stopping us?

The problem with calling the slippery slope a logical fallacy is that it's something more than just a logical fallacy.  It also happens--a lot.  This is why people, at least those of us who are still old-fashioned enough to be concerned with things like morality, worry about whether allowing X will lead to Y.  With embryonic stem cell research, the first concern is that we are making a decision--however we euphemistically describe it--that either the blastocysts aren't "alive" and therefore warrant no moral consideration at all (also the stance many of the extreme pro-choicers take, as I've argued before, although I don't think that's how *most* pro-choicers feel), or, alternatively, that this life just isn't worth as much as the life of someone with Alzheimer's who may someday be cured by those stem cells.  Either way, we've made a moral decision, and because we are too cowardly to admit it, we have no language available to determine why this case is allowable but another, similar case might not be.  So, fetuses were bound to be the next step, and we will again hear argument that this must be done to help those who need kidney transplants and, anyway, these products of abortion would be *wasted*  It's really no different from organ donation, right?  Except that these fetuses had no say in the matter, but since we've already pushed fetuses outside the realm of moral consideration (via the abortion "debate," among other things), then that doesn't matter.

What's interesting to me in all this--or, one of the interesting things--is that the notion that we can or should find a cure for every disease and save everyone's life is taken as given.  One reason I find this interesting is that some of the same people who apparently have no moral concerns with the idea (if not, certainly, the reality) of extending human life as long as possible speak rather viciously about those of us who have decided to have children.  The decision of whether or not to have children, and if so, how many, is supposed by some to be a kind of cost-benefit analysis in which the overall cost of the child to the planet and to society's systems is to be considered a major factor.  The decision, on the other hand, of whether to prolong the lives of the sick and the elderly is apparently not.  I guess the sick and the elderly aren't responsible for any fossil-fuel use.  Or death is only bad if it occurs in someone who already knows how to talk.  Or something.  I really don't see any logical or ethical consistency there.

And, yeah, it's totally because I have something against people with kidney damage, and I just want to see them suffer.  Totally.  At least, that's how simple minds will read this, I'm sure (just like if you have any moral qualms about abortion, or at least about the way it gets framed, you must be anti-abortion, right?  Right!).  It's just that there actually is a complex moral question being hidden by a debate that purports to be value-neutral and only concerned with "science."  This is misleading at best.

Worse, though, is that by covering up what we're really talking about, we don't have the moral language (or the cojones) left to put the brakes on the real-life slippery slope when we want to.  That's one reason why social conservatives are right to be concerned about it, and, yes, it does matter, unless you're comfortable with a gradual speed up in the slide to nihilism. 

I think Eric Holder was mostly wrong in his assessment of our ability to talk about race.  For my money, we talk about race more than is really helpful.  But we sure the fuck are a nation of cowards when it comes to talking about morality.  The Christian right is comfortable with it, but they do it far too rigidly and often hypocritically (not that the left is less hypocritical in most cases).  Actually, we're worse than cowards because what we're usually trying to cover up is that we prefer one moral choice over another because it's either more convenient for us or for some other baldly self-interested consideration (e.g., once we're old enough to do so, we all fear disease and death, especially horrible ones like Alzheimer's.  Rather than cope with those fears on an adult level, we have any number of devices to cover over our fears and push them away, and if it means we can't find a way to stop the slide to infanticide (not that we have to slide very far for that one--we have more than enough infanticide, and instead of just letting those babies get thrown away, we should totally harvest their kidneys, and then throw them away), then so be it.  We just won't talk about it, and then it will go away.  Much easier that way.  

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/10/opinion/edstem.php

Yeah, God forbid we should worry about morals!  Who fucking cares about morals anymore? 

Nevermind, of course--OF COURSE--that this decision is not value-free.  In the background is an implicit moral decision, to wit that life can be created and destroyed in the cause of possible medical and scientific advancement.  That is a moral decision, albeit one that many people find immoral.  Of course, PETA and the vegetarians would find it immoral if, instead of human embryos, this discussion was about rats and chimps.  Christ--now I've made myself think of Peter Singer, unwittingly, and my blood is aboil.  He, of course, has become so desensitized to the notion that human life has any worth at all that he thinks the right to abortion should extend to some time after birth, essentially to infanticide.  But, hey, what's the difference, right? 

But something is being lost here.  We, as a people, are losing the ability to talk about morality and make moral decisions.  Those crazy ideologues in the Christian conservative movement are right that we're losing our sensitivity to subtle moral distinctions.  That's why any criticism of abortion seems to automatically mean that you're not pro-choice, which is just fucking ridiculous.  How did Americans get so bloody Manichean?  The left criticized GWBush for that all the time, but they're just as bad.  The left feels it necessary to talk about embryos and fetuses as if they aren't alive.  So, I guess a beating heart and spontaneous movement aren't enough to make something "alive." 

Look, I don't mean that it's necessarily wrong to do this research.  My point is that this decision does imply a moral choice, and I don't know why we should pretend otherwise.  To do so just takes us further and further away from a point where we're able to publicly discuss morality at all.  Maybe most Americans are content to be a society without morals, but for me, it's disgusting beyond words. 

Obama, you're one arrogant son of a bitch, man.  In that, you are no different from your immediate predecessor.  I suppose that's what it takes to want to be president.  Jesus effin Christ.  I just want to rip my hair out.

You know what?  Fuck it.  I do secede.  Fuck this miserable collection of undereducated, arrogant, self-righteous, whiny zealots who call themselves Americans.  The past few weeks I have been utterly blinded by disgust at the citizenry of this nation.  What a bunch of dumbfucks.  But the worst kind of dumbfucks--dumbfucks who think they know everything.  Dumbfucks who want to be relieved of every sort of responsibility but who want more and more "rights" not that 90% of our population has any real conception of what that word means, just that we know we're supposed to have them and lots of them.  Nevermind that we have become incapable of even basic moral reasoning.  We have also become ignorant of our own history--apparently completely so.  Yet worse, we seem to have become completely incapable of the kind of fundamental self-reflection that might enlighten us when we're being hypocritical jackasses.  Right now, I am especially enamored of the people who claim to want science and reason to guide our society but then do incredibly stupid shit like refuse to vaccinate their kids, making some kind of bogus claim that vaccinations "weaken their immune systems" or something equally ignorant.  Where the fuck did you people come from?  How do you even manage to function?  Why am I supposed to believe that you are overworked and overstressed when you seem to have endless hours to sit around at work and update your goddamned Facebook status? 

Eh.  I just went on a long rant about some of the things that have been filling me with such rage and disgust lately, but it's not worth it.  It's just pointless.  I completely give up on this stupid, rotten country.  Or at least the people who inhabit it. 

We tell white lies every day, but have you ever told a big lie, and if so, why did you do it? Confess!
Submitted by Sophie.

Well, what the hell.  I guess I can talk about it, though I'm not very proud of it.  I'm a liar.  I lie all the time.  Big ones, small ones.  I lie for no reason at all most of the time.  Although I can somewhat trace the origins of this behavior, I don't really know why I do it.  I don't do it (usually) to keep myself out of trouble.  It's more like a game, like to see if anyone will notice.  Usually, people don't.  Partly, it's because a lifetime of routine practice has made me really good at it.  Partly, it's also that since I have some weird things going on with my affect--I believe I have said here before that my emotional functions are not all optimized, or something like that, and they're not; they malfunction routinely, worse than Windows even--my affect lies with me.  Er...if you see what I mean.  My affect is so good at this by now, too, that I wouldn't be surprised if I could fool Robert DeNiro's character in Meet the Parents.  And a big part of it I've come to realize is that most people won't notice most lies because most people will believe what they want to believe--and even hear what they want to hear--anyway, no matter what comes out of my mouth.

Other than my parents, though, I don't lie to people I love.  Well, sometimes I fail to tell them things which they might or might not consider important.  My mother calls these "lies of omission."  But for the most part, I think I'm pretty good with people I care about.  I try to be.  It's a little bit like breaking a lifetime bad habit, though, as if lying were some kind of narcotic.  I suppose it is, in its way, some kind of archaic defense mechanism that just became a reflex.

I try not to lie to my parents anymore, either, but of course that's where this whole business began, so it's especially hard to break that habit.  Like I said, it's usually not to keep myself out of trouble or anything, though.  It's just all very stupid. 

I don't lie on GinBaby either, for what it's worth.

I suppose I've told some big lies, although most of the lies I can remember telling are inconsequential, unless you buy the Kantian argument that any instance of lying degrades the ultimate truth value of language--which in a post-Derridean world seems a little goofy anyway, no?

Hmmmm...so I think the big confession here is really that I lie habitually and with little rhyme or reason.  Or I used to.  I don't do it so much anymore because when you think about it, it's a rather ridiculous habit.  I don't think there are any really big lies to confess to per se.  Seems like a bit of a letdown, no? 

If you had to teach something, what would you teach?

The fact is that I do teach something.  It isn't as easy to teach someone to do something as you might think.  It isn't as easy as being able to do that thing yourself.  Teaching is a completely separate skill.

I actually just got a real-life job teaching adult ESL here.  We've needed an adult ESL program here for a long time, but the funding for it just materialized from god-knows-where, and I was hired, despite the fact that my baby is due one week after class ends.  At the informational meeting, only 6 people showed up, and I was a little worried that it wouldn't go, but at the first class, we had 16 people and at least one more who wants to come.  All my students are from Mexico, mostly central Mexico. 

It's weird.  Not that they're from Mexico.  I mean, I grew up in New Mexico and nobody really thinks to segregate the whites from the Mexicans.  That's for a lot of reasons, a lot of things that are different there than they are up here.  In this town, the population is nearly half from Mexico, but they're recent immigrants.  Both "sides" seem to want to stop the de facto segregation (it's not a physical segregation at all--there's no "Mexican part of town" unless you count the apartments that are state-subsidized and meant to house "agricultural workers" which apparently only means "Mexican agricultural workers".  Everyone's kids go to the same school, mainly because there is only one.  But outside of school functions and the annual Easter egg hunt, the two halves of town don't interact at all.  It's creepy).  My students' main concern in coming to ESL class is that they'd like to be able to just interact and maybe even make some friends outside of their immediate social circle.  Basically they have access to all government services and so forth in Spanish, but this combined with the fact that they live among Spanish-speaking friends and family means they don't make a lot of progress in conversational English and any time they have to use English is almost panic-inducing for some of them.  From what they're telling me, I think that the government money that is currently used to translate everything into Spanish and to provide free translation services--well, at least some portion of that money would be better spent hiring more ESL teachers to provide free classes to adults who want to come and can come.  The way we're doing things right now is serving mostly to keep recent adult immigrants sidelined and pigeonholed and without much of a chance to integrate.  I keep wondering what my students do when they're faced with an emergency.  I mean, even the hospitals here have translation services, but no translation service or translated pamphlet can cover everything that can happen. 

Anyway, it's nice for me to have a real-life job and not always be sitting around my computer.  The situation in the country and certainly in the public discourse is really intolerable to me and filling me with rage and hatred and dampening my natural joie de vivre.  The computer just exacerbates the negativity.  A roomful of Mexican ladies talking about SpongeBob, though, that's a totally different story.

I'm also teaching my son the fundamentals of reading, arithmetic, and some science, mostly as it pertains to baking.  You can learn a lot of science through baking, although he still doesn't believe me that yeast are alive and that they leaven breads by eating sugars and producing, um, gaseous emissions.  I think it would help if he could really see the yeast move around some, but all he sees is the magic.

Show us your favorite food from the country of your heritage.
Submitted by MexicanRobot.

I couldn't really swear that it's my favorite, but it's certainly the native American food I'm most craving right now.  The country of my heritage is America.  I am sure there are Americans who can still trace their descent back to one county, but I wouldn't think that most of us can.  I'm mostly Irish, and since we're fairly recent immigrants and since we settled in the South and were poor dirt farmers, we didn't mix with other ethnicities as much as we might have elsewhere.  There is possibly some Scottish and a stray German or two in the mix.  There are also at least two different Indian tribes mixed up with us, the Quapaw and the Osage. 

So, like I said, the country of my heritage is America.  One of the things I love about America is that being American has nothing to do with your ethnic background or race or any kind of language or religion that's holding us together.  I don't know what is holding us together anymore, and maybe there never was anything except happenstance.  It once seemed to me that the thing that was supposed to be holding us together was a basic agreement about the ideals that America was founded on--which, admittedly, need constant vigilance to maintain and improve--and ideas about what constitutes a good life, but increasingly it seems to be something much less. 

The Navajo taco is native to my home country--not just America, but Southwest America.  It's also good eats.  If you find yourself in the Four Corners region, stop in at some dubious looking roadside stand and have one.  What the heck?  Since you're enjoying a Navajo taco, listen to the Navajo radio station for a while.  Personally, I always found living in such proximity to the great Navajo Nation inspiring, in terms of what it means to be an American.  Kind of like growing up amongst "Hispanics" who can trace their property rights back to land grants from the king of Spain.  Context is everything, and the thing I love most about New Mexican food is the way it reflects its context.  If I wanted to get all romantic about it, I might tell you that you can read the history of the American west in every bowl of pozole, but let's not exaggerate.  In most places in America, it's the minorities who feel like and are treated like interlopers.  In New Mexico, it's the white people who are the interlopers.  The Navajos won't say that to your face, of course, but there are some people up in Chama who might.

Maybe that's what I need if I'm going to stay in America, to get back to my roots. Maybe I just don't belong around white people.

This is fucking appalling.  It's appalling, abominable, despicable.  What the fuck is wrong with people anymore?  Yeah, good idea--track down everyone who disagrees with you and harass them for their opinion.  Good work.  That certainly makes you look like the righteous side here, the just side, the side I want to support. 

My favorite part:  "They believe in the will of the people if it's in tune with what they believe," said Jennifer Pizer, marriage project director of Lambda Legal, the gay rights legal organization, in Los Angeles.

She's referring to the pro-Prop 8 donors who are currently being publicized and harassed, not to the gay rights activists who are going around harassing people.  Apparently she doesn't see the irony, if such it can be called, of what she said.  Gay rights activists in this case are a prime example of people who would be happy to overthrow the will of the people since it is not in tune with what they believe.

Later, Jennifer Pizer points out that there are already laws against the death threats, vandalism, physical assaults, and so on that supporters of Prop 8 have apparently been subject to.  Indeed there are such laws.  And if I pointed out that there are already laws protecting gays from discrimination and assault--and hate crime laws that offer special protection to groups such as gays, but not to supporters of a piece of legislation--would she think that was an appropriate way to dismiss the various acts of discrimination and assault that gay people have suffered?  I doubt it very much, yet there are such laws.  The two cases are the same, but in one case, she shrugs it off, and in the other?  Right. 

What a bunch of fucking fascists.  I just don't have any sympathy for these assholes at all anymore. 

Sorry, but this is just too much.  This is a fundamental violation of the basic freedoms and rights that this country is supposed to be founded on.  And, yes, I absolutely think that people's right to believe what they believe is more important than gay couples getting a fucking tax break.  I am so done with so-called "liberals" who purport to have the open minds and the tolerance and all that crap and then show themselves to be just as closed-minded, just as intolerant and hateful and, well, criminal as anyone else.   

Uh-uh--don't even come at me with the "well, gay people have suffered harassment and assault, too."  Yeah, so that makes it OK?  So, it's like payback time?  What the fuck?  No way.  Especially not on motherfucking Martin Luther King, Jr., day.  Woo.  My rage is really making me foul-mouthed.  Sorry, MLK.  Somehow I don't think he'd approve.  But at least I haven't assaulted anyone.

Anyway.  

This essay, on the other hand, is quite good.

This isn't about the upcoming one, about which I care very little.   

I was just helping a student with an essay about Lincoln's Second Inaugural, a great speech if ever there was one.  The student, clearly a deep thinker, mentioned that Lincoln's tone seemed "sad." 

What makes me sad is that we're still fighting this war.  Not the slavery part, because despite the assumptions of Northerners and Californians, Southerners do not still fly the Confederate flag because of some lingering hope to reinstitute slavery.  There are still white supremacists in the South, I'm sure, but there are such assholes everywhere.  Idaho has quite a number of them, and to my knowledge whites never owned slaves here (the Natives, though, that's a different story).

But the battle is still the same.  The North (now joined by the West Coast) is highly urbanized and more populous than other areas of the country and thus is essentially in control of our national politics.  Consequently, and this is part of the delusion that whatever life you happen to be leading is the right and just one, they think everyone should live like them and think like them. 

Despite Lincoln's best efforts to encourage a healing of the national wounds, we didn't get charity toward all and malice toward none.  Our better angels haven't really come out.  Despite his incredibly convincing arguments that both sides were claiming righteousness--righteousness that perhaps neither side had a justifiable claim to--and his refusal to place blame solely on either side, we haven't learned anything.  Whatever issue is being debated now, both sides claim righteousness, even as that righteousness is no longer usually rooted in religious doctrine (and, in a lot of cases, doesn't seem to be rooted in anything concrete, just such-and-such is "right."  Ask what the philosophical or other justification for this "rightness" is and you are sure to be met with hostility and confusion.  Nobody knows.  Nobody cares, frankly, except a few musty old philosophers and some religious folks).

Bah.  I want to secede.  This country has great ideas, great documents, great speeches, great natural beauty, and citizens who routinely ignore all of them. 

From Glamour Mama:

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
Grew cardoons.  Taught a class entirely online.  Recoiled at the sight of a homegrown tomato (freakin pregnancy hormones!).

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't really make resolutions at the new year.  It seems so artificial.  I keep a notebook with various goals and crap like that, and I'm doing reasonably well with them.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Well, not physically close, but some of my friends did, yes.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?
Texas.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
A fucking cocktail, man.  Lately, I've had to give up sugar, too, because while I do not have gestational diabetes, I had some warning signs that I might be headed there.   Do you know what it's like to give up gin and chocolate at the same time?  HUH??  Do you, punk? 

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
None, I guess, although I will remember this as the year that my son first went to preschool (3 hours a week), that we conceived our second child, that we accidentally stumbled into a Japanese festival in Jackson, Wyoming, and made fun of the sign for the tea room that said "Cha-dou" because we're snobby that way.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Probably the kale that wouldn't quit.  Oh, right, we got the farmer's market started, too.  I'm sure there are other things, but why dwell? 

9. What was your biggest failure?
Pregnancy-induced grumpiness.  Constant and entirely futile attempts to make people care about the rampant illogic in our political discourse.  Still cannot make myself actually like people.   

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing physical.  I believe the wounds caused from beating my head against rhetorical brick walls are entirely psychosomatic.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
If you asked my son this question, he would tell you it was the Kota the Triceratops that we bought him for Christmas.  Otherwise, I don't know.  The new washing machine is very nice, but it is, after all, just a washing machine.  We don't buy a lot of stuff other than groceries and clothes for the kid.  Oh, right, I did get a new computer for work (which is also home), and I like it a lot.  

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My husband because he's amazingly right for me.  My son because most of the time even I can't believe how well behaved, charming, and kind he is.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Most people's, especially during the election cycle.  It has occurred to me recently that we have definitely become a people who ask not what we can do for our country but what our country can do for us.  Yes, the government just owes us all, doesn't it?  My own behavior appalled me for a couple of months there at the beginning of the pregnancy, but I have an excuse...or something. 

14. Where did most of your money go?
House payments, car payments, groceries, gasoline.  I guess health insurance would be next on the list, but it's not much compared to the others.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Having another baby.  Texas.  Blackberry-mint jam.  I invented it this year, and I waxed rhapsodic.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?
Hard to pick just one.  "Chicken Fried" by the Zac Brown Band comes to mind.  I hated that song when it first came out, but it grew on me.  "Learning How to Bend" by Gary Allan, definitely, because it reminds me in some ways, as does "Roll With Me" by Montgomery Gentry, of the project I've been undertaking, especially this year, to be a better wife and mother.  Yeah, "Roll With Me" is a song to take to heart.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? about the same, I think--maybe a little calmer
b) thinner or fatter? fatter--or, really, "pregnanter"
c) richer or poorer? same

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Kept in touch with my friends and family.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Worry about people's idiotic political opinions which apparently aren't going to change anyway, no matter how carefully you spell out why they're idiotic.

20. How did you spend Christmas?
At my parents' house with my grandma.  It's quite a thing to have four generations together who can actually enjoy each other's company.  We cooked, we played games, we listened to Kota the Triceratops grumble and roar. 

21. Did you fall in love in 2008?
Yes. With my husband, about three separate times.  Sometimes people think our marriage is somehow easier than theirs.  The trick is that when we're getting bored and frustrated with each other, we make an effort to notice each other all over again.  It's always small things.  Sometimes it's just that instead of griping about what my husband isn't doing, I take a look at the fact that he's teaching my son how to hold a screwdriver or something, some tiny little thing, and I think he's wonderful, and I fall in love with him again.  I think how much we've been through--all the moves, the miscarriage, the financial stress (which has been immense at times), the Green Card, just all the shit--and how even after all of it, he still looks at me with the same unwavering devotion as always.  So, I keep falling in love with the same man, over and over.  Occasionally, I feel like I'm cheating on my husband with my husband.  It was a good year. 

22. What was your favorite TV program?
Dirty Jobs, I guess.  Oh, I like In Plain Sight a lot, too.  I'm kind of obsessed with Mary.  I've just recently got hooked on Reno 911!, too, and there is always The Colbert Report, a perennial favorite.  Jon Stewart, on the other hand--lately, I could take it or leave it. 

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Nope.  Hate is something I've given up on.

24. What was the best book you read?
Hmmm...I was actually pretty impressed by Richard North Patterson's Protect and Defend, and that's probably the book that I most remember from this year.  I either chose stupid books this year or else my tastes are just changing, because there were actually a few books this year that I didn't even bother finishing.  I also reread a lot of books this year and discovered that my passions for Jorge Amado and Izumi Kyoka remain intact--nevermind that, as an American, I'm not supposed to read foreign literature.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
That approximately one-third of my CDs go entirely unloved and unlistened-to.

26. What did you want and get?
Pregnant.

27. What did you want and not get?
An ice cream maker.   

28. What was your favorite film of this year?
We don't watch movies, generally, until they're a couple of years old.  I think the only 2008 movie we actually saw in 2008 was "Tropic Thunder" which we liked.  Oh, "Get Smart"...?  We just saw that.  What year is that from?  Whatever.  Does Colbert's Christmas special count?  That was fucking brilliant.  Colbert and Stewart singing about Hanukkah is good times. 

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
We went to Jackson, Wyoming, where we stumbled into a Japanese fire festival, which was pretty cool.  That is also when we learned that a Toyota Yaris is just not equipped to deal with mountain passes.  There is something to be said for a powerful engine.  I turned 34.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Being able to continue eating the garden produce up til the end of it.  The pregnancy could have been timed better.  I was so fatigued and crappy and nauseous that I did not get in most of my end-of-summer chores, and so we now find our store of pickles somewhat wanting.  Green tomatoes went to waste because I had not the energy to deal with them.  For an Arkansas girl, letting green tomatoes go to waste is something akin to blasphemy.  *sigh*  Maybe next year, though with an infant and a wild preschooler, I don't know.  I already talked about it with my husband and we're already thinking up ways to make the food preservation deal as easy on me as possible for next year.  If more shit gets frozen instead of canned and for one bleeping year we waste some electricity to freeze it, so be it.  I have bigger fish to fry.  Besides, apparently Idaho gets less of its electricity from coal than the national average, so perhaps I can quit blaming myself every time I think about the devastation of Appalachia.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
Grass stains.

32. What kept you sane?
If anything did, it would be my husband.  I love my son so much it's indescribable, but my husband keeps me as sane as possible.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I realized that I have a crush on Mike Rowe.  And I fancy Kal Penn rather like I fancy a pint of Ben and Jerry's.  So yummy. 

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Just the general hypocrisy, name-calling, and illogic rampant on both sides of every issue.  Mostly, I don't want to talk to people anymore because if they're talking about anything remotely political, I feel an almost compulsive need to point out every logical flaw in what they're saying.  It's a personal failing, I know, but it's making me (probably literally) insane.  Especially, I expected more from Jon Stewart.  He's been a big disappoinment on the ideological-hypocrisy issue.

35. Who did you miss?
John and Kurt.  That's nothing new.  I miss them every year since about 2001.  Oh, and Shmuel--been missing him a lot lately, too.  We all just live too far apart now.  Bulgaria?  Oregon?  What is that all about?

36. Who was the best new person you met?
Diane.  I actually think I met her in 2007, but I've just recently started getting to know her, and she's a great person.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
People think they deserve a lot more than they actually do without being thankful for most of what they have.  Ideologies are, at root, all the same and eventually become fundamentalist and rigid and equally frightening.  Anytime you close your mind off to the possibility that you're wrong, you're fucking doomed.  At some point, I let "depressed" become my normal mental condition, and that's just stupid.  People see what they want to see.  I learned a long time ago that going to college doesn't mean that you're smarter or more thoughtful or, certainly, more worthwhile as a person, but I just realized this year that most Americans who have gone to college really do think that it does, just like people who live in cities think they're smarter because they live in cities.  That shit blows my mind. I guess the life lesson is that people will go to extraordinary lengths of self-delusion to convince themselves that they're better than other people. 

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
Pretty much all of this, except the parts about going to church, because we don't.