Do Your Homework...Go to Jail

Recently, I posted about my dismay at the way all discussion about the Virginia Tech shooter seemed to hinge on the question of whether we should have known that he was a danger to others, with inadequate thought about the human being who was obviously living in an emotional state most of us are fortunate enough never to experience. My post came largely in response to a comment I'd read from someone else asking why the student hadn't been suspended from school--as if getting him out of one particular place would have somehow helped in the greater scheme of things.

On Thursday, the Chicago Tribune ran an astonishing story about a high school student who wrote a "disturbing" paper for his creative writing class. This student wasn't suspended either. He was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

I'm sure it's not relevant, but the student's last name is Lee. Right, like Bruce Lee. Draw your own conclusions.

Astonishingly, Cary Police Chief Ron Delelio reportedly said that disorderly conduct "can also apply when someone's writings can disturb an individual."

Damn. I hope Brett Easton Ellis never visits Illinois. Or Stephen King, even. Or what about Ken Kesey? I think he might be dead, so he's probably safe from arrest, but has ever a more disturbing story been told than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? I didn't think so.

Fortunately, it's just a misdemeanor with a maximimum penalty of 30 days and a maximum fine of $1,500, so for an up-ando-coming writer (or even an established one), the press might be worth the inconvenience. For a reported straight-A high school student in a smallish town in Illinois, I'm not thinking it will pay off quite so well.

So I'm not a Big Fan of Blogs...But I love Disney Princesses

Let's overlook for a moment the fact that I have five personal blogs and eight professional ones. It's all in a day's work, mostly. I'm not a big fan of blogs. That is, I don't get why a lot of the people who blog blog, and I don't get why a lot of people who talk all the time about how they don't like to blog start blogs, and I REALLY don't get why people read blogs. I mean, industry blogs are one thing. Blogs that provide commentary on recent developments in your field, blogs that provide little informational bulletins about things you need to know about...that I get. I guess if you're a teenager and your favorite rock star has a blog and you don't realize that he actually pays some PR person to write the blog for him and doesn't even know what it says, then you might have an inclination to read the blog. But just wandering the internet reading about how other bloggers burned their toast this morning or had a revelation while stuck in traffic or wish they'd remembered to kiss their husbands goodbye?

Um.

Yeah.

This evening, though, I ran across a blog post about Disney Princesses.

Let me just say that I have deep appreciation for Disney Princesses. DEEP. It's not that I especially like them (or even that I did when I was a child). It probably comes as no surprise to you that I'm not much of a romantic. "Someday My Prince Will Come" is not exactly my theme song. I find happily ever after sort of unlikely, and there's a part of me that thinks it would be sort of cloying even if it turned out to be true. Okay, a big part.

So why the love of Disney Princesses?

It's not the gowns (though I really like the pink one Cinderella has on BEFORE the fairy godmother got involved...I always thought her own dress was better than the magical one).

And it's not the veracity for sure, because I've ALWAYS been bothered by the fact that everything ELSE turned back to what it was before at midnight, but the glass slippers remained. Oh, sure, I told myself it was because they were the only wholly created item, while everything else was some other item or creature in disguise, but I didn't really buy it.

It's this: I have an eleven-year-old daughter. Eleven. You know, BALANCED ON THE VERY FINE LINE BETWEEN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE? And she loves Disney Princesses. She's occasionally tempted by Green Day posters and such, but thus far she has eschewed them in favor of keeping her room Pink. Princess comforter, outrageously priced (but gorgeous) Princess blinds, Princess sheets, Princess lamp, Princess posters, some....Princess THING I can't even identify that scrolls Cinderella and the Prince across a lighted background. You get the picture. And it's a picture of a little girl's room, at least for a minute longer. It's a picture of such excitement over Cinderella III that I end up letting her open the DVD the night before her birthday so we can watch it while it's still the weekend. It's a picture of a child/teen who sometimes tries to get out of the house in make-up, but sometimes plays INSIDE in a tiara with a magic wand.

I'm a fan of Princesses, and especially Cinderella, whom I have always preferred in her apron with her hair loose and her head covered by a scarf. Frankly, until I saw this blog today, I didn't even know that the Princesses were under attack. But this lady, whomever she might be, has it covered. I don't even have to defend those Princesses. And even more surprising, I found myself reading the post before...and the one before that.

Today We're Taking On...

Content scraping. Which is really just the modern, web-based way of saying copyright infringement. I dislike copyright infringement. I dislike people and companies who opt to capitalize on (read: steal) the creative efforts of others instead of creating something their own damned selves.

That's why I so enjoyed this post, which appeared today on two blogs...which is sort of the point. The original post appears here: The Injury Blog

The premise of the post is that another site, InjurySite dot com, has been stealing the Injury Blog's content on a daily basis for months. And the proof is in the posting. Because the InjurySite dot com's blog has a surprising post heading up its front page today...the headline reads ENTIRE INJURY SITE BLOG SCRAPED FROM TOTAL INJURY BLOG. It's worth checking out, just for a laugh, but you'll have to type in the URL. I'm not giving the lousy thieves an inbound link to help jack up their search ranking--not even one from a little personal blog with no page rank.

The remainder of the post explains that Total Injury employs a staff of designers, researchers, writers, even attorneys to produce its website, whereas the Injury Site simply steals the content produce by Total Injury and puts it on their blog without reading it. In fact, the post says, if you're reading this on the Injury Site, then you KNOW they're not even reading their own content...and as of this posting, you can read all about the shady practices the Injury Site engages in...right on the front page of the Injury Site.

Buying a Gun? Bring a Friend!

In the wake of the most recent shooting tragedy, I've heard a lot of commentary that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. One writer suggested that "greed" had kept university officials from taking proper action, because a student with this kind of emotional problems shouldn't have been allowed to continue to attend. That may or may not be true, but it's difficult for me to understand how taking a mentally and emotionally unstable young man and kicking him out of school might have made him less dangerous. Tell me someone should have taken more action to intervene, to get him mental health services, and maybe I'll agree. Frankly, I don't know enough about the specifics of his behavior (and neither do you) to know what was reasonable under the circumstances, but those sorts of reactions seem natural. There are plenty of people after the fact to talk about how "off" his behavior was in various ways, and it seems like that's always the case.

And then, of course, everyone says, "We never thought he'd do anything like THIS!"

Oh.

Well.

That's okay then. If you have a guy in your class or your dorm suite or working alongside you every day who seems entirely isolated ("he had no friends"), who seems immersed in violent fantasies (as suggested by fellow writing students and instructors), etc., etc., etc., then that's okay so long as you don't expect him to kill other people, right? I mean, surely someone would have stepped in if...um...they'd known they were at risk themselves.

But the idea that the administration should have gotten him out of the way smacks of so much more avoidance in my mind. It seems to suggest that they should have ensured that if he was going to blow up, he wouldn't kill their students.

The one thing that can't be ignored, though, is that after the fact people are always saying, "he was always a loner". So much so that it's become a kind of sick joke. Someone suggested to me this week that rather than background checks and permits and fingerprints and all that, it might make sense simply to require anyone buying a gun to bring four friends. It made me laugh in the way that unfortunate truths sometimes do, but it also made me think that maybe we're all too focused on the gun.

It's a horrible tragedy when someone implodes to the point of killing dozens of innocent people, and it makes living in our world very scary. But the sad fact is that a lot of people are living on that edge in our society, and maybe whether or not they're a threat to the rest of us isn't the biggest issue. Maybe the biggest issue is that people are living in this kind of anger and confusion and instability and desperation all around us, and we're content to observe those things about them and let them go as long as they don't present a threat to us, or to "innocent people". As if it's okay if they only hurt themselves, or only those close to them, and not something we need concern ourselves with.

As if when people tell us after the fact "he ate by himself at every meal", that's only an issue because it might have been a sign that one day he'd be a threat to the rest of us. Today, a lot of people might be thinking that they should have done or said something because this tragedy could have been averted. But would those same people ever have had the same thoughts if the only tragedy were that a young man passed through his school years having no friends, trapped in violent fantasies he spilled out in stories that scared his classmates, and eating alone every day? Would anyone even remember him?

Some Questions about the Homeless

Don't get me wrong.

Homelessness specifically and poverty in general are huge and very real problems in our country, and anyone who claims otherwise has made a conscious decision not to see the truth lest he be required to do something about it. I work downtown in one of the largest cities in the U.S., and I give away a lot of money on the street, in addition to the money I give away by mail and the money I slip into the poor box at church and....you get the point. The homeless are there. There are many, many reasons that they can't "just get a job" and stop pestering us for money. Some of those reasons include lack of contact information to write on job applications, lack of the necessary literacy to fill out job applications, lack of transportation, lack of a place to shower, lack of suitable clothing to show up to fill out a job interview, lack of access to newspapers or internet job banks (don't tell me "they can always go to the library!" You need a DRIVER'S LICENSE to use the internet connection at most libraries!), lack of proper documentation to complete I-9 forms...and much more.

Still, I'm analytical by nature. A lot of people view this as "finding fault" or "picking things apart", but it's not something I DO. It's just the way I see things. Some people love this about me, some hate it, but for better or worse, it is what it is. And so, a few things have been bothering me about the homeless downtown ever since I started my current job.

I'm not talking about the usual things like, "That guy is dressed as well as I am and clean and apparently young and healthy--what is he doing out here?" or "Why is that woman walking down those stairs when she was sitting in a wheelchair yesterday?"

No, I'm talking about real mysteries.

Things like Where do they get the markers?

You know what I'm talking about. Every homeless person on the downtown streets has a cardboard sign written in black marker. Sometimes they're written in multiple colors, which raises whole other issues, but for the time being, let's stick to black.

I work in a thirty-story office building and a lot of times I can't find a good black marker. How is it that every homeless person in town has easy access to one? And, since they're homeless, where ARE their markers while they're sitting there on the streetcorner with their signs, and no apparent marker in sight?

And, on a related note, where do they print out those full-color pictures of Jesus they have taped to their signs sometimes? (Let's leave aside for a moment why they think it's cool to use Jesus as a marketing ploy and stick to the practicalities.) I don't know about anyone else out there, but I never have color ink when I need it. I, of course, have a home, and a computer, and a printer, and a regular income, but it's not all that easy for me to print out a full-color picture...and I think twice before doing so, anyway, because it eats up so much of a cartridge that runs about $35.

So I guess the real question in my mind comes down to this: where do the homeless keep their office supplies?

It's Not About Knitting...It's About SEX!

Recently, I voted (though no opinions had been solicited) a hearty "NO" when the author of the So the Thing Is Blog wondered aloud whether her blog was becoming a knitting blog. Good news...the latest entry is about sex.

Of course, she did the whole Seinfeld thing; it doesn't SAY it's about sex. But trust me--it's about sex. And maybe it's good that it's done discreetly, because, you know, it's a family show over there. Not so this blog, so I'm going to call it like it is. She advocates, via advice from an unnamed friend, having sex twice a week as a means of improving communication in marriage.

I think it works. Of course, I'm not married, but when I was, I developed a theory that marriage was much happier and easier for everyone if you had sex every day. That's right--not twice a week, but every single day. If you gave it the same priority you gave to things like eating dinner and showing up at work and showering, it could really improve everyone's attitude. I suggested this to other married friends and at various times various of us experimented with it, and it worked. I never heard anyone say that it didn't. Interestingly enough, it seemed to make no difference whether or not one or both partners actually WANTED to be participating--the feeling of closeness increased, regardless. The tension and intolerance for little annoyances decreased, regardless. It seemed, all in all, to be the key to a happy marriage.

So why, then, doesn't everybody do it?

Partly, I suspect, it's one of those vicious circles--the worse you're getting along, the less inclined you are to make love. The less you make love, the worse you get along. And so on and so on. I think that the generally accepted view is that of course you're going to have less sex if you can't stand each other, but my absolutely non-scientific and small-scale study indicates precisely the opposite...you'll be able to stand each other if you just make it a point to have more sex.

You may have noticed that, despite having discovered the foolproof means of maintaining a happy marriage, I'm divorced. So is at least one of the friends who participated in my experiment with positive results. So what went wrong?

It's not so much a flaw in the plan as it is a balancing. It works, but is it worth it? At least some of us, obviously, decided that it wasn't. And that's pretty representative of marriage as a whole, isn't it? There are so many little things that, if we did them consistently, would significantly improve our homes and marriages and the way we live together, but we don't do them. It isn't because we don't know they would help, it's simply that we can't or don't or won't make them a priority. Maybe it's more important to be right. Maybe it's more important to get some fucking sleep. Maybe it's more important to watch the latest episode of X-Files. And maybe that's because we don't view marriage as the framework of our lives, we don't start out willing to work at it, we start out with a fairy-tale vision and never expect that a lot of times, it's going to be as much fun and require as much effort as cleaning up the bathroom after the sewers back up.

But we don't just move out of our houses when that happens, do we?

Recently, I offered the opinion that it's just too damned easy to get married. I still believe that, but Danny Bonaduce provided a surprising counterpoint to my argument this week by...getting divorced. You see, Danny Bonaduce has been married--or so I learned this week--for sixteen years. And if their story is to be believed, he's been married to a woman he didn't know, a woman he married in Vegas while he was drunk so that he could get her into bed, and who introduced herself as his wife the next morning. Sure, the marriage is ending, but they've made it longer than a lot of couples who planned their weddings in advance, stone-cold sober and for what they thought were much better reasons. That doesn't mean I think instant weddings are the way to go now, but it does go to show that if you're committed enough, you can make almost anything work. They must have had sex at least twice a week.

The Bees of Roanoke Island

Today at work, I overheard that 80% of the honeybees are missing.

It was the word "missing" that made me laugh. I know bees pollinate most of our vegetation and that it's a serious threat to the ecosystem if bees are in short supply and all that, but the idea that the bees were missing made me laugh. They weren't dying off. They weren't migrating away. They weren't failing to procreate. They were missing.

For the hell of it, I Googled "Where have all the bees gone?"

(Sorry Google. I know I'm not supposed to use Google as a verb. I like Google, and I understand trademarks, and I don't want to be a part of the gradual and unwitting move toward common usage that will steal Google's trademark from them...but "Google" is what I did.)

I got 1.48 million results for "Where have all the bees gone?", and many of the top results were local news stories. One of them said, "entire colonies stand empty..."

That's when I wrote the email to one of my co-workers with the subject line, "The Bees of Roanoke Island". He didn't think it was funny, but I couldn't help it. I wasn't WILLFULLY entertained by the imminent demise of civilization or anything like that, I just couldn't help thinking about how "entire colonies stand empty" would be received if these were people.

Well, actually, we knew. Because it happened at Roanoke Island and we're still talking about it a couple of centuries later. We're still speculating.

So forget all the gloom and doom about what's going to happen to us without the bees...let's theorize. Were they kidnapped by aliens? Killed off by a rival civilization? My personal pet theory is that they've gone off together to a remote island, where they're stockpiling pollen and plotting to take over the world once we all die off from lack of vegetation. But I'm sure there are other possibilities. And those ominous colonies standing empty are just begging for a story.

Blogging about blogging about blogs

I wrote a column once, years ago, about making money writing books about making money writing books about making money writing books. Comical as it was, it was a wholly viable plan, and the column was triggered by my realization that the author--whose name I've since forgotten--of The Well Fed Writer wrote a book about making a living as a freelance copywriter, but in interviews copped to the fact that most of his income (the vast majority, if I recall correctly) came from the book about how to make money as a freelance writer, not his actual work as a freelance writer.
Today, I'm taking on blogs. Recently, a friend of mine commented that she hated her blog, and it came as no surprise to me, because nearly everyone I know who has a blog hates it. Of course, there are bloggers who get paid to blog, and bloggers who have one particular subject they're passionate about and seem to be happy writing about, and bloggers who simply seem to journal online and be fine with it. Some of the most successful of these include naked pictures of themselves, which raises a whole different set of questions. And some include details of their sex lives; in fact, some serious litigation and some Capitol Hill firings recently followed the disclosure by one Congressional aide, on her blog, that another Congressional aide she'd spent some time with like to spank her.
But those seem to be the exception. These days, it seems that the average person has a blog. It also seems that the average person has no idea what to DO with said blog, and fluctuates between annoyance that he has this blog that he's now obliged to keep up with and guilt that he doesn't blog more often.
Interestingly, it appears that no one ever reads, or even sees, most blogs. If you check out the pages you'll find that the vast majority of blogs you find when flipping through blogger or a similar system have no page rank, and that Google hasn't even indexed them. That means no one even knows they're there, unless the blogger has sent out links. Often, he hasn't, because a lot of people seem to be embarrassed by their blogs, when they're not busy being irritated that they have them or shamefaced that they haven't posted in so long. So the source of the guilt associated with not posting is a bit questionable--it isn't as if there's an audience out there who's being let down.
On the other hand...the blogger isn't a blogger without blogging, right? And the prospective blogger must have thought he had something to say when he started the blog, or he wouldn't have taken the time to choose the colors and set up the blogroll and create his log-ins and slect the settings and all that, right?
So go ahead. Post.
No one's looking, anyway.

So the thing is...knitting is ruining the world

A year or so ago, my sister took up knitting in earnest. If you're having visions of those "lovely" afghans grandma used to make everyone for Christmas...add a factor of ten. For a long time, she knitted only prayer shawls. Then she taught my daughter to knit. The two of them set to work knitting hats for homeless infants (I swear), which was nice, and when my sister would babysit for me I'd come home to find them both asleep in my living room, cuddling their knitting needles--which was not so nice.

Time passed. The knitting continued, but the fervor died down. And then I got a Christmas letter from an old friend, and he mentioned that his wife--a government lawyer--was running a yarn co-op. I made a conscious decision not to think through what that might be.

But this morning, the line was crossed. I'm a big fan of humor columnist Barb Cooper. I know, I know--she's awfully positive for a girl like me, but what can I say? She's smart and she's a mom, and she has an incredible way of pointing out the humor, the irony, and even the hope in those little moments we tend to gloss right over in life.

Until today.

This morning, I dropped by the So the Thing Is Blog (which, I might add, I was DELIGHTED to see being regularly updated for the first time in...ever), and...

it was about knitting.

Not the whole blog, of course, but there are. Um. Photographs of yarn.

I blame the Yarn Harlot.

The Thing About Lawyers

Is that they can't freaking win.

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of bad lawyers. I worked in the legal field once, and I've seen lawyers compromise cases and lie to clients just to save themselves some work. I've seen lawyers mock their clients and denigrate them to friends and colleagues--even opposing counsel. I've seen trade-offs where one client is sold down the river, so to speak, so that the lawyer can get the deal he wants on another case.

It can be ugly.

But there's ugliness in every profession.

The thing about lawyers is that if they're "only in it for the money", that's some kind of stigma, even though pretty much everyone does his or her job primarily as a means of supporting himself and his family. Lawyers are expected to be somehow more noble. They should help people who need help regardless of whether or not they can pay, because...well...I've never heard an end to that sentence. The theory seems to be that it doesn't cost them anything to help, but of course that's not true. There are a limited number of billable hours in a day, and I'm a firm believer that everyone--absolutely everyone--should give some of them away. But I also know from personal experience that there aren't enough hours in the day to handle all of the problems of the people who come to a law office begging and pleading for free help--people with legitimate needs and cases. Any attorney who said yes to all of them would soon be working 80-100 hour weeks without making a dime, because there wouldn't be any time left for paying clients, and even so would soon have to start turning people away. It's a problem. A serious one. But not one that the average attorney can solve just by saying yes to everyone who walks through his door.

The place it really breaks down for me, though--the thing that really seems unfair--is that lawyers who are "in it for the money" are evil, but lawyers who are in it for something else...something like truth and justice, maybe...are reviled just as thoroughly. I doubt that there's a criminal defense lawyer on the face of the earth who hasn't been asked contemptuously, "How can you...?" and heard the smug, superior, "Well, I could never!" And sometimes it's worse than just an attitude.

For instance, look at the recent radio commentary by former Pentagon official Cully Stimson egging corporations on to penalize law firms providing pro bono representation to Guantanamo Bay detainees. The public outcry over that statement led to Stimson's resignation, but it seems it was only because he was dumb enough to speak up in public. In the wake of his resignation, military lawyers appointed to represent Guantanamo detainees are reporting that their careers are suffering and that they're being actively discouraged from doing the job too well.

So, it seems like if you're an attorney, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Zealous representation is bad--it means you're "on the wrong side". Just doing your job is bad--it means you're "in it for the money".

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of bad lawyers. I know a lot of bad lawyers. But I begin to wonder if by our current social standards there can be any good ones.

Of Mice and Men

No, sadly, we're not here to talk about literature. Not that I'm not game, if anyone has a favorite novel s/he'd like to rehash, but that's not what I came here to talk about.

No, I didn't come to talk about the draft, either.

I came here to talk about the mouse that recently escaped from a Maine man...three times...and after it's last escape, stole his dentures. That's right, carried them right into his mouse hole. They had to take out a piece of the wall to retrieve them.

The mouse won that round, I think, and apparently he thinks so, too, because the couple insists that the mouse comes out of his hole and stares at his nemesis.

But it could be worse. Several months ago, another news story reported that a man (clearly of questionable character) had thrown a live mouse into his fireplace. Yes, while there was a fire in the fireplace. Oddly enough, the mouse opted not to stay in the fire. Of course, fire being what it is and mice being a little on the hairy side, the little creature carried some flames out of the fireplace with him...and up the curtains....and burned the house down.

The mice are winning.

Which means this discussion may be about literature after all. Maybe the Hitchhiker's Guide had it right all along, and we're really not running the show.

Maybe the mice will do a better job.