Sad face. It’s time to go back to work after two and a half weeks off.
I always hate shaving off the facial hair I grew on leave. It’s like that final big step saying “go be a grown up again and earn a paycheck.”
At least I planned well… One day of work before a four day weekend.
You have to ease back into certain things. Baby steps.
My two year old loves loves loves Doctor Who. When the theme starts, he forms an ‘o’ with his lips and sings “Ooooh-oooh-OOOOH” along with the music.
So we were watching Doctor Who today, because he tricked us once again into turning it on, and we got to the 4th season finale (Davros and the Daleks create the reality bomb; the Doctor and the other Doctor and the Doctor-Donna pool their considerable wits and defeat the scheme).
And the copy of the Doctor goes one step further: he doesn’t just defeat the evil scheme, he blows up all the Daleks.
The entire race. Complete genocide.
(Well, ok, somehow they come back of course because Daleks are adorable balls of hate and you can’t have the series without them.)
The actual Doctor is super angry. And in the end, that’s the justification for leaving the copy of the Doctor behind. Of course it ties loose ends, puts a copy of David Tennant Doctor with Rose Tyler – a long overdue happy ending of sorts. And due to the way he was copied, he is part human, with one heart, and with the ability to age normally. In other words, Rose and the Doctor can have their life and grow old together.
But the actual Doctor says he’s leaving this one behind why? Because he’s dangerous. And the hope is that Rose can help change him into the jolly good fellow we all love.
So what happens when the copy-Doctor grows old? What if Rose dies? How will the Doctor cope with being a human and suffering that loss, along with the effects of aging in a way he’s never experienced before?
This copy-Tennant, he’s already the one who broke the promise of the name Doctor, isn’t he? Genocide is not in line with being the Doctor. But he’s also still a part of “the Doctor” and thus a part of his timeline.
I know there are plenty of good possibilities out there. Is John Hurt a future incarnation of the Time Lord we know as the Doctor? Is he maybe an incarnation between the already-mysterious 8th and the surprisingly edgy and dark 9th Doctor? Maybe that would explain the edge that Christopher Eccleston brings to the character. Or perhaps there’s something completely different going on.
But one of my crazy theories is:
What if John Hurt is playing the copy Doctor all growed up?
I call this blog Literary Karaoke because I realized that my writing – like many other things I do – is good enough for people to enjoy it for free, but not necessarily good enough to make a living.
I play piano really well, but I fall into that same category. And I also draw a decent picture… decent enough that people like my artwork, but not so much that I can hang up my military hat and draw a paycheck. (See what I did there?)
Let’s add another thing to the list: Cakes!
Good enough to please our 8 year old birthday boy… and that’s what counts.
He’s the middle child. Technically he’s one of two middle children, but our oldest boy (12 now) and teenage daughter (14 last week) are usually teamed up. So the Angry Bird lover is the one who most often gets excluded, and exhibits the “middle child” symptoms the most.
We aimed to make today special – he got to have one of his friends over for cake, ice cream, and a movie. He got a present from a friend of our oldest boy. He opened gifts from his grandparents, and I surprised him with a Lego set my wife and I had hidden away.
We ate a cheap decoy cake while the cake I made was cooling in the fridge.
But then his friend gets a knock on the door in the middle of the movie. Other neighborhood kids want the friend to come out and bike around the housing area or whatever. And this friend’s logic is, “Well, I have already seen this movie, so…” and he walks out.
Pretty crappy, if you ask me.
At the same time, it’s a hard life lesson. Sadly, all too often, people don’t care about you except for how you benefit them. “I’ll come over for the cake and the ice cream until something more interesting comes along.”
My son didn’t seem to mind, but I still brought him over and let him curl up on my lap to watch the rest of the movie. He snuggled up and fell asleep. It was a rare moment, especially considering how he keeps getting older. (Why don’t they just stay at that perfect cute age of…well, not growing up so fast?)
After the movie, he got up, built his Lego set (which was promptly destroyed by the 2 year old), and played on his scooter outside for a bit. And I decorated the cake with his favorite bird, his favorite color, his favorite frosting, and some surprise treats in the form of Angry Birds gummies around the edges.
Because I want him to know that no matter what the world says or does, no matter how often they’re content to take what they want from him and then set him aside, there’s one thing he can count on.
Mom and Dad think he’s amazing, and there’s always a special place for him here.
And sometimes there’s cake.
I just played a pretty cool game on the iPad. What do you think of it?
Silly question, eh? First you have to know what the game was, so that you could go play it yourself. Only then could we have a meaningful conversation about the game in question.
Let’s try a different one:
What’s your opinion of the first draft of my fantasy novel?
I know you’ve never read it, but I’m looking for meaningful critique. I need to know where I’m messing up and where I’ve got things right. So I’m eager to hear your point of view.
Ridiculous, isn’t it? Not if you’re the government.
Since government collection of data is all over the news this week, I’m going to assume your Google Fu is sufficient to find the applicable news stories.
I wish this was a surprise. The disclosure of information – that was a surprise, of course. But the idea that the government might be looking closely at the online activities of its citizens? Sadly, no, that’s no great shock in post 9/11 land. Everyone’s a potential threat, so everyone has to get monitored, because we MUST be secure, at any cost. Or so goes the logic, it would seem.
In response to the leaked information and the explosion of the story in the news media, the current administration’s answer is that they “welcome debate on these challenging issues” or something similar.
Well, that’s great.
But you can’t debate what you don’t know about, so that’s a pretty empty statement. Sure, our elected Congressmen get to discuss it (at least some small number of them do), but again, we’ll never know what gets decided and what points are made or left unsaid.
Given some quotes by Congressmen about seemingly basic subjects (i.e. “Guam might capsize if we put too many Marines on it” and “women can shut down pregnancy from rape” and so on), let’s just say I’m not so sure that a good sensible discussion will take place. But I’ll never know, so now I’m even more unsettled about it.
I get why. If we have a public debate about the means we use to collect intelligence on possible threats to American interests, those people are going to change their tactics. Now we’ll have no information instead of whatever we might have gained, and they’ll still be just as committed to their efforts against us, with little to stand in their way. So we really can’t just call some town hall meetings to figure out what level and methods of intelligence collection John Q Public is going to approve.
And maybe to some extent it’s our fault as a nation. When any terror event happens, there’s an outcry asking why we didn’t see it coming, why we didn’t prevent it.
You can only do that with information, so you have to collect lots of information in the hopes of getting the little pieces of the puzzle that you need. But then you’re treating the average American like a potential terrorist, in the hopes of preventing potential terrorism.
CNN featured a blog that referred to this newest round of scandal. It included a quote about this dilemma from former Director of NSA Michael Hayden:
Hayden went on to chastise what he called the “political elites” who criticize the intelligence community for not doing enough, but as soon as they feel safe, “pontificate that we’re doing too much.”
Reminds me of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. “On the other side of that firewall are Chinese hackers looking to damage American interests and terrorists looking to kill American civilians. Someone needs to be watching your chat with your wife on Facebook… someone needs to be looking at every video posted to YouTube… someone needs to read through those e-mails. You want NSA on that firewall. You need NSA on that firewall. You go to sleep under the blanket of freedom they provide and then have the audacity to question the manner in which they provide it?”
Yeah, I guess we do.
I know very few people who trusted the government even a couple years ago. And then there’s all the Patriot Act style concessions, trading small liberties for a hoped-for but hard-to-prove increase in security. Plus there’s incompetence like Fast and Furious, followed by the appearance of political targeting of American citizens in the IRS scandal. Add to that the appropriation of phone records and such by the Department of Justice against reporters. And now this.
Is it government of the people, by the people, for the people? Or is it government of the potential terrorists, against the potential terrorists?
Uncle Sam is quickly becoming the creepy old man that I wouldn’t want anywhere near my kids. Too bad he has keys to all the locks on the house.
Today I have a tongue-in-cheek parenting survey for you, dear reader.
My daughter (13) and son (12) begged me to let them go over to a friend’s house to play XBox and watch Disney shows like Good Luck Charlie and Dog with a Blog (which, I guess, is a thing dogs can do now).
Is it wrong that I mainly said yes in order to keep the vultures from swarming over the snacks I was bringing into the house, so that I could eat the first of the snacks?
Or is it pragmatic and wise, when dealing with ravenous teenagers?
Let me know what you think!
I had the privilege of watching Star Trek Into Darkness last weekend. Without getting too far into spoiler territory, the opening scene puts Zachary Quinto’s fantastic Spock into a deadly situation, freezing a volcano in order to save a planet from certain doom. Things go wrong, as they always must, and Spock is trapped. He chooses to stay and do the job, but he cannot be rescued.
He calls back to the Enterprise and explains his logic. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
Chris Pine’s Kirk has a differing view about that.
But in that moment, we see the heroism of Spock’s selfless and practical decision. One man can die to save a population from destruction. If you’ve got to go, that’s not a bad achievement to take from your death.
Now imagine the scene from another angle. Kirk lines up a few “red shirts” and says, “I am going to choose one of you for a suicide mission. You’ll save the planet, but you’ll die in the process.” And then he covers his eyes and points, or plays eenie-meenie-miney-moe, or whatever Kirkly method he chooses, and he selects his crewman. “Lieutenant Jones, it’s you.”
Jones goes to the transporter crying, screaming, fighting until he is restrained. And then he gets beamed down to the planet, ordered to ensure the detonation of a device that will kill him in the process of saving many others. Instead, he scrambles to deactivate the device, like a time bomb. Spock’s voice echoes in Jones’ ears. “It is the logical decision, Lieutenant. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of you.” And Jones fails to stop the device, it goes off, and the day is saved at the cost of Lieutenant Jones’ unwilling sacrifice.
That doesn’t play so well, does it?
Sacrifice is heroic when individuals are free to take that burden upon themselves. The man who jumps on a grenade to save his friends, the medic who pulls his comrades to safety at great risk under heavy fire, the fireman who races into the burning building to save the missing child knowing the structure may collapse at any moment… we see these as heroes and rightly so.
It’s not so moving when someone chooses to sacrifice others against their will. The leader who sends his soldiers into pointless battle for an impossible objective, the criminal who makes his fortune by deception, the deadbeat who takes care of himself while neglecting the basic needs of his children… no one views the sacrifice imposed on the victims as a heroic or praiseworthy situation.
This is what comes to mind for me when I think about “reproductive rights” and abortion in the West.
I thought of this as I was attending a Chinese class. In China, the population lives under the “One Child Policy,” the rule that only the first child receives benefits from the Communist government. I discussed this with my Chinese teacher, along with Spock’s logic. And she confirmed that Chinese society has pretty much accepted this population control as a sacrifice made for the good of the nation. The nation trumps the individual, hands down.
Not so much here. We’re very much about the individual, and their freedom and right to self-determination. Don’t impose your beliefs or values on someone else, and don’t act like there’s some universal values all should esteem. We each have the right to choose!
Yet in the case of abortion, we praise “freedom of choice” when the human beings who make the greatest sacrifice have this burden thrust upon them unwillingly. The fetus does not choose, it is chosen–or rather, unchosen. We are Kirk, sending a red shirt to their death.
I know, I’m a man, so there’s a sense that I’m automatically disqualified from speaking about a woman’s right. But I’m also a human being (as are the victims of abortion). I am also aware of the basic fundamentals of biology which reaffirm that we’re talking about ending the development of human beings during these protected procedures. We may claim that a fetus is not a “person” yet, but it is a human being at a particular stage in development.
I won’t go into the graphic details of how that development is terminated, because it is disturbing. If you so desire, google Gosnell or read about the other similar cases coming to light. Then google or wiki up some abortion procedures. Then ask yourself how it is that what Gosnell did is illegal, but when he did it to a fetus inside a womb, it’s all good.
This is a complex issue, no doubt. I don’t want women in alleys with coat-hangers, to borrow from the Planned Paranoia debate playbook. I’m not keen on abstinence-only education because it seems to me like having information is a general plus. An informed decision about contraceptives might very well prevent an informed (or uninformed) decision about abortion, so I don’t know why many of us aren’t all for that.
I also don’t much like how the Pro-Life movement comes across. Opponents rightly ask, “If you’re all for saving these unborn children and bringing them into the world, who is going to take care of them?” The implication, borne out in reality, is that as much as Pro-Lifers love charity and adoption, there’s not enough of either going on to cover the needs of all the unborn children we might have saved if Roe v. Wade was overturned. Government may be the worst at welfare programs, but if they’re the only player in the game, people take what they can get.
And there are more nuances to consider, no doubt.
I simply want to express how tiresome it is to hear the praises of “choice” in this debate. It’s like generals and politicians exercising choice to send waves of young men and women into combat.
Not quite, though.
The soldier got to raise his or her right hand and volunteer.
The fetus, not so much.
Today is entirely unproductive.
I have been doing well on my diet and exercise plan. Today, I am sore from my first day out of my support boot on the foot that’s still healing. So I don’t feel like exercising. I also felt like eating a few more lumpia than I should. (Actually, I don’t know if diet and lumpia EVER go together.)
I wanted to write a bit on two story ideas, but the words aren’t flowing quite right and the ideas aren’t communicating the way I want. So I wrote two pages and stopped there.
My wife and I were going to go out and celebrate Mother’s Day early, on a rare dinner date. We both realized neither of us feel like getting out the door today.
There’s also that level of Candy Crush that has me stumped.
So I think today has become a useless “relax and play Warcraft” day. And I’m ok with that. It’s Saturday. It’s been a long week, and next week is going to be even busier than this one.
I went over the music for tomorrow’s church service.
I learned all about my wife’s FarmVille farms.
I hugged two of my boys close as we watched Despicable Me.
And I let the teenage daughter and almost-teenage son escape to go play with friends.
That’ll do, pig.
This A to Z blog challenge is really kicking my butt. Still, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Two more days and… several entries until it’s over!
Check Fat Guys Vs. Gym for the fitness blog posts and Wanton Disregard for Safety for the spirituality posts.
On top of that, I had a splendid distraction this weekend. My brother, my sister-in-law, and their two sons came out from Chicago to visit my family for a couple days. It’s a roughly eight-hour drive with two small children under 3, so… kudos to them for their bravery!
Friday night, we went to eat Chinese food at a nearby restaurant. We turned around for one moment, and their older child prepared himself for battle using the ancient technique of “crab rangoon war paint.”
We survived the dinner (although our youngest scattered enough fried rice to feed an army), and then we had a nice trip to the park at sunset.
The kids played some basketball with their uncle, and then everyone meandered over to the swings. My youngest and my brother’s oldest both made a beeline for swinging children, as if they wanted to get kicked. Disaster was averted. At some point, my brother commented on how parenting at this age is pretty much 24-hour suicide watch. He has a dry sense of humor that gets me every time.
Saturday involved a pleasant visit catching up and sharing terrifying parent stories (many of which involved poop), followed by ice cream at Dairy Queen.
Prior to the visit, we discussed plans or lack thereof. My brother mentioned our visit in 2007, and how he and my parents had a variety of plans to make the most of the time. I don’t remember it, but we must have shot down a good many of those plans based on a desire for “nothing complicated.” My brother was single at the time, and admitted over the phone, “I had no idea why you guys were so set on simple plans.”
Now, with two small children, he laughed and said, “I completely understand. I had to learn the hard way, I guess.”
So we had simple plans, and it was enough. We enjoyed a lovely dinner with a friend from the Wordsowers writers’ group here in Omaha, and then they visited our church service on Sunday morning before heading back to Chicago.
My brother asked, “Do you agree with this statement? ‘Having children is both the most rewarding and most difficult experience in my life.'”
Of course I agreed. So has every other parent he’s asked.
We had a great time, and enjoyed sharing in each other’s joys and difficulties as parents. Challenging, yes… but one we gladly accept.
Sad but true. Where did the last two days go?
Today I discovered that a mad scientist slash crazy mom was kind enough to nominate my blog for the Liebster Award.
I recently started following her blog because of the A to Z challenge, and also because she made the flu virus sound interesting. Then I saw she has kids roughly the same ages as mine (though her family has one more child than us). Science fun plus parenting fun… fantastic. She checked out some of my entries as well.
I had heard of the Liebster thing, but I didn’t really know how it worked. We use the term “nomination” as though there are authorities out there on the Interwebz who are going to come look and make a solemn gesture of approval, thereby formally blessing us with the award.
Nah, it’s just one blogger to another, saying, “hey, I like what you’re doing over there, and I wanted to call attention to your blog. How about you do the same, but for other people? Pay it forward, and all that.”
Ah, yes, there is the matter of some Q&A first. The way this particular Liebster goes is that I must post random facts about me, answer the Mad Scientist’s questions, and then post blogs that I deem worthy:
First, the facts about me.
Now, to answer Mad Scientist’s questions:
And now, my Liebster Award Nominees:
Here’s how it works. You can accept and pay it forward, but of course there’s no obligation. Or you can ignore the award (and make me cry).
If you do accept:
*if you have more than 200, my apologies. I may have misunderstood what was visible on your site. But you’re still worthy of awards!
My nominees, with a brief description of why:
Secretly I nominated all of them because I enjoy what they have to share and I want to encourage them to keep on sharing. I also like the idea of finding out more about the people behind the posts.
If you nominees are willing to play along, then here are the questions I have for you:
(Full disclosure, they’re exactly the same on both of my Liebster posts, so you only need to answer once.)
There you have it. I “lieb” it all up to you, fellow bloggers. Go forth, and pass on the pat-on-the-back to those blogs that inspire you!