It’s been said that the mistake women make going into marriage is that “He’ll change” and the mistake men make is “She won’t.”

As long as I’ve been alike, there has been the archetype of the woman that sets out to change her man. It’s the subject of jokes and movies and even resentful male theories (”Women like jerks because they want a challenge in reforming him”). The general consensus, though, is that this is a folly of a quest and that “You can’t change him.” I don’t really know how true it is of women as a group that they do get a thrill domesticating men or a sense of accomplishment that he loves her so much that he changed for her. I also don’t know the extent to which men, as a group, do the same.

I have seen it happen, though. I’ve seen women get together with a guy and embark on the sudden mission of turning him into something else. It could be a simple matter of teaching him to be more domesticated or more masculine. Some women can be optimistic about the degree to which a man will change himself because he loves her so much or because she’s that good at manipulation/teaching. It usually doesn’t end well. Sometimes, though, it does.

My ex-girlfriend’s brother Mack was not the pinnacle of respectability. His grades were never good. Not because he was dumb, but rather he was more interested in drinking and partying. Despite being a somewhat hefty guy and despite a lazy eye that required an eyepatch a weekend or two every couple of months, he was really quite popular at school and had a never-ending string of girlfriends that ranged from cute-but-dumb to smarter and more with-it than he deserved. He was that charismatic. As with Julie, it was his parents intention that he would go to college and get a degree, but he had to take summer school just about every year to stay in his grade. I thought that sending him to college was a waste. He had a very natural career in sales. He’d be particularly good at the “used car” variety. I pretty much knew that he would go to college and within a year flunk out with a .5 GPA or something of the like.

Around his senior year, he met Eileen. Eileen was a pretty and ambitious young girl with designs on law school. I frankly never knew for sure what she saw in Mack other than that he was a guaranteed good time. His previous nitwit of a girlfriend seemed a much better match. Eileen came across to me as having a bit on the manipulative side. I think that she had a desire to be the favorite and the best and I think that I came in the way of that because (unlike the nitwit, oddly enough) she never seemed to care for me. It was nothing in particular, but a general vibe that was really without any foundation (my relationship with her boyfriend had always been good and I had more in common with her than he did, at the time). When Julie and I broke up, Eileen took it upon herself to tell everyone in the family that I’d dumped her despite knowing that it was meant to be a secret. That all lead to the most awkward Christmas Party in my entire life, where everyone there knew that I broke Julie’s heart but there I was anyway.

From the start, though, Eileen was a stellar influence on Mack. His parents tried just about everything that they could to get him to pay attention to his studies and nothing worked. She had him making pretty good grades within a semester. The kid whose college career I figured to be doomed graduated with a respectable GPA and is now a teacher (she, as planned, is a lawyer). They’re married now with a kid on the way.

Having watched Eileen work her magic on Mack, it makes me wonder a little bit about Julie. Julie and I dated for four years. She, too, changed over the time that I knew her and since, but not necessarily for the better.

When I met her, she was anti-alcohol. Not just did she not drink (as is the case with my wife), but she objected vociferously to me drinking. She was so upset the first time that I told her that I’d had some alcohol that I didn’t tell her again for a long time after. It only came up when we started going to parties with alcohol together and to music shows at bars that served alcohol after we were both 21. I encouraged her to start drinking so that she would not worry so much about my drinking. she started with wine coolers and worked her way up to the liquor (which is mostly what I drank at the time). I remember when we were at a Troy Thomason music show and she drank so much that she became sick. It was after last call when the bar let me in the women’s bathroom to keep her company while she dry heaved with nothing left to puke. I figured our drinking days were done, but they weren’t.

Whenever I’ve talked to her these past couple of years, she mentions that she’s about to go out and drink or that Happy Hour is part of her daily routine. It leaves me a bit worried sometimes. Particularly when she was struggling with her breakup with Tony.

It’s not just the alcohol, though. When I met her she was an honors student with ambition. While I was with her, she flunked out of Southern Tech twice and ended up a few credits shy of an associate’s degree from the junior college before calling it quits. On the other hand, she is further along in her career than just about anyone I know and makes more than any of my peers with the possible exception of Hubert. At the time that I left her, though, she was making a piddly paycheck as a clerk at a vet clinic. Whatever has happened since can arguably more despite my influence rather than because of it.

None of this is to say that I am responsible for her position in life. Not the good stuff or the bad. I do wonder, sometimes, if I was ultimately a pretty negative influence on her on the whole. I was probably a distraction while she was in school. I introduced her to alcohol and parties and bars. I didn’t do much for her career ambitions in part because they conflicted with my own desires. She left the one field that mattered the most to her at least partly because it would have required that I do things that I didn’t want to do (ironically enough, the big thing was relocation). Perhaps the biggest thing is something that Tony and I double-teamed her on. She was never particularly free with her emotions, but she was never as guarded as she is these days. Like she’s disinclined to really enjoy everything except the nice new kitchen set that she just brought and the latest episode of Total Makeover.

She’s always been an difficult person to read, though never moreso than these days. Maybe she’s really happy with her life. She says that she is fine. All the time. I remain doubtful. Maybe a part of me prefers the image of her suffering in my mind. Not sure why that would be since I do wish her the best, but it could be related to the fact that she is now where I was in between Evangeline and Clancy and I remember that being a miserable place. Maybe it’s because when things with Eva turned so bad she was maddeningly cocky about it and she was very unsupportive of the rapid progression of my relationship with Clancy and our relationship has turned from one of romantic to friendly to cooler to rivalrous and a part of me relishes in the idea that I’m happy and she’s not. As terrible as I felt for her when Tony left her, I must confess that a part of me felt as cocky as she did when Eva did her thing on me. Or maybe I’m envious of the money that she makes and want to believe that it’s not really making her happy.

Whatever the case, she send me a very nice little Thanksgiving Day email. She told me that she was doing “fine” (her favorite description of her well-being regardless of the actual state of her well-being much of the time). She gave me updates on what’s going on with her. Most of the stuff she mentioned was negative (long work hours, family turmoil, Happy Hour), except for the assurance that she’s doing fine.

There’s a pretty sad story from Walmart that you’ve probably heard about by now:

By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.

Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him. Others who had stood alongside Mr. Damour trying to hold the doors were also hurled back and run over, witnesses said.

Damour’s injuries were fatal.

I almost always respond to things like this with a cold curiosity before anything else. So here is what I was curious about: Walmart was closed? Half of the reason I’ve historically shopped at Walmart is because it does not close. Not in the big city of Colosse or the rural locations in Deseret. I was vaguely aware that some did somewhere and maybe this is one of them.

I’ve always wondered how 24-hour stores handle events like this. I got a taste several years ago when John Fustle, Hubert Graham, Dennis Loxley, and I (maybe Web was there, too, I can’t recall) went around from location to location trying to get ahold of PlayStation 2’s when they were originally released. Walmart was one of the places that we stopped. I remember wondering how they would handle people piling up in their store for the release that was supposed to happen at 8:00 or so. Or maybe they would keep everybody in line outside the place or something. The answer, it turned out, was that they secretly started selling them at 6:00 and were sold out by 7:45 when we got there.

Somewhere, at least three guys are going to try this.

I suspect more than one of them will run into this reaction:

I didn’t end up going to the casino after all. I looked at the place’s website and it didn’t make any mention of the buffet that they advertised on their light-up billboard. So I started looking at local restaraunts. There is a chain in Delosa called Gertrude’s that’s somewhat well-known in the area as a place to eat at Thanksgiving if you’ve got nowhere else. It’s sort of a cafeteria kind of place and it’s sort of where parents will threaten to take their kids to T-Day if they’re not showing sufficient appreciation for Mom’s home cooking. I thought it’d be fun to eat there since Mom made that threat on more than one occasion, but apparently it’s a regional establishment without many locations outside my home state.

So Gertrude’s was out. I found a website that listed restaurants that were having all sorts of meals, buffets and otherwise. Unfortunately, most of them mentioned the need for reservations. A couple others that I called even had their bars filled to the rim. The websites of chain’s didn’t have any information on Thanksgiving Day specials or anything so I figured that they were either not doing anything turkey-related or otherwise were closed. Suddenly, I was running out of options.

I decided that I would drive down Main Street and see what was open. Almost nothing was. I did see a Denny’s and figured that they must have something turkey. I wasn’t sure that they were open since there wasn’t any “Open” sign, but their sign was lit and there were some sparse cars in the parking lot. For some reason, Safeway popped into mind. I remembered that they often had pre-made chicken. What were the odds that they had a pre-made turkey that I could take home? If not, I could make my way back to Denny’s.

Sure enough, Safeway had three “Turkey breasts” left. They were charging a boatload for a measley breast, so I figured that I would get the breast and then maybe one of their little chickens. That way I could have some turkey, but would have ample white meat without having to buy two turkey breasts. I also decided that while I couldn’t replicate the kind of T-Day that I’d get sometimes with my family, I needed some fixin’s. So I got a tub of mashed potatoes, two tubs of gravy, some macaroni and cheese, and some cream spinich. I don’t really like cream spinach, but I figure no Thanksgiving is complete without me ending up eating something that I didn’t care that much to eat.

It was pretty obvious in check-out what I was doing. You wouldn’t think that a couple teenagers making minimum wage as they have to work on Thanksgiving wouldn’t be looking at someone like me in pitty, but they did.

Considering that the food I bought was “pre-made”, prep time still took longer than one might expect. The meat was hot but everything else was cold. So I too turns rotating stuff out of the microwave so that I could eat some of the meat while it was still hot and one side at a time. I didn’t realize this when I made my purchase, but the turkey was expensive because it was a lot of meat! I ended up eating half of it. So now I have half a turkey breast in the fridge, a full chicken, and half of my fixins. I’m going to be sick of this stuff by the time I’m done with it.

Leftovers and turkey fatigue… two more rock-solid Thanksgiving traditions. So it looks like I made a real Thanksgiving out of my day after all.

“I know when I’m busting them. What I didn’t realize is what a pain I’ve been when I thought I was just being me. At age six, I decide I don’t need to talk to other kids ever again, my parents are the ones that get called into school. At 12, I decide to try out some Shakespearian insults on my teachers, my parents are the ones that called ito school. At fifteen, I decide to start writing revenge fantasies just to get a reaction…” -Daria Morgandorffer

Perhaps the best episode of the old MTV cartoon Daria was the last one. It was an unusually somber episode. In the episode, a refrigerator box triggers a memory of Daria’s of her parents having some nasty fight and her father yelling as he ran out the door. The cause of the tension that caused the fight was Daria herself. She had made the decision to go her own way and she paid a steep cost for it. What she never realized was that her parents were paying a price for it, too.

The same goes for Dharma’s parents on the TV show Dharma & Greg. Being anti-establishment and all that, they chose never to formalize their relationship with marriage. For them that was fine for the mot part, though it was a form of isolation and instability for Dharma. The instability turned out to be illusory as they were happily together for 28 years at the outset of the show, but it was there all the same.

“There were times growing up when I wish you guys were married. Like that time in ballet class when all the kids called me The Graceful Little Bastard…” “All my life, you guys told me that your way was better because every day you chose to be together. Did you ever stop to think that there was somebody in that house that woke up in the morning wondering if this was the day her parents were going to choose not to be together?” -Dharma Montgomery

One area where my wife and I differ philosophically is when it comes to tradition and cultural norms. Her perspective is that culture norms must be justified rationally, practically, and morally in order to be adhered to. I take a slightly different view, which is that a cultural norm and tradition must be demonstrably irrational, impractical, or immoral in order to be tossed aside.

To me, tradition and cultural norms have intrinsic practicality and are naturally rational because the path most taken is the path of least resistance. That’s not to say that I always advocate this path, but if I am mulling over an alternative, I need a good reason to take it. Being different for the sake of being different is a social dead end and is not good for the actor, for the culture surrounding him, and as I’m getting to in this post not good for the people around the actor. As Daria and Dharma’s parents learned, there are people around you who pay the price for you to “do your own thing.”

One last example I will throw out there is from The Practice, where one of the biggie lawyers at a major firm is talking to a lowly associate that she just caught dancing on a bar-room table.

When you meet new people I imagine the question ‘What do you do?’ pops immediately into the conversation. You answer ‘I’m an attorney at Crane, Poole, & Schmidt’. When others describe you: smart girl, nice, works at Crane, Poole, & Schmidt. As much as you might like to lay claim to your personal time and your private life, who you are and where you work are inextricably bound, Sally. And when you’re standing in a public bar, on the bar, half-naked, thrusting your great divide as if it were a tourist attraction, there are people saying ’she’s a lawyer at Crane, Poole, & Schmidt’.” -Hannah Rose

It’s certainly no secret that what we do has an effect on those around us. What I think that we sometimes forget, though, is that even when we’re not doing something that directly harms someone else, we may be harming them in another way. Putting them in a particular pickle. Even if what you’re doing isn’t wrong at all, as long as it garners negative attention to you, it does the same to people around you.

If a couple chooses to get married by a JP in some location other than a church, that could cause discomfort for the bride’s or groom’s mother who has to explain to her religious friends “Why not?” (if they’re religious). A wife that chooses not to take her husband’s name may have good reasons for it and may not mind explaining to everybody that she chose to keep her birth name, but she has enlisted the help of her husband, her future children, and others in associating them with a principled stance that isn’t theirs. Parents that don’t go to church are isolating their kids from one of the great social magnets of American society and making them forever different. A kid that grows up and becomes a shock jock is putting his parents in the position of having to pretend to approve of what he does or tell their friends that they’re not proud of their kid. A Mormon that leaves the church also leaves behind parents that are stuck with some judgmental fellow parishioners who think that they’ve failed as parents.

None of this is to say that anybody should toe the line for the sake of everyone around them. We all have to make our own decisions and be our own persons. The main thing that I’m trying to get at here, though, is that who we become affects those around us even if we are not doing anything wrong in our own eyes and we’re willing to pay the costs of going against the grain.

quenkyle: Any plans for Thanksgiving?

trumwill: None, actually. My wife is working the overnight.

quenkyle: So what are you going to do?

trumwill: Not sure, which is why I have none plans. I saw a light billboard that said that there was a buffet at the Sandlot Casino.

quenkyle: Sounds fun!

trumwill: Yeah, but I’m kind of anti-gambling, so that may be a problem.

quenkyle: Could be. So why would you go to a casino if you don’t gamble?

quenkyle: Come to think of it, why would anybody go to a casino on Thanksgiving? If you’re spending Thanksgiving gambling, you have some pretty serious problems.

trumwill: Someone should go to the casino on Thanksgiving and hand out fliers for Gamblers Anonymous. Anybody there on T-Day needs it more than anybody.

quenkyle: Not as much as someone that’s there on Christmas.

trumwill: Good point.

quenkyle: Actually, what someone needs to do is go to a casino on Christmas and hand out fliers for their pawn shop.

trumwill: I’ll bet a pawnshop next to a casino makes some pretty good money.

quenkyle: Totally.

trumwill: Of course, there are some heavier operating expenses. The real estate can’t be cheap. Nor the melatonin.

quenkyle: Melatonin?

trumwill: Yeah, cause if you’re buying off the last bits of property from gamblers on Christmas, you’ll need something to help you sleep at night.

quenkyle: True.

trumwill: I don’t see as many pawn shops out here as I did in Delosa. Of course, seemed like the pawn shops in Delosa made a lot of their money on selling guns. I’ll bet Cascadia has stricter requirements on that.

quenkyle: That’s a shame. Lots of money to be made selling guns to gamblers at a casino on Christmas Day.

trumwill: How much melatonin would you need then?

Barry and Bob have a back-and-forth on one of Web’s post about the extent to which sex that is derived from the impairment of judgment that comes with alochol consumption should be considered rape.

Barry:

There’s always the argument that, if it’s possible to consent to sex while under the influence of alcohol when normally you wouldn’t, then the person loses some of that right to use it as a defense the moment they take that first drink. One might say by taking that first drink, you open yourself to the possibility that one might lead to another, and another, and another and eventually waking up next to a guy (or girl) you don’t know and terribly afraid of something you (or they) did that night.

To me, sure there’s a lot of grey areas in that forbidden land of who said what and when and under what degree of impairment - but it’s the responsibility of each individual to not drink if there’s a chance that such an unwanted event could occur.

Bob:

Barry, you could a organize society according to the rule you propose, but we have not. In general, I cannot agree to sell my house for you $10 when I am drunk. Neither can a nurse get me to consent to giving her my kidney as I am coming off of general anesthesia (despite my having known fully well that I would be groggy when I got out of it.)

The problem with Bob’s example is that it is something where a “take-back” is possible. You can invalidate a contract, but you can’t un-make a night of groggy sex. Of course, if you agree to sell your kidney under the influence and it is taken before you sober up, that’s somewhat more comparable. Though even there you have expectations at play. A man or woman that gets drunk knows that there are certain risks involved from something relatively minor like coyote ugly to something severe like rape. There is no expectation that a kidney-seller might want you to become a vendor on the spot.

That being said, I’m probably more sympathetic to Bob’s point of view than I am Barry’s. A woman that gets drunk and gets raped may share some moral and logistical culpability, but I could not even remotely support a regime where she bears moral culpability in all cases. For one thing, the man may have been less than forthcoming about what he put in the mixed drinks and it should not be up to her to prove otherwise.

When it’s obvious that the man got the woman drunk for the sake of fornication, it’s pretty clearly rape. When a woman gets drunk independently and a man (knowing that her judgment is impaired by alcohol) and in a sober state takes advantage of her, that’s something less severe than forcible rape but is extremely serious nonetheless.

But there are a lot of gray areas. If a woman is in extreme emotional turmoil, she may consent to actions that she would later regret. Her state-of-mind may be such that it’s actually worse than if she should be drinking. I can imagine scenarios in which this is actually worse than taking advantage of someone that got independently drunk. The woman is less likely to have been put in that awful emotional place as voluntarily as the woman got drunk, for instance. The problem is that opening up a law to this effect, criminally prohibiting sex because the woman was not emotionally prepared for it, opens doors that few have seriously suggested opening and even if I did oppose the criminalization of having sex with a drunk woman, one wrong need not justify another.

Another area of concern when it comes to rape law is that when a drunk woman has sex, there is a not-unsubstantial likelihood that the man is drunk as well. What is the right approach when that is the case? Most of the time the woman will not feel taken advantage of and would not press charges. But what if she does? Being drunk is not a defense against committing other crimes. Even something like solicitation, where there that’s exactly the sort of misjudgment that alcohol would set free to roam. Should in that vein, why should we make an exception for rape?

Some women (and some men, to be sure) are rather unsympathetic to this plight. The idea is that he should have thought of that before he got drunk. But of course that same argument could be used for the woman, as Barry suggests. The second prong to the argument is that consensual drunken sex wouldn’t be brought to the courts because the hardship a woman faces when making rape accusations would make it so that she would only step forward if it were something serious. There is definitely some truth to this as I would bet a substantial sum that unreported rape cases are much more frequent than false accusations. But relying on the honor and judgment of women can be a pretty serious risk to impose on men.

One of the stimying problems in the discussion is that by and large men are far-and-away more likely to be accused of rape and women are far-and-away more likely to be raped. That puts each side of the gender divide of having to assess the risk to the other. No great surprise, men often assert that women should assume the risks (or assumed them with the behavior that led up to the act) and women assert that men should.

Though it does happen, men are rarely raped and so it’s hard to fully appreciate a woman’s fear of it and why it’s so important that women that are raped have as many rights as possible. If you make it harder to make the accusation, there will be fewer stepping forward and more ways for men to evade responsibility for their acts. Women, on the other hand, are rarely (falsely or otherwise) accused of rape and so it’s hard for them to fully appreciate men’s fear of it and why we’re often very apprehensive about making rape charges easier to make. The easier it is for women to make substantive accusations of rape, the more vulnerable they are even if they’ve done nothing wrong.

As I say with regularity, it’s easy to be cavalier about the risks assigned to others than to ourselves.

Preteens watching American Idol react to a vote gone (apparently) horribly, horribly wrong.

I can’t help but point out here that in the World According to Gannon, many of these girls are only a couple of years away from being sexual prospects for 20-25 year old men.

I’ve mentioned before that I wasted a lot of time when I was young watching and re-watching the same episodes of Matlock. Matlock, because it was always on every day and, when we got cable, on several channels every day, remains my greatest time-sink sin. It was never a good program (would that I were raised in The Age of Law & Order!) and… well, it was Matlock. Some people, however, might contest Matlock’s status as the primary timesuck because for a year every day I would watch a show of legendarily shoddy quality. In case you haven’t figured it out yet by the title of this post or the video up above, that show is Small Wonder.

Small Wonder was a program about a little robot girl, VICI (”Vicki”). She was created by her geeky father as a human replica of sorts. Ted, the father (whose name I didn’t even have to look up!), didn’t want to tell his employers about his little project for reasons that I cannot recall. So Vicki was the Lawsons’ little secret. The episodes generally revolved around either the typical hijinx of situation comedy with often a few robot-related things thrown in for good measure. A lot of it involved trying to keep what would have been the greatest techological achievement in mankind up to that point (an achievement still unmatched in the real world) from anyone that might notice little Vicki’s monotone voice, odd behavior, and lack of a bedroom (she “slept” upright in a closet).

To give you an idea of just how much sense the story made, one episode involved around Jamie (whose name I also did not even bother to need to look up), Vicki’s brother, getting impatient with living with the coolest invention ever and not being able to tell anybody when faced with the typical “My dad is cooler than your dad” arguments at school. So Ted tells Jamie that the blender in their kitchen is really a nuclear somethingorother. Jamie thinks this is awesome, but then of course Ted tells him that he can’t tell anybody. Somehow, Jamie doesn’t seem to notice that he is in no better position that he was. Maybe because he tells people anyway (despite being perfectly able to keep Vicki a secret throughout the show). Hilarity ensues when the Lawson’s neighbor (and Ted’s father) gets wind of the blender. Ha, ha.

Another episode (a couple episodes, I think) had a more high-tech clone of Vicki named Vanessa (VICI was short for Voice Input Child Indenticant… no telling what Vanessa could have been short for) who was smarter and more human than Vicki but also more freedom-minded and likely to get herself (and the lawsons) into trouble. There was apparently talk of a Vanessa spinoff.

There was once a Very Special Episode about Jamie’s friend, who is… horror of horrors, a latchkey kid! You may have to reach pretty far back in the recesses of your mind, if you’re old enough, to recall that term. It referred to the poor, poor unfortunate youths who had working parents and had to let themselves in when they got home from school.

I make fun of the show now, but it will always have a place in my heart somewhere between Thundercats and Gilligan’s Island. I used to watch it day in and day out with my best friend Clint. Not over at his house or anything. We’d both be watching it at our own houses and talk about what transpired on the phone. I didn’t have a phone or TV in my bedroom, so I sat on the wooden chair in the kitchen so that I could be on the corded phone and we could discuss this important television program. Ahhh, those were the best days. I never went through a “girls are icky” phase like a lot of boys did, so Vicki was always cute even though I did not yet know what was meant to be done in response to that cuteness (though some say that Vicki was TV’s first lesbian! Then again, on the show the girl was a robot, so I shouldn’t go there anyway. Notably, the actress found Jesus and appeared on The 700 Club at some point).

Below are some clips. If you’ve never seen the show or want to get a blast from the past if you have, you can get a pretty good feel in the first minute or so of each clip.

-{This blast from the past courtesy of BoingBoing}-

Gus, the World’s Ugliest Dog, has died. I don’t personally think that Gus was nearly as ugly has some of his predecessors, though.

What do you think?

-{The rest of this post is now below the fold for those of you that might be eating. Sorry about that, Logtar}- (more…)

In America, we have a large variety of “rights.” A lot of things people consider “rights” today - health care, college education, etc - aren’t really “rights.” There is no right, for instance, to not be offended… indeed, the actual right we have (the right to free speech) seems specifically designed to ensure that one can say things that may be offensive, a right that is nonexistent in many other countries.

Thus it comes to one of the weirdest cases the Supreme Court has declined in recent memory: a rape trial in which the judge ruled that the plaintiff was not allowed to use certain words.

The conflicting rights brought up in the case:
- The right to face one’s accuser (she took the stand against him).
- The right to free speech.
- The right to a fair trial.

The other weird things in the trial:
- The first trial ended in a “mistrial” when the jury couldn’t reach a verdict, at least partially due to the fact that they found the plaintiff “unreliable.” She was, quite believably, constantly stopping to check her words, terrified of the judge attacking her for violating his word-ban order and holding her in contempt of court (which could carry jail terms and other issues). In other words, the witness was being tampered with and intimidated by the judge himself.
- The retrial ended in mistrial because the judge called it so, citing media attention and victims’ rights protesters who were upset at the bizarre ruling.

Unfortunately, this is a lousy case to go on - and as the saying goes, “Easy cases make bad law”, with the necessary corollary, “Hard cases make bad law.” In this case, we have one of the classic he-said she-said conundrums that always gets advocate groups (on both sides) upset; a case in which we know sex occurred and that verbal consent appears to have been possibly given, BUT the woman is (now) claiming it was rape because she was too drunk to actually consent to sex.

Not to make light of these sorts of situations, but it’s entirely possible that this ought to have been one of those “mistrial and no jury will ever come to a unanimous verdict” situations to start with, because it could be any one of any number of situations. It could be that she was drunk, and “consented” without consenting (and equally possible that he was ALSO in a drunk enough state not to be able to consent… which would mean two people, neither of who was in a condition to consent to sex, had sex anyways and she is merely the first one to go to the police). It could be that it was consensual, but she felt guilty (for religious reasons or anger reasons later) and went to the police, changing her story. It could be that this is one of those situations where sex contract advocates always say to get something in writing… though, again, “too drunk to consent” would also apply to a written contract I’m sure.

Again, are there situations where men get women drunk (or slip them drugs) merely to have sex with them? Yes. There are also men who do it to other men, women who do it to men, and women who do it to women. I don’t mean to minimize this as real rape; I do have to consider that in this particular case, the chance of getting a real and just verdict is a matter of severe difficulty and that the judge was dealing with a very difficult situation trying to balance the right to a “fair” trial against the usage of some very severe words, the societal impact of which has very much become a “guilty until proven innocent” problem, and as we mentioned above… bad cases make bad law.

On the one side, the right of the victim to make her accusation, in full exercise of her 1st-amendment right to free speech, and see her rights represented in the courtroom. On the other, the accused’s right to a fair trial. In the middle, a case of “he said, she said” in which the physical evidence means little-to-nothing and the line between “consent” on the part of either party comes down to the particular BAC levels of each individual… and since we lack a notarized breathalyzer test and signed sexual consent form, we probably will simply never know the 100% objective “truth” of what happened that night.

He said, she said… and a bad case winds up making bad law. I’m actually not surprised the Supremes took a look at this and said “oh heck no, we’re not getting anywhere near this mess.”

This explains so much of my wife’s tenure delivering babies in Deseret.

Oddly, though, that’s the third last name that I’ve had this since yesterday. More on the second one next week.

A couple days ago, I looked and the mirror and discovered that I got a papercut… on my forehead.

I thought to myself that I must have rubbed paper against it at some point. At least it looked like a paper cut. What else makes a cut that looks like that?!

Then, this evening, I noticed that I had two more cuts that were identical in nature though much smaller.

Cuts on the forehead tend to bleed a lot. Professional wrestlers (of the entertainment variety) cut their foreheads when they need bloody faces because they bleed so much and hurt so little. I remember when an battery pump for an air mattress fell on my head, it gushed blood. Whatever it was that cut my head resulted in no blood whatsoever, but definitely left a visible mark. Or three marks. I can buy that I might slide paper against it wrong once, but three different times? That just made no sense.

I think I figured it out, though. I have a little table by my bed. I think I must be laying my head against it and maybe rubbing it just enough to leave a mark. I move around a lot in my sleep and I’m used to sleeping up against a wall, so that makes a bit of sense. I guess I’ll have to get a blanket or something.

Or maybe I’ll just keep scratching up my head and look like a total badass professional wrestler!

It’s a common notion in some circles on both the left (feminists) and right (borderline or full misogynists) that successful women paint themselves into a corner when they become successful and demand an equally or more successful man or otherwise are spurned by less successful men who feel threatened. There is also the notion that since women have excelled in the workplace, assortive mating has become a deeper problem since male lawyers are now marrying other lawyers instead of their secretaries and doctors are marrying female doctors rather than nurses. I’m not going to get into the veracity of either of these notions except to say that there is some truth to it but the picture is actually a lot more complicated in the longer and deeper views.

I say this as a segue to a couple comments that I’ve been making recently that SFG has picked up on and asked me to elaborate on. While it’s true that people very frequently marry into their level of success and that if there is a difference it’s usually the man that is more successful, the notion that doctors marry doctors (or lawyers or others of similar success) doesn’t mesh with the reality that I’ve seen on the outside looking in to my wife’s medical profession. The male doctors I’ve come to know generally seem to partner up with future homemakers. More interesting to SFG is that female doctors seem more inclined to marry engineering and computer types than fellow doctors or otherwise “alpha males” (unless one uses the term circularly to define anyone that lands a doctor). Male doctors seem to marry cheerleaders, female doctors seem to marry nerds.

The careers of my wife’s female colleagues go as follows: IT grunt (me), engineer, engineer, IT grunt, engineer, low-wage service worker, grad student (major unknown), IT-something, military man (rank unknown), cowboy, IT-something. There are a couple that haven’t met their partner yet and others I don’t really know about, but of the female docs that have a partner that I know about, 7 of the 11 are or were either in an engineering or IT career or some sort and none were doctors.

I should add a disclaimer here in that my wife is in a particular field that is likely not representative of the medical profession as a whole. Family practitioners on the whole tend to be less money-oriented, more politically liberal, and more family-oriented than say surgeons for instance. That may skew the results a little, but it seems to be a pattern wherever we go. There are also other things that lead me to believe that doctors frequently (if not always) favor nerd-types.

To explore this, I think it might be best to go back all the way to medical school. One interesting observation that Clancy shared with me shortly after we first met was that in her medical school class, about two-thirds or three-quarters of her male classmates were married, engaged, or in a serious relationship likely headed in that direction. The same was only true of about a third of her female classmates. There is a certain contingent of woman that flocks to (or is extremely receptive towards) a man with the intelligence, discipline, and earning potential of a doctor. To the extent that there is a contingent of men that do the same, it’s much smaller. So to support the first notion above, being successful helps men a lot more than it does women securing a mate.

So we can pretty safely assume that female doctors have fewer options than their male counterparts. There are a lot of reasons for this. Being a doctor has a mystique all its own to the point that there is a generational custom that they are the picks of the litter. Women haven’t been doctors for nearly long enough to have that sort of reputation and there are other social obstacles to prevent that from being true even if it were so. More often than not, above a certain income line (a line that doctors are certainly above) the male is the primary earner and if there are children involved it will be women that either leave the workforce or take a career-progression hit by needing to bow out for extended periods and work fewer hours to take care of the children. So a woman’s earning power is on the whole less advantageous than a man’s.

One of the things that I’ve learned is that it can be quite frequently harmful to one’s career to be married to a doctor in particular. My case may be unusually so because I’ve had to move twice in the last three years and three times in the last six. But it’s often true even without our particular circumstances. You have to pick up and move to the location of her residency. Then you have to move again to wherever you’re going to practice. The places that you’re moving to are not necessarily places that are going to help your career. If you have children during this time, you will have to be the one to take time off work to pick up the slack that she can’t because she’s so frequently working or sleeping. Three of the above-mentioned 11 have children and two of those three (both engineers) became stay-at-home fathers for their young children while their wives were residents and only one wife of a male resident worked (part time, and their marriage did not survive the residency).

Another factor to consider here is that female doctors are smart. They not unreasonably want a man that is also smart. So what they need is a man that is simultaneously smart but without the ambitions that smart people often have. This is not a significant portion of the male population. It does, however, describe a lot of nerds.

In the IT sector, other than software developers it seems to be a career that people stumble into more than anything. That’s true of my generation at least. We were introduced to computers, liked them, then eventually realized that there was money to be made there. Nerds are notoriously inflexible in some things, but when it comes to their careers I think that they are more flexible than most. The job isn’t something that energizes us so much as it is something to do to make the money to buy the toys that do energize us or in the alternative allow for us to take care of our families. If computer nerds don’t have to worry about making a whole lot of money, we can satisfy achievement-hunger and purpose-thirst working on our set-ups at home, writing our own software, designing our own websites, and so on.

Engineers are a bit tougher to figure out, though, because they spent a lot more time and energy getting their qualifications than most computer people did. I think it’s the case there, too, that a lot of them went into engineering primarily for the paycheck rather than to take the world by storm as a captain of industry or whatnot. Those that want to advance seem to often want to do so for primarily financial reasons rather than the raw ambition of making a difference. Maybe if you worked for NASA in the 1960’s or are today are an environmental engineer on a crusade, but I think it’s often the case that they found that the tasks of the job fit their strengths and it was a good paycheck. Further, engineers are generally practical individuals and marrying a doctor is often a practical thing to do!

And on the subject of practicality, engineering and IT work are (in my experience) tend to be full of people that are, if not liberal, pretty open-minded and somewhat socially open-minded or sometimes even progressive (at least prior to having children). They’re probably less likely than most to be bothered by the idea of being out-earned by their spouse. They’re less likely to be competitive about it. IT people in particular often veer towards passivity (remember that they did sort of stumble into their career much of the time). Some respond by insecure and defensive, but a lot don’t.

It seems that most other careers I can think of don’t meet one of the important above characteristics. Professors may be open-minded, but they’re ambitious in their own way and their job isn’t portable. Business majors are more likely to ambitious and are much more frequently competitive. Lawyers as a class are not well-regarded by doctors, so that’s a problem all its own, but you usually have the ambition problem in addition to that. With blue collar work there is frequently an intelligence gap or a lack of social progressiveness. Teachers are probably often a good fit (my personal experience in Southern Tech University’s College of Education notwithstanding), though you do have issues varying from transportability (if you’re trying to take your license across state lines) to political conflict (teachers frequently believe that medical care should be as free as education and doctors fear that free medical care will be as good as our free education system).

There is also one last thing that SFG himself touches on, which is the idea that it’s frequently the case that female doctors are former nerds themselves. I’m not entirely sure because I don’t know what my wife’s female colleagues were like when they were younger. I should point out that Clancy herself is the daughter of an engineering economist and herself went to college with the intention of becoming an engineer. Part of the problem here is that there really isn’t much of a stereotype of a female nerd to draw from. They are almost by definition inordinately book-smart. Maybe I need to start finding out what their fathers did in addition to what their husbands do since most female nerds are the product of nerdy fathers.

Last month, Transplanted Lawyer linked with modest disapproval to a new idea that’s being tried in schools across the country: Pay students to make good grades. Half Sigma has approvingly nodded to the idea.

Whether paying students for performance is effective or not I do not know. The jury is still out and the results we have so far are not particularly encouraging. Kids generally have short time horizons that make it difficult to tell them that if they work hard for the next six weeks they will get a reward then and only then. A more effective strategy might be an approach measuring small gains. Give them a test at the end of every couple weeks and see how they do. Mark Kleimann has actually recommended doing something like that in lieu of our current standardized testing performance-measuring regime. It could well be true that even paying students for performance will never be more effective than other uses for that money, but I’m all about trying new and different things to see what works. If it doesn’t work, move on to something new.

This post is not an endorsement of this particular strategy. Rather, it’s an objection to an objection to it that I’ve heard so frequently that it’s grated on my nerves. The objection goes like this: If you start paying kids to get good grades, they will do whatever they do for the money and not for their future or for the sake of actually learning.

I don’t know what my IQ is, but I think it’s fair to say that I would be somewhere in the top-third of the curve. I am also an intellectually curious person that spends a lot of time thinking about things and probably spend more time than most people out of school learning stuff. My High School GPA was solid if unremarkable at one of the more competitive public high schools in the city and I graduated with membership in the honors college of my alma mater. None of this is spectacular, but even if I’m not remarkable I have achieved more than the vast majority of people my age.

I say this not to brag (again, not spectacular), but to get to an important point: Despite having turned out much like my parents and school system had hoped, I couldn’t have cared a camel’s lick about learning when I was in K-12. I didn’t start enjoying learning for the sake of learning until I was at least a couple years past teachers and professors trying to thrust knowledge upon me. I learned what I learned for one major reason: to get good grades. And I didn’t get good grades to go to a great university or so that I could get a great job. I got good grades for one major reason: my parents expected it of me.

I did what I did for parental approval. My parents (particularly my father) had tremendous moral authority and their approval was very important to me. Getting good grades got positive results. Bad grades got negative results. Had my parents not taken this attitude, I might well have dropped out of school altogether as soon as legally capable. More to the point, had my parents not had the respect from me that they did (a respect that they did not just demand, but earned), I would not have turned out so well. Had my parents not had the time and money to monitor my progress and to assure me that I would be going to college like everybody else, things might have been different. While maybe it would have been preferable if I’d had my own ambitions and thirst for learning at a young age, the fact that I did what I did because I was (in a sense) manipulated to do it does not matter one fraction as much as the fact that I did it, regardless of my motivations. Further, had my parents relied on me to want to learn for its own sake or for my own ambition so that I’d do the right thing for the “right reason”, I would almost certainly have done the wrong thing and my reasoning would be moot.

A lot of kids don’t have my parents. They may have parents that have an abstract desires that their children go to a good college, but they don’t have a clear roadmap of what to expect when. Or they don’t have the time to monitor their kids as my parents monitored me. Or they didn’t have the moral authority to demand it or the consistency to apply the right pressures at the right time. And much like me, they don’t have the future time orientation to do all the right things on their own accord. Maybe it would be ideal if they had any and all of these things, but they don’t. And stripping them of any other motivation won’t necessarily give it to them.

To bring it to something that adults can relate to, it’s like going to work. Ideally speaking, we should go to work because we enjoy it or are making a valuable contribution to society or industry and we should consider that enough. Mostly, though, we do it to get paid. Otherwise, we’d be in a nation of 50 million writers, 20 million musicians, and no janitors. I really don’t know what position we are in to say that money should not be a sufficient motivator.

As I said above, this is not an endorsement of pay-for-performance with students. I don’t know if it works or not or whether it can be tweaked to work or not. Even if it can be tweaked, there are some questions of fairness if you give it to kids that go to this school but not kids that go to that one. And there are questions about whether we want kids to get money bypassing their parents entirely because they could likely find some destructive uses for it. But the notion that it provides bad incentives and is bad on that basis is ignoring the lack of good motivations that the vast majority of young people have.

Spungen has written a post inspired by a comment that I made on Half Sigma about community colleges that left her with the impression that I didn’t think that I would be bothered by being surrounded by people of lower economic and social classes.

One of the constant themes of Spungen’s posts regarding money and class is that the worst parts about not having money is the inability to filter out lower-class people the way that they are automatically filtered out when you grow up in an environment with money and with the seeming impenetrability of the upper classes who are rather difficult to meet when you didn’t have the opportunity to go to the same schools that they did or work the same jobs that they do.

The second aspect of that, the impenetrability of the upper classes, is something that some people can relate to even if they come from more money than Spungen did. When a lot of us get out of college we are suddenly no longer surrounded by peers. One of my earliest jobs outside of college was in an office place where I was the only person under 35 working in the office throughout most of my tenure and I was the only unmarried person ineligible for AARP. Contrast that to my job at Falstaff in Deseret where I was surrounded by young and mostly unmarried people* and had one of the best social atmospheres I’d ever had at any job before or since.

Of course, that’s definitely not the same thing as Spungen’s complaint because I still had my college friends and roommates to lean on. I also had friends in the area dating back to high school. If I’d been more on-the-ball, I could have utilized those friends to make more. The issue for Spungen is that those opportunities were not available to her in the first place. She’d been at that point where I was only temporarily (at a couple jobs in Colosse) for most of her life. Plus, I had the first part. When I was working at Wildcat, I could go out and hang out at the warehouse if I wanted to or I could stay in. It was completely my call. But it at least gives me an idea of what she means and a place to start from when contemplating it.

In the course of the conversation that followed from Spungen’s post, Larry pointed out that the Internet changes this somewhat. Now there’s a way to meet people outside work and geographical boundaries.

I think that there’s an important distinction to make, though, between friendships that start on the Internet and move offline and those that start and end by way of the Internet. Those friendships that have always existed independent of geography rarely last as long as those friendships that you take offline. Part of it is that friendship bonds occur, in part, through common experiences. Having a common background helps, but it seems to me that friendships that occur without something concrete tend to dissipate over time once whatever bond you do have loosens. One of you gets out of the routine of visiting a particular message board or stops collecting whatever collectables you originally started talking about, your paths diverge even if your online friendship once went beyond that to a more personal level.

Where I would expect the Internet to be most useful are ones that may have started online, but eventually moved offline. That requires, among other things, geography. Once a friendship moves offline, it becomes like any other. The fact that you met via computers and cables becomes a biographical detail.

As most of you know, when I was in my late teens I joined a BBS that allowed me to talk to others through a computer. I made a lot of friends on Camelot BBS. I met a lot of those people offline at parties and whatnot. Some I became friends with independent of Camelot. Whether we became friends offline or not share no more than a little corrollation with how close we were online. It would start because we both happened to be free on the same weekend, they needed a ride somewhere, or something like that. More on that in a sec. Yet it’s those friendships that endured. It was through those people that I found my social networks. Those are the people that came to my wedding and I theirs. Those are the people that I talk about here in the present tense. Hubert, Kyle, and Tony were never my best friends on Camelot, but they’re among my best friends now.

That’s one of the downsides of the Internet compared to Camelot. Since calls were clearly marked long and shortdistance in the age before cell phones and VoIP, everybody that called was in the same town. When I was hanging out on the Internet as a single guy, I had to work to filter out-of-towners when it came to meeting girls or guys to boost my social life. In that sense, something like a BBS wouldn’t have helped Spungen back in her day because there was probably not a big BBSing scene where she’s from. Young people growing up there now can make friends all across the country, but not in ways that noticeably improve their social life.

Geography matters a great deal in these things. I remember my freshman year in college when Hubert and I were living in Lecter Hall and most of his friends were in Greenwood Hall. Despite the fact that they were his friends, they kept doing things without him. Not because they were trying to exclude him (he had not yet become nearly intolerable), but because they’d all be hanging around the dorm and they’d decide to do something spontaneously and he though he was a building away he was nonetheless excluded by default because he didn’t happen to be right there. On the other hand, I became friends with Web, Karl, John Fustle, and various other people at first because they were around a lot. They were sort of friends by osmosis. Some of those friendships endured, like Web and Hubert, but others have since become frequent acquaintances. Even with the latter people, though, the point is that we all had ample opportunity to get to know one another due primarily to proximity.

That’s one of the hardest parts for people that aren’t in proximity to people that they’re a good match for. Spungen was born with the sharp, inquisitive, and ambitious mind that was suited for the sort of nice suburb that she lives in now. She just didn’t grow up there and never had the kind of money to have the sort of proximity that she needed until much later in life. The Internet or BBSes could have helped her find those people that did live near her that shared her interests, but only to the extent that those people existed and that they had transportation to form their own network outside their school, as I did with my Camelot friends, or the opportunity to join an existing network.

Of course, even with that, she would still have the Hubert Problem. And she would have the problem that I had in junior high and at other select portions of my life, where she is stuck around people not of her own choosing that often don’t treat her (or one another) well and aren’t generally compatible even if they do. So while it would alleviate the overall problem, it certainly wouldn’t fix it even in the best of circumstances.

This all leaves me a little concerned for the future children that Clancy and I will have. We will be living in a small town. Most small towns are generally speaking undereducated and a lot of them contain a fair amount of poverty. Poverty won’t be a problem in the Truman household, but that may not matter as much as I would like. Clancy once did a brief stint in a small town in the rural northwest.

One of the things that stood out to me when I visited her there was how unusually “middle class” the town was for such a small place unconnected with any particular large places. There was a two-year college there, but it wasn’t a college town. Clancy and I have been looking closer at college towns than other places of comparable size so that, as I put it, I wouldn’t be the only person on the school board voting to teach evolution in science class. Keeping all of the above in mind, finding a town with a substantial educated population takes on more importance because of the effects that it might have on our kids.

* - Yes, I was married at the time, but I was a residency widower. So while I wasn’t in the dating market, I still needed friends moreso than the average married guy does. And they couldn’t be “couples” friends because the other part of my couple was always working.

Will posits the trouble of being middle management, beholden to company superiors and policy and yet also expected to interface with lower level employees and try to work out their concerns to keep the office running smoothly.

The contents of this post also tangentially relate to the Department I Don’t Work For.

I’m in a semi-middle management (in that I can reassign work to “level 1″ and that more and more of my job responsibility is not taking care of every little thing myself, but seeing that whoever I assigned it to gets it done while I work on the Big Things) role now, and moving up shortly to what I will consider a fully middle-management position. My responsibilities have changed from “grunt work” to the occasional small thing (when we’re short staffed) with the rest of my time occupied by keeping abreast of policy issues, changes being done from above, and the ongoing changes in technology so that when people under my pay grade get confused, I can give them the info/training necessary to get their jobs done.

Part of this role, given that it’s at Southern Tech University, involves interfacing with the various faculty/staff and trying to meet their “needs” (or desires) while staying within policy. Only, since it is a government institution, we have the following policies we have to keep abreast of:
- Federal regulations (safety, security, privacy)
- State regulations (safety, security, privacy, information retention)
- Systemwide regulations
- College-level regulations
- Our own department mandate (we have a very specific charter on what we are allowed to spend money on, tied directly to the fact that it has to be either for student use or for educational in-classroom use, and other departments are always trying to find “loopholes” to get into our money).

Where this gets even hairier is that we are in the unenviable position of trying to enforce these regulations on tenured faculty. The thing to remember about tenured faculty is that they are (a) at least 80% completely technologically inept and (b) used to constantly getting their way from students and grad assistants, and even from the College itself if they happen to bring in a particularly large grant and can threaten to take it to another institution.

For many of our discussions, we are (for better or worse) stuck in between a fast-moving object (the faculty) and an immovable object (the various regulations). Faculty that are used to getting the rules ‘bent’ for them on things like the spending of grant money or the deadlines for various applications come to us wanting things changed “just for them.” Things like password reset deadlines or complexity requirements, alterations to the email server so that their Blackberry can function (Blackberry’s server-side software, alas, tries to auto-install a rather insecure MS-SQL setup and eats up a ton of resources), or more unusual requests that often involve a fundamental inability of the faculty member to understand the limitations of technology. Quite often, we are stuck in a situation where we are the bearer of bad news (”I’m sorry, but what you are asking for cannot be done under Regulation X.Y.Z”) or else we are caught between someone asking for something and forced to tell them no on the grounds that (a) it is technologically impossible, (b) it is cost-prohibitive, or (c) it would require the purchase of X and it does not fit within our purview to make that purchase for the intended use.

Some days, they even come back and try to make threats and trouble with us for bringing the response back about regulations.

I doubt most middle-management deals with that; I imagine that most of the time “or I quit” is about the extent of the major threat, unless employees have access to sensitive information or their loss would seriously impact a project in some way. I don’t know that it the IT-side question 100% matches the “middle management” question, but it is always interesting (and sometimes quite frustrating) being the go-between.

There’s been a bit of discussion here and there about men marrying women that have substantial debts. One explores credit card debt and the other student loan debt. As a brief aside, I find it interesting how Half Sigma’s commentariat suddenly finds financial concerns to be of the utmost relevancy when choosing a mate when there is considerably carping about women who choose the same criterion, but I’ll let that be for now. This happens to be an area of great interest to me.

Take the four most significant women in my life and exclude the first because she was too young to have any credit, and there is a distinct pattern. Julie was constantly about $3,000 in consumer debt, which was the maximum allowed by her credit card. Evangeline was roughly $30,000 in debt primarily on credit cards though she racked it up in part as a stopgap to pay for college, and my wife Clancy is (and collectively we are) $100,000 in debt due entirely to student loans. It seemed that with every passing relationship, I ended up more in debt! Ironically, debt became a decreasing factor in each one.

Money was one of the few things that Julie and I fought about with any sort of regularity. In retrospect I cannot believe that $3,000 was such a big deal, but it really was. And it wasn’t entirely the money. The bigger deal was what the money had been spent on. She spent hundreds of dollars that she did not have on Beanie Babies. He used only the best gas in a car that couldn’t really make the most of it. She ate out at every opportunity. Mostly, though, it was the Beanie Babies. For me, failing to live within one’s means (when possible) is more than just a financial failing. It’s practically a moral one. Seeing it as a moral failing as I did, that represented a huge problem. More practically, I worried about what would happen with our potential family finances.

Her perspective was a little different, though. The way she looked at it, it was her money and none of my damn business. She was genuinely angry that I would get upset at a problem that was (at that point) hers and only hers. The whole affair represented to her a controlling streak within me not unlike what she had put up with during her previous boyfriend’s tenure. She was also caught between me and her parents. Her parents told her that it was extremely important that she have money in the bank even if that meant that she couldn’t pay off her credit cards as quickly as she might like. So she could either keep the money in the bank, which would please her parents, upset me, and never actually last long in the bank anyway. Or she could pay off her credit cards, disobey her parents, and get a lecture from that end. I can appreciate the no-win situation that she was in now better than I could back then.

Notably, when she moved in with her next boyfriend Tony, money was constantly a problem in their relationship. They made a combined $90,000, didn’t own a home and had no children and they had debt and not money to divy up when he left her. He made 2/3 of what she did but paid the rent and car notes. To this day he has no idea what she spent her money on, but after he left she was nonetheless in debt.

The most glorious irony of all of this was that before dropping out she majored in… accounting.

After Julie was Evangeline, who was monumentally more in debt. Fortunately for her she let this slip when I was so taken with her that things like debt and repeated abortions were something I could easily swallow. Even so, her debt actually bothered me somewhat less. Partially it was because she (by her own telling, anyway) came by a lot of it more honestly (if very foolishly). On two occasions her father failed to come through at the very last moment on a couple semesters worth of tuition and she put it on her credit card. From there the interest kept racking up. That, combined with some foolish spending habits, created an amount of debt that she was unable to even contemplating being able to pay off. She put it off until she could graduate and when she graduated she didn’t make enough money to pay it off. Once she got so far into the whole, she gave up on the whole “financial responsibility” thing. More than the circumstances under which the debt was accrued (certainly a fair portion of it could be blamed on her), the bigger reason why it wasn’t as big a deal for me was that unlike Julie, she recognized that there was a problem and if things had progressed between the two of us I would have taken over the finances, put her on an allowance, and gotten it paid off. Money, ironically, was one of the only things that we didn’t fight about.

A couple years ago she declared bankrupcy.

Then came Clancy. Yeah, $100,000 is a lot of money, but it’s fraggin’ medical school. Half Sigma and company cannot fathom marrying somebody with loads of student loan debts, but that was a no-brainer for me. Some of it is because it’s medical school and not some liberal arts degree or even law school, but mostly it’s because she’s slightly more budget-conscious than I am. I really am convinced that it wasn’t the money in particular that drove me crazy with Julie (and to a lesser extent Eva) as it was how they got there and how they planned to get out. Seriously, on the question of whether I would pay $40,000 or even $100,000 for the right marriage, it would be a question of whether I could afford it rather than whether or not I would spend it.

On the other hand, there is my brother Oliver. Ollie married straight out of college to a young woman about $40,000 in debt. Whitney had a business degree, so she had earning capacity, but she also had an eye for the finer things in life and together they racked up significant consumer debt. I’m not sure exactly how it came to be, but when she left him after that one year (for a wealthy 40-something man, no less), he got saddled with half of the student loan debts that she had acquired before they were married.

Will points to a hilarious bit on how people take technology for granted; Bobvis opines on the supposedly meaningless advance of shaving technology.

I put myself somewhere in between the two beliefs.

First of all, yes, there is “technology” that is amazing. The fact that humans, in the last century, crafted devices to do everything from imitating birds to automating all sorts of tasks (such as, among other things, slicing bread) should indeed be amazing. On the other hand, an equally amazing amount of technological “advances” are barely advances and are merely the result of the saner portions of the population taking the logical next step, time and again. For one example, the cellular phone - occasionally referred to as a “technological marvel” and descending from the minds of people who watched a lot of Star Trek when they were younger - is not a fantastical creation, but the mere combination of a number of already-existing technologies (voice encoding and radio transmission).

At the same time, so much “time-saving” has been accomplished, and people are so “connected”, that the idea of waiting (or, to use the language of the rant above, not being an impatient brat) has seemed to vanish entirely.

Recently, I had occasion to go a couple weeks without power at my house. Certain things (wash) were annoying. Certain things weren’t available. I wouldn’t want to live like it permanently.

On the other hand… I did start taking a number of things a bit slower. Maybe there’s something to being a little less “connected” in one’s life.

Several months ago, before I left Soyokaze America and the State of Estacado, the President of Soyokaze America was also a fan of our space program. Whereas Willard’s story involves Apollo 13, mine involves the HBO miniseries “Earth to the Moon”.

The whole thing gets started in the aforementioned moment when Jack Kennedy makes the promise that sends everybody at NASA scrambling to figure out how they were going to go about doing it. They drafted up a bunch of things that they would need to do before they could land on the moon (successfully orbit, space-walk, rendezvous, docking, etc) and set those up as milestones towards the ultimate goal.

According to Soyokaze’s president, the lesson here was “Think big! Make big promises! Don’t worry until later how or whether you will be able to actually do it!”

We saw something very different, though. We saw an organization that did not just decide that something was going to be done, but decided how it as going to do it. They set up steps where in each case they would not move on to the next step until the previous step was complete. When they had a setback, they moved not just the date for that segment, but the projected date of the actual landing back. The goal was to get there safely.

Had Soyokaze been in charge of the Moon Landing, it would have looked very different: After the first milestone had been passed, a senior manager at NASA would request that the spacecraft become made Mars-compliant. So everyone would have to start again from scratch, but the first milestone wouldn’t be tested again and instead we’d be trying to get a guy space-walking before they achieved orbit. Oh, well, that didn’t work, so hopefully we’ll hit both of those when we rendezvous! The initial projected launch date of 1967 wouldn’t be moved until we’d already passed it. They’d move it once, they’d move it again. Then, some time six months before the end of the decade aim the rocket as close to the moon as we could, close our eyes, cross our fingers, and launch the sucker! Afterwards, some After-Incident Reports would be filed, and having never successfully gotten to the Moon, we’d take the next logical step of going to Mars. After all, they wanted the rocketship to be Mars compliant for a reason.

About a month later, he had us watch the second part of the miniseries, which involved the Apollo 1 explosion that killed Ed White, Gus Grissolm, and Roger Chafee. It also followed the investigation afterwards into the crash. In the climax, astronaut Frank Borman saved the entire project by saying that Grissom would have wanted the project to carry on and that things were overlooked because not all potential problems were correctly assessed. It was, he said, a failure of imagination.

According to Soyokaze’s president, the lesson was, “Things go wrong when you don’t use all of your creativity to solve problems. Imagine how something can be solved and put it into practice.”

Once again, we saw something different. As in, the movie that he was showing us. The “failure of the imagination” was not a failure in problem-solving, it was a failure to foresee everything that could go wrong! From a QA perspective, this was particularly infuriating because we’d filed report after report of our products defects and over and over again we were told “It’ll work out fine” and “It’s good enough”. The “failure of the imagination” was when they fail to imagine that our alarm that our product destroyed customer hardware was justified or that the software lifecycle is suboptimal.

I’m not sure entirely what it is about space analogies that CEOs love, but they do seem to love space analogies. I think it all goes back to Kennedy. He said “Hey, we’re going to the moon!” and a thousands and thousands of other people worked their posteriors off and it nonetheless goes down in history as something that Kennedy made happen. I guess I can see why that appeals.