Hi Anonymous Commenter--Thanks for the fun article read: Why There's No Such Thing as Having it All by Lori Gottlieb (response piece to the infamous Slaughter article).
I think Gottlieb made some excellent points (dare I say she even echoed my own sentiments about the destructive corporate culture of 24-7 connectivity that is tearing the fabric of our souls to shreds?) and I've always loved her insights and writing. Full disclosure--LOVED her book--Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (or something like that).
But what's with all the b*tchiness?
Her tone was just so mean.
I admit Slaughter's proffered solutions to the problem of 'work-life' balance were unrealistic and totally ripped apart by Gottlieb's rapier-sharp logic. But man, chill out.
Slaughter made at least a few good points and presented one very profound question:
Is there significant societal value in having mothers proportionately represented in top professional positions?
Right now, working moms face the problem that Slaughter and Gottlieb both admit to--they can NOT have it all. They can not be 'present' mothers AND hold top-level demanding positions (in the majority of fields) simply because of the nature of the job.
Right now women have a choice--be a mom OR get that top title. And a lot of people (perhaps Gottlieb as well) say that's all fine and dandy. Everyone faces choices. Be grateful you have a choice. Women have choices!!! Feminism won.
But I think Slaughter is asking the next big question--are we okay with this? As a society, do we lose out if women have to make this kind of choice? If society IS better off with having moms represented in top positions, then what can we possibly do from a policy perspective to create this better world?
And the answer might very well be--nothing. There's nothing we can do. That's just the way things are. We cannot grow wings. A leopard cannot change its spots. Mothers of children under 18 can not be top policy advisors to the president. And as Gottlieb would say--we all have limitations--live with it, suck it up.
But I think it's at least a discussion worth having.
Showing posts with label ripped from other sources. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ripped from other sources. Show all posts
Friday, July 20, 2012
Monday, July 09, 2012
Philosophers Against Procreation
Speaking of not having kids, here's a provocative article I came across today:
The Case Against Kids: Is procreation immoral?
Haven't given it a thorough read, but from just glancing at it, looks spicy. I guess my blog is also a pinterest board for articles I'll save to read later.
The Case Against Kids: Is procreation immoral?
Haven't given it a thorough read, but from just glancing at it, looks spicy. I guess my blog is also a pinterest board for articles I'll save to read later.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
High Careers and Babies Don't Mix?
Within minutes of each other, 3 people 'sent' this article to me today:
Why Women Still Can't Have it All by Anne-Marie Slaughter (first woman director of policy planning at the State Department and Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs)
Well, technically, only my hubby sent it to me.
The other 2 people (female law school classmates) 'shared' it on Facebook.
It's basically about her reflections on how motherhood and professional career success are incompatible, and perhaps irreconciliably so (yeah, I may have made up that word). I don't have time to write much on this right now, but talk amongst yourselves.
Women can NOT have it all...yes? No?
Why Women Still Can't Have it All by Anne-Marie Slaughter (first woman director of policy planning at the State Department and Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs)
Well, technically, only my hubby sent it to me.
The other 2 people (female law school classmates) 'shared' it on Facebook.
It's basically about her reflections on how motherhood and professional career success are incompatible, and perhaps irreconciliably so (yeah, I may have made up that word). I don't have time to write much on this right now, but talk amongst yourselves.
Women can NOT have it all...yes? No?
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Oldies but Goodies
Recently I found old blog entries from my LiveJournal days. Remember LiveJournal? Probably not since that was a million years ago when dinosaurs like MySpace and AOL roamed cyberspace.
I just had to repost this because it made me chuckle:
Our Bathroom, Ourselves
Every morning I use the second to last stall on the left. It's my old faithful because it's always clean whereas other ones have waste and toilet paper floating in them and driplets on the seat. I use that stall so often that I think I should dedicate my first CD album to it, Second to Last Stall on the Left.
That's all we ask for in a public bathroom. No repelling odors and a clean bowl and seat. Is that so hard? All too often, the answer is yes. We do very well in our own homes (most of us), but somehow, cleanliness and courtesy goes to pot as soon as anonymity is offered up.
Indeed, it takes real integrity to clean up after yourself (or even after someone else) instead of conveniently leaving things a mess in there for the next person. They say integrity is measured by what you do when no one else is looking. Well then, do we need more evidence for total depravity than the average filthy public restroom?
One of the best measures I've employed in charting my own Christian growth is my private public bathroom behavior.
When I was a child, my mother taught me to stand on the toilet seat and squat, thereby minimizing skin contact with the seat. Sometimes after traipsing in muddy fields, my shoes left discouraging wet brown marks on the seat. I was not taught to wipe them off. Pity the patron who was next.
But soon, when I got older and my mother stopped accompanying me into the stall, my conscience got the best of me and I thought it was rather rude to leave dirty shoe marks on the seat. Instead, I half-squatted and because I was short, mostly missed the seat, thereby usually leaving driplets on the seat. That wasn't very polite and I felt badly too, but I often found the seat to be wet and dirty already, so I rationalized that I wasn't really doing anything rude. The next person would just find it in about the same condition whether I went there or not.
But that gradually started to bother me too. I remember thinking to myself when I was around 8, if I loved my neighbor as myself, I would leave the stall as clean as possible. But since I couldn't bear the thought of wiping up urine and flushing down pre-existing waste left by the patron before me, I realized then and there that I was still a sinner in need of grace. I wondered one day if I would be sanctified enough to live up to such shining moral integrity.
Well...it's been a slow but upward journey and being married has helped a lot. When you're married you do have to think of the other person's comfort and touch other people's funkiness.
So next time you are in a public bathroom, just remember, you are only as good as your public bathroom behavior. Will you return an eye-sore for an eye-sore? Or will you stoop to wash another's dirtiness? Will you ignore the empty paper-roll and seat cover box? Or will you care for your fellow anonymous man?
I just had to repost this because it made me chuckle:
Our Bathroom, Ourselves
Every morning I use the second to last stall on the left. It's my old faithful because it's always clean whereas other ones have waste and toilet paper floating in them and driplets on the seat. I use that stall so often that I think I should dedicate my first CD album to it, Second to Last Stall on the Left.
That's all we ask for in a public bathroom. No repelling odors and a clean bowl and seat. Is that so hard? All too often, the answer is yes. We do very well in our own homes (most of us), but somehow, cleanliness and courtesy goes to pot as soon as anonymity is offered up.
Indeed, it takes real integrity to clean up after yourself (or even after someone else) instead of conveniently leaving things a mess in there for the next person. They say integrity is measured by what you do when no one else is looking. Well then, do we need more evidence for total depravity than the average filthy public restroom?
One of the best measures I've employed in charting my own Christian growth is my private public bathroom behavior.
When I was a child, my mother taught me to stand on the toilet seat and squat, thereby minimizing skin contact with the seat. Sometimes after traipsing in muddy fields, my shoes left discouraging wet brown marks on the seat. I was not taught to wipe them off. Pity the patron who was next.
But soon, when I got older and my mother stopped accompanying me into the stall, my conscience got the best of me and I thought it was rather rude to leave dirty shoe marks on the seat. Instead, I half-squatted and because I was short, mostly missed the seat, thereby usually leaving driplets on the seat. That wasn't very polite and I felt badly too, but I often found the seat to be wet and dirty already, so I rationalized that I wasn't really doing anything rude. The next person would just find it in about the same condition whether I went there or not.
But that gradually started to bother me too. I remember thinking to myself when I was around 8, if I loved my neighbor as myself, I would leave the stall as clean as possible. But since I couldn't bear the thought of wiping up urine and flushing down pre-existing waste left by the patron before me, I realized then and there that I was still a sinner in need of grace. I wondered one day if I would be sanctified enough to live up to such shining moral integrity.
Well...it's been a slow but upward journey and being married has helped a lot. When you're married you do have to think of the other person's comfort and touch other people's funkiness.
So next time you are in a public bathroom, just remember, you are only as good as your public bathroom behavior. Will you return an eye-sore for an eye-sore? Or will you stoop to wash another's dirtiness? Will you ignore the empty paper-roll and seat cover box? Or will you care for your fellow anonymous man?
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Trying
Man, this woman has been through hell and back in her quest for fertility. I can NOT imagine the tenacity, frustration, and heartache she's had to experience as she suffered miscarriage after miscarriage. Had to post something so compelling. (Btw, she's the actress that plays George Lopez's wife in his sitcom).
Constance Marie’s Blog: My Fertility Fight
This week’s topic: My fertility journey. Oy! It was so long, but so worth every second, because at the end of it, I got my sweet little Luna Marie. I always knew I would have a family, but I just didn’t know how I would get there.
I never felt ready to have a baby until I was about 37 years old. I knew I always wanted kids someday, but I needed to be “ready,” ya know? Emotionally, physically, mentally, financially, etc.
Plus, my mother had me when she was 18 — I didn’t want to repeat that. So, like any smart girl I was always careful. Growing up we are told every day, “Don’t get pregnant! Be cautious!” As if just standing next to a boy would knock us up! Right?!
But then, somewhere in our lives that all changes! It goes from, “Make sure to not get pregnant!” to “Oh man! I gotta hurry up and get pregnant!” Honestly, I wish we had a visible meter that would just DING and announce, “It is time to get serious ladies!” That biological clock is a force to be reckoned with.
I do wish I had started earlier, but I never thought I would have a problem! I had read how a lot of women were having kids later in life. I was healthy, in good shape and Latina! I mean come on! We are supposed to be muy fertile right?! For sure it was gonna be easy! Wrong.
When I turned 38, Kent and I decided it was time. We were thinking “Yea! We have to have lots of sex!” And by nine months in, it was, “Ugh, we have to have lots of sex!”
My doctor suggested I have some blood tests done and go to a specialist for a test called a hysterosalpingogram, which I can only describe as a combination x-ray/pap smear. They inject dye into your fallopian tubes to see if there’s a problem. Sounds like fun right? Um … no.
The test did not go well. His diagnosis: blocked fallopian tubes. I was shocked! All these years I had been trying not to get pregnant and I had blocked tubes! What a waste of a lot of birth control right?! I was so shocked and sad. I would not be able to get pregnant naturally.
My gyno suggested I wait a bit and then go for a second opinion. I went to see a different specialist that I nicknamed “Mr. Sunshine.” He was patient, sweet and calm. This time — I kid you not — he injected the dye, it just flew up the tubes and presto! Like a frickin’ miracle, they were fine! I didn’t question it — back to lots of sex! I was on a mission! This time I bought an ovulation kit and I became a pro at peeing on a stick.
After a few months I was pregnant! Kent and I were in shock! Wow! At seven weeks we went for an ultrasound to see and hear the baby’s heartbeat. As we eagerly looked at the monitor, we grew silent. There was no baby. Words cannot express how sad we were. That was a horrible day.
The only thing I had to hold onto was that years earlier a friend of mine had shared her pregnancy journey with me. She told me that she had gotten pregnant three times and that each time, it didn’t work out. She was very matter of fact about it. She knew it was just part of the process when a woman is older. That friend went on to have two beautiful girls. I loved her so much for being honest and sharing that story with me. I needed hope.
Once more we got pregnant! Once more, it did not work out. Another horrible day.
I tried the holistic approach, doing research on toxins that could impede my getting knocked up. I eliminated coffee and fish from my diet. The pesticides in coffee and fish, as well as the mercury in the latter are considered possible contributors to birth defects in fetal tissue. I also stopped drinking out of plastic bottles, because the plastic releases a toxin called Bisphenol A (BPA), a known hormone disruptor. Lastly, I did a few cleanses. I was not kidding around!
We decided to get even more serious. My doctor suggested Clomid, a drug that helps a woman produce more than one egg each cycle, along with the most common type of Artificial Insemination, Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI). We did this about six times! One of the times, our substitute doctor — because of course, I only ovulated on major holidays and weekends, especially Sundays — spilled the specimen all over the floor! Dammit! After all of Kent’s hard work. Then he had the nerve to say he wouldn’t charge us!
So far, none of this was working. I was getting tense. I was running out of time and knew I needed to bring in the BIG GUNS!
In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) was our next step. I asked around and my friends suggested the rock star of the IVF game, Dr. Richard Marrs. I LOVE this guy! I started a regimen of injections — Yes, I injected myself. Eek! — plus meticulously timed sex. Romantic right? Not so much.
This did not work.
Then we upped our game. Major hormone injections helped me to produce up to 13-18 eggs each cycle — that will bloat a girl! — that they would then harvest like I was a frickin’ orange tree while I was under anesthesia. I was nervous but trusted Dr. Marrs.
Afterwards, they would take my egg and thin the outer layer — because it had grown hard and bitchy over my 38+ years — and Kent’s sperm and introduce them to one another. When they weren’t looking, they’d SHOVE them together! When they formed an embryo, we would wait to see how it developed, literally calling in every day to see how our lil guy/gal was doing. When it had developed far enough, it was time to be put back in my uterus.
I also included acupuncture into this method because it has been reported to increase the ability of the embryo to implant into the wall of the uterus.
We did the IVF process two times. Each time, my odds looked so great, but each time it did not work out.
At this point, Dr. Marrs started to realize that something was wrong. I was able to get pregnant naturally but because the fetal tissue wasn’t great quality, the baby wouldn’t develop. Now they were putting in the A-team embryos and still nothing! I had eight embryos left, so Dr. Marrs started thinking outside the box.
He believed that the IVF medicines were messing with my own natural implantation process. That part I could do fine on my own, so he decided that we should freeze the remainder of the embryos and just wait, allowing my body to clear out from all the hormones and get back to normal.
Me? I did not like this concept! I was panicking and feeling pressed for time. I wanted that baby NOW. But who was I to argue with an IVF rock star?
I detoxed, relaxed and cleaned out mentally and physically. Whew! During a regular ovulation cycle two and a half months later, we defrosted a few of my little popsicles and put them in the oven, followed immediately by acupuncture. To ensure implantation, I literally laid down on the couch for two days until one of those little buggers took hold.
And take hold one did! One little embryo survived the ice age and implanted! That little embryo was and is little Miss Luna Marie, the love of my life!
I cannot tell you how depressing, frustrating, difficult, sad, lonely and just plain crappy the whole process was. However, I can say that I would do it ALL OVER AGAIN! As I sit here listening to those little puffy pickle toes running upstairs and screaming “Mama!” while I sit here and type away, I can tell you that it was all worth EVERY minute!
That is my story, as condensed as I possibly could. I hope it is helpful to some of you who are just beginning or mid-process, or maybe you can forward it to a friend. Just know that you are not alone. We women need to support each other!
My last thought — if you want a family, it can and will happen! One way or another!
***********************
Constance Marie’s Blog: My Fertility Fight
This week’s topic: My fertility journey. Oy! It was so long, but so worth every second, because at the end of it, I got my sweet little Luna Marie. I always knew I would have a family, but I just didn’t know how I would get there.
I never felt ready to have a baby until I was about 37 years old. I knew I always wanted kids someday, but I needed to be “ready,” ya know? Emotionally, physically, mentally, financially, etc.
Plus, my mother had me when she was 18 — I didn’t want to repeat that. So, like any smart girl I was always careful. Growing up we are told every day, “Don’t get pregnant! Be cautious!” As if just standing next to a boy would knock us up! Right?!
But then, somewhere in our lives that all changes! It goes from, “Make sure to not get pregnant!” to “Oh man! I gotta hurry up and get pregnant!” Honestly, I wish we had a visible meter that would just DING and announce, “It is time to get serious ladies!” That biological clock is a force to be reckoned with.
I do wish I had started earlier, but I never thought I would have a problem! I had read how a lot of women were having kids later in life. I was healthy, in good shape and Latina! I mean come on! We are supposed to be muy fertile right?! For sure it was gonna be easy! Wrong.
When I turned 38, Kent and I decided it was time. We were thinking “Yea! We have to have lots of sex!” And by nine months in, it was, “Ugh, we have to have lots of sex!”
My doctor suggested I have some blood tests done and go to a specialist for a test called a hysterosalpingogram, which I can only describe as a combination x-ray/pap smear. They inject dye into your fallopian tubes to see if there’s a problem. Sounds like fun right? Um … no.
The test did not go well. His diagnosis: blocked fallopian tubes. I was shocked! All these years I had been trying not to get pregnant and I had blocked tubes! What a waste of a lot of birth control right?! I was so shocked and sad. I would not be able to get pregnant naturally.
My gyno suggested I wait a bit and then go for a second opinion. I went to see a different specialist that I nicknamed “Mr. Sunshine.” He was patient, sweet and calm. This time — I kid you not — he injected the dye, it just flew up the tubes and presto! Like a frickin’ miracle, they were fine! I didn’t question it — back to lots of sex! I was on a mission! This time I bought an ovulation kit and I became a pro at peeing on a stick.
After a few months I was pregnant! Kent and I were in shock! Wow! At seven weeks we went for an ultrasound to see and hear the baby’s heartbeat. As we eagerly looked at the monitor, we grew silent. There was no baby. Words cannot express how sad we were. That was a horrible day.
The only thing I had to hold onto was that years earlier a friend of mine had shared her pregnancy journey with me. She told me that she had gotten pregnant three times and that each time, it didn’t work out. She was very matter of fact about it. She knew it was just part of the process when a woman is older. That friend went on to have two beautiful girls. I loved her so much for being honest and sharing that story with me. I needed hope.
Once more we got pregnant! Once more, it did not work out. Another horrible day.
I tried the holistic approach, doing research on toxins that could impede my getting knocked up. I eliminated coffee and fish from my diet. The pesticides in coffee and fish, as well as the mercury in the latter are considered possible contributors to birth defects in fetal tissue. I also stopped drinking out of plastic bottles, because the plastic releases a toxin called Bisphenol A (BPA), a known hormone disruptor. Lastly, I did a few cleanses. I was not kidding around!
We decided to get even more serious. My doctor suggested Clomid, a drug that helps a woman produce more than one egg each cycle, along with the most common type of Artificial Insemination, Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI). We did this about six times! One of the times, our substitute doctor — because of course, I only ovulated on major holidays and weekends, especially Sundays — spilled the specimen all over the floor! Dammit! After all of Kent’s hard work. Then he had the nerve to say he wouldn’t charge us!
So far, none of this was working. I was getting tense. I was running out of time and knew I needed to bring in the BIG GUNS!
In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) was our next step. I asked around and my friends suggested the rock star of the IVF game, Dr. Richard Marrs. I LOVE this guy! I started a regimen of injections — Yes, I injected myself. Eek! — plus meticulously timed sex. Romantic right? Not so much.
This did not work.
Then we upped our game. Major hormone injections helped me to produce up to 13-18 eggs each cycle — that will bloat a girl! — that they would then harvest like I was a frickin’ orange tree while I was under anesthesia. I was nervous but trusted Dr. Marrs.
Afterwards, they would take my egg and thin the outer layer — because it had grown hard and bitchy over my 38+ years — and Kent’s sperm and introduce them to one another. When they weren’t looking, they’d SHOVE them together! When they formed an embryo, we would wait to see how it developed, literally calling in every day to see how our lil guy/gal was doing. When it had developed far enough, it was time to be put back in my uterus.
I also included acupuncture into this method because it has been reported to increase the ability of the embryo to implant into the wall of the uterus.
We did the IVF process two times. Each time, my odds looked so great, but each time it did not work out.
At this point, Dr. Marrs started to realize that something was wrong. I was able to get pregnant naturally but because the fetal tissue wasn’t great quality, the baby wouldn’t develop. Now they were putting in the A-team embryos and still nothing! I had eight embryos left, so Dr. Marrs started thinking outside the box.
He believed that the IVF medicines were messing with my own natural implantation process. That part I could do fine on my own, so he decided that we should freeze the remainder of the embryos and just wait, allowing my body to clear out from all the hormones and get back to normal.
Me? I did not like this concept! I was panicking and feeling pressed for time. I wanted that baby NOW. But who was I to argue with an IVF rock star?
I detoxed, relaxed and cleaned out mentally and physically. Whew! During a regular ovulation cycle two and a half months later, we defrosted a few of my little popsicles and put them in the oven, followed immediately by acupuncture. To ensure implantation, I literally laid down on the couch for two days until one of those little buggers took hold.
And take hold one did! One little embryo survived the ice age and implanted! That little embryo was and is little Miss Luna Marie, the love of my life!
I cannot tell you how depressing, frustrating, difficult, sad, lonely and just plain crappy the whole process was. However, I can say that I would do it ALL OVER AGAIN! As I sit here listening to those little puffy pickle toes running upstairs and screaming “Mama!” while I sit here and type away, I can tell you that it was all worth EVERY minute!
That is my story, as condensed as I possibly could. I hope it is helpful to some of you who are just beginning or mid-process, or maybe you can forward it to a friend. Just know that you are not alone. We women need to support each other!
My last thought — if you want a family, it can and will happen! One way or another!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Predator Island
Oprah recently re-aired a story about a special confinement center informally dubbed Predator Island, in the beautiful Puget Sound.
It’s a facility that houses sexual predators, 60% of which are child molesters. This is not a prison, however. The unique twist is that all these predators have already served their sentences, but a judge has assigned them to be civilly committed because they are too likely to re-offend. If these predators elect to go through treatment, and are declared “cured,” they can get off the island.
But why would they want to?
Oprah’s cameras panned around the facility and it seriously looks like a state-of-the-art dormitory. There are recreational rooms with brand new basketball courts, flat-screen tv’s, computers, libraries, comfortable beds, etc. This facility is not like a run-down nasty inner-city public school. It is pretty darn posh. Oh yeah, and free health-care!
If I ever find myself down-and-out and about to be homeless, I'm going to pretend to molest someone, plead guilty, and spend the rest of my life in ease and comfort, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Inmates can knit, sew, do woodworking, all kinds of hobbies. Sign me up!
It is reported that federal tax payers spend $165,000 per offender each year to put them up in these nice digs!
That just seems wrong to me. Why can’t we just chemically castrate them and then release them back into society? It would be so much cheaper and, *bonus* they would never offend again. Problem solved.
Just another case of our tax dollars “hard at work” subsidizing the Washington State economy. FAIL.
You can read more about this depressing topic here.
It’s a facility that houses sexual predators, 60% of which are child molesters. This is not a prison, however. The unique twist is that all these predators have already served their sentences, but a judge has assigned them to be civilly committed because they are too likely to re-offend. If these predators elect to go through treatment, and are declared “cured,” they can get off the island.
But why would they want to?
Oprah’s cameras panned around the facility and it seriously looks like a state-of-the-art dormitory. There are recreational rooms with brand new basketball courts, flat-screen tv’s, computers, libraries, comfortable beds, etc. This facility is not like a run-down nasty inner-city public school. It is pretty darn posh. Oh yeah, and free health-care!
If I ever find myself down-and-out and about to be homeless, I'm going to pretend to molest someone, plead guilty, and spend the rest of my life in ease and comfort, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Inmates can knit, sew, do woodworking, all kinds of hobbies. Sign me up!
It is reported that federal tax payers spend $165,000 per offender each year to put them up in these nice digs!
That just seems wrong to me. Why can’t we just chemically castrate them and then release them back into society? It would be so much cheaper and, *bonus* they would never offend again. Problem solved.
Just another case of our tax dollars “hard at work” subsidizing the Washington State economy. FAIL.
You can read more about this depressing topic here.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Poop
I heard the best quote today on NPR.
They were doing some story about a laid off dad who now spends everyday at home with his infant, which he really enjoys. And then the narrator said something like, but every situation has its downside...
"Poop," said the dad's voice, "Poop is the major downside."
[End scene]
I laughed hysterically. That is pure poetry.
They were doing some story about a laid off dad who now spends everyday at home with his infant, which he really enjoys. And then the narrator said something like, but every situation has its downside...
"Poop," said the dad's voice, "Poop is the major downside."
[End scene]
I laughed hysterically. That is pure poetry.
Monday, August 24, 2009
What's that Lassie? You think I should get a biopsy?
This article gives me another reason to love dogs...
"In the small world of people who train dogs to sniff cancer, a little-known Northern California clinic has made a big claim: that it has trained five dogs - three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs - to detect lung cancer in the breath of cancer sufferers with 99 percent accuracy.
The study was based on well-established concepts. It has been known since the 80's that tumors exude tiny amounts of alkanes and benzene derivatives not found in healthy tissue."
"In the small world of people who train dogs to sniff cancer, a little-known Northern California clinic has made a big claim: that it has trained five dogs - three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs - to detect lung cancer in the breath of cancer sufferers with 99 percent accuracy.
The study was based on well-established concepts. It has been known since the 80's that tumors exude tiny amounts of alkanes and benzene derivatives not found in healthy tissue."
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Eureka!--The Obvious
When I read this article in the NYT I could not stop snickering in my head.
Not laughing, mind you, but snickering.
It's the classic example of academics being so caught up in their own little world that they don't realize they've spent their entire lives studying what everyone already KNOWS to be COMMON SENSE. It's the ultimate DUH.
I mean, seriously, academics are sometimes so proud of discovering the obvious. I don't need "experts" to tell me men prefer to marry younger, hotter women and that women prefer rich guys. Whatever evolutionary psychologists--that's not even a real science!
But I digress.
In this instance, what may seem obvious to you and me was apparently quite eye-opening to David Kessler, Harvard-educated pediatrician and head of the FDA under two presidents.
As the article explains, "In an experiment of one, Dr. Kessler tested his willpower by buying two gooey chocolate chip cookies that he didn’t plan to eat. At home, he found himself staring at the cookies, and even distracted by memories of the chocolate chunks and doughy peaks as he left the room. He left the house, and the cookies remained uneaten. Feeling triumphant, he stopped for coffee, saw cookies on the counter and gobbled one down.
'Why does that chocolate chip cookie have such power over me?' Dr. Kessler asked in an interview. 'Is it the cookie, the representation of the cookie in my brain? I spent seven years trying to figure out the answer.'"
So, let me get this straight buddy. You spent 7 years wondering why a cookie is delicious?! Because it's full of sugar and butter, Idiot!
Kessler has jotted down his oh-so-obvious thoughts and musings in a book called The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.
The article gives us a hint into why Kessler is not aware that his oh-so-obvious thoughts are oh-so-obvious. Kessler was deeply involved in fighting big tobacco and saw all the sneaky, tricky, deceptive things big tobacco did to make their products addictive and delicious. So then he decided to turn that eagle-eye of his to another great American public health enemy: FOOD!
As the article explains "In The End of Overeating Dr. Kessler finds some similarities in the food industry, which has combined and created foods in a way that taps into our brain circuitry and stimulates our desire for more."
Uh, you mean how the food industry tries to make food delicious? Okay, whatever. That's not exactly earth-shattering news. If Kessler had uncovered that the food industry laced its products with crack, that would be exciting. But unfortunately his thoughts are much more banal. To wit:
"When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full."
Uh, food makers are doing what?! You don't say! They are combining fats, sugar and salt?!!! Sacred bleu! Stop the presses! And they're doing it in a way that makes us want more? You mean they're making the food yummy? Oh. My. Gosh! But it gets better:
"Dr. Kessler isn’t convinced that food makers fully understand the neuroscience of the forces they have unleashed, but food companies certainly understand human behavior, taste preferences and desire. In fact, he offers descriptions of how restaurants and food makers manipulate ingredients to reach the aptly named 'bliss point.' Foods that contain too little or too much sugar, fat or salt are either bland or overwhelming. But food scientists work hard to reach the precise point at which we derive the greatest pleasure from fat, sugar and salt."
Yes, let's give your stupid research a fancy-pants, legit-sounding term like "bliss point"! Did you spend a long time thinking up that word Kessler? Did you go through a list, like Yummy Point? (No...too unsophisticated sounding) Delicious Point? (No, doesn't make my research sound legit) Wow-Can-I-Have-Another-One Point? (No, too Oliver Twist).
"The result is that chain restaurants like Chili’s cook up “hyper-palatable food that requires little chewing and goes down easily,” he notes. And Dr. Kessler reports that the Snickers bar, for instance, is “extraordinarily well engineered.” As we chew it, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel traps the peanuts so the entire combination of flavors is blissfully experienced in the mouth at the same time."
Gasp! The food industry is so big and powerful--it's all a huge conspiracy. Bad chain restaurants! They're no better than big tobacco! How dare they try to make our food "hyper-palatable"! We demand moderately palatable food. That's what I want when I go out on the town.
And on and on the article goes about how fascinating Kessler's discoveries are.
What. Ever.
Look, I'm sure Kessler's book and research has something interesting to contribute to society. But this article sure ain't highlighting it. If I wasn't sure I was reading NYT, I'd a thought I was reading The Onion.
RESEARCHER DISCOVERS RESTAURANTS TRY TO MAKE FOOD DELICIOUS (by combining salt, sugar and fat in just the right amounts)!
And in other news of the hour, DOG BITES MAN!
Not laughing, mind you, but snickering.
It's the classic example of academics being so caught up in their own little world that they don't realize they've spent their entire lives studying what everyone already KNOWS to be COMMON SENSE. It's the ultimate DUH.
I mean, seriously, academics are sometimes so proud of discovering the obvious. I don't need "experts" to tell me men prefer to marry younger, hotter women and that women prefer rich guys. Whatever evolutionary psychologists--that's not even a real science!
But I digress.
In this instance, what may seem obvious to you and me was apparently quite eye-opening to David Kessler, Harvard-educated pediatrician and head of the FDA under two presidents.
As the article explains, "In an experiment of one, Dr. Kessler tested his willpower by buying two gooey chocolate chip cookies that he didn’t plan to eat. At home, he found himself staring at the cookies, and even distracted by memories of the chocolate chunks and doughy peaks as he left the room. He left the house, and the cookies remained uneaten. Feeling triumphant, he stopped for coffee, saw cookies on the counter and gobbled one down.
'Why does that chocolate chip cookie have such power over me?' Dr. Kessler asked in an interview. 'Is it the cookie, the representation of the cookie in my brain? I spent seven years trying to figure out the answer.'"
So, let me get this straight buddy. You spent 7 years wondering why a cookie is delicious?! Because it's full of sugar and butter, Idiot!
Kessler has jotted down his oh-so-obvious thoughts and musings in a book called The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.
The article gives us a hint into why Kessler is not aware that his oh-so-obvious thoughts are oh-so-obvious. Kessler was deeply involved in fighting big tobacco and saw all the sneaky, tricky, deceptive things big tobacco did to make their products addictive and delicious. So then he decided to turn that eagle-eye of his to another great American public health enemy: FOOD!
As the article explains "In The End of Overeating Dr. Kessler finds some similarities in the food industry, which has combined and created foods in a way that taps into our brain circuitry and stimulates our desire for more."
Uh, you mean how the food industry tries to make food delicious? Okay, whatever. That's not exactly earth-shattering news. If Kessler had uncovered that the food industry laced its products with crack, that would be exciting. But unfortunately his thoughts are much more banal. To wit:
"When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full."
Uh, food makers are doing what?! You don't say! They are combining fats, sugar and salt?!!! Sacred bleu! Stop the presses! And they're doing it in a way that makes us want more? You mean they're making the food yummy? Oh. My. Gosh! But it gets better:
"Dr. Kessler isn’t convinced that food makers fully understand the neuroscience of the forces they have unleashed, but food companies certainly understand human behavior, taste preferences and desire. In fact, he offers descriptions of how restaurants and food makers manipulate ingredients to reach the aptly named 'bliss point.' Foods that contain too little or too much sugar, fat or salt are either bland or overwhelming. But food scientists work hard to reach the precise point at which we derive the greatest pleasure from fat, sugar and salt."
Yes, let's give your stupid research a fancy-pants, legit-sounding term like "bliss point"! Did you spend a long time thinking up that word Kessler? Did you go through a list, like Yummy Point? (No...too unsophisticated sounding) Delicious Point? (No, doesn't make my research sound legit) Wow-Can-I-Have-Another-One Point? (No, too Oliver Twist).
"The result is that chain restaurants like Chili’s cook up “hyper-palatable food that requires little chewing and goes down easily,” he notes. And Dr. Kessler reports that the Snickers bar, for instance, is “extraordinarily well engineered.” As we chew it, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel traps the peanuts so the entire combination of flavors is blissfully experienced in the mouth at the same time."
Gasp! The food industry is so big and powerful--it's all a huge conspiracy. Bad chain restaurants! They're no better than big tobacco! How dare they try to make our food "hyper-palatable"! We demand moderately palatable food. That's what I want when I go out on the town.
And on and on the article goes about how fascinating Kessler's discoveries are.
What. Ever.
Look, I'm sure Kessler's book and research has something interesting to contribute to society. But this article sure ain't highlighting it. If I wasn't sure I was reading NYT, I'd a thought I was reading The Onion.
RESEARCHER DISCOVERS RESTAURANTS TRY TO MAKE FOOD DELICIOUS (by combining salt, sugar and fat in just the right amounts)!
And in other news of the hour, DOG BITES MAN!
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The Sound of Blogs Dying
A few weeks back I was thinking about how personal blogs were a dying breed and then came accross this article a few days later in the NYTimes which confirmed my suspicions.
Blogs are dead and dying.
And it's time to purge my blogroll. In the next few days I'm going to remove all blogs from my sidebar that haven't posted in the last 6 months. (Post now! It's not too late to save yourself!)
And despite the odds, I'm gonna try my darndest to find new ones. (Cuz I need entertainment at work!)
Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
“HI, I’m Judy Nichols. Welcome to my rant.”
Thus was born Rantings of a Crazed Soccer Mom, the blog of a stay-at-home mother and murder-mystery writer from Wilmington, N.C. Mrs. Nichols, 52, put up her first post in late 2004, serving up a litany of gripes about the Bush administration and people who thought they had “a monopoly on morality.” After urging her readers to vote for John Kerry, she closed with a flourish: “Practice compassionate regime change.”
The post generated no comments.
Today, Mrs. Nichols speaks about her blog as if it were a diet or half-finished novel. “I’m going to get back to it,” she swears. Her last entry, in December of last year, was curt and none too profound. “Books make great gifts,” she began, breaking a silence of nearly a month.
Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.
“I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments,” Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. “Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, ‘I would like that.’ ”
Not all fallow blogs die from lack of reader interest. Some bloggers find themselves too busy — what with, say, homework and swim practice, or perhaps even housework and parenting. Others graduate to more immediate formats, like Twitter and Facebook. And a few — gasp — actually decide to reclaim some smidgen of personal privacy.
“Before you could be anonymous, and now you can’t,” said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.
Ms. Sun’s posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from “The Simpsons” — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the “best online diary” award at the South by Southwest media powwow.
But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions — wrong ones — about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.
“The Internet is different now,” she said over a cup of tea in Midtown. “I was too Web 1.0. You want to be anonymous, you want to write, like, long entries, and no one wants to read that stuff.”
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”
That’s a serious letdown from the hype that greeted blogs when they first became popular. No longer would writers toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry, we were told. Finally the world of ideas would be democratized! This was the catnip that intoxicated Mrs. Nichols. “That was when people were starting to talk about blogs and how anyone could, if not get famous, get their opinions out there and get them read,” she recalled. “I just wanted to post something interesting and get people talking, but mostly it was just my sister commenting.”
Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta, had no trouble attracting an audience to his self-explanatory site, Things My Dog Ate, which included tales of his foxhound, Watson, eating remote controls, a wig and a $400 pair of Prada shoes.
“I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said. That led to some small advertising deals, including one with PetSmart and another with a company that made dog-proof cellphone chargers. Mr. Goodman posted a video of his dog failing to destroy one.
“I guess the charger wasn’t very popular,” he said. “I think I made about $20” from readers clicking on the ads. He last updated the site in November.
Mr. Jalichandra of Technorati — a blogger himself — also points out that some retired bloggers have merely found new platforms. “Some of that activity has gone to Facebook and MySpace, and obviously Twitter is a new phenomenon,” he said.
Others simply tire of telling their stories. “Stephanie,” a semi-anonymous 17-year-old with a precocious knowledge of designers and a sharp sense of humor, abandoned her blog, Fashion Robot, about a week before it got a shoutout in the “blog watch” column of The Wall Street Journal last December. Her final post, simply titled “The End,” said she just didn’t feel like blogging any more. She declined an e-mail request for an interview, saying she was no longer interested in publicity.
As for Ms. Sun of Cromulent.org, she has made peace with being public. She has a new blog, SaladDays.org, where she keeps her posts short and jaunty, not personally revealing; mostly, she offers up health and diet tips, with the occasional quote from Simone de Beauvoir.
What is she after this time around? In person, she was noncommittal, but that night she sent a follow-up e-mail message.
“To be honest, I would love a book deal to come out of my blog,” she wrote. “Or I would love for Salad Days to give me a means to be financially independent to continue pursuing and sharing what I love with the world.”
Blogs are dead and dying.
And it's time to purge my blogroll. In the next few days I'm going to remove all blogs from my sidebar that haven't posted in the last 6 months. (Post now! It's not too late to save yourself!)
And despite the odds, I'm gonna try my darndest to find new ones. (Cuz I need entertainment at work!)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
“HI, I’m Judy Nichols. Welcome to my rant.”
Thus was born Rantings of a Crazed Soccer Mom, the blog of a stay-at-home mother and murder-mystery writer from Wilmington, N.C. Mrs. Nichols, 52, put up her first post in late 2004, serving up a litany of gripes about the Bush administration and people who thought they had “a monopoly on morality.” After urging her readers to vote for John Kerry, she closed with a flourish: “Practice compassionate regime change.”
The post generated no comments.
Today, Mrs. Nichols speaks about her blog as if it were a diet or half-finished novel. “I’m going to get back to it,” she swears. Her last entry, in December of last year, was curt and none too profound. “Books make great gifts,” she began, breaking a silence of nearly a month.
Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.
“I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments,” Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. “Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, ‘I would like that.’ ”
Not all fallow blogs die from lack of reader interest. Some bloggers find themselves too busy — what with, say, homework and swim practice, or perhaps even housework and parenting. Others graduate to more immediate formats, like Twitter and Facebook. And a few — gasp — actually decide to reclaim some smidgen of personal privacy.
“Before you could be anonymous, and now you can’t,” said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.
Ms. Sun’s posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from “The Simpsons” — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the “best online diary” award at the South by Southwest media powwow.
But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions — wrong ones — about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.
“The Internet is different now,” she said over a cup of tea in Midtown. “I was too Web 1.0. You want to be anonymous, you want to write, like, long entries, and no one wants to read that stuff.”
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”
That’s a serious letdown from the hype that greeted blogs when they first became popular. No longer would writers toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry, we were told. Finally the world of ideas would be democratized! This was the catnip that intoxicated Mrs. Nichols. “That was when people were starting to talk about blogs and how anyone could, if not get famous, get their opinions out there and get them read,” she recalled. “I just wanted to post something interesting and get people talking, but mostly it was just my sister commenting.”
Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta, had no trouble attracting an audience to his self-explanatory site, Things My Dog Ate, which included tales of his foxhound, Watson, eating remote controls, a wig and a $400 pair of Prada shoes.
“I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said. That led to some small advertising deals, including one with PetSmart and another with a company that made dog-proof cellphone chargers. Mr. Goodman posted a video of his dog failing to destroy one.
“I guess the charger wasn’t very popular,” he said. “I think I made about $20” from readers clicking on the ads. He last updated the site in November.
Mr. Jalichandra of Technorati — a blogger himself — also points out that some retired bloggers have merely found new platforms. “Some of that activity has gone to Facebook and MySpace, and obviously Twitter is a new phenomenon,” he said.
Others simply tire of telling their stories. “Stephanie,” a semi-anonymous 17-year-old with a precocious knowledge of designers and a sharp sense of humor, abandoned her blog, Fashion Robot, about a week before it got a shoutout in the “blog watch” column of The Wall Street Journal last December. Her final post, simply titled “The End,” said she just didn’t feel like blogging any more. She declined an e-mail request for an interview, saying she was no longer interested in publicity.
As for Ms. Sun of Cromulent.org, she has made peace with being public. She has a new blog, SaladDays.org, where she keeps her posts short and jaunty, not personally revealing; mostly, she offers up health and diet tips, with the occasional quote from Simone de Beauvoir.
What is she after this time around? In person, she was noncommittal, but that night she sent a follow-up e-mail message.
“To be honest, I would love a book deal to come out of my blog,” she wrote. “Or I would love for Salad Days to give me a means to be financially independent to continue pursuing and sharing what I love with the world.”
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
It Really Works!
During this time of horrible economic downturn, I thought I would look for a silver lining through rent reduction. Surely, I reasoned, with property values dropping like flies, I could get a humble rent decrease?
So I did some research and read this article in the WSJ, which came complete with a form letter the author used to reduce her rent.
Inspired, I decided to write my own letter loosely based on hers:
To Whom It May Concern:
We are writing in regards to the impending expiration of our lease at [REDACTED, Oakland, CA].
On June 18, 2008, we, M. and C. moved into the aforementioned property. Our one year lease term expires on June 30, 2009, at which point we would like to extend the lease under a month-to-month tenancy as provided in the terms of the lease.
However, given the ongoing decline in property values in the Bay Area, instead of continuing our tenancy at the current rent of $1750 per month, we request that our rent be reduced to $1700 per month, effective July 1, 2009.
We have confirmed that several units nearly identical to ours are being offered for rent in the Oakland area below $1700 per month and thus feel it is reasonable for our rent to be lowered to $1700 per month, especially given our flawless rental history. [Of course I didn't mention that identical units in our complex were asking for $1850 a month on Craigslist!]
We look forward to hearing from you shortly.
Sincerely,
M. and C.
After a week of waiting, the property manager called to say, "Yes." Yes! Sweet sweet victory--yes! I've been renting my whole life since moving out of the freshman dorms and for once, for just this ONCE, the rent is going DOWNward.
Nevermind that the actual amount I saved is not that much...it's about the simple joy of getting a break (must be the cheap Asian in me).
Try it out for yourself...let me know if it works for you too!
So I did some research and read this article in the WSJ, which came complete with a form letter the author used to reduce her rent.
Inspired, I decided to write my own letter loosely based on hers:
To Whom It May Concern:
We are writing in regards to the impending expiration of our lease at [REDACTED, Oakland, CA].
On June 18, 2008, we, M. and C. moved into the aforementioned property. Our one year lease term expires on June 30, 2009, at which point we would like to extend the lease under a month-to-month tenancy as provided in the terms of the lease.
However, given the ongoing decline in property values in the Bay Area, instead of continuing our tenancy at the current rent of $1750 per month, we request that our rent be reduced to $1700 per month, effective July 1, 2009.
We have confirmed that several units nearly identical to ours are being offered for rent in the Oakland area below $1700 per month and thus feel it is reasonable for our rent to be lowered to $1700 per month, especially given our flawless rental history. [Of course I didn't mention that identical units in our complex were asking for $1850 a month on Craigslist!]
We look forward to hearing from you shortly.
Sincerely,
M. and C.
After a week of waiting, the property manager called to say, "Yes." Yes! Sweet sweet victory--yes! I've been renting my whole life since moving out of the freshman dorms and for once, for just this ONCE, the rent is going DOWNward.
Nevermind that the actual amount I saved is not that much...it's about the simple joy of getting a break (must be the cheap Asian in me).
Try it out for yourself...let me know if it works for you too!
Friday, June 20, 2008
Thank you Brooks
This, from a guy who was (and maybe still is) pro-Obama:
The Two Obamas
David Brooks, NYTimes
God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.
But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.
Back when he was in the Illinois State Senate, Dr. Barack could have taken positions on politically uncomfortable issues. But Fast Eddie Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times. From time to time, he threw his voting power under the truck.
Dr. Barack said he could no more disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than disown his own grandmother. Then the political costs of Rev. Wright escalated and Fast Eddie Obama threw Wright under the truck.
Dr. Barack could have been a workhorse senator. But primary candidates don’t do tough votes, so Fast Eddie Obama threw the workhorse duties under the truck.
Dr. Barack could have changed the way presidential campaigning works. John McCain offered to have a series of extended town-hall meetings around the country. But favored candidates don’t go in for unscripted free-range conversations. Fast Eddie Obama threw the new-politics mantra under the truck.
And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.
But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.
And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.
The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.
I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.
All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.
The Two Obamas
David Brooks, NYTimes
God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.
But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.
Back when he was in the Illinois State Senate, Dr. Barack could have taken positions on politically uncomfortable issues. But Fast Eddie Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times. From time to time, he threw his voting power under the truck.
Dr. Barack said he could no more disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than disown his own grandmother. Then the political costs of Rev. Wright escalated and Fast Eddie Obama threw Wright under the truck.
Dr. Barack could have been a workhorse senator. But primary candidates don’t do tough votes, so Fast Eddie Obama threw the workhorse duties under the truck.
Dr. Barack could have changed the way presidential campaigning works. John McCain offered to have a series of extended town-hall meetings around the country. But favored candidates don’t go in for unscripted free-range conversations. Fast Eddie Obama threw the new-politics mantra under the truck.
And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.
But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.
And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.
The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.
I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.
All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Peggy bit me
For the last 3 days my lifelong friend Peggy has been visiting and we've been hamming it up around Boston.
Until I find the time to post about it, here's at least one thing from her visit I can immediately share: the youtube video that had us cracking up for hours...
And this one too...
Until I find the time to post about it, here's at least one thing from her visit I can immediately share: the youtube video that had us cracking up for hours...
And this one too...
Thursday, March 20, 2008
The Curse of Freedom
"No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility." ~Seneca
I've known a lot of people who feel like their lives are meaningless. They find their thoughts gravitating toward suicide for lack of anything to care about. I myself have toyed with those sentiments before in a previous life.
It's always been somewhat of a mystery to me though. Why do relatively well-off Americans seem so much more miserable than subsistence-level farmers in developing countries, or even their own ancestors just a few decades ago?
This excerpt may enlighten:
"In the late nineteenth century, one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, performed a scholarly miracle. He gathered data from across Europe to study the factors that affect the suicide rate. His findings can be summarized in one word: constraints.
"No matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds, and obligations were more likely to kill themselves. Durkheim looked at the 'degree of integration of religious society' and found that Protestants, who lived the least demanding religious lives at the time, had higher suicide rates than Catholics; Jews, with the densest network of social and religious obligations, had the lowest. He examined the 'degree of integration of domestic society'--the family--and found the same thing: People living alone were most likely to kill themselves; married people, less; married people with children, still less.
"Durkeim concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives: 'The more weakened the groups to which a man belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests.'
"A hundred years of further studies have confirmed Durkheim's diagnosis. If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live...you should find out about her social relationships.... An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.
"Seneca was right: "No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility."
~The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Doubting Doubt
Here is a clip of Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC, giving a talk at Berkeley about his new book, The Reason For God. He talks about all the typical reasons why nonbelievers don't believe:
"It's arrogant to say there's only one right religion."
"How can there be a God when there's so much evil in the world?"
"Religion is a strait-jacket."
"Evolutionary biology basically disproves religion."
"How can a loving God send people to hell?"
"The Church is responsible for so much injustice!"
(Length: 95 minutes)
"It's arrogant to say there's only one right religion."
"How can there be a God when there's so much evil in the world?"
"Religion is a strait-jacket."
"Evolutionary biology basically disproves religion."
"How can a loving God send people to hell?"
"The Church is responsible for so much injustice!"
(Length: 95 minutes)
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Inductee Into Fraudster's Hall of Fame
I just love a good fraud.
Remember Azia Kim, the teen who pretended to be a Stanford student for a good 9 months or so? Love her.
Remember the quiet unassuming bureaucrat who was actually a Russian spy for 20 odd years? Loved that.
And now there's Tania Head, a woman who claims to be a 9/11 survivor but who's story has never been verified. Read the gripping account here.
You know how I know she's probably guilty of fraud? She lawyered up. Her lawyer/mouthpiece tells reporters: “With regard to the veracity of my client’s story, neither my client, nor I, have any comment.”
No comment. There's a telltale sign if there ever was one.
I don't know why I love frauds and fraudsters. Maybe it's their ballsiness, that they dare tell a baldface lie to everyone they meet. Maybe it's morbid curiosity about the depths of treachery that everyday people are capable of. Maybe it's simple shadenfreude.
And maybe, just maybe, it's the mystery that fraudsters imbue to even the most mundane events of our lives: going to school, picking up mail, etc.
Who knows? Who knows whether your friendly neighborhood CPA is actually a huge Ponzi schemer? A mass murderer? A sociopathic spy? It just makes life a little more interesting for the rest of us.
Remember Azia Kim, the teen who pretended to be a Stanford student for a good 9 months or so? Love her.
Remember the quiet unassuming bureaucrat who was actually a Russian spy for 20 odd years? Loved that.
And now there's Tania Head, a woman who claims to be a 9/11 survivor but who's story has never been verified. Read the gripping account here.
You know how I know she's probably guilty of fraud? She lawyered up. Her lawyer/mouthpiece tells reporters: “With regard to the veracity of my client’s story, neither my client, nor I, have any comment.”
No comment. There's a telltale sign if there ever was one.
I don't know why I love frauds and fraudsters. Maybe it's their ballsiness, that they dare tell a baldface lie to everyone they meet. Maybe it's morbid curiosity about the depths of treachery that everyday people are capable of. Maybe it's simple shadenfreude.
And maybe, just maybe, it's the mystery that fraudsters imbue to even the most mundane events of our lives: going to school, picking up mail, etc.
Who knows? Who knows whether your friendly neighborhood CPA is actually a huge Ponzi schemer? A mass murderer? A sociopathic spy? It just makes life a little more interesting for the rest of us.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
A Heartbreaking and Fascinating Story
My Father Was an Anonymous Sperm Donor
By Katrina Clark, Washington Post, Sunday, December 17, 2006
I really wasn't expecting anything the day, earlier this year, when I sent an e-mail to a man whose name I had found on the Internet. I was looking for my father, and in some ways this man fit the bill. But I never thought I'd hit pay dirt on my first try. Then I got a reply -- with a picture attached.
From my computer screen, my own face seemed to stare back at me. And just like that, after 17 years, the missing piece of the puzzle snapped into place.
The puzzle of who I am.
I'm 18, and for most of my life, I haven't known half my origins. I didn't know where my nose or jaw came from, or my interest in foreign cultures. I obviously got my teeth and my penchant for corny jokes from my mother, along with my feminist perspective. But a whole other part of me was a mystery.
That part came from my father. The only thing was, I had never met him, never heard any stories about him, never seen a picture of him. I didn't know his name. My mother never talked about him -- because she didn't have a clue who he was.
When she was 32, my mother -- single, and worried that she might never marry and have a family -- allowed a doctor wearing rubber gloves to inject a syringe of sperm from an unknown man into her uterus so that she could have a baby. I am the result: a donor-conceived child.
And for a while, I was pretty angry about it.
I was angry at the idea that where donor conception is concerned, everyone focuses on the "parents" -- the adults who can make choices about their own lives. The recipient gets sympathy for wanting to have a child. The donor gets a guarantee of anonymity and absolution from any responsibility for the offspring of his "donation." As long as these adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?
Not so. The children born of these transactions are people, too. Those of us in the first documented generation of donor babies -- conceived in the late 1980s and early '90s, when sperm banks became more common and donor insemination began to flourish -- are coming of age, and we have something to say.
I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn't ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.
We offspring are recognizing the right that was stripped from us at birth -- the right to know who both our parents are.
And we're ready to reclaim it.
Growing up, it didn't matter that I don't have a dad -- or at least that is what I told myself. Just sometimes, when I was small, I would daydream about a tall, lean man picking me up and swinging me around in the front yard, a manly man melting at a touch from his little girl. I wouldn't have minded if he weren't around all the time, as long as I could have the sweet moments of reuniting with his strong arms and hearty laugh. My daydreams always ended abruptly; I knew I would never have a dad. As a coping mechanism, I used to think that he was dead. That made it easier.
I've never been angry at my mother -- all my life she has been my hero, my everything. She sacrificed so much as a single mother, living on food stamps, trying to make ends meet. I know that many people considered her a pioneer, a trailblazer for a new offshoot of the women's movement. She explained to me when I was quite young why it was that I didn't have a "dad," just a "biological father." I used to love to repeat that word -- biological -- because it made me feel smart, even though I didn't understand its implications.
Then when I was 9, the mother of one of my classmates ran for political office. I remember seeing a television ad for her, and her family appeared at the end -- the complete nuclear household in the back yard, the kids playing on a swing suspended from a tree and eating their father's barbeque. I looked back at my lonely, tired mother, who sat there with a weak smile on her face.
In the middle of the fifth grade, I met a new friend, and we had a lot in common: We both had single mothers. Her mother had suffered through two divorces. My friend didn't have much to say about her dad, mainly because she knew so little about him. But at least she got to visit him and his new family. And I was jealous. Later, in the eighth grade, another friend's father had an affair and her parents divorced. She was in so much pain, and I tried to empathize for the loss of her dad. But I was jealous of her, too, for all the attention she was getting. No one had ever offered me support or sympathy like that.
Around this time, my mother and I moved in with a friend and -- along with several other teenagers, one infant and some other adults -- lived with her for nearly a year. I went through a teenage anger stage; I would stay in my room, listening to Avril Lavigne and to Eminem's lyrics of broken homes and broken people. I felt broken, too. All the other teenagers in the house had problems with their dads. I would sit with them through tears during various rough times, and then I'd go back to my room and listen to some more Eminem. I was angry, too, and angry that I had nowhere to direct my anger.
When my mother eventually got married, I didn't get along with her husband. For so long, it had been just the two of us, my mom and I, and now I felt like the odd girl out. When she and I quarreled, this new man in our lives took to interjecting his opinion, and I didn't like that. One day, I lost my composure and screamed that he had no authority over me, that he wasn't my father -- because I didn't have one.
That was when the emptiness came over me. I realized that I am, in a sense, a freak. I really, truly would never have a dad. I finally understood what it meant to be donor-conceived, and I hated it.
It might have gone on this way indefinitely, but about a year ago I happened to see a television show about a woman who had died of a heart attack. A genetic disease had caused her heart to deteriorate, but she didn't know about her predisposition because she had been adopted as a baby and didn't know her biological families' medical histories. It hit me that I didn't know mine, either. Or half of it, at least.
So I began to research Fairfax Cryobank, the Northern Virginia sperm bank where my mother had been inseminated. I knew that sperm donors are screened and tested thoroughly, but I was still concerned. The bank had been established in 1986, a mere two years before my conception. Many maladies have come to light since then.
I e-mailed the bank five times over the course of a year, requesting medical information about my donor, but no one responded. Then one Friday last spring, I started surfing the Web. Eventually I came upon an archive of "Oprah" shows. One was a show about artificial insemination using anonymous donors. A girl perched on Oprah's couch. Next to her sat her "donor," the man who was her biological father.
I froze. Why hadn't I thought of that? If I wanted medical information and a sense of roots, who better to seek out than the man responsible for them?
I set out to find my own donor. From the limited information my mother had been given -- his blood type, race, ethnicity, eye and hair color and hair texture; his height, weight and body build; his years of college and course of study -- I concluded that he had probably graduated from a four-year university in Northern Virginia or the District within a span of three years. Now all I had to do was search through the records and yearbooks of all the possible universities and make some awkward phone calls. I figured if I worked intensely enough, my search would take a minimum of 10 years. But I was ready and willing.
A few days later, searching for an online message board for donor-conceived people, I came across a donor and offspring registry. Scanning past some entries for more recent donors, I spotted a donation date closer to what I was looking for. I e-mailed the man who had posted the entry. A few days later he sent a warm response and attached a picture of himself. I read through his pleasant words and scrolled down to look at the photo. My breath stopped. I called for my mother, who rushed in, thinking something was terribly wrong. "I think I've found my biological father," I gasped between sobs. "Look at the picture. . . .That's my face."
After a few weeks of e-mailing, this stranger and I took DNA tests. When the results arrived, I tore open the envelope, feeling like a character in a soap opera. Most of the scientific language went over my head, but I understood one fact more clearly than I have ever understood anything in my life: There was, the letter said, a 99.9902 percent chance that this man was my father. After 17 years, I let out a long sigh.
I had found the man who had given me blue eyes and blond hair. And it had taken me only a month.
My life has changed since then. Once the initial disbelief that I had found my father wore off, my thoughts turned to all the other donor-conceived kids out there who have been or will be holding their breath much longer than I. My search for my father had been unusually successful; most offspring will look for many, many years before they succeed, if they ever do.
My heart went out to those others, especially after I participated in a couple of online groups. When I read some of the mothers' thoughts about their choice for conception, it made me feel degraded to nothing more than a vial of frozen sperm. It seemed to me that most of the mothers and donors give little thought to the feelings of the children who would result from their actions. It's not so much that they're coldhearted as that they don't consider what the children might think once they grow up.
Those of us created with donated sperm won't stay bubbly babies forever. We're all going to grow into adults and form opinions about the decision to bring us into the world in a way that deprives us of the basic right to know where we came from, what our history is and who both our parents are.
Some countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, are beginning to move away from the practice of paying donors and granting them anonymity, and making it somewhat easier for offspring to find their biological fathers. I understand anonymity's appeal for so many donors: Even if their offspring were to find them one day -- which is becoming more and more probable -- they have no legal, social, financial or moral obligation to their children.
But perhaps if donors were not paid and anonymity were no longer guaranteed, those still willing to participate would seriously consider the repercussions of their actions. They would have to be prepared to someday meet the people whom they helped create, to answer questions and to deal with a range of erratic emotions from their offspring. I believe I've let go of any resentment about the way I was conceived. I'm playing the cards I've been dealt and trying to make the best of things. But not all donor-conceived people share this mindset.
As relief about my own situation has come to me, I've talked freely and regularly about being donor-conceived, in public and in private. In the beginning, I also talked about it a lot with my biological father. After a bit, though, I noticed that his enthusiasm for our developing relationship seemed to be waning. When I told him of my suspicion, he confirmed that he was tired of "this whole sperm-donor thing." The irony stings me more each time I think of him saying that. The very thing that brought us together was pushing us in opposite directions.
Even though I've only recently come into contact with him, I wouldn't be able to just suck it up if he stopped communicating with me. There's still so much I want to know. I want to know him. I want to know his family. I'm certain he has no idea how big a role he has played in my life despite his absence -- or because of his absence. If I can't be too attached to him as my father, I'll still always be attached to the feeling I now have of having a father.
I feel more whole now than I ever have. I love our conversations, even the most trivial ones. I don't love him, and I don't know if I ever will, but I care about him a lot.
Now that he knows I exist, I'm okay if he doesn't care for me in the same way. But I hope he at least thinks of me sometimes.
Katrina Clark is a student in the undergraduate hearing program at Gallaudet University. clarkatrina@gmail.com
What do YOU think about her story? Discuss.
By Katrina Clark, Washington Post, Sunday, December 17, 2006
I really wasn't expecting anything the day, earlier this year, when I sent an e-mail to a man whose name I had found on the Internet. I was looking for my father, and in some ways this man fit the bill. But I never thought I'd hit pay dirt on my first try. Then I got a reply -- with a picture attached.From my computer screen, my own face seemed to stare back at me. And just like that, after 17 years, the missing piece of the puzzle snapped into place.
The puzzle of who I am.
I'm 18, and for most of my life, I haven't known half my origins. I didn't know where my nose or jaw came from, or my interest in foreign cultures. I obviously got my teeth and my penchant for corny jokes from my mother, along with my feminist perspective. But a whole other part of me was a mystery.
That part came from my father. The only thing was, I had never met him, never heard any stories about him, never seen a picture of him. I didn't know his name. My mother never talked about him -- because she didn't have a clue who he was.
When she was 32, my mother -- single, and worried that she might never marry and have a family -- allowed a doctor wearing rubber gloves to inject a syringe of sperm from an unknown man into her uterus so that she could have a baby. I am the result: a donor-conceived child.
And for a while, I was pretty angry about it.
I was angry at the idea that where donor conception is concerned, everyone focuses on the "parents" -- the adults who can make choices about their own lives. The recipient gets sympathy for wanting to have a child. The donor gets a guarantee of anonymity and absolution from any responsibility for the offspring of his "donation." As long as these adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?
Not so. The children born of these transactions are people, too. Those of us in the first documented generation of donor babies -- conceived in the late 1980s and early '90s, when sperm banks became more common and donor insemination began to flourish -- are coming of age, and we have something to say.
I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn't ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.
We offspring are recognizing the right that was stripped from us at birth -- the right to know who both our parents are.
And we're ready to reclaim it.
Growing up, it didn't matter that I don't have a dad -- or at least that is what I told myself. Just sometimes, when I was small, I would daydream about a tall, lean man picking me up and swinging me around in the front yard, a manly man melting at a touch from his little girl. I wouldn't have minded if he weren't around all the time, as long as I could have the sweet moments of reuniting with his strong arms and hearty laugh. My daydreams always ended abruptly; I knew I would never have a dad. As a coping mechanism, I used to think that he was dead. That made it easier.
I've never been angry at my mother -- all my life she has been my hero, my everything. She sacrificed so much as a single mother, living on food stamps, trying to make ends meet. I know that many people considered her a pioneer, a trailblazer for a new offshoot of the women's movement. She explained to me when I was quite young why it was that I didn't have a "dad," just a "biological father." I used to love to repeat that word -- biological -- because it made me feel smart, even though I didn't understand its implications.
Then when I was 9, the mother of one of my classmates ran for political office. I remember seeing a television ad for her, and her family appeared at the end -- the complete nuclear household in the back yard, the kids playing on a swing suspended from a tree and eating their father's barbeque. I looked back at my lonely, tired mother, who sat there with a weak smile on her face.
In the middle of the fifth grade, I met a new friend, and we had a lot in common: We both had single mothers. Her mother had suffered through two divorces. My friend didn't have much to say about her dad, mainly because she knew so little about him. But at least she got to visit him and his new family. And I was jealous. Later, in the eighth grade, another friend's father had an affair and her parents divorced. She was in so much pain, and I tried to empathize for the loss of her dad. But I was jealous of her, too, for all the attention she was getting. No one had ever offered me support or sympathy like that.
Around this time, my mother and I moved in with a friend and -- along with several other teenagers, one infant and some other adults -- lived with her for nearly a year. I went through a teenage anger stage; I would stay in my room, listening to Avril Lavigne and to Eminem's lyrics of broken homes and broken people. I felt broken, too. All the other teenagers in the house had problems with their dads. I would sit with them through tears during various rough times, and then I'd go back to my room and listen to some more Eminem. I was angry, too, and angry that I had nowhere to direct my anger.
When my mother eventually got married, I didn't get along with her husband. For so long, it had been just the two of us, my mom and I, and now I felt like the odd girl out. When she and I quarreled, this new man in our lives took to interjecting his opinion, and I didn't like that. One day, I lost my composure and screamed that he had no authority over me, that he wasn't my father -- because I didn't have one.
That was when the emptiness came over me. I realized that I am, in a sense, a freak. I really, truly would never have a dad. I finally understood what it meant to be donor-conceived, and I hated it.
It might have gone on this way indefinitely, but about a year ago I happened to see a television show about a woman who had died of a heart attack. A genetic disease had caused her heart to deteriorate, but she didn't know about her predisposition because she had been adopted as a baby and didn't know her biological families' medical histories. It hit me that I didn't know mine, either. Or half of it, at least.
So I began to research Fairfax Cryobank, the Northern Virginia sperm bank where my mother had been inseminated. I knew that sperm donors are screened and tested thoroughly, but I was still concerned. The bank had been established in 1986, a mere two years before my conception. Many maladies have come to light since then.
I e-mailed the bank five times over the course of a year, requesting medical information about my donor, but no one responded. Then one Friday last spring, I started surfing the Web. Eventually I came upon an archive of "Oprah" shows. One was a show about artificial insemination using anonymous donors. A girl perched on Oprah's couch. Next to her sat her "donor," the man who was her biological father.
I froze. Why hadn't I thought of that? If I wanted medical information and a sense of roots, who better to seek out than the man responsible for them?
I set out to find my own donor. From the limited information my mother had been given -- his blood type, race, ethnicity, eye and hair color and hair texture; his height, weight and body build; his years of college and course of study -- I concluded that he had probably graduated from a four-year university in Northern Virginia or the District within a span of three years. Now all I had to do was search through the records and yearbooks of all the possible universities and make some awkward phone calls. I figured if I worked intensely enough, my search would take a minimum of 10 years. But I was ready and willing.
A few days later, searching for an online message board for donor-conceived people, I came across a donor and offspring registry. Scanning past some entries for more recent donors, I spotted a donation date closer to what I was looking for. I e-mailed the man who had posted the entry. A few days later he sent a warm response and attached a picture of himself. I read through his pleasant words and scrolled down to look at the photo. My breath stopped. I called for my mother, who rushed in, thinking something was terribly wrong. "I think I've found my biological father," I gasped between sobs. "Look at the picture. . . .That's my face."
After a few weeks of e-mailing, this stranger and I took DNA tests. When the results arrived, I tore open the envelope, feeling like a character in a soap opera. Most of the scientific language went over my head, but I understood one fact more clearly than I have ever understood anything in my life: There was, the letter said, a 99.9902 percent chance that this man was my father. After 17 years, I let out a long sigh.
I had found the man who had given me blue eyes and blond hair. And it had taken me only a month.
My life has changed since then. Once the initial disbelief that I had found my father wore off, my thoughts turned to all the other donor-conceived kids out there who have been or will be holding their breath much longer than I. My search for my father had been unusually successful; most offspring will look for many, many years before they succeed, if they ever do.
My heart went out to those others, especially after I participated in a couple of online groups. When I read some of the mothers' thoughts about their choice for conception, it made me feel degraded to nothing more than a vial of frozen sperm. It seemed to me that most of the mothers and donors give little thought to the feelings of the children who would result from their actions. It's not so much that they're coldhearted as that they don't consider what the children might think once they grow up.
Those of us created with donated sperm won't stay bubbly babies forever. We're all going to grow into adults and form opinions about the decision to bring us into the world in a way that deprives us of the basic right to know where we came from, what our history is and who both our parents are.
Some countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, are beginning to move away from the practice of paying donors and granting them anonymity, and making it somewhat easier for offspring to find their biological fathers. I understand anonymity's appeal for so many donors: Even if their offspring were to find them one day -- which is becoming more and more probable -- they have no legal, social, financial or moral obligation to their children.
But perhaps if donors were not paid and anonymity were no longer guaranteed, those still willing to participate would seriously consider the repercussions of their actions. They would have to be prepared to someday meet the people whom they helped create, to answer questions and to deal with a range of erratic emotions from their offspring. I believe I've let go of any resentment about the way I was conceived. I'm playing the cards I've been dealt and trying to make the best of things. But not all donor-conceived people share this mindset.
As relief about my own situation has come to me, I've talked freely and regularly about being donor-conceived, in public and in private. In the beginning, I also talked about it a lot with my biological father. After a bit, though, I noticed that his enthusiasm for our developing relationship seemed to be waning. When I told him of my suspicion, he confirmed that he was tired of "this whole sperm-donor thing." The irony stings me more each time I think of him saying that. The very thing that brought us together was pushing us in opposite directions.
Even though I've only recently come into contact with him, I wouldn't be able to just suck it up if he stopped communicating with me. There's still so much I want to know. I want to know him. I want to know his family. I'm certain he has no idea how big a role he has played in my life despite his absence -- or because of his absence. If I can't be too attached to him as my father, I'll still always be attached to the feeling I now have of having a father.
I feel more whole now than I ever have. I love our conversations, even the most trivial ones. I don't love him, and I don't know if I ever will, but I care about him a lot.
Now that he knows I exist, I'm okay if he doesn't care for me in the same way. But I hope he at least thinks of me sometimes.
Katrina Clark is a student in the undergraduate hearing program at Gallaudet University. clarkatrina@gmail.com
What do YOU think about her story? Discuss.
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