It was a cold and rainy night...

Omaha had to be up at the Longhouse yesterday evening to rehearse for this Saturday's ceremony with the rest of her coven. I had, at first, discouraged the idea that we should all go up there. It's usually a 45 minute drive and most of the facilities would be locked up and off limits, but after calling two of the other participants we determined that there would be other kids there and Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan would at least have a chance to run around and use up energy.

The drive turned out to be much longer, almost 90 minutes. The rush-hour traffic through the S-curves of I-405 Northbound wasn't bad at all, but part of our route took us right through Redmond and SR202, and the huge volumes of traffic disbursing from Microsoft to their burbclaves made the last two miles of the trek a half-hour slog. I mean that bit about burbclaves literally: gated communinities with twelve-foot-high cement walls to block out road noise that make the roads feel more like buried canals through which cars slink like illicit salamanders.

By the time we'd reached the longhouse the skies had prematurely darkened with grey, heavy stormclouds rolling in from the mountains. We were late, but others were ever moreso. Once everyone arrived there was a brief frenzy of feeding upon chicken, chips, bread, and salad.

And then the ritualists went off to practice. As the only person there who was not a ritualist, it became my duty to oversee the children, a grand total of six, three girls and three boys, the eldest of which was 12 and the youngest of which was five. We were not allowed into the house, just the grounds, and even as the ritualists trundled out to the circle the rain started to come down and hammer on the canvas-covered shelter.

The rain passed and the kids broke out into the small field and started an impromptu game of frisbee. The smallest child, C., had forgotten to bring anything with which to stay warm and when the temperature dropped below 15C it was everything I could do to encourage her to run around and stay warm.

I will say that part of me is sad Omaha and I never had a boy; they look like they're fun after they get over their childhood stupidities and race into their adolescent stupidities instead. But I'm happy with Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan just they way they are, and I think raising them has been more than satisfying and worthwhile. And probably easier.

In due time rehearsal was done. Everyone was chilled, and I was already exhausted. The drive home was uneventful. We got home and watered the cat, put the kids to bed, and then just crashed. Omaha went at 9:30. I stayed up an extra half-hour, but the second I went to bed I was down and out for the count.

How to Get Things Done: Roles vs. Responsibilities

I am the chronic absent-minded middle-aged writer. To overcome this terrific affliction I've tried hard to adopt as much of the Seven Habits / GTD stuff as I possibly can, although the daily discipline of GTD often gets lost in the bad habits of a chronic infovore like myself. It's extremely difficult for me to just sit down at the start of the day and not want to suck up everything that happened in the last ten hours: the news, the views, the arguing and bickering and entertaining pwnage that is the world at large.

But I do try. And one of the things that's always bothered me about the Seven Habit method is the focus on so-called Roles & Goals. This is the part of the system where, on a weekly basis, you review your "roles" (as father, as employee, as citizen, and so forth) and then determine if your current projects and their goals are in sync.

I was looking through my day planner's major projects list and the associated roles and realized that I didn't believe it. I've never bought into the nonsense about roles. I think I've finally identified why: the people we admire don't have them. They have responsibilities. I bet you Patton never considered his role; he thought about his responsibilities. The same is true of Lincoln, or Ghandi. To take an amusing fictional example, Miles Vorkosigan's roles are determined by his responsibilities, and not the other way around.

Role implies an act and an actor, often one taken on with a sense of facade. "For the next three hours, Elf will take on the role of father," or "For the next hour, Elf will take on the role of writer." There are so many false notes in such an approach that I wonder how it ever became popular.

Instead, "responsibility" has a sense of authenticity (and not in the pomo sense of "authenticity"): my responsibility to my family is to keep the house in good shape, my responsibility to my kids is to make sure they reach adulthood healthy, hale, and with the tools necessary to take on the world and win, my responsibility to my employer is to deliver working and contemporarily styled user interfaces on deadline and with no defects, my responsibility to my readers is to deliver thoughtful and engaging stories, my responsibility to you is to stay interesting.

So I'm going to revise the "roles & goals" page into "responsibilities & projects," which seems to me a much more profound way of viewing yourself. Most importantly, to me, they imply a whole and integrated human being, not someone who puts on a different facade within different contexts. We do enough of that already: the vocabulary you use at work is very different from the one you use in the bedroom, I hope. Formalizing it into a collection of cheap suits and masks just makes the fragmentation of ourselves even worse. We do not wear "roles", and if we have goals then to be meaningful they must be subsumed into something greater, something which enables accomplishment. Those things are responsibilities, duties, projects, and deadlines.

WOWCWHABPC: Sherri Shepherd, The Stupidity, It Burns!

Does anyone remember Roman Hruska^[?]? He was a U.S. Senator from Nebraska. He became famous for an incident on the floor of the U.S. Senate in which he was defending the nomination of Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Responding to the criticism that Carswell was mediocre as a judge, Hruska responded

So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there.

Unfortunately for Americans, Hruska's stance has become pretty much the usual fare of modern media: for every thinking person who appears on the TV screen, she must be balanced by someone's who's brain was last seen on a milk carton.

The latest example of stunning stupidity comes from Whoopie Goldberg's show, The View, and her co-host Sherri Shepherd. In an exchange between herself, Goldberg, and Barbara Walters, Shepherd said she doesn't know if the world is round or flat:

GOLDBERG: Is the world flat?

SHEPHERD: Is the world flat? (laughter)

GOLDBERG: Yes.

SHEPHERD: ... I Don't know.

GOLDBERG: What do you think?

SHEPHERD: I-- I never thought about it, Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it.

WALTERS: You've never thought about whether the world was round or flat?

SHEPHERD: I tell you what I've thought about. How I'm going to feed my child--

While this story has been widely reported, what has not been reported is Shepherd's flat-out admission earlier in the same show that she "doesn't believe in evolution, period." In that case, if she ever catches a Staph infection^[?], she should be happy with perfectly old-school penicillin, right?

You have to love her appeal to "screw knowledge, I have to take care of the children. Whoopie, think of the chilllllldrrrenn!!"

Sigh. Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

[Hat tips to Huffington Post (they've got it on video!), Boing Boing, The Daily Background, and of course PZ Myers.]