My brain, in despair.

Hookers and Blow at the Department of the Interior!?

( A culture of ethical failure. )

I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It And I Went To Hell

( More Christian Love )

She's been the VP candidate for two weeks and she has not yet answered a single question

When will Sarah Palin actually face the press?

Yes, Sarah Palin wanted to ban books.

( On the advice of her church )

Does John McCain believe that he was tortured?

Someone please ask him. Because if he believes that, then he is complicit in authorizing the CIA's use of torture, and created American war criminals.

Palin billed Alaska for lodging expenses while staying in her own home.

( A culture of ethical failure, continued. )

"Knowing stuff" is elitist!

( So says McCain's foreign policy advisor. )

Palin's favorite writer on "small town virtues."

( Who was Westbrook Pagler? )

WND: John McCain is too Humanist to be president!

( “Country first?” No. Faith in God first! )

Obama vs McCain, it's three vs. one!

( “You can't promise Carrie Underwood and deliver Lawrence Welk” )

"Where's Sarah?"

( A culture of ethical failure, continued. )

McCain attacks Obama on earmarks!?

( Man, the Rove playbook is really in full swing! )

My brain, looking for the light!

Some fun stuff. Fafblog is political, of course, but in a good way!

Mixed message: Exercise "as effective as medication" in fighting depression, but only in people already inclined to be physically active.

Which makes me wonder: Does the whole "sex makes you happy, so you should try having sex even when you're not in the mood," only work on people who are already inclined to be having sex?

Fafnir: The Moral of the Story

( Oh, Fafnir, How Do I Love Thee? )

Giblets: Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!

( Giblets makes me happy! )

It's The Eleventh of September, Two Thousand and Eight of the Common Era

I've been reading my friends and some of them have despaired that nobody's mentioned 9/11 yet, and the few that have all says more or less the same thing: "Today is not the day for partisan rancour. Today is the day we remember."

I remember that we figured out who did it, and seven years ago he and his friends hid in the hills of Pakistan, and they're living there still.

I remember that gas was less than two dollars a gallon.

I remember we were sold a war that, among all the other reasons proposed by administration mouthpieces, "stabilizing the oil supply" was whispered now and then.

I remember that four thousand soldiers, good men and women, have died in a war for which the incidents of that day were merely an excuse.

I remember that there was a middle-eastern faction that didn't hate us so much then as they do now.

I remember that, seven years ago, I lost nobody to the flames.

I remember instead that day as the beginning of the end of my country as I had loved it. I live in a "new reality" now, one in which, citizen, you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, and have nothing to be ashamed of if you're good and law-abiding, citizen.

I remember living in America.

It's amazing how easy it is to mess up the moral of the story!

For the past five days, Omaha has been teaching Yamaraashi-chan to ride Metro by herself. Omaha has taken her everywhere on the bus, to the library, doctor's appointments, haircuts, since it is her only mode of transportation, but we weren't sure how much attention Yamaraashi-chan was paying when she did. We made this effort to help her get to school on time without having to wake her at 6:00am, which is unholy for me, much less for a kid. In the winter time, that's nearly three hours before dawn! An extra 45 minutes is a blessing, and that's what we were trying to buy with Metro. When I was her age, I was taking Metro regularly to bookstores, the movies, and the mall. That was back when malls had video arcades, which made them legitimate places for kids like me to hang out.

For four days, Omaha rode with Yamaraashi-chan the entire route, showing her the steps to take, how to take them. On the last day, Omaha had Yamaraashi-chan do the route herself, telling Omaha what steps she would take and so on.

I love my kid. In way too many ways she's a very smart kid. But if there's one thing she lacks it's self-confidence. I see this very much as a consequence of her early upbringing, and it manifests itself very clearly. So on her first day riding the bus alone, she missed her stop. She apparently totally freaked out, and with tears in her eyes begged the driver to help her. She gave the driver her mother's phone number (not mine, not Omaha's), and... we're not sure what happened next, but Yamaraashi-chan made it to school eventually. Apparently a Metro supervisor at the next transit center gave her a ride in his truck.

So that ends that experiment. Yamaraashi-chan has learned that passive-aggressive works, and unfortunately she's still young enough that people take pity on her and don't recognize it for what it is. It also means that another opportunity to teach her think for herself has ended in failure.

This is really kinda frustrating. We've been working hard to teach her independence, to "free range" her as the expression goes. We've sent her and Kouryou-chan down to the store two blocks away to buy things like bread and milk for dinner, but if everything isn't exactly like what the script says she freaks out and cannot handle it. That's why we send them together: Kouryou-chan has the self-assurance to ride her bike high and low through the subdivision, but Yamaraashi-chan is objectively frightened of going anywhere she's never been before, facing any problem she for which she doesn't have a script. She's at the age where we should be able to leave her alone for long enough to run to the grocery, but whenever we run through the house emergency procedures ("What do you do if there's a fire?" "What do you do if the toilet overflows?" "What do you do if you smell something really bad?"), if we add some new problem to it, she says "I don't know" and just freezes up. She doesn't think to solve the problem. Someone else will solve it for her.

Sigh. She really needs to unlearn that. Someday, her mother's not going to be there to solve her every problem, and neither will I.

---

Since Omaha had taken Yamaraashi-chan this week, I've been dealing with Kouryou-chan. She's not too hard to deal with, though, getting her through breakfast and making her lunch and all that. After her carpool picked her up, I drove to the Park'n'Ride transit center near my house because the bus that goes by my house to the transit center doesn't run by for another forty minutes or so, but there's an express leaving the transit center in ten.

I had a pretty good day at work. Figured out the internals of XUL node addressing, and hooked up a Python interpreter to do it for me.

I rode the bus home. I took the express, which turns into the bus that goes right past my house, so that was good. Omaha and I sat down and had a long talk with Yamaraashi-chan about all the things that went wrong, and what we were going to have to do now to deal with it. It wasn't an easy talk, but it was better than not having one.

After we were done talking, Omaha and I went back out into the living room to discuss what had happened. I looked out the window and noticed something odd. "Omaha, where's the car?"

I'd left it at the transit center's Park'n'Ride lot. I'd missed my stop.

We told Yamaraashi-chan about my stupidity, and then for practice brainstormed alternatives. I could wait until tomorrow; I could bike there; I could take a bus there; I could call a friend who'd help me. lisakit lives just a few blocks away. "I don't want to impose on Lisakit," I said. "She's a good friend, but that would be imposing."

More in bemusement than anger, I looked at the schedule. A bus was coming in five minutes back to the transit center. I ran for it.

It took only about ten minutes to reach the transit center. I got off the bus and found my car.

I'd forgotten my keys.

Okay, you all can stop laughing now.

Since Omaha couldn't help me-- she had the kids and can't drive anyway-- I took a deep breath and called Lisakit anyway. After she was done giggling at me, she kindly agreed to swing by my house, grab my keys, and bring them to me. I bought her dinner to show my gratitude.

Man, I felt stupid after that.

But while I was sitting on my car, I did have a good idea for another Bastet story, this one involving hemp rope and fortune cookies and ivolucien's house.

The Troof Will Set You Free

This afternoon, for lunch, I went into downtown from my office to run some errands. I wanted to pick up Best Buddhist Writing, 2007, since it's just come out, although I have to say that when I started thumbing through it I was less than impressed. I'm not happy with the way Mahayana is seeping back into the American nominally non-theistic practice; Theravada's got a much harder row to hoe, but it's core principle of your being responsible for your own journey is much more interesting to me. The whole Bodhisattva thing is, well, it smacks too much of gods and angels for my taste. You can't find that stuff in the words of Siddhartha, the Buddha. When asked if there were gods or angels who made the world, Buddha said, "When your house is on fire, you don't care who made it or where they are. Get out of the house." Don't worry about the gods, Buddha taught. Deal with your own life first. (Confucious said more or less the same thing: "When the nation is in disarray is not a time to worry about the gods." I've always had a soft spot for Confucious, but he wasn't giving a religion; he was teaching law.)

I didn't buy the book after all. Instead, I went over to The Dragon's Toybox and picked out a card game for Kouryou-chan called Quiddler, which the woman behind the counter recommended as a gentler introduction to word games than Boggle, a game that Kouryou-chan finds frustrating. I bought a lox sandwich at the bagel store next door, which makes them with red onion and capers and just the right amount of cream cheese.

Walking back, I passed through Westlake center. I'd forgotten what day it was. There was a guy on the cement dais on the edge of the big outdoor triangle that takes up half the city block, strumming his guitar. He was surrounded by Truthers holding street signs and yelling out random things, handing out stickers and pamphlets. Two held up a big banner proclaiming, "The WTC was Demolished!" I studiously ignored all of them.

While I was walking around, I saw a traffic cop on a three-wheeled contraption vaguely like a knockoff Segway. I said to her, "They couldn't even buy you a real Segway?"

"I can't stand those things," she said. "They hurt, you know that? You spend all day on one of those things, balancing back and forth, and it really starts to hurt in your calves and your feet. This thing is a lot better."

I did not know that. I thanked her for the knowledge.

I was deeply saddened to learn that both McCormick Bookstore and Blue Canary Stationery have gone out of business. Bleah! Now where will I buy my soft-backed Moleskines no-lined notebooks?

On the way back to the office, I swear, the bus driver was, um, happy. Very cheerful; obviously dreamed of being a train master some day. Said "Thank you" and "You're welcome" very loudly, and when we paused at a bus stop with a lot of people he even shouted, "All aboard!" I said "Thank you" to him as I got off and he said, "Take it easy, bro."

And I finished my Africa story on the bus, and immediately started into a new one:

Charles had made the mistake, two parties ago, of mouthing off the opinion within her earshot that Geena was one of those nekomimi furry freaks who pretended to be a Bastet. He had no doubt Lucien knew a lot of those. Geena, however, had turned out to be the real thing.

Oops.