Advice?

A friend of mine has been going through a rough patch lately, and I’m not really sure how it is that I should respond to him or support him emotionally. He got married a few years ago, and his wife goes to college a few states away. She doesn’t want to transfer to a more local college (and maybe she shouldn’t have to, of course), and he can’t leave his career. They have resigned themselves to a distance-marriage with frequent visits to each other.

Unconventional, but not that terribly strange, right?

Well, recently, things have begun to get weird. She doesn’t wear her wedding ring because she says that guys try to hit on her when she’s wearing it. Even though my friend and his wife have had discussions where they agreed not to use birth control (since they would like to have children), on a recent visit to her, my friend found birth control pills that had been taken regularly. On that same visit, a friend of the wife told my friend that another guy had been getting pretty close to my friend’s wife. She also stopped listing herself as married on her ‘myspace’ page.

During the summer break from classes, my friend’s wife told my friend that she was going on a month-long business trip for her job that would entail extra pay, but that he wouldn’t be able to get in touch with her for most of that time. When she came back from her trip, my friend surprised her with a special visit at her home as a ‘welcome back’ present, and noticed that she had a red mark on her neck. She explained it as being a bruise from where a kid had shot her with a BB. Strangely, hotel and rental car charges appeared on the credit card account shared by my friend and his wife, and the extra pay from the business trip never materialized. The charges, she contends are mistakes and she is pursuing the credit company to have those charges expunged, and she says that the extra money is being held up by the red tape of her company.

As the last straw for my friend, he discovered that his wife had e-mail accounts and instant messenger personas that he didn’t know existed before, and found a posting on an internet forum (posted only days after her business trip) wherein his wife explicitly says that she met a guy online, that he flew in to meet her at her university, that they spend a few weeks together, and that she fell in love in spite of herself.

My friend’s wife is alleging to him that none of this stuff means what he thinks it means, and that she might be a compulsive liar (so not to trust what she said online).

Here’s the rub. She’s coming to visit soon, and I already know of at least one social function where I’ll be forced to interact with both of them together. How should I play it off? I want to believe that there is an innocent explanation for all of this, but I’m finding that innocent explanation harder and harder to believe. I don’t want to think badly of her, and I don’t want my friend to be hurt if it turns out to be what he thinks the evidence points to. What should I do and how should I act?

Religion of peace? Not on your life - literally.

I’ve never really been much of a Manichean – something about dividing the world up into a ‘light’ and ‘dark’ universal battle has always bothered me. Nonetheless, as I have continued to amass experiences and an understanding of history, I’m reluctantly beginning to believe that, in fact, the simplistic way of looking at reality that has hallmarked the major religions of the world is correct. Perhaps the world is the stage for a cataclysmal war between two divergent and antagonistic paths.

Unlike most religions (the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths in particular) that see the world as a battle between good and evil, I’ve come to the conclusion that the sides are somewhat more nuanced – but make no mistake: your choice of allegiance in the battle is one of the most important decisions that you will ever make in your life.

On one side of the battle are found the principles of the Enlightenment. These are a commitment to scientific understanding, education, reason and rationality, and the freedoms that many people in the civilized West take for granted. On the other side of the battle is religion, which urges people not to think, but to believe – to believe in the absence of evidence or in the face of contradictory evidence. It is unwilling to examine it’s bases, and unless watered down with a humanism picked up from its opposition (which ultimately destroys the religious content), is unvaryingly at odds with the expression of freedoms won in the Enlightenment.

I discussed this issue partly back during the period when there was the ferocious uproar among the world’s Muslim population (not the Muslim’s who’ve cherry-picked their scriptures and surahs to better reflect the humanistic principles of the Enlightenment, but the ones who actually stand by their holy documents as written) over a spate of cartoons in Denmark. If you will recall, buildings were burned down, people were beaten, more than a hundred people were killed, and death threats against the cartoonists, newspapers, and government officials even remotely related to the incident filled the airwaves. If there could be any evidence that accommodation of Enlightenment freedoms with hardline religious sentiment is impossible, that incident should have provided it in spades. I mean, I couldn’t believe that people were ready and willing to murder people in cold blood over a couple of cartoons depicting a religious figure. Little doubt was left in my mind that, had some magical power whisked one of the cartoonists into the ether and deposited him into the middle of one of the mobs that were televised in Pakistan or Egypt, he would have been slaughtered.

Freedom of speech (and its corollary, freedom of expression) is the backbone of the Enlightenment. No idea is too sacred to discuss and no conclusion is too offensive to merit an open-minded hearing. That’s not to say that at the end of the hearing, we can’t pronounce the conclusion to be wrong, but to stifle the expression of that conclusion before the hearing has been given does a grave disservice to both the person making the claim, the person refusing to hear the claim, and every other person in the community as well who might have profited by the discussion.

Well, once again, the ire of Muslims has been raised and death threats are accumulating. A Swedish cartoonist, Lars Vilks, consciously opted to draw an offensive picture of the Muslim prophet Mohammed (as a dog – an ‘unclean’ animal) in an effort to bring to the world stage again the discussion about the importance of freedom of expression. Surely enough, Muslim groups have issued a reward of $100,000 for any Muslim who manages to murder Vilks. As an added incentive, a $50,000 bonus will be given if the death is by slitting Vilks’ throat. Vilks is under police protection, must live in safe-houses, check his car for explosives, and gets death threats on a daily basis (from people living very near to him, no less).

Can there be any accommodation between the humanistic goals of modern civilization and the type of depraved, sociopathic irrationality that personifies these extremists? No. What compromise can there be between the civilization of the 21st century and that of the 14th? Ethical advancement is just as objective and real as is scientific and technological advancement – and some cultures simply are behind the curve by their own choice.

I fully support the work done by cartoonist Vilks. His works are offensive for all the right reasons and serve to highlight the ridiculous and anti-civilized behaviours of an astonishingly and appallingly large percentage of the world’s population – a population that loses the respect of rational individuals with each new outrage.

Most artists see the absolute need for freedom of expression, and abhor the self-censorship they are required to implement in order to pass their own crafts through a filter of relativism. Strangely, most media outlets (like CNN) refuse to side with those who support the freedom of expression (the bedrock upon which the press is built in the United States), and refuse to show the works or oppose the howling masses demanding outcomes that would have been right at home among the leaders of the Catholic Inquisition.

Self-censorship in the face of irrational responses is the downfall of Western, Enlightenment values, and I won’t be a part of that. To that end, I’m going to say some things that I think should be mentioned.

First, Islam’s prophet Mohammed was an illiterate pedophile who married a six-year old girl and consummated his marriage to her when she was only nine. For any man to engage in sexual intercourse with a child less than ten is abominable, and to hold up a man who made his pre-pubescent wife clean semen-stains off of his clothing (as his young wife wrote) as moral is the mark of a people who don’t understand the meaning of morality. We should denounce them for exactly the same reasons that we should feel comfortable denouncing the medieval Europeans – one of whose favorite pastimes was gathering up a big sack of cats and then throwing the sack on a bonfire, just to hear the cats howl as they burned to death. There can be no middle-ground between morality and immorality, and to condone the absolute barbarism of a large fraction of North-Africa, the Middle-East, and South-central Asia in this particular case is to be no better than those who accommodated the Nazi war machine, the violent racist policies of the American South prior to and after the U.S. Civil War, or the cold-blooded murders of medical professionals by Christian anti-abortion activists.

Freedom means something special, and no amount of ‘offense’ to the sensibilities of a people mired in the mentality of the middle ages should be reason enough for civilized people to discard it. Nonetheless, discard it many will.

Am I the only one who seems to think it is time to fight back and scream into their faces ‘Get you therefore hence, poor miserable wretches, to your death!’ and send the snarling dervishes back into the wilderness? When will the civilization built on the freedoms of the Enlightenment find the gall to muster its strength and crush the cringing remnants of iron-age thought beneath the wheels of modernity? For all of our sakes, we had best hope soon.

Scary thought

I have always been particularly fascinated by ethical issues involving living beings. Whether those living beings are non-human animals subjected to human oppression and torture or a human animal trying to determine whether it is morally permissible to end the life of a fetus growing inside her, issues of life and suffering have always found me to be a receptive listener and willing analyst. Particularly when dealing with issues of human life (but on rare occasions for non-human animal life) I find people coming back with the ethical equivalent of political party’s published ‘talking points’ – small soundbites of intuitively palatable moral wisdom which the public seems to absorb and digest approximately as well as they would absorb and digest a steel ball bearing. Inevitably, sometime in the discussion, someone will regurgitate the soundbite, poisoning the discussion for a frustratingly vast stretch of otherwise useful conversation.

Among the most pernicious of these moral maxims people love to parrot is ‘All life is precious!’ This little gem seems lovely on its surface, but it never seems to pass inspection by anyone who stops to look beyond the initial “Ooh… shiny!” intuitive reaction. All life is precious? If someone seriously thinks this, I’m worried about whether they understand the meaning of the terms ‘life’ and ‘precious.’

Currently in the United Kingdom, a furor is being raised over a medical decision being made by a mother with a teenaged daughter. The daughter, Katie Thorpe, appears to be severely disabled (both mentally and physically) and she cannot care for herself in any appreciable way. The mother, fearing that her daughter will soon begin menstruating has chosen to have doctors perform surgery on her daughter to remove the daughter’s uterus. The mother’s explanation is that while her daughter may not have a very high quality of life, she can at least spare her the indignity of monthly cramps, headaches, and bleeding that will cause her discomfort she is wholly unequipped to understand or deal with.

Groups which stand up for the rights of the disabled, however, are incensed. They are calling the procedure a forced sterilization of a disabled individual, and some advocates holding their position are invoking the time-honored tradition of painting their opponents as Nazis. In discussing this issue with some people who agreed that the medical procedure should be prohibited from being performed on this girl, they invoked that classical gem ‘But all life is precious, therefore we should let this little girl flower into womanhood and make her own reproductive choices.’

Now, I’m going to sidestep over my critique that the girl is wholly incapable of making any choices – whether those choices are of what to wear that day or of whether to undergo costly and invasive surgery to prevent her from becoming a reproductive adult. I’m also going to leave by the wayside the logical structure of the argument where the conclusion ‘we should let the girl [not have the surgery]’ doesn’t in any way follow from the premise that ‘All life is precious.’ Instead, I want to think about the concept of whether that first statement of ‘All life is precious’ is actually true.

Most people won’t hold the position that the statement is meant to actually include ALL life, so I’ll ignore non-human animals and plants. The statement appears to have two conceptual parts: First, there seems to be the assertion that all human lives are equally valuable, and second, there seems included the hidden statement (that would alleviate the logical error committed by my friend above who made the statement that sparked my thoughts on this matter) of ‘performing action ‘X’ which causes harm to a human on the basis of some inter-human discrimination is morally objectionable.’
Is all human life equally valuable and are inter-human discriminations morally objectionable? It seems morally palatable to say so on the surface. This intuition (whether natural or learned) is precisely what allows us to easily say that treating someone differently on the basis of their skin color, the shape of their eyes, the language that they speak, or the religion that they practice is wrong. There isn’t any reason for us to treat these groups differently. Just because someone of darker skin than I have looks different than me doesn’t mean that I can morally treat them differently than myself. It isn’t a valid line to draw across humanity since we are all the same.

And yet, to blithely assume that there are no valid lines that could be drawn across humanity, for any reason at all, seems to me to be somehow strikingly naïve. Here, of course, we aren’t discussing ‘final solutions’ or anything that terrible – we’re talking about whether another person can make medical choices on behalf of another person simply because of the latter person’s membership in some sub-set of humanity.

But let’s take a step out further into the crazy land of philosophical hypotheticals and propose a scenario that actually WILL entail the deaths of others. Does the idea that we are all equally valuable even hold up there, where we might think it to be the strongest?

Suppose that reality actually is the plot of some awful Hollywood Sci-Fi action flick (which however terrible, I’d probably still want to see it). A giant meteor is rushing toward the Earth and a scientist has managed to discover it in time to alert the world’s governments as to the immanent demise of our world. For the purposes of this scenario, suppose the meteor is so large that diverting it or blowing it up simply aren’t options. We will either leave the Earth or we will die. After getting together enormous sums of money, the world’s governments manage to construct a massive ‘Noah’s Ark’-like spaceship on which to load 1,000 humans, our accumulated knowledge, scientific equipment, and genetic samples of as many non-human animals and plants as they could accumulate. The spaceship will provide a safe home for the thousand individuals chosen to inhabit it, and they are capable of surviving the fiery holocaust to come for long enough to allow the planet’s surface to become habitable again. You are in charge of filling the available spots in the life-raft, so to speak. Who will you choose?

Of course, there will be discriminations made, and I’m sure that even an ‘All life is precious’ sort of person will be more than amenable to saying that the ship will need highly skilled people to help rebuild civilization after when the smoke clears. Doctors, engineers, metallurgists, and other trades will be needed. I don’t think that anyone would truly favor a sort of purely random lottery choice to fill the ship since you might end up with a group reminiscent of the spaceship found in Douglas Adam’s ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series, where the spaceship sent to colonize a new world was populated only by hairdressers, advertising people, and phone-booth sanitizers. What I’m after is whether there are any appropriate physical discriminations that can, or rather should, be made when choosing who will live and who will die.

Suppose there are two engineers with identical skills and knowledge. Both would be useful for helping society to rebuild. Both would be equally capable of designing the new roads, bridges, and vehicles necessary to do the work. The only difference between them is that one of the engineers is in a wheelchair and the other has the full use of his legs and is easily mobile. However heartless it might seem, there does seem to be a plausible argument for letting the ambulatory individual onboard while sadly condemning the wheelchair-bound fellow to a terrifying death.

Assuming that all of the ‘knowledge’ or ‘craftspeople’ positions were filled and you still had another hundred spots to fill, would it be appropriate to fill one of those spots with an individual who is profoundly mentally retarded? With someone with Down’s Syndrome? To make the discrimination even more clear, would it be appropriate to fill the spot with someone who is known to have a heritable heart defect, or even someone in whose family runs poor vision necessitating the wearing of reading glasses? Given the ample supply of equivalent, but non-defective human specimens from which to choose, aren’t such discriminations morally obligated?

Naturally, when extended to absurd lengths, common moral sentiments can be found to have gaps and holes all over them. Invoking the ‘lifeboat’ situation always finds ways to strain our conventional notions of morality. The point of the exercise is rarely to point out that the lifeboat scenario holds the key to moral choices in everyday life, but rather to show that our moral statements are not nearly so absolute as we might otherwise think. Some other rule as yet unexplicated tells us where to draw the line between the lifeboat case and the easy case of whether to discriminate on the basis of skin color. Instead of invoking the rule now shown to be non-absolute, perhaps it is time to delve into the project of figuring out when it is and is not appropriate to make those discriminations. Perhaps it is time to examine the exact preciousness of the life at issue in the given case under the given circumstances to determine what the moral choice is.

It is a difficult path to walk, but it is one that I would recommend for everyone. Striving to understand how one ought to live demands more than regurgitating simplistic moral axioms and applying them to novel situations. It demands that one be willing to override the easy answer and question everything, including whether there are some times when it is morally acceptable or even obligatory to make a decision that condemns billions to a fiery grave. If it might so be acceptable or obligatory, then we need to be substantially less blase about how we go about positing the rightness or wrongness of ordering a hysterectomy on a single developmentally disabled child.

I'd like to say that I was busy saving the world, but the truth is that I was just busy.

I seem to be in the habit of going on especially long hiatuses recently. I certainly don’t intend that to be the case. I’ve always found that writing down my thoughts and publishing them in some context or other has been profoundly useful to me in straightening out the things that I think and ironing out the wrinkles in the way that I understand the world to be. Nothing can quite show you the truly horrific gaps in your reasoning or fallacious conclusions quite like having to critically examine them as you write them down. It is a simultaneously humbling experience to see your own thoughts laid so plainly in front of you and a powerfully uplifting experience to see at once how to improve your own arguments and think more coherently.

I’ve dozens of topics about which I have been meaning to write. The refusal of New York City officials to allow the Iranian President to lay a wreath at ‘Ground Zero’ for the victims who died when the towers collapsed on 9/11 galled me, especially since the predominant reason seemed to be a nebulous form of racism or religious discrimination. Iran has never been shown to have been involved in the devastation wrought that day, but the publicized opinion of New Yorkers seemed to be ‘He [the Iranian President] should be ashamed to even ask such a thing. He should go to hell.’ After all, he’s a brown person, right? And a Muslim to boot. “They” must all be guilty, right?

I meant to write about how the Iranian President was received when he came to speak at a university. Imagine such an honor! The visiting President of a foreign nation deigning to speak to a crowd of at a college? It’s fantastic. That kind of thing is a fabulous opportunity for students to meet and learn about a man who will shape the foreign policy of a whole region of the world – and who might influence the foreign policy of our own country as well. Instead of simply allowing the Iranian President to speak freely of his ideas and letting the students decide for themselves how totally screwed up (or not) he is (and he is very screwed up, let me assure you), his introduction to the assembled auditorium was filled with vitriol calling him a petty dictator and asserting that most of the visiting dignitary’s ideas were false. While it is true that many of his ideas are false, simply asserting so in such a manner runs flatly counter to the entire educational enterprise and should have been condemned for what it was: a cheap ploy to pander to the same popular anti-Muslim/racist sentiment that motivated the New Yorker’s response to the same man. (Git ‘im! He’s a brown feller what worships a demon desert-god!). If the University had desired to have their students learn from the episode instead of treating the event as a publicity stunt designed to hold a foreign Executive up for ridicule (fat chance of having other foreign leaders address our Universities now…), the University could have easily arranged for a second presentation afterwards in which historians presented the powerful and overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust most certainly did occur, or where sociologists presented the evidence which would show that Iranians are not immune from being born as homosexuals (one of the Iranian President’s more silly claims).

I’ve wanted to write about my battles with the state bureaucracy here in Washington, in which official after official gives me differing and sometimes contradictory answers to identical questions, and in which state and county agencies seem to make quite serious errors without any noticeable effort on their parts to discover the sources of those errors or remedy them in a timely fashion. For instance, I registered to vote in Washington by mailing in a form to the Secretary of State’s office. After waiting a month without receiving my voter’s registration card, I called up my local elections office who notified me that I was indeed registered to vote, but that for some unknown reason, they had simply failed to mail me a registration card. When I asked for one to be mailed, they informed me that because the primaries were starting, they’d be too busy to mail me the registration card - documentation that I needed for another government service. After the primary was completed (a month later), they said they would mail me the card they had initially forgotten to send, but that card didn’t arrive in my mailbox until a full two-weeks after they said it had been mailed to me. I know mail can sometimes be slow, but given that the elections office from which it was mailed is located within ten miles of me, I’m fairly sure that two weeks is an unreasonably long time to wait. I could have walked it to my mailbox in a minute fraction of that time…

Anyway, there have been many developments about which I have wanted to write, exploring my thoughts and feelings about them in some depth, but over the past month, I have consistently failed to ever sit down and attempt to write down my thoughts. Every time I attempted to do so, I found myself distracted.

Here’s to hoping that I can manage to set aside my attention-span issue for a moment and get back to work.

Perhaps I overdid it

Today, I spent part of the day working out with my weights. I've never really pushed myself with them to my physical limit - instead preferring to simply do a particular set number of lifts. Today, I opted to keep going for so long as my arms would hold out, and then opted to do so again this afternoon.

Personal record: Just a hair over 10 tons of weight lifted today.

What the...?

I think I'm going to have to switch shampoo brands or something. Being a consummate cheapskate, I typically buy the inexpensive shampoo/conditioner sets from Suave. When I went down to the Bartells (Washington's answer to Walgreens) to get some the other day, the only scent they had left was 'berry smoothie.' While not the 'lilac' I usually get, I figured I'd try it and see how it went.

I'm apparently making my cubicle-mate hungry because my hair smells like Grape "Bubble-yum." Sigh.

Soap Operatic Avian Action

My brother owns a small group of friendly cockatiels that reside in his home-aviary, and over the past few months, I have been growing to enjoy their presence more and more. Astonishingly intelligent birds, their daily antics and machinations usually find me reevaluating their native personalities.

Perhaps I am simply anthropomorphizing, but I've usually been a believer in the concept of similarity. When I see behaviours in human animals, I can (relatively) reliably attribute mental states to the individuals exhibiting various behaviours. When I observe similar behaviours in a non-human animal species, a presumption must exist that similar mental states have motivated the behaviours. For instance, it should be uncontroversial to suggest that if someone sees me eating a sandwich, they might believe me to be hungry. Should they see another animal eating, it would be sensible to posit 'hunger' as a mental state of the other animal. Far fewer people are willing to extend this same concept to social behaviours, though, for reasons which I feel it safe to label speciesist.

The small family of cockatiels is comprised of Mother, Father, Sister, and Brother (not very personal, but appropriately descriptive). Brother and Sister are the adult children of Mother and Father. When I arrived in Washington, the status quo was near-daily matings of Mother/Father and Father/Sister. Of course, no nests were present in the enclosure, and cockatiels will not lay eggs unless they have a dark, enclosed place in which to do so.

I suggested to my brother that we might provide for them a nest and thereby increase the number of cockatiels present. However, upon the presentation of the nest to the cockatiels, the 'pecking' order shifted. Brother became increasingly aggressive, and frequently attacked Father, even going so far as to push Father off of Mother while the elders were getting it on - and then taking over where Father left off.

Finally, Father accepted his lesser position, and began mating exclusively with Sister while Brother monopolized Mother's reproductive interests. Unfortunately for Father, Mother claimed the nest as her own and jealously guards it from Sister's curiosity. After several weeks investigating the nest and mating with Brother a dozen times a day, Mother finally felt safe enough to start laying eggs inside of it.

The real drama begins when Father (who doesn't seem to quite grasp the biology involved) began to behave as if the newly laid eggs inside the nest were his progeny. I mean, he's been through this once before, and he knows that he's supposed to sit on the eggs with Mother. Brother also seems to understand that he's supposed to be in the nest with the eggs. Unfortunately for the first full clutch of eggs, Brother and Father fought in the nest and broke a few eggs.

With Mother and Brother sitting on the eggs in the small nest, little room existed for Father, but he didn't let anything like that stop him. He enthusiastically climbed into the nest as well, and things have finally settled into a fairly stable and peaceful sort of domestic confusion. Mother doesn't know why there are two males in her nest. Brother doesn't understand why Father is intruding into his nest. Father - blissfully ignorant of the fact that the eggs are clearly not his - happily spends his time caring for the eggs and singing to them.

Eleven eggs and two months later, a single chick has finally been hatched (we can hear the quiet squeaks inside the nest), but we're a bit pessimistic concerning the chick's ability to fend off three separate parents who all want to feed it at the same time. With any luck, though, soon we'll get to say 'hello' to Son or Daughter.

Worth the build-up.

I don't laugh all that often. I'm not an especially funny person, and humor makes up a shockingly low part of my average day. Apart from an incident a day ago when a player in an online game I play asked a large group of people how to "mine" fish (as if they were a mineral or gemstone) out of the water, I haven't laughed in quite a while.

However, I happened across a cute little video yesterday and hit the floor. Somehow, it struck a chord, and there is definitely something familiar about the whole scenario that resonates with my experiences. Why is it that two people can connect so well and then suddenly take sharply different directions at the same juncture?

Numb

They say that time can cure all wounds, but I've found that it leaves behind some fairly deep scars.

South Pacific in the North Pacific?

In the Broadway musical “South Pacific,” one of the main characters laments his inability to declare his love for the young, South Pacific island girl with whom he has been sleeping at night. Lieutenant Cable sings out that:

You’ve got to be carefully taught to hate and fear.
You’ve got to be carefully taught from year to year.
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear.
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade.
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it is too late -
Before you are six, or seven, or eight -
To hate all the people your relatives hate.
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

In the song, Cable is lamenting his own upbringing that led him to be unable to experience the joy he knows is fully within his grasp, if only he could let go of his prejudices and relate to his mistress on more than a purely physical level.

Coming from a relatively liberal household, I always found it strange when I heard people in women’s studies departments, minority rights groups, and other such organizations screaming and protesting about how prevalent discrimination is. I’d never seen it, and I was pretty sure that they’d never seen it either. I mean, where are all of these people who teach their young children to hate like this? Aside from the occasional Fred Phelps or other extremist, I thought those people just weren’t around anymore.

This past weekend, my brother and I looked after our young sister-in-law, who is in elementary school. As we were driving with her down the highway, my brother commented on the license plate on a vehicle in front of us (always seizing on an opportunity to try to teach her something) and pointed out to our young sister-in-law that it was from ‘Alberta.’ I was pleasantly surprised to discover that she knew that Alberta was in Canada, but then pointed out that she didn’t like Canadians.

Filled with curiosity, my brother asked why she didn’t like Canadians, she said that Canadians were the world’s second-worst drivers - beaten out only by “Orientals.” That statement met my brother and I with a heavy silence for a few minutes. Not only does our sister-in-law know nothing about driving (she’s still in a car-seat, for crying out loud!), but she doesn’t even know what an “Oriental” is. She asked my brother and I (both white-as-white-can-be boys from the Central Plains) if we were “Orientals.”

Now I’m left wondering just how carefully taught she was.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Ostensibly with a title like this, I ought to be discussing something to do with Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison. However much I like Rex Harrison, this brief vignette concerning my recent activities has nothing to do with him. Rather, the words of the title sum up my feelings regarding my first real venture out into the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.

A week past, my brother and I accompanied one of my brother’s friends on a “leisurely” walk through the woods. That’s how my brother described it to me, anyhow - “leisurely.” When he proposed getting me out into the wilderness, he suggested that we go walk on this small trail that circles a nearby lake. What he neglected to mention was that the lake was found near the top of a mountain, and was only accessible via an eight-mile, up-mountain hike over loose gravel and ice, with thirty foot drops off one side of the trail. I almost think the eight miles coming down were worse than the eight going up.

When we started out, it was barely light outside, and when we finished the hike, it was almost time for dinner. When I went to bed that night, I was fairly sure that I was in more physical pain than I’d ever been in before. I had to reassess that thought when I woke up the next morning, and I had plenty of time to reassess it since it took me the better part of a half-hour to manage to figure out how to get out of my bed. Isn’t somebody supposed to warn me that I’m going to go into some kind of stiffened posture overnight? Sigh.

Despite the grueling pace my brother set and the searing sensations in every muscle below my waist, once we got up near the tree-line, some nice vistas opened up exposing a view that I would have liked to stop to savor for a short while. I’m not sure the hike was worth the view, but to save everyone else the trouble of having to claw their way up a steep mountainside for five hours to see it, I’ve provided one of my pictures here.

This picture was taken on one of those vistas, looking toward the West (I think). Don't let the picture fool you, the lowest area you can see on the picture is still about halfway up the mountain. I apologize for the low-quality image. I normally shoot at a 1600 x 1200 digitial resolution, and shrinking it down caused a number of compression artifacts I didn't care enough to fix.