Author: blueZhift

Hello spring! Spring has finally made an appearance in Chicago. I spied the most spectacular black woman in a yellow skirt and top in the nearby Trader Joe’s yesterday. That was one time I did not mind waiting a short time longer in line!^_^

Having just passed the 500th blog posting here (sake for everyone!), I found myself pondering what is perhaps the biggest question of my existence during my lunch time walk. My wife and I are raising our kids with the goal of helping them grow up into the people they were meant to be. But in all of this time, I never asked myself, have I become the person I was meant to be? I almost stopped in my tracks because I really don’t know. If I can’t answer that question for myself, then it certainly begs the question of whether I can answer it for anyone else, including my kids.

But maybe that’s the whole point. I can’t see the endpoint because I’m not there yet. All I can do is make the best decisions I can based on the information I have on hand and some fundamental principles that come out of my spiritual and philosophical beliefs. I may be completely wrong in the end, but I won’t know that until this story is over, I hope.

There’s so much talk about how the US is losing its edge and how we need to improve our schools. Yet we seem to do everything we can to make sure that good teachers are discouraged and talented people are forever kept away from even considering teaching as a profession. The story that’s got me angry today is a CNN report of an Indiana school teacher who is being transferred for allowing the school paper to publish an editorial advocating tolerance of gays. Rather than being fired, she is being transferred to another school where she will not be allowed to teach journalism. What a great lesson we have there! Advocate tolerance for gays, or any unpopular group for that matter, and either lose your job or be barred from teaching something you love. Yeah, that’s the way to make our schools and America great. In the end, I cannot see how God is going to bless such a close hearted land as the US has become. That we get the good things that we do is nothing less than either evidence of a graceful god, or that this universe is mad and meaningless. Our bad schools are no one’s fault but our own. We’re just getting the schools we deserve.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, the gun debate rages on. This isn’t anything new, but this time around, the notion that armed students or professors would have prevented the massacre is getting significant play. Admittedly, it is plausible, and some might argue, even cool that some heroic student would have just blown Cho away thus ending the carnage before it could fully blossom. The view that an armed populace is necessary for general safety immediately reminded me of the Star Trek episode entitled, “A Piece of the Action.”

In this episode, the Enterprise visits a planet that has chosen to based their society on the old Chicago gangs (Al Capone, etc…). The different gangs are constantly fighting each other for territory which, apparently, necessitates an armed populace. Every adult is armed, even moms have a machine gun stashed in the baby carriage. Would we really be safer in such a society? I don’t know, but I do know that there is one scenario that people have left out that bears mention.

We all assume that if there were other armed students, they would have acted to stop Cho. But it is certainly possible that some of them could have decided to help Cho! There are a lot of angry and disaffected people in our world, and just like looting seems almost infectious after a blackout or disaster, why shouldn’t some people choose to take part in the developing carnage? A lot of the time it just takes one “deviant” to show the way and push others over the edge. We see this with copycat crimes all the time. So in this worst case scenario, there could easily have been far more deaths than actually occured.

I remember growing up that when my dad took a newspaper into the bathroom, we were in for a long wait before he came out again. This is a tradition that I have continued in my own family, though my bathroom tends to be stocked with gaming mags rather than newspapers. Today I feel I have taken this tradition to a new height, quite unintentionally.

I finished the second of the two anime music videos I had planned to enter in the Anime Central AMV contest just in time last week. So I’ve been pretty happy the last couple of days since it did not seem that the second one was going to be completed on time initially. Well I’d just transcoded them to an mp4 format my iPod could play and resynched the pod when nature called. Without thinking too much about it, I took the iPod along with me and wanting to check the playback, watched the AMVs on the crapper! A new era of bathroom “reading” has begun!

Right now we have a strange juxtaposition of things in the media. On the one side of the page we have embattled Don Imus being barbequed for calling the NCAA Champion Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed hos”. While on the other side of the page, we have a triumphant Larry Birkhead celebrating his paternity of a child with another man’s dead woman/companion(???) which puts him in line to control a fortune of millions of dollars. Hmmm, who’s the real ho here? Strange world we have here, honor is dishonored while dishonor is honored. T_T