January 2011
1 post
Tweeting Your Epitaph
On Friday, I joked that people should have to spend one day a year wearing their internet comments on a sandwich board. On Saturday, a man walked up to a United States Congresswoman and shot her through the head. He shot an wounded 17 other people, and killing six. Among the dead was a 9-year-old girl who’d wanted to meet the politician because she’d recently been elected to her...
December 2010
1 post
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Repealed
I’m happy about this news. Congratulations to all of you who serve our country with honor despite being treated as a second class citizen or as a ticking time bomb. For those of you for whom this comes too late, I’m sorry.
The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is the first gay rights issue I can remember being aware of. I was in high school when President...
October 2010
2 posts
5 tags
A Coming Out Story
Like a lot of people that grew up in small towns in the 80s and 90s, I had only a dim awareness of the many varieties of sexuality. Although I learned later that several of my friends in middle and high school were gay, I didn’t know anyone openly gay until college, and I’ll be honest that I wasn’t completely comfortable around the gay men I met.
I wanted to be. Intellectually,...
5 tags
I'm not finished.
I didn’t get the best education. My college wasn’t the greatest, but even there I could have gotten a better education if I’d really wanted it. I didn’t try very hard because I’d never had to, and I didn’t have any real end goals to try for anyway, and so I just slid by. My grades were good enough to keep my scholarships, but I didn’t learn much of...
September 2010
3 posts
On Toys
One of the consolations of parenthood is that toys return to your life. I hadn’t realized how much I missed them, but here they are again- little totems that you endow with a fraction of your imagination.
I know adults, men mostly, who still buy toys for themselves. I understand the desire to own a little bit of something you love, to open the package and run your fingers over it or put...
On Modesty, Katy Perry, and Muppets
Dr. Chapman and I had a discussion a few days ago about a recent incident involving Sesame Street and Katy Perry. We’re not a household that consumes much Sesame Street, but we do have small children, so it comes up in conversation. It was an interesting talk, and I continued chewing on it afterward.
I believe the controversy also trickled out into the mythical land of childless adults...
6 tags
On Government "Waste" and Stupidity
I tend to froth a little when politicians and journalists offer examples of wasteful government spending that, given a moment’s reflection, isn’t all that wasteful. For example, when Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal attacked budget allocations for volcano monitoring. If there was ever something you wanted the government to monitor, I would expect a volcano to be it.
So, when one of my...
August 2010
1 post
4 tags
Repost: Five Corrections
(I need something to test this new RSS feed, so I’m reposting this. You don’t have to read it.)
No one has written a Wikipedia entry about me, but I’ve compiled a list of common misapprehensions about me just in case.
That I was born in Alabama.
I grew up in Alabama, but I was born in Texas and lived there until the age of seven. Actually, I’m the only person that ever made this...