My Day

Many of you may not be aware of the kind of person I've become. I think that most everyone who ever looks at this thing has spent some period of time in which they were pretty closely involved in my life--knew what I did most of the time. But not anymore. So, this is how things go now.

Woke up at 7:45. That's a good morning--3 mornings per week I go prepare breakfast for a lesbian couple and "their" son, and then I take the little boy to school. Those mornings, I have to wake up at 6:15. Even waking up at 7:45 today, I seriously contemplated going back to sleep until I absolutely had to wake up.

Annie did that morning job this morning, and she gets home from it at about 8:25. Just in time for me to kiss her as I'm walking out the door. We make fruit smoothies every morning--I left it on the counter for her, where I also tragically left my part of it.

Class at 8:40- Federal Civil Litigation. My group and I, along with all of the other groups, had submitted a drafts of a Complaint last Friday, and the professor spent today telling us how terribly we'd done. He thinks that we should be so dedicated to our jobs that we should be up every night reading laws and treatises between midnight and 2 a.m. He tells us that every day of class.

Class at 10:20, right after the first one ended--Natural Resources Law and Policy. I have a visiting professor for this one, and my experience with those that they're fairly low quality. If this guy's tasteful clothes and impeccably styled hair are any indication, he plays for the other team. He also has stlyishly long stubble, which he sometimes plays with absently as he's trying to get through another sentence, which doesn't come easily to him. The concepts in the class are interesting, but I prefer to get them from the book.

11:50- walking home for lunch. I had planned to play basketball at the campus gym before going home, but my gym clothes are sitting, perfectly packed, next to my smoothie. It's a 15 minute walk. Winds in Harvard Square average around 12 mph, which combined with the habitually sub-freezing winter temperatures makes for a cold walk. Deciding whether or not to call Annie or a family member on the walk home is a question of how much I love my hand that day.

I guess I have a lot to say about my day :) So I'll split it into another post.

Natural Resources Law and Policy

That's one of my classes this semester. And I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I think the way we treat the non-human parts of our world is important, for a couple of reasons. Oh, incidentally, for those of you who may have thought about this a lot more than I have, I'd like to point out that I know that everything I'm about to write over-simplifies the issues, but you have to start somewhere.

First, how I treat the environment affects other people. After all, what I pour into the river upstream is what you're drinking downstream. So, in some ways, how I treat the environment is part of how I treat other people. There's also the bit about preserving the environment for future generations.

Second, how I treat the environment is important in itself. I draw this from Genesis 1:28, among other scriptures. That's the one about multiplying and replenishing the earth, subduing it and having dominion over it, etc. I read this to mean "stewardship."

So those are the reasons that I think it's important to think about and try to preserve/improve/whatever the non-human parts of the world (it's been pointed out to me that "nature" is kind of a hard term to pin down).

On the other hand, to study Natural Resources Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, you have to deal with a lot of ideologies that I find kind of strange. For instance, some people believe in "deep ecology," which has among its tenets that "all organisms and entities in the ecosphere, as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth" and that "the flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease."

These other ideologies are, of course, very popular in Cambridge, MA. Indeed, for many of the modern residents here, environmentalism is religion. That can make it difficult for someone like me, who cares about the environment in a more utilitarian fashion.

So how can you study and care about the environment today without going to extremes? I'm open for suggestions.

P.S.- My wife thinks it's really funny when I'm frustrated. Yesterday we were driving to the nearest Sears Auto Center to get new tires--a good 25 minutes, if you know where you're going. That last bit was important: if you know where you're going. My lovely wife often knows generally where she's going, but not exactly where she's going. So on occasions like yesterday, when I forgot to ask whether she knew exactly where she was going, we sometimes get to the general area and then have to drive around kind of hoping we happen upon the right street. We did, eventually, but while we were just kind of driving around, my frustration started to build a little bit, and my wife thought it was hilarious.

Now that the moment has passed, I can look back and laugh, too. But does anyone else's wife have trouble taking him seriously when he's frustrated? Is this normal? Should I just get used to it? There may not be easy answers to these questions.

Our First Christmas Tree

Total cost: about $10. And it's artificial, and therefore reusable.

Some Stories

So, I didn't really intend for this to be a political blog. I made it when I was single as a place to just pour out thoughts about different things. It's been getting too political lately, so now I'm just going to put up a couple of stories about my life (and....PICTURES!).

Story 1

I met my wife thanks to my turkey-cooking skillz. I cooked my first turkey on my mission, then cooked several more while I was at BYU. Anyway, soon after I got to Cambridge, I got a call from this girl I'd seen before in the ward, Annie Siddoway. I found it quite flattering that she'd call me, since I thought she was quite pretty. Well, she was actually calling because she needed to cook a turkey for a dinner she was putting on for the guys that had helped her move, but her oven was broken. Since she knew my roommates (in fact, she had dated one of them) and we lived only a couple of blocks from her new apartment, she called my roommates to ask if she could use our oven. But only I was home.

So, soon enough there was a knock at the door, and when I opened it there stood Annie, holding a raw turkey. I showed her to the oven. Soon, however, it became apparent that she (and her roommate that was with her. Of course she never would have come alone) had never cooked a turkey before. Well. I showed her how to cook a turkey. I think she was especially impressed when I momentarily disappeared into my room, reappearing moments later with a baster. Her version of what she was thinking at the time: "Ok, this guy is either incredibly weird or incredibly cute." She has since determined that the former is always true, while the latter is only occasionally true.

To make a long story short, it takes a few hours to cook a turkey, so I had a captive audience. And the rest is history.



Story 2

I have a very odd sense of humor. I'm the kind of man who loves the Muppets, Ask a Ninja, and videos about blenders powered by v8 engines. I also love unintentional comedy--when actors are very much trying to be serious but only succeed in being ridiculous.

This is what makes it so wonderful that Annie and I have so much fun together. There are not that many people that understand or enjoy my sense of humor--most people can enjoy certain parts of it, but Annie enjoys almost all of it. As demonstrated by the gifts she has gotten me so far.

Our first holiday as a couple (not yet a married couple) was Christmas of last year. As she thought of what to get me for Christmas, Annie remembered that one of the most memorable of our early dates was the time we went to see High School Musical 3. As far as unintentional comedy goes, it doesn't get much better than Zac Efron sings and dances out his teenage angst in a high school gym as hundreds of computer-animated basketballs fall around him and lightning flashes in the background. So, for Christmas, Annie got me a Zac Efron t-shirt. There was a lot of laughter at the time...we're still not quite sure what to do with it. I won't wear it in public and she won't let me hang it above her side of the bed.

Valentine's Day brought another fun gift from Annie. Earlier we had discussed one of the kinds of gifts that I loved seeing on Valentine's Day in high school--stuffed animals inside of balloons. To me, there just aren't many more ridiculous looking things. Well. Annie got me socks (Smart Wool socks. Awesome), but had the nerve to go to a gift place and ask them to put the socks into a balloon with confetti and the whole bit. While she definitely got some weird looks from everyone at the store, I absolutely loved it.

Conclusion

That's probably enough stories for one post. I do want to leave everyone with a couple more pictures, just in case you're one day called upon to recognize me or Annie in a crowd and it's been years since you've seen either of us.

An Account of Democratic Self-Government

The following is from Ronald Dworkin:

To achieve that sense of a national partnership in self-government, it is not enough for a community to treat citizens only as if they were shareholders in a company, giving them votes only in periodic elections of officials. It must design institutions, practices, and conventions that allow them to be more engaged in public life, and to make a contribution to it, even when their views do not prevail. Two conditions are necessary for this:

a) First, each citizen must have a fair and reasonably equal opportunity not only to hear the views of others as these are published or broadcast, but to command attention for his own views, either as a candidate for office or as a member of a politically active group committed to some program or conviction.

b) Second, the tone of public discourse must be appropriate to the deliberations of a partnership or joint venture rather than the selfish negotiations of commercial rivals or military enemies.

If we embraced that attractive account of the conditions of self-government, we would have to accept that democracy—self-government by the people as a whole—is always a matter of degree. It will never be perfectly fulfilled, because it seems incredible that the politics of a pluralistic contemporary society could ever become as egalitarian in access and as deliberative in tone as the standards I just described demand. We would then understand democracy not as a pedigree a nation earns just by adopting some constitutional structure of free elections, but as an ideal toward which any would-be democratic society must continually strive.

We would also have to accept not only that America falls short of important democratic ideals, but that in the age of television politics the shortfall has steadily become worse. The influence of wealth unequally distributed is greater, and its consequences more profound, than at any time in the past, and our politics seem daily more rancorous, ill-spirited, and divisive.

So this analysis of democracy as self-government confirms—and helps to explain—the growing sense of despair about American politics that I began this essay by trying to describe. How should we respond to that despair? We must understand the First Amendment as a challenge, not a barrier to improvement. We must reject the blanket principle the Supreme Court relied on in Buckley, that government should never attempt to regulate the public political discourse in any way, in favor of a more discriminating principle that condemns the constraints that do violate genuine principles of democracy—that deny citizens information they need for political judgment or that deny equality of citizenship for people with unpopular beliefs or tastes, for example—but that nevertheless permits us to try to reverse our democracy's decline.

Risk/Reward Question

So, it's unprecedented for me to post twice in a single day, but I have a question now.

I just read this.

Among other societal/economic problems right now, we have a lack of risk taking and a dearth of effective leadership. If we want to increase risk, do we have to decrease scrutiny and criticism? If so, how can we do it w/o unconstitutionally abrogating speech?

We need more warrior/adventurer spirit. How can we get it?

A Political Thought or Two

It's probably pointless to post this here, since most (if not all) the people who read this blog usually vote Republican. But in any case.

Here's a recurring theme in present day politics. The President (a liberal Democrat) or the Congress (majority Democrat, with liberal Democrats in the highest leadership positions) proposes a governmental solution to some problem--be it the economic/financial crisis, health care, whatever. Republicans, and especially conservatives, decry the solution as one that a) likely won't work, and b) involves too great an expansion of government power. The Democrats' rejoinder, at least in large part, is often "all you're doing is criticizing. You haven't offered another solution."

While that may be true (the Republicans/conservatives who offer the criticism may not have been thinking of a solution), there seems to be an obvious counterpoint that at least the Democrats are missing. That is, that the alternative "solution" may not be that the government do something else. It may be that the government do less, if not nothing. To assume that this is the equivalent of "do nothing" is to assume that the government is the only possible actor in the situation.

Republicans'/conservatives' preference--and perhaps mine, though I just don't think I know enough to make strong claims about what will and won't work--might be that private individuals, private groups of individuals, and private business entities work for themselves, stimulating the economy through their own economic activity. The idea is that you work for yourself; don't ask government to work for you. It won't do a good job.

This leads to other questions, such as whether the distribution of wealth and power in the market has become such that a small number of powerful actors working in their own self-interest make it impossible to achieve everyone's self interest (I feel like game theory should come into this, somehow, but I don't know enough about game theory). If that is the case, maybe the government does need to level the playing field somehow? But I don't know that I'm quite ready to believe that.

On a related note, I tire of the argument that Republicans' failed policies got us into this mess, so their proposed solutions have no merit. The ability to see mistakes in hindsight says nothing about the merits of proposed solutions to current problems. It means neither a) that Republicans proposals won't work for current problems, nor b) that Democrats' proposed solutions will. Yes, the Democrats have an electoral mandate to try their solutions, but that doesn't mean they can assume the Republicans' solutions to current problems are wrong just because some Republican policies arguably led to undesirable consequences.

In the end, I don't know the future any more than the people that are making these arguments. And really, I hope their solutions work, because they're the only solutions we're likely to get for a long time, given who's in power right now. But I hate bad argumentation.