what on earth am i doing out of bed?

answer: overcompensating. so anxious about waking up late that i got up early. morning is a strange time. i don't know if i like it.

link courtesy of lori

i adored mr. michael chabon even before this op-ed piece (which you apparently don't have to register to read, but registration at nytimes.com is still free and painless). this has only cemented my loyalty. everyone should read it -- particularly, i suspect, those who are parents of teenagers.

We don't want teenagers to write violent poems, horrifying stories, explicit lyrics and rhymes; they're ugly, in precisely the way that we are ugly, and out of protectiveness and hypocrisy, even out of pity and love and tenderness, we try to force young people to be innocent of everything but the effects of that ugliness. And so we censor the art they consume and produce, and prosecute and suspend and expel them, and when, once in a great while, a teenager reaches for an easy gun and shoots somebody or himself, we tell ourselves that if we had only censored his journals and curtailed his music and video games, that awful burst of final ugliness could surely have been prevented. As if art caused the ugliness, when of course all it can ever do is reflect and, perhaps, attempt to explain it.

Let teenagers languish, therefore, in their sense of isolation, without outlet or nourishment, bereft of the only thing that makes it all bearable: knowing that somebody else has felt the way that you feel, has faced it, run from it, rued it, lamented it and transformed it into art; has been there, and returned, and lived, for the only good reason we have: to tell the tale. How confident we shall be, once we have done this, of never encountering the ugliness again! How happy our children will be, and how brave, and how safe!

GIP!

this would be from 2/28, our first game, in which we did very well. which is to say: i don't remember this shot, but i'm willing to bet it was a good one. :-) (you're looking at history -- this was taken maybe two hours or so before The Bruise. which i still have.)

memo to ellen_fremedon

wheee! i don't have to deal with lunch at all.