I got called in for two days this week. Oddly, both seemed to involve special education. Today it’s SE PE, tomorrow it’s just plain special education. I was wondering what was up with that. Apparently, the answer is that they’re training for the Special Olympics.

All of which, perhaps inappropriately, reminds me of the The Onion. First, about the Special Olympics itself:

According to the undercover probe, over the years hundreds and possibly thousands of participating athletes have been declared “winners,” despite losing their respective contests, often by wide margins.

“I don’t think there’s anything ‘winning’ or ‘special’ about finishing in eighth or ninth place,” chief investigator Harlan Brundage said. “Do these kids think they’re winners just because they tried? Just because they gave it their all? Well, let me tell you, trying doesn’t make you a winner. Coming in first does.”

An estimated 15,000 athletes participated in the Special Olympics this year, and, according to Special Olympics awards records, every one of them was declared a “winner.”

The second, in conjunction with a post about demographics serving in the armed forces, Clinton Deploys Very Special Forces:

Clinton said the objective of the mission, dubbed Operation Great Job!, is twofold: to keep pressure on Saddam Hussein to permit the return of U.N. weapons inspectors, and to provide America’s very special forces with a positive, rewarding, esteem-building experience.

“With Operation Great Job!, we send the message loud and clear to Saddam Hussein that his open defiance of the United Nations and international law will not be tolerated,” Clinton said. “We also send the equally important message to our own troops that what’s important is not whether you defeat the enemy, but that you try your best and have fun.”

Slate is running a series this week on cases where the justice system got it wrong; somewhat spurred by the Illinois legislation abolishing the death penalty, partly just a good conversation.

The author, Brandon L. Garrett, is a bit pimping his new book but is also providing a good look at two of the most widely believed – but at the same time not entirely reliable – types of evidence on which many criminal cases rely. The first is eyewitness accounts and identification, the second is the confession of guilt.

Now that we know—with the benefit of the DNA tests—that Sterling is innocent, one wonders how an innocent man could have guessed at incredibly specific crime scene details? Sterling later explained it this way: “They just wore me down.” “I was just so tired.” “It’s like, ‘Come on, guys, I’m tired—what do you want me to do, just confess to it?””

In a pair of videos I link to very often, there’s a great answer to how someone “knows unreleased details” – the cops slip them to the accused in one form or another, or lead the accused into guessing until they have them “guessing right” on tape.

More interestingly to me, however – Garrett finally comes up with some hard numbers. I’ve chided the Innocence Project before about this, because they make a habit of releasing only their “number of innocent people freed” number, rather than giving us the chance to see the total number of cases they’ve examined. Will has said – and I agree – that even this may not be an exact figure, since IP only takes cases “likely to exonerate” on their early examination before proceeding all the way down the line, but it at least would give us something to work with.

Garrett, however, gives us a gem.

In 16 percent of the first 250 DNA exonerations, or 40 of the 250 cases I studied for my book, Convicting the Innocent, innocent defendants confessed to crimes they did not commit. (Additional DNA exonerees did not deliver confessions in custody, but they made incriminating statements or pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit).

The false confessions pose a puzzle. All but two of the 40 DNA exonerees who falsely confessed were said to have confessed in detail.

Now, this is not perfect. His study is only on those cases that are proven false convictions. But we at least have a hard number here – 250 cases of proven innocent, 40 cases of false confession, 38 of which are said to be an “in depth” confession. And every one proven innocent almost-definitively by DNA evidence. This leads to at least a reasonable suspicion that confessions in districts across the nation are contaminated or even coerced by the cops – perhaps by cops who don’t know what they are doing, or perhaps by the type of behavior we commonly associate with not-so-honest cops who start and stop the recording on TV shows, only recording the parts of the interview they want to be available in court.

The Huffington Post singles out six states that are the worst about software piracy:

According to a new report released by anti-piracy organization Business Software Alliance, only six states were responsible for nearly half of all software piracy incidents reported in the United States in 2010. {…}

Which states were the biggest offenders?

BSA pointed a finger at California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Michigan. As much as 49.3 percent of unlicensed software is believed to have originated in these states.

Nearly fifty percent. That sounds shocking until you look at the states. With the exception of Michigan, what do the other five have in common? In fact, they’re the five largest states in the country (Michigan is 8th). And if you add up the populations of those states, you get 40% of the country. They’re also the states with the largest economies. So it’s not exactly surprising that they would have 20% outsized share of software piracy.

Mike Hunt and I had a discussion a little while back on what effect the economy might have on armed services recruiting. We weren’t sure if the end result would be that the new recruits would be less impressive (because the job opportunities for less impressive people have dried up) or more impressive (because they can afford to be more selective). The answer, it would seem, is more selective:

Last year, 99% of recruits had a high school diploma before entering the service, up from 91% in 2006, when fighting in Iraq was near its peak and the economy was stronger.

The increased interest in the armed forces means recruiters can be choosier about whom they let into the military.

“We turn away a lot more people than we have in years past,” said Army Staff Sgt. David Harris, a recruiter in Roswell, Ga.

The military has dramatically cut the number of “waivers,” which allowed people to join the military despite past misconduct or medical reasons.

The Army granted waivers to 8.7% of the recruits entering the service last fiscal year, down from 15.6% the previous year. Most of those waivers were for medical reasons.

The State of Texas is looking at raising speed limits to be the fastest in the nation:

The Texas House of Representatives has approved a bill that would raise the speed limit to 85 mph on some highways. The bill now goes to the state Senate, the Austin Statesman reports. {…}

Texas currently has more than 520 miles of interstate highways where the speed limit is 80 mph, according to the Associated Press. The bill would allow the Texas Department of Transportation to raise the speed limit on certain roads or lanes after engineering and traffic studies are conducted. The 85 mph maximum would likely be permitted on rural roads with long sightlines.

Texas is currently one of the only two states currently allowing 80mph speed limits on a few stretches. Utah is the other.

The two main groups against it are the insurance companies and environmentalists. Though I could have sworn I saw 80mph speed limits on my original move from Delosa to Deseret, I can’t find anything to back me up on that. So I guess I have never driven on an 80mph road. I would think that you would want to be careful about where you put them, but there are some stretches of road that are asking for it. Particularly in the great plains region. When moving to Deseret, I took a route that had me going north through (a tip of) New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming instead of the GoogleMaps approved route that takes you through Kansas, Nebraska, and so on. The main reason for the detour was the scenery, but if the great plains had 85mph speed limits, I probably would have gone that route.

This cannot stand.

Another stat shows that 80 percent of babies and toddlers know how to use the internet.

OH MY GOD TODDLERS AND BABIES ARE LEARNING TO USE ONE OF THE ESSENTIAL TOOLS OUR TIME! THIS IS POSITIVELY DISASTROUS!

Okay, actually, I find that statistic more puzzling than disastrous. How is “use the internet” defined? Learning to click on a link? Playing an Adobe Flash game? However you define it, being a toddler is a time for children to develop motor skills and language skills. Assuming that they can’t read, figuring out that clicking the button thingie when the pointer thingie will consistently cause such-and-such to happen strikes me as kind of useful. Granted, the spacial skills that come with playing with blocks are moreso, but are we really worried that kids aren’t playing with blocks?

Okay, setting that one sentence and my unreasonable response to it aside, let’s go back to the beginning:

• Text messages sent per day in the U.S.: nearly 5 billion
• Number of emails sent per second in the world: 2.8 million
• Average professional/work related meetings attended per month: 61

Sounds positively ominous… or does it? The first statistical set is the United States, the second set is the world, and the third is… what? Not the world. I doubt it’s even a company. I assume it’s an individual, in which case that’s actually kind of horrifying for a different reason. Does the average person really go to almost three meetings a day? I guess since I’ve only rarely been in management, that sounds awfully high to me. But I guess while I attended only one or two a week, there are others who just go from meeting to meeting and so it balances out to that. And maybe they define meeting liberally (though not so liberally, I would assume, that any time you stop by a boss’s office, that counts).

So is this a rallying call for more meetings? Why settle something with the convenience of an email when you can disrupt everyone’s schedule and have them drop what they’re doing for more “face time”?

My response may be somewhat intemperate, but with the exception of the part about Blackberries during family time (which I agree can be problematic), I am having difficulty what I am supposed to be pulling from this article other than “Be scared” and/or “You may not realize it, but you feel isolated.”

Except… I don’t. At least not in any of the ways that the article mentions. I have historically worked in the IT sector. We are not exactly luddites when it comes to electronic communication. We’re also not known for being the most sociable people. But, if anything, the places I have worked have involved us spending too much time talking to one another face-to-face. Often just chewing the fat. It’s a product of the Cubicle Age. I’m an introvert, but even I start up conversations with the guy sitting next to me. The only time I really avoided facetime was when everyone around me spoke through heavily accented English that I had difficulty understanding. And the only times I was really anti-social to my coworkers involved heavily accented English or an office full of people that were twenty years older than me or the fundamentalist father of triplets. I mean, am I alone in this? Due to geek-cultural solidarity and employers too cheap to spring for separate offices?

And Facebook? For every friendship it has created problems with (I can think of maybe one), it’s reignited friendships with dozens of others. I went to college at the dawn of Instant Messaging. ICQ came around my second year. My best friend Clint and I barely talked that first year. The second year and beyond, he was coordinating to see me every time he came to town and I was taking trips out there to see him. And of course this doesn’t even touch on BBSes, which provided me more friends than high school ever did. I don’t mean cyberfriends. I mean people that I met. People that I am still in touch with. And, of course, it provided me a course-correcting social education that my schools did not. But this is all kind of beside the point. The point is that unless you live in Callie, Arapaho, or some place similarly small, the only way you’re not making friends from cyber-communication is if that’s what you want. And if it isn’t bolstering your friendships, you’re likely not doing it right.

Which is not to say that there aren’t pitfalls to avoid. And in fact, I may be in one of those pitfalls now. Spending too much time online and not enough time around town making local friends which I might be forced to do in an earlier era. But a lot of that is circumstantial. I had a number of ideas on ways to meet people, but they sort of fell apart. And most of the ideas that occur to me are ideas that involve making friends way out in Redstone. And really, I was lousy with meeting people before the Internet (and BBSes), so it’s not like I can blame it on the wire. You can call it a crutch, but my ankle is sort of sprained.

So yeah, on the part about being able to put the Blackberry away at the dinner table, I’m kind of sympathetic. But complaining about the Internet getting in the way of “real communication” is like complaining that bicycles are problematic because they don’t give you the same workout as running.

“One of the most powerful feelings I came back {from his first trip to Europe} with was a feeling of anger at the fact that if I had been born into almost any other time or place in history, I would’ve been screwed over for life. Sometimes I don’t know how to deal with that.” –Samson’s Jawbone

When I first started substitute teaching up in Redstone, one of the things I was worried about was, well, Redstoners. The term was introduced to me by my trainer with the Census Bureau to express her disdain to the Redstone hand-off person. A Redstoner is a Redstonian that basically doesn’t have their act together at all. The hand-off person, for instance, was pregnant by one of two men while trying to convince a third man that he was actually the father. She thought that the not-father might buy it because “Redstoners can’t count to nine (months).” It’s a slight at a particular kind of Redstonian, but with the assumption that most of them fit that profile.

Callieites, as a general rule, don’t like Redstone. I do. But even so, it’s hard to deny that there is a certain lack of… ambition… or put-togetherness among much of its population. Barely 20% have college degrees despite the fact that they have a college. It has a high drop-out rate and a median home price of $115,000. Callie looks downright cosmopolitan by example. My wife’s coworker’s husband, Jack Alvarez, is a thrice-successful entrepreneur who had intended to start a business upon arriving, but quickly discovered a distinct lack of human capital (a lack of people in Callie, a lack of people with skills in Redstone).

So I wasn’t sure what to expect when I signed on to teach their young. Particularly given how the Catholic school likely siphons off a lot of those from good families (2/3 of the town is Catholic, 3/4 if you include Greek/Serbian/Eastern Orthodox). But the student population really surprised me. There were certainly some that were obviously future Redstoners, but a lot that weren’t. Their personalities really start to form in junior high where you can start seeing their trajectories. Some are destined to be Redstoners. A lot, though, seem to me the exact kind of people that would become future employees of Jack Alvarez. Do all of them lose all of that in high school? That was a depressing thought. Then I wondered what these people would do professionally, and in a “no spit, spurlock” moment it became all too clear what happens to them.

They leave.

They go off to college, stay wherever they went, or move some place else where there are jobs. Redstone has lost population (and Alexandria gained it) more census counts than not since it’s peak over half a century ago. Some come back and teach (seems almost every teacher I’ve met went through the Redstone schooling system), but if they keep track of how many of the top half of high school graduates end up staying in Redstone, I’d bet the number to be pretty low. The thought isn’t as depressing as when I was wondering if there was some natural regression, but it’s still kind of sad.

Of course, what’s the alternative? Back when I was working in Mocum, Deseret, I wondered aloud on this blog why so many of the people I knew there were still there working for less than $10/hr when their skills could get them so much more elsewhere. I suppose if I taught in Mocum’s schools I would probably consider the tragedy of those who do leave rather than those that chose not to.

The following are a couple of arguments for and against state lotteries. I often find that the best way to explore issues is to create arguments from the perspective of characters in my novel-writing. So that’s what I’ve done here. Neither BC nor RK are straight-line partisans, though they each have their histories and backstories. BC is coming from a more liberal perspective (particularly economics, he considers himself socially liberal but has a stubborn conservative streak on some issues). He comes from a Catholic, blue collar background, though he himself has gone to college and “made good”, so to speak, with a career in computers. RK comes from a thoroughly white-collar, WASP family. He went to law school, but is among those that had difficulty converting that into a sustainable legal career and instead works as a security/investigations consultant for a Pinkerton-like organization. He is a soft libertarian, but breaks to the right on some cultural issues.

The role of a government in society is a subject of constant debate. Some believe that it is the role of society, through its government, to protect the least among us. Others believe that doing that interferes with the free market, which ultimately helps everybody or if not is otherwise more just. Whether we believe in the redistribution of wealth or not, one thing we should all agree on is that it should not be the business of the government to specifically target the poor and working classes for the benefit of the middle class and beyond. Ultimately, however, that’s precisely what lotteries do.

One of the jobs I had in college was working at a gas station and truck stop on the edge of town, right beside an industrial park. With the manufacturing sector struggling, I spent a lot of time serving people with generally poor economic prospects. Some of them worked in the industrial park, some stopped by just to go place to place in search for a job. Some worked part time. Some worked off the books for a meager income. One of my job functions was to cash checks. Often, very meager checks. Some days I would think that it is the responsibility of the government to help these people out. Other days I would think that the government already is often helping these people out and subsidizing self-destructive behavior. But even apart from the welfare quandary, the government already assists in their counterproductive behavior. Every Thursday and Friday, generally paydays, they would cash their checks and spend the first of their newfound money on three things: cigarettes, alcohol, and lottery tickets.

There aren’t any easy answers on what to do about cigarettes and alcohol. We could criminalize them, but that hasn’t really worked historically. We can tax them, but in addition to providing a (maybe needed) disincentive, it is also regressive. The end result isn’t that my patrons would buy less, but rather they would just end up spending that much more. But the third item – the lottery – is really extremely easy. Gambling is illegal in {BC’s home state}. While it still goes on, I’m sure, it’s made inconvenient enough that those that want to destroy their lives gambling will go to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or Louisiana. The fact that they can instead gamble at any local convenience store creates demand. Markets tend to do that, and for some things (like the City of Las Vegas) perhaps it is the free market at work. But state run lotteries are not. They are run by the state. The enemy isn’t some marketing guru in a Vegas high-rise that has determined that if you add this smell and take away the windows and clocks people will piss away more and more of their income. It’s the state. It’s us.

Lotteries are popular because they are generally instituted to pay for things that people like, such as education. Others like it because it “taxes stupid.” But aren’t the stupid taxed enough already? Not in the literal sense, but they will live their lives stupid. I have no delusions that my former customers would be a-ok but for the state lottery. They were often alcoholics or worse. Some of them maybe just need a good job to get back on their feet, but others would screw it up even if they had it. Their position in life is the result of their screwups. Due, in large part, to the fact that they are stupid. They lack impulse control. The odds against winning the lottery as so high that they can’t even wrap their heads around the numbers. They are (usually) the products of our public school system. It is the height of irony that our system takes money from the ill-educated to put right back into the system that failed to educate them in the first place. But even if the system can’t educate them, their own limitations mean that they will likely live their lives without financial or physical security. They will never be able to afford the lifestyle of the smart. They’ll never be able to achieve it. They’ll never be able to plan for it. While it may give us satisfaction to tax this, we’re aiming our barrels at people that cannot really take care of themselves or we’re contributing to the decisions that make it so they will not. One way or another, the state will end up taking care of them anyway.

Whether gambling itself should be legal is a difficult question. But even if we agree that it should, it shouldn’t be the government doing it. The only reason we might want the government to do it is if we believe that they will do it more ethically. But they see the same dollar signs that private industry does. {BC’s home state} recently fiddled with the rules to make already long odds of winning even more long. Because they, like any good marketing company, recognize that sales go up as jackpots rise. And jackpots rise when people don’t win. So less winners equals more money. They’ve essentially discovered the same scent that Las Vegas casinos push through their vents.

It’s a fact of life that very, very few of us will grow up to be rich. The more you redistribute income, the more you’re preventing people from becoming wealthy in the first place. The less you redistribute income, you’re supporting a status quo in which the wealthy get wealthier while the rest of us get by. Sure, there are people that find the magic formula to become the new rich, but that is exceedingly rare. It requires risks that few want to take. It requires smarts that few have. So you have those that already have money – and lots of it. You have those that have the smarts and gumption to risk it all to become rich. But that’s not most people. Most people just want enough money to get by and a savings to retire on. That’s hard enough. Making millions? That’s for other people. It may be a depressing thought, but it’s true.

Lotteries circumvent that. They provide a way for anybody with a dollar in their pocket to become wealthy. Almost none of them will, of course. The numbers are out there for everyone to see. And even the innumerate among us know that the odds are longer than we can possibly imagine. But as they say, you can’t win if you don’t play. And if you can’t win, you can’t dream of becoming a millionaire. When you buy a lottery ticket, you’re buying more the long odds at a jackpot. You’re buying a ticket to dream.

This is particularly true when it comes to the working class and below. Not only will these people never be wealthy, but they will probably never be comfortable. They’ll likely never have a comfortable retirement. They’ll probably always be living from one paycheck to the next. The lottery doesn’t change this. This is the way of the world. But the lottery provides them the ability to imagine a different life. A better one. We’re talking about a lot of people who don’t have anything to look forward to. Even if it’s almost entirely illusory (and even if winners lives don’t actually improve), the lottery is a little, quiet voice that says “it could happen to you.” It’s a reason to get up in the morning. It’s a form of entertainment. We spent all kinds of money watching people throw balls of various sizes and shapes around. That’s a game we have no stake in. If our team wins, we don’t materially benefit. There is no material benefit at all, no matter what happens.

If you look at the lottery in this way, it’s no less counterproductive productive than paying $3 to drink a beer so that you can watch the game on the bigscreen or spending $50 a month for cable so you can watch a game on TV. Most members of society have their basic material needs met. Even the losers who used to come to BC’s convenience store most likely had a roof over their heads and were (statistically) more likely to be overweight than not eating enough. So what do you do with the rest of that money? There’s really no right answer. But the lottery is, itself, not really the wrong one. I remember reading a comic strip once that said “Leo forgot to buy his lottery ticket, so he decided to play the home version” and shows him burning a $1. But isn’t it worth something to have that ticket in your pocket, to turn on the TV and watch the news for the winning numbers, and for some portion of the day to imagine how life could be if you won? But almost nobody expects to win. It’s all part of a carnival roller coaster. It’s living.

And if we’re going to allow for this sort of thing, then why not have the state do it? The state may be no more responsible than private industry (something “my side” has been saying for years). But it’s profits to the state that would otherwise go to someone else. And, though this argument doesn’t appeal all that much to me, if you’re concerned about gambling, it makes the state less likely to legalize it writ-large, because it would cut into the state’s profits. Allow people to bet on horse-races or drop their quarters in casinos, then they will will devote less money to the system that the state profits from. And given the short time horizon on horserace bets and slot machines (which don’t even make you pull down a lever anymore), you run the risk of the dumb population throwing a whole lot more money a whole lot more quickly with just about any major form of gambling than a daily lottery outside of the stock market.

Pterodactyl has a really thoughtful post on Sweet Valley High, her decision to choose male priorities over female ones, and male status-hunting:

Although I’m far ahead of my peer group in what may be termed “worldly resource competition” matters (professional/business etc), I’m far behind in the social realm – particularly the girly stuff, dating and so on. You may have picked up on some of that, what with my (partly tongue-in-cheek) references to My Little Pony, 80s cartoons etc. It’s nostalgic escapism from a high-pressure present, into a time of wonder and possibility (relatively speaking).
A Study of Male Hypergamy amongst the Manosphere, e.g. Vox Day

At some point in my life (around late elementary school/early junior-high age), I decided to be a man. No, this isn’t about the true confessions of a K.D. Lang fan (I’m straight), nor tranniness, nor some sort of gender confusion – to use a favorite feminii (lefty feminist) buzzword, I’m “cis gender”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

What I mean is, I decided to pursue what has traditionally, or stereotypically, been viewed as a male path: admitting to oneself that one is dissatisfied with one’s economic position in life (rather than trying to delude oneself otherwise, and girlishly preening in one’s current place), and being aggressive in going for self-improvement through a single-minded pursuit of worldly resource competition endeavors. In practice, such a single-minded and aggressive pursuit involves what some may view as a male mentality (relatively unconcerned with popularity, relationships etc) and male lifestyle (femininity is time-consuming, and after some brief late-elementary school forays at The Limited and Claire’s, around the early junior-high timeframe, I transitioned to full-on tomboy mode –I still don’t have any real knowledge or experience in fashion, or applying makeup).

There are a lot of separate points that she makes and each one of them could be the subject of a different post. But there were two aspects that I found most interesting. Choosing masculinity, in a sense, and the making of a choice at all (not between masculinity or femininity, but of choosing paths in general).

I suspect that the author and my wife would get along quite well if they ever met, because a lot of what I read echos some of the early things I learned about Clancy. There were a number of reasons that Clancy and her two very independent sisters chose a different path. And to some extent, the sisters’ stories are different from one another. But for Clancy and her younger sister Ellie, it seems that there was a cycle of antipathy between them and their surroundings. It’s difficult to know whether Clancy and Ellie spurned feminine society first and society responded accordingly or whether it was the other way around. But that, combined with an uneven relationship with their father and their father’s uneven relationship with their mother (all since rectified), created a doctor and a lawyer who were not going to rely on any man and were not going to buy into a culture that demanded that they do.

Leaving aside feminine culture specifically for a moment, to some extent there are choices that we all make. Or that we fail to make. It’s something that I have thought about regarding myself as I look back at K-12 and (to a lesser extent) beyond. My decision to reject my high school’s culture, for example. It can be made to sound high-minded and “independent”, but it can also be made to sound petty and counterproductive. And whichever it was, it was also incomplete. I look back and wish that I had actually participated in extra-curriculars and the like, but even at the time there was some resentment for what it cost me and the knowledge that it was a reactive, rather than proactive, choice. For which I am largely grateful. A proactive rejection would have been very different, and given the circumstances, more destructive.

My fourth novel deals with these sorts of subjects. A narrator who wanted to choose a “different path” than the vapidity he saw around him, but who didn’t really have a roadmap to where he wanted to go. Said character, CB, is not really based on myself other than through some basic biographical detail. A couple other characters, one in the novel and one I am going to insert at the next revision, hit closer to home as far as that goes and as far as the Sweet Valley post goes.

One of them, BC, grew up in what can be described as a “high prole” family. His father was a master machinist. But due to some health problems with his mother, they were always financially struggling, so achieving financial independence became his primary objective. Extremely smart, he was able to get a full-ride to college. But coming from a family where college is not the norm, he didn’t have any solid idea of what do to when he got there except study hard (but not making a particularly good choice in what to study, choosing physics over something more vocational). Lacking Ptero’s sense of direction, even moderately good luck career-wise, and the social training of the “middle class”, he found himself largely out of his element when it came to trying to find someone to settle down with.

The other, RK, grew up in an environment much more similar to my own but made completely different choices than I did. He made the decision to really try to buy in at the high school level and then beyond. Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter because whatever he had, someone else had more. He could do the exact same things and jump through the exact same hoops as others, but he never really measured up with those to whom such superficial and conformist behavior came naturally. He had to read in books what others knew immediately. And his response to every failure was simply to try harder. And there’s nothing the hierarchy scorns as much as someone who reeks of effort.

On the other hand, neither character is particularly upset with the decisions that they made (even if both, twenty years down the line, wonder about the ferocity with which they made them). In a sense, it goes down to who they are. One who believes that the world owes you nothing and that there’s no point in asking. The other who believes that the world is out there for it if you can just figure out how to navigate the harsh terrain. Neither are exactly right and the stories of both involve them coming to terms with this.

Then there’s me, who really chose neither path. Or rather, who couldn’t stick with a choice. I remember a while back reading about a study that those who have a guiding principle, with which they make choices consistently, tend to do better than those who approach each subject as it comes. Professionally, I’m a systems guy and this sort of thing always appealed to me. But like with RK and BC, it seems that every path I deliberately chose failed me one way or another. Since neither path is exactly right or wrong for everybody, I find myself walking some other path. I find myself uncertain of where it will go, sometimes dissatisfied with it, and yet also feeling that it is the only path I can walk. At least for the time being.