Holiday in Cambodia

A few more days to go 'till the election and my head is about to explode. The news out of Iraq continues to be unbelievably bad (more hostages taken; Ramadi will soon be a no-go zone for US troops; the incredible blunder of not securing the 380 tons of plastic explosives at Al Qaqaa and the absolutely disgraceful effort of the White House and Pentagon to excuse it away; the execution of 11 Iraqi soldiers; the slaughter of 49 Iraqi national guardsmen; another 70 billion to be requested for the Iraqi occupation post-election), yet (if you believe the pollsters and pundits) half the electorate will follow Dubya over the edge into the abyss, no questions asked...

A new study by Johns Hopkins University just published in The Lancet estimates that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians -- fully half of the dead women and children -- have been killed during our little experiment in democracy and nation-building. And this study did not include the number of dead in Falluja, which would have skewed their results higher, since it has been unusually violent there. Of note, the researchers attribute many of the deaths to bombs dropped from US planes and fire from helicopter gunships (oh, sorry I didn't follow my Pentagon-issued style book -- not "deaths" but "collateral damage"). What's 100,000 non-white civilian deaths in our righteous "war on terror?" Liberty is on the march! (Yeah, we're liberating them from their lives, all right.) God forgive us for what death and destruction Bush and Co. have wrought on these people in our name.

The Village Voice posits that it's the end of democracy as we know it in the United States, in large part due to the rise of the Christian evangelical right:

"Evangelicals are trained to recruit from the cradle," observes one witheringly astute expert on Christian conservative culture. Call this informant Deep Faith: A Ph.D. student in divinity, he grew up in the rural South in an intensely pious Pentecostal community and still believes its creeds after five years at an Ivy League university. He has not, however, kept faith with his ministers' injunction that evangelicals must devote themselves to building a Republican America. The notion, in fact, horrifies him. In college, the first time he spent extended periods outside evangelical circles, he says, "I realized the main thing that separated us evangelicals from them was that they believed in dialogue and compromise. And we believed in taking no prisoners. . . . Democracy can't function in an environment where one party will not sit down and play by the rules.

He uses a saying of the apostle Paul, beloved of evangelicals, to drive home the point: "Be all things to all people." A missionary, he says, might interpret that to mean that it's OK to swear on a visa application that she's not a missionary: "Technically, it's illegal and you're lying. But if you honestly believe that you're going to save somebody from eternal torture and damnation, and deliver them into a life of eternal bliss, then you're going to do what you have to do." So, he thinks, might people who claim to be "registering" voters--for such means-justifies-the-ends thinking now also marks evangelicals' political attitudes.

"Whenever you think that there are eternal, apocalyptic stakes, and that you can make a difference, you can rationalize a whole lot of stuff to yourself," he says. "I think evangelicals really don't like democracy much at all, especially when it's not going their way."

No doubt, this is how Dubya doesn't lose any sleep, what with so much blood on his hands...

And the New Yorker, no doubt viewed as one of the preeminent elite, eastern, effete, intellectual-snobby publications by some of our friends in the red states, presents a powerfully damning indictment of the Bush administration in its first-ever presidential endorsement of Senator Kerry. Good stuff.

Paul Krugman rocks (as always)! This guy has been one of the few columnists brave enough to consistently call the Bush administration on all of its lies, deceptions, and blunders. Krugman, you are the MAN! Keep on keeping on! I've been meaning to write this for a long time. He deserves tons of props.

Finally, on the web there has been lots written about the curbing of free speech at Bush rallies and public appearances, but rarely do any articles on the subject appear in the mainstream press. This article from the Washington Post, "Policing is Aggressive at Bush Events," summarizes just a few of the incidents I've been reading about all summer. It'll send a good shiver up the spine of any American who cherishes their civil rights. Happy Halloween, indeed.

Those Were the Days

Last week, in a rare instance of being out of the apartment sans kids, my wife and I attended the opening night of “Dirty Tricks” at the Public Theater (my better half and her friend run a special events company that produced the opening night party for Shakespeare in the Park this past summer, hence our juice). The play was savaged by the press (especially The NYT), but I thought Judith Ivey’s 90-minute solo performance was pretty amazing. Plus, I had no idea who Martha Mitchell was and her role in exposing Watergate, so it was interesting on that level alone. (I was but a wee lad when all of this was going down, and can’t even recall any mention of Vietnam from those days.) Her husband, John Mitchell, was Nixon’s Attorney General, who resigned to head up his re-election effort in ’72 (named CREEP, the Committee to RE-Elect the President), and approved the funds for the bungled break-in at the DNC headquarters (earning him jail-time and public scorn).

Since Mrs. Mitchell frequently spoke to the press (Helen Thomas of AP in particular) -- her phone lines were tapped to keep tabs on her -- Nixon had his goons smack her around and dope her up in a hotel room in an effort to keep her quiet. It all seems so quaint now. If Watergate had taken place on Dubya's watch, Rove's henchmen would have pummelled us all with their talking points, and the Republicans would have launched an "investigation" headed nowhere to be soon forgotten by press and the public...(Bush had his spooks spy on UN weapons inspector Hans Blix during the run-up to the Iraq invasion/occupation, without a peep of outrage here in the US).

On the way to the opening night party, we shared an elevator with the diminutive (in stature, not talent) Charlotte Rae of “Facts of Life” (and “Diff’rent Strokes”) fame (I luff huh! And will always have a thing for Jo!), and then found ourselves waiting in line behind “60 Minutes’” Morley Safer looking at the Herblock political cartoons from that era (I wanted to ask him what it was like to see the play, having been a reporter during those years, but wussed out). Just imagine the six degrees of separation we can map out with these two celebs…

Mad World, Part 3

Now we find out that a mind-boggling amount of explosives are missing from an Iraqi munitions depot we knew about before the war -- and the UN repeatedly begged us to guard it -- yet somehow failed to secure. Well, I guess that the only way to explain it (other than to say that we didn't have enough troops to do the job) is to paraphrase my favorite, cantankerous everyman/grandpa Donald Rumsfeld: sometimes freedom is messy (cue up tape of the Iraqi woman with the 3,000 year-old vase on her head, looted from the museum).

Mmm...great leadership and planning. I guess make that 101 reasons not to vote for Bush...

I Like to Ride My Bicycle

A scene from last week: Hurtling down Ninth Avenue clutching onto my battered folding bike for dear life, I was forced to trail behind a NYC sanitation truck by the cars zooming around me. A black thought crossed my mind – it already had been one of those mornings when everything was ten times harder than it should have been (like my bike chain popped off twice!) – what if the truck stopped short or I hit a bad bump and ended up unconscious in the back of the hopper, and was unknowingly compacted at their next pick-up (only to be found at the end of their run)? Would that make a great CSI episode or what?

****

I bought this bike right after 9/11 to commute to work, as I was convinced that the subways soon would be crawling with suicide bombers (visions of bombed-out buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem burned in my head). Now I ride to my job for exercise, and take the trains when it rains. If all else fails, I walk.

Pictures of You

On a lark, I dug out a VHS dub of some B&W Super-8 films I made after college in the early '90s to see how they held up after all these years. (In school, I double-majored in English/Media Studies - with a concentration in film.) One, "The Killer Inside of Me" - the title ripped-off from a trashy Jim Thompson crime novel - was pretty damn awful. Visually, it wasn't too shabby, but the voice-over I did was really cheesy and melodramatic; it ruins the film. Here's the plot: our heroine meets a stud at a party, they sleep together, and many days later she's sick. She sees an ad on TV for a generic HIV test kit (all my films from that era featured generic brands of beer, etc.), and then visits a doctor who informs her that she is positive. That night in her bedroom, she's visited by unseen men telling her that the government is monitoring her every move. The next scene finds her about to undergo some sort of procedure, when the Feds bust in and arrest her for trying to kill her unborn child (!). A judge declares that the state will remove her viable fetus - and then she'll be executed. The screen goes black as we hear the sound of a vacuum (yes, she's sucked apart). Sick and paranoid, but it was at the tail-end of the Reagan/Bush nightmare...Clinton was still a gleam in the Democrats' eyes.

"The Approach of Impending Doom," on the other hand, ain't half bad. I'm thinking about digitizing the footage and re-editing it on my wife's iBook. "Doom" relays the tale of a man we believe to be a bike messenger, who breaks into an apartment, rifles through the owner's belongings, and then comes across a dead man. The messenger then appears to clean (even anoint) the body, places him in the bathroom tub, and then sprays some sort of liquid on the shrouded corpse. A scene later, we find that the flesh has dissolved, as the messenger fishes out the man's skull from the tub filled with blood. It's influenced by Albert Camus' "The Plague" - especially the nightmarish vision of a city filled with corpses that must somehow be disposed of. For the film's soundtrack, I do a voice-over where I convey two semi-true stories about racism and AIDS.

In a rare instance of shameless self-promotion, you can watch the music video for "Two-Tone Army" that I created for The Toasters, which debuted on MTV's 120 Minutes back in '96 (I was the promotions/marketing director at their label at the time). The band wasn't too cooperative about it, so I shot some B&W Super 8 footage of them at a gig at FIT and at a photo-shoot, and intercut it with some goofy stuff (my sister-in-law's boyfriend skanking, etc.) filmed in my living room. The craziest thing is that band decided to switch songs after I shot all the footage! Of course, we didn't have any synched sound, so everything was faked when we digitally edited the video: the guitarist/singer's mouth was largely obscured by his microphone, and both songs had the same rhythm. The price tag for the whole thing (most of which went to the edit house) was a jaw-dropping $2,500 (a mere drop in the bucket compared to what most bands spend). The band was psyched that their video received a lot of airplay on 120 Minutes, M2 and elsewhere (and an excerpt from the song was used in the Jenny McCarthy/MTV dating gameshow "Singled Out" for a season), but I know the band thought my style filmmaking was too DIY for them (not enough rock star power) and they hired another director for the rest of their videos (and spent loads more money on 'em too.) I still think I gave them the best bang for their buck.

Mad World, Part 2

More frothing at the mouth: 100 documented reasons why George W. Bush should not be elected in November. Gotta bring people leaning toward Bush back into this dimension...

Mad World

Last night, I was talking to my dad (a good old ’60s liberal) about the presidential elections and was foaming at the mouth about all of the unbelievable disasters Bush and Co. have created for this country and the world. After patiently listening to me rant for far too long, he finally cut me off by assuring me that he didn’t need convincing that Dubya’s got to go in November. So, I told him that I felt like I’m the crazy one – how can so many of my fellow citizens believe that Dubya’s done a good job and has their best interests at heart?

It defies all logic and common sense that Bush is even in the running for president with his record over the last four years (the biggest security failure in the history of the US leading to the deaths of 3,000 civilians; legalized torture of suspected enemies of the state; the suspension of due process/civil rights for American citizens; 5,000 arrests of suspected terrorists, but ZERO convictions; the creation of the largest deficit in the history of the United States; shifting the tax burden to the lower and middle class, while enriching the super rich; corporate welfare and deregulation on a scale never before seen; huge increases in poverty and unemployment; the outright dismantling of many of the New Deal and Great Society programs that comprise our tattered social safety net; tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead and wounded in a war based on lies, disinformation, and more lies, with no reasonable end in sight – no WMDs, no connection whatsoever to bin Laden; systemic replacement of non-partisan civil servants with right-wing evangelical ideologues throughout every federal agency; packing the federal judiciary with ultra-conservative judges who tend to impose their worldview on the law; pouring federal funds into dubious "abstinence only" programs, while unwanted pregnancies and abortion rates rise; favoring ideology over science at the FDA and CDC; the complete gutting of EPA regulations, etc., etc., etc.).

Apparently, my answer lies in a new survey by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks, which reveals an astounding level of ignorance/denial among Bush supporters regarding his actual policies and their results. (It turns out they mistakenly think Bush is for policies that Kerry actually supports, and are clinging to beliefs – like the Duelfer Report found WMDs in Iraq – that have been widely and thoroughly debunked!) Here’s some analysis from the PIPA survey:

“The roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake. This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters – and an idealized image of the President that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion would be critical of his policies or that the president could hold foreign policy positions that are at odds with his supporters.”

I love my country and all…but, man, there are a lot of dumb, gullible Americans out there.

Freedom of Choice

Here's a great article I've come across that deflates the whole anti-choice argument for pressuring girls and women to go through with an unwanted pregnancy and place their child up for adoption, rather that opt for an abortion:

Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio)
October 21, 2004
Adoption Can't End Abortion
BY: By Steve Conn

The writer is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University.

It was a throw-away line in the second presidential debate. Somewhere during his response to a soft-ball question about federal funding of abortion for poor women, President Bush suggested that he supported adoption as an alternative to abortion.

And as Ronald Reagan might have said: There he goes again.

It has become a standard response on the part of those who oppose women's reproductive choices that adoption is a solution to the problem of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. In fact, the president's father, once he abandoned his pro-choice position for a spot on Ronald Reagan's ticket, was fond of saying as much.

But equating adoption and abortion in this way is a rhetorical sleight of hand, hiding a fundamental misunderstanding of both adoption and abortion.

The implication here is that rather than terminating a pregnancy, women instead ought to carry those pregnancies to term, go through the ecstatic agony of labor and child birth and then hand their newborns over to some other parents. Never mind that during those nine months, a woman might well experience physical discomfort, gestational diabetes or, worse, be bed-ridden for some number of weeks or months.

We have heard a great deal from anti-choice advocates that abortion is physical and psychologically dangerous for women. No doubt it has proved to be for some number. But in fact, pregnancy remains a greater physical hazard for women than abortion.

Likewise, the implication of the slogan ''adoption not abortion'' is that, while abortion leaves women psychologically scarred for life, giving a child up for adoption is easy as pie. No muss, no fuss.

Few want to discuss just how difficult it is for a woman to give up her baby, and how that decision haunts her for the rest of her life.

In essence, those, like the president, who would tell pregnant women that their single moral obligation is to deliver a baby, see women largely as elaborate life-support systems for their uteruses.

As if this weren't offensive enough to women, the fallacies continue. To propose adoption rather than abortion is to imply that there is a long line of families waiting for children, and that every child born in this country has a home waiting for it. This is simply and utterly wrong.

There are thousands of children in this country who will grow up in under-funded foster care systems, kicking around through the courts in custody battles, or bouncing around from one relative or another. And once an unwanted child reaches the age of 6 or thereabouts, the chances that he or she will ever find an adoptive home are crushingly small.

The children President Bush insists women ought to have will, in all likelihood, become yet more children left behind, like so many are already in this country.

Internationally, the situation is even worse. Put bluntly, the number of ''surplus'' children around the globe today is in the millions.

Children who suffer, who are victimized and whose life options and chances will prove narrow and harrowing. When the president extends his ''adoption not abortion'' fatuousness to the developing world through the imposition of the global gag rule, he condemns these children to poverty and deprivation. In many cases, their mothers had no access to safe, reliable birth control and in almost no case will they be adopted into more privileged families.

What the president and other abortion opponents seem not to grasp is that adoption and abortion are different questions entirely, despite the president's conflation of them during the debate and on the stump. It is easy, indeed, facile for the president to lump them together, the one a solution for the other.

But in so doing, he reveals an ignorance about the situation the world's children find themselves in. He reveals as well his contempt for women who are faced with the most difficult, complicated choice of their lives.

I know a bit of what I speak. I come from a two-generation adoptive family. My baby sister -- hardly a baby any more -- and my oldest child are both adopted.

I can attest that adopted kids are just as wonderful and miraculous and moving (and frustrating and maddening and sleep-depriving) as children who arrive the old fashioned way.

I often have been asked by people who meet my daughter why my wife and I chose to adopt. I sometimes respond: Why have you chosen not to? Most don't know what to say, because most haven't thought about it that much.

Neither, apparently, has the president, and I am a bit weary of the way he uses my family to promote an entirely different agenda.

A few nights ago on CNN's Paula Zahn Now, a Roman Catholic Bishop from the Midwest was going on about how abortion was "intrinsically evil" and, according to his moral outlook, worse than executing an adult. (He was warning Catholics that they must not vote for a presidential candidate who supports abortion rights, but, when asked by Ms. Zahn, stopped short of actually endorsing a candidate.) It's wild that he and so many other people favor a potential life over a fully mature human being. I'm all for protecting and ministering to those who are suffering, vulnerable, etc., but we're doing a really shabby job now of taking care of the millions of poor and sick children and adults that are already among us. Wouldn't it be more productive for the anti-choice movement to channel all of its energy into tackling poverty, hunger, or homelessness?

How do the anti-choice folks know that God is on their side? Where exactly is abortion condemned in the Bible? (I don't think it's mentioned at all!) What about all of the fertilized eggs that are naturally and spontaneously aborted? If you subscribe to the theory that God is the impetus behind everything that happens on Earth, doesn't this make God the biggest abortionist of all? (I guess He/She really works in mysterious ways!)

Another contradiction that I can't wrap my head around is that the majority of anti-choice folks appear to be dead-set against all contraceptives that would prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. They claim that any device or medicine that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall causes an abortion. This is at complete odds with medical science, which considers a pregnancy established when the fertilized egg is attached to the uterus, for without the mother's body's nourishment, etc., the fertilized egg cannot develop into a fetus. Hello, you can't have an abortion if you're not pregnant! But I guess all that science and logic doesn't really matter to them...facts are inconvenient for those obsessed with ideology and dogma...and that might raise all sorts of uncomfortable and complicated questions now, wouldn't it?

Personal Jesus

I stand corrected. Apparently, Jesus has pretty much endorsed Dubya's candidacy. Wonders never cease.

World Shut Your Mouth

I hope you caught the amazing piece in this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine by Ron Suskind about Dubya’s faith. Among the scary conclusions is that Bush uses his faith as an excuse to not be bothered by the necessary details or reality of a given situation (the Reverend Jim Wallis thinks Dubya's faith gives him an “easy certainty”). Essentially, Dubya believes his faith in his evangelical Christian God guides him to the right (and righteous) solution in all of his decision making.

Suskind writes:

“Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

Here's more:

“That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.

The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!''

And we got this guy instead of Al Gore -- one of the smartest, intellectually curious people this side of Clinton? It's amazing how Rove has kept Dubya's incredibly self-righteous arrogance and pure disdain for those who question or oppose him largely out of the public eye. I guess this is the real reason for them screening out and/or arresting dissenters from Bush/Cheney campaign rallies, and keeping the so-called "Free Speech Zones" so far away from the president of the free world. It keeps Dubya from blowing his stack on camera.

Does Dubya's faith instruct him to keep preying (or is it praying) on people's fear of more terrorist attacks in order to win this election? Does God tell him which of His non-white children to bomb next? Does Jesus instruct him to take from the poor and middle class and give to the rich? Did the Holy Ghost help write the torture memo the led us to Abu Gharib? Does Dubya's absolute faith in himself absolve him of his hand in all the deaths of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians? Is God a Republican...or even American? Why doesn't God officially endorse Dubya's candidacy? Is God a he or she? Is God solely a evangelical Christian God, or is (S)He the God of Muslims and Jews, too? Does God have a rating system for all of the various Christian sects? Does Dubya have a special red phone on his desk to reach God? What if God were one of us, just a stranger on the bus?

President Gas

We're getting closer to an evangelical Christian theocracy than you think. Even though I'm all to cognizant of the Bush administrations efforts to eliminate women's access to safe abortion, birth control, and medically-accurate reproductive health information, it scared the living poop out of me to read this article in The Nation about their efforts to funnel millions of tax dollars to the Christian right's grassroots organizations, while using the full might of the federal government to defund, discredit, and persecute the Christian right's perceived enemies (Planned Parenthood, the Audubon Society, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, etc.). Who would have thought that Bush and Co. could have obliterated so much of what has made America great in so little time? What happened to the separation of church and state? What happened to the "great American melting pot" (sorry to go so "Schoolhouse Rock" on you) -- the acknowledgment that our diversity is a source of America's strength?

Speaking of Bush's trampling of the Constitution, why hasn't anyone been fired over Abu Gharib (and why hasn't it been an issue in the election)? If this had happened on Clinton's watch, he and his Secretary of Defense would have been crucified by the Republicans and the press! Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, the freak who wrote the legal memo justifying the President's use of torture in the "war on terror," is now a federal judge, for pete's sake, and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez is being promoted! Where's the outrage over Ashcroft's Department of Justice (proof positive that irony's not dead) trying to indefinitely revoke Jose Padilla's Constitutional right to due process? Who knows who they'll be "disappearing" if they win (or again are selected by the Supreme Court) in November? If you're an outspoken opponent of the Bush Regime, or an enemy of the Christian right (and you thought Nixon's sh*t list was long!), it might be you.

Happy Death Men

This past weekend, my wife and I took the kids to see a gallery exhibition of John Lennon’s artwork commemorating what would have been his 64th birthday (October 9) – it also doubled as a benefit for Adopt-a-Classroom as they took up a collection at the entrance (props to Yoko). The show was titled “When I’m 64” – even though McCartney penned the tune and these guys ended up despising each other. My six year-old son is a Beatles fanatic who favors John’s tunes more than Paul’s (it’s surreal to see him strum his guitar and sing along to “The Ballad of John and Yoko”), so this was a pretty meaningful trip for him. (Last year, we spotted Yoko Ono at an art opening at P.S. 1 – she had a piece in the show – and he was thrilled.) He especially liked the “Instant Karma” stickers featuring John’s self-portrait that they gave out at the door – one is now on his wall.

Yeah, it was cool to see John’s beautifully simple line drawings, and to make a connection with this man’s artistic legacy (though I gotta say that he was loads more talented as a songwriter/performer than as an artist). But as I watched the red dot stickers (meaning 'sold') go up on more and more of his pieces, or more appropriately, rock star memorabilia, I had the sinking feeling that we all were buzzards and hyenas tussling over the remaining bits of his bones. Oh well, happy birthday John, rest in peace. Your music still rocks.

Tell Me Why

Every night, just before my six year-old son drifts off to sleep, he tends to ask me the most profound questions about the world around us. One evening it was, "who was the first person alive?" -- another night: "how do you make rocks?" (Hopefully, my abriged explanations of evolution and the big bang weren't too convoluted and lame...) Last night he wondered "how do you make glass?" (Answer: melt sand.) We've long ago had the discussion about how babies are made (including the logical follow-up question about how it feels to have sex), and the exact way we are all born (his response: "that's gross!"). Nuts and bolts stuff. (Inquisitive minds want to know.)

Recently, he asked my wife if I ever met the woman I "came out of" (i.e.: my birth mother). I was given up for adoption at birth, and my son has been trying to wrap his head around this -- out of a genuine concern for me -- for some time. Who can blame him. It is a weird concept -- and a threatening one too (are you going to give me up too at some point?). But already he is accepting of non-traditional families -- one of his friends at school has two dads, and two women friends of ours are married (by a minister -- to hell with what the state thinks!). So adoption is not that much of a stretch, and I'm proud as hell that he embraces diversity and is not scared of people who are different. When Max was much younger, my wife picked up a book called "Little Miss Spider" by David Kirk, which is about a baby spider who can't find her mother after being born (it's not alluded to, but I think she's dead -- very Disney-like), and is rescued from being eaten by birds by a beetle who becomes her adoptive mother. The good message: "For finding your mother, there's one certain test. You must look for the creature who loves you the best."

Not bad advice for seeking out all of our relationships, eh?