Occam's Razor

For Trekkies waiting to satisfy their craving for the latest incarnation of Star Trek it’s been four nail biting years. It’s been crazy long. It took longer to produce a sequel to the last movie than it took for the whole original Star Trek series to run on television! It’s infuriating. Can’t director J.J. Abrams put out a new episode at least every year or two, like the Harry Potter franchise?

Abrams definitely has the magic touch when it comes to Star Trek, but it is torture to make fans wait four years between movies. Perhaps new movies will now come out at a faster rate. Since Star Trek, Abrams has become a hot commodity. He has been asked to direct the next series of Star Wars movies. Whether the director of the next Star Trek movie will have Abrams golden touch remains to be seen but perhaps we will at least get movies cranked out quicker. Fortunately, at least with Star Trek Into Darkness, Abrams delivers a fine sequel to the original movie, albeit way too late.

Trekkies are finicky lot. Delivering the goods in just the right dose is hard. You have to get the seasonings just right. There has to be plenty of action. There has to be plenty of character development even while the characters don’t really change that much. The characters have to mix it up just right and of course Spock has to be pulled from all sides. He sure has a demanding girlfriend. (Yes, he and Lieutenant Uhuru are an item now). Even when he is seconds away from being obliterated by an active volcano he has to worry whether he is sensitive enough to the communication officer’s feelings. There must be backstory. You got to work in Leonard Nimoy in there somewhere, at least while he is alive. He is making ancient look young, but at least one member of the original cast is still around. Scotty and Bones are gone, and William Shatner would no longer fit into the captain’s chair, at least not without significant widening and probably steel supports. And there must be plenty of violence, even though of course the Federation is all about peace and respecting the Prime Directive. Except, of course, this version of Captain James T. Kirk played by Chris Pine is just as bad about respecting the Prime Directive as the last one. That’s made clear in the first few minutes of the movie.

One of the curiosities about Star Trek is that despite all the 23^rd century technology, the plot has to pivot around actions by people, stuff only humans can do, like a good old fashioned fistfight. It may be the 23^rd century, but no one has developed a robot to go inside warp cores to realign them. What’s up with that, Scotty? The Enterprise, of course, has to get severely beat up otherwise what’s the point in spending all those millions on a blockbuster? Actors must do impossible physical acts and just in case seeing the Enterprise get all shot up isn’t enough special effects for you, why not lay waste to parts of London and San Francisco as well?

When you look at it objectively it’s all more than a little bit crazy but heck, this is entertainment! We need our fistfights and our petty interpersonal squabbles. We need Dr. McCoy to tell us he’s a doctor not a [fill in the blank]. We need Scotty to obsess about his engines. We also need candy for the longtime fans. Allude to Nurse Chapel. Reintroduce Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) who will probably eventually give Kirk an heir in this incarnation too. And reintroduce a classic Star Trek villain, Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch). Khan may have gone all British now but he is still evil. It’s unlikely Cumberbatch will ever be selling Chrysler Cordoba’s for extra cash. He’s too hot an actor right now to have time for commercials anyhow.

But what about the movie, Mark? Oh yeah, sorry about that! Star Trek Into Darkness gives us just the right blend of those special seasonings, proving Abrams hasn’t lost his touch with this franchise. If you have to wait four years between Star Trek movies, you had better get an A+ product, and Abrams delivers. It’s the actors though who really come through, losing none of their abilities to subsume themselves in their characters over four years. The special effects are all window dressing now anyhow. We’ve seen all these tricks before and they fail to impress. What really matters is the story. It is all fun, frenetic and gritty. The props and backdrops are mere window dressing. The franchise is pretty much how Gene Roddenberry envisioned it: a western shot in space. Khan is the bad guy, with elements of civil behavior. Kirk is the local marshal also with a few dents in his badge and his personality. It’s all entirely logical, as Spock would say, except of course it’s not that much. This is Star Trek and it’s far more about emotions and people interacting and tiffs and screaming and fistfights and heartfelt platonic love between Kirk and Spock than it is about a very coherent plot.

Regardless, you won’t care and you will be too entertained to be pissed that we get Khan appearing yet again in a Star Trek movie. Instead, you will be enjoying having Admiral Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) giving Kirk another slap down or watching Spock and Uhuru get in a tiff in a shuttle.

A few things though have changed. Uhuru is much more assertive and kick ass, particularly in this movie, than the modest miniskirted black wallflower that Nichele Nichols portrayed. Cumberbatch is terrific as Khan, even if he is British instead of Hispanic or Occidental. The U.S.S. Enterprise, however, seems doomed to keep getting shot through and blown up. But, like Sherlock Holmes, you can’t kill that spirit of Enterprise. And speaking of enterprise, this franchise continues to keep the profits of Paramount healthily in the black, with your pocket is picked clean by the $16 a person tickets to see it in IMAX. Ca-ching!

Well, at least you got your money’s worth!

3.4 on my four-point scale.

The worst thing about going to the doctor is not when they tell you that you have incurable cancer. It’s when they put you on the scale. I don’t want to know how much I weigh so I don’t peek, but doctors care. They are obsessed with weight, body mass indexes and other warning signs like blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

It seems that once again I have succeeded in taking off weight and then slowly but incrementally putting it back on again. Here I am hardly unique. In fact, it is hard to find the case of someone who after taking off large amounts of weight doesn’t put it back on again.

Permanent weight loss after decades of being overweight or obese most of the time is actually quite hard. Given our ever-expanding American girth, it seems like Mission Impossible. It is made harder by the tons of disinformation about healthy eating and weight loss out there, plus the heaping doses of guilt you absorb. You would think with all the money spent by the National Institute of Health they might have a study that would indicate the most effective ways of losing weight and keeping it off. Even if there were such a way, most doctors operate on the illusion that weight loss is handled through a one size fits all solution. “Eat less and exercise more,” is basically what they will tell you.

In fact, I had been eating less and I get plenty of exercise. While I get vegetables and lean meats on a daily basis, I clearly have been eating too many carbohydrates, which my body promptly turned into fat. This comes in part from exercise, which burns blood sugar and makes me crave carbohydrates. The Dark Chocolate M&Ms addiction has also contributed to my carbohydrate problem. Anyhow, my cardiologist felt the need to give me a stern lecture about my weight last week.

“Look doctor,” I told her. “I’m good at taking weight off. Like most Americans, I have done it lots of times. The only problem is keeping it off. I don’t want to waste my time with another trip to Weight Watchers when their success rate is as miserable as anyone else’s in the diet industry.”

This doctor though was prepared. Cardiologists see lots of overweight and obese people. They deliver this lecture dozens of times a day. Apparently this practice got so sick of not having any real solutions for their patients that one of the practice doctors decided to do something about it. He thoroughly researched the problem and then set up a clinic down the hall from their office. “If you want to take weight off and keep it off, go see them,” she told me. So I did.

Of course, what I really wanted was a diet where I could literally have my cake and eat it too. Every dieter wants a painless weight loss plan. We particularly want one that requires us to eat lots of easily processed sugary carbohydrates. Of course, no such plan exists that actually works. Lots of plans, including Weight Watchers’ newest one, wants to convince you otherwise. Weight Watchers has a relatively new “Fruit is free” plan. Their market has always been “eat what you want, just a lot less of it.” The new plan lets you eat as much fruit as you want but ups the points on everything else. You can lose weight if you follow their plan. But more than likely because your carbohydrate addiction craving has not really been solved, you will put the weight back on. It’s not bad for their business model. You reenter the program, take the weight off again, and their cash registers go ching.

Thus I found myself yesterday talking to my new diet coach at The Healthy Weigh Now down the hall from my cardiologist. While the doctor in charge and the nurses and coaches there actually work for the cardiology practice, the program they are following is really the Ideal Protein plan. No fruit allowed on this plan, or pretty much anything in the way of carbohydrates. Not much in the way of calories either. The plan is 900-1000 calories a day. It’s no surprise then that those who follow the plan take off weight, and quickly. Women lose on average 2-3 pounds a week; men 3-5 pounds a week.

This plan stuffs you with vegetables, but also “ideal” proteins. To burn fat, you must first use up sugar in the blood. The body will then turn to muscles for energy and finally resort to burning fat. Their “ideal” protein supplements keeps your muscles from losing muscle mass and convinces your body to instead burn fat. And so it goes if you can stick to the diet.

The first twenty-four hours has been a bit challenging but not too difficult. I find myself mildly hungry for much of the day, but that should pass in a couple of days. “Meals” though stretch the definition. Two out of three meals come from their prepared food packages, which are often powders combined with water. There is a daily snack from one of their approved snacks. All emphasize protein. Dinner consists of eight ounces of lean protein and certain vegetables. There are also numerous vitamin supplements, olive oil, fish oil and lots of water to drink. The food categories so far taste better than I thought, but calling a half glass of fruit flavored high protein “juice” a breakfast is a bit much. Just follow the protocol, they tell me, and those pounds will quickly disappear. “You will soon be punching new holes in your belt,” they assured me. It just works.

And I am confident that it will make me lose weight quickly. So I have really only one question: will my body rebel and I find myself at a Dunkin Donuts scarfing down boxes of French Crullers, the food I would prefer to eat?

If so then comes the real challenge: keeping the weight off for good. Here is where the plan will hopefully succeed where others have failed, as I transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 and eventually all the way to Phase 4, with a doctor and coaches weighing and watching and adjusting and advising all along the way.

When I can pass a plate of brownies at the dessert bar without instinctively wanting to reach for one of them, that’s when I know I will have succeeded.

Attention graduates! Here is why you really went to college and what you should have gotten out of it. Did you absorb the lesson?

The point of education is not just to give you a leg up so you can survive and have a higher standard of living, but so you can see beyond the surface and to think independently and originally and discern cause and effect independently in a complex and increasingly confusing world.

Welcome to adulthood.

She took her final exam today, the very last exam for her very last class in a journey that consumed five years (two in community college) and three at Virginia Commonwealth University. “She” would be my daughter, age 23, who now merely needs to wait for the mail to get her diploma for a bachelor’s degree in English. Despite some prodding, she doesn’t want to attend her own graduation.

Which means she is mostly home now and we will continue to pay the rent on what will likely be her empty room in Richmond through the end of July. She needs to find a job but if her experience is like mine it may be a year or two before she finds a “real” job, assuming there are real jobs for people with English degrees. There are a few of them out there, and I am not talking about “do you want fries with that” jobs at the local Burger King. A real job for a while though might be working at a Costco or Wegmans, where they pay a living wage, which would be great because I don’t want her to get too attached to her old bedroom. Rather, it’s time for her to move out once and for all.

It’s hard to say how long that will take but I’ll lay odds somehow a year from now she will still be inhabiting her bedroom. Young adults today are painfully aware of the true cost of living, which is much higher than it was when I was a youth. This may be because so many things are assumed: the car, the smartphone, health insurance, high speed Internet and they are used to mom and dad paying for them. I don’t care if $12 an hour really is a living wage these days; that probably won’t buy you all of the above, even with a roommate or two.

What she wants to do is goof off, sleep late, stay up all night and when not distracted by things on the Internet write the great novel that probably won’t get sold, at least not without a whole lot more pain and suffering. Fortunately she is a bit more realistic now and is sending out random resumes, which suggests intent to find a job but not necessarily serious commitment. She could live a lot cheaper, assuming she lived alone, by settling in Richmond where she just finished her degree. But the jobs would pay a lot less and she seems happy to be home on a more or less full time basis. She actually cleaned her room and removed heaps of trash off her desk the other day. Either she is trying to get her life in order or she is planning to start a new burrow. Time will tell.

We’ve suggested some employers that might hire English majors. A friend at my church works for Motley Fool, and they hire English majors. Except she knows nothing about personal finance other than living on our money and making her allowance stretch until the end of the month. She wants to learn less, although I have provided a couple books on personal finance as a “gift”. The headquarters of Learning Tree in nearby Reston is near us. They teach mostly leading edge technology courses to people whose employers have deep pockets. They need people to write content for their web pages and course curriculum. And I have another friend whose office is always willing to hire college graduates, providing they want to learn the business of making specialized contact lenses. She worked there briefly out of high school and found it didn’t agree with her. I doubt she would want to give it another try.

Still, it is an accomplishment having a degree of any kind, and getting a degree in English is more interesting than it seems. She wrote a thesis on arguably the world’s worst English poet, William McGonagall. She learned a lot about Old English, and obscure Scottish literature. She interned at a Richmond publishing house and worked with female prisoners at a local jail teaching creative writing. Mainly she had the university experience, such as it is today, minus the fun stuff like sororities. She is not social enough for that stuff. She had the usual mixture of brilliant and mediocre professors, ate in the dining halls, learned that parking tickets cost real money, and that you can have really crappy roommates.

We learned that college education today is very expensive. Once we entertained the idea that, as parents with one child, we could send her to a private university. What a crazy idea! Her bachelor’s degree took a year longer than we budgeted. We paid for two cars, only because she wrecked the first one driving home with a homeless kitten. The expenses added up quickly. The nearly final total according to Quicken:  $116,238.05, or $36,238.05 more than the $80,000 I thought we were going to spend. And these are just the direct costs. It’s amazing anyone can afford to get any kind of degree these days. At least she graduates debt free. We were her scholarship fund.

Parenting is not over. Now comes the coaching phase, followed by the nagging and heaping on the guilt phase if necessary. The job hunting is still poor, and bad in particular for English majors with lackluster GPAs. At least here in Northern Virginia the unemployment rate is relatively low, but the mere hassle of commuting around here will probably ensure that she calls someplace far away from here home eventually.

A new adventure called real life awaits her. “What’s it like, dad?” she asked me some weeks ago. “Well, it’s not a lot of fun. But you get used to it.” And really, that’s about the most honest thing you can say about adulthood. I wish you the best, kid, but it’s time for you to cut the apron strings and fully direct your own life. Hopefully, we gave you enough of the tools to make your life meaningful but for the most part the rest will be up to you.

You can only dodge the bullet for so long. Somehow I dodged it for sixteen years.

That’s how long I’ve been attending my local Unitarian Universalist church. And that’s how long I’ve not been on its board of directors. Not that I never did anything more than put money into the collection plate. Over the years I’ve taught religious education, helped with a youth group, took kids on field trips, spent a night in a lockdown so youth could play all night and even went to our denomination’s general assembly. I’ve ushered, helped put together lunches for annual meetings, cleaned up the church kitchen after services, put away lots of chairs and hymnals after services and drank copious amounts of coffee after services too. I’ve attended church auctions, church dinners, facilitated rummage sales, painted walls, cleaned out closets and showed youth how to pray toward Mecca.

That was then. This weekend I find myself on our board of directors, although my three-year term does not start officially until July. I tried to talk them out of it. I said usually directors were chosen from an elite inner circle, not from the next circle in, which is where I saw myself. That’s probably where they saw me too except after sixteen years they could no longer not call me. They had run through the usual suspects too many times. So I am on the board of directors, somewhat unwillingly, but mainly because I could not think of a good enough excuse to get out of it.

In truth I have plenty of other commitments already. This would be one more and anecdotally it was likely to evolve into one of these unappreciated, time consuming and open-ended commitments. The sad truth about non-profit operations like churches is they don’t run themselves. They are complex organisms of relationships. Bill Gates once famously said that trying to manage programmers was like trying to herd cats. Managing churches is like trying to nail Jello to the wall.

There are all sorts of challenges in our church, none of which are likely to get solved no matter how much we flagellate ourselves or how much time I give it. Membership is declining. Our minister of just three years is leaving, for reasons she will not explicitly state, which of course pumps the rumor mill. As I once noted, churches are human institutions, and ours certainly is. We have a long and storied history of settled ministers leaving us for greener pastures or in strange circumstances, and this latest episode is just one more that feeds the fear, is there something intrinsically wrong with us?

Supposedly we have institutionalized trust issues but it seems that we really have ministerial issues. Our first minister was later revealed to be philandering with the congregants he was supposed to be counseling. His replacement left abruptly after less than a year. One of our interim ministers wrote a letter purporting to be from our board of directors endorsing himself for a permanent ministry elsewhere. He was, of course, quickly sacked. The last interim minister complained that we were a surreal congregation, happy enough to listen to sermons but reticent to challenge him on them, something he saw routinely in other congregations. Not that all of our ministers have been bad. Most recently we had a husband/wife pair that spent nine happy years with us.

The Catholics at least have a pragmatic solution to these organizational problems: the priest gets to decide. His decisions may be imperfect, but at least they tend to be final. In a covenantal church like ours everything is done democratically, which means that consensus is usually needed and usually hard to achieve, even though we are quite similar to each other in categories like race, income levels and politics. A building expansion consumed ten years, all but two of which involved in coming to consensus on whether then what to build. Curiously, once we finally broke ground it all went swimmingly: delivered on time and on budget but for a lot more money than had we done it in year one instead of year eight.

All these details and institutional detritus were on display this weekend as I and eight other members of the board huddled at the church for our annual retreat. It’s an opportunity to talk about big picture things, and for new members like me to get acquainted and subsumed in the church issues of the day. You would think that after forty years we’d have a refined governance structure, but we haggled through issues like whether we should micromanage or empower committees, and how to oversee the myriad committees that we have. Some things are clearer: slowly declining membership is probably due to some cliquishness in the congregation but mostly due to the pressure on members to do church work, and then do more church work. If you aren’t on a couple of committees already, you are a considered some sort of slacker. Being a member is more about taking a second, unpaid job than getting spiritually enlightened. It’s not surprising then that many who come through the door don’t want to stay.

So maybe we need to do less as a church, but no one seems to want to give up any programs. They are all vital. No hypothermia project? How can we let homeless people freeze on cold winter nights? No social action committee? Fighting for issues like gay marriage is in our DNA. And yet it is clearly too much and everyone is exhausted, including me, their newest board member, from just listening to it all. The sandwiches for our retreat from PotBelly were at least tasty, but except for sleep spending twenty-four hours on church business was exhausting, as is the stack of action items I received as I am now the board member overseeing education. I will no doubt be petitioned to attend all these related committee meetings, and the monthly board meetings plus follow up on an ever changing list of action items.

I get to do this and a full time job and nurture my wife back to health after her accident and help my daughter transition from degree to productive employee somewhere and monitor a declining cat who needs regular doses of drugs and special cat foods and all the other stuff in life like finishing painting downstairs. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

So what’s the point? The point is to change the world for the better, one small step at a time. It takes a lot of energy to heal a broken society, which is the whole purpose of our church. It is made harder when our own church is rife with purely predictable human dramas and institutional malaise. It seems so pointless somehow, until you see the success of the Alternative Gift Market and that realize families in third world countries are getting cows, which means they have a path toward a better life. It seems pointless except a church brings people together who volunteer to help out at the homeless shelter. It seems pointless except for the youth group bonding for life at a weekend at Chincoteague, or the passing out of sandwiches to the homeless on alternate Friday nights. Then you realize there is a point to all of it, exhausting and inefficient though it may be. And you realize that while being on the board of directors is a hassle and our means are far from perfect, there is some value from all these committees, although it is hard to see while you wallow in organizational mess bordering on chaos.

And so you keep pulling at the institutional oars, though you don’t know if you are going in the right direction, though the efforts seem microscopic in comparison to the size of the problems to be addressed. You hope that your unreasonable faith in what you cherish most highly through your church results in outcomes you will mostly not see that matter and that will leave the world a better place.

So you pick up the phone and dial that member and ask them if they are interested in being in the next ministerial search committee. And you find yourself in your off hours looking at the church’s web logs to see what could be done to bring in new members. And you get in email threads with other directors on the minutia of this stuff. And you keep going, despite frequent deficiencies in both interest and energy. You don’t really know why you do it, but you do it. It is both an expression of your faith and absurdity, but you keep going.

Washington Wizards center Jason Collins came out today. It was a top story on Yahoo News and on many other news sites. The reason why Jason’s proclamation was news was because he is the first major athlete of a U.S. team to do so. Apparently our professional sports teams are assumed to be full of homophobes because Jason was somehow the first to do so. Most likely this “news” will soon become as newsworthy as the fact that there are gays in the military. I know I read the headline and simply shrugged and moved onto the next article.

Gays are all around us. They always have been around us. Most of us heterosexuals just preferred to ignore or discount the evidence. The difference between 2013 and, say, 1963 is in 1963 this was not obvious to us. Few even knew that homosexuals existed, but assumed that if they existed, they were some tiny fraction of the population, like twins conjoined at birth. Now even in deeply red states people know that gays are out there by the tens of millions. While there are still some prejudiced anti-gay bigots, if anything, they constitute a smaller percent of the population than gays and lesbians do. Some of us may still have some moral qualms about gays marrying or think that gay sex is disgusting. But all but a handful of us now understand that there is nothing we can really do about it. If there is anything newsworthy about Jason Collins’s admission, it should be why it took so long.

I really doubt there is anyone on the Washington Wizards or anyone in playing in the NBA who really gives a crap about Collins’s sexual orientation. I doubt any of the fans care either, although they will care if his performance starts to suffer. Ten years ago maybe a player or two might have felt awkward being in the shower with someone openly gay and their sex. Maybe they wondered if they would be sexually assaulted if they reached over to pick up that bar of soap they dropped. Or that they might be secretly gay, as evidenced by the boner they might get when in the shower with the gay guy. Maybe. Not anymore. I certainly never give these things a thought when I am in a public shower. Heck, I doubt I would even register shock if a team of women basketball players joined us in the shower. Unless you are sexually inexperienced or never saw any porn, it’s not like the human body is a mystery. If anything, seeing people naked makes us appreciate that all but about five percent of us look better with clothes on than without them.

Being homophobic is not a natural state of affairs; it is a learned behavior. I grew up in a lily-white community. I don’t recall even seeing a black or oriental person until I was more than ten years old. It sure was strange and uncomfortable for me when we moved south and suddenly I was surrounded by all sorts of blacks. But I got over it. It became normal. After a while I simply gave it no thought. In fact, now I find I like living in multiethnic communities. It’s like moving from a black and white world into a Technicolor world. A multiethnic, multiracial community is far more interesting a place to live in. If nothing else, the choice of dining tends to improve greatly. It would be a real challenge to go back to living in one of these virtually all white communities. It would seem so unnatural now; I’d feel like I had hives.

Sexual orientation is not obvious. Of course some gays choose to flaunt their sexual orientation, but even among gays there is incredible diversity on how they choose to express their sexuality. But that’s true of all of us. We all have our kinks and peculiarities. Most transvestites are happily heterosexual men. The sorts of weird behavior that make me queasy are those that I would never do. Sadomasochism is something I would never do, but some people are into it. As long as it is consensual and I am not participating, it’s perfectly fine by me. I am old fashioned enough to request some civility. I ask that it please be done indoors, preferably with the curtains drawn and not with kids in the house. I cannot be offended by something I cannot see.

You certainly cannot see someone’s sexual orientation. Try as you might you will never see it. You might see behavior that is often associated with gays or lesbians, but I’ve been proven wrong leaping to these assumptions. The only way someone’s sexual orientation matters to me is that it takes her out of my potential dating pool, and since I am married that’s not something to worry about.

I’m sorry that Jason Collins felt the need to come out at all. Granted, it is tougher to be gay and black than gay and white, so perhaps there is some bravery coming out while being both of these. Sexual orientation simply does not matter anymore than it matters whether someone has blue eyes or brown, is short rather than tall, or has size 14 feet instead of size 4. The qualities about someone that truly matter are intangibles like their character. All the rest, including sexual orientations, are simply tests on our character.

I’d like to find out some of that character stuff about Jason. That might be newsworthy.

Sorry Razor fans for being a bit remote this week. Life has taken me places I didn’t want to go, like Bay 18 at Fairfax Hospital’s emergency room and subsequently room T275 Bed 2. The only good part of this story is that it wasn’t me in that hospital bed. It was my wife Terri. Last Saturday around 3:30 p.m. she had a seizure.

I was down in the basement putting a second coat of paint on the walls of our rec room. I was subliminally aware of my wife upstairs from her humming and the sound of her pushing one of those Swiffer cleaner mops across our kitchen floor. Then abruptly I heard the loud sound of a bellowing seal, or so it sounded. “Whoop, whoop, whoop,” was the only way to describe it, sounds of a body parts hitting solid walls, then a huge thunk as she hit the floor. I dashed upstairs to find the door barred by her body. With considerable force I pushed her body out of the way and wedged myself between the door and the wall. I found her face down on the floor, twitching, something like bile coming out of her mouth and incontinent. She was bleeding from a cut above her left eye, and the swelling was rapidly turning her forehead into a grapefruit. If I hadn’t been on heart medicines, I might have joined her on the floor myself from the shock.

I remembered some advice to take deep breaths, then quickly reached for the phone and dialed 911. Did she have a heart attack? She was breathing, sort of, through a small opening in her mouth obstructed by her tongue. Her face was turning gray. The operator had me turn her on her back, not an easy maneuver in so small a space. To facilitate her breathing, I found I had to wedge some fingers into her mouth. She was getting grayer and her forehead was growing larger.

Amazingly, within five minutes two ambulances and a fire truck were at our door and a squad of EMTs was in the house. They asked questions about her medical history (no previous history of seizures), medications she was on (I babbled some of the few I remembered, but she is about a dozen), her conditions (quite a few there too) while they stuck things into her arms, put an oxygen mask over her face and tried fruitlessly to bring her to consciousness.

“Take her to Fair Oaks Hospital and I’ll follow,” I said knowing she preferred it to Reston Hospital. She stabilized a bit. I gathered her stuff, failed to find her list of prescriptions, grabbed my cell phone and began a comedy of errors. I followed the wrong ambulance down the parkway, which abruptly turned around. Ohmigod, I thought, they must be taking her to Reston Hospital because they can better treat something that had just developed. I did a U turn with the ambulance which cleared all the lights while I waited at them. At Reston Hospital’s emergency room, I found an ambulance parked outside but they had no record of her. I ran back to my car and drove as fast as I could back down the parkway to Fair Oaks Hospital’s Emergency Room. No, she hadn’t come in there but since it was in the Inova network they checked Inova’s other hospitals. The ambulance had delivered her to Fairfax Hospital fifteen miles away, Bay 18. The EMTs could not reach me because neither of us had thought to provide my cell phone number. Despite the heart medicines my heart was racing, but the traffic wasn’t. I was stuck in stop and go traffic on I-66, finally showing up at Fairfax Hospital’s emergency room around 5 PM, three emergency rooms and ninety minutes or so after the incident. Some pissed off looking employee at the emergency room desk finally gave me a sticker to go into the emergency room, perhaps because I knew her room number.

She was groggy but conscious and tethered to the usual medical equipment. What the hell had happened? There were no obvious answers. She just remembers waking up in the ambulance and had no memory of the incident itself. The important thing was that she was alive and seemingly stable for the moment. The nurses were working on other cases, but I did meet the EMT who explained why they took her to Fairfax Hospital (better heart care). Nurse Kelly came in occasionally, and eventually we met the emergency room physician. The doctor agreed with my diagnosis (she had a seizure) but we had no idea what caused it or if it might recur.

Six hours in the emergency bay eventually landed her in a bed in a hospital room on the second floor of the main hospital, where other people with swollen eyes seem to congregate. The swollen eye was a red flag to the emergency room personnel: had I been beating her up? She was asked this repeatedly. (“It’s okay to tell us. You will be safe.”) They even asked her again while I was in the room. It must happen so often that is it unusual to come in with a black eye from a simple fall.

Two nights in the hospital, lots of expensive tests, scans and blood draws. No concussion, no blood on the brain. That was good. Concerned phone calls and emails to and from family, including our daughter in Richmond who came up Monday after getting a pass from her professors. Getting lost in hospital corridors and in the parking garage and getting dinner from a vending machine. Arriving home around midnight to a freaked out cat, but at least one who had been fed. Our friend Mary came over, cleaned up the mess and put things away. The force of my wife’s impact on the floor dislodged a light globe in the basement. Sunday involved trips to and from the hospital, phone calls and emails, and eventually flowers and cards. My iPad let her communicate with far-flung family and friends.

She was released Monday afternoon and since then it has been mostly a round of doctor visits and more tests. She was told not to drive, feels reasonably weak but otherwise seems normal, just with a face that looks like Elphaba Thropp from Wicked plus a black eye that would make a prizefighter proud. And so it will go for most of next week or two. She did make it to work for a few hours on Thursday only to discover that she really wasn’t well enough to be very productive at work.

There are no answers so far, and there may never be any. We are not sure when or if she can drive a car again, or if her life will be fundamentally changed from now on.

I am grateful to have my daughter home for a bit. She ferried my wife around to most of her appointments, which let me get to work and try to keep up on my busy agenda there.

Life feels more fragile, more ephemeral, more due to the whimsy of an unseen god that is toying with us. This is an incident we hope will work itself out in time and normal life may then resume again. Or not.

No answers. Just ambiguity.

Last week was a good week to stick your head in the ground. Unfortunately, we are not ostriches so we were left to endure two major tragedies instead: the Boston bombings and an explosion of a fertilizer factory in West, Texas. The former got disproportionate attention, but the latter actually caused more deaths.

Last Monday’s twin bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon murdered three people including a boy, left at least thirteen people with severed limbs, and more than 178 people were treated at local hospitals. It was arguably the first major case of terrorism within the United States since September 11, 2001. For some of us who were in or around the events of 9/11, these bombings evoked visceral reminders of that day. I was one of the people caught in Washington, D.C. that day. My way of coping last week was not to watch videos of this event, but otherwise the news was inescapable. The total deaths were really four if you include the MIT police officer Sean Collier, who was killed by gunfire from the bombing suspects, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev early Friday morning. Police killed Tamerlan, the elder brother on Friday morning. His brother Dzhokhar is now in hospitalized and in custody after a wild manhunt that shut down Boston and surrounding areas for much of Friday.

The visceral reaction to this incident was understandable, given that the Boston Marathon is a huge public event and perhaps the premier running event in the United States. In a sense it was an attack on all of us because it was so indiscriminate. The chaotic reporting of the event did not do credit to the media, social media or crowdsourcing. What was impressive was the effectiveness of law enforcement at city, state and the federal levels. Within three days of the event officials had identified two suspects from thousands of images in and around the event, and within four days one suspect was dead and the other was captured wounded in nearby Watertown after an extensive and scary manhunt that shut down the Boston area. Less noted by the press was what had not occurred in the twelve years in between these events. We know of some of the planned terrorist events that were thwarted by law enforcement over these years, and there are doubtless many more that we do not know about. This incident also demonstrated that when these events occur we can marshal the right resources to effectively manage and contain the event. We have also put in place an infrastructure that is generally effective at preventing most of these incidents. Our law enforcement community deserves applause from all Americans for their forceful and effective response to these tragic bombings. The citizens of Boston proved their resilience as well, by offering assistance to victims of the bombing and by keeping their cool while neighborhoods swarmed with SWAT teams.

Adding to the surreal nature of these events was the rejection by the U.S. senate of expanded background checks for gun purchasers last week. The legislation would not have stopped the bombings themselves, which were wrought by low-tech pressure cookers placed in backpacks. However, had the law been in effect it might have kept the Tsarnaev brothers from acquiring weapons in the first place. During the shootout with police Thursday night, the brothers outgunned the police, at least as far as the number of bullets exchanged. As the nearby Newtown incident demonstrated, it’s not hard to buy lots of bullets in this country. Both brothers were able to acquire guns that were used to kill Officer Collier. Authorities had previously interviewed the elder brother Tamerian because the Russian government believed him to have Chechen sympathies. If they appeared on any watch list, it did not appear to have kept them from getting guns.

While the news from Boston riveted our attention, arguably the explosion at the West Fertilizer Company in West, Texas near Waco on Wednesday was more newsworthy. While it’s unclear if the Boston bombings could have been prevented, the incident in West was eminently preventable and exacerbated by the Texan stubbornness not to allow zoning laws. Currently there are fourteen confirmed deaths and more than 160 people injured, mostly residents of this small Texan town. The town’s volunteer firefighters made up a plurality of those killed. They first successfully evacuated residents from a nearby nursing home before the plant exploded. OSHA had not inspected the plant itself since 1985. The Department of Homeland Security, which is supposed to regulate fertilizer factories like this one but depends on these factories to self identify themselves never was notified. The destruction amounted to sixty to 80 homes completely destroyed, including a fifty-unit apartment building. Fifty to 75 additional homes were damaged. The only good thing about the explosion is that a fire started at the plant before it exploded, allowing responders to get the elderly out of a nearby nursing home and residents from neighboring homes before the explosion. It’s hard to imagine what the death toll had been had there been no warning.

This incident is a prime example of a wholly preventable accident. Even if the accident could not have been prevented, zoning laws could have kept industrial areas far away from residential areas, as is common in the vast majority of states except for states with something prickly up their rears, like Texas, who think “freedom” trumps basic public safety. The state of Texas is hostile to zoning regulations of any sort, so it’s perfectly okay to put major industrial plants like this fertilizer storage facility close to residential areas. An incident like this would normally have state legislatures scrambling to enact zoning laws to give jurisdictions authority to put public safety first. This is unlikely to happen, so something like this is bound to happen again.

In fact, it has. Texas, known for its refineries as well as many other hazardous industries, has a sorry history of large and preventable industrial accidents. In 1947, the Texas City Disaster killed at least 581 people and left only one person alive in the city’s fire department. The culprit was a ship loaded with ammonia nitrate, the same stuff that blew up in West Texas, except it was on a ship and 2,300 tons of the stuff went up at once, creating an explosion so powerful it had the force of a nuclear bomb. Also in Texas City in 2005 the Texas City Refinery exploded, killed 15 people and injured 170 others, making it roughly equivalent to this latest incident. If you feel somewhat ghoulish, check out this slide show of large Texan industrial accidents. They will have a familiar ring to them.

Since 9/11 we have done a lot as a country to reduce terrorist incidents like the Boston bombing. We obviously could do more, but we could clearly do a lot more to prevent large-scale industrial accidents such as occurred in West, Texas last week. Like terrorism, it requires putting the public good ahead of private profit and convenience. Let’s hope we learn some new lessons here at least, but like the NRA’s successful effort to get the Senate to turn down legislation for expanded background checks of gun purchasers supported by ninety percent of Americans, it seems that Texans will put stubbornness ahead of public safety once again.

Like many liberals, I am going through a painful disillusionment phase with Barack Obama. I am disheartened and saddened by his approach to governing since his reelection. I fear he is setting Democrats up for failure in 2014.

If there is one thing that unites Democrats it is a passion for the needs of the middle class and the poor. Since his reelection Barack Obama is showing signs that he is putting some nebulous legacy and quest to “get things done no matter what the odds” ahead of the best interests of the American people.

The most painful aspect has been Obama’s repeated declarations, most explicitly in his FY2014 budget, that he is prepared to scale back social security cost of living adjustments and increase Medicare payments in order to balance the budget. He says this will only happen if Republicans agree as part of a grand bargain to also raise taxes elsewhere.

Obama is way too smart a politician to not realize that social security is not contributing to the deficit. Indeed in most years it diminishes the deficit by putting its surpluses into the treasury. This proposed means of diminishing social security benefits is through a mechanism called “chained CPI” (consumer price index). Basically it would reduce inflation protections built into social security, on the assumption that people will reduce spending patterns when prices rise, for example going with ground beef instead of steaks. However, the elderly spend a disproportionate amount of their income on health care expenses, which has proven resistant to the “ground beef for steak” approach. Regardless, this would still amount to a cut in income generally compared with inflation for people who can least afford to take the hit. This means they will endure a reduction of standard of living, which is already pretty poor for many social security beneficiaries without pensions or high valued 401Ks. Worse, it would do nothing to control the deficit. Obama appears to be willing to balance the budget on the backs of those least able to afford it, and who contributed to their social security over the years based on certain assumptions which may well go by the wayside. It’s unfair and it is back stabbing.

As for Medicare, the president is proposing means testing, essentially requiring those at somewhat higher income levels to contribute more in the way of deductibles and copays when we use Medicare. There is no question that Medicare is a growing entitlement and there is enormous waste in the system. I am all for removing the waste in the system, which can be done by moving it from a fee-for-service model to an outcome-based payment model. As a driver of medical inflation, Medicare is a laggard not a leader, with significantly lower costs and inflation per enrollee than private health insurance. As for means testing, it is unfair because those who earn more have contributed more of their income over the years toward Medicare, effectively subsidizing the care for those at lower income levels. The tax is 1.45% of your income. Someone making $20,000 pays $290 a year in Medicare taxes. Someone at my income level pays closer to $1900 a year in Medicare taxes. The result of this proposed change would be to charge people like me more for the same benefits when we claim them after having already paid more by contributing more to the system during our working lives. It’s sort of like paying an income tax twice. It is fundamentally unfair.

To add insult to injury, yesterday the president signed into law changes to the STOCK act that essentially undid the work of the last Congress to provide better visibility into stocks owned by members of Congress and the Administration. This was a no-brainer for a supposedly progressive president: veto it.

Meanwhile, the former organization Obama for American has morphed into Organizing for Action, and the organization has been petitioning people like me to contribute to it, supposedly to help promote progressive causes. What is progressive about cutting social security benefits for people in a solvent system? Why would I contribute to an organization that works for a president who wants to do the exact opposite of what Vice President Joe Biden promised in the last campaign: not to cut social security benefits, not even by one dime? How do I get excited about sending them money when they want people to contribute more toward Medicare instead of removing the waste in the system?

The worst part is this could easily set up a repeat of the disastrous 2010 election, which brought in Tea Party members that have largely obstructed work from getting done. What drives people to the polls is motivation. Seniors, already disinclined to vote for Democrats, will be even gladder to vote for Republicans who promise not to cut their social security benefits, as even Paul Ryan has pledged. How do you excite the Democratic base to turn out when they are being asked to enthusiastically endorse an agenda that further stiffs it to the working class and seems more a product of Republican thinking than Democratic thinking?

To say the least all of this is disappointing, which amounts to leaving us Democrats dispirited, which gives us little incentive to vote or to get further engaged in politics, which is supposedly the whole purpose of Organizing for Action. But OFA is really about promoting the president’s agenda, not the people’s agenda. They no longer align.

I will support and vote for true Democrats who will fight for the working class, who will fight to ensure that everyone pays their fair share, including corporations that pay increasing fewer taxes every year. Once these under taxed groups have paid their taxes, then I will consider tax increases on the working class. I will not vote for Republican-lite candidates.

I hope Obama wakes up because he is making a fatal mistake not just to his legacy, but to his agenda and to the needs of Americans. The compromise he is chasing simply will not happen with the current Congress, which is good, because Republicans in Congress will put lower spending ahead of deficit reduction, as they have shown time and again. However, there is no reason to move our goalpost first when they won’t move their post at all. The mere act of moving proves not statesmanship but cowardice because it will show conciliation without affect. It also drains energy from progressives and makes us feel all our energy was for naught.

Democrats would be wise to estrange themselves from Obama and OFA. I know I am until he asks for contrition and puts the American people ahead of the concerns of the rich.

Google recently announced its inactive account manager. If you have a Google Account, this new manager essentially tells Google, “Assume I’ve died if I haven’t logged in after X days. And if I hit that number of days, destroy all data about me.” You can also tell Google not to destroy its data about you, but to authorize a list of other individuals to then access your Google account.

This might be welcome news to the executor of your estate who has to slog through the odious task of getting your creditors to go away as well as notifying friends, relatives, distant acquaintances and your LinkedIn.com colleagues that you are no more. Assuming Google follows through, if you choose to have its records about you destroyed sometime after your death, not only are you dead in the actual sense, but also dead in the digital sense, at least for data about you in Google.

It’s nice of Google to plan for your demise. Other companies out there are likely not to be so willing to delete data about you. The predominant companies in the online world though are figuring out ways to handle your electronic data after your physical demise. Facebook is trying out a way to let people memorialize a dead person’s Facebook account. Twitter has a convoluted process for decommissioning an account which in its current form will make your executor not even want to bother trying. Doubtless other social media and internet conglomerates will develop their own policies, but is likely your square Instagram pictures will still be out there somewhere in cyberspace centuries after you are dead. Technology is providing a way for us to become immortal, at least in the electronic sense, long after our bodies have succumbed to their finite limits.

Also likely being immortalized about you are many of those digital fingerprints you left. Which ads you clicked on. The dreck you purchased from eBay back in 2003. Your rantings in public forums and comments on Yahoo news articles. Maybe even the porn sites you visited and your account on ashleymadison.com. Also your credit history, your spending patterns as documented on mint.com, your family history as you charted it with Facebook’s family history app and maybe all that stuff you uploaded to your personal cloud. All there for others to pick over. If you think about it, you should feel aghast. I have heard unconfirmed reports that one of my grandfathers snuck out the back door frequently for some booty down the street, presumably unbeknownst to dear old grandma. No one can plausibly confirm or deny it, so I will choose to remember my grandpa as the genial guy who grossed me out when I went fishing with him and he sliced off the fish’s head.

Our generation won’t have plausible deniability. Some enterprising great granddaughter in 2100 may be sifting through open source big data warehouses and be able to trace that message to a lover you made on ashleymadison.com to your IP and computer when five minutes earlier you had sent out an email to a friend. So that’s the downside, but the real bummer is it is probably too late to do anything about it. Being humans we’re bound to have moral failings, it’s just that in the past they did not normally come to light, so the living assumed the best about us. The good news is that if you can keep the researchers from putting all these facts together until after you are dead then it will all be moot. Your ex and children may be shocked when they subsequently learn of your immoral behavior, but it won’t matter to you. I am guessing that an account on reputation.com isn’t going to quite cut it.

So your drunkenness, lecherousness, gambling addiction, wife beating and stash of pornography, or at least some part of it, will be available for those willing to look for it. It is not too hard to envision companies that will do this for profit. In fact, I can see a whole new business model built around electronic blackmail. (The blackmail.com domain, curiously, is owned but parked. I should probably make an offer on the domain.) Something like:

Dear Mr. John Jones,

We are aware that you are seeing two other women on the side, plus you have a gay lover you see on alternate Wednesdays. But no one needs to know because we won’t tell! We guarantee that we will not reveal this information about you for the low price of $1000 a year paid now, or low monthly installments of just $100 a month.

Otherwise we will be sending a summary of the information we have about you to gawker.com and Pastor Vleek at the United Methodist Church where you tithe on May 1^st, along with proof of the veracity of certain claims we will make so they are beyond plausible deniability.

We accept Visa, Mastercard and Discover, or you can make payments confidentially with your PayPal account. Please visit my.blackmail.com and enter your special confidential access code 6f7gjk93! to initiate payment.

Sincerely,

Jason Dweeb
Account Executive

What’s the upside? Well, electronic immortality! Because there won’t be just blackmail.com, you will also want to hire memorializedforever.com. In the past you were memorialized with fading photographs and copies of handwritten letters, if that. In the future you will have the ability to let people see you in high fidelity. You will want to buy their high fidelity service, in which you will be recorded in high definition 3-D. The voice quality will be high fidelity too. Your future great, great grandchildren will feel like they really know that guy otherwise known as the carcass planted under the tombstone at Crestview Cemetery. If you want you can expound about your history, your feelings, your concerns or anything you want future generations to know about you. You can even pay for the three way backup service, where your high definition memorial is hosted in redundant cloud servers plus immortalized in a blocks of digital friendly material, which can be readily uploaded in the event of a catastrophic failure.

I hope this is what you want, but it’s all sort of moot. It’s happening and there is not much that can be done to stop it. There will probably be federal legislation at some point to at least regulate this business, but as a practical matter the internet is impossible to really police, so it will all be stored somewhere anyhow and available for a price.

As for me, when I die I would prefer to be really dead, just like dear old possibly lecherous grandpa. I won’t have that opportunity, but I will at least take the time to set my Google inactive account manager settings, as a courtesy to my wife who will probably clean up behind me and really hates paperwork.