Making a Million

This weekend, we attended a horrible event that promised 61,000 participants that they could all become millionaires. Um, yeah. I don't really know why we thought it was a good idea to go, but the tickets were tolerably cheap and justifiable because we donated money to our local public radio station to get them. There, see, we are okay.

Here were some good takeaway lessons from Mr. Donald Trump, who, by the way, was fucking funny. His hair could actually reach his shoulders if he didn't take so much care to brush if over his forehead.

Mr. Trump said that there are some ways to be successful in life, and for each lesson, he provided a completely irrelevant story to back himself up. Some of us rejoiced in the absurdity of hearing this self-proclaimed schmuck prattle on in non-sequiturs prior to taking questions that probed his taste in young women and his preference for boxers or briefs. Others, not us, really thought they were finding the path to that million dollars the event sponsors advertised. In the interest of protecting myself from any of you who might expect a million at the conclusion of this blog entry, I am going to say now, don't expect shit.

Here is a partial list of Trump's steps to success. (I can't give it all away or you will anticipate my next move when I go to steal your next deal.)
1. Luck.
2. Don't trust anyone because we are a bad species.
3. Get even. Or, don't let them come back for seconds.
4. Love losers because they make you look good.
5. Do what you enjoy.

So, that was the gist of it. Much to the chagrin of all the presenters who preceded him, with arena rock blaring as they preached the next snake oil that guarantees fiscal liberation, Trump said, "Buy low, sell high, and sign a prenup; it's just about that easy." Are there any questions? Okay, are there any questions that don't relate to whether Trump likes boxers or briefs?

I didn't think so. He likes boxers.

Mind your children

In most conversations I share with friends who can't seem to make the leap to parenthood, one of the biggest reasons for hesitation is the fear of bearing a conservative child. Really. I'm serious. The world is crazy enough right now; bringing a kid into it, AND THEN discovering that kid signed his name in blood on the Young Republicans' roster is a nightmare I don't wish to realize.

There are other reasons not to have kids too. I mean, they are stinky when they shit in their pants. The first year seems to be about stink and sleeplessness and crooked smiles that really just mean the kid has gas and will become stinkier. The second year seems worse; my impression is that parents just wish the kid was only stinky, rather than a walking stinkbomb deadset on eating the electrical outlets and killing the dog. At three, the cruising stinkbomb starts to make coherent sentences and that leads to greater difficulties involving waste-making as the kid starts to announce to the world everything about his or her parents' defacation habits. Of course, the three year old talks far too much about everything, and that's just annoying. But it's worse at four, when the kid is totally mobile, but still slow to get in and out of the car and developing all these idiosyncrasies that really aren't adorable, and would have been punishable if everyone had my father. Five, six, seven... well, whatever. It's all the same. Kid wants stuff and parents have to pay for it. I think a good age is around 20, but by that time, the kid can vote, and you may be dealing with a conservative, even after all your hardwork.

I haven't even tickled the possibilities for drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, juvenile hall, freaky decisions to remain in boy or girl scouts beyond 10, genital piercings or finding yourself the embarrassed parent of the bitchiest girl in school. Oh, oh! And, it's really expensive! No wonder few of my friends are signing up for this terrifying hell. We will all become old and withered with no one to call and bother. We will have dogs, I suppose. What a shame.

Which leads me to this article. Apparently, about 20 years ago, some social scientists in Berkeley, CA started to watch a bunch of kids and record their traits. They weren't looking for any hints as to political leanings, but years later, as the kids became adults, they discovered an interesting phenomenon. The whiny, tattle-tale, insecure, paranoid kids all grew up to be conservatives. The kids who could play nicely on their own, who were resilient and confident: they turned liberal. Of course, it could be that the paranoid kids needed something traditional and different than the standard Berkeley offering, and so they turned to what is the counter-culture over there. Or, it could just be that these scientists discovered what we all know already: Dick Cheney was the kid that punched all the other kids in their tummies before skipping gaily to the teacher to report on the general peacefulness in what everyone knew was a hostile playground. What a scoundrel. And, oh yeah, Georgie Bush whined in the corner until someone cut the crusts off his bologna sandwich, because crusts are against freedom.

Here is the article:

HOW TO SPOT A BABY CONSERVATIVE
KURT KLEINER
SPECIAL TO THE Toronto STAR

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative. At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.
The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding. But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.
A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity. The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.
Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.
In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives. Of course, if you're studying the psychology of politics, you shouldn't be surprised to get a political reaction. Similar work by John T. Jost of Stanford and colleagues in 2003 drew a political backlash. The researchers reviewed 44 years worth of studies into the psychology of conservatism, and concluded that people who are dogmatic, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order and structure are more likely to gravitate to conservatism. Critics branded it the "conservatives are crazy" study and accused the authors of a political bias. Jost welcomed the new study, saying it lends support to his conclusions. But Jeff Greenberg, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona who was critical of Jost's study, was less impressed.
"I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members. The results do raise some obvious questions. Are nursery school teachers in the conservative heartland cursed with classes filled with little proto-conservative whiners?
Or does an insecure little boy raised in Idaho or Alberta surrounded by conservatives turn instead to liberalism? Or do the whiny kids grow up conservative along with the majority of their more confident peers, while only the kids with poor impulse control turn liberal?
Part of the answer is that personality is not the only factor that determines political leanings. For instance, there was a .27 correlation between being self-reliant in nursery school and being a liberal as an adult. Another way of saying it is that self-reliance predicts statistically about 7 per cent of the variance between kids who became liberal and those who became conservative. (If every self-reliant kid became a liberal and none became conservatives, it would predict 100 per cent of the variance). Seven per cent is fairly strong for social science, but it still leaves an awful lot of room for other influences, such as friends, family, education, personal experience and plain old intellect.
For conservatives whose feelings are still hurt, there is a more flattering way for them to look at the results. Even if they really did tend to be insecure complainers as kids, they might simply have recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place.
Their grown-up conclusion that the safest thing is to stick to tradition could well be the right one. As for their "rigidity," maybe that's just moral certainty.
The grown-up liberal men, on the other hand, with their introspection and recognition of complexity in the world, could be seen as self-indulgent and ineffectual.
Whether anyone's feelings are hurt or not, the work suggests that personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we've reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along behind, rationalizing after the fact?
It could be that whom we vote for has less to do with our judgments about tax policy or free trade or health care, and more with the personalities we've been stuck with since we were kids.

Originally posted at: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1142722231554

My new pen-pal, Barbara Boxer

Check this out. I got a response from Senator Boxer. Okay, the response was likely from an unpaid, blonde staffer working toward a degree in poli-sci or maybe communications at UCLA. She's probably doing a semester in DC, her first out of California and trying to decide if she should take the lucrative job as a pharmaceutical rep right out of college or spend another 60k on law school. She'll take law school after meeting some dark-haired boy from Massachusetts or Vermont who spends more time debating the value of government involvement in social services than talking about the next frat party. They'll hook up for a bit. He'll be slightly blinded, temporarily, by her happy, blonde Southern California spirit. She'll be smitten with his way of finding the gravitas in every situation. Then, as the semester folds in on itself, spitting our blonde hottie into the summer, they'll both decide to scrap the plans they had to travel through Europe together because she wants to party on the Greek Islands, and he would like to check out the situation in Belarus.

Ah, young, political love. Lucky for me, even in the throes of her first relationship with an East Coast boy, our unpaid intern found the time to punch up a communique assuring me that Boxer is, indeed, on the march to admonish the President. It's just going to be a quiet march, it seems.

Now, where the hell is my response from Feinstein? Geez. Aren't there enough cutie-pies to employ in DC to assure everyone a pen-pal in Washington?

Here's the letter:

Thank you for contacting me regarding Senator Russell Feingold's (D-WI) resolution to censure President Bush. I want to you know that I appreciate hearing from you, and I am a co-sponsor of this resolution.

On March 13, 2006, Senator Feingold introduced Senate Resolution 398, which would admonish President Bush for his unlawful authorization of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, his failure to keep Congress fully informed of this program as required by law, and his efforts to mislead the American people about the legality of the program and the legal authorities relied upon by his administration to conduct it.

The Feingold Resolution has been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee at the request of Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Senator Feingold has called for the Committee to hold hearings, debate, and then vote on the resolution. I share Senator Feingold's strong objections to the administration's warrantless domestic wiretapping program, and I intend to vote for Senator Feingold's resolution should it come before the Senate.

Again, thank you for writing me.


Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

Did someone say job?

Here's what I've been thinking about lately: I have been wondering about my life plan. Wasn't I supposed to be something other than a volunteer, occasional blogger, wannabe writer and unemployed attorney by the time I turned 31? Well, I am married, and that's an achievement. I have a dog, and she is well-trained. I have a decent education under my belt, but it isn't really working for me at this point. Still, I pay my student loans, and that gives me the opportunity to remember how comfortable I was in school, knowing that a few years out of law school, I would be settled and satisfied in a career that would be emotionally rewarding, if not financially so. Wait, that didn't work.

Well, here I am! Hello! Yeah! This is it! Life!

Today, I have spent the majority of my day watching training videos that will enable me to volunteer with an organization for whom I would much rather just WORK. But that's cool, I can do the volunteer gig. Today, I also did a bit of writing which I will share with my new writers' group. That's cool too. See, it's just easier to join a writers' group than to actually figure out how the hell I am supposed to share my work in a manner that might earn a penny or two. Maybe it's also my way of further looking after the public interest. I don't want to impose some crapass writing to anyone unless I have to tolerate his crapass writing as well. Quid pro quo.

Finally, I found some dustballs, swept them up, and did some yoga. That's the day. Life!

So, what the hell am I doing with my life? Here's the funny part: when I consider the stuff that I am doing, I am largely content. I appreciate a loving relationship in a lovely house with a loyal dog. As a volunteer, I have personally helped quite a few people take a couple stable steps into the future that they might not have been able to take without me. I enjoy sitting for hours writing short stories that eventually end and get filed away, awaiting a reader, or not. I am happy to take notes through hours of training videos because I know the work will be interesting, and the money really doesn't mean too much, except that it's expensive to live in America, and our bills ain't cheap, and I would like to think that my husband and I may actually get to retire together someday, assuming I ever come out of retirement again. So, I am pleased and content and that's great. But I still feel there's something-- pride, attention, intellectual networking-- that is missing. Or, is it something different? Maybe it is just the extra couple thousand bucks I could bring in every month as a working public interest attorney. Maybe that really is all that I'm missing. Just the green. The benjamins.

This job search is turning into a joke, in my mind, between little bouts of sobbing and despondency. I may yet cultivate some sort of entrepreneurial interest. Or, watch out, I may figure out how to get someone to pay me for writing crapass shit. Yeah. Hello. Oh damn. Did I really just write "benjamins?"

My dog growls at everyone who walks by

There are many little things to discover in the day when there is no where to go, but you still keep your head up. For example, I understand that unemployed, depressed folks might close the shutters and sit beneath a blanket as day progresses toward dark. This is a most unfortunate decision since, should they open the blinds, and the windows too, they would notice that a bunch of people seem to have nothing much to do during the day, and wander around interminably, attracting the attention of dogs like mine. Aside from the pedestrian traffic, I have started to pay attention to the steady car traffic, trying to discern whether the drivers are actively engaged in seeking a destination, or if they are just driving somewhere, to get somewhere, like I do, often.

Other strange things to find when you don't work:

There is a crossing guard at the signal who makes it his duty to push the button for the wandering unemployed. He has a bright orange safety vest, so he looks official, but I don't think he is. When it's cold, he sits in his SUV and then hops out when he spots a pedestrian approaching. He makes kind comments about the weather and staying warm and being careful on the street.

There are a LOT of old people at Safeway in the middle of the day. When I worked, back in the good ol' days, I used to dream of doing the grocery shopping at a time when I wasn't competing with fast-walking, cell-phone talking, cart-pushers who wanted to snag the organic coffee quickly but then stand there contemplating WHICH organic coffee, the shade-grown Mexican or the fair-trade Colombian, while leaving their carts in the middle of the aisle and prattling on about the zillion important projects in line at work. I have found that my dream of shopping at mid-day, on a Wednesday say, is actually a nightmarish experience in which NO one moves their carts, and most of the shoppers can't reach, see or decide which product they might want to buy, let alone actually get to the coffee. It's a lovely bunch, for those lovingly patient people who want to make dry conversation about the increasing price of eggs and the change in their quality and the many kinds of bread available. But that ain't me. I don't want to talk, listen or wait for anyone. I just want to grab the shit we eat all week, and I want to leave. That's it.

Traffic is horrible by schools from noon on.

Coffee shops have a lot of those same old people on their way home from Safeway.

Cops don't pull over enough minivans.

Men driving minivans are menaces to society.

Someday, I will have a job again. Maybe. People tell me to stay positive, so I say these things to keep myself from closing the blinds and grabbing the blanket. And when I do have the job, maybe I'll miss the old folks clustering their carts in the produce section, commenting on the interesting shapes of mangos.

Phew, what happened?

Back in Amuhrica...

I am still shocked to see how apathetic we all are with regard to our government despite some fairly obvious demonstrations of anger and frustration in normal life. And I'm talking populace here; not me. Although, I will admit to a degree of anger as I start to realize how difficult it is becoming to find a job here. Luckily, I don't really want one, so I can't get super aggressive about being left out of the career march.

This morning, I noticed that the Democrats turned and ran from Senator Feingold's proposal to censure Corporation President Bush for illegally spying on the US. I huffed a bit and then sent out the following to Feinstein and Boxer, my two Senators in this fine state of California.

****

Honorable Senator Feinstein,

I rarely take time to write to my Senators, and perhaps I should more often. As a Democrat, as a woman, and as an attorney, I am becoming increasingly concerned about the fate of this country's two party system. I can no longer recognize any evidence of courage among the Democrats.

For this reason, I was pleasantly surprised and encouraged by Feingold's proposal to censure the President. While I didn't expect much, I certainly did not anticipate such a quick fold by the Dems. The Republicans, notably Bill Frist, stamp Feingold's move with the label "politically motivated." Of course it is! Why can't the Democrats step up and agree with this? Why can't the Democrats stand up and acknowledge that membership in Congress requires political dancing?

Please, stand with each other. Please, be strong. It's time the Democrats told the country that they are not afraid. If the Republicans can succeed on a platform of deception, ignorance, racism and cronyism, certainly the Dems can rally their own troops with some honest declarations of frustration and promises to no longer tolerate the robbery of our civil rights. They are only inalienable until they are sold, after all.

I hope you will consider supporting Feingold in his efforts.

Thank you for your time,
xxx