Well hello there

Long time no see. Long time no write, too. Sorry everyone. It's been a busy month. We will get back into the swing of posting this week. But I'm going to start off small because I've spent 14 of the last 48 hours sleeping and almost 20 hours of the last 48 with two children under the age of 10. Not an optimal amount of spare time for blogging. Or having any energy. Because it's summertime, which means lots of activities and an exhausted owl at day's end.

So here's a brief update on my life and the summer to come: 

In the next two and a half months I will have at least two weekends spoken for by wedding. I watched two good friends tie the knot a few weeks ago and am incredibly proud and happy for them. I am at the age (26) when my friends are all starting to get married and engaged in droves. 

I have many days claimed by my two charges who will doubtless spend the time devouring every bit of summer they can, hopefully while leaving my patience and love for them both intact. So far so good, though it's only been a week. I finished tutoring a 4th grade boy I have been working with since 2nd grade. Next year will be my last year with him and I'm looking forward to finishing off elementary school with him, though I'll miss him after next year. It is pretty cool watching a little kid becoming a teenager. Though I may prefer it from a distance. 

Raven and I are basically done reorganizing and arranging the apartment after Crow's departure. We miss him a ton basically all the time, but having the house look new and different than when he lived here helps. (That doesn't mean we wouldn't have you back here in a second if you wanted it, Crow!) That said, it is really neat to have a space that feels like it was created by the two of us. It is a very adult thing we have done and it does feel a bit more like co-habitation this way. 

I have finally obtained a hard copy of a Dorothy Parker book of poems. From a secondhand shop. Who gives this away you guys? Next entry I will share some of my favorite excerpts, but you will just have to wait for that because I can't really read this entry well...

The letters are blurring so it's time to admit defeat. And go to bed. Write more soon. No really. I will. Don't you trust me? .... Maybe that's fair. 

Until next time,

Owl

Insomnia

I think by now we can dismiss all pretenses that this is in any way a daily blog. On the bright side, I've had three separate people prod Owl and I about updating, which at least means that we have followers! Well, three of them at any rate.

Instead of another tired apology for a long blogging dry spell, I'm going to talk about an issue that is near and dear to my heart.

Okay, so it's one of those things.

I've spoken a bit about Mystery Illness, but I haven't spent quite as much time addressing an issue that has plagued me for pretty much as far back as I can recall. With my clever and subtle title, I'm sure you're all chomping at the bit to find out whatever that could be.

I remember struggling with sleeping through the night, and with getting to sleep, as far back as elementary school. It wasn't dire, then, barring one memorable incident when I was in third or fourth grade where I was told a scary story at a Girl Scouts sleepover that haunted me so badly that I couldn't fall asleep without somebody else in the room. I don't remember how long this lasted---in all liklihood it was only a week or so, but to my tired, traumatized little brain it seemed like an eternity. I distinctly recall sitting in my classroom trying to attend to the teacher explaining long division to us, my eyes dry and scratchy, eyelids drooping, resisting the urge to lay my head down on my desk, and thinking that this feeling, this terrible, dull ache in the back of my skull, the fuzziness between my eyes, and the gnawing horror both from the lingering effects of that one damn story and from the creeping panic that sets in after two or three nights of restless agony, this feeling was going to last forever.

That was one isolated incident in my childhood, but it has etched itself in my brain in a way that only the most vivid struggles of an otherwise unburdened youth can---deeply and with much embellishment. Had I known that day in the classroom that I had only just gotten a small taste of what would become my future relationship with insomnia, I think tiny nine-year-old me would have broken down in tears. (Granted, we were studying long division, so tears may have been an inevitable part of the equation.)

At some point in middle school I was informed that a healthy human required, on average, eight hours of sleep to function properly. By that point my sleep issues were bad enough that eight seemed rather high, but not outside the realm of believability. By late high school and early college however, eight hours of sleep a night seemed like an utterly alien concept, a luxury that I could not imagine anybody ever being lucky enough to afford. The incident above was the only point in my life that my insomnia has been assosiated with a clear external cause, barring the occasional post-horror movie restlessness or the pre-exam stress-induced sleeplessness. Normally, though, it's just...there. This constant, inexplicable barrier that nothing I do can overcome. Some things make it better, of course, sometimes, but so far, there's no reliable fix, no instant cure, nothing I can depend on to secure those eight (or so) hours of recharging we all need to be as awesome as we can be.

Let me be perfectly clear here: Insomnia sucks. It's draining, nerve-wrecking, and seeps into areas of your life that you'd never expect. Try showing up for an 8am class or a job that starts at 7 when you haven't slept for the past two days straight. (Don't actually try this at home, kids.) You know that feeling you get when you've been sitting at your desk for too long and your back and neck ache? With insomnia, everything aches. Constantly. It can make you sick to your stomach, light headed, and irritable. It can ruin your appetite---some people gain weight, some people lose it, some people do both, fluctuating between the two like their internal mechanisms have gone entirely haywire, because that's essentially what they're doing.

If you don't have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, count your blessings (as well as your sheep, of course). It feels not unlike what I imagine slowly going mad might feel like, once you've gone long enough without proper rest. At times, it can be not just inconvenient and exhausting, but terrifying. For me, there's still sometimes this irrational, annoying, tiny Raven in the back of my head that chimes in, just around the time dawn is breaking, after twenty- or thirty-odd hours of sleeplessness, with the suggestion that maybe, juuuuust maybe, I would never sleep again. That tiny voice in my head is a real bastard, but when you're staring at your ceiling listening to a cacophony of robins right outside your window, even that seems plausible.

I've been trying, however, not to dwell too much on the negatives, however. So, let me say this as well.

Recently I've come to understand a curious phenomenon : when something becomes a constant, pervasive force in your life, you tend to develop a relationship with it. Whehter it is a good force or a bad force, it is an important enough influence in your life that it takes on a life of its own. To a degree this has happened to me with Mystery Illness, and it has certainly happened with insomnia. And as with all relationships, we either have to find a way to tolerate them, or cut them out of my life. Unlike other relationships, however, insomnia isn't like a jealous ex or a petty coworker. You can't just walk away from it. You have to find a way to tolerate it.

Right now, my insomnia and I have a working relationship. It is not a good relationship. It's the sort of relationship that has our friends shaking their heads and warning us away from one another, as though we could do anything to resist. It's like insomnia and I are two people stuck on a deserted island. There's no sign of rescue, so we've got to buckle down and work together, or at least around one another, to survive until help comes. (Help, in this case, is sleep. Was that metaphor not clear enough? Maybe a Lost analogy will make the deserted island metaphor better: Insomnia is Jack, and I'm Locke. Or possibly Sawyer, depending on how irritable I'm feeling.) It may not be a good relationship, but right now we have an understanding. Insomnia insists its here to stay, and since it doesn't seem to be budging on this issue, I've decided to put down my foot. If it's going to crash in my house, it's playing by my rules. Just because I'm not sleeping doesn't mean I can't be productive. Do you have any idea the number of things you can get done in the middle of the night? I can reorganize my notebooks and pens without Owl looking at me funny! I can catch up on Netflix shows I'm too busy to watch normally.

Honestly, I'm more productive when I can't sleep. A night owl by nature, I do some of my best writing in the wee hours. I read more. I draw. I paint.  The number of times I've dedicated several hours in the middle of the night to troubleshooting problems with my tablet or my PC is astonishing. Just a few hours ago I solved an issue between my tablet, an app I reaaaaaally wanted to play (guys go check out Plague Inc!) and Google Play that has been bothering me all week. Lately, I've been awake to greet the dawn. Sunrise is a time of day that I adore, but generally speaking I only see it from the wrong way round. But this week, I've been making the most of it. I've been compiling to-do lists. I've been tidying. I've started heading down to the bakery/cafe down the street when they open at 6. I grab two cups of coffee and some pastries, and bring them back home so that they're there for Owl and I when it approaches normal-people hours. Then I take my notebook and head down to the pier right behind our apartment. I love sitting on the benches and the rocks and looking out at the expanse of lake before me. I can see the downtown area and the university from the pier and the capitol building wreathed in fog is an image I will never grow tired of. I would probably rather be well-rested, but as a second choice, being constantly overwhelmed by the beauty of the city that I live in and the immense fortune and joy I have in my life is not the worst option.

Basically, this is a very long-winded explaination as to why I started this blog post at four in the morning. The bakery is open now, so I'm going to go fetch us some breakfast and take a walk down to the lake. Later today we will have the delightful rhubarb and strawberry pie we made last night, and we're making somem delicious homemade iced tea to go with it! We're planning to spend much of the day cooking and baking. We went to the Farmers' Market on Saturday, so we've got garlic bulbs and scapes that we're going to turn into a delightful compound butter along with sage from our freshly potted sage plant! We're also going to figure out what to do with the rest of our rhubarb, and do some meal planning and prepping for this week. It's going to be a pretty great day, so the fact that I got to be up for all of it is a good thing, right?

...right?

Thank God for June

I love May. I really do. It's one of my favorite months, in fact, for precisely the same reason that I am now incredibly glad it's over.

Basically everything forever happens in May, at least on my calendar. For instance, Owl, my mother, and one of my best friends all have May birthdays. Both my parents and Owl and I have anniversaries in May, theirs for their wedding, ours for our (somewhat less impressive) first date. Mother's Day happens. Memorial Day happens. If you're as huge a nerd as I am, May is a big time for that as well, as May 4th is Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with us all) and May 25th is Geek Pride Day (a.k.a. Towel Day in honor of Douglas Adams, but it also marks the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May, and the 1977 release of Star Wars).

This May we also celebrated with my cousin at her baby shower, and with two of our good college friends on the occasion of their wedding. This last event was especially exciting, and was also the main source of my exhaustion the past few days. The wedding itself was last week, and was an absolutely beautiful affair. I couldn't be happier for the beautiful couple. The occasion was especially exciting since it meant that a gaggle of college friends flew in, and we ended up having a number of folks sleeping on our couches and futon. This includes Crow, our old roommate who abandoned us forever, except not really! It was wonderful to see him for the weekend, and he got to crash in his old room, which looks exactly the same except almost everything is different. As much as we love having a new media room/guest room/office/insomnia hideaway, I think both Owl and I would much rather it still belong to Crow, and it was hard to see him leave again yesterday.

Oh, and I also was the lucky recipient of not one, not two, not three, but five doctors visits/exams/sharp needle poking experiences in the past week. It was super fun, only exactly the opposite of that. Actually, it wasn't horrendous, but that is still many more sterile white offices than I want to see in the span of seven days.

On top of that, classes ended, I turned in final papers, I was hired on for another project, and all sorts of exciting, fun, and occasionally stressful things happened.

So, May really is a fun and exciting month for me, but perhaps now you can see why I am a bit tired, and why the blog has been awfully quiet of late.

If all goes well, we will resume regular posts this week, but I don't want to make promises that I may very well break! With any luck, though, you'll see me again on Thursday.

Ta, lovelies.

-Raven the Sleepy

22 Deaths Every Day

I seem to be jumping from serious subject to serious subject of late. I will be doing another post on Boko Haram and Nigeria a bit later this week, but today is Memorial Day in the United States. Memorial Day is a US tradition stretching back to 1868 when it was Decoration Day - a day to visit the graves of fallen soldiers and honor them by placing flowers at the site. When it began, shortly after the end of the Civil War, the day focused primarily on fallen Union soldiers, but today the day serves as a collection national commemorative moment to honor all those who have given their lives in service while serving in the armed forces.

More than just a three day weekend Memorial Day is a time to reflect on the sacrifices of war and the price we pay for global military engagement. As someone who opposes war far more frequently than supporting it, today is a keen reminder of one of the reasons for that opposition as much as it is a reminder than sometimes there is no other way, though the cost is very real and very high. 

Since the Revolutionary War more than 1.3 million members of the US armed services have died in combat. Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 close to 7000 soldiers have died in combat. Iraq and Afghanistan have been the most costly military actions the US has taken since the Vietnam War. And although this Memorial Day marks the first Memorial Day since September 11th and the subsequent war in Afghanistan that ground troops have not been in active combat, the United States has still been in a state of war for most of my lifetime. 15 years out of my just barely 26. That's about 60% of my lifetime. 

Today I think about the 7000 people who have died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last 14 years who wanted to serve their country. I also think about the more than 1 million people who have given their lives in the last 240 years. Their service and deaths have shaped this country and the world. There will be other days to talk about my issues with war. Other days to question where the military recruits from and whether minorities and those who live with poverty are unfairly burdened with military service. These issues, while important, can be put aside for today in order to honor the people we have lost.

However, there is one linked issue I do want to address briefly as I think about the human cost of war today. That issue is veteran suicide. There is a number that has been floating around on the news and online for some time where this issue is concerned. 22. 22 veteran suicides a day. Or, in other words, over 8000 veteran deaths every year. That number 8000 you may notice is larger than the number of combined deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last 14 years. There are some who actually estimate that 22 is an under-reporting of the real numbers, but very few argue the number is an overestimate. What that means is that veterans are 50, in some cases (especially in the case of female veterans) more than 60 percent more likely to commit suicide than their counterparts in the civilian population.

We have a problem in this country. More soldiers are dying at peace, than at war. They deserve honor and recognition just as much as those who die on a battlefield. They deserve to feel supported for their service, not shamed. On this Memorial Day, and in the year that follows, I hope our government and the population at large will honor our fallen, our uniformed, and our veteran men and women by making veteran suicide a priority when we talk about military spending. Because service doesn't end when a war does. It's a lifelong commitment. Soldiers are holding up their end, we are failing to hold up ours.

To celebrate Memorial Day today I'm donating $22 (to represent the 22 veteran lives lost every day) to the non profit group: Stop Soldier Suicide, an organization focused on soldiers talking to other soldiers to get them to right places for help and support. You should check out the organization's website if you're interested in getting involved, or learning more about the issue of veteran suicide in the US.

I'm going to leave you with this poem from spoken word artist Andrea Gibson who sums up my feelings on this a whole lot better than I just did.

Late post is late...

...as I am back in my hometown for my mother's birthday party. Happy birthday, Mama Raven! (Though you're also Mama Rook...hm. Not quite sure how this avian family works.) There's going to be an incredibly lovely party tomorrow and I am very excited, though there's a lot of work to do! This weekend feels a little bit like the scene in Beauty and the Beast where they're all getting ready for the big feast. Y'know, sans all the talking cultery.

There are cats though. Does that count? They're not the best conversationalists, but they make up for it by pawing desperately at anybody who walks by.

I don't have much of substance to say today, as I only have a few minutes. The rest of this weekend is dedicated to family, as I don't get to see them nearly as often as I would like, and blogging takes a back seat to spending time with them. Rook is even home for the weekend, and I hardly ever get to see him. My parents and Rook are three of the most incredible people ever, and if you know them you probably wish you could be hanging out with them instead of reading this blog, too!

So, in lieu of deep substantial posts, my part of the next few days of posting will be....more lists! Owl did a stellar job of covering Boko Haram earlier this week, so at least you have something of substance to tide you over. I always said she was the smart one. (And the pretty one, and the cool one. I'm just the funny one.)

Rook just got himself some nice, shiny Marvel Unlimited. The newly-updated app combined with his sleek Fire is a pretty swank set-up, and I'm envious. Last time I tried MU on my tablet it was...basically non-functional. Looks like it's gotten a little bit better since then, so I may give it another go, but I will say there's a bit of a risk right now for anybody paying for the MU subscription and hoping for great functionality on mobile devices.

That said, in the spirit of oooh look at the shiny new comics, have a list about comics!

8 Marvel Comics Recommended by Raven and Rook (based off what we've read recently.)

1. Deadpool Vol 1: Dead Presidents
This 2012 Deadpool arch is pretty amazing. If you like Deadpool, Dead Presidents is a great arch, and if you don't...well, this is very Deadpool.
2. Runaways
A bunch of teens find out that their parents are supervillians. They're...not thrilled.
3. Ms. Marvel
Because duh.
4. Avengers Academy
Rook describes this as taking teenagers who are at risk to become super villians and training them to become heroes instead. Hopefully. 
5.  Superior Foes of Spiderman
"A Fiasco-esque story about villians plotting against villians, badly." -Rook
6. Rocket Raccoon
Did you like the Guardians of the Galaxy movie? Did you think Rocket was the best part of it? Read these. He's the best part of most things.
7. Secret Warriors
"Nick Fury's hand-picked team of unknowns that he shapes into his super-powered black ops task force." -Also Rook
8. Hawkeye Vol. 1: My Life as a Weapon
Really, this whole series is great, and Matt Fraction is stellar. But My Life as a Weapon is my favorite so far, because of the way it sets up the dynamic between Barton and Kate.

That's right. I'm mixing in recommendations for single volumes along with recommendations for entier series. There is no rhyme or reason in this world anymore!

But seriously, go read some awesome comics.

OH, AND!

**Way to go, Ireland! Today, they became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. This is incredible news! Definitely exciting enough to merit a full post. Sorry, Ireland. I'm not forgetting about you. I'll talk about how awesome you are again sometime soon.***

Have a great Memorial Day Weekend, if you're here in Amurica. If you're not, have a great normal weekend!

Cheerio,
Raven

The Truth Resists Simplicity*

Tonight's post is going to be a more serious one, but I hope you'll read anyways.

I have been watching a lot of West Wing and listening to an astounding amount of NPR both in my car and at home. That combination is bound to put me in a more reflective and somber mind frame. And there has been a lot to reflect about this week. There always seems to be. This week stories on everything from the White House restricting militarized gear for local police to concern over the Rohingya refugees driven to the sea to escape Myanmar/Burma grabbed the headlines. Not to mention the fall of Ramadi in Iraq to the Islamic State. All of these stories are worthy of a great deal of consideration and attention, but the story that has captured my attention for the week is the ongoing saga of Boko Haram in Nigeria.

One of the reasons I am so keen on this story is that my knowledge of the African continent is woefully lacking. I can tell you a few things about Kenya. I could tell you Mt. Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania. I even kept pace with stories out of Darfur in the Sudan and about Al-Shabaab in Somalia, but always in a rather distant - not quite disinterested, but quite disengaged way. I have come to realize that it is hard for me to engage with African political affairs. It is a sentiment I imagine many citizens of the US suffer as well. We don't engage well because we weren't taught to. Africa isn't high on the list of priorities in public school curriculum. We talk about apartheid in South Africa. We talk about the pharaohs and Cleopatra in Egypt. We may even talk about Rwanda or Darfur in high school (though I certainly don't remember spending any significant amount of time on it). I remember one very zealous high school teacher of mine had us memorize the map of Africa (a few years later I had a college professor who assigned the same thing), but I'll admit to not remembering much of it now. And that's it. We have no context for our engagement.

I think it is easier for us to engage with something we know at least the basics of or something that has an immediate impact on our own lives. It seems likely that people will educate themselves on the Middle East, because it's on the news all the time. Our country has more strategic interest in that region - therefore more coverage of the situation and history of the area. People are more likely to put their energies there (and let's be honest, most people in this country aren't even doing that much). Back in 2006 CNN released findings from a report that showed almost 2/3 (more than 65%) couldn't point to Iraq on a world map. We had been actively involved in a war in that country for 3 years at that point! Though that was perhaps an unsurprisingly revelation when viewed alongside the fact that a whopping 33% of respondents couldn't locate Louisiana on a map (this was 6 months after Katrina) and Louisiana has a pretty distinctive shape! Not to mention it's in the country the respondents actually live in. I wonder how many of them could place Ramadi on a map (not sure I could).

So maybe we even have difficulty engaging with anything that isn't directly outside of ourselves. Our family, our friends, our neighborhood, our town, maybe our state. I don't want to wag a finger and say "for shame" to people that feel that way, because it's a tempting feeling. To disengage and look out for ourselves. It's easier and (after listening to hours of NPR I can tell you) a hell of a lot less depressing. BUT (and here's where I do a bit of finger wagging) the United States is a superpower. The biggest in the world at the moment. We talk a lot in this country (or at least our politicians and commentators certainly do) about having a moral imperative to intercede abroad to uphold democracy and freedom. If we are going to do that we have to have an informed electorate capable of evaluating candidates effectively to speak for us. So that means the difficult process of engagement. For me, that also means confronting the great Vlogbrother's maxim that "the truth resists simplicity". Nowhere is that more apparent than in history, politics, and religion - three things that intersect splendidly in the case of Boko Haram.

So I'm going to take a swing at engagement myself today and see if I can take some of you along for the ride. Let's delve into Boko Haram a bit. Today I'm just going to explain what Boko Haram claims to be and what it grew out of. But I urge you to do your own searching because there are layers upon layers of nuance and minutiae involved in this (as in every) news story.

Let's start off simple -
What is Boko Haram?
Founded in 2002 Boko Haram is a Muslim terrorist organization based out of Nigeria (Maiduguri to be precise in the northeast of Nigeria). According to this BBC article "[t]he group's official name is Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad, which in Arabic means 'People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad.'" For my sake I'm going to refer to them by their Hausa name Boko Haram, which translated means "Western education forbidden" - Boko meaning western education and haram meaning forbidden.

What Do They Want?
What they wanted in the beginning was to oppose western education in northern Nigeria. What they want now is to overthrow the Nigerian government and create a Muslim caliphate in Nigeria. If that sounds familiar then you are clearly also listening to a lot of other extremist Muslim terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda. It's hardly a new agenda.

Which brings us to... Are They Affiliated with Other Terrorist Organizations?
Yes. They have been affiliated with Al-Qaeda in the past, but since the rise of ISIS they have thrown in their cap with the ultra-violent extremist group and received recognition from that group.

But Who Exactly Are Boko Haram?
The founder of the group is Mohammed Yusuf, a Muslim cleric from Yobe State in northeastern Nigeria. He was killed in 2009 by Nigerian security forces after increased violence instigated by Boko Haram in Maiduguri. Though most thought Boko Haram finished after Yusuf's death, the group rallied under a new leader, Abubakar Shekau. Boko Haram recruits mainly from the Kanuri, an African ethnic group living in modern day Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon. They are mainly Muslim. Many engage in the tradition of facial scarring. Their accent is also quite distinctive and they are an easily recognizable ethnic group within the country.

Where Did Boko Haram Come From?
So much for easy questions. This one is complicated and I'm not going to go into a lot of details, but for me this group can trace its beginnings to 1903 when the Sokoto caliphate fell to the British. Colonization leaves a long shadow and carving up the caliphate and imposing western education did not endear the British conquerors to their conquered. Like other extremist groups poverty also plays a large role in discontent in the region and therefore the formation of the group. It's no coincidence that some of the poorest areas of Nigeria are in the north, where Boko Haram makes its home. Young, unemployed, desperate men make for dangerous enemies. Between poverty and a historical dislike of the west you have some pretty good ingredients for anti-western extremism.

So Where Does the Complexity Come In?
The complexity is in the history in this case. There are hundreds, even thousands of years of history behind this area and the discontent is not new. And the west (and western-backed governments) clearly haven't been able to fix the problems for the region. At least at the group's core the dissatisfaction and mistrust with and of the west may very well be justified. As I said, colonization casts a long shadow. It is easy to dismiss this (and indeed all extremist groups) as "bad people" intent of causing death and chaos to upset the "good people" and the "good government", but nothing is ever that simple.
I won't argue that the people of Boko Haram aren't bad people. They're kidnapping school girls and raping them. They're forcing women to become child brides and adhere to laws they don't want (and shouldn't be forced) to follow. But they aren't mustache twirling villains out of Bond. Perhaps most importantly, they probably don't see themselves as the evil villains of the piece. They are just as convinced that we are the bad guys as we are convinced of the opposite. Their concerns aren't being honestly assessed and addressed (this is at least partly the fault of Boko Haram for pushing their agenda the way they do). But the group will never truly go away until the root of the problem is addressed. If we can't at least try to see it their way we are doomed to repeat this pattern again and again. There is a whole other side to this parallel - "the good guys". The Nigerian government is like any government, some people we would call good, some we would call corrupt and a whole lot in between.
The danger is to believe it is a simple conflict with a simple solution and a simple cause. History runs deep and memories last as long as we can hold our anger. And when you're hungry, poor, and see no promise of change for you or your children's future anger isn't hard to hold onto.



I know this a lot of information. And I know it's not easy to engage with it. There are a million "important" news stories out there. No one can really know them all. I can't tell you much about what's going with drug trafficking in Venezuela right now. Or with whatever our Congress is messing about with on the Hill. I focused on Boko Haram this week. There is a trade-off to be made. We can't do it all. But we can do something. We can make a commitment to knowing the world we live in. We can vow to look at that world with sympathy and compassion. We can try to see other countries as they see themselves, instead of imposing our culture and our norms on them.

The truth resists simplicity. But our minds love it. We have to look at the world critically, while keeping our minds open to the truth. That elusive ideal that can never quite be obtained.

Well Raven, I think that's all I've got in me for the night. I look forward to your update tomorrow (or I guess later today).



*Thanks to John Green for this gem of wisdom. You always keep me thinking.

And the answer is....

Poland. Poland is the answer to the question I posed in last night's post. A million points to anyone who can tell me why in comments.


I'm crafting a real update tonight as well, but didn't want to lump it in with the more lighthearted fare from yesterday. Should be out soon-ish.