new year's 2012

writing at new year's never seems to work out the way i hope it will, but i remembered that sometime this past january i had a better idea. having just gotten a new phone, tonight seemed like the perfect time to empty the old one of all remaining text messages.

what i found was a very telling picture of what we (i) value. whose messages are saved, which ones, and how that decision differs for different people. how many of the words i kept were my own compared to how many were sent to me by others. what relationships i built, and how, and why i felt it was important to remember.

right along with that is the razor's edge between benefit and detriment that we each walk by creating our own revisionist history. there truly are two sides to every story. but had those things been said during a phone call, rather than written, they would have been lost as soon as they were spoken, and memory--however faulty--would be our only reference.

thank god or whomever for the opportunity to start fresh.

notice:

falling in love with a girl who becomes a boy is a completely different experience than falling in love with a boy who used to be a girl.

on, in, and out of iraq

Ravaged and Remade, Iraq Is on Its Own as U.S. Ends War

i have such mixed feelings about the iraq war, and this NY Times article touches on most of them. we have spent almost 9 years, a trillion dollars, and countless lives on a war that turned out to be basically a failure. the American fatalities alone have far outstripped the lives lost on 9/11. that doesn't even address the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed. even if Saddam Hussein's unseating is a positive change for the world at large, the absence of weapons of mass destruction all but proves that this invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation was based on a lie.

i have always been anti-war, and as my life develops, i find only more reasons to hold that belief.

mantra:

inspiration, from one of my students within seconds of when her class first met me:

"k! omigosh, you are SO HERE right now!"

i kind of want a cross stitch of this on the wall of my office.