Degrees IV

As best as I can recall, The TakeOuts performed close to seventy-five gigs together before our band slowly drifted apart, inching me closer to getting that university degree my mother wanted for me so very badly. That stamped piece of paper held mystical importance to her, but I was having none of it. Could a university have taught me about the surprising dynamics of live sound, or about the tricky intricacies of being in a co-ed band, or how to find sure-fire parking on the Lower East Side? Maybe it could have, but it would have taught these subjects as concepts ressurected from paper and put up for for discussion in a spartan classroom by a thirty year-old professor. This setting was so obviously inferior to Greenwich Village's riot of color, sound and people so as to render ridiculous even the notion of such a comparison. How to help a parent to understand this? I was in my early twenties having an immersive, 3-D, university-like experience, all for the price of gas and tunnel fare.

Life motored along like this for close to two years before things started to change. It wasn’t just that the band was drifting apart, but something started changing inside of me. It began when I was standing in that alley wearing that mini-dress, in the oppressive humidity of a New Jersey summer night with the blaring Latin music pouring out from the apartment window above. Right then, right in that moment, I wasn’t so sure what I was doing anymore. Lita had just punched a man who was twice her size. I didn't know people who punched other people. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to belong anymore.

“I hit him”, Lita had said, wiping the mascara from under her eyes, and she launched into her story with a sarcastic laugh.

Well, the girl who’d answered Jon's phone was more than just a friend. Her name was Danielle, and he’d met her at a bar at a friend’s gig. Lita went on to explain that Jon had answered each and every one of her pointed questions calmly and truthfully, offering no more information than she’d asked for, and no apologies. When Lita asked Jon what he saw in Danielle, he replied that Danielle had a bachelor's degree in history. Lita punched Jon in the face when Jon reported that Danielle was now studying for her Masters in Business Administration. And that, Lita reported bitterly, was the end of that.

We finished the set together that night, Lita, Jon, Big Paulie, Little Paulie, Theo and I. Afterward, Will and I made the usual 45-minute drive home, and after that things tried to go on as usual in spite of the tectonic shift that seemed to be occurring. We had some more gigs after that, although Lita was absent for some of them. Jon started bringing Danielle around, and she turned out to be delightful, making it difficult for me to actively ignore her on Lita's behalf. Lita started spending more time with her five-year old daughter. Big Paulie was getting frustrated with the band's lack of progress toward global fame. Will and I started talking about marriage. At work, the World Wide Web started happening, and when I was assigned to a project to help figure out what to do about the Web, suddenly my day job didn't feel so pointless. My mother, who'd been hanging around in the background like Casper the Friendly University-Reminder Ghost, seized the opportunity to rattle those chains again.

More later,

S@L

How Rick Springfield Led Me To The Plight Of Mousavi's Iranian Supporters

At some point late last night, I began watching old Rick Springfield videos on YouTube. In my defense, I'd originally gone to YouTube to see a video of a friend's daughter performing in a ballet recital, but then You Tube thought that if I liked that video, I might also like these fifteen videos, and yadda, yadda, yadda, click-click-click and whaddya know, fifteen minutes later I'm watching a sweaty Rick Springfield strum his guitar with a dozen red roses.

I was watching these videos and also aimlessly watching my email and Twitter feed when I noticed that Twitter's biggest trend at the moment was the hashtag #CNNfail. This sounded slightly more interesting that Rick Springfield (and only slightly. I love Rick.), and so two clicks later I am watching the Iranian post-election drama unfold on my computer screen in nearly real-time. It turned out that some people were furious that CNN and other major media outlets were not covering the Iranian post-election events, so they were tweeting their discontent using the #CNNfail hash tag.

Judging from the tweets of Iranians immersed in the protest, these people had every right to be angry. After doing my own fact-checking and validating that indeed, as protests were raging in a country where protest was even occuring for the first time in years, neither CNN.com nor MSNBC.com featured stories of import other than the U.S. digital signal conversion, which is ironic given that even if their televisions had been working they wouldn't have seen the post-election news unfolding. Even Fox News was covering this one, people. Let that sink in for a moment: Fox. News.

I soon found myself drawn into reading the #Iranelection tweets from students and protestors on the ground. I'd refresh my screen, but after I refreshed, Twitter would report "55 more results since you (last refreshed)". Protestor after protestor were sending messages of strength to each other, or tweeting places to meet or places where the police had been seen beating and teargassing others. As a quick primer, Mousavi officially lost to Ahmadinejad, but the election results were highly suspicious for reasons which are clearly and best explained by Juan Cole.

Here are some tweets from 15 hours ago:

"Security forces are now gathering a large force near university of physics"

"From Enghelab square my friend just called me, Police & unknown forces beating everybody for no apparent reason"

"tired & beaten. we couldn't break through their wall, they were too many & we were no match for an entire army of special forces"

"according to rumor mousavi requested all people to gather near his office at 12:30 pm today"

"I'm going inside the building to inform the others, I hope we can get out peacefully with university's bus, we must be there at 12:30"

At this point, many people tweet this protestor not to go to Mousavi's speech because it could be a trap. To which he responds:

"We can't just risk loosing mousavi because it could be a trap! his core support was always us students!"

I began the evening watching Rick sing "I Get Excited", and ended the evening actually getting so excited by this student's minute-by-minute plight that I could not go to bed. I was worried for his safety, and I didn't think he should go to the 12:30 speech because it seemed suspicious. I am a mom, after all.

Even though CNN failed, "experiencing" current events through Twitter was far closer to 'being there" than any major news outlet could bring me because I was hearing from real, live people who were right in the mix. There was no intermediary. I could instantly follow people like @Change_For_Iran, and know where he was, where he was going next, what the police were doing there, and what he thought about it all. I could watch his real time videos and even speak "directly" to him, if I chose. When I started following him late last night, he had 2,300 followers. Now he has 5,848. Read for yourself. At the time I write this, Twitter is reporting that the Iranian police are opening fire on protestors. The people are the first to know.

The revolution will not be televised after all. It will be Twitterized.

More later,

S@L

The One Where She Talks About Abortion

The next installment in the "Degrees" series has been temporarily put on hold for a post about - what else - abortion! Read on as I touch the third rail of mommy blogging with a post that officially transforms me from "Mommy Blogger" to "Blogger".

I started thinking about abortion again with the news of the murder of Dr. Tiller. Surely you've heard about this tragedy. If you haven't, Google some current events and come back later. If you have not heard of Google, please go make me a shed or a pie and then come back and I will fill you in.

The truth is that when I first heard of Dr. Tiller as "a provider of third-trimester abortions", my immediate, visceral aversion to the thought of a "third trimester abortion" was concerning. My God, I thought, what is happening to me? I am a woman who is, for all intents and purposes, a one-issue voter on this topic. Have I reached some weird life stage to which we seem to lose so many otherwise reasonable people to the Red Hat Society, or to golf?

I raised the issue with my husband in bed, when the lights were out. I do not recommend this approach for the discussion of weighty issues. My second mistake was in not providing context for my comments. Just before sleep hit us, my husband said something about the horror of Dr. Tiller's murder, and I, assuming he was inside of my head, said, "Yeah...I don't know."

I felt the slow turn of his head on the pillow.

"Yes, it was tragedy, an act of terror, and a crime.", I responded, "But separately from that, it got me thinking about the issue of third-trimester abortions in general."

In reality I didn't respond quite like this, but this is my blog and one of the benefits of having a blog is that you can easily edit your words to sound smarter and more put-together. It's fun until you meet your readers in person and they realize that you are actually just like them, kind of frenetic and not concise, and they wonder when, exactly, you took your Giant Pill Of Ridiculousness.

My husband is, as those of you who know him can attest, not a man who has passing conversations about Big Ticket Topics. You gotta be on your game to raise and discuss Big Ticket Topics with my husband and leave the conversation with some semblance of Un-Ridiculousness. My husband is a man of facts and logic. The man will can whip out facts of all varieties in his sleep. I am a woman of a few facts, some decent logic, hot shoes, common sense, a good handbag, and a little gossip.

It was as these two people that we had "the talk", the difficult talk that only two undying liberals can have in the privacy of their own home about the philosophy behind abortion. And I said what I feel, which is this:

• I am personally morally comfortable with abortions up to the 12th week of gestation.

• I am personally morally comfortable with third-trimester abortions for reasons where the mother's life is threatened, the mother is a 9 year-old rape and incest victim, or if the fetus is proven to have severe genetic issues.

I didn't say that what I felt was logical. I just said that this is where my personal moral compass stands on the issue. But a problem comes in when I explore that "feeling" a little deeper.

If I believe the two statements above, then it follows that:

• if I am morally comfortable with an abortion in the first trimester (for any/all reasons), but I am not somehow not morally comfortable with an abortion (for any/all reasons) in the third trimester, so I seem to believe that "life" and someone's right to it begins at some arbitrary point after the 12th week of gestation.

Okay, fine: I have inadvertently decided that human life begins at the beginning of the second trimester. Great. Arbitrary, of course, but there is no definitive answer on the issue. It's complicated. But let's follow this logic:

• If I am morally comfortable with the idea of a third-trimester abortion under some circumstances but not others, what I'm really saying is that I am morally comfortable with taking the life of a human who had, according to my own logic, a right to it (again, regardless of the circumstances).

• If I am morally comfortable with the idea of a third-trimester abortion in circumstances where the mother's life is threatened, the mother is 9 years-old, or if the fetus is proven to have severe genetic issues, but I am not comfortable with the idea when both the mother and child are healthy and projected to remain healthy, then I should accurately call a third-trimester abortion of a severely genetically disabled life by another name, which is something akin to euthanasia - a death for some greater good.

I know. I know.

Go ahead and take a moment to collect yourself. Read through my logic again if you must. Believe me, I have been through it over and over in my own thoughts, and I cannot find the "loophole" that makes me (and me personally), feel that a third-trimester abortion is somehow not euthanasia.

I am not saying that euthanasia is wrong in certain extreme, third-trimester cases. Keep the origin of the word in mind: [Greek euthanasiā, a good death : eu-, eu- + thanatos, death.] I am simply saying that I, personally, cannot call a third-trimester abortion an "abortion" because I seem to believe that a fetus is actually a "life" when it starts to look like a baby, but not before that. And of course, you see that *that* is where some Big Ridiculousness comes in. When does a life begin? At conception or consciousness? It might matter to me.

I checked my ACLU card and it's still there. I am still beaming-proud of Obama, and I still believe that George W. Bush took a Giant Pill Of Ridciulousness every single day, sometimes twice, and probably intravenously. I will never vote in such a way that puts my daughter in danger of dying in a back alley, where she was praying to fix a mistake or a crime. But I agree with Ayelet Waldman, who stated yesterday at a talk that we need to come up with better national dialog on the issue. Maybe we can start by having those hard-to-have conversations in our own homes. My hope is that one of the fervent anti-choice advocates will turn to her equally anti-choice husband in the night and give voice to some tiny, nagging question about their standard logic. Something like, "You know? I'm not sure that it's 'right' to prevent a woman who has been raped from having an abortion."

With any luck, her husband will listen respectfully and be interested enough in her logic to consider another point of view. My husband was not threatened by my seeming 'break from the pack', he was merely annoyed that I'd chosen 10:46PM on a "school night" to kick off what has since become an interesting and ongoing and multi-faceted discussion.

Postscript: Before you consider commenting on the general topic of this post (which is that of having thoughtful, objective dialog about abortion), please know that if you are going to comment fervently on one side or the other side of the currently-defined "sides" of the abortion issue, you are completely missing the point of this post. Everyone reading your comment will say, "What a shame. That person completely missed the point of this post. Their mamma didn't raise them right. "

More later,

S@L

PS - If you are interested in reading more about this general topic, my husband has alerted me to Ted Rall's great article "How Pro-Choicers Should Learn To Talk To Pro-Lifers".