When it comes to firing someone, there is a right way and a wrong way.  When it comes to breaking up with someone the rules are less clear but still somewhat defined.  When the split falls somewhere around the halfway point along the continuum between these two situations I suspect that the rules are especially vague.  Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder if Tiger Woods still managed to do it wrong.

It came out this week that Woods fired his longtime caddie Steve Williams.  Williams had been with him for 12 years, since nearly the beginning of the golfing phenom’s career.  And in a move that was apparently as shocking to Williams himself as it was to the rest of us, Woods has cut him loose.

I don’t fault Tiger for changing caddies.  He has a job to do (although he’s been riding the bench lately) and if he feels that a new caddy is going to improve his performance then he should make that change.  But, like most aspects of Tiger Woods’ life in the past couple of years, this one isn’t quite so simple.  The difference here is that Williams has been fiercely loyal to Tiger.  Such loyalty isn’t all that impressive when your boss is the number one golfer in the world and you take a percentage of all his winnings.  It becomes more so when your boss becomes mired in a tawdry sex scandal, tumbles in the rankings, and sits out of multiple tournaments nursing various injuries.

What I’d like to have seen out of Woods this week is something of a mea culpa.  I wish he’d said something to the tune of, “It’s not Stevie’s fault that my life is in a shambles, or that I need to make radical changes just to recalibrate myself.  He’s a hell of a caddy and anyone else on the tour will be lucky to have him.  I’m grateful for his loyalty both on and off the golf course.”  That, however, is not what he said.  Paying mere lip service to the man who carried his bag for more than a decade he said, “I want to express my deepest gratitude to Stevie for all his help, but I think it’s time for a change,”  Something about it feels obligatory.

When you get right down to it, Tiger Woods’ life is really not my business.  Whether he is gracious or surly in his professional life affects me no more than any one else whose professional life doesn’t intersect with my own.  Nevertheless, for better or worse, he plays a big role in setting the tone in the sports world.  Young people look at him and want to model themselves after him.  I think he missed an opportunity here.  (If we’re being frank, he’s missed a lot of opportunities lately.)  He could have fallen on his sword a bit, taken some accountability for the fact that he got himself into this mess, and softened the ground for Williams before going public with the split.  That wasn’t the path he chose, though.

It’s such a tricky business looking to athletes to model citizenship for us.  Professional athletes have reached the pinnacle of their respective sports by being singularly focused on their performance and competitive edge.  In many cases other traits – like grace and gratitude – get left behind.  And yet we try to build up the image of a well-rounded individual to suit our own desires.  Naturally there are exceptions here, but by and large I have to believe we’re better served by making role models out of people whom we know to be worthy of our discipleship, rather than people whose lives are bright and shiny on the outside, but may not be so when the curtain is lifted.

Breaking up is never easy.  I suspect it is even harder when the world is watching.  And that is why it confounds me that Woods didn’t do it more carefully.  Apparently, even after nearly two years of disappointment, my expectations are still too high.

Last month the nation took notice when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas announced in the The New York Times Magazine that he had been living in the U.S. illegally since the age of 12.  As a follow-up to that article he was interviewed by Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday; an interview that I listened to with rapt attention.

Of all that was fascinating about Vargas’ story, the element that most captivated me was the one that I felt was most overlooked – the circumstances under which he left his home country.  In his NYT piece Vargas describes it this way:

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12.

In the NPR interview Vargas elaborated that he has never left the U.S. since his arrival here in 1993, and has not seen his mother since the day he left her.  He commented that he understood from a very young age that his future lay in America; that he did not know how or when that future might begin, only that some day it would.

But back to his departure from the Philippines.  I cannot fathom it.  For starters, having been lucky enough to be born in a developed nation, much less into a happy, educated, and stable family, I cannot entirely wrap my head around what it must be like to grow up knowing that everything around you is something you’re trying to escape.  Further still, I cannot imagine, at the age of 12 – old enough to understand the magnitude of what’s happening, yet not old enough to control any of it – being shipped off with a stranger with no prior warning and very little explanation.  And yet the way Vargas tells it, this was not by any means the most poignant moment of his journey as an illegal immigrant.  But I would imagine that this kind of thing happens all the time.

The promise of a better life, that’s what motivates these often-heart-wrenching stories.  Vargas beat the odds – most illegal immigrants do not go on to work for the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the New York Times.  (Even the most advantaged journalists struggle to compete for those jobs.)  But in spite of the odds of any notable success being slim, those odds are perceived as an improvement over a person’s status quo.

So I wonder, does the promise of that better life offer enough hope to assuage the pain of being ripped from your mother at the dawn of your adolescence?  Are those wounds that can ever heal?  In his NPR interview Vargas didn’t speak about there being wounds there at all (which isn’t to say that they aren’t there and were perhaps just too personal to discuss, or simply not the point of his story).  But if this story were mine I can only imagine that that August morning in 1993 would be a pivotal moment in my experience, rather than merely the introduction.

I wonder if he thinks it was worth it.  I wonder if the promise of a better life – a promise which for Vargas was actually realized – was enough to offset what had to have been a traumatic moment.  Even more so I wonder about the people who do not end up as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists – the people who end up picking fruit or cleaning hotel rooms.  For those people was that promise, which America maybe didn’t make good on, enough to soothe the loss of what they left behind?

When I was pregnant with IEP I quite specifically did not want to know if he was a boy or a girl.  Not typically prone to sixth senses about things, I had the strong sensation throughout that pregnancy that I was not supposed to know.  I felt that my job was to focus on keeping myself and my baby healthy – getting rest and exercise and maintaining a balanced diet – and that knowing the sex would just be a distraction.  GAP (who probably would have opted to find out the sex) graciously indulged my desire to remain in the dark.  And so it was that it was in my delivery room that we first heard the words, “It’s a boy” (in a decidedly uncelebratory tone…).

Because my first pregnancy was routine throughout, textbook even, I was able to make the decision not to find out my baby’s sex very much about me and my desires.  This time around, it all went down differently.

In mid-May I went in for my 16-week prenatal appointment during which blood was drawn for my Quad Screen.  Four days later I got a phone call informing me that my test results indicated the baby had an elevated risk for Downs Syndrome.  Three days after that GAP and I met with a genetic counselor.  I had a detailed ultrasound looking for physical markers of Downs, the results of which were encouraging, but inconclusive.  We ultimately decided to have an amniocentesis done to determine with certainty whether or not our baby was healthy.  The whole ordeal was overwhelming, and stressful, and frightening.

The great thing about an amnio is that it is extraordinarily accurate.  The bad thing about an amnio is that the results take days to determine.  Our initial results (which looked specifically for Downs) took five days.  The full panel of results took more than a week.  In the five days between the time the amnio was performed and the time the initial results were given to us we: drove three hours to spend Memorial Day weekend with GAPs family, smiled extensively for professional pictures of the entire family (19 of us including six kids aged three and under), cried as we left IEP with his grandparents and drove three hours back home to leave for vacation, caught a delayed flight to Chicago, missed our connection to Dublin, spent 24 unplanned hours in Chicago waiting for the next Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, flew to Dublin, and drove to Belfast.  It was not exactly an easy few days.  And that is how it came to pass that we were standing on a street corner in Belfast when we got the genetic counselor’s phone call telling us that our baby is healthy.

We ducked into a mostly-empty bar to call our parents with the news.  GAP drank a pint of Smithwick’s and I drank a Coke.  We breathed a great sigh of relief, and continued our sightseeing knowing our baby was fine.

At this point we still didn’t know the sex.

Until my Quad Screen results came back, I had assumed that we would take the same approach to finding out the baby’s sex as we had the first time around.  I contemplated finding out for IEP’s sake, thinking that something as abstract as a pregnancy would be easier for a two-year-old to grasp if he knew whether he was getting a brother or a sister.  But since IEP is only beginning to understand that he himself is a boy I eventually settled back into my original philosophy – focus on having a healthy pregnancy.  The Downs Syndrome fears, however, changed my whole paradigm.

The decision which was once all about me and my idiosyncracies (again, because GAP had always left it up to me) was no longer about me, and all about the baby.  I decided that if the amnio results came back positive for Downs we would find out the sex; that in that situation I wouldn’t comfortable leaving any unknown hanging in the balance.  As I waited to have the amnio done and then waited again for the results this approach – this “I should find out everything I can about this baby” approach – seeped deep into every thought I had about the pregnancy.

Later that evening in Belfast we sat in a pub waiting to order dinner.  It was only 1:00pm at home.  A single phone call back to our genetic counselor was all it would take to find out the sex if we wanted to.  After days of hoping for the best but bracing for the worst most of my convictions about waiting to find out the baby’s sex had crumbled.  So when GAP said, “Oh let’s find out,” that was all it took for me to pick up the phone and call.

We are having another boy, and I couldn’t be happier.

As for my thoughts on finding out the sex, well, they are quite varied at this point.  Most of all, it feels weird knowing.  When you don’t find out the sex you’re always explaining yourself.  “Is it a boy or a girl?” people would ask.  “Oh, we didn’t find out.”  Then there was always an awkward pause where I was presumably supposed to justify that decision.  There is something about knowing the sex that makes conversations with people (especially strangers) much easier.

But beyond that bit of prenatal culture shock my dominant thought is that my opinions on the matter carry no weight outside of my own family.  I did what was right for me both times, and made a different decision each time.  If my own circumstances can sway my decision from one pregnancy to the next, who am I to weigh the merits of finding out for somebody else?  It is a highly personal decision, and unless it’s my own pregnancy it has nothing to do with me.  Thankfully, most of the time it is a fun decision that is not riddled with health concerns.  But rarely do we know the full story of another person’s pregnancy.  We don’t know what factors influenced her decision.  And frankly it’s none of our business.

My baby is healthy.  And truly, that is the only thing that matters.

I remember the first time I heard the phrase “retail therapy.”  I was working at my first job out of college and a colleague – a few years older, very pretty, and very sophisticated (I had a bit of a girl crush on her) – mentioned that she was going shopping after work because it had been a long week and she needed some retail therapy.  “Ohhhhhh,” I thought, recognizing the sentiment, ”It has a name!”

Ever since then I’ve considered retail therapy a privileged person’s excuse for placating her materialism.  (Which certainly isn’t to say that I haven’t indulged in it myself.)  So I was surprised to learn this week that a study has proven that retail therapy is psychologically legit.  I made my way through the article waiting for the other shoe to drop.  As I neared the end I expected to read that the temporary mood boost afforded by shopping is short lived, and gives way to buyer’s remorse and feelings of guilt.  Conversely, while the article conceded that the negative moods that lead to retail therapy can spike impulsive behavior, the net effect is that ”…retail therapy has lasting positive impacts on mood. Feelings of regret and guilt are not associated with the unplanned purchases made to repair a bad mood.”

My mixed response to this news surprised me.  On one hand, I though, ”Hooray!  Affirmation!”  On the other hand I thought, “Really?  Is this how we want to encourage people to work through bum moods?”

I think my second response stems back to a particular moment of my adolescence when I experienced exactly the same feelings of guilt and remorse that the article said don’t correspond to retail therapy.  As a kid I was a huge penny pincher.  I collected my allowance for weeks and weeks in a hinged wooden piggy bank.  I remember that at one point in second grade I had accumulated $80 thanks to my miserly ways.  And while, for the most part, I enjoyed counting my pennies and congratulating my incredible fiscal restraint (yes, GAP, this is all true…), there were moments when I felt like a prisoner of my own piggy bank.  Eventually I snapped.  When I was 15 I decided to let my hair down for once and go on a bit of a shopping spree.  Wielding my Loony Toons checkbook with conviction I spent about $350 in the course of a few hours.  I experienced an incredible high in the process, but that happiness quickly gave way to the sense that I’d made a huge mistake.  Sitting in my bedroom surrounded by shopping bags I felt deflated (much like my checking account balance…).

In retrospect I think it was the extreme swing in my behavior that left me feeling like I’d gotten in over my head.  The article mentions that most people spend about $59 to perk up a bad mood, and $115 to celebrate an achievement.  And those figures are for adults, who, presumably, earn more than $15 per week doing household chores.  This context allows me to see that my $350 spending spree as a 15-year-old was far more impulsive than I realized.

As an adult I have settled into more moderate spending patterns.  Part of me is happy to learn that whatever emotional boost I get from a new blouse or trip to the cosmetics counter is psychological fact.  But I also worry that this study may lure people into the belief that they have carte blanche to solve their problems with spending.  I hear stories on the news about how many Americans have no savings accumulated, how much credit card debt we carry, and how our proclivity to spend money we don’t have has gotten us into trouble time and again.  Nevertheless, whether your splurge is a $500 handbag or a $5 cappucino, it’s still nice knowing that with some regard for our relative means, we can indulge ourselves without major regret.

Epilogue – My ill-advised shopping spree did help me stumble into my favorite retail therapy trick.  When I’m in the mood to shop, but don’t actually need anything, I go about it as I usually would, perusing clothing racks, trying things on etc.  Once I’ve settled on the collection of things I want to buy I take them to the counter and ask the salesperson to put them on hold for me.  If I really want them, I’ll continue thinking about them for a couple of days and be willing to go back for a planned purchase.  But nine times out of 10 I don’t.  I’ve sated my impulse desire to shop without actually spending anything.

I would wager that at some level we each like to fancy ourselves the curator.  That is, we believe that we know a good thing when we see it.  Especially those of us in the blog-reading/writing set like to believe that we are tuned in, aware of our surroundings, observent, and (dare I say it) present.  We notice and appreciate the little things around us that only gain meaning when thoughtfully absorbed.  But really, would we notice beauty – true beauty – if we walked past it out of context?

A 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece from The Washington Post says no.

I came across this piece by way of my mother, who had tickets to see Joshua Bell in concert this past weekend.  She mentioned the Washington Post’s experiment to me, and naturally I had to go find the whole story.  It went down like this:

At 7:51am on a Friday morning in January of 2007 (yes, I’m a little late to the party here) acclaimed virtuoso violinist Josh Bell put on jeans and a t-shirt, carried his $3.5 million Stradivarius violin into D.C. subway station, threw some seed money into his case, and started playing.  He played six pieces over the course of about 45 minutes with the objective of discovering which busy commuters would recognize talent and beauty when they heard it.

The results, as you might expect, were rather disappointing.  It turns out that we Americans are an uncultured lot who can’t appreciate musical brilliance when it’s standing in front of us.  Actually, that overstates it as there are various theories explained the article as to why people overlook such beauty when they aren’t expecting to see it (or in this case, hear it).  Nevertheless, the fact remains that in the 43 minutes Bell played 1,097 people walked past him.  Of those 1,097 people 27 gave money, most without stopping, and a mere seven stopped to listen with more focus.

The original article goes into much more detail about the entire event.  It is both fascinating and a bit heartbreaking and I highly encourage you to read it because I am leaving further description of it to the Post, as A) it’s already a Pulitzer quality article, so really what more could I add? and B) my thoughts on the subject are in a slightly different vein.

Going back to my original comments on our abilities to play the curator, what is it we’re looking for when we identify something as beautiful?  Is there some objective yardstick against which all objects are measured?  Or is it all merely a function of our own perception?  The Post article cites Gottfried Leibniz who claims that beauty is a measurable fact, David Hume who believes it is merely an opinion, and Immanuel Kant who claims that it is, “a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer.”   This hybrid definition then raises the question, are heralded classics played by a master more beautiful in Carnegie Hall than they are in the D.C. metro?  Or are they just as lovely, but we are predisposed not to realize it because we don’t expect it?  I am inclined to say No.  I suspect that Bell’s performance was every bit as stunning on that January morning in the metro as it was the week before in the Library of Congress, and that it was the mindset of the commuter that blinded most of them to the actuality of their surroundings in that moment.

Further still, does one kind of beauty trump another?  Is one of Monet’s lily pads – considered to be masterpieces – more beautiful than a sunset off view from your balcony at the end of a perfect day on vacation?  (I mention the lily pads on purpose, because I’ve always found them a bit dull.)  If seeing something created by an artistic genius and arbitrarily hanging on a museum wall does less for me (I’m just talking about the lily pads here) than the sunset that is laced with context and subtext, does this mean that I’m an ignorant boor?  Surely not.  Nevertheless, if there is any objective component then shouldn’t the Monet masterpiece carry more, or at least equal, weight in my estimation?

Setting all these abstract questions aside, there was one aspect of the article on the Joshua Bell experiment that has stuck with me the most since I first read it more than a week ago.  Of the 1,097 people who passed Bell, every single one of the children either stopped or tried to stop, only to be rushed along by their parents.  This tells me that at some level, we are innately wired to recognize beauty in any context, but that over time that ability atrophies and perhaps eventually dies altogether if left unused.  There are a number of times in life when the mindset of a child behooves us.  Joshua Bell in a subway station, it turns out, is one of those times.

I think I started down this path a couple of weeks ago when I opted to read Prep instead of continuing to stall out in my attempts at Anna Karenina.  What I wasn’t ready to tell you then was that my failure with Tolstoy had much to do with being pregnant, and with the fact that lately if I get into bed at 9:30 my typical half hour of reading is always trumped by the opportunity for more sleep.  Nevertheless, I made the decision (for which I continue to be glad as I am now devouring Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto) to accept the fact that, despite my best intentions, I had bitten off more than I could chew.  It seems I have arrived at such a crossroads again.

A couple of months ago I told you about my upcoming cupcake battle with GAP’s family.  When I wrote that post I was eager for Cupcake Wars.  My competitive spirit had been stirred.  I made the first of what I thought would be many batches of trial cupcakes in pursuit of my best contender.  But shortly thereafter that plan was derailed (also by pregnancy).  The first trimester sends my regular sweet tooth into hiding and has me craving salty, savory foods.  The mere thought of multiple batches of cupcakes (and worse yet, frosting – blech!) was enough to make my stomach turn.  As it turned out, my first trial batch was also my last.

I changed tack and decided to submit my entry into the savory cupcake category – I was charmed by thoughts of tiny chicken pot pies and potato gratins tucked into cupcake wrappers.  I would conquer the cupcake battle yet!

As it turns out, that plan has fallen by the wayside as well.  The reason?  IEP.

Early this month I spent six days on the West coast with my sister and her new baby.  It was, as always, difficult being away from my adorable and increasingly hilarious son, but it was an important trip, and one which I wouldn’t trade.  Then, for the first half of this week I was in San Diego for work.  This weekend we will be busy with GAP’s family.  And early next month I will be away for several days again.  This meant that upon arriving home Wednesday night I had two evenings with IEP before the craziness of weekend family plans and additional travel began whittle away at my time with him.

I could have spent those two evenings crafting tiny pot pies (which, for the record, would have been delicious and prize worthy), but making such creations would also have made me, well, miserable.  I would have been guilt-ridden by my divided attention, and would not have enjoyed what should have been a fun culinary project due to the acute pains of being spread too thin.

I don’t like saying “I can’t.”  It doesn’t roll off my tongue easily.  And if we want to get technical about things I could have gotten it all done.  I could have stayed up late, sacrificed sleep, ignored the sage suggestions of my husband to let something slide, and managed to squeeze a few batches of savory cupcakes into two evenings packed with laundry, dog walking, packing, and limited toddler snuggling.  But here’s what’s great about being 33 instead of 23: I don’t want to.

Aging certainly has its drawbacks.  My body doesn’t look like it did 10 years ago.  I have plucked at least half a dozen grey hairs from my head in the past month.  And 11:00 at night feels awfully late these days.  But today I have confidence that was totally out of reach in my twenties.  I have nothing to prove – especially to GAP’s family who has known and loved me for nearly a dozen years now.  I can bow out of Cupcake Wars without a dent to my pride.  I can easily explain that things have been crazy lately and I felt it was more important to spend my free time working puzzles with my son than tweaking recipes in the kitchen.  I can fawn over everyone else’s delicious confections without thoughts of inadequacy swirling in my head.

And let me tell you what – it feels good.

It’s hard admitting what I can’t do.  It’s hard accepting that I have limitations.  But I know from experience that it’s even harder to live a life under the delusion that I don’t.  I’m disappointed to withdraw from a fun family competition.  I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to tell white lies about secret ingredients and playfully trash talk with my sisters-in-law.  But 10-ish years of adulthood and two-and-a-half years of motherhood give a girl perspective.  And what a relief that is.

Thank you all for your kind congratulations on my little announcement on Monday.  It is an exciting time in the life of our family and I was likewise excited to share it with you.

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to respond to your comments as they were written.  I was in the air most of Monday, making my way to the San Diego area for work.  As you can see from the photo below (taken from my hotel room), it’s miserable here.

Paradise aside, this trip has gotten me thinking about the blessings and curses of business travel.  Here I am with enjoying an unparalleled climate, laughs and meals with coworkers, and the luxury of sleeping past 6:00.  And yet at the same time my thoughts drift toward home – toward my husband and my son, both of whom I miss deeply, and toward the tornado-riddled Midwest.

In the midst of these thoughts there is another thought that courses through my head – a thought I have some measure of guilt about: Why can’t I be from here?  Of course, we could move here if we wanted to.  But we can’t move our families and we can’t move our roots.  They are in the Midwest and there’s nothing I can do about that.  There are  many things about the Midwest that I find maddening.  The cold, icy winters and the hot, humid summers.  The politics.  The lack of emphasis on arts.  The poor air quality and the poor public schools.  And yet, the Midwest is where we’re from.  It is home.

I don’t know if we’ll always live in the Midwest.  And in the midst of trips like this, it becomes very easy to imagine a life someplace else.  As avid and eager travelers, GAP and I debate this conundrum often.  We love our life as it is, but we love to imagine our life as it might be in some other place.  We think of all that we would gain, and of all that we would lose.

And this brings me back to my original thought – why can’t we just be from here?  It would make things so much easier.

When you learned of the death of Osama bin Laden, what was your first thought?  Actually, scratch that.  What was your tenth thought?  What was going through your mind the next day as the story unfolded and the details (many erroneous – tsk, tsk) spilled forth?  Did you weigh out whether or not you felt happy about the death of another person?  Did you marvel at the bravery and strategic mettle of our armed forces?  Did you shake your head in disbelief as you tried to put yourself in President Obama’s shoes with such a huge decision on the line?  Or did you see dollar signs?

I’m not a sociologist or a social worker or a shrink, but I’d wager that those first three responses were totally normal – universal even – given the magnitude of what had happened.  On the other hand, if you’d told me that within a handful of days you’d filed trademark applications for the name “SEAL Team 6″ (the illustrious group that executed the bin Laden raid), I might have, ever-so-politely of course, suggested that you were a sociopath.  And yet, that is exactly what the Walt Disney Company did.

Yes, my friends, in the wake of this national moment most of us grappled with a buffet of conflicting emotions.  We sorted out fact from rumor.  We sat in disbelief that this man, who had so long seemed a phantom, had actually been found in the flesh.  But while the rest of our heads were still spinning, Mickey and Donald and the gang trotted their way straight to the patent office and made sure they’d get a sweet payday out of the deal.

I’m no fool.  I know that Disney is not all princesses and fairy dust and Mouseketeers.  It is a behemoth, and an immensely profitable behemoth at that.  The Magic Kingdom may peddle a dream of childhood innocence, but the magic word here is “peddle.”  As in “sell.” As in “they’re not giving anything away for free.”  Not Disneyland admission.  Not movie tickets.  Not stuffed, flammable dolls of Minnie or Simba or Ariel.  So it’s not like I’m living in a dream world believing that Disney exists merely for the good of humanity.  But this?  I found this move a little unseemly even for a mega-corporation.*

Beyond my moral aversion to this news, I question both the legal viability of such a trademark as well as the business wisdom.  From the legal perspective, how can a corporation trademark the name of a U.S. military organization?  Surely names like Army, Navy, and Marines are owned by the federal government, that is if they do not supercede ownership altogether.  Does Disney really have a case here?  I asked a lawyer friend this very question and his answer was: absolutely.  He surmised that something as big as “U.S. Navy” is probably already trademarked,  but such a small and heretofore not-so-famous military squad may well not be.  And there’s nothing to stop Disney from laying claim to it if they get there first.

As for the business wisdom, I wonder what Disney’s intentions for this trademark are.  Will they merely ring up royalties any time a news outlet mentions the name of the SEAL team in question?  Or will they plaster it on lunchboxes and action figure sets available in every Target and Toys R Us nation wide?  If it is the former, wouldn’t royalty-paying types just take care not to use the name “SEAL Team 6″ (which, if we’re being persnickety, and clearly I am, was technically dissolved in 1987 and renamed United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group)?  And if it’s the latter, is there no concern that today’s lunchbox-toting set has zero recollection of September 11th, and further that their parents may be reluctant to purchase such toys for fear of thrusting the concept of terrorism at their kids too early?  Perhaps the opportunity cost of filing an application was too low to worry about such pitfalls.  Certainly products aimed at an older demographic (movies, video games, etc.) are more likely commercialization candidates.  But I still question whether the mere presence of a viable target market validates the creation of a product that, when you get right down to it, ultimately profits from acts of terrorism and revenge.

Much like the celebration itself that ensued after bin Laden’s death, this situation leaves me feeling icky.  So today I will force myself to be thankful for free speech and a free economy.  Because in moments like these it’s their dark side that shines the brightest.

*That is not to say that I think Disney is a fundamentally a bad company, or that I wouldn’t patronize them.  On the contrary, we, along with GAP’s entire family, are already planning a trip to Disney World for next year and I am quite looking forward to it.  Nevertheless, I find this particular decision unfortunate and unsavory.

Last year I was something of a New Year’s Resolutions maven.  I laid out my resolutions on January first and lived up to each of them all year long.  It was incredibly satisfying.

So far, this year has been different.  At the moment, I’m one for nine.  (I have actually been pretty good about carrying reusable grocery bags.)  Here we are, more than a third of the way through the year and I have only one victory to my name.  I still have plenty of time to make good on most of my promises, but there’s one in particular that has been a real struggle and I have a strong suspicion that it’s not going to improve.  My nemesis this year?  Reading.

This particular failing hits me hard because my reading goal for last year – to read more nonfiction – was a smashing success.  I devoured one nonfiction title after another.  As a lifetime reader of novels up to that point I was both invigorated by and impressed with my ability to find such strong affection for a new genre.  Not only did I like trying something different, but I liked having a reading goal for the year.  I established a new reading goal for this year – to read literary classics – and was eager to replicate last year’s success.

By this time last year I’d finished about five books within my goal category.  My tally this year: none.  I’ve been 20 pages into Anna Karenina for about three months now.  Every time I pick it up I enjoy what I read, but can’t seem to plow through more than three or four pages at a time and finally stalled out completely a month or so ago.  It’s completely depressing.  I’ve had some big distractions lately which make my failure slightly more tolerable.  Nevertheless, I’m still disappointed in myself.

The silver lining to all this, though, is that I’m about to permit myself a paradigm shift.

I don’t like not reading.  And for whatever reason Tolstoy, Cather, Dickens, the Brontes, Shakespeare, Proulx, and Franzen aren’t doing it for me right now.  As long as I keep myself boxed into this category, reading just doesn’t appeal to me.  Since not reading at all is not a path I’m willing to take (that would be a bigger failure than merely flaking out on my classics goal), I’ve decided to change tack.  And I have my new niece to thank for that.

I flew out to the West coast last Friday to visit my sister’s tiny and darling lump of a baby.  Since I wasn’t especially enthralled with the book I had brought along I started perusing her shelves when I got here.  Without much thought I picked up her copy of “Prep.”  For reasons I can’t adequately articulate, but which almost certainly relate exclusively to misperceptions about the quality of the writing and the relevance of the subject matter, I didn’t read it when it hit the bestseller lists about five years ago.  Something about being in vacation mode permitted me to indulge myself of a book with a pink grosgrain belt displayed across the dust cover.  But within the first 10 pages I was hooked.  Not only did I quickly discover how brilliant Curtis Sittenfeld’s writing is, but I remembered how great it feels to get lost in a book.

I bring this all up today because in the life of this blog I’ve been a big advocate of goals.  I still am a big advocate of goals.  I think it’s important to identify the things about ourselves that we wish were different and earmark them for improvement.  However, I also think it’s important to be realistic, flexible, and tolerant when we fall short of our ambitions.  In this case I’m choosing a lesser of evils.  Better to read what engages me (within reason, of course – no Danielle Steele around here) than not to read at all.  Perhaps later in the year I’ll find myself with renewed vigor for the classics.  But for the moment I’m happy to be devouring something unexpected, fun, and wickedly clever.  For the moment it was more important to renew my vigor for reading in the first place.

Over the past two days I have been relieved to learn that I am not alone in my discomfort with all the celebration over the death of Osama bin Laden.  When the news broke I clutched GAP’s hand.  I was incredulous.  A smile started to spread across my face which I quickly stifled.  And as the news started to sink in my appreciation for the gravity of the situation increased.

Prior to President Obama’s address to the nation news anchors filled air with the few details that had been confirmed, and with coverage of the spontaneous celebrations that had erupted in Times Square and in front of the White House.  Those celebrations didn’t sit right with me at the time, but it took me a little while to articulate why.  Then, on Monday, I posted the following to my Facebook wall:

I’m bewildered by all the celebration over Bin Laden’s death. I feel relief. I feel thankful. And I feel a sense of closure. But I do not feel joyful.

This was out of character for me.  Most of my FB posts are limited to blog links and other articles I find interesting.  Rarely do I comment on my own opinions, the logistics of my day, or other minutiae of daily life.  And less than rarely do I comment on politics or other controversial topics.  But I felt strongly about my reactions to the celebrations; strongly enough to risk stirring the pot.  Also, I was curious about how people would respond.  I originally hail from a very red state, and wondered if my words would resonate with many of my Facebook friends, or if they would register as unpatriotic.

I was proud and relieved to find that many of my friends responded in affirmation.  And since then, as I have perused the web for other responses to this news, I have found that many people share my bewilderment.  In fact, another Facebook friend posted the following quote attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Upon reading it I commented on my friend’s post that I found the quote inspiring and that I thought a great number of people needed to read it as well.  Apparently I wasn’t the only person with this response to the quote because it was all over Twitter and Facebook on Monday.  I found this heartening until I learned from this brief article in The Atlantic online that the quote was contrived.  That is, the second, third, and fourth sentences of the quote were in fact spoken by Dr. King, although in an entirely different context.  (Mass killings such as we saw on September 11th did not occur during the civil rights movement.)  But the first sentence was wholly made up by someone else.  By whom?  I don’t know.  Why?  I don’t know.  But what I do know is that we latched onto it with incredible fervor.

Are we so desperate for inspiration that we’ll grasp at anything false just to feel something in our hands?  Are we so starved for eloquence and meaning that we are willing to fabricate them just to sate our unmet desires?  If the answer is yes, then let us embrace that desperation and turn our attentions to fulfilling it.  But let’s do it authentically.  The first sentence of the fake MLK quote is lovely.  Whoever wrote it clearly knows how to turn a phrase.  I wonder what else that person might have to say.  And I wonder why he would choose to hide in the middle of someone else’s words, rather than to stand up and let his own voice be heard.

I’m glad that there is a critical mass of people who find celebration over the death of another person unseemly.  And I’m glad that we’re looking for inspiring words to guide us during a time of great ambivalence.  I just wish that in our search we weren’t so eager to fill the void that we would choose to latch onto what is first, rather than what is real.