BraceLand

Yesterday, one of my favorite Berkman fellows, Aaron Shaw (we share a love of North Oakland), gave a brilliant talk at the Berkman Luncheon Series on the research he’s doing on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Since you can watch the video yourself (and I highly recommend that you do) I won’t spend too much time repeating it, but from what I gathered Aaron is basically trying to see if it’s possible to use Mechanical Turk as a survey platform for academic (or other?) research. Intrinsic in his research is a study of how Mechanical Turk itself works and what issues this new labor market raises. (Apologies to Aaron if I totally butchered his project).

For me, the most interesting part of the talk/Q&A revolved around these various issues. Namely:

*Are there any implications for labor policy here? When you’re paying someone 2 cents for 5 minutes of work, that’s a steep devaluation of people’s time. If sites like AMT take off and become a real labor force, will we see government getting involved? Legislation/law suits? Labor organizing?

*How does this differ from volunteer work? I’ve heard from a lot of people who work on various crowdsourced projects that most people would rather work for free and see themselves as volunteering their time to a cause than get paid less than market value for their skills, which is insulting. There’s something about inserting money into the equation, even if the difference is only a penny, that changes the motivation. I know people have done a lot of thinking and writing about this and I’m just really ignorant to it (Wikinomics and whatnot), but I find that dynamic really interesting. I was curious to know whether there are any examples of sites that “pay” people in some non-monetary but still tangible form. Like rewards points or something similar. Aaron didn’t know of any, but I wonder how that would change the dynamic? You’re still getting paid for your labor, it’s not an altruistic act, but is there something about taking the actual cash payment out of the equation that makes a difference in motivations?

*What’s the impact of disassociating a task from the project? This one was covered mostly in an off-the-record meeting of the Berkman Fellows directly after the lunch, so there isn’t much on the video. Jonathan Zittrain attended that meeting and pushed back with a much less rosy view of distributed labor. His critiques centered around what happens when a task is broken down into such small pieces that all meaning is lost. The laborer has no view into what he or she is building or contributing to? What impact does that have? He pondered the spectrum of that impact from the loss of craftsmanship to the potential for bad guys to engage a mass labor market to help build towards some nefarious cause (ie: having people circle all the hospitals in a satellite photo in order to identify bomb targets). The discussion touched on potential barriers to bad guys, like putting more of an onus (normative or legal) on sites like AMT to police their job requesters.

I’d say that JZ’s fears are probably several years, if not decades, out. At this point, AMT is a really small site and it’d have to get much bigger and competitors would have to join the game for the threats to become really relevant. And who knows what can happen in the meantime? As for the uneasiness of the devaluation of workers’ time and what this means for the labor market, I find it hard to get too worked up on that front. All of these people are joining AMT voluntarily, and, as one luncheon guest pointed out, they’re probably performing tasks while they’re at work making a real wage. If they’re offended at the going rate, they don’t have to participate. i do think it’s fascinating to think about how this might change labor markets or be reflected in union organizing, but I’m skeptical that these sites will get big enough to make a difference in the real market. In the end, as afraid as we are of robots taking over the world, I really don’t think there’s any replacement for human labor. There are only so many projects you can break down into miniscule tasks; it doesn’t seem to me that AMT is going to save us from our desk jobs any time soon.

UPDATE: Please Note: This talk incorporates research-in-progress from the Berkman Center’s Online Cooperation Research in collaboration with Daniel Chen and John Horton. After the event was over, Aaron realized that he neglected to explicitly acknowledge Chen and Horton’s invaluable role in the project during the presentation. Aaron feels terrible about this and sincerely apologizes. He also hopes that you’ll visit their websites (links above) and read at least one of their papers. Daniel and John’s contributions to the field of experimental research on online labor markets include (a) recognizing that AMT could serve as a venue for experimental studies; (b) conducting the earliest labor market experiments on AMT; (c) solving a bunch of difficult problems so that they could make valid causal inference based on the results of these experiments.

This is one of those books that sits with you long after you’ve finished it.

The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins, the renowned war correspondent from the New York Times, was a fascinating read chronicling the author’s time spent in Afghanistan before and after 9/11/2001, and his three plus years in Iraq after war was declared in March, 2003. Since the book is more memoir/diary than reportage, it’s a bit hard to keep the timeline straight, but Filkins gives us pieces of the conflict in peaks and valleys, from the time Saddam falls to the Sunni Awakening (and all of the ugliness between).

As I was working through it I vacillated between whether it was an astonishingly beautiful and insightful account of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or an astonishing work of ego. While there’s no doubt that there’s ego at play here (what war correspondent doesn’t have an obnoxiously large ego?), it really is such a stunning read that I was able to forgive the arrogance.

Besides, Filkins has earned the right to some ego. He’s spent much of the last decade (and more) reporting from some of the shittiest hell holes on earth, and is a remarkable writer to boot. The moment I decided to forgive him comes about halfway through the book. He’s gone out with his photographer and a group of marines in order to get a picture of a insurgent who’d been killed a couple days previous in a battle. The body lies at the top of a mosque minaret. One of the marines, Billy Miller, stepped forward to lead the way up the treacherous stair case. As you can probably see coming, Miller is shot and killed by another insurgent who has found himself (has he been their since the battle? did he come to retrieve his dead comrade and happen to be there at the wrong time?) at the top of the minaret.

Ashley [the photographer] was still seated on the stoop, helmet crooked, mumbling to himself like a child. My fault.

Miller appeared. Two marines had pulled him out, Goggin one of them, choking and coughing. Black lung, they called it later. Miller was on his back; he’d come out head first. His face was opened in a large V, split like meat, fish maybe, with the two sides jiggling.

‘Please tell me he’s not dead,’ Ash said. ‘Please tell me.’

‘He’s dead,’ I said.

I felt it then. Darting, out of reach. You go into these places and they are overrated, they are not nearly as dangerous as people say. Keep your head, keep the gunfire in front of you. You get close and come out unscathed every time, your face as youthful and as untroubled as before. The life of the reporter: always someone else’s pain. A woman in an Iraqi hospital cradles her son newly blinded, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. The cheek is so dry and the tear moves so slowly that you focus on it for a while, the tear traveling across a wide desert plain. Your photographer needed a corpse for the newspaper, so you and a bunch of marines went out to get one. Then suddenly it’s there, the warm liquid on your face, the death you’ve always avoided, smiling back at you like it knew all along. Your fault.

Filkins has dedicated the book to Billy Miller, “who went first.”

Filkins doesn’t come right out and say it, but they’re looking for that picture of the dead insurgent because someone has made a decision that it’ll sell more newspapers. The New York Times, admirably, spent a lot of money on their Baghdad bureau but it’s hard to forget that they were complicit in starting this war in the first place. With this at the back of my head, and as I was reveling in Filkins beautiful prose, I started thinking about the need for funded news outlets in places like this. On one hand, Filkins wouldn’t have the access or resources that he did without the support of the Times. On the other, the Times helped get us in this mess in the first place, partly because they made editorial decisions to remain “neutral” which meant shelving any personal doubts they may have had and focusing on the bottom line instead of the story. I kept wondering: if Filkins had written his stories for the paper as he wrote this book, what influence would it have had? He won numerous awards for his reporting from Fallujah, but those articles don’t deliver the feeling of this war to you the way that this book does. There’s a chapter about a raid on a Ramadi hospital that the Americans thought was being used by the insurgents. The Americans are also using this raid as a training mission for Iraqi troops. As Filkins tells it, the Iraqi troops didn’t show up until the raid was over (the troops discovered a bag of cell phones and a bunch of elderly patients), and when they did come they made a big show of busting down doors to empty rooms, then taking a nap in the deserted hallways. The Americans let them sleep while they finished up. The next day, there was a press release from American forces which said “early this morning Iraqi Security Forces, with support from Coalition forces, began searching a hospital in northern Ramadi, which was being used as a center for insurgent activity. This Iraqi Army-led operation will deny the insurgents use of the Saddam Hospital.” This little tidbit doesn’t seem to have made it into the Times because Filkins didn’t make it back to the bureau until a few days later. One wonders, if Filkins had written like he writes in this book (ie: if he was allowed to blog instead of succumbing to the constraints of NY Times edited “journalism”) what difference it could have made.

It’s hard following a war from the comfort of Cambridge (ironically, where Filkins now calls home when he’s in the states; he’s currently reporting from Afghanistan in the lead up to that country’s August elections). There’s only so much you can read or watch that will give you any idea what’s going on. The scale is just too big. Too much death, too much pain, too much destruction, too ugly. Filkins, simply by telling his story, saying what he saw and felt, has brought the war to a micro level that allows us to have some sense of what we’ve signed up for–willingly or unwillingly. He talks about his evening runs (to which I can relate) and what happens at the checkpoints set up along his route (to which I cannot). It’s his descriptions of the inanities of life going on in this war zone, the profiles of the individuals he met along the way, that bring the human cost into focus. Despite his ego, there’s a sense of humility that breaks through in his writing style. His writing seems to be both an apology and an act of catharsis. As much a peek into these post-9/11 conflicts this book is an attempt at personal healing. This war has clearly scarred Filkins (at one point after he returns to the States he says he’s unable to speak to anyone who hasn’t been to Iraq about anything at all), yet he keeps going back for more. Selfishly, I look forward to receiving has future dispatches from the front lines.

I’ve struggled mightily to articulate, to myself and others, why I insist on being Catholic.  It’s very hard to reconcile the peace I feel in the church with my deep disappointment in the leadership.  This essay, by Michelle Madigan, reveals far better than I can just about what I feel and why I choose to stay a part of the church.  In short:

It is through practice that I have come to believe that if there is indeed a God presiding over the End of Days, the particulars, the language and myth, various sects employ as means for understanding and revering God will wash away moot in the flood of some unified, unifying light. Practicing provides pockets of peace, soothes me when I am terrified, enhances my appreciation of the created world, helps me to shape who I am into the woman I wish to become. When I’m lucky, practice ushers me toward glints of transcendence.

I’ve just spent the last 48 hours watching waaayy more children’s television than I ever wanted to watch. Dora the Exlporer, Go Diego Go, Little Bill, Pinky Dinky Doo, The Backyardigans, you name it. All of these shows seem to be 100 times more advanced than the stuff I watched as a kid (Inspector Gadget, Sesame Street, Square One). Or maybe it’s just that I don’t have the right perspective anymore.

Anyway, two of these shows are particularly whacked out. I watch them and think, “what in God’s name must these writers be on to come up with this shit?” The first one is Spongebob Squarepants. Everyone knows him. There was even a (utterly fantastic) essay on Spongebob in the Atlantic a couple months ago.

The other one, which you probably haven’t heard of, is called Yo Gabba Gabba. This show is positively psychotropic: the host, a black guy named DJ Lance Rock, is dressed in orange fur and white sunglasses; the dancing live-action characters are “Muno (the red cyclops), Foofa (the pink flower bubble), Brobee (a little green monster), Toodee (the blue cat-dragon) and Plex (the magic yellow robot)”–no word yet on which of them is gay; in addition,”among the varied animation sequences during the show is Super Martian Robot Girl, designed by indie cartoonists Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer.”

In other words, stuff you’d expect some hipster stoners to be watching on a random Tuesday at 2:14AM. Well, my two-year old niece (despite the afro, not really a hipster) happens to be OBSESSED with it. I’m not really sure what to make of this other than that after 3 hours of constant running around I’m more than happy that someone other than me can hold her undivided attention for a few minutes so I can brush my teeth and grab some coffee. There’s another part of me, the part that wrote this post on Geoffrey Canada’s Children’s Zone, that feels really bad about plopping an impressionable mind in front of a channel that claims to be “preschool on television.” But, if there’s anything I’ve learned this weekend, it’s that it’s really easy to rail against this stuff when you don’t have kids (or a nanny), and spending 12 uninterrupted hours with a toddler requires some breaks if you’re not to become in need of psychotropic drugs yourself. I remember one horrifying epiphany when I was babysitting over Christmas. I looked at the clock, realized I’d been up for the equivalent of an entire work day with an 18-month old without any adult conversation, and it wasn’t even lunch time yet. It dawned on me: some people do this every. single. day (even weekends!), and sometimes they do it WITH MORE THAN ONE KID!!! It was almost enough to send me veering into a ditch. As much as I love my niece, the only thing that keeps me sane on these trips is that I know I can go home. I’m always so much more appreciative of my own life when I leave here.

Consequently, I have a weird mixture of awe, respect and pity for my sister. There’s a weird paradox to being a mom: either you work during the day and are utterly exhausted, guilty for not spending time with your kid, guilty for not doing enough housework, but able to have conversations with adults every day, or you’re a stay-at-home mom, able to take your time getting ready in the morning but spending 75% of your time conversating with people whose brains are only 25% developed.

If I didn’t have enough ambivalence about marriage, there’s this whole kid thing to throw on top of things. If it’s not clear to anyone who hasn’t been a parent before, let me tell you as someone who’s traveled over to the dark side and lived to tell about it: it’s not fun, be ready to give up your life, sleep, and brain. For the life of me, I’m not sure why people do this twice. On the other hand, there are times when Grace says my name (she calls me “Cogky”) that absolutely melts me, and I think “maybe I could do this one day.” Well, we’ll see.

I spent a long time drafting that last post, and I’m still not really happy with it, probably because I haven’t really decided how I feel about the issue.  But when did that ever stop me from having an opinion!

Anyway, my view sharpened a little bit after I read this interview with Mark Sanford who, for those who don’t know, is the governor of South Carolina and has been carrying on an affair with an Argentinian woman for the last few months.  In the interview, the married Sanford says that his mistress is his “soul mate” and calls their affair a “forbidden love story” but that he’s trying to reconcile with his wife because, well, he’s married to her.

I feel really strongly that people shouldn’t give up on marriage too easily.  I think a lot of divorces could be avoided (and a lot of people could learn a lot about life and happiness) if people were willing to put in the hard work that makes a marriage work.  But when someone admits that they’ve met someone who is their SOUL MATE but that they’re staying with their wife because of the sanctity of marriage, I’ve got to believe we’ve completely lost the plot and need to start from scratch.

Let me be clear, I’m not sure that having a successful marriage is necessarily about being with your soul mate (maybe partly because I don’t believe in soul mates), but I am pretty sure that your marriage is doomed if you have a soul mate AND IT’S NOT YOUR SPOUSE.

I’m not really sure I have a conclusion (yet).  I think I’m just really disheartened that this is what we’ve come to–on one hand discounting marriage altogether (I have friends who have), on the other forcing yourself into a miserable arrangement and foregoing all chance of happiness, just to honor some long-lost commitment.
Sigh.

“At our very first meeting, Juliet Schwarz turned to Rachel and asked if she loved me and, if yes, what it was about me that she loved. (…)

“’Love,’” Rachel desperately replied, “is such an omnibus word.”

Here was an irony of our continental separation (undertaken, remember, in the hope of clarification): it had made things less clear than ever. By and large, we separators succeeded only in separating our feelings from any meaning we could give them. That was my experience, if you want to talk about experience. I had no way of knowing if what I felt, brooding in New York City, was love’s abstract or love’s miserable leftover. The idea of love was itself separated by meaning. Love? Rachel had gotten it right. Love was an omnibus thronged by a rabble.

And yet we again climbed aboard, she and I.

Netherland, Joseph O,Neill

I’ve been puzzling over marriage a lot lately.

I’m very proud resident of the first state to legalize gay marriage, and so have been watching the recent marriage debates with a strong interest, not because I’m gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but because I really believe in the institution of marriage. Or I thought I did. Or I believe in a different institution than the one people are fighting over. But I really love weddings and have been doing my fair share of participating in planning/prepping for friends’ weddings this summer.

Anyway, it’s led me to rethink a lot of what I thought I was sure about. I’m heartened to see people fighting for what I think is their civil right to marry who they want (my own parents’ marriage would have been illegal at one point) but looking at all the ugliness in this debate, I gotta say, I’m feeling pretty cynical about the institution I thought I believed in wholeheartedly.

The Christian right spends a lot of time talking about the redefinition of marriage, but from where I sit it seems to me that they’re the ones with their priorities out of whack. Since when did marriage and family become about intolerance, judgment and exclusion? (Wait, maybe don’t answer that). In addition, I feel like the right (along with the wedding industrial complex) has played a big part in setting up this unrealistic, Leave it to Beaver, unattainable fairy tale standard for what marriage should be. It’s no wonder so many people get divorced if their measure for failure is that they didn’t live up to a fantasy.

For their part, a lot of my friends on the left seem happy to throw the whole thing out, baby and bath water, so I can’t say I’m really in their camp on this one either. Sure, it’s not perfect, it’s an inherently sexist arrangement, blah blah, but there is something to be said for two committed parents raising their kids in stable, secure households, working through their issues together as a family no matter what the dysfunction.

I guess I’m feeling like there’s nothing left to hold on to—seems like these days it’s either Ward and June or anything goes. If those are my options, what’s the point?

In the face of this discouragement I happened to recently read two works of fiction (ironically) that I thought depicted the beautifully flawed, human side of marriage that comes from two imperfect people making a lifelong commitment to each other. How on earth could that possibly be easy? Zadie Smith (“On Beauty”) and Joseph O’Neill (“Netherland”) have written, gorgeous unvarnished stories about marriages that have at the core of them deep love, commitment and hope. In other words, they’re nothing like the fairy tale marriages that the pro-marriage crew is trying to cram down our throats.

The recent commentary about Netherland has focused on the fact that President Obama seems to be reading it, and so, therefore, devotes a ton of attention to the political themes of the story (post-9/11 NYC, the immigrant experience in 21^st century America). For my part, I thought the politics were secondary to the relationship themes, tools used to tell the story of their marriage. Hans and his wife live through 9/11, and the stress of the experience serves to highlight tensions they’re already experiencing. In the wreckage of his marriage, Hans finds refuge on the cricket fields of Staten Island with West Indian and South Asian immigrants to get as far away from his upper-class banker’s life in Manhattan and seek comfort in the familiarity of the game he played as a kid.

Two of my best friends are getting married this summer. I’ll be spending a good chunk of my summer planning with and feting them. In the midst of it all, I’m hoping they don’t fall victim to the unattainable fairy tale expectations society is trying to foist upon them. I hope when the going gets tough their first instinct isn’t to bail. I hope they don’t become ashamed because things aren’t as blissful as they’ve been told they’ll be. I hope they can find beauty in the struggle. Now that I think about it, maybe they’ll be getting some books as their wedding gifts.

Reading my favorite blogger today, Ta-Nehisi Coates, I came across one of his trademark posts.  That is, a completely articulate and self-aware (yet always humble) evaluation of himself in the context of society.  This time it was about his racial identity.  He’s been reading a lot about the Civil War and Reconstruction, which happens to be one of my three favorite periods in American history (along with the Revolution and World War II).  Anyway, today he articulated better than I ever could what fascinates me so much about that era:

“I read those passages and got that old, stupid thrill again–Negroes with guns, Negroes fighting back. But more legitimately, I was, as I have been throughout all of this reading, simply stunned by the preservation of humanity–no, by the repeated assertions of humanity made by people who lived under a system specifically structured to destroy it.”

I haven’t ever really considered myself “African-American” mostly because I think there’s something very distinct about the development of racial identity when you’re half white.  But there is something about unfolding the utter tragedy of Reconstruction (which, you could argue, was much more tragic than slavery itself), then registering the breathtaking resilience of an entire group of people–your own ancestors–in the face of something close to attempted genocide, that inspires great pride.

A couple days ago, I found myself listening to an interview with Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of DC public schools, on the Diane Rehm Show. The interview was recorded in December (I’m a little backed up with my podcasts) just about the same time President Obama was naming Arne Duncan as his education secretary.

Michelle Rhee has been quite a controversial figure in education circles lately. She came to her current position after a bit of a power play by DC’s mayor, Adrian Fenty (who’s been compared to Obama), to move authority for the city’s public schools into the mayor’s office and away from the city council. Around the same time, Fenty appointed Rhee and gave her a pretty strong mandate to clean up the schools. In the process, she’s been championing some pretty unconventional solutions, including taking on the teachers’ union by seeking to abolish tenure, revising student disciplinary policies, and supporting school choice. One of her most noteworthy proposals is to offer teachers either a) the opportunity for tenure with a small raise in pay, or b) no opportunity for tenure with an almost 100% raise. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, the unions are balking.

As I listened to Rhee discuss all this and take questions, I was struck by how traditionally conservative these policies seemed, and even more struck by how much support the policies were receiving from liberal quarters. Where was this outpouring of support when Newt Gingrich was the one touting reform? Why is it that it’s taking a group of young, liberal politicians and public figures to enact these traditionally conservative policies?

I think the question has a two-part answer.

First, and most obviously, Newt Gingrich and his ilk don’t exactly have the most credibility when it comes to promoting what’s best for poor minorities in the inner city. Folks can be forgiven for being skeptical that the prosperous, white male crew running the GOP had their best interests at heart.

My second reaction, and what I find more interesting, is how willing young liberals have been to embrace conservative principles and incorporate those principles into policy. Abolishing tenure and offering merit pay seem like obvious good solutions to try for people for people of my generation, but if you followed politics for the last 40 years you know it’s not that obvious to most on the polarized left and right.  I remember it being so refreshing to see Obama on Meet the Press right near the start of his run for presidency (sorry, can’t find the link) saying that he wasn’t concerned about where an idea came from as long as it was a good one, that he was most concerned about solving problems (whether through the public or private sector), and that liberals of all people should be the most up in arms about government waste because that means money is not being directed to the very programs they hold up and revere.  It goes hand in hand with his co-optation of small “c” conservative principles outlined in my Michael Pollan post a couple weeks back.  Two years later, that approach to public policy, through people like Rhee, Fenty, and Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker, is starting to take shape into its own sort of political ideology.  I’m thinking of calling it progressive pragmatism. (Damn, looks like someone’s already coined that term).  Well anyway, you see what I’m getting at.  It’ll be interesting to see how this conservative, results-oriented point of view meshes with progressive liberal concerns and whether we (the Obama generation) can turn it into an enduring paradigm through which we try and solve the great policy problems we’ll have to tackle.

“This is really all we’ve got, this increase, this matter of life loving itself; everything else we have has to come from this.”

Somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean this Memorial Day, Ian McEwan cemented himself as my favorite novelist. The Child in Time was the sort of novel that opens you up and makes you feel the human experience in a way that is completely unpleasant yet somehow comforting.

The unpleasantness on this occasion stemmed partly from me trying to clear the lump from my throat and blink back tears while the flight attendant pushed the duty-free cart down the aisle. But it’s also because that sort of openness to human experience makes you recognize vulnerabilities that are hard to confront. This feeling, at least for me, is completely uncomfortable. (Tangent: I also just finished reading this month’s fascinating Atlantic cover story on that longitudinal happiness study which made the point that happiness was often a harder emotion to bear than sadness because it makes you drop your defenses, opening yourself up for injury).

The comfort came from McEwan’s demonstration (showcased in several of his novels) of the ability of inanely normal people to suffer traumatic, life-changing events and come out on the other side with a lucid, utterly poignant but ultimately completely hopeful perspective on human suffering. I am reassured by his faith in humans to make sense and then begin to heal after what could have been decimating experiences. In Saturday it was a home invasion, in Atonement it was the accusation of rape. The Child in Time centers around Stephen, an accidentally successful children’s book author whose 3-year old daughter is kidnapped from him at the grocery store. Over the next two years, Stephen deals with his grief which is compounded by a separation from his wife.

Until the last ten pages, I was content with reading the book as an exploration of the meaning of childhood and parenthood, going along for the ride since I don’t have kids (and I haven’t been one for a pretty long time). As I should have expected, McEwan had different ideas. I was completely taken aback by the ending of the book. I won’t give it away, but there’s a transposition of pain to joy that gives Stephen the insight I quoted above and it’s utterly stunning.

I’ve never lost a child or been accused of rape, but there are certain things we all experience that give us a sense of this despair. I guess the trick is realizing that this is all part of it and figuring out how to plumb the pain for the little nugget that’s always in there looking to be found. Somewhere along the way in my Catholic education, someone told me that prayer is not about asking God for things or to change circumstances. It’s about asking God to help you find the strength you’ll need to face what you’re up against and to find the increase that Stephen discovered.

I’m not sure I’ve been very good at following this advice or appreciating this connection to human experience (I REALLY hate being exposed), but I’m trying to be better which is one reason I started blogging again. What really helps is reading books like this, such good reminders of why I should bother.

Exactly seven years ago, I was sitting on the field in Boston College’s Alumni Stadium listening to Nicholas Burns (at the time, he was Ambassador to NATO) tell us how we had to grab life by the horns, live without regrets, etc and so on. No offense to Amb. Burns, but it was quite possibly the most miserable day of my life. Aside from the massive withdrawal symptoms I was feeling coming off what can only be described as a week-long bender, I had less than zero clue what I wanted to do with my life. My class of graduates had the good timing of being seniors during the 9/11 attacks, so many of us didn’t have jobs as of 5/23/02; I was one of them. I also felt like just when I was starting to feel comfortable in my own skin and in charge of my life, everything that was stable and that I had control over was yanked out from under me. I didn’t have a place to live; my social life was gutted because all my friends were scattering to the four winds; I didn’t know how I was going to pay rent let alone cover health insurance; and I had to pick a direction. Those eight or so months after graduation were probably the darkest of my entire life.

I eventually found a job, got an apartment, made new friends and settled in to a routine. It’s only now, seven years later, that I can recognize how important those dark times were in putting me where I am, allowing me the perspective I have now, the ability to see that the most good often comes from what seems to be the worst times. I’m starting to fully recognize how important that education was, almost as important as the four years that preceded it.  I even think I might be making progress on that whole picking-a-direction thing.
I’m not sure why this year has me reflecting more than the past six Mays. Some sort of seven-year itch or something. But today I’m finding myself really thinking about those kids waiting for their name to be called so they can walk across that stage, head back to their rooms to pack up the last bits of their stuff, say goodbye to their closest friends, and head out into the numbing terror of the absolute unknown.  I really don’t have any advice for them that’s not going to sound like it’s cliche commencement speech crap that I’m sure they’ve heard 5000 times in the last few months.  Besides, I’m not sure there’s anything anyone could tell them that would make them understand the combination of pain, fear, depression, joy, excitement and hope they’re going to feel over the next few months.  So hard, but so worth it.