For me personally, I try to stay very in touch with everyone I care about. I call my parents or e-mail them pretty regularly, I call or e-mail friends from New Mexico if I've got their contact info (or read their blogs, those that have them), and I try to call or e-mail my friends from Berkeley now that I'm gone. I'm not perfect about it, and sometimes I forget or get busy or don't manage to get to everyone. It would be awesome if all the people I cared about were bloggers, but mostly they aren't.

The response varies a lot. I think Jeanine is pretty much the most responsive; she e-mails me sometimes or calls, and in undergrad she sent me an e-mail pretty much every week. On the other end of that spectrum are other people who take several calls to get ahold of, don't return messages or respond to e-mail sometimes. Most people are in between... they don't tend to call me first, but they're happy to hear from me and if I have to leave a message, they'll definitely call back and track me down.

I know that sometimes this is frustrating for me, because it makes me feel like I'm the only one making an effort to stay in touch. Most of the time I don't mind, though... it's important to me to do so I don't mind doing it. But it does make me wonder about the sort of mindset required to not stay in touch with the people one cares about. Several of my friends who are impossible to stay in good touch with assure me that they care about me, and we are friends for life, and that they're glad I try. But how do they view things so that their inaction makes sense? I'm a big believer in that everyone's actions make infinite sense from their own point of view, and it's essential to try to understand other people's mindsets. So can anyone offer some insights on how this internally makes sense?

Btw, I don't mean this entry to sound confrontational, just curious.

My thinking on this has, like most people's, evolved a lot over the last few years. It's fluttered through all sorts of feelings and emotions, through examinations of freedom of religion and whether profiling is helpful or not, through examinations of freedom of speech, through the questions of when, if ever, the ends justify the means. I feel clear on two points.

The first is an echo of things I've said before, that terrorism is a hateful thing, based on a system of values that deserves nothing but contempt. It's true, in some cases, that people turned to terrorism such as the Palestinians are often coming from extremely desperate circumstances, and have had everything taken from them. Or alternately, the Israelis (who I feel are equally guilty of mass civilian slaughter), who are trying to defend what they feel is their home in a sea of hostility and danger. We must have empathy for that, and lapses born of desperation should be expected. But they are not justified. But when we see hurtful systems of values being adopted elsewhere and being used to hurt us, I think it's essential to first examine our own behavior to look for our own ethical lapses. Where have we committed the same mistakes? Where have we invented our own? We must be sure we are acting faithfully on our own principles beforing accusing anyone else. And I think it's critical in fighting terrorists that we stand by our moral code. Abandoning free speech, abandoning right to trial, abandoning any of our own rights or the rights of others, which we assert are universal, kills the thing we seek to defend. I still believe something I said a time ago that when a person acts towards destruction of life, that person's life is forfeit. But that does not mean we should take it, and break our own code.

The second point concerns the loss, the hurt, the tremendous waste. There's a feature in the New York Times right now that talks about families who lost someone; apparently they did a profile 1 year after and have now done a second for many families. You can read a few, and they're interesting, but what's amazing and terrible is to see how many profiles they've done, and realize how small a fraction that is of all the people who were hurt by what happened. Have you seen Munich"? It's well-executed and very disturbing, and I highly recommend it. And after you see it, most probably you'll be moved to feel the way I do, that all this fighting is mostly a terrible waste. I think one always has to realize that whenever a person takes an action, they have from their point of view all the reason in the world to take that action, and from their perspective they are being reasonable, just, and caring. And it's terrible to think, isn't it, about some of the worldviews necessary for the actions we've seen in recent years, both from the Muslim extremists and from our own government. It's foolish to say we shouldn't defend ourselves, but equally foolish to do so in a way that wastes life and hurts our own cause.

It's to the point where I can barely listen to world news any more. I'm not sure what's to be done, other than vote and keep pushing the world with my own small strength in the direction I want it to go.

One thing that you have to be careful of in politics is that often, a pending law or referendum makes what appears on the surface to be a very logical argument. And it's only when you peer underneath that you see the people backing this movement don't believe their argument at all, but have a larger goal in mind which they're using the referendum or whatever for. An easy example of this is many of the restrictions that people attempt to place on abortion, including not unreasonable ones such as parental notification or spousal notification. These can seem reasonable, in some light, until you see that the people who are backing them push for restrictions on abortion by any means necessary.

There's this long magazine article in the New York Times right now about abortion in El Salvador. It's very difficult to read if you have any sense of empathy. But I think it illustrates so well how abortion restrictions hurt women, especially poor women, and how even though it would be ideal if no one ever got an abortion, when women really need them it's so important to have access to something clean and legal. Two quotes that left me shocked, and just horrified:

'According to Sara Valdés, the director of the Hospital de Maternidad, women coming to her hospital with ectopic pregnancies cannot be operated on until fetal death or a rupture of the fallopian tube. "That is our policy," Valdés told me. She was plainly in torment about the subject. "That is the law," she said. "The D.A.'s office told us that this was the law." Valdés estimated that her hospital treated more than a hundred ectopic pregnancies each year. She described the hospital's practice. "Once we determine that they have an ectopic pregnancy, we make sure they stay in the hospital," she said. The women are sent to the dispensary, where they receive a daily ultrasound to check the fetus. "If it's dead, we can operate," she said. "Before that, we can't." If there is a persistent fetal heartbeat, then they have to wait for the fallopian tube to rupture. If they are able to persuade the patient to stay, though, doctors can operate the minute any signs of early rupturing are detected. Even a few drops of blood seeping from a fallopian tube will "irritate the abdominal wall and cause pain," Valdés explained. By operating at the earliest signs of a potential rupture, she said, her doctors are able to minimize the risk to the woman.

One doctor, who asked to remain anonymous because of the risk of prosecution, explained that there are creative solutions to the problem of ectopic pregnancies: "Sometimes when an ectopic pregnancy comes in, the attendant will say, 'Send this patient to the best ultrasound doctor.' And I'll say, 'No, send her to the least-experienced ultrasound doctor.' He'll say, 'I can't find a heartbeat here.' Then we can operate."'

'When the woman is first detained, the form of custody can vary. Wandee Mira, an obstetrician at a hospital in San Salvador, told me that she had seen "a young girl handcuffed to her hospital bed with a police officer standing outside the door."'

Here is the full text of the article... I think everyone should read this.( pro-life nation )

Tuesday was my dad's 58th birthday.

If you know me reasonably well, you know that I love my dad. I admire him a lot; his inquiring mind, his sense of fairness, his understanding of other people, his empathy. There are a lot of lessons he taught me that I carry closely today, like the idea of always asking if it's worth it when you make decisions, and the spirit of scientific inquiry. My dad helped instill in me very deeply the processes of rationality and fairness, even as he saw me at my most mean, stupid, and blindly selfish moments. He made mistakes, sure, but he admitted them and forgave mine. He was and is my cheerleader, my helper, my guardian. He listened to my thoughts seriously, all my life, and respected me as a person before nearly anyone else did.

He also taught me things through his actions. He stayed in a town where he had no job and almost no possibility of finding one, and passed up countless career opportunities to stay with me and help me grow up. I'd say I don't know where I'd be without him, but I know exactly where I'd be without him. It would have been much harder, in every way.

Happy birthday, dad. I love you so much. :)

If any of you have stories you feel like sharing, about parents or anyone influential and important to you, it would make me really happy to hear them.

after my conversation in comments with Chih, I started listening to this song and felt like posting lyrics. if you want the song, IM me and I'll send it to you. :)

I stand in the distance,
I view, from afar,
Should I offer some assistance?
Should it matter who you are?
We all get hurt by love,
And we all have a cross to bear,
But in the name of understanding now,
Our problems should be shared

( confide in me )