Mavericks, renegades, and beards, oh my!

Sarah Palin and Jimmy McMillan (of "The Rent is Too Damn High" fame) exchange political opinions at a recent mixer in San Francisco.

Scary, right?

I can say with some confidence that going out in San Francisco on Halloween, dressed as Sarah Palin, complete with a button reading "Renegade: Palin for President 2012," was a bit like whispering the word "Voldemort" in a fifth grade classroom. On the bus home, people asked who I was, and when they saw me with the glasses and the button, trying to mimic that Alaskan charm, 9 out of 10 people turned away, saying, "Oh God."

Perhaps as scary as seeing a twentysomething white computer programmer glue a cotton beard to his face and pretend to be New York candidate for governor slash muse for aspiring deejays.

Weirder things could happen.

Didion doesn't slouch

Tonight I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Joan Didion is brilliant. She writes about all my favorite places: San Francisco, New York, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and yet she writes about them with a complete lack of sentimentality. She seems to possess this unbridled interest in the act of recording that which is truly interesting, truly human. Tragic and entertaining and thoughtful and never patronizing. Straightforward.

And then I read "Notes from a Native Daughter." Didion grew up in the Sacramento Valley, and she manages to articulate the nostalgia, boredom, listlessness and history of the place that I've never really been able to perfectly capture myself:

"...that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

And it struck me, that here in this most fertile of valleys, the communities themselves have grown in a manner disproportionate to the crops that thrive. Maybe that's why it sometimes takes me a few days to fall into hometown habits; because in Davis, even more so than Sacramento, the town wants to grow as much as it wants to drop leaves, or blossom flowers; that is to say, it wants to grow when it is time to grow, and not before.

It makes me feel good to know that a writer like Didion came from a place and a family not too far removed from my own. That maybe, at some point, I'll be able to put into words my own version of that murmuring culture that she captures so beautifully.

Tommy's Tale

Most families have pet folklore. My dad recently recounted the epic story of how he acquired our first family dog, Tomasino Paisano de la Lucci, a black and white springer spaniel mix that he sprung from a pound when he was in his 20s. At the time, my dad was working in the Bay Area, and one day while driving to work, he found an injured puppy in the middle of the road. He gathered him up and took him to his office where he called the SPCA to see if they could save him. The SPCA collected the dog with the understanding that they were required to turn the dog over to the local shelter for three days for the owners to come claim him before making the dog available for adoption. Meanwhile, they agreed to treat the dog's wounds.

My dad went back to the pound a few times to see how the dog was doing. Each time, the technicians reminded him that if he wanted the dog, he'd have to wait til the end of the week, at which point he'd also have to pay the vet bill. Dad showed up just before closing time on Friday, but the technician turned him away, saying that they had to wait three full days, so Dad would have to come back Saturday. They refused to let him come take the dog on the day they told him to come; according to their rules, they had to wait a certain amount of time for owners to collect the dog, but neither could they afford to keep the dog any longer than a specific amount of time.

"If you want the dog, you’ll be here at 8:00 am sharp," they said, "or he’ll be put down on the first rounds tomorrow morning."

Dad was pissed. Why did they even bother treating the dog in the first place, if they wouldn't put him up for adoption, and would end up killing him anyway? He asked to speak to the supervisor, and was told the same thing. Come back Saturday morning, or forget the dog. They would not even take payment and hold the dog until Monday.

He didn't know what to do. He felt trapped. Here he had gone out of his way to follow the center's instructions, and was happy to pay the vet bill, would have arranged for someone else to pick up the dog for him, but they wouldn't allow that either. He went out into the parking lot and watched the dogs interacting in their cages. Tommy was sitting in a little pen surrounded by a chain link fence.

He approached the fence, stuck his hands through the holes and whistled for the dog. Once he was close enough, Dad reached out and took Tommy gently in his hands, slowly edging him up the length of the fence, first withdrawing one hand through the gaps, then the other. Miraculously, no one seemed to notice. He got the little dog him up the height of the fence, he pushed him through a small, puppy-sized opening. Dad says Tommy was a bit confused, but offered no resistance as he hopped across the parking lot and into his car, and eventually, our life.

Tommy lived to be 15 years old. He went where my dad went. I'll never forget the night he died. I was eight years old and it was a school night, so I was surprised when my mom woke me and Josh up in the middle of the night and took us out onto the lawn. Tommy usually slept in a little bed on my parents' floor, but my dad had carried him, wrapped tenderly in towels, down the stairs and outside. I think the moon was full. Tommy was old and frail, his eyes lost in flappy ears and withered fur. And my dad, my dad leaned low over him, as if whispering to him, and stayed that way for what seemed like hours. When it was over we had a little service and dug a little hole for him under the rosebush.

For years my dad referred to Tommy as "my fine dog." My parents have had dogs since, always rescue dogs, always black and white, always T names: Tipper (during the Clinton administration), Tam, and Taj. They were all wonderful dogs, but to be called "fine" -- that was a distinction my dad reserves for a rare few.

Forget cellar door. Open road is where it's at.

This summer, driving cross country, we passed many cars with decorative antennae. The cacti were often my favorite. Watching their little flapping plastic tendrils zip by on the I-10 made it look like all the passing cars were sticking out their hands for high fives. Parked cars with dangling antennae smirked at us when we stopped to refuel.

I miss watching the scenery change. The concept of settling anywhere is fundamentally mature, and while with every passing year it seems less final, less scary, the romance of the open road is often more attractive than the stability of staying put.

Open road. Can you think of two words more beautiful?

How Ingrid Betancourt Woke Me Up

I tend to stress out when I'm on deadline. I'll circle my room like a dog preparing to lie down, and when I finally do get down to work, it will start out feeling so arduous. But then I'll learn about someone who has done something far braver than I, something requiring much more intellect or raw individual power, someone who has faced situations more harrowing and unimaginable than those I have ever experienced, and then I'll stop circling.

One such example is an interview I heard recently with Ingrid Betancourt, the former Colombian politician who was running for president in 2002 when she was abducted by the terrorist organization the FARC. I first learned about Ms. Betancourt back in 2007, when I was working for the International Museum of Women in San Francisco. We were curating an online exhibit on Women, Power and Politics, and it was hard not to see the parallel between notable female presidential candidates in the months leading up to the 2008 election here in the States.

I remember watching a soul-wrenching documentary about Ms. Betancourt's presidential campaign, which, after she was taken away, was carried on by her then-husband. Kidnapping is such a big problem in Colombia that there are laws stating that political candidates can continue their campaigns even if they themselves cannot participate; in the case of Ms. Betancourt, her husband stepped up in her place. The documentary filmmakers had started the film before she was abducted, so it was especially tragic to see the interviews with her, bright-eyed and idealistic, in the months before her forced exile. By the time I learned who she was in 2007, she had been away for five years, which I took to mean that if she hadn't died already, she probably wouldn't survive.

And then, somewhat miraculously, she reappeared in 2008. I remember hearing the news rather off-handedly,so subtly that I thought perhaps I had made it up. But then I heard her on KQED's Forum, in an interview with Dave Iverson, talking quite earnestly about what it felt like to be captive in the jungle, struggling to hear her mother's voice over the radio airwaves. This was a woman of privilege, who during her latter year or so of captivity, was chained to a tree by her neck. And yet the honesty and emotion with which she expressed herself really woke me up.

Ms. Betancourt's experience - that was true captivity. There was no circling there. I was listening to her interview while biking to work, and by the time I got there and removed my headphones, it was as if I was aware of new sounds in the world.

There are more out there like her - maybe next time I'm stressing about a paper or a deadline I'll revisit Aung San Suu Kyi.

Seeking guard turtle

About a month ago I came home to find a little turtle in the front yard. I thought it was a large rock until Taj sniffed it and pointed his nose, just like a regular bloodhound. And it wasn't until both the dog and I had backed away that I saw four little legs squirm their way out, one at a time, from the shell. The head slinked out last. For a moment the three of us stood there, dog, turtle, and human, regarding one another, none of us sure how to react. And then Taj found something more interesting behind the bushes and I went on to get the mail, and when I came back the turtle was still there, one leg slowly retreating into its shell.

I wondered, at that moment, if I would ever have that kind of patience, if I'd ever be quiet and slow enough to gauge the difference between actual danger and momentary risk.

My mom and I named the turtle Sushi. I imagined us becoming great friends, her acting as my little guard turtle, warding away bad spirits and unwelcome snails. I left some old lettuce out for her. Well, to be perfectly frank, I more or less threw the lettuce onto the surface of her shell as I was rushing out of the house to get to work.

I've been checking the front of the house every morning, but she hasn't been back yet. Either that, or she's waiting for me in a place I haven't yet found.

--

This image is taken from

Delanco Camp

's T-Shirt contest. I'm not familiar with this camp, but I found the picture on Google Image.

(Home)Town

I recently moved back to my hometown to attend graduate school, and it was only this week that the words home and town seemed like two such disparate worlds.

What is home? Home is a reflection of body memory. A sensual experience involving the food I grew up eating, the smell of our house on cold nights in late winter, the sounds of the records that sometimes skipped while my dad and I washed the after dinner dishes. The awareness that wherever I went there were people I knew.

What is town? Town is a small place, in which social circles overlap so dizzyingly that there are rarely moments of quiet, despite the wide expanse of dried safflower and last season's tomatoes. Town is a place where people gather for the sake of gathering, where my grocer knows my rabbi, who knows my previous employer, who knows my parents and back again. And occasionally they all gather, and when I do go to the farmer's market, the wealth of social knowledge is so abundant that there is simply no way to just walk, and walk, and not talk.

I wonder at what point in our lives we stop longing. For years, I wanted nothing more than to get further away, and further away still, as if with every mile I was proving the power of independence, of unleashed, unabashed curiosity about the world. And yet, each time I moved, I took with me a sense of what I had left behind. I carried photographs of my family and friends, longed for that nuclear sense of familiarity, missed what it felt like to be somewhere where people knew you were before you opened your mouth.

But what happens when you move back, and the dialogue picks right back up where you left off?

It's not a question of good or bad, or even better or worse. It is a revision of memory, a rewriting of the way things used to smell or taste, a new concept of the way you understand your immediate world. And sometimes, I worry that by coming home to work and study, I'm not properly home, but rather just back in town.

What not to put on your book cover

This betrays how very little I actually know about drawing. It is also what happened when I was working at a bookstore and someone propped a four-foot image of an entrepreneur-cum-novelist atop the register.

Bathroom Stall Series, #8

Not sure where exactly to locate the tragedy in this particular installment of the Bathroom Stall Series. This was taken in the humanities building bathroom at SF State, which means this girl is probably in her 20s, and is probably pretty torn up about her boyfriend's actual sexuality. I glean all this from the elegantly long downward curve of her frowny-face.

What perhaps is more tragic are the attempts to assuage her feelings of sadness and remorse: "He's confused" counters nicely to "Woo! Fag hag!" I wonder what it feels like to be stuck between two polarizing reactions. It's as if our culture still doesn't know how to approach the complex nature of adolescent sexuality. I mean, we really must not be ready to talk about it, otherwise we wouldn't write about it on bathroom walls.

All About Evil, San Francisco Style

And now, for my latest love letter to San Francisco, I invite you in to the Victoria Theater, the historic Mission theater that has been around more than 100 years. This weekend I had my first opportunity to walk inside its handsome doors, when I went to see All About Evil, the campy slasher flick directed by notable SF drag queen Peaches Christ. The show was marketed as a "4-D experience" not only because Peaches had organized an entire pre-film performance, complete with choreographed monster dances and movie-specific ballads, but also because the film itself was shot in the theater, and all of the gory scenes took place in our very seats. The fabulous SF-based performer Trixxie Carr introduced the show by belting out some impressive ballads while dressed as the film's main character, the diabolical Deborah Tennis (pronounced "de-BOR-ah ten-ISE"). I might go even as far to say that the lovely Ms. Carr would have been just as excellent cast in the film itself--maybe in the sequel? The film also highlighted classic actresses from John-Waters-era camp and gore such as Mink Stole and Cassandra Peterson (a.k.a. Elvira).

I'll be the first to admit that my tolerance for gore is low at best, but perhaps what made this experience so awesome was that the cast and crew were so committed to its campiness, so utterly loyal to an artistic vision that constituted a tribute to slasher films past, that it was hard not to get swept into the visceral excitement in the room. Besides, there's really now way to avoid giddiness when one is just two rows away from the sheer glamor of tangoing zombies and arrogant murderesses in period costume. Add to that the a palpable sense of suspense when we, as an entire theater full of people, collectively realized that the room in which we were very sitting, with its victorian air and old-fashioned decor, was as real a character in the film as the evil twin girls or the naive theatergoers who break Deborah's rules.

I was amazed by the artistry and impressed by the scale of the production, which has been on the road for several weeks now. But perhaps more than anything I was moved by the sense of community that linked all of these performers together. After the first set had finished, Peaches introduced all of the dancers by their stage names, and pointed out who had written the lyrics and who had choreographed the steps, who had put in extra time in the art department and who had helped with costumes. It was a true collaborative effort, and it was as fun to see them acknowledged, and the pleasure that gave them, as it was to see them perform.

The alchemy of that show was heightened by the fact that we got to see it where we did, in a beautiful theater just a week before Halloween in the best city in the world.

San Francisco, I'm so not over you yet.

Ligre Returns

This one is better left to the imagination.

Go Team!

This is in tribute to Mr. Alpers, who was the world's best runner assistant today at the San Jose Rock N' Roll Half Marathon. He was our chauffeur, our baggage-check boy, our acquirer of GU and our cheerleader. Our bearded cheerleader. Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself how it is that I find myself in these situations: jogging in place with Shirlee (his mom, my running partner today) at 8 am in the morning in a sea of runners, weaving my way through a city still waking up on a foggy Sunday morning. We were surrounded by people in Team in Training jerseys, or in homemade t-shirts with the names of their loved ones written on in puffy paint. I had forgotten my favorite "Diabetes Sucks" cap, but was wearing a belt with pump, GU, continuous blood glucose monitor and blood sugar monitor.

We kept a good pace until about mile 7, at which point I decided to increase my pace. Ryan was waiting at mile 10, which (incidentally) was located right in front of the high school where he works. I kept looking from one side of the street to the other, wondering how on earth I'd see him in this moving, sweaty mob, but when I did finally spot him, he insisted on running alongside me, chattering away, passing me water and GU, his big bicycle bag thumping against his back.

And then we passed the cheerleaders from his high school, all decked out in their school colors, some with ribbons, some with braces, all of them chanting. They slapped high fives and I heard him yell, "That's my girlfriend!" And I felt lucky.

The last two miles were a lot harder than I thought they'd be, especially when I started noticing the number of runners who had stopped, or were seeking medical attention on the side of the road. Ryan later said that, while biking from the 10 mile mark to the finish line, he saw a runner "bonk"; that is, he saw the guy begin to fall backward, until another runner caught him as he fell and helped him to the ground. "I saw a runner go off the course in an ambulance, and it wasn't you or my mom, so I thought the day was a success."

And, all in all, it was. I'm so glad I finally did it, and I'm incredibly grateful for the support not just of Ryan, his family, and my own unstoppable Team HJ, but of all the friends and family members who have donated to JDRF, offered emotional support and overall made it possible for me to do something I at times doubted I could do.

Until next time...

Rocking, Rolling, Running, & Curing

This weekend I plan to run my first ever half-marathon. I've been training for the past ten weeks with a running group here in Davis. Grad school started this week, as did my new job, and somehow this race has crept up on me. I will be running on the same day as the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes, which is no small coincidence. In these last few days before the event, I can't help thinking what a tremendous symbol this has all become.

Running has always been my catharsis, my time to zone out and turn off my brain, to challenge my body while nobody else is looking. There's no way to be "good" at running; the most successful runners I've met are the ones with a keen understanding of how to push themselves, and when it is appropriate to. I'm still working on that second part.

When I run in a group, I sense gears shifting in my body, and suddenly there is something to prove. The person just in front of me becomes the person I most desperately want to beat, and once I beat them, there is always someone else. I run with a little fanny pack with my blood sugar monitor, insulin pump, and three or four packs of GU. The part of the run I relish the most happens after we're all done, after the other runners have stopped to chat or refill their water bottles, when I sit down and whip out my glucose monitor to test my sugar. I take great pride -- probably (definitely) more pride than I truly deserve -- in watching the recognition register on someone else's face that, holy shit, she beat me, AND she's diabetic?

Hell yeah.

I might be feeling differently on Sunday afternoon, after 13.1 miles in this late summer heat. But no matter what, I can't wait for that feeling of satisfaction that I will have done something I've never done before, and done it on a day when my team and I are committed to finding a cure.

Adventures of the Bookmaiden

If I owned my own bookstore, all clerks would be called bookmaidens and book lords. Or maybe book queens. Tomorrow is my last day at the independent bookstore the Avid Reader, my favorite place to go as a child growing up in Davis. I've been lucky enough to work there in the summer interim, assembling press scrapbooks, selling and shelving books, assisting at events. There is something to be said for the loyalty and chutzpa that independent businesses attract.

That, and I learned this summer not to operate a cash register with my hair in two braids, less I feel like fending off comments such as "You're sure you're old enough to operate that?"

Bookmaidens can do a hell whole of a lot more than just operate cash registers.

Team Malibu Pumpers Wants YOU

School is starting, the wind is picking up, and there is a heightened electricity in the air: that's right, it's the season for fundraising. This is the ninth year that my family and I are gearing up to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), a nonprofit organization founded by the parents of children with type 1 diabetes in 1970. In the past 40 years, JDRF has raised $1.4 billion, and nearly every penny of that is devoted to research.

Why should people care? Here's why:

-More than 23 million Americans live with diabetes, and of that number, about 5-10% live with type 1, insulin-dependent diabetes. This less common form of diabetes was formerly known as juvenile diabetes, because the majority of people who live with it are diagnosed as young children or adolescents. This means that type 1 kids and teens are badasses because they have to learn how to test their blood sugar and give themselves injections while learning how to tie their shoes, ride bikes, compete at sports, apply for college, etc.

-Diabetes is considered a pre-existing condition, which, as we all know, makes applying for health insurance especially frustrating.

-Because Halle Berry, Nick Jonas, Mary Tyler Moore, and certain twentysomething bloggers take insulin every day, and still make time to make movies, sing songs, write books, and in my case, go to grad school and work two jobs.

This year, while my uber-supportive Team Malibu Pumpers represents at the 5K walk at the State Capitol on Sunday, October 3, I will be running my first-ever half marathon. This is something I've wanted to do for three years, ever since I got my worst blood test results as a diabetic and felt the need to prove I was still healthy. I've been training over the past few months and am excited to finally put myself to the test. And while other people might run this race for time or place, I'll be running it to prove I can do it and not get low.

So, what can you do? You can make a tax-deductible donation for our team here. You can visit JDRF online and sign up for a corresponding walk in another city. Or, if you don't have the money this time but really want to show support, you can learn the differences between type 1 and type 2 diabetes and explain it to the next person who asks. Believe you me, it'll be a relief for the rest of us who grow tired when unsuspecting strangers relate long stories about their grandparents with gangrene feet.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your support.

What You Can Get for Four Quarters in Meridian, Mississippi

This was my one and only impression of Mississippi this summer: condom dispensers in gas station bathrooms. The text on the machines read "Hygeia helps protect against AIDS and other sexually-transmitted infections. However, the best way to avoid AIDS is to practice abstinence, and to remain in monogamous relationships until marriage."

I added the "sexless" part. The sign seemed to hope that gas station patrons were virgins.

Below the text were arrows and explicit instructions reading put all four quarters into the appropriate slot.

I'll never forget emerging from that bathroom with a sense of glee, not sure whether Mississippi was beating the system or creating it. Ryan reported that the same sign and machine was posted in the men's bathroom.

Needless to say, we did not spend the night in Mississippi.

In Honor of My Other Love, San Francisco

Hipster Parking Only
Remember when a bicycle was just a bike? A means of transportation? Not sure I do either, but these days the streets of big cities are paved with fancy fixed-gear bicycles, a.k.a. the Maseratis of the cycling world. Or maybe the Ferraris? I know my speedy cars about as well as I know my speedy bikes, and perhaps that says something.

Don't get me wrong: My preferred transit method is my bike. I was a diligent San Francisco bike commuter for three years, a beach bum Santa Barbara biker in college, and a perpetually-late-for-class cycling high schooler back in the day. I respect the two wheels. I rely on them. I admire the pelotons that whoosh past me when I go running in West Davis, the ones who yell "Incoming!" loud enough to overpower any functional woman's iPod, and then squeeze by you with thighs that seem to laugh at you with their sheer force. I, at one time, wove blue streamers through my bike wheels so I could participate in the Picnic Day Parade. I joined the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and volunteered at the summertime Phat Tire event. I've done my fair share of critical masses, and boy, there are few things more exhilarating then tearing through the Sutter tunnel at rush hour on a Friday, surrounded by a few hundred likewise giddy cyclists who, on a normal day, would never dream of zipping through MUNI and commute traffic for that kind of adrenaline rush.

The real issue I see with cycling today isn't the bicycle itself, nor really the people who use it to commute or to exercise, but the general aura of ennui that it seems to breed among the young and oh-so-hip. That really annoying way that fixie riders tend to jerk abruptly from side to side to effect a brake. And, finally, the fashion choices that cycling sometimes inspires. I've got no problem with spandex and padded shorts--if anything, the world needs more of both--but what I'm referring to here is the skinny jeans phenomena. Skinny jeans and skinny mustaches.

I'd like to close this on a happy note, so I'm enclosing a picture of two bicycles dear to my heart. I'd like to think that this picture captures the reasons I bike: to get somewhere, to exercise, and to bike with people who likewise like to bike.

Operation Iraqi...Freedom?

After seven and a half years and more than

4,400 American casualties and upwards of 70,000 Iraqis dead

, "'Operation Iraqi Freedom'" is over. President Obama said so, and thus it must be true.

I'm glad to hear that the war is "over," and that we as a nation are finally withdrawing ourselves from a mission that, at its heart, was always controversial. Even if, on the odd chance that former President George W. Bush had truly altruistic intentions in invading Iraq back in March 2003, and even if, by some bizarre miracle, our soldiers could bypass cultural and linguistic barriers to bestow the magic that is "freedom" upon a country with whom we have never had stellar relations, it would still seem naive to think that we could sprinkle liberty like fairy dust, and that after seven years of intense fighting and messy political reorganization, that would be that. I'm not sure what I find more depressing: the fact that we truly believed we could force our vision of freedom on another country by invading it, or the fact that, after expending so much energy and so many people, we are retreating and leaving the people we've invaded to pick up the leftover pieces.

I have respect for the military and all that our soldiers (and those in other countries) sacrifice in order to maintain a sense of patriotic idealism. I don't doubt that there are people out there, both alive and dead, whose efforts abroad were just that--an expression of real, honest, unselfish work--people who have accomplished things I'd never be capable of doing. I know that many of the soldiers who volunteered in this war began their service with a certain understanding of their mission and what they would later get for it, and for many of them, especially those serving in 2004 and 2005, their commitment to their country and to their job was tested by multiple deployments and several months away from their families and lives. I can't imagine making such an important and ultimately selfless decision. And because I can't imagine this, it makes it doubly hard to think of all those who left in 2003 thinking that they were out to achieve something truly great, and that our actions in Iraq would make the world better.

I have no idea what we accomplished and what we sacrificed, but I am relieved to hear that our remaining troops will be coming home over the next year. In my mind, the true measure of our success abroad won't be something as vague and ambiguous as how "free" people feel, but in how we decide to define freedom ourselves, and in what circumstances we are obligated or even permitted to enforce our ideas elsewhere.

I'll close with

this image

, taken February 15, 2003, in Rome. I remember the newspapers that week were filled with images of people protesting worldwide. I remember being a freshman in college and going to weekly protests in Santa Barbara for more than six months. We thought we were making a statement. I have to wonder, now, what kind of statement we have made.

What Professionals Look Like

There's no reason to worry. I'm a professional.

Bathroom Stall Series, #7

Why are there so many stupid people in COLLEGE?

I find this rather tragic. Is stupid relative? Is college relative? Do stupid people read the writing on the bathroom wall? Or defend it?

Perhaps what's saddest about this one isn't the sheer existence of stupidity on campus, but rather the realization that there are stupid people everywhere. The world's full of them, and at some point we all recognize that there's no one magical place to be, no one magical thing to study, no one magical job to have. And maybe, the day we realize this, we'll be doing our business on a public toilet, as this young lady has here.

And for the record, I'm not really such a fan of the word "stupid." I overheard a comedian on the Sound of Young America say that hearing his work described as "silly" or "dumb" actually was a compliment, because it was the silliest ideas that he enjoyed pursuing. "Stupid" implies not only ignorance, but willed ignorance, something far more dangerous than simple immaturity.

Personally, I like the silly and goofy on my campus, and don't mind the stupid, as long as it's debated on bathroom stall walls.