Twitter: Comments from Work in Book Two: The Fifteenth Year of the Third Millennium of the Common Era

(1) Judge me harshly for this if you wish but… I am damned sick of people saying that they are “activists for justice” but have no concept of intersectionality or anything deeper than the visual. I understand and support activism on racial grounds and gender grounds. But just because all you see is a White Man… that doesn’t mean I’m the perfect target for your activism. Saying to me accusingly “A white man will never know what it is like to be discriminated against!” is stupidly ignorant. You don’t know if I’m gay… if I’m disabled… if I’m impoverished… or a hundred other things that are deeper than visual but just as likely to be discriminated against and worse. Bothers the hell out of me!

(2) One of the hardest things for me to experience in my Corrections job:
A defendant with a long list of violating protection orders… and then he commits an act of violence. Sometimes it’s violent property destruction, usually it is violent assault, today it was murder. I can’t say this publicly for fear of backlash and a shitstorm starting on FB but… it is really true- “A restraining order is only paper.” If you are genuinely in fear… learn self-defense, communicate with friends and relatives that can help you… do what you have to do to protect YOURSELF! Honestly… it is one of the primary reasons why I never got a restraining order against my psychotic Ex back in the day.

(3) As the majority of my job is incredibly low level data analysis (really… I count Misdemeanors and Felonies in past records most days. That’s it!)… my mind tends to wander. This used to be excellent! I could go to work, get paid, and still let my mind focus on whatever Moot Court case or Law School assignment I needed to complete. Lately, however, an idle mind has not been a blessing. Today for example… I had my Pandora Radio playing and it was in the middle of this lovely string of Chinese Classical melodies. The kind you tend to hear in Chinese Period pieces (if you ever watch them). And it was great… but my mind was getting bored with everything and took a walkabout. It thought back to when I watched “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” for the first time. A female friend from Water Polo had invited me (the mention of Water Polo means this was clearly Freshman or Sophomore year of HS). We went to a movie theater in the middle of the city and made certain that we were getting tickets to the Subtitled film. Original Language is always preferred for me. To this day, I don’t know if that was a date or not. And it made me think about how that has been a big thing in my romantic life. I’ve always been bumbling, simply tripping over myself in the dark wondering what in the hell I was doing or what I was supposed to do. Which is why I absolutely ruined things with Aoife… which is (probably) another reason I never sowed any wild oats sexually… which is how I ended up with my wife and how we got to our current predicament… in some ways. Ultimately, I believe (though can only speculate) that without Wife… I may never have gained the confidence or willingness to be open about sexual matters or in any way in touch with that side of myself.
It was at this moment in my thinking that I shook my head and tried, again, to focus on my work. As I said… the mindlessness of the job allows my mind to wander, sometimes much too far.

(4) Mind wandering again… this time to yet another “Alternate Reality” where I don’t make quite as many mistakes. Because… I chose to go to Creighton because of their Criminal Law program… and I chose not to apply to Drake because it was almost exclusively a “Business School.” However, Drake is IN Des Moines. So… if I had applied to Drake and had actually gone there… we wouldn’t have had to move. So… instead of the whirlwind (for those who don’t know… Wife and I got married July 2, 2011… had no time or money for a honeymoon because we moved to Omaha August 3, 2011… and then I started law school that same month). If I’d just tried for Drake University Law School… we wouldn’t have had to move and Wife would have stayed at the Wal Mart she liked instead of being shifted to one she despises and I would have been in the same town as my parents and been much closer to my niece.
(Update: I was telling Wife about this thought process and she was actually supportive. She said if I’d gone to Drake I wouldn’t have met the people I did at Creighton and since those people are so important to us… it was an acceptable exchange.)

(5) I just received an e-mail from a job I applied to in June. It was at the Kid’s First Law Firm… a firm that tries to give kids legal protection and a voice in Divorce and Custody cases. It is the only firm in Iowa that represents children in these matters and provides a service I find, personally, very valuable. Unfortunately, they were not able to offer me a job… because they no longer have the funding to offer a job. And… friggin Iowa!!! A state that was once one of the best in the Nation in schools? Now is shutting down all of their Mental Health Institutes (two remain open due to lawsuits and the like). Governor Terry Brandstad personally vetoed an education budget that took the Iowa Congress months to complete… because a 3% raise in funds was too much… meanwhile, he tried to get a 9% increase to his own staff!! AND… medicaid is being privatized in the state as of January 1.

I’m a centrist. Formerly, a die-hard conservative. So I absolutely appreciate and support the idea of fiscal responsibility. Responsibility, by its nature, requires measured and intelligent actions. Fiscal responsibility requires WISE spending, not NO spending. Leadership requires THINKING OF OTHERS, not merely thinking of yourself. How in the good freaking hell have we (Iowa OR the US) gotten to the point where we don’t mind taxes being spent on certain Government Salaries and Bank Bailouts and trying to kill Net Neutrality… yet NO spending on infrastructure and worthwhile programs and things like education!! Seriously?! And… it is hard to say “The United States doesn’t want that, just the government”… because the Government is supposed to be We The People… we elect, we run. But clearly (a) the system is broken as fuck; and (b) how we feel doesn’t affect our voting choices or turnout. After all, in 2014… Congress had a 14% approval rating BUT a 95% re-election rating. We feel unheard and angry but clearly… the way the system currently works, it doesn’t matter. Frustrating.

Last updated January 05, 2016