Two Things that Piss Me Off. One Thing That is Kind of Glorious.

Please Stop the Witch Hunt in San Diego. Please.

Ok, clearly (I should hope) I find the tragic end of Chelsea King in San Diego devastating. Especially because there are many elements of her at 16 that remind me of me at 16, right? Though not a SoCal girl, I was once an honors student who frequently went jogging in rural areas. Horrible. And probably there were preventative things that could have been done to ensure this never happened. However, let me read you some quotes from people about her alleged murderer.

"Former San Diego County District Attorney Paul Pfingst was slightly more objective.

'I am of the view that people who do harm to teenage girls should go to Gitmo and stay there for the rest of their lives and be waterboarded,' he said."

Or, how about this one:

"'The law should be once you offend, you're done, you're toast, you're in the slammer or you are executed,' one angry woman said as she stood among protestors outside the courthouse."

Executed? Really?

Now, these quotes may in fact be fine if you are simply talking about a punishment for or response to the murder, or for that matter even a rape. But these contextually were talking about the fact that Gardner was even free to walk the streets to begin with because he had previously been convicted of a sex crime against a minor. That's what those quotes were about.

I'm just going to put this in perspective for you: In 2000, Gardner (the alleged murderer) plead guilty to charges of committing lewd and lascivious acts on 13-year-old girl in his parents' home.

If you do the math, that means that when he was twenty years old he was committed of:

"activities of which the main intention is to arouse sexual sensation or sex related impulses on the public by exposing genitalia or publishing sexually teasing postures etc"

Really? That should have been end game for him? REALLY? I'm not saying that it's ok. The guy is a creep and a disturbed individual and should be punished. Strongly. And ABSOLUTELY we should be more proactive about tracking convicted sex offenders once they're released from prison and ABSOLUTELY this guy had red flags all over him when he was released. But I'm saying the following...

Though that may have involved a plea, he was not convicted of raping a child. He did not murder anybody. He served 5 years out of a 6 year sentence, which is what our justice system felt was an appropriate sentence. Am I saying that there shouldn't have been better neighborhood programs to make people aware of him and keep track of him? No, there absolutely should have been (and I hope you are prepared for tax dollars to be spent in order to protect our young girls). HOWEVER, let's also keep it real. Would those programs have kept Chelsea King's parents from letting their responsible, almost adult daughter go jogging? No. So, unless those programs involve house arrest or sending Gardner to Gitmo to get waterboarded, they were not going to be 100% effective. That's true.

Our entire justice and prison system is based on the idea that *most* criminals and *most crimes* are able to be rehabilitated. If we're going to decide that that's not the case, then PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD let's stop spending tax dollars on schools and chapels in prisons. For that matter, let's do away with the prisons altogether and embrace the death penalty, because if you can't be rehabilitated then you have no place in society. And while we're at it, let's change our name from "The United States of America" to "The United States of Texas."

And when that happens, please don't let me hear anybody crying about all of the innocent people or people who were victims of bad circumstances or people who could have changed who are now suffering in Gitmo. Getting waterboarded. If you're going to accept the idea of redemption and the human spirit, then you have to accept it pretty wholesale. And if not, well ... Texas! I honestly don't know if, in the current state of the world, I do believe in redemption. But you make a choice, and thus far as a nation we've chosen to believe in rehabilitation. It says something about us if we abandon that. And maybe it is time to, but do it with thought. Not as a reaction to one event. Terrible things happen in the world. The question then arises: Are you willing to abandon hope for redeeming a minority in order to more closely control a majority?

Dear Mr. King and the city of San Diego: I feel your pain. I do. I can only imagine. But it wasn't only the justice system that let you down. His parents let you down, society let you down, a media that sexualizes teenage girls and glamorizes violence let you down. It was all of those things, and I'm not sure just treating the last kernel in the chain is the way to go here.

Please Shut Up, College Students

There are all of these protests going on around the U.S. right now about the budget cuts and rising cost of higher education. PLEASE SHUT UP. And please do not let me hear you say, yet again, that you deserve a higher education. That is a privilege, not a right.

Today, I actually heard a college professor (though I somehow doubt she was really a professor, maybe a grad student), say that she'd seen a decrease in the quality of her students over the last five years because so many of them have to work two jobs while going to college. SHUT THE FUCK UP. Know who worked two jobs the entire time she was in college? This girl. Between ice cream and res life, 20 hours of my week were taken up with work, and that's if it was a light week where I was only on backup duty and didn't pick up an extra shift at the ice cream shop. Know who managed to graduate with honors? This girl. So bite me.

And also, not everybody should be going to college. That's how we ended up with a nation of people who think they deserve big screen tvs. Not everybody can be "that person."

And also, I'm sorry it's an economic reality that you'll have to pay more to get less for a while. I bet, as a college student, you've told people to treat you like an adult many times. Well, welcome to what it is when you're an adult.

And also, I'm SURE I sounded this annoying and idealistic and entitled when I was in college, and I now understand how infuriating that must have been. Sorry for that.

Remember ... email?

So, I've been using about 5 different email clients of late, and I decided to pull them all into Outlook to make my life easier. And when I pulled my gmail into outlook, I wasn't paying attention and inadvertently downloaded every message from 2007 on.

Wow. Remember when we all used to use email? I think I may miss those days. We would have conversations that were more than 140 characters long. We would actually tell stories after they had happened, with thought and reflection, rather than update people real-time as they were happening? Not everything had a picture attached so you actually had to describe things? It's fairly obvious by just about every study out there that, while obviously people will be using email for a long time to come, interpersonal relationships aren't done that way any more. It took three hours for 2007 to download. It too 30 minutes for 2009 to download. Facebook. Twitter. More time efficient.

But the other thing is, you don't realize how much of your life is documented in your email (or used to be documented via email). Oh, here's the email so and so sent when we were talking about such and such. Or, "oh remember how much fun we had planning x,y,z." It was a beautiful trip down memory lane.

Glorious. Except maybe for the part that included all of the many emails from ex-boyfriends. Wow. That kind of sucked. "Remember when I thought he was so awesome? Before I realized that he wasn't?" I could go my whole life and never have that flash before my face again.

It'll be sad when we're fully transitioned into social networking, away from the longer written word. And there's no study that's going to convince me that that's not going to happen. But for now, I'll be glad that I have so many years of emails that, even as I bang my head against the table and say "FINISH THE DOWNLOAD", I can smile as I reread.

And you know what I realized? The last six months have been strange, and I've questioned my decisions, but one thing that is clear as I look back at those emails and then forward to the next nine months: I'm pretty sure that, as usual, everything landed exactly where it was supposed to land.