The Zen of Doggy-Doo, Part 1

We’ve been dealing with a crappy problem for quite some time at our house.  Actually, crap is the problem.  And of all the crappy problems one could possible have, actual crap may be the worst. 

Oh, by the way, I should warn you; if you’re already getting put off by the multiple uses of the word ‘crap,’ you may want to stop reading now.  It’s only going to get worse. 

My mom’s kind of squeamish that way.  Strangely, not when it comes to dealing with the real thing (she raised six kids after all); no, it’s the vocabulary words that get to her.  Whenever my mom hears someone say a word as mild as ‘crap,’ ‘poop,’ or ‘ca-ca,’ her eyes start to flutter; anything stronger and she appears to be coming down with a case of the vapors, which I didn’t realize even still existed.  The term she prefers to use when referring to the biological process of eliminating solid waste is the cryptic letter combination ‘B.M.’  It wasn’t always that way, though.  When we were kids it was simply ‘potty,’ or if she needed to be more specific, ‘number 1’ and ‘number 2.’  Those two numbers were in such common usage in my house that when I got to first grade, I would argue with my teacher whenever she tried to tell us that 1 + 1 = 2.  Even from what little I understood about the digestive process, there was just no way that could be true. 

But now it’s ‘B.M.’  For the longest time, I didn’t even know what ‘B.M.’ referred to.  Mom, who would sometimes take care of our oldest daughter when she was little, first sprung that one on me when I stopped by after work one day to pick her up.  She was casually debriefing me on the day’s activities when her voice suddenly dropped almost to a conspiratorial hush, and she said, “Jessica had a ‘B.M.’ today.”  She paused, presumably for dramatic effect, before adding, “It was fine.”  Then she went right back to her normal conversational tone, telling me how Jessica had given the cat quite a scare by dropping a block on its head while it slept.  I went the better part of a year thinking a ‘B.M.’ was some kind of beverage, like a V-8.  I figured the reason for the low voice was that it somehow involved granddad, who had probably invoked his grandparent’s prerogative again, and disregarded our strident plea to limit drinks to either milk or watered-down apple juice. 

I thought nothing more of my mom’s sporadic ‘B.M.’ references until the day she sidled up to me while Jessica was in the corner, preoccupied with trying to put her shoes on.  She leaned in close, looking serious and slightly worried, and whispered, “Jessica had a ‘B.M.’ today, but it was a little off.” The word ‘off’ was accompanied by a contortion of her face into a brief, but intensely pained, expression.  She then peered around me, to make sure Jessica wasn’t listening before she continued.  “It was a little on the runny side.  You may want to keep an eye on that.”  Well that threw me, because it no longer sounded like we were talking about drinks at all.  Maybe ‘B.M.’ referred to a certain way of making eggs.  For some reason, I wanted to associate ‘B.M.’ with food, which, in a roundabout way, I guess it does, kind of.  Anyway, not wanting to embarrass my mom further by belaboring what was obviously such a delicate issue for her, I nodded gravely in response, and said something like, “Well, we’ll see to it she doesn’t have any more of those today.”  It was my wife who finally clued me in that ‘B.M.’ stands for ‘Bowel Movement.’

Fountain Hubris, Arizona

As a kid, my folks stopped to see the Fountain Hills fountain once on a trip to Payson. It was the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of summer.  The first time I saw the fountain go off, shooting water so high into the sky I couldn’t look all the way up to the top without sneezing, I thought they had discovered an ingenious new way to keep cool.  Maybe it was some great new form of evaporative cooler, one that worked by chilling the air around an entire town with one giant column of water.  It was exciting.  I dreamed that I was seeing the future, and that someday every town would have a giant fountain like this, and kids would finally be able to play outside all summer long.  But then, after a few minutes spent on the sizzling concrete at the edge of the man-made lake, and still feeling every single one of the 113 degrees it must have been that day, I realized that, as far as providing relief was concerned, the fountain was an abject failure.  My short-lived dream was dashed.  I returned to the car, which my mom had never left, and watched the fountain finish in air-conditioned comfort. 

Yes, I was disillusioned at an early age by the Fountain Hills fountain, and my animosity has only grown with the years. 

People have tried to tell me that the Fountain Hills fountain is a landmark.  People see that fountain from miles away, they contend, and so they know exactly where they are.  To which I say: Really? What good is a landmark that only appears for five or ten minutes every hour?  Is this the sort of thing we should trust our navigation to?  I’m fairly sure that commercial airliners don’t rely on a once-in-a-while plume of water to find their way safely home.   I did have to agree on one thing, though.  The fountain does tell you exactly where you are; when you see that fountain you know with absolute certainty that you’re thirty minutes away from Phoenix.  Aside from that, though, I can’t see their point. 

The business leaders in Fountain Hills like the fountain.  They say it boosts business.  I say, if it’s so good for business, why are the city’s residents being asked to shoulder the two million dollars needed for essential repairs, and pay almost $150,000 a year for the electricity to operate the thing for a few minutes every hour?  If the fountain really packs in the tourists like they say, why don’t those businesses come together and provide the necessary money?  Then they could run it as much as they want, maybe even all the time, and it really could be a landmark. 

What’s that?  Oh, I see, it’s not that good for business…

Perhaps they’re somewhat overstating the economic impact of the fountain.  Look, I’ve been living here since 1979, and in all that time I’ve been to the fountain exactly twice.  And the only time we have ever spent money in Fountain Hills has been at the McDonalds on Shea, right there by the Beeline highway.  Now that was a smart business decision. 

Let’s face it:  only in Arizona would we think that people will come from far and wide to see water spew into up into the sky and then watch it come down again.  There’s a reason why competitive fountain-building is such a lonely sport.  It’s because no one else cares.  It’s water.  For most places, water is as common as clouds, or wet sidewalks.  Trust me, nobody’s sitting in a café in Boston, Chicago, or Seattle, talking with a friend about how they just have to get out to Arizona to see the most excessive display of needless water propulsion in the country.   

Night of the Laughing Stars

One night, not so long ago, I went outside to the backyard, just trying to distance myself from a particularly irritating set of mundane household frustrations. 

Seeking relief, I looked up at the stars. 

These were the same stars I used to look at with wonder as a child, when I would spend hours imagining all the possible worlds that orbited distant suns out there, all the strange variations of life, and the fantastic civilizations that might exist.  When I was a teenager, I used to stand under the stars and beg for something to happen, for an alien spaceship to come out from amongst those stars and get me, take me away from the small, boring, insignificant life I had, break the chains I could already feel binding me to an ordinary, tedious future, and show me all the wonders of the universe.  Then, once I was out and on my own, I stopped looking up much at all (far too busy making a paycheck for that), and the stars receded into a beautiful, but flat, backdrop.  Years passed, and I finally reached the point where I would look up at the stars, and found that I resented them.  They represented the universe, after all, and the universe was no friend of mine.  Not a universe that kept me trapped and feeling miserable, not a universe that did nothing while I struggled so pathetically, not a universe that I had actually come to believe was conspiring against me.  It felt like the stars were only there to mock me, make fun of my pain, and taunt me with the reminder that I was stuck down here, hopeless and alone, while they were up there, far beyond my reach, living it up. 

But this night was different for some reason.  Oh, I was still frustrated and feeling empty inside and at a loss for what to do, where to go.  I had exhausted my ideas, and exhausted myself.  I looked up at those stars and felt the same old remorseless laughter in response to my puny human problems.  But I remembered how I used to see the stars so differently, how they had once been filled with so much hope and wonder, and it made me ask a question I had not yet dared to ask myself:  So, who was wrong?  The me I used to be, or the me I am now?  The stars themselves hadn’t changed; they were almost the exact same stars in every measurable way that I had been looking at all my life.  Clearly I was the one that had changed.  But had I changed for the better, or for the worse?   After all these years, had I grown wiser, or had I only grown more foolish?

Of course I knew the answer, even without admitting it.  And that led to more questions.  Was it possible that my whole way of looking at the world was fundamentally flawed?  Could it be that the pervasive sense of lack I was experiencing in my life was merely a perception, and didn’t represent the actual working reality of the universe?  Was it possible that I was wrong, and all those things that I felt I lacked:  work I loved, the opportunity to do the things I wanted to do, money, and most of all, the time to do anything about it, were really the result of a terribly misbegotten focus, a choice I had somehow unknowingly made, instead of the natural order of things? 

And if I was wrong, what did it mean to be wrong?  If the universe wasn’t my enemy, if it wasn’t actively seeking out chances to thwart me at every turn, or to punish me for continuing to cling to my ratty old dreams, if it wasn’t responsible for the helpless sense I had of things never going my way, then what kind of universe did I live in?  A neutral universe, empty?  The kind that doesn’t pay attention to you, and conversely doesn’t require that you pay attention to it?  In other words, the universe of my twenties, when I believed that I made myself, and that my will, my mind, and my hands were responsible for everything good that happened to me?  The stars as simple stage scenery?  Or was it possible that I had it right as a kid, when I saw something more out there: hope and wonder and beauty beyond my ability to encompass?   Was it possible that I lived in a universe that was not forlorn or expressionless, not antagonistic or cruel, but seething with boundless life?

Damn Passion

Walter Isaacson, the biographer whose book on Steve Jobs was such a sensation last year, made an interesting comment the other day that got me really cranked up at first.  He was recalling a conversation he once had with Jobs about passion.  “We talked about the fact that it isn’t just about your damn passion,” Isaacson reportedly said, “it’s about doing something larger than yourself.  It’s about serving this world, helping others.  So if you have a whole generation of people [who’ve been] told, ‘Oh, just follow your passion,’ they’re going to forget that there’s some purpose in life.”  

Of course, when the story was released, it went out under the somewhat misleading and certainly manipulative headline, “Isaacson:  It’s not just about your damn passion.”  When I first saw that headline, I was instantly incensed and had to know more.  Which goes a long way towards explaining why the media likes to be somewhat misleading and certainly manipulative. 

I haven’t read Isaacson’s biography of Jobs yet, although Elizabeth bought me a copy for Christmas last year (curse you, Dark Tower!), but I did read an earlier biography he wrote about Benjamin Franklin, which I thought was absolutely terrific.  In fact, based on that biography, I wrote an essay in which I compared Franklin to the game of baseball.  I know that probably sounds weird, especially seeing how Franklin predated the game by fifty or sixty years, but trust me, it was a good essay, and it made a valid point somehow about the balance between individual and community.  If anyone’s interested, I’ll clean it up and post it sometime.  I should do it anyway, if only because I find the visual image of Franklin in a Phillies uniform holding a bat irresistibly entertaining. 

Anyway, for the record, I agree completely with Isaacson when he basically equates serving others as being a person’s highest purpose in life.  I actually believe that.  But I also believe that passion has a place, an absolutely necessary and integral place, in how to best serve others.  Let me give you an example from my own experience.  I spent four years as a teacher.  I changed careers at thirty-eight because I thought I was finally ready to respond to my highest calling, which I believed was to teach teenagers how to improve their reading and writing.  For those four years, I served those high school students as best I could.  I loved and cared about the students that I taught, and I loved and cared about the people that I worked with.

Yet, by the end of those four years, I was more miserable than I had ever been in my life.   It took a lot of soul-searching, but I finally figured out that, without passion, serving others can still lead to unhappiness – profound, existential unhappiness.  Even though I loved almost everyone I was around, I was miserable being a teacher.  I had no passion for teaching.  Not in a classroom.  Not that way.

My passion lay elsewhere.

Now, maybe there’s just something wrong with me.  Trust me, I’ve considered that possibility often.  But from that experience I learned that you can’t force yourself to serve a higher purpose; it has to be done willingly.  In fact, pure passion is about the only thing that will get me to willingly do more than I absolutely have to. 

During an interview I did with Dorina Groves a few months back, she showed me a tattoo on her arm which says, “Purpose produces passion.”  I think many of us, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Isaacson included, would agree with that basic premise, if not perhaps the idea of stitching it into your skin for all eternity.  But I also think the opposite is just as true, that passion produces purpose.  I think the two are inextricable.  I think that passion exists to lead us to our purpose, to lead us to a greater awareness of our unique reason for being here, and to lead us to discover the work that is ours to do.  Whether you start with passion or start with purpose isn’t anywhere near as important as just starting. 

Don Bluth and The Front Row Theatre

The man met us on the porch in front of his house.  He was lanky, compact; his thin silver hair skimming far above a vast expanse of forehead, a matching silver moustache lying pencil-straight across his upper lip, and clear blue eyes that regarded us warmly as we advanced up the gravel driveway.  His face broke into a broad, embracing smile.  Somehow, it was the smile that convinced me that I knew who he was, for we had never met before.  As Elizabeth and I reached the landing, I leaned forward eagerly and extended my hand.  “You must be Don Bluth,” I said, smiling myself.  We shook hands.  “Yes, that’s me,” he said, nodding as if sheepishly admitting his culpability in doing a good deed.  Then he ushered us into his house. 

Just like that, I had met one of the great artists and most respected names in the history of animated movies. 

Two weeks before, I had no idea he even lived in the Valley, let alone was opening his home on a regular basis to complete strangers.  What an act of faith, I thought as we stood in the entry hall, next to a temporarily abandoned table.  After welcoming us, Mr. Bluth asked us to wait in the foyer while he attended to some last-minute details.  A woman soon stepped out from behind a curtained archway, and pleasantly welcomed us again.  She asked us for our names, checking them against a list, while a tall man who appeared at almost the same time affably accepted our $40 donation, and handed us two folded pieces of paper in return.  The pleasant woman then guided us through the hall to the living room, and delivered us to our seats.

We had arrived at The Front Row Theatre. 

The Front Row Theatre is an aptly named place.  The seating consists of one full row of chairs which corrals, on three sides, a very modest, two-tiered stage in the center of the room.  There is a partial second row of chairs, except on one side of the room where a wet bar has been converted into an audio/visual control booth.  There are about forty seats altogether.  We were sitting in the front row, seats 4 and 5, just to the left of center.  The edge of the stage was not three feet away. 

The show that night was “Barefoot in the Park,” the Neil Simon comedy about two young newlyweds, Paul and Corie, who move into their first place together in NYC, only to discover that the differences between them are underscored and exacerbated by the challenging conditions of the apartment they find themselves in.  Much conflict and comedy ensue before a happy ending.  The 1967 movie, with Robert Redford as Paul and Jane Fonda as Corie, has long been one of Elizabeth’s favorites.  It’s a movie she introduced me to when we were dating twenty-however-many years ago. 

Primarily for this reason, I wanted our destination to be a surprise for Elizabeth.  Leaving the house, all she had known about the night ahead of her was that I was taking her “to a show.”  When we pulled into a residential neighborhood off of Shea Boulevard in Scottsdale filled with capacious, stately homes on large, professionally landscaped lots, she was instantly suspicious.  “Where are you going?” she kept repeating.  “We don’t know anyone who lives in this area.”  When we pulled up in front of Mr. Bluth’s house, she was tilting dangerously toward ill-humor.  “Who lives here?  I thought you said you were taking me to a show.”  Then she noticed the cars parked along the street and in the driveway, and gave me a barely restrained glare.  “Who’s house is this?  Are we crashing someone’s party?” I feigned as much stupidity as I dared for as long as I dared, but was finally forced to confess that ‘the show’ we had to come to see was going to take place inside this particular house.  It was the only way I could get her to leave the car.

A Bug's Death

It’s Wednesday morning, and we’re running late.  I’ve got about five minutes to get Maria dressed, brush her hair, and get her to preschool.  Luckily, the school is only four blocks away, and it is preschool after all, not a job interview; but still, I don’t want her to be late. 

By the time we rush out the door, I have one minute to get her to school.  With an automatic expertise born of endless repetition, I click her into her car seat, close the door, and hustle around the back of the car.  As I whip by the plants that line the side of the carport, I happen to notice a strange, dark spot on one of the white lily blossoms.  By the time the blot has registered in my mind, I have already opened my door and lifted one leg to step in.  I stop in mid-motion.  

What was that black thing on the lilies?  To ask a question like that, in a situation like that, is one of the things that makes me me.  Another is my inability to ignore the question. 

In spite of the pressure to get Maria to school, I step back, leaving the car door open while I take a look.  It was probably just a bit of trash that the wind lodged there, or a piece of foliage burnt to a crisp by the wicked sun.  But I have to verify; my innate curiosity has been aroused.    

I back up until I can clearly see the stunted white flowers of the lilies, which have sprung up unexpectedly because of all the recent rain.  The blossoms are anemic and tightly bunched; they look like small groups of geese being throttled, bills open, heads lolling.  On one of these flowers is a bug.  It’s a pretty big bug, easily the size of a thumbnail. Its body is elongated and flat, its head small and black.  Legs jutted up and away from the body before angling acutely down at the joint, reminiscent of a spider.  They are streaked with bright yellow and red.  The colors are striking, and for some reason the yellow, red and black pattern has a streamlined quality to it that reminds me of a football uniform.  And not a bad-looking one at that. 

I have never seen a bug like this before, and I’m the kind of person who keeps track of these things.  I get excited.  I immediately come to grips with the fact that Maria will be late to school; nothing matters more at that moment but getting a picture of this exotic-looking insect.  I hurry back into the house, where Elizabeth is in the kitchen, watching me quizzically as I pass through the dining room.  “What’s wrong?” she asks, but I don’t stop to explain.  I just say, “Need a camera,” and then grab one from the desk and rush straight back out the door.  I snap a few quick pictures of the bug, which hasn’t moved, then hop in the car and zoom off to school with Maria.  I’m hoping the creature will still be there when I get back, so I can take more carefully composed pictures.

Yes, I am one of those people who takes pictures of weird-looking bugs.  Now you know this about me.  It was bound to come out sooner or later.  I’ve been taking pictures of unusual insects for a while now.  So far, I’ve contented myself with photographing the ones I see around our house, in the front or back yard.  Some of insects I find are alive and well, like the one on the lily blossom Wednesday morning, but oftentimes I discover them only after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. 

Kev's Really Gnarly Meat Sauce Recipe

Generic picture of spaghetti
with meat sauce

Last Thursday I made spaghetti for dinner.  It turned out to be an inspired decision, but at the time I was just trying to do something with the two pounds of cooked hamburger meat that had been sitting in the fridge for several days.  Exactly how many days I can’t say, but I’m using the word several in its highly elastic sense.  It was long enough, at least, that I was close to losing my nerve and throwing away $7.32 worth of 80/20. 

I also had a veritable heap of pasta left over from dinner the night before, which is why spaghetti was the obvious choice.  I don’t do all my menu planning this way, but when you can kill two birds with one stone, you should do it, right?  Anyway, I thought if I made a meat sauce from scratch to put over the noodles, maybe no one would notice that we were eating old hamburger mixed with old pasta. 

So I found a recipe online for a homemade spaghetti sauce whose ingredient list matched what I was fairly confident we already had in the house.  Many times I will come up against a recipe I would love to try, but then discover we’re missing a key ingredient or two.  In these situations, there are a few things I can do:  make forced substitutions, or order pizza.  This is why, in our house, when we’re not eating pizza, chicken parmesan is sometimes made with canned tuna. 

Another generic picture of
spaghetti w/meat sauce

The option that is unequivocally not on the table is to make a special trip to the grocery store for that one missing ingredient.  Oh, no, not on my watch.  I’m a man, dammit, and we can make do with what we’ve got on hand.  As with most men, I pride myself on my resourcefulness.  In fact, resourceful is my middle name.  Well, actually it’s Jon, but that just shows how resourceful my dad was:  he found a way to give me that name using only 75% of the necessary letters. 

After several minutes spent trying to memorize the recipe off the computer screen, I concluded that it would be easier, and quicker, to just run back and forth between the kitchen and my desk as many times as necessary.  I focused only on the first step, which was to cut up one medium-sized onion, and four cloves of garlic.  For some reason it’s always the little ambiguities that get me when I cook.   I know what an onion is.  But do I really know exactly what constitutes a medium-sized onion?  How big, exactly, is medium?  I lined up my three suspects on the counter, and pondered each carefully.  Yes, they were definitely onions.  And they were all almost identical in size.  But were they all medium, or were they all something else?  I was already at a definite disadvantage working with old hamburger and pasta; I didn’t want to compound my problems by over-onioning or under-onioning the sauce.  I stared them down, hoping one of them would crack and spill the scallions.  After several long moments, I realized that my youngest daughter was watching me, so I pretended to be examining the onions very carefully for blemishes.  After the kid wandered off, I selected the most average-looking one, and then, so I wouldn’t be tempted to second-guess myself, hid the other two in a nearby cookie jar. 

The Forward Path - 28 August 2012

It’s been about eight months now since I’ve posted an update on The Forward Path.  The goal I set in January was to do one every month.  And that tells you everything you need to know about me and New Year’s resolutions.

So, where do things stand, one year and one month after starting my writing career?

Well, I am now back at work on the Hercules revisited novel. I posted one brief chunk of my rough draft under the name Let the Adventure Begin!, and then abruptly took a four-month hiatus from working on the book over the summer.   Our schedules since May just haven’t allowed me the time to continue writing for the blog and work on the book.   But I’ve resumed work on it now that school’s back in session (more on that in a bit).  You may remember I set a goal to have a rough draft done by the end of this year, and that’s still my goal, so it’s time to get cracking on that.  Should I be worried that my track record with goals is no better than my track record with New Year’s resolutions?

The blog remains the overwhelming focus of my writing output.  This is as it should be, because remember, the purpose of the blog is to force me to get used to the feeling of writing publicly, and to create some accountability in the sense of continuing to produce new writing, and writing to somewhat of a schedule (even if it is completely of my own making).  Plus, I am starting to see patterns in what I choose to write about that have me thinking that eventually some of the posts could be combined into a themed collection of essays.  In short, the blog is an absolute key to my development as a writer, and I love doing it.

Statistically, as of August 28^th, 2012, thunderstrokes has seen 13,283 pageviews since it began in July of 2011.   Thanks to everyone, my great friend Rick and my sister Kari especially, but including any and all lurkers, who have taken time to read my writing.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: as someone who has been plagued by self-doubt about his abilities for most of his life, I can’t tell you how important, and how gratifying it is, to know that you’re out there, and that roughly 1,000 times a month, somebody is clicking on a page of thunderstrokes (and hopefully reading a little of it). 

A Few Choice Words for Lance Armstrong

Just a heads-up before we begin.  What you are about to read probably isn’t going to sound a whole lot like me, at least not the me you’re used to.  I try very hard to keep a positive attitude when I write, and focus on the good in things.  I don’t want to give in to the easy temptation of using the blog to vent, or conduct personal attacks of any sort.  I try not to write angry. 

This post violates all of these self-imposed restrictions. 

In this case, I’m just going to let it all hang out.  After all, my blog is all about documenting where I am in life, and right now I’m angry.  Hurt and angry.  So I’m just going to write this and then let it go, and hopefully release at least some of my anger and disappointment along with it.  

To some, it might sound a little like a break-up letter, at least as close to one as a forty-four-year-old man who’s been happily married for twenty-three years is capable of producing.  If you’re here looking for entertainment, I suppose you might get something out of that idea…   

Dear Lance-

Champion.  It’s such an interesting word, isn’t it?

To some people, a champion is someone who wins a lot, someone who does whatever it takes to beat everyone else and claim the prize.  To those people, you are probably considered a champion and will always be one.

Most people agree on the qualities embodied by a champion:  determination, commitment to excellence, strength, courage, focus, passion.  Again, by that definition no one could deny that you are a champion among champions. 

But, to people like me, a champion requires one more thing, one more essential ingredient to truly elevate a person to that level, and allow the rare human being to transcend sport and serve as an example to all people of what is finest in us.  That ingredient is honor. 

'Stroke of Genius: Brittany Wenger

Brittany Wenger is seventeen.  She lives in Florida where she’s a senior in high school. 

Remember senior year in high school?  That’s the year you worked really hard to do just enough to graduate while sneaking out with your friends as much as possible.  Your parents and teachers had a name for this, remember?  They called it ‘senioritis,’ and usually the only effective way to treat the symptoms was with the repeated threat of yet another year in high school.

For all I know, Brittany Wenger is just like any other high school senior in that regard.  But I do know at least one thing that distinguishes her from everyone else in high school, and I’m talking the history of high school.  Ms. Wenger has invented a neural network that allows breast cancer tissue samples to be analyzed with more than 99% accuracy.  She taught herself artificial intelligence programming so she could create her own neural network, and then learned everything she needed to know about how breast cancer is diagnosed from tissue samples so she could then ‘teach’ the computer program to sort through all the data and reach an accurate conclusion more than 99 times out of 100. 

Hey-ha-huh??!

And I thought I was a genius when I figured out how to replace the rubber flush-flapper thingy in our toilet last week.

It’s true, though.  She did just that.  The seventeen-year-old found a way to make the most minimally invasive breast cancer detection procedure, called fine needle aspirate, almost 100% effective, where it had traditionally been among the least.

I may not be a genius (see above), but to me this is Nobel Prize-caliber stuff.  Whether or not the folks in Stockholm agree and are currently engraving anything with her name on it I have no idea; but she did recently win the grand prize, including a $50,000 college scholarship, an internship opportunity, and an award made entirely of Legos in the 2^nd annual Google Science Fair.  

Even though the contest was held last month, I only discovered Ms. Wenger’s achievement by accident earlier this week.  And that, in itself, raises a point.  How is it that this story isn’t plastered across newspapers, blared from TV sets, and heralded on credible news websites all over the country?  Fer cryin’ out loud, Google is one of the icons of the information age, and on top of that, they sponsored the contest, yet I still had to google ‘google science fair’ to find the actual site.  Seems to me they could have at least created one of those cute, customized Google logos they like to do to publicize the event. 

I feel like we should be giving this kid a parade.  Seriously, is there anybody here who hasn’t lost someone or know someone who has had to battle for their life with breast cancer?    Shouldn’t we be showering this brilliant young woman with public appreciation for her accomplishment?  Shouldn’t she be in a commercial where they show her being hoisted into the air by a legion of ecstatic fans while an announcer says, “Brittany Wenger, you just invented a neural network that diagnoses breast cancer with more than 99 percent accuracy, which could help save thousands of women’s lives every year.  What are you going to do now?” And she responds excitedly:  “I’m going to the Galapagos Islands!”  Which she is (it was another one of the prizes for winning the Google Science Fair). 

What is wrong with us that a seventeen-year-old girl can do something like this, and it gets no reaction?  Aren’t we the least bit worried we might be sending the wrong message here?  Have we really reached the point where, unless you’re an impossibly cute Disney channel star, a boob-jobbed and belly-shirted reality show sensation, or former teenage celebrity engaging in bad behavior, you don’t even make the cultural radar?  Do we really want to teach our girls that to receive attention they have to rely solely on the laws of physical attraction?

As the father of two daughters, I can only hope that’s not the case.  I want them to live in a world where girls and women are recognized for the fullness of who they are, for their amazing intelligence, and all of their gifts and beauty, and not just the disproportionately large, shiny parts you see on some lonely trucker’s mudflaps.