HinesSight

I score a great photo at Crag Law Center benefit

It was a win-win night at the Crag Law Center "Wild Shots" benefit auction in Portland. With the purchase of only one -- count 'em, one -- raffle ticket (albeit for $25), I scored a beautiful Mark Gamba photograph.

And Crag ended up raising quite a bit of money.

Along with other professional photographers, and one amateur, Gamba had donated artwork for an oral auction. The grand prize of the raffle was being able to walk away with any photograph before the auction started.

Here's Laurel guarding the photo I chose. Until benefit volunteers packaged it up, I didn't want to chance it somehow getting back into the auction -- that's how much I liked it.

Showing how my wife and I often differ on the optimism front, after I bought the raffle ticket I said to Laurel, "Let's go look at the oral auction items so I'll be ready to choose one when my ticket is picked."

Laurel said, "You're crazy. You aren't going to win."

Well, she was half right. But I won.

I didn't hesitate when Crag Law Center co-director Ralph Bloemers called out the winning number and it was mine! I headed right to Mark Gamba's remarkable photo of a whale surfacing next to a kayaker in Glacier Bay, Alaska.

 Hopefully Mark won't mind me sharing this screenshot of the photo that I captured from the "whereabouts" section of his website. 

I respect copyright law, but wanted to show the photo in all of its glory, and couldn't get a decent image of my framed photograph given my minimal camera skills.

Plus, Crag currently has this very photo on the front page of their web site, where I first saw it when I was looking for info about the Wild Shots auction.

What instantly attracted me to the photograph was the moment. The whale tail is a now you see it, now you don't deal. And having the kayaker in the shot makes us realize that a human (in addition to Mark Gamba) was there in the moment.

You can see other terrific photographs that were auctioned off on the Crag Law Center Wild Shots page. I liked many of them. The whale photo was the only one that I loved.

It goes nicely with this photo that resides on another wall in my office.

Photographer King Wu captured the scene in China. As with Gamba's image, both shots show itty-bitty people in the big wide world of nature.

Which is as it should be.

We Homo sapiens need the natural world to survive; the natural world, on the other hand, did just fine without us for billions of years. 

The Crag Law Center's goal is to support "community efforts to protect and sustain the Pacific Northwest's natural legacy."

Ralph Bloemers and other Crag staff have done a great job helping our neighborhood fight a Measure 37 subdivision that threatens to dry up wells and a community-owned lake with senior water rights.

Consider making a donation to the Crag Law Center. Currently $1 from you will turn into $2, thanks to a matching grant from the Brainerd Foundation.

Groups like our neighborhood's Keep Our Water Safe committee would find it much tougher to battle environmental threats without the help of Crag's lower-cost legal help. 

So thanks, Crag Law Center. For all the good work that you do for the Northwest. And for the photo that gives me enjoyment every time I look at it.

Portland police can't handle a 12 year old girl

You'd think that members of the Portland (Oregon) police force would be embarrassed that several of their brethren weren't able to handle a combative 12 year old girl.

An officer shot her at close-range with a beanbag gun, even though several men had her down on the ground and were trying to wrestle her into submission.

But no, per usual the police union is all upset that Officer Christopher Humphries, who shot the girl, has been suspended pending an investigation. Humphries also has been disciplined for his role in the death of an unarmed mentally man.

Watching a security camera video of the girl's shooting, it sure looks like Humphries was strutting around with the gun on his shoulder, itching to use it.

Wow, what a tough guy. He wasn't willing to help his fellow officers handle the girl, choosing to stand safely next to her and fire a beanbag round into her thigh.

Like I've said before, police officers need more martial arts training. Three adult male police officers should be able to deal with one unarmed 12 year old girl without having to shoot her.

And the police union should stop its knee-jerk reaction when an officer is suspended for excessive use of force. As Jack Bog's blog puts it, "Rogue cop at it again." The public is justified in mistrusting police when they rarely face accountability for their actions.

U of O squashes great "I love my ducks" video

Quack!

That's the sound of an offended Oregon Duck football fan, who's turned off by the Rose Bowl buzz kill inflicted by the university when it demanded that a great student-made video be removed from the Internets.

Of course, this heavy-handed attempt at censorship didn't succeed. I just watched the video on the Oregonian web site, where sports columnist Ken Goe correctly says that the University of Oregon got it all wrong.

I Smell Roses @ Yahoo!7 Video

Goe tells the sad story of how this video got squashed because -- horror of horrors! -- the Oregon Duck mascot appears briefly in various scenes.

It wasn't until later Tuesday morning that Angie Sit, Oregon's assistant athletic director for marketing, got involved. Sit's message to the guys was sharp and unequivocal: edit The Duck out of the video, or take down the video, or else. They had until 5 p.m.

They appealed, pointing out that putting together their production had taken an entire weekend. Removing The Duck involved not only editing, but remixing and possibly reshooting. And, they are students, after all. They do have classes.

The appeal got nowhere...So, the guys reluctantly shut down the YouTube video Tuesday night.

If you want to tell Angie Sit how you feel about her heavy-handed action against some wondrously creative and enthusiastic U of O students (and I hope you do) here's her email address: angies@uoregon.edu

Angie, I made this screenshot of a frame from the video. 

I must be breaking all sorts of Disney copyright law also. And confusing people who think my blog is an official U of O athletic department web site.

I await a visit from your lawyers. So does my dog, who also is a Duck football fan.

(Tell the lawyers to bring a chew stick if they want to get in our door. And better legal arguments than you told Ken Goe.)

Life's little annoyances

What good is a blog if you can't rant on it? Hearing no reply from the cosmos except a no good at all! from inside my head, I shall rant on.

Tuesday. It's grocery shopping day. I have a hyper-organized shopping list system. It soothes my left-brain soul to get everything on the list. And usually, not to get anything not on the list (my wife takes care of impulse shopping).

I push my empty cart into the south Salem Fred Meyer. Organic bananas always are my first stop. They're behind the display of regular bananas. I angle toward them.

But a 30-something woman heads me off, even though she was slightly behind me coming into the store. The organic bananas aren't visible from the entrance, so she must be psychic. As I approach her and her cart, I see there's only a few organic bananas scattered on the shelf.

Enough for both of us -- about five each, I quickly calculated. That'd be enough to put on top of my oatmeal for the rest of the week. I try to put a longing for organic bananas look on my face as I politely stand with my cart a fair distance away, letting her do her thing.

Which is, frowning slightly as she fingers each and every banana before deciding whether to put it in her cart. Seemingly she's wondering, as I would, why these bananas are the last ones on the shelf.

They look fine to me. And, unfortunately, to her. One by one, she takes all of the remaining loose organic bananas. Then she rolls away.

I wheel over to the banana stand. I ponder the relative health benefits of (1) eating no bananas this week, vs. (2) eating non-organic bananas. It seems like the peel must have some protective properties. I toss a small bunch into my cart, figuring that they won't kill me. (If they do, the organic banana woman has some karma to work out.)

Then I get home, open up my laptop, and find an email from Starbucks inviting me to join the Starbucks Passion Panel.

To get started right now, click on the Join Now button below to complete a questionnaire so we can get an understanding of your Starbucks usage and interests. If you are chosen for our panel, we will upload $5 onto your most recently used, registered Starbucks Card in 6 to 8 weeks, and every future survey you complete qualifies you for additional opportunities to receive rewards from Starbucks.

That sounded good. Assuming I'm still alive in 6 to 8 weeks after eating those non-organic bananas. I clicked away.

I enjoyed telling Starbucks all about my coffee-drinking passions. How often. What sorts of fluids I imbibe into my body. Where I do it. The questionnaire was appealingly erotic.

Then I got to a section where I was supposed to share my feelings about Starbucks itself, responding to statements such as "I would defend Starbucks against attacks" on a strongly agree to strongly disagree scale.

The first statement was on a post-it note'y image with a green paper clip and a "1/9." To the right were rectangular boxes labeled "strongly agree," "somewhat agree,"  and so on. I figured that I was supposed to click inside one of the boxes, then I'd get the next question.

Except, nothing happened. I kept clicking. More nothing.

I clicked on the "next" button. I got a stern red-fonted warning saying that I hadn't answered the previous question and to try again. I did. I still couldn't figure out how to answer the last part of the freaking questionnaire. I saw my $5 going down the coffee drain.

I found a technical support link. I complained about the time I'd put into answering the previous questions, only to be stymied by an apparent programming glitch. To Starbucks' credit, I got a quick (if unhelpful) email response.

Dear Brian, we apologize for the inconvenience. If you continue to experience difficulties, please refresh the browser window.  We are currently working on resolving this issue for our future studies.

Thank you for your interest.

Sincerely,
The Starbucks Passion Panel Team

I decided to try my Firefox browser, rather than Safari. Redid the questionnaire. Got to the attitude toward Starbucks section. Held my breath and clicked in a box. Found that nothing happened once again, even after refreshing. Started to really wonder what sorts of idiots Starbucks hired to do their web site programming.

Then I discovered that they weren't idiots -- just too clever. I clicked on the first agree/disagree statement to see what might happen. And found that it moved slightly.

Whoa! It was draggable!

I was supposed to drag the statement into one of the boxes. Then a new one popped up, 2/9, and so on. Clever. Except, in all of my questionnaire-taking experience online, I'd never come across this sort of answering technique.

My annoyance with Starbucks faded some now that I'd been able to figure out the agree/disagree response puzzle. I wondered how many other Starbucks Passion Panelers had been befuddled like I was. I pressed on to finish the survey and become eligible for the five bucks.

Where I was led to the final annoyance. Not that I can blame Starbucks. Just life. And aging.

I'd noticed this before, how it takes a heck of a lot longer now to answer a "your age" question via a pull-down menu where I'm supposed to choose the year I was born. I click on it and am presented with a recent year, something in the 1990's I believe.

I scroll down. And keep scrolling.

It seems to take forever to get all of the way to 1948. As the decades roll by I think of Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy, Eisenhower, everything that has happened since I was born, party lines on the telephone, black and white TV, the Korean war.

Hey, Starbucks: how about just letting me type in my birth year, rather than reminding me of how many people were born more recently? I drink coffee to cheer myself up. This part of your questionnaire had the opposite effect.

I kept scrolling after I got to 1948 just to see how many years were left below mine. I think the final one was 1920. So what's the deal? Nobody over 89 is supposed to be signing up for the Starbucks Passion Panel?

I got to worrying -- and also hoping, in a way -- that one day I'd fill out an online questionnaire, get to the personal information section, and find that the year I was born is off the chart of the pulldown menu.

That'd be annoying. But also satisfying. Which is the point of annoyances, I guess. They're worse than pleasures, yet a heck of a lot better than being in a state of non-annoyability.

Which, however, I'm still afraid those non-organic bananas might put me in. Tomorrow I'll be living dangerously as I eat my oatmeal.

"Health, Money, and Fear" shows weakness of reform bill

Last night I listened to a couple of Oregon physicians nail what this country needs to do to solve our health care problems. In short: a single payer system, Medicare for all.

They convinced me that in many ways the health care reform bills being considered by Congress are going to move us in the wrong direction. I'd already had misgivings about this legislation; now I'm as worried that it will pass as that it will fail.

Salem's Progressive Film Series, a class act, showed "Health, Money, and Fear" yesterday. You can watch the entire movie at OurAilingHealthCare.com.

It was made by Dr. Paul Hochfeld, a Corvallis E.R. doctor. He spoke after the film, along with Dr. Michael Huntington, one of the Mad As Hell Doctors who recently made a cross-country trip to push for real health care reform.

I worked in health planning and health policy research for over a dozen years. It's disturbing that the same problems being grappled with back in the 70's and 80's are still with us -- and are even bigger now. 

Hochfeld and Huntington said that the current health care reform legislation is better than nothing. But not a whole lot better, because it basically brings tens of millions of more people into a crappy, inefficient, over-priced health insurance system.

Make that non-system.

Right off the bat they asked the audience if our health care system needed to be fixed. Just about everybody raised a hand. Then they said: "Wrong answer. We don't have a health care system. It isn't a system at all."

It's a mess. Fareed Zakaria echoed Hochfeld and Huntington in a recent Newsweek column:

There are two great health-care crises in America -- one involving coverage and the other cost. The Obama plan appears likely to tackle the first but not the second. This is bad economics but also bad politics: the crisis of cost affects 85 percent of Amercians, while the crisis of coverage affects about 15 percent.

Obama's message to the country appears to be "We have a dysfunctional health-care system with out-of-control costs, and let's add 45 million people to it."

A single-payer system clearly is the way to go. And it's just as clear that neither Congress nor Obama wants to head that way, unfortunately.

I wanted to ask Hochfeld and Huntington some questions, but didn't get to.

One issue I wondered about got answered pretty well in the Q & A session after the movie: given that there are so many problems facing U.S. health care, why do you seem to feel that changing the payment system to single-payer is the most important thing to do?

They said that when health care providers know they'll be seeing a patient for a long time, maybe for the rest of his or her life, there are going to be big incentives to focus on preventive care and health promotion. People won't be drifting out of the system (oops, non-system) when insurance coverage is lost.

A nationwide electronic records system would be much easier to implement with a single-payer system. Research on what treatments work best would be greatly facilitated, leading to better health outcomes at lower cost.

Malpractice lawsuits would be reduced under a single-payer system. Patients wouldn't worry about going bankrupt if a medical care glitch resulted in them needing more treatment. And they would feel warmer and fuzzier toward their health care providers once those nasty money-grubbing insurance companies don't stand between people and their doctors.

It looks like if a single payer system ever is going to be available to Oregonians in the semi-near future, it will be the state of Oregon that makes it possible. 

Hochfeld and Huntington appeared fairly optimistic that this could happen. If John Kitzhaber, a reform-minded physician, becomes governor again the chances would be considerably higher, since Kitzhaber isn't wild about the direction health care reform is taking now.

Bliss: front row seats at Champions of the Dance

Last month I bought myself a birthday present: front row center seats for Champions of the Dance, which we saw last night at the Hult Center in Eugene.

Excellent ticket-buying decision.

There's a time to be at least a few rows back in a large auditorium, so you can get the stage's big picture. But not for a professional ballroom dancing show which mostly featured one couple onstage at once.

We hugely enjoyed Champions of the Dance. The quality of the performers didn't seem quite up to the level of the finalists in The American Ballroom Challenge, which we've watched on PBS the past few years.

But they were darn good.

 
Maria Damalas was my favorite, for reasons that would be even more readily apparent than you can judge by this photo of her if you picture her dressed in a skin-tight body stocking rather than a dress.

Near the end of the show (thankfully, because it prevented my blood pressure from continuing to rise into a danger zone) Maria turned her back to the audience and performed a booty-shaking shimmy that was a marvel to behold.

You can get a flavor of what this level of ballroom dancing is like via a video of some American Ballroom Challenge competition. I've got some of these performances copied on DVD. (The Latin action that starts at about the 56 second mark is way cool.)

The moments when Maria -- to offer an example that comes readily, really readily, to mind -- danced near the edge of the stage and projected one of her intense sultry, sensual looks taught me a lot about professional dancing that isn't apparent from TV watching.

These dancers are into it. 100%. They don't hold anything back. When they move, everything moves. Every part of their body. Along with their mind, personality, emotions.

This morning I came across a passage in a Zen book. 

Whatever you do
if you do it wholeheartedly,
it is perfect.

Guess that helps explain why the dancers we watched last night looked so perfect. Their perfection wasn't just a lack of missteps, but also was reflected in how they committed themselves so completely to each and every movement.

Laurel and I were surprised by how expressive the dancers' mouths were. Lots of opening and closing, which at first seemed a bit fakey to me.

But then I saw their ever-moving faces as part and parcel of their ever-moving legs, arms, torsos, and other body parts. Most of us preserve a "poker face" pretty much as we go through our day, not allowing our feelings to be openly apparent.

With these dancers, though, the music meshed with their mood, which meshed with their movements, which meshed with the entire atmosphere in the auditorium.

Wonderful.

As was the rest of our Eugene experience, a town we don't visit as often as we should. Started at Vero Expresso House: great lattes and scones. Then had an enjoyable vegetarian dinner at Ratatouille, a few blocks away.

 
Champions of the Dance was dessert. I did a lot of drooling.

Abortion rights get screwed by health care reform

Ridiculous.

The health care reform bill passed by the House last weekend doesn't allow an abortion to be part of a benefit package bought by anyone who gets a government tax credit to help pay for the insurance.

Put another way:

Abortion would not be paid for in plans offered by a government-run insurance system. Also, people who took federal subsidies to buy insurance would not be able to use the money to buy such coverage.

It's enough to make this progressive scream. Aaaarrrrrggghhh! And I'm not even a woman, nor a man of child-bearing capability.

Along that line, I got a vasectomy before my re-marriage nineteen years ago. I'd had a child in my first marriage. I didn't want another one. My second wife-to-be felt the same way.

But when I went to talk with my family doctor about this, he didn't want to perform a vasectomy. "You're only 40," he said. "What if you want to eventually have another child?"

I told him that I was sure I didn't. He was still very reluctant. That creeped me out. Who was this guy to tell me what I should do with my sperm? I ended up going to another doctor.

This experience gives me some insight into how women feel who want an abortion, yet face roadblocks in getting one. This procedure is legal. So why is it often so difficult to have an abortion?

Because too many people in this country believe that it's OK to stick their noses into other peoples' private lives. Including a distressing number of Democrats who voted for the House abortion amendment.

Apparently women buying plans in the government exchange will be able to purchase an insurance rider that covers abortions. That's better than being excluded from coverage altogether. 

However, I don't see why people who get government help to buy health insurance can't be treated like those who purchase private insurance on their own. After all:

Remember the promises? Reform was about expanding choices, not allowing government to come between you and your doctor, no one will lose their coverage, and if you like your current plan you get to keep it. Apparently being female is a preexisting condition that exempts us from the promises, too.

My Regence Blue Cross of Oregon individual plan seems to include coverage for abortions. It's not crystal clear from the contract that I looked through this afternoon, but there's no mention of abortion in the list of stuff that isn't covered (like cosmetic surgery, massage, and such).

The 2010 health insurance plan for employees of the state of Oregon definitely includes abortion, as do 90% of private insurance plans.

Fortunately, it looks like President Obama recognizes the absurdity of reducing health insurance options for women. He wants the abortion restrictions in the House health care bill changed. 

President Obama suggested Monday that he was not comfortable with abortion restrictions inserted into the House version of major health care legislation, and he prodded Congress to revise them.

...On the one hand, Mr. Obama said, “we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.”

On the other hand, he said, he wanted to make sure “we’re not restricting women’s insurance choices,” because he had promised that “if you’re happy and satisfied with the insurance that you have, it’s not going to change.”

In the end, I suspect Obama will get his way. But it's irritating to see most Republicans in the House, and a loud minority of Democrats, treating women like second-class health care citizens.

A poll found that 71% of voters favor including reproductive services like birth control and abortion as part of health care reform. Hopefully they'll remember this come election time in 2010 and vote out the House members who are ignoring the will of the people.

Live longer by slowing time down

Time keeps marching on. When I wrote my previous blog post, "How to make time slow down," I was 59. Now, I'm 61.

Obviously I haven't been able to stop chronological time. Every year, on my birthday, my age meter advances a click. But we all know how time seems to fly sometimes, and drag at other times.

None of us wants life to be a drag.

However, the older I get, the more I want time to slow down. Perceived time, that is, because I know I can't do anything about those damn birthdays coming around every 365 days.

Previously I quoted Steve Taylor, who argues persuasively that mindfulness is one of the best ways to slow time down. 

A second way in which we can slow down time is by making a conscious effort to be 'mindful' of our experience… Poets and artists often have this kind of 'child-like' vision – in fact it's this that usually provides the inspiration for their work. They often have a sense of strangeness and wonder about things which most of us take for granted, and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions.

An article in the October 24-30, 2009 issue of New Scientist, "The Time Machine Inside Your Head," provides some explanations for why mindfulness succeeds in slowing down time for us.

Researchers wondered why we feel that some experiences (such as a frightening one) last longer than others. People who survive a serious car accident, for example, often say "I felt like everything was happening in slow motion." According to the article:

[David] Eagleman now attributes the apparent slowing of time to a trick of memory. An intense experience, with heightened fear or excitement, rivets our attention and evokes the firing of many neurons across the brain, he says, causing us to soak up more sensory details.

Richer memories seem to last longer, he says, because you assume you would have needed more time to record so many details.

...That could explain many other temporal illusions too, such as the "oddball effect." When people see the same thing over and over (a picture of a dog flashed on a computer screen, say) and then suddenly see something different (Margaret Thatcher), the new thing seems to last longer, even if all the pictures are actually shown for the same duration.

So if we see familiar things as if for the first time, this should slow down time for us. The years we have left to live will seem like they take longer to pass.

As Steve Taylor says:

Mindfulness means stopping thinking and starting to be aware, to live in the here and now of your experience instead of the 'there and then' of your thoughts. It stretches time in exactly the same way that new experience does: because we give more attention to our experience, we take in more information from it.

In other words, to some extent we can control time. It doesn't have to speed up as [we] get older. Some of us try to extend our lives by keeping fit and eating healthy food, which is completely sensible. But it's also possible for us to expand time from the inside, by changing the way we experience the moment to moment reality of our lives. We can live for longer not just in terms of years, but also in terms of perception.

Life lessons from Michael Jackson's "This Is It"

Whether or not someone has a philosophical bone in their body, he or she likely will enjoy "This Is It" -- a documentary featuring rehearsal footage of Michael Jackson preparing for a monumental concert tour.

I do have philosophical bones. And they loved this well-reviewed movie as much as the non-pondering side of me.

Over on my other blog I opined that "This Is It" is a great movie. Also, a terrific philosophy. We're always waiting for It to arrive in the future, or wondering what happened to It in the past.

Meanwhile, life -- It -- keeps yelling "Here I am! Here! Now!" in the present moment. But often we don't have ears to hear it.

This is the main message that I got from the movie. Your results may differ. Side effects may vary.

Regardless, I heartily recommend going to see "This Is It" while it's still playing in a theater with a big screen and Dolby sound (it won't be the same on your TV, believe me). If nothing else, you'll get an impression of Michael Jackson that will be different from whatever you had before.

My wife and I left the theater feeling that Jackson was a genuinely nice guy. Previously I'd put him in my mental box of "weird tortured artists" with strange peccadilloes, like young boys.

This sort of typecasting doesn't reflect the rich complexity of people.

I don't like it when right-wingers sum up our president with one word: he's a socialist. Nor did I like it when my fellow progressives said about George Bush: he's an idiot. (I'd point out that he got a MBA from the Harvard Business School, which idiots can't do.)

I've been surprised at some highly negative comments about Michael Jackson in response to my other blog post about the movie. One guy said that he was selfish. However, it's estimated that Jackson gave over $500 million to charitable causes.

"Selfish," or any other term, can't come close to summing up a human being. Each of us is unsummable. There's no way to add up any set of qualities and arrive at a total that equals Me. Or You. Or Anybody.

Sure, Histories 'R Us to a large extent. We're creatures of our past.

In the movie Michael Jackson carried the record of his plastic surgeries on his face. And reflected his astounding musical career with every note he sang and step he danced. But what really grabbed me as I watched "This Is It" was...

It. The moment. The here-and-now of Jackson captured on film. Which produced a corresponding feeling of It in me.

Michael Jackson had sung the songs -- "Billy Jean," "Beat It," "Black and White," and so on -- that were to be in the show countless times. But the rehearsal footage showed how Jackson was able to seemingly sing them for the first time, every time.

This unscripted documentary showed me a side of Jackson that hadn't been very apparent to me in all the other times I'd seen him perform onscreen: how his music was him, and he was his music.

Now. Always now.

At one point he tells the musicians and other performers that they'll need to wait for his cue before moving to a certain part of a song. Because he was feeling the music say pause -- it's marvelous how Jackson moves between movement and stillness -- and only he knew how to listen to the saying.

I had the sense that if Michael Jackson hadn't died, and "This Is It" had gone on its 50-date tour, almost every performance of a song would have been subtly different.

He was a highly creative artist. Jackson was creating life at each and every moment. We can quibble with his choices, his creations, his art work. But the movie is a reminder that for each of us, no matter what we do or who we are...

This

Is

It.

(Richard Corliss of TIME has an interesting review of the movie. So does Roger Ebert.)

How disappointed should progressives be about Obama?

It's another election day, albeit a rather low-key off-year one. I'm getting flashbacks to 2008, when it seemed like everything was going to be just fine now.

With Obama our president for the next four years, wouldn't we get the change that we'd be wanting for the past eight? The way things have turned out so far, mostly not.

Nothing Obama has done to date excites me the way his campaign did.

Arianna Huffington nailed this theme in today's "Obama One Year Later: The Audacity of Winning Versus the Timidity of Governing." She made me think, right on, sister!

Indeed, reading the book [by David Plouffe] I often found myself wondering what Candidate Obama would think of President Obama. Would he look at what the White House is doing and say, "that's what I and my supporters worked so hard for?"

How did the candidate who got into the race because he'd decided that "the core leadership had turned rotten" and that "the people were getting hosed" become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?

How did the candidate who told a stadium of supporters in Denver that "the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result" become the president who has surrounded himself with the same old players trying the same old politics, expecting a different result?

Huffington said that she asked Plouffe what happened to the 13 million people on Obama's email list. He replied that its hard to maintain the intensity of the engagement.

Well, I can tell you what usually happens when one of the 13 million, me, gets another of the frequent emails urging me to do something or other (call, write, donate) for some cause or another (health care reform, at the moment).

I delete the message.

The only exception I can remember was right after Obama's speech to the joint session of congress, where he showed some of the energy and passion that marked his campaign. I made a donation to the health care cause after getting a "please help" email.

But otherwise I feel that my wife and I did our bit last year when we worked along with countless other progressives to elect Democrats. Successfully. Now the Dems control the White House and both houses of Congress.

Yet Obama's email machine still wants me to hold house parties about health care reform, to call my Senator and Representative, and send in $25 or more to support TV ads.

Almost always I think, "nope."

The ball's in your court, Obama. When I see you trying as hard to win legislative battles as you fought to be elected president, then I might feel differently.

Like lots of progressives, I'm disappointed that Obama isn't playing the political game as differently as he said he would during the campaign. I like Obama's positions on domestic and foreign policy issues much better than Bush's. But the way he's trying to get his way doesn't seem all that different.

Suck up to special interests. Favor Wall Street over Main Street. Do whatever Israel wants. Assume the United States citizenry is center-right rather than center or center-left.

In Obama's defense, Anna Quindlen reminded me of some realities in her Newsweek piece, "Hope Springs Eternal."

Fom time to time the American people participate in a mass delusion about how their government works. Such a delusion took place exactly a year ago, when a 47-year-old African-American who had once been accorded little chance of prevailing was elected president of the United States.

History will judge Barack Obama over the long haul. But we've learned something in the short term that is simple, obvious, and has less to do with him than with the Founding Fathers. This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold.

OK. I get it.

Obama can't snap his fingers and make change happen. He's got to get legislation passed through a Byzantine maze of Congressional committees, power brokers, and massive egos (think Joe Lieberman).

However, tell that to Robert Ellis Gordon, who wrote a terrifically moving guest opinion for the Oregonian editorial page recently, "The Morality of Health Care Reform." Gordon is seriously ill from an autoimmune disease.

What do I know for certain?

That when I took ill in 1989, I discovered what so many other sick people have discovered: Private health insurance companies didn't like me any more. And this was more than mild antipathy. Their behavior led to the inescapable conclusion that for reasons of profit, they wanted me dead and dead soon. To cite one of numerous examples, when my autoimmune disease attacked my blood and I had multiple pulmonary emboli, my private insurer refused to cover the heparin necessary to save my life.

Gordon asks Obama to consider what he is going to feel when he comes to the end of his own life. With the power of the presidency in his hand, did he wield it as effectively as he could for the benefit of humanity? 

You are a man who has everything to live for, Mr. President, and I wish you a long and healthy life.

But difficult as this is for me to say to you, that life will one day end.

And if you have forewarning, if you know your death is coming and wish for a peaceful death, you, too, will have to walk the Via Dolorosa, The Way of Sorrow, The Road of Stilettos. And as you look back on your remarkable life, you'll have to scrutinize the actions you took during month 10 of your fledgling presidency. And if you find that you had an opportunity to "get it right" as you put it in that eloquent address, but chose, instead, to sentence tens if not tens upon tens of millions to live and die on the streets?

Well?

Speaking to you as citizen to citizen, and (if I may be so bold) as friend to friend, it is incumbent on me to pass this along: Health care is, as you have told us, the most profoundly moral issue of our time. And if you cave -- if you fail this test of personal character -- you may find a peaceful death to be elusive.

What makes something "fun"?

Some would say that nothing is less fun than pondering the question, "What is fun?" However, I'm the sort of person who enjoys ponders, and fun is about enjoyment, so I'll press on.

I got to thinking about fun recently by -- no big surprise -- having fun!

This year Laurel and I broke our usual no Halloween costume habit. Salem's RJ Dance Studio invited people to costume-up at a Friday night open dance. So, we did.

  Laurel was a creative vision in blue, accessorizing with a feather boa and over the top makeup.

I took a more minimalist approach, my costume shopping having been limited to picking up a black mullet wig at WalMart for $8. After adding a hunting cap, shades, and Harley t-shirt I told anyone who asked, plus some who didn't, that I was a rural Oregon meth lab operator.

At any rate, we had fun with our get-ups, notwithstanding the fact that we were the only people at the dance in costumes. I felt like we danced better than usual, having a lot of fun (that word again!), but that might just be the meth contact high speaking.

Then, today sun and semi-warm temperature (50's) led me to fire up my Suzuki Burgman 650 maxi-scooter and two-wheel around for several enjoyable hours. It'd been a week or so since I'd ridden my scooter.

As soon as I hit the main road and opened up the throttle, my mind screamed Wow, this is so much fun!

Putting on a Halloween costume. Ballroom dancing. Scootering. What's the fun-connection that ties them all together? I've got some answers, but they come with a caveat:

I'm just talking about me. At my ripe age of 61 (I hope I never have to say "rotting"), one bit of wisdom I've learned is that fun, like happiness, is almost entirely idiosyncratic.

In the 60's -- the decade, not my age -- we were fond of saying, "If it feels good, do it." That's still excellent advice, so long as some practicalities are taken into consideration. If what feels good is your boss's spouse, and you want to keep your job, some other sort of fun should be contemplated.

I've read several books about the nature of happiness and how to be happier. None made much of an impression on me. I'm especially skeptical of the oft-heard adage that real happiness is more like calm bliss than passionate fun.

Who says?

If having fun makes me happy, assuming there is any difference between "fun" and "happy," then I need to have more fun. I used to believe that sitting cross-legged in meditation would make me happy. Now I've taken to meditating less and dancing more.

I feel happier. Because dancing is fun. As is scootering and dressing up as a different persona. I come back to why? For me, and maybe only me...

Flowing is fun. Thinking too much makes me feel jagged, rough, jumpy, uncertain. Just doing it without excessive ratiocination, no matter what the "it" is, fills me with energy, confidence, smoothness, connectivity.

For a few moments Friday night I wondered whether my costume was too stupid to wear to the dance. Then I felt, who cares, I want to do it. And proceeded to do it. 

Ditto with taking the lead in ballroom dancing. In our several years of lessons I've learned that hesitancy is the kiss of dance death for the leader (usually, a man). It's better to make a wrong move than no move at all.

Plus, it's a lot more fun to take decisive charge of your partner than to waffle around wondering what to do next.

Same applies on a scooter or motorcycle, even more so. If your mind wanders on two non-air-bagged wheels, uncertain whether to move this way or that way when a dangerous situation demands instant action, your next move could be sliding along the pavement.

Focusing is fun. Flowing and focusing might seem at odds, but they aren't for me. When my mind is divided, pulled in several directions at once, I feel neither in the flow nor focused.

In this regard, and going back to the 60's, Benzedrine and Preludin taught me a lot (now, strong coffee is my stimulant of choice). Namely, that just about anything is fun when you're zeroed in on just that thing.

I didn't enjoy the statistics course I had to take for my psychology major. But after popping a "bennie," I remember being utterly fascinated by t-tests and the normal distribution. It was just me and my statistics book for several concentrated fun hours of studying -- no monkey mind jumping around with distracting "this is boring!" chatter.

Ballroom dancing, I've got to attend to the music, to the dance style, to my partner, to other couples. Scootering, I've got to watch out (more so than when driving a car) for other vehicles, imperfections in the pavement, angle and lean of curves.

It's fun to just be in the moment. Not remembering or worrying about the past or future. Simply doing this, now. Then, that. Now.

Buddhists call this mindfulness, I think. But I don't want to over-think flowing and focusing. This blog post has flowed along quite smoothly, my focus aided by -- what else? -- a strong cup of coffee.

In my book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus, I started off the "Happiness is Here" chapter with a sentence that popped out of my mind in a flash, but which I didn't really understand.

Or even entirely agree with. But I left it in the book, because it seemed so true.

In the present moment, you and I are as happy as we will ever be.

So have fun. Now, the only time it will be possible.