This new study … did not advocate abstinence until marriage but urged students to wait until they were more mature. It encouraged abstinence as a way to eliminate the risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, had youngsters draw up lists of the pros and cons of sexual activity, and taught strategies for resisting pressure to have intercourse.

the other happy-news article that i liked this week was this one about a study of the most-often emailed articles in the times.  which turned out to be long, intellectually stimulating, scientific, and uplifting/optimistic articles.  that made me excited, since maybe that study or any further studies it inspires might influence the media to realize that Americans don’t really want to be ministered to as if we are all idiots who want to watch the glitziest celebrity trainwreck.  i guess this was a study of people reading the times, which is a biased sample, but still, it was nice.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

January 8, 2010:  It was five years ago today that my father died.  And my plan for today, about what to do and think about today, was to write some reflections on this and have some profound and touching thing to write and share with the people in my life on this day and those who have supported me through so much over the last five years.  I’m finding that I’m not feeling so profound-of-mind at the moment though – I’m rather feeling peaceful and like I don’t know that I have anything special to say, but that there is something I would like to share, and I would like to ask you all to think of my dad today, whether or not you knew him.

I was planning to use this time to reflect on what the last five years have been for me, and I am finding I don’t need to do that right now, since I’ve been doing that in smaller bits over the last few weeks as today approached.  A friend of mine has a quotation by Rilke as her email signature, and I’d written this quotation down maybe as long as a year ago, and just came across the place I’d written it the other day.  This sent me to the bookstore where I bought Duino Elegies, and am glad that I let this synchronicity guide me because these poems spoke to me deeply of the project of living in the presence of death…a project I’ve struggled through the many phases of during the last five years.  The core of what I wanted to express with this writing is gratitude for all of you who have been with me through these phases, though many of them were intense and probably hard to sit with.  Coming back from my recent trip to New York I sat on the plane and was torn between feeling sad to leave the community that I love in New York and excited to see people I was missing in San Francisco, and I stopped feeling torn for a moment and noticed how blessed I was to have so many friends all over the place that I really love, and what a Wonderful Life I have (and yes, I’d just seen that movie too, it being Christmas and all…).  I noticed also how hard it was to imagine feeling otherwise.  Which took some of the fluffy-hippieness out of the gratitude-fest for me because the reason I was trying to imagine feeling otherwise is that I know that I did feel otherwise, or even opposite, not long ago.  To hold the whole of death to my heart gently, and not refuse to go on living…when there are so many ways that one can refuse to go on living and they are so easy to fall into in the face of loss.  That one can contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart gently, and not refuse to go on living, is inexpressible.

This is all, though, an introduction to the thing that I want to share.  When I was a child my dad was the singer in our church, and I grew up thinking of religion as being the place where my dad would sing, with a bunch of other boring stuff in between.  (And it is only in the last few years that I’ve realized that I still kind of think of religion that way, and that this is in fact just the right way to think of it, and that this is not meant as a degradation of religion, at all.)  We had an old VHS of my uncle’s wedding from when I was about 6, old enough that it didn’t really work in any of the VCRs that I tried, and I’ve been pursuing this project of getting the video to watchable format for a long while because I knew my dad sang in this wedding.  This finally just worked, so I’m sharing now something that I’ve looked forward to sharing all while I was trying to get this thing to work – some recordings of my dad singing.

All along while working on this I misremembered that all that was on the video was my dad singing “Danny Boy,” and that he had not hit the high note in one of the verses when he sang it in church.  So part of my plan was that I was going to use the miracles of modern technology to steal the high note from one of the other verses, and cover up the mistake, and make this perfect recording and then share that.  Though as I thought about it, I wondered why it was that I needed to do that – why I needed to remember my dad as artificially perfect.  So I then decided that I would play with the recording so I’d have a smooth one to listen to when I wanted to, but that I would share both the perfect and the imperfect versions.  And then I kept examining this attachment I had to the perfect recording and finally decided that what I needed to do was be able to listen to it the way that it was, keep it the way that it was, and share it the way that it was.  When I finally recovered the recordings, I found that (a) there was only one verse anyway, so my whole striving for perfection was futile regardless, and/but (b) he did sing “Danny Boy,” and did make a mistake, but also sang a perfect “Somewhere” and “One Hand, One Heart” from West Side Story, and “Ave Maria”.  [Insert suitable conclusion about how looking for perfection in your loved ones is futile, and if you give up on looking, you’ll probably find it there, anyway.]

In the video, the first time my dad sings, the video first pans the church and moves slowly up to where he’s singing in the balcony, and it is so easy to imagine that he’s singing to me and telling me how “peace and quiet and open air, waits for us, somewhere…”  I’ve listened to it probably 50 times already and it makes me so happy, and I hope it can bring you some joy or sorrow (or jouissance, for my psych/philosophy nerd friends), or whatever emotion might also remind you to feel more alive, today.

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:
they are weaned from earth’s sorrows and joys, as gently as children
outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers.  But we, who do need
such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often
the source of our spirit’s growth—: could we exist without them?
Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,
the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;
and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god
had suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

Listen…

1. touching: a one-man show that i really wish i was in new york to see sometime over the next 6 weeks, by a man raised by heroin addicts who both died of AIDS when he was a teenager. we had many discussions in our intern group about working with clients who were struggling to parent while drug-addicted, so the story of a child who grew up in this situation who worked through adversity to recovery through the arts is powerful.  the article mentions a documentary about him, which hopefully i can see since i’m too far from the play performance.

and

2. troubling: a report of heroin use on the rise among affluent teens in new york, as it becomes more accessible, more “cool”, and cheaper than other drugs.  scary.

The gem of wisdom to take away from the study:

In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

i am so not bored of course that i don’t have time to write about it, but think that the not-boredom in itself is notable, since i have been bored with most every other job i have ever had.  even if the job was in service of doing something that i cared about, the actual day-to-day of the job never worked for me.  and i worried life would just be like this forever.  it is not!  which is highly exciting, and which i thought was worth sharing in a few sentences.  (maybe the excitement is not as apparent for all of you who have not been in my head with me during my other jobs, but if you had been, you would know this is a momentous observation.)

okay, random.

btw, the title of this post is from a prohibition-era political poem by Franklin Pierce Adams, that i also have always found applicable to our current drug war:

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.
We like it.
It’s left a trail of graft and slime
It don’t prohibit worth a dime
It’s filled our land with vice and crime
Nevertheless, we’re for it.

i especially like this post from arianna huffington, which lays out the important issues, and the problematic motives of the opposition, excellently.  i’d put some exerpts but don’t want to deter anyone from reading the whole thing, which really covers all the bases.  please read, especially if you are undecided on prop 5.  this post follows up huffington’s with some additional info.

prop5-prop36 is a fact sheet explaining how prop 5 works to expand to successes and fill in the holes of prop 36, like adding treatment for youth that is not currently covered by prop 36.  and here is a long list of the supporters of prop 5, and an faq from the yes on 5 website.

please vote yes on 5!  if you have any questions about it please feel free to ask me.

Considering the family’s long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Maverick insists that John McCain, who has voted so often with his party, “is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.”

“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’ ”

“He’s a Republican,” she said. “He’s branded.”

read the whole article for some neato etymology.