3:45 IN THE MORNING“…something tells me I shall miss these late evenings with daughter Julia.” Maybe it was the psychological trauma of baby Julia’s second day in a new day-care center. New faces, new noises, new smells – a new place surrounded by other babies and toddlers — it was a lot to take in for a baby in a world which already is so large and overwhelming. Maybe after a whole day of this Julia’s brain was overloaded with stimuli. Maybe this resulted in nightmares and uneven, restless sleep. Or maybe Julia was just teething. Whatever the reason, Julia woke up around midnight crying. It was not the whiny,…
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Civil Liberties and Security: The Precarious Balance
GUANTANAMO BAY DETENTION CENTERReasonable measure to secure our country? Or overreaction and judicial “black hole”? ON TERRORISM AND CIVIL RIGHTS: Today is the sixth anniversary of the terror attacks on September 11th, 2001. It is time to opine on a topic increasingly on my mind these past several months: civil rights in the context of the age of spectacular terrorist attacks. For several years I have struggled to make up my mind about the detention centers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the US Government has held thousands of suspected terrorists swept off the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere. This has been a keystone policy of President Bush’s “War on Terror,”…
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That Rare Thing, a Worthwhile Newspaper Article
Worth the read every single day? TO READ OR NOT TO READ? I read two newspapers everyday. It is the one ritual I promised to keep after the upheaval of becoming a father, the daily activity I would keep to bridge the gap the life between the “before” and “after” metamorphosis of becoming responsible for a baby. “I am the same person as before; I am still me,” I tell myself, as my day retains a semblance of its earlier pattern. The ritual anchors my life in the vertiginous upheaval which is new parenthood. Some people stop at Starbuck’s on the way to work or do a crossword puzzle over…
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An Unhappy Morning Surprise
Thieves broke windows in late night school burglary. CLASSROOM BREAK-IN I arrived to my school as usual yesterday morning, Friday September 7, 2007. But as I turned the corner towards my classroom I encountered not the empty twenty steps of sidewalk that leads to my place of work but instead a throng of school district employees and concerned administrators talking into their radios and cell phones. I pulled up in surprise as Principal Joe Bova explained to me there had been a break-in at around 3:30 a.m. The burglars smashed a window, entered the classroom, stole a computer and LCD projector, and then attempted to break into another classroom in…
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Sports and Alcohol
USC crunches Idaho 38-10 in 2007 season opener SPORTS AND BOOZE So last night my father and I walked around Balboa Island in my hometown of Newport Beach, California. The moon beamed down on us as we walked and talked in the darkness, and the air still had a touch of the heat that had baked Southern California during the day. It was around 10:00 p.m. on a balmy late summer evening in late August 2007. Part of the deal on there is that when walking on the sidewalk which circles the island one can hardly fail to see into the houses bordering the water. Everything is so tight together…