Soapbox

6/14/07

    I am writing in response to Thursday’s letter "Creation Museum doesn’t Stray from Facts". I have not seen the new creation museum myself, so I will not comment on that claim. The author of the letter does, however, stray from facts.
    I strongly disagree with the writer’s statement that the laws of thermodynamics can not be true if evolutionary theory is valid. I find no scientific evidence that  this statement is anything but the author’s personal opinion. Further, I was appalled at his misstatement of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law says that energy systems have a tendency to increase their entropy. It does NOT state that energy and matter are moving from order to disorder! However, it is worth noting that a lot of creationist literature does misrepresent the second law of thermodynamics in exactly that way.

    The writer claims a college degree in "a scientific field". Politeness prevents me from speculating what type of science he is referring to, but I suggest that, in the future, the writer try getting his scientific facts from an actual scientific source rather than from a religious webiste masquerading as science. I realize that our current government frowns upon too much truth in its science, but it does prevent ones foot from ending up wedged in ones mouth in print.

    I have only a degree in an "Arts field" myself, but a 30 second Google search was enough for even me to discover the truth about the subject. Of course, that assumes one is interested in discovering the truth.

So I’ve got this kid…
…and tomorrow morning, bright and early, she leaves on yet another school trip abroad- this time to Italy and Greece. Ok, first of all, the only trips people in my school went on (you know- "back in the day") was to Washington DC for 2 whirlwind days. Ted and I put off our 20th anniversary trip to Scotland indefinitely so we could pay for college…and apparently, for her trip to Italy and Greece. Well, you want your kids to have things you never did, right?

The child, to her credit, has earned half the money for the trip herself this time. That’s a LOT of lawns mowed, children babysat and dogs walked. Let me clarify that: she earned half of the cost of the ticket. The cost of the trip keeps mounting!
First there are the clothes. I would not have expected her to need that many new clothes, since she has a closet bursting with perfectly respectable clothes, but such is NOT the case. We recently were informed that the kids are not allowed to wear jeans at all except on the planes. It seems they don’t want them to look "too American".
Now this makes no sense to me, since I expect half of Europe to be in jeans, and I don’t think American-ness is a thing you can disguise in a chattering group of 50 kids, all commenting that the Vatican is, like, really awesome, you know? But there you have it: only skirts or "slacks" for girls. Katie is NOT the slacks type, and skirts are cooler anyway, so I suggested that she let me make her a few knit skirts- something that won’t get terribly wrinkled. I have a whole store of fabrics and patterns to choose from, but no- she is not the knit skirt type either, she informed me.
So we went shopping.

Katie now has several nice cotton skirts that will be so wrinkled that she will look like she just crawled out of bed in them by the time she gets off the bus in the morning, but she says she doesn’t care. Oh, but she decided she needed slacks too, after all.
So we went shopping.
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30 didn’t phase me, 40 was no big deal…
50, I guess, is going to be a bitch.

I really don’t want to go back
To those cyclonic days of my youth
Full of young dreams and lovely friends
But also young demons and fears,
Confusion and pain.

I was such a child then- looking back
I see so much sadness that I caused myself
Over things I thought I would die without
And the wounds, large and small, that I agonized over,
Watching them bleed,
When I should have seen how little they mattered.
How I struggled with things
That should have been simple.

But suddenly
That past seems so very far away that I feel panicked-
like a child who realizes she has strayed too far
to ever find her way back home.

It makes no sense.
I could not go back to the past the day I left it.
Why am I sad that I can not return
From 30 years beyond?
Loves lost were lost a lifetime ago
And love gained has outweighed them a thousand fold.

But I feel suddenly irrelevant, incidental:
Like nothing I do will really matter now.
I am blessed to have done so many things I wanted to do-
Graduation, marriage,
Children born, and loved, and taught
And now sent on their way
Towards that brilliance of young adulthood
Which I can still remember like it was mere weeks ago-
and yet, at the same time
It seems nothing more than a movie I once watched
Of someone else’s life.
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