The Culture Blogs: Sex Education, isn't it about time?

As I finished my last blog I said that I was going to blog about Abortion.  Let's just say that was the seed of a larger idea.  This is one of many trees that have grown from that seed.  I'll get to Abortion itself eventually, but we need a foundation by which to have that conversation.  This series is dedicated to building a better foundation for people understanding sex itself.

President Obama said during his last campaign a loaded statement about his daughers: "If they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."  This is the kind of fodder that political newscasters rail folks for and here you can see it developed into a meme.  So I went to CNN for a more complete version of what was said.  He followed this statement with: "I don't want them punished with a STD at the age of 16."  Which clearly made this conversation about Sex Education.  But for the sake of our discussion I'd like bring up a single point of the wide array of subjects underneath Sexual Education:  Birth Control.

Politically, Sexual Education is a wedge issue.  In my experience these are issues politicians talk about a lot, and put into place poor standards for how to fix them.  Danielle Deaver's experience is an example of this.  And I'll be honest I don't blame them.  We as American's don't take the time to really learn about most issues in our society.  We tend to hear a few comments that we agree with or disagree with and base our decision on what we want on that.  Because let's face it, most of us don't really want the facts.  The facts can mess with our idea of morality, and too many of us are too shallow in our ideologies to really deal with them (notice I didn't remove myself from that generalization).

My wife a few years ago was in a Human Sexuality class where she was asked to ask a Pharmacist: What is the most effective form of birth control?  The purpose of the question was to see how pharmacists might react to that question.  Well when she went to the pharmacy she wasn't wearing her wedding ring (cause she was going to go exercise after the visit) and she was wearing a Carebears hoodie which made her look like a 19 year old.  And when she approached the pharmacy the pharmacy assistant asked if they could help her.  She asked her question and it caused the assistant take a step back away from her and the counter.  (I can't help, but wonder why?  Maybe it had something to do with her unadorned left hand.)  The assistant then went back to get the Pharmacist and spoke in a low voice to the pharmacist.  The Pharmacist came up, looked at my wife's left hand, and then asked my wife how he could help her.  She asked her question.  Afterwards he began asking her questions that she felt were inappropriate such as: "Why don't you want to have children?"  "How old are you?"& "Does your partner approve of this?"  Because she is awesome, she managed to put up with it long enough for the pharmacist to give her the information.  In her class she was the only person who had a bad experience, but she's not alone in this kind of treatment.  Karen, on prochoice America's Youtube channel shares about her own pharmacy refusal story here.   They are two of thousands who I'm certain have been given the same treatment.  This frightens me.  Not because of their questions, but about the kind of power a Pharmacist (who is a medical professional and therefore required by law to be impartial) has.  Because if either one of them came in as a rape victim and asked for the morning after pill, there is a high likelihood that either the Pharmacist would have refused or they would have walked out because of the emotional stress the Pharmacist would be putting them through.  Neither one of those answers are acceptable.

Birth Control takes various different forms from pills, to condoms, to even implants to prevent pregnancy.  It isn't something folks use just because they don't want a baby, it is used for far more purposes than that.  The morning after pill is crucial for victims of rape, because I cannot see anything more traumatic than giving birth to the child of your rapist.  Even if she puts the child up for adoption she will always wonder about that child and that could get in the way of her healing.  The morning after pill prevents a impregnation in several ways (all of which can be found at goaskalice.com).  Two of which are: Stopping the woman's overies from releasing eggs (ovulation), and making the uterine lining inhospitable to a fertilized egg.  Now contrary to popular belief this is not abortion because there will not be a pregnancy at all if the zygote or blastocyst doesn't attach to either the fallopian tube (which you don't want to happen under any circumstances) or the uterine wall.  This saves a rape victim from having to deal with birthing a possible child from her attacker.

Ever heard of Polycytic Ovary Syndrome?  This is one of the most common female endocrine disorders  which can cause anovulation, irregular menstration, amenorrhea, and polycystic ovaries.  And one of the things they prescribe to help with it is Birth Control Pills.

And lets face it, what if a woman does want to use birth control so that she can have sexual intercourse?  Does this make her a slut?  No.  Basing this on a moral judgment is unfair because all of us have different moral backgrounds.  We don't have a right to judge a woman who has chosen to be responsible about when she has children.  The funny thing about the responsible woman is she has been made a rarity, because receiving an education to be responsible is difficult.  In my experience the same folks who would judge the woman for her actions, are the same who will not give their children an adequate sexual education.  Instead many of them speak of sex as dirty, sinful, and ugly.  Because we don't support sexual education, we unwittingly support the entertainment media that sells kids sexual glamorization.

If we want a nation where birth control is used responsibly we have to give our citizens the right to learn about it.  If parents won't open their mouths, then we need it in our schools and we need professionals who are qualified to teach it without an inflection of their own moral system.  I was in college before I had adequate education concerning sex to help my understanding.  Is it just me, or does that strike you as too late?

I'm deliberately avoiding current controversies to institute deeper thought, because I know as well as you do sometimes we think on an emotional basis as opposed to a logical one.  I hope that this has expanded your understanding concerning birth control.  And I welcome your opinions.  Feel free to add to these thoughts in a way that doesn't tear down what anyone else thinks or believes.  I'm Jayrod Garrett, the First OG and here's a departing question for you:

Do you want your children to be punished by children or

Recognize them for the gift that they really are?

The Weapons Cache: Guns and Gun Control

Howdy folks!  Before I get into the gun toting action of this blog too far, I wanted to share with you about A Round of Words in Eighty Days.  Some of you know that I participate in this event and on Wednesdays with my Mashup you can find a list of my goals for the week with the event.  Well... just to let you know the second round started today!  Woo hoo!  So if you are looking for a writing community to help you to reach your potential this is a great place to stop.  We have several published and unpublished authors who want to support you and help you to reach your dreams.  So give it a shot.  Now that we've finished that, it is on to the guns!



Even though I've been a soldier for the past twelve years I never really got into guns.  Now I know there are folks out there who are thinking that this is some sort of crazy sacrilege, but it is the truth.  I've always thought they were neat, that they were powerful, but I'd take a sword any day over a gun.  Swords in my book are just cooler.

That is probably how a lot of folks feel about guns, because I remember when I was younger seeing the character to the left in a video game called Final Fantasy 7.  A great game and a great story, but some of the science they had in the game was dead wrong.  Like Barret here.  Notice the chain gun on his right arm.  That isn't something that could ever be attached to a person because it wouldn't ever work.  It is a nice idea, but it wouldn't function in real life.  The reason that comes to mind most immediately is that the recoil on such a weapon is incredible.  He would be thrown back every time he tried to fire such a weapon.  There is a reason why police officers hold guns in two hands and a person with a rifle puts it up to their shoulder.  You can't fire accurately when you can't control the weapon properly.

For example, I'm sure all of you have seen this: the sidehold.  Kay, this doesn't work because one, the gun is pointed down.  Two, he doesn't have the proper support to actually aim his fire.  And three because he's put it on its side he can't aim it because the weapon is designed to be aimed when  everything is horizontal rather than vertical.  This is not cool, nor is it neat.  The way this man is holding this weapon shows his disrespect for the weapon and carelessness for human life.

Through my training in the military I've developed a moral sense of how a weapon should be handled, and I think if everyone followed these rules we would have no need of gun control laws.  I'm going to share with you a version of these rules from the Marines and then I'm going to break it down in the style of the OG.

The four rules of safety for a firearm are as follows:

1. Treat every weapon as if it were loaded.
     This means that you should treat it as if it were loaded at all times.  I've seen folks who have pointed guns at other people because they think its funny.  I'm sorry, its not.  Please don't point a gun at me, because I don't know if it is loaded or unloaded.  And you should only point a weapon at someone or something you intend on killing.
2. Keep your finger straight and off the trigger, until you intend to fire.
     This is such an important rule.  Triggers do not take a lot of pressure to pull.  Consider it only takes a little strength in one finger to pull most triggers.  And if you have your finger in the trigger well and someone surprises you, guess what, your gun just went off.  This is even worse when you consider a hairline trigger, that takes hardly any pressure to cause the hammer to drop.
3. Never point your weapon at anything you don't intend to shoot.
     When you point your weapon at someone you don't intend on shooting, you start a habit of being careless with a firearm.  You should NEVER be careless with a firearm.  Consider the purpose of a gun for most folks is to kill.  Do you want to make anyone feel like you are out to kill them?  I certainly hope not.  This might seem a little repetitive.  Did I mention this above?  Yeah, I did.  Put a star next to rules one and three.
4. Keep your weapon on safe until you intend to fire.
     You know what this really means?  Be familiar enough with your weapon to know when it is on safe and on fire.  This means you might need to find out what all the parts are and what they do.  The diagram to the left is a good start to understanding a gun a lot better.  But I'm certain if you Google it, you can find much better examples.

Now honestly if we actually had most folks follow those rules, we would have little need for gun laws.  If we actually would spend time learning the correct principles behind how to use these we wouldn't have the government dictating who and who can't purchase a weapon as much as they do.  Say what you want about Obama and Democrats wanting stricter gun laws, I believe that we have a great amount of say in the laws we have in our country.  And when we don't take responsibility for our actions, others will do so for us, because they want to protect their families from those who might hurt them because they do not have the good sense to be responsible.

Government has the purpose of guiding and protecting us as people.  And just like a gun when we choose to ignore the proper use of the government, or abuse its power, we deny ourselves the freedoms that we would otherwise blessed to enjoy.  That's part of the reason that I've chosen to be a soldier, it is because I care about the freedoms that I have and I'm willing to kill, and even die to protect those freedoms.

Most people have guns for similar reasons to that.  They have them to protect their homes, nothing more.  The gangsters from Los Angeles and New York we see have them to protect their families too.  Misguided though they are, they want to protect what they feel is theirs.  Hunters use them to provide for their families.  So even though this weapon has the purpose of killing, it can provide through its proper use several blessings.

Do you own a gun or a rifle?  I didn't until recently.  My adopted Dad, purchased me a Mosin Nagant for Christmas.  It is a beautiful weapon with a maximum effective range of 2000 yards.  I'm really looking forward to getting out to a range to learn better how to use it.  Because I refuse to be an uneducated gun owner.  When you hold the power of life or death in your hands, it is crucial that you understand how to use it, and even more important that you can use it properly.

Well another month has come and gone.  I'm sad to see March gone, but April looks like it is going to be a beautiful month to be honest with you.  I feel like I'm going to get a lot of writing done and that's always a good thing.  Another good thing is that we have a winner for our giveaway last month.  And that is: Carmen Esposito.  Congratulations!

Unfortunately, I need to be responsible.  My family has fallen on some hard times financially, so I cannot do this for the month of April.  Perhaps in May things will be better and I'll feel like we can afford it, but not this month.  My apologies.  But I'm sure if you look around my blog you'll always find a good book to read, cause I like to recommend books.

Well that's all I have for now.  This is Jayrod Garrett, the First OG keeping it real with a few questions for you.  For those of you who are gun nuts out there: What would you recommend for a good pistol?  And for those of you who barely know anything about guns: How do you think gun safety education would benefit us as a society?

The Culture Blogs: Shades of Brown (3 of 3)

As I conclude my series of blogs on black men (here is part 1 and part 2) , I realize I have left out a huge demographic of black men.  I could talk about what blackhood is internationally, but it occurred to me that I need to address blackhood of those in third world countries.  To be honest this idea came from my wife.  Thank you, Sweetheart, for your support!

As the center piece of the living room when one walks into my home they will see this picture.  Okay you caught me, I'm a Christian.  But this isn't about Christ.  It is about the little boy.  He's a real little boy from Africa.  The painter is a woman by the name of Liz Lemon Swindle.  She shares about an the experience she had in Africa back in 2007 with the organization Mothers without Borders (the full story can be found here).  The little boys name is Kennedy.  At the age of three Kennedy had lost both of his parents to AIDS and lived alone with his six year old brother and their ten year old sister.   You may have seen the internet meme of first world problems, and third world problems.  The reality of it is that they are worse than most realize.

We all are aware of AIDS being a problem in Africa.  Much of this comes from the common practice of prostitution in Africa.  Often the cases involve transactional sexual relationships between older men and younger women and girls.  According to a fact sheet on www.unaids.org "An estimated 22.5 million [20.9 million–24.2 million] people living with HIV resided in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2009, representing 68% of the global HIV burden."  While that information isn't current, I don't expect that it has changed significantly, especially considering that the use of condoms in Africa is a cultural taboo.  Now while we in a First World Country will complain about our healthcare system and how terrible it is, the truth of the matter is: We have a healthcare system.

Let us consider another problem of Africa, this comes particularly from the Congo, because this is where I have heard of it occurring the most.  This problem is known as the fistula.  According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary a fistula is: 

An abnormal passage that leads from an abscess or hollow organ or part to the body surface or from one hollow organ to part to another and that may be surgically created to permit passage of fluids or secretions.

Because of poor training among medical staff, complications during childbirth, or rape women are left incontinent because of a fistula or rupture between the lining of the vagina and bladder or rectum.  According to various sources (This material can be disturbing, please take caution in reviewing source 1 & source 2) you'll get different pictures of the epidemic.  Whether you believe that most of it is being caused by the lack of medical understanding or the brutalization of women most of us don't have to worry about that being common among us.

Last of all the issues we'll discuss today is the problem of First World e-waste being sent to Africa for recycling.  So what happens is we throw away our electronics and through various means it finds its way to Africa where families Africa make their living off of stripping them of the valuable metals that are within them such as: gold, copper, and other rare earth metals.  The problem with this is that in order to do this they have to contend with dangerous metals such as: mercury and lead.

If you notice in this picture you have various folks in a family stripping the metals from electronics to sell.  The fumes coming from the burning electronics is dangerous.  The possibility of coming in contact with the dangerous metals is deadly.  And they have no safety or health regulations, no healthcare to support them if someone gets sick and worst of all it is such an important industry to the people that they would rebel if you attempted to take it from them.  They need it to support their families.  Millions of people supporting their families this way is even more frightening when you realize that the annual revenue of the industry is only 268 million a year currently.  That means these folks are risking their lives for very little money.  And oftentimes we complain about how terrible our government and political system is.

Now you may be asking, "Mr. Garrett isn't this supposed to be about black men?"  It is.  Every black man I've met who has come from Africa has been an impeccable gentleman.  Smart, well cultured, and thoughtful.  But we often don't consider the cost for these men to leave.  A Long Way Gone is a book I read a few years ago that was written by a young man who was a child soldier in Sierra Leone.  His story is amazing, especially when you realize what a good person he has become.  But that wasn't an easy journey.

These are things to consider when you think about black men around the world.  What kind of circumstances are they dealing with?  How does a young black man deal with a mistake that leaves him with HIV?  How do you think they deal with their wives and daughters having fistulas?  Or how are they dealing with having children ill from the means by which they make their money each day?  Our world is so much more complicated than we can even comprehend.  Oft as Americans we think we are superior to others because of where we live.  We minimize the importance of the cultures and lives of others around the world.  Both as readers and writers we have the responsibility of seeing the world as it really is and trying to make things better for those within the sphere of influence we have chosen.  I don't have the money to invest in making these people's lives better.  But I have the time to inform you about them.

As I close out this series of blogs, I want to express my gratitude for the opportunities that I have been given to live in the United States with freedom to live my life as I will.  I am so grateful to have a healthcare system and government regulations to protect me.  More than anything I'm glad to never have to worry about if anything so terrible as a fistula will take place to my wife during childbirth.  I chose to write on this subject as a small way of expressing my gratitude for all I have.

Another small way of expressing my gratitude is my monthly book give away.  This month I'm giving away one bundle of books.  Karen Sandler's Tankborn (one of my reads for this month) and Samuel Delany's Dhalgren.  For each person who follows the blog (inclusive to those who joined since the beginning of March) I'll put your name into the contest three times.  And for each person who comments on each post for the month I'll put you down for one per comment.  A blog is a conversation, and this is just a little way for me to say thanks for talking with me.

Next time I'll have my Mashup for Wednesday and my ROW80 goals for this week.  This is Jayrod Garrett, the First OG, with just one question for you.  Did this make you grateful for the life you have?

The Culture Blogs: Left Brain vs Right Brain

“I am the left brain.  I am dependent on denotative language and abstraction.  I yield clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless.  I love the familiar.  Principles.  Segregation.  I am black and white.  I am organized reality.  I am your world and your views.    Morals.  Hatred.  Values.  Love.  I am the rational mind.”

                                    Versus

“I am the right brain.  I yield a world of changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world.  I am Diversity.  An open mind.  Connection.  Intertextuality.  I am so many sounds you can't comprehend them all.  So many colors you can't tell where one ends and the next begins.  And more tastes than you can bear to examine.  I am boundless imagination.  I am everything and everyone.  Art.  Mathematics.  Music.  Noise.  Infinity.  I am the intuitive mind.”

You've probably seen this picture before.  If so you are likely saying that's not what the captions beside the picture say.  And you would be right.  But when I saw this picture I immediately decided to do a little bit of research on the matter.  What I found completely blew me away.  I discovered this RSA Animate on the Divided Brain and it sparked all sorts of new ideas for me.  From why we tend to polarize in politics, religions, and in education.  It has all to do with how our brains work and the society we have developed around ourselves.

It's kinda long, but I promise its worth it!

For those of you who didn’t watch it, I’ll give ya a short recap.  Basically it shares about how we have lost sight of what the mind actually does for us.  It is entirely designed to inhibit information from one side to the other so that we can correctly interpret it.  And as we have grown as a society we have begun to focus more on the power of the left side of the brain, the rational side as opposed to the intuitive side, and we effects of that in our society are interesting.

Here’s three examples of this culture that can be used in your writing:

1. Left Brain thinking in Politics

In politics there is a great deal of hero worship and demonizing that goes on.  I see it among my friends, neighbors, and those people that I try to ignore sometimes.  President Obama is a great example of these types of thoughts.  Those who support Obama think that he is amazing and that he has been good for America.  On the other hand those who don’t support him tend to say everything he has done has been bad, and there are even those who go as far as to call him the Anti-Christ.

Now is one end the truth or the other?  Personal opinion is that he’s probably somewhere in the middle.  But if you want to be able to write fiction that is balanced and referential to our current day, you wouldn’t go wrong by using this in your political climate. 

2. Left Brain thinking in War

As a soldier allow me to tell you that this is a crucial matter for a soldier.  I was trained to seek out and destroy the enemy back in basic training.  There were times I said kill as I performed an attack so much that I hated what I was doing.  But as a soldier I cannot have right brain thinking on the battlefield about the enemy’s family: their spouse, children, and pets.  I cannot afford to humanize them, or else when it comes down life or death I might hesitate.  And then the person dead is me.

However encompassing right brain thinking into the mourning process afterwards I think is important.  Because for me it forces me to recognize the importance of human life, and how people can be on opposite sides of a conflict and still fighting for the same basic values: Government, Freedom, Family, and Religion.

3. Left Brain thinking in Education

Math is the most hated class in high school and university classes hands down.  Often folks say that Math Teachers can’t teach.  Others say Math is useless.  And the iron gates of the Left Brain shut off to Math because it is hard.

Now I’m okay at Math, not great.  But I think it is because I approach it from the perspective of a Right Brained person.  Math is a language like Spanish, Russian, or German.  And so it requires me to study like it is a language.  Meaning I have to do study groups, find applications in everyday life, and spend copious amounts of time learning it.  I suffered from the Left Brain thinking for years before I realized that.  I passed Math once I discovered that.

If you spend some time thinking about it, I’m sure there are some plots or subplots to a novel you can use this concept in.  Or perhaps you can apply it to your own life, like I did to be able to get through my Math courses.  Either way using both sides of our brain to process what we are given each day is crucial to a correct understanding of the world around us.

Think about what issues you are decided on, and then spend time listening to the arguments of the other side.  Allow both sides of your brain a chance to use everything they have.  You may stay right where you are in your opinion, but you may experience a revolution of the mind where you discover not that you are wrong, but that there are other opinions that are just as valid and right as your own.

As we are drawing close to the end of February I would love for everyone who visits my blog to leave a comment.  For every person that comments on my blog this month I am putting an entry into a hat for an opportunity to win a copy of N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  I plan on giving three of these away.  It was nominated last year for both a Hugo and a Nebula award.  And it has been a fascinating read thus far.

That’s all for now folks, my name is Jayrod Garrett and I am the First OG.  How do you use both your rational and intuitive minds together?

Proposition Eight and Marriage

At the risk of sharing a bit too much of myself with my audience today I decided, instead of posting about the unjust story of Rumpelstiltskin, I would talk about a current issue.  That is gay rights.  First before anything else I would like you to know that I fully support gay rights.  I think that we as law abiding citizens should all share the same rights as other people.  There should be no discrimination between people in matters of employment, rearing a family, or privileges and rights offered by the government to a person.  However there is a place where I draw my line.  It is in religion.

As I mentioned in another post recently I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (in other words a Mormon).  And as many of you know in the Proposition Eight controversy many members of my church donated money to the cause of seeing Gay Marriage blocked in the state of California.  In 2010 it was overturned and then people appealed it.  And yesterday that decision was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California.  Which means it is finally truly legal for homosexuals to marry in California.  The entire issue of Proposition Eight has caused a great deal of challenges in the homes of many Mormons.  Even in my home.  My wife entirely believes that gays should have the right to marry.  I don't.

Most of the difficulty of the issue comes from the idea of whether or not marriage is a religious term or a legal term.  Because if it is meant to be a legal term then, of course gays need to have the right to marry and you cannot deny them that.  It would be a gross violation of civil rights.  And this is exactly where my wife and many people in the LGBT (or Lesbian-Gay-Bi-sexual-Transgendered) community are.  Because it is a legal term to deny them the right isn't only unconstitutional, but it sends us back to hundreds of years in our treatment of people in our nation.

I believe that marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman who are joined in a holy union before God.  It is a religious ceremony and I would prefer it to remain that way.  However because of the nature of how our country was founded and has grown, it is no longer simply a religious ceremony as I would like.  It is so riddled with political and legal rules that it cannot ever be simply a religious ceremony of the union between a man and a woman again.

Do not misunderstand me, I do not mean to say if a church decides they desire to endorse a man and man or a woman and woman relationship that it is wrong.  I am saying that I personally don't believe in that.  There is a huge difference between those two concepts.

So now with all of this legal mumbo-jumbo concerning marriage and civil unions, I find myself wondering how in the world do we make this just?  How do we make this fair?  Gays can't get married in every state, and civil unions aren't accepted universally to my knowledge either.  And because I want the world to be a place where we can accept the diversity and uniqueness of everyone in the world, I need to have a solution to this current problem.

So I decided that we should abolish the legal function of marriage and instead institute civil unions throughout all those who are currently married.  This would do several things.  It would have all the companies who have their current laws set up to help only those who are married rewrite their rules and laws for their companies in such a way that it would have to include all those who are currently in civil unions.  It would also remove marriage which is a religious term from the vocabulary of politics.  It would return the power of declaring what marriage is and is not to the individual churches and religions themselves.

Personally I wouldn't mind what I am in being known as a civil union legally and a marriage religiously.  It wouldn't change how I feel about my wife.  It wouldn't change my rights or privileges.  It wouldn't make me any less of an Iraqi veteran.  It would enable people who love each other to have legal rights to their children with their partner, to change the way people see the LGBT community in their neighborhood, and perhaps most important teach us as a nation that each of us has an individual worth and value.  That we shouldn't hate each other so much, nor should we fight against each other so much, and instead we should seek to find how we can envelop the entire human family within the bounds of respect, truth, and love.  And I now stand by the overturn of Proposition Eight, grateful that the people of California spoke for what they wanted for themselves.

I chose this as my subject because during my writing today I was writing about a young female warrior who has PTSD (or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in my story.  And it got me thinking about how sometimes people are so misunderstood and especially in that community.  Speaking of communities, perhaps I should share my goals now.

My ROW Goals for the week are now as follows:
1. Finishing a Scene of "Crimes of the Umbramancer" each day.
     I've been searching for a job lately and the same time that is dedicated to the job search is often shared with writing, so I'm behind.  I plan on catching up by this evening however though.  (For the record I got an interview coming up this Monday, which I'm super excited about.  Hopefully this will work out for the best.)
2. Comment on ten blogs in ROW80:
     I've been working hard on this goal.  I'm starting to retweet blogs of things I find important and also comment as much as possible.  I've commented on nobody's ROW80 posts for this week, but a lot of their regular blogs.  I'll take care of this tonight when I post however.
3. No more than twelve hours of video games per week.
     I haven't played anything this week at all.  I'm pretty proud of myself.
4. Bedtime between 11PM and Midnight each day so I can be up at six or seven to take advantage of the early hours to write.
     Of seven days I got about four.  Much better than last week.  But I think I still can do a lot better than that.
5. Walking at least a mile five times a week.
     I've probably gotten to this honestly about three out of five days this week.  I'm kinda bummed about that.  Being so busy with various obligations has made it difficult to find the time.  But I'm hoping this upcoming week will be better.
6. Finding a new job in the upcoming month.
    This past weekend I had a conversation with an Amir Jackson, the Founder of a Nurture the Creative Mind and perhaps I might be able to work with his organization and bring some of my talents to helping the minds and talents of local youth grow.  And as recent as this afternoon I spoke with a woman at a local Junior High about being able to work in a program at their school to help them out.  So things may be looking up in terms of jobs.  I worry only because I need to find enough employment to support my wife and I.  I am ever hopeful though.

You might also notice that I recently changed the design of my blog slightly.  I am working on branding myself and I wanted colors that represented me as well as something I could have in my twitter profile also.  I chose the topic today, because part of who I am, is about being fair and just as best as I can see how.  I might be wrong, but part of taking a stand for what you believe in is taking the chance that you could be wrong.  And I would love to hear you tell me why I'm wrong, or why I'm right, or what you liked about this.  Please comment below and I'll make certain to get back to you as soon as I can.  I sincerely enjoy responding to everyone's comments.


Here's the links to other ROW80 blogs.  Hopefully you find interesting comments there too.  Happy reading!