Letter Writing Campaign

I had a goal in high school to get into as many yearbook photos as possible. Being editor of the yearbook my senior year helped, but so did joining a boatload of school organizations. I had a bunch of friends in Amnesty International, so I thought, "I can go to a lunch meeting once a month to protest against torturing people. I mean, that's bad stuff."

One week, we started writing letters in protest of the death penalty. I pulled our advisor aside and told him I thought I'd have to drop out of the group. I believed in the death penalty. I believed that if you killed someone, your death was a logical punishment. An eye for an eye type of thing. Fortunately, the AI advisor said I could stay in the group and focus my efforts on another letter writing campaign. If you look at the 1995 Manual HS yearbook, I'm totally in the Amnesty International group photo, probably rockin' my favorite red & blue rugby shirt and some sweet ripped jeans (ah, grunge).

Fast forward 6 years after high school graduation...

I got a phone call from Jon's mom. Jon was a childhood friend that I hadn't seen in about a year. I knew it had to be bad news because why else would Jon's mom be calling me? I thought maybe someone's dad had a heart attack. 

It turned out that our dear friend, Roberta, had been brutally, brutally murdered out in LA. Her body had been found in a park by some joggers and the killer was still on the run. The police had an ATM photo of the killer from the night before when he'd forced Roberta to withdraw money from her bank account. They knew who he was, they just didn't know where he was.

It took about three days for the killer to turn himself in - he had taken Roberta's car and driven all the way to Michigan. During those three days, I thought a lot about this guy. Was he mentally stable? What happened to him that he could be capable of the horrible things he'd done? What made him so powerless in life that he felt the need to violently dominate another person? 

Faced with the stark black and white reality of Roberta's murder, my stance on the death penalty was all of a sudden very gray. I'd think about what Roberta's last moments alive must have been like and that this guy was responsible for those last minutes consisting of fear and pain. I wanted him to feel those same things. To feel what it was like to know someone else held power over whether he lived. And yet if this guy was executed, it wouldn't bring Roberta back. It wouldn't make me feel any better.

The crime qualified for the death penalty - kidnapping, robbery, rape and murder. The trial was relatively quick. With DNA and photographic evidence and the car, there wasn't really too much to defend. The killer got life in prison, and the relief I felt at his sentence was surprising. The death toll ended there. One life was gone, but another life still held hope for something good to somehow come of it. 

This year, the Colorado legislature has been considering a bill that would take away funding for the death penalty and instead put the money toward solving cold cases. In effect, this would take away the death penalty from Colorado courts without jumping through the hurdles of declaring it unconstitutional. It looks like opponents of the bill will defeat this legislation by providing alternate funding for cold cases. 

If the bill does face defeat, I think I can pick up where my teenage self left off and start up that letter writing campaign.

Nostalgia

We are getting ready to put our house on the market.  So far, "getting ready" has entailed creating a list of the home improvement projects we didn't quite finish or get to, convincing my Mom to be our realtor, and creating piles of stuff we don't want anymore.  Needless to say, we've got a lot of work ahead of us.

I went through my books and CDs today and separated out the keepers from the get-rid-ofs.  It was so much easier to get rid of the CDs than the books.  I get really, really attached to my books. Even books I didn't love, I feel like I'm somehow betraying the characters by admitting that maybe they aren't worth living in my library.  

CDs on the other hand, are pretty easy to get rid of. The good ones I've got on my computer. And the bad ones are the hardest to get rid of because I have to admit that I actually purchased that music at one point (um, Candlebox? I plead the insanity of the 90s).

I also found a whole bunch of tapes that I held onto.  Mostly mix tapes from old friends and a large collection of U2. I know I got rid of tapes a long time ago and I must have held onto U2 because the tapes are all from when they were beyond awesome. I purged the tapes, but found a few that I just couldn't get rid of:

To: Anne From: Chris Keep Jammin' in the Car, Chica. A mix tape from my friend, Christine, from our junior year of high school. Having good tunes in the car in high school was key. I took this mix with me to Architecture Camp the summer between my junior & senior years of high school and the mix became famous in my studio for its awesomeness. Plus, I'm feeling all nostalgic.

Learn Xhosa with Anne Munik. This tape is from my Xhosa language class in South Africa. Anne Munik was my teacher and she was the cutest little white lady. She had grown up on a farm outside of Cape Town and absolutely loved the Xhosa culture and language - enough to dedicate her career to teaching it to other white people so they could appreciate it as well. The thing I absolutely adored about Anne was that whenever we'd learn something contradictory from our host families to what she taught us in class, she'd say, "Well, it is their culture, so they know it best." And she'd make a note. In a country where white people had for so long ruled as oppressors, it was amazing to see this woman who not only loved and appreciated the African cultures around her, but realized that she could never be the ultimate expert despite all of her learnings. 

A Reading for Anne 2003.  I usually get my tarot cards read about once a year, usually around my birthday.  I adore my Mom's friend, Bonnie, who reads the cards and records the sessions for us. She is such a gentle soul and I love that there are people in the world that see things that I don't. I also think that this is the reading she gave me where she said I would have a husband whose birthday was very close to mine. I met Will later that year and his birthday is 5 days after mine. Coincidence? I think not.

An unopened, blank tape. You never know when you are going to need ancient relics like this.

Now that I've decided what to keep, I need to figure out what to do with the old.

Curve Ball

I thought I'd write something today insightful today about the Obama inauguration and how happy I am. But people that are much smarter than I am have got that one covered. So then I thought I'd write about my cat cheating on his girlfriend (the story involves multiple cashmere sweaters and should have a soundtrack straight outta the '70s and maybe a pornstache on the cat). Or maybe I'd write about the freakin' snow pile still on the North side of our block despite almost 70 degree weather. But sometimes, life throws you a curve ball. 

I found out today that a guy I grew up with died in a plane crash last week just outside Wray, CO. He was deadheading on the flight so the FAA records initially only showed the pilot & copilot.  But it was confirmed this weekend that Zach was on the flight too and died in the crash.

I have such a jumble of memories of Zach - mostly from elementary school when I was crazy about him. I remember playing blocks in first grade when he told me he had a girlfriend. 

"Oh, yeah, who is your girlfriend?" I asked, trying to be cool and hide my massive disappointment.

"It's you." Zach said. 

 

A little presumptive, but whatever. I was all about being his girlfriend.  Which mostly meant that I let him catch me when it was boys chase girls on the playground and vice versa. But apparently that was serious enough for 6-year olds because our teacher, Ms. Furnace, introduced our parents to each other as the in-laws at Parent / Teacher conference night. Which, I mean, was inevitable since we were going to get married after high school. Zach was going to play for the Broncos and I was going to be a yuppy lawyer. I really wanted to be a yuppy. 

I remember him dressing as an Ewok for Halloween, a whole bunch of us trying to break dance at Christine's birthday party (a massive fail on my part), school plays, and just a lot of silliness (all set to a soundtrack of Michael Jackson back before he was a giant weirdo). By the time Zach and I were in high school we hung out with different crowds. But we still had a good giggle at high school graduation about our former plans to get married (at 6, high school seemed plenty old enough for marriage).

And really, I haven't seen Zach in a long, long time. Maybe 7 years. I didn't even recognize him in the news footage. But the 6-year old in me feels like I've lost my first boyfriend.

Zach was a good guy and my heart hurts for his family.

Drill, Baby Drill!

Remember back in school when you had mandatory fire drills?

I've been out of public education now for a few years (13, ahem) and haven't been through a fire drill in awhile. It hadn't really occurred to me that I was missing anything though. I mean, Manual was kinda ghetto - we had bomb threat drills in addition to your standard fire drills. And for about a 2 month period, we had fire drills every Friday because it was good times for folks to pull out a 2-foot long sheet of paper towels and then light it on fire. Yeah, we knew how to have a good time back in the '90s. Go Bolts!

So imagine my surprise today while type type typing away on my computer at my hotel, there was a fire alarm. Apparently these days, it isn't just a bell that sounds to alert your teaches to get you out of the building without losing track of students who decide to ditch class for the rest of the day. No, the Sheraton West Des Moines has a fancy system, complete with a speaker to announce the type of drill you are having.

Type type type... Loud, blaring alarm noises... Announcement to please leave the building calmly due a reported "incident" - do not take the elevators, please.

I'm always one to follow directions, so I left my hotel room with all necessary materials for my next meeting. I walked past some dude blatantly ignoring direction and waiting for the elevator to come get him. I found the fire exit stairs and got down 8 levels pretty quickly, all the while comforting the poor lady who was cleaning rooms on my floor.

Turns out, it was completely a false alarm. But it also turns out, I learned a lot in high school that can be applied to real life. It was a win-win situation.