Get Off My Lawn!

This is the second time that someone has stolen the "SUPPORT OUR TROOPS... BRING THEM HOME" sign out of our front yard.

My husband and I have discussed numerous options. So far almost all of them are extremely labor-intensive and/or morally suspect, but I thought I'd list them anyway.

• Put a "No Trespassing" sign next to the other sign.
• Use Quick-Crete to cement the sign in
• Cover the sign with poison ivy juice and itching powder
• Set up a surveillance webcam
• Fence the yard
• Electrify the sign
• Booby-trap the sign
• Borrow a gun, stay up all night, and when we see them coming, shoot in the air
• Borrow a gun, stay up all night, and when we see them coming, shoot them

We'll probably just put up a new sign. We get them for free... so ha!

All-Picture Post

Some Jason Scott Lee pics for Cattygurl! :-)

Dispiriting Generalization

We're putting in an inquiry for two Asian boys. They are slightly above our age range so I called our worker to talk about it and to reinforce the fact that we were very interested.

They're in a far-off state, but not Hawaii (An interstate Hawaii adoption would be unlikely, and besides that, the culture there is so different... moving from Hawaii to Georgia would involve such culture shock and I don't think it would be in the best interests of a child there, unless as a total last resort).

The boys have Anglo identifying names, something along the lines of "John" and "Dave". The worker said, "Oh, those names must mean they were adopted."

I just said "No, no, that's impossible to tell that."

It doesn't matter to me whether they're from a disrupted transracial international adoption or from an Asian-American family. But I find it disturbing that the worker would leap to a conclusion like that based on a first name. I have an Anglo first name and I wasn't adopted; tons of Asian-American families give their kids Anglo first names.

I hope the worker does not proceed with this inquiry making other kinds of weird generalizations. It could potentially be harmful.

I wish I had a manual called "What Black Social Workers Think About Asian Parents".

442nd/100th two-for-one movie review - Part II

(Continued from Part I)

Only the Brave is a labor of love by lead actor/director Lane Nishikawa. Born in Hawaii, his uncles fought in the 442nd.

It stars Lane Nishikawa as the sergeant. Other cast members of note are Tamlyn Tomita, Mark Dacascos (you may know him as Chairman Kaga's nephew), Pat Morita (one of his last roles before dying) and Jason Scott Lee.

My favorite is Jason Scott Lee. He's an actor with an amazing physical presence, and I wish he could get decent roles instead of the usual drek reserved for Asian-American men. I highly recommend Map of the Human Heart. He carries that movie, and I always cry for the last ten minutes straight while watching it.

Only the Brave centers on the most famous action of the 442nd, the rescue of the Texas Lost Battalion. It's a pretty grim movie. The main theme isn't racism, or bravery, it's the sheer psychological torment of undergoing massive casualties. There's some moments of happiness and camaraderie, but the movie is dominated by scenes of soldiers dying at a steadily increasing pace.

The cast is great, and the acting is solid throughout. More than anything, you get a sense that these soldiers were three-dimensional human beings from diverse backgrounds. They weren't dominated by ideology, they just did what they felt was right. The movie doesn't stuff their tragic circumstances down the audience's throat. The camps are portrayed in a matter-of-fact way, as simple, bare rooms from which families say goodbye. There are only two brief confrontations with white men shown. The rest of the movie just concentrates on the positive and supportive relationships between 442nd members.

The visuals of the movie are very well-done and the action scenes are also impressive, especially the bloody attack at the end of the movie.

Is Only the Brave a great movie? Well, I have to be honest. It has great intentions, and some strengths, but also some flaws. Since I feel bad about criticizing it directly, I'll just say it suffers from The Thin Red Line-ism, which in my opinion is one of the worst war movies ever made.

(I just have to add, my mother once told me that movie should be called "The Thin Green Stalk" because most of the scenes have soldiers running through endless grass fields... with constipated looks on their face and strings throbbing in the background.)

Thin Red Line-ism symptoms:
- massive ensemble cast which is too big to get to know any character well
- abuse of symbols symbolizing the brutality of war in a symbolic way
- abuse of flashbacks
- substituting flashbacks for character development, plot structure and pacing
- too many flashbacks
- sappy music

I'll say that "Only the Brave" has some symptoms, and leave it at that. Otherwise I strongly recommend it. I also hope more movies eventually get made about the 442nd. There are many amazing stories waiting to be told.

There was one much earlier movie made about the 442nd called "Go For Broke". It was written and directed by Robert Pirosh in 1951 and stars Van Johnson. Yes, it's one of those movies starring a totally extraneous white guy. Van Johnson plays an officer assigned to train and lead Nisei soldiers. He starts off distrusting the wily Japanese but comes to respect them. Yes, it's horribly cliched. However, I found myself thoroughly enjoying this movie and very much recommend it. The miracle is that the movie's two biggest flaws -- insertion of Extraneous White Guy and lack of a real plot -- actually cancel each other out. About a third of the way into the story, the movie forgets that Van Johnson is supposed to be the star. He gets reassigned and drifts out of the plot. The rest of the movie is mostly taken up with casual vignettes of the soldiers making their way through Italy. Since many of the actors were actually real surviving members of the 442nd, this is as close to a documentary as it gets, and the scenes are fantastic.

The movie takes a much lighter note. There's a ukulele performance and a sentimental subplot involving a piglet mascot. It gets dark towards the end as the 442nd starts taking massive casualties, then ends with a triumphant flourish as the Nisei rescue the Texas Lost Battalion and even take down a few Nazis using aikido moves.

For 1951, and for its limited budget, this is pretty good.

442nd/100th two-for-one movie review - Part I

This weekend I received my copy of "Only the Brave". I ordered it directly from the linked website, since it's not in wide release.

The 100th and the 442nd were made up of Japanese-Americans who fought in the European Theater. Their story is incredible and inspiring. They fought in some of the fiercest battles in WWII and were the most decorated unit of their type. And they would have received even more medals were it not for the racism of the time.

For example, Senator Daniel Inouye did not receive his much-deserved Medal of Honor until 2000. He should have received it 55 years ago. I was absolutely mindboggled when I read exactly what he did, because if I'd seen it in a war movie I'd have thought it was ludicrous and physically impossible.

Back in Italy, the 442nd was assaulting a heavily defended hill in the closing months of the war when Lieutenant Inouye was hit in his abdomen by a bullet which came out his back, barely missing his spine. He continued to lead the platoon and advanced alone against a machine gun nest which had his men pinned down. He tossed two hand grenades with devastating effect before his right arm was shattered by a German rifle grenade at close range. Inouye threw his last grenade with his left hand, attacked with a submachine gun (emphasis mine) and was finally knocked down the hill by a bullet in the leg.

The Japanese-American history of internment and WWII is not really my family inheritance, because I'm the first Japanese-American in my family. Nevertheless, I feel a strong connection to the events.

If your family had all their land and goods and businesses and home stolen by neighbors, had your children pulled out of school, and then you were rounded up and forced to live in a shack in a desert surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards... how hard would that make you want to fight for your country?

After learning more about this history, one interesting thing I came to understand was that the root cause of internment was not racism. It was simply greed, aided of course by racism. To explain this, there were three basic groups of Japanese-Americans at the time: Hawaiian, West Coast and East Coast. The ones in Hawaii were very numerous and had been there for several generations already. Many started off at the very bottom as sugarcane cutters, but they had become integrated into the island economy. On the East Coast, Japanese-Americans were few, scattered and diverse. On the West Coast, there were more, and many had achieved economic success in fields like strawberry farming and running small grocery stores.

It was this success that got them into trouble. There weren't enough East Coast Japanese to bother stealing from, so they were mostly left alone. In Hawaii, interning all Japanese-Americans would have caused an economic crisis. But on the West Coast, people starting looking at their neighbors and seeing dollar signs. They grabbed the stores and farms and land and sent their neighbors off to the camps.

The soldiers of the 442nd were divided among Hawaiians and mainlanders, and their culture and backgrounds were very different. Originally the 100th was Hawaiian and the 442nd was from the camps, but because of massive casualties they were eventually combined into the 442nd.

After giving all this background I'm a bit tired, so I'll have to postpone the actual movie reviews to Part II, which I'll post either tomorrow or the day after. I'll review Only the Brave and Go for Broke, the only other movie about the 442nd that I'm aware of.

Jena 6 Coverage: Quick Link

Local reporter A.man.I is on the ground.

Personal Update: Meditation

I went to a Buddhist center to do some meditating the other night. I'd like to start doing that on a regular basis. I'll give this center a try for now. It's very close to where I live.

This particular center appeals heavily to "Westerners" (I hate that term but can't think of a good synonym for the context) and I was the only Asian there. This may sound like a superficial observation, but I found it bizarre... nobody was really sitting cross-legged! They all had monster foot-high pillows. I don't understand why sitting cross-legged is so hard. I think it's comfortable. I prefer to sit like that anyway if there aren't any chairs around.

This, on the other hand, is nothing but horrible torture:



I'm keeping busy this week with a ton of activities. We recently had a training session with a lot of useful parenting information. The trainer stressed the importance of always giving totally specific positive feedback. I've heard the advice before never to just say "good job" or "you were good", but I couldn't really outline it or give a good intuitive explanation to my husband. The training session nailed it. Now my husband is starting to use it in his tutoring. The refugee kids have a lot of emotional problems, obviously, and the specific positive feedback is especially good for them.

I also enjoyed the rundown of stupid questions parents ask their kids, like "what is your problem?" and "do you want a spanking?" The point was that you have a very limited window of time to draw on discipline techniques to get the desired behavior. De-escalate, distract, redirect... don't ask stupid questions or get into pointless arguments. It was very much a "Cesar Millan" style approach to discipline: the parent changes their own attitudes and behaviors before trying to change anyone else.

Evil Heartless John Linder (R-GA 7th) Insults a School Custodian

Thank goodness this creature is not my congressional representative. He's the seventh, I'm in the fourth. My mother went to one of his townhall meetings last week and he said something astonishingly vicious.

In the meeting, a woman spoke up and described her problem. She was an Eastern European immigrant and naturalized US citizen. She worked as a custodian for the county school system; her husband worked in bus maintenance for the school. She also had a medical condition she needed an operation for. She either couldn't work at present, or was soon going to have to stop working because of her inability to get the operation (my mother said her English was OK but not that easy to understand). She wanted to know what John Linder could do to help the situation of his underinsured constituents.

He turned to the rest of the audience and said, "She wants YOU to pay for her operation!"

He didn't even bother to make sympathetic noises. That was his only response. He quickly moved on to a more important matter: denying the existence of global warming.

This is a woman who works at one of the jobs that is vital for the infrastructure of our civilization. I can't believe how disrespectful he was.

Financial Advice - Debt Reduction and College Savings

I have a question from Stilla Momma on debt reduction and college savings. OK, college savings first.

Let's start with the obvious. If you have a 0-year-old baby, you need to plan for 18 years in the future. This is tough. However, if things go really badly, we'll be fighting off cannibals and radiation sickness and won't have to worry about college, and if things go really well, we'll have an enlightened government subsidizing college in order to produce a generation of mental giants to colonize Mars... either way, college savings become obsolete. The best is to plan for a future that's much the same as today, but slightly worse.

I once used one of those calculators to look at how much it would take to fully fund sending an 18-year-old to Harvard. That was a mistake. It's not going to happen. My conservative estimate came out to $20,000 a year that you'd need to save. Unless you're at a very high income level, you should just save what you can realistically afford to save. Your child will hopefully be able to make up the difference using loans, grants and a part-time job.

One thing to guard against is inflation. If we go through a period of monster inflation just as you need to cash out the college savings, that would be a disaster. We haven't had serious inflation in a long time. Take a look at these figures:

Year	College Inflation (CB)	General Inflation (CPI)	Rate Ratio
2006	5.9%	3.23%	1.83
2005	5.94%	3.39%	1.75
2004	5.97%	2.66%	2.24
2003	5.99%	2.28%	2.63
2002	5.80%	1.58%	3.67
2001	5.48%	2.85%	1.92
...	...	...	...
1985	8.15%	3.55%	2.30
1984	8.03%	4.14%	1.94
1983	9.78%	2.44%	4.00
1982	14.35%	6.48%	OH MY GOD
1981	13.95%	10.73%	HOLY MOLY
1980	12.00%	13.22%	WHOAH
1979	9.05%	11.27%	0.80

What these numbers mean is that unless you are earning a high rate of return, the real value of your college savings will plummet, and they won't go nearly as far. If your child needs to go to college during those years, you'll take a big hit.

The easiest way to guard against this possible is to buy investments that are protected
against inflation. You may be able to do this within a 529 plan. Other ways are buying US Treasury I-bonds. These are savings bonds that are indexed to the rate of inflation, so if inflation leaps, the return on the bonds will also leap. Don't buy gold and silver. These might be OK investments in their own right, depending on supply and demand, but they don't always go up when inflation goes up.

Moving back a little bit to the basics, you should start by opening an account. It should be a combination of a 529 plan, savings bonds (like I-bonds) and maybe an IRA. Savings bonds are especially good if your household income is not super-high, because they give you a tax break that phases out after $98,000 in annual income.

Here is a chart you can use to compare college savings vehicles.

Here are some things to think about when choosing a vehicle or mix of vehicles:

1) what is the most advantageous in terms of taxes?
2) If I think we will be earning more now than in 18 years, we should try to postpone paying taxes, for example using a Traditional IRA. On the other hand, if we think we will be earning more in 18 years, we want to pay our taxes up front so we won't have to pay them later.
3) if I can't fund all of college, our child will qualify for more financial aid. To qualify for more financial aid, income should be as low as possible. We want the kind of savings that don't "count" as much according to the measures that the financial aid offices use.
4) How active are you in managing investments? Do you want a "set it and forget it" type of plan, or one where you check in several times a year and try to maximize your returns by buying and selling mutual funds and stocks?
5) What happens if your kid doesn't go to college? If you think they'll go eventually, with most vehicles, you can hang on to the money, or use it for someone else. Generally, for educational expenses the only rule is that they have to be related to you. Or you can use it for yourself.

Here's a sample savings plan that is extremely simple. It doesn't have a 529 component because these can be complicated and need lots of research.

1. Set up an internet account at TreasuryDirect. Link your bank account. Set up an automatic savings program that deducts $100 a month and buys I-bonds with it.
2. Set up an internet account with a direct investment firm such as Fidelity or Scottrade. Open a Roth or Traditional IRA, depending on your projections about income. Begin an automatic investment program for a good balanced mutual fund. I like PAXWX, which is also an SRI (Socially Responsible Investment). After buying into the fund's minimum opening requirement, set up an automatic investment program of $100 a month.

If you start off with $1000 and do this for 18 years, not upping the amount, earning a very conservative rate of 5%, you'll have $72,000 for college. Taking inflation into account, this will be enough to pay tuition at a decent state college... room and board if you're lucky and your rate is higher, or the inflation is lower.

Debt reduction: I'll just give two tips. One is to read Dave Ramsey and his latte factor. You don't have to give Dave Ramsey any more money than he already has, just read about him here and on other sites and maybe check out one of his books from the library. The latte factor means you should stop drinking lattes. Basically, examine your life for any expensive habits that don't have big payouts. This doesn't mean turn your life into a joyless desert. Just recognize that there is a vast marketing machine out there brainwashing you into believing you need things you really don't need.

Starbucks lattes are a good example. For example, I drink Starbucks maybe two or three times a month. It's not a habit; it's a fallback for when I need a coffee and I'm driving around or traveling. There are a lot of people at my office who insist on drinking Starbucks every morning, whereas I just drink the nearly-free coffee I make myself. Everything that you consume once a day or once a week, multiply it by 365 or 52 and then think about it! Expand the latte factor to include all fluids. Give yourself a fluid audit. Nobody should be drinking bottled water on a daily basis in the U.S., unless you live next to a Superfund site. If your water is clean but tastes bad, get a water filter device. Bottled water is environmentally unsound and sucks away your savings. As this reporter asks, "what is Evian spelled backwards?"

So a good way to start debt reduction is to give yourself a wasteful spending audit. Determine how much money you're wasting a month, then set up an automatic payment for that amount to be applied to your debt as a payment.

The second tip is to go easy on yourself and recognize your flaws and imperfections when it comes to money. You need to work with the flaws you can't get rid of. Here is an example. Let's say you have a $10,000 loan at 7% interest. You have the opportunity to move it to a 0% offer on a credit card. The 0% lasts for a year.

Moving it all to the 0% would be a mistake if you can't pay it all off within a year. Yes, you might find another 0% offer, but if your credit tanks in 6 months, you might not. The safest thing to do might be to transfer $3000 to the 0%, because you know you can pay that down within a year. On the other hand, this is all getting rather complicated. If you think you might screw up payments at any point, don't make the transfer at all, because the worst that could happen is messing up your credit and having the amount go up to 15% or 25%! Before you embark on payment plans, make sure you have a good banking and billpaying routine established. If you have a habit of being forgetful or putting things off, find ways to trick yourself.

Follow-Up to Frustrating Adoption Conversation

Since no one's biting on the financial advice post, I thought I'd address some comments on the post from a few days ago. I dashed off that post fairly quickly, so now I'll go back and try to explain my reaction a little bit more.

I suppose I'm using a framework of foster care adoption to look at private adoption. Removing a child from their parents is not about judging a family as grade C or D and improving the situation by placing the child in a new, grade A or B family. It's about (or should be about) removing the child from an "F" situation because it would be almost impossible for things to get worse.

I know a lot of people who grew up having less than ideal family lives... as I suspect do most people from all walks of life. For example, my stepfather grew up under the thumb of a narcissistic, abusive alcoholic. I've only met a very few who really think that being placed into a new family should definitely have been their fate.

So I'm fairly set in my belief that giving up your child should only happen in an "F" situation. This doesn't mean an "F" mother. The quintessential "F" situation is that you have a terminal illness and no trustworthy relatives. If that was the case with me, I would start making an adoption plan in a heartbeat.

I don't think it should happen if you're in a "C" or "D" scenario and just think it might get worse.
I've heard a private adoption reform slogan -- "adoption is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" -- and it makes a lot of sense to me.

I don't want to sound too judgmental about women who relinquish children not out of massive desperation or psychological pressure. I don't agree with it, but I don't agree with a lot of things people do. Private adoption needs serious reform. But if a woman is determined to relinquish her child, then that child absolutely deserves a new and loving permanent family, not to be held in limbo for years. Replacing all private adoption with the foster care system would be a disaster (especially since the foster care system is practically a disaster anyways). I guess it's a fine line... children shouldn't have to suffer to prove a point, or to satisfy the ego of an adult, but they also shouldn't have biological connections severed out of fear of potential suffering.

There are a lot of examples in my own family that push me towards thinking this way... although other people from nontraditional backgrounds won't necessarily share my point of view.

My mother wasn't married when she had me. She was drifting aimlessly throughout South Asia and Africa with occasional pit stops in Europe and a later stay in Japan. My father sent some money now and then, and dropped in on us for weeks or months in periods between jobs, and my grandparents wired $20 a month. This went a long way in countries like India and Afghanistan and Kenya. She stayed with friends she met on her travels. My mother carried me on her back. I had almost nothing, just a little crocheted bear and a set of wooden blocks. As for drugs... well, she was a hippie, it was the 1970s, enough said.

I remember that time as a kind of privileged paradise. Constantly exposed to new people and places and things and food... I was happy all the time. I had one of the happiest childhoods imaginable. In fact, I don't think I knew what it meant to be unhappy until I started to go to school in Japan and then later in America. During the rough times to come, at least I could always look back and think about what a wonderful life I had lived.

I don't think the life we had was ideal for everyone. We lived in a monastery outside of New Delhi for a while, and my mother told me that Western heroin junkies washed up there like human flotsam, because the monks never turned anyone away, and a few of the junkies came with sad scrawny children.

In short, my mother lived an extremely irresponsible life. She eventually settled down and started to earn a living. But I didn't suffer for that period of irresponsibility, and I'm fact I'm extremely glad for it.

And again, there's my relative who had the baby with the (failed) crack dealer. I wish she hadn't done certain things in certain ways, yes, but today her baby is wanted, loved and well cared for.

"V" has less good sense than my mother or my relative, but at this point in her life "V" could and should pull herself together and start being a good mother instead of a mediocre-to-bad one. However, I doubt anything I say will affect whatever (probably bad) decision she will make.

Personal Finance and Investment Open Post

Since my blog has been so downbeat lately I thought I'd try something new before I embark on another post along the lines of a) adoption woes b) "what's up with these white people?" c) complaints about Atlanta's criminal justice system.

I forget I have an MBA sometimes! It's not the mightiest MBA in the world, having been obtained from an institution several steps up from the University of Phoenix but several stair flights down from Harvard Business School. However, I know a fair amount about investing and keep up to date on personal finance issues.

Does anyone have any questions about subjects like: high-yield savings, interest rates, automatic savings plans, debt reduction, socially responsible investing, establishing college funds and so on? I may be able to answer your question, and if not, I can definitely give you at least two or three of the most useful and accurate web links. There's a lot of horrible financial advice out there on the internet.

More Incompetence!

I swear this is the last post bitching about my incompetent ex-caseworker. It's getting old.

After the new review our new worker mentioned we only had 4 hours of post-class training on file. We should have 11 hours. My husband always dropped off the certificates at the office. I guess she just lost half of them.

Luckily we have copies!

Frustrating Adoption Conversation

I had an interesting talk with my mother tonight about a daughter of her friend who is considering giving her child up for adoption. I know my mother's friend well and have met this daughter before. This is from when my mother lived in another state, by the way.

I'm going to be brutally honest about my assessment of the situation. I try very hard not to hold any stereotypes about women who give up their children for adoption because I know there are so many different kinds of women and reasons and situations. This particular situation, and again I have to be brutally honest, does not reflect well on the woman.

The woman (I'll call her V) had a baby a year and half ago and is pregnant again. She's very irresponsible and my mother calls her "the most selfish person I've met in my life". The father of both children is a meth dealer. She's not on meth, or if she is, has hidden it so far. Her own mother had five children, worked hard all her life, and has taken a firm stance towards her own daughter. She tells her that V can move in permanently as long as she gets a job, any job... which V won't do. V just relies on friends and her mother and floats around with her baby.

V didn't get an abortion because "it's against her morals". I think there is some fundamentalist influence on the family, but not a huge amount. Her mother has some James Dobson books. The father is kind of a nonentity and doesn't do much of anything except sit at home and complain; her mother pretty much carries the whole family.

V is thinking about giving one or both children up for adoption. My mother said she thought this was a good idea.

I told her I thought it was an absolutely terrible idea. The idea that children are always automatically better off adopted is a strange white Christian subgroup phenomenon. My mother is not involved in that, but must have picked up the attitude from V's mother. To me, adoption should be the absolute last-ditch resort for a biological mother. I believe that V's wanting to relinquish is motivated out of pure selfishness and irresponsibility. She wants attention. She doesn't want to work for it. She really is not that bad off.

You know, I have an in-law relative who had a baby with a crack dealer and she's doing just fine! (Calling him a crack dealer is really a compliment, since he's more properly a failed crack dealer. Yes, he lost money selling crack. I've read this is quite common if you're, say, working the mean streets of Baltimore. But he lost money selling crack in small-town Georgia, which is truly, deeply stupid and pathetic, as well as a sad commentary on the math taught in our public school system.) Anyway, today she's a responsible single mother and her child is loved and thriving.

V could turn herself around. She has support. She's nowhere near rock bottom. She just wants to keep drifting. If she's really in bad trouble (and especially if she's on meth) and worried about bringing harm to her children, then I do believe she should seriously consider adoption. At least she lives in a state with an enforceable open adoption agreement.

I told my mother all my thoughts on this, stressing that I thought it was a very bad idea, that V probably did not understand the consequences, and that the family may have been exposed to certain messages that relinquishing a child was just a really positive and cool thing to do... I told her to pass it on to her friend.

I find it very frustrating to counsel dysfunctional adults, and am probably terrible at it, which is why I avoid doing it whenever possible.

Personal Update: Sticking to it for now

The senior caseworker is handling our case now. We had a meeting with her today. I think we're going to stay with our agency until the end of the year. If we still feel no progress is being made, we'll leave.

I found out the extent of the damage caused by the sluggishness of our old worker. We had been given our homestudy to read over five months ago. I made numerous corrections. Those corrections were simply never made and the erroneous version kept being submitted. Here are a few of the errors listed roughly in decreasing importance. I thought these all had been corrected 5 months ago.

Was	Should Be
0-6	0-7
"minor emotional needs"	"mild to moderate"
that my husband and I had been dating for 5 years before getting married last year	living together for 5 years
adoptive placement only, no legal risk	some legal risk OK
MPA	MBA

The caseworker has promised to update it immediately and add an addendum. The addendum will say 0-10. She said they are really going to get cracking on our case. I have a measured degree of confidence in her.

She didn't actually apologize to us on behalf of the agency, which I think should have been done. However, she did say something that made me feel better: "I know this is my job, but it's your life."

We've also been advised to attend an adoption fair in order to make ourselves visible to the caseworkers who also attend the fair. So far, we've been skipping them. Everybody hates adoption fairs. I'm not too happy about the idea, but she has a point.

My feelings right now are rather complicated. I want to take a break, but things might be heating up. Blah...

In order to make myself feel better this week I spent some time looking into a physical goal. This is tough because I'm not very physical. Every time I think about getting back into doing karate or aikido, which I used to do as a kid, I remind myself it actually involves exercising, which I hate.

Between the ages of 15-50, my father was probably in better shape than all the hosts on the Discovery Channel put together. Although for mysterious reasons he has something against running, he hiked, cross-country skied, swam, dived, rock-climbed, bicycled, and has ridden a motorcycle across the Sahara desert. In his mid-sixties he's still in excellent shape although his ankle fusion slows him down, and he's scratched a few of the activities off the list. Anyway, I have inherited none of it except swimming. I love swimming and I'm a natural open-water swimmer. My form isn't great and I'm not fast, but I can stay in the water for hours and swim miles if I'm in any kind of decent shape.

I'm too chicken to do major open-water swimming on my own, but I found the perfect adventure vacation at www.swimtrek.com:

SwimTrek is the world's only swimming holiday operator, running swimming tours to Croatia, Greece, Malta, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and the British Isles. We go island or lake hopping following routes of cultural, historical and geographical significance.

I can easily handle their 5km a day average with a bit of preparation. The price of a tour includes being accompanied by a boat and put up every night.

I made my husband take some basic swimming lessons, because the first time we swam together I was quite frankly terrified he would drown. Let's just say he would not be up for this kind of tour. My mother gets too seasick. In the past, my father would swim too fast for me, but the ankle fusion would slow him down enough... I was optimistic, but he responded to my email about a swim trek by proclaiming "I'm an animal with solitary behavior".

Maybe a couple friends will be interested, but if they're not, I might go by myself for a week next summer. It's a nice long-term goal to keep in mind.

Foster Care Adoption ARRRRRRRRGH

We have a meeting with the senior caseworker/agency head on Wednesday to address our concerns.

This has been brewing for the last few weeks.

Basically, our caseworker up and quit. This is a woman I trusted, with whom I felt an emotional connection, and I told a lot of very personal things to her, including my worries about how my race would affect the placement process. I learned about her quitting from a third party. I have also been learning that she hasn't done a very good job with us. Our homestudy still says "mild emotional needs" only, and it should say mild to moderate. Basically, any not-too-violent behavior that doesn't require one full stay-at-home parent, we can handle. Our homestudy does not reflect that. It also had an inaccurate younger age range. Remember the ongoing saga Response to a Rejection and Response to a Response to a Rejection? Well, our caseworker's response was also inaccurate. I received the real response this weekend. We were out of the running not because of geography, but because of the age range and because the sibling group presented "more than minor" emotional needs. Everything else in the homestudy was fine, apparently.

I feel stabbed in the back. My normally optimistic husband is also feeling the hurt. Perhaps most of the inquiries (50+) I have sent out for the last five months have been for naught.

My negative feelings start with the fact that we're being treated poorly. No one has bothered to apologize to us yet. I've just heard "turnover is high in this field" as if that was an excuse for not sending us a simple email like "hey your caseworker is leaving". Then when I start to feel aggrieved it triggers guilt instead... it has been hinted, in not so many words, we're selfish for wanting a young (under 8) child. Thank goodness I know people who have already done this. Otherwise I would have dropped out a while back, like I suspect the majority of my class already has, because of the lack of moral support. There's only so far you can push people.

A while back, last year, I wrote a long post based around the Evan. B. Donaldson report on overcoming barriers to adoption from foster care. A lot of my thoughts on the report still apply. I ended it by saying it was important to remind myself that social workers are human beings, not almighty telepathic gatekeepers. However, I am currently in the mindset of reminding myself that social workers are human beings, not lying backstabbing incompetent scum.

I know the root problem is really the low value placed on human services in our society.

I have an online friend who thinks I should switch to the county. There would be a lot more placement opportunities. According to what I have heard locally the drawbacks of the county are: high turnover of workers, low advocacy, chaotic bureaucracy, high probability of being lied to. Since I'm already experiencing those things at my current agency, how much worse can it get? Maybe a little, maybe a lot.

In our meeting Wednesday I am going to politely but honestly lay out all our concerns, ask for an updated homestudy, to have a copy of our updated homestudy, and tell her that if we feel no progress has been made on our behalf we are going to switch to the county (or MAYBE another public agency) at the end of the year. I'm sick of the endless round of fruitless inquiries. I can't feel any positive thoughts about making a home for potential imaginary children in the middle of all this mess.

Last week was a dual anniversary. In early September 2006 my husband and I got married in the courthouse, and then went to drop off our application form at the agency. For our anniversary we celebrated by going to a great Vietnamese restaurant. I thought we would be farther along now. These events cast a shadow on our night but did not ruin it.

On the bright side, I feel confident that both of us are handling this well. I haven't broken down crying or anything; it hasn't destroyed our resolve. I know we will likely face harsher tests in future and will pass them.

I'll have an update soon!

Random Violence Sunday

Yesterday started off great, then detoured into random violence.

I went to church with my mother, then we stopped at the garden center and I bought an evergreen viburnum. I got back, cooked us all an omelette, my mother left with our dog to take him to visit his dog friends, my husband and I worked in the yard for a while, our diamond doves were diligently nesting.

A truck screeched to a halt on the intersection across the street from us. A man and a woman got out and started fighting on our neighbor's yard. At first it was just wrestling. Then he punched her in the face, hard. My husband called 911. I held the door open and tried to beckon her from across the street to come over to our door. 911 put us on hold, dammit! She was yelling and saying she just wanted her phone so she could call her aunt, and that she didn't deserve to get beaten. He punched her in the face again, got back in the car... I was hoping she would walk away, but she just got back in the car with him. They drove off too fast for me to get the license plate. However, just a minute later we saw a police car driving down the street in the other direction. My husband ran over to car, flagged them down and told the cop he might be able to catch them. We were thinking they may have pulled over at the next intersection and gotten into it again... unfortunately the cop returned after 15 minutes, said he couldn't find the car, and that was that.

I'm really angry about 911 putting us on hold. We never got anyone. Looking back on the recent times I've called 911, I've always gotten someone after a couple rings.

• Earlier this year: called 911 to report rabid raccoon blocking traffic. The situation was rather urgent because very ignorant and foolhardy people kept trying to shoo it out of the way with sticks or their feet.
• 1 year ago: called 911 to report messed-up pedestrian weaving back and forth dangerously close to traffic on the shoulder of a major highway.
• 2.5 years ago in prior residence: called 911 after man knocking on my front door threatens to sexually assault me. The police came quickly but didn't bother arresting him because after just a few minutes he convinces them it was all a misunderstanding. Within 24 hours he threatens his roommate, stabs himself and runs off into the night... thanks, lazy cops! I have to give another group of police the credit for finally and efficiently arresting him.

At least that policeman my husband flagged down made an honest effort. Overall, I believe we would all be much safer if we had more good neighborhood beat cops. This includes reacting to domestic violence. I feel very powerless after witnessing what I did today. I had about a 20-second window where I could have gone across the street and tried to stop the beating. Of course, the man could also have pulled out a gun and shot me, so I didn't.

The rest of the evening was pretty quiet. I grilled some squid on our backyard grill, and we had that for dinner with rice and salad.

Metascam!

My husband gets the best Nigerian scam emails.

They've gotten really creative recently. Earlier this year, he received one from an Army Captain in Iraq. To summarize: while looting a palace, the Captain and his merry crew had discovered three crates: one full of cocaine, another containing a tactical nuke, the third full of cash. Of course they needed my husband's help to get all of this out of Iraq. More specifically, his bank account number. I wish I still had that email.

He just got one that takes the scam to whole 'nother level. It's a metascam. Wow!

NIGERIAN FOREIGN PAYMENT INVESTIGATION AGENCY
ANTI- TERRORISM CLEARANCE/FRAUD UNIT
FALOMO OFFICE COMPLEX IKOYI


Attn: My Dear Beneficiary.

It is our duty to monitor this payment to you according to this new procedure of payment sign by the presidential senate committee to pay you directly from their paymaster through ATM CARD From HSBC London UK, Our responsibility is to lift up the battered image of this great country and not to destroy it. Please save your indulgence approach and make no further comment on our integrity, we are here to help you and not destroy.

Based on our findings in this investigation department we wish to warn you against some Miscreants, Hoodlums and Touts who go about scamming innocent people by claiming to be who they are not and thereby tarnishing the image of this wonderful country. We were informed that some Hoodlums are contacting you in respect to the collection of your fund which was long approved in your favour with the Central Bank of Nigeria. As a matter of fact we have been on this investigation assignments for some time codedly known to no one but the Presidency and some top government official who are in support of this investigation team to help stop fraudalert activities in this country and as well restore the image that has been tarnished by the above listed group of people.

we have maped every strategy to forestall and make sure that we track down the past fraudulent and impersonator's that has been the obstacle for you to receive your right funds owed to you by our government. It will interest and help us if you send further information that will help us more to hold these culprint and bring them to justice under the Nigeria Law, we already have some of them in custody for prosecuting after final investigation and evidence, if you can provide any information's to us concerning any one that has contacted you in regards to this payment, please forward it so that we will look into it and know if it is one the people already in our custody.

Note: your ATM CARD from London is here on our desk and is ready to deliver to you immediately you reconfirm your delivery Address to avoid wrong payment.

We applogise on behalf of the President and the people of Nigeria for any dealy and lost this must have coursed you in any way and promise that such thing will not occure again in the furture and should incase you are currently dealing with any one of them regarding your fund ( ATM CARD ), we urge you to stop further contact with them as you are taking a very big risk and it might interest you to know that you will never get your fund from them as they have nothing to offer.The hoodlums will continue coming up with expences and thereby requesting for money from you untill you go Bankrupt. Hence, your ATM CARD get to you, Note that we are duly inter-switched and you can make withdrawal in any location of the ATM Center of your choice/nearest to you.

Finally, we are expecting to hear from you immediately unfailingly so as to enable us serve you better and you get your FUND THROUGH ATM CARD to your door step without any delay again. Remember to reconfirm your delivery Address to avoid wrong payment.
Belowi is the info:

1) Your full name.....................................
2) Your phone and fax number..........................
3) Your full mailing address..........................
4) Your complete Age..................................

Thank you very much for your anticipated co-operation and understanding while we wait for your urgent response to this Email address (ONLY) : chairmanribadunuhu_efcc@yahoo.co.uk

Yours sincerely,

MICHAEL.B AMADI/SUPPORTER RIBADU NUHU.
Economic and financial crimes commission (EFCC)

Here is the real Nigerian EFCC.

"At Least You Know Where You Stand"

This is a post about racism and segregation in the South. It's not really a "turning over a rock" post because it's too rambling.

I'm usually very South-positive on this blog. The New South, racial diversity, Atlanta has everything, etcetera. A series of stories just reminded me I need to temper myself a bit.

I heard a story on NPR the other day about support for the Iraq war from the town of Pontotoc, Mississippi. It sounded very unbalanced to me. Every single person interviewed about the dead soldiers of Pontotoc expressed unwavering support for Bush and hope that the war would continue.

The unbalanced part was that everyone sounded white.

I remember earlier this year sitting in the airport with my husband. It was around the time of the surge and there was a lot of troop movement. We were sitting in the rotunda when a large group of soldiers lined up on the balcony. Everyone in the rotunda began clapping for them. Well, not everyone. I took a quick look around. Everyone who was clapping was white. All the black people just looked sort of downcast and uncomfortable.

The reaction I felt was shame. If I was truly a courageous person I would have yelled "please don't go!" at the soldiers. How can you "clap for the surge" if you're antiwar? It would be like clapping at a group of young people about to go jump off a cliff just because a morally-challenged idiot told them it was the right thing to do. Some of those soldiers who were on the balcony that day are probably horribly wounded or dead now... damn, this stupid war needs to end.

Anyway, if the NPR reporter had interviewed some black residents of Pontotoc I doubt there would have been the same positive response to the war. But they didn't, and the typical liberal NPR viewer will have their stereotypes of Mississippi and the South confirmed. Here are some demographics of Mississippi:

Race	Mississipi	USA
White persons, percent, 2005 (a)	61.2%	80.2%
Black persons, percent, 2005 (a)	36.9%	12.8%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2005 (a)	0.4%	1.0%
Asian persons, percent, 2005 (a)	0.7%	4.3%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2005 (a)	0.0%	0.2%
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2005	0.6%	1.5%
Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2005 (b)	1.7%	14.4%
White persons not Hispanic, percent, 2005	59.7%	66.9%

And the growth trend, which for some reason doesn't include Hispanic/Latino:

% Growth 2000-2005
	White	Black	Asian
2000 (total population)	62.37%	36.66%	0.82%
2005 (total population)	61.72%	37.24%	0.91%
Growth 2000-2005 (total population)	1.62%	4.33%	13.67%

The interview, with its overwhelming white focus in a state where white people are actually much less numerous than average, was probably not very representative of Mississippi attitudes.

I was talking about this with my husband and he asked me if I wanted to go live in Mississippi, to which my response was a big "heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell noooooooo."

I need to step back and be fair. Maybe the interview was representative of Pontotoc. There are many small towns like that that are almost completely monoracial due to the history of segregation. Even where towns are multiracial the legacy persists. I lived for almost a year in a small town in the mountains in Virginia and only once visited the small "black side" of town. The thing that really freaked me out was that I noticed the black residents pronounced the name of the town in a totally different way than the white residents. They pronounced it more the way it was spelled whereas the white people had an odd vowel change. Their lives were so separate they weren't even living in the same town, even though they lived in the same town... it was a kind of deep linguistic/metaphysical segregation.

One point I'm touching on is that the South can be a very hostile environment for non-white people, more specifically black people but also including other people of color when they happen to become more visible. I just read a terrifying story called "Do You Understand Where You Are" about some black people getting shot at just for stepping across a line. Impersonal institutionalized racism sucks, but the rarer, up-close-and-personal racism is what really brings the pain, terror and violence.

There are still many people who prefer to live in the South. Even people who don't have deep cultural ties to the region. I've heard this statement a fair number of times when discussing why... "at least you know where you stand".

What does this really mean? On an obvious level, a hostile racist in the South is easier to spot. Not everyone with a confederate flag on their pickup truck is a hostile racist but the chance of them being one goes way, way up.

On a deeper level, I think it means that people who say they are not racist are more likely to not be racist, or be less racist.

It's easy for someone who lives in a small town in Connecticut to say something like "I don't have anything against those people". Their only contact with "those people" is rare, fleeting or confined to television.

A white person in the South has probably grown up among narratives of racism, prejudice and segregation. They've also probably had more contact with real live non-white human beings.

If you're a person of color with a decent degree of social mobility, you're faced with a lot of interesting choices about where you want to live, and how much and what kind of hostility you can handle. A place where there are already many of you, with a long history, but you're informally segregated into a lower rung of society? A place where you're an exotic stranger, highly visible, social status uncertain? A place where you're a hated newcomer? A place where everyone insists these types of social demarcations don't exist, even when you can see them plain as day? A sterile exurban spot where you don't have to worry about any of this stuff because there's no community at all, but which is also terribly isolating?

Personal note: someone like me, with no hometown, a strange accent, always assumed to be the foreigner... wherever I go, I try to understand where it is I'm standing. It's tiring. I find it much easier when people just straight up tell me, or else I know for certain that they don't really care. Maybe this is one reason why I never felt uncomfortable during my stays in Mexico. The stares and the questions felt more honest, even though a lot of people expressed doubt that I was really from the United States. I was sort of a gringa, not a güera, definitely a "china" and unambiguously a foreigner.

Parent Practice

Today was superbusy! I spent the afternoon doing respite care for a new adoptive mother. She needed a little bit of babysitting to attend a special event. My husband had to work the whole day and couldn't be around.

During the morning I ran some errands, cleaned the house and drafted my mother. The boy is 18 months old and I needed backup. I actually have some experience with toddlers -- in fact, I spent a summer when I was young as an au pair for a toddler -- but at 18 months, they're more like a very heavy baby than a toddler, and the task seemed intimidating.

My mother and I had an amusing conversation while installing electrical outlet protectors.

- "When I was taking care of you we never bothered with anything like this! You never stuck anything in an outlet."
- "Actually mom, I stuck a fork in an outlet once. To see what would happen. It was a long time ago but I remember it quite vividly because it was so painful."
- "What?!?! You never told me! Was this in America?"
- "Yep."
- "Then you must have been six or seven. By that age there's no device guaranteed to protect children from the consequences of their own stupidity!"
- "True."

The baby was cute as a button. He napped, woke up, ate his meal and had a diaper change, and was very sad. He had such a worried expression on his little face and kept making hiccupy sobs. I tried everything I could. We played with his toys, read his books and rocked him and so on. Then I noticed he was watching cars out the window. I took him outside, sat him on my lap on the front doorstep and gave him a flower to play with while he watched cars and buses go by. This really cheered him up! Then I watered some plants with him and sat on the doorstep some more. When his mother drove up, he jumped into her arms and turned into the happiest baby in the world, laughing and talking up a storm.

There's something going down right now, an external thing that is affecting our matching process. Even though I keep this blog anonymous I don't feel free to talk about it. It's negative. However it's not causing me huge anxiety because I'm developing multiple avenues of information on the situation. Yesterday I was very confused and angry but today I feel more confident. I hate to get all cloak and dagger like this, but maybe I can explain some more of it in a few weeks. I've semi-evangelized foster care adoption in this blog and on some forums... but I love to be honest, and I have to say it can be exhausting, frustrating and just plain bizarre.