1. The kid is going to be an enlisted grunt in the Marine Corp. He probably needs to get over this thing about questioning authority sooner rather than later.

2. He hasn’t accomplished anything at all. He signed a piece of a paper. He could be deferred, he could wash out of Basic due to medical issues, he could get scared and go AWOL. So he wants special recognition for signing his name? Graduating from Basic is an accomplishment. Serving out your term honorably is an accomplishment. Serving 20+ years and retiring is a huge accomplishment. Signing the paper is not an accomplishment.

3. The kid has joined the United States Marine Corp. Maybe it’s time for Mommy to stop fighting his battles for him? (Hat tip to Nance for that snark.)

4. If the special tassel is that important, he can carry it in his pocket and put it on his cap after graduation for pictures. This obsession with individual recognition is sort of unbecoming for a future Marine. This is something that the good guys at Parris Island will get to teach him in a few months.

High school graduation is about high school achievements. Period. I totally support the principal’s decision here. It’s not high school related, and it’s not even an accomplishment. I respect his decision to serve the country, but I suspect when he gets to Parris Island the friendly guys there will make it quite evident that he hasn’t accomplished squat; until he walks out as an United States Marine.

I started working before I was 10. My father would get me odd jobs doing yard work and pet sitting for his friends. Later on, I would simply go door to door with a lawn mower in the summer. I got a “real job” at 16 and worked all through college too. Pretty much everybody I knew in high school had a part time job. You turned 16 and you found a job. It was standard operating procedure. Most of the employees at my local pizza joint appear to be my age. Granted, there are several factors at work here, none of them under the control of a teenager.

1. The economy. Duh! Adults are taking the jobs that used to go to teenagers.
2. The general decline of retail. Between automated checkout lines and Amazon, the local retail establishments just don’t support as many jobs as they used to.
3. Competition for college. Especially among upper-middle class kids, doing something that looks more impressive on a college application that “McDonalds” takes priority. Given that a full ride to a private school is worth $200,000 that isn’t necessarily a bad strategy.

How does this play out when the kids are 21 or 22 though? Not having the 5-6 years of work experience that we had upon college graduation could make the next generation a slower ramp into the full-time work world, as they have to learn the lessons we learned at 17. OTOH, maybe they’ll be more likely to go an entrepreneurial route, with I think would be a net benefit to the country. With health care reform,recent college grads will be able to stay on their parents insurance until they are 26. They can write a check to their parents each month for their part of the insurance premium, and have 4-5 years to try to make it on their own without needing the health care security blanket that may come with a corporate job.

Teenagers today need to be thinking about the long game years before we ever worried about it. They should be lining up internships and volunteer opportunities so that the graduate not only with a degree, but with 3-5 years of applicable work experience, and not just 3-5 years of work experience. It kind of sucks that kids have to worry about this stuff. Most 18 years old don’t really know what they want to be when they grow up. That adds a certain level of difficulty to lining up the right part time and summer jobs.

This might be a rare instance when I’m happy I’m not 18 again.

Buck shook his head and looked me in the eyes. And very slowly, with a teacher’s edge in his voice, Buck said this: “Son, in this life, you don’t ever walk by a red dress.”

Buck was answering a question about why he (a 94 year old) was flirting with a 20 something – but I think the point he was making goes beyond attractive women in red dresses.

Ferris Bueller said it as, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Of course Ferris is fake, Buck O’Neil is real.

The Buddha talked about the importance of mindfulness- of fully experiencing each moment we have on this earth.

It’s all the same point. We can go through life on auto-pilot, checking things off our to-do list without really experiencing what we just completed, in a rush to just get through the list. Or we can slow down, realizing that 80% of our to-do list probably doesn’t actually have to get done, and fully experience the 20% that matters. If we do that, I think we all find a lot more red dresses in our lives.

I think it’s common knowledge that clothing store dressing rooms do this. But the bathroom mirror at the movie theater seems to be a stretch. I’d love to know if they have hard data showing that the mirror does increase concession sales. I’d also love to know if any female executives at Paragon Theaters objected to the mirrors when the idea was originally pitched.

Then again, movies are the land of make-believe, so maybe this shouldn’t really be a surprise to me

First of all, Monument Ave may be technically cobblestone, but it is not the quaint narrow cobblestone street that you are probably envisioning. The cobblestone surface is very smooth, the road is 2 lanes each way, with a 30 mph speed limit that is ignored. Most cars are doing about 40 through there. The locals use the wide grassy median as a park, hanging out and picnicking. On previous drives through, I always thought the stately houses were really pretty. And they are nice, but when you are walking you can see that many of them are really apartments, and judging by the number of craft beer bottles I saw littering porches, populated by a party happy crowd. That probably also accounts for the number of young female joggers that were out today. It’s definitely not a bad choice of neighborhood if you are a young single guy in Richmond! Quite a few of the houses needed some basic maintenance too; and generally, it’s not quite as uppity a neighborhood as the Richmond tourist sites lead you to believe. It’s nice, but not as extravagant as I was expecting.

If you are wondering how an Arthur Ashe monument ended up on a street with monuments to 5 Confederate war heroes, you aren’t alone. I think it’s one of those things still likely to start an argument in many places in Richmond. IMHO, the Ashe monument is out of place and probably should have been placed somewhere better than the northern edge of the Monument Drive park.

More pictures.

Once we get to the Pentagon I join the masses on public transportation. A large percentage of people will have headphones on, often loud enough that the people around them can also enjoy their music. Traveling around DC via subway with your sense of sound essentially shut off seems a little but dangerous, especially if you are young and/or female and thus already a potential target for crime or harassment.

Note: This morning I had my headphones on all the way to my destination Metro stop – so I’m just as guilty as anybody else. Although I just started this in the last couple of weeks. I used to put my MP3 player away when we got to the Pentagon, because traveling through public spaces disconnected from my environment made me nervous. I do keep the volume low enough that I can hear what is going on around me.

It just seems odd to me that we all have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook that we interact with, yet we try to avoid interacting with the people around us in the real world. If you ride in a car with 3 strangers for an hour, and the total extent of your interaction is a thank you to the driver as you exit, did you even really share the experience of the ride? It’s more like we had 4 separate rides, while sharing a physical space.

Walt Whitman once wrote something about a rose being just a rose, not aware of any past or future, or any other roses. It just is, in that moment. We humans are increasingly doing the opposite. We live in every moment except the one we are currently experiencing.

I’m wondering if that is really healthy, both individually, and for society.

Ultimately, the Clinton administration decided to not publish their study, in part because they were concerned about Congress going on a spending spree if they thought we were in that good of shape. That was probably a good call.

So what happened? The dot com boom stopped booming, which slowed tax receipts. Bush slashed taxes, which further reduced tax incoming cash to the government, all the while the government was spending cash like a drunken sailor on shore leave; with multiple wars and the prescription drug vote buying scheme for seniors.

Slashing income while dramatically increasing expenses is no way to run a family, a business, or a government.

The easiest thing to change was my default search engine. I’m using Duck Duck Go, and I have to say, I don’t miss Google at all for search. DDG has found a way to filter the splogs that clog up Google. I’m quite impressed by the search results from Duck Duck Go.

Phasing out Gmail is not so easy. I was in one of the first waves of beta invites for Gmail. I’ve had a Gmail account since back when that meant something! Also, Gmail is still the best damn webmail interface out there. The ODonnellWeb server has Squirrel Mail and Horde available. After a quick look, I decided to go back to an email client – Thunderbird. After a week back on Thunderbird I’m still not comfortable. So tonight I spent about 90 minutes poking around under the hood of Horde. I have to say, Horde is a pretty damn powerful tool, with decent enough calendar, and nicely integrated task list and general note tool. The preferences are somewhat obtuse, and it took a fair amount of searching for me to get simple stuff like filtering working the way I want. But I think it is set up ok now, so I’m going to give it a week.

I’m still using Gmail as my newsletter / web sigh up address, for now. I took a look at the new Yahoo Mail too, and I have to say I’m impressed. They have really improved it with the new release. Of course, Yahoo wants to do the same things that Google does, they just aren’t nearly as good at it. If you aren’t paying for a service, you are the product. I’m going to try to stick with stuff I’ve paid for, where I can.

I had an interesting issue today with Google + and Picasa integration. I sent a photo to 3 friends by emailing them the link from Picasweb. It is a non-public photo. Later I saw that photo and and a comment on it in my G+ stream. Only me and the three recipients could see it, but it was still a little disconcerting for it show up somewhere I wasn’t expecting to see it. I went as far as to check the random web user view of my G+ profile to make sure it wasn’t there. That got me thinking about bringing photos back to my server too. The reality is my photos at Picasa get few views and no comments. Zenphoto looks very nice, I’ll probably install it sometime soon and give it a test run.

So, this week I’ll be deciding if I can be happy living with Horde. If that doesn’t work I don’t know what is next. Maybe Telnet and Pine?