I was thumbing through my Google Reader this morning, trying to sort through the stuff I’m terribly behind on reading. I’m behind on everything at the moment, it seems. So I was looking through the entries for TED (”TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.”)

So I see this entry for “Stroke of Insight: Jill Bolte Taylor “, a neuroanatomist — she studies and maps the brain and its functions. Here’s an excerpt from the TED page:

One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness …

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the “Singin’ Scientist.”

Watch how a scientist describes what happened to herself. If you’re not intrigued by what she has to say and the enormous possibility it implies, then IMHO you ought to check your pulse…

My father passed away this evening, February 15, 2008 at home, with my mother, brother, and a sister at his side.

My dad didn’t achieve great things; and, like all of us, he made plenty of mistakes. But whatever he did or didn’t do in life, I was proud of him. Many years ago, he quit what was to him a boring job as a draftsman to follow his dream of being a professional pilot. Almost 40 years later, his flying career ended when he couldn’t pass the level of flight physical he needed. His last flight job was flying Lear jets for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I don’t think it could be termed ‘wanderlust’, but even after he was forced from flying, he couldn’t sit still. He trained for and took a job driving long-haul trucks — but not just any. He had to pick the ones that other drivers weren’t comfortable with: the triples, tankers, dangerous cargoes.

I didn’t get to see him as much as I wanted these last few years; it always seemed like our paths were going different directions, and for one reason or another, just didn’t intersect. Miles, money, time — it was always something. I regret now not making more of an effort.

Robert Eugene Johnson
April 2, 1933 — February 15, 2008

Dad, I love you. I will miss you.

Godspeed.

Mr. Stanton Peele, (”a psychologist and addiction expert, and the author of “Addiction-Proof Your Child” (Three Rivers Press, 2007)“) takes issue in an article in the Wall Street Journal (Drug Use and the Candidates) with Mitt Romney’s statement that “It’s just not a good idea for people running for president of the United States, who potentially could be the role model for a lot of people, to talk about their personal failings while they were kids, because it opens the doorway to other kids thinking, ‘Well I can do that too.’”

The subject is drug use, and whether candidates should show their “human side” by admitting to things they did as a young adult that may have been somewhat ‘extra-lawful’.

It is Mr. Peele’s “educated” opinion that it’s good for kids to hear about others that may have strayed from the path, ala Barack Obama:

This is the opposite of the approach of nearly all school drug education programs. Here the logic is to troop in people who have ruined their lives by their drug use and drinking, as object lessons in the evils of sin. But there are reasons to believe that kids reject negative messages from figures like these, and that purely scare tactics don’t work. Research on effective drug resistance programs finds that the best ways to prevent substance abuse are for kids to develop skills, feel good about themselves, have positive peers, and look forward to their futures.

From this perspective, Mr. Obama’s message that he briefly stumbled but then righted himself to achieve success may be just what the doctor ordered.

I don’t know about any of you, but had the lesson taught when I was younger been “It’s OK to do some of this stuff. Don’t go overboard, but it won’t cost you later”, I’d likely have done a lot more than what I did.

Where is this guy coming from, anyway? Of course scare tactics work. They don’t work completely on everyone, to be sure, but they do work.

What is this mamby-pamby bullshit about ‘developing skills’, ‘feel good about yourself’, ‘have positive peers’, and ‘look forward to your future’ when you’re in high school? I mean, come on. My high-school years, and most of my friends’, were all about seeing what we could get away with, doing as little as possible to get by (don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a complete screwed-up stoner–I graduated highschool with a 3.6 GPA. But it wasn’t because I worked at it).

Positive peers? WHAT positive peers? I don’t remember any of us, ever, sitting around a table deciding what we were going to be when we turned 40. I did meet with my peer group, though. Our meetings consisted of sitting around on the floor, half or more naked, more than half stoned/drunk/both, playing spin-the-bottle and listening to The Dark Side of the Moon. I miss my peer meetings sometimes.

I don’t know, though. Maybe if I’d had positive peers, felt good about myself, and looked forward to my future with my developing skills I’d have refrained from doing the things I’ve been told I shouldn’t have done.

I doubt it though. What kept me from doing more than I did was the relative certainty that if I kept at it, my ass would end up in the Oregon Correctional Institution and I would be really unhappy.