Another Year of Wonderful Reading

This is going to be an extra-long blog post because it wasn’t written for this blog. It was my submitted essay for Steve Duin’s annual reading contest. Duin is a columnist for the Oregonian who started hosting an informal “reading contest” some years back, mostly to encourage people to read more and to talk about what they’ve been reading. I’ve entered the contest a number of times, usually place respectably but never near the top. He reported this year’s results at the beginning of this week, and as often happens, I got mentioned in his column.

Here’s the essay I wrote for this past year of reading. . . . 

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When people congratulate me on “doing what you love,” they’re usually talking about the acting and modeling career that has reared its unlikely head over the past several years. But I’d rather be reading. You might say I’ve arranged my professional and private life largely to accommodate my pleasure reading.

I would imagine a majority of the folks who post big numbers in the reading contest are either in school or retired. At 53, I’m a long way from either end of that spectrum, making less income than I have in years, yet happy in my reading habits. I started stage acting in Portland in earnest in 2005, and went free-lance as an actor and wordsmith (writing, editing, proofreading) in the summer of 2009. But I still probably spend more time reading. Everything else is little more than an excuse for that.

TGI(not)F - The Irrelevance of Weekends

Every time my local bank gets a new teller, I have to train her (or him).

Most retail service workers have a verbal routine or “tic” that comes (or at least develops) with the job. Clothing store clerks wander over and say, “May I help you find something?” Waiters coo “Is everything all right?” anywhere from one to fifteen minutes after serving you … although it appears to be a point of pride to do it as quickly as possible; I’ve had the question posed before I’d taken a bite of the entrée.

(My family traveled in the former Yugoslavia in 1970, and I remember my parents being struck by how refreshing it was that shop owners actually seemed taken aback or pleasantly surprised to be asked what something cost. They just stood by, silently beaming, while we wandered through their place, as if proud just to be a business owner or to have a visitor looking over their offerings.)

At least the clothing store and restaurant queries have some semblance of a rational connection to the business relationship between yourself and the employee. As potential customer or diner, you might indeed have a response that relates to your needs.

But at my bank, the conversational gambit invariably involves a reference to the weekend. On a Monday or Tuesday, the teller might ask: “Did you have a good weekend?” On a Thursday or Friday, it’s “Got any plans for the weekend?”

This always catches me up short. I don’t have weekends, really. In the three and a half years since I lost my last day job and went free-lance as a wordsmith and actor/model, anything can happen, on any day.

Guns Do NOT Make Us Safer - the LAPD Shows Us Why

The erroneous shootings of innocent civilians by the Los Angeles Police Department this week were a perfect example of why more firearms are precisely the wrong solution to the problem of thousands of annual gun fatalities in this country.

The NRA asserts that in order to avoid future mass killings such as the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut last December, we need more armed guards and teachers carrying firearms in elementary schools -- and more armed civilians in general.

The LAPD showed us this week why that’s NOT the answer.

On Tuesday morning at about 5:30 a.m., during a manhunt for a former Navy Reservist and Los Angeles police officer named Christopher Dorner, LAPD officers shot two Hispanic women who were delivering newspapers in a Torrance housing tract. Dorner is an African-American male.

Four days before, Dorner had shot two people in Irvine as part of what he termed a campaign of “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” on the Los Angeles Police Department for wrongfully terminating him. Very early on Tuesday morning, he had been spotted in Riverside and shot two officers in their marked patrol car; one died, the other was critically wounded but survived.