Midlife Meditation

No, it doesn't make me believe him--but maybe I'm weird. Once or twice a school day, one of the two hundred children I see makes a bad choice that results in another child being in tears. Classmates are quick to finger the perp, who initially will point at innocent bystanders as the true culprits. When that fails to impress me, the child will say something along the lines of "It was an accident" or "I didn't mean to." My response is consistent: whether or not you meant to hurt someone else, you did, and now you need to apologize. In some cases, the denials take on an angry edge, with raised voices and furious eyes accompanying the insistence of innocence. Sometimes this works, to an extent: I'll investigate further, wanting to be absolutely sure who was responsible for the incident. As often as not, though, the stridency of the protest correlates with the guilt of the protestor. The louder they deny, they guiltier they are. For much of my ...

Neither of these men belongs in public office. Of all the candidates Republican presidents have nominated to the Supreme Court in my lifetime, Brett Kavanaugh is the least qualified. That list includes both Robert Bork, whose nomination was withdrawn once his then-too-extreme opinions became known, and Clarence Thomas, whose more-extreme-than-Bork views were nothing next to the extent of his inappropriate behavior around women. The extent of Kavanaugh's own history of sexual assault and alcohol abuse may never be known, unless the House of Representatives goes Democratic, and a genuinely thorough investigation is launched; but even without a full reckoning of his youthful history of beer-drenched recklessness and aggression, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee should have demonstrated, to any rational, principled legislator, that he has no business joining the court. Faced with credible accusations of both sexual and alcohol abuse, a qualified candidate w...

Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh, c. 1982 I was not one of those boys. The boys I hung out with were not like those boys. But I certainly knew some of those boys, knew how they behaved, how they talked, and what they did when they weren't at school. I'm a few years older than those boys. The high school I attended was a rural public school, not a posh urban prep school like those boys went to. But I knew athletes like those boys--and also athletes who were definitely not like those boys. I also knew other boys whose love of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana kept them off the teams, and some of these non-varsity boys very likely engaged in similar pastimes to those boys. Again, I didn't typically associate with them. I willingly embraced my parents' puritanism around controlled substances, and while my attitude toward them has loosened up in my adult years, I still am uncomfortable around people who use them to the point of impairment. As a college student...

Brett Kavanaugh and Lindsay Graham are angry about the same thing: a woman has challenged their entitlement. I love being a music teacher. It's physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging--by the time I leave school, my Apple watch tells me I've completed all my exercise goals for the day, and at the end of my commute, I frequently take a nap in the driveway before leaving my car--but it's the best work I've ever done, and it saddens me to imagine not doing it when I retire in a few years. The previous paragraph is actually a slight exaggeration: I'm rounding up from 96%. That's the percentage of children I typically see who, despite their many problems--and this includes homesick kindergartners crying for mommy, emotionally disabled kids hitting each other (or me!), hyper kids that literally can't stop wiggling, impulsive kids who can't keep themselves from touching and playing instruments without permission, anxious kids who hide in th...