Half marathon!!

En route to accomplishing one of my life goals (qualifying for the Boston Marathon) lies a smaller, but no less significant, hurdle: my first half marathon.  My dear friend Bethany and I will be competing in the Oleksak Lumber Half Marathon this coming April, and while I've always "been" a "runner," it's great to have something tangible and so very very soon to actively train toward.  So here's to early mornings at the gym, eight mile Sunday runs and lots and lots of chicken-based dinners!  Will try to keep this endeavor somewhat updated, as it might lend itself to more reflection on the far end.

Here's the route:

This isn't a topographical map, but you can tell by the shorter distances between miles 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 9 and 10 that there are some significant inclines.  But, as anyone who knows my running preferences can affirm--I do love me some hills.  SO PUMPED.

Shame map

Thanks to my apartmentmates and Alyssa Maine for this.  All I can say is: sucks to be from North Dakota.  Click to zoom!

China and human rights

I've been reading about human rights lately, in large part because my senior thesis has found itself very much a commentary on forgiveness, sin and mourning.  As communities of all shapes and sizes, we are confronted with joys and tragedies (e.g. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords), and political leaders are sought to stand as mediators and interpreters of the pain and uncertainty that is "the next step forward."  President Obama's address regarding the Tuscon shootings was lauded not for its political fervor nor any intense call for partisanship to reign supreme--as if the Democrats respond to pain any better than the Republicans, or vice versa--but for its optimism and belief that the American spirit is one of resilience.  In a remarkably humble return to a large part of his campaign rhetoric, Obama moved for peace and shared story.  The strength of the American Constitution and constitution seems to be this desire for shared story, and then the U.S.'s human rights ethic follows the same lines: how do we write an ethic that does justice to the community?  This goes beyond "majority rules," and instead focuses with surprise sophistication a philosophy of memoir and the cultivation of a graceful aesthetic: what, and how, will we remember and be remembered?

So when in this article we read that the human rights issue in China has been sorely overlooked--even blatantly ignored--I am convinced that recent American events should make us think differently.  What stories will we be willing to take the blame for, and how will we allow ourselves, as powerful Americans on an international stage, to have our lines recorded in playbooks? 

StoryPeople, January 18

It's hard to say the right words without practice, I said & she whispered in my ear, Say them as many times as you like & we practiced late into the night.

Response to: the freedom to fail

Thoughts on Michael Goodwin's assertion that loss of failure as an imperative is crippling the nation.  

Michael Goodwin raises some valid fears regarding our society’s penchant for ignoring the difficult, complicated and disappointing in our efforts to coddle, encourage and edify.   However, there are a few fallacies in his argument. Firstly, Goodwin fails to define what he means by success and failure.  Secondly, he neglects to establish effective filters for differentiating between the two.

Goodwin fails to provide a rubric for both the concepts of success and failure, and his argument requires that we agree with his distinctions. It is unclear whether success is measured by degrees of safety, social capital, academic degrees or financial stability.  Similarly, it is unclear whether failure is measured by degrees of poverty, lack of education or geographic isolation.  When Goodwin mentions social promotion, analyzing the sobering statistics requires a tongue-in-cheek perspective: although seventy-five percent of New York City high school graduates require remedial work to make up for inadequacies in previous education, no policy analyst would solely blame the student; instead, the school system is clearly the flawed institution, and government administrations are meant to account for such shortcomings, as in the well-intentioned vein of No Child Left Behind.  

Such social nets will not go ultimately unchallenged.  The college graduate who works hard to maintain a competitive GPA, takes difficult courses and invests in extracurricular activities will be rewarded when an impressive résumé is presented to future employers.  The college graduate who ignores classes and neglects work will perhaps graduate, but certainly won’t be looked upon favorably when applying to competitive employment positions.  In this scenario, failure is indeed an inevitable outcome for the former case, and eventually a rewarding one.  This challenges what I understand Goodwin to be saying; the core of his argument seems to be not so much that there is an increasing absence of failure, but rather that failure goes unpunished.  This is an invalid assumption. The high school student who graduates unqualifiedly will need remedial work.  The person who buys a cheap but unreliable car will need to compensate for a bad purchase. In this way there seems to be no shortage of failure; failure might simply be described differently in the economic equation: if either buyer or seller perceives the short end of the fiscal stick, the ground will have to be made up eventually. 

At what level in the social ladder should failure as a filtering mechanism be instated? Should there be a lottery system to determine who is allowed to continue on to middle school, for the sake of improving the caliber of output?  Should marketplace exchanges be capped each day in order to encourage a frenzy of early efforts and cutthroat strategies, for the sake of increasing market capital?  If Goodwin’s call for failure for failure’s sake is played out this way, its natural product will not be success, but anarchy, and so the question is an entirely personal one.  The American democratic system allows plenty of room for the freedom to fail—the question is, for how long?