I'm packing up to go to the cafe section of the Barnes and Noble in Paramus, where I'll do some one finger typing on my iPad. (Chapter Four, you're dead meat!) Maybe I'll get some oatmeal. Then I'll go to the gym for a two mile run. Do I sometimes tire of this predictable suburban life? Yes, I do. Sigh.
Let's see what has caught my eye in the news:
"More than 75 professors at Catholic University and other prominent Catholic colleges have written a pointed letter to Mr. Boehner saying that the Republican-supported budget he shepherded through the House will hurt the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable, and that he therefore has failed to uphold basic Catholic moral teachings."
Peace Corps volunteers describe rapes and sexual assaults that happened when they were overseas and say that they didn't receive enough support or protection from the US gov't. Shameful.
I really should reread Up the Down Staircase.
More later, after I fly overseas to meet my new lover in a villa in France.
Apt. 11d 
The Peace Corps article is sad, but it’s also worth remembering that there can be quite a lot of variation in the quality of administration in different countries and locations, from the country director down to the medical staff. When I was in the Peace Corps we had training on sexual assault and rape that was more extensive and serious than any I’d seen before- much better than what most universities give, for example, I expect. But I’m sure that different locations have different levels of implementation, and I suspect that some of the problems are more due to bad implementation than anything else. (Of course, that doesn’t mean that improvements are not needed.)
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Good for Catholic U.
How do you find typing on the iPad? Do you have the separate keyboard? It’s the one thing holding me back on getting one. I can type pretty fast on a laptop, but I don’t know that I could go as quickly on an iPad. What do you use for word processing on it? Do you like it?
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During my Peace Corps training in the Russian Far East, two Peace Corps volunteers talked about having been raped while serving in other countries, one of them by her local counterpart (in Peace Corpsese, every Peace Corps Volunteer is supposed to have a local counterpart to work closely with). I don’t know of any sexual assaults that happened to women I served with (although I mainly stuck to my village, so I wouldn’t necessarily have heard), but during my time one male volunteer was very badly beaten and robbed coming out of a waterfront casino (as I recall) and another male volunteer was drugged and robbed by some new friends in Moscow (note that both of these episodes were preventable by being a bit less friendly and not being in the wrong place at the wrong time). Russia has something like 5X the murder rate of the US. A lot of Peace Corps locations are very dangerous places, especially for lone young foreign women.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Russia
When I was finishing up my two years, the father of one of my students (the father was a 250-pound mine worker and former soccer player with fists the size of volleyballs) told me that when I first arrived in the village, he’d gone around to all of the local bums and low-lifes, telling them to leave the American alone. I’m glad he was on my side.
A complication is that the distances involved are enormous and HQ will have dozens of volunteers to keep tabs on. I lived an hour or two out from HQ, and I practically never saw them except if I went looking for them myself. Meanwhile, other volunteers had posts two or three days away by train. With the yearly rhythm of preparing for, training and finding positions for the new batch of Peace Corps volunteers, plus needing to fight for visas for everybody, HQ barely had time to think about existing volunteers. As a PCV, you are very much on your own, which is part of the charm–as long as things are going well. Modern technology may have changed some of this, though, because it is much more possible to be in touch. In the mid-90s, none of us had telephones (the Russian apartments were rarely wired for them), so the best way of contacting somebody far away was to send a telegram. And Russia was a much more developed country than a lot of places Peace Corps goes.
Peace Corps Volunteer safety has come up a number of times over the years.
“Walter Poirier was an idealistic 22-year-old working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia. Then he vanished. His parents want to know why they were the only ones who noticed he was gone.”
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/missing_peace/
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My guardian angel was kind of a tough guy (scratch that–he was a REALLY tough guy), but he explained his philosophy once in the following phrase: “Bog ne fraier” (God is not a sucker). Vladimir wasn’t a religious man at the time, but he meant that there is cosmic payback for taking unfair advantage of another person.
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“HQ barely had time to think about existing volunteers…”
That was a little bit incomplete–I should have mentioned that a handful of the headquarters people were continually on the road doing visits to remotely located volunteers. However, there were so many volunteers, and the locations were so far-flung that any particular volunteer would see the headquarters people on site very rarely. Being very close to Vladivostok myself, I saw them a total of perhaps 2 times in 2 years once I was settled in at my site. (I’d also pop in to headquarters myself about once a month.)
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I would go with C.S. Lewis:
“I do not like the pretensions of Government – the grounds on which it demands my obedience – to be pitched too high. . . . I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ it lies, and lies dangerously.”
So if a bunch of Catholic professors want to use the coercive power of the state to collect and distribute taxes, it would be more appropriate if they argued on secular grounds accessible to all, rather than draping themselves in the mantle of the Lord.
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“How do you find typing on the iPad? Do you have the separate keyboard? It’s the one thing holding me back on getting one. ”
Typing on the ipad is nothing like typing on a laptop. I find it frustrating to type much more than a short blog comment.
I haven’t tried the bluetooth keyboards, though, some of which also function as cases. I think those might work effectively enough to allow typing on the ipad.
I do a fair amount of photo editing on my computers, and so the iPad is never going to be a laptop replacement for me. But, it is a out on the town going to a coffee shop replacement. But I’m not writing a book.
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Russia has something like 5X the murder rate of the US.
If the Russians who stay are like the Russians who moved to America, I think I know why. They manage to be both over familiar and unfriendly at the same time. That’s bound to start a murder or two.
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“So if a bunch of Catholic professors want to use the coercive power of the state to collect and distribute taxes, it would be more appropriate if they argued on secular grounds accessible to all, rather than draping themselves in the mantle of the Lord.”
y81,
I wouldn’t go so far (see Neuhaus’s unreadable but very important The Naked Public Square). However, I think that what’s very properly making you feel uncomfortable about this is the understanding that if you made a Bible-quoting argument for Boehner’s budget (and I for one can think of a number of appropriate verses right now), you wouldn’t get a respectful hearing. If it is appropriate to argue against the budget on religious grounds, it’s appropriate to argue for it on religious grounds. I think that is an important exercise for everybody –how would I enjoy it if the shoe were on the other foot?
To start off with, here’s Dave Ramsey’s favorite: “The borrower is slave to the lender” (Proverbs 22:7, RSV). (In the interests of full disclosure, the full verse is “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.”)
That’s an excellent argument not to borrow money to do good stuff, no matter how good the stuff is.
There’s some very good stuff in Paul’s letters, also. Paul was actually in the position of figuring out how to run social welfare arrangements for the early church, and he came face to face with the problem of 1) people who wanted to stop working and wait for Jesus to come back and 2) people who weren’t taking care of their families, but expecting the church to pick up the slack.
“If a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn their religious duty to their own family and make some return to their parents…” (1 Timothy 5:4)
“If any one does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” (1 Timothy 5:8)
“Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not living in accord with the tradition that you received from us.” (2 Thessalonians 3:6)
“For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: If any one will not work, let him not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work in quietness and to earn their own living.” (2 Thessalonians 3:10)
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They manage to be both over familiar and unfriendly at the same time. That’s bound to start a murder or two.
The old ex-pat newspaper in Moscow, The eXile, used to run a “death porn” section in the back pretty regularly, where various murders were described. A surprising number started with one guy going to a friend’s house to celebrate something (a birthday, or maybe Tuesday, or whatever) w/ a couple bottles of vodka and a cake, and ended up with someone stabbed to death w/ the knife used to cut the cake. (An exaggeration, of course, but not too much of one.)
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That kind of thing maybe more likely to happen in Russia simply because the average man has a larger window between drunk enough to lose inhibiitons against killing and too drunk to stand.
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The iPad is good for super, super rough drafts. It’s actually been good for me as I try to undo some bad habits that I picked up in academia. I’m trying to write more linearly. It’s really hard to jump around and cut and paste with the iPad, and I need to get away from recycling sentences and all that.
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So is “fraier” originally in Russian? I certainly learned that word in Hebrew!
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“So is “fraier” originally in Russian? I certainly learned that word in Hebrew!”
I can’t seem to find an online Russian etymology, but it’s from thieves’ jargon, and “fraier” roughly means a mark, a sucker, a non-thief, a schmuck. In Russian thieves’ culture, there’s the idea of a very clear separation between the thieves’ world and the fraiers’ world. The word “fraier” doesn’t look Russian or Slavic, so it might actually have traveled from Hebrew into Russian (or maybe from some third language). There’s a surprising amount of overlap between Russian and Yiddish (based on my limited reading of Manischewitz packages).
What does “fraier” mean in Hebrew?
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Which villa, no link?
(and, I guess I should also ask which lover, w/ a link, too, please)
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bj,
I believe Laura is referring to some checkstand literature.
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My husband tells me that in techie circles circles there’s a joke about the ipad. It goes like this–wouldn’t it be cool to have an ipad, a keyboard and a hinge to connect the two? I remind myself of that line every time I get the urge for an ipad.
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