Congratulations On A Job Well Done

Normally my column is written with a wide audience in mind, today I write thinking of one person, my oldest son Andrew.  This past week he graduated with honors from Minco High School. 

Congratulations on a job well done.

Privileged to attend school with classmates of great character and ability, you walked beside them, shoulder to shoulder, achieving as they achieved.  You and they are a blessing to the world you now enter.

Facing opportunities offered, you embraced those opportunities and made the most of them.  Dedicating countless hours to your education, you didn’t merely gain information, you mastered it.  Jumping at difficult prospects, you embraced the demands, expanding your education well beyond prescribed curriculum.  Through struggles you persevered, occasionally losing battles but never focus, forgoing excuses and finishing strong.

Supported by exceptional teachers, faculty and staff you were gracious and mindful of their contributions, honoring their efforts with your own.  Recognizing their wisdom, you allowed them to make you better.  Embracing their efforts, you have prepared yourself to succeed throughout life.

Though focusing on academics you remained well rounded.   Playing varsity basketball, your efforts on the court paralleled your efforts in the classroom earning First Team Academic All-State.  Prioritizing your spiritual life you were active in church, taking repeated opportunities as camp councilor to mentor those younger than you, supporting their efforts and encouraging their growth.  Upholding family commitments, you maintained relationships, contributed to household chores, and placed your family’s best interest above your own.

Intelligent, compassionate, moral, tolerant, focused, competent, and mature, you are blessed with many gifts.  Use them wisely and generously, remembering that you can’t determine the outcome, just the input, and that victory comes to those that seek it not occasionally, but consistently.     

Use your strengths as tools to accomplish your objectives.  Be slow to compromise but quick to adjust.  Understand the path to a goal is neither straight nor smooth.  And appreciate those around you; victories are seldom earned alone.

There are many successes in your future, celebrate them and those that helped.  Remember failure is hard, but it’s essential and contains lesson learned nowhere else.  Let neither pride nor shame determine your self-worth, both exaggerate.

Call home once in awhile, come home once in a while and remember, holidays are to be celebrated with family.  Marry for love, have beautiful babies and bear in mind, the most important job you’ll ever have is parent, do it well.

I’m honored to be a part of your life, proud of the man you’ve become and excited to see the future you’re creating.  Congratulations on a job well done.

What’s bugging you?

The human population of planet Earth is over 7 billion.  While that’s a lot of people, the number pales in comparison to the population of microbes in and on a single human body, a figure about 15,000 times larger.  The average healthy human hosts one hundred trillion microbes and can attribute between thirty-two and eighty ounces of their total weight to the tiny tenants.  A week on intravenous Lysol won’t put you back in your high school 501s but it’s good to know there’re a few pounds that can be justifiably denied.

Before you rub down with alcohol or drink Purell you should know the vast majority of the tiny fellows spend their lives supporting yours.  Sure, some are just along for the ride and others are nasty little pathogens looking for their chance to harass, but without the trillions of tiny critters we’d be headed for a miserable death.

If you’re interested in knowing who you’re hosting you can check out the Public Library of Science’s Human Microbiome Project Collection.  Recently the initial phase of the project finished mapping the full community of microbes that inhabit healthy humans and providing a broad baseline of microorganisms found in 18 different areas of the human body.

In their five year mission (to go where no man has gone before?) 200 scientists at 80 institutions sequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from over 200 healthy people.
 
They discovered as many as a thousand bacterial strains in each person. And, interestingly, each person’s collection of microbes was different from the next person’s; we’re our own bacterial planet. They also found evidence of potential disease-causing bacteria lurking in everyone’s microbiome but living peacefully among their miniscule neighbors.

How infested are we with microbes? According to Dr. Lita Proctor, program director for the Human Microbiome Project, “The gut is not jam-packed with food; it is jam-packed with microbes,” Dr. Proctor said. “Half of your stool is not leftover food. It is microbial biomass.”  Huh, no sh…kidding?

According to the PLoS website, “The healthy adult body hosts ten times as many microbial cells as human cells, including bacteria, archaea, viruses, and eukaryotic microbes resident on nearly every body surface.”  You’ll want to keep in mind, all those cells are much smaller than human cells, sort of like minnows compared to sharks.

Dr. David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist, compared a human body to a coral reef, “an assemblage of life-forms living together.”  We’re not unlike planet Earth, one entity with masses of life in every nook and cranny. It’s only because we couldn’t see them that we never realized they’re there.

Traditionally, we think of bacteria as bad, and some are, but many are essential for human health.  With plenty of dirty little critters out there waiting to bring you down a notch it’s best to keep those hands washed, but farming the good ones is essential.  The better job you do the healthier you’ll be.  So now you know what’s bugging you.

Avoiding my own Cardinal’s sin

Recently there’s been a male Cardinal obsessed with the mirrors on my truck.  Looking in them, he worries, postures, yaps and pecks.  He perceives a threat from the invader staring back at him as intensely as he stares at it.  And he attacks, trying to eliminate the problem, as it attacks back, heightening the conflict.

As an outside viewer with a greater perspective I realize the Cardinal is his own worst enemy.  If he’d simply smile and fly away there wouldn’t be an issue.  It amuses me to watch the bird-brained animal attacking his own image, thinking about how complicated he’s making his own life and how much frustration he’d save himself if he’d just get his own misconceptions out of the way.  It’s a repeated source of amusement…as long as I don’t think about it.

Unfortunately, the lesson the Cardinal needs to learn is one I’ve been dealing with for years.  I create far more stress for myself than any outside source provides.  And that’s saying something for an extreme introvert, I get stress just from being around other people (extroverts get stress-relief from being around people).  I should add, I’m not shy; introverted and shy aren’t interchangeable.  I enjoy people but I need to escape them from time to time.  Sadly, I can’t escape my own thoughts as readily.

Usually thinking is a good thing.  Analytical reasoning is considered a strength.  But, like sneaking bites of cookie dough, hitting the snooze or mentioning your child’s latest brilliant achievement, moderation is the key.

Occam’s razor is a principle that says the answer with the fewest assumptions is the correct one.  In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the truest.  For that bird, he may not have the intelligence to understand a mirror’s reflection.  His slide down Occam’s razor leads him to think, “That devilishly handsome Cardinal is here to take over my territory.”  It also leads him to spend a ridiculous amount of time away from mating and eating (a Cardinal’s primary jobs) and focus on kicking his own rump.  The mirrors on my cars lessen the poor bird’s chances of fathering future generations of beautiful, red, overzealous simpletons.

Following Occam’s razor it’s much more likely my dog is simply in the bathroom and near his water bowl more often when I’m there because he likes to follow me around, than him having a devious plan to make the most obnoxious noises (the sound of an animal slurping goes through me like nails on a chalkboard, I must have been water-boarded in a past life) in my presence, trying to drive me insane in an effort to take over the house and gain unlimited access to the refrigerator.

Another interesting side effect to the bird’s aggression is smeared poop on my door and mirror.  This leads me to believe either A) birds are dirty fighters or B) he has to deal with a great deal of anxiety and fear to wage the war on his identical opponent.

The first takes away from his character in my eyes, while the other adds to it...the valor, not the lack of colon control.  Both make me glad birds are neither much larger nor mad at me.  And watching him makes me work a little harder at avoiding my own Cardinal’s sin.

Licensed Gun Owner

We should need a license to buy a gun.

Let me state my position on gun control: It scares me.  The 2^nd Amendment wasn’t put in place so citizens could hunt, defend their homes against criminals or plink at targets; its intent is to serve as a balance against the federal government’s ability to legislate itself excessive powers.  Don’t paint me as a conspiracy theorist but that seems to be a legitimate concern.

It also scares me for guns to be sold as freely as raw milk…wait, bad example…as freely as supersized drinks…wait, bad example…as freely as the morning-after pill.  There are idiots out there and arming them is as smart as ignoring the threats of an insane, wet-behind-the-ears Asian dictator with the resources of an entire country at his disposal.

For example, recently, in a terribly tragic accident a 5-year-old shot and killed his 2-year-old sister with a loaded rifle his parents left laying around the house.  Leaving a loaded weapon (or unloaded weapon) accessible to a 5-year-old is every bit as intelligent as leaving Draino, kitchen knives or prescription medicine accessible to a five-year-old.  These are people that shouldn’t be trusted to own guns…or raise children.  Maybe we need to require background checks for unprotected sex. 

Back to my original point, citizens have guns as a source of power to ensure the government represents citizens and their interests as opposed to becoming a ruling class, living the high life while their subjects foot the bill.  It’s happened repeated times throughout history and trusting that it couldn’t happen in our country is like trusting that your dog won’t get on the couch while you’re at work.

And, since the reason for an armed citizenry is to keep the government legitimate, it makes no sense for the government to keep track of the very firearms keeping it honest.  This leaves the question: how can we keep criminals, idiots and the mentally unstable from getting guns without infringing on everyone else?  The short answer is, to a great extent we can’t, look at the success we’ve had in keeping illegal drugs out of the hands of those same criminals, idiots and the mentally unstable.

But we do a pretty decent job of keeping minors from buying cigarettes, the vision impaired from driving without glasses and the untrained from driving school buses.  So why not take the same approach?  When you get a driver’s license, if you’ve committed a felony, are nuts or have some other reason to be prohibited from owning a gun your license would have a gun and ammunition purchasing restriction.  It’s anonymous and effective.  Based on that same system my teen sons can’t buy beer but I can…but nobody knows if I have.

Driver’s license gun restrictions (or lack of if you haven’t screwed up you right to keep and bear arms) allows for responsible citizens to buy guns, irresponsible citizens to be stopped and the government to not regulate (or keep a diary of) their regulators.  What happens if a gun seller (business or private) doesn’t honor the restriction?  The same thing that happens if they sell beer to a minor, they get fined and/or go to jail.

This idea, of course, doesn’t address adults without a license, but neither do our alcohol and tobacco laws.  It also doesn’t address the wants of people who have a phobia of guns, nor those that have a phobia of governments.  But for the vast majority of us in the middle, I think we can agree, we should need a license to buy a gun.