Stalking The Bogeyman - Anchorage Is Location Of The Play And Events In The Play

When he was 31, they found their son's diary that said he'd been raped..  It happened when he was seven.  David Hothouse (played by Devin Frey) tells his story in this play.  How it happened, why he didn't tell anyone, how it haunted him, how he stalked his rapist with the intent to kill him.

Cast discusses play with audience after performance

This is not a spoiler.  I'd read the 2004 Anchorage Press article about the rape when it came out.

I'd heard the This American Life piece David did.

I'd read the follow up Press article that came out last year that named his rapist.

And I heard him testify last year urging the legislature to pass Erin's law (it passed, despite  Sen. Dunleavy)  to require Alaska schools to teach students how to spot the signs of a child molester and how to report suspicions or if something happens.  So I knew most of what was going to happen on stage.

It didn't matter.  The play is riveting.  The story was adapted to the stage deftly.  It's one fast eighty minute ride.  The University of Alaska Anchorage actors are spot on.  Amazingly, Frey plays David at ages seven through 31.  And he's believable in all of them.  Yes, it's his adult body, but he manages to make being seven work effortlessly.  (Well for the audience, I'm sure he put a lot of effort into it.)
The play is especially compelling because most of it takes place in Anchorage.  The story is real.  The actors portray real people.  One of them was the principal of my son's high school.  
But the play itself doesn't preach.  Its instruction is merely reliving David's experience and David telling us about it - how it happened, why he didn't tell, how he had to repeatedly be around his molester, and how it affected him.  

This is an important play, not only because it speaks about the unspeakable, but it's a very good drama.   

You can see it this afternoon at UAA or next weekend.  You can get your ticket online here.  No, I'm not working for the UAA theater department.  I just think it's an amazing play that as many people should see as possible.  And for those of you outside of Anchorage, they are taking it on the road this summer.  The site says 'including "Mat-Su, Homer, Seward, Valdez and Fairbanks." Unfortunately, it looks like they're sticking to the road system. Maybe if other locations invite them, they'll think about coming.

I was thinking, at the end of the play, that we'd gone the whole evening without any humor to relieve the tension.  But thinking back I realized there had been some, but I couldn't remember anyone laughing.  I mentioned this to the director afterward, and he said some audiences laugh, others don't.  Devin said there was some laughter that night, but not much.  Actors also noted the extra tension of acting in front of some of the people they were portraying.  

The psychology department at UAA was also involved in this production.  Working with the actors during rehearsals and there were people there that night.  One student is doing research on theater as a means of communicating important issues and others were there to talk with audience members who might need counseling after the play.   

I got to talk to Devin Frey, who played David Holthouse, after the performance.  I pulled out my camera to take a picture, but he was interesting and so I did a short video as he was talking about learning from David about the role.  It's only about a minute long.  

But don't just take my word for it, you can read the New York Times review of when this played Off-Broadway.  This is the West Coast premier.  

And there's a lot I should have mentioned but didn't.  The director, Dr. Brian cook played an important role.  All the other actors (who are in the top picture) two of whom played multiple roles, and the playwright, Markus Potter, who heard the piece on This American Life and contacted David about making it into a play.  

I have to say, I never understood the spelling of 'bogeyman' since it's pronounced 'boogie man.'

Thanks to the cast and crew for a great evening.  I first included David Holthouse (which spell check keeps changing to Hothouse) in that sentence.  But my comments to David are more complicated.  I'm truly sorry you were raped and then haunted by your rapist for so many years.  I thank you for finding ways to tell this story and hope that it plays a role in helping children avoid what happened to you, and let them know how to reach out if it does happen.   And help parents interpret the  non-verbal signs of abuse their kids send while they try to hide what happened.  And I hope that you can now, or at least soon, leave this behind, and live the life you were headed for before that night.


[UPDATE 9:40 AM:  Again, I'm back.  I left out the most important point of this story  - the silence and denial over the issue of child molestation.  For whatever reasons, this is a huge sickness in our country (and I'm supposing world) that gets way too little attention for its magnitude and horrors.  The statistics I learned last year at the Erin's Law hearings are staggering - one in four girls, one in five boys are molested.  (This ranges from inappropriate touching to fondling all the way to rape as in this play.)  And while we get story after story in the news - today I'm reading about Dennis Hastert - yet we can just skip over to the next article and go on doing nothing.  Being in a dark theater with 100 or more other people watching live actors portray David's story communicates this horror in a way all the newspaper articles just don't do.]

"The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."

For people who are totally stymied by all the incompetent politicians they see who are doing really dumb and often damaging things, let me offer you an explanation:

The Dunning and Kruger Effect or why incompetent people are so incompetent.

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.[1] The bias was first experimentally observed by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in 1999. They postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in the unskilled, and external misperception in the skilled: 'The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.'"

Let's tease this out with an example from my own life.

In my first six months or so as new Peace Corps volunteer, I was learning and learning and I was sure I would have everything mastered shortly.

But then my brain morphed and I began to feel incredibly incompetent and hopeless.

In both cases I was right.  I was learning at an incredible rate.  My Thai vocabulary and ability to communicate kept growing in leaps and bounds.  I was meeting all sorts of new people and situations and adding them all into my new experiences file.

BUT, one day I began to become aware of how much more there was to know that I hadn't realized before.  The size of my ignorance (that I was aware of) was growing at a much faster rate than my new knowledge was growing.

Thai culture was so much richer and complex than I had originally thought.  As I learned ten things, I became aware of 100 more things I knew nothing about.

I began, for instance, to understand that my American way of seeing the world blinded me from so much.  How could that be?  Well, I labeled and organized everything using my American way of seeing the world.  On the simplest level, I was thinking about my new Thai words as equivalents to English words.  But eventually, I realized that their meanings,  while similar, often weren't captured in the closest English word.  Sure, a car was a car and a telephone was a telephone.  But the social meanings of having a car or a telephone were totally different in 1960s Thailand and California.  And other words had no equivalents whatsoever in English.  They were abstract concepts that had no labels in English, were embedded in Thai and/or Buddhist culture.  Learning these words and what they meant were peeks into this alien (to me) culture and to ways of thinking about the world that were invisible to most people.

The point of all this is to explain how somebody can think he's more competent than he is - as I was in the beginning in Thailand.

And to explain how someone who is reasonably competent, can feel he isn't competent - because as I grew to know so much more than when I arrived in Thailand, I became aware that my ignorance was significantly greater than what I knew.  And as I learned more about Thailand, my mental map of  of my ignorance was growing much faster than my mental map of my knowledge.

Being incompetent has some benefits.  One great advantage of the incompetent is their certainty of their rightness.  To be certain, gives one power.  There are no second thoughts, no doubts about the path you are taking.  You can charge forth with total commitment.  Those about you who raise questions, are simply wrong and wrong-headed.  And the more intangible the work you do, the easier it is to think you're right.  After a while, for example, a basketball player whose shots never go through the rim, figures out that he's not performing.  But not so a politician whose bills get passed.  The fact that they're passed because the majority are as incompetent as he is, or because the rules and procedures are rigged in his favor, doesn't matter to his certainty.  And it's hard to prove him wrong.  Even if things go bad, he can always say, "Yeah, but they woulda been even worse without my legislation."  (Think about how Alaskan Republican law makers are dancing around the fact that the tax credit they gave the oil companies a couple of years ago to stimulate drilling and jobs, is now more than the revenue we get from oil.  And those jobs?  Companies are cutting back.  But they have answers to all that.)

However, if you are wiser, more competent, you see all the possible problems with your plan.  You understand the issues your opponents raise and they cause you to pause.  You understand that history is filled with people who have been hailed as heroes in their own time, but history's revisions have identified them as fools.  So your self-confidence is always in check.  It's harder to use simplistic sound bytes, because you know things are much more complex.  And when you try to include those complications, your opponents' eyes glaze over and in their minds you are proving the weakness of your position.

So is there hope?  Dunning and Kruger do say that incompetent people can grow to understand their incompetence with good training.  The title quote described the situation of a number of my grad students when they entered the program.  They simply didn't have the analytical skills to understand why they were wrong.  Thinking skills were part of what we taught.  And I saw transformations among my students as they learned to apply some rigor to their thinking.

When a student responded to a question.  I'd often follow up the student's initial response with "Why?"  In the beginning the student looked bewildered.  But it was always gratifying when a student, later in the semester,  would look at me and say, "I knew you were going to ask that."  It just meant to me that she had already asked that same question after her first response.  She was starting to think critically about her own answers.

But it's harder to retrain legislators who are in leadership positions in the majority.  They are surrounded by people who reinforce their incompetence.   Staffers for good legislators challenge them.  But other staffers know that challenging their bosses is not a way to move up.   Lobbyists wine and dine legislators.  They tell them how smart they are, they supply them with fabricated research that refutes their opponents' arguments.  The good lobbyists are making ten to twenty times as much as the legislators make and in many cases are far better educated than the legislators are.  At least many in key leadership positions today.

It's heady stuff having power and being surrounded by people who tell you how smart and courageous you are and how evil your opponents are.   It reinforces your mistaken assessment of your competence.  It helps seal out the doubts and questions that truly competent people have.

And it's not a Republican monopoly.  The problem is having so much power that you no longer have to listen to the loyal opposition.  You can just tune them out and do what you want.  It's why we need a more evenly divided state legislature.  And why the new Anchorage Assembly, with eight to three leaning left, can be a problem too.

Irony -No Smoking, But Guns OK

We went to see Stalking The Bogey Man at UAA tonight.  Get tickets and go.  Not only is it a powerful play, but Anchorage is the locale for most of it, and the topic is one of the most important for our children.  You won't be bored.  You can get tickets here.  There's no one who shouldn't see this play - unless you're a rape victim and can't deal with it yet.  More on it later.   I don't have time to do it justice tonight.

But as we were walking to the theater on campus I was struck by this big sign.

We have a smoke free campus here.  You can't take a break any more and stand outside when it's 10˚F out and puff with your fellow smokers.  You have to actually get off campus.  I'm not sure if that isn't taking things a little too far, but I started pushing for no smoking in class back in the mid 1970s, so I definitely like the indoor ban.

But I was thinking about the headline in this morning's paper as I passed this sign.

I try to be objective and look at all sides of an issue.  Here's the kind of 'rational' article on guns on campus that  I would normally write.  And here's one that explains why guns on campus is a bad idea. But at some point, you have to stop being polite and rational and just say it like it is.

There's no real middle ground here.  There are national organizations, like ALEC  and Americans for Prosperity that are anti-worker, anti-regulation, anti-public school, and other right wing legislation at the state level.  It's far cheaper to influence state officials than national ones.  I don't know that either of these organizations is helping with this drive.  I don't know who's helping Pete Kelly with this bill. But I know the people of Fairbanks are responsible for electing Pete Kelly and the other Republican legislators who have supported this bill are all culpable in this.

My Senator - Berta Gardner - pointed out the other day that while the Senate is forcing the University to change it's concealed weapon policy, they aren't themselves allowing guns in the capital building.  I guess that's next year.  And I'd bet there are a few legislators who have guns in their offices.

The legislature has ignored the warnings about oil and the state budget for years.  And now, instead of seriously working on raising revenue to keep the University strong as well as other important government services, they're refusing to consider raising revenues like responsible states do - through an income tax.  But they do have time to pass legislation to allow concealed carry on campus.  Even the highly corporate Board of Regents don't support this law.    This isn't about safety on compass, it's about power - and what better symbol of power than a gun.

But, in the mean time, concealed carry, or any carry, is not allowed on campus.  But if Pete Kelly gets his way, while you won't be able to light up on campus, you can take your gun when you talk to your professor about your grade on the last exam.

I realize that posts like this will probably cause a group to sponsor legislation to allow smoking on campus.

About 5000 Votes Still To Be Counted In Anchorage Election

I talked to the Municipal Deputy Election Clerk (that means she works in the Clerk's office and is the Deputy Clerk in charge of the elections) Amanda Moser this morning.  I had two questions:

1.  How come there were already 2076 votes already posted on the 20:03pm unofficial election results?  [Those results are no longer available online, but I put them up at that link.]  Where were these votes from?

2.  How many votes were still to be counted?

Let me answer Question 2 first.  It's a much shorter answer and comes up again in Question 1. There are about 5000 votes to be counted.  These include absentee by mail that came in yesterday and today (and will trickle in for a few more days), absentee in person, and questioned ballots.  Absentee in person means people voted at one of the polling places, like Loussac library, before the election.  Questioned votes are for people who voted out of their precincts or didn't have ID, or other irregularity that caused the precinct worker to have questions about the voter.

Question 1:  What were those 2076 votes already counted before any of the precincts had brought their boxes to election central?

Amanda Moser told me that these were absentee by mail votes that the Clerk's office had received BEFORE Tuesday.  The office decided that since they had them already, it might be interesting to just get them up right away after the election, so people would have some numbers to look at as soon as the polls closed.  I didn't remember that from previous elections and Moser confirmed they hadn't done that in previous elections.

You can see those early numbers in my first post from last night.  They were much more conservative than the actual outcome.

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 3 - SEAT DPERMAN, Ira 40 11.66%DARDEN, Dustin 11 3.21%CROFT, Eric 114 33.24%TROMBLEY, Adam 178 51.90%Write-in Votes 0 0.00%

Trombley was leading with 51.9% of the vote among these early voters.

In the last count, he got 33% to winner Croft's 45%.

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 4 - SEAT FALLEVA, Ron 111 39.78%TRAINI, Dick 164 58.78%Write-in Votes 4 1.43%

This race ended up Traini 62% to Alleva 35%.  Not as big a change.  

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 5 - SEAT HDUNBAR, Forrest 188 45.97%GALES, Terre 219 53.55%Write-in Votes 2 0.49%

Gales went from 53% over Dunbar's 45%  in this first set of ballots to Dunbar 60% and Gales 39% in the latest count.  

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 6 - SEAT JSCHIMSCHEIMER, Mark 76 13.82%WEDDLETON, John 170 30.91%TAYLOR, Treg 301 54.73%Write-in Votes 3 0.55%

The latest count in this race has Weddleton ahead 43% over Taylor's 40%.  Weddleton leads by 290 votes.  There are 5000 or so votes yet to count city wide.  The total counted so far is 43,000 and this Assembly race had 10,800 votes, just under 25%.  So, there are maybe 1200 votes left to be counted from the absentee by mail and in-person votes.  For Taylor to win, he'd need to get 300 more votes than Weddleton.  It would have to be at least 750 to 450.  Or, put another way, he'd have to pick up 62% of the remaining votes.  (And there was one more candidate in the race I'm not even considering.)   That's highly unlikely.  He didn't even have that big a margin in this early vote that was clearly leaning right.  


SCHOOL BOARD - SEAT A
DAVIS, Bettye 840 44.03%
HUGHES, Brent 1050 55.03% Write-in Votes 18 0.94%

This one really turned around.  Davis won with 56% of the vote to 42%.  

SCHOOL BOARD - SEAT B
SCHUSTER, Kay 693 37.77%
NEES, David 604 32.92%
MARSETT, Starr 519 28.28%

I didn't even know who Kay Schuster was.  Her website is pretty bland.  But there was a Republican Women's fundraiser for her at McGinley's pub with supporters including former Mayor Sullivan.  Nees has run as a  conservative in the past.  

The last count had Schuster with 35% and Marsett with 34%.  

This one is still too close to call.  With 5,000 votes outstanding in this city wide race , Marsett would have to get 40% of the remaining votes.  Not as big a challenge as Treg Taylor has in his Assembly race, but still a formidable challenge.  Particularly if the remaining votes - mostly absentee by mail or in person - have any sort of conservative leaning as the first set of absentee by mail votes had.  


So, either conservatives are more likely to vote by mail, or the Republicans did a better job of getting their voters to vote by mail.  In either case, that first set of votes we got last night had a significantly more conservative tinge than the eventual outcomes.  

Some other issues from yesterday's elections came up in my conversation with Amanda Moser, but I need to review my notes more carefully before I post on that.  It involves aging voting machines and memory cards which caused machines not to read people's cards the first, second, or third times, and required some complete recounting for some precincts.


[Blogger notes.  When I realized that answering Question 2 first made more sense, why didn't I just make that one Question 1?  Good question.  I thought about switching the question numbers around.  But Question 1 really was my first question, the one that got me to call the Clerk's office to ask.  

I'd also note that I did contribute to two of the candidates mentioned in this post.  I know old time journalists got taught that to remain impartial, they shouldn't ever contribute to a campaign.  Some even believe they shouldn't vote.  I already had trouble as an academic about having to use language that imagined that I was some objective observer who had no opinions.  Of course reporters have opinions.  Some can step back and write reasonably objectively and some can't.   I think it's better to just state your biases up front and let the reader consider how that bias might have impacted the story.  

In this case, my reporting on specific races is as objective as it can be - just citing numbers and probabilities.  And where I mention loaded words like ' conservative' and 'liberal,' I'm not voicing any opinion that hasn't been voiced already by people seen as on the left or on the right.  So I don't think it's necessary to mention the specific candidates I wrote checks for.  Readers who need to know, can look it up on the APOC website. I doubt it will be a surprise to regular readers.]

What Does The Anchorage Election Mean For The Assembly?

Assembly Seats Up For Election:

Eagle River - Amy Demboski - one of the most conservative Assembly member representing a very conservative part of Anchorage.  She's going to stay in office.

West Anchorage - Ernie Hall - had become a conservative vote and wasn't running again.  He's likely being replaced by  Eric Croft, who is more liberal establishment.

East Anchorage - Paul Honeman was in the liberal team and it looks like he will be replaced by another liberal - Forrest Dunbar.

Mid-Town - Dick Traini who has been on the Assembly longer than anyone else ever - is probably genetically more conservative, but his degrees in public planning and public administration gave him skills to analyze more objectively, and he's been considered a key player among the liberals.  He's going to stay for another term.

South Anchorage -  Jennifer Johnson has been considered as a member of the conservative wing of the Assembly and the race to replace her is close.  But John Weddleton is slightly ahead (91% of the precincts reporting) with 3545 votes (43.40%) to Treg Taylor with 3297 votes (40.36%). Weddleton was very active in the rewrite of Title 21 which set the guidelines for building and development of Anchorage and would be in the liberal side if he wins. Taylor has billed himself as a conservative.
[Next update keeps a similar margin:  Weddleton 3786 (43%) and Taylor 3527 (40%) with 92% of the vote.]
[11:15pm update:  Weddleton edges a little more ahead  4711 - 4421  (43.38% to 40.71%) with 92.3% of the vote in that race counted.  Though I don't think that includes the early and absentee votes.]

So, at this point, three liberals have won seats on the Assembly (a change of one more liberal) and one conservative has kept her seat. The final seat is too close to call.

The new assembly will be either be seven leaning left and four leaning right, or eight leaning left and three leaning right.

You can check for later results on the Weddleton/Taylor race here.  (District 6, Seat J)

And I should say this liberal/conservative dichotomy is a short cut.  But in reality there is a variety of issues that might 'test' someone's location in the political universe.  And politicians are not necessarily predictable on all those issues.

Demboski, Croft, Traini, Dunbar Look Like Winners, Other Races Closer

Demboski, Croft, Traini, Dunbar  look like they are winners.


The South Anchorage race is too close to call.

Bettye Davis is likely the winner in her School District race, the other race is too close.

The Tax proposition is likely to pass - this is the one former mayor Dan Sullivan supported.

The props look mostly yes.  The school bonds are not certain.  The Girdwood proposition looks shaky.  Marijuana tax is a landslide.

You can see the exact numbers for Assembly and School Board here.  And the propositions here.
(These links update, so the numbers you get will depend when you link.  I'm linking now to the 21:57pm edition.)

58% of Precincts Reporting - Numbers Look More Like Expected

Here's the 21:39 report with 58% of precincts reporting.

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 2 - SEAT A	Votes	Percent
Demboski	1252
Begich	811	39.34%
Write In Votes	12	0.58%
ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 3 - SEAT D
Perman	950	15.52%
Darden	287	4.69%
Croft	2943	48.07%
Trombley	1920	31.36%
Write In Votes	22	0.36%
ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 4 - SEAT F
Alleva	1179
Traini	2041	62.55%
Write In Votes	43	1.32%
ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 5 - SEAT H
Dunbar	2478	59.06%
Gales	1704	40.61%
Write In Votes	14	0.33%
ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 6 - SEAT J
Schimscheimer	497	14.25%
Weddleton	1468	42.10%
Taylor	1498	42.96%
Write In Votes	23	0.69%
SCHOOL BOARD - SEAT A
Davis	11,394	57.79%
Hughes	8126	41.22%
Write In Votes	196	0.99%
SCHOOL BOARD - SEAT B
Schuster	6486	34.91%
Nees	5472	29.45%
Marsett	6406	34.48%

Very First Anchorage Election Returns Show Conservative Surge

It's not clear what these votes represent.   It says 0.0% of 124 precincts reporting.

So, are these early votes?  There really aren't enough of them and in the past these have been counted after all the other votes were counted.

Did someone hack the machines and get things primed with a starting bias?  (Just asking questions that pop into my mind.)  I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation.  But let's get the starting numbers documented.

This is for 20:03 pm - so no votes have even had time to get downtown to the election headquarters yet.

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 2 - SEAT A
DEMBOSKI, Amy 253 72.49%
BEGICH, Nicholas 94 26.93%
Write-in Votes 2 0.57%

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 3 - SEAT D
PERMAN, Ira 40 11.66%
DARDEN, Dustin 11 3.21%
CROFT, Eric 114 33.24%
TROMBLEY, Adam1 78 51.90%
Write-in Votes 0 0.00%

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 4 - SEAT F
ALLEVA, Ron 111 39.78%
TRAINI, Dick 164 58.78%
Write-in Votes 4 1.43%

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 5 - SEAT H
DUNBAR, Forrest 188 45.97%
GALES, Terre 219 53.55%
Write-in Votes 2 0.49%

ASSEMBLY - DISTRICT 6 - SEAT J
SCHIMSCHEIMER, Mark 76 13.82%
WEDDLETON, John 170 30.91%
TAYLOR, Treg 301 54.73%
Write-in Votes 3 0.55%

SCHOOL BOARD - SEAT A
DAVIS, Bettye 840 44.03%
HUGHES, Brent 1050 55.03% Write-in Votes 18 0.94%

SCHOOL BOARD - SEAT B
SCHUSTER, Kay 693 37.77%
NEES, David 604 32.92%
MARSETT, Starr 519 28.28%




[UPDATE: Here is the first report for the propositions.]

PROP 1 ANCHORAGE SCHOOL DISTRICT CAPITAL IMPROVEMENTS
YES 746 35.93%
NO 1330 64.07%
PROP 2 MARIJUANA SALES TAX
YES 1703 81.37%
NO 390 18.63%
PROP 3 AREA SAFETY CAPITAL IMPROVEMENTS
YES 1243 59.13%
NO 859 40.87%
PROP 4 PARKS & REC CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT
YES 907 43.33%
NO 1186 56.67%
Prop 4 Parks and Rec Capital Improvements
YES 766 44.07%
NO 972 55.93%
PROP 5 ARDSA STORM & DRAINAGE
YES 1059 50.36%
NO 1044 49.64%
Prop 5 Ardsa & Strom and Drainage Bonds
YES 805 52.72%
NO 722 47.28%
PROP 6 ANCHORAGE FIRE SERVICE AREA FIRE PROTECTION BONDS
YES 1276 60.56%
NO 831 39.44%
Prop 6 Anchorage Fire Service Area Protection Bonds
YES 1203 60.67%
NO 780 39.33%
PROP 7 ANCHORAGE METROPOLITAN POLICE SERVICE AREA FACILITIES BONDS
YES 1101 52.35%
NO 1002 47.65%
Prop 7 Anchorage Metropoliain Police Service Area Facities
YES 1093 52.40%
NO 993 47.60%
PROP 8 TAX INCREASE LIMITATION
YES 1444 69.56%
NO 632 30.44%

Clutter Wars: Mom Liked Pussy Willows, Files, Neighborhood Clutter

My mom's house and garage are a great stimulus to clean out our own stuff and we're working on it daily.  But the inflow of paper courtesy of the US mail makes it a never ending process.

But then there's stuff that has meaning.  For instance, my mom loved pussy willows and had bunches of dried pussy willows in vases around the house when she died.  My heartless friends saved me lots of agonizing decision making by glaring at me and pointing to the garden recycling bin in LA.  (Thank you, really.)

But as I wandered our snow free yard recently, I couldn't help but break off some fresh pussy willows.  There's a reason my mom like them.





So I put them in a vase in the bathroom.



Then I saw the little glass bowl where I've put the even littler blue velvet bag with some of my mom's ashes.  Since my mom like the pussy willows, I thought I'd put her next to them.

I understand this could seem rather bizarre, but having a bit of my mom nearby gives me some sense of normalcy, that she's still around.  I can share things with her that she would like.  Fortunately, I have no sense of her being there when I wouldn't want her watching me.   She always gave me lots of space and freedom and never guilted me over things.  That was a great gift.

As I said, I've been tackling old paperwork, sorting through files upon files.  One pile is for direct transit to the recycling bin.  (I've been removing this pile before getting more files, so there was a lot more than just this.)  Another pile has to be shredded first - anything with identifiers, particularly social security numbers.

As you can see in the picture, there are a lot of empty folders too.  Some go to recycling, some I might reuse.

And there are things to sort through more carefully.  For instance, I found a small envelope from my father with a handwritten label, "Some poetry Steve might enjoy reading."   There's insight to parts of my father's life we never discussed when he was alive.  And then there's a poem called "Heimweh."  Only the title is in German (it means homesick).  It's about suddenly thinking about his childhood home and how it made him cry..  (His aunt in Chicago helped him secure a visa so he could flee Nazi Germany, but he was never able to secure visas to get his parents out.)   The last stanza gives some justification for keeping some of this stuff.

"I shed my tears in agony
for I was mourning,
      but in vain,
since all the world that
      used to be
will never be again"

My father lives here still with me, through his poems, his old letters, some of his things and documents.  This document was in the same folder with the poems.

It fills in bits and pieces of his life I knew very little about.  This was in files I'd glanced through after he died and knew enough to keep for sorting later.  Later is here, I guess.  It's back into another keep and look through later pile.  But I'm getting rid of a lot of the stuff that is just taking up room.  And while the historian/archeologist in me would keep all the old income tax folders and checkbooks, because they do document the times I lived and how we spent money and how much things cost, my mom's garage screams out at me to just shred it.  

Here's the nearly empty file cabinet where all this came from.  There are some folders I still need to go through and sort more carefully, but this does feel like I've accomplished something.







And then I walked around the block to get some fresh air and was reminded that my clutter level wasn't all that bad.







Here's the house that burned last month.

And here's another neighbor's backyard.  

And front yard.





Stuff!!  Glad I don't have to clean out their yard and house.

This Seemed Obvious Last November

An LA Times article Saturday said:

"For months, as Donald Trump lurched from controversy to controversy, commentators marveled that his voters remained loyal: Trump is impervious to political attack, some said.
Not so. Trump wasn't immune; analysts were just failing to look at the whole board."

I don't usually write, "I told you so" posts, but when I read that, I couldn't help but think about this post I put up in November:

Trump's Poll Numbers: 70-80% Of Republicans Support Someone Else

That post said that when the media focus his poll numbers and on the percent of votes Trump was getting in the multi-candidate Republican primaries, they were missing the bigger picture - that most Republicans were voting against Trump.  The post stepped back even further and said if you counted all voters - Republicans, Democrats, and all the various independent voters - he was only pulling about 7% of all voters.  He was the biggest fish in the relatively small Republican party pond.  But in the bigger pond, he was pretty small.

At that point I was only saying how many people were voting for others, I didn't have a basis to say that the rest had a strong unfavorable impression of him.  But the LA Times article says that evidence is now available.

"While Trump’s polarizing campaign did not dent his standing with core supporters in the Republican primaries, it took a punishing toll on how the rest of the electorate views him. Trump’s image, which was poor even before he ran for president, has plunged to an unequaled low. Among scores of major political figures measured in polls over the last 30 years, Trump’s numbers are the worst.
If Trump were to win the GOP presidential nomination with his current public image, he would be the most unpopular nominee in the history of U.S. opinion surveys, veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart said in an email."

The article goes on to explain why people think Trump has no chance to win the presidency if he gets the Republican nomination.  While I think that's the case - and said so in the November post - I'd haggle a little with this point made in the LA Times article:

"Many examples certainly exist of public figures who have succeeded in improving damaged reputations.  .  .
Usually, however, political candidates' images get worse, not better, during a campaign. Democratic strategists are counting on that."

I would argue that

• historically, candidates haven't gotten the primary exposure of the 2012 and 2016 Republican primaries (all the multi-candidate Republican debates and all the social media exposure), so I'd expect the candidates today are better known and much of the damage is already done
• candidates who have gotten past nominations had much better approval ratings going into the election, so it would be more likely for their ratings to dip
• if Trump does get the nomination, I expect he'd change his presentation to reflect his new audience, though it's hard to be sure what is bluster for the far right (that could be changed) and what is true Trump (that would be harder to change)

• 
  

[Sorry for reposting, Feebburner issues again.]