Chronically Sleep Deprived

We made it six years. We've really tried to avoid this, but it's inevitable. Six years of marriage, and all the juggling, hand-wringing, and long discussions to work things out, and we can't avoid it any longer. We're getting a car payment. John totalled our car on the way to work day after Christmas. The roads were bad; he took his usual exit off the freeway and the car in front of him fishtailed, then stopped. He'd left a lot of distance between them but it wasn't enough considering she just stopped suddenly. We actually had the body shop do an estimate on the repairs. $7,998 - and he stressed that that was by no means final, since there was a lot of damage and he couldn't see parts of the engine clearly. Definitely a total loss. I tried to convince John to go car-free for a while. I thought it would be an interesting social experiment, not to mention that it would save us over $400 a month (including a car payment, gas, insurance, maintenance, registratio

#1 Last night at work, my more advanced students read an adapted version of the O. Henry story, "The Gift of the Magi." As you may recall, it's the story of a young, poor couple, Della and Jim, who each sell their most prized possession to buy a Christmas present for the other person. They discover in the end that their gifts are useless, as he sold his watch to buy combs for her hair and she sold her hair to buy a chain for his watch. So, my students are reading along, and the tutor asked John (my forty-something Korean student) to read the characters' dialogue. John starts reading, and he used this very high, very dainty voice for Della and a very deep, manly voice for Jim. It was very, very funny to hear "Oh, Jim, you still like me, don't you? I'm still me, aren't I?" coming from a Korean man reading in a girly voice with a thick Korean accent. The other students were nearly rolling on the floor. I so wish I'd had a tape recorder. #2 I'

Outsourcing is a problem for our economy, right? So, let's start saving the U.S. government and the states some money with outsourcing. We can start with prisons. Anyone committed of a crime with a sentence of, oh, more than 2 years (subject to a cost-benefit analysis, but I think that is a long enough sentence to offset the cost of the plane ticket) gets sent to prison in a developing country. Thailand comes to mind. We'll pay them slightly more than the cost of actually maintaining the prisons; given what I've heard about Thai prisons, and the much lower cost of labor and food, we'll still save boatloads of cash. Maybe we can arrange some prisons in Spanish-speaking countries, or African nations. The prisoners would come back bilingual! Maybe we'll make it so they only have to spend a couple of years there, and then they can apply to finish their sentences here and take advantage of educational and vocational training programs, since I do think that is important.