Friday, March 16, 2007

Pledging

your virginity to your father?

Right now the Today show is doing a segment on the Purity Ball. The claim is that its growing out of the "abstinence movement" and is to help reduce the 80% (!?!) of high schoolers who have sex by their 18th birthday. First, I find it pretty hard to believe that 12 yr olds (well, at least the 12 yr olds I grew up with, maybe "things are different now") REALLY understand what a vow of chastity means. Also, its unclear (to me at least) if this is a vow of purity till marriage or till their 18th birthday. And I don't think that this can be good for parent-child communication. What if they ARE "involved" in HS and thinking about sex and then don't feel comfortable talking to mom/dad about it because of this pledge from middle school?? Lastly, I really get the impression that part of this vow is having your father "protect" you till you have a husband to "protect" you. Ugh. What happened to empowerment?

However....My biggest issue....

There's no mention of the sons. The boys these daughters are (or are not) have sex with. Appearently noone cares about their purity.

I hate double standards.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

on the road...

Things I've seen while on the road in the past few days:

1) The Toddler Spa. This is disturbing for so many reasons that I don't think its necessary to type out.
2) A lady that got hit by a car. I heard the screech while on 17th and rounded the corner onto Walnut in time to see people rushing to her. By the time I was close enough to see what was going on, it was obvious she was ok. She was sitting on the curb and people were retrieving her shopping bags and shoes (ballet flats) for her. The driver was in tears and calling someone (the insurance or police I'd guess). On a side note, she was not in a crosswalk. Us jaywalkers should probably keep this incident in mind.
3) A taxi driver that let someone (me) unparallel park....seriously, the driver waited for me to pull out of my space, despite that it made him miss the green light. I'm not sure if he was trying to run up the meter, or if Philly cabbies are just that much nicer than NYC cabbies.
4) 6 girls with beehives camping on the grass outside the library. I wish I had a camera with me this morning. I also am rather curious as to why they had beehives, and why they were camping out on Penn's campus (sleeping bags and all, assuming they didn't drag them out there for an 8:40 am study session).
5) The finish line. I finished my second half marathon (the first being in fall 04) on Sunday in 1:59:58, just shy of my two hour goal. Not bad considering that miles 4ish-9 were uphill and I lost about 20 seconds/mile on my pace for that segment. Luckily, what goes up must come down, so 9-12 were pretty nice....then the 1/4 mile uphill to the finish line! A masochist planned that.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Free

from comps!!! (At least for the next 4-6 weeks, until I find out if I passed, or just didn't fail and have to re-do a portion)

By 1:30 pm on Friday, I was drunk off $16 worth of Mad4Mex's best. Excellent. We do have the best cohort ever. Seriously. I need to make time to hang out with these folks more before we scatter back around the country. (On the downside, the end of comps signals its time to REALLY get moving looking for jobs!!)