I felt very thankful this Thanksgiving for all that I have been given, but when it came time for me to give a little back, even in the simplest and easiest thing, I discovered that in practice, I'm still really ungrateful after all. I was all kinds of grateful in theory, but when it came to translating that into action, somehow I just couldn't manage to give back for what I have received.

Sometimes we all need a wake-up call to stop congratulating ourselves and become more aware of how much we're really taking other people for granted. The people in our lives won't be here forever.

Happy T Day to all! Spent the afternoon with my mother, now headed back to spend the evening with Ken, Jess & the critters. McKenzie, it will be playtime soon!

65redroses was just featured in lj_spotlight!

Bad cases make bad law. This Child Passenger Protection Act just enacted in New York State probably sounds really good to most people who hear about it, and there should be a lot of political points won from it for the governor and all the legislators who voted for it. Everyone will think it's great to be so tough on people who "drive drunk with children in the car," until the first time they know a first-time offender, with a blood alcohol of .08 or more (it doesn't take much at all to get to that level), who is unexpectedly called upon some evening to take a fifteen-year-old son or daughter somewhere in a hurry because their teenager's planned ride didn't show up, who can end up with up to four years in prison even if no one is injured.

I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this year. Instead I'm doing something really different: WORK!

That's an "end of an era" kind of thing .... yes, an era of bad HTML, auto-playing MIDI files and twinkly graphics, and I've been guilty of all of the above (see XKCD's totally-right-on parody of Geocities today), but a lot of fannish connections were formed through sites there. Good night and thank you, Geocities!

I got up early in the hope that I would be able to bring McKenzie (the kitten) to a specialty vet for a second opinion this morning, but the other vet's office had no openings this morning. So I'm sitting here sipping my coffee, thinking about someone I never met, and about cat food, and about Calvinism - strange combination!

I'm thinking about my own bad choices in the past. For example, every time I see a roadside sign advertising the candidacy of Brian Stewart for state Supreme Court, I remember that I have owed his sister and his brother-in-law an apology for over twenty-five years and have never had the courage to do it. I could look them up right now and send some kind of apology, if they are both still around after all this time, and I might try to do that today, but that wouldn't change the fact that I didn't do it for more than twenty-five years.

I finally have a hard copy of the entire book The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability by Stephen Darwall (I had previously read significant portions of it online), and I'm in the process of thinking through my own beliefs on free will and accountability. Does this relate to the Calvinism stuff? Yes, it does.

Here's the basic question I'm working with: Is our moral responsibility as human beings co-extensive with our freedom to choose our actions? In other words, can we rightfully be punished for the conduct which we genuinely could not control? By "genuinely could not control" I don't mean the phony powerlessness of those who claim that they "couldn't help it" when their behavior was clearly voluntary, and I am not referring to my own bad choices either. They were choices and I am clearly responsible for them. I am referring to an inherent, unchangeable inability to act differently, such as in the Calvinist view of salvation and damnation.