Crack a Window

The shooting of a man by a Bart police officer is on the front page of the Chronicle, and it catches my eight-year-old daughter’s attention as we pass by the news rack on the way to her school. She has lots of questions: What happened? Why did the officer shoot the man? What was the man doing?

I answer that no one knows all the facts, and then tell her some of the facts I do know. One man was shot. One officer did the shooting. One bullet was fired. One life ended. The dead man was unarmed. There were many people around yelling.

I imagine the situation was very tense, I tell her. It would have been terrible to be there. It’s a tragedy for everyone involved: the dead man, his family and friends, the officer–even him.

I don’t tell her everything I know. I leave out that the man was lying face down on the ground when the officer shot him. I don’t want that picture in her head. I don’t want her to be afraid of the police.

In the evening, it’s still on her mind. She wants to talk about it as she’s getting ready for bed and makes me follow her to the bathroom and talk to her from the hall while she pees. The questions, the same questions again and again, stop briefly. I hear her urine splashing into the toilet, the toilet paper roll spinning, water running while she washes her hands.

Her obsession I think is healthy and normal. I’m glad she wants to talk to my wife and me about it, because she’s talking about it to her friends. Amaya says he was shot 26 times, she says. I quickly correct that; one bullet, one shot, I say. Don’t believe everything your friends tell you. People make things up, fill in the blanks when they don’t know the details. I realize that’s what I’m doing when I speak to her about the incident; I don’t know everything. I wasn’t there, and even if I was, I still wouldn’t, couldn’t know everything.

Since it’s occupying her mind, since it’s got her focus, I try to use the incident as a teachable moment. I try to put some ideas into her head. The police aren’t perfect, but they are better than the alternative: no police. Give them the benefit of the doubt, and let them do their job. When an officer tells you to do something, do it. A gun can kill even if you don’t mean it to. At 2AM, when people are rowdy, bad things can happen.

There’s a video of the shooting, several videos actually, on the Internet. My daughter knows about them, and she wants to know if I’ve watched them. I say, “No.” It’s not a lie. I haven’t watched the videos, and I don’t want to. I don’t want those images in my daughter’s head or my own. The videos exist; the people who need to see them have seen them. I’m not one of those people.

Tragic, terrible, violent things happen; lives end in an instant. I knew that before the Bart shooting. Gradually, sooner than I’d like, my daughter is learning it too.

With single parent families and families where both parents work common, child care availability is a major issue. One logical source of child care is employers. Nevertheless, I don’t think employers should provide free child care.

First, I must say there are many reasons why it would make sense for employers to provide child care. It would make employees more tied to the company and thereby reduce turnover. New mothers and fathers would come back to work sooner, and they would be less stressed at work knowing their children are being taken care of. Finally it would be good PR for the company to be able to say that it provides free child care; it’s easy to imagine a profile run in a local publication that mentioned the child care benefit.

On the other hand, there are additional costs that come along with providing child care. An employer would need to hire child-care workers, and since these workers are probably not part of the company’s core business, the company would also need to hire a service to vet the care workers. The company would also need to create a suitable child-care space; the employer couldn’t expect to be able to just stuff the children in cubicles or a spare conference room. And, of course, before any child appeared on company property, the company would have to obtain additional insurance, which would likely be very expensive because one injured child could bring a lawsuit that could go after all the company’s assets.

In addition to the liability of injured children, another liability would be the children themselves. What happens with children who have special physical or developmental needs, who require highly trained and expensive care providers and a much lower adult to child ratio? If an employer refused to provide care for a special needs child, the employer would open itself up to a lawsuit claiming bias in company policy and actions. And even ignoring special needs children, what would an employer do if a child at the center was simply unruly and did not fit in with the rest of the group? Wouldn’t the company run the risk of an employee lawsuit, if it kicked the child out of the child care?

Lastly, I mentioned the good PR that free child care could provide a company. Well that good PR could quickly become bad PR. For example, if the company was forced to lay off workers, those workers would also be losing their child care. It’s easy to imagine the local and even national media picking up the story of parents forced to look for work and child care at the same time because of a “heartless” company.

Working parents want to know that their children are being taken care of, and finding good child care is difficult. However, although there are reasons why an employer might want to provide free child care, the combination of extra costs and potential liabilities makes providing free child care something employers should not do.

It probably won’t happen, but I think that legalizing marijuana would be a smart move because it would reduce crime without increasing illegal drug use while helping the economy and encouraging innovation.

Legalizing marijuana is not likely to increase use. People who want to use the drug today do not have trouble getting it. Also making the drug illegal will make it less cool, which may mean that younger people will not be as interested in using it.

Meanwhile, criminal enterprises will be damaged by making marijuana legal. It will remove the economic incentive for trading the drug illegally and for importing the drug to the United States from outside the country. If the drug were legal, it could be sold in stores, so people would not need to go to dangerous areas to buy it. There would be no need to fight “turf” wars to control lucrative inner-city corners and streets where the drug trade thrives.

Legal marijuana would also help contribute to the economy. The crop could become a valuable export from popular marijuana growing states including California and Hawaii. Packages could be taxed like cigarettes. New products could be created for alternative ways of taking the drug, such as muffins for people who did not want to smoke it. More snack products, such as Doritos, Ho-Hos, and Cheezits, would be sold. Also, nearly empty refrigerators and stoned college students could help develop the next great snack craze; think potato skins or micro-waved cheese on a plate. If marijuana were legal, scientists could probably even create a version that didn’t give users the munchies: diet pot.

From a consumer stand point, legalization would mean improved quality and supply. First, anyone could grow it; there could even be college classes and television specials explaining how to do it. In stores, marijuana could be sold in different strengths: You could have an after dinner strength like a nice wine, a stronger version for winding down after a bad day at work, and finally a stronger version that would make the user feel like a genius with the answer to all the world’s problems. Consumers would be able to buy organic and gourmet marijuana in small boutique stores and at farmers markets.

I believe that someday the country will legalize marijuana, and when that happens, crime will be reduced and the economy will be improved. Of course, that someday is not going to come around any time soon, so don’t hold your breath, unless you’ve just taken a hit.

I had a hard time sleeping last night. We got to bed late because we were over at our friend’s house for a New Year’s Eve party. It was close to 1AM when we got home, and I was so wired I decided to read, which was a mistake since I had picked up a new book that day. I was excited about it and read for another hour. I didn’t get the light turned off until after two.

Things were OK for a couple of hours, but at 4:30, I had to go to the bathroom. When I got back in bed, I was too hot. I took my sweat shirt off. Then I put one leg out of the covers. I moved away from my wife in the bed. I lay on top of the covers. Then I got cold, so I had to reverse the steps I’d taken to cool off.

Next, I noticed the paper attached to the construction next door flapping in the wind; it sounded like someone shaking a piece of tin up and down. Once my ears keyed in on that sound, I couldn’t ignore it. It happened intermittently. There would be a few minutes of silence, and then the wind would gust and the paper would flap.

I got madder and madder listening to it. It reminded me of how annoyed I am about the people next door adding a story onto their house. My mind raced about that. I want to complain to the contractor and my neighbor about the loose paper and other things: They don’t clean up the sawdust that gets onto our side patio. The workers talk loud and yell while they are working. They don’t have a job card posted in front of the house while they are working–I could complain to the City about that. Then I thought they’ll just ignore my complaints, and even if they do fix the paper, it’s not going to help me fall asleep now. I started wondering if I can find out where the contractor lives, so that I can go over to his house and wake him up at 4:30AM every morning for the next six months.

In the middle of my figuring out how to punish the contractor for the flapping paper, the cat at the end of the bed started heaving like she was going to throw up. I kicked her onto the floor and listened while she gagged and coughed for twenty or thirty seconds more. I wasn’t sure if she’d gotten the hairball out or not. Now I was wondering if I was going to have the joy of stepping in cat barf the next time I walked across the room in the dark. At least it distracted me from the flapping paper for a couple minutes.

Finally at 6:30, tired and mad, I gave up on sleep and got out of bed.

So far 2009 is not an improvement over 2008.

Prompt

Write about a time when your reactions to an event or a situation in life were not what you would have expected. Describe the event and explain how your response surprised you.

Essay

Most of us can look back and remember a time (or many times) when we did something in a situation that surprised us. We may have reacted in a way that made us feel better or in a way that made us feel worse, or we might have simply done something that showed us something new about ourselves. Something new about myself is what I learned the time I slapped a woman in my acting class.

It was a junior-college acting exercise. I was 21 and my acting partner was in her 40’s. We were improvising as mother and son. My character’s goal in the scene was to convince my mother that my wife was a good person, and my partner’s character’s goal was to convince her son (me) that his wife was a bad person. Our teacher wanted us both to push for our scene goals and not give up.

We began the scene, and my acting partner immediately said my fictional wife was a whore, who was cheating on me. Her accusation raised the acting stakes and put me on the defensive.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “She’s a wonderful person. You’ve always hated her. You’ll say anything to break us up.”

“She’s a whore,” my partner said again.

“Stop saying that.”

“I can’t. It’s true.”

It went on like this. I tried to change tactics. “She made a mistake,” I said. “That doesn’t make her a whore.”

But my partner kept coming back with some variation of, “She’s a whore. Your wife is a whore.”

The two of us were on the stage alone, and as the scene went on I grew more and more angry both as a character and as an actor. I couldn’t get through to this woman. She wouldn’t change her course of action. She wouldn’t expand her accusation. It was simply the same thing over and over: “She’s a whore.”

I walked around on the stage, toward her, away from her. “I’m not going to divorce her,” I said, “I’m going to make it work. None of us are perfect. I’m not perfect, and neither are you.”

It went on. My partner had a smug look on her face, like she enjoyed watching me flail around in the scene. She wasn’t trying to convince me of anything. She had decided if she kept me from reaching my scene goal, changing her mind, she had succeeded. But that wasn’t the damn exercise. She was simply blocking me, the bitch.

The slap surprised us both. We were facing each other, separated by two feet of black stage. She said it again for what seemed like the hundredth time: “She’s a whore.” She had the smug look: I win; you lose. My fingers and the palm of my hand and hit her cheek. We both stepped back. Her smug look was gone. I could feel my mouth hanging open.

Perhaps it’s not so big a thing, slapping someone. But it’s still hard for me to believe I did it. The incident showed me that I was capable of becoming violent, that I could lash out physically. I have not struck anyone in the twenty years since that slap, but since then I’ve known that I could.

Prompt

Describe a difficult task that you carried out successfully or a difficult goal that you achieved. Explain how you went about it and what you learned from the experience of overcoming the odds.

Essay

When I was in my mid 20’s, I drove across country in three days to make it home for Christmas. I had been in the south east performing stand-up comedy since before Thanksgiving, and my final show was in Charlotte, North Carolina, at 10PM on December 22nd. I decided if I left right after the show, I could make it home to Lodi, California, in time to surprise my family and my girlfriend who were celebrating Christmas together.

Driving across country in less than 72 hours is always difficult, because to make it you really can’t stop to sleep. But in the winter, the road conditions and the cold temperatures make it even harder. On my trip there were two points when my journey nearly ended.

The first trouble spot came in the early afternoon on the 23rd when I slid off the road. I was crossing from Arkansas to Oklahoma, and I ran into my first real bad weather. Sleet covered my windshield. I had to keep my wipers going full speed to keep them from freezing to the glass as I crossed the Mississippi River. On the other side of the river, there was snow falling, and cars were pulled over on the side of the road, but there were still two lanes of cars going on the freeway so I kept moving.

One lane of cars was going slow, and the other lane was going fast. I stayed in the fast lane. I was fine until the brake lights of the car ahead of me flashed. I hit my breaks, but instead of slowing down, my car shot forward straight at the car in front of me. To avoid a collision, I turned off the road into the center median, where my car did a 180 and then stopped. My head pounding, my hands still tight on the steering wheel, I sat there staring back in the direction I had come. Two guys in a Power Wagon charged $40.00 to pull me back onto the road. Once I was going again, I stayed in the lane with the slow cars.

The second major problem began at around 2AM on Christmas morning. I was climbing up the hill to Flagstaff, Arizona, and my car started losing power. I kept down shifting and soon I was in first gear, making promises to my car if it would just keep going. I had only stopped to sleep a couple times since leaving Charlotte, but now I was wide awake and scared. It was dark. There were no cars on the road, and I thought my engine was freezing.

I made it into Flagstaff and found an open Chevron station with a phone booth. I called my stepfather, who’s a mechanic. It was the first time I’d told anyone that I was on my way home. After I described what was happening, he diagnosed the problem as low-octane gas that I’d purchased in the Arizona low lands. I bought a bottle of Octane Boost from the station and poured it into my gas tank. Then I drove around town for 15 minutes. At first the car was still sluggish, but gradually its pep returned, and after topping off the tank at the station, I continued on.

The rest of the trip was exhausting but manageable. My mom and stepfather kept my coming secret and made excuses to keep my brothers and my girlfriend at the house until got there. I arrived just before 9 PM, dirty and unshaven, but very happy to be home with my family, who were thrilled to see me.

It was wonderful to make it home for Christmas that year, to see the surprise and joy on my girlfriend’s (now wife’s) face when she recognized me under my beard and grime, but I would not make a trip like that again. I could easily have injured or killed myself or someone else driving when I was so tired. It was only dumb luck I didn’t hit another car when I slid off the road in Oklahoma, and if my car had died completely on the climb to Flagstaff, I could have froze there on the side of the road. I was very lucky. I wouldn’t let myself depend on luck like that again.

Prompt

Describe a difficult task that you carried out successfully or a difficult goal that you achieved. Explain how you went about it and what you learned from the experience of overcoming the odds.

Essay

A few years ago, when I was working as a software developer, I was assigned the task of implementing my company’s telephone-based banking application at a customer site. I ran into a serious problem because the bank did not have a way to let customers create their own personal identification numbers (PINs). Our application could prompt the caller for a PIN, but the bank’s database did not have a way to store it. This problem prevented the implementation from going forward.

The first step I took to solve this problem was to gather information. I had meetings with the banks information technology (IT) staff. I reviewed the bank’s database schema, and I reviewed existing authentication methods we had used at other customers.

The problem came down to storing the PIN. The bank’s database did not have a field for the PIN, and the database itself could not be modified. I had to work with what was already in the database schema.

I realized that the bank could add a “dummy” account for each customer and use fields in this account to store the PIN. I wrote up this solution and proposed it to the bank’s IT staff. They accepted it. Once the authentication problem was solved, the rest of the implementation went smoothly.

In working on the authentication problem for this project, I learned that by researching a problem, talking with people about it, and looking for a solution given what’s available, you can often find a creative answer to a difficult problem.

Prompt

Describe a difficult choice you have made.

Essay

We are faced with choices every day, some difficult and some easy. In my life, I believe I have usually made good choices, but it is the difficult choices where I have chosen wrong that I’ve learned the most from. That’s the case with the choice I made that nearly cost my wife her life.

She was admitted to the hospital with preeclampsia when she was 36 weeks pregnant with our first child. Her blood pressure was elevated and the readings in her urine weren’t what they were supposed to be. She also had a very bad headache. Normally a patient with preeclampsia is given magnesium sulfate to prevent her from having a seizure, but my wife did not want it, and the doctors thought it wasn’t necessary. They decided to monitor my wife to see if she would go into labor on her own and have the baby vaginally rather than by C-section.

I stayed in the hospital with her for nearly 48 hours straight. She got weaker and weaker and the headache worsened. I knew she was suffering and that she didn’t have the strength for a vaginal birth even if she did go into labor, but I chose to believe the doctors knew what they were doing. I chose not to speak up and insist they give my wife more aggressive care. I chose to sit by her side and wait. As a result, my wife had a seizure and had to be rushed to an operating room for an emergency C-section. It took her nearly 36 hours to mostly regain her senses. She has no memory of the birth.

Through this scary experience, I learned that doctors can be wrong. You have to speak up and advocate for the people you care about, especially when they cannot advocate for themselves.

Prompt

What is your definition of success? Describe what it means to be successful.

Essay

For me, being successful will take three things. I’ll have to have enough money, a good job, and a happy home life. When I have these three things, I will consider myself successful.

For me, having enough money means that I and my family can live the way we want to live. We will be able to buy all of what we need and a lot of what we want. We will own our own home in San Francisco and drive dependable cars. We will be able to go on vacation once a year and travel to Europe every other year. We will be able to pay for our daughter’s schooling and put money away for retirement. When we see something we want to buy for ourselves or someone else, such as fancy earrings or a pair of fine leather loafers, we will be able to make the purchase and still pay off the credit card balance at the end of the month.

I’ll be a success at work when I have the right job. I’ll be doing something I enjoy, and I’ll feel like what I do makes a difference in the world. I’ll respect my coworkers and have their respect. The work will be challenging but not overwhelming, and the job will be secure. In the mornings, I’ll be excited about going to work, and in the evenings I’ll be able to leave early enough to get home and spend time with my family.

In my view, family life success is the most important part of being successful. I want to have a family that likes to have me around and that I like to be around. I want a wife I can talk, laugh, and cry with. I want a child who is loving, self confident, and kind, who knows that she is loved unconditionally. Really, I want a home where I can be myself, that’s filled with people who love me and who are loved by me.

Someday I believe I will be successful. For now, I don’t have as much money as I would like, and I’m still looking for the right job, but I have a wonderful family that I love spending time with. I think that’s a good start.

Prompt

Write an essay explaining how people of diverse backgrounds can get along better.

OK. I hated this topic too.

Essay

Sometimes in our diverse communities people from different backgrounds have trouble getting along. People from different groups may distrust each other and feel they are in conflict. Two ways to help people from different backgrounds get along better are cultural education and building a sense of a larger, inclusive community.

People often don’t get along because they don’t know or understand each other, so learning about other cultures makes them less foreign and less threatening. We should have people from different groups in the community come speak at schools to explain about their cultures. They could do role plays to show how a person’s action in one culture might be off-putting or confusing to someone from another culture. Cultural understanding outside of schools could be promoted by having multi-cultural music, art, and food festivals.

Having the multi-cultural festivals would not only allow people to learn about each other’s backgrounds, they would also encourage people from different groups to work together. It would be a festival for the community and not just one group. There are other ways to promote the sense of a larger community that includes everyone. You can have public projects such as park and neighborhood cleanup days. People can come together to paint schools. These kinds of activities make everyone, regardless of their background, feel like they are part of the larger community.

Today many of us live in diverse communities. I think that by learning about our different cultures, and by making everyone feel like they are part of the larger community, we can all get along.