I started a blogarhythm last week about my Best Day Ever, officially September 26, 2006. Not a great day like I learned a lesson or made a human connection; I mean a lucky and lazy day of the highest order. In that one day alone I: won a semi-real trip to Las Vegas, called off work, got my car fixed by an Armenian for $20, I saw two great musical performances (boy and girl R+B combo at the Jackson Blue Line stop and Sufjan Stevens), was served a tasty Crunchwrap Supreme by a man with a beautiful smile, walked around the downtown of the greatest of the Great Lakes Cities, easily found every book I wanted at the library, and I ended the day with one free pair of super kickin' green and white Adidas.

So I get that day and a whole bunch of other people get raped and tortured and killed. That was their day. And just in case someone out there has an answer about all this, like a ranking of American lives compared to Iraqi lives compared to Amish lives, or rape vs. murder vs. torture, I say to you: bullshit. Or congratulations. Because I think about these things not all the time, or even a majority of my time, but a fair chunk considering my general self-obsession, and I can't get anywhere but Sad and Confused. I attended a three hour training on working with children who exhibit problematic sexual behaviors and it turns out that 'sexually abused leads to sexual abusers' doesn't really play out, you know, empirically. Dr. Spacarelli of CAUSES knew as much, knew that the correlation between having been abused and abusing was weaker than, say, narcissism and sexual abuse. Not necessarily fancy DSM-IV narcissism but generally assholishness. And that sexual behaviors, while Law and Order: SVU and our general sexual culture in the US would have you believe otherwise, may not actually be more heinous, but we view them more heinously, that the line between adult and child gets blurry and my God, my Lord above, what is with human sexuality? And then, because it gets harder to separate the sexualized behaviors from the non-sexualized behaviors if you keep looking at them, what is with the strong and the weak and the lions and the lambs?

I promise you, these questions seem much deeper and insightful in my head, but then when they exit my body it comes out like "ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" like DFW said "the sound of a stick of butter being hit with a mallet." Along those lines. I think I get that we are not, in fact, living in the end times, that, in as close to fact as we can get, this is just how crappy we humans are, and just as terrific as we are likely to get. At the same time, however, it is raining like crazy outside and I think maybe we could have another big flood? Just wipe it all away. I just read 'Oryx and Crake' by Margaret Atwood and she basically laid it all out, although she seems to be more upset about the environmental degradation whereas I get more jumpy about rapes and murders but then, really, isn't it all the same thing? And speaking of how everything is everything, what is with poop related to sex? One of the signs that a kid is struggling with some sex-related trauma is that they poop themselves, hide poop, stuff toilets, smear poop all over bathroom stalls. I have seen this process and I don't really get it. And also: poor attachment seems to be a big indicator of later sexualized issues, meaning one is more likely to sexually assault others if they didn't really bond with a caregiver early on, more likely even than had they been sexually abused themselves. At the same time I'm learning this I'm reading about the erotic bond of mother and child, and isn't that fascinating? Maybe there was no erotic connection forged early on. Thinking is so much fun and all the time, people live and die, have horrible things happen to them, some get Crunchwrap Supremes instead. So, to sum up, what have we learned today?

-be nice and snuggly to babies

-seriously.