Sunday roundup and ramble

Can Russia's newfound volunteerism survive the government's crackdown on civil society?

Britain's system of gun control.

The issue of a government's legitimacy is not binary.

Frank Bruni's poignant ode to his initially-illegal immigrant grandfather. More on immigration, from the standpoint of the Founding Fathers, LGBT rights, and this line business. Can we at least agree to let in Afghan interpreters?

Look: if you're trying to go vegetarian/vegan, don't sweat the occasional lapse. Also: chickens aren't plants. I understand strong cravings: I'm experiencing an intense hankering for an apple, even as we speak. But I'm out and I'm not going to go and get one before I finish this roundup.

The irony of Carlos Lozada's rambling conversation about national conversations is that it could get to the point a lot more succinctly. But it's a good point.

Here are some Virginia laws you should break as often as humanly possible.

I agree with the gist of this column about revenge porn, but I'm going to go ahead and say what the writer says it's easy to say:

It's easy to say, "Well if you don't want naked pictures on the internet, don't send men naked pictures."

God bless the groundhog!


Ernessa, congratulations!

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And now for my ramble.

I'm now less quick to judge the driver that knocked out the utility pole two weeks ago, leaving my whole neighborhood out of power. I lost control of my car last night over some black ice, but thankfully--I was going pretty slowly--managed to get it back before hitting anything.

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Over dinner, my friends and I--two of whom are parents--discussed the oversharing-on-social-media thing. One said that the prevalence of opportunities to overshare makes her value the privacy and intimacy of family moments even more. Which is a fair position, but I was thinking more about the sharing of gratuitous, unnecessary information (for example, the size of your kid's turds). The equivalent isn't sharing pictures or descriptions of one's food; the equivalent could be, for example, my posting a photo of the genuinely impressive amount of hair I plunged out of my shower drain. Fear not: no such photo was taken, not even ironically.

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We also talked about the end of "30 Rock." There was a tweet about the horror of saying goodbye to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Liz Lemon in the same week. Thank goodness for "The Mindy Project."

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"Get out the Map" (Indigo Girls) is on Pandora; it's one of my favorite travel songs, along with "Southern Cross," "Under the Milky Way," "Miles from Our Home," "Moving Right Along," "World Falls"... I could go on. I like a lot of travel songs. Anyway, there's this line that always particularly resonates:

Why do we hurtle ourselves/ through every inch of time and space?

I manage to do that even when I'm not traveling.

Pandora is onto Jem's "It's Amazing," which also has amazing, resonating lines. Part of my crazy, time-space hurtling day yesterday was taking a rock-climbing class at a climbing gym. This was not my first rock-climbing experience, nor the hardest, but it's been years and years and I'm still pretty scared of heights. This was one of those things where I bought the groupon and it was expiring, so I had to get my ass over there (just after trying on costumes for the Washington's Birthday Parade; I'll be wearing either blue or burgundy, depending on the weather). Anyway, I got half-way up the wall and--this is no departure from my prior climbing experiences--did not want to keep going. Like, really didn't want to keep going. But I knew I wouldn't be able to live it down if I didn't, so I did. And it was fine--even better than fine. To think I even thought about trading that in for an easy way out! And to think--having written grant proposals about this kind of thing--I'm not sure what lessons I'm supposed to draw from this with regard to my life in general.

Speaking of "Under the Milky Way," I'm hoping for decent stargazing weather.