It's the Fourth of July and I've got Aaron Copland in my headphones. Yes, I'm proud to be an American.

Of course, Independence Day is a day when I usually get a bee in my bonnet about what it means to be an American. It's a question that seems to be in need of an answer, because I'm seeing a lot more flags on cars and hearing a lot less sense in voices than I used to; this suggests to me that an occasional examination of the State of the Union might be appropriate fodder for an online journal. Sure, maybe it's not polite to talk politics (or religion, or sex), but politeness has never stopped me before, has it?

I've got numerous concerns about our President, our Attorney General, our international standing, our intelligence community, our military, and the way all of the above have been interacting, but since it's a holiday, let's focus on the good stuff.

I've been pleased to see two decisions by the Supreme Court that strike me as eminently sensible: the striking down of Texas' anti-sodomy law, and the preservation of at least one form of affirmative action at the University of Michigan. The former, to me, is the classic no-brainer. I cannot see any way in which the state has any compelling interest in what two of its citizens do to, with, around, on, or in each other. If they want to read Proust, eat olives, dance the macarena, watch Buffy reruns, sign complex insurance forms, mix concrete, or shag like a pair of weasels, fine. The government and the rest of the citizenry can just sit politely outside the bedroom door and wait for the two involved to come out. I'm a straight, married man with no particularly interesting kinks that I know of, but neither I nor any other American should have to worry about whether the way I like to have sex taxes the imaginations of Rick Santorum, Bill Frist, and the members of the local police force.

The affirmative action issue, by contrast, is less open-and-shut. I certainly look forward to the day when race is not an issue in America, but lord, when's that going to be? Selma, the Watts riots, the assassinations of X and MLK--I was young, but alive for all of these. I remember for myself the Boston busing controversy, the Bakke decision, the acquittal of three KKK members who started a gunfight in Greensboro, the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed. I was in grad school before there was a black quarterback in the Super Bowl, and I was a father of two when Jesse Helms played the race card (the infamous "white hands" TV commercial) to get himself re-elected for the last time. I've sat at this very computer and watched Trent Lott self-destruct, and I know of black colleagues--college graduates, family men, some of them more conservative than I am--who've been pulled for "DWB" several times. The argument that our race problems are all gone, so we shouldn't do anything to fix them--well, it's just laughable.

The question then is: what should we do to fix them? Well, there's the less open-and-shut part. I do think the Supremes got one important thing right in the Bakke decision: racial quotas are a powder keg. No admissions or hiring decision should be based exclusively on race. At the same time, I do think race can be a factor in admissions and hiring--and I think so despite of what happened to me when I was fresh out of grad school and looking for a teaching job.

I had driven over three hours from Chapel Hill in order to interview for an English position at a public high school. A few weeks later, the principal called me to let me know I hadn't gotten it. I was disappointed; Kelly and I had a baby on the way, and I was getting pretty desperate to find a full-time teaching job. I'd looked forward to the possibility of getting this one, even to the point of doing a little research into rents and real estate; it was a town I liked, and even knew a little about, and I liked the location, too. But no, the principal thanked me for my interest and said the job had gone to "a young man from Winston-Salem State."

I mulled that comment over for a long time. Why had he made it? Was it just a slip of the tongue, or did he mean to tell me something? If the latter, what did he mean? There was no reason to mention the man who'd gotten the job except to tell me that he'd graduated from WSS, and the only reason to casually mention WSS was the fact that most of its students are (and have been for years) black. Was he telling me that he'd passed on me and hired this WSS grad because I was white and he wasn't? Eventually, I decided that he was. And how did I feel about that, with a baby on the way and no job of my own?

Pretty much the same way I do now. I'm white by luck of the draw, not by deserving it, yet I benefit from my skin color in a variety of ways; I don't get stopped randomly by traffic cops, nor do people make assumptions about my political views or taste in music, nor do I worry that I'll have trouble getting a bank loan (well, not because of skin color, anyway...) Many of these benefits don't even occur to me because I take them for granted.

So for once in my life my whiteness worked to my detriment? Well, darn. Man bites dog for once.

I went back out and found myself a different job. And I hope that anonymous guy from Winston-Salem State has been a great role model and an inspiration to a decade's worth of kids.

Happy Fourth, everybody. E pluribus unum.
7:44 AM

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(Stop me if you've heard this: Blogger.com is doing something weird right now. As a result, a couple of my archive links are behaving strangely. We're on the case, but we may end up having to do something creative to get all my journal entries into the archives. Joy.)

Weight report: another five pounds gone, making a total of eleven for the two weeks I've been on Atkins. I'm shooting for losing another thirty; at that point I'll consider my options. Every time I've looked at a Body Mass Index table, I've been freaked out by the numbers; apparently the BMI assumes that everyone of the same height must also be of the same build, and I just don't think that's so. My brother's a good inch or two taller than I, but even if we were both at the peak of our muscular development, with the same minimal degree of body fat--this is purely hypothetical, understand--I'd be astonished if I didn't outweigh him.

Today I celebrated my weigh-in by going on a sixteen-mile bike trip, which was a good deal easier than last week's nineteen-miler. (The ten extra degrees of heat we had last week made last week a lot tougher.) We've also invested in some low-carb snack bars and some pecans, both of which are permitted after you're done with the Induction phase of Atkins and have moved into the OWL phase. (That's "Ongoing Weight Loss," by the way--we're not eating mice and casting up the bones in disgusting little furry pellets a few hours later.) I'm not sure I really want to go to the OWL phase right now, since weight loss does slow down when you do so, but I'll admit that the lack of variety in our menu, especially at breakfast, has been a bit frustrating. I'm hoping I can hover on the edge of the Induction phase for a couple more weeks and keep losing fat at a quick clip.

Of course, many of you are now rolling your eyes and thinking The only thing worse than hearing about someone else's dreams is hearing about someone else's diet. And of course you're right. Unfortunately, it's a pretty big part of my life right now, and sadly, it's needed to be a big part of my life for some time. There was a brief period in my life when I was lean--it started in eighth grade and ended in my junior year of college when I went to England and discovered beer I liked. (Actually, I've seen some pictures from my senior year, and I still wasn't that pudgy yet.) But during my entire married life, which began in 1986, I've carried between 200 and 250 pounds on my six-foot frame, and the vast majority of it was centered on my center. My legs have always been fairly lean, since I've long worked in jobs where standing and walking are the norm, but my gut has long made up for that fact, and no amount of prodding from Kelly got me to lose it.

Kelly's prodding comes from a pretty straightforward source: her family's history of heart trouble and other weight-related complications. Her dad had congestive heart failure; three of her brothers have had heart attacks; one of them developed diabetes, another one hypoglycemia. These experiences make her Extremely Concerned About My Health. On one occasion early in our marriage when I was working a reeeeeeally bad temp job, I woke up one morning with a pain in my chest, and mentioned it casually.

She looked me in the eye and said, "You're going to the doctor. Now."

I didn't mess with her. Luckily, it wasn't a cardiac problem. The doctor diagnosed me with, of all things, a pulled muscle in my rib cage--a pull produced by the temp job, which had caught me between the rock of tension (since I was constantly gritting my teeth about my irritating coworkers and the nonstop pumped-in Muzak) and the hard place of overcaffeination (since the job's dull and repetitive tasks made me so stuporous that I was swilling ten or twelve cups of coffee a day just to stay awake.) I often think it was the Muzak version of Talking Heads' "And She Was" that sent me over the edge.

But now I'm forty, getting to the point where exercise often hurts enough to prevent me from getting more exercise. I'm on sabbatical from school, with time to spend on my physical well-being and relatively few job-related distractions to take my attention from it. If I'm going to lighten the load of stress Kelly's carrying about my health, now's the time to start.

Think you can bear with me for a couple more weeks?
10:44 PM

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