You know you’re a nerd when you go to Las Vegas and have a great time hanging out with other nerds instead of going to the casinos. I suppose I should go and look at the man casino before I leave, so I know what one looks like. But the whole Riviera Hotel is one big casino.

I’m just checking in quickly between panels. This place is a HOOT!

This morning I found myself hanging around in a little group of people that INCLUDED Joe Wilson, Larry Johnson, Murray Waas, and George Lakoff. Just shootin’ the breeze with my bro’s. And I got to shake Mr. Wilson’s and Mr. Johnson’s hands and introduce myself.

That was so cool!!!!

I’ll try to blog some more later, but now the panel’s about to start. See ya.

When I was ‘negotiating’ with Maha about trying myself at blogging, the timing of this unique opportunity was unfortunate. Maha was to be away in Las Vegas, and was willing to hand over to a ‘guest’ blog/neophyte at exactly the same time I myself am in the middle of doing a very big project: I am re-roofing my house, with only one other person to help [luckily, my helper has brawn and brains!]. Two other helpers who had agreed to come and help yesterday failed to show up.

The re-roofing project is awfully consuming, especially as my roof has seventeen different slopes [when one counts the dormers], two large six foot by three foot ’sky windows’ near the peak facing south[which flood inner rooms with light] plus two chimneys and eight ‘regular’ skylights. If that doesn’t seem complicated enough, I have decided to ‘curve’ all fascia board surfaces with a view to ‘wrapping’ all eave and rake edges [hoping to achieve more of a 'cottage look'].

Today, its ok to have a bit of a break: the big truck has come with its boom arm and delivered to the roof some big piles of materials, all places made bare by removal of the old material have been tarped, and, well, it is supposed to rain and possibly even gullywash in a few hours.

So, here I sit with time to open a blog post. Problem is that I have not been able to surf the news and commentary much. Soooo, I will ask a question which I consider relevant to an individual’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and therefore ultimately relevant to the world we share.

The question is, “What are some important questions to ask of oneself?”

Yes, I know that most blogging is all about thoughts and opinions which sweep widely and are probably much more fun. But, in a very real way, ‘what to do about what we all care about’ comes down to actions or inactions by ‘we’ individuals. A common lament in the blogosphere is the lament of ‘what can we do’ about this or that important issue. I personally believe that if I am right with myself, I much more likely to be in harmony with my neighbors and fellow citizens. Besides, it is basic and important work to understand how to deal successfully with one’s own goals before there can be successful dealing with shared goals. I will start this off by offering a couple of what I consider ‘important questions’.

I used to try to get more familiar with my deeper values by asking the following, “I’ll pretend I am on my death bed and am looking back at my life……..what is it I wish I had done differently? Or what is it I wish I had done that I never did do?

Probably the most relevant question I have ever asked myself is this: ” What exactly do I do ‘to live with’ what is unacceptable?” In trying to answer that question, I have encountered a number of ‘coping mechanisms’ such as going numb, going dumb, diverting my attention elsewhere, ‘explaining away’ the problem, trying to force another to change, and so forth. Funny thing is, once I got the focus on me by asking that question, I found myself much less likely to ‘just live with’ whatever was unacceptable. Plus, it’s pretty basic: I only have control over myself and my own actions. I’d be beating my head against a brick wall to demand change in others, rather than explore change in myself. Confession, I was ‘head against brick wall’ for awhile yesterday when those guys failed to show!

Well, I could go on a lot about ‘what questions’, but I want to stop here. How about it? Is this topic of interest? I would love to hear from any others who want to formulate good questions for oneself.

So my mother runs this here blog, and she sent me an email before she left for YearlyKos saying that I should post some links and things for you people so that you don’t get bored in her absence.

And you may already know me as the daughter partly responsible for last fall’s blog re-design (so, yes, you can blame all the display glitches on me, thanks) and the occasional subject of posts on diaper rash or whatever. I also blog, but I think the only people who read my blog are my friends, so it’s kind of neat to annex this blog for a few days, since it reaches a much wider audience. I hope I don’t blow my audition.

Yesterday’s big news was the death of Zarqawi, but I don’t really want to post about that, particularly since a) it won’t make much difference in the war effort, and b) we could have got him without going to war, and that whole debate makes me weary. Also, I generally don’t really feel qualified to say much about Iraq, since my knowledge of the subject is limited, so lets talk about things I am familiar with: women and science! (But feel free to talk about Zarqawi in the comments if that rocks your boat.)

I want to preface this by saying that this discussion has been kicking around on the feminist blogs for a while, but my perception here is that the demographic here skews a little differently, so I hope you learn something new!

The big story this morning is that the FDA approved the HPV vaccine. Under any other circumstances, a vaccine that prevents cancer would be cause of celebration and ticker tape parades and all that, but because the disease prevents a cancer caused by a sexually transmitted virus that mainly affects women, we have to stop and talk about it.

So first, congrats to the FDA for being less stupid about the HPV vaccine than they are about emergency contraception.

But second, boo! to the conservatives that would block the administration of the vaccine. Arthur Caplan at MSNBC points out:

[T]he best time to vaccinate is just before women become sexually active. And that is why this new cervical cancer vaccine is sure to be ethically controversial.

Some conservative religious groups and family-values advocates believe that the best way to prevent any sexually transmitted disease is to teach young people to be abstinent until marriage. They don’t want HPV vaccine offered to young women because it will encourage, in their view, sexual promiscuity. Or they only want the vaccine discussed by parents not in schools or in the doctor’s office. But there is a big flaw in this reasoning.

Even though a woman may remain chaste until marriage she may marry someone who wasn’t. She would still be at risk of infection. Given that risk, the case for getting schools, doctors, public health departments involved even if you are someone who wants to keep all talk of sex in the home starts to become very strong.

Not to mention the pressure a lot of girls feel to have sex anyway, regardless of how much abstinence is emphasized. A new study indicates a lot of teenaged girls have sex when they don’t want to, “and the result may be a higher risk of sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.” That’s a whole other post about how girls are socialized and expected to behave, but the study speaks to the point that teaching abstinence is not going to prevent the spread of STDs like HPV. (There’s been some buzz recently about teens breaking their virginity pledges as well. So much for that, eh?)

Further, there’s no reason to think access to the vaccine would encourage more girls to have sex anyway. Studies in countries where emergency contraception is available over the counter indicate that there was no rise in sexual activity once the pills became available, so there’s no reason to think an HPV vaccine would cause that either, especially since this one vaccine doesn’t really make women immune to, you know, every other STD plus pregnancy. More to the point, HPV is one of the least talked about STDs (AIDS kind of trumps most discussions) but is also the most common.

But there you have it, folks. For some conservative Christian groups, choosing between cancer and sex, sex is the greater evil.

The other problem is that the vaccine is expensive, and some groups are pushing for administration of the vaccine to be mandatory for pre-teen girls, which begs the question of who will pay for it. And there’s also an interesting ethical dilemma: should we treat a vaccine for a sexually transmitted virus the same as we treat the vaccine for the measles? Or are we framing the question wrong? The Times article I linked to above says that cervical cancer — almost all of which is caused by HPV — is the second-leading cause of death among women worldwide. If that’s the case, why not say we’re administering a vaccine for cancer? Isn’t that revolutionary? Take sex out of the equation.

Heh, my first post on my mom’s blog and I write about sex. Good thing she’s so cool! (Hi, Mom!)