Hey, sorry to cheese out on you this month, but "technical difficulties" associated with my recent move to the Southwest have kept me from delivering an editorial for this issue. Please know I did try... In fact, I started a number of them. There was my warm and fuzzy tribute to a pair of hot air balloons, the unexpected sight of which brightened my morning a few weeks back. There was the beginning of a cutting and potentially humorous political commentary, titled "Some Days are Better than Others." It talked about how some mornings I wake up feeling like I'm Bill Clinton, others like Bob Dole. I leave it to the reader to discern the difference between these two kinds of days.
Another idea that didn't quite make it to full bloom came about after a trip to the mall exploded into an argument over parking protocol. I intended to ask the question, "Which is more important, to park between the lines or between the cars?" and discuss the many philosophical issues related to the same. Five pages of torpid prose later, I realized this is no easy issue to nail down. Maybe I can resolve it in the future, but right now, in my present state, beset by difficulties of a nature both technical and not, I simply cannot deliver.
It is a shame, though, I didn't do an editorial this month. There are so many amazing things out there, just begging discussion. Take the recent media announcement of the Pope embracing Darwin's theory of evolution, when in fact the Pope actually said the opposite. This seems to conflict pretty directly with the Darwinian tenet that species survive or are destroyed by an environment free of both malice and compassion. All of which makes an interesting springboard into the discussion of the Pope himself (just what exactly is his role in today's world?), science in general, evolution in particular (for our purposes, is it more useful to think of evolution as a creation myth—one of many—than as a scientific theory, even if most of us believe it's true?), and last but not least, the dissemination of "truth" by our global mass media (there apparently being two kinds of "truth" the global mass media seems to prefer: half-truths and un-truths).
Another thing making my lack of an editorial all the more tragic is the remarkable upheaval my life has undergone this month. It would've been nice to share the many lessons I've learned about myself and life, about unemployment, homesickness, what it's like to have symbolic nightmares every night, progressing chronologically through each period of my life, highlighting the many ways I screwed up in each.
All of these things will just have to wait to be properly discussed in a future editorial. Many probably just won't ever be discussed, and all because I couldn't overcome my "technical difficulties."
I really am sorry.
