Stormy's Corner

Meeting someone in jail: what a ridiculous process

The jail visitation process is obviously not made with the visitor's convenience in mind. And definitely not with the detainee's convenience in mind.

I have to meet with someone who's in jail. (Don't ask. It's not anyone I'm close to but I've got to talk to this person.) Actually, I'm not even sure if it's jail or detention center or holding or what. So here's how it works in Larimer County:

• You cannot call someone in jail. You can send them a snail mail letter or you can schedule a visit with them.
• Regardless of when the person is arrested, you can only call to schedule a visit on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 11am-1pm. This is not when you can visit, this is when you can call.
• Visits happen on Wednesdays and Thursdays (scheduled on Tuesday) and on Saturdays and Tuesdays (scheduled on Thursdays). The hours are not clear to me but I was given a choice of 8:30-10:30 on Wednesday morning or some time Thursday evening.
• Each person is allowed one visitor a day.
• It's first come, first serve. I got advice to start calling at two minutes to 11:00 and to keep hitting redial until I got through. I hit redial for 12 minutes and then was on hold for another 15 minutes or so.
• The detainee has no say. You don't have to prove any relationship or business either. So if you want to screw someone in jail, I suppose you could just go see them everyday so they could never see their friends or family.
• You can't carry in anything like paper or pen or pencil. I need a name and phone number so I guess I'll have to memorize it somehow!

So this person was arrested last week. Wednesday is the first time anyone can visit them and it's going to be a stranger. Obviously they must have some cause for the arrest but there's been no trial and no conviction. And yet, they have no freedom. (Note, they haven't posted bail which I believe is an option.)

Moral of the story: don't get arrested. It looks like you lose most of your rights in the process.

UPDATE: You have to go through a metal detector but they turned it off for my group because one of the women had a pace maker. They then took us upstairs in an elevator with no buttons. (The women walkie-talkied to someone who controlled it remotely.) They then dropped us off (and left us) in a room with four windows with stools in front and telephones. The windows faced the main detention center with all the prisoners walking around on the other side. You talk through the telephone to the prisoner on the other side - just like the movies. We were left there for 30 minutes. I finished my business in 30 seconds and I had a few minutes of "oh, no!" when I realized there was no way to call the elevator back or leave the room. After a few minutes of searching I found the intercom button and managed to get them to send the elevator back up for me.

Nobody would have noticed if I'd carried in a pen and paper.

Should single moms settle?

I have several friends who are single moms "on purpose" - they got pregnant knowing there would be no dad in the picture. We actually used to debate the best way to get pregnant without involving a guy - we came up with some creative and often hilarious ideas. (Hilarious as long as they didn't apply to me and you didn't consider the morality and ethics too closely!) My friends that are now single moms all profess to be happy with their decisions but I admit that I often wonder if they are being honest.

Today's Atlantic Monthly magazine article Marry Him! was written by a single mom who says she regrets it. Her advice to women is to settle and marry the best guy they find without waiting for Mr. Perfect because almost any guy will be better than no husband. 

I think she's wrong.  While I think it's possible that some women are too picky, (they aren't perfect, so why do they expect a guy to be perfect?) I don't think you should marry a guy because you are looking for a child raising partner. You'll only have kids at home for 20 years and most people having kids can expect to live another 40-50 years! Having someone to watch the kids for 20 minutes while you eat lunch is not a good reason to marry someone. (If you don't have someone, it might be a reason not to have a kid, but that's for another post.)

I think our approach to child rearing needs to change. Very few kids have two parents that are married and living in the same home. Some have one parent, some have two, some have four or more! Some kids have one home, many have two, and some have three or more! Some parents have 80% of the responsibility, some have 20%, some have Mondays and Tuesdays, some have weekends. 

What we need are better ways to connect parents to others like them. We need better daycare options for parents that need to go on dates, more flexible work environments for parents that need to attend a school play or doctor appointment, more daycare options closer to home and work, more work from home options (to save on commutes), etc.

Connecting parents to other parents like them is the one I'd most like to see. Most the Mommy and Me get togethers are for stay at home parents. While I can flex my time and make the meetings, I meet people who don't have the same interests as me. When I meet parents at games or school events, we don't really have enough time to connect.

A friend of mine has worked out an agreement where she watches her friend's kid two mornings a week and the friend watches her kid two mornings a week so they both get some kid free time. I liked that. More of that would be good. Now if I just knew people in my neighborhood with little kids. Think they are on Facebook? (Once your kids are school age, it's easier to find other families.)

So I think single moms face all the same problems that married moms face, they just don't have a built-in partner to commiserate with.  But I think we could find ways to connect moms to people that would help them.  It would help both single moms and married moms ... and unmarried moms living with boyfriends/dads.

Some women are still punished for being raped

Rape victim gets 200 lashes. Actually, I think the punishment was for being alone with an unrelated man.  This makes me:

• sad that some women live without the rights I take for granted,
• angry that the people around her have accepted and perpetuate this as normal,
• grateful that I have so much freedom and so many rights,
• frustrated that I have no idea how to fix something I think is wrong,
• scared to ever travel to a Muslim country.

What American accent do you have?

I took the quiz, and it should come as no surprise to anyone who knows where I grew up (everywhere) that I have the "default, lowest-common-denominator American accent." Here's what they said:

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Midland ("Midland" is not necessarily the same thing as "Midwest") The default, lowest-common-denominator American accent that newscasters try to imitate.  Since it's a neutral accent, just because you have a Midland accent doesn't mean you're from the Midland.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Which accent do you have?  You can take the quiz.

Will our current corporate culture change?

Escape from the Cubicle Nation by Pamela Slim has a podcast by Dr. Srikumar Rao, Columbia and London Business Schools, author of Are You Ready to Succeed?  My favorite quote was:

I don't have a work life and a personal life.  I have one life and either it's working or it's not.

If you are the same person at work and at home and if you are unhappy at work or at home, you'll likely be unhappy both at work and at home.

Pamela thinks the corporate environment is so broken that so many people will start leaving to start their own business that corporations will have to change in order to keep people.  Maybe I'm a cynic but I think it's much easier for people to go into work everyday and collect a paycheck than it is for them to dream up a business model, quit and run a business.   I think corporations and the current corporate culture is around to stay for a while.

One of the reasons that many small business owners are not successful is because they want to do what they love, not run a business.  For example, massage therapists go into massage because they like massage therapy and want to help people and then they discover that you have to run your own business.   Giving massages is not the same as advertising, making business cards, renting an office, scheduling clients, etc.  Running a business is a lot of work.  If you just like writing code or giving massages or fixing cars, you might not be willing to quit your job to start a business of your own.  You might spend a lot less time actually writing code or giving massages.

Which would you prefer, more money or more friends?

I just read a very thought provoking article, Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy by Bill McKibben.  The author argues that pursuing more wealth worked well in the past when we didn't have much material wealth but now that we are a relatively wealthy nation, pursuing more and more wealth is making us less happy not happier.   His main points are:

1. We are pursuing more and more wealth because it worked in the past,
2. We are spending less and less time with family and friends,
3. We are busier and more isolated,
4. And it isn't working anymore.

He points out that if you are rich in relationships and poor, more money might make you happy, but if you are poor in relationships and have plenty of money, a new friend will make you much happier than more money.  If you are a peasant in China with lots of relationships and no money, a little money can go a long way towards making you happier but a sixth person living in your house won't.  On the flip side, if you are an American living in a 2000 square foot house, another friend might make you a lot happier than the money for another coffee maker.

He argues that in the pursuit of wealth, we've lost our community.  We spend less and less time with family and friends and more and more time isolated: commuting, working, watching tv, surfing the internet.  And yet studies show that it's social networks (the real ones, not the virtual ones) that keep us happy and even healthy.  Robert E. Lane, a Yale political science professor writes that "evidence shows that companionship ... contributes more to well-being than does income."

One point he made that really struck me because I can't tell you how many people told me that college was going to be the best years of my life and I kept asking, "Why?  Does it go downhill from there?"  Apparently it does if you look at the quality of your relationships.

Why do people so often look back on their college days as the best years of their lives? Because their classes were so fascinating? Or because in college, we live more closely and intensely with a community than most of us ever do before or after?

Something I read recently said that the number of friends we have drops off dramatically after our 20s.  Recently, I've realized that I really miss the number of friends I had in my teens and 20s.  I did things with large groups of friends several times a week if not every day.  Now we are lucky if we squeeze something in once a week.  And even when you have time (like when I was on maternity leave), your friends likely won't have time!

So think about it.  Increasing the time you spend with your friends and extended family will do more to make you happy than a raise at work.  And I'd even argue it'd make you happier than winning the lottery!

Do rich people make you uncomfortable?

Do rich people make you uncomfortable? 

I've been surprised lately at how many people say they don't like rich people.   For example, I have massage therapist friends who won't work on wealthy people  (How's that for a business plan!) because they find rich people's concerns and troubles just too far removed from what they consider reality.  Another example.  I have a group of friends that raise guide dog puppies and they are great people.  I never realized that they were all  pretty wealthy until I invited a friend to a guide dog puppy party and he said he had nothing in common with them.  I tried pointing out all the things they had in common (dogs, kids, houses, location, hobbies) and he just couldn't get over that they were in a different socio-economic group therefore they must not have anything in common!

I wasn't raised in a rich family but it was rich in experience.  Every year I become more aware of how diverse my experience was.  I have a friend who also grew up overseas - she's lived in several different countries and met lots of people and she's very outgoing.  I thought that meant she'd be comfortable in any social situation.  So I was surprised when I took her to a country western bar and she was extremely uncomfortable - it was a culture she had never experienced before.  She didn't dance (even though she loves dancing) and she won't go back. 

Growing up not only did I meet farmers as well as city people, I also met rich people as well as poor people.  (And for the record, despite the stereotype some farmers are very wealthy.)  I have friends who have more family money than I'll ever have unless I win the lottery and I have friends that barely make it paycheck to paycheck.  My dad even used to invite this homeless woman to a cup of coffee every day.  So I never knew that people in different socio-economic groups make people uncomfortable.   I never considered them different than me - they might have different problems or different priorities because life has dealt them a different deck of cards but they were still people very much like me!  It also helps that I know millionaires that wear jeans and drive old pickup trucks and people driving brand new cars that live paycheck to paycheck.

I think people are uncomfortable with rich people because they believe that money will solve all their problems.  And if money will solve all their problems then rich people must not have any real problems. Neither is true.  Money might enable you to buy clothes and activities for your kids but it won't teach you how to be a good parent.  Money might buy you the right clothes and entrance to clubs but it won't buy you good friends.  Money might give you time to spend with your spouse but it won't make you a good partner.  Money might enable you to go to med school but it won't make you a doctor.  Money can't live your life for you and while it may make some things easier it won't solve all your problems.  If you were rich, you would still have problems and they would not be trivial.

Rich people are just people too.  When you consider what money can do to someone, you might even consider that the rich are people with more problems than average.  They can't blame lack of money for not accomplishing something in life.

Fancy lockers at the law school

When I think of lawyers, I think of suits and ties, fancy dinners and nice cars.  Things to recruit clients with.  And things associated with lawyers are also fancy, like law libraries.  Well, just so you know, even the lockers at law schools are upscale.  This is a picture of the very nice wooden lockers at the CU Law School.  They look nothing like the metal ones we had in high school and college. 

The students on the other hand were wearing jeans like students everywhere.

Basques in Boise, Idaho

Did you know that there is a community of Basques in Boise, Idaho?  I'm in Boise on a business trip and after hearing about two great Basque restaurants I asked, how did Boise, Idaho end up with Basque restaurants?  It turns out that Boise has the largest population of Basques outside of Spain.  They came here in the 1800s as sheepherders, miners and loggers.  Now there are Basque restaurants, museums and even a Basque preschool in Boise!

Photo by Thorbion.

Discrimination against non-vegetarians

Since I've written about unusual racisms or discriminations, like discriminating against atheists, I couldn't pass up blogging on this.

Dina was not allowed to buy a condo because she is not a vegetarian.