A year and a half later: the gangrape in West Palm Beach

Can you believe it's already been a year and a half since this:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Mother and son huddled together, battered and beaten, in the bathroom — sobbing, wondering why no one came to help.

Surely the neighbors had heard their screams. The walls are thin, the screen doors flimsy in this violence-plagued housing project on the edge of downtown.

For three hours, the pair say, they endured sheer terror as the 35-year-old Haitian immigrant was raped and sodomized by up to 10 masked teenagers and her 12-year-old son was beaten in another room.

I recently came across this great commentary by Rod Dreher on the subject. That's worth reading.

I had a similar occurrence to Dreher. I was in middle school out in Wellington and kids were pegging me with gumballs (doesn't sound painful, but when they hit you in face, eyes, etc. it really hurts). It was in my English classroom. Ms. Warren saw it and ignored it. That set the stage for the rest of my middle school career because at the moment I realized that I wasn't safe. That whatever happened would be up to me to stop, because the adults were too scared to do anything.

100 Confessions: The Authors that Drive Me

(12)My love of writing stems from two very different writers: J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen King. One's a high-literature writer, one's a pop writer. One wrote fantasy, one writes horror. But both are people who specialize in writing stories of hope. Stephen King may seem an odd choice.

Here's an excerpt from "God in Popular Culture" by Andrew Greeley:

"You're writing religious stories," I accused Stephen King at a Literary Guild cocktail party in New York.
"Of course I am," he agreed. "Most people don't believe me, but that's exactly what I'm doing."
"Anyone who writes about hope," I continued, "is writing about religion."
"Absolutely. Sometimes I wish I was Catholic like my wife. You people have great images of hope. But you almost have to be raised with them."
Thus my theory of sociology of religions was summarized and validated in a brief exchange of dialogue.
King writes stories of hope, maybe only a little hope--as in Cujo in which things got better, not much, but a little better--but still hope. In his non-fiction study of horror literature, King contends that the appeal of the field to readers is that they are scared stuff but still survive and thus experience a hint that one does survive, no matter how great the terror.

100 Confessions: DVD Addiction

(11) I enjoy watching DVD season's back to back. It's my drug of choice. When I began my working life after getting married I found my evenings--well, oddly empty. No homework. No clubs. Even if I did my daily creative writing, that only took up an hour of my time. Mimi and I decided we'd try to some of these "hit" shows and see if they really were any good. We started with the first disc of LOST, which we rented from Blockbuster. Since then, we've been through 24, Heroes, Gossip Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Arrested Development. Currently? We're going through Bones (via Netflix), and Smallville (via cheap prices at Best Buy).

100 Confessions: The Greg CounterBalance Diet

(10) I think people get way to worked up over dieting. Just work out more, ride your bike to work, or (gasp) walk to work. In my high school I would hear people talk about going on a diet and I'd be like "dude, why don't you just do a sport?" Possible objections: diets are healthy.
Let me speak for my own diet. You can eat cheeseburgers, pizza, chocolate cake, all of the above. But when your done, balance it out with a piece of fruit. You counterbalanced the unhealthy food with healthy food so your good again.

100 Confessions: Washing Machine Misconduct

(9) From time to time, I wash things that don't survive being washed. And then I usually throw them in the dryer as well. This doesn't just included those "dry-clean" only clothes that end up coming out 3rd-grader sized but also cell phones, thumb drives, car keys (with electric clicker), etc.

Can't we all just get along?

What's the deal with these folks?

100 Confessions: Travel Anxiety 2

(8) I can't sleep on planes. It's not a fear of flying. My father's a pilot for Continental Airlines and I grew up loving planes. The entire experience is exciting for me, the preparation, the take off, the landing. But I've done it so many times over the years that I can't rightly chaulk it up to excitement either. Maybe it's the uncomfortable seats?