A former reporter for the now-defunct print edition of the Tucson Citizen has filed a civil lawsuit against Gannett Co., Inc. and Citizen Publishing, Co. for breach of contract.

The lawsuit for A.J. Flick, who worked for the Citizen for 15 years before its closure this spring, was filed in Pima County Superior Court late Monday night by Adam Watters, a local attorney specializing in employment law.

The specific dollar amount of damages sought by Flick isn’t specified in the complaint, but she said, “It’s less than what some Gannett executives pay for a round of golf,” referring to Robert Dickey, president of Gannett U.S. Community Publishing, paying somewhere between $12,500 and $25,000 in green fees at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic the day after delivering the news of the Citizen’s sale/closure to stunned reporters and editors.

Dickey told Citizen employees Jan. 15 that the paper was for sale and if it wasn’t sold by March 21, it would be closed. Employees were also given a written statement to that effect, which noted that employees would get one-week severance pay for each year they’d worked at the Citizen if they stayed employed through March 20.

Flick, who covered the courts beat during her final six years at the Citizen, claims Gannett broke its contract when, on March 17, it told Citizen employees that the paper would be open “day to day” because a buyer had surfaced and negotiations were “ongoing.”

“I had a vacation I had already planned and paid for at that time, so I went on that, and then when I got back, I met with my lawyer and our stance was, whatever Gannett asks people to do after the 20^th is a new agreement,” Flick said. “We basically said to them I will come back to work for you indefinitely if you give me my severance now and pay me for the work I do until the paper closes. I had plans to move on after March 20. If they wanted me to work, we’d needed to strike a new agreement. They should have offered me a new contract, but no, they were forcing my hand, asking me to do something extra for them and then they would give me severance. But how would I know they would honor that contract?”

Flick and Watters engaged in a month-long letter exchange with Gannett officials while Flick was on unpaid leave, continuing to argue breach of contract. In mid-April, Flick was warned by interim editor Jennifer Boice that if she didn’t return to work she would be fired. Then, on April 27^th, Flick received notice via certified mail that she was being fired.

“Mark (Evans) had called and said he needed to get my (Citizen) equipment from me and we were having lunch when the certified letter came from Jennifer,” Flick said. Evans was Flick’s direct editor at the time and is the current editor of TucsonCitizen.com, one of only two full-time employees on Gannett’s Tucson payroll.

In her lawsuit, Flick asks for the 15 weeks of severance she feels is due to her because of her 15 years at the Citizen, as well as the value of health benefits she would have received during that severance period, triple that amount in damages, and attorney and legal fees.

“Gannett told me on Jan. 15 of this year that it was putting the Tucson Citizen up for sale and if I were still employed on March 20 and the paper not sold by March 21, I would get one week of severance for every year of employment with all of my health benefits,” Flick said. “I was employed by the Citizen on March 20 and the paper was not sold. However, Gannett tacked on a 12th-hour requirement that employees needed to stay past March 20th, indefinitely, in order to collect severance, contrary to what we were told previously in person and in writing.

“I filed the lawsuit because I held up my end of the bargain and Gannett did not. The lawsuit basically says I relied on Gannett’s promises, to my detriment, and suffered financially.”

Representatives from Gannett were not immediately available to speak about the lawsuit this morning and Boice declined to comment, referring comment to Gannett corporate offices.

Flick, 48, is now pursuing freelance writing and legal research. During her Citizen tenure, she covered a number of sensational trials, including the James Allen Selby serial rapist trial (for which she appeared on an episode of A&E’s “Cold Case Files”) and the Bradley Schwartz and Ronald Bruce Bigger trials for the murder of Tucson eye doctor Brian Stidham.

Flick has won numerous awards, including two for the coverage of the Stidham murder and a second place in the Arizona Associated Press’s public safety reporting category for her story “Prison without bars,” which reported on the Tucson state prison’s Catalina Unit. In 2004, she was part of a team that won first place in Arizona AP’s deadline news reporting for covering a fatal hostage crisis that left three people, including the shooter, dead.

The Tucson Citizen printed its final edition May 16 and TucsonCitizen.com launched May 18.

1. The post I did last week on noise in public libraries was a hot discussion topic both on this blog and out in my neighborhood, so I called Nancy Ledeboer, Pima County Library Director, today to get some information about how local libraries are dealing with concerns over noise. As per normal when one speaks with a librarian, I learned something: Libraries are actually serving a broader range of the public than they did in the past, thus being more “public” than ever.

“We say we’re a public library here to serve everyone in the community,” Ledeboer said. “But the truth is what we were servicing in the past were people from middle class backgrounds who grew up in a culture of using the library.”

But now, she explained, libraries are drawing from all strata of the community because libraries offer more than books. The Internet changed the game in the ’90s, and people who could not afford access to a private computer – or lacked Internet access at home – came to the one free place where they knew they could find both computers and Internet access.

“A whole new group of people began coming to the library library looking for information,” Ledeboer said. “That’s a good thing – we’ve got more and more people acquainted with the library and what a library offers. But it did create a clash of sorts because so many people are using it.”

That clash is often about noise. Ledeboer said it has been an issue at many of the 27 branches in the library system, and each of the libraries is dealing with it in different ways.

“We’ve charged each of our libraries to create a quiet zone, and if they don’t have enough space for a quiet zone, then they are working to create a quiet time. “But frankly, some of our libraries are just too small. In that case, people need to approach a librarian if they feel they are being disturbed. Some people are hypersensitive to noise, and some people don’t know they’re being noisy so it is a matter of finding a find balance where people can all coexist in the libraries. We do have a code of conduct policy posted on our Website that says you’re not allowed to create a disruption that interferes with other people’s use of the libraries, but we don’t have specific ‘no cellphone’ policies.”

Ledeboer also said that the belief that fewer people are reading books because they only use the library for the computers or to hang out after school is a fallacy. She said books circulation is actually way up in the past few years when contrasted to before the time when libraries were community centers, and part of that is because when people come into a library branch to do research on a computer or participate in one of the job clubs or book clubs or get tutoring, they often leave with a book as well.

So, yes, libraries may be more noisy than in the past, but that is because libraries are, thanks to computers, Internet access and the myriad programs offers, actually living up to the “public” in their names in a manner that didn’t happen in the past. And that’s a great thing. See how much you can learn if you talk to a librarian?

2. Yet again, there was a study saying we’re killing ourselves with food. Actually, the report was about how more 60-somethings are disabled now than ever before and that disability is directly attributed to obesity. This is something that really gets on my last nerve because – surprise – we all have the ability to control what we eat. (Well, except for those people who have the syndrome where they eat in their sleep and all that.) We have the ability to get off our tail and go for a walk or something more strenuous. We have the ability to say no or go to food-addiction meetings to get help saying no. But we don’t. How many times do we have to hear that we are killing ourselves by eating this and drinking this and then eating this? With talk of health care all the rage, is anyone besides me wondering if we should put a limit on what a government plan would cover in regards to illnesses caused by obesity? Should healthy taxpayers have to pay for people to get insulin when their diabetes could be controlled with diet but those people refuse to control their food intake? Should we fine parents who let their children get obese? If you want help eating right and exercising, here’s an article you could read. And here is a clue: The sooner you start getting in shape, the better it is for you. It is harder to lose weight with every passing year and the damage is cumulative.

3. And speaking of eating …Thanksgiving is just around the corner and fellow religion blogger Karen Edmisten is asking, “Have you started your Thanksgiving tree?” If you don’t know what one is, check out her blog here. We used to make these when my kids were small and I’m thinking the idea needs to be revisited, especially in this year of loss. Too often we focus on what we don’t have … a Thanksgiving Tree is the cure for that.

4.  John Allen, reporter on all things Catholic and Vatican has come out with a new book, The Future Church: How 10 Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church. In this blog post, he says that if he had to pick a motto for his book it would be “Designed to start arguments, not settle them.” Sounds like my kind of read. Anyway, he is inviting people to read the book and then meet in cyberspace for discussions — should be fun. (And maybe interesting to see who actually shows up.

5. And finally, if you want to do good while you’re searching the Web, add GoodSearch to your browser. You can pick any charity you want and they get funds from your searches. Share, and share alike is what I say.

National Public Radio this morning had a report that included interviews with doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday’s Fort Hood massacre. That report came before employees at WR were put on lock down as far as talking to anyone, including the press, and, according to NPR, the FBI.

I can’t find the report on their Web site, although this story mentions briefly how Hasan was reprimanded for proselytizing about Islam when he was in training at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Even though I’m lacking evidence that what I heard in the car this morning wasn’t a product of my imagination, I’m sticking my neck out with a big question: Why didn’t the folks at Walter Reed report this guy as crazy if what they recall happening indeed did happen?

I think it is because there is a fine line between racial/ethnic/religious profiling and pointing out the obvious and people are really afraid of crossing over to the wrong side. Since 9/11 people have been afraid of appearing racist where Muslims are concerned. There’s good reason for that, such as the case of the flying imams.

So, instead of appearing intolerant, people stay quiet, even – sometimes especially – other Muslims. They don’t want to be judged by their religion so they are reluctant to judge others by that rubric, even when they know that the person they are dealing with is dangerous.

A few months after 9/11, I was working on an analysis piece for the Texas Catholic, and I interviewed a Dallas imam about this very thing. I asked him why imams would keep quiet if they knew someone nefarious was in their congregations. He said that if a dangerous Muslim was at a mosque, the best thing was to hope that he – in hearing the moderate, educated teaching preached at the majority of American mosques – would either change his stripes or, “in most cases, we just hope he leaves.” The community wants the crazy guy out of their religious space because, the imam said, lunatics are just as likely to kill other Muslims as anyone else.

In other words, moderate Muslims are trying to protect themselves as much as the rest of us, but in so doing – in not directly going after the crazies among them – they are putting others at risk. Ditto for your average citizen, or the doctors who knew Hasan. Who wants to be called intolerant or a racist? According to the NPR story, Hasan was cold, horrible with patients and fanatical about his religion. Doctors would talk about him in the hallway, the report said, asking themselves if he could be a terrorist or if he was just a really bad doctor.

Who knows if that is what drew him to kill people at Fort Hood? We won’t know until the investigation is complete, or until he talks. (And once he gets a lawyer, fat chance of him talking). But what we do know is that he was not a very warm, caring doctor – even by military standards – and people noticed that early on. They noticed that he seemed more concerned with his religion than his schooling and treatment of soldiers. They noticed that he used  medical lecture slot to preach the Quran. And yet he continued at the medical school, worked at the hospital, moved on like low-achieving students who are socially promoted because the grade they are leaving just wants them out of their hair.

What happened at Fort Hood shows that common sense really needs a shot in the arm. We don’t necessarily have to go all Hannity on folks, but we need to stop being so afraid of speaking up when craziness is staring us in the face.

I didn’t realize my post about loud libraries would elicit such fervent comments. Ergo, I think I need to offer a clarification or two, the first of which is I LOVE LIBRARIES! OK, and the rest:

#1. I’m normally not so cranky when I write a post and so my tone was, well, cranky. When you write about libraries, you shouldn’t be cranky because they are great institutions run by great people who have a love of the printed word. (Let us all give homage to words on paper even if the whole world is headed toward reading on iPhones.)

#2. I wasn’t picking on the Oro Valley library, I just happened to be there that day. I regularly visit the Nanini Library and the Joel Valdez Main Library as well, with an occasional jaunt to the Woods Memorial Branch Library and the cell phone chatting is present in all of them. I’ve mentioned noise to librarians before at those various branches, which is how I learned about the libraries as community center model. And most days, it doesn’t bother me, really. Yesterday was just one too many cell phone chatters.

#3. I am not an ogre who thinks there should be absolute silence in libraries, or stern librarians getting angry with library patrons, although it would be easy to think I believe those things from yesterday’s (cranky) post. I recognize that libraries have to be more welcoming than some might have found them in the past. Just the fact that every city library I visit is JAM-PACKED most days is evidence that libraries are doing things the right way.

#4. I do, however, mourn the loss of manners on the part of library patrons, especially, like I said, the people who should know better. You might expect teens to chat away oblivious to those around them; I was surprised to see it happening with more mature folks. I have no problem with small children running squealing through the library in joy; I love seeing that. And tutoring is wonderful (and have done it myself), even if it is in a louder voice; anything to help kids is to be praised and I was a dweeb to criticize (I was cranky!)  But talking on cell phones at length in full voice or not turning your phone ringer to silent? That seems impossibly rude and that’s really what pushed my cranky button yesterday.

All that said, perhaps the people talking on the cell phones yesterday do not have access to computers in their home. Perhaps they have to come to the library to conduct business by phone because they need both an Internet connection and a phone. Perhaps they lost their jobs and are trying to remake their lives and have to use the library as their office (this is reportedly happening across the nation) and they can’t whisper on the phone because whomever is on the line would then know that they aren’t in an office.

In other words, there might be plenty of reasons besides rudeness that people talk on their cell phones in what used to be a semi-silent space. I should have considered that before posting — instead of letting my cranky-self rule the day.

Two interesting pieces on Google News this morning to share. No comment from yours truly, as I’m up to my eyeballs in homework, but feel free to read and discuss amongst yourselves. (But remember to play nice in the God Blogging sandbox, please.) Here’s one on interfaith dialogue and here’s another out of the New Statesman that discusses how faith in science (think global warming) is now officially protected in the same category as religious belief. Hmmm. I guess that means that atheists really are, in spite of their fervent denials,  “believers.”

Interesting side note, the New Statesman (”created in 1913 with the aim of permeating the educated and influential classes with socialist ideas,” according to their Web site) being a United Kingdom publication, sticks w/ the King’s English usage so there are no periods after honorifics such as Mr. and Ms. and that completely makes me want to pick up a red pen. It also has a religion blog called The God Blog, which makes me feel like a copycat having God Blogging.

I wish I saw this sign in my local library (sigh). Image courtesy of CityofSound blog

So, I’m in the Oro Valley Public Library, a satellite of the Pima County Library System, and it is crowded and, more often than not, noisy. It appears all the laid-off people in OV now spend their days in the library – or maybe OV has always had this many self-employed folks. Whatever, they are noisy. Their cell phones ring and they answer them (!!!) right where they are sitting, frequently carrying on a detailed, fully voiced conversation.

There are also kind adults tutoring kids and, OK, that is a good thing overall, but I don’t really understand why the instruction has to be loud. And, a few minutes ago, a dog-trainer came in with a handi-dog doing what is necessary to train the dog (expose dog to people and places) but the chatter she carried on was not necessary.

This is all part of the movement of library as entertainment center to make libraries more accessible to the public. It has its positive points; one does want the public to use libraries, even if few of them read something actually printed on paper and head instead to the bank of computers. But there is something to be said about silence, as well as for basic manners.

Everyone knows the young imitate the old, so I would hope the 40 to 60 year olds could maintain some decorum and set an example for the younsters, but alas, it isn’t so. In fact, the Baby Boomer set, overall is louder than the younger library-goers. I just listened to a 60-something man at the computer station conduct a 15-minute conversation on his cell with someone about a Web page he was viewing. This guy sitting at a table behind me? His cell phone ring is turned up to “loud and annoying.” What is up with that? Turn the dang thing to vibrate, buddy!

You can’t stop progress, or so they say, so this new silent-never-more library-with-a-bookstore-feel train can’t be derailed. But perhaps the librarians could consider allocating space on the basis of noise level. You know, a tutoring section, a chit-chat section and then a research and study session where the old golden rule of silence – and no cell phones – applied. Just sayin’.

Trying to clean off my desk this afternoon and came across two curiosities. The first is this article in Wired Magazine  about Thorkil Sonne, an IT worker in Denmark who decided a few years ago that people with autism and related conditions like Asperger’s would be great for jobs requiring total concentration and near-total recall —- jobs like software engineers.

In most countries, a diagnosis of autism means a lifetime of struggling with social and people skills. I know two young adults with high-functioning autism, both at the University of Arizona. In social situations, they stand out like clothed people at a nudist colony. They are kind and intelligent, but their obsessive focus on minute details in a conversation makes relating to them difficult.

No surprise to that, says Sonne, which is why most folks with an autism-spectrum disorder don’t fit in at many jobs – they don’t “do” social interaction. However, they do do persistence and structure and routine in a way that would drive many workers batty, which makes them perfect as software engineers. In 2004, Sonne founded Specialisterne (Danish for “specialists”), an IT consultancy firm that hires people with autism-spectrum disorders. These consultants work for places like Microsoft and Cisco, finding software errors missed by those companies’ designers, according to the Wired article.

The consultants do well, staying focused long after most of us with our 7-minute attention spans have switched gears and gotten distracted talking about last night’s episode of The Office. “This is not cheap labor, and its’ not occupational therapy,” Sonne is quoted as saying. “We simply do a better job.”

Item 2: Parents of students at the UA received a plea letter this week that looks like it is from the Alumni Association. It is actually from a “Final Exams Service Program” in Trenton, NJ, that partners with heave knows how many Alumni Associations to provide heavy-fat, high-sugar “care packages” for students during finals week. So, first point is, don’t they know we have an obesity epidemic among young people? And the second point is the tone of the letter. Take a peak inside the one I received:

Two students showed up to get their Care Packages. One beamed when she received her package. The other, whose family had not reserved a package, immediately used her cell phone and called Mom with a plaintive, “You didn’t send me a care package?”

First of all, why would the kid have shown up at the UA Alumni Association building to get a care package if her parents had not sent one? She wouldn’t have been notified. Secondly, I’ve received these letters before and they just been an offer (”You too can spend even more money on college!!!”), not a guilt trip. It seems odd, especially during this economic downturn, that any university would pair up with this business and allow pleas such as the following:

Because so many students receive Care Packages during exam time, it can hurt if a student is left out. This year, we have a solution to make sure every student feels supported at this critical time. The enclosed free gift card is our way to help. Please send it even if you don’t plan to reserve a Care Package. Of course, it will be more appreciated if it comes with food.

Of course! Good gravy. Parents have enough guilt as it is and they are paying through the nose to get their kid a degree and, in their minds (c’mon, admit it), that kid needs to buckle down during finals with or without the Pop-Tarts and Andy Capp Cheddar Fries.

I happen to send my kids my own version of a care package around exam time. There are homemade chocolate chip cookies, but then its fresh fruit or veggies and nuts and maybe a coffee card. I’ve done this for too many years to remember, since I tend to believe a good salad cures all ills and all greens should be washed down by chocolate. But I don’t like being guilted into thinking that if I don’t cough up $25 to $60 for an “Exam Survival Pack” or a “Wildcat Spirit Care Package” I’ll somehow be causing my offspring to feel excluded. We’re not talking 5-year-olds here, people, but young adults who (one would hope) have a sense of perspective. But maybe I don’t know as much about this age group as the Final Exams Service Program does. After all:

If you’ve sent (a care package) before, you already know how much it helped. If you haven’ts, you can be sure your student will appreciate receiving the same kind of support other classmates receive.

The advertisement for Elvis' Friday appearance at Desert Rain Coffee

It isn’t every day one gets her coffee served by the King, but folks up Oro Valley way can have that experience today by stopping by Desert Rain Coffee inside the lobby of the Oro Valley Hospital. And, if you bring a non-perishable food item, Elvis will give you $1 off your favorite beverage.

This is the second year Desert Rain owner/operator John Hall has been able to convince Elvis to run a food drive for Catalina Community Services. Last year, according to the King, the event raised $100 in cash and about 100 pounds in canned goods.

Elvis doing his thing at Desert Rain Coffee

So, if you want a cup of the most consistently good Java north of River Road, and you want to do some good while you’re at it, stop by John’s shop with some food or a little extra cash before 3 p.m. today. If you’re really nice, maybe Elvis will sing the song he’s been working on for the past 30 years: A Whole Latte Love.

Cute pigs who CANNOT give you the Swine Flu

They aren’t really broadcasting this at UA, but according to my UA-student daughter, a number of people are out sick with the flu in Wildcat town, some of them with H1NI.

Clare, who began running a high fever last night and started feeling sick “all over,” called UA Campus Health Services this a.m. to get an appointment so she could get a doctors note that would allow her to miss classes (some professors require this). She was told she couldn’t come in because Health Services is trying to reduce the number of people exposed to the flu. This is probably part of UA’s pandemic plan some of which is based on the CDC’s recommendations for universities in dealing with H1N1.

A nurse administered a health survey to Clare over the phone and pronounced her sick with the flu, then gave her a lecture about how “contagious and viscous this strain is” without saying it was swine flu. She prescribed some medicine to reduce the symptoms, especially the massive headache, then explained how Campus Health Services sent off samples (of body fluids, I’m guessing) from people early in the semester who came in sick and “they tested positive for H1N1.”

Students are supposed to stay away from classes until they are free of fever for 24 hours without the use of Tylenol, which, Clare said the nurse said, could be anywhere from three to seven days from the onset of symptoms. I’m wondering if the overall GPA of the UA will be down considerably this semester from students not being able to keep up with work when they are missing so many days of school. Clare says she’ll be able to keep up with things by viewing class lectures online – once her head stops pounding.

Backtracking to try to figure out where Clare may have picked up the germ is difficult: it could have been anywhere in town. But she said someone in her French class was coughing last week, as was someone in the choir she sings with. Upwards of 30 people were exposed by those two people when Clare was exposed – not counting all the other people they exposed in their other classes at UA. Clare started feeling sick yesterday, in the Dallas airport, so she exposed everyone on the plane as she flew back to Tucson, although she said she tried to hold her breath as much as possible for the whole flight. Of course, she has two roommates who will be exposed, and they will continue to go to classes until they feel sick, by which time they may have exposed more people. And thus the flu virus – H1N1 or the “regular” – travels on.

An armed robber in Indianapolis shopping center ended up hugging the woman he was trying to rob and then praying with her before leaving with only $20 and the woman’s cell phone. A brief story on the event can be found here, and it is all over the news this a.m. All I wanted to add was that people frequently question the power of prayer because their understanding of God is so limited. They view God as a magician and prayer as the way you can get God to do your bidding.

But what anyone who has spent any length of time on their knees will tell you is that prayer doesn’t necessarily change events; it changes the person praying. And in that personal change, events can – as happened during the robbery – take a turn for the better. If you watch this video, it is obvious that prayer has some power. It just isn’t the power televangelists proclaim.

From the comments on yesterday’s post about the staged reading The Laramie Project; 10 Years Later, a thank you to those who attended:

On behalf of the rest of the cast and crew of Laramie Project 10 Years Later, thanks to all who came to see the performance last night. As an actor, I have to say, this was by far the most powerful theatrical experience I have had in a long time, particularly because of the warm reception we received from the audience.

I couldn’t believe it when I read that Penelope Trunk, 42 going on 16, had tweeted her miscarriage. Surely, I thought, the columnist had it wrong. No one, least of all someone who claims to be a “career expert” and long past the age of what most would consider grown-up, would be so banal, so shallow, so unprofessional as to broadcast her miscarriage over Twitter.

But, no, a little research did indeed reveal that Ms. Trunk, author of the blog “Brazen Careerist” and a Twitterer with more than 19,000 followers, wrote at 7:34 a.m. on Sept. 21 “I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a f*****-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”

Who does that? Who makes light of death of a child? (Yes, class, quick review: The thing growing inside pregnant women is not a frog or a dog or a fish, but a human.) Who does the equivalent of yelling in a crowded bookstore something that is so very private? Someone, I dare say, who needs to be sterilized.

I think even Planned Parenthood, never a paragon of virtue, would have a problem with Trunk so lightly broadcasting her plans to get an abortion. Especially since the argument for legalized abortion has centered around privacy, as noted in the column about Trunk by Kathleen Parker. I can’t imagine what her parents think, what her “friends” must say about her in private, or what rabbis do when she tweets things like “New way to torture myself for being a bad Jew: Write a post about how I shouldn’t post on Yom Kippur and then twitter it.”

I can imagine quite clearly, however, why her husband left her. This is a woman who suffers from a lack of filter – moral and otherwise – and can’t stop her own verbal vomit about the most personal of issues, including her marital problems. I’d leave her too. (A glance at her blog about her then-husband demonstrates Trunk’s total cluelessness about parenting, since she can’t say anything nice about the father of her children. She must not know that kids need to be able to idolize both parents – at least until they reach middle school.)

Trunk is an old-enough-to-know-better, self-aggrandizing “author, blogger, entrepreneur” who serves as today’s Exhibit A of what is wrong with the world: Self-centered, immature people wandering around in the land of Let’s Not Judge challenging someone – anyone – to slap them and say, “Grow up!” Of course, few people ever do confront these nattering nabobs of narcissism and when they do, they get labeled “judgmental,” as though having basic standards of decency is a sin.

Well, go ahead and throw the J label at me because I think Trunk is a danger to civilized society. Not just because she violates the sanctity of every relationship she has with her tweets, but because she has two children who are learning from her how to be a grown-up. They need a better example. They’re also learning how to be scared of Mom. The fact that Trunk doesn’t “get” this shows she is an unfit parent.

Let me explain: Most women, if they have a miscarriage, go through loss and grief; they don’t throw a virtual high-five party. Most women seeking an abortion don’t go around wearing it like a badge of honor even if they are the type who believes the surgical removal of a 6-week-old human fetus is simply corrective birth control. And none of them usually broadcast their abortive plans or action in a manner that their living children can discover. Why? Because to do so is emotional child abuse.

Children are notoriously curious and if they know about an abortion will eventually ask: Why did you get an abortion? And then Mom has to explain and most explanations, once unpacked, come down to “I didn’t want a child at that time,” which leads the living child to wonder if Mom might decide one day that she doesn’t want him/her. Can anyone say “childhood insecurity”?

Parker reports about Trunk being interviewed about her miscarriage tweet by CNN’s Rick Sanchez, who asked her, “Have you no shame?” Trunk’s reply? “Why are you asking?”

Why are you asking? Why are you asking? Who IS this woman? Answer: A woman who writes on her blog about the CNN interview that she had “a good hair day.” A woman who desperately needs parenting classes, reality-check therapy and sterilization.

The economic meltdown has launched any number of new small businesses as people get laid off from their jobs, take salary cuts or find out that they have to support family members who have lost their jobs.

Such is the case with Tucsonan Christiana Staller, owner and operator of Little Flower House Cleaners. I’m writing about Christiana today because she’s one of the happiest women I know, in spite of a background that would have crushed lesser women. She just believes in believing in yourself, learning from your mistakes, and starting over again – although it took her a number of years to get to that happy space after years as a domestic violence victim.

So when her housecleaning business started to lose customers as people who hired her lost their jobs and had to clean their homes themselves, Christiana – a single mother with three of her five children still living at home – didn’t sit down and feel sorry for herself. She just got busy with Passion Parties. (Motto: “The ultimate Girls Night In.”)

You’ve heard of Tupperware parties and Pampered Chef, no doubt. A  Woman invites over some friends, opens a bottle of wine, passes around some snacks and they all watch a consultant demonstrate items that can later be purchased. Passion Parties is along the same lines except there isn’t any burping of plastic or cooking lessons involved.

“The way I explain it to the ladies is that Passion Parties accessories bring passion and romance back to their lives,” Christiana said. “There are lots of creams, lotions, body washes, perfumes, things that will make you feel beautiful and sexy and then, of course, there are toys to play with because, after all, sex is supposed to be fun!”

Christiana’s New York cousin convinced her to give the job a go two months ago, and so now Christiana can clean a woman’s bedroom in the morning and then offer to sell her, ahem, “items” to spice up the marital bed at a party that night.

“You can just get a catalogue from me and order from there but it is more fun to have a party and the hostess gets discounts based on what people at her party might buy,” Christiana says. “The girls just have some wine, talk girl talk about love and live and buy some stuff. It’s fun!”

The items for purchase range from $10 to $175 and if you’d like to host a party and put a little passion into your life (because, after all, it IS Happiness Wednesday), contact Christiana at petitefluer@live.com

The University of Arizona Faculty Officers just released to university faculty their Executive Summary of written comments that were included in last week’s poll on UA faculty confidence in the current administrative leadership. It’s not a whole lot of good news for either President Robert N. Shelton or Provost Meredith Hay, and you’ll note the call for Hay to resign or for Shelton to fire her and the unusual call for the Arizona Board of Regents to intervene. The entire summary is posted below, for those interested.

Re:      Faculty Poll Comments Summary

In addition to answering specific questions, over 700 respondents to the Poll offered thoughts in the Comments section.  We have tried to capture the main themes expressed in these comments in the Summary below.  All the Comments are posted, un-edited, at the Faculty Governance URL at

(http://fp.arizona.edu/senate/FACULTY%20POLL%20COMPLETE%20COMMENTS.htm).

We understand that the Poll was not perfect, that there were many other questions that could have been asked, but weren’t, and that the mechanics of carrying it out fell somewhat short.  Nonetheless we believe the response was substantial and the Poll valid, and that the message was clear:  there is amongst faculty much discontent at multiple levels.  A lack of transparency and honest open communication has resulted in a loss of trust.  The absence of a clearly articulated vision of what this university can and must be has left faculty frustrated and scared.  Decisions have been made without adequate involvement of the faculty and indeed the entire campus community.  These are but some of the things that must change if we are to heal the rift and move forward together.  As Faculty Leaders we will do our best to insist on those changes, and to make certain that the message of this Poll is heard and understood.

President Robert Shelton

President Shelton came in for a good deal of criticism in the comments, some of which cited him individually, and others which combined criticism of the President with the Provost, and/or high level administrators generally.

Some poll respondents simply recommended that the President be fired.  Those who fleshed out their comments had concerns in these areas:

· Better (not more) communication; less spin and more frank talk about the challenges we face and decisions made to address those challenges; clearer articulation of short-term (tactical) and long-term (strategic) vision.

· Lack of transparency in decision making; lack of consultation with faculty prior to making decisions; inadequate explanation/justification of decisions once they are made.

· Better representation of the UA’s mission and needs to the Arizona Board of Regents and to the Legislature.

· Better leadership in generating financial support , both from the Legislature and from alternate revenue sources.

· Bias towards science to the detriment of other core liberal arts disciplines.

· Need to reduce the number of senior administrators.

Provost Meredith Hay

Provost Meredith Hay has clearly become the lightning rod for faculty discontent with the University’s Transformation and budget reduction processes.  This discontent was clear in the numerical voting, and was reinforced in the comments that accompanied the votes.  Approximately one third of all of the comments mentioned some aspect of the Provost’s performance, and very few of those comments were supportive.

Many of the comments simply stated that the Provost should resign, or be fired.  Faculty who fleshed out their criticism of Dr. Hay focused primarily on these themes:

· Lack of transparency in decision making; lack of consultation with faculty prior to making decisions; inadequate explanation/justification of decisions once they have been made;

· Poor communication, which relates to the transparency issue but also includes a personal interactions which struck faculty commenters as “divisive,” “rude,” “acerbic,” and/or “disrespectful;”

· Lack of respect for faculty, including a failure to understand their contributions and concerns, in addition to the communication issues listed above;

· Poor leadership, as a result of the confluence of the above issues; and

· A bias towards science, to the detriment of other core liberal arts disciplines, in the allocation of budget cuts.

Central Administration

There was pervasive criticism of the role of central administration and how this affected the lives and economies of the faculty. Moreover, commentary questioned the size and the cost of the administrative machine wondering if this structure was going to be “transformed”. Thematic lines here also included:

· Downsize/transform the administration’s structure

· Cut the number of VP positions/reduce salaries at that level, that will help to save funds for academic related activities

· Perceived unilateral decision making= better communication and more input from faculty

· Perceived lack of clear vision from the administration, short and long term

· Change profile of administrative apparatus: fire mediocre professional managers, promote faculty members to engage in these functions

· Perceived culture of fear and intimidation in the administration dealings with faculty and staff

Faculty Governance

Many respondents indicated that shared or faculty governance at the UA has become less important and effective over the last several years.  Others call for renewed support for and greater participation in shared governance of the University.  General themes included:

· Without early and sustained discussion among administration and faculty, especially regarding investments and cuts, real shared governance does not exist. Several expressed the notion that faculty and administration should have equal decision making power relative to academic support.

· Proactive, rather than reactive budget planning must occur to avoid the constant giving money back

· At UA change is not often driven by stakeholders, rather it is top-down

Deans/Department Heads/Unit Directors

Comments on this thematic line seemed to highlight forward moving operations and some suggestions that current leadership should be replaced in some units. Other topics identified were:

• A generalized perception of poor communication between Deans and units/faculty

• · CLAS(College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences) related issues: restore previous structure, perceived conflict of interest with the current dean being also COS dean, remove current dean, de-centralize budget process
• · More transparency in budgetary decision making, better involvement of faculty
• · More accountability from deans and heads, more faculty involvement, creation of mechanisms that can ensure this
• · Protect and promote COH and SBS departments and programs since they are among the units with the highest differential budget cuts
• · Perceived climate of fear at that level (deans, heads), regular faculty seem unable to come together and is perceived as being left out of the decision making processes
• · Streamline some administrative processes and offices to save money
• · Incentivize top units in colleges to excel and to do a better job to retain key faculty
• · A number of comments criticized and alluded to the replacement of several deans and heads (in the Colleges of Engineering, Eller, Arts, Letters and Science, Dean of Students, Medicine, Pharmacy, Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Dept of Astronomy). The closing of the Phoenix Med School to save funds was also suggested

Goals, Mission and Vision

The lack of a well-articulated vision and a sense that this vision must be broader than a mere focus on revenue generation were mentioned in multiple comments.  Given such a vision, there was support for decisive action that would allocate resources differentially based on excellence. Other themes:

• Academic issues should be primary, with budget goals organized to support the academic mission of the university, rather than the other way around.
• Leadership is required to rally the campus around a vision.
• The university’s vision must extend beyond those activities that can most readily generate grant support.

Communication and Transparency

Many comments were directed at the issues of transparency and communication.  Most of these expressed frustration at the lack of transparency in all areas of university life.  Respondents expressed the need for not just more communication, but more honest communication.  A perceived lack of respect for input from all sectors of the campus, faculty, staff and students, was a common theme.  The following concerns were expressed often:

• Decision-making at the highest levels needs to be transparent, to clearly spell out the reasons why specific decisions were taken, and the budgetary consequences of these decisions
• Input from faculty should be solicited, listened to, and respected.  It should be sought before, not after, decisions are taken.
• The vision of what the UA should be needs to be clearly articulated, and the unique role of universities needs to be better communicated to the public, and legislature
• Better communication is needed, involving more direct contact between administrators and the rest of the campus.  Messages need to be clear and honest, with a lot less spin. Such changes are critical to improve morale, which is harmed by a lack of transparency, poor communication and a corporate management style

Differential Cuts/Budget and Investments

Poll respondents’ comments reflected concerns relating to the seemingly changing character of the University of Arizona.  The emphasis on investing in units that can generate revenue leads to questions about UAs strategic priorities;  and doubts about our ability to maintain excellence in the broad scope of disciplines required to have a world-class public research university.   Most comments reflected the following themes:

• · The wide spread of budget cuts among colleges sends a valuing message that demoralizes those faculty who are part of the colleges with the highest level of cuts.  A sense of lost hope and passion for their work is the most striking reference.
• · Little focus and/or importance was placed on the importance of quality undergraduate education, including its revenue generation
• · While many faculty agree with the concept of differential cuts, these are most fairly made at the unit level, rather than the college level.  Academic units across all colleges should be evaluated using accepted and consistently applied criteria and metrics that judge quality and productivity.  There are many severely cut non-science departments that would likely be judged of higher quality than less severely cut science departments.
• · Investment criteria should be generated from the bottom-up according to strategic priorities as determined by the entire UA community
• · Reduce administrative infrastructure, including the number and salary of its personnel

· Improve accountability of administrators as well as faculty through meaningful evaluation.

Transformation

Many poll comments specifically mentioned the current Transformation Process underway. The comments essentially ranged from saying the transformation process was just fine as is to a call for Transformation to be stopped immediately.

• One predominant theme in comments mentioning the transformation was a repeated call for more information, transparency and faculty input at every step of the way.

Teaching and Research

Opinions here were mixed, with a number of themes emerging.  Notwithstanding the variety of opinions there was strong support for excellence as the major goal:

• More emphasis on the teaching mission of the university
• More emphasis on the research mission of the university
• More support for graduate students
• Less support for athletics

Revenue and Funding

There were numerous poll responses that were concerned with revenue and funding for the university. The vast majority of these responses included positive suggestions of action on finding new sources of funding or ways to reallocate internal funds. And although there were several calls for restored state funding, poll responses seem to indicate faculty acceptance of the idea that the university will never have its state funding restored and must move to different sources of funding.

· One predominate theme in the poll comments about funding and revenue called for more reliance on funding from tuition, grants and endowments, moving the university towards a more privatized funding model with less dependence on state funding.

· A large number of comments echoed a repeated call for more transparency in financial decisions and direct faculty access to not only budget information, but also more direct faculty involvement in budget decisions.

· Poll comments indicate that many faculty seem willing to engage in seeking more grants and even helping to raise endowment funding, but need assistance in doing so and also need to be rewarded for their efforts.

· There were repeated calls for increasing efficiencies wherever possible, with many comments mentioning administration as a principle area for seeking financial efficiencies. Cutting administrative positions was also mentioned by many.

· Numerous comments asked for departmental and unit level funding to be tied to teaching whereby tuition dollars went directly to the units doing the most teaching.

· Several comments suggested permanently cutting entire units to support the stronger units or those most recognized for excellence.

Faculty Salaries/Tenure/ Retention

The issue of faculty compensation is on the minds of many, including the role merit should play in changes in salaries.  As is true for academic units, individual faculty accountability is important.  The following were mentioned multiple times:

• · Faculty retention is not totally related to salary, but it does make a difference.
• · UA faculty compensation must be compatible to our peer institutions
• · Salary compression and inequities with regard to gender and discipline must be acknowledged and plans for correction defined
• · Faculty accountability and performance should be tied to compensation; our Post Tenure Review system is not effective in distinguishing merit-worthy faculty
• · Increase support to productive faculty; decrease support to non-productive faculty; faculty work-load models should be defined and used.
• · Reduce administrator compensation and redirect to most productive faculty

Arizona Board of Regents

A number of poll respondents expressed a desire for the Arizona Board of Regents to intercede in the internal workings of the U of A. These poll responses were principally centered on three themes.

• ABOR needs to look to a different way of considering the future of the universities rather than the corporate model.
• ABOR needs to lead the fight in pressuring the legislature to invest in education.
• Several comments directly asked the Arizona Board of Regents to remove the president and provost and appoint new leadership.

State/Legislative/Economy

Comments on this section highlighted the very tense relationship between the university and the Arizona state Legislature materialized in chronic decreased funding. Commentary also mentioned the problems emerging from this historical relationship and the reduced contributions of the state to the UA budget. Recurring themes were:

• · More funding from the Legislature/improve state support
• · Replace the state Legislature, vote for education responsible legislators
• · Make legislators accountable at election time for underfunding higher education in the state
• · Create better lobbying mechanisms, involve community as a whole
• · Little optimism about future increases in funding from the state
• · Finds ways for units to become financially self-sufficient
• · Educate the legislators, use parents and students to showcase our strengths and needs

· Reinstate health insurance benefits for domestic partners and disabled dependents

Courtesy of the lovely and wonderful Clare, I bring you this video. It will make you happy, I promise. Enjoy the rest of the day and check back here tomorrow for updates on the University of Arizona.

This Youtube video is worth passing around. Best three minutes you might spend today.

For those of you out there serious about increasing your own happiness, I will once again recommend The How of Happiness. I am more than half-way through and, of the dozens of self-help, raise-those-endorphins books I’ve consumed in the past decade, this is by far the most practical. It is also the only one that has research directly tied to it (the author gives a suggestion, then tells you what research shows about it), which just gives it the feeling of being more solid than other books I’ve read on the subject. So, first happiness advice for today is get that book.

Second piece of happiness I want to share is this quote:

“(Optimism) is not about providing a recipe for self-deception. The world can be a horrible, cruel place, and at the same time, it can be wonderful and abundant. These are both truths. There is not a halfway point; there is only choosing which truth to put in your personal foreground.”

I LOVE THAT QUOTE!! As a culture, I think we suffer from a “He made me” mentality. We get angry and blame that anger on someone who was a jerk to us. But that’s a lie. We get angry because we CHOOSE to respond to the jerk by getting angry. You can also choose to ignore the jerk. (Caveat: Sometimes, anger is the only response to bullies who try to mug you.) We stress over a lack of time, but don’t want to take the time (ha!) to figure out how best to organize ourselves – and what to let go – so we don’t feel so stressed. Our attitude, in other words, is a choice, perhaps so habitual it is subconscious, but a choice nonetheless about how we see the world.

That said, we often are overwhelmed by negative information and struggle knowing what to do with it all. That can lead to the big killer of happiness: over-thinking/rumination. Now, if there was ever a ruminator, you’re looking at her. I have to constantly fight the tendency to obsess over what bad outcome might be forthcoming. It gets harder each day in this world of 24-7 information – there’s just so much to worry about! I feel like I’m in a reality show for perfection, especially since I heard an interview with the guy behind the No Impact Man blog and film. (Yes, yet another blogger who will become rich off of a movie. No, I am not jealous.)

The no impact guy, a self-proclaimed liberal, decided to live for a year without buying ANYTHING except locally-grown food. He gave up electricity (except solar produced), TV and transportation that could not be accomplished on his own feet or his bike’s wheels, toilet paper and stopped producing garbage. He did this as a married man with a 2-year-old daughter, with a smile on his face.

The interview was inspirational, but also overwhelming. Since I joined the ranks of the unemployed (or the very underemployed, since I did get a freelance assignment from the new downtown magazine Zocalo Tucson recently), I’ve been concentrating a lot on cutting back. But it was an economic thing, not an environmental thing.

I spent my high school and college years in Corvallis, Oregon. I was very big into reusing and recycling and produced very little garbage. When I moved to Texas, I was shocked that people littered and would actually chase these heathens down and ask, waving the litter in their general direction, “Did you drop this?” I was mostly vegetarian, and rode a bike to the newspaper where I worked and to most of my assignments – that was possible in Denton, Texas.

Austerity Plus: No clothes for that baby!

When I married my meat-and-potatoes husband, I brought him along in many of my austere ways, but not all. When we started having children and especially, when we started living on one income so I could be home with those children, austerity became our middle name.

We did everything on the cheap and, in many ways, resembled No Impact Man. We used cloth diapers, hung our laundry out to dry, wore sweaters instead of turning up the heat, ate beans and rice because it is a perfect protein and we couldn’t afford animal protein. We bought used toys, clothing and cars. We recycled, grew our own veggies, made homemade bread, and built beds for our kids – three of whom shared one room for a while. (continue reading…)

Oprah Winfrey has picked a book of short stories, Say You’re One of Them, written by a Nigerian Jesuit priest as her 63rd Book Club selection. This guarantees that the Jesuits will be a lot richer this year.

Books, books and more books

I’m just joking – sort of. Anything Oprah proclaims as readable turns golden, but the Jebbies, like all religious-order priests, take a vow of poverty, meaning any royalties author Uwem Akpan gets from the book will go to the Order and go towards everything from funding missions, to funding universities, to paying the salaries of Jesuits serving in parishes.

The news of Akpan’s book came via Twitter from National Catholic Reporter, which reports that Akpan’s book is the first short-story collection ever blessed by Oprah as a book club selection. Say You’re One of Them is an “awe-inspiring collection of stories that challenges you to look beyond the headlines and see an Africa full of both joy and despair,” according to Miss O’s Web site. “This is a book you won’t soon forget.”

So, those of you who are taking my 10-books before the New Year challenge, this is one you might want to pick up. And speaking of that challenge, you can find the list of books I’ve read on my way to the 10 in the sidebar to the right of these posts. I’d love to hear about any you read, and if you send them to me with numerical reviews (4 out of 10), I’ll post them in another sidebar as “reader’s picks.”

Some of the Lost Boys of Sudan; photo by Sarah Gordon; courtesy of the Alliance for the Lost Boys of Sudan

Through the wonder that is Face Book, I found out about Stephanie White, a UA student trying to raise money through getting us all to eat a bunch of frozen yogurt. The Frozen Yogurt % Night for Make Benefit Glorious School Children of Sudan is an offshoot of HELPSudan, an organization founded by some of the Lost Boys of Sudan now living in Chicago.

Tucson has its own contingent of Lost Boys, some of the nearly 30,000 young boys who were orphaned during the 20-year Sudanese Civil War that ended in 2005. I wrote a story about one of the local Lost Boys and his ongoing efforts to help his home country. You can read that him and learn how you might help here. (And I apologize that you have to read it in cache form with highlighted words, but Gannett Co., Inc. who owned the Tucson Citizen and now owns TC.com, has closed access to the online archives, even to reporters who worked there.)

But if you like frozen yogurt – and who, really, doesn’t like frozen yogurt? – you can help Sudan tomorrow by

Frozen Yogurt from a Penguins shop -- which is now ZWIRL on University Blvd. in Main Gate Square

participating in Stephanie’s night. All you need to do is head to ZWIRL, on University Blvd., next to Johnny Rockets from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday. You walk in and say, “I’m buying this yogurt for the Sudan benefit,” and whatever you buy, the ZWIRL folks will donate a 20 cents on the dollar to HELPSudan. (BTW, this shop used to be called Penguins, and my sources tell me the Penguins sign is still up, so if you can’t find a ZWIRL sign, not to worry. Just go into the only yogurt shop next to Johnny Rockets and you’ll be in the right place.

Naysayers might say of the 20 cents, “Hey, that’s kinda lame on the froyo people’s part,” but Stephanie details what that donationwill buy in her FB invite:

Perhaps you’ve realized that this event won’t make very much money. At this fundraiser night, 80 cents of your $4 yogurt will go to HELPSudan. So if 100 people show up, that’s only 80 dollars….
However, it is worth noting just how far our currency goes in a place as poor as Southern Sudan:

* $30 will buy supplies for one student for an entire year.
* $100 will provide clean water for 100 students for an entire year.
* $300 will buy books for one class in one grade-level
* $1000 will buy enough cement for an entire classroom.
* $5000 will buy a brick machine, which creates jobs and builds classrooms.

The goal of HELPSudan is to build permanent schools and get them outfitted for a generation that only knows war. In a Face Book message to me, Stephanie explained why she decided to encourage massive yogurt consumption on Friday:

We hear a lot of 30-second news reports about sad things that are going on around the globe, but instead of being continually shocked into complacency about suffering that is happening far from my home, I wanted to ask myself what I could do to help. I can’t help everyone, but maybe I can help someone. I see a lot of people around the University wearing shirts that say “Save Darfur” or “Peace in Africa by 2025” so I knew if I decided to fund-raise I could gain lots of support.

I chose HELPSudan because they have a very practical and clearly stated plan for the betterment of communities in Southern Sudan – providing basic resources such as digging wells for water and creating community through education. … Right now they are working on acquiring brick machines to build permanent schools instead of seasonal grass huts that get destroyed in the rainy season. That way they can look for teachers which the government can then hire, creating a more permanent school system and stable community.

To learn more about the effort, check out this video, or Stephanie’s flyer (or, if you prefer, flier) about the event, or sign up to attend on this Face Book page. And, then, get yourself over there tomorrow night. Yes, I mean you red star, tiponeill, leftfield, mopckoe, fortbuckley ….

St. Frances de Sales, the patron saint of journalists and writers, once said, “Half an hour’s meditation each day is essential, except when you are busy. Then a full hour is needed.”

I’ve been thinking about statement almost obsessively over the past five days for two reasons: One, I read this article on the “radical idea” of people taking 24 hours of absolute solitude and, two, I got hurt exercising and have been confined against my will as my injury heals.

While every person’s road to happiness is different, there are some things that research shows increase happiness in general, and one of them is a little bit of silence. Not every day, necessarily, and not necessarily for a long time, but some silence sometime. Some of us – the ones already prone to overthinking everything – might actually be harmed by too much solitude, too much “think time.” These folks might be better aimed toward happiness by actively helping other people.

The most amazing group of teenagers I've ever worked with, at the end of our week of gutting two homes destroyed by Katrina so they could be reconstructed on the inside

I’m a middle-of-the-roader here: I need both active engagement and time alone, and I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older, the need for the latter has increased greatly, something I could never have imagined when I was 20. The times I’ve felt happiest (except for the births of each of my kids) have been when I’ve actually DONE something to help someone out, like when I helped gut houses in New Orleans with a bunch of teenagers after Hurricane Katrina.

I need evidence of my work, to see that I’ve done something concrete to make the world a better place, in order to get the hit of happiness that keeps me going in this life. Writing a check to a charity just doesn’t do it, nor does sitting on a board of a charity that does good work I never touch. I’m a hands-on, get-it-done girl who doesn’t like to be told “No,” or “Let’s have a meeting” or “Perhaps we should pray about it.”

Exhausted after a days work gutting houses, sleeping on the floor of a parish rectory that still, a year after Katrina, had no hot water and sporadic electricity

That said, I’ve found that if I don’t have some reflection time – about 60 minutes/week – my hamster-wheel brain jumps from one idea to another with not a whole lot of direction. I need silence, pure and uninterrupted, to prioritize where my energy would best be spent in this world of need.

I think for most folks, distracted by texting, tweeting, Web surfing, IMing, Face Book and every other technological do-dad, a little silence could go a long way toward offering some perspective and peace.

And most importantly, that silence would give us time to think, as opposed to having our brains be constantly revved up by outside stimuli. Great ideas don’t just jump into one’s mind fully formed, all the nits worked out. Creativity – be it in the science lab or the art studio – is fed by the ability to daydream. And daydreaming can’t happen when one’s mind (or a section of one’s mind) is distracted by NOISE.

One of the many New Orleans homes devastated by Hurricane Katrina. This was one of the first things we saw coming into the city.

So, all you happiness seekers out there, some questions for today: Have you ever sought out absolute solitude (no outside stimulation at all, including books) as a means toward peacefulness, happiness or a more contented life? When was the last time you just laid on your back looking at clouds, or, at night, looking at the stars? How does silence – or the lack thereof – affected your overall well-being? Or, are you a person who needs action more than silence for happiness?