Regarding children, freedom, overprotectiveness, and pedophiles... My mother was fairly protective when I was a child (the 70s), which meant that I had more freedom than many kids do now. But it turned out that I probably would have been safer (as a fairly street-smart kid) wandering the streets than in my own bedroom, since my father sexually abused me explicitly for several years as an adolescent, and somewhat more implicitly throughout my teen years. I was too intimidated to tell anyone, so being able to GET AWAY from my family through activities and going out into the world alone was one of the only ways I kept semi-functional (years of therapy have still left me with some deeply rooted dysfunctions).
This is also one of the reasons that I am not a fan of home schooling - I think children need to be able to have reasonable access to people outside the family who they can interact with in unstructured ways, and it's too easy to keep them under tight control in a homeschooling environment (I know it doesn't have to be done that way, but it can and often is).
*I usually post here under a(nother) name, but this is something I still generally don't tell people.
According to his entry in Writertopia, Schoen published a story in the Low Port anthology back in 2003; the guidelines listed the pay scale at 5-8 cents a word and there were certainly enough copies printed to count as a pro sale.
When does Campbell eligibility start?
#67 At no point is Hugh Jackman shirtless in The Fountain
No, as noted later in the thread there is a long kissy bathtub scene whose entire purpose seems to have been to have a long loving look at wet shirtless Hugh.
The Fountain is A Big Serious Allegory; the only way it could be less subtle is if the main characters had names like Loving Man Blinded by Own Ambition and Woman Of Intuition. Stirring violins are unrelenting in telling us "here's a Poignant Important Moment; here's another". Also there is lots and lots of crying in close-up, which drives me bats because it makes me cry involuntarily even if I'm totally unmoved.
I agree that it could have been good with a few changes; as-is, it's tolerable only because Jackman and Weiss (and yay Ellen Burstyn!) are very watchable. If you love surreal images, it might be worth seeing on the big screen, but otherwise not.
Laurel wrote: Can you really defend partial birth abortion?
I was 5 months pregnant with a very-much wanted child when I got the last scheduled ultrasound for my pregnancy, and it wasn't good news. The doctor saw a deformity and immediately ordered an amnio to confirm the image. The fetus was anencephalic- it had no brain. There was a tiny stem that would have meant that the baby would have been born alive, but it would have only survived a few hours or days at best.
In every other respect, the fetus was completely healthy- I could have finished the last four months of that pregnancy to give birth to an organ donor, but I'm sorry- I wasn't that magnanimous. A D&X is a pretty horrible experience, but it was much better than feeling a baby grow and kick inside me, only to be essentially born dead.
Second and third trimester abortions account for only 10% of all abortions, and 90% of those are performed for health and life reasons. Not mine, though- my health wasn't in danger, the fetus would have grown and been born in a normal way. That abortion I had ten years ago would be illegal now. I would have to finish that pregnancy, and that, folks, is what you're voting against when you vote against "partial birth abortion."
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