Random Bits of Monday

Today was a day off....my days off used to be Thursday and Friday (Saturday and Sunday being clergy work days) but for many reasons, Thursday wasn't working out to be a good day to be off, so now I'm taking Monday and Friday. I give up having two days in a row, but I still think it is a good move...Monday was never a very productive day in the office, and it feels good to be off after Sunday, which is invariably a crazy busy day.

Friday I wasted most of the day doing nothing. That would've been okay if I'd felt relaxed at the end of it, but I didn't--I just felt irritated with myself for not accomplishing anything, so I tried to be more productive today. And I managed to:
--call HP about my almost new printer that prints gorgeous pictures but won't print documents for anything. With very little conversation they agreed to send me a new printer, and it will be here tomorrow!
--make an eye appointment for the Kid whose eyes are alarmingly bad--even with his glasses he can't see lots of things I can see.
--confirm the Kid's camp registration after trying to cancel it last week--he is, shall we say, a bit ambivalent about going. A friend yesterday convinced him he had to go, and there's no turning back now! It's just one week of sleep-over camp, and I know he'll have a good time once he gets there.
--mail a shower gift for my daughter's bridal shower coming up on Saturday that I am not able to attend because of work. I am notorious about not mailing things on time, so this is good thing.
--go to the "bird store" and lay out big bucks for a couple of new bird feeders. In the last month the squirrels and grackles have destroyed all four of my feeders. So I sprang for two that are supposedly squirrel and grackle proof. We'll see. And I bought a feeder designed for Baltimore Orioles (the bird, not the team). I've never seen an Oriole, but they frequent this part of the country, and now, apparently, is the time to attract them.
--read through some liturgical notes from seminary to help me plan two weddings and a baptism coming up.
--completely blow my top when I found out that not only did the Kid get an abysmally low grade in algebra, but also he failed to give me his report card for more than two weeks (and when I asked about it over the weekend told me it hadn't come out yet). Can we say GROUNDED?

And in the larger world, I've been listening off and on to reports on demonstrations by immigrants today (Ianqui has a post on one such demonstration in NYC). The fact that some businesses (like Tyson and Perdue meat packing plants) shut down because of threatened employee absenteeism speaks volumes about the role immigrants (legal and illegal) play in our economy. NYC would not be the only place that would shut down without the hard work of immigrants.

Phantom wrote eloquently about her grandparents who came to the United States just before restrictive immigration policies were put into effect--policies that helped doom hundreds of thousands of European Jews. Even though I learned about the Holocaust in school as a child, I never learned about the US immigration policies that kept Jews attempting to escape Europe out of the US until I was teaching History of Psychology. In a good example of how social science can be badly misguided, psychologists played a role in immigration policy by pushing the notion of eugenics, and the notion (completely false) that immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were of inferior intelligence. If we allowed such inferior types in the country, so the reasoning went, and if they reproduced at a higher rate than people with more superior pedigrees, it would spell doom for the US. Of course, no one openly endorses eugenics these days, but sadly and scarily, I hear hints of the same sort of thinking when I hear laments about how our culture is threatened by large numbers of immigrants. Phantom hits the nail on the head when she says, "The best way to limit immigration [if you are worried about it] is to work to end poverty, war, and suffering wherever they are found." I would add that most of us are descended from immigrants, and that it was immigrants who built this country. I'm more than a little embarrassed and disturbed by the anti-immigrant attitude that is in the air these days.