Quiet Night, Not-So Holy Night...

At least not with Law School Melissa in attendence! Shelly and I, en route to a quiet evening at home on a Friday despite our best efforts, received a call from Melissa. She was eager to come over and spend some time with us, thus relieving the two of us of the guilt we would have felt for not studying for our respective exams.
Arriving at 8:30pm, she sat and chatted with us for a few hours, plying us in lawyerly fashion with questions about our eHarmony experiences. Prompted by the inquisition, Shelly and I logged onto our old accounts and got a laugh out of some of our matches and the communications we initially wrote back and forth to each other. It's funny to think, with us married now, how fragile our relationship was at one time, and how easy it could have been cut off (which, Shelly pointed out to me, I gave her at least two reasons to do during the course of the eHarmony communication! Thank God she didn't!).
Once we exhausted our store of conversation subjects, we awkwardly sat staring at each other for a few moments. Panicking, seeking to salvage something of the evening, I grabbed the first DVD I could find and shoved it into the player. It turned out to be Shrek 2, a favorite of Shelly and I's and a movie Melissa hadn't seen since it came out 2 1/2 years ago. With Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy filling the void, we laughed until midnight, at which point Melissa went home.

...and Veteran's Day

That brings us to today, Veterans Day, a day we honor all the soldiers, sailors, marines, and aviators who have served and died defending this great land of ours. Though I doubt any of them will read what I'm about to write, I would like to thank all of them for the sacrifices they have made and the dangers they've faced, so those here at home don't have to. If we still lived in the DC area, it would be a perfect day to visit the National Mall and see the WWII, Vietnam, and Korean War Memorials, and remember the men who fought and died in those wars. Remember also the ones that came before, when our nation was young, and it was an even less forgone conclusion that we would win the wars we became involved in, when it was not just our prestige or livelihood on the line, but our very survival. Could our country stomach today a war to cleanse the evil of slavery from our shores, when the cost in lives reached well over half a million? What if our citizens at the beginning of the last century had reasoned 'we lost but a handful of Amerians on the Lusitania; is it worth 262,725 military causalities and 58,480 dead on the fields of Europe merely to avenge them?' Or sixty five years ago, if Imperial Japan had not in its foolish arrogance attacked us, would the giant have continued sleeping, keeping its senses deadened to acts like these? I'd like to think not, and I would like to believe that the answer is still no- that we will never as a nation believe that a war against a man with a record like this is anything other just, noble, honorable, and worth the sacrifice it will take to win.
But we will have to wait to see.