Farewell

     Well ladies and gents, I must bid you adieu for a short while.  I know, I know, you're wondering why the guy with unlimited spare time can't find five minutes to pen a blog post.  Laugh it up.

     Actually, I stay pretty busy in this zoo.  Full-time college and work along with church responsibilities leave me just enough time to write letters and work on my book.  I recently decided to increase my workload and will be taking a few correspondence certifications in addition to my current projects (personal training, nonprofit grantsmanship, and the like).  I'll pick this back up in several months and hope I'll find you have all behaved in the meantime.

     Prison is hard, but so is your life in the outside world.  The whole purpose of this blog is to illustrate that if I can find peace and happiness in this unforgiving environment, then surely you can find it out there.  Keep your heads up readers!  No matter how hard it gets you can find serenity.  And if you need a friend, you know where to find me:   Ephraim Miles  #254330
                                       ASPC Tucson, Santa Rita Unit, 1-B-7
                                       P.O. Box 24406
                                       Tucson, AZ 85734

     Farewell and God Bless!

Democracy

     Today as I sat in my little cell, meticulously sharpening a golf pencil with a broken safety razor, I realized I miss election season.  Seriously.  At no other time have my fellow convicts offered up a more delightful selection of outrageous opinions for me to savor.  I will never forget the epic battle in which I tragically failed to convince another inmate that the President is allowed a vote.  It seems you must fight illogic with illogic 'round these parts, and mine was sadly lacking.  

     I did win one debate however.  As I watched CNN with a friend, the commentators discussed the large number of citizens who fail to vote, leading to this:

Friend:  "Politicians should just pay a bunch of
              bums a couple bucks to vote for them...
              They probably do, huh?"

          Me:      "Uhh, probably not.  That's definitely illegal."

Friend:  "No it's not, this is a democracy - that's just
              how it works." 

Me:      "Thanks for showing me the silver lining of felons
              losing their vote." 

Friend:  "What?"  

To Be or Horology?

     Encountered a good quote by Orson Welles today:

                              

 "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed.  They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce?  The cuckoo clock."  

      Trials can smother a man with the deepest darkness.  At times life seems to punish the most sincere efforts and honorable actions, leaving reason incapable of dispersing these clouds.  I know.  I also know that by forgiving those that hurt you, and yourself, you can always get through.  This spiritual precept has carried me through a remarkable array of hard times:  crippling remorse, deaths of loved ones, serious illness, intense loneliness, and the suffocation of living in a cage.  I have found comfort in seeing that not only does good always prevail, but that if we pay attention to our trials we can extract wisdom from them.

     And I smile, knowing that when I die, I'll leave behind more than a cuckoo clock.

Math and Feminism

     I must apologize for being negligent - naturally criminally so - in my updates.  Great news:  I've completed another year of my sentence.  Three down, six to go!  You'll also be relieved to know I fared well in the recent riot - no serious injuries.

     I've been suffering a bout of scattered thoughts lately and am combatting it with my usual cure of eccentric reading.  Today I'm perusing a lovely history of Algebra and becoming duly shocked at my ignorance.  For instance, I knew of course that Descartes penned Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), but I must have dozed off the day they taught us that his Latin name was Cartesius and that our modern system of identifying points on a plane (Cartesian coordinates) was named for him.  (x,y) has a father!

     I was subsequently saddened by the lack of featured female mathematicians.  Why wasn't that a suitable profession for a young lady?  Surely there is nothing more attractive than a woman who knows her way around multidimensional geometry.

     My take on feminism?  Are women as capable as men?  Here's a fact you may have forgotten (or chauvinistically repressed):  The Little Engine That Could was a girl.  So that pretty much settles that.  

Church Ball

I've picked basketball back up lately.  It gets pretty brutal!  I'm getting used to jammed fingers and elbowed kidneys, though.  I'm kind of worried that when I get around to Elder's Quorum ball I'm going to play way to rough for them.  "No blood, no fould, Brother Jones!  Get back in the game."  I've broken two guys' sunglasses, sprained someone's ankle, and had a few post/mid-game boxing matches. But no losses yet :).  Now that is healthy fun.

Poe

I've been spending a lot of time helping Poe prepare for his G.E.D.  He's due tot take the test July 19th. He'll be ready.  Or else.  He's also really coming along with his investigation of the church.  He's read through Second Nephi, comes to church with me every week, and has agreed to be my home teaching companion.  I'm pretty excited about it.

Recently, one of his kids (he has five even though he's just 21) is barely learning to talk.  He only knows a handful of words like book and airplane.  When Poe's babies' mother brought the children to visit however, Poe thought the poor child was holding out on him.

Poe:  "Say Daddy."
Kid:  "Book."
Poe:  "Say Daddy!"
Kid:  "Book!"
Poe (frustrated):  "Daddy?"
Kid:  "AIRPLANE!!!"
Poe:  "Quit messing with me!  What do you know?"

His exasperation equals my delight.

Another Ridiculous Conversation

I overhead this beastly miscommunication while one inmate tried to covertly pass some contraband to another inmate:

1st guy:  "Grab it fool.  It's in my right hand."
              "No man, my right hand!"
2nd guy:  "That's your left hand, dawg."
1st guy:  "Nuh uh fool-I'm left handed.
               I write with dis hand, so it's my
               write-hand!  Get it out my right
               hand, dawg.  [Expletive] you dumb!"