Thursday, February 10, 2005

Babies & Border Crossings

I found out yesterday that a girl I graduated with from MIT is four months pregnant. !?! Okay, she got married a while ago, and I knew that she wanted to have children pretty early, but still... it's a little weird. I don't know why it continually surprises me when people my age are doing things that I can't imagine myself doing at least for another 10 years, if ever. For example, when I first moved to Texas, I had three people in the space of about a week ask me if I was married. I'm 22! Who's married at 22? I have enough trouble doing adult things, like buying a car, signing a lease on an apartment, scheduling my own dentist appointment... getting married would be much more difficult. Plus, I look back on the last four or five years of my life and can't really imagine where I would have fit in getting married and pregnant. Ahh well... different priorities, I guess.

One more rant before I move on - why is it that men put their hands down their pants as if it's just another pocket? I was in a meeting this morning, sitting behind a guy who just casually stuck his hand (well, just his fingers, really) underneath his belt as he was flipping through the presentation slides. Do they not realize that this looks weird/inappropriate? Is it really that much further to reach the actual pocket in the pants? I don't get it.

Okay, end rant.

If you're wondering about the "border crossings" in the title, I saw an article in the New York Times yesterday about a pamphlet that the Mexican government produced with some advice for illegally crossing the border into the U.S. The first thing that popped into my mind was Border Crossing for Dummies. The government's rationale is that it's "simply being realistic." The best parts of the article are the quotes from the immigrants that the New York Times interviewed about their opinions on the pamphlet - apparently the government left out some key pieces of advice.

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