I've been thinking about this opinion piece I just read in the Salt Lake City Tribune. Actually, it's just a letter to the editor from someone in Utah who's sick of being judged by people who think it's wrong for Americans to adopt babies from overseas. She has a lovely sister from China, and she's sure her family's choices were the right ones, but she's still tired of getting flak from people who don't agree.

Things like this confuse me. I mean, I kinda think the letter writer is correct (I would, wouldn't I?). But I'm not sure about the headline - "Judging solves nothing."

I've gotten used to the idea of challenges to my way of thinking when it comes to this project that my family has become. I think it's good to be challenged, although often it's a pain in the butt (and for whatever reason, the weird questions in public in front of Daughter seem to have subsided recently).

(And now, having said that, I just know someone's going to say, "Hey, IS SHE YOURS?" the next time we go grocery shopping together. This is the way of the jinx.)

Frankly, though, sometimes I kind of think other people are from Mars. It's not a bad thing, in itself, to be from Mars, but it makes it hard to see eye-to-eye.

An example of that of which I speak: I can't tell if Judy Alive's podcast about adopting a 31-year-old Chinese baby is awesome or not. The "31" is not a typo. It's... disturbing. Which makes it funny. But it's really disturbing.

The moral that I take from these two things (am I the only one that sees the letter and the abduction video as being two sides of the same thing?) is that life is like that sometimes. That's the expression one uses in the face of tragic absurdity, right?

If I could, I'd illustrate this post with one of the photographs of this art installation by Cai Guo-Qiang, manufactured in Quanzhou, China, because it seems thematically appropriate. 99 wolves leaping in midair and colliding with a glass wall....

Life is like that sometimes.