An invite to my ten-year law school reunion arrived in my e-mail today. I haven’t decided if I’m going yet. I’m still grappling with the notion that a decade has passed since I graduated. It makes me realize how ridiculously young I was at the time; not even halfway through my twenties. Taking a couple years off between college and law school might have done me some good, but I don’t have a clue what I would have done if I had stuck around Green Bay.

A friend asked me last night if I ever thought about going back to school for another degree. I might consider a Master’s in Public Administration at some point, but for now me and my solitary graduate degree are quite content.

Somewhere, John Madden is curled up in a ball and sobbing as he clutches a Brett Favre bobblehead close to his chest. Favre’s retirement comes as unexpected news to many of us Packers fans, particularly after the superb season he just completed. Some commentators are speculating that the Packers wouldn’t go along with Favre’s wish to pick up Randy Moss. That might have facilitated Favre’s hopes of winning one more Super Bowl, but it wouldn’t have served the team well in the longer term. I’m glad I had the opportunity to watch him in his last season, when he really seemed to be enjoying himself again. He brought to fruition the hopes of many long-suffering fans who hadn’t seen the Packers in the Super Bowl for three decades. We really can’t ask for anything more than that.

Who wrote The Canterbury Tales? When did the Civil War occur? What was the Renaissance? If you know the answers to these questions, you’re probably not a high school student. A recent survey by Common Core found that American teenagers are “stunningly ignorant” when it comes to humanities like literature and history. I suppose one could argue that kids don’t need to know these facts to land a job in sales or software engineering. And if we’re content to be a nation of industrious, productive, and wholly unimaginative worker bee dullards, then we should by all means limit access to liberal arts education to the wealthy elite. After all, only the rich can afford to take the time to read Shakespeare and Plato. Us proles need to learn our numbers and letters so that we can fulfill our destinies of serving the knowledgeable and informed (i.e. the ruling class).

When I was eight or nine, I had aspirations of being a hacker. I had just seen the movie WarGames, which gave the impression that hacking into top-secret government computers required little more than a computer, a phone line, and an idle afternoon. If Matthew Broderick could come this close to igniting global thermonuclear war, then surely I could cause some mischief with the Apple IIe in my parents’ basement. Maybe people would finally take me seriously if they learned that I was the one responsible for bringing down the entire Northeastern Wisconsin power grid.

My criminal ambitions were frustrated by the fact that my parents wouldn’t let me have a modem until several years later. But I always wondered what might have happened if I had gained notoriety as a hacker. Would my disability have softened any legal consequences that I might have faced? That strategy doesn’t seem to have worked out for Li’l Hacker, a teenaged phone phreaker who happens to be blind. The kid has made prank hostage calls to the police and has harassed hundreds of people across the country. He’s the target of an FBI investigation and may be prosecuted. Let this be a lesson to all of us gimps. We can get away with a lot, but we shouldn’t push our luck.

Wired Magazine is running a feature on Amanda Baggs, author of the Ballastexistenz blog. Amanda has autism and, through her writings and short videos, is working to change popular perceptions of people like herself. Here’s how Amanda sums up the message she hopes to spread:

We’re here. We’re weird. Get used to it.

The article goes on to suggest that our current view of autism as a disease might one day seem as misguided as the scientific community’s historical classification of homosexuality as a mental illness.

Without the Internet, Amanda would never have been able to spread that message and gain the attention of researchers and journalists. The disability activists of past decades could only dream of having that kind of metaphorical loudspeaker. Twenty years from now, someone should write a book about digital culture and its influence on the disability rights movement.