October is famous as Breast Cancer Awareness Month when stores are awash in pink products that often contain breast cancer causing chemicals are sold to women in an effort to fund various activities to combat breast cancer. However, I'll save that topic for next Monday. October is also Domestic Violence Awareness Month. According to The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), one in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. In addition, one in six women and one in 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape, and 1 in 12 women and 1 in 45 men will be stalked in their lifetime.

There are two values that occupy the highest places in my heart: Helping all children develop to their fullest potential, and supporting individuals in their quests to live full lives outside of the restrictive social roles that we learn from very young ages. The two values are related, but not the same.

When I engage in cardio workouts at my gym, there is nothing I like more than a mindless magazine. (Unless I run. Then I can't consume junk food for the brain because it's too hard to focus on a page while on a treadmill. If I run, I love me some mindless television, like America's Next Top Model or I Love New York.) Fortunately, my gym often offers issues of Us Weekly, InTouch, and/or People to its sweaty members for their guilty workout pleasures.

Nancy Hicks Maynard, the first black female reporter at The New York Times, a co-founder of an institute to provide training to journalists of color, and along with her husband, the first person of color to own a major city daily newspaper, died on Sunday, Sept. 21. She was only 61, but as journalism professor and BlogHer Contributing Editor Kim Pearson said in an email about Hicks Maynard, "She accomplished a lot in 61 years."

A few weeks ago, I heard rumblings that after Sarah Palin became mayor of Wasilla and fired the police chief for not providing enough support for her agenda, the police chief she hired, Charlie Fannon, changed Wasilla's policy on how evidence for rape cases were handled. The old chief included money in the budget to pay for rape kits, which are used to collect evidence from the rape victim's own body for the case. Fannon, however, decided that the victim's insurance company should be billed for the rape kit, as the taxpayers of Wasilla already shouldered too much tax burden. This would save the town somewhere between $5,000 and $14,000 per year. (Oddly, he does not seem to have proposed that the home owner's insurance of robbery victims be charged when evidence was collected during home invasion cases or that murder victims' estates be charged for the cost of gathering evidence in homicide cases.)