Everyone can relax now.

I have replaced my lost $400 white gold wedding band lost to the bottom of the Tuckaseegee River in May with a $14 sterling silver one that looks almost the same from a kiosk outside the train station downtown. At last, I should be safe from the constant onslaught of advances from single women! Sorry, taken! See the ring?

I was in a good mood, having just gotten my new ring downstairs, as I went up to Vox, the teen newspaper where I volunteer, to help edit their stories. Then the two stories I worked on were about one girl who was learning to love herself after having been raped over and over for six months when she was seven by her 15 year old cousin, and another who was learning to love herself after having been pimped out for a year when she was 14, including one instance of being kidnapped and raped with a gun to her head.

The paper is frequently full of essays about girls learning to love themselves for various reasons like body image issues or being dumped or dateless or whatever, all fine reasons for girls to learn to love themselves since I suppose there couldn't be a bad reason. (There are fewer boys who write for the paper, and for whatever reason they don't seem to conclude as often that they need to learn to love themselves.) Both of these were particularly powerful and well-written and, not surprisingly given the subject matter, rather lengthy and detailed.

There's relatively little that I, as an old white guy who shows up every week or so to volunteer, can offer these girls in terms of support in their efforts to learn to love themselves, but I felt kind of bad that my particular contribution in this case consisted of hacking out big parts of the stories they wanted to tell. The one from the underage prostitute in particular was probably twice as long as there was room for, and since the paper had to go to the printer the next day there was no time to get her to cut it herself so I had to do it.

Hopefully the cuts made the stories a little more readable if not as detailed, but the young writers may not appreciate that. As a professional reporter myself, I know that every word I turn in is critically important to my stories and so any changes made are abominations to the craft of journalism. Hopefully nobody's taught them the voodoo editor vengeance rituals yet.

We were hoping to spend that evening at Manuel's Tavern watching the debate. Manuel's is an Atlanta institution for Democrats, the place where Jimmy Carter plotted his insurgent presidential run (and still stops by every once in a while) and state-level pols hang out. Bear in mind, this is still Georgia so even a big Democrat bar isn't necessarily a bastion of progressive liberalism, but we still figured it'd be as fun a place to watch the debate as any other.

I guess every other Democrat in Atlanta had the same idea, because we couldn't get within a quarter mile of the place half an hour before it started, with cars and TV satellite trucks lining every street. It was a disappointment, but a good sign for Obama in Atlanta, I guess. Now if only the entire rest of the state forgets to vote...