Viewpoints

Dear Michelle Obama,

I know you're really busy right now, what with being a mom and First Lady and all. I know you and the First Fam just a got a new dog, Bo Diddley, and you must be exhausted from the Annual Easter Egg Roll last week and an ongoing tour of the federal departments to visit and thank staff. But since you're settling in and enjoying the first Hundred Days, I thought now might be a good time to talk about what I hope you will do for the country.

Danielle Distefano sits cross legged in a big, wooden chair on the reading terrace tucked inside a local library and laughs. "The first tattoo I got was a band tattoo on my stomach so my mom wouldn't see it," she smiles. "It was for this hardcore New York band Sick Of It All. I thought I was so tough."

I look down. There's a sweet girl with huge blue eyes looking at me. She says, "I can't do this." She is struggling to read the word "the". A word that seems simple to most and one that we have learned and gone over and over. I know she has to know it. I know that somewhere behind her ocean colored eyes, the word "the" is swimming in her head.

I've been in school from what feels like birth to May 2007, during which I spent progressively more and more time staring at a computer screen. It's gotten so bad now that I get up, check the weather and listen to iTunes while getting ready, then go to work and sit at a computer for 7.5 hours each workday -and sometimes 8.5 if I surf the net during "lunch," which is often- then come home and read blogs and watch movies on my laptop until I fall asleep. I mean seriously, now that I've laid it all out like this, it's painful to realize.