Mavis will save us

i'm sitting at my makeshift desk by the window - two bookshelves shoved together for a table; for a seat, the minifridge on loan from Tom, our dorm's resident priest. (comfy except every two minutes or so the thing revs up again and vibrates my butt.) kids are gone for the day - or until my mandatory class visit at 1 pm to watch them dissect rats. (ooh.)

i'm wondering: why does no one write pop secular ethics books? i mean, there are a lot of self-help books about how to make you feel better, but not that many about how to be a better person. why is it in our culture that only christians [and maybe peter singer] write comprehensible books on how to live an ethical life? i guess most novels carry implicit ideas of how to live a good life, but i mistrust my tendency to read them that way. they're art not an instruction manual... where do we atheists look for guidance? (TV?)

unrelated: in the dining hall today, a crowd of 5-year-old boys from soccer camp were lining up to go outside. i think the littluns must have chosen their own team name because as they fumbled their way into single file their instructors were shouting "i'm not going to tell you again! snakes of darkness, line up! line up!"

the moral is,
5-year-old boys = heaps of awesome.