The Timblog

The Future Back Then

2012-02-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

It's fun to imagine what the future will be like. Usually the first thing we think of is all the technological advances-- we'll all have personal jet packs and our Flintstone vitamins will inoculate against cancer.

It's harder to imagine what kinds of social changes there will be-- what new societal problems will arise and how attitudes about certain issues will change.

These are the thoughts I've been having as I listen to a collection of science fiction short stories from 60 years ago: Earthlight and Other Stories: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, 1950-1951.

As the title states, these stories were published in the early 1950s. Some of them are very gripping with a neat twist ending. Some bring up interesting ideas I like to think about. Others are kinda lame with massive plot holes.

It's fascinating to see what Clarke's vision of the future was. In some ways he underestimates what's possible and in other ways he overestimates.

One of the main plot holes in many of the stories is that although he can envision space travel and colonies on distant planets outside our solar system, the idea of a personal communication device (i.e. cell phones) seems to be out of his grasp. So, for example, a man gets caught in the middle of a road on a planet colony when his car breaks down, but has no way to call for help. I know they had radio communication back then. Didn't Clarke think that we would advance on that front?

One of the stories is about taking a vacation on the moon. Neat idea. This story was particularly salient because it takes place "early in the 21st century." So, like, right now. Clarke way overestimates our advances when he envisions research colonies on the moon, and even people living on Mars and Venus.

But then he underestimates other things, like although they have a "long long-distance" call from the moon to Earth, they have to wait an hour for a "telegram" with travel details to arrive. Imagine what he would make of email.

What's even more interesting, though, is the social attitudes. The stories are riddled with words like "men," "man," and "mankind" to mean people and humans. Any sweeping statements about human development, technology, or space travel are reduced to "man." I guess only men contribute to civilization. It gets tiresome after a while.

In the story about the vacation on the moon, an astronomer invites his wife, daughter, and son to visit him at the moon research colony where he's staying. The attitudes are incredibly paternalistic. The parents are patronizing to the kids, and the men are patronizing to the women. The wife of the research scientist has no interest in all his science-y stuff, and he chides her-- in a jokey, patronizing way-- for not knowing about the big supernova event that's going on.

During their spaceship journey to the moon, the teenage daughter is intimidated by all the dials and buttons on the ship, while her little brother can't get enough of it. He's completely "in his element."

Later, much of the story is told from the point of view of the teenage daughter, and after she sees a pretty nebula through a moon telescope (with the help of a handsome young male astronomer), she realizes that all this science isn't just about complicated equations and calculations (boring math stuff) but something more beautiful.

She's also surprised to see all the female astronomers at the moon base, and learns that in some cases the women scientists outnumber the men! Interestingly, though, no female scientists are actually characters in the story, you just hear about them in a distant, abstract way.

So the young teenage daughter of the astronomer decides that maybe she could be a scientist herself one day. I'm sure Clarke felt like he was being very progressive, what with his idea of female scientists in the future, and he probably was for the 1950s.

But the plot hole in this story is, if there are so many female astronomers, how is it that the daughter of one is so ignorant of this fact? Why does she need a visit to the moon to realize that this career path is available to her? I would think that by the time that women are that well represented in the field, it would not be news to this presumably middle-class educated young adult. In other words, where are all these other female scientists coming from if it's so unusual?

Ironically, right after his progressive feminist passage in the story, Clarke writes a sentence about "All the planets in which men have lived." Sigh.

(I'm also guessing that "men" in Clarke's vision were all white, but that's a different story. And the idea that little daughter would naturally be interested in a young male astronomer, and not in another female... that would have been totally anathema to the world of 1950s sci fi. If the writers of these stories could see the LGBT movement today, what would they think? Alien world, indeed.)

+++++

As Jack Handy says, "We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me."

I'm not here to rag on Arthur C. Clarke's antiquated sexist world view. He's a product of his time and place. He's trying his best to stretch his his mind and imagine all that the future might hold for "man." I'm sure in 60 years my ideas will be antiquated, too.

Brain Bugs

2012-02-07T20:33:00.000-08:00

There are lots of things I'd like to be when I grow up: economist, cartographer, psychologist, David Sedaris, linguist, evolutionary biologist. I like skylines, so maybe I should throw architect in there, too.

I want his job

My latest obsession is with neurobiology and the evolution of the human brain. This is thanks to another book I read, which reinforces my love of a topic that developed when I read Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. This one is called Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives by Dean Buonomano.

As George Costanza would say, you know I always wanted to pretend to be a neurobiologist.

(Interestingly, my girlfriend's dad is a neurobiologist, sort of, or a biomedical engineer who specializes in the physiology of the eyeball, or some other interdisciplinary researchy thing that's hard to pin down.)

Like Kluge, Brain Bugs is all about how our brains evolved in a world that is very different from the world we now live in. So there are lots of things are brains do that are not very well adapted for the modern world. Buonomano calls these "brain bugs."

Not this kind of brain bug

It's a fascinating read about how:

our memories fail
our fears are irrational and outdated
we're not built for number, time, or space calculation
we're easily susceptible to advertising and suggestion
we tend toward (irrational) supernatural beliefs

Buonomano approaches all of these issues with an explanation on how the brain evolved.

But it doesn't explain why my brain is so fascinated with this kind of stuff.

Sports and TiVo

2012-01-30T18:56:00.000-08:00

Some people complain that sports aren't real-- that people get all worked up about something that has no actual affect on their lives.

Bad actor, but you get the point

But I think that sports are real in one important sense: in terms of entertainment, they are the only real true drama. If you watch a movie or TV show or play, you know that it's scripted. There's a protagonist who you know to root for and if there's not necessarily a happy ending, there's at least some redemption.

With sports, that's not the case. You truly don't know who's going to win, so you don't know whether there will be a happy ending, or redemption, or what. You cheer for someone, but they might not actually be the protagonist. You just don't know what will happen. So it's the only "true" drama we have.

This is why it's so important for people to NOT know the outcome of a game, match, race, or wiggly scrum (or whatever they call them in cricket) before they watch a sporting event. The excitement of the event is in the fact that the result is a mystery.

+++++

This point was made clear to me last week when I tried to TiVo the semifinals of the Australian Open. The live matches were aired at 2:30 in the morning local time, and because of stupid sleep and work, I was not able to watch them live. So I recorded them on my TiVo, hoping to watch them 16 hours later after work.

I tried to find an image of TiVo holding a tennis racket, but no luck. Use your imagination

The first semifinal, on Thursday morning, featured a matchup for the ages: Federer vs. Nadal in another chapter in the fierce rivalry between two of the Best Players Ever. I was very excited about this match. I was also worried that somehow I would find out the results of the match before I got home from work, either from the radio, interwebs, or co-workers. Generally, people don't talk about tennis around the water cooler like they do other sports, so I felt relatively safe. On the other hand, this is Federer vs. Nadal, the rivalry of a generation. People might talk about that.

There are LOTS of online images of "Federer vs. Nadal." I could have picked them screaming, looking fierce, playing hard, or posing in front of trophies together. I decided to go with the post-match hug instead.

In my paranoia Thursday morning, I checked my TiVo to make sure it had recorded the match, and to check some settings. (They usually replay the match later in the day, and in the event that TiVo turned off before the live match was over, I wanted to make sure it would record the second showing.) As I did that, I accidentally clicked on live TV. It showed one of the players smiling and signing the camera, something they only do when they win.

Fuck!!!

Fuckity fuck fuck fuck!!!!

In my worry that I would find out the results too early, I had sabotaged myself. I hadn't even left for work yet, and now I knew who won.

This is a first world problem, I know, but it was supremely frustrating.

I came home later and watched the match, and it was a good match with amazing points, but still, in the back of my mind I was bothered by the fact that I knew how it was going to end. There was no real drama.

+++++

Friday morning the exact same scenario would repeat itself. The next semifinal, between Djokovic and Murray, would be played at 2:30 am. I TiVoed it, and this time I didn't sabotage myself. Because of a hectic work and social schedule, Friday night was the only night all week I had off, so I planned to come home, eat dinner, and plant myself on the couch for exciting tennis action.

The plan was going great until late in the afternoon, when I received an email from the USTA (U.S. Tennis Association.) All I read was the subject line, but it was enough to send me into a fury: "Nole vs. Rafa! Exclusive Aussie Open Finals digital preview!"

Motherfucker!!

I googled "Djokovic" and the auto-fill function offered, among others, "shirtless." Why not continue with the homoerotic theme started with the hugging men above?

"Nole" is the nickname for Novak Djokovic, one of the semifinalists. This email was telling me that he had won his semifinal against Andy Murray, and would be playing Rafa Nadal in the finals. I don't even know what the USTA was advertising, and I didn't care. I never signed up for ANY email alerts from them, so I don't know why they sent me this message. I even went to my notification settings on my USTA account, and none of the "email alerts" was checked. So why the hell are they sending me solicitation emails I never asked for that reveal the winner of the match I'd TiVoed and planned to watch later?

I sent a nasty email to member services to complain, and received this quick reply: "I apologize for the inconvenience. Your request has been forwarded on to the appropriate department." Since then I've received no response whatsoever.

So, am I being unreasonable here? In this age of instant information, is it unrealistic to expect to wait 16 hours to watch a sporting event? Or is the USTA justified in sending me some promotional email advertising an event (the Finals) that was to take place in less than two days? In this age of TiVo and DVR, what's a reasonable time to wait and expect that people have already seen the match?

I don't know the answers. It's not that I couldn't enjoy the matches once I knew who would win, it just wasn't as exciting. Maybe I'm fighting a losing battle, and if I really want to enjoy a sporting event, I have to watch it live.

+++++

Speaking of tennis, I've been frustrated for a different reason lately. I'm in one of the worst slumps of my tennis career. Since last September, I've gone 2-15 in league play. And most of those 15 losses have been blowouts. I struggle to win 2 or 3 games in a set.

My latest match was a 2-6, 1-6 loss to a friendly rival. We used to have these epic long three-set matches with lots of exciting points, games, and sets. At the end we'd both be exhausted but happy for the workout and competition. I miss those epic matches.

I used to be the guy who, even if I lost, made you work for it. I'd push people to their limit. Now I'm the guy who just loses with little effort or struggle. I lose by scores like 0-6, 2-6 or 3-6, 1-6.

Granted, I've been playing in the highest league, the Gold, where the competition is a lot tougher. But still, I'm playing people I've played before and losing a lot worse. Am I playing worse or are they playing better? I don't know. I don't know how to get out of this slump. I can't explain it, and for me, not knowing what's causing a problem, much less how to solve it, drives me nuts.

I know this is a first world problem. There are a lot of things in my life that are going great. But I miss tennis. I miss being competitive.

Friday Video

2012-01-27T13:03:00.000-08:00

I came across this video and had to share. It's funny and amazing. I love the swarming monkeys and the juxtaposition of nature with human clothes/cars/toys.

And as an added bonus, here's a fun pic:

It's a cute kitten facebook pun. How often do you see one of those?

Belize!

2012-01-24T19:08:00.000-08:00

Belize was amazing-- unbelizeable!-- definitely one of the best trips I've ever had. Now I'm trying to figure out how to write (blog) about it.

For the class I took at my college, I had to submit a report of my travel experiences. Since I'm not really interested in the college credit, I could have just blown it off, but it was a fun and valuable experience to write out all my thoughts and memories of the trip. That, along with 379 pictures I took, will be a good way to preserve and capture my Belize experience.

The report I wrote for my college was 13 pages and almost 5,000 words. Way too big for a single blog post. And it was a boring diary-like account of what we did each day, with random snarky comments and observations thrown in. There are a few themes or specific experiences I could break out into different blog posts, some possibilities being:

Belize as a Hollywood set
Where chocolate comes from
Flora & Fauna
Injuries & ailments
People & Politics

The problem is I have lots of random, disjointed observations that don't really fit within larger themes. I feel like an artist who has a wonderful array of colors and wants to use all of them. But art isn't about using ALL the colors, but the right ones in the right combination.

I could just post what I wrote for my class, and break it down chronologically, devoting one blog post per day in Belize, but that could be boring.

Who am I kidding? I could make it boring either way. After posting 200 pictures (with comments) on Facebook, I'm not sure what more a blog post could add, other than bore a slightly different audience in a slightly different medium.

I'll ponder it some more. In the meantime, here are some pictures of things in trees (in Belize):

Leaf-cutter ants

Termite nest

Orchid

Monkey (w/ fruit)

Librarian

Packed Into One Year

2012-01-11T21:47:00.000-08:00

In 2011, I...

took my first cruise
visited Mexico for the first time
saw Chichen Itza, the "Vegas" of Mayan ruins
had my first "published" article since college
wrote several articles for Smile Politely, a local online magazine, including three installments about my cruise
won my first tennis tournament, and won a league also
went 8-0 in singles tennis in one of my outdoor USTA leagues (yet still couldn't beat my big brother in our annual Schreiberfest tennis challenge)
discovered new music: Ben Folds, The Book of Mormon, etc.
read at least 35 books, according to my Goodreads bookshelf
was inspired to blog about eleven different books
made several new pen pals (and Facebook friends) through blogging
went to a conference in Chicago. Realized that for the past 11 years I've lived 150 miles away from one of the most vibrant cities in the world. Made it a goal to start visiting more often.
visited Chicago at least once a month for the next eight months
attended my first Green Festival (in Chicago)
went on 6 different first dates
took a road trip to Wilmington (NC)-- hung out with my brothers and an old high school friend
visited Denver, hiked in the Rockies, saw Red Rocks for the first time
attended my first Bar Mitzvah
took on my first major lawn project: filled in the Portal to Hell in my back yard
switched to green kitty litter, started making my own granola bars, ate more greens (fell in love with arugula), and in general become a little more hippie-ish and foodie-like.
joined a second book club, created the FB page for it and became the co-organizer
organized my own (very successful) tennis league
attended my first pro tennis tournament, was spitting distance from Roger Federer (!) and countless others
had my first in-real-life meeting with a blogfriend (who lives in Germany, but we met in Chicago)
played tennis on a clay court for the first time
turned 40
threw a successful Night Before Timageddon birthday party
painted my living room (with much help)
finally got past a second date, made a new girlfriend
got to know Evanston (suburb of Chicago) and became well-acquainted with the 154-mile route between my house and my girlfriend's.
took my first trip to Belize (which I will write about soon)
a wild monkey touched me! took fruit right out of my hand

(Just got this one in, since it happened on the last day of the year.)
met dozens of new people, learned hundreds of new facts/ideas, tried new foods, read new books, heard new music, saw new sites, gathered hundreds of stories, smiled, laughed, cried, mourned, ranted, and felt joy, pain, and contentment.

For someone who thinks of himself as a slacker, that's quite a list of experiences. I may have had lots of ordinary everyday occurrences, but when you add them all up over the course of a year, it's amazing to see all that can happen.

I'm not the kind of person to make resolutions or set goals for a coming year. Because I know that, merely by living my life, I'm going to experience new things and grow in ways I can't anticipate.

I know 2012 will be no different.

Settle vs. Compromise

2011-12-27T10:32:00.000-08:00

Voice-over narration:

In a world... where single women in their late 30's/early 40's have passed up plenty of good men...

I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but feminism has completely fucked up my love life... It's not that I would give back the gains of feminism for anything... It's just that I wish I hadn't tried to apply what I believe to be 'feminist ideals' to dating. p. 43

"...I want a husband and a boyfriend!" p. 279

What's so hard to accept about loneliness and desire for connection? Is there really something wrong with our self-esteem or our values if we want someone to share the literal and metaphorical driving with? We're so worried about 'settling', but then we find ourselves unhappily "unsettled"-- living in our single-person apartments, eating takeout for dinner in front of the TV, and hoping for a guy to show up so we can 'settle down.' (p. 59)

"Since when is getting 80% considered settling?... We create these fantasy men-- he's going to have this kind of career, this color eyes, be this age. How specific can you get before you rule out almost everyone?" p. 266

"...women generally have higher expectations than men...With women, the word "butterflies" came up again and again, but guys didn't use that word. Guys would say, 'I knew this person was the right person when we'd been dating for six months and she had to go away for a week, and when she was gone, I missed her so much. I thought I felt happier when she was around. I realized how important she was.' Women talked a lot about chemistry and fireworks." p. 279.

"So which is it-- do you want exciting, or do you want comfortable? What do you want long-term?" p. 283.

"He ordered tap water. He took the subway to meet me. He didn't even take a cab at night. He's cheap." In fact he was tall and handsome and wealthy, so I just said, "He may not care about bottled water or cabs, but if they're important to you, maybe he'd understand that...These are things you can discuss if you ended up liking each other. At least go out with him again." But it rubbed her the wrong way. She wasn't into it. p. 98

"The best husbands are the ones who have these unseen qualities, the kind of things you'll see over time, like kindness, patience, generosity, and honesty." p. 195
"That's an idiotic dating strategy...He's known her a week. How does he know he wouldn't like you better?"... I tried to feel reassured by my friends' comments, but instead they made me respect Sheldon more: the thought of 'better' didn't seem to occur to him. He had no so-called dating strategy. He was an ethical guy who didn't sleep with one woman and go on a blind date with another... p. 89.

"There was a lack of correlation between what people said they wanted on the questionnaire, and what they actually picked when they met a real, live person." p. 116

It did seem hypocritical-- I wanted men to accept me for who I was, but I wasn't willing to accept them for who they were. In the past, I'd always focused on what compromises I'd have to make to be with someone else, but I didn't seriously consider the second part-- that being with me wouldn't be winning the lottery either.... Like most women, I had friends constantly telling me what a great "catch" I was, that any guy would be "lucky" to have me, and that I should never compromise when choosing a mate." p. 126

"The culture tells us to approach dating like shopping-- but in shopping , no one points out the shopper's own flaws." p. 27

I'd mention the couch metaphor, and while my younger single friends had trouble understanding why this made me so happy ("He's like an old couch!?" they'd ask), my older married friends were delighted. p. 309

"Was it love at first site? It wasn't then-- but it sure is now." Anne Meara p. 195

Anne Meara has been married to Jerry Stiller for 55 years. Incidentally, they're Ben Stiller's parents.

+++++

That is how I would organize the trailer if the latest book to capture my attention were made into a movie. The provocative title is a bit misleading: Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb.

It's not really about "settling," a word that offends a lot of people. It's just about having more realistic expectations. It's about compromise, something that everyone does, all the time, if you interact (successfully) with other human beings.

Gottlieb, a 41-year-old single mother who had a child on her own, wondered why she and so many of her friends were having so much trouble finding the right man to marry. The endless supply of boyfriends they had in their 20's had disappeared, replaced by short, balding, divorced guys in their 50's. Now they regret having let so many great guys go for shallow or trivial reasons.

As one of those guys who plenty of women passed over when I was younger, a part of me feels some vindication at reading this book. But another part of me takes it to heart. Although I'm not the exact audience for this book, I know that there's a reason I'm 40 and single. I, too, need to have realistic expectations.

This is one of those books I could write hundreds more words about, but I think I'll let the "trailer" speak for itself. There are lots of thought-provoking points, anecdotes, data, and quotes about dating, relationships, and marriage in the book. Read it yourself if that kind of thing appeals to you. Discuss.

Bad Aunt

2011-12-20T15:01:00.000-08:00

"I'm not a very good uncle."

This is a common refrain of mine. Sometimes I have to admit it sheepishly to single women who I have a crush on. It's not a very endearing trait-- being a bad uncle.

Not me

But is it true? It's not like I'm mean to my siblings' offspring. I don't insult them or beat them or tell them Santa died of a broken heart because they were wicked little urchins. My biggest offense is negligence. I just don't really take much interest in them.

One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said. "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late. -- Jack Handy

Also not me

I've always thought this makes me a bad uncle because every childless single woman I know absolutely dotes on her nephews and nieces. They can't wait to spend time with them, take tons of pictures of them, smother them with presents and auntly love.

Me... not so much. I'll be there for the occasional baseball game, school play, cross-country meet, or birthday, but compared to my single childless female friends, I'm as active in my siblings' children's lives as a neighborhood dog.

But I realized something recently. Not living up to my female friends doesn't necessarily make me a bad uncle, all it makes me is a bad aunt.

I can live with that.

Innovative Disagreements

2011-12-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

I've been roped onto a committee at work in charge of planning a staff development activity for our division.

The topic? INNOVATION!!

I suggested to the other committee members that instead of doing the same boring thing we always do, like hiring a monolithic speaker, we do something different like show fun, varied, and educational Youtube videos (1-3 minutes each) to illustrate the different ways people approach innovation.

The response from one of the committee members? "But we're supposed to hire a speaker!"

The irony was not lost on me: A committee in charge of presenting INNOVATION was resistant to a new idea.

I collected about 15 different videos on Youtube, and many of them emphasized how corporate culture crushes innovation because people are afraid to be wrong or make mistakes.

+++++

Have you ever been in a meeting with someone who seems to be your exact opposite? Like, every idea you have they shoot down, and vice-versa?

That's what this meeting felt like. She thought my ideas were boring. I thought hers were.

One video in particular I thought was really clever and insightful:

She said it was boring and stopped watching halfway through.

It's four minutes long. Four minutes! And it has cool drawings and interesting ideas about creativity and sharing and collaboration. And turtles!! Who doesn't like that?

It's not actually turtles doing it, but two "slow hunches" joining together for a new idea. Still... they look very happy.

Maybe I'm a nerd.

But I don't think it's too much to ask that people who work AT A COLLEGE get interested in diverse presentations and be open to a free exchange of ideas, which is what the video itself is talking about.

+++++

This story does have a happy-ish ending. My colleague/nemesis did come up with some good ideas that seemed in the spirit of innovation. We were able to compromise in a way that made most of us happy, I think.

For our upcoming staff development we'll still show some videos and do other activities that may or may not fall flat.

And we all learned a valuable lesson about teamwork, sharing, and corporate platitudes.

Most importantly, we learned this:

Library Enforcer

2011-12-07T19:17:00.000-08:00

When I got to work Monday morning, I wondered what the over/under would be on the number of times I'd have to ask students to turn down the music on their headphones this week. I put it at 15.

It's a part of my job that I hate, but even more than that, I hate having to listen to that tinny, chirping beat emanating out of their ears from 30 feet away. People may be having a conversation at the same decibel level, but that doesn't bother me like the headphone music does. It's like a bee buzzing around your face. And really, if I can hear something buried in your ear from that far away, IT'S TOO LOUD! (This is not a big brother thing. I don't give a damn about your hearing. I just don't want to have to listen to your tiny music in the library.)

Toronto Transit agrees with me.

So I tap them on the shoulder, make eye contact, and do the universal sign for turning down the volume-- twisting my thumb and forefinger around an imaginary knob. When they remove the headphones and look at me, I say with a smile on my face, "Could you turn that down a little? I can hear it all the way over there." And point over to my desk.

They might get annoyed or embarrassed or incredulous, but they all comply. Sometimes they ask, "You can hear that?" as if I am some super human with canine hearing. Yes, sadly, I can. And I get really tired of having to ask people to turn down their music, but if I didn't do it, the library would be overrun with competing headphones blaring from every direction.

+++++

The only other policing I have to do in the library is about food. Since our library renovation, we now have an upstairs lounge with vending machines where people can eat and drink. But the main floor, with the computers and computer lab, is still off-limits for eating.

Not our sign, but I wish it was.

So when I see someone with food at a computer, I have to ask them to take it upstairs to the 2nd floor.

Which is what happened today. A student walked past my desk on her way to the lab with a (personal-sized) pizza she'd just bought at the campus Subway.

"Um, I'm sorry, but there's no eating in the computer lab," I tell her. She says, "Okay, I'm just going to put it in my bag." I'm not crazy about this idea, but what can I do? If she really puts it in her bag, she's not eating it.

Twenty minutes later, I go into the lab to attend to the printer, and what do I see? Pizza Girl, with the pizza box in front of her, chewing on something. (The pizza box is closed.) I say, "I told you there's no eating in here, and I see you eating. You'll have to take that upstairs."

She argues with me. "I'll put it in my bag and won't eat any more. I'm not hurting anyone." She's working on a group project with some other people. "I've been here since 10:00 this morning." (It's about 3:00 pm.)

"I understand that," I say, "But there are places on campus where you can eat and places where you can't."

I leave the room, fuming. The pizza in the room bothers me, but worse than that is the fact that SHE LIED TO ME. When she did that, she made this a power struggle, and now I have to be an asshole and call her on it. I'm not hurting anyone, she says. But she is. She's hurting me.

She's forcing me to defend a policy that, while I agree with it, certainly brings up some grey areas. A water bottle? Yeah, okay, I'll look the other way on that. But a fucking pizza? In the computer lab? I can't ignore that. I'm not in the mood to get into a policy debate over why we don't allow food in the library. It's been debated by faculty, staff, and administration for years. The decision was made. I'm enforcing that decision.

Two minutes later I go back into the lab. The pizza box is still sitting there, closed, while she works. I tell her, "Look, I can smell the pizza in the room. If someone else comes in and smells that, they get the wrong impression. You need to take it out."

She continues to try to argue with me, but thankfully, the guy she's working with is very reasonable and says they'll leave. He's polite and asks about the lounge area upstairs. (Unfortunately there are no computers up there.) Finally they pack up all their things and leave, and he apologizes for causing trouble. I'm thankful that he was there, or the situation might have escalated.

I came away from it feeling like the trollish little nazi who kicked some diligent students out of the library.

But seriously... pizza in a public computer lab? Isn't that common sense?

Things I Want You To Know About Eva Gabrielsson's Book

2011-12-01T11:34:00.000-08:00

Stieg Larsson wrote some great books, and like the main character in his Millenium/Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, Mikael Blomkvist, he was a tireless activist, leftist, feminist, and overall muckraker. According to his widow, Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson was not the same person as his alter ego, but Blomkvist was the journalist Larsson wished he had been.

Stieg

That's one interesting thing I learned from Gabrielsson's book, "There Are Things I Want You To Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me.

Sadly, the book is more interesting as a primary source than as a literary work. The writing is as tortured and confusing as the title. It brings up more questions than it enlightens. Like, why are the first eight words of the title in quotes?

It's hard for me to get a handle on the tone of the book. I wanted to like her, and I really want to feel for her. She was Larsson's companion for 32 years. They never had kids or got married, but lived together for 30 years. When he died suddenly (of a heart attack at 50 years old), just before the first of his three (already written) books was published, she was not only left without the primary presence in her life, but it also lead to a dispute over his estate and the rights to his works with his father and brother.

Eva

I can't imagine how devastating and heartbreaking his sudden death must have been for her. And it sounds like his father and brother betrayed her and Stieg, trying to capitalize on the work of someone who, although closely related by blood, they did not understand very well. Because Larsson and Gabrielsson never married, she didn't get the rights to his works.

Brother and father Larsson. I have to admit, it's hard to look at this picture and imagine evil greedy Swedes.

It's a messy, complicated situation.

And yet, there are things about "There Are Things I Want You To Know..." that just bug me. It seems to ramble in lots of different directions, address questions I never had, as if she is responding to a heckler I can't hear. As if she's presenting a case to a jury, but we're only hearing half the conversation. There's a defensive, secretive, disjointed tone that you often get from crazy people.

Let me stress here: I don't know any of these people. I don't know Stieg, I don't know Eva, I don't know his father or his brother. All I have to go on is what Eva's written in her book. I obviously defer to her about what Stieg was like and what he would have wanted. And it's certainly within the realm of possibility that his father and brother are greedy relatives who just want to cash in on his work. I'm just saying that the narrator of her book comes across, sometimes, as an unreliable character. She puts details in the book that seem irrelevant, and then leaves out things that seem important.

She writes a lot about how their life together influenced his crime novels. She lists people, places, and things from his real life that appear in the books. She stresses all the things from the books that she has a personal connection to, as if to tell the jury, "See? I was important! He made a reference to me here, and here, and here!"

But one big question she never addresses, one I kept having, was Mikael Blomkvist's relationship with Erika Berger, an unusual but very close "open relationship" with a married woman. How much of that was fiction? Blomkvist is a commitment-phobe who gets a lot of women, but Gabrielsson never addresses this side of Larsson's alter ego in her book. It is a conspicuous omission. As if she is saying, "There are things I don't want you to know about Stieg Larsson and me."

And then there are the strains of anger and revenge throughout the book. Gabrielsson has a disturbing fixation on revenge. Granted, she says this is how Stieg was, and in that, I'll defer to her. She even goes so far as to perform an ancient Norse revenge ritual on some mysterious enemy of Stieg's, whom she never names, nor does she explain what heinous thing this person did. It's a bizarre chapter and makes for bad writing. Someone did something horrible, and they knew who they are, so let me tell you in detail about the ritual I performed.

I understand that she objects to the Stieg Larsson industry that has cropped up since his death. It seems to go against so much of what he stood for, and that must be painful for her. I'm sympathetic. On the other hand, I'm torn, because if it weren't for that industry, I might not have been exposed to his books, which I really enjoyed.

If nothing else, Gabrielsson's book has piqued my curiosity. I have to admit I haven't read anything else about this story, or even reviews of her book, before writing this post. I could be missing lots of stuff. Now I'd like to read what other people have written about Larsson, to see what a good writer and real journalist has to say about the situation. (There are a surprising number of biographies about him. The story behind his books seems almost as amazing as the ones he wrote.) I accept that, as Eva says, these people never knew Stieg, but maybe she is simply too close to him to present a coherent story.

Black Friday Fits

2011-11-29T19:58:00.000-08:00

I can't believe it's been three years since I last wrote about my utter bafflement over the phenomenon that is Black Friday. Back then, a man was trampled to death by a horde of shoppers.

Instead of that horrible incident serving as a wake-up call for more reason and restraint in the world of mob consumerism, Black Friday has only gotten worse.

Several horrifying stories have come out this year, the most notable the one about the lady who pepper-sprayed fellow shoppers in order to get a video game.

I can't say much more about this than I did three years ago, but Stephen Colbert had some brilliant quips about it.

The Colbert Report

Stephen says Black Friday is the day when Americans "wake from their tryptophan-induced coma to trade gluttony for greed."

We are

spending money we don't have on things we don't need to give to people we don't like.

I'll buy that.

Haxcellent Advice

2011-11-23T00:08:00.000-08:00

I have a new favorite advice columnist. Her name is Carolyn Hax, and she writes for the Washington Post. I don't think her column even has a name, but I absolutely love how she cuts through the bullshit and zeros in on the issue.

Here's a great example:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/whats-behind-the-reluctance-to-live-together/2011/10/23/gIQA52r1mM_story.html

Dear Carolyn: I have been dating a wonderful woman for a year, exclusively for six months. We are both 24. Our relationship is built on solid friendship; I love her fully and unconditionally.

I have reached a point in my life that I want to get married and begin a family. She makes me happy on every possible level and I could not think of a better teammate. Recently we have cooled off physically, and I attribute that to the end of the “honeymoon stage.”
I’m sure it is only my self-consciousness, but I fear the cooling down will continue beyond the normal leveling that I expected. I am fully committed to her, and she to me. We trust each other 100 percent. When I make comments about marriage and growing old together, she agrees that she also wants these things. However, when I have suggested that we move in together, she shuts me down.
She spends 90 percent of her time at my place. It makes financial sense and I believe we would both be happier. She claims she fears judgment from friends and family because we haven’t been together long enough to warrant their acceptance.
I find these sentiments to be petty and childish, and that is not her personality. She is the strongest person I know. We are adults. We know what is best for us. I fear she is being less than forthright but I do not want to accuse her of being deceptive. She has given me no reason to doubt her sincerity to date.
I have attempted to ask questions like, “Are you sure that is the only reason you are apprehensive?” and she tells me she is sure and drops the subject.
Am I worrying unnecessarily? Or is her hesitation to take the next step in a relationship that has been beautiful and fulfilling from day one a clue that she is not ready for these things? — Worried she won’t grow up

Carolyn's reply:

First: Stop busting her chops about moving in with you. She’s not ready. That’s fine.
Next: “I love her fully and unconditionally”; “happy on every possible level”; “We trust each other 100 percent”; “She is the strongest person I know”; “We know what is best for us”; “Beautiful and fulfilling from day one.”
Um. What if she makes a mistake? A sloppy, impulsive, hurtful, consequential cuss-up of distinctly human proportions?
Will you reconsider your entire opinion of her? Will you blame her for that? Will you believe she owes it to you to return to idealized form (i.e., “grow up”)?
There’s a fine line between thinking someone is perfect for you, and needing them to be perfect. It’s appreciating someone’s good qualities vs. refusing to accept the bad ones. Over that line is where most controlling behavior starts, and it’s a fine enough line that people who cross it rarely see when they do.
So please dismantle your pedestals — smash them — and worship the truth instead. She is flawed. You are flawed. The relationship is flawed.
To get you started: Your relationship hasn’t been all that since day one; you dated other people for months. Which is fine! And, you don’t know what is best for you; you know some things and guess at others, like anyone else. Which is fine! And she’s not the strongest person you know, given her immature living-together response. Which is fine! She’s 24, human, and you’re not the strongest person you know, either.
And: You don’t trust her “100 percent” — which is fine, since absolute trust is fiction — and even you don’t believe she makes you happy on every possible level. You’re plainly doubting her on legitimate fronts: sex, maturity, maybe even honesty.
The only way you’ll be able to weigh those issues rationally is if you accept that pan-happiness doesn’t exist. Here or anywhere.
Accordingly, finding someone good isn’t about finding someone with zero (or fixable) shortcomings; it’s about finding someone whose strengths elevate you, and whose shortcomings don’t aggravate yours or preempt what you want out of life.
That means you do need to trace the origin of her concern about appearances. Does she actually guide herself by them, or is she too . . . scared? dishonest? . . . to admit her real concern about moving in?
You can’t learn who she is if all you do is dance around the issue with “Are you sure?”-type feelers. Again — don’t press her to move in. Simply spell out your frustration with her answer and ask what’s behind it.
Then, most important: Be someone who can hear a difficult truth without making the truth-teller pay. If your response to bad news is to punish, withdraw or obsess — if your mind receives every outbreak of humanity as cognitive dissonance — then you’ve got important emotional work to do before you have any business committing to somebody else. The strength of a relationship isn’t in its proximity to perfection. It’s in finding intimacy and peace.

"worship the truth instead." Can she throw down some advice, or what?

++++

And recently a friend sent me this video from my other favorite advice columnist, Dan Savage, who has similar advice on perfectionism in relationships, which he calls The Price of Admission:

++++

What would I do without my advice gurus?

Knowledge vs. Intelligence

2011-11-20T15:04:00.001-08:00

Here is my one-question IQ test: does reading the entire encyclopedia automatically make you smarter?

If you answer yes, then you're not very smart.

If you answer no, then you at least understand the difference between knowledge and intelligence.

++++

This question comes courtesy of a fun but sometimes annoying book I'm reading: The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs.

Over the course of a year Jacobs reads the entire Encyclopeadia Britannica from A to Z: thirty volumes and 33,000 pages. He then writes about his quest in bite-sized chunks of interesting, funny, and trivial facts he learns as he works his way through the alphabet.

I appreciate his project. As a fellow trivia nerd, I think it's a cool and noble goal. Certainly better than, say, building the loudest car stereo or eating a 25-pound burger.

What I find annoying is how Jacobs is obsessed with being "smart," and he thinks the way to do it is to cram his head with facts. Being smart and knowing a lot of stuff often go hand in hand, but that's correlation, not causation. (A concept smart people understand.)

I don't know if it's just his shtick-- playing dumb and going for the cheap laugh rather than showing off his intellect-- but time and time again throughout the book, Jacobs illustrates how having all this knowledge does not make him particularly smart. He focuses so hard on trivialities that he fails to see the big picture.

For example, it irritates him that the logo for Rene Lacoste's brand of tennis shirts is described as an alligator, even though his nickname when he played was The Crocodile. Which one is it on the shirt, Jacobs asks, an alligator or a crocodile? Now, a smart person would get that the two animals are similar enough, and a logo is crude enough, that there's really no difference.

Is it a boy or a girl? How old? Have long ago did it eat?

But Jacobs starts his own journalistic investigation, calling the company and such, to get to the bottom of it. When one source says an alligator and another source says a crocodile, he is greatly distressed. What he doesn't consider is that the people themselves might not care or understand the difference between two similar animals. A smart person would understand that people often use the wrong words.

This is a theme that pops up a lot in the book. What Jacobs doesn't seem to consider is that knowledge itself is fluid. There's often not a clear definitive answer, but lots of different competing theories or interpretations. He has an almost pathological respect for the writers of Britannica, as if they are the final arbiters of all facts. If he really wanted to show how smart he is, he would illustrate his understanding of bias and where knowledge comes from. The world is complicated. The smarter you are, the messier knowledge becomes.
To be fair, it's possible that Jacobs understands all this. His book is popular literature, not an academic treatise. His whole "smart person" angle could just be a marketing gimmick. And he does bring up some insightful ideas about the process of reading the entire encyclopedia. The book is part memoir, and he does a good job of threading his own life through the new things he's learned. For example, throughout the year he and his wife are struggling to get pregnant, so entries that deal with stuff like gametes or fertility or reproduction, for example, get particular attention.

I do admire Jacobs for having the stamina to finish a project like this. I know I couldn't. I'm a slow reader and it takes me forever to read something-- even exciting novels that I really get into. I don't know how Jacobs could possibly read, pay attention to, and absorb 33,000 pages of dry encyclopedia entries. (Which I calculated is 90 pages a day for a year.)

+++++

Part of the problem might be that I'm listening to part of the book on an audio CD during my commute. The guy who's reading the book? He's very... shticky, like a bad comedian delivering lines in emphatic and excited tones. And the voices are just too much. Whenever he's quoting someone who's not the author, he'll adopt a terrible accent. His French or German accent sounds like a drunk frat boy at a party trying to imitate a foreign professor. He tries to sound haughty and British when he quotes the Britannica himself. The accents are so bad as to be distracting, so I end up not understanding a thing he says. It's annoying.

I got both the book and the CD from the library, which is an interesting experience in itself. I'll listen to some of it, then find the place in the book where it left off, and start reading again.

This process is complicated by the fact that the audio CD I got is abridged. I hate hate hate abridged audio books. It makes me angry to even know they exist. But I didn't realize this one was abridged until I started switching back and forth from it to the book, and noticed that lots of entries were missing. WTF?!?

If it were any other book, I would have immediately stopped listening to the odious abridgement. But with a book like this, with lots of bite-sized entries that don't necessarily advance a plot, I think I can pull it off.

It's not as impressive as reading the entire Britannica. But then again, my blog isn't nearly as impressive as his book.

Lost in Stinky Decatur

2011-11-16T18:55:00.000-08:00

I needed to go to the Decatur Conference Center for a work thing. So I typed "decatur conference center, decatur il" into Google maps and asked for directions.

It gave me an address and clear directions to it from my house. I printed them out, including a map of the Decatur area where I was going, in case there were some complications. It looked pretty straightforward, as Google Maps directions usually are.

So I left early, followed the directions, and got to the location early enough to allow for any unforeseen complications. As I got off the exit and drove through Decatur, I mused at what a gross, depressed city it was. Near my destination I passed a huge-ass factory.

Isn't Google Maps' webcam amazing?

I have no idea whose factory it is or what it makes. All I know is that it was huge and belched lots of smoke (from several different orifices) into the gray Decatur sky.

As I got closer to my destination, I noticed a stench that was inhuman. It vaguely smelled like a fast food restaurant, but only if you took all the good smells out of it. I know that doesn't make sense, but that's how it felt. Take whatever unpleasant smells come out of a processed burger, fries, and a coke, mix them together and magnify it by 1000. That's what it smelled like.

I put one and one together and assumed that the smell was coming from the factory. There were houses (and even a park) nearby and I thought, "Do these people have to live with this smell all the time?"

But I had other things to worry about. Namely, finding my destination. I knew at some point I was supposed to turn left into the conference center parking lot. But when I came to that point where I needed to turn, this is what I saw:

Not only was it impossible to turn left, there was no sign of the conference center. Was it behind those trees? I kept driving, thinking that maybe the map had misjudged where to turn. The center must be somewhere around here, I thought.

I drove around and around. Three blocks down the road, then back, then circled the area where the map said the center was supposed to be. I drove through a park. Onto a road called Lake Shore Dr, which I thought was funny, since I've recently spent a lot of time on another Lake Shore road-- the one in Chicago. This one in Decatur was less impressive.

I drove around a neighborhood, cursing the whole time. WTF, Google Maps? Where is this damn conference center? There were a few buildings around the park, like this:

Is that the conference center? I asked snarkily. I parked outside this building. I don't have a smart phone, so I couldn't consult any web sources. I tried to call people at my work, but no one was answering the phone.

Finally, I swallowed my pride and asked a local man. He said that the conference center was on this same road, but on the complete other side of town. I would have to drive all the way through town to get there.

Both of these locations are the conference center, according to Google Maps. Same address, same name, but they're 6.2 miles away.

WTF, Google Maps? I've had small issues with using web map directions before, but nothing of this epic FAIL proportions. What could it possibly have been thinking?

But that's the problem. It doesn't think. It's just a computer program, and in this case it couldn't interpret 4191 US 36 West.

As I drove to the correct location for my meeting, and showed up about 15 minutes late, I pondered who was at fault for this snafu. Was there something I should have done differently? Was I negligent in letting Google Maps tell me where to go?

What did people do before there were online mapping tools? Twenty years ago I surely would not have been expected to look up the address of a conference center in another city and find the directions on my own? No, whoever organized the conference would have sent me directions. In this case, they didn't even send me an address. All they said was "Decatur Conference Center." And in this day and age, that should suffice.

But it didn't.

++++

If you're dying to hear about the elusive Decatur Conference Center, it's about as impressive as it sounds. Which is: not very. On their website they claim to be "down-state’s largest conference center and hotel." I think about the best thing it has going for it is its central location. After my adventure in finding the place, it was also hard to find my way around inside it. The signage was spotty and the place looked pretty run down.

Even their website is cheap and hard to navigate. They don't list any directions, or even an address, that I could find easily.

So I think I'll blame them for the Google Maps FAIL.

Cross Examination

2011-11-07T21:03:00.000-08:00

When I was in the 8th grade, I had to read To Kill a Mockingbird for school.

The book was okay, and I don't remember a whole lot about it, but one thing I vividly remember is how excited I got when the trial started and the defense attorney deftly picked apart a witness' testimony. He asked probing questions, logically deconstructed the witness' claims, presented conflicting evidence, and caught them red-handed in a lie. It was my first experience with that kind of rhetorical chess match, and I was heady with excitement.

I had fallen in love with logic.

To this day I still love those kinds of court room scenes in movies and books where an attorney gets someone to admit something that seems innocuous, gets them to verify it again and again, only to use their own words against them. There's something so powerful and compelling about catching someone in a logical fallacy or an outright lie.

Above all, I love truth. And I love it when people can extract truth in clever and intelligent ways, especially from those trying to hide or deny it.

+++++

So I am absolutely loving the climax of the Stieg Larsson Millenium trilogy. I'm at the end of the third book, and Lisbeth Salander and her lawyer are using brilliant logic and cross examination to catch all the mean, evil bastards in their own lies and smoke screens. I'm listening to the audio book during my commute to work, and every day I can't wait to get in my car to hear what's going to happen next.

It is the culmination of three books' worth of intrigue, machinations, and people trying to out-think each other. The main character, Mikael Blomkvist, is a reporter who values research, doing your homework, and evidence to prove his claims.

As a librarian, I like that kind of hero.

Jokes That Blow Your Mind

2011-10-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

I love this cartoon.

And I love it on a much deeper level than you do.

Because I'm about to get all nerdy and deconstruct this joke. To me, it's about so much more than just Kermit having a hand up his wazoo. In fact, when I first heard about it, I did a Google image search for it, and I found two alternate captions for it. Here's the other one:

This one, while still funny, doesn't quite have the impact of "this will change your life forever."

That's what makes this joke so incredibly clever to me. It brings up this image of Kermit going about his life, interacting with people and the world around him, making assumptions about the nature of his existence, all the while there is a shocking truth just below the surface.

Are you really sure you want to know it?

Is Kermit ready for his life to be turned upside down? For everything that he thought was true to be challenged? That's some serious shit.

Not easy being green, indeed.

+++++

As I've written before, I'm fascinated by books and movies that are about ideas, things that make me imagine a world or reality that's different from my own. That's why the Kermit joke is so cool to me.

The latest book I read for one of my book clubs is like that.

Before I Go To Sleep, by S.J. Watson, is about a woman with memory problems. It's not a new idea. In fact, the book is a perfect combination between two movies, 50 First Dates and Memento.

It's like 50 First Dates in that the main character wakes up every morning with no memory of who she is. As the result of an accident, she has no memories of the past 20 years, so every day her husband has to remind her who she is, who he is, and why she can't remember.

Unlike 50 First Dates, which is a romantic comedy with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, this book has more sinister overtones. The main character becomes suspicious that her husband is hiding things from her, so she starts writing things down.

It turns into a race to see if she can figure out the mystery every day before she goes to sleep and her memory gets erased again.

The book brings up all sorts of questions about memory and identity. It's a fun and fascinating read with a nice twist ending.

Reading the book is not quite like discovering you have a skeleton hand controlling your brain, but it might make you think.

Police Brutality or Bad Propaganda?

2011-10-26T21:02:00.000-07:00

A lot of my liberal friends have what I consider to be an unhealthy distrust of authority. Anyone who makes, supports, or enforces rules is "the man" and can't be trusted.

I don't trust or distrust people in authority any more than anyone else. I question authority, but no more or less than I question anyone else. My philosophy is: treat everyone with respect, regardless of their position, and expect it in return.

Not everyone shares this attitude. Some people bristle when they encounter a police officer and make assumptions that it's someone who gets off on power. Someone who will abuse that power if given the chance.

To be fair, they might come by it honestly. Maybe they've had personal encounters where the police abused or disrespected them. I've been fortunate enough not to have experienced that. What I do know is that time after time after time, people get in trouble not for their initial transgression, but how they respond to authority.

+++++

Above all, I value the truth. So when I see a story like the one I read in Smile Politely today, it bothers me. Because the whole thing just smelled fishy and sensational, starting with the headline: "Local activist's son beaten by Champaign police." The article recounts the story of Calvin Miller, an 18-year-old black kid who ran from police when they tried to stop him, and in the ensuing scuffle, got roughed up.

As it's written here, it's not a news story, but propaganda. Lots of facts of the case are obscured or downplayed. There's no effort whatsoever to tell both sides of the story. Photos of the teen with a swollen eye and on crutches are there to elicit an emotional response. There are so many holes in the story, so many unanswered questions it brings up, that I was more suspicious of the teenager's story after I read it. Which makes it not only propaganda, but bad propaganda at that.

According to the story:

A cop tried to pull Calvin over for "no apparent reason." How does he know that? He didn't stop, so there's no way to know whether there was a legitimate reason or not.
"...he walked into the courtroom with crutches. His right ankle was sprained, maybe fractured." How exactly does one hurt their ankle while they're being beaten by police? I've hurt my ankle many times, and it's always a result of me running or jumping. How is this evidence of a police beat-down?
"...the vehicle he was driving ran into the porch steps of a house..." Notice how this sentence implies that the vehicle itself was the agent of action, not the driver.
"The officer turned on his lights. Close to his mother’s house, Calvin kept driving with the hope he could make it there." What was he hoping to accomplish by driving to his mother's house? Did he think the police would stop their pursuit once he got there?
"After a couple blocks, he turned into a residential driveway on Arcadia. The police officer rammed him with his squad car, causing the car to lurch forward into the porch steps." First of all, why this house? Wasn't he trying to get home? And the story about the police car lurching his car forward into the porch? This lessens his credibility. Not only is this an outlandish account, but it shows how much he's trying to deflect responsibility.
"Calvin got out of the car and started to run toward his house. Police told him to stop and Calvin says he responded by getting on the ground." Why run? Then, why stop?
"Calvin put his hands up over his head, but the cop kept beating him, injuring him on his forehead, eye, and jaw. He rolled over onto his stomach and was placed in handcuffs. Lieb pepper sprayed Calvin directly in his face while he was handcuffed." I wasn't there, and neither was the writer of this article, so this is all speculation, even though it's written as fact. I'm pretty sure the cops will have a different account of things. What we do know, which is undisputed by both accounts, is that Calvin has already, prior to this moment, fled from the police twice (once in the car and once on foot.)
"He was then placed under arrest. Calvin was taken to Carle Hospital which failed to conduct any tests or even wash the pepper spray out of his eyes." I don't know how these situations work. But what kinds of tests is the hospital supposed to conduct? Is it standard procedure to wash pepper spray out of eyes? Is that possible? Again, I don't know the answers, but the way it's phrased makes it sound suspect to me.
"Calvin has no criminal background, but remains scared of the police." I don't doubt that. But how does running from them make the police any less scary? It seems this whole situation could have been avoided if he had not let his fear take over in the first place.

It's not that I support the police brutalizing a young teen. What I object to is the article itself, and how it makes an assumption (local police are thugs) and then does everything it can to push that agenda. There's no nuance or complexity. No respect for the complex issues involved in this case. No balance. No fairness. And it does everything it can to push emotional buttons, like showing pictures of Calvin on crutches or with a swollen eye.

These were all my reactions from reading the Smile Politely article alone. This was before I saw the News Gazette account of the story, which filled in some of the holes and directly disputed some of Calvin's claims. For example, police said they tried to stop Calvin after they saw him speed out of a parking lot, run over a curb, and run a red light at 1:30 in the morning. That doesn't sound like "no apparent reason" to me.

He jumped out of a moving vehicle-- which then slowly drifted into a porch-- and fled from police on foot. He jumped a fence and then was tackled by police. They wrestled him down and sprayed him with pepper spray. It sounds like his ankle problems were most likely caused by running from police and jumping a fence. Does injuring yourself as you run away count as police brutality? (As the Smile Politely article implies?) It seems entirely possible to me that the injuries he sustained-- a swollen eye and a bruised forehead-- could easily be explained by pepper spray and being tackled. It's not evidence that "police beat the crap out of a black kid", as one commenter of the Smile Politely article asserts.

+++++

There are other issues involved here. The local African American community doesn't trust local police, and there are many stories of the police using excessive force. A few years ago an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by police. In that situation, as in this one, the kid panicked when he felt police were harassing him without cause. I tend to be very rule oriented, so it's hard for me to empathize when people don't follow the rules. One rule that I would think would be obvious is, "Don't run from police." On the other hand, if you've grown up feeling like the rules don't exist for you, don't protect your interests, I can understand not having respect for them.

I'm sympathetic, and I wish the police could do better community outreach to make the African American community feel safe. I'm not one of those racist pricks who thinks that these kids get what they deserve and it's evidence of moral decay among the blacks. I'm not going to use the phrase "black privilege" that one commenter on the SP article does to provoke racial tensions. We need solutions, not antagonism.

Which is why the Smile Politely article bothers me. It doesn't constructively build bridges, it's just trying to stoke racial unrest by implying that the police are racist thugs. It encourages the attitude that we should fear and distrust the police. And because it is so blatantly one-sided, it makes me question the credibility of the "victim" of what may or may not be a case of police brutality.

However you might interpret the incident with Calvin Miller, can't we at least agree that running from the police is a bad idea? That he made a potentially routine traffic stop way worse than it had to be? If you believe the local police are abusive, you're only inviting trouble if you antagonize them. Does Miller really believe that if he had simply pulled over when the cops turned on their lights, he would have been "beaten" by them? Does anyone? We'll never know, and because of that, his allegation of police brutality is a lot weaker.

Calvin Miller's father is a local activist who has "consistently appeared at city council meetings reporting on the brutality of the Champaign police," the Smile Politely article says. In the News Gazette article, the local state's attorney said that when she interviewed Calvin, he said his father had told him not to stop for police and call him if he's followed. I can't imagine feeling that much distrust and fear about authority figures. In a way, it seems that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Calvin was afraid of being beaten by police, so he ran from them, which resulted in him being beaten. (Or sustaining injuries, depending on which story you believe.)

We may never know what exactly happened. Even if there were 14 cameras recording the entire incident, I'm convinced you'd still have people arguing over what each frame proves. On the left you're still going to have people screaming police brutality and on the right you will have people saying this dangerous black kid got what he deserved.

It's more complicated than that. Let's be reasonable and try to solve the problem. It's not easy being a police officer, and it's not easy being a member of an oppressed group that has a legitimate historical fear of authority figures.

In Defense of Food

2011-10-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Those are the seven words that Michael Pollan uses to boil down the contents of his "eating manifesto," In Defense of Food, which is kind of a sequel to The Omnivore's Dilemma.

The Omnivore's Dilemma had a profound effect on my life, and after reading it I joined the local co-op and started cooking more, using more organic local ingredients.

I'm pretty sure In Defense of Food will continue this life-changing trend. What I like about the book is not so much the practical advice of what to eat, but the emphasis on changing our relationship to food and eating.

Pollan draws a clear line between "nutritionism,"-- breaking food down into its nutrient parts-- and, well, eating.

Eating is about culture, not nutrition. And back when people looked at food as a way of life-- rather than a delivery system for protein and vitamins and amino acids and saturated fats and antioxidants and Omega 3 fatty acids-- they were healthier. When we obsess about all those nutrient parts, we lose site of the big picture, which is food.

Food: how many ingredients are listed on these packages? Oh, right, there are no packages!

This idea of nutritionism reminds me of those old science fiction visions of the future where people would eat whole meals from a pill. Is that where we are headed? Do we want to be?

Pill on a plate: looks delicious!

The advice to "eat food" may sound silly, but Pollan considers most of what you buy at the supermarket today not food, but "food-like products."

Not food

We process food, which removes their nutrients, and then artificially stuff them with the nutrients they lost. This doesn't work. Despite our fixation on nutrition, this "Western diet" has proven again and again that it's not healthy for our bodies. Diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, obesity. There are a slew of ailments that skyrocket in a population once they start eating such a diet.

Pollan contrasts the American disease of nutritionism with the French diet. They eat a lot of stuff that, by our standards, should be bad for you. Meats, cheeses, wine. So why are the French healthier, on the whole, than Americans? They have a different attitude toward food. They eat real food, in moderation, and as an event. Eating is not simply a delivery system to getting energy (nutrients) into the body. It's a social and cultural experience.

There are a lot of other great points Pollan makes in the book, so I highly recommend you read it yourself. It's not a perfect book. In some parts he falls into the trap of nutritionism himself, for example when he argues why we need more Omega 3 fats in our diet. (In the next chapter he acknowledges this inconsistency.)

The main question I had was this: Yes, of course, eating whole foods is better than processed, but since our population is mostly urban, don't we need all of this processing of whole food to keep billions of humans fed? Is it even possible to go back to a more natural diet? I don't know the answer. But if we're going to feed those billions of people, it's the system that needs to change, and not just a few hippie liberal granolas growing food/plants in their yard.

Until then I'll continue to tweak my diet to include more food, and less food-like products.

Who left all the milk, cheese, meat and fish(!) out? That stuff's going to spoil! Ironically, this picture was probably made with plastic substitutes. They photograph better.

Uncooperative

2011-10-18T20:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a story that has lots of different layers of politics. It's an example of how people of all stripes can be hypocritical and spiteful. This is my perspective as a librarian and a liberal.

My local library, the Champaign Public Library, is part of library consortium, Lincoln Trail*, which includes about 90-100 libraries that all share resources. This means that a patron of CPL can order books directly and online from any of those 100ish libraries, and vice-versa. For free.

*Lincoln Trail is going away-- being subsumed under a much larger system, Illinois Heartland-- but that's not relevant to this issue.

It is through this cooperative agreement that libraries work best. My patrons and your patrons get access to way much more material than they ever would if confined to the materials in your building. It's a microcosm of how civilization works. Cooperatively, we can achieve much more than we can on our own.

Cooperation!

Since Champaign is the large population base of the region, it has more resources and social services than smaller communities around it. Some people choose to live in bedroom communities near Champaign so that they can avoid paying the higher taxes associated with "the big city." People in those communities have small meager libraries that don't require very high taxes. But some of them then come to Champaign and use CPL's larger collection, taking advantage of the library cooperative agreement. They don't believe in high taxes for supporting libraries, but then they abuse the library. They are hypocrites.

Of course, as in any cooperative agreement, some people game the system. The way I see it, that's just simply the cost of doing business; the cost of living in a society where serving the needs of the citizens is more important than denying them things. I'd rather that everyone get the support they need rather than prevent a few bad apples from taking advantage. Perhaps that is why I'm a liberal.

CPL's response to this problem has angered me. The first stage was to violate the consortial agreement (in spirit, if not in letter) and limit borrowing from nearby communities. I felt like this was a very bad move, borne out of fear and isolationism rather than the spirit of library cooperation. Once you start keeping score in a situation like this, the whole system breaks down.
I didn't like where it was heading.

I had arguments with other liberals who supported this decision, because their hatred of a few conservative hypocrites overrode their liberal ideals. I was shocked to be having this argument with people who I'd always considered to be passionate supporters of libraries.

+++++

Sure enough, that was just the first step. CPL is now leaving the consortium, starting their own catalog with the Urbana Free Library. Now the two biggest libraries in the Lincoln Trail system are taking their toys and going home.

It doesn't exactly illustrate my point, but isn't this adorable puppy a good respite from all this angry political talk?

Full disclosure: As a librarian at one of those smaller Lincoln Trail libraries, this bothers me. It bothers me that my patrons won't have easy access to CPL materials any more.

But it's not just about my patrons. This move also bothers me as a resident and patron of CPL. What people don't realize in these kinds of cooperative agreements is that the larger libraries are often "net borrowers," which means that their patrons actually order more things from other libraries than the other way around. (I know that is the case with my library and CPL. They're larger than we are, but they also borrow more materials from us than we borrow from them.) So patrons from both libraries will be affected. And as a CPL patron, I'm annoyed that my access to these 90-some other collections in the system is going to be limited.

Of course, none of this is evident in the press releases from the library. They make it sound like this is a great new development-- an upgrade in services. It's not.

Like the harsh immigration laws in Arizona, it creates walls and shuts people off. It's a unilateral, political decision made with a business model in mind, not public services. It's bad for patrons, it's bad for libraries, and it's bad for democracy.

Okay, so it may be hyperbole to compare my public library to Wall Street. But it's topical and illustrates my feelings.

Nostalgic News

2011-10-13T21:08:00.000-07:00

On impulse, I bought Huey Lewis & The News' Greatest Hits last week. More than for the musical enjoyment, it was a nostalgia trip.

Huey Lewis & The News were an interesting flash in the pan. From 1983 to 1986 they ruled the charts, with two #1 albums, five #1 singles, and a dozen-ish top ten singles. It's interesting how quickly they rose through the charts, and then how quickly they fell, and how the rise and fall mirrored each other. All through only four albums.

In 1982 they released Picture This, which had one main hit, "Do You Believe In Love," and 2-3 other singles that charted. The album went to #13.

Then in 1983 through 1986 they released two studio albums, Sports and Fore!, which both had a string of hits and both hit #1 as albums. These albums were huge.

I listened to this album a hundred times as a teenager

Sports and Fore! featured hit studio songs like "Heart and Soul," "I Want a New Drug," "The Heart of Rock & Roll," "If This Is It," "Stuck with You," "Jacob's Ladder," and "Hip to Be Square." The band also had some hits from the soundtrack to Back to the Future, "Power of Love" and "Back in Time."

If you listened to any radio in the 80's, you probably recognize many of those songs. They also had a lot of entertaining videos on MTV.

This is the video I remember the most

In 1988 they released Small World, which was much like Picture This (1982) in that it only had one or two hits and went to #11.

Then they mostly faded out from the pop/rock music world.

++++

It's a different phenomenon from a one-hit wonder, but it's interesting to me how a band can be so wildly successful for such a short time, then fade out so quickly. I never hear their songs on classic or nostalgia radio. Why didn't they have more staying power? Maybe this is simply the nature of the music business, but I can't think of any other examples of a band bursting on the scene so quickly, doing so well, then fading out just as quickly.

There probably are other examples of that, but none that I know so well. I was a huge fan of Huey Lewis. Their explosion in popularity coincided perfectly with my musical awakening. As a 15-year-old, I thought they were the coolest, raddest band ever. Their music reminds me of countless friends and events from my adolescence. But looking at it 25 years later, I wonder how good they really were/are.

I ponder what made them so popular. They were kinda bluesy at times, with lots of horns and pleasing harmonies, but they combined that with drum machines and synthesizers, the cutting technology of the day. (Listen to me sounding all like a music critic who knows what he's talking about.) I don't know enough about music to know how talented they actually were, if Huey was a good singer or if "The News" were technically proficient with their instruments. I do know, looking at it now, that their lyrics were pretty bad. To wit: "I like the sound of breaking glass/if you don't believe me/ why do you ask?"

But they certainly tapped into something from the mid-80's zeitgeist.

+++++

After listening to their Greatest Hits, I realize that today I'm not as interested in their big hits. Maybe I've heard them too many times to appreciate them. I still like "Stuck With You," but only one of their hits really gets my juices flowing. Interestingly, it's their very first hit, "Do You Believe In Love." (No question mark in the title, this punctuation stickler notes.)

Cheesy 80's video, great song. "Wee-ooh, wee-ooh, wee-ooh, do you believe in love?"

Three of my favorite songs on the CD are covers of old R&B songs recorded after their heyday: "It's Alright" (from Curtis Mayfield), "Cruisin', " (by Smokey Robinson, recorded as a duet with Gwyneth Paltrow for the movie Duets in 2000 and became a late #1 single for Huey), and "But It's Alright."

"It's Alright" is a cappella, or something like it, with lots of The News's voices standing in for instruments. It reminds me of one of my favorite songs from the band, from back in the day, that's not on their Greatest Hits. It was also a capella, called "Naturally."

I still love that song.

Homemade Art

2011-10-10T05:23:00.000-07:00

The new flannel sheets I bought for my bed came in this cool rectangular packaging, and when I took them out of the package, I was delighted to see that the box kept its form.

Now I have this cool, see-through aquarium of air that I've put in front of my window.

I have no idea what to do with it, but I just like having it there. It's fun to look at. Isn't that what art is?

Competitive Advantage?

2011-10-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

Because it had the keyword "tennis" in its description, my TiVo recorded an ESPN documentary on Renee Richards, the tennis playing transsexual from the 70's.

So I watched it and I'd like to talk about it. But before I discuss the film itself, let me explain my general attitude toward gender reassignment, so that I can make my biases known up front.

As much as I'm an advocate for LGBT rights, I have to admit that I have a blind spot for the "T" part. Don't get me wrong: I am pro-choice on this issue. I don't want to deny anyone the right to change their gender, nor do I think they should be discriminated against because of it.

But, unlike with homosexuality, which is simply about allowing people to love who they love, it's harder for me to grasp and sympathize with the issues behind changing one's gender. It involves uncomfortable issues (to me) like an entirely new identity, hormone injections, invasive surgery, denying your history, and challenging your genetic code (XY vs. XX.)

I can accept that although these things scare me personally, there are people who are so miserable in the body they were born in that they embrace such changes. So I'm learning more about the issue and trying to be more open-minded.

It was with this attitude that I watched Renee, a documentary produced by ESPN. I tend to think of ESPN as a pretty testosterone-driven network, so I was surprised to see them tackling such a progressive topic.

+++++

The central question of the film is whether Renee Richards, after undergoing gender reassignment, should have been allowed to compete in professional women's tennis in 1976. Would a man who becomes a woman have too much of a competitive advantage playing against women?

I know this question is a political minefield, with lots of implications beyond competition and tennis, but at face value the answer seems obvious to me: Of course she would have a competitive advantage. For the first 40 years of her life, Richards had played men's tennis in a man's body. She was 6'2", with broad shoulders, large hands, and size 12 feet. I suppose we could get mired in a discussion on what exactly the rationale is for separating men's and women's tennis, but I assume it's because men have, on average, bigger and stronger bodies.

In the documentary, tennis legend Billie Jean King says she talked to experts about gender reassignment, and they said it's really the hormones (testosterone/estrogen) that separate the men from the women. And now that Richards was receiving estrogen treatments, it made her body more like that of a woman's. But still, her body was built by testosterone, wasn't it? Even if it wasn't using it anymore?

To me, what makes the answer to the "competitive advantage" question obvious is that Richards was a 42-year-old amateur playing in the U.S. Open. Do you know how hard it is to make it to the U.S. Open? Most amateurs and pros who dedicate their entire lives to tennis don't make it there, not even in the prime of their game.

And here was a practicing doctor, not a professional tennis player (although she had been one of the best amateur players in the country in her 20's), who had not seriously competed in years and suddenly burst on the scene in middle age and could compete with the best players in the world? After having undergone a very traumatic physical transformation? Many in the documentary talked about what a competitive disadvantage this was, and I agree, which paradoxically just proves that she must have had a natural advantage. It's hard for me to imagine any "natural" woman could have come back to the game at such an age and been so competitive.

At the end of the movie, Richards herself even seems to admit that might not have been fair.

++++

I appreciate how difficult it must have been for Richards to give up her whole life and identity in order to be true to herself. She gave up a wife, young son, and successful medical career, moved across the country, and became a different person. But does being sensitive to that issue mean it's fair to let her compete in professional tennis against women? Does my answer to that question have to hinge on whether I support LGBT issues?

+++++

Overall, I enjoyed the film for bringing up these thorny questions. Some other issues it brings up:

In the very first scene of the movie, Richard's older sister refers to her as "him." When the interviewer asks her sister about this, she says (of Renee), "He's my little brother. He'll always be my little brother." Renee says the male pronouns don't bother her, but her sister is the only person in the world for whom that's the case. (Kind of like how my sisters are the only people who can still call me "Timmy" and it doesn't sound weird.)

Richards' son, who was four when his dad moved away and became a woman, is about my age and seems to have a lot of resentment toward his parent. (Curiously, Richards never uses the word "mom" or "dad" to describe herself in the movie, just "parent.") In the documentary, her son is a troubled, drug-addled loser who looks and talks like Michael Stipe of REM.

Curiously, I couldn't find an online picture of her son to put here. I wanted to show how he looks like Michael Stipe. I guess it's good that the interwebs, so far, are respecting his privacy.

Richards has been living with a female partner for many years now. But their relationship is completely asexual. Ironically, when she was a man, Renee was quite the rake. She says that since she became a woman, she doesn't have the passion for men like she had a passion for women when she was a man. "I lost that," she says.

Overall, the tone of the movie was sad. It's not a happy, triumphant, or inspirational story. So often when you hear of gay people coming out or transgender people... um... transitioning (? Not trying to be cute here, I just don't know what the proper verb is), they talk of how happy and fulfilled they are now that they can be themselves. I don't get that impression from Richards, at least not through this movie. Maybe that's a fault of the film, or maybe it's an accurate interpretation. At the very end of the movie, Renee's son uses the phrase "torment and happiness" to describe her.

I'm 40

2011-10-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

They say that as you get older, time goes faster.

I can certainly attest to that. Since I turned 40 (less than two weeks ago), my life has been a whirlwind of activity. I haven't even had a chance to blog about my birthday til now. Middle Age is exhausting.

Why does Google images give me pictures of old people when I search "middle age"? This image was titled "Middle age couple." Really? Are they from a place where people routinely live to 120?

+++++

I'm 40 now. Timageddon came and went. The sun still rises and sets according to the predictable motions of the heavenly spheres. I get up every day and do the same things I did just before I was 40. My mind is still sharp. My body is still strong. (Except for this weird sinusy almost-cold thing I've had for a week, which won't bloom into a full-fledged sickness but also won't go away. I swear, I've spent half of my 40's being almost sick.)

Okay, so my body isn't THAT strong.

After much existential angst, I decided to make a Big Deal out of my 40th birthday. When's the next time in my life I'll be able to get a bunch of people to pay attention to me? So I took the 40 theme and ran with it.

I had a cookout party at my brother's large house and yard the night before my birthday. I called it The Night Before Timageddon and I invited everyone who might possibly come, and many who wouldn't.

Not my cookout

In all, 29 people showed up (including kids), and as far I as I know, they had a good time.

My sister-in-law came up with the idea of having everyone bring 40 of something, so I received:

40 Little Debbie cakes
40 sparklers
40 tiny candy bars
40 random unpaired objects from someone's house (most of them socks-- I was mostly shocked that any one house could have so many lost socks)
My poet friends wrote 40 phrases (fun/nonsensical/tim-related) that had never been used effectively in a poem.
Other people brought things like coffee mugs and cupcakes, but not 40 of them.
My paramedic friend had to leave the party early for his night shift, but promised to save someone's life in my honor. So I have that going for me.

My 40's of things

My sister read out a list of 40 memories she had of me, which was perhaps the highlight of the evening. Most of the memories were already a part of family lore-- stories I'd heard and talked about for years and years. But a few of them were new to me, like the fact that I wore braces on my legs when I was a toddler. Like Forrest Gump!

Of course, someone had to bring a "40" of Miller High Life. (I.e. a 40-ounce bottle of it.) I'd already drank three (good high-quality) beers before that, so downing the 40 was quite a challenge.

That's not apple juice.

But I wasn't going to let 40 beat me. I finished it.

(no picture available)

++++

When I first woke up as a 40-year-old man, at 4:30 in the morning, I felt like absolute crap. But after re-hydrating and getting some more sleep, I felt much better and ready to tackle the new decade.

First project of the new era? Paint my living room.

I'd been meaning to paint the main wall in my living room for a while now. Since my brother, sister, and mom were still in town, I asked them to lend their expertise, consultation, and labor to help with this project.

We went with a dark red, maroon-ish color that matches the new dark green (sage) couch I bought last spring. We did the main wall where the fireplace and mantle is, and which the couch faces, so it's the wall I look at the most.

The area of my wall I look at the most. Probably because it's over that big rectangular device-- my movin' picture box.

Birthday cards on the mantle.

My sister also convinced me to paint the adjacent wall, which has a big archway that leads into the dining room.

She said the arch was begging to be painted. She'd had her eye on it since I first bought the house. It was ripe for the painting. Because I'm an agreeable little brother, I was fine with that.

The unpainted wall

New coat rack my mom got me for my birthday

We finished both coats in one day, and now I have a beautiful new red living room.

Cat sold separately

For a new decade.

Not Mindy Kaling's Type

2011-09-22T20:02:00.000-07:00

If you watch The Office, you know Mindy Kaling. Not only does she play Kelly Kapoor on the show, she's also a writer and producer. And she's adorable.

The fact that she was a writer and producer of the show always made me think that her portrayal of Kelly Kapoor was brilliant satire-- that she was lambasting a shallow, immature chatterbox who only cares about shopping, landing a husband, and gossip.

I love good satire, and this made me love her all the more.

+++++

So I was excited when I was going through a catalog at work and saw that Kaling has written a nonfiction book. I absolutely had to order this for our leisure-reading collection.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns) is the title, and you can read excerpts from it here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/56238687/Is-Everyone-Hanging-Out-Without-Me-by-Mindy-Kaling-Excerpt.

Since I have such a huge crush on her, I was particularly interested in her "guide to being an awesome guy," because who wouldn't want Mindy Kaling to think he's awesome?

I really like her humble disclaimer to start out the section:

(Let me say here that if you’re some kind of iconoclastic dude who goes by the beat of your own drummer, you will find this insufferable. I totally respect that. I would never want you to stop wearing your skinny jeans and straw hat. I mean it!)

Problem is, I'm no iconoclast who wears straw hats. I'm just a nerd. Not even the disclaimer applies to me. Not a good sign.

+++++

Since Kaling is so good at satirizing stereotypical girl things, I expected her to be more cynical and edgy. But what surprised me about her list is how much it sounds like Kelly Kapoor. Toned down, of course, but you can see the inner Kelly lurking. Most of her tips are about fashion or "product."

So, of course, I fail her test miserably. I don't even know what a "peacoat" is, let alone how to make it look "snappy as the first day you wore it." I don't have a signature drink like James Bond, unless Hefeweizen beer counts. I don't know what "straight-leg jeans" means, I rarely ride elevators, I've never worn cologne, and I have no idea what Kiehl's or Bumble and Bumble are.

I gather from the context that Kiehl's and Bumble and Bumble are beauty products. Ironically, she says that if you only use these two products, "you look all classily self-restrained because you only have two beauty products. You’re basically a cowboy."

So what's a guy who has zero beauty products? A caveman?

The one piece of her advice I have no problem following? "Get a little jealous now and again..." That's something that this unsophisticated caveman can accomplish!

+++++

Anyway, despite my disappointment at not being anything close to Kaling's dream man, the excerpts I read were entertaining. So I recommend the book. I even bought it for my library.

Still... why is nothing about a man's taste in books on her list?

On Being 40

2011-09-20T18:58:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna be 40!

When?

Someday...

In eight years!

Things You Think

2011-09-19T18:07:00.000-07:00

"A new book comes out every 30 seconds..."

Fun literary facts from my favorite author of lad lit, Nick Hornby.

Accompanied by one of my favorite new musicians (Ben Folds) and an internet duo I'd never heard of (Pomplamoose):

Smoke your lil' smoke
and drink your lil' drink.
And try to make sense of
the things that you think

I love this video. I dare you to listen to it and not bob your head.

See Salt

2011-09-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

Has anyone else noticed the explosion of sea salt in all of our snacks lately?

Every salty snack I see in the grocery now proudly announces that it uses "sea salt."

I'd never seen this on any package five years ago. They used to just say "salt."

I know that marketing is rife with copycats. When one product hits on something big, suddenly they all start doing it.

Ever since the Old Spice Guy got popular, lots of commercials now feature quirky spokespeople making nonsensical, choppy pronouncements.

+++++

So I have three questions.

Is "sea salt" the kind of salt these products always used, but they just didn't call it that? In other words, is this explosion of sea salt just a labeling phenomenon?

Or, has sea salt itself suddenly become the Next Big Thing in snacks, and whatever they used before-- rock salt? lake salt? underground gnome salt?-- has become obsolete or too expensive?

And my third question-- what's going to be the next big ingredient that they will use to sell snacks?

"Tear Salt & Chipped Molasses!"

Made from the tears of beautiful Danish children who harvested the molasses

Santorum Explosion

2011-08-30T19:29:00.000-07:00

The Timblog blew up this weekend.

Here are the daily number of hits I got near the end of last week:

Aug 24: 24
Aug 25: 80
Aug 26: 98
Aug 27: 201
Aug 28: 225
Aug 29: 220

Here's what that looks like in a graph:

My previous record had been 44 in a day. That record almost doubled on Friday, then doubled again on Saturday. I had three days in a row of 200+ page views.

+++++

People are suddenly flocking to the Timpage. WTF?

Thanks to blogger's detailed stats, I was able to surmise that it's just one post that's getting all the attention: a post titled Evolution of Marriage I wrote in defense of same-sex marriage in February 2010. In the past week alone that one post has received 697 page views. Holy shit! That blows away the previous record for one post, the one about hair, which received 345 hits over an entire year.

I also know from Blogger stats where those new page views are coming from. A famous blog, Spreading Santorum, has sent hordes of readers my way. It's all coming from one particular post: http://blog.spreadingsantorum.com/2011/08/its-hard-to-clean-up-santorum.html. But why?

The post itself does not mention me or my blog anywhere. I couldn't find any links to my Timpage anywhere in the text or comments or blog rolls. All I could find was that they use an image that I had used in my Evolution of Marriage post.

If you click on that image on the spreadingsantorum blog post, instead of just opening the image, it opens up my "Evolution of Marriage" post.

I don't own this image. In fact, I just stole it off the interwebs. (After some investigation, it appears to have been created by a graphic artist named Ariah Fine: http://tumblr.tryingtofollow.com/post/60574427/traditional-marriage-a-timeline-poster-prints.) I assume the writer of the spreadingsantorum blog found it from my blog through a google image search. But instead of just stealing it without attribution, like everyone else does on the interwebs, they "credit" me by linking back to my blog.

+++++

Although I'm flattered that Spreading Santorum, a blog associated with one of my writing heroes, Dan Savage, has noticed little ol' me, I'm not thrilled by the jump in numbers. These aren't people flocking to read my blog. They're people following a link from an image. Ninety percent of them will immediately see they've stumbled on some boring personal navel-gazing blog and go away, like a driver who's found she's made a wrong turn into a private lot.

I may pick up a few new readers, but is it worth the skew in numbers? I'll be happy when my page hits calm down to a more accurate number, and I know that the numbers are not artificially inflated.

My page views for August are at 1,549, shattering the old monthly record of 635.

Even before the santorum hit the blog, I was headed toward a record month. But now it feels like the record is tainted, and there's no way I'll ever be able to beat it without another blow up-- without getting santorum all over me.

Timageddon

2011-08-25T22:40:00.000-07:00

A month from today something terrible is going to happen.

It's something I don't like to talk about, think about, or tell people about.

It's my secret shame. I try to hide it from people, because when I tell them, I know they will look at me differently, think of me differently, and put me in a different category.

A month from today I turn 40.

+++++

Ever since my divorce three years ago, I've been reluctant to tell people my age. When they ask me how old I am, I turn it around and ask, "How old do you think I am?" Thankfully, they usually guess much younger than I am, sometimes as much as 10 years younger.

Can you believe Dick Clark is 106?

I don't look or act my age, and most of the friends I've made in the past three years have been in their early 30's. It's actually uncanny how I'll make a new friend and then later discover they are between 30 and 32. That must be the demographic that I have the most in common with.

+++++

People say age is just a number, but it's a number other people will judge you for. I may not look my age, but when people discover that number, I can feel their judgy gaze. What's this geezer doing hanging out with us?

And if it's someone I'm trying to date, it's often a dealbreaker. Especially on online dating sites, where they filter you out based on a number, 40 can be a death knell. (What's a "death knell" anyway? Why not a "death gong?") I defended myself to one woman on a dating site, explaining that I was in great shape, immature, and I only read at a 32-year-old level. She thought that was funny, but she still rejected me just the same.

(I don't only try to date younger people. I'd love to date someone my own age. It's just harder to find them.)

++++

It's not so much being 40 that bothers me. It's the boolean combination of being 40 AND single.

A venn diagram of a boolean search. Cecilia = "People who are breaking my heart" AND "People who are shaking my confidence daily."

I never wanted to be single this late in my life. Dating in your late 30's sucks, and I imagine it only gets worse in your 40's. Dating in general sucks, but at least in your 20's you can convince yourself you have plenty of time. Now I'm getting too old to date most graduate students, which used to be my biggest pool of potentials.

Forty is that age when people start to panic and compromise. Whenever young single people make a backup pact, it always starts with, "If neither one of married by the time we're 40..."

Well, I AM 40.

Almost.

++++

Perhaps that "almost" is the worst part. The anticipation of turning 40 may be worse than the actual thing. In a way, the last month of being 39 may be the hardest part of being 40.

Here's a story to illustrate my point.

When I lived in Germany I traveled over the winter break. I was in Prague for Christmas, so my friend and I went to midnight mass at the huge and beautiful Prague cathedral.

That cathedral was packed more full of people than any place I've ever seen. We stood in the back, squished together in standing room only. The mass was in Czech and we didn't understand much, so after about 10 minutes we decided to leave. But as we tried to get out, there were so many people it was a huge bottleneck at the door. It took us a full 10 minutes just to get out, and at the point where we squeezed through the door, I almost got crushed from the bottleneck. It was actually quite a terrifying moment.

But I managed to wiggle through the door. Once outside in the cold Czech winter night, it felt good to out in the air where I could breathe.

Right now I feel all this pressure to enjoy the last of my 30's. As I get closer to turning over my odometer, I'm going to get more panicky, until I'll almost be crushed by anxiety. But maybe once I get past it, I'll feel relieved to be on the other side of it, out in the cool air of middle age.

That's what I hope turning 40 will be like.

+++++

My 20's were better than my teens. My 30's were better than my 20's. There's no reason to believe that my 40's won't continue that trend. As I get older and more experienced, I have more resources, tools, and knowledge to deal with life. I'd even venture to say that, thanks to tennis, organic cooking & eating, and healthier habits, in some ways I'll be in better physical shape at 40 than I was at 30.

But that doesn't mean that the big Four-Oh-- the portal to middle age-- isn't a big ol' scary place.

Mug Shot

2011-08-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

When I was in Denver this summer for my nephew's bar mitzvah, my mom, her husband, and I rented a car to get around in.

On our way from the airport to the hotel, we drove through busy Denver traffic on a Friday afternoon. I drove and my mom navigated, based on directions she'd printed out from Mapquest or Googlemaps or something. (I don't do GPS. (Long story.)) I don't like driving in metropolitan traffic, so I wasn't the most relaxed driver.

Near the end of our journey, we were on a highway-like road with exits, and as we neared our exit for the hotel, I needed to speed up to pass someone on the right so that I could make the exit.

To add to the excitement, we were in a construction zone, so the speed limit was something ridiculous like 25.

As I sped up to pass this annoying car who was in my way, I saw a flash from the side of the road. A camera flash? It seemed to come from a vehicle parked on the shoulder.

Uh-oh, I thought. I think they may have used their new-fangled pict-o-scope image thingies to catch me speeding. I planned to mention it to my brother and ask if that's how they caught speeders out here in CO, but then I got distracted by the fun family weekend.

++++

About a month later I got a letter from the rental car company. The car I had been driving had been ticketed for a moving violation, or something like that, from the Sheridan police department. They'd forwarded my information on to the police, so they would be banging down my door and roughing me up soon. And just to rub it in, the rental company tacked on an extra $15 fee.

About a month after that I got a letter from the Sheridan police. I'd been nabbed going 51 in a 40 zone, 11 mph over the limit. Thankfully, the fine was only $80. (In Illinois, speeding in a construction zone is $375.)

I have to admit the Sheridan police department has an efficient convenient online payment website, so it was relatively easy and painless to pay with my credit card.

And just to make sure I didn't try to weasel out of the fine, they included that very picture from the moment I saw that camera flash. The photo was in the letter they sent me and on the payment website.

Yep, that's me, in my granny driving shades, with my mom beside me and her husband in the back.

Not my proudest moment.

Name Dropping

2011-08-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

So I was hanging out with my tennis hero, Roger Federer, the other day and he said something funny.

Well, I imagine it was something funny. He didn't actually say it to me, but to Stanislas Wawrinka, his countryman and practice partner. They were sitting next to each other during a break in their hitting session. I was about 20 yards away from them and I couldn't actually hear them, so I don't even know what language they were speaking. Was it Swiss German? French? English?

Actual photo of me watching Roger by my friend Laura. I am just out of the picture, to the left and behind that throng of people. See me?

+++++

Roger wasn't the only tennis superstar that I was within water-cannon-range of last weekend. Even if you don't follow tennis, you've maybe heard of Rafa Nadal, Maria Sharapova, Andy Roddick, and James Blake.

Sharapova. All photos by Laura.

Tennis fans might also recognize the names John Isner, Andy Murray, Francesca Schiavone, Nikolay Davydenko, Juergen Melzer, Mikhail Youzhny, Ana Ivanovic, David Ferrer, Caroline Wozniacki, Juan Martin del Potro, Fernando Verdasco, Li Na, Marcos Baghdatis, Jie Zheng.

I saw all of these people in person and "larger than life," at the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati. It had almost all the best players in the world. It's like a mini U.S. Open, but at a more convenient location that's less crowded. The tournament press said that nine individual grand slam champions were there. There were so many famous names in the draw, I didn't even get to see all the people I wanted to.

Francesca Schiavone: French Open champion

I say the players were "larger than life" because, even though I saw them live, the only experience I'd had with these people up to then had been on TV. And in person, these people are huge. They're taller, leaner, and more built than they look on the small screen. Andy Roddick, for example, was like a walking mountain of lean muscle.

When you think about it, it makes sense that they would be taller in person. When you see them on TV, 95% of the time the camera is looking down at them on the court. But when I walked past them, they were life-sized and I was looking up at them.

+++++

The way I was able to get so close to so many of them was on the practice courts. They each had an hour or so scheduled on any of a dozen different practice courts. Some of them, like Nadal and Sharapova, even had practice time scheduled on one of the big stadium courts. (While we were waiting for Nadal to show up for his practice time, I went to the bathroom. On my way back, I almost ran into Nadal's entourage walking toward the court. It took me a while to figure out that in the middle of that pack that almost ran me over was one of the greatest players in the history of the sport.)

Nadal practicing on the Grandstand court.

On the practice courts, you can sit 20 feet away from them as they hit with their coach, hitting partner, or another famous player. Federer practiced with his friend and countryman Wawrinka, but it was also weird to see people like Andy Murray (of Great Britain) playing practice points against David Ferrer (of Spain.) Just two top ten players in the world hitting the ball around. No big thang.

Nikolay Davydenko, once ranked as high as 3rd in the world, practiced with his coach and his wife (not the same person.) His wife tried to feed him balls but kept mis-hitting them. I got the impression he was teasing her for this, but my Russian is limited to "goodbye," "please," and "kiss me," so I don't know what he actually said.

Davydenko. Great action shot by Laura. And hey! He's balder than me!

+++++

Federer was scheduled to be on court #8 at noon, so at about 11:45 the modest metal stands next to the court were packed with people. It was standing room only. I waited with intense anticipation, under a hot sun surrounded by annoying other people, as the clock ticked by. 12:05, no Federer. 12:10... 12:15... no Federer. Metal bleachers full of people staring at an empty practice court. People made jokes: "Those are some really impressive lines on that court."

12:20... 12:30... no Federer. People complained about how unprofessional and disrespectful Roger was being. How could he make us wait like that? Although I was profoundly annoyed, impatient, and disappointed, I didn't blame Federer.

These guys are world-class athletes, and in the end, when they step out onto the court, they're just entertainers. But can we expect them to entertain us during their practices? Do they owe us fans practice time? We didn't buy a ticket to the practice. For all we know Federer signed up for the practice court, or it was assigned to him, but that doesn't mean he has to use the whole time.

It is an interesting study in celebrity. He's basically going to work, doing those mundane menial tasks that we all do at work, and throngs of people wait for hours to watch him do it. Other, real matches were going on at the same time, but we missed those for a possible chance to watch the great Roger Federer warm up his forehand. It was a little ridiculous, actually. It would be like me arriving for work and having my Reference Desk surrounded by people who couldn't wait to admire me looking stuff up in a library database. Who are these people?

Well, I was one of those people. After waiting an hour, I was restless and starving, so I took a walk to check out the real match on the main court, and then got some ice cream. As I made my way back to practice court #8, I noticed that the crowd has swelled to its largest size yet. There was a buzz.

I went back to where my friend sat, but there was no room anymore. Roger and Stan were warming up. And the frustrating thing was, everyone was standing up. So I couldn't see over people.

This was a study in selfishness. If the people in the front row would have sat down, the people behind them could have sat down, and so on and so on, until the people standing in the back could have seen. Instead, the selfish people in the front row insisted on standing up, and therefore, even though I was 30 feet away, I could only see snippets of Roger. People suck.

The other interesting thing was that Roger practiced with Stan Wawrinka, the 14th-best singles player in the world. He's an Olympic champion, having won the Gold in doubles with Roger in 2008. And not a single eye was on poor Stan. He might was well have been the water boy. I guess fame is relative.

+++++

There were also actual matches going on at this tennis tournament. We saw parts of about eight matches, but because there was so much going on at once, there were only two matches we saw from start to finish. One was a doubles match with John Isner and James Blake playing two other Americans I didn't know. (They lost.) It was a good match, but the most amazing thing was seeing Isner in person. He's huge, 6'9", I believe, and when he stands next to the net, it only comes up to his thigh. Imagine playing tennis on a net as high as your thigh. (True fact: Isner grew up in Greensboro, NC, and went to Page High School, the big rival of my high school, Grimsley.)

Isner and Blake at the net

The very last match we saw was a women's singles contest late in the day between two unseeded young ladies on a side court. A 19-year-old American, Christina McHale, was playing Tsvetana Pironkova of Bulgaria. These are both women I've seen playing on TV, but they're not exactly household names.

In fact, they are so much not household names that we were able to sit in the second row court-side. It wasn't after we sat down that I realized that we were in the "player's box." That is to say, I think McHale's mom and sister were right next to me.

I base this on the fact that after every big point, she would look right over to them, like many of the players do with their coaches and families. Also, the ladies next to me would call her nicknames like "Chris" and hugged after the match was over. They obviously knew her. So that was pretty cool.

View of McHale from her player's box. I like her skirt.

McHale won a really long and exciting three-set match.

Later, after we got home, I found out that McHale upset the #1 player in the world, Caroline Wozniacki, in the next round. She's going to be the Next Big Thing! And we were close enough to catch her sweat!

Deep Fried Dissatisfied

2011-08-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

The second stop on Tim's Summer Tour II '11 was Indianapolis, where I went to the Indiana State Fair.

There I saw cows, a bull with huge hanging testicles, the world's largest boar, eleventy different kinds of roosters, bunnies, and baby ducklings. I also saw a Lego model of the Indianapolis 500.

Not the world's largest "bore," although he didn't seem to do much.

But the thing that left the biggest impression on me, literally, was the food. I ate a fried corn dog, fried vegetables, a deep fried Twinkie on a stick, and a fried elephant ear. Most of it was crap, and didn't even taste good.

Could it be that I've outgrown eating fried stuff on a stick? That all the cooking and eating organic, local stuff over the past year has altered my tastes?

All I know is that I felt like bloated bag of fried crap the rest of the day and never wanted to eat anything else ever again, ever.

Until dinner.

+++++

I really wasn't very hungry, but it was dinner time and some of us were hungry. So we went to an Ethiopian place in some strip mall in Indianapolis, which may be the strip mall capital of the world.

Abyssinia: The actual place we went

I'd only had Ethiopian food one other time, in Greenwich Village in NYC about two years ago. I'd enjoyed it and was eager to try it again.

It appears that Ethiopian cuisine is the perfect antidote to fried fair food on a stick. The two styles of food may be as far apart from each other as possible. The only similarity is that in both cases, you don't use any utensils.

What I love about Ethiopian food:

The whole table shares one massive plate, piled with lots of little dishes.
You take this awesome spongy, sour bread and use it to pick up the food.
The sour bread is the perfect contrast to spicy beef, lamb, chicken, spinach, potato, bean, veggies, and other little dishes.
All the food itself sits on a piece of the bread on a platter, so that when you're done you just eat the bread that's been soaking up all the spicy juices.
What can I say? It just tasted really, really good. How do you explain that?

The bread is called injera, and it looks like the foam you put under carpet. But it tastes divine.

Maybe it was the contrast to the fair food I'd had earlier, but it was the best meal I'd had all week. Maybe all month, and possibly even all year. Certainly in the top ten this year.

I think I've found a new favorite ethnic food.

Ethiopian!!

Solo Tourist

2011-08-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

An acquaintance of mine told me she's going to Portland (OR) on vacation. She's traveling by herself, not meeting anyone there nor attending any specific event.

I've heard great things about Portland, and someday I'd like to visit it if I have an occasion to be there. But I couldn't imagine flying across the country just to see the city itself. I know it's a cool green hippie city and all, but what would a tourist actually do there?

Is this what tourists in Portland do?

In our discussion about my friend's vacation, I thought about how I've never vacationed alone.

I've traveled alone. A lot. It started when I was 17 and drove six hours by myself to visit my brother on spring break. Ever since then, I've had no trouble driving, flying, walking places by myself. I take solo road trips all the time. I've flown solo to Germany and back multiple times.

But in all those cases there was always someone else at my destination that I planned to meet. I never planned an entire trip alone where no one I knew was a part of it in some way.

Then I remembered my cruise. D'oh! That was something I did entirely by myself. That was just six months ago. How could I have forgotten about it already?

+++++

The day trip that I took to Chicago this week couldn't really be characterized as solo, since the main reason for the trip was to meet someone. Someone I'd never met before, but that I already knew pretty well.

It was my first IRL (in-real-life) meeting with one of my blogfriends. Over the past few years I have made dozens of new friends and pen-pals from across the country and the world. We write, we chat, we friend on FB. But I've never met any of them IRL.

So my friend, who lives in Germany but is from Chicago, was home to visit family. I took the train up to Chicago to meet her and her husband.

The meeting went great. I liked them both a lot and there was no awkwardness or weirdness. It was like we were old friends, which, in a way, we were.

++++

But aside from a long lunch in the suburbs with my German blogfriends, it was mostly a solo trip. I traveled on the train alone. I walked around Chicago alone. I took the Metra alone. My train home didn't leave til 8:00 pm, so when I found myself back downtown at 4:00, I had about four hours to kill in the Big City.

I decided to walk to Navy Pier, since I'd never been there before.

I love walking around big cities. I love the energy, the people-watching, the funky arty sculptures, the architecture and the skyline, which is as beautiful to me as a mountain range. I love the geometry of walking between the canyons of tall buildings lining a street.

For some reason, I can walk for miles and miles in the city and not notice the distance the way I would at home. I'd never think to walk the two miles from my home to downtown Champaign, (not to mention the 3.3 miles all the way to downtown Urbana), but in Chicago that distance doesn't faze me.

So I set about to walk to Navy Pier, with no idea how far it was or even where it was located exactly. I knew it was near downtown, and obviously on the water (it's a pier), so I just started walking east toward the lake. Several times I walked into pedestrian dead-ends and had to retrace my steps to go back to a suitable place to cross. So I ended up walking a lot further than just a straight line between the two points.

Then it started raining. At first the rain wasn't so bad, just a light drizzle. It wasn't until I got to Navy Pier that it really started to come down hard.

Luckily (or not), Navy Pier is mostly like an indoor mall and covered shops, stalls, and other stuff to spend money on. So it was nice to be in out of the rain, but I was stuck there, in a commercial shopping mecca that's not really my thing. I walked the entire length of it, which itself is about half a mile long.

+++++

After waiting an hour for the rain to stop, I decided I was just going to have to get wet. I couldn't miss my train. So I started the long trek back to the train station. It was raining really hard now. I had brought my cap along for the day to protect me from the sun. What I didn't realize was that it would serve an entirely different purpose: to keep my head dry and the rain out of my eyes.

I walked and walked and walked in a hard rain. Since it was raining, it was hard to look up at all the buildings, so I mostly had to keep my head down. The bill of my hat dripped, and my shorts and t-shirt got soaked.

Since the train station is right next to the Sears Tower*, and I was about 2 hours early for my train, I bought a ticket to the Skydeck so that I could go up to the top of one of the world's tallest buildings.

* I know it's called Willis Tower now. But to me it will always be the Sears Tower.

"One adult" I said to the ticket person, surrounded by families and couples. I was by myself doing one of the most touristy things you can do in Chicago. I was also wet: wet shirt, wet shorts, wet shoes and wet socks. And I was freezing because they had the air conditioning on.

Luckily, I had brought a change of clothes in my backpack: a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve flannel shirt, because I knew I might get cold inside air-conditioned buildings. So once I got up to the Skydeck, I went into the bathroom and changed into dry clothes. I'd never changed clothes in a bathroom on the 103rd floor before! Unfortunately, I didn't have any dry socks, so I had to put my wet socks and shoes back on.

[No picture available. Incidentally, if you want to see a lot of porn, do a Google image search for "changing clothes." Or the word "wet."]

+++++

At the train station I got a crappy sandwich for dinner. I also looked in all the souvenir shops for new dry socks. Maybe there were some novelty Chicago socks? Nope. It would be wet socks for the rest of my trip.

Not at the train station

While I was waiting in line to board the train, I looked at a map of the city that was on the wall. I counted the blocks I'd walked that day, and estimated that it was about 31 blocks from Union Station to Navy Pier. So there and back would have been 62 blocks. I'd once heard that a city block is approximately 1/10 of a mile, so that would have made it a 6-mile hike through the urban jungle.

When I came home and had access to the interwebs again, I checked Google Maps. From the train station to the end of Navy Pier is 2.9 miles, it said. Which would have made my hike 5.8 miles total. I'm sure it was more than that, with all the times I ran into dead-ends and had to backtrack. But still, I'm impressed that my estimate was so close.

I walked that whole way. Half of it in the rain.

Stats and Searches

2011-08-05T06:55:00.000-07:00

I love Blogger Stats. It tells me how many hits my blog gets-- per month, per day, even per hour. It tells me which of my individual posts get the most hits, and where my visitors come from. It gives me pretty graphs and maps for visual illustration. It's the perfect tool for a numbers nerd like me to geek out on.

I check it almost every day, just to see how the blue graph has changed.

Since July, 2010, when Blogger started keeping track-- and this wonderful feature appeared on my dashboard-- I've had 4,790 hits. It's not very much, only about 12 hits per day. By comparison, the super secret anonymous blog I retired earlier this year was getting as many as 100-150 hits a day. But lately there has been a sharp uptick in activity.

Since April of this year, hits on the Timblog have been climbing.

April: 311
May: 349
June: 410
July: 635

It sort of exploded in July, partly because I wrote more posts that month than ever before.

+++++
The only problem with these stats is that I don't know how many people actually read the blog, and how many people just stumble upon it. One of the coolest things Blogger Stats gives me is Search Keywords people used to find my blog:

librarians in love
be my friend
college wrestler penis
boats churning in the sea
are blogs dead
wrestling haircuts
pictures of capuchin monkey with candle
zojiv [WTF?]
boys hair cut bowl

For some of these, it's easy to figure out how they lead to my blog. For others it's very puzzling. But that's a discussion for another day. The weird thing about this list is it keeps changing. I saved a bunch of these phrases about a month ago because I wanted to write about them, and half of them don't even appear in the stats anymore. And new ones keep replacing them, like:

goblins
pooper scoopers
demotivational such an occasion
raping goblins

Anyway, my point is, I'd say at least half of the hits on my blog have nothing to do with loyal readers. It's people doing Google searches for things like "be my friend" and finding my post from last year about annoying auto dealerships who want to be my friend.

By far the most popular post in the history of this blog was when I wrote about my hair. (It's in first place with 335 pageviews. Second place only has 136.) Obviously people are looking for things about haircuts and stumbling upon my hairy navel-gazing.

So I don't know if I'm actually gaining new readers, or if I'm just becoming more findable in the searchiverse. One thing I do know is that it used to be that if I googled "timblog," it didn't even appear on the first page of results. Now it's the second result. So I guess that's progress.

The Freak Who Helps People Move

2011-07-31T12:24:00.000-07:00

The message left on my voicemail was cautious and tentative. An acquaintance of mine, a friend of my sister-in-law's (SIL), was moving this weekend and SIL had insisted that she call me, because, I, uh, like to help people move?

She said this in a tone that suggested someone was playing a practical joke on her. Who actually enjoys moving other people's stuff? Do I volunteer to do their dishes or paint their garage, too?

I called her back and said, "Yep, SIL was absolutely right: I love helping people move."

I don't know if it's a sickness, a fetish, or a calling, but I am the Friend Who Helps People Move. It's how I contribute to society. It's what I do.

The caption for this picture read, "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's helping people move." A common sentiment, and one that I freakishly don't share.

+++++

It must have started in college. I remember one weekend when my good friend and his girlfriend were moving into a larger apartment in the same complex. She had to work on Friday and he had to work on Saturday, so I was the only person who was there over the two-day moving process. I put in more hours moving their stuff than the actual people moving did.

Since then I have helped dozens of people move. Some were family members, some were good friends, some were people I worked with, some were friends of friends. Whenever I hear that someone I know is moving, I'm eager to let them know I can help. I will even badger them, "Do you need help? Do you need help? Do you need help?" I get offended if I find out they moved without me.

This is not how I help

Yeah, it's probably a sickness.

+++++

I guess my predilection for helping people move starts with the fact that I love moving myself. I come by it honestly-- I've moved about 30 times in my life.

When I explain to people about my fetish for moving, many of them react as if I've just told them some repulsive sexual proclivity, like I like to eat poo or something. What kind of freak actually likes that kind of stress?

I love packing-- going through all of my things, assessing my belongings, weeding out things I no longer need, organizing my shit. I love the physical act of carrying boxes and furniture and loading them efficiently into a truck or car. I love how, as each load is removed, my old dwelling slowly transforms itself from a cluttered living area to an empty and pristine space. I also love the empty canvas of my new place, figuring out the furniture arrangement, and finding the best space for all of my things. Watching it slowly transform itself from a series of empty rooms to my new home.

See how happy they are?

I love recruiting my family and friends to help share in this transitional moment of my life. I love showing off my new place and ordering pizza to reward ourselves for our hard work. I could hire movers, but it's not just about relocating your stuff from one place to another. It's about sharing this moment of your life. Who wants to do that with strangers?

See how scary these professional movers are?

And I guess somehow this love of moving has projected itself into helping others move. I like to share in the energy and excitement of their new adventure.

+++++

This has been an unusual week. I've helped two different people move, and neither of them was a good friend or family member. In fact, one of them was a complete stranger, a new hire at my "church" who was moving into town.

The other moving experience was she of the voicemail, the friend of my SIL. I spent most of my Saturday in 90-degree heat doing much of the heavy lifting, since there were only 2-3 of us who could lift the really heavy stuff. There were times when I thought, "This is crazy. Why am I doing this on my day off?" But the thought quickly passed, and I knew it was all worth it when I chowed down on well-earned pizza and got a sweaty hug of abject appreciation from the mover.

I'd earned my karma points for the day.

+++++

Some guys who grew up on farms like to take a day off from their desk jobs and tote bales of hay. (Or bale totes of hay, or hay totes of bales. I'm not sure exactly what it means, but manly men like to do it.) I think it reminds them of their childhood.

He's really a systems analyst from Des Moines

What I did a lot during my childhood, and throughout my college years, was move. So taking a day to move a bunch of heavy furniture is like a nostalgia trip for me. And the physical exercise makes me feel like I'm actually accomplishing something- unlike sitting on my ass and staring at a computer screen eight hours a day like I do at work.

Perhaps it's an exaggeration to say I love to help people move. It is hard work, and stressful for the person moving, but what I appreciate is the opportunity to earn easy karma points with something that I'm good at, I know how to do, and is relatively easy and stress-free for me.

So if you ever need any help moving your stuff, let me know.

Goats In Trees

2011-07-26T06:43:00.001-07:00

Dear Goats In Trees 2012 Desk Calendar,

YOU WILL BE MINE!

Rape Goblins

2011-07-24T12:26:00.000-07:00

"You're gonna miss everything cool and die angry!"

That is how Patten Oswalt eviscerates an audience member during one of his recorded concerts.

As Patten is telling a story, during a quiet tender moment, this guy makes a loud whooping sound. This really seems to piss off Patten, who goes into a long rant about how this "dumb douchebag" was so uncomfortable with the silence that he had to disrupt the flow of the story.

I love the guy who's terrified at any kind of silence... fuck me for building a moment...I'd hate to see you at a funeral... [funny voice] 'SKYNARD!!!... Sorry, it was like 20 seconds of silence, I thought I was gonna shit my pants, I got real scared...'

Still in the voice of the heckler, Patten goes on to bring up the rape goblins:

"My mom told me that if it's quiet for more than 15 minutes, then goblins would come out the ground and rape you... so I was trying to protect everybody by yelling...I thought I would scream... to scare the rape goblins away...uh, has no one been raped?... Then I think I just saved the whole room..."

Start at the around the 6:00 mark to hear the heckler part.

+++++

The rape goblins are clearly the work of a comic genius, but it's also a great metaphor to use in my own life.

As a single person, I feel like I'm constantly trying to keep my own rape goblins away.

When my life gets too "quiet," when there is too much alone time, I turn mean and antisocial. It's particularly bad on Saturday nights. For some reason, all my life there's been this enormous pressure to do stuff on Saturday nights. It's the one night a week when I'm most likely to feel like a loser if I stay home alone.

So this is why I try to keep a very active social life. Why I play tennis 3-4 times a week, constantly try to make lunch/dinner plans with people, belong to two book clubs, join committees, volunteer, participate in groups, go to events, organize outings, plan vacations. It's not because I necessarily enjoy all of these activities.

I do it to keep the rape goblins away.

So I don't miss everything cool and die angry.

Book of Musicals

2011-07-19T20:05:00.000-07:00

I did not grow up a fan of musical theater. As a kid I was into sports and Star Wars and computer games and TV. But people spontaneously breaking out into song and dance? That wasn't a part of my childhood.

Not a fan

It's taken a lot of time, but thanks to muppets having sex and Mormons singing about clitorises, I've become a fan of Broadway musicals. It's hard to listen to show tunes and be in a bad mood. There's just something about them that makes me so goddamn happy in spite of myself.

I only own two Broadway musicals CDs. The first was Avenue Q, which I bought a few years ago after someone played me a video for the song "The Internet is for Porn" and I knew I just had to hear the whole show. And it's brilliant, like Sesame Street for adults. For many years Avenue Q was the only Broadway musical I knew intimately. I finally got to see it during a trip to New York a few years ago. It was awesome.

The Internet is for posting dorky tourist pics of you in front of the Avenue Q poster. And porn.

Last weekend I doubled my collection of Original Broadway Cast Recordings when I bought The Book of Mormon. I'd been hearing everywhere about how great it was, and since it was written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame, I figured I'd try it out. (When I got the CD, I saw that Robert Lopez also co-wrote it. I thought I recognized that name, so I looked on my Avenue Q CD, and sure enough, he co-wrote that too. Good sign.)

+++++

The Book of Mormon had a lot to live up to. Everyone was raving about it. Even people who had their doubts became converts. Dan Savage wrote this about it in his column:

I didn’t think it was possible, but Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone’s brilliant new musical about well-intentioned Mormons on a mission exceeds the hype. It’s the funniest, dirtiest, smartest thing that this showqueen has ever seen on Broadway.

I have to admit that about halfway through my first listen, there was a small disappointment. I think maybe my expectations were too high. The music wasn't great and much of the lyrics felt like too much South Park shock value. But the story ended so brilliantly that it pulled me back in. And on the second, third, and fourth listen it grew on me even more. I was impressed with how it all fit together.

I haven't even seen the show. I only have the CD and the liner notes to go on. But the music alone is funny and raunchy (even for me it gets too crude in places) and smart in that it brings up lots of issues about religion, belief, oral (hehe) traditions and mythology. And there are lots of wacky misinterpretations.

Of course it makes fun of Mormons. To wit:

Wow! So the Bible is actually a trilogy, and the Book of Mormon is Return of the Jedi?!? I'M interested. ("All-American Prophet")

Imagine that your brain is made of tiny boxes, then find the box that's gay and... CRUSH IT!!... Turn it off, like a light switch. ("Turn It Off")

You're making things up again, Arnold. You're taking the holy word and adding fiction! ("Making Things Up Again")

I can't believe Jesus called me a dick!!!! ("Spooky Mormon Hell Dreams")

And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America. I am a Mormon, and a Mormon just believes. ("I Believe.")

I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people!!! You can be a Mormon! A Mormon who just believes. ("I Believe")

Let's be really fucking polite to everyone! ("Joseph Smith American Moses")

But despite all this, there is real affection for the Mormon characters in this story. It is not a hostile critique. As it states in the liner notes (much more eloquently than I could): "...the satirical tone is far closer to bemused tolerance than blasphemous antipathy... Parker, Stone and Lopez can't help but be seduced by the fabulousness of those golden plates."

I'm curious what Mormons themselves, if they've seen the show, think about it. I'm sure a lot of them aren't happy about it, but I could see some more open-minded Mormons enjoying it. A quick Google search confirmed my theory:

Mormons find musical 'Book of Mormon' surprisingly sweet

"I was expecting to be offended," said Anne Christensen, a 22-year-old LDS New Yorker, "but was pleasantly surprised by how incredibly sweet it was."

Her mother, Janet Christensen, added: "It's not G-rated, but they treated us with affection. And they did their homework."

Here's a Mormon who thinks it's offensive, although curiously she doesn't say exactly which parts are a "misrepresentation of my Mormon faith."

Are Mormons Offended by Book of Mormon Musical?

And the official statement from the LDS Church is short and "media savvy", as this writer says:

LDS Church Responds to South Park Mormon Musical

+++++

Josh Gad, a correspondent for The Daily Show, plays the lead, a simple and confused young man going on his Mormon mission. He confuses the Book of Mormon with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Sometimes he comes across as too "special" and that kind of distracts from his performance, but otherwise he's brilliant. I've never been much impressed with him on the Daily Show, but raunchy musical theater is really his calling.

In particular, Gad's duet with the female lead in "Baptize Me" is the sexiest song about baptism I've ever heard.

Him:

I just baptized her!
She got doused by the Heavenly Father!
I just baptized her good!

...I performed like a champ!

Her:

You baptized me...

I'm wet with salvation!

There's a lot more to love about this musical, but I'll just leave you with this:

Tomorrow's a doper, phatter latter day!

Poop Scoop Solution

2011-07-16T14:02:00.001-07:00

For years and years I always used the gray clay-based clumping cat litter. But lately it was annoying me because it would always leave this dusty, perfumy, chemically smell around my house that I didn't like. It also seemed that the brand I used kept changing the formula so that it was getting more dusty.

Since I've been going more and more green over the past few years, I decided I would investigate greener litter options. So a few months ago I Googled "natural cat litter" and found something called Swheat Scoop. It's a clumping cat litter made from wheat instead of clay. According to the website, this miracle cat litter naturally eliminates odors, clumps firmly, has less dust and tracking than clay litters, is safe for kittens, and is found at a location near you.

They also have a picture of a blue-eyed cat on their bag whose gaze pierces your soul

After checking a few different pet stores, it was indeed found at a location near me. So I bought a big-ass bag of it and hauled it home. I switched out the clay stuff with the wheat stuff and waited for the swheat, swheat smell of all-natural cat waste to surround my house.

After a few weeks of vacuuming and sweeping, pretty much all traces of the old gray dusty clay litter was gone from my house. That gross perfumy chemically smell was replaced by a scent that reminded me of the hay lofts in the barn where my cousins grew up. Ah, nature!

Not my cousin

But nature also comes with compromises. It turns out their promise that there would be less dust and tracking was an outright lie. If anything, there is more dust kicked up by the wheat litter. My litter box, litter mats, and utility-room floor is covered in a light tan film. Sometimes I even see it on my black cat.

Not my cat

Okay, so they lied about that, but that's a small price to pay for the other advantages, not the least being this is better for the environment.

Then the smells came.

+++++

I know that every cat owner has their own technique, and mine has always been to empty the clumping litter into a small wastebasket I keep near the litter box.

Very similar to my actual litter trash can

I do this once a day. I know some people who scoop out their litter box after every, uh, incident the cat has. They practically follow the cat around with a pooper scooper. And I know some people who go days and days without emptying it.

I do it once a day, and at the end of the week I empty the litter wastebasket into my larger trash can, which I then take to the curb.

I once had a girlfriend who thought it was disgusting that I "saved" my cats' poop in a receptacle, as if I was collecting truffles in the wild. I would always explain to her, "I'm not SAVING it, this is TRASH." But it still grossed her out.

But once the Swheat Scoop collected in the wastebasket, I started to notice a smell coming from my utility room. Although it no longer reeked of dusty chemically clay litter, now it smelled like straight-up cat pee.

I have no idea why an image of this beautiful woman came up when I googled "cat pee smell." But, wow, isn't she amazing? Now back to cat pee...

On their website, the Swheat Scoop people say "[our] litter has the deodorizing strength it takes to keep your house smelling fresh and clean." Um, no. That, too, is a lie. When I walk through my utility room, I smell cat pee.

But I wasn't ready to give up on this green alternative to the traditional clay litter. In the meantime I even discovered that my local food co-op sells Swheat Scoop, so I could buy it there when I do my weekly shopping. So I thought I'd keep trying different things to see if I could make it work.

+++++

I sat down to write this post this afternoon, and right before I started I checked my blog reader to catch up on some other blogs. By an interesting coincidence a blogfriend posted something about catwatching for a friend of a friend and having to scoop up turds. She mentioned how the micro-managing cat owners wanted her to drag the litter boxes across two rooms to the bathroom so she could dump the waste there.

And then I remembered, Swheat Scoop is biodegradable! I can flush it down the toilet! Why am I saving it in a little trash can and letting it stink up my house when I can just flush it once a day? Now when I "save" my kitty waste in my little trash can, I can just take it directly to the toilet.

So here is a simple lesson in solutions. First of all, often times if you give it some time, the solution to a problem appears to you from unexpected places.

And sometimes the solution is ridiculously obvious, but you couldn't think of it because to do so would have challenged the inertia of how you've always done it.

Death and Mowing

2011-07-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

My next door neighbor died last month. I hardly knew him. In fact, I think the only interaction I had with him was when I was out buying shoes and he recognized me. He said, "I'm your neighbor. The one with the crazy wife."

I had more interactions with the "crazy wife." She's always doing yard work. Even at night, in the dark. When I first moved in two years ago, she said that she and her husband were separating and she had a place in the country. I never could quite figure out what the deal was with that, because she was still around all the time, doing yard work. I sometimes got the impression she desperately wanted to work on my yard, since I'm so lax about weeds & stuff. I let things grow. I think that drove her crazy, and one time I suspect she poured bleach over my stone bed to kill weeds growing out of it.

Not my neighbor

Anyway, a few months ago she mentioned to me in passing that her husband was really sick. I said I was sorry to hear that, and the conversation ended there, like many of our awkward conversations. Then last month there was a notice for a funeral showing left in my mailbox. I didn't recognize the name and there was no postage on it. The showing was already past, so I walked over to my neighbor, who was out in her yard and asked if this was her husband. She said yes and started crying. He had just lost his job a few months before, and soon after was diagnosed with cancer, and died a matter of weeks after that. It was all very sudden and she was terribly shaken. She asked me for a hug.

I felt terrible and I said I was really really sorry and to let me know if there was anything I could do.

But other than giving her that hug, I didn't know what I could do.

The only thing I could think to say was, "I could mow your lawn."

Not me

+++++

My neighbor has a really big beautiful lawn.

Not my neigbhor's lawn

It borders a part of the street that curves, so the lawn makes a big curving arc along the street, like Trivial Pursuit piece. It's a fun lawn to mow. And mowing the lawn, like doing laundry or vacuuming, is one of those easy chores I enjoy doing. I like walking outside, getting exercise, making these neat tidy geometric lines, the smell of cut grass. So mowing her lawn was an easy way I could contribute.

The next time I mowed my lawn, about a week later, I went over to her house to see if this was a good time to mow hers. Before I knocked on her door, I heard wailing from inside the house. Like actual literal wailing. Someone moaning "oohhhhh!" in a heartbroken, distraught voice. I wasn't sure what to do, but I knocked anyway. She came to the door and said, "Sorry, you caught me at a bad time." I said it was okay and asked if I could mow her lawn. She said yes and thank you.

I don't know what kind of relationship she had with her husband. If they were separated, reconciling, working on it, or what. But clearly his death had shaken her. And other than mowing her lawn, I didn't know what I could do. I didn't think I could be there for her emotionally. I hardly know her. And, frankly, I'm not the kind of guy who can provide that kind of support to someone I don't know.

So I mowed her lawn. It was the least I could do.

+++++

Last week I mowed my lawn again and saw that her lawn could use it, too. But I didn't see her around her yard, and I was apprehensive about mowing her lawn without asking her first. It was 10:00 in the morning, and no one answered the doorbell when I rang.

I'm not one of those people who does people favors before I have their permission (or know for a fact it's something they would like.) Sometimes a "favor" can do more harm than good. For example, I used to work in a library where the circulation clerk would automatically renew my materials for me. I know she meant well, but I like knowing when my stuff is due. It reminds me of the things I have out, and nudges me to return stuff I'm not going to finish. So I thanked her for renewing my items, but asked if she could let me do it from now on.

Another example: Whenever I see a car in a parking lot with its lights left on, I'm reluctant to go and turn the lights off myself. I know there are people who would do this, and I wish I were that brave. But I worry about approaching a car that's not mine. I worry someone might think I'm breaking into it. I worry that maybe it's automatic lights that will turn off in a minute, or maybe the person intentionally left them on for some reason.

In short, I don't like to make assumptions.

So when my neighbor was not around at 10:00 on a Friday morning, I wasn't sure if I should go ahead and mow her lawn or not. Since I'd already done it once and she seemed thankful, I decided to go for it. I mowed the lawn. When I saw her later in the day, I found out that she'd been sleeping. Oops. She was very appreciative, and didn't say that I'd woken her up, but I still wondered if I should have gone ahead and done it without checking with her first.

+++++

I'm not sure what the point of this post is, other than to illustrate my philosophy of contribution. (And my compulsory liberal/Catholic guilt.) We all have different talents, abilities, and comfort zones. I feel like the best way I can help my grieving neighbor is to mow her lawn, a chore that's not much of a burden for me.

It's like how I am the Friend Who Helps People Move. I love the process of moving and experiencing that with other people, so whenever a friend or acquaintance puts out a call for moving help, I'm all over it. It's a tiny way I can contribute to the world.

I'm not looking for a medal or karmic rewards or even a pat on the back. I'm just trying to figure out what's the right thing to do in awkward neighborly situations.

Portal to Hell No More

2011-07-10T11:22:00.000-07:00

When I bought my house two years ago, there was this big, weird rectangular indentation in the back yard.

Along the edges of it were stone walls, and at one end it opened up where a door would be, and there were metal pipes nearby that the lawnmower would hit, which made a horrible awful sound.

No one-- the seller, the neighbors, the seller's realtor, my realtor-- knew what it was. Theories included an old greenhouse, barn, garden, bomb shelter. I thought it might be an alien landing pad, or an Indian burial ground, but then I decided it was just a generic Portal to Hell.

Whatever it was, it had been filled in, and then settled, so that now there was a big old indention in my back yard. For two years it sat on my list of house projects to fill it in.

Last week I made it happen.

First I needed a shit-ton of dirt. My landscape consultant, Peter, priced around and told me to order "8 yards" of it from our dirt guy.

A big dump truck dropped off 8 yards of pulverized processed topsoil, which looks like this:

AKA, a shit-ton. On the receipt it says "Sterling Dump." I don't know what this refers to-- the place it came from, the type of dump truck, the method by which the dirt was created-- but I really like that phrase.

I never realized when I bought my house that I'd be concerned with the price of dirt, but this mound of premium fertile Midwestern soil cost me $191.20. And I was excited about it-- another thing I never thought I'd be capable of before I owned a home.

Here's what the Portal to Hell looked like just before the project:

The plan was to remove the grass sod, lay it aside, fill in the hole, then cover it back up with the sod. About three hours into the project, we'd removed a lot of the sod:

And laid it aside on tarp:

It took us about four hours to get all the sod up.

We unearthed many artifacts (click on photo for larger view.)

Pieces of cinder, glass bottles, clay pipes, light bulbs, a blue plastic knife, plastic bags, a rubber O-ring, big stone slates. No human bones, though. The demons must have already feasted on those.

Now the fun part started. Moving the dirt from the big mound on my driveway back to the Portal. This was my favorite part of the project. I really wish I'd counted how many wheelbarrow loads it took. My guess is about 50. Here's the pile when we were about halfway done:

Two wheelbarrows: one red and one green. To make it festive.

We dumped the dirt into the hole.

The last load:

Swells of dirt, like a mountain chain:

Then we smoothed it out:

The last step was the most boring, difficult, and tedious. We had to take all the sod pieces...

and put them back over the dirt. It was like putting together a huge, filthy puzzle. Under a hot sun.

I took a picture of our progress once an hour:

The shadow from the house moved across the yard, making pics difficult. But as these time-lapse photos attest, it took at least four hours to finish this part. All that was left at this point was the very back edge:

There was some dirt left over from the sod pieces, so I dumped it in the corner and created Mount Tim. I will use this dirt to fill in any holes as they appear.

It looks bigger live

The last step is to drench the Portal so that the grass transplant takes.

We were lucky that it didn't rain at all during the three days we worked on this project. Moving wet dirt (aka mud) would have made it a real mess, and more difficult.

However, since I've finished this project, we haven't gotten any rain. One of the few times in my life when I would WELCOME rain-- where it wouldn't just ruin tennis plans or outdoor fun-- and it won't come. I've been watering the Portal day and night all week. I can't imagine what my water bill is going to be this month. (Yes, I know: First World Problem.)

I love the idea of all the grass and mud pieces fusing back together into one teeming mass of roots, soil, and life. I'm really eager to see what it will look like in 2 or 3 months. Will there be any evidence that the Portal was ever there?

But I'm not too concerned. If I learned anything from Jurassic Park, it's that life will find a way.

Eventually, something will grow there.

Password Protracted

2011-07-04T20:07:00.000-07:00

It used to be that paying my bills meant sitting down once or twice a month and writing out a bunch of checks.

Not my checks

But as more and more of my monthly bills go online, I'm finding I have fewer checks to write. I now pay my mortgage, credit card, Vonage, Netflix, and cell phone bills all online. Most of them just deduct the amount automatically from my account.

So with this trend in mind, I noticed on my latest water bill that I could "manage [my] residential account online." That could be one less check I have to write every month. So I went online full of hope and wonder that the internets could lighten my bill-paying load.

I went online and filled out their form to register for an online account. I filled in my account number, name, email address, and created a username and password.

When I clicked "Submit" (Does anyone else think of an evil villain shouting "You will SUBMIT to me!!" whenever they click that button? Especially when it says "Submit Now!" I think of someone shouting it in a German accent), an error message came back:

"LoginId is required and between 8 and 12 characters."

Oh, bother. The standard username I use for these types of transactions is only 7 characters long.

So I expand it to my full email address, which a lot of sites use for your login.

The same error message comes back. Now it's too long. Sonofabitch! (I guess I should have read the words "between 8 and 12 characters" closer.) Now I have to use some stupid hybrid that is unique only for this one website.

I change it and submit again. Then I get the following error:

"Password is required and between 8 and 12 characters with at least 1 capital letter, 1 lower case letter, and 1 number."

Oh, for fuck's sake!

Here's the thing that frustrates me. I have dozens of online accounts. When I wrote about this issue three years ago, back then I counted 33 separate logins in my life. And I've added a lot more since then. Obviously, I'm not going to create a separate username and password for each one of them. I would go insane. So I have a standard username and password that I use for most of them. (On those kinds of sites where they test the strength of your password, mine always comes out as "very strong.")

But my standard login is not good enough for the water company. They want me to create a brand-new, unique username and password that consists of capital letters, Greek symbols, puns, and retina scans.

Jesus, water people, get over yourselves. It's an account for my water bill, which I probably won't log into once a month. It's not a security clearance to enter Fort Knox. Even if someone did hack into my account, what are they going to do? Pay my water bill for me?

Until the water company gets a more realistic attitude about their place of importance among my online accounts, I'll continue to write them checks.

Idea Books

2011-06-30T07:55:00.000-07:00

I like books and movies that ask me to imagine a different world or reality. I call these "idea books/movies." I've recently encountered two idea books.

Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives by David Eagleman is a small thing, a short read that I could probably finish off in one sitting if I were so inspired. It's a fascinating idea: 40 different theories on what happens to you when you die.

Unfortunately, the idea is more interesting than the content. It does have some fascinating, mind-blowing ideas, but on the whole the book is mostly disappointing. Maybe that's what the afterlife is really like: you get all excited about the idea of it, but then it's anticlimactic.

The title passage, "Sum", posits that in death we re-live all the moments of our life, but they are bunched together by activity. Therefore, we sleep for 30 years and spend six days clipping our nails. Seven months of non-stop sex. One year reading books. Twenty-seven intense hours of pain: broken bones, accidents, cuts, etc. Three weeks realizing you're wrong. You get the picture. Everything is clumped together.

Although the statistics would be interesting, it's kind of a stupid idea. As I was reading it, I protested, "But you can't just take all of these moments out of context like that." Relaxing on the couch after a long strenuous day is different from sitting on it for months at a time. But that is his point. He ends this story with the moral that we are fortunate that life is broken up into "tiny swallowable pieces." Like so many other theories in the book, it seems to point more to life than to death.

Almost every theory in the book points to one conclusion: when you die, you find out what the true nature of life and the universe is. (Which happens to be what I always hoped the afterlife would be like.) It's only that true nature that changes from story to story. There's also a very heavy Western bias in all the theories. They're mostly all about the Judeo-Christian God-- some anthropomorphized deity-- living in heaven. I had kind of hoped that the theories would be a little more out there.

The writing isn't that great, and a lot of the examples or conclusions he comes to don't make sense to me. He might have an interesting idea, but the implementation feels all wrong. For example, there's a theory about how you are represented in the afterlife by yourself at every age, so that your 5-year-old self might hang out with your 34-year-old self and your 67-year-old self. Neat idea, but then he goes on to say that many of your different selves realize they have hardly anything in common other than a name. Huh? Surely sharing the same life history and experiences counts for a strong bond, even if it's a teenager and an elderly version of yourself?

Still, as an idea book, it gets the job done. Some of his ideas are very similar to ideas I've had, and some are completely new to me. Those new and old ideas mingled and brought up new theories.

For example, as I was reading the book, I had this revelation that maybe I have already died dozens of times, but the superior being who is playing the "Game of Tim" keeps going back to an earlier saved version of the game and reviving me. I do this when I play computer games if I make a stupid fatal mistake. I go back and try again. Maybe that's what my life is like. That could explain why I'm convinced that things will work out in the end. Any fatal mistakes can be fixed by going back to an earlier saved version.

The book is a short read that can get your creative juices flowing, so I recommend it.

+++++

The other idea book I'm reading right now is The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

I really like this book. Besides the fact that its main character is a librarian who lives in Chicago, it brings up fascinating ideas that branch off in all different directions.

Henry has Chrono Displacement, a genetic condition where he travels through time with no control over when and where. He is married to Clare. At their first first meeting, she is 6 and he is in his 30's. At their second first meeting, she is 20 and he is 28. She has known him her whole childhood, but he has no idea who she is. But his future self has visited her throughout her childhood. Encounters between them happen at different ages, so that when a 32-year-old Henry visits a 14-year-old Clare, he doesn't yet have a memory of when his 40-year-old self visited her when she was 9.

It brings up a lot of weird issues, like: would it be wrong to sleep with your wife when she's 16 and begging for it, when you're a 35-year-old guy and married to her older self? (He doesn't.) Would you tell your friends and family their future? Would you "get intimate" with a younger version of yourself? (He does.)

The circular determinism brings up all sorts of questions about free will. Henry visits Clare when she's a child because they're married, but the only reason she falls for him as an adult is that he was such a huge part of her childhood. It turns into quite a mindfuck if you think too hard on it.

But it's a fun mindfuck.

+++++

Like most of my book reviews, I'm only halfway through The Time Traveler's Wife, so if you're like Henry and you know my future, don't tell me what happens. I guess there's a movie, too, and I'd like to see that when I'm done with the book.

Indecision

2011-06-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when you hem and haw over a decision, it gets made for you.

I'm about to get more personal than I usually get on this blog, but since I think hardly anyone reads it, I don't think it matters all that much.

I've been uneasy about the "Why I'm An Ally" essay I wrote, which I first posted on this blog and then submitted a revised version to the local online magazine, Smile Politely.

I'm not uneasy about "coming out" publicly as an advocate for gay rights. That's easy. What worried me was that some people might doubt my sincerity at claiming to be a straight advocate for gay rights.

For reasons that are too personal to go into here, some people might argue that I am bisexual. I have good reason to believe I'm not (like wondering if I'm gay, I've wondered if I'm bi, but always come to the same conclusion: I overwhelmingly prefer women) so I don't identify as such, but if someone believed it, it would certainly weaken the points I make in the essay. For this reason, I felt that the article was not entirely honest, and I was hesitant to post it to my Facebook page, where I have many gay and bisexual friends who might think I'm just a closet-case in denial.

Meanwhile, this week I got into an argument on Facebook with some bisexuals over this article: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/bisexuals/Content?oid=8743322, so I'm feeling even more sensitive about this whole issue. (The disagreement was that bisexuals think Dan Savage sucks, and I think he is awesome, even though he is snarky and disrespectful.)

So then, this morning, Joel Derfner himself, the author who I quote in my article, leaves a comment: "Tim, thank you for writing this—and thank you for reading (and, I hope, enjoying) my book!" Wow! Someone famous noticed me! This is thrilling news. The kind of thing I would love to share on Facebook, but, to do so would expose all my friends to this article I'm ambivalent about. What to do?

As I was agonizing over this, a friend of a friend who found the article on Smile Politely posted it to her Facebook page, and then tagged me in it. This means that, without me doing anything, the article has been published on my Facebook page.

Okay, I guess the decision has been made for me. So, that's that.

Featured Article

2011-06-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

I finally cleaned up my Why I'm an Ally essay and submitted it to Smile Politely. I'm still not 100% happy with it, but I was pleased that they used it as their "Featured Article" early this Monday Morning.

You can read the published version here: http://www.smilepolitely.com/opinion/why_im_an_ally/

UPDATE: For various reasons, I'm not super happy with this article and can see a lot that someone would object to. So it's a little satisfying that on the website and FB it's received five effusive comments and 7 "likes," all from people I don't know. And one friend sent me a message that said it was "totally gay," which made me laugh-- hopefully not in a homophobic manner.

Gift Books

2011-06-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

I will be attending my first bar mitzvah this weekend. My nephew David is becoming a man in the Jewish tradition.

I'm looking forward to it. I've never seen any Jewish service at all, so it will be a completely new experience for me.

When I asked my sister-in-law what kind of gift is appropriate for the occasion, she suggested I get him a book that is special to me. My mind immediately thought of the only book that had a profound effect on me when I was a teenager: Portnoy's Complaint.

Hey, it's about a Jewish boy becoming a man, right? Well, kind of. For the uninitiated, Portnoy's Complaint is a detailed account of a neurotic Jewish boy/man's sexual (mis)adventures, starting with him, uh, "violating" a piece of liver that would become his family's dinner. (It was begging for it.)

I read it when I was in 8th or 9th grade, and probably again in the 9th or 10th grade, and again in 11th or 12th grade, and then probably again in college. I read that book so often it could have turned me blind.

So when I joked to my sister-in-law that I could get David Portnoy's Complaint as a bar mitzvah gift, she was not amused. But she took it well and said, "Maybe not for another few years." He is, after all, only 13. Also, receiving such a gift from your uncle, at any age, would be very creepy.

Still, the thought amused me.

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Frankly, I can't think of any other books that have special significance to me that also would be appropriate for a 13-year-old boy. My favorite book, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, wouldn't be creepy, just kind of boring for someone of that age, I think.

Shel Silverstein's The Missing Piece is another favorite, but again, I don't know if it's age/gender appropriate. Same with Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.

As I was pondering this, I came across this video on Facebook:

It's going viral in a hurry. Two of my friends, from different parts of the country, posted it within hours of each other. Each of them had re-posted it from friends of theirs.

It's a reading of the book is Go the Fuck to Sleep, read by Samuel L. Jackson. For any parent or caregiver who's ever dealt with a child who keeps stalling to go to bed, it's brilliant.

Again, not appropriate for my nephew's bar mitzvah, but it may be my new favorite children's book of all time.

Why I Am an Ally

2011-06-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

I've been working on this article for several weeks now, hoping to publish it in Smile Politely. But I'm just not happy with it. So while I try to figure out what to do with it, I thought I might as well throw what I have up on my blog, where I have much lower standards. That's what a blog is for, right?

June is Pride Month, so it seems like good timing.

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Why I Am an Ally

I’ve known ever since I was a young boy that I was attracted to girls. I love the female form: their curves, their voices, their faces, their hair, even their hands and feet.

I know this is not a courageous thing for a man to admit. It reminds me of the Onion headline: “Area Man Has Naked Lady Fetish.” But it’s something that I’d like to establish up front, because I would like to explain why I am a staunch advocate for gay rights.

As a liberal, there are lots of issues that I can get behind. I could attend anti-war protests. I could rail against genetically modified food. I could get all up in your face about the PATRIOT Act.

Yeah, I care about those things, but they’re not issues that I’m passionate about. The issue the really sticks in my craw, the one that gets my blood pumping, is why homosexuals can’t get married. This despite the fact that there are many other issues that have a much more direct impact on my life. I mean, I never have to worry about the state or society recognizing my relationships. So why do I care so much?

The first time I realized that I did care was when I was in high school. Some friends speculated about whether a classmate of ours was gay or not. We discussed the evidence, which for 16-year-old boys was all assumptions and hearsay. Finally, I said, “So what? Would it change your opinion of him if he was gay?” They said, “Of course it would!”

To back up their position, they explained, “It’s a sin.”

Pul-leeeeze, as Dan Savage would say. These were guys who would have lied, cheated, and stolen if it would have gotten them laid, but now when we start talking about dudes getting with dudes they suddenly become paragons of piety? What I realized from that conversation was that, huh, I guess I did have an opinion about gays, and huh, who knew that my friends were such homophobes?

A few years later, in college, there was a big controversy over a letter written to the school paper. Some deeply homophobic asshat wrote a screed against homosexuality, ending it with his wish that all gays would “move to California, get AIDS, and die.” This letter bothered me. A lot. I couldn’t stop thinking about how offensive it was. I lost sleep and stayed up late writing an impassioned response. Again, I had to ask myself, why did I care so much?

Of course, an obvious reason for my reaction would be that I was a closet-case myself. Who else would be so bothered about an issue that didn’t seem to concern him? It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times, and even did my share of experimentation in college, but I always come back to the same conclusion: I love women.

Over the years I have made many gay friends and got involved in gay causes. I read gay books and go to gay lectures. Two of my favorite writers are David Sedaris and Dan Savage. I can’t explain my interest in gay culture, but it’s there. Despite my enduring interest in the ladies, I am a friend of the Friends of Dorothy.

A while back I was reading a book, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever by Joel Derfner. It’s a humorous book, but in one serious passage he explains how being gay affects everything he does. This line jumped out at me: “I believe that the desire to love or be loved is the strongest force on earth.”

I agree. I’ve always been a romantic. The one consistent goal I’ve had throughout my life is to find a partner, a snugglebunny, a soul mate. I’ve been lucky enough to experience that connection on a handful of occasions, enough to know that nothing really compares to it. A lot of my single friends are perfectly happy with their independent lifestyle, and I can appreciate that, but it’s not my ultimate goal. The desire to love and be loved is certainly the strongest force in my life.

Coming from that perspective, you can imagine how offensive it is to me that people would seek to suppress in others the need to love and be loved. I consider the desire for companionship as much a part of the human condition as the desire for food, shelter, and safety. We are social pair-bonding animals. To deny someone such a basic need is an affront to whatever god (or natural forces) gave you the capacity to love in the first place.

What’s most frustrating about this is, it is the civil rights issue that is the easiest to solve. It requires no effort or sacrifice whatsoever. You don’t have to stop a war or solve hunger problems or build up an infrastructure. Ending slavery, for example, at least had economic consequences. But there is absolutely no practical impediment to denying gays marriage licenses. There’s no argument against it that makes any logical or legal sense.

All you have to do is recognize love. Anyone who considers herself a romantic, who acknowledges the fundamental need for love in the human heart, should open their mind to it as well.

Where does the love come from?

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For resources on how to be an ally yourself, see the UP Center of Champaign County website: http://unitingpride.org/

Signs

2011-06-01T06:57:00.000-07:00

I recently reconnected with a friend on Facebook. (The Universal Friend Reconnector and Love Broker.) A week later, I bought a compost bin. An hour after I set up said compost bin in my back yard, I checked Facebook. My friend posted something asking if her FB friends would be interested in composting advice. She had no idea I'd just bought a bin-- just set it up an hour earlier!-- so the timing seemed too coincidental.

It must be a sign! The Universe wants us to bond over composting! (Or as one friend said, maybe it means we need to dump the leftovers on our past relationship to let it decompose for a while.)

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I attended a lecture/luncheon at the university a few weeks ago. I made a new friend-- it turned out we had a mutual acquaintance. That wasn't a huge coincidence. I know lots of people, and the subject of the lecture insured that like-minded people would be there.

Here's the coincidence. In trying to set up a lunch date with my new friend, we were discussing schedules. She said it would have to be next week, because the week after that she was going to NC to help her parents move. I'd been planning a trip for a few weeks now to go to NC with my brother to help my dad move. I said, "You won't believe this, but I'm going to NC (Wilmington) that same week to help my dad move." I asked her, where in NC will you be? Answer: Wilmington!

So we're both going to be in the same place, 870 miles away from where we live, at the same time, doing the same thing-- helping our respective parents move.

We agreed that this was a weird, ridiculous coincidence. My Universe-Sign-o-Meter was off the charts! This must MEAN something!

It didn't.

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I don't really believe in signs from the Universe. We are pattern-seeking animals, so we often find patterns that aren't there. Usually what we see as "signs" are simply things we wanted to see in the first place. Things that have been on our mind.

And when you think about it, coincidences are not as amazing as you think. In the first example, I got interested in composting in the first place because of this particular friend. And it was the first warm spring day, on a weekend, when people would have things like gardening on the brain.

I was talking about this to a friend and she sent me this video. As the summary says: "A poor understanding of probability leads many people to put forward supernatural explanation for events that are far more common than they think. This video shows how probability theory is sufficient to explain even seemingly remarkable coincidences."

I love scientific shit like that.

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Because I always find things in patterns of three, here's another coincidence I noticed this week.

Whenever I drive to my hometown to see family, I drive through West Lafayette, IN. Just North of Lafayette, as you're coming into town, is a street sign that says Nikole Dr. I have an ex named Nikole, with the same unusual spelling. The street sign right after Nikole Drive is Debbie Drive. I have a sister named Debbie (same spelling.)

I don't know what that coincidence is supposed to signify, other than the developer who built this particular neighborhood also knew a Debbie and a Nikole. And apparently a Donna and a Mark. And a North Connie and a South Connie.

Although these street names are, in a literal sense, signs, they are not Signs from the Universe.

Am I Green?

2011-05-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to be green?

For Kermit, it was as simple as looking at his own skin.

As I walked around the Chicago Green Festival on Saturday, looking at people wearing stickers saying, "I'm a Green American," I realized that I don't really think of myself as green. That is, I don't think of myself as living the environmentally-conscious life. To be sure, I'm pro environment, but I don't know if I really walk the talk. Because there's always more you can do.

What's funny is that I had this thought at the same time I was blowing my nose on my cloth handkerchief, carrying around my metal water bottle, which was wrapped up in my cloth napkin that I knew I'd be using for lunch, which was all transported to the conference in my hybrid Prius.

Hm, maybe I'm a little green.

What the question is really getting at, though, is this: Do I fit in here? Are these "green people" my people? Like so many questions in my life, the answer is complicated.

When I first started walking around the exhibit hall, I was absolutely thrilled to be there. I was convinced that this was the place for me. I sampled granola bar bits, cereal, salsa with weird tortillas, "tiny" popcorn, all-natural gum, and hundreds of kinds of chocolates. I tried hemp oil, hemp seeds, and hemp chocolate "milk", which was definitely NOT for me. I got some free coupons for this new wheat-based kitty litter, which I'd just started buying last month. I got some coupons for the kinds of granola bars I already buy at my local co-op. I heard a speaker talk about making your home more energy efficient, which was really cool because they had a hand-out which listed the average kWh of all these different things in your home. Did you know that a dehumidifier (228 kWh) uses 13 times more energy than an oven (18)?

I got some business cards made out of elephant poop. No shit! Mr. Ellie Pooh, LLC, makes paper out of elephant poo.

I really wanted to buy this shirt, but I didn't have enough cash and the guy's credit card machine wasn't working.

I got a free sample of a new kind of water bottle made entirely out of plants. No petroleum whatsoever. That was pretty cool. The label said the bottle was compostable, but when I asked the guy more about it, he said that was industrial composting, where they heat it. If I throw it in my compost bin in my back yard, it won't decompose.

I also bought some decanters made from old wine bottles, and some all-natural household cleaner to replace my 409.

There were also a lot of really cute hippie-ish women with no makeup and sensible shoes there, the kind of women I tend to be attracted to.

All these things were very cool and made me feel like I belonged.

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But there were also things that made me feel like I didn't belong. Perhaps I'm just too cynical to really get into the spirit. The largest presence at the festival was Ford, which was showing off some of its hybrid and electric models. Ford also sponsored all of the "Resource Recovery Stations," which turned out to be the trash/recycling areas. For the longest time I walked around looking for a trash or recycling bin, but it never occurred to me to use something called a Resource Recovery Station. Can you hear the sound of my eyes rolling?

The keynote speaker was pretty inspiring, all about how we live in a corporatocracy where large corporations have all the power, and we need to hold them accountable, but I couldn't help but notice the contradiction between that and the presence of Ford all over this conference.

There was an exhibit for something called Ki, which is some new-agey massage-like thing where they appear to just wave their hands all around your body, maybe destroying thetons or midiclorians or juicing up your Jedi powers. As you can see, I'm a skeptic.

The weirdest exhibit I visited was something called the Humane Society University. They had tons of promotional materials with dogs and cats on them. It's an online, for-profit "university" that somehow has a connection to the Humane Society. Presumably the diploma certifies that you and indeed a good graduate, yes you are, yes you are! I had trouble understanding what exactly the purpose was, and even more trouble understanding what this had to do with a "green" festival.

Sit. Stay. Roll over.

One of the talks I went to gave out fortune cookies. Here's what mine read: "Your fortune will not escape your home when you plug leaks with air sealing and insulation." Yeah, that's cheesy.

Speaking of cheesy, the biggest way I felt different was the food. It was all vegan. I got lunch from a place called Soul Vegetarian, which tried to reproduce Southern soul food. I got the lunch plate, which included barbecue bits, mac & cheese, greens, and cornbread. The barbecue was seitan, a meat substitute, which was pretty good, but the mac & cheese was a huge disappointment. It was some sort of unholy approximation of cheese that just made it taste way worse than if they called it something different. The greens were okay, but the cornbread was way too dry.

I know that a vegan diet is way more green, but the word itself scares me. I just can't give up my dairy. And there are more humane ways to get it than from factory farms. The one saving grace about vegans is they still have chocolate. There were tons of chocolate exhibits there, and I sampled dozens of different kinds. I even bought myself a bar of organic fair trade orange dark chocolate (70% cacao). The cynic in me wonders, though, how many people would still be vegan if they had to give up chocolate?

Anyway, I'm not going to debate that whole issue here. I just mean to say, I feel out of place around militant vegans. And Ki practitioners. And people who think they're saving the Earth by using a Resource Recovery Station instead of a recycling bin. And I don't like signing petitions about things I haven't investigated first.

So like Kermit says, it's not easy being green.

Libertarians and Liberals

2011-05-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

It's certainly a strange twist of fate that my new best friend is a libertarian conservative George Bush fan from Texas. Who I've never met. Funny the ways that life can surprise you.

We get along great, but sometimes our friendship brings articles like this to my attention: It's Time To Kill The 'Robin Hood' Myth. It's from a column called The Objectivist from Forbes magazine, which is an appropriate title, because I can't resist objecting to it.

I'll leave Stephen Colbert to skewer the whole Ayn Rand Objectivism thing (jump to the 2:25 mark in the video to get to the Atlas Shrugged review):

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I especially like Colbert's line of Ayn Rand birthday cards: "Grandmother, You are a drain on society... I ate your cake."

The article above is an attempt to discredit the "reverse-Robin Hood" myth that providing tax breaks to the wealthy is "giving" to them, and that cutting social programs for the poor is "stealing" from them. There's an attitude that runs throughout this article that signals to me the biggest difference between liberals and libertarians. As they state in the article:

On our view, you earned your wealth and it belongs to you, and no politician has any business talking about how much of your money he can “afford” to let you keep.

Libertarians love to emphasize how the mean old government is taking their money. They act as if they live in a self-sustained bubble that has no effect or interaction with anyone around them. This is their fatal logical flaw.

We liberals, on the other hand, understand how in a civilized society, people depend on each other. All of us, working together, can achieve much more than any individual can working alone. Individuals don't build roads or court systems or firehouses or police forces or national defense or education. All that wealth that you earned was done as a result of the infrastructure provided by the state. You didn't do it alone.

When I hear people whine about how the government is taking their money, it reminds me of a teenager who has a part-time job and complains when his parents ask him to put some of it into buying a new family car. "But it's MY money! I earned it!" What the teenager doesn't acknowledge is that he was only able to make his money because his parents payed for his housing, food, medical care, utilities, clothing, etc.

I understand that people work hard and want to keep what they earn. But plenty of people work just as hard around the world and aren't able to amass any wealth at all. So it seems like a small price to pay for adults to acknowledge and support the infrastructure that made it possible for them to earn money at all.

I think balancing the public budget is important and we need to have serious discussions about how best to spend our tax dollars. But this attitude of "I earned it and it's mine" does not contribute to that discussion in a positive way.

Are Blogs Dead?

2011-05-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

I had a discussion with my brother recently about blogs. He thinks blogs are sooo 2008 and are going the way of the 8-track tape.

He laments that the trend is now toward twittering and facebooking, where people express themselves in shorter, less substantial posts.

I don't doubt that blogs will someday go the way of the 8-track, just like rotary telephones, facebooking, twittering, and metaZombieClustering (or whatever the next big new thing will be.) Social networking is constantly changing, and the rate of change just gets faster and faster. Five years ago I didn't even know Facebook existed, and now it's hard for me to imagine life without it. Who knows what new thing will be indespensible to me three years from now.

So the debate I had with my brother was, how dead is blogging? He doesn't waste his time on it anymore because he sees it as already obsolete. I agree with him that that's where the trend is headed, but to quote a line from Monty Python from before there was texting, email, or even cordless phones: blogs are "not dead yet!"

There are lots of blogging communities that are going strong and adding new members every day. Just last week someone told me about a new blog her sister started. I recently retired an anonymous blog that was part of such a community. In eight months it got 21,700 page hits. Near the end I was getting about 150 hits a day. I retired the blog for a lot of reasons, but part of it was because my blogroll was growing too much and it was taking up too much of my time. That doesn't quite sound like a dead medium.

Of course, that's just anecdotal evidence. One person's experience doesn't prove the overall trend. But it's hard for me to believe people who read, write, and participate in blog communities are like groups of vinyl record enthusiasts-- luddites who refuse to embrace the new popular technology. I'd also like to point out that people have been making jokes about blogs being dead for many years now. (One article I found with the title, "Is blogging dead?" is from 2007.) But they're still hanging around.

I've had seven blogs in my life, and none of them have lasted more than about three years. An individual blog has a short shelf life. But blogging, as an activity, has been part of my life for about eight years. It's a good medium for me. I enjoy writing out my fluff thoughts, with goofy pictures, and flinging them out into the world.

So as long as I still enjoy it, I will continue to blog. Even if I'm not getting anywhere close to 150 hits a day on this blog.

Even if it's a dying medium, it's not dead yet.

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Here's other people who have, uh, blogged about this topic:

http://manofdepravity.com/2011/02/22/blogs-dying-nytimes/

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374448,00.asp

http://www.editorsweblog.org/newsrooms_and_journalism/2011/02/blogging_is_dead_or_is_it_only_adapting.php

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UPDATE: So here's the punchline. After publishing this post and re-reading it, I realize it's really boring. Even I'm bored by this post, and I wrote it. Or maybe it's just not very well written or investigated. Whether or not blogs are dying, this post is not doing a good job of keeping them alive.

What's Real?

2011-04-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

In the middle of the date I had to run back to my hotel room to use the bathroom, but couldn't go because my niece kept opening the door, so I ran to the neighboring hotel to see if they had a free bathroom.

As I crossed the plaza between hotels, I thought, "This is exactly the kind of thing I would dream about." How funny, because it was obviously real life. I wasn't imagining the concrete beneath me!

When I got to the neighborhood hotel, I climbed a staircase in search of a bathroom. But the staircase suddenly got closed off, and I couldn't continue. Goddammit! WTF! I walked back down the stairs and asked the bellman if there was a bathroom around. He walked me back up the stairs, and where there had been an impediment, now he opened a door to a dingy little dive bar. "There's a bathroom in there," he said.

After some searching, I found the rickety door to the men's room. But when I opened it up, it was not what I expected. It was a huge video game room-- many times larger than the bar I'd come from. I didn't see any toilets, but I walked around thinking they must be behind the huge rows of video consoles.

Then I woke up.

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I apologize for springing this dream on you. I know that hearing about other people's dreams is about as interesting is watching videos of their child's birth, and if I had started the above passage with, "So I had this really weird dream...", you would have tuned it out much sooner. As I quoted Nicholson Baker in this blog a while back, "...lovers are the only people who will put up with hearing your dreams." And that's as it should be.

I'm generally not a fan of listening to other people's dreams. Dreams are your subconscious taking out the trash. I don't need to sift through the discarded coffee grounds and junk mail of your mind. (Unless, as Nicholson Baker says, we're sleeping together. Then I take my job seriously.)

But at least real dreams do give a glimpse into a real person. What I really hate is fictional dreams: reading an account of a dream in a novel or seeing dreams in a movie/TV show. Unless the dream is integral to the plot (a la Inception), I don't want to hear a crude imitation of some fictional character's subconscious. Invariably they are either too obvious or too cryptic. It's really hard to make something like that interesting to me.

So, anyway. The particular dream I had the other night was interesting only for the fact that, while I was dreaming, I acknowledged that it resembled a dream, and yet I still believed that it was 100% real. Even though it wasn't.

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My certainty that I wasn't dreaming, when in fact I was, makes me wonder what is really real in my life and what isn't. I will often daydream about whether the things I'm seeing, hearing, touching and smelling are real. Am I in The Matrix? The Truman Show? The Sixth Sense? Memento? I love movies like that, because they challenge our basic assumptions about the nature of reality.

Even before I saw any of those movies, I had this elaborate fantasy that I was the only real person in the world. I'm a test subject in a huge alien experiment, and everyone else in the whole world were actors given scripts designed to see how I would react to different situations.

"Let's see how the subject deals with his wife leaving him," the coordinators of the experiment say. Or, "Let's let him win the tennis league." I imagine them with clipboards, recording all of my reactions.

Judging from movies like The Truman Show, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's had similar thoughts. They're incredibly narcissistic, but don't we all have a little of that in us?

Don't we? Don't we?

Or am I the only one?

First World Problems

2011-04-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

I recently heard the phrase "first world problems" to describe almost every problem you or any of your friends/family have ever had. It describes the kinds of things that I complain about on this blog:

disappointing music
whether or not to blog about tennis
writing challenges
my TiVo not recording things I tell it to

These are all first world problems.

They don't quite compare to the kinds of things that people in the third world deal with every day: death, disease, war, starvation, ritual gang rape as punishment.

It's that last thing that struck me as I read Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. This book describes almost every possible example of women being abused, humiliated, and mutilated around the world.

Certain parts of the book made me cringe and put images in my head that I couldn't bear to even think about.

I have a problem thinking about something that happens every day in real life to real people? What a first world wuss I am. For some reason, it's the medical descriptions in the book that cause me the most problems. I'm way too squeamish to ever be a doctor. In particular, I would be happy to never hear the word "fistula" ever again.

The appalling thing I learned from the book is how women are so shockingly undervalued in some parts of the world. The treatment, abuse, and downright inhumanity shown towards women and girls just baffles me. I don't understand how people can be so utterly without compassion. To treat other people like that. I would be disgusted if someone treated a dog like that. Or a spider. And yet these are human beings. And it's not just criminal or deviant behavior within a culture, but a twisted moral code, an extreme view of punishment and justice, that entire villages are complicit in.

As a friend of mine quipped when I told him about it: "It takes a village to rape a child."

+++++

The book isn't all about doom and gloom, however. There are some redemptive stories and inspirational successes in the book. The one thing that seems to make all the difference-- the easiest way to make the world an infinitely better place-- is education for girls. The longer a girl stays in school, the less likely she is to be abused (or to tolerate abuse when it happens), the older she is when she gets married, the better medical care she'll receive, the more she can earn money and contribute to the economy, and the less children she will have.

Education for girls appears to have a ripple effect on every part of a culture. They even make a strong case for how it reduces terrorism.

So from now on I'd like to put most of my international aid effort toward helping to educate girls and women in misogynistic cultures. That seems to be the most significant third world problem, and one that takes precedence over whether I find the right pair of tennis shoes.

It is impossible to realize our goals while discriminating against half the human race. As study after study has taught us, there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women. ---Kofi Annan, former UN General Secretary

Cruise: Part Three

2011-04-03T18:11:00.000-07:00

Here's the last part of my cruise essay. If you want to read the whole thing, start with these two posts:

Part One (Forward)
Part Two(Floating, Fun, Food)

And then read this:

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Foreign Lands

One huge difference between my cruise and DFW’s is that he never left the boat when they were in port. This seems ridiculous to me, like going to a Mexican restaurant and ordering the hamburger. He never really gives a reason for this, but takes advantage of the boat’s solitude while everyone else is enjoying onshore excursions.

Our cruise had two stops, both in Mexico off the Yucatan Peninsula. I was most excited about my day trip to Chichen Itza, a famous site of Mayan ruins. It’s like the Vegas of Mayan ruins: a wonder of the ancient world complete with a large pyramid, tons of temples, and the largest ball court in ancient Mesoamerica.

My trip to Chichen Itza was almost a disaster. When I got on the bus that morning I thought that I had left my camera, notepad, and leisure-reading paperback back on the boat. Taking a two-hour bus ride to visit one of the Wonders of the World without any way to document it would be a special kind of hell for me. Luckily, it turned out that, in my rush to get ready that morning, I had stuffed all of those things into my insulated cooler.

I had a good touristy time at Chichen Itza, taking lots of pictures and reflecting on the modern way that Europeans now invade the Mayan civilization: as armies of tourists.

Our second day in port was in Cozumel, an island off the Yucatan peninsula. It’s a crowded tourist destination with dozens of cruise ships arriving daily. Instead of taking advantage of any of the planned shore excursions the cruise line offered, I decided to just explore the town on my own.

I understand there are people who enjoy shopping. For them, it is not a chore, but a hobby. They plan afternoons, weekends, even entire vacations around this hobby. I am not one of those people. So I was a little disconcerted to encounter the hardcore aggressive manner that wares were peddled in downtown Cozumel. It was like this at Chichen Itza as well, but Cozumel was commerce on steroids.

After I left the ship, one of the first sites I saw in Cozumel were a bunch of t-shirts for sale in a shop window. They were all pretty tacky or offensive, but one of them really got my blood boiling: a t-shirt that said, “SPEAK FUCKING ENGLISH! COZUMEL.” This was the perfect representation of all that is wrong with arrogant imperial tourism. It is the Ugly American at its worst, and I was angry and ashamed that I was a part of it.

I know the uber-hyped commerce was simply a result of locals trying to make a peso. They need to make a living. But it was not my style. I could not walk down the sidewalk, look at items in a window, or make eye contact with any locals (as we Midwesterners are wont to do) without having them try to sell me something. “What do you like, Amigo? I give you good price...” was the refrain I heard at least a hundred times. When I went into the town local history museum, it was quite a respite that only two people inside the building tried to sell me something. I even had a cop on a corner try to sell me a taxi ride.

At one point I took to walking along some side streets just to get away from the constant harassment. A guy on the other side of the street shouted over to me, trying to sell jewelry. When I said, “No, thanks,” he asked, “What are you looking for?” I’m looking to be left alone, I wanted to shout. This task was made even more difficult by the fact that I did actually have to buy some souvenirs for friends and family. I couldn’t come back from my cruise empty-handed. But every time I stopped to just look at something, I was accosted. This is not how I like to conduct business.

Friends

David Foster Wallace and I both cruised alone. We were outsiders—out of our element, out of our comfort zone, out of our demographic.

On the first night of the cruise I tried to attend a “Friends of Dorothy” social in the wine bar. This was an event for GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual) people. Although I don’t strictly fall into any of those categories, many of my closest friends do, and we often share the same values. I guess you could call me a friend of Friends of Dorothy. So I was hoping this would be a way to meet some like-minded people on the ship. Unfortunately, when I showed up at the event, there was no one there. I would try several more times to attend such events, since the Funtimes announced one every evening, but I never once saw anyone show up for them. This is perhaps the best illustration of the demographics of the cruise I was on.

I did meet people, though, and like DFW, dinner was a good venue for that. (DFW provides an entertaining and detailed description of his dining mates in one of his longer footnotes that spreads over two pages. The man obsessed with footnotes. His 97-page essay features 137 of them. And he does advanced things with them, like double footnotes (two of them for the same passage), sub-footnotes (e.g. 137a) and footnotes within footnotes. I couldn’t decipher his formula for what he included in the main text, a parenthetical aside, a footnote, or a sub-footnote within a footnote.)

Every evening I ate at the same table with the same people. I dined with three parties of three: a married couple from Mississippi with the wife’s single friend, a married couple from Minnesota with the wife’s younger brother, and a mother from New Jersey with her two adult daughters. What was interesting to me about the geographic mix at the table was how everyone seemed to play to stereotypes: the taciturn Minnesotans, the loud pushy New Jerseyans, the laid-back, friendly coastal Mississippians, and... whatever I represented from Central Illinois. By the end of the week we were exchanging email addresses to keep in touch (we haven’t), but that first night the conversation was awkward. We mostly talked about football.

It was awkward being surrounded by so many shiny happy people and not having anyone close to talk to. I carried a book around with me every where I went-- a paperback of Gulliver’s Travels, which I thought would be appropriate-- but I didn’t read much of it because I often got bored or restless and needed to see what was shaking elsewhere on the boat. As if the only way to combat my solitude was to keep moving and mingling among the people. Once when I was doing my rounds, I came upon a family of about 30 Asian-Americans trying to get a huge group picture. They asked me if I would take the picture and I happily obliged, while they handed me four different cameras. That was the highlight of my afternoon.

I spent much of the first half of the cruise being lonely and mopey, but then things started to turn around.

My best source of socialness on the cruise was the dance club, where I hung out every night well past my usual bed time (9:30). It was there that I met a group of dancing nurses who shook their booty every night. They invited me along to some of their excursions, and one night after we closed the dance club I took them to the 24-hour pizza place near the pool. (I’d discovered it during my many walks around the ship.) DFW didn’t mention any dancing nurses from his cruise, but I get the impression his cruise had a much more, uh, mature demographic. According to him, Carnival has a reputation as the party boat.

By the last afternoon of the cruise, I was feeling much more like the life of the party. In one half hour period I ran into three people I knew as I walked around the boat. I toasted someone’s deceased mother, quaffed free drinks at a farewell party, and had a new friend buy me a beer at the casino bar. At dinner, I entertained my dinner mates with tales of the day, and I finished up the week-long cruise back at the casino bar with my dancing nurse friends, up till 2:00 am even though we had to be off the boat in about five hours.

And when I got home, I made a new friend in David Foster Wallace, who took me along on a cruise of his own.

Cruising, Part Two

2011-03-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

Since my cruise essay is so damn big, I'm breaking it up into parts. Here's the second part of the first draft. You can read the introductory section ("Forward") here.

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Floating

I boarded the ship, the Carnival Triumph, around noon on a Monday. The first mistake I made was not to have surrendered my luggage at the Ellis Island-like check-in process. Once on the boat, we were not able to enter our cabins for a few hours, so I had to carry my heavy bags around everywhere.

David Foster Wallace did not have to deal with this problem, as his bags were taken from him at the airport as he boarded the cruise line bus. “A... crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler’s List.” It’s a great image, but here again I have to defer to DFW’s tortured genius, as I did not think of the Holocaust once during my own cruise.

We had a great view of the New Orleans skyline as we departed. The mighty Mississippi awaited, with storms in the distance.

One of the first things I tried to do once we set sail (Can I say “set sail” if there are no sails?) was to stand in front of the ship and get a “I’m King of the World!” picture. (An homage to both Titanic and The Office.) But it turns out there are no places for the unwashed masses to stand in the front of the boat. The best I could do was stand off the frontish side and get a “I’m Going To Tell This Story!” picture.

One afternoon I was bored so I rode the glass elevator in the atrium from the second floor all the way up to the 11th floor. It’s difficult to reconcile those words: glass elevator, atrium, 11th floor, with the fact that I was on a boat. The thing was huge. A floating hotel. I wondered how it compared to an aircraft carrier, oil tanker, or battleship.

It’s an incredible feat of nautical engineering, the culmination of thousands of years of seafaring, war, fishing, and exploration—all for the sole purpose of pleasure. Or more accurately, making money.

It’s a strange feeling to be floating in the middle of nowhere, with no land in site. Especially on a ship of this size, and with so many people. It’s like a small city disconnected from the world. A strange mix of crowded isolation. Sitting at the back of the boat watching the water churn behind us was very calming.

Some people got nauseous or sea sick, but I enjoyed the rocking of the boat. The last two days of the cruise the boat was very rocky. It was like being on a low-impact roller coaster all the time. The water in the pool sloshed from side to side.

When I visited the dance club late that night, I reflected how I’d never been in a disco that was swaying before.

The weather in New Orleans had not be very tropical, so when I woke up Tuesday morning and came up on deck, I was pleasantly surprised to feel the warm Gulf weather. This is what I wrote on my notes: “Sun!! Warmth!!! Hot girls in bikinis! This is why I’m here.”

Before I left on my cruise, the standard refrain I got from everyone was, “Don’t forget your sunscreen!” I heard it as often as a performer hears “Break a leg!” This advice seeped into my brain to such an extent that I bought four different tubes of sunscreen. The downside of all of this skin care paranoia was that, although the weather was sunny and beautiful for much of my cruise, I was so vigilant about skin care that I hardly gained any color at all. DFW had a similar experience, although he was one of those uber-nerds who slathered that white zinc oxide stuff on his nose.

Under the hot sun, I contemplated life boats. Each ship had dozens of them hanging along the side like a row of beads. But these were not little dingie rowboats. They were highly sophisticated machines with motors and a steerage cab. In thinking about all the resources that are used up during a cruise, it’s amazing to think of all the engineering, manufacturing, and materials used to create an army of objects that, in all likelihood, would never even be used.

Fun

On the itinerary for my cruise were two dates designated a “FUN DAY AT SEA.” These were days when we would be traversing the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore all fun would be had onboard. In other words, no stops in port.

When I first saw that on the itinerary, I was excited. FUN was the port, the destination, the only agenda for the entire day. How could I not enjoy that? That was before I realized the role that single word played in the Carnival propaganda machine.

I first noticed the insidiousness of the word during the Welcome Aboard Show the first night of the cruise. This was my introduction to cruise ship live entertainment. I’ve never seen any stage shows in places like Vegas, Branson, or Gatlinburg , so I don’t know how they compare, but do people really enjoy this kind of thing? It was a cheesy song and dance medley all about FUN!!! Men and women in sequins pranced about singing various songs with the word "fun" in it. (Fun fun fun til our daddy takes the t-bird away, Girls just wanna have fun, etc.) They went through dozens of costume and scenery changes, the only constant being three huge props: the letters F, U, and N.

It felt like they were trying way too hard to put the word “fun” in our brains. So that when we came home from our cruise and people asked us how it was, we would automatically answer, “It was so fun!” It was less entertainment than indoctrination. “You are having fun... you are having fun... you are having fun...”

DFW touches on this as well. He mentions how the word “pamper” is strategically placed throughout the cruise’s promotional material, and that it’s no accident that the word also conjures up an infantile helplessness, since the cruise essentially takes all decisions and responsibility for fun away from the cruisers. “You WILL have fun,” the brochure commands.

The word FUN was everywhere, often in all caps. Every afternoon, a fresh copy of the ship’s bulletin, FUNTIMES, would arrive on my cabin bed, along with an towel-animal and a small foil-wrapped chocolate.

The guide to port excursions was called FUN ASHORE. The Carvinal credit card they were hocking would let you earn “FunPoints.” With that you could buy watches and apparel at “The Fun Shops.” The order form for taking home bathrobes and beach towels (aka “cruise comforts”) was labeled “Fun Stuff.” Even my luggage tags said, “Enjoy Your ‘Fun Ship’ Cruise.”

After I got home, the survey Carnival sent me asked me to rate my “Fun Ship experience.” Even in their feedback, they want to put fun on my brain.

There were indeed times when I had “fun.” Perhaps the highlight of the week was karaoke-ing Jimmy Buffett’s “Cheeseburgers in Paradise” on Wednedsay night. Aside from Karaoke, I went to the dance club on the ship every single night. I’ve never been “clubbing” four nights in a row. I don’t know if “fun” was the right word, but it certainly was exhilarating to consider the fact that at 1:40 am on a weekday I was in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico in a loud thumping rocking dance club. It was not my usual Monday night.

I also had a particularly good time on the last afternoon and evening of the trip. Around 4:00 pm I was bored and melancholy, so I decided to throw caution to the rough seas and ordered a mixed drink. I drank the rest of the day and ran into lots of new friends, who bought me more drinks. I experienced drunk cruising, drunk dining, and drunk packing for the first time in my life. The lesson I took away from this was that good things happened when I drink.

But the FUN was not constant, and only one of dozens of words I would use to describe the week.

Food

The thing I most looked forward to before my cruise was the food. Everyone who has ever told me about their cruise raved about the food: how good it was, how many choices there were, a bottomless supply available everywhere and at all times. Before I left I told people, “I plan to eat my weight in shellfish!” (The similarity between the words “shellfish” and “selfish” was not lost on me—my subconscious liberal guilt was already at work.)

In truth, I was mostly disappointed with the food. The meals on my cruise ranged from crappy to a little above average. There was nothing that completly rocked my taste buds, and several things that were just plain horrible. The dining menu tried to dress up dishes, but like the FUN propaganda, it felt too forced. The first night I ordered something with an elaborate “sun-dried tomato” name. From the description it wasn’t clear exactly what it was-- it turned out to be unremarkable tomato soup. “Corn-fed chicken” was on the menu, as if that’s a rare and special type of poultry.

The breakfast I had the first morning was crappy: bacon, eggs, cajun sausage, and the worst toast I’ve ever met. I happened to be wearing my Moosewood Restaurant t-shirt that day, and reflected on the irony of eating such a meat-heavy breakfast while wearing it. Moosewood is a famous vegetarian restaurant known for its vegetarian cookbooks. I usually take it for granted that where ever I am that there are vegetarians there, but from the demographics of my cruise I’m not sure that was the case.

I should probably point out that, according to one of DFW’s many footnotes, the cruise line I was on, Carnival, has a certain reputation in the cruise industry. He describes it as the Walmart of cruise lines. So that may explain the demographics and substandard food on the cruise. For example, Wallace luxuriates in the fruit baskets left in his cabin every day. He never ate so much fruit in his life. Really, he goes on and on about the fruit. I’ve never seen anyone get so excited about fruit before. In contrast, there was no fruit left in my cabin.

Like almost every cruiser you talk to, Wallace focuses a lot on the food. I only had two meals that were worth, well, writing home about. After my horrible breakfast Tuesday morning, I had a crappy lunch experience as well. It’s too involved and boring to explain in detail, but it ends with me getting a crappy burger and fries and eating it on the back of the boat, watching the water churn out behind us. About two hours later I was walking past the lunch buffet and saw shrimp quesadillas under the sneeze guard. Shrimp quesadillas! And I wasted my lunch on a sub-par burger and fries?

But then I realized—I’m on a cruise. The food is free (or pre-paid) and I have nothing else to do. Why not indulge in a mid-afternoon meal? That’s why I’m here, right? To break out of my usual routine and eat my weight in shellfish?

So I had a second lunch. If not the best tasting, it was the meal that made the biggest impression on me. I got cilantro pesto with “Home Made Chips,”, tortilla crusted chicken, and of course, shrimp quesadillas. The food was good, but it was the thrill of having a spontaneous second lunch that really stuck with me.

I woke up the following morning feeling a little bloated, so I went to breakfast determined to have a light breakfast. FAIL. I ended up getting grits, cantaloupe, salty potato slices, french toast, and “panko crusted eggs,” a deep-fried hardboiled egg, which was the star of breakfast, mostly for its novelty.

Perhaps the most novel thing about eating on a cruise ship is the scheduled dinner every evening. It’s in a nice restaurant with servers and bus-people fretting over you. Only, there are no prices on the menu because it’s unlimited and already been paid for. At the end of your dining experience, there is no bill to pay or tip to figure out. You just get up and leave.

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Tune in for the exciting conclusion-- or really just the last two sections (Foreign Lands and Friends)-- at some indeterminate time in the future.

UPDATE: That some indeterminate time is now. Here's the last installment.

"Published"

2011-03-23T18:56:00.000-07:00

I'm "published" for the first time in over 15 years.

I wrote an article for a local volunteer online magazine, and they put it on their site. In terms of prestige, I don't know where that stands between a college newspaper column, stories for my family and friends, and blogging. They do have editors, so there's some kind of filter. I suspect there may be less readership for this article than for some of my blogs, though.

Anyhoo, here's the article: http://www.smilepolitely.com/opinion/like_water_for_dating/.

It's about online dating. And deception.

House Possessed

2011-03-20T09:19:00.001-07:00

A string of weird goings-on in my house lately has made me wonder if I'm being stalked, going crazy, or my house is possessed.

My favorite button-down shirt and my light spring jacket are missing. Neither can be found hanging up in my closet, which is the only place I keep such things. How do you lose a jacket? I'm not one of those people who's constantly misplacing things. In my house, everything has a place, and since I live alone, it stays there. So it's always weird when I can't find something.

My house has been making weird noises lately. Yeah, I know, all houses make weird noises. But this is a new weird noise, and it seems to happen around the same time in the evenings. It's like a loud bang. A friend of mine was over the other night and it happened when he was here, and even he asked what it was.

I googled "house noises" and got this. It doesn't really apply to my text, but it was too good not to post.

My roommate, TiVo, has been acting very strangely lately. TiVo lies to me. It tells me that it can't record a program that I told it to record because "the tuner was not available." Bullshit. It recorded shows on the same channel before and after that program, and it wasn't recording anything on another channel at the same time. Why do you lie to me, TiVo?

Lately the lies have taken a sinister turn. Last week TiVo told me it couldn't record something because "Someone in your household would not allow the tuner to change the channel." WTF? This was in the middle of the night when I was asleep, so I know it wasn't me. It also deleted something I hadn't watched, blaming it (again) on "someone in [your] house."

Is this an update on the old urban legend: "The phone calls are coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!"? The person messing with my TiVo is coming from inside my own house!

The weirdest thing happened with the portal to my attic. It's in the ceiling in my garage. The last time I was up there was some time last year. Whenever I go up there, I make sure that the trap door is shut securely.

So I was a little freaked out the other day when I looked up and saw this:

The door had been moved and was no longer flush in the groove. WTF? Has someone been up in my attic? How? Why? The door is too heavy to be the result of the wind or a critter or something like that. And I know I wouldn't have left it like that, because I'm anal about these kinds of things.

I remembered one day last fall when I came home from work and found my (automatic) garage door completely open. I entered the house cautiously, but nothing appeared to be missing. I assumed I just spaced out and forgot to shut it in the morning when I left. But now I worry that someone could be messing with me.

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Combine these incidents with some email paranoia I've been having lately: Four or five people have not responded to messages. In addition, on an online dating site I've had six consecutive women simply ignore or disappear from conversations. Aside from making me think that maybe I have the online dating equivalent of a booger hanging off my nose, it makes me wonder if someone's hacking into my online shit and deleting things.

I came to this theory after watching a story on the Colbert Report about Anonymous, an organization of hackers associated with Wikileaks who can apparently get into any private accounts and wreak havoc.

That report scared the shit out of me, because it made me realize that none of us is really safe when people are determined to take you down.

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There are lots of possible conspiracy theories as to what's going on:

My house is possessed.
Someone is harassing me.
Some Anonymous-level hacker has taken an interest in me for some reason.
I'm into some split personality psychosis like the dude in Fight Club.

However, there's a principle in science that states the simplest explanation is usually the most likely.

All of these things could have a simple explanation. Maybe I left my shirt/coat somewhere when I was traveling. TiVo is probably having software problems. (It's been acting weird since I had to get a cable box last fall.) And most likely, people are not responding to my messages because they are busy or not interested.

It's just the cumulative effect of them all happening at once that's putting conspiracy theories in my head.

And the attic door... well, I don't know what the fuck's going on there.

Writing Logjam

2011-03-10T21:42:00.000-08:00

It's been over two months since I returned from my cruise, and I'm still trying to finish an essay about it. The problem with this writing project is that it's keeping me from getting to lots of other projects I plan to do. It's creating a logjam in my creative process.

Sometimes this happens with reading projects, too. I'll be in the middle of a book, and although it's not very engaging, I'll be determined to finish it before I start something else. So I slowly slog through it. Once I finish it, I can turn my attention to the logjam of other reading material that has piled up in the meantime.

You see, when I went on my solo cruise, I took notes. Way too many notes. I filled up 30 pages of a hotel notepad with them. And now I'm struggling with what to do with all my witty, insightful, navel-gazing, personal, and boring thoughts (with pictures!) I guess this is the right venue for that kind of thing, but I'm also trying to write an article for a local online magazine. And that's the logjam. Writing out random thoughts on a blog is one thing, but publishing something for a wider audience requires more focus and better writing.

I'm suffering from that old writer's tension between wanting to include all my brilliant insights and having a coherent theme throughout. It's already way too long, and it's only half written. I wish I could just finish it already so that I could get on to other writing projects.

Besides that, real life keeps getting in the way: work, chores and errands, and trying to have a social life.

So, I figured I would put the first draft of the first part here, just to show that I have been doing something the past two months. Maybe breaking it up into a series of blog posts will make it more manageable.

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Meta-Cruising With David Foster Wallace

Forward

“So how was your cruise?”

I knew the question was coming. I spent the entire trip home, as I hopped from ship to bus to airport to airplane, trying to come up with a good answer for it. I couldn’t in good conscience give the pat “It was fun!” answer, in part because I refused to succumb to Carnival’s constant propaganda to put the word FUN! on my brain. More importantly, there was simply no one word to describe the experience. It was collection of conflicting adjectives: warm, cold, calm, windy, huge, tiny, lonely, crowded, cheesy, grand, gluttonous, eventful, drunken, sobering, relaxing, exhausting, boring, and, yes: fun.

Because I traveled alone and didn’t have anyone to tell my witty and insightful observations to, I took what I thought were copious notes on my five-day Western Caribbean cruise in January. I filled up 30 sheets of my Applebutter Inn notepad (a souvenir from an earlier vacation to Vermont.)

Once I got back and told people about my notepad bursting with insights, three people pointed me to David Foster Wallace’s essay about his own cruise experience, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” For that essay, which is 97 pages long, Wallace filled up almost three entire Mead notebooks with his observations.

Okay, so I’m no David Foster Wallace. He was a tortured genius, and I’m just an uncomfortable creative type.

I’m not as profound or eloquent or loquacious as David Foster Wallace. For example, all the death and despair themes from his essay? I didn’t pick up on that. But Wallace and I were both curmudgeonly curious Midwestern outsiders who traveled solo and viewed the whole thing with a critical eye. We shared a liberal guilt over the decadence and class distinctions of the experience.

I’ve enjoyed comparing and contrasting our two experiences. And just like the food and the parties and the blue seas and the weather and the rocking boat and the tourism and the Mayan ruins, DFW’s essay has now become part of my own cruise experience.

Perhaps the biggest difference between my cruise and DFW’s was the purpose. I took this solo tropical vacation because I had three weeks off over the winter holidays (I work in academia and don’t work when classes are out of session), I was newly single, and I needed a distraction from the soul-sucking Midwestern winter.

I was, however, ambivalent about it. The week before I had met with an adviser about getting involved in socially responsible investing. I didn’t quite have enough of a nest egg to start investing, so what do I do instead? I take a socially irresponsible vacation aboard a floating luxury hotel designed for decadent pleasure. Some liberal I am.

DFW, on the other hand, took a cruise because a magazine paid him to.

When Wallace overhears other cruisers in the waiting area talk about why they’re going on a cruise, no one says they’re going on a cruise just to go on one. “Everybody characterizes the upcoming week as either a long-put-off reward or a last-ditch effort to salvage sanity and self from some inconceivable crockpot of pressure.” He says this is evidence of the “subtle universal shame that accompanies self-indulgence.”

I guess I’m not that different from other people after all.

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Read Part Two of this essay here.

Singles Tennis

2011-03-08T18:18:00.000-08:00

When I left the tennis center with the cheap plastic trophy for winning the tournament, I swore to myself that I was NOT going to make a Big Deal out of this. Because, in the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal.

As a single person, no one wants to hear about my tennis matches. It's kind of like telling someone about a dream you had. As I read in a book today (Nicholson Baker, The Fermata), "...lovers are the only people who will put up with hearing your dreams." *

This resolution-- to be low-key about my tennis success-- lasted about three minutes. I was still in the car on the way home when I got out my cell and tried to call my brother. Since then I think I've told most people I've come into contact with. I even broke down and posted it on Facebook. And now I'm blogging about it.

So much for not making a Big Deal out of this.

The thing is, winning the tournament truly wasn't a huge accomplishment. Full Disclosure: there were only three people in my draw, the Men's 35 Singles (ages 35-44.) I did have to beat a pretty tough rival in the finals, outlasting him 6-2, 1-6, 1-0 (10-7). In the third set super-tiebreak, he was up 6-3, but I won six straight points to take an insurmountable 9-6 lead.

What was interesting about that "championship" match is that it featured probably the only two single men over 35 who play tennis at our center. All the married guys have lives and other commitments and so can't devote the time to a tournament like this. The only other guy in our draw was a married dude whose wife had signed him up because he daughter was competing in the girl's division. Even he was committed to a family event-- it just happened to be the tournament. It truly was a "singles" final.

This is the kind of thing you get when you google "ball and chain tennis"

oooooooo

Still, this was the first tennis tournament I've ever won.

Even more impressive than winning the tournament, however, was that in the same week I clinched the Silver League championship. It's the second time I've won the Silver, but this time I ran the table, going 7-0. (The last time I blogged about tennis, I was struggling in the Silver league, having only won 2 of my first 17 matches. So I guess I've made some progress!) So between that and the tournament I've won nine straight matches. My last singles loss was on December 22nd.

This is the fourth time I've won a tennis league, but I've never received any hardware for that. When you win a league, you get to move up to the next level and they give you $10 off the registration fee for the next league. But a $10 discount is a difficult thing to show off in my living room.

ooooooo

And that cheesy cheap plastic trophy looks pretty good on my fireplace mantle.

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* Ironically, the day after I read that Nicholson Baker quote about sharing dreams, I had a really interesting one about finding a cute blind twin, who I met simultaneously online on a dating site at the same time I showed up at her house. There were people speaking German, hippies smoking pot, and circus animals-- horses and tigers-- in the house that she shared with her married twin sister, who was also blind. I swear, I hardly ever have/remember interesting dreams like this to tell people about.