Featured Article

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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.